Dear Cary - Dyan Cannon [33]
In Phoenix (after my job as first secretary to the Minister of Gropiness) I’d met a nice Jewish boy named Sonny. He was in his early thirties and worked in real estate in Los Angeles but visited Phoenix every other weekend to see his friends Gail and Marty. He took quite a shine to me, and we’d go out whenever he was in town. In a way, I hadn’t changed that much since high school. I was a passionate kisser, but when the boy started trying to score, I was as fierce as a goalie in a hockey rink.
“Is it me?” Sonny finally asked in frustration.
“No, Sonny,” I said. “I’m an old-fashioned girl. I’m not going there until I’m married.”
“If that’s all it is, let’s get married!”
And just like that, we went off to look for a justice of the peace, with Gail and Marty as witnesses. As to what was going through my mind . . . all I can figure is I must have had heatstroke. We found a justice, who asked some basic questions: our dates and places of birth, residencies, parents’ names, and so on. I turned to look at Sonny and said, “I can’t do this. I don’t even know you. This is crazy.”
“Okay,” he said. “But I still want to marry you. Why don’t you move to L.A. and we’ll get to know each other and take it from there?”
I did. And we took it from there. It wasn’t very far from “there” to “nowhere,” though. Sonny and I were rapidly losing interest in each other, but now Los Angeles was my home. When I’d gotten into town, Sonny had generously offered me his extra room. That was clearly a case of the fox guarding the henhouse, so I told him flat-out no. So he hooked me up with his friend Ann, who had an extra bedroom for rent. Ann worked for a dress manufacturer, and two days later she took me downtown to meet an acquaintance of hers, Oscar Levinson, at the Eleanor Greene Company. Oscar and I hit it off, and the next day I was hiring models for the company’s low-key fashion shows. I couldn’t believe how quickly everything was falling into place! Everything except Sonny, anyway. He soon decided that marriage was too high a price to pay for sex. Neither one of us walked away brokenhearted.
Ann was wonderful. She had an extra set of keys made for her car, so I could borrow it from time to time. She’d come home with boxes of chocolates. And once she even gave me a beautiful cashmere sweater. I felt lucky to have such a kind and generous person in my life. There were a couple of minor hiccups, but I guess that happens in every friendship. Once, for example, when one of my friends called, Ann picked up the phone and said, “She’s not here,” then hung up. In front of me. I was right there, on the couch, reading.
“Why’d you tell her that?” I asked.
“She’s not a good person,” Ann declared flatly, and left the room. Another time she called my mother and told her I was running with a bad crowd. Naturally, my mother called me, concerned. I assured her my friends neither wore prison blues nor had rap sheets, and in fact were first-rate people, and together we puzzled over Ann’s strange behavior.
Then one day at work Oscar approached and asked me if I was happy living with Ann.
“Sure,” I replied. “She’s great.”
Oscar squinted at me. “But are you of that, uh, persuasion?” he asked dubiously.
“I didn’t know Ann was religious.”
“Diane, what I mean is, Ann prefers women.”
“To what?” I said, confused.
“To men,” he replied.
“Oh?” I said. “Oh . . . Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. You didn’t know?”
This rattled me a little. When I got home I asked her point-blank about her “persuasion.”
She was certainly up-front about it. “Yes, sweetheart, it’s true. I prefer women, and I really like you,” she told me breathily.
“Well, Ann, I . . . of course I like you too, but I don’t like-you like-you. I mean not like I like men . . . and, you know, not like you like women the . . . way . . . you . . . like women.”
Ann just gazed back at me blankly as I stammered on. “I mean, if I liked women the way you like women, then I’m sure I’d like you, but you see, I like men the way you like women, and . . . I just don’t think this is working.”
My next roommates were,