Boys in the Trees: A Memoir (44 page)

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As the 1970s came to an end and the eighties began, I had a couple of big hits in “Nobody Does It Better” and “Jesse,” which was originally inspired by my son, Ben, and how in an attempt to “baby-train” his sleep patterns, I was advised by all the books to leave him crying alone in the crib for a limited period of time, which was traumatizing for both of us. The song began as “Ben, I won’t go to you … I won’t come and pick you up,” or lyrics to that effect, that later turned into “Jesse, I won’t cut fresh flowers for you / I won’t make the wine cold for you.” That all started with leaving my baby boy in his crib to cry things out.

But overall, despite having hits here and there, my albums didn’t do as well on the charts as they once had. My assertiveness receded slightly, and I retreated to a more hushed place in my head. I grew quieter and quieter. With James often on the road, my days were mostly overtaken with domestic and maternal affairs—taking Sally for pancake breakfasts at the Black Dog, the little restaurant on the Sound; going shopping for lamps and rugs in Edgartown; picking up food for dinner at Cronig’s supermarket. I totally agree with Diane Johnson, who once wrote in
A Shadow Knows
, “I often think that motherhood, in its physical aspects, is like one of those prying disorders such as hay fever or asthma, which receive verbal sympathy but no real consideration, in view of their lack of fatality, and which after years of attrition, can sour and pervert the character beyond all recovery,” a quote I identified with strongly enough to put in my diary.

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I was very preoccupied with Ben’s health. He became sicker and sicker, with constant fevers. We took him to one doctor after another and he spent almost a year on gamma globulin to strengthen his immune system. After Christmas in 1978, we decided to get him to a warmer climate, and took a trip to Tortola. James’s mother, Trudy, came with us. One day on a coconut-gathering trip, James badly injured his hand trying to cut the fruit open. After that, Trudy was concerned with being a mother to James, whereas I had my hands full being a mother to Ben, who kept coming down with one illness after the next. Parallel moms. Nothing worried me so much as the state of Ben’s health, and as much as Trudy wanted to tend to James’s hand, the underlying problem with James was drugs, in the same way the underlying problem with Ben, we would find out only later, was a dysplastic kidney, which was causing his immune system to break down. In retrospect, my focus should have been 50 percent on Ben, 50 percent on James. Instead, it was 80 percent Ben, 20 percent James.

I wasn’t focused on my love for James, nor was he focused on me. He spent our Tortola vacation searching for coconuts, or out sailing with friends. It wasn’t that I was blind or insensitive to James’s drug use or his sliced hand; I simply had my worried mind full to the brim with Ben’s physical condition. It didn’t occur to me at the time that James might have had a girlfriend, or that she even had a name.

“Ride with the tide and go with the flow.”

“Here we are, like children forever, taking care of one another.”
—“There We Are,” James Taylor

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

showdown

“
H
ow’s Ben?” I asked when I got home one night in the spring of 1980, and was relieved to find out from Lillian, the babysitter, that my three-year-old son didn’t have a fever. Still, an hour later, Ben woke up and told me that both his tummy and his back hurt. When I took his temperature, it was skyrocketing: 104. I tried to reach James, but couldn’t.

It was a time when things between James and me were unbuckling in slow motion, with the status quo of our world no longer sufficient for either one of us.

I didn’t know of any rock ’n’ roll guys who didn’t cheat on their wives or girlfriends. They’d have sex with someone and the next day have no recollection of who that person was. Did that count as infidelity? Then there were any number of “behind the stalls in dressing rooms” moments. What about those—did
they
count? The rules, it seemed, were foggy, bendable, forever in play. Out of town and out of sight, James would get wasted alongside his “brothers” and end up doing God knows what with God knows whom. Rock ’n’ roll aside, men did these things anyway, I told myself, especially when their beauteous wives are transformed suddenly into
mothers
: milk-spewing, overprotective lionesses, preoccupied with the safety and well-being of their kids, the husbands in turn feeling rejected and becoming resentful small children themselves. Around that time I read Tolstoy’s novella
The Kreutzer Sonata
, which tells the story of a man who claims his marriage began to deteriorate when he first had sex with his wife. The man describes sex in the most guilt-ridden terms, as a perversion, an obscenity, a “fall” from a quixotic ideal of purity, and tells how after his wife had children, he began to hate her. It made a huge impression on me.

The down-tempo unraveling of our marriage began when I discovered that James had had a dalliance with one of his backup singers during his 1979 summer tour. A close friend mentioned it to me casually, assuming I must already know, but it came as news to me. It was a discovery that opened a revolving door of mutual deception. As revolving doors go, was this one going to stop and let me out, or keep spinning? I confronted James about it, going so far as to fall onto the rug in despair. “This isn’t about you,” James said coldly. But if it wasn’t about me, who, then, was it about? Did James feel, as I did, that we were not really living, but merely simulating? That something once clear, sharp, generous, infinite, a window view looking out over some forever landscape, was now too hazy to see through?

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Smarting with hurt, and feeling unloved and alone, I embarked on my first extramarital relationship with another man. Scott Litt was my engineer, and when I confided in Scott how unvalued and uncared for I felt in my marriage to James, he let me know repeatedly that it was okay for me to flirt with other men, as if that was news. The recording studio had a suggestion box where anyone could leave anonymous notes, and two or three of them, I remember, said,
Dump James
. It was obvious they could have come from no one but Scott. He came to be one of the few men in my life whom I really trust.

In light of Scott’s and my relationship, my producer, Mike Mainieri, insisted I had to tell James in the name of honesty. Why I so instantly took his word over my instinct to wait is beyond me. I guess I wanted to hurt James very badly. The following weekend, on the Vineyard, as James and I sat on a boulder in a field we called “the poison ivy patch,” I confessed, and felt tormented doing so. In spite of whatever dalliances James had had over the years, I couldn’t bear to break the vow that, when I had made it, felt as religious as any experience I’d ever had. It was then that James confessed that he’d been “seeing a few other women,” among them Evey: an Asian dancer who, he told me, was currently living in the fourth-floor walkup apartment on West Seventieth Street he used for rehearsals.

It was an awful conversation, one I didn’t want to have. Nor did I wish to spend a second longer with Scott if there was the remotest possibility that James’s and my marriage could be on solid footing again. I left the conversation with the conviction that James’s “thing” with Evey was temporary, but as time went on, it became clear that Evey wasn’t going anywhere, and that James didn’t want her to, either. The one time I asked, James had refused to let me meet Evey. “She won’t talk to you,” he said.

It was a shattering time in my life, especially in my marriage. I still wanted things to work with James. I had married him forever. It wasn’t an illusion. Ours would never be an easy marriage to hold together, but it would also be nearly impossible to leave. Then again, beyond precoital love, did exclusivity in love really exist? Hadn’t Tolstoy written in
The Kreutzer Sonata
words to the effect that asking that kind of love to survive was like asking a candle flame to keep burning forever?

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As the two of us continued treading water, making and missing appointments with couples therapists on the Upper East Side, other issues reared their heads. James and I had gone to an appointment with a doctor—an expert—so many experts!—who told me that if I could remain nursing Ben a little longer, I would produce one extremely healthy child, both emotionally and physically. I’d taken his advice, but my nursing Ben, who was two and a half, made James angry. As James grew unhappier, he pointed fingers at me about even the smallest things. As the conflicts between us simmered, James seemed to slip away from me even more.

Once, at the end of 1979, when I came across a love letter intended for James from an old girlfriend from the 1960s, James seemed nonplussed by her professions of love. “It’s not your problem,” he said to me. “It’s got nothing to do with you.” Come again? What a way to erase me completely. Casting around wildly for some solution to our marital problems, I followed a recipe provided by a Spanish witch doctor (signs of my own desperate thinking getting messy), smearing myself with oils and unguents—it was a love spell, designed to restore whatever passion or magic had left our relationship—but when James came into the bedroom that night to be faced by red and black candles, fragrances, and Latin music purring from the sound system, he asked if there was anything medicinally interesting in the vapors.

At the same time, there were moments of love, grace, wonder. James and I sang “You Can Close Your Eyes” together at a concert in Long Island. On the way to the concert, my emotional pendulum had swung back to an ardent belief in our marriage and awe in the combination of James’s qualities—genius, craziness, fascination, selfishness, joy. Onstage, when we sang “You Can Close Your Eyes,” James’s gaze communicated:
You have this. You always will, too, because I will always love you.

Another day, James and I turned a Robert Burns poem into a song, in two-part harmony. Creating a melody was fun and came easy to us.
“John Anderson my jo, John, when we were first acquent, your locks were like the raven … your bonnie brow was brent … but now your brow is beld, John, your locks are like the snaw … but blessings on your frosty pow, John Anderson, my jo!”
The song had never had a melody before. This was how James and I operated, though—as though we were following each other’s spirits around the notes.

That afternoon, as we sang the Robert Burns poem, both of us cried, as we improvised melody and harmony, in part because it was so easy and natural, like breathing, almost inevitable, for us to do. That mixture of music and tears made us realize how ideal things could be if that was all there was.

In the end, it seemed to me that so much about love, no matter what you did or tried, was left to chance. In my diary I wrote, “If I could manage to achieve constant forbearance … but when James would return after a make-up vow of repentance, and many apologies, my worries would remain: How long would he stay? Long enough to open new wounds, demand promises, looking good from the outside, claim shared songs and poems, flirt with new ways of expressing our undying love … James is visiting the marriage. Always on the verge of moving off. James is always a half-departed man.”

The state of our marriage gave me the lyrics to what is perhaps the saddest song I’ve ever written, “We’re So Close,” from my album
Spy
, which I wrote one day in 1979 on the Vineyard while James was keeping me waiting for an hour in the car as he pulled his sailboat from the water. By the time he returned to the car, more than anything I wanted to read the lyrics back to him—“We’re so close we have a silent language / We don’t need words at all … He says: We’re beyond flowers / He says: We’re beyond compliments … We’re so close we can dispense with love / We don’t need love at all”—but something stopped me. What would James have done if I’d read him those lyrics aloud? Most likely nothing. But he would add it to a column in his mind: a long, stern, silent column of recrimination.