Dear Cary - Dyan Cannon [105]
“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 said. “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