Boys in the Trees: A Memoir (39 page)

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.”

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.

Inevitably it happens that a new bride will start to compare her new family with her own family of origin. With Mommy and Trudy living in Vineyard houses not all that far away from each other, Mommy, I felt, was always competing with Trudy for the title of Best Mother in the Neighborhood. As for my sisters, there had always been a natural amount of sibling jealousy among us, which wasn’t helped any by the fact that I was now married to a famous prince, and getting the princess treatment. The more that happened, the worse, and guiltier, I felt.

*   *   *

Again, that Christmas, James and I had little alone time. The cabin in the woods—all four rooms of it now—was densely populated with Jimmy, Jimmy, John, Luke, and Laurie, the No Jets Construction Company, as well as a steady stream of visitors, some well intentioned, others not exactly unwilling to accept a James Taylor handout. In order to carve out some times to ourselves, we took long walks through the nearly frozen woods on the land neighboring ours, stopping at an empty summerhouse to satisfy our still torrid just-married inclinations. It was great, though not as easy as you’d think—maintaining a state of ecstasy while laughing our heads off as we made a beeline for a nearby house. We never knew for sure if the house was empty, but most were. I was almost aghast at what a good time we had, stripping off our lower garments and bending over washing machines, perching on couch arms, angling ourselves astride perfect strangers’ Shaker sideboards.

One afternoon, shortly after the New Year, someone from Elektra called with the news that
No Secrets
and its lead single, “You’re So Vain,” had both jumped the charts from number 39 to number 1. For me, a performer who in her mid-twenties still saw herself as the stammering younger sister, the one eternally lagging behind, it was a wholly new experience. By sheer coincidence, James’s album
One Man Dog
and its lead single, “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight,” had been released at approximately the same time as mine. Even though James’s new album was doing extremely well, it wasn’t the monster of a hit that “You’re So Vain” was turning out to be. You would think I might have permitted myself a few hours, if not days, of satisfaction, or pride, but I couldn’t. I had a crush on the song “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight,” similar to the crush I had on James, and the only thing I remember thinking was that I wished it were him, and not me.

It was the first time James and I had ever directly competed, and it confused me, not just because I’d always assumed James would be more commercially successful than I, but because my desire to make him happy was woven so intricately into the submissive side I’d cultivated in my childhood by bringing Uncle Peter milk shakes adorned with four-leaf clovers on top whenever he finished a tennis match. What is it about men that allows them to be at ease as the successful ones, without feeling any guilt if their wives come up short? Like many women of my generation, I wasn’t remotely at peace with the idea of winning any competition with my man.

James’s talent put everyone else to shame, and I only hoped he could savor his own tonality and poetry and sheer musicianship. To this day, there is a song on
One Man Dog
, “Little David,” which is so childhood Vineyard to me. I think of Davy Gude and David our dog and it blends and merges together into then and now. As for my success with
No Secrets
, James couldn’t have been prouder, or more gallant, in praising my work, and he seemed to take genuine pride that he was married to me. Whenever we picked up hitchhikers, which we often did, James always made it a point to call me by my name in the car, dropping a “Carly” here and there to let the person know it was me sitting there in the passenger seat. But perhaps I’m mistaken. I want to think he was proud.

At the same time, I couldn’t help but pick up a new disturbance in the air. To make matters worse, my mother kept relaying messages to me that my sisters, Joey and Lucy, were both individually ruined, like Anastasia and Drizella, having heard the news about the overnight success of their stammering stepsister Cinderella, once best friends with cellar mice and dust balls, now riding around in magical style long after her midnight curfew should have expired. Instead of gloating, I just felt guilty. In the Simon family dynamic, for me to come out ahead was senseless and wrong. Hopefully, it was just a passing worry.

The “thing” I sensed in the air between James and me came to a head one bright weekend morning during our first year together. I was taking a bath in the claw-foot tub in the bathroom, which still lacked a door. As I was scrubbing myself off, I noticed how dirty the bathwater was getting. “I feel like I should get up and wash myself again and rinse myself under the faucet,” I called out to James. “All this soap is leaving scum on my skin. It feels grubby.”

Undergoing an instantaneous personality change, James stared at me, his face pinched and condemning, blurting out, as if in response to the most egregious comment ever uttered by anyone ever, “Haven’t you ever heard of
emulsification
?”

Emulsification.
I wasn’t well versed in chemistry, the way James, genuinely interested in chemistry, was. It was one of those words you’ve heard, but don’t know the meaning of. I knew vaguely that it had something to do with the breakdown of fat globules into smaller particles. The exact meaning of the word wasn’t the point; the larger point was that James, schooled in physics and chemistry, knew a term that I didn’t, and had pounced on me, humiliated me by deliberately making me feel dumb. A few seconds later, he’d gone outside, leaving me confused, embarrassed, and feeling rather bullied. Later, with my great friend Libby Titus, I made a list of other words and phrases that might catch me unaware and off-guard in the future, including
détente
,
creosoted posts
, and
perestroika
. Who knew what would come next?

More stinging than anything else was James’s sudden shift into coldness. I was reminded of how he had spoken on the phone to two of his ex-girlfriends, Maggie Corey and Joni Mitchell, and how his apparent callousness had stunned me. A year earlier, during the first weekend I spent at the cabin, Maggie had called him. James picked up the wall phone, mounted on one of the beams holding the living room ceiling in place. Very politely, never dropping his southern gentleman persona, he warned Maggie not to call him ever again, and when he hung up the phone he started swearing. At the time, I thought his terseness with her was a sidelong way of making me feel more secure in his life by providing proof that his relationship with Maggie was over and done with. Still, what had she done, what had gone so terribly wrong, that she deserved to be guillotined like that?

A similar conversation had occurred a week or two later, when Joni Mitchell called the house. At the time James was in the cabin loft, the small room above the second story, and he must have been fully aware that I could hear every word of his end of the conversation. In essence, the blade came down again as he told Joni, “You shouldn’t call here anymore.” Yes, I was relieved that his relationship with Joni, his most recent love before me, was over, but at the same time, how could anyone ever be “over” Joni Mitchell? Joni was brilliant and enchanting, and her love for James, I always imagined, was original and deep. When James hung up and came down the stairs from the loft, he looked steely and furious.

As a woman who loved him, the last thing in the world I wanted to say was “Don’t ever speak to someone you have loved, or told that you loved, or made love to, in such a way,” and I didn’t. I never said anything, simply registered this facet of James’s personality.

Still, it was a sign, an omen. I should have picked up the precision with which the guillotine fell, should have memorized the quality of his incisive, elegant baritone. I huddled in my own private cubbyhole of watchfulness, transfixed by my own innocent conceit in believing James belonged to me now, and that words so icy, and so final, could never, ever fly in my direction.

*   *   *

In early January of 1973, the two of us flew to Japan, where James was on tour. The Japanese press seemed equally fascinated by me, and, not least, by our marriage. Every night, one of the tour promoters took it upon himself to introduce each of the members of James’s band who had arrived without a wife or girlfriend in tow to a Japanese lady of the night. It was a way of life there, just as it’s a way of life for many musicians on the road, and the guys in the band loved traveling to Japan for just that reason, the easy separation of the heart and the body. James and I spent three weeks in Japan, using the Tokyo Hilton as our home base despite the concerts he was performing in Osaka and elsewhere, and I couldn’t help wondering whether James felt a little bit excluded from the boys’ club.

The Japanese tour held another surprise for me. Almost daily, I received notification from the lobby that a dozen red roses were downstairs, addressed to me. They were attached to a note signed,
M.P
. Michael Phillips was one of Mick’s many aliases, one he probably used in hotel rooms across the world. What prompted this? I hadn’t encouraged Mick, but neither had I discouraged him. He knew I was married, so why didn’t I just call him and tell him to stop? Any decent female in a Jane Austen novel would have done that. I suppose that both Mick and I were hanging onto something, and I wasn’t sure enough of myself to disengage from him completely. When James asked me who they were from, I hedged and told him they were a gift from the tour promoter for both of us. The roses continued showing up.

At the same time, the jarring amount of attention that the Japanese press was paying to James and me led us one night to a difficult but crucially honest conversation about the competition between us. I don’t remember exactly what was said, but our talk centered around the gargantuan success of “You’re So Vain,” the attention I was receiving in Japan, and the fact that this might be one of the very few times in my career I was temporarily surfing a bigger wave than he was. James had torn feelings about this—he didn’t want to feel jealous of, or competitive with, the person he loved most in the world, he told me. His words were extremely painful for me, since I continued to feel guilty about being “big” or “important” within the Simon family. This was just the time that my mother decided she would write me out of parts of her will, since I wouldn’t need the money anymore. More worrisome, I never wanted to overshadow the man I loved. “What a good, if painful, talk it was,” I wrote afterward in my diary. “He did let me in. Very smart he is. Glad for the opportunity of having it make us so direct and open with each other. He doesn’t miss a trick.”

*   *   *

The early 1970s was an era when hallucinogens and other drugs were freely passed from record company presidents and A&R men to artists and their sidemen, backup singers, and stage crews. Whatever you wanted was freely available: cocaine, mushrooms, LSD, pot, as well as a few new fabrications recently invented in cutting-edge laboratories. Which explains why one of the men connected to the tour had recently given James and me four tablets of mescaline in capsule form to take to Japan. (For the record, I was innately fearful of all psychedelics. People who knew me well, including Jake and James, told me I wouldn’t do well with them, since my nervous system seems to reside outside my body rather than inside, or “in my plume,” as my son Ben says), so I simply packed the mescaline tablets inside my cosmetics case and forgot about them. We didn’t take them in Japan, and when we got back I forgot all about them, at least until a few weeks later, when James and I took a short trip.