Boys in the Trees: A Memoir (47 page)

She stopped there, the stampede of words over, short of breath. Was she goading me into responding? Was this all part of a strategy? I had prepared nothing in return, and now I wished I had. I felt speechless, mortified. I knew there was—or was there?—practically no credibility in Evey’s garbled version of James’s depictions, but it didn’t altogether matter, since no matter which way you looked at it, the litany of faults I seemed to have committed in James’s eyes was bad news.

All of a sudden, Evey began wailing again, this time the sounds coming from her throat more operatic and staccato. I froze. I couldn’t walk out now. I couldn’t just leave, erase what I’d just heard from my consciousness. What was I supposed to do with it? Where was I supposed to go? I remember wishing she hadn’t turned off the Mozart; the clarinet would have softened the whole picture. Evey stood in front of me now, both hands in her pockets, drawing a graceful circle on the floor with her small, demure foot, a strange gesture, as if she were casting some kind of spell or trance. I had to raise my voice to hear myself over her howling.

“I know you want to believe everything James has told you,” I said as clearly as I could, “but you have to see it can’t all be true. He would never have loved me in the first place if I was all those things. He just said them to justify his actions to you.”

Evey fired back: “He said once you were sexy and fun and now you ruined it all with your greediness and your furniture and your manicures.”

Ha—finally something good! This, I knew, was horseshit. I could feel the Beast, my ally now, stirring inside me, this time in a good mood, reminding me that James had actually complimented me more than once on my lack of hand and foot grooming. “Thank God you don’t do those things to your hands and feet that almost every other female I know does. Your feet are beautiful.”

“I need to use the bathroom,” I said. Evey didn’t bother to follow me with her eyes, staring instead at one of the walls, blankly, like one of the Charivari mannequins glancing sightlessly west, in the direction of Riverside Park, the Hudson River, and beyond that, New Jersey. What a sight she was. Lost.

The bathroom was tiny, airless, the sink counter made of some kind of plastic painted to resemble marble. Scattered on its surface was Evey’s small assemblage of accoutrements designed to embellish her already perfect features: an eye pencil, Pond’s cold cream, Seba-Nil astringent, cotton balls bound with a loop of string, a toothbrush in a glass. A single razor. What did she do with a single razor blade? Picking it up, I had a sudden, violent impulse to cut myself. My thoughts were fast, flurrying: No, I can’t cut myself. I would just wind up dead on the floor, with no one feeling remotely sorry for me but instead, furious that I’d left behind two babies. That’s the one thing that ends when you have children—you can no longer seriously entertain those thoughts of ending it all.

“What do you use a razor blade for?”

No reply. Why was I talking to Evey from the bathroom?

At last Evey spoke, her voice deliberate. “Jamie and I have the same trines in our charts. We dig each other. You don’t get him.”

Trine
—a word with which most likely some astrological nuncio had armed her. So that was what it was all about: she and “Jamie” were destined to be together all thanks to their
trines
.

I sat down on the closed toilet seat, mulling my options. How would I emerge from this situation? Short of getting physical, I had very few options. It hit me suddenly: Why would I ever want to hurt another person? Why would I ever want to hurt Evey? Once when my brother Peter was seven years old, I remember pushing him, and as a result, he accidentally toppled down the stairs in our house in Riverdale. As he hit the floor at the bottom, I saw his face and body go into spasm. He screamed, I screamed, and the adults came running, followed by explanations, apologies, tears, and punishments. I never hit Peter again. I felt hopeless, oddly dispirited that one of my weapons had been removed. I’d never be able to hurt anyone again and feel okay about it. And that included Evey.

Standing there, I glanced at myself in the mirror over the sink. The overhead lighting did strange things to my features, and for a moment it was hard to recognize who I was exactly. Something from deep inside me seemed to be overtaking my features, my expression, a transition I’d seen only in special-effects movies. The person before me wasn’t a character, or a monster, in a movie. No, it was just me, my own reflection. Whatever was coming through at this moment was something I’d been afraid of my whole life, but in its emerging outline I wasn’t afraid of it at all. I didn’t have to squint to see it. No, it was purely, completely mine, filling me with something that felt, uncannily, like awe. I could control what I was seeing, but I no longer had to. It was in command. It had no competitors. It might not stick around permanently, it might come and go, and even vanish for long stretches of time, but I knew now, for certain, that it was there. In the light of the mirror, I didn’t look pretty, for sure—nor was that the point—but I did look fierce. In truth, I was staring the Beast in the eye. I held its gaze and I thought, Cool, God is in me.

*   *   *

I wasn’t exactly being a pacifist. Nor was I being a coward. Instead, I was where I’d found myself many times in my life—somewhere between those poles—the difference being that tonight I had defined what I felt in a way I never had before: I felt unshackled, strong, finally freed.… Our marriage was the only god I knew, my only religion. Religion was my home. “Over everybody else. One over everybody else.”

My next thought, as I needlessly flushed the toilet, was: Poor Evey. She’s not my problem.

I came out of the bathroom and without a single word put on my coat. I held out my hand to Evey: Shake? Instead, she looked down at the floor: “Evey,” I said, “I’m really glad I came here tonight. I’m sure it didn’t make you happy, but I want you to know that I will tell James that I saw you.” I tried not to sound pompous, or insincere, and considering the context, felt as though I’d succeeded in being decent.

When our eyes connected for a split second, I smiled broadly. Evey didn’t smile back, nor had I expected her to. I didn’t need her to.

*   *   *

On the way home, the Charivari mannequins glanced past me, disjointed and erotic, but did they really have any choice? I felt strangely settled, weirdly satisfied. Back on Central Park West and Seventy-third Street, I let myself into the apartment, turned off some lights, and checked in on Sally and Ben. Ben was clutching a couple of uncuddly battery-operated mechanical dogs, a gift to James from a Japanese promoter, whose hard metal bodies weren’t exactly what most children would want to cuddle in the moments before sleep. Quietly, softly, I lifted his arm, my goal being to set the dogs on his bedside table, but as I was lifting it, Ben called out in his sleep, quite loudly, “Where are the dogs?” I couldn’t help but laugh. Even in his sleep, that boy was funny. I leaned down to kiss his head, replacing the hard-bodied dogs back in their proper spot under his arm. Ben’s room was stuffy—the damn heaters were loud and clanking, and always left the rooms either too hot or too cold—and I opened his windows a few inches.

When I went into our bedroom, I saw that James had lit a candle. Was there a message in that? I didn’t know, but it didn’t matter. I felt good. James was asleep, and I lay down on the bed beside him. “I love you so much, my darling man,” I said, feeling a forgiveness much, much larger than myself. Of course my husband didn’t hear me. He was dreaming, no doubt, about his own fascinating rhythms and moods, his comedy, his codas, his craziness, the sawing, hammering, musical, lyrical circus that was his life. Somewhere in the soft gulf between dreams and sleep, maybe he could intuit the love I had for him, and love me back in return. I undressed, put my hair up in a hasty ponytail, and got under the covers. This was destiny. That’s what destiny is:
This.

One of us slipped last night and said “Darling”

There in the middle of the night

Between dreams and sleep

Did you say it, or did I?

I don’t know

But it interrupted the war

That’s the way these cold wars are

I love you, we said

Or one of us did

And the other agreed from the heart

One of us slipped last night and said “sorry”

There in the middle of the madness

Between the dark and the light

Who cares if all the doors had been closed

And no love had entered for days

Cold wars like these go up in a blaze

“I love you,” we said, or one of us did

And the other agreed from the heart

Through the haze of the dream

The truth could come through

You can see that I’m still open to you

“I love you,

I love you,” we said, from the heart

—“From the Heart,” 1980

Destiny—Tranquillo.

On stage at the Stanley Theater in Pittsburgh, 1981.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

sheets the color of fire

A
year later, James and I were—somehow—still together—and I was in Pittsburgh, as part of a fourteen-show tour with my band. I was at an all-time low weight. I was looking shrivelled, scared, and anyone aware of the serious bundle of nerves I was should never have allowed me to leave home, much less perform.

The previous six months had been incredibly challenging, starting on the day when a physician informed James and me that Ben had been born with a “dysplastic kidney,” which, in layman’s terms, meant his kidney had been busy recycling urine back inside his one-, two-, and three-year-old body. His whole life, Ben had been worrisomely sick far more often than was usual, and it wasn’t until his grandfather, Ike, urged us to make an appointment with a kidney specialist that we found out Ben had a congenital problem that surgery would fortunately be able to rectify. We set a date for the operation in early June.

When Ben finally came out of surgery, the relief was enormous. Six months later, in a daze of sleep problems, stress-related weight loss, adult acne, worry, and nerves, I was pressured to go ahead with rehearsals for my upcoming tour, trying to connect with my band, forcing a smile onto my stuttering lips. After all, I kept telling myself, it’s only fourteen shows. I continued to pour my really heavy emotions—my nerves, my utterly lost feelings—onto the shoulders of my sweet lover, Scott Litt, in the same way James still had Evey or maybe even someone else entirely.

I’d been writing songs, too, some of them about James. Far more painful than writing about shadowy crushes was writing about my own husband. My method was often mildly passive-aggressive, in the hopes James might pick up or learn something about how I felt, that way bypassing an actual conversation likely to end up in an argument. Or sometimes my lyrics were direct, hopeful. In 1980 I remember writing the song “James” when he was asleep on the couch, totally wasted on one thing or another. “Your voice is like the water / when I lift the shell I can hear you pouring out your heart to me / James, the beauty of your voice fills me with sadness / James…”

Warner Bros. had invested a lot of money into backing my tour. My manager, Arlyne, strongly believed that it would be good for me to get my mind off the two crazy, empty shells my homes in New York and Martha’s Vineyard had become, as well as off James. I was consoled by the fact that my children were in good hands. Sally was in elementary school, and well taken care of at home, plus I would be gone no more than a few nights a week. Ben, now fully recovered from his surgery, would either stay in New York or travel with me, depending on how near the venue was.

As I began rehearsals, I felt oddly detached and disembodied, a stranger to my own image and self. I had a hard time reading people’s feelings for me or mine for them. Despite the revelation in the mirror at Evey’s, all of a sudden, it seemed, I knew nothing about myself, including what I should wear, and why, or how to wear my hair, which, at the time, looked just wrong, like a hayfield shorn by an anxious, fluttering scythe. Internally, banging around inside the cage of my frazzled brain, I felt equally lopsided, as if my entire being had now tuned to the wrong note, one that had been further distorted by the high-pitched EQ of an early 1970s heavy-metal guitar, the words on repeat:
Ben. Sally. Ben. Ben. Sally. Sally. James, oh lord, my darling James: I need you. I can’t go on without you. I want our marriage back. I want the day we were born back.