Read Online Boys in the Trees: A Memoir by Carly Simon - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Carly Simon
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took a nice bite right off the top. Then another one. He had consumed half of the pop when he began singing with Davy again, never looking at me once. He just had great ice cream aim.
“Jamie.” That’s what everybody called him. His whole name was James Taylor. On the Vineyard the next summer, Daddy and I went to a “sing” at the Chilmark Community Center. Davy was going to be singing with Jessie Benton (Thomas Hart Benton’s brilliant daughter). I sang along with them on “Dr. Freud, how I wish that you were differently employed.” The whole audience was sitting on the floor, and almost everyone sang with them on the chorus. Jamie Taylor was there, sitting not too far away. His brother was with him, whose name I learned was Alex. Alex was very blond and a little chubby, in contrast to Jamie’s dark lankiness. Daddy was just staring at Jessie Benton. “She’s a knockout,” he said. He was right.
I was feeling sick about Billy. These gods of music, these gorgeous tan boys who were singing and smiling, were my age. As I thought about Billy, I almost had to leave the community center. It was such a terrible feeling. But I forgot about it soon, and I learned to think of it as something completely “other.” Maybe it had never happened. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? I kept thinking I saw Jamie on his bike everywhere. I found out the Taylors lived on South Road right near Stonewall Pond, where the ocean almost connects to Menemsha Pond. Up-island.
Before that summer was over, my diary revealed that I wanted nothing more than for Davy Gude to fall in love with me, but that wasn’t going to happen. The real, live, beautiful couple that summer was Davy and Jessie. But Davy did lots of good things for me. At his house one afternoon, he brought out his second guitar. He taught Lucy and me a new strumming technique for “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod,” Lucy’s song that she had written based on a Eugene Field poem, but which Davy was going to record for a record label!!! Lucy and I began to sing that wonderful song at my parents’ parties, and eventually we recorded it. It was our “starting point,” our “break.”
In addition to learning a lot of music, listening to it, and listening to other people play and sing, I came across a book at the house we had rented that summer about the Greek gods. I spent an hour reading about Orpheus and Eurydice. I savored every tragic detail: how Orpheus, the magical musician and poet, falls deeply in love with Eurydice. As he strums his lyre and sings to her, they fall more and more in love, and eventually they marry. Bitten by a snake, Eurydice dies in Orpheus’s arms and descends to the Underworld. Desperate to bring her back, Orpheus follows her, begging the Lord of the Underworld for his assistance. Overwhelmed, as everyone is, by the beauty and the magic of Orpheus’s singing and playing, Pluto agrees to allow Eurydice to return to the surface of the earth, but with one condition: during their ascent, Orpheus is forbidden even to glance at her. Not once, not even for a second. If he does look, Eurydice will disappear forever.
Orpheus agrees, but as the two of them are making their way out of the Underworld and Orpheus catches a glimpse of the first welcoming light, he loses his faith. Unsure that Eurydice is really still there, he looks behind him, and the moment he does, she, the woman he loves more than anything in the world and knows he will love forever, vanishes slowly backward into the hazy, twilit nothingness of the Underworld. “The story isn’t real, it’s a myth,” I remember Daddy trying to reassure me. Was it? I thought. Is it? Why did I feel so connected to its power at such an early age?
For me, the wind-and-water-swept romantic, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice was all about everlasting love, about a beautiful musical god so in love with a woman that he couldn’t stand not to look back at her. It was about the cool, cleansing air of music,
“Jamie.” That’s what everybody called him. His whole name was James Taylor. On the Vineyard the next summer, Daddy and I went to a “sing” at the Chilmark Community Center. Davy was going to be singing with Jessie Benton (Thomas Hart Benton’s brilliant daughter). I sang along with them on “Dr. Freud, how I wish that you were differently employed.” The whole audience was sitting on the floor, and almost everyone sang with them on the chorus. Jamie Taylor was there, sitting not too far away. His brother was with him, whose name I learned was Alex. Alex was very blond and a little chubby, in contrast to Jamie’s dark lankiness. Daddy was just staring at Jessie Benton. “She’s a knockout,” he said. He was right.
I was feeling sick about Billy. These gods of music, these gorgeous tan boys who were singing and smiling, were my age. As I thought about Billy, I almost had to leave the community center. It was such a terrible feeling. But I forgot about it soon, and I learned to think of it as something completely “other.” Maybe it had never happened. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? I kept thinking I saw Jamie on his bike everywhere. I found out the Taylors lived on South Road right near Stonewall Pond, where the ocean almost connects to Menemsha Pond. Up-island.
Before that summer was over, my diary revealed that I wanted nothing more than for Davy Gude to fall in love with me, but that wasn’t going to happen. The real, live, beautiful couple that summer was Davy and Jessie. But Davy did lots of good things for me. At his house one afternoon, he brought out his second guitar. He taught Lucy and me a new strumming technique for “Winkin’, Blinkin’ and Nod,” Lucy’s song that she had written based on a Eugene Field poem, but which Davy was going to record for a record label!!! Lucy and I began to sing that wonderful song at my parents’ parties, and eventually we recorded it. It was our “starting point,” our “break.”
In addition to learning a lot of music, listening to it, and listening to other people play and sing, I came across a book at the house we had rented that summer about the Greek gods. I spent an hour reading about Orpheus and Eurydice. I savored every tragic detail: how Orpheus, the magical musician and poet, falls deeply in love with Eurydice. As he strums his lyre and sings to her, they fall more and more in love, and eventually they marry. Bitten by a snake, Eurydice dies in Orpheus’s arms and descends to the Underworld. Desperate to bring her back, Orpheus follows her, begging the Lord of the Underworld for his assistance. Overwhelmed, as everyone is, by the beauty and the magic of Orpheus’s singing and playing, Pluto agrees to allow Eurydice to return to the surface of the earth, but with one condition: during their ascent, Orpheus is forbidden even to glance at her. Not once, not even for a second. If he does look, Eurydice will disappear forever.
Orpheus agrees, but as the two of them are making their way out of the Underworld and Orpheus catches a glimpse of the first welcoming light, he loses his faith. Unsure that Eurydice is really still there, he looks behind him, and the moment he does, she, the woman he loves more than anything in the world and knows he will love forever, vanishes slowly backward into the hazy, twilit nothingness of the Underworld. “The story isn’t real, it’s a myth,” I remember Daddy trying to reassure me. Was it? I thought. Is it? Why did I feel so connected to its power at such an early age?
For me, the wind-and-water-swept romantic, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice was all about everlasting love, about a beautiful musical god so in love with a woman that he couldn’t stand not to look back at her. It was about the cool, cleansing air of music,
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