Dear Cary

by Dyan Cannon

  I whispered into his ear, “Cary, all I want in this world is to make you happy.”

  New Year’s Eve. The holidays were nearly behind us, and we were at Cary’s house in Beverly Hills, sitting by the fire and sipping cognac.

  “Almost midnight,” Cary said. “I wonder what 1965 will bring.”

  “Maybe a resolution to our relationship?” I said, immediately wishing I could withdraw the remark. It had just slipped out, thoughts and words, breaking together in a single wave. Damn. I really intended to keep things light.

  Cary bristled. “Dear girl,” he said. “We’ve already had that conversation.”

  “You’re right, we have,” I said. Nothing had changed. Nothing was changing. Nothing was going to change. Being in limbo with Cary Grant was no different than being in limbo with anybody else. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. Being with Cary was exquisite—as long as I didn’t think about where it was going. Why couldn’t I just not think about where it was going? Because I just couldn’t. I knew what I wanted. Commitment. A husband. A family. Years could go by like this. If Cary wasn’t going to budge, all I was doing was licking honey off a razor blade. There was nothing more that I could do. If he couldn’t commit to living his life with me, I’d have to move on.

  On the other hand, part of me really wondered if anything was wrong in continuing the relationship on Cary’s terms. We loved being together. He’d certainly given marriage a chance. Three times. Maybe he was right. Maybe marriage was overrated. Maybe this was the future. That possibility held less sway with me, but . . .

  The clock struck midnight. Cary popped a bottle of champagne and poured two glasses.

  “Cheers!” he said, and kissed me.

  “Cheers.”

  Cary started singing, and I joined him:

  Should auld acquaintance be forgot

  and never brought to mind?

  Should auld acquaintance be forgot

  and days of auld lang syne

  “What does ‘auld lang syne’ mean?”

  “It’s Scottish,” Cary said. “It means ‘old long ago.’ Basically, it’s asking whether we should—or maybe even can—forget the past and move on.”

  “It’s a good question,” I said. “What do you think?”

  “I think we should just leave well enough alone.”

  “Does that mean being alone is enough?”

  “You’re twisting my words around, Dyan.”

  “You’re twisting my heart around, Cary.”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t do more than I can do.”

  “I’m sorry, neither can I. Happy New Year.” I kissed him on the cheek and left.

  It was five minutes after midnight.

  One thing was becoming clear to me: whenever I declared my independence from Cary, things happened for me professionally. And before I knew it, I was on The Danny Kaye Show. I did two skits with Vincent Price and one with Danny, and then I had a solo. I sang, “Have I Stayed Too Long at the Fair?” There was an unmistakable pulse in the applause that let me know I’d nailed it. I bowed and curtsied and hurried off the stage, walking on air. Addie and Hal were waiting for me in the wings and they looked very, very pleased.

  “Did I do all right?” I asked.

  “Dyan, there’s no other way of saying it: you’ve arrived.”

  And suddenly there was Cary, holding a bottle of champagne.

  “I had no idea you could sing like that,” Cary said.

  “Neither did I,” I said.

  “We could have been singing duets all this time!”

  “Fancy that!” I said.

  It was the first time I’d seen him since New Year’s Eve. We’d spoken once or twice on the phone in the past month, and I held my ground. I needed some time. I needed some space . . . away from him. It wasn’t a tiff. It wasn’t me being angry. It was just me being very clear about what I needed.

  I was delighted to see his smiling face, though. Just a little unsure of how far to let him in.

  “I have a little surprise set up for you,” Cary said. “Everything else aside, this is your night, and I am your biggest fan.”

  Cary no doubt sensed my hesitation, but he also sensed that it could be easily overcome. Oh, why not, I thought. This was a big night for me, and there was no one else with whom I’d rather celebrate it.

  I followed him through the empty parking lot, past a white van, to a candlelit table set with white linen and silver cutlery. There were even a pair of flaming tiki torches. It was the beach in Jamaica, re-created in the studio parking lot. Cary didn’t play fair.

  He popped the champagne cork and raised a toast. “To talent! And you’ve got it by the busload!”

  My mind was bubbling over with feelings, but I kept them to myself. I was elated that the show had gone well, overjoyed to see Cary, and wistful that nothing had changed. He could line the road to eternity with tiki torches and pave it with champagne bottles, and it would still be the same open-ended, noncommitted thing. It would be easy enough to go merrily along for the ride. But I had too clear a sense of what I wanted my life to look like, and it was a family portrait, not a portrait of a happily unmarried couple. If I put ten years of my life into this relationship and Cary suddenly decided to move on with someone else, where would I be then?

  The dinner was exquisite, naturally. Steak Diane. That was a sweet touch. It was prepared tableside, with creamed spinach and broiled mushrooms, followed by strawberry shortcake. We chatted and laughed but kept it light. When it was over, Cary took my hand.

  “You’re a sight for sore eyes,” he said. So are you, I thought, but all I ever wind up with is a sore heart.

  “Thank you for celebrating with me,” I said. “It was the perfect ending to a perfect day.”

  “Dear girl . . . I liked it the way it was with us.”

  “We’ll always have the memories, Cary.”

  “Won’t you come by the house for just a while now?”

  I was torn, but not quite in two. I ached to go home with him, but I wasn’t going to go on spinning my wheels. I kissed him on the cheek, walked back to my car, and drove back to my apartment.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Emergencies

  The next day, just after noon, Cary called and said he—we—needed to talk, that it was urgent. He did not sound happy. I asked if something was wrong. “No,” he snapped. “There’s just something I need to discuss with you.”

  I didn’t like the sound of this. Whenever anybody announces that they need to discuss something and makes an appointment to discuss it, you can generally assume that you’re in for a good tushie-whipping. Then, when you’re waiting for the “discussion,” time stands still.

  “Okay, how about dinner tonight?” I asked.

  “No, I’m coming over now.”

  Oh dear.

  The next twenty-eight minutes felt like being stuck on the airport runway in a crowded coach section for three hours with no air-conditioning. What could he want to talk about that could be so ominous? Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good.

  I scripted the scene in my head:

  I’m sorry, Dyan. Our situation has become untenable. There are things you want from me that I can never give you, and I refuse to keep taking advantage of you . . . Oh, and Leslie Caron and I are going to move into a bungalow in Fiji and have thirty children. We hope you’ll come and visit.

  Oy!

  I heard a crash in the parking court and then a nasty metal-on-concrete scraping sound. A car door opened and slammed. I looked out the window and saw Cary surveying the damage to his silver Rolls-Royce. He’d driven into one of the concrete pillars in the parking court. There was a gash in the front quarter panel, and the paint was badly scratched. Cary kicked the door, walked a few paces, kicked the trash can . . . then he got back in the car and threw it into reverse with a screech. He backed into the street. A horn blew and tires squealed. He threw it into drive and pulled into a parking space. Then he got out and started stomping up the st
airs to my apartment. Cary Grant is stomping, I thought. Cary Grant was the most graceful man who ever trod the earth, and he was stomping. Clomp-clomp-clomp up the steps. Bang-bang-bang on the door. I opened it and braced myself.

  He stood there with his hands thrust into his pockets—another thing he never normally did—biting down hard on his lower lip. I could practically see green sparks shooting out of his eyes.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  Cary shut the door behind him. A low growl emanated from his throat. Not a grrrrr; a growl. He was acting positively deranged.

  “Is everything okay?” I said, trying again.

  “No, everything is not okay!” he snapped. He crossed to the window and let out kind of a karate-chop yelp.

  “Cary, are you going to talk to me?”

  “Actually, no—no I’m not,” he said. He then turned, flung the door shut behind him, and ran down the corridor.

  I watched from the window as he got into his battered Rolls, backed over the trash can lid, and pulled into the street. More tires screeched. He lurched to a halt, and then peeled off.

  My imagination was having a tea party for every single catastrophe that might have occurred. Had something happened to Elsie? I thought about calling Maggie and Eric, but I didn’t want to alarm them for nothing. Maybe Cary had had some terrible financial setback. Or . . . he’d mentioned recently that he was due for his annual physical. Maybe that was it . . . had he been diagnosed with some terrible disease? I thought about calling Stanley Fox. But even if Stanley knew, he wouldn’t divulge anything. I tried to settle down and watch television, but my head was spinning with dreadful possibilities.

  The hours dragged by. Later that night, I sat in front of the TV, massaging my gums, per my dentist’s orders, with the little rubber nub on the base of the toothbrush handle. I had a little itch in my ear, and I scratched it with the nub. After a few minutes, I realized I couldn’t hear the TV all that well. I looked down at my toothbrush and realized the little red nub was gone. But I found it—in my ear. I tried to dig it out with my pinky but only managed to push it in deeper. Then the phone rang. It was Cary, but I couldn’t hear him very well. Only well enough to tell that he was still agitated.

  “Let me switch ears,” I said. “I can’t hear out of this one. There.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know that little red rubber thingie on your toothbrush you’re supposed to use on your gums? I’ve got one stuck in my ear.”

  “Really? It won’t come out?”

  “No. It’s in there really deep.”

  Cary was on the case. His tone shifted to dispassionate medical practitioner. My predicament provided a face-saving opportunity for both of us. “Get in the shower, make the water as hot as you can, and let it run in your ear. Then tip your head and give yourself a few hard whacks. That ought to dislodge it.”

  I gave it a try and called him back. “It didn’t work. It’s still stuck.”

  “Jump up and down.”

  “Be serious.”

  “I am serious. Jump up and down!” What a stupid idea, I thought. A rubber nub embedded deep inside an ear wasn’t going to come loose from the impact of jumping up and down. But Cary had said to do it, so I did it. I jumped up and down. For several minutes. I got the predictable outcome, which was a headache. I called him back.

  “Still there,” I said.

  “All right. Sit tight. I’m coming to get you.”

  No more than fifteen minutes later, Cary honked from the parking lot. I went downstairs and climbed into his somewhat beat-up Rolls, and we headed for the hospital. Cary waited in the car while I went into the emergency room. It took the doctor all of ten seconds to remove the little nub. He was about to drop it into the waste can when I asked if I could keep it.

  He shrugged and dropped it into my hand. “Sterilize it before you use it on your gums,” he said.

  Back in the car, I turned to look at Cary. “My ear is fixed,” I said.

  “What did the doctor say?”

  “He said that from now on, I’ll only be able to hear good things. Give me your hand.” I dropped the nub into it. “From me to you. From the bottom of my ear.”

  “Hmmmph.”

  He drove a few blocks in a befuddled silence, twisting his mouth around like he’d prefer to be talking to himself but didn’t want to be seen doing it. I decided to try to pull him out of his mental grease pit with silliness. I let out a dramatic gasp and flung the back of my hand to my forehead, pretending to go into a swoon.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he sputtered. Now that the crisis was over we were back stuck being lovers at odds. But I didn’t feel like playing a lover at odds. I just felt like playing.

  “I’ve just had surgery! I’ve been traumatized.”

  “And what are the symptoms of this trauma?”

  “I have an overpowering craving for ice cream.”

  “I suppose nothing but licorice ice cream would do.”

  “How did you know?”

  There was a Baskin-Robbins a few blocks away. Cary pulled in and I went to get the ice cream. He said he didn’t want any, but I got him a scoop of butter pecan anyway and pressed the cone into his reluctant hand. As he was backing out of the lot, a small tuft of my licorice ice cream cone fell onto the seat.

  “Dyan, could you be more careful?” he scolded. “You know Elsie used to fine me ten pence every time I spilled my milk on the table.”

  “You poor thing. Well, to keep the family tradition going . . . ,” I said. I reached into my purse, scooped up some pennies, and dropped them into his shirt pocket. He swatted at my hand, toppling his ice cream onto the seat.

  “Look what you’ve made me do!” he exclaimed. “Damn it, Dyan.”

  “Now you have to pay the fine! Give me those pennies back!” I reached into his shirt pocket.

  “Damn it, Dyan!”

  “Damn it what, Dyan?”

  He slammed on the brakes, came to a screeching halt in the middle of the street, and smacked the steering wheel with his hands.

  “Damn it, Dyan, do you want to get married?”

  Now I really did gasp. Even with the nagging chorus of beeping horns flying past us, I couldn’t take my licoriced lips off his.

  That night, for the first time, Cary spent the night with me at my apartment. In his arms, I slept like I hadn’t slept in ages. It was as if all this time I’d been sleeping on a thorn without knowing it. Now it was gone, and I was floating on air through a corridor of dreams.

  I felt safe.

  Just after dawn, Cary stirred awake and rolled over to face me.

  “Do I know you from somewhere?” he said.

  “I had a dream that you asked me to marry you,” I said.

  “That was no dream. I asked you in real life. And you said yes. And I’m holding you to it.”

  “No matter what I say or do?”

  “No matter what.”

  Later that morning, after Cary left, I took Bangs for a walk. It was early spring, and there were chirping birds and mailmen, lawn mowers and roses. The sounds, the colors, the smells . . . my senses had come alive like they’d never been before.

  Love.

  From the time I was a schoolgirl, it seemed that love was all we ever talked about and everything we were waiting for . . . without having the first clue what it was, what it felt like, how it tasted.

  Now I knew.

  When Cary and I first met, we talked about God . . . like he—or she or it—was something out there in the cosmos, waiting to be discovered, like Columbus discovered America or Pizarro discovered the Pacific. Like God was something remote.

  But God is in love—the love of another person, I thought.

  I’d found my god, and he’d just asked me to marry him.

  I flew to Seattle to share the news with my parents, who so far were the only ones I was allowed to let in on the secret. Mom and Dad picked me up at the airport. I tried to keep the news to myself until we
got back to the house, but Dad had only just pulled away from the curb when I blurted it out: “Cary proposed to me!”

  Dad was quiet. Mom was delighted, wanting all the details. How had he proposed? On his knees? Was it going to be a big wedding? Where was my ring?

  Hmmm. Where was my ring? I said I was sure he had special-ordered it. As for the rest, I told them it was very spontaneous.

  Then Cary called the house and asked to speak to Dad, who seemed a bit perplexed when he took the phone. “Your fiancé apologized for not having come to see me personally to ask for your hand in marriage,” he said. “He just asked for it, though.”

  “And?”

  “And I gave it.”

  “Honey, you let me know anything I can do to help,” Mom said. “I’m sure there’s going to be a million details you won’t have time for.”

  “Where’s the wedding going to be?” Dad asked.

  “We haven’t started planning yet, Daddy.”

  “It’s never too early to start shopping,” Mom said with a smile. “Listen, I’ve got a hair appointment in town tomorrow afternoon. Why don’t I make one for you too . . . we can combine that with some shopping and some lunch.” She smiled at my dad. “Just us girls.”

  It was great. A little lingerie hunting, a little lunch, a little coffee . . . then to the hairdresser, Rachel, who suggested using a rinse to bring out the highlights in my hair. I loved it. Mom thought it looked great. So did Dad, who pronounced it “nice and subtle”—when it came to his daughter’s appearance, “subtle” was the highest compliment. “You’ve never looked more beautiful,” he said.

  “Cary’s going to think so too,” Mom added.

  However, Cary did not think so. Picking me up at the curb, he took one look at me and demanded, “What have you done to your hair?” There was a vitriol in his voice I’d never heard before. He didn’t even kiss me when I got into the car. You’d think I’d just shaved my head with a dull razor. I took a minute to collect myself and then tried to explain.

  “Cary, they only put a brightening rinse on my hair.”