by Carly Simon
At that time, I was in a career downswing in the volatile, up-and-down weather pattern that was show business. When you’re hot you’re hot, when you’re not you’re not, and I was no longer as good as I’d been once at maintaining my indifference. Married to James, I’d been moated off by the Camelot status of our marriage. People loved us, hated us, feared us, denigrated us, and circled us with their jealousy and desire and longing. They opened doors for us when we wanted them opened (which was practically never), anxious to find their way somehow inside this tall, strapping, lanky duo. A near-mystical allure of power had protected, surrounded, and trailed behind us for years, but with James and me no longer two against the world, I was in temporary stasis.
Naturally, I wanted to be on top again—to feel connected, wanted, admired. Knowing the fakery of show business all too well, I should have been above status seeking, but I wasn’t. At the end of the day, the illusion of glamour and fame is as potent and insidious as any other drug. You’re suckered into thinking you desire something you know very well is shoddy, phony, and fleeting. The problem is, it also makes you feel good, gives you a voice and an identity, fools you into believing you belong to a higher tier of people who are more fun, more sparkly, more worthwhile to be around. Most of all, showbiz makes you feel wanted, but with my marriage over and my career in a lull, I felt doubly unwelcome.
* * *
Thirty minutes passed. Then forty-five. Michael Korda, Simon & Schuster’s editor in chief, appeared in the hallway, and we chatted for a while before Korda was called into a meeting. As I kept on waiting for Dick Snyder, I told my children stories about how brilliant and risk-taking their grandfather had been. Like mercury, which made Daddy, by definition, mercurial, an adjective that joined the word-of-the-day grammar list on our fridge, which that week alone included defenestration (the act of throwing someone or something out a window), lucubration (laborious, intensive study by lamplight), and pusillanimous (cowardly). Daddy wasn’t only brilliant and charismatic, I told Ben and Sally, but his reputation for grooming and tending his writers was legendary. He never used false praise, either. He genuinely meant it when he greeted one of his stable of authors with an enthusiastic grin or a generous pat or clap on the back.
The longer I sat there, the tenser I got, my wallflower instincts receding, replaced by anger. Dick Snyder was an hour and a half late. I was beginning to feel affronted and disrespected. My reasons for coming here were simple: to show Sally and Ben the company my father had founded at the impossibly young age of twenty-five, in the hope they’d be as proud of Daddy as I was. Just then a receptionist shepherded us from the reception area into another large room, this one bereft of objects other than a streamlined modern desk the size of a lap pool. With a Diet Coke can before him, Dick Snyder stood up and sauntered over no farther than the front of his desk, looking down his Pinocchio-pointy nose at us.
I introduced Ben and Sally, adding, as an aside, that Ben’s middle name was “Simon.” At this, Dick Snyder deigned to make eye contact and even shook Ben’s small, sturdy hand. Retreating behind his desk, he seemed finally to notice Sally, too. He spat a little cough into one hand before murmuring, “Sally, you said, yes—nice of you to come,” and indicating we should all sit, make ourselves at home.
“Either of you kids top students?” he asked Ben and Sally. “You want to come here and work some day?” Both kids responded politely, with “ums,” Ben even adding, “Yes, sir, I’d say so.” Simon & Schuster was a pretty darn nice place to work, Snyder said. He took one last slug of his Diet Coke and pulverized it in one hand. Pulling his arm back, he fired it into the wastebasket across the room. He made the shot with practiced ease. A hard man in a soft profession. Along with Sally, I couldn’t have cared less, but Ben was obviously impressed. Then, with the confidence of any number of white boys in pin-striped suits, Dick Snyder gazed down at Ben and Sally, leveling one final, booming admonition: “Well, if your grandfather had been smart, this could have been yours.”
* * *
Was history repeating itself? Was my own life, like Daddy’s, a gleaming surface under which the most degenerate forces simmered and fumed? Had I spent my life trying to save my father, to avenge the losses he suffered, while also doing everything possible never, ever to end up like him?
Like everyone, I had losses of my own, starting with minor and ending with big. The biggest loss of all over the past twenty years has been the togetherness of our family. Some core things stay the same. My stammer still comes and goes, unpredictably, as does my stage fright. I still believe wildly, wholeheartedly, in the power of love. I might add that losses aren’t entirely negative, either. Just as night follows day, sadness follows joy, and the underworld sometimes takes aim at innocence, a lifelong nemesis like my stammering turned out to be the very thing that made my music crucial to me in the first place.
How does a person—me, or anyone else?—move ahead, push forward through life? The answer is that none of us does, not entirely. I have simply found a way of loving through whatever absences or dejections have fallen like tree branches in my path. I move forward by incorporating whoever or whatever is missing or vanished into my very being, my body, my breath. The psychologists call this introjection, but I call it surviving. I lost Daddy, and incorporated him inside me. I lost my marriage, and James became a part of how I look at life. I let go of Orpheus, not realizing, perhaps, that I just had to get to know him before I could become him.
The shack, 1970, Martha’s Vineyard.
“I’ve lived in all the houses he’s built
The one in the air
The one underground
The one on the water
The one in the sand.”
—“We’re So Close,” 1979
Hidden Star Hill, 2015.
epilogue
I used to have a whole other life. Very little has changed in the surroundings where I live today on Martha’s Vineyard. I live in the same house, even sleep in the same bed, where James and I once slept. It’s been years since this was our house together, and I still haven’t taken down his fishing rod from where he placed it above the sliding doors in the living room. In fact, the living room is pretty much the same as when he and I lived here. The Plexiglas that James nailed into the window frames is still there keeping out the cold. It stays far too warm in the summer, for as original as his idea was, it makes opening the windows a major event. Still, I never wanted to change anything in the living room because it was the part of the house he built before we met. Before I came into the life of this house so many Thanksgivings ago and the two of us began adding bathroom doors, closets, odd-shaped windows, towers, eaves, catwalks, and circular staircases.
Everyone says the house is uniquely beautiful, like a Russian cathedral, a fairy tale castle. Only James and I knew it was a folly: a testament to our romantic brainstorming. We pretended to be practical. He gave in to me, I gave in to him. He said the bathroom for the children should be small and neat, functional, like a ship’s head. When it was finally completed, it looked more like a bathroom for the criminally insane, with a door that opened in, taking up most of what was already a cramped space lined with dull, gray tile. It sported a miniature toilet which the children outgrew almost immediately. The toilet remains, and now you have to crouch down to the size of a small child to use it. It should have been padded, that bathroom. You can’t help knocking yourself silly even when brushing your hair in the mirror: an elbow collides with a cabinet, a knee with a drawer.
Then there was the matter of the kitchen. I wanted a large family kitchen that I could go bustling about in, feeling all earthy with flour powdering down my long apron. With the builders hired to recognize our dream, we built that kitchen, the only problem being that we forgot to extend the plumbing beyond two feet of one corner of the room before all the walls were plastered and painted. The finished effect was not unlike the bathroom for the criminally insane, though this was the “kitchen for the cook confined to a wheel
chair.” You didn’t have to move more than a few inches to get from the sink to the stove to the refrigerator, but you had to make sure the dishwasher door was closed in order to open the refrigerator.
James and I were like two maniacs posted at the gates of domesticity, feverishly going about preventing anything really comfortable from happening. I wanted a circular garden, he wanted a forty-five-foot hexagonal tower. I wanted a cobblestone driveway, he wanted individual houses for the pig, the tractor, and the dog. I wanted a pool, James wanted a pond and a windmill.
So we spent lavishly and lived with carpenters, landscapers, painters, and sawdust for most of our summers together as Sally and Ben, three years apart, were growing up. When the most ambitious addition—the flying bridge over the courtyard leading to the kids’ rooms—was completed, James and I gradually moved farther and farther apart and finally resigned from building any future life together. Still, and with many alterations over the years, I live in this flamboyant white elephant, and as I go around its many curvy steps and corners, as I move through new times and claim new and further spaces, I add up past and present and this house becomes more and more a home that steers its own course and knows its masters, the echoes of its songs, the barks of its dogs. Every reconciliation of a roofline adds to its personality, the latest overflow of books calling for a new shelf (and I’m home alone with a hammer), every flowerbed that takes off, finally, changes the shape of the lawn, every touch-up of a wall that has required a coat of paint, the new speaker in the tower, the hammock on the deck, the brick walkway to the guest cottage, the curved door to my bedroom getting three coats of warm-toned varnish. Ben’s fire pit down the road, the sheep shed, the deepening cracks in the beams. Each room is my life. This sky, this hot summer eve, is a new room. This is a home where I am so much more welcome than in the first twenty years, when I didn’t quite understand what a home could or might be.
I am not the type of person to let go of my past easily. My memory is too good. That’s why it doesn’t seem to make much difference if I take down James’s fishing rod or not. Leaving things as they were is a relief. It takes less energy to glimpse that fishing rod than to conjure it up. Fact is, I am still partly living in the imagination of the man who made the life I lead in this damnably difficult, audaciously original house. But how to erase him? I wouldn’t know just who to erase. Everyone identifies with being two people. One who he very naturally allows himself to be, the one who surrounds his soul. The other, the one he pretends to be, has gotten into his system and is fixed in place like a mask. He is the visiting man. The vanishing man. Always on the verge of moving away. If I were trying to erase all traces of James, then I could never look at Ben, so similar to his father in many ways; brilliant and charming, with a sweetness beneath the cutting edge of a wit, already devastating, even as a child of five. And Sally, the golden, beautiful daughter of her father’s dreams, the Sarah Maria of his song.
Recently, in one of the compartments in the guitar closet, I found a little assemblage of James’s. Guitar strings, bits of twine, two or three burned-out matches, a pair of grandpa glasses with one lens missing, and a Polaroid snapshot of me. Except for the picture, it was a fairly typical pile of James’s. Probably the detritus of a pocket that got too full. He emptied his pockets almost at random, anywhere he happened to be, when they became too crammed. Their contents now reveal to me the pain he was in. Not so much the individual items, but more how the piles themselves were so unrelated to each other. James was never like those men who empty their pockets each day onto the same bureau top until their wives come along to sweep or tidy everything up. No, James’s assemblages would materialize on top of the fridge, beside a bed, at rest on a window ledge. What I once saw as a sort of hectic masculine jubilee, I now see as something terribly poignant. Maybe he wanted me to make some sense out of these offerings, to decipher a puzzle piece in the bigger jigsaw.
The Polaroid I recognized as one James took the year after we got married, the summer we went to Vienna. I was sitting across from him outdoors at the hotel café, eating Sacher torte and drinking café au lait, my pregnancy making me ravenous: Sally on her way. “Come to me my melon-bellied baby,” James would sing, looking to see if he could detect the minute progress every day of our ripening fruit. I never liked it when James took the camera from me. He’d take too long to focus or frame, and I got self-conscious waiting for the snap. He put that Polaroid snapshot in our scrapbook, and then one day it was no longer there. He must have removed it like a kidnapper with no obvious motive.
It always amazes me that we can look right past something that finally smacks us in the face. That blind spot. How could I for years have overlooked the chaos—the spidery string-ends and ash-clumps James accumulated; little bits of hope he thought he could piece together. But damn, if it didn’t move me something fierce to see that old Polaroid of me in the pile. Me wearing that attempted mirror grin, unsure without the mirror. Why did he add that to his pile of pain? That clutter and confusion. The tribulations of our remorse. He never really criticized me, he just grew cold. The heartbeat went out of our house, the rhythm went out of our romance, but so what? In life that happens, doesn’t it? You just have to remember to breathe. But our breathing became irregular and strained, and instead of managing a peaceful farmyard, we found that we had corralled a wild animal. When it broke loose, it jumped the fence and got out the gate.
* * *
When we made our parting official, neither of us thought we could stay in this house. But Sally and Ben had attachments that went beyond the ends of the land here in these hills and valleys and wooded trails, pools and ponds and circle gardens, trees where they began to climb and collect the apples in August.
I tried to create a new bedroom out of the space Kate had been using as her bedroom when I first arrived in December 1971. In the following years, it had turned into a playroom. Moving to the new wing seemed to make good sense. The room was like a great big barn, with a peaked roof, a hexagonal bright red stained-glass window and a circular staircase leading to the loft where James and I slept for at least the first two years. This was the same room where James recorded his album One Man Dog, with my favorite song of his, “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight.” The band and gear lay just a few feet below the bed. All those Orpheus-like men making that jazz, those beats, the melodies, and words, just underneath my head. It wasn’t all that different from Daddy playing the piano below the floorboards of Joey’s and my bedroom in Stamford. Times, periods, decades that feel like no more than a few seconds ago in the appalling span of years.
Out of that music room I tried to make myself a new bedroom. Something a little more feminine, with my old dolls playing house with Sally’s new ones. Attempting to create a soft-toned ambience, I treated the hexagonal window to new violet-colored glass and installed flowered chintz to frame the French doors. I brought in a lilac-colored carpet, wicker lamps, and a brass bed with a deep purple embossed velvet bedspread.
This all fit as uniquely as a powdered, sweet-scented seventeenth-century courtesan’s wig on the head of a stable boy. The experiment failed, and I let the guests have it, moving back down the long bridge over the courtyard to the old bedroom, which still leads up two flights to the top of the tower. A different division of the museum. This is the very tower where the kids and their friends wandered around nooks, angles, and dark-stained beams, up the two staircases to that peak of six angular glass windows that fracture six spaces of our sky. Now just as we did when the trees were all still short and spiky, we come to its zenith to watch shooting stars zipper through the blackness. The shack is still a work in progress.
* * *
Since our divorce in 1983, James and I both have lives that we work at in our own ways. Many relationships have come and gone, with most remaining solidly entrenched in the glad, grateful part of my memory. Over the years, I’ve learned something that has made my life easier, more honest and satisfying: I’ve stopped trying to stop loving. If t
he rules decree that you are allowed to love only if that love is reciprocated, then whoever made up those rules is cutting an important part of their authenticity away. The commonly accepted belief that once you begin a new life, or move on, you must stop loving someone, has nothing to do with your own private heart. That heart might have been broken, but brokenness doesn’t stop it from loving. It has nothing to do with masochism, and it’s not a conscious decision either. How can you not love a person whose genes are in the two people, your children, you love most in the world?
Looking back, I made lots of mistakes. I remember and have made peace with each one, just as I forgive James for anything he may have done or not done. I replace any unhappy, hurtful memories with those of music and joy and the perfect fourths and the shared genes and this house on the hill and the things scattered around the house that remind me that we are all ever only stewards of something larger than ourselves. I am deeply lucky to have continued to build a family home on this land.
The Vineyard will always be home for me. Even on charcoal-colored, dismal days, what do you do when where you live is home? How can I possibly pretend anyplace else would come close to looking or feeling the same? I’ve always especially loved the trees here in the middle of the forest. Some have grown extremely tall, and are home to thousands of birds that nestle and hide in high branches, singing songs I try to learn and communicate back to them. Whether they think I’m a bird myself is in question, but either way we have a close relationship. The Vineyard and Hidden Star Hill in particular are part of my family’s history and rootedness, from fainting at the fair as a baby, the smell of the honeysuckle on the path to the North Road, to meeting Davy Gude, Jamie Taylor eating half of my vanilla pop, running down the splinter-happy steps away from Nick, living and loving and writing songs in this house. So many of them. Maybe a hundred songs. Some of them anyone might be proud of.
