Dear Cary

by Dyan Cannon

  “Where are you going?” Cary asked.

  “To the market.”

  “Not with Jennifer.”

  “Why not?” I responded.

  “What if she were kidnapped?”

  “Kidnapped?”

  “Jennifer is one of the most famous babies in Hollywood. It could happen.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  I hadn’t thought of that because there wasn’t any solid basis for worrying about a kidnapping. He could just as well have said, “What if there’s an earthquake?” But Cary happened to have said exactly the right thing at the right time to make me decide to fold my hand. I couldn’t take another minute.

  I didn’t argue—not out loud, anyway.

  I said, “Okay,” and put down my purse and put Jennifer in her playpen.

  An hour later, when Cary left for the studio, I called Mary Gries and asked her if she could make room for Jennifer and me.

  Mary had a large house in Malibu, right on the water. By now, her two sons had left home, and her husband was away. When I arrived with Jennifer, she took one look at me and said, “I’ll take care of the baby. You need to sleep.”

  I slept through to morning, a deep and heavy sleep that came over me from the feeling that I’d found a place of refuge. When I awoke, Mary told me Cary had called several times and wanted to come over, but she’d told him I was resting and it would be better to wait before he spoke to me. I’d left a note telling Cary where we were and not to worry. Never inclined to patiently wait for his calls to be returned, he called again almost as soon as I was up.

  “I want you back here,” he said.

  “Cary, I don’t think you know what you want.”

  “Dyan, I love you. I want my family back together.”

  “I know you love Jennifer, Cary, but that’s really the only thing I am sure of.”

  After we talked a few more times that day, I told Cary he was welcome to come and see Jennifer but that I would be walking on the beach. “I really need some space to collect myself,” I told him. We set a time for him to come, and I made sure I was out on the beach during his visit. We did that several times that week.

  “Dyan, if you need to talk, I’m here,” Mary told me more than once. After a day or so, I’d recuperated enough to open up.

  “My head is just a big traffic jam of negative thoughts,” I told her. “I’m not good enough . . . I’m not pretty enough, skinny enough, smart enough . . . I need help. It’s like I need a traffic cop to direct all these . . . thoughts. Because they’re all just honking like a bunch of cars backed up for miles.”

  I told her how I worried about one thing or another, minute by minute, hour by hour. Fear throbbed within my whole being like a toothache. “And the damnedest thing, Mary, is that I still love him.”

  Walking on the beach, listening to the waves crunch softly along the waterline, hearing the gulls and watching them catch the wind . . . the serene atmosphere of Malibu was a balm for my tormented mind and I began to be able to think a little more clearly. Being true to Cary, in every possible way, had been my mantra. But in the end, I had to be true to myself, even if it meant losing Cary. The problem was, I didn’t know where or who myself was anymore.

  “You know, Dyan, every relationship has its stuff,” Mary said one evening when we were watching the sun slide into the ocean. “Every relationship has the things that make it work and the things that make it go south.” I was quiet. Mary squeezed my arm. “Come on, Dyan. Talk to me. It’s important to let it out.”

  “I know that, Mary,” I said, “but some of the things that made it go south I can’t talk about. Not now. Maybe not ever. I just can’t. All I can tell you is that they’ve driven me to a place where I can’t feel anymore, and that scares me. I’m faking it all the time. And I’m so worn out with wearing this ‘everything’s just fine’ mask.” I hesitated . . . “I’m just so afraid of losing him.”

  Mary was quiet. Finally she said, “I don’t remember where I heard it, or who said it, but I’ll never forget it . . . ‘Oh learn to know you can lose nothing that is real. If it’s real you can’t lose it. And if it’s not real you don’t want it.’ ”

  That’s all well and good, I thought. But how do you know what’s real?

  I stayed with Mary for a week before I could muster the fortitude to go to the house. But I needed clothes, and Jennifer needed to see Cary, and vice versa, and I thought it was time to face him—or at least peek at him.

  When I got there, he was conciliatory and even contrite. His affection for Jennifer was something to behold. When he was with Jennifer, Cary became his kindest, most loving self, and I watched as he sat on the floor while she crawled around him like a little panda bear. Then he got to his feet, scooped her up, and came over to me.

  “Can we start over, Dyan?”

  “I’m so confused, Cary, I really don’t know.”

  And I didn’t know. What I did know, though, after watching him and Jennifer together, was that I had to leave the door open to reconciliation. On the other hand, for my sanity, I knew I had to get out. It was like being in quicksand. I sank if I stood still and I sank if I moved. I wished someone would throw me a line, but who? One way or another, I had to get back on solid ground.

  An hour or so into our visit, Cary’s face dissolved into utter seriousness. “Dyan, I have something for you,” he said. He laid Jennifer down in her playpen, went to his room, and came back with a script. He rifled the pages and gave it to me. The title was The Old Man and Me.

  I looked at him for an explanation.

  “I think it’s high time we did a movie together,” he said. I didn’t know what to say. He went on. “This is the perfect script for us. Young American woman comes to London to conquer the arts scene and cruelly seduces grizzled old literary lion.”

  I was completely thrown. It was as if this person who had always spoken English was now speaking Chinese. I could make out the words but I couldn’t connect to their meaning.

  “I’ll make sure the studio gives you an extremely plummy rate for this. You can put it in the bank, do what you want with it, so you don’t feel like you have to be so dependent on me.”

  I studied him for a moment and said, “I don’t know, Cary.” I wanted to know, wanted to believe that he was trying to change, to make things better for us.

  “Cary, that would’ve been music to my ears a couple of years ago,” I said, finally finding my voice. “But it’s about you and me now. It’s not about a movie or money. It’s about you and me and Jennifer, living happily together.”

  “Dyan . . .” Other than after one of his bad encounters with Elsie, it was the only time I ever saw him look so dismal. He took me by the hand and looked at me pleadingly.

  “I don’t know if I have another divorce left in me,” he said.

  My heart broke.

  “Will you stay here tonight?” he asked.

  I didn’t want to think anymore. I didn’t know what was right or wrong, smart or stupid. I just wanted to be with him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Time Out

  “No, Dyan, she’s a spiritual teacher,” Artis said. “She has wisdom. It doesn’t have anything to do with religion.”

  I was having lunch with Vince and Artis, who had become two very close friends during the time Cary and I were hanging in limbo. Cary and I had agreed that for the time being, we needed to have separate residences, so I’d moved into a house on Foothill Boulevard a couple of weeks earlier, just five minutes away from Cary’s house. Vince and Artis seemed to know by intuition the exact moment when my spirit was sinking, and without me even calling them, they’d appear magically at my doorstep. They were telling me about a woman named Lily Cowell whom they’d gone to for spiritual advice for years and who, they said, had radically changed their lives. I was skeptical. The whole idea of getting spiritual advice seemed a little goofy to me, but I trusted Vince and Artis.

  “You promise she�
��s not a wacky California woo-woo bird who professes all that touchy-feely stuff?” I asked.

  “We promise, she’s none of that,” Vince said. “Anything we try to tell you about her isn’t going to do her justice.”

  “This is life-changing, Dyan,” Artis said. Where had I heard that before?

  “If you’re not completely satisfied, your misery will be refunded in full,” Vince added.

  It sounded a little strange, but no other doors seemed to be opening. I needed to find some clarity, and I wasn’t about to go back to another shrink. If Vince and Artis thought a half hour with Lily would turn things around, what did I have to lose?

  That evening, I put Jennifer to bed and sat by the fire, imagining the opening credits to The Old Man and Me. Starring Cary Grant and Dyan Cannon. I played the movie trailer in my mind, imagined the double-page magazine spreads with at-home interviews of Cary and me, the happy couple . . . I thought about having a big bank account and the mobility to do some of the things I wanted to without having to clear it with Cary.

  The script, the money . . . they were certainly attractive gestures, but something in me held back. I feared that accepting the offer would mean I was entering into a bargain, and what was disconcertingly unclear was what I would be expected to put up as collateral. I feared that ultimately it would be my freedom. Not freedom from Cary, nor freedom from marriage, but freedom to be myself—whoever that was. So I knew what I had to do, but I was still torn. I told Cary that I’d love to do the movie with him if we could work out our marriage first. He agreed, but I had a feeling his agreement was based on his belief that I’d ultimately take him up on it.

  I thought about Vince and Artis, how kind and supportive they’d been. I was still a little skeptical about Lily, their “teacher,” but I’d made an appointment with her for the end of the week.

  I hoped she wasn’t going to shake chicken bones at me or throw a lot of blue powder into the air.

  “Is everything we talk about private?” I asked Lily. I remembered that the act of merely buying a bucket of fried chicken had landed in the papers. I didn’t relish the idea of a gossip column reporting that I was seeking spiritual advice.

  “Yes, of course,” Lily said, and there was something in the way she said it that made me trust her. She was a very petite woman with blond-silver hair, a beautiful heart-shaped face, and an easygoing, natural grace.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I told her haltingly. “He wants me to change, so I’ve been trying to change. I love this man, with all my heart. The thought of leaving him kills me. I think I’d die without him.” And then I told her everything. Everything.

  Lily gave me a gentle nod acknowledging that she’d taken this all in, that she got the picture. Serenity flowed from her eyes like water from a very deep spring, and I felt reassured and peaceful, even though she’d said very little. After a few moments, she finally spoke.

  “That doesn’t sound like love,” she said softly.

  That doesn’t sound like love.

  The thought and the voice that uttered it echoed into the depths of my being and rang a freedom bell of truth that carried far more meaning than those five simple words could possibly bear on their own. For the first time in several years, the honking, screeching, clanging traffic jam in my head went quiet, and I could finally just be still and listen to a distant, delicate chime of redemption. It was far, far away, but I felt that if I could clear away the noise in my head once and for all and follow its sound, I could free myself from the anguish that had attached itself like a barnacle to my soul.

  She didn’t give me advice or tell me how to proceed from there. She just looked at me with eyes that radiated compassion and that told me I had heard what I needed to hear.

  There was a pool in the backyard, and the happiest hours of my day were spent in the pool with Jennifer and her swimming teacher. Frolicking in the pool with my daughter was the one activity that lifted my depression. I lived a lot of the time in a cavern of dread, and I knew that some way, somehow, I had to break out of it. My love for Jennifer was the one thing that kept me going.

  Addie was insistent that I get back into action, and despite my lack of motivation, she took me by the earlobe and marched me to an acting class. I hadn’t worked in almost three years, and the idea of getting up onstage paralyzed me with anxiety. On the first day, I was overcome by a panic attack just doing warm-up exercises, and there in front of my fellow actors, I froze as stiff as a cold corpse with rigor mortis. I could not get a word out. My arms seemed glued to my sides. My feet were set in concrete. I had turned completely to stone. The instructor actually had to walk me back to my seat.

  I collapsed in a chair as another student took my place. What had happened? I’d never in my life even experienced a shadow of stage fright, and here I’d turned into an ice sculpture, so mortified that I wasn’t even shaking. I was afraid I’d lost it, once and for all, and spent the rest of the class in a cold sweat, watching the others, thinking if I could just make it out the door, I would call the next day and drop out—which is probably what I would have done if I hadn’t called Addie first.

  “Dyan, it’s been three years and you’ve been through a lot,” she said. “You can break through this and you will. You have to.”

  “I can’t do it,” I said. “I—”

  “You can do it, you need to do it, and you will do it.”

  Fortunately, she was right on all counts. I remembered that day in the desert when my horse threw me and Darlene yelling, “Get back on! Now!” So I went to the next class, fully expecting to turn so stiff I’d have to be lifted off the stage by a crane. But when my turn came to read a scene, it started to come back, slowly if not surely. I stuck with the class and gradually got my stage legs back. That was a significant victory. Except for Jennifer’s love, theater was the only activity that allowed me to get out of the harness and walk away from the heavy sled of despair I pulled behind myself constantly.

  Otherwise, I hovered over my life like a cloud, looking at it from high above like it was happening to someone else. I got to that high place with marijuana and margaritas . . . and a virtual trove of pills to prop me up when I was down, and lay me down when I was too far up. Most people thought I seemed happier than I had in a long time. I’d found a place inside my head where I could hide. It was safe there because I could feel nothing— absolutely nothing. And the best thing about it was that no one could see in. I could smile without really feeling it and I got away with it. No one knew how I really felt. No one. Not even me.

  That doesn’t sound like love.

  Lily’s words stayed with me, and somewhere in the pea-soup fog that enclosed my mind, her statement twittered like a bird outside the bedroom window. If what Cary and I felt for each other wasn’t love, then what was it? The question troubled me deeply. I could still halfway talk myself into thinking things with Cary could get better, and my memory grabbed on to the good times. I thought of the licorice ice cream kiss in Palm Springs, the seaside dinner in Jamaica, New Year’s in Paris. Even though it was often difficult for us to even be together, I still could see myself as Mrs. Cary Grant.

  On other days, though, the idea seemed impossibly remote. If anything was clear, it was that my indecision was tearing me apart. I had to decide what to do.

  Over the next few months, Cary and I occasionally met for dinner or lunch, spent evenings together, even took weekend trips, some with Jennifer, some without. Those occasions had been polite at best and strained at worst, and my hope for wholehearted reconciliation had waned. But what if his offer that we do the movie together was a real change of heart? I’d struggled with the sensation that he might just be dangling a carrot in front of me, ultimately to keep things in the status quo, but I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. I really wanted to believe that he was determined to treat me as an equal partner, in life, marriage, and business. That was a thrilling thing to contemplate. On top of that, there were moments when he seemed more
engaged and more enthusiastic about our being together.

  One night—it was several months after I’d moved out—it almost seemed like old times. The best of old times, that is. He picked me up for dinner in the Rolls. I dressed with that English conservative chic because I knew he’d approve, and somehow it felt good.

  At a stop sign on the way down the hill, I suddenly felt playful. I started to reach for the car keys, but I stopped myself. The impulse had come and gone quickly.

  Cary smiled. “Dyan, you weren’t going to throw those keys out the window, were you?”

  “I thought about it. But you’ll always remember the time I did, won’t you?”

  He laughed. “I was so angry with you.” Then he smiled.

  It was going on six years since we’d first met. Cary was now sixty-three, and looking at him, he still seemed ageless—and if anything, only better looking with the extra years. We went to dinner at Hoi Ping, just like old times. We stuffed ourselves, just like old times. Hoi Ping didn’t have margaritas, but Cary suggested we order a big gaudy rum drink called a Suffering Bastard. Half of one did the job for me. Cary finished mine and ordered one more.

  I looked at Cary and almost believed it was old times. We’d both been hoping that the old magic would find us again, like a St. Bernard coming to the rescue of two avalanche survivors, and there were moments when I thought it had. This was one of them. I studied him in the dim red glow of the electric Chinese lanterns. He seemed so at home with me in that moment. I smiled at him and in my mind, fixed him in that frame, wishing that I could have and hold him like that forever.

  “What would you like Jennifer to be when she grows up, Cary?” I asked.

  “A highly evolved, kindhearted woman,” Cary answered softly. “Someone who got the best from each of her parents.”

  “That’s a perfect answer,” I said. We sat for a few seconds in serene silence. “Is that how you think of me, Cary?”