Boys in the Trees: A Memoir (33 page)

James’s cabin was still at a pretty rustic stage in its construction—two tall rooms and not much more. Four steps down from a landing was a living room with a wood-burning Franklin stove, all lit up and keeping the house toasty. Above the stove was a wooden grate that carried the heat upstairs to a second story, and above that, a small loft. The wood trim throughout the house was oak and pine, and the bare floors were covered here and there by throw rugs. In one corner of the first-floor living room was an almost five-foot-high pyramid of letters—James’s unopened fan mail, a white mountain that was beginning to spill down, cascade, and overwhelm the room. Nearby was a pullout couch where James and I would later turn in for the night, and the walls were lined with books and nails where coats, vests, towels, pants, shirts, bathrobes, pliers, hammers, saws, and other tools were hanging. The small bathroom featured an antique toilet with a pull chain, a deep tub, and a mirrored cabinet above a small tin sink. The bathroom had no door, and the bathtub had no curtain. James soon bought waterproof material and sewed one himself, using fishing line threaded through a needle with a huge eye.

On the other side of a counter, dividing it from the living room, was the kitchen.
Kitchen
really meant four burners, a sink, and a small fridge beneath a counter. Kate, James’s sister, was there when we walked in, making Toll House cookies, and she welcomed us as if we were two tall, lost, rosy-cheeked children from a Swedish fairy tale. Since I had met Kate a few times, and loved her right away, I couldn’t have been happier to see her.

The next morning, we took a long walk around the property (I borrowed Kate’s walking shoes). James led me around low forests of crowded new-growth pine and scrub oak, autumn clematis, and blueberry bushes that the first frost had almost flattened to the earth, all belonging to James. The property felt so grown-up. What did landownership really mean? I suppose my parents—and other grown-ups—knew those rules and answers, but I didn’t, not then. There were deep crevasses in the land, rolling hills and steep ridges, as if the entire property had been carved during some kind of major glacial activity eons earlier. It was, and is, the hilliest part of the island. Like the rest of the north side of the island, the soil was generally sandy but heavy and fertile enough to nourish tall trees and fat vegetables over time, and though James’s land wasn’t on the water, it was close enough for the air to smell of salt and sea.

That day, and other times, too, James described his vision: fields as far as the eye could see. He would clear the woods in order to create them. Wheat and rye and oats. He would plant willow trees and a golden chain tree by the beautiful natural pond near the entrance of the driveway, a pond James would eventually christen Carly’s Bottom, as a tribute to his new lady’s derriere. He described the many varieties of trees he would plant, too—beeches, Atlas cedars, dogwoods, mimosas, Colorado spruces—and where exactly he was planning on building a shed for his tools, and a barn for the horses he’d soon own. He cared about trees the way I did. There was frequently some strong-armed man pruning, molding the shape of them.

I didn’t doubt him for a second. Already he was having rock walls constructed by a local artisan, one of the many builders who were helping James bring his vision to life. There was a young group of hippies who lived off James’s land and built things with their hands and hung out at James’s cabin, contributing their ideas, aptitudes, and skills. At the time I couldn’t have dreamed of the powerful hold that James’s cabin would come to have over me. During my first few visits, not wanting to be intrusive, I remember I was hesitant about making any suggestions at all, especially as James’s vision for the place was still developing, and he’d done everything from sawing and nailing wood to hand-sewing the shower curtain. Should I, maybe, propose he put a door on the bathroom? Or was that too conventional an idea, the sort of overly civilized suggestion that defied the very notion of living a plainspoken Vineyard life? Maybe it was only that I didn’t want to let on that I was pre-nesting as hard as I was.
(Caution: comfort ahead!)
James and I didn’t talk about any of this right away, and certainly not about where the two of us would live if we stayed together. But one night, full of love, James had a prescient moment. If our relationship lasted, and if we got married someday, he told me, we would have two children. First would come a little girl whom we would name Sarah, and then, a couple of years later, a boy, whose name, he told me, would be Ben.

During that first Vineyard trip, James and I spent a lot of time with Kate. A naturally talented beauty with big blue eyes and a kind, especially gentle spirit, Kate was living year-round on the island and sleeping on a second pullout couch on the cabin’s second floor. Kate was a musician and a weaver—a singer with a guitar, a spinner with a loom, and she had a mutt named Rodeo—and James, her older brother, was highly protective of her during a vulnerable time in her life. At the time Kate was going out with a scary giant of a boy named Hank. Hank was a local, a former Green Beret and Vietnam vet, whose family had a reputation for extremes. His mother owned a shotgun that she would aim right at you if you got too close to her property, and Hank’s sister, who was erotically fixated on James, once clung on to James’s truck door even when he tried to drive away from her (James ended up driving over her foot by accident, without doing any damage). Kate’s boyfriend—maybe
pursuer
was the better word—had come right out and said, or maybe threatened, that he had nine lives, three of which he hadn’t yet lived.

Kate, though, was wisely getting ready to break things off with Hank. One night, “The Man from ’Nam,” as James later named him, was upstairs on the second floor with Kate, and James, hearing a male voice whose tone he didn’t quite trust, became nervous on his sister’s behalf. Like the rest of his clan, Hank had an aggressive reputation, but that didn’t stop James. He headed up to the second floor and, with a raised but courteous voice, asked Hank to leave. In no way could you ever describe James as a shouter. His personality style is like his music—quiet, downplayed, courtly—and his rare outbreaks of anger show themselves in the style of a southern gentleman, which he was and still is, I’m assuming. Tonight, though, he was facing a soldier and a war veteran who believed he still had a few lives remaining. What was called for was surely more than what James was accustomed to, or what made him comfortable, and his typical dulcet tones, irony, and dry subtlety would have been lost on Hank anyway. I waited downstairs, listening to a very tense back-and-forth confrontation. A minute or two later, Hank came down the stairs, swearing at top volume, slammed the door, and left the house. James came down, looking shaken, but when I told him how brave he was to have stood up to Hank, he shrugged, as if to imply:
Well, what else was I gonna do?
Then he announced that he was going outside to chop some wood.

James left the cabin, trekking through the woods to the woodpile. It was a frigid night, I remember, with a nearly full moon. I soon heard the sounds of hard, successive pounding. James must have been relieved, and proud of himself, for standing up to Kate’s miserable Green Beret. Maybe he was punishing himself, too, picking up an ax and taking out whatever violence he fantasized doing to Hank against a pile of helpless logs. I couldn’t help but think of the Philip Larkin lines in the book of poems Willie gave me: “This is the first thing / I have understood: / Time is the echo of an axe / Within a wood.” Then, abruptly, the sounds of chopping stopped, and James yelled out into the moonlit night:

“CARLY, I LOVE YOU!”

When he returned to the house, he laid a few pieces of newly split wood inside the Franklin stove and lit it on up (James always “lit it on up,” striking a match on the underside of the kitchen counter or against the sole of his shoe). Once he got the fire going, he closed the stove’s glass doors and turned out all but one small lamp near our pullout bed. Before retiring, he went back upstairs to check how Kate was faring. The way I saw it, that night James had seized the moment, protected his sister, had a catharsis, and in a fit of love-crazed wood chopping, sung my name up to the moon. And I was letting that love shine in, shining it back at him in return. To me, being with James wasn’t so much a decision as a kind of magical predestination.

Reappearing downstairs, James vanished into the doorless bathroom, where he washed the soot and ash off his hands. Still dressed and wearing his boots, he approached our bed in no hurry at all. His boots (I remember they were made by a company called White’s) made him a good two inches taller than his already tall, toned, six-foot, two-and-a-half-inch frame. He wore a light-brown-and-blue-plaid workman’s shirt. His turquoise belt buckle was loosened, and his jeans, baggy in the knees and unbuttoned at the waist, hung down unevenly over his boots. In the lamplight, I could see his eyes: blazing blue. Even though the room wasn’t entirely dark, I’d never seen that color blue light up the dark in such a way, those two eyes gazing at me wide open, a breathing, cursing, loving, yearning blueness that touched me beyond all words.

As James came toward me, the space between us got smaller and smaller, and our perpendicular lines, with the surge of a waterfall, became parallel. Our life together would go on in just this way for quite some time.

*   *   *

From the beginning, James and I were linked together as strongly as we were not just because of love, and music, but because we were both troubled people trying our best to pass as normal. The lengths both of us had to go to
act
as though we felt at ease in the world was a strain. It was a comfort to have in each other a relief from our private, individual craziness. James, of course, had been famously written about before we met. As a student at Milton Academy, the prep school outside Boston, he’d left school his junior year and gone into McLean Hospital, which also provided schooling. Many of his songs from his first album, including “Night Owl” and “Knocking ’Round the Zoo,” were written either about the people or the situations he had encountered there. Whatever his diagnosis was, it was likely complex, part of that marvelous, difficult brain that led him to depression and drug addiction. Both were, and are, so much a part of each other.

As for me, if I was in trouble, James always rescued me, though I knew he felt he didn’t belong on this earth as much as I did. I don’t know if he really understood my own alienation and feelings of being on the outside almost all the time. Except when I was with him. 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.) If James was suffering, his pain diverted my attention away from myself, the result being that I agonized about myself less. It’s like being a parent: you may be suffering from the worst migraine on earth, but if your child is sick, your self-centered immersion fades into irrelevance and gives itself over instead to the purity and relief of selfless caretaking. In her novel
The Shadow Knows
, the writer Diane Johnson describes a character holding her children’s hands as they cross the street. The woman wonders how her children can possibly trust her since her capacity to trust herself is so fragile. The same was true for James and me. For the next decade, he and I would grip each other’s hands against the ever-onrushing traffic of the curious, the jealous, the smilers with knives.

For the first few months, James and I traveled back and forth from New York to the Vineyard, where we splashed on some new paint, pounded a few nails, and cleared some fields, while planting some new, real trees (anything but the prodigious oak or pine). On Lambert’s Cove, there was always the beauty of the outdoors, wood to chop, sassafras to be plumbed for tea, a basement to clean. Owning a place, I was finding out, was a lot different from renting. For example, I never even knew if there
was
a basement in our Thirty-fifth Street apartment building.

In New York, we felt as though we didn’t want to socialize other than coparenting James’s giant puppy, David. We cooked, got stoned, and ate. James had a few dishes he would eventually become well known for: beans, for one, an altogether remarkable Jamesian recipe, containing lots of garlic and onions, steeping for days. James slept late most days, and at night, he and I went out with Arlyne or socialized with Jake, Carinthia, Ellen, David, and Mary Ellen. Neither of us was really comfortable with friends
or
idle time. Accustomed to being “on” when we were out in public, being alone in our apartment felt like an almost foreign notion—and almost always: a huge relief. We got antsy, restless, eternally juggling ideas about what to do and when to do it, quickly becoming irked with ourselves if we stayed home when so many people expected us to attend their shindigs, shows, or get-togethers.

Our relationship was only three months old when I went out to L.A. to record a demo, while James stayed behind in New York to help record a few cuts for Abigale Haness, the girl backstage at the Carnegie Hall concert who would later marry Danny Kortchmar. Early one morning, my phone rang. It was 3 a.m. Los Angeles time, 6 a.m. East Coast time. It was James, and the story he told me had nothing to do with Abigale’s recording session but, instead, with the eccentric plumbing in our Stanford White apartment building. James had been taking a shower that morning when the hot water quit. Finding himself suddenly under a deluge of icy water, he shut off the cold faucet, forgetting to turn off the hot. He went about his business, spending the rest of the day recording Abigale up in Nyack, an hour north of New York. Sometime during the day, our building’s hot water came back on—including, of course, the water in the shower stall. When he returned to our apartment, it looked like a Ukrainian steam room, minus the old naked men. The living room wallpaper was curling off in strips. The photos and posters had begun a slow curtsying peel inward, and my record collection was warping. All our photos were ruined, though some I eventually straightened out between the pages of heavy books. We ultimately had to move out for three months while the entire place got re-wallpapered.