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

felt bored, unappreciated, undesired. What she didn’t know was that the secret love she was about to embark on inside her husband’s own house would impair Daddy’s health and probably even hasten his early death. Or maybe she suspected but had just stopped caring.
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    Mommy had always feared for my little brother Peter’s manhood in an all-female household. Daddy was worldly and sophisticated and driven—no one really expected him to be the lawn-mowing, basketball-dribbling, baseball-batting type of father, too. Which is why one day, Mommy tacked up an ad on a bulletin board in the hallway of Columbia University’s Teachers College. Wanted: A young, athletic male companion who had the time and patience to oversee the only boy, aged six, in a household of girls, and who could shuttle the boy back and forth to assorted playing fields and sports events. More or less.
    I was eight years old and making myself a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich the afternoon Ronny first appeared in our kitchen in Riverdale, the official reason being that he was a perfect candidate for the Peter-babysitting job. Ronny was maybe an inch or two shorter than Daddy and densely muscled, his physique that of a big, healthy football player, with a light rubbery ring of hard flesh around his waist. It was a kind of alien midwestern bulk I’d never seen before, one where I could almost imagine what lay underneath: steaks and potato salad, mingling with Ronny’s own gristle and fascia. It took only a few weeks for my mother to begin likening him to her idol, Gary Cooper, by which I think she meant Ronny was more a body man than a word man.
    As Ronny stood beside her, I picked up subtle changes in my mother. Her eyelids fluttered and her lips puckered: “Ron will be staying with us upstairs, in the back bedroom,” Mommy said, adding that he was from Pittsburgh and studying to be a teacher. Mommy was forty-two at the time, Ronny only nineteen.
    The first time I laid eyes on Ronny, I felt an immediate, electric dislike, followed by an inexplicable disgust. The world felt suddenly unstable, as though it had gone from solid to liquid, but rather than confront what was going on—and really, I had no clue at the time—I focused on something else: Ronny’s sandaled bare left foot, specifically his toe. I just couldn’t ignore it. The explanation was simple—Ronny had an ingrown toenail—but all I could think of was that his nail was alive, an aquatic horror-movie creature pushing and burrowing further inside his body. I turned away, but it was too late: Ronny’s toe had already registered in my brain. Already there was a wrongness about him, building connections inside me on a cellular level. Or maybe I was already responding to the invisible currents between him and my mother.
    In the weeks and days before we packed up to go to Stamford that summer, Ronny was officially hired by the Simon family. It made perfect sense for Peter to have a male babysitter. Along with writing and putting on plays, Helen Gaspard, now the nanny for our whole family, had taught us girls to sew, make up plays for our dolls, and put on stage makeup. In contrast, Peter and his friends collected baseball cards, played with wooden soldiers and train sets, and shook down the adults for spare change in exchange for elaborate card tricks. Ronny seemed custom-made for the job.
    He was awkward and uncomfortable around the adults, but no matter—Ronny was also custom-made for Mommy. The connection between them was instantaneous, and they must have found private solace in their shared vulnerability. An orphan, Ronny certainly must have told Mommy his backstory—how he’d watched the airplane that held his mother and father explode as it took off from the airport in Pittsburgh, crashing to the earth, leaving him parentless and alone. No doubt Mommy could match him sorrow by sorrow, as she told him about sitting in her drunken father’s lap or sleeping out on the