PAUL SIMON: Songs of A Thinking Man

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The sympathetic imagination didn't have to strain to see the break coming. Simon's writing then was as vulnerable, and quite a bit more open, as anything he would do until his travails with Fisher resulted in his terrific (but commercially problematic) 1983 album, Hearts and Bones. It was Garfunkel, working down in Mexico on Catch-22, about whom Simon seemed to be singing when he asked, "Why don't you write me," just as it was very probably Garfunkel who was being addressed in The Only Living Boy in New York, an intensely wistful ballad about the encroachments of loneliness and the first endings of a vital friendship. "I've never asked him if any of the songs he's written were about me and our split," Garfunkel reflects. "But So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright ((also on Bridge)) may be. I was an architecture student. And Why Don't You Write Me sounds a lot like, 'Where the hell are you, Artie?' "

There has been a little work together during the years since, including a memorable reunion concert (and resultant high-selling live album) in Central Park in 1981, but altogether, their relationship now follows the course of a Simon song, where endings are lingering but emphatic, and pain, like some rare vintage, grows keener with age. "He does things that I could never understand," says Garfunkel, who lives right across Central Park from his old friend. "He called me up one day and said, 'Artie, I'm dropping your vocals on Hearts and Bones. It's not turning into the kind of album I want it to. And by the way, I'm marrying Carrie on Tuesday, and I want you to come.' "

Simon's rejoinders to such talk are kept out of conversation and stashed where they can do the most good: in his songs. "From what I can see/ Of the people like me," he sings in Allergies on Hearts and Bones, "We get better/ But we never get well." Simon does work at it, though, as far from public scrutiny as he can manage. "Paul's been famous since high school," says Lorne Michaels, "so he may have gotten soured on the way his image has been portrayed." The 18-year-old son of his first marriage, Harper, has temporarily left school and spends a good deal of time living with Carrie Fisher in California, where he can be near his girlfriend. When he comes East, his father, an inveterate night owl, rouses himself early to cook breakfast. "There's very little bullshit between them," Michaels observes, and Harper, a Grateful Dead fan, appears to be finding his own way.

But there is a stillness that goes beyond quiet in that apartment overlooking the park. There is a prevailing inwardness, a tone of twilight reflection, that seems to mirror Simon's own tenuous spiritual equipoise. "We see very little of each other now," Art Garfunkel says. "I see him about four times a year. I miss him. We have very complex feelings toward each other. We're not close friends anymore. But we are friends at the bottom of it all. There is a great love for each other that would snap into place on a dime."