Boys in the Trees: A Memoir

by Carly Simon

  I heard my own voice saying “Yes,” while my brain, as was its lifelong habit, took flapping flight, tripping on far-flung trivia. How and why had death you do part become death do you part? Where did the you and the do really belong? Where were the adrenals in the human body? Were they in the back, or over to one side? But which side? Why was I still shaking so much, and where in my body was I feeling whatever it was I was feeling, and were my spleen and my hypothalamus (wherever they were located, though I imagined they were very close to the adrenals) both holding up under all this strain?

  “I now pronounce you husband and wife…”

  “You may kiss the bride…”

  As Judge Ash removed a document from his folder, James and I kissed. Then we did it once more, my brain nearly bursting with Oh-my-good-Gods.

  A few feet away from me, my mother was wiping away tears. Having evolved beyond her initial belief that James was a drug user (in the beginning, she referred to him as a “potter,” not knowing exactly what “pot” had to do with drugs, or if and where a verb or a noun was needed), James surely reminded her now of Daddy in his younger days, back when she still loved him. As the years went on, in fact, I grew to suspect she had developed a crush on James, not exactly a reach for my mother where biblically inconvenient younger men were concerned. Then again, James could “charm the ugly off an ape,” as his own brother Alex put it.

  Next to my mother, Trudy Taylor was holding a pitchfork, a metaphorical one not yet visible to the human eye. I was eager to win her over, and had made her a needlepointed pillow six months after our first meeting, the first time I’d ever attempted a “craft”—in this case a bunch of flowers inspired by a Picasso print. Trudy loved it, and my gift bought us a good ten years of sweet talk and recipe swapping. That said, Mommy and Trudy were always slightly combative. Standing beside the two mothers, Jake looked slightly baffled and wore a typically impassive Jake look: the one where I knew he was expending vastly more time and energy deciphering other people’s expressions than bothering to arrange his own. After Jake’s first-night comment about James’s shoes, and a rough, uneasy eight months of getting to know each other, James and Jake finally became close friends. I wasn’t leaving Jake behind, either, as he and Ricky were still going strong. To me, Jake’s little smile conveyed only, We’ll see. Many rivers to cross here.

  Afterward, our small group formed a celebratory circle, a group huddle of sorts. No one was officially designated to count things off in any kind of 1 … 2 … 3, but voices of the assembled joined together in a loud, exultant “Whooooopie!” Any song would have sufficed, so long as it was loose, informal, simple, and unchallenging, and Trudy started the one we all sang: “Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat / Please do put a penny in the old man’s hat…”

  Once the gang was gone, I broke out into giddy, let-it-all-hang-out laughter that soon turned into tearful hysteria. My own nervous energy was contagious. James began laughing at me, and then at “it”—the whole crazy scene in which we’d just participated, and the fact that he and I could now, with perfectly straight faces, call each other “husband” and “wife.” We shed most of our clothes and went straight to the fridge to take out the Sara Lee banana cake we’d bought especially for the occasion. Grabbing spoons, we both devoured the cake as if nothing we’d ever done, eaten, seen, heard, felt, or experienced before had been so over-the-top funny: banana cake, for God’s sake! We were like kids scrambling to raid the fridge before a responsible adult wearing a sheriff’s star busted us in the act. We ended up in the bedroom, lying in a warm, worn nest of wedding dress, suit, camel tie, blue bra, stockings, pearls, and garter belt, all happily, chaotically entwined on the carpet. On that floor we made love, looking ahead as married people … or a couple of kids making believe they were married.

  The next day I wrote in my diary:

  Nov 4th:

  The thrill of feeling myself go, and becoming complete, the other half filling in as if by a warm infusion—a compound of excitement, relief, a summer storm building over a hot afternoon as it joins forces with fronts, a duet of clouds that crash without form, through mists and moving air. My skin grows bright and my veins, attracted to its surface warmth, allow a color resembling the hue of a feather in the hair of a flamenco dancer.

  I’m losing myself—it’s so good that I want to lose more and more as if I were traveling by opium boats but could notice every hair rise on my arms. No swarm, just the soft tumble into warm water from air that’s only two degrees warmer than the water. Someday you might need something else—something more, or less—but right now, it’s just me. Ours will evolve into another kind of embrace. One that is inclusive. More existential, less subjective. Your hands turning my face to face yours, your hips branching over mine. I hold you inside me for as long as you will stay, and I think it will never be this good but it will and it has been and then it isn’t, but it gets good again and it’s what I’ve always looked for. I can’t believe I have it. I have it. I have it.

  * * *

  Love and marriage were one thing, the demands of performing another. The night of our wedding, James got ready for his show, changing into corduroys, work boots, a blue-patterned shirt covered over with a Fair Isle sweater vest, and his by-now-familiar “lucky” turquoise belt. I wore a blue full-length cotton skirt, James’s favorite piece of clothing I owned, one I’d bought in Greenwich Village right after getting out of Sarah Lawrence. It was the best, most perfect weight, and the ideal length from the ground, the waist allowing room for the top to curve down toward my navel like a bib. I finished off my outfit with an Indian-made pink-cotton mirrored jersey I’d bought in London that came down to the top of the skirt, high socks, and a pair of clogs. Together we walked out onto Thirty-fifth Street and into a waiting stretch limo, one much larger than we needed, one to be slightly embarrassed about in James’s and my shared reverse-snobbery way. As it drove uptown, James went over the set list. He would lead with “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” but at what point should he introduce me? He was trying not to pounce on himself for nerves; that was my specialty, after all.

  The biggest thing of all? Both James and I were wearing our wedding rings. I kept snatching glances down at mine, half excited, half disbelieving. My ring felt like an amulet, possessed of superpowers. Nothing can hurt me now. Over the next few days, I made things even more official by changing the name on my three credit cards. My Bloomingdale’s card would now read, in bold print, MRS. JAMES TAYLOR, DON’T FUCK WITH ME. Never in my life had I felt as sure of anything as I did about my new marriage to James. I hoped, and could have sworn on it, too, that whatever fears, worries, and dark uncertainties I’d experienced over the last year and even before that would turn to vapor and vanish into the unseen ozone.

  * * *

  The after-concert party in the Time-Life Building was joyous. James and I were surrounded by every single blood relative we had, as well as every record-company executive who had created salable brands from our faces, bodies, and voices. Jac Holzman, Mo Ostin, Lenny Waronker, Peter Asher, and my manager Arlyne toasted us, as did brothers, sisters, ex-girlfriends, ex-boyfriends, mothers, and close friends (including a few smilers with knives). I thought briefly about the call the previous night from Bianca and dismissed any relevance it would ever have to have. My family was there, looking ever so faintly slighted at having been left out of the actual wedding ceremony—or maybe I was imagining things—and my brother Peter took photos, including one where under the room’s ghoulish overhead lighting, James and I ate pasta, strands dripping from our forks over a shared plate.

  James and I left early. As we boarded the elevator, assorted guests threw rice at us, a grain-storm that slid down our shirts and into our hair and eyes, though most of it ended up sleeting down the elevator shaft. Outside, it was freezing, and James and I were immediately accosted by a crowd of concertgoers asking for autographs. After piling into the waiting limo, James and I fell into each other’s arms, exultant, half sc
reaming, “Hi baby, hi baby, oh God, I love you.” Ten minutes later, we opened our apartment door only to be met by David, looking guilty. While we were out, David had somehow burrowed his way into my lone clothes closet and chewed up all my shoes, rendering them forever irrelevant as footwear, and forever useful as dog toys. The ones we had carefully packed from the Barbizon weren’t enough. David was a “shoe man.”

  As I got ready for bed, I looked in my eyes in the mirror. I wanted to put it all together, to not compartmentalize this one. I wanted to bring myself into a healthy union or perfect fourth with my darling. I saw no sign of the Beast. The boys in the trees would go away now. There was no reason to look at another man. I no longer felt the same. I no longer had the same name. I would maintain my professional name as Carly Simon, but if names are a form of music, my new name rounded out the original chord of “Carly Simon.” I felt destined, almost, to be known thenceforth as Carly Simon Taylor, the look of it melodic, balanced, a harmony of the spheres. Then there was my new husband, a man easy to get drenched by, easy to leave my old self behind for as the two of us pushed forward, arms linked. I would continue riding on the James Taylor railroad, in sickness and in health, for a long, long time.

  Co-written in the air on the way to the shack.

  “Another bride, another groom.”

  That’s my guitar!

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  emulsification

  Many marriages rise, fall, steady out again. You blurt out something unmentionable, reconcile again, and on and on into the sunset. James’s and my marriage was like any other, because when all is said and done, marriage involves two people, who need food to subsist on and a house to provide them shelter from snow, wind, rain, and too-hot August days, where they can bustle around, sleep, and rest their aching feet. The only difference here was that James and I were both performers, private people in the public eye. Blame that, or our individual natures, but the waves and surf patterns defining our marriage were, I daresay, bigger and more turbulent than in most marriages. Our love became bipolar, switching from love to hate, lust to loathing, and back again, sometimes within a day. The pleasure with James was pure euphoria, whereas the pain was, for me at least, almost unendurable. Throughout it all, I was ever aware of my watchfulness, a lighthouse sweep vigilantly seeking out clues that James loved me, that the two of us would be all right, that we would manage to get home safely. Because no matter how many years have now gone by, James, for me, will always be a big part of what I call home.

  These days, I’m anxious for Ben and Sally, our two children, to believe their father was happy with me. Obviously, not all of me, and not everything, but that there was enough good in me, and in the two of us, that James would not want to exclude me from his memories. James remembers, I’m sure, that he was in the delivery room when Sally and Ben were born, that together we bought and decorated a house on East Sixty-second Street, where we spent a couple of years, while also jetting back and forth between the Vineyard and Los Angeles, before we moved to a sprawling rental on Central Park West. Today, James would likely forget a good many things that I remember being flooded with color, just as he might also recall sunlight on days that for me were gray and dimly lit. Whatever he thinks of me today, I daresay it’s slightly less damning than the way I see myself through his absent eyes. I imagine, too, that even with the pacification of age and hindsight, he still has the right to thrash around in moody retribution, always a specialty of the house.

  He might also remember this—that he came home one night to confess that he’d seen a girl from behind on the street and was utterly riveted by the sight of her. He’d gone so far as to tail her secretly for one or two blocks, adding that he felt guilty and creepy the whole time. She, the girl, was tall, attired in a hip-hugging leather miniskirt and chamois boots, and James felt deeply ashamed to have lustful feelings about other women just after getting married. Then, he told me, the girl finally turned around. It was me, right there on the street. We fell into each other’s arms laughing.

  Then there was a humid summer night when he and I were walking to Murray Hill after attending a Dylan concert at Madison Square Garden—James and I were both shocked by the high, nasal quality of Bob’s voice, though it was pretty interesting, too, Dylan remaking himself for no discernible reason other than a love of change and experimentation, something that wasn’t in either James’s or my repertoire. Both of us, I remember, were dressed simply in airy, summer fabrics. When we reached Lexington and Thirtieth Street, and knowing that James was eager, as ever, to get to another Sara Lee banana cake in the refrigerator, I made a guesstimate out of thin air. “From here,” I intoned, “it’s exactly eighty-seven steps to our apartment.” Without elongating our strides, he and I began walking the remaining distance, counting our steps as we did, marking, in the end, exactly eighty-seven steps. From that point on, I imagined that James was a little bit more impressed with me, and I would certainly use my impressive predictive techniques a few other times. How many seconds would it take before the elevator reached the top of the Time-Life Building the night we got married? How many minutes would it take the waiter to come by with the soup? How long would it take James’s dog, David, to relieve himself when we took him for a late-night stroll? It was probably the same obsessive-compulsiveness that started when Daddy got sick, or even earlier than that, but I preferred to think of it as magical, uncanny, my own version of psychic time control. I didn’t have that much confidence in it, though. It was only correct a lot of the time.

  A month after our wedding, James and I flew to the Vineyard to spend Christmas. A crowd of workmen filed in and out of our property, just as over the next few years, James, along with a ragtag team of local carpenters and craftspeople, would forever be at work on the house and surrounding fields. There were always people around hammering, sawing, splitting wood, making fences, clearing brush, laying down rocks, building porches—“the circus that is my life,” James used to call it. First came the kitchen wing, leading to the bedroom directly upstairs. Elsewhere, workers were busy planting, clearing fields, and building stone walls as well as a new, improved driveway. We planted a very small kousa dogwood tree in the center of the deck we were building. As the months and years went on, the sheer physical presence of so many burly or scrawny well-intentioned tradespeople—and the fact that James and I were seldom alone in our own house—began getting under my skin. But that first Christmas, the constant choral accompaniment of saws and hammers was almost mixed in with the arrival of holiday packages from Elektra and Warner Bros., reminding both James and me how much our record companies loved and appreciated us. Most of all, they seemed delighted by the progress of both our albums, No Secrets and One Man Dog, which were rising higher and higher on the charts and getting lots of good press along the way.

  I was as happy as I’d ever been in my life. “How has life changed since we have been married?” I wrote. “Mainly from the outside. But I wake up, sometimes from sleep and sometimes from preoccupation, and look at James and realize with immense delight that he is my own dear husband. My every thought includes him. He is so many good things, and his virtues seem to overwhelm me at times. Marriage seems to suit us both but why I don’t know … can’t figure out … but I don’t feel any more worthy inside than I did previously.”

  Where, oh where did that feeling of unworthiness come from? I knew only that it was something that was with me all the time. Why did I expect marriage to change how I felt? Were my expectations too dramatic? Now and again, I said to myself, You’re married! You no longer have to cross that boundary! You’re now a Jane Austen heroine! Nothing bad can ever happen to you again! These thoughts mixed in with another voice, the Beast’s, intoning, But you’re not quite good enough. These voices weren’t with me all the time, but they were around enough. As James said to me once, “You’re just difficult enough, Carly. If you were any more difficult, I couldn’t live with you. If you were any less difficult, it wouldn’t be nearly as fun.”r />
  With our house ridiculously messy and overturned-looking, James and I climbed into our equally messy car and drove over to Trudy Taylor’s house for Christmas dinner, joining the rest of the Taylor clan. Despite the long, skin-deep history I had with some of James’s family members, I was still the awkward newcomer, but they were an impressive bunch of welcoming, animated northerners of the southern variety, Trudy a lifelong Yankee, Ike a southern-born one. Of course I knew Kate and Livingston already—Liv handsome, hilarious, and by far the friendliest of all the Taylor kids—but that night I also had a chance to talk to James’s two other brothers, Hugh and Alex. Alex, the oldest, had a blues singer’s sonorous voice, and was discernibly different from the other Taylors, including the adorable youngest, Hughie, at seventeen probably the “cutest” of them all. I went home that night with the distinct impression that as a family, the Taylors could be insular, interested mostly in the goings-on of its various members, with a collective habit, one that James had come by honestly, of rarely looking you directly in the eye. They were like an island tribe who spoke a private, loving language only they knew.

  Trudy, the complicated mother of this huge, musical clan, was always in the kitchen, cooking one of the hundred or so meals I would consume in her house during my daughter-in-law years. A true gourmet who had studied cooking in China and elsewhere, Trudy got the compliments for her cooking that she deserved, which were many, varied, and slightly hysterical (you always had to outdo yourself, genuinely, too, with superlatives). Still, despite or maybe because of the family’s unusual closeness, what could have been a tense, competitive atmosphere—each member of the family was actively creating, singing onstage, or recording something—was mitigated by their genuine enthusiasm for one another’s accomplishments. Everyone was in everyone else’s court, and I left that night with the knowledge that the Taylors were a family who knew how to support one another.