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

save me.
    I was falling in love with Billy. Lucy was in love with her boyfriend, Marty, Joey was in love with her current paramour, and Mommy, well, Mommy … I didn’t know yet, but she seemed to be waiting. Just waiting.
    That, right there, is such a crucial point in my emotional life. I was already doing things that grown-ups, who shouldn’t be doing what they were doing, were doing anyway in an overly sexual atmosphere, where the night was a series of dark corners inhabited by couples swinging branch to branch, lost in music and rapture. The night was a wild cat, stalking from garden to garden. One big copper beech tree in the center of this Garden of Paradise may have been keeping its secrets. It was a part of the thoroughfare on which Daddy would walk at night, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father on the ramparts. How many were in those bushes, in those shadows, that if my father had known about, would have taken his life then and there? But he walked, looking straight ahead and never at the shadows.

 

    Me graduating from sixth grade.

Ronny and Mommy, 1955.

 
    CHAPTER FOUR
    carly, meet ronny
    I n the mid-1950s, around the same time Billy was quietly stealing a part of me, I started losing my parents. Mommy and Daddy were still there, of course, but in altered forms. Love, as I’d defined it up until that point, took on darker, more secretive meanings and shadowy forms. Our house became a place of intrigue, and implications, and late-night taboos.
    Until that time, and in spite of what was going on with Billy, I’d been happily suspended in a Little Golden Books world, with their sunny, skinny spines and images of family normalcy—Daddy coming home from work; Mommy turning around from the stove, where she was placing the top crust onto the apple pie; Laurie the dog wagging her tail. I didn’t understand how beneath what looked to the world like an enviable marriage, each one of my parents must have felt so alone, to the extent that in 1954, my mother began a relationship with a much younger man.
    Granted, I knew nothing at the time. In fact, not until 1960. But the relationship hung so heavily in the air that I intuitively knew something was happening, knew that my parents weren’t in love, knew that what my sisters had told me was true: that when Mommy and Daddy kissed, it was nothing more than a show. And then I repelled that notion and forgot it. A few times as I was growing up, probably in thrall to a romantic movie I’d just seen, I would ask Daddy to bend Mommy down as if in a swoon and kiss her with “passion.” When they obliged me, the meeting of their lips came off as awkwardly as two antiques clanking together in the back of a moving truck. In retrospect, I knew there was a reason that I was always watching Mommy and Daddy for signs, hints, clues of what was really going on in their marriage, trying to read between the lines, and yet rejecting everything that didn’t fit in with my storybook fantasy.
    Why was Mommy so interested in this man, and why did she move him into our house? What did they have in common? I could only guess. Mommy grew up poor in a row of red-brick-porched houses in a lower-middle-class part of Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood. Cockroaches were underfoot, utilities and rent bills went unpaid. Mommy always seemed proud of her hand-to-mouth background. Even as Mrs. Simon, she was never a snobby, prissy, uptown brat, never had matching table linen, silver spoons, or china with no nicks. Throughout her marriage, Mommy had done everything she could to impress Daddy and the social circles in which they moved. Lacking easy wit, she had tried to appear a woman of words, not realizing that brilliant men rarely seek out brilliant women. Maybe she had enough finesse, of acted-out glamour, of “putting it on,” flinging her hair back, applying red lipstick, coming up with the “just so” word or story in between the dessert course and the after-dinner brandies. Maybe she