Boys in the Trees

by Carly Simon

The town house at 133 West Eleventh Street, between Sixth Avenue and Seventh Avenue South in Greenwich Village,

College.

I needed to be reminded, that what happens in a marriage can never be understood by anyone but the people inside it.

The secrets, subversions, and dark spirits inside the Simon household were extremely real. Billy. My mother. Ronny. I sought

“If you want me to get the message,” I said coolly, “why don’t you just tell me what the message is?”

happens when you go through your life carrying another person’s mantle?

Jung once said, when you know something, you don’t have to believe.

And like so many blind, determined fools, I took his version to be the truth—or maybe, I should say, my character did.

Having just finished Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, and before that Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls,

The town house was elegant but also funky and dressed down, four floors of raffish English charm.

(the higher the social class, the more missing threads, is a pretty dependable rule of thumb),

I felt uncannily comfortable being who it was that I was in his presence.

I am his ‘kind’ of trouble.”

“Do you find me strange?” he asked. “I mean reserved, odd … like something in me is missing and is slowly

being regained?”

were enveloping a man whom I wanted, and there was no chance of losing him, since he wasn’t mine. Once he was mine, and he would be, it would come into focus, the alchemy of it all, the possibility of an ending.

Instead, I relished the safety of not yet having attained.

nightgown, getting ready for bed, whereas

grip. In retrospect, I

pas de deux.

Still, Terry and I weren’t the easiest fit. If Jake and I shared a dirt driveway into each other’s sensibilities and senses of humor, Terry was on another road entirely.

The couples cling and claw And drown in love’s debris You say we’ll soar like two birds through the clouds But soon you’ll cage me on your shelf

I’ll never learn to be just me first By myself.

The story goes that Catherine had never seen the Ukraine before and was coming there to see how he had taken over as Governor of these devastated lands. Potemkin ordered his builders to construct miles of houses and splendid villages

along the banks of the Dnieper River, so that when Catherine’s barge arrived she and her visitors would see prosperity and order. But Potemkin realized that due to time constraints it would not be completed in time. He wisely instructed his builders to make exotic fronts of the houses and stores that could be seen

from the river, much like a Hollywood set. “The New Russia” was a success. What a coup. So, I think of Warren as Potemkin, lining his psyche with such “sets.” I can see him riding, the whistles...

It was James’s cabin, silhouetted in the moonlight. The pitch of the roof was steep.

I preferred focusing on James, no matter the situation, and if I could be helpful I would always try. (Of course, this occasionally led to me trying too hard, and being a nudge, or annoying, or cloying,

or in general overdoing it.)

I felt another thing, too: if James fell in love with me, then I could never doubt myself, or my own attractiveness, ever again. (Yeah, sure. And no. But I’ll get to that.) Then, too, James also reminded me of my own father—that combination of musicianship, worldliness, and dryness,

I found out that the

same fire that ignited our relationship could turn to icy silence, to “no-ness,” to “can’t-go-there-ness,” to “we don’t talk about that-ness.”

“Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.”

Dr. L says an addict will always lie to protect his disease.

Proust says somewhere that “happiness is the

absence of fever.”

I had less anger toward James. Also less passion.

but merely

simulating?

Someone told me once that we are capable of loving only four people in our lives. Another person told me that human beings can love an infinite number of people. I’m more comfortable with the infinite-number theory, the crucial difference being the number of people I feel I can love well.

“Thank God you don’t do those things to your hands and feet that almost every other female I know does. Your feet are beautiful.”

Our marriage was the only god I knew, my only religion.

in an effort to bring him back into the harmony and

When a marriage ends you don’t always get to choose what remains.

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

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.

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.

He never really criticized me, he just

grew cold.