Boys in the Trees: A Memoir (46 page)

Ben jumped in, from his high chair: “I spilled ketchup on it.”

“Why did you do that, Ben?” James said.

“It’s okay, darling,” I said. “I got it off. Or almost.”

That night I spent a good forty minutes putting the kids to bed. They both slept in Ben’s bed, big, roomy, and crowded with stuffed animals, each child holding one of my arms as I told them stories in the dark. I waited until their breathing was even, turned on their night-lights, left the door open a few inches so they could have the benefit of the dim hall light—and then slipped away.

I had no idea what James was planning for that evening. If he planned on going out somewhere, I would stay home with Sal and Ben. Because of his steady uptake of whatever he was drinking, I suspected James would probably crash early.

I made my way down the long hall, from Ben’s bedroom into the den. James was on the couch, watching TV, still wearing his hooded black terrycloth robe. He’d bought it the first week we were in love, dashing to Bloomingdale’s with a shopping list including gifts for his parents and all his siblings. He ended up buying everyone the same robe, though Trudy got a version in regal, maternal blue. Eight years later, James looked rumpled, his mustache shadowing his top lip, his hair long, dirty, sexy, and stringy, bare legs extended, strong, squarish bare feet crossed. Guitars surrounded him, three acoustic and one electric; he was making inroads on a new song. A cigarette burned from between two fingers, though no ashtray was in sight.

James seemed transfixed by what he was watching—a VCR tape called
Animals Are Beautiful People
that I could have sworn had been playing all day. I would have done anything to curl up beside him to watch crocodiles nuzzle, orangutans kiss, leopards copulate. I would have done anything to return with him to Bermuda, to frolic in the bathtub there, to imitate Uncle Peter’s dance. Instead, I stood in the gap of the double sliding French doors and announced, in a clear, unemotional voice:

“I’m going to your other apartment to meet Evey.”

James must not have taken me seriously. If he had turned toward me, he would have had to acknowledge what I’d just said. He didn’t.

And he had no idea that I had an extra set of keys.

Five minutes later, I’d washed my face, my hair was loose and messy, reaching to the middle of my back. If James came in, it would look to him, and to anyone else who cared, as if I was simply getting ready for bed, that I’d changed my mind, that my announcement had been nothing more than some daft comment. My heart began pounding. I switched on the radio and called Lucy, telling her my plans. Our conversation lasted for half an hour or more. She, Reasonable Lulu, tried to argue me out of going, but to no avail. “You know who he is,” she said. “He’s not going to change tonight. You just have to get through this awful period.” Staring at myself in the mirror during our whole phone conversation, I opened up my makeup kit. On the radio, Chrissie Hynde sang “Brass in Pocket,” a song I loved and immediately castigated myself for not having written.

I was wearing jeans and a lightweight tan leather shirt. In the hallway outside the dressing closet, I slipped my bare feet into rubber fur-lined boots. They made no noise on the carpet, or on the hallway that led to the tile in the kitchen. I put on my full-length black leather coat and very quietly exited the apartment. By now it was well after midnight.

*   *   *

Why was I planning to face down my husband’s mistress in their West Seventieth Street love nest? Because I wanted Evey to see that I was not a character in a story James was telling her, not some phantom abstraction, but a real person, and a nice person, too. I wanted her to respect James’s and my marriage, our children, our life together. As I left our building, I slipped into a Gothic night. Looking up at the barbicans and the turrets of the Dakota, the half-moon slid white and ghostly between tar-stained, vaporous clouds, which softened the hard lines of the building’s architecture.

The temperature was in the low forties, and the weatherman had predicted a “chance of precipitation.” I followed the point of the moon, heading in a southwesterly direction. I’d blazed similar trails countless times. This was my neighborhood. Now it was probably close to 2 a.m. on a weekday morning.

As I made my way down that first very long block between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue, I forced myself to go slowly, my heart still pounding, as my brain sifted through possibilities of how I would confront this bizarre unknown. The streets, naturally, were empty, the avenue itself bleak looking and exposed, jittery neon shut down for the night, storefronts armored with metal gates. I noticed that Charivari, an upscale boutique on the corner of Seventy-second and Columbus, had new mannequins in its windows, imports from Madison Avenue, wigless, with hard, white, pouty-lipped faces, shoulders ringed in fake fur. Two of them looked in my general direction and said: “You’re one of us. You stare into the night just as we do, c’mon darling. Look down, that’s it. Look fierce in your eyes. Only the face you put on is important. Why can my legs do just about anything? That’s what mannequins do. Women yearn to be like us. Men find us erotic.”

I wondered whether James had even noticed I was gone. What antelope was being ravaged by what tiger on
Animals Are Beautiful People
? Was James blinking, or were his facial muscles in a relaxed hold? When James was writing a song, guitar in hand, head bowed down, in a trance almost, he often uttered the most delicate, profound things. I’ve never seen anyone reveal himself so mysteriously, yet approachably, at the same time. Oblique and vague, touchable and remote, the flashes of his dream world opening his listeners’ eyes to the lonely spinning galaxy he believed was his true home.

On Seventy-first Street and Columbus, I passed by Victor’s Café, a Cuban joint that had been there for decades. Through the windows a waiter was pouring sangria into waiting glasses, and I heard dull, scattered sounds of laughter. Tucking my thick brown cashmere sweater inside my coat, I pulled up the collar, like elephant ears, around my long neck. It was a gesture, but for whom? The few stragglers inside Victor’s looked friendly enough, and I decided to join the fray. I knew I had a Valium in my coat pocket—why hadn’t I taken it earlier? I dug around for it, found it, placed it righteously under my tongue so that the little fragments of powdery “chill” would dissolve.

I took a seat in the back, keeping my coat on, and when the waiter came around, ordered a single glass. He took my order with a smile of recognition: Didn’t I remember him? Juan? Well, of course I did. “You come in here with your
oosban
,” Juan said, glad I knew him in the same way he seemed to know me. Juan was wearing pure patches of black and white, a starched shirt under a rumpled black waiter’s jacket. A mustache. Short black curly hair. Noticeably kind eyes, whose darkness covered most of the surrounding white, eyes that looked that night both like a full moon in eclipse and as though they were on the verge of tears.

Juan asked me where I was going on such a cold night. I had to think for a moment. “I’m out for a spin with some good thoughts,” I said at last.

He saw right through my lie. “You
oosban
and you ev a fight, you can tell Juan.” When I demurred he repeated, “You can tell Juan.
Ee
come in with the Japanese girl. She no good. She try to spleet you”—and he made a gesture with his hand of a string, or a rope, snapping, breaking in two. “C’mon, you ev a nice glass of red wine from where my mother leev in Cuba.”

That was when I told him that my own grandmother, Chibie, had lived in Cuba, raised there by a foster family who had shipped her off to England to a convent. I wished I knew more about her, I went on. Then, overcome with the relief of having a friendly, familiar person in front of me, I blurted out suddenly, “Please—tell me something true, Juan, something to believe. And I will.”

Whether it was the sangria, or the Valium, or the night, I could feel my eyes well up as Juan spoke in a gentle voice. It was
love
that leads all, he told me. It was love that knows what babies need.
Love
, he emphasized, knows
all
. God tells all men to know love, tells men to open their hearts, to be on the lookout for the secrets of the night. As for that Japanese woman, he went on—“She try to take your
oosban
away. Stay to love. Don’t let it get away from your side. Go home now and love eem. Love eem over everybody else but God. Love is good,” he concluded, “and God is love.”

I gave Juan a hug, leaving behind a big bill before I took my leave. But rather than going home to tell James how much I loved him—which, I might add, I desperately wanted to—I resumed my trek south. It was too late to turn back, though I was newly equipped with a profound realization: I would not “visit” my marriage, as if it were a second or third house, or a pair of flip-flops I slipped my feet into now and again. No: James’s and my marriage was a religion, holding the two of us strongly together. Then and always, our marriage was the definition of
home
. “Love eem over everybody else … over every other.”

*   *   *

The building on West Seventieth was discreet and dark-bricked, of the Edwardian type popular on that and neighboring blocks. The key fit easily into the downstairs lock. The door to the building opened in, and my head flooded with
You can do it, you can do it.
Mommy’s words to a stutterer. Once I was inside the lobby, I immediately heard wails coming from several flights above. James’s apartment, I knew, was on the fourth floor: 4F. Was the wailing I heard coming from Evey? I’m turning around now. No, I’m not
.

There was no elevator, just a staircase with a faded, ancient carpet runner, its drab color acquired from countless shoe soles traipsing up and down through the years like barges on the Cuyahoga River. The banister was oak, solidly built, the steps lacking much if any squeak, which disappointed me slightly: Wouldn’t a squeak have added some much-needed apprehension? In the same way I wrote songs, I was turning the “I” that was me into a third-person “her”: the dramatized film-noir wife in the movie that had become her life, the one whose director seemed to have quit.

*   *   *

I continued up the stairs, the hallways a dim, early-morning blur of high-hung sconces and dark wooden doors. With each step I advanced, the wailing sound grew more eerie. From the second or maybe third floor, I heard, very dimly, the second movement of Mozart’s clarinet quintet, the one Benny Goodman played back in ’56, that Jackie Robinson talked about with him. James must have told Evey how much he admired the piece, and in turn, I fantasized that she’d promptly run out to Tower Records to buy it. She was now playing it to comfort herself, or maybe it had even incited her wailing.

By the time I reached the fourth-floor landing, I was breathing hard. Then came a shock: even though I hadn’t knocked, or made any noise, a door suddenly burst open. She, Evey, had known, somehow, that someone was outside in the hall. Swami. Buffalo Girl. Psychic. Bitch. Enemy. Had James called to forewarn her?

“I’m Carly,” I said.

“Well … you’re not any friend of mine,” she replied.

“I know. But still. I’m Carly.”

She stood there, hair in her eyes, which were wide with what I interpreted as terror and angst. The woman before me, Evey, was tiny and muscular. She wore a black leotard, dance pants, and small black dance slippers—size four, I guessed. Her torso was beautifully molded, and her hands were white, perfect, not a single mark on them, only a band on the fourth finger, the fingers of a child-ghost. My hands, by contrast, were large, unrefined, a peasant’s hands; wishing I hadn’t removed my gloves, I automatically concealed them in my coat pockets, shoving my shoulder bag to one side. My self-confidence was on trial, and my hands, poor things, had already failed. I quietly thanked God for the Valium and the sangria.

Sniffling, snuffling, and breathing, as if to herself, “Oh, my Jamie,” to my surprise Evey indicated with one hand that I should come inside.

Come inside? Take off my coat? I didn’t understand. Was Evey merely being polite? No: she was, in fact, asserting ownership of James’s apartment. The place—a loft, actually—was pristine, sparsely furnished, with a futon on the floor.

“Evey, it is you, right? Just to be sure.”

This irritated her. “Very funny.”

Removing my coat, I took a seat on the futon, my hands folded. Evey, who had turned off Mozart’s clarinet quintet, burped loudly. It might have been an imperious belch or a sign of respect, a Japanese tradition of welcoming visitors. I spoke first:

“I want you to see that I’m not such a monster.”

“Oh, yes you are,” she said.

She trying to take your oosban.

“I’m trying hard here,” I said. “Can you help me a little? I want us to be the best we can both be.” What I was trying to say, I went on, was that I wasn’t her adversary. I wasn’t a conniving, manipulative product of a moody, unhappy husband’s imagination. I was a real person, married to a real man, James.

“No, you’re not,” she replied in her broken English. “Jamie doesn’t love you. Don’t you know that? He calls you a JAP—and he told me you buy big Mercedes convertible, and drive around California trying to be a movie star, but you’re not pretty enough.” She continued in this vein: Jamie had told her that I’d built a swimming pool because I couldn’t bear to step on any seaweed or any rocks beneath my feet “where real people go swimming.”

Jamie had also told her I disliked the feeling of sand, and that if any got in the house, I would take a bottle of spray cleaner out from under the sink and spray out all the sand as if it was some dangerous fungus. Hmm, not a bad idea. “Jamie tells me about you and the mosquitoes and the spiders and how you scream,” she went on. “He says you spend all day shopping and buying fur coats and that you are dressing up your children just like you. He tells me you nurse your little boy still and that he will grow up to be a fairy.” Evey’s voice rose. “And don’t think I don’t know the difference between ‘fairy tale’ and ‘fairy.’” Pausing, she scoured her brain for other sins. “He said you don’t really sing well and that you spend all day getting bikini waxes so you look good for all your rich boyfriends who send planes for you all over the world. He says you won’t even notice when he is out of your house because you’re so in love with your diamonds and your fancy shoes and you try them on in front of your mirror. You are party girl. You are a bitch. A city girl, a lazy playgirl. What did he call you? Yes—a swashbuckler. That’s it.”