Boys in the Trees: A Memoir (37 page)

Buying a ring was not a trivial affair, and looking back, I don’t know why James and I found ourselves at some cheap Middle Eastern downtown tourist kiosk. Thinking back on it, it was James at his most New England-y: farmyard wedding rings. James and I paid for each other’s rings, each one costing $17.95, so there wasn’t much wallet shuffling, with each of us handing the cashier a twenty-dollar bill. (Remember, these were the expensive rings.) The one we decided on for James was slightly wider than the one we picked out for me. James’s was faintly curved and beveled, with a dull sheen, while mine was narrower, with a more polished look. They were both ostentatiously “non-statement.” The rings went into the store’s small, ordinary white cartons and, pocketing our boxes, we waved good-bye to the saleswoman.

Fred Leighton, a Mexican-import-clothing store that had recently begun selling precious jewelry, was our next stop. I was hoping to find something useful
and
original to wear at my wedding that I could maybe wear in the future, too. I found the right dress at once and held it up, silently offering James veto power. He asked me to try it on, but when I said, “It’s pretty loose-fitting, and it’s a medium. It’ll fit,” he said, “Done!”

A simple gray-and-white, long-sleeved Mexican dress, vertically striped and floor length, it reminded me of the outfits Lucy and I wore when we performed at the Moors in Provincetown. That dress—my wedding dress—is one of the many articles of clothing that, along with various other irreplaceable things, have mysteriously vanished from my house. Gone, too, is the beautiful diamond necklace that James bought for me after we were married. Over the years, countless pairs of my best, worn-in leather boots have gone missing, too. Some of James’s belongings have also disappeared, including a beautiful book that Joni Mitchell gave him containing pen-and-ink drawings and handwritten lyrics to the songs on
Blue
, most of which were originally inspired by James. I remember distinctly Joni’s drawing of a girl’s face, with a gleaming diamond instead of a teardrop. A friend of mine said she’d keep it safe for me.

*   *   *

Even at the eleventh hour, James and I still hadn’t figured out an exact time or location, much less gotten in touch with a justice of the peace. I was hoping a simple notary could handle the job, but this, it turned out, was beyond a notary’s job description. I hurriedly placed a phone call to my mother in Riverdale, explaining that James and I wanted to get married the following day at five in the afternoon—James was playing a show that night at Radio City Music Hall—and that we desperately needed to track down a justice of the peace.

Even though Mother had already been asked by James, Mommy sounded exultant. She promised to call a Riverdale acquaintance, Judge Ash, the second we hung up, and if Judge Ash was unavailable, she assured me she would find someone else. “Darling, darling Carly…” she said. “Are you having a big gathering?”

No, I told her. It would be just her, James’s mother Trudy, and, of course, Jake.

“Cosa linda! Cosa linda!”
It was the same endearment my mother and father had used with each other. Mommy again assured me she’d call Judge Ash the moment we hung up.

Jake was the next call. Could he possibly show up at my apartment the following afternoon at 5 p.m. sharp? When I told him why, that James and I were getting married, there was a long pause. “Are you serious?” he said at last. “Carpe diem. What about tearful nights and angry dawns?” His lyrics for our first song infiltrated our conversation like smoke seeping under a door crack.

I knew it seemed sudden, and impulsive, I told him, but … that’s the way it was.

“I guess so,” Jake said.

I couldn’t help it. “And that’s the way I’ve always heard it should be.”

There was no laugh—just thirty seconds of breathing, from one mouthpiece to another.

I may have cried. I can’t remember, but that’s how my memory shapes things today. It was a heavy moment nonetheless, a deep conversation, as our song, finally, had come to life, suffused as it was now with almost too much meaning. “I’ll be there,” Jake said before he hung up. “Of course I will. Dress code?”

James placed a call to his mother, Trudy, asking if she could be at our apartment tomorrow afternoon at the same time. I couldn’t get a good grip on Trudy’s reaction, but the conversation wasn’t long. I felt a hole in my heart on behalf of our joint family members who wouldn’t be present. Neither James nor I had wanted a big festival of a wedding. In truth, the optimal wedding would have involved just the two of us, and maybe our sheer haste, plus the question of “Whom do you
not
invite?” gave us the excuse to keep the ceremony very small. (I also think I would have been too nervous to carry out such an intimate vow in front of a big crowd.) The fact of the matter was that it would have been impossible to assemble the most important people in our lives in such a short time, and I knew Joey, Lucy, and Peter would understand. In lieu of a huge crowd, we’d created a time, and a date, and made our decision, with everyone invited to James’s after-concert party at the Time-Life Building in Rockefeller Center. How on earth, I wondered, did James have the calm and steadfastness to even consider walking onstage at Radio City Music Hall only three hours after our wedding?

*   *   *

Once the plans were set, I hung James’s white linen suit in the shower to steam out the wrinkles. James took a nap while I tidied up around the apartment and took David the dog out for a walk.

I couldn’t help thinking about Daddy, and how much he would have liked and approved of James. James was a Harvard boy in spirit and style, one smart enough never to have attended the college. Ivy League or not, James, in fact, was too smart, too all-seeing, for his own comfort. When he slept at night, he moved around a lot, once telling me he’d dreamed he was emerging through a black hole, that he knew he wasn’t from this planet, but had no choice but to bear up under the strain of living on this earth. I’m guessing half or more of James’s thoughts or perceptions were ones he wished were someone else’s. At the time I thought, and I still do, that he’s an uncommon genius.

That evening, though, James was nothing more than a nervous groom-to-be, and I was pretending just as hard to remain calm and unruffled, with both of us tossing customary rituals out the window, including the wedding superstition of the bride and groom not seeing each other before the ceremony.

“How does this look?” James asked. “Should the ivory pin stick through the tie, or should I just keep the tie tucked under the jacket?” His only small stylistic eccentricity was a hand-painted tie with a camel on it, which we both agreed he should wear.

I fixed it for him, and then it was my turn. “Do you think I should wear my hair up, or would that look too sedate?”

“No, wear it the way it is. I love it long.”

Our wedding style, if you could even call it that, could be summed up as a slightly ostentatious absence of style. Neither of us considered that the occasion merited any fanfare or toys, paper hats, or long-winded, solemn speeches, and anything more than the most low-key recitation of our vows would have no doubt darkened James’s reticently jovial mood. We already had enough of a public life, one that would get even more splashy and unhidden as the years went by. Already we had the normal number of people asking us for the normal number of autographs, James always signing his name with a fast “caged animal” scrawl, me delivering a perfect schoolgirl script, making James’s, by comparison, all the more treasured. On the Vineyard, then and throughout the seventies, the attention people were paying to us would become even more pronounced. James was attracted to the Lambert’s Cove property because of its beauty and privacy, but neither of us had counted on the presence of a nearby camping site known as Cranberry Acres. Fans would come right up beyond the borders of our property, and even take pictures outside our cabin windows. James would get extremely angry, but in general his road manager, Jock, helped ward trespassers off. As the decade went on, things got worse, with cars driving down our road at all hours, snapping photos and taking videos, and some people even knocking on our door.

But at that moment, none of that mattered. To paraphrase Tolstoy, it’s absurd to think of charm or lipstick, feathers or hairstyles, at a time when, if you lack a proper base of ethics, you might as well forget the union. You have the wrong partner. Or at least, the wrong one with whom to build a life. We had that base of ethics. With James’s modesty and good manners, he would have been in his element living his whole life in the sand somewhere, unglimpsed from behind the blackberry bushes, perhaps stealing out for an hour or two a day for a fast, surprise appearance and a smattering of folksy applause. That same paradox lived inside me, too, wanting to disappear into the woods while simultaneously being recognized and loved for a few minutes of reassurance.

*   *   *

Side by side, with James on my left, we stood beside the Tonk upright piano in our apartment with me clutching James’s hand and shaking evenly from head to toe, and Judge Ash standing before us, presiding. On the other side of us was one of our unofficial ushers, James’s (and now
our
) dog, David. In search of distraction, my eyes found the colors of the camel on James’s hand-painted tie.
Oh my Lord, James, problems have and will arise, but you are my whole life.

James and I both wanted the briefest of speeches from the judge, without any allusions to religion. He finally spoke: “Will you, James, take this woman, Carly, to be your lawful, wedded wife in sickness and in health, till death do you part?”

“Yes,” James said.

“And will you, Carly, take this man, James, to be your husband, in sickness and in health, till death do you part?”

I heard my own voice saying “Yes,” while my brain, as was its lifelong habit, took flapping flight, tripping on far-flung trivia. How and why had
death you do part
become
death do you part
? Where did the
you
and the
do
really belong? Where were the adrenals in the human body? Were they in the back, or over to one side? But which side? Why was I still shaking so much, and where in my body was I feeling whatever it was I was feeling, and were my spleen and my hypothalamus (wherever they were located, though I imagined they were very close to the adrenals) both holding up under all this strain?

“I now pronounce you husband and wife…”

“You may kiss the bride…”

As Judge Ash removed a document from his folder, James and I kissed. Then we did it once more, my brain nearly bursting with
Oh-my-good-God
s.

A few feet away from me, my mother was wiping away tears. Having evolved beyond her initial belief that James was a drug user (in the beginning, she referred to him as a “potter,” not knowing exactly what “pot” had to do with drugs, or if and where a verb or a noun was needed), James surely reminded her now of Daddy in his younger days, back when she still loved him. As the years went on, in fact, I grew to suspect she had developed a crush on James, not exactly a reach for my mother where biblically inconvenient younger men were concerned. Then again, James could “charm the ugly off an ape,” as his own brother Alex put it.

Next to my mother, Trudy Taylor was holding a pitchfork, a metaphorical one not yet visible to the human eye. I was eager to win her over, and had made her a needlepointed pillow six months after our first meeting, the first time I’d ever attempted a “craft”—in this case a bunch of flowers inspired by a Picasso print. Trudy loved it, and my gift bought us a good ten years of sweet talk and recipe swapping. That said, Mommy and Trudy were always slightly combative. Standing beside the two mothers, Jake looked slightly baffled and wore a typically impassive Jake look: the one where I knew he was expending vastly more time and energy deciphering other people’s expressions than bothering to arrange his own. After Jake’s first-night comment about James’s shoes, and a rough, uneasy eight months of getting to know each other, James and Jake finally became close friends. I wasn’t leaving Jake behind, either, as he and Ricky were still going strong. To me, Jake’s little smile conveyed only,
We’ll see. Many rivers to cross here.

Afterward, our small group formed a celebratory circle, a group huddle of sorts. No one was officially designated to count things off in any kind of 1 … 2 … 3, but voices of the assembled joined together in a loud, exultant
“Whooooopie!”
Any song would have sufficed, so long as it was loose, informal, simple, and unchallenging, and Trudy started the one we all sang:
“Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat / Please do put a penny in the old man’s hat…”

Once the gang was gone, I broke out into giddy, let-it-all-hang-out laughter that soon turned into tearful hysteria. My own nervous energy was contagious. James began laughing at me, and then at “it”—the whole crazy scene in which we’d just participated, and the fact that he and I could now, with perfectly straight faces, call each other “husband” and “wife.” We shed most of our clothes and went straight to the fridge to take out the Sara Lee banana cake we’d bought especially for the occasion. Grabbing spoons, we both devoured the cake as if nothing we’d ever done, eaten, seen, heard, felt, or experienced before had been so over-the-top funny: banana cake, for God’s sake! We were like kids scrambling to raid the fridge before a responsible adult wearing a sheriff’s star busted us in the act. We ended up in the bedroom, lying in a warm, worn nest of wedding dress, suit, camel tie, blue bra, stockings, pearls, and garter belt, all happily, chaotically entwined on the carpet. On that floor we made love, looking ahead as married people … or a couple of kids making believe they were married.

The next day I wrote in my diary:

Nov 4th:

The thrill of feeling myself go, and becoming complete, the other half filling in as if by a warm infusion—a compound of excitement, relief, a summer storm building over a hot afternoon as it joins forces with fronts, a duet of clouds that crash without form, through mists and moving air. My skin grows bright and my veins, attracted to its surface warmth, allow a color resembling the hue of a feather in the hair of a flamenco dancer.