Dear Cary - Dyan Cannon [107]
“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.”
“Cary, 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.
“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