Boys in the Trees: A Memoir (18 page)

Thus, due to my maladies, Nick’s and my physical relationship had a few rivers to cross. The magic of the trip, I knew, depended on my becoming healthy as soon as humanly possible, but I was already beginning to resent the whole process of the boiling-and-then-cooling of the water. At the same time, the plastic tubing hanging over the toilet was the inspiration for my earliest lyrics, which I wrote in an effort to get relief from my own pain and frustration. Writing lyrics became an emotional outlet, turning my own experiences and history into another person’s. “I can’t stand you” becomes “She can’t stand him.” “I no longer love you” becomes “She no longer loves him.” By switching from
me
and
I
to
her
and
she
, I was able to free up the words and emotion inside me. Just like on the beach running away from Nick, turning into Monica Vitti or Sophia Loren.

Sometime during the first month, in the middle of the night, I first developed a symptom that would dog me for the rest of my visit. It was 2 a.m., and I awoke suddenly, quivering. It felt as if I were sitting on the hood of a car whose motor was running. I asked Nick to touch me, to confirm that I was feeling what I was feeling. Was my shaking—or “my vibrations,” as Nick and I called them—the symptom of some underlying psychological or physical problem? Was I becoming more mentally unbalanced? Just as I’d once knocked against wood to prevent my father from dying, I did the same with my vibrations:
this night, you will not shake
. A day would pass and the same thing happened again, as it would every night, with a few exceptions, for the next few months. Nick was invariably tender, assuring me that my body wasn’t actually shaking, that I was probably dreaming, that everything would be all right and I should try to fall back to sleep. I always did, but the next night it would happen again. If one morning I woke up without the shakes, my mood would be exaggeratedly optimistic, manic even, and as the day went on, it would begin swinging wildly back and forth as I faced down the prospect of another night of trembling.

My only distraction was cooking. I’d bought a French calendar whose black-and-white photos of local flora and fauna were accompanied by recipes. Taking my cue from the calendar, every day I prepared a new meal, nearly all of which were saturated with cream, mushrooms, onions, garlic, wine, spices, and herbs. Nick and I ate mussels and oysters, often followed by elaborate desserts I’d baked, filled with dried fruits, pine nuts, brandy, and wine. Every night, we washed down our dinner and dessert with a shared bottle of local wine, almost always a Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

Still, the shaking wouldn’t stop. Nick and I went to the Picasso Museum in the little town of Vence. I bought a piece of pottery for my mother. That night, I awoke shaking and depressed.

We went to Eze-sur-Haute, and then Eze-sur-Mer. A brilliant walk on the beach. Drove back to Châteauneuf de Grasse. Night came around; I fell asleep and awoke, shaking.

At one point, six weeks into our stay, Nick and I drove to Spain, pausing along the way in ancient French towns that reminded me of the canvases of Cézanne and Van Gogh. We puttered past and through Aix, Les Baux, Arles, Montpellier, Cap d’Agde, Perpignan, and just over the Spanish border, Cadaqués, the town that Salvador Dalí painted, as well as a resting spot for Picasso, Miró, and Duchamp. Nick and I shared a sunny room in Cadaqués. It was the first night of hot running water in weeks, which we took full advantage of by filling the tub almost to overflowing. Our stay was enchanted, and I attributed the relaxation I felt to one thing: I didn’t tremble. After a long hiatus, Nick and I made love, which also helped alleviate any symptoms of “the vibrations.” The next day, we headed for Barcelona. When I first glimpsed what I thought was the city, brash and ugly and charmless, with factories and pollution filling the air, I felt my spirit break in half, and was relieved to discover that the city I beheld was
Badalona
, on the seacoast forty-five minutes to the northeast of Barcelona. What a difference a
d
makes. Nick drove at top speed to Barcelona, where a reservation awaited us at the Avenida Palace. A total relief, a magnificent city.

At dinner that night, I glimpsed a woman at another table who looked so much like Chibie I dissolved into tears. My grandmother had died of a heart attack the previous summer, a week after I fainted in front of Odetta. Since then I’d been having quiet anxiety attacks where I feared losing control the same way I’d lost control onstage in front of Odetta. That night at dinner the dam finally broke. I cried so long and so uncontrollably that the waiters and the formally attired diners surrounding us noticed, and the maître d’ became so concerned that he arrived at our table bearing cold towels. Nick was worried, and prepared to call an ambulance. Instead, somehow we escaped from the dining room, me with my torso bent over, collapsed into Nick’s shoulder. Both of us were bewildered. What exactly was going on? That night I stayed awake, shaking, sleep coming only after I took a hot bath and a phenobarbital.

Early the next morning, still in Barcelona, I called my mother from the hotel room and described my symptoms. Mommy had recently become intrigued by psychoanalysis, and from time to time saw a famous practitioner in New York, a disciple of Freud named Dr. Albert Lowenstein. Later that same morning, after consulting with him, Mommy called me back. Based on my symptoms, she and Dr. Lowenstein thought I might be suffering from a “nervous breakdown,” the same thing Daddy had been hospitalized for twice. We made a plan: I would leave, go home, and get help.

A week before I left, I lay out by the twig-strewn pool on one side of our little house, reading Stendhal’s
The Red and the Black
. Blowing in off the ocean up the foothills of the Alps were tiny water drops, reflecting the shimmering hues of the mountain flowers. It was, I found out, the local phenomenon known as the mistral—a strong, cold, ill wind, similar to the sirocco that bulldozes across Africa or the mystical Santa Ana winds in Southern California. Leaves piled up thickly on the bottom of the muddy pool as I read my book, riveted by its melodrama, longing, and romance.

Nick would remain in Châteauneuf de Grasse, writing his novel, as well as letters to me about the hillside and his excursions. I hadn’t even left yet, but already I missed him terribly, missed our small house, missed our tiny, cold-water bathtub, missed the flowers and the cooking, missed our expatriate life together. I also regretted that our love wasn’t more physical, or urgent. I didn’t feel that my body was something he would want to spend time with. When he touched me, I felt
his
hand more than
my
body.

As I lay there reading, Nick joined me, and we had a depressing but honest conversation about the state of affairs between us. We both agreed that our relationship had grown middle-aged (ha!) and uneventful (how amusing to feel this way before you’re even twenty-one!). We were both bored, and if another romantic opportunity arose, we agreed we would urge the other person to take it. Nick was as aware as I was of what was wrong with our relationship. I knew it and so did he, but I think he was surprised I felt the same way. My youthful conclusion was this: I should never have stopped looking things up in the encyclopedia, never stopped trying to keep Nick interested. Why hadn’t I asked him about Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir? Why wasn’t I better read, more casually literate? Why hadn’t I insisted upon reading the book he was writing? If only I had devoted more time to keeping Nick intellectually stimulated, I might have kept myself stimulated, too.

Has anyone ever properly explained love’s weather patterns, low-pressure systems, cold fronts, storms? Surviving its tides and seasons, I’ve found out, is a feat exclusively for the strong of heart. With the agitation that had been building up all spring drained off, Nick and I were left to bask in the love we still had for each other. My last night in Châteauneuf de Grasse with Nick still lives vividly in my memory: The stove in our little kitchen. The woodpile just outside the front door. The mimosas beginning to sharpen their yellow tones. The sweet early green of the olive trees, the verbena, and the climbing roses subtly changing the complexion and color of our caretaker’s cottage as the season began its softly spiraling turn. That night, I cooked our favorite recipe: Swedish meatballs with a lot of heavy cream, brandy, and noodles. We made love, and I packed, and there was more unspoken than spoken.

The next morning, Nick drove me to Nice. On the boat to Europe and throughout my stay, I’d fantasized about meeting French musicians who would show up at our house carrying guitars, lutes, flutes, and hand drums, all of us jamming late into the night, the entire scene ending up, inexplicably, with Lady Brett Ashley from Hemingway’s
The Sun Also Rises
in the stands of a Spanish bullfight. Naturally, none of that had happened—not even close. But along with the homecoming presents I’d tucked inside my suitcase for my family, I would be returning to the States with my Phillips tape recorder and at least three songs I’d written, two with Nick as lyricist. While not as much or as many as I’d hoped, those three melodies represented some sort of beginning.

*   *   *

I began therapy immediately with an old-school Freudian analyst whom Dr. Lowenstein had recommended. Five days a week, I lay down on Dr. F’s couch, never once looking at him, Dr. F unremittingly silent in return, which gave me ample time to dwell on the Rorschach-like paintings of trees and cucumbers covering the walls. Sometimes during my sessions, I suffered quasi–anxiety attacks. I’d sit up on the couch, hide my head between my knees, breathe hard, and try to find answers that could shed some light on the puzzle of what ailed me. I had countless dreams about both Billy and Ronny, but Dr. F and I never got to the bottom of their significance—or I just didn’t believe his interpretations. Occasionally I could hear the sound of his pen scribbling, and entering and leaving his office I occasionally caught fast glimpses of a nice-looking man whose unfocused right eye lent him a slightly comical—or maybe it was magical—expression.

The most significant result of my sessions with Dr. F? I no longer had the shakes, not even once since returning to New York. I had come to believe that my trembling was the direct result of my relationship with Nick. Dr. F also spent a lot of time asking me about Ronny, though I remember being extremely embarrassed to talk about anything important, or intimate. In some essential core of myself, I’d always known about Mommy and Ronny, and their involvement was now out in the open. Four years after Daddy’s death, Mommy and Ronny could be found everywhere: on the library couch in Riverdale, in the garden planting bulbs, kissing in the kitchen, walking my mother’s Dalmatians, Mandy and Pandy. Everyone in my mother’s social circle must have known. What did they think? I wondered. Did they gossip? Did they care?

I was never able to understand the unself-conscious ease Mommy obviously felt over her affair with Ronny, never able to accept that whatever guilt she might have felt ended the moment Daddy died. I still wasn’t cutting Ronny any slack. I loathed him. His speaking voice always had a phony note to it, one that always made me imagine he was hearing his voice on a tape recorder and wondering how it stacked up against Ezio Pinza’s.

At the conclusion of my analysis—coincidentally, at the same time the small inheritance my father left me had run out—Dr. F told me gently that it was time to graduate, that together, we had gotten to the root core of my psychological problems. From this point on, he said, I would be far more capable of handling any situation that came my way. Looking back, I assume he must have caught a whiff of that pungent, sour aroma of future bounced checks, the scent of a patient on the cusp of exhausting her funds.

*   *   *

By now, Nick, too, had returned to New York, and we went out to dinner at Chez Napoleon, on West Fiftieth Street, to celebrate my psychoanalytic “graduation.” Among the offerings on the wine list that night was Châteauneuf-du-Pape, the same wine we had drunk every night in France. Over a shared bottle, Nick and I ate flounder, oysters, and onions in cream sauce as we reminisced about our days and nights in the Alpes-Maritimes, both of us aware we had been in that stage of our relationship where couples who love each other say good-bye, in very slow motion, before moving on to others.

After dinner, we walked all the way over to the East Side, where I was living with my sister Joey at Fifty-fifth Street and First Avenue. Nick left me there, as there was no longer a reliable question of his spending the night. I fell asleep watching a movie, and a few hours later was awakened by a rumbling throughout my body—the same shakes I’d had in France, the ones that had driven me into psychoanalysis. Here they were again. Why? Had I had a bad day? Did seeing Nick unearth some ancient memory of our relationship in France that had resurfaced at the restaurant? Then it finally hit me: it was the red wine, the Châteauneuf-du-Pape! The same wine Nick and I drank almost every night when we were in Europe. Like the final twist in an O. Henry story, it wasn’t a nervous breakdown at all, but instead: allergies. If only I’d gone to an allergist instead of spending all that time, not to mention my inheritance, on Dr. F’s couch, I might still be in France with Nick, buying little Mattisses and Picassos in seaport towns.

Allergies aside, I still had to decide whether or not to go back to college. My mother, Joey, and Lucy all saw me on a stage. Nick was alone in pressuring me to resume my education, and I loved him all the more for ultimately being on the losing side of this debate, and not least for accompanying me, hand in hand, through the hardships of the mistral. I honestly had no idea what I wanted. I would have gone in any direction anyone else seemed sure of. I could see nothing really positive about returning to Sarah Lawrence and was happy, and even relieved, to put my formal education on permanent hold. Lucy and I had hastily released a second album by then, and we were singing all over the country, but the problem was I didn’t really want to continue doing
that
, either. If the truth be known, I didn’t really develop any major new musical ambitions until I fell in love with Willie Donaldson.