Dear Cary

by Dyan Cannon

  I rested my head on the steering wheel.

  “I can’t, Daddy.”

  “I guess I knew that.” He sighed.

  After Dad got home that night, Mom called. “Take Jennifer, get on a plane, and come home,” she told me. “You need a time-out and you need rest.”

  “I can’t run away now, Mom. I have to face this and fix it.”

  “You can’t fix it if you’re feeling broken. Dyan. Please.”

  “Sorry, Mom.”

  For two days, Cary and I didn’t say a word to each other. I kept my attention centered on Jennifer, holding her close, trying to shield her from the hostility that swirled around the house like dust devils. Through her, I could still feel the pulse of life beyond our tormented household, though that pulse was weak. Cary would take her and play with her when he got home while I retreated to the bedroom and lay on the bed, limp as a rag. A voice inside kept telling me, You can’t do this anymore. It was answered by another voice that said, But you have to. You have to go on. Not just for yourself, but for your daughter. I cried a lot, and in fact, just about anything could trigger my tears. A song, a television commercial, a squirrel outside the window. I spent a lot of the day softly weeping.

  On the third day, Cary broke the silence. When he came home, I was in the bathtub. Crying again. I was drained. I looked up to see him standing in the doorway.

  “Why are you crying?” he asked.

  “Because I’m sad.”

  “It seems like you’re crying a lot lately.”

  “I’ve been sad a lot lately.”

  He was quiet. Very quiet. Then he looked at me with undisguised irritation. “I asked you a question,” he said. “I want to know what you’re crying about.”

  I buried my face in my hands.

  “Dyan, talk to me!”

  The words took on a life of their own, rushing out of my mouth before I could edit them:

  “Cary, don’t you have everything you want? I know I’m not the perfect wife, but I’ll try harder. I’m still Dyan, Cary. I’m not your mother, who disappeared on you. I’m not your father, who lied to you. I’m Dyan. And I love you and we have a wonderful child together and you finally have the family you’ve always wanted. Why are you throwing us away?”

  It was as if he hadn’t heard a word. As if he couldn’t or wouldn’t allow himself to hear it. I looked up at him. His face was as wooden as a totem mask.

  “What happened to the laughter?” I asked softly. “We were always laughing together. What happened?”

  “That was a different time,” he said grimly.

  “You want to know what I’m crying about, Cary? I’m crying because you made me promise that I wouldn’t let you do this. You made me promise that I wouldn’t let you turn me into Elsie. Don’t force me to break my promise. You’re the one who’s cracking our foundation. You’re not giving our marriage a chance. It’s almost like you want me to leave. Do you want me to leave, Cary?”

  “Maybe that’s all I’m good at—making people leave me.”

  He slammed the front door as he left the house.

  I heard Jennifer start crying. I got out of the tub, took Cary’s heavy robe off the wardrobe hook, and went to the nursery. I wrapped the robe around Jennifer and me and quieted her.

  Cary didn’t come home that night. I took Jennifer to bed with me. On the nightstand I saw the stack of newspaper and magazine clippings Cary had deposited there for my education. I started to read them, thinking he’d be pleased that I’d done my homework . . . then I realized the insanity of thinking Reader’s Digest articles would make any difference in this mess of a marriage. I lay there, trying not to toss and turn so I wouldn’t disturb Jennifer. I got very little sleep. I thought maybe Cary had slipped in during the night and gone to sleep in one of the extra bedrooms, so I went to check. But no, he hadn’t come home. At seven, I called Cary’s bungalow—no answer. I called Addie and told her the situation. I thought maybe I should call the police. She said I shouldn’t. She said to calm down and wait, that he was only shaking it off by himself somewhere. At ten, I called the bungalow again. Dorothy answered. She said he wasn’t there, but I wasn’t sure I believed her. I wasn’t sure of anything.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Breaking Points

  I had just put Jennifer down for her noon nap when the intercom buzzed. The nanny came into the nursery to tell me that Stanley Fox was outside the gate, and should she let him in? I nodded and went to open the front door.

  “Stanley! Is something wrong? Has something happened to Cary?”

  “No, Dyan, Cary’s fine,” Stanley said.

  “Oh, thank God.” I let a shiver run through me. “He didn’t come home last night. I’ve been so worried.”

  “Dyan, can I come in?”

  I’d always liked Stanley and found him to be a calming presence. When other people were getting excited or wound up, Stanley was the calm in the storm. That day, though, there was something about Stanley that put me on edge. Something was amiss and I knew it, but I had no idea what. “Can we go into the study?” he asked.

  “Of course.” I offered him coffee. He declined in a way that indicated he wasn’t going to stay long.

  The only furniture in the study was a desk and two chairs. Stanley sat down in the chair behind the desk, intertwined his fingers, and leaned forward—almost as if I’d asked for this conference. I sat down, facing the window. Outside, the swimming pool caught the noon sun and kicked a beam of light through the window. It backlit Stanley so that the light burst in all around him while his face was in shadow.

  “Dyan, from what I understand, things haven’t been going very well between you and Cary. And I’m sorry to hear that.” Stanley was a slow and smooth talker. It was part of his negotiating style—long, elongated words oozed out like molasses while his mind was spinning at a thousand rpms. It was driving me crazy. I wished he’d come right to the point. Right then, Jennifer started crying. I went to the nursery and quieted her down, then returned to the study and sat back down across from Stanley.

  “Well, I talked to Cary this morning,” he said. “He thinks it might be best if you two separated.”

  I went into shock. All of my instincts had told me to brace myself for a left hook. But this punch came out of nowhere. I really didn’t see it coming. It didn’t register.

  “You know, Stanley, I’ve been up all night waiting for my husband to come home, and I’m a little bleary. What does that mean—‘separated’? I don’t understand.”

  “Dyan, I’m sorry, but it means he wants a divorce.”

  The man who said he would love me forever and never leave me didn’t love me anymore and wanted to leave me. My head hurt.

  “Excuse me for a minute.” I went to the hall and took three deep breaths, then returned and sat down again.

  There was a long and naked silence between us. Finally, I said, “Stanley, what kind of a man would ask another man to go to his home and tell his wife that he wants a divorce?”

  Stanley stayed cool as rain, didn’t blink, just looked at me for a second and said, “I’m sorry about this, Dyan. I’ll let myself out.”

  My heart was in my throat. I couldn’t breathe.

  I sat there for a long time, thinking. Memories arose and dissolved. Some lingered longer than others. Cary with his socks stuck to the kitchen floor in a puddle of gooey, dried cola. Cary crashing his car the day he came to propose and chickened out. Cary kissing me in London with my face all spattered with red blotches.

  I called Addie and told her what happened. She asked if she should come over, but I told her I needed to be alone and not think. But about ten minutes later when I thought I was going to lose my mind, I called my mom and dad and told them the news. “I made a commitment to marry, and until death do us part,” I told them. “But I’m dying here.” I sobbed. “What shall I do? I don’t know what to do.”

  “The first thing to do is to take a few breaths and get as calm as you can,” Dad s
aid. “Don’t try to make any important decisions when you’re this emotional.”

  “Then what?” I asked dispiritedly.

  “Honey,” Dad said, “I can only tell you what works for me when things are tough. I pray.”

  “To whom? My god has let me down. My god has asked for a divorce. My god doesn’t want me anymore. And I will die without him. You have to understand that. I will die.”

  My dad said, “Honey, Cary Grant is not God.”

  My mother chimed in and said, “Ben, that’s the first time you and I ever agreed on anything to do with God. Your dad’s right, honey.” Then I heard my mom start to cry.

  Dad said, “I’m going to send you a ticket. We want you to come home.”

  “I’ll keep you posted,” I told him.

  I spent the rest of the day in a fugue of numbness. When the phone rang, I didn’t pick up; I knew it was my parents and I really didn’t have anything to tell them. In a way, though, I felt relief. Finally, Cary and I had pulled off our masks. We had dropped the pretenses and the politeness, stopped pretending that the boat wasn’t about to capsize. There was something liberating about that. Or maybe I was just getting weirder faster than my situation was.

  When Cary finally came home late in the day, he sat down across from me in the living room. He seemed to be waiting for me to say something. I didn’t. After a few moments, he said, “Stanley told me he talked to you.”

  After a pause I said, “You know, Cary, after Stanley left, I remembered the time I was in the hospital and you told me you were a coward. I didn’t believe you then. I do now.” We stared at each other for a bit, saying nothing. “Tell me exactly how you want me to do this,” I said.

  “It’s up to you.”

  “Cary, you just asked me for a divorce. Or rather, your attorney did. Please. Please tell me, what happened to ‘I’ll love you forever and I’ll never leave you’?”

  “You were different then.”

  “So were you . . . What do you want, Cary?”

  “A happy family. Peace. Joy.”

  “And how are you contributing to that?”

  Cary moved toward me. “Honestly, Dyan, I don’t want you to leave,” he said, and started to put his arms around me. But I pushed him back.

  “Please tell me how in the hell you’re able to reconcile ‘I don’t want you to leave’ with ‘I want a divorce.’ Maybe I’m slow, but to my mind, they don’t fit together very well.”

  “Dyan, maybe it was a bad move. I was upset and I didn’t know how else to get through to you.”

  “You’re playing with me like I’m some kind of a yo-yo, Cary.”

  I went into the bathroom and turned on the tub faucet. I sat on the edge of the tub for a few minutes, just listening to the water.

  When I came out, Cary was in his armchair, holding Jennifer, talking baby talk to her. It was dusk and the sunset was a melting smear of gold-tinged pink filling the living room’s long picture window. A single lamp cast the two of them in a low, golden light: Cary with his collar open and tie loosened, just the hint of a five o’clock shadow, holding our pink, happy baby in her blue jumper. She gripped his finger with her tiny hand. He kissed her nose. She broke into a big baby smile. He broke into a big daddy smile. Baby love. Daddy love . . . Gorgeous to watch.

  The specter of prying Jennifer loose from Cary with divorce was more terrifying, more painful, and more unbearable than any session of LSD. The way things were, there were three of us in a lifeboat that only had room for two. I had been drinking salt water for too long, and I wouldn’t last much longer if I kept it up. But to push Cary out of the boat and separate him from his family? He would drown, I thought. He would drown in anguish. Of course, he would be able to see her, but I felt deeply that he needed the complete family—Jennifer and me—to keep his dream.

  I was convinced of this. I was sure I was the only thing holding the three of us together, individually and collectively, but I was not far from drying to dust and scattering to the four winds. Even if I managed to keep myself in one piece, though, what would the poisonous and oppressive atmosphere do to Jennifer?

  Over and over, I tried to balance these ideas against each other. I got nowhere.

  I was scared for myself. I was scared of dying. Something was wrong with me. I hadn’t been myself in a while, and I wondered if it had something to do with LSD. I had been having memory lapses and midstream gaps in my concentration. I would forget what I was saying in midsentence, forget what I was doing in midaction, forget where I was going, even from room to room. I kept thinking tomorrow would be better. I was certain tomorrow would be better. But what about today?

  I brooded over what to do. Cary was obsessed with the idea that LSD would make me whole. I wished I could believe him, but how could I when the wondrous benefits he claimed to have received from it were invisible to me? But I had to do it, I decided. For the sake of being able to say I’d tried everything, I had to give it one more shot.

  That night we lay on the bed in the dark, each stretched out with our arms folded over our chests, like two bodies in repose on a funeral slab.

  “If you want me to try LSD again, I will,” I said.

  Cary stretched his arm across me and pulled me closer. “I knew you weren’t a quitter,” he said. “You almost made it last time. Dyan, I can’t even describe to you what’s waiting for you on the other side. Only that it is a whole new universe.”

  “Is that where God lives?” I asked wearily.

  “Thank you for trusting me, dear girl. You won’t be sorry.”

  So, to reach one more time for that golden star of transformation, I went back for another dose. I took Vince and Artis up on their long-standing offer to take Jennifer and the nanny for a day. They came for them at about ten, and we took the drug at eleven. An hour later I looked out the long living room window at the swimming pool, from which sprang a tall, powder-blue maple tree, into which a huge flock of crows descended. I could hear them cawing, and the sound of it grew louder and louder, becoming ever more distorted until it sounded like the motor of a chain saw, except much lower. The crows and the whole tree turned red—and then faded into a rose-colored glow that reminded me of the taillights of an old Chevy. Then the birds dissolved into a unified mass around the tree in the shape of a gigantic heart that throbbed and thrummed with a terrifying echo.

  Cary asked what I was seeing, and I described this to him. “Stay with it,” he told me, but I was getting very uncomfortable.

  I was utterly convinced that my blood vessels were going to burst through my skin any minute. Oh, and my teeth were buzzing. “Cary, I think I’m really going to lose it.”

  “You can handle it. You’re getting there.”

  “Getting where?”

  “Let your mind enter the vision. The truth is wrapped up inside of it.”

  I looked at Cary. There was a kind of energy pulsating from his body that I wasn’t sure I could see but that I could definitely feel. Thought waves that traveled across the room like blue smoke and curled around my skull. Cary’s thought waves. They circled around my mind and tightened until I felt like an iron mask had been clamped over my head. “Cary, I think you’d better give me a Valium,” I said. My rib cage was constricting around my lungs and before long my internal organs were going to be squeezed up my throat and out of my mouth.

  “Stay with it, Dyan. It may not be easy but it’s worth it.”

  I looked back at the tree, which had turned into a mass of black, undulating energy, and I had a terrifying sensation that it was pulling me into it. I described that to Cary and pleaded with him to give me a Valium. “Not yet,” he said.

  “Yes, now. I’m being sucked into a dark tunnel.”

  “Dyan, you have to find out what’s on the other side.”

  “Oh my God, Cary! I’m in the tunnel. Get me out of here! Get me out of here! It’s so dark. It’s so dark.”

  “You’ve got to go through that tunnel, Dyan.”

  “Car
y, listen to me. I can’t breathe. I’m going to die. I’m going to die.”

  “And then you’ll be reborn!” Cary kneeled beside me. His eyes were two pools of mercury. “You’ll be reborn and you’ll be new!”

  “Make it stop! Stop it now!” Then I screamed for my life.

  The next few days, we retreated back into that old, lethal politeness—the cold war of our marriage. It could have gone on like that indefinitely, perhaps even forever. At first, I dealt with it by not thinking about it. But then I reassessed the situation. The LSD experiment was finally and permanently over and done with. “Never again,” I’d told him after that last gruesome time. I meant it and he knew it. “My psyche won’t take another battering like that.”

  “If it won’t, it won’t,” Cary said curtly, walking away.

  Where did that leave me? Acting was out—Cary had put down his foot about that. The only avenue open to me was redoubling my efforts at being a wife, mother, and homemaker.

  I decided that a nonworking mother with only one child didn’t really need a nanny, and in fact, having one left me with too much time on my hands and nothing much to do with it. I regretfully let Kathleen, our nanny, go. I told her she was wonderful, but that I thought I needed to take charge of the home myself. I’d be a full-time mom to Jennifer and more of an all-around homemaker for her and Cary, who I naively thought would be pleased.

  Pleased he was not, and in fact he became visibly upset when I told him. He challenged my strategy on every level. What if he needed me for some reason and I was stuck in the kitchen “trying” to cook? He needed me to be available when he wanted me. I liked the idea that he wanted me close by. Maybe in some crazy way, it meant I was making progress. But he concluded by insisting that I call Kathleen and tell her to come back before somebody else hired her.

  The next day would have been Kathleen’s day off anyway, and I needed to do some shopping. I made my list, dressed Jennifer, and folded up her stroller to put into the car.