Boys in the Trees: A Memoir by Carly Simon Read Free Book Online

was feeling, but it was clear that he was the male, I was the female; he was the one strutting, and I was the one holding back. By now I wasn’t shivering anymore; I was shaking. Was it fear? Was it desire? I couldn’t tell the two of them apart. Billy reached down and kissed me on the cheek, doused his hand under the shower needles, and dripped hot water on my face, guiding it down in little drips from my forehead.
    “Okay,” he said softly. “You’ll be more comfortable on your knees.”
    I obeyed what seemed like the right next command.
    “Okay, Carly Darling, look up at me.” Billy called me “Carly Darling” a lot, as if mimicking one of my parents, who called me that. I did as he asked, gazing up at his face, though a moment later, by moving my chin lower, Billy made it perfectly clear he hadn’t meant me to look up at his face. “Take it in your hand,” he said.
    How? Like a baseball bat? Like a dinner fork? Like the stem of a flower? I felt the first rise of anger. I wanted to be the one in charge, not Billy. Still, I did as he asked, kneeling on the wet tile and lifting my eyes upward. Then, as fast as possible, I touched him. My shakes dissolved. I couldn’t have given a name to what I was feeling; it was way too complicated. There were opposites at work, but there was no doubt about it: I was also turned on. But that was it for the night. I pivoted and ran back to the night-lights of the main house.
    *   *   *
    After that night, wherever Billy and I happened to find ourselves alone, we misbehaved. A bathroom here, a closet there. A beach, a random patch of grass. During Sunday lunches, Billy would try to pull me into his mood in an upstairs bathroom, as the potatoes were being passed downstairs. By the time I saw Dr. Frunzhoffa, I’d become so benumbed to Billy’s behavior—which mostly involved him touching himself, with me never undressed; Billy’s only interest, it seems, was in being observed by another person—my numbness itself almost deserved a verse of Frunzhoffa’s Fred-and-Ginger ballad. Meanwhile, the whole time I was secretly tortured by the fact that Billy was lusting after my sister Lucy and had no qualms about telling me so. On his part I must have represented some covert compromise, I who was too young to know any better, and too infatuated to bust him, even to Dr. Frunzhoffa.
    My “interludes” with Billy lasted, but with less frequency, for six years, into my teens. Until that time, he was my captor and I was his slave. Love: that was what I felt for him, or so I convinced myself. During those years, I waited on his every word, gesture, glance, and mood. Being in pursuit of such a low, sneaky, treacherous catch caused me to retreat even farther down inside myself, if that was even possible. It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to get Billy into trouble, more that I didn’t want anyone to stop me, or bring to light how ashamed and conflicted I felt about what the two of us were doing.
    When I told Joey and Lucy about Billy, they both accused me of making it up. At the same time, they told my mother, who expelled Billy for an entire month of one summer, which in retrospect feels like a strangely mild response. The biggest secret and vanity of the Simon family was to insist that nothing was wrong when, in fact, so much was wrong, and neither one of my parents ever owned up to it. Today, when I hold my preadolescent diary, small and old and blue, with its cover graphic of a little girl holding a mass of flowers, I have in my hands the tenderest possible proof of my own innocent, flailing, unparented judgment, all of it expelled and encrypted inside that diary whenever it took place. After finishing each entry, I would secure the cover with its tiny key, keeping my fascinated public at bay for another day. If someone had been interested or persistent enough to dig, my diary, with its secrets both exposed and concealed, would have called out: Someone, please read this and