Dear Cary - Dyan Cannon [114]
Throughout the proceedings, I felt myself being sucked into a miasma of emotions: a vortex of guilt, a riptide of despair, an all-consuming sense of failure. I felt I’d failed Cary. And Jennifer. And my parents. And myself . . . I felt that I’d blown it, that my own mental frailty, my own stupidity, and my own stubbornness had been the rotten beam that caused the roof to collapse on our family. But just as forcefully, deep in my core, there burned an inferno of outward blame. As guilty as I felt for the mess that our marriage had become, hot gusts of black rage tore through my brain when I thought of the man who promised to always love me and never leave me. And how whenever I tried to step into a new frame to become the person he wanted me to be, he always changed lenses.
I inhaled guilt, I exhaled anger. I felt like an old house that had been gutted by fire, with little left but a rickety, charred frame and a few shingles. In most ways, it was a divorce like any other: a merciless spectacle of gladiators and assassins. Even without the media, it would have been like putting my heart in a meat grinder.
I tried to tell myself that it was all just an unpleasant technicality and that the procedures and the news really had nothing to do with what had happened between Cary and me. But however I strived to armor myself against the onslaught of negativity, I couldn’t completely protect myself from feeling judged, and harshly. I took everything personally.
The media, predictably, covered the divorce with savage intensity. For days, I couldn’t turn on the television or the radio, or look at a newspaper, for fear of seeing my name or picture. To have the dirty laundry of one’s own life aired in a courtroom full of people is bad enough; to have it aired in the press was a horror that is unimaginable to most people. Naturally, the headlines sounded like posters for third-rate film noir movies. I was simultaneously portrayed as a gold-digging party girl, a shy and woebegone waif, a calculating femme fatale, the innocent victim of a domineering megalomaniac.
I did not recognize myself in any of these sketches, but on some level I bought into all of them. I no longer had any defense against suggestion, and I was open to all of it. I was like a sack of guts without a rib cage, with no protection against anything that was said about me in the courtroom or written about me in the papers.
After three days of testimony, I was granted a divorce on the grounds of “mental and emotional cruelty.” I was awarded full custody of Jennifer, with Cary being given visitation rights.
I was awarded $2,500 a month in alimony for the first six months, $1,750 for the next eighteen months, and $1,000 per month for the year after that. For child support, I was awarded $1,500 per month.
I came out of the marriage with no home and no car, but I didn’t care. I felt like I had been in a prison and I wanted out.
On the way home from court I developed a powerful craving for Mexican food. It came out of nowhere—the only other time I’d wanted it so badly was when I was pregnant. We stopped at Casa Vega. Of course, you can’t have Mexican food without margaritas, or it’s not Mexican food. I had several, and so did Addie and Mary. I looked around the room at the festive sombreros and the faux colonial plaster and realized the last time I’d been there was with Cary when I was pregnant. For a moment I started to really sink, but I buoyed myself with another margarita.