Touched by the Sun: My Friendship With Jackie

by Carly Simon

  I know that I leaned over and gave her a tentative, formal, quick hug.

  What on earth could I say? Had I ever made such a comparison, or put it together that despite the huge and obvious differences between them, we both had had husbands who were “gone” for us, yet whose voices remained? To have an important part of your life reduced to an easy song, even if it was the title song on a personal album, was akin in some far-fetched ways to Jackie’s own experience. It’s almost impossible to conceive. Perhaps she really felt an alliance.

  “James used to sit on the edge of my bed writing songs,” I told her. “I particularly remember him composing ‘Secret O’ Life.’” When I told her this, Jackie smiled.

  “I was just thinking,” she said, “that Jack would sit on the edge of my bed when he was going over his inauguration speech and perfecting it and he’d ask me what I thought.” She and I laughed at the synchronicity, the obvious self-congratulation that some people would read into the scene.

  How did it feel to hear “one’s husband’s” voice on the radio? I couldn’t take the leap and ask her that question in return. Not then, at least. I would wait for when and if she brought it up more directly. This was no doubt a quandary for many of Jackie’s friends, and though I can’t be sure, I had sensed that Bunny Mellon, perfect in every way, would have known when to press, and follow up, and when to remain silent.

  Instead, I said, “Did I ever tell you that James and I have the same rising sign—astrologically speaking, that is? Something about our moons being seventeen degrees in Aries? I don’t know what it says about our connection, but it seems as if maybe James was referring to that statistic when he sings, ‘synchronized with the rising moon, even with the evening star’ …”

  I wanted to hit myself the minute I said it. How trivial I was. The gatekeeper would need a fierce talking-to.

  “‘True love written in stone,’” Jackie said. She paused and then continued with her analysis: “‘One must be so close to the flame to be alive.’”

  Could this really be happening? Our conversation was not that different from two girls coming home from school with the latest album and slipping it out of its sleeve, fitting it on the turntable, and devouring and dissecting every speck of cover art and every word in the liner notes as we examined and attempted to analyze every single turn of every single phrase.

  * * *

  IT WAS EARLY 1991 OR ’92, springtime on the Vineyard. Late May, late morning, nearing noon, and I was off to Jackie’s house in Aquinnah for lunch.

  The morning had come up hoarse, the windows of my house misted over with humidity, with no imminent relief of rain to clear the air. The air lay there, befogged, as if the breezes couldn’t make up their minds in which direction to stream, coming in instead from all four directions, and every other direction in between. Altogether an unsteady start to the day.

  From my house in Lambert’s Cove I took the slower, more delicious route “up-island,” signifying the section of the Vineyard where the towns don’t groove and holler with stores and restaurants. Up-island is the quiet part of the Vineyard, with only a fishing village, a few rustic boutiques, a general store, and my favorite fish market, Poole’s, where residents lined up to eat oysters raw while balancing their Bergdorf bags in their salty paws. It’s also where I spent my summers growing up, with my family, and, when I was fifteen, with my boyfriend, Nick, who drove a fish delivery truck.

  I picked up some shrimp in Menemsha, then continued down North Road. By now the fog had lifted and I admired the trees that were at their glorious best, each one revealing its blooms on a private timetable. Some were hardly showing at all, while others revealed a shy light green, like butterflies against the silhouettes of other trees only days more mature, slightly darker or bluer. Over this impressionistic canvas, the oaks, the locusts, the beetlebungs, the maples, the beeches, and the birch trees stood in reflection against the high hedge evergreens. Finally, tossing in a carelessly romantic flourish was the full bloom of the shad, holding forth like a fairy princess in a spin cycle.

  I must remember to tell Jackie all of this, I thought. Jackie, who loved any and all descriptions of nature. I took a left turn through a gate leading to the long driveway to Jackie’s house, which was perched in a safe spot at a distance from the ocean and the beach, lest the water do what all our conservationist friends, including Teddy Kennedy, promised it might someday do. Jackie’s brother-in-law was a longtime proponent of preserving lighthouses, combating erosion, improving water quality, and addressing so many other valuable things. It was something of a surprise that Jackie had decided that the remote end of the island was to be the site of her home. It was in the middle of the Native American reservation, far from the hospital, airport, and ferry. Isolated.

  Just as I was turning in the driveway to park, I heard a very familiar intro to a song on the radio that at first I couldn’t identify. Maybe it was a song by Simply Red or Crowded House? Then the vocal began. It was James singing It used to be her town … I mean, fuck. I sat there, listening to the whole thing. I even sang along with it. What on earth?

  Throughout the eighties and nineties, I had seen James now and again, mostly when he picked up Ben and Sally, then sped away in his little silver car. We, all of us, were still looking for a rapprochement with him and finding not even a single signpost. I was always so dumbly hopeful, overanalyzing or reading too much into every moment, tender or not, lest I catch the wrong wave. Our encounters were a combination of moments to mute and chill the soul, followed, when I least expected it, by sweet, memorable ones. Why were both equally wrenching to me?

  Last night was Sally’s 19th birthday at Orso, I wrote in my diary around that time.

  James joined us. It was so much fun, and on the way home in the cab with Ben, me, and James, a song came on the radio, some 1970s-era tune. “Gosh, there I am on the radio again,” I said, kidding. “Oh, I thought it was James Taylor,” the cabdriver said, not recognizing James in the back seat. Then, “Do you ever talk to him?” “Not very much,” James broke in, adding, “Not enough.” The cabdriver said something complimentary about James’s music and I said, “Yeah, well, he’s … he’s … OK,” and all four of us shared secretive smiles in the back of the cab. That was a first: communicating dishonestly through cabdrivers.

  * * *

  ANOTHER TIME IN THE MID-NINETIES, midsummer, midday, I was alone in the Vineyard house when James showed up unexpectedly. It had been our home together for so many years, it would have seemed natural for him to walk the halls and go look for what he was looking for without having to communicate with me. He was picking up Ben’s Rollerblades. The TV was on and I didn’t hear him come in the back door. I was smoking a cigarette (a habit I had publicly quit) when I heard a noise and went searching for its source. There was James, a Rollerblade in each hand. I wondered: who was the most vulnerable person in this house? The most dangerous? Who was the intruder? We didn’t embrace, surrounded as we were by the wrong furniture, weighed down by history, history that had an uneasy subtext. I remembered the fight we had over when to move Ben’s crib into that room and where to place the baby monitor.

  For the next half hour, I experienced the highest level of awkwardness. We talked about the easy things at first: the fallen willow, kids’ photos on the wall, work pressures, financial pressures, how the Vineyard had changed since we had built this house. Not how the house had changed. That would have been too intimate. Then he broke the unspoken rule of staying bland:

  “Mirth has left me … at a time when I should be happy because I am single.”

  A shock wave passed through me. Who the hell did he think I was? Mirth? Left you? When was mirth a part of the rule book? Discussing his mirth? It was like mentioning a visit to the proctologist. His comment brought me back to the familiar part of myself that always revealed more than I should have. I said, “Just know that wherever you are, there is somebody here who quietly loves you forever.”

  There was a long
, strained silence. I looked straight into his eyes and he moved away from my asking face. He shifted back to indifference, having left it only long enough to elicit my declaration of love. He then asked me how long I would be on the Vineyard. He stood on the stairs, with me on the landing above him, my hair hanging down over the bars of the banister. I thought: These sentimental complications are part of our landscape now, but James Taylor, your indifference is no match for my love. You come into my house as though you know you still own it. You do own it, but it’s not the house.

  “You really are a sweetheart,” he said, to fill the empty air. It was then I thought of Mike saying to me: “When you’re feeling unloved, play loved.”

  I smiled and stood up straight.

  He left through the door he had come in, disappearing, with the Rollerblades, into the overly humid summer day.

  When he was gone, I felt defeated, silly, and in love, but those were not unfamiliar emotions. It was like learning to live with a disease, or the loss of a limb. That “half of myself” feeling is, just maybe, one of the themes of my life.

  * * *

  MARTA SCUBIN was not just Jackie’s truly dear, smart, and talented cook and housekeeper, but also a close friend to her whole family. She greeted me at the front door. She told me “Madame” was waiting with tea and crumpets on her flagstone porch, the one looking out over the pond that required a short kayak or rowboat ride, or a muddy walk past in order to reach Jackie’s big, beautiful, almost empty beach. Egrets, yes. Gulls, yes. People, no. Except for family, Jackie never liked having a lot of people around her. Unless they were off to the right, and at quite a distance—one whose sighting would require a muscular pair of spyglasses.

  A few minutes later, Jackie and I were settling down in our chairs, getting comfortable. She wore a bathing suit, with a simple sarong around her waist, and I was in mid-thigh shorts and a tank top. We were both wearing our wampum bracelets that Kate Taylor, James’s sister, had made. I got mine first, and Jackie told me she adored it, so of course I called Kate, who made one for Jackie in record time. Jackie’s was just a little more gorgeous than mine, which was only right.

  I told Jackie about hearing James’s voice on the radio on the way up to her house. She went straight to the heart of things:

  “Will you ever understand such an interception?” she asked. Her choice of words was “perfect,” I told her, “brilliant”: an interception. I was so appreciative that Jackie was able to get so quickly to the essence of what I was feeling. I thought, Yes, friends should be able to reveal themselves like characters in a novel you love, otherwise what’s the point of having them?

  “I was reeled in when I wasn’t expecting it,” I told her, adding that of course I had to listen all through to where James sings, She gets the house and the garden, he gets the boys in the band.

  “It’s as though the universe knew you’d be in the car at that time and it wanted to test you. I don’t know…” She paused. “Maybe it was cunning. It seems as though certain songs follow me around, too, like ‘Greensleeves,’ which I’ve told you was Jack’s favorite song.”

  * * *

  ANOTHER TIME IN THE EARLY YEARS of our friendship, away from the Vineyard in a restaurant in New York, after another long lunch that stretched into the early evening, I had a spur-of-the-moment thought. Would Jackie like to come back to my apartment for tea? She’d come over before, but it would certainly be the first time she had been there without my getting it ready for her. As we entered through the kitchen door into my old-school, paint-chipped, high-ceilinged, rent-controlled, dozen-room abode with its messy kitchen, shabby curtains, and oddly paired fabrics pulled together from assorted old houses, I naturally focused exclusively on all the uncomely elements and eyesores. School notebooks, Ben’s exotic motor toys, dog playthings, and not overly fresh-smelling dog food unwashed from its bowl. There were also intrusions of scarves and gloves that had been flopped here, there, and everywhere over the past few months.

  “This is just what I love about the way you make your home feel.” Jackie swooned. “It’s really … natural, and well, ‘friendly’ wouldn’t be quite the right word, but still it has a charm that’s so particularly ‘you.’ I mean, Bunny would never have, oh, say, positioned the carton of milk on the counter just so, but…”

  No, she was kidding, right? She wasn’t going to simultaneously make fun of the milk carton while also putting it in a positive artistic light. Was she?

  Jackie had done this before—called attention to a completely mundane assemblage of my pots and pans distributed in a—what’s the best way to describe it?—an “artsy” way. Regarding my aesthetic, wasn’t she really saying, Carly, it’s so sweet how completely messy you are? No. That wasn’t like her, to be a phony. Oh, she could phony it up (we all could), but she knew I would have caught it. No. “Oh, look, how charming, the bed’s not made, how quaint, all your clothes are left on the floor!” are some of the things she didn’t say, and wouldn’t have said without a wink, about the collective selvedges of drapes, clothes, makeup, and bedclothes she had to walk over and through. I remembered the well-publicized fact that Jackie made her kids clean their own rooms and pick their clothes up off the floor.

  It had been raining, and we took off our soaked outer clothes, leaving them on the backs of the kitchen chairs. It seemed that Sally and Ben had had a friend or friends over that day, and loud, restless punk music came from their rooms. Well, I was pretty sure that Jackie’s son John didn’t listen to a whole lot of Mozart or Duke Ellington, either. In fact, I was very much in sync with Sally and Ben’s musical tastes. We all listened to and loved the Stones, the Beatles, Cat Stevens, Nina Simone, Neil Young, Bonnie Raitt, Aretha, sixties Motown, Andreas Vollenweider, and others. I was also pretty sure I didn’t want to knock on their bedroom doors and intrude on a bunch of school friends busy downing, along with their hosts, a bottle of the hormone-animating Johnnie Walker.

  I asked Jackie if she wanted some tea and in turn she asked for the “powder room,” and I led her down the hall to the bathroom—ring around the tub, towels on the floor, not to mention Sally’s powder, hair clips, and other paraphernalia befitting a teenage girl. I returned to the kitchen to set up a little tray with two cups and saucers, some Earl Grey tea bags, teaspoons, sugar cubes in a little bowl, and skim milk in a pitcher. I had forgotten entirely about the hot water.

  I soon heard Jackie walking back up the long hallway, pausing every few feet to glance at the two dozen or so photographs lining the walls. She’d seen them all before, but her fascination was not politesse. I truly think she was hungry for details she’d forgotten from past visits. There were the usual Simon family photos, taken mostly by my father and my brother, Peter, black-and-white and displayed in uniform three-quarter-inch frames. Another thing that might have been a nice surprise for Jackie? There was no art. Nothing on the walls that might have caused her to think, Oh, dear, I think Jayne Wrightsman might have one of those Rothkos, too. I’d better rush out and get one.

  I knew that Jackie identified with Jayne and Bunny. But at the same time, there was also another, more curious and attractive sensibility at play. Jackie was, at heart if not in appearance, a bohemian. She was attracted to the unconventional. She was someone who loved sneaking out with me to smoke a cigarette in the middle of the opera, the two of us kneeling down to extinguish our half-smoked butts for the purpose of relighting them at the next intermission. Even if we ended up in a place where it was perfectly legal to smoke, Jackie always made the whole thing feel illicit in a furtive, adolescent way. And if someone came up to ask her for an autograph, she could be rather abrupt when she said, “Not now,” or “No, that’s all right, thank you.” She had the attitude of “why would anyone want my autograph? Shoo.”

  She never said it the way a royal would. The words were succinct, a gruff statement of fact (her First Lady voice?) that sometimes made me feel bad for the person asking. In the years I knew her, I never saw Jackie sign a single scr
ap of paper. She had done it enough times and she had decided at one point she would never do it again. Other times she punted the question over to me: “Carly, you sign your name…” in a low whisper under one hand. Whenever we were out together and someone spotted her—at the opera, say, or just walking down the street—Jackie would always pretend people were staring at me.

  “They’re all trying to get a good look at you, Carly,” she would whisper as we took our seats at the Met. Once when we were swimming off Maurice’s yacht on the Vineyard, an airplane began flying low, as if trying to get a photo. “Look, Carly,” Jackie called out, “they’re trying to see you in the boat!” Did she think for one second I would ever fall for that? Still, the deflection was charming and for the briefest of seconds flattering, before I reminded myself of the absurdity of it all. As the world knows by now, Jackie disliked being the center of attention. In her presence, I never remembered or accepted the fact that I was a well-known person in my own right. In my own field. But compared to hers, my field was a small garden of roses in the middle of the Amazon rain forest.

  I ended up boiling plenty of water for those Earl Grey tea bags, and as we drank tea and spoke intimately over the bass-heavy soundtrack coming from Ben’s and Sally’s rooms, afternoon drifted into evening. When Jackie left through the kitchen door, the milk carton was still in its place.