Boys in the Trees: A Memoir

by Carly Simon

  Joey followed me upstairs. Bob, her boyfriend, who had been a rock through this whole thing, had made all the funeral arrangements. Joey was sleeping in a guest room with Bob, but she kissed me good night, and Lucy did, too. That night was just awful. Nothing was right. The next morning I called Nick, who promised he would come visit the next day.

  The world, it appeared, could be a very cold place. The only exceptions were my siblings, our twin Labradors, Porgy and Bess, and Laurie, my dog, of course. I couldn’t help but remember a few summers before, and how, despite the presence of Billy, and Ronny, I was untroubled then. My parents’ dinner parties, one after another, like gold, shimmering beads strung on a necklace. Show people, and composers, new scores ringing through the rooms of our house: What’s the use of wond’rin’ if the endin’ will be sad … you’re his girl and he’s your fella … and there’s nothin’ more to say.

  Daddy: He walked straight—looking neither right nor left. 1960.

  BOOK TWO

  Nick Delbanco, 1963.

  CHAPTER NINE

  the hardships of the mistral

  It was 1961, and Daddy had been gone for a little over a year. His ashes were dropped from a small plane over the copper beech tree on our Stamford property. It was a rough period between my junior and senior years, and I barely got into college. Lucy was attending Bennington College in Vermont, so I thought I’d have a chance there, but Bennington put me on its waiting list. Joey had gone to Sarah Lawrence, so surely that was a slam dunk, but Sarah Lawrence accepted me only as an “off-campus” day student.

  The reasons why weren’t terribly surprising. I hadn’t done as well as I might have in high school, mostly because of my stammer, but in retrospect I also had a few undiagnosed cognitive problems—a psychiatrist later told me my brain was like a wild tossed salad. My speech handicap froze me from participating in most classroom discussions—just finessing the guttural r’s in French class was hair-raising—and when it was my turn to read aloud in my other classes, I would come up with any number of excuses as to why I couldn’t. A tickle in my throat, indigestion, a terrible pain in my knee that I had to see the nurse about right away. Too mortified to discuss my condition with anybody, I would burst into frustrated tears instead, followed by even more excuses, including blaming my difficulties on allergies. Of course my stutter continued to affect my grades.

  I’d also done abominably on my SATs. I was so worried about failing that I cheated, copying the marks of the girl seated beside me. Unfortunately, her test was different from mine, which meant that just about all of my answers came out wrong. Midtest, I also suffered a panic attack that caused me to flee to the bathroom, trailed by the proctor, whose high heels clacked against the floor of the gym and into the girls’ room, where I locked myself into the stall and sat frozen on the toilet seat, my head in my hands, my throat stopped up, my heart beating in my chest like a captured bird. I didn’t go back to finish. It was later arranged for me to retake the test at home, but my scores were still too low to entice any self-respecting college admissions department.

  Fortunately for me, that year my beloved fourth-grade teacher from my school in Riverdale had joined the Sarah Lawrence admissions committee. Mr. Papaleo, or Pappy, as we called him, had eased me into his classroom once upon a time, thanks to his yo-yo tricks, his empathy, and his sweetness. Now, via the kind of excellent coincidence that has defined other areas of my life, Pappy put in a good word for me with the admissions committee, laying out the case that I was an “artistic” type—sensitive, yes, but a “special” girl who might in fact excel at a school like Sarah Lawrence. Half the girls in my freshman year English class at Sarah Lawrence, in fact, were “special” girls, with one kind of “sensitive” quality or another. Jessie, my best friend in my class, kept telling me how “interesting” I was, the same adjective Mommy used to describe my repertoire of “artistic” neuroses. In the face of all my various verbal anxieties, I should have considered attending Juilliard, as Mommy suggested. But I ended up at Sarah Lawrence, which was only seven miles away from our Riverdale house. Going there felt at once safe, hip, and normal.

  In the early 1960s, Sarah Lawrence’s student body seemed to be made up entirely of two all-pervasive types of young women. The first was the beautiful beatnik with pierced ears and straight, defiantly dirty hair to her waist, wearing a peasant blouse, tight, cut-off jeans, and sandals made by Fred Braun. Those girls could have been models on a Sarah Lawrence runway, and I hated them all instantly. The second group was lesbians, Sarah Lawrence being one of the most liberal, gay-friendly campuses in the country. It may sound hard to believe, but at the time I had no idea what being a lesbian meant, though someone advised me to be on the lookout for girls who resembled the famous painting of Louis XIV in his red tights. Overall, college in general, and Sarah Lawrence in particular, seemed to be all about which female body could summon the most admiring glances, with all females’ eyes trained on one another. To hell with philosophy or art history—even though Sarah Lawrence had the finest professors of those subjects—we still wanted husbands, like college students in the fifties.

  I was still going out with Nick Delbanco, and every swan I spied crossing the lawn, seated in class, or waiting in line at the dining hall made me think, If Nicky sees her, I’m doomed. But what else had I expected as the daughter of parents whose behaviors elicited more questions than answers on matters of sex, love, and loyalty? As a girl who’d been introduced to male-female intimacy with Billy in the darkness of my family’s pool house, it would have been semimiraculous if I’d begun my college years with any confidence at all.

  I didn’t even have the questionable self-assurance that comes from having money. At Sarah Lawrence, no one considered me a rich girl, and except for one or two moments, I’d never grown up feeling privileged. Once, at school in Riverdale, a group of my classmates was talking about who had the biggest house in town, and mine, I remember, tied with another student’s as the biggest. Another time, the kids found out that Daddy was the “Simon” of Simon & Schuster, the name on the spine of any number of library books. But true to the ethos of the Simon family, having money meant that you never spoke about money, and surrounded as I was in college by so many daughters of “name” families, I felt like the opposite of a big fish and lived happily on the twenty-five dollars a week Mommy put in my bank account. The big secret was that there wasn’t much of Daddy’s money left.

  It was around this time that the dark force I’d soon identify as the Beast was forming inside me. It began when I started comparing myself to every girl I saw, feeling perennially “less than” them. My waist wasn’t narrow enough. I wasn’t as graceful as other girls were in dance class. I couldn’t read aloud in the classroom. When I compared myself to other girls, my “not-good-enough” thinking came into play, gaining in force. This is a kind of Beast, I remember thinking.

  The Beast was hardly a foreign presence, but it wasn’t until Sarah Lawrence that I gave it a formal name. To me, the Beast was so many things. It began in my childhood, with my stutter, and intensified with trauma, thanks to Billy, a flourishing of a dark self-hatred inside an all-too-sad little girl who was not at fault, but vulnerable enough to allow underground spirits to infect and invade her thinking. The Beast was the feeling that I was never good enough, or loved enough—the persistent fear that I would forever end up a trivial second-best to my beautiful sisters Lucy and Joey. The Beast was self-consciousness, fear, and loneliness inside a house run by a mother and a father who only occasionally took their roles as parents seriously. Then and forever, the Beast was my envious feelings about everything I worried about not being. The Beast was, and is, whatever feels insurmountable in the moment. Its key words are enough, and you should, and why can’t you, with me falling short, and feeling ashamed and exposed, every single time.

  * * *

  Nick and I had fallen in love in the little town of Wind Gap, Pennsylvania, where Joey, Ronny, and I were appearing in a summer
-stock production of Kiss Me, Kate. It was the end of my junior year of high school and, with Uncle Peter’s help, I got a summer job working as a makeup girl at the same theater company that had offered Joey and Ronny leading roles. I knew how to apply mascara, but I have no recollection of how I ended up onstage in the role of a butler, wearing blackface, singing “Another Op’nin’, Another Show,” or as the understudy for Bianca, the second female lead, which I was given with the assurance that I could sing my dialogue if I couldn’t speak it.

  One night, Nick drove to Pennsylvania to visit me, and the hint of romance that both of us had felt other times reached a new plateau. One day it escalated, when Nick and I went canoeing on a lake, the energy between us passing back and forth. The lake was lined with weekend houses, and Nick and I took turns rating their attractiveness, earning silent points with each other as we slowly paddled. “I hope they reconsider that roof,” Nick said about a house in mid-construction that didn’t even have a roof, a remark that made me like him even more. When we got out of the canoe, my dress caught on the seat, and he gripped my knee, steadying my step. “Tell me, have I ever seen such a knee?” Nick inquired, a flattering quip accompanied by a toothy half smile. A few minutes later, we were embracing, me standing below him on a gentle rise, making sure I positioned myself so that we were approximately the same height. I was completely enthralled. Hugging Nick was a lot sexier than I’d imagined it would be.

  I later realized that I’d been initiated into sex countless times over the course of my life. I had been exposed to it, one way or another, ever since I was eight years old. Billy. Nora. Mommy and Ronny. A serious high school boyfriend named Timmy with whom I practiced the age-old concepts of first base, second base, and third base. But with Nick, I officially lost my virginity. Strangely enough, my deflowering took place on the very same cement bordering the swimming pool in Stamford where the majority of my summer encounters with Billy had taken place. Where to place Billy in my context of the sex/love duet, I still don’t know.

  Nick and I were walking around the Stamford property one abundantly starry night in mid-July after my junior year of high school. I was showing him all my favorite spots, including the red barn with the Ping-Pong table and the apple orchard, the windmill and the greenhouse, the tennis court and the pool house, Stoneybroke. The two of us made our way down the stone steps to the pool. It was a warm night, with a strong breeze. I had on a pair of Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt, and Nick was in khakis and a loose white linen shirt. I’ve always liked longish hair on men, and Nick had the perfect head and good looks to get away with it. As his name, Delbanco, would suggest, he was Italian on his father’s side. “A pure product of the Italian soil,” Chibie said when she met him.

  The moon made the air lustrous, as though it had been polished. Nick took my hand. It was the first time for both of us. He was awkward, and I compensated by moving like a gazelle (or so I thought at the time). He urged me toward him until our bodies touched, and he kissed me full on the lips. This was my romance. Only mine. Nobody intervened. There were no ghosts. No memories. Just Nicky and me.

  We sat down on the cement surrounding the pool. Nicky pulled up the legs of his khakis, and we both submerged our legs, calf-deep, into the warm pool water. “You’re really beautiful,” Nick said, which made me glance the other way, as if to say, “Don’t look too close—you’ll find a problem.” He drew me to him again, and this time our embrace lasted longer and was more sensual. Nick made a sound in his throat that mingled with the sound of the wind, as he pulled me down on the cement, our ankles still in the water. We took our time, spending the next five minutes acting demure and hesitant, as opposed to being overtly, inexpertly, sexy. It paid off, too. We were naked by the time we were ready to have the kind of sex I’d never had before. It was surprisingly painful. It didn’t yet bring the pleasure it would with practice, but being with Nick seemed to erase all the heartbreakingly hollow confusion I’d had with Billy.

  Nick was a prodigious reader and writer, and by far my intellectual superior. He was responsible for igniting my interest in philosophy, poetry, and literature. I had done all the required reading for high school English classes and not much more than that, but Nick turned me on to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sartre, Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Nick was patient, too, helping me with my papers and sending me long letters to improve my grasp of concepts ranging from existentialism to the life of the tragic hero. The tragic hero, Nick explained in a long letter to me, was a man (or woman) of an “essentially good character and an admirable dignity” whose fatal flaw, or crack, in an otherwise admirable personality, precipitates his downfall. The tragic hero, he went on, is very often a great man who defies evil, or who comes face to face with “an indifferent universe.”

  All of which made me think of Daddy, and Nick himself pointed out the similarities. Why, Nick wrote in that same letter, should any man suffer out of all proportion to his sin? Why, indeed, unless the universe be evil and meaningless? “Tragedy depends on the notion of greatness, and a tragic fall can only be from the heights,” he wrote, adding that Aristotle demanded that his heroes be princes, and that King Lear becomes a true monarch only when he is deposed. “Only and out of this misery comes his godliness … out of his fall comes a rise.”

  Who would ever write about my own father’s tragic heroism? Would anyone care about his legacy? A publishing house that bore his name, but an empire-in-the-making wrested from him by thieves.

  * * *

  Just as I’d done in high school, I spent the first two semesters of Sarah Lawrence answering teachers’ questions as rarely as I could get away with. During class, I would hide out in the bathroom, sometimes twice during the same class, to avoid being put on the spot. Did my professors suspect anything? Of course they did. Present or absent, I was the stuttering white elephant in the room.

  By my second semester, I’d become a boarding student, enmeshed in the full Sarah Lawrence College experience.

  Once I began living in a dorm, I brought my guitar from home—one Lucy had helped me pick out at Manny’s Music, the famous instrument store on Forty-eighth Street—and stowed it under my bed. For the next few months I played my guitar every chance I could get. Lucy would come home on the weekends, as would I, and I remember closely watching her every move. I imitated the clothes she wore, and the songs she sang, until I could develop a style of my own. Lucy was imitating Joan Baez in a time when Joan Baez’s first album was the dominating influence on an entire generation of girls. Bold, blond, blue-eyed Judy Collins was another great arrival on the music scene.

  My sister and I hadn’t started playing music together yet, but by the time she’d left for Bennington, she was getting comfortable on the guitar, and bought her first really good one during her freshman year. She learned a few chords, enough to play every song on Joan Baez’s debut album. She had the same register as Joan Baez, a high, pure soprano with a strong vibrato. I had bought my first guitar sometime during my senior year of high school, and soon my friend Jessie Hoffman and I began writing and playing songs together. The first one’s title was a combination of our names, the “Si-hoff Blues.” Lucy would teach me chords on weekends and then over the summer, which reinforced my interest in both playing and singing. I bought a few albums and began imitating different singers. My voice didn’t travel very far up the scale, but it had a deep, resonant quality. My reigning musical heroine at the time was Odetta. Hers was everything a woman’s voice could be, its power deep, sonorous, almost demanding. Alone in my room at home, I sang along to her albums on my cheap little machine, whose needle scratched every LP I owned, tapping into my own lower register. Hollowing out my throat, shaping my mouth into a long-columned O, I trained myself to control my breathing in order to extend words with vowels like home and alone, stretching that o out comfortably in my lungs. I had a naturally strong, even vibrato, and various rooms
with high ceilings and natural acoustics—like gyms, bathrooms, or any tiled room, for that matter—provided good settings for me to learn how to appreciate my own voice.

  Sarah Lawrence required every freshman to learn a foreign language, and I picked Italian. My classmates and I were assigned to memorize a long poem, and mine, two pages in length, would have been a difficult task even if I spoke without hesitation. That night, I had an idea. When I got back to my room, I took out my guitar and immediately, as if the poem had been written as a song, I fell into the wide field and endless sky, the free and easy space, of music. My speech barriers—its doors, windows, bars—lifted away, and I wrote a melody to the song in less than an hour. More and more, week by week, it seemed, I was coming out of my “singer’s closet” by remembering that the melody and rhythm were always there when I needed them.

  When word got back to my Italian professor that I was composing music to the poems she’d assigned us, she urged me to sing one of them in class. Galloping back to the dorm, I grabbed my guitar, returned to the Foreign Language building, tuned up in the hallway, and began the song, trusting that the music would override my stutter, which it did. When I finished, the class’s response was ridiculously effusive, which gave me a boy-oh-boy kind of thrill.

  After that, one friend and then another asked if I’d be willing to visit the student lounge, or someone’s dorm room, to play my guitar and sing. I was flattered, even excited. Rather than typing out a big paper on fourteenth-century painting in the Balkans, it was much more inspiring to write and sing a few songs for my friends. My roommate and other girls in my dorm would flop on beds, lean against bureau tops, stand in corners, and crowd the already-messy floors as I led them through evenings when text and numbers, books and typewriters, were all left behind, and music was the only thing that mattered. “Let me tell you something,” I wrote to Nick around that time. “I may be famous!! I gave a concert at school (in my bedroom) and sang a combination of religious and folk songs like ‘St. James Infirmary’ and ‘Darlin’ Corey’ and ‘Motherless Child.’ The girls looked to be taken into a very definite spiritual rapture.… Oh, Nick, we’re going to grow together and make lots of money and kind of take the world over, you and me!”