Boys in the Trees: A Memoir (32 page)

Soft. We were sheep whose fleece covered every hard place. We curled. We breathed on each other’s necks, we moved our limbs gently and discovered the surface of each other’s skin. Very little hair covered either of us. Not the wool of sheep, it was just skin, tender as rose petals. I was too trembly to know where the feeling was coming from, but James breathing on my hair and my ear made rise in me a desire which I couldn’t move to the music of because I thought I must respect the decision that we would just go to sleep. I liked the notion that we could always say to our grandchildren, in-laws, shopkeepers: “We didn’t make love right away.”
Blossom smile some sunshine down my way
 … my lips moved very slightly, silently. We’d see what happened when we woke. I placed my right leg over his thighs—I didn’t know where else to go—and my right arm rested across his chest. I laid my head on his shoulder and found the cranny that sloped down toward his chest. This was a chest I had yearned to lay my head on. In the near past, when I’d harmonized alone in my room to “Circle Round the Sun,” I had imagined being in the circle of his arms.

“We should just go to sleep” was the gentle, unspoken suggestion from the man I had already loved for a year or more. I had spent every day with headphones on, listening to his second album,
Sweet Baby James
, and harmonizing with every song, imagining looking into his eyes and singing with him. While singing along to James’s songs, though, I felt a similarity of outlook on the world and a sense of becoming part of the song, part of the story, the voice, and even part of a future, as if I could visualize future generations. Years before, I had learned “Circle Round the Sun” and had performed it as my solo when Lucy and I were the Simon Sisters. This year, listening to James’s first album, I had relearned the folk song as James sang it, harmonized and phrased as he did, only altering the arrangement a little. Our versions could have been superimposed on each other’s. I was in the circle of his love.

These are things I thought about as James fell asleep and began breathing with a regularity and a soft sound that was sweet like the breath of a newborn baby. Awake still, I was left alone with my desire, but I felt the merging of a part of our union that went much closer. This was the same preadolescent, knobby-kneed boy who had been subconsciously making his way around my dreams for years. The same boy who had helped himself to my vanilla pop on the porch at Sewards when he was barely a teenager.

*   *   *

I don’t think I experienced more than a slight dimming of my consciousness in the two hours between the time James fell into his soft space of slumber and the time he woke up. I was lying fairly awake with his songs going around in my head until there was a blending of sounds, both silent, of the feminine and masculine, and I coaxed my songs to melt into his. My lips moved silently. “His pastures to change … deep greens and blues are the colors I choose … down in my dreams…”

I was singing to him in my brain, the part of it that was so thoughtfully unthinking. Singing and singing. “Blossom, smile some sunshine down my way … lately I’ve been lonesome.” The songs topsy-turvied on each other, and I remained restless and especially inspired. “There’s a well on the hill, you just can’t kill for Jesus, there’s a well on the hill, let it be.” And then I sang my own lyrics, already about him: “Then you turn on the radio and sing with the singer in the band, and think kind of sadly to yourself, this isn’t exactly what you had planned … ’cause you’re a legend in your own time, a hero in the footlights, playin’ tunes to fit your rhyme, but a legend’s only a lonely boy when he goes home alone.”

James was my muse, my Orpheus, my sleeping darling, my “good night, sweet prince,” my something-in-the-way-he-moves. The bedroom was quiet and dark, with only a few slats of light through the louvered shutters. I ran the fingers of my right hand very softly on his left arm to his shoulder, over his slopes, lightly so as not to wake him.

He had said the night before, when we moved from the living room into the bedroom, “Let’s just go to sleep.” I agreed heartily. Let’s put off what we’re both pretty scared of, I thought. He added that we had both been playing the field and this shouldn’t be like that. We knew it wasn’t going to be a one-night stand. There were many things we both knew already. Many years later he would accuse me of loving him for “being James Taylor,” which ironically he meant disparagingly. But it was right on, and a very accurate description of the way I felt.

*   *   *

It was just becoming light outside, and in the bedroom I could see the closet door with the mirror, which caught a part of our bodies in a gray charcoal mist.

Everything else was blurry, and the one candle that had breathed through the night was still by far the brightest thing in the room. Our bodies were still in a graceful tangle. I hadn’t moved once except to relieve numbness in one of my legs by very slowly gliding my ankle from beneath his calf. He hadn’t stirred then, but when he did finally stir, he woke up amorous. He kissed me right away. So natural and simple was the gesture. I let his lips surround mine. With two sets of eyes closed, two sets of lips can find each other.

He was relaxed, and our bodies did that Bali Ha’i dance, hardly any sound but those of waves breaking and blankets moving and pillows muffling the high-end frequency of the sheets brushing together. The amount of energy that had collected during the two hours (mine, as I held still, and his, as he dreamed) gave way to openness unattended by self-consciousness. James lay on top of me and kissed me and I returned his love. There are different characteristics in the sounds that notes make when they are played together. That’s what we were, just two notes.

I felt we were a perfect fourth. I came to feel that I was the F-sharp and he was the C-sharp. Lots of singing together over the years seemed to bear this out. Our voices were so perfectly complementary and harmonized so well. His voice, his tone so clear and fine, inserted itself like the sound of an oboe cutting through the breathy rise of an alto flute. This music theory, and theory of love, has not been confirmed or proven. Like some things, maybe it’s only true if I continue to believe it.

At my sixth-floor apartment in Murray Hill, New York City, sometime during the first month of our romance. We have no secrets.

Building a tool shed and other spaces onto James’s shack, with Zack Weisner and No Jets construction, 1971.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

choppin’ wood

T
he Vineyard is about a hundred square miles total, with six towns in all. Edgartown, Oak Bluffs, and Vineyard Haven are on the northernmost part of the island, and considered “down-island,” while West Tisbury, Chilmark, and Aquinnah (known for a long time as Gay Head) are all considered “up-island.” Down-island is where most of the commerce takes place—little shops, bigger shops, auto and hardware stores, bakeries, and groceries—and while there are a few scattered stores, up-island land undulates like a lullaby, and you see farms and huge green stretches of ocean-facing land, fenced in or surrounded by rock walls, some four or five generations old, farmers and their children, horses, pigs, cows, chickens. Crisscrossing the island are three main roads, South, Middle, and North. Off the main roads are funky offshoot places like Menemsha, a tiny fishing village on the northwest coast on Vineyard Sound, as well as assorted ponds, and the steep, dramatic Gay Head cliffs facing due west.

When I was little, my family would always rent or borrow houses up-island, either in Chilmark, Menemsha, or West Tisbury. Like us, the Taylor family, who started coming to the island in 1953, were up-islanders, living in a house in Chilmark. Unlike Mommy and Daddy, who always rented, the Taylors were serious islanders, at first summers-only until Trudy, James’s mother, made the beautiful, rustic house on Stonewall Beach in Chilmark a full-time residence.

With our Martha’s Vineyard connection, James and I talked about the island in a kind of shorthand, as if we shared a secret language we had both grown up speaking—which, in fact, we had. Almost as soon as we met, we started making plans to go there, excited to see places together that we both knew so well and had seen, without the other around, for decades. James’s soul was on the Vineyard, on his land, and mine would eventually make its full-time home there, too. Like his father, who had bought a section of the tip of Gay Head, James had found and bought his own large piece of land in 1969, but on the other end of the island, in the Lambert’s Cove region of Tisbury—175 acres of woods, mainly scrub oak, tangles of lady’s slippers, wild berries, cedar, cypress, and pine. James had gotten a good deal, too, buying the land with the money Apple Records gave him for his first album. Aside from wild and rolling, it was private, close enough to his parents’ place for easy get-togethers. He shared the property with an enormous pig named Mona and his puppy, David, who was part wolf, part German shepherd. James’s plan was to build a homestead up on the hill, and he was naturally eager to show it to me.

After that first night, James moved into my Murray Hill apartment immediately, the seamless meshing of the gears of our lives already perfectly in place, as if they had been in place forever. There was no sense of pressure, no sense of hurry. Later that morning, the two of us collected all his bags and baggage from the Barbizon-Plaza, stuffing messages into a small suitcase that said
JT
on it. He packed another suitcase with lots of pairs of dog-chewed sneakers. James’s hotel room was as chaotic as a teenage boy’s. James left a twenty-dollar bill behind for the housekeepers, but everything else we lugged back to Murray Hill—and for the next span of time, he and I were never apart for more than a few days.

The day after we spent our first night together, we walked up to Manny’s Music on Forty-eighth Street. Our entrance into the store turned into a milestone of sorts, marking us officially as a couple, the musical equivalent of a banner advertisement. Henry Goldrich, who owned Manny’s, made a huge fuss, even asking if he could put our photos together on the store’s Wall of Fame. Of course, we both answered, we’d be honored. Our pictures were already in residence, but far apart, so Henry moved mine over so it hung next to James’s, prominently, too, at eye level.

*   *   *

Less than two weeks later, we drove to the Vineyard in James’s green truck, to see his “cabin in the woods”—the “shack,” as James kept on referring to it. Having spent my Vineyard summers up-island, I had always dreamed of having a house there someday, maybe in Chilmark, directly on the water. In contrast, James’s formidable property seemed in some way out of place, as if it should be on the south coast. The land was closer to the down-island sections of the Vineyard I knew far less about, near the water, but with no access to the beach. It was as though James were emphasizing the importance, and value, of upholding a more modest workaday image—announcing to the world that he wasn’t the son of an esteemed physician who’d gone to Harvard, but instead he himself was a man who worked with his hands and had the calluses to show for it. Neither of us imagined how the land would become a life-long work-in-progress.

I remember our arrival, our first night there. We turned off Lambert’s Cove Road into James’s driveway, driving the quarter-mile distance extremely slowly, as the moon rose up in the east, to our left, seeming to follow us as we made our way along the long dirt road. James told me later how nervous he was about what I would think, worried that I might be one of those uptight New-York-at-heart girls rigidly opinionated about the peasant hierarchy. Ahead of us I could see the outlines of what looked like a romantic music box of a house. It was James’s cabin, silhouetted in the moonlight. The pitch of the roof was steep. The windows were high and narrow. Everything about the house was like James himself: tall, lean, modest, and beautiful.

Only two pale lights shone from the cabin—one downstairs, one upstairs. Before untangling ourselves from the truck, crawling over shopping bags, luggage, and McDonald’s debris, James did a lot of fumbling around for the right disclaimers about the place, not only to alert me to things I might not immediately love, but also to apologize for how rough and unfinished it was. He reemphasized that it was a “shack,” and indeed, when I walked through the door, I could see that he was telling it like it was. There was no threshold for him to carry me across, not that I was expecting one, and I would later come to learn that that kind of fairy tale moment was not in James’s mind-set anyway. I was the romantic, mistletoe-kissing one, not him. He was the no-frills, down-to-earth, Yankee-influenced, practical madman.