It is a story for our times, if not the story of our times-she loves him, he leaves her, and her longing for him is such that she haunts his tomorrows. It played one way in ”Fatal Attraction,” but how differently it comes to us again in Carly Simon`s whimsical new book, ”The Fisherman`s Song”
(Doubleday, $15).
In Simon`s version of girl loses boy, the girl is transformed into a wraith who infiltrates her former soulmate`s quiet moments to whisper her love into ears deaf to her passion.
As with her two previous books, ”Amy, the Dancing Bear” and ”The Boys of the Bells,” Margot Datz`s delicately precise illustrations lend charm to Simon`s wispy tale.
But unlike those books, ”The Fisherman`s Song” is not exclusively a children`s book.
”I hear that women are buying it for each other,” says Simon, who is not surprised that her sad story with pretty pictures has found an adult audience.
But she is not about to castigate her male protagonist as being a typical fear-of-commitment `80s male in fisherman`s clothing.
”Maybe he just didn`t love her,” she speculates. ”Maybe she wasn`t right for him. Maybe she was mean to him.”
Nor did the tale arise, at least not directly, from Simon`s own complicated romantic past as James Taylor`s former wife who dated a lot and almost married a drummer, but now is seemingly happily married to poet Jim Hart.
It came from a night when she was stretched out next to her sleeping son, Ben (now 13), able to say things to him that would have embarrassed the boy if he were awake.
”I smelled the back of his neck, kissed his eyelids, you know, the things mothers do but that he was too old for,” she recalls.
”Then when I went out of the room I thought, `Why haven`t I done that before? Gone to people in my life with thoughts I couldn`t approach them with during the day and told them while they were asleep?` ”
Ben is much on her mind these days. Both her children are away at boarding school, but she has adjusted to 17-year-old Sally`s absence in the four years her daughter has been gone, while Ben`s loss is fresh.
When her children are around, ”I can define my happiness most completely, and when they are not I hate it.”
Despite her career, there is an emptiness at the core that infiltrates everything. She is scoring a new movie, writing an opera commissioned by New York`s Metropolitan and Washington`s Kennedy Center, and working on her next album (unscheduled as yet).
One thing she is not at work on is her memoirs, a project that originated with her good friend Jacqueline Onassis, who was also responsible for launching Simon as a children`s author.
Onassis, says Simon, is always there for her, ”100 percent as an editor and a friend,” and was completely understanding when Simon finally decided she could not deliver the intimate book they both had hoped for.
It`s probably no coincidence that she considered writing her memoirs during a period when it seemed the shelf life of her career as a pop star had about expired.
During the `80s, she was busy with her kids and, she says, her label positioned her to make commercial records that, unfortunately, weren`t.
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Now she`s back as an artist-her last album, ”Have You Seen Me Lately?”
includes a musical version of ”The Fisherman`s Song”-fighting Clive Davis, the head of Arista, when she feels the need to preserve her musical integrity.