Dear Cary - Dyan Cannon [19]
I smiled. I melted, and not from the desert heat. “I want you to know that I had a really wonderful time,” I said.
“That was the idea,” he said.
CHAPTER SIX
Table for Two
Two days later we were having dinner at a Chinese restaurant called Hoi Ping, one of Cary’s favorites. It was off the beaten path and probably notable only because Cary ate there. Cary loved food, and as time went on, I came to envy the way he could eat anything he wanted and as much of it as he wanted without adding even a shadow of roundness to that famous square jawline. His unassailable trimness sure didn’t owe anything to exercise. He did like to swim—for about fifteen minutes twice a month. He just had that kind of metabolism.
When we pulled up to the restaurant, Cary asked me to scope out the dining room. He was a little worried about the paparazzi, who’d found out that Hoi Ping was a regular stop along Cary’s flight path. I was thrilled. I was spying for Cary Grant! “It’s empty,” I said, reporting back. “Two waiters, a man who looks like the owner, and a busboy.”
“Perfect!” he said.
“Ah! Mr. Grant! So good to see you again.” Ong Ling, the owner, greeted Cary with discreet warmth. He bowed slightly toward me and smiled with his eyes cast downward, and didn’t ask questions. I could see why Cary was comfortable here. Ong made sure Cary’s privacy was respected.
Ong led us to a corner banquette—Cary’s booth—and smoothed the pristine tablecloth with his hands. “The usual, Mr. Grant?”
“You bet!” Cary said cheerfully, and turned to me. “ ‘The usual’ is basically everything on the menu minus the marinated chicken feet,” he said.
Within minutes, a convoy of covered dishes streamed onto the table. Piping-hot wonton soup; spring rolls; duck-and-scallion pancakes; moo shu pork; chicken with cashews; string beans in a dark, aromatic sauce. The waiter served us, and with my first bite of moo shu pork, I knew why Cary loved Hoi Ping.
There were a few subjects I wanted to break the ice about. Ex-wives seemed a little too touchy, so I decided to start with drugs. I’d been intrigued and a little bothered about Cary’s experiments with LSD ever since Skip had shown me the magazine article about it.
“I want to ask you something, Cary.”
“Fine, but only if it’s personal,” he said with a wink.
“What’s this business about you and LSD? I thought that was for beatniks.”
“Ah! I was hoping you’d ask me that.”
“Really?”
“No,” he said, laughing. “But since you asked, I’ll tell you. First of all, it’s perfectly legal . . .” He went on to say he’d first tried it in 1958, in a controlled experiment with a group of psychiatrists, including his own physician, Dr. Mortimer Hartman, and that under its influence he felt as if he understood the universe. “Everything suddenly made sense,” he said. “It was as if the whole world were within my grasp. There was such clarity that for the first time in my life I felt I understood God.”
“Really? You understand God?”
“Well, yes. But not in the traditional, Christian sense; not an old man with a white beard sitting on a cloud. I see God as some kind of force, something inside us. Somewhere along the line, I’d already adopted that view as a principle, but LSD made it real for me, and I’d never had an experience like it. Do you believe in God, Dyan?”
That was a big question. As I’d told Cary, the issue of God in my parents’ house was like a big jar of nitroglycerin and I never knew when someone was going to drop it and cause an explosion.
“I believe there’s something out there that’s moving the furniture around,” I said. And I did believe that. The problem was my anger at this unidentified being. “I had kind of a profound experience when I was a kid.”
“Tell me,” Cary said.
“In the wintertime, my dad used to water down the backyard several nights in a row so the