Dear Cary - Dyan Cannon [5]
“Shall I just mark that as a ‘no’?”
“Yes. Please.”
***
Me: Eduardo, I really need to know. Are you or are you not married?
Eduardo: Oh, Dy-yann, I have tol’ you many times already. I wass marry-ed, and I have two bee-yootiful children, but I am no longer marry-ed.
Me: So you’re divorced?
Eduardo: Technically, yes. But officially, no.
Me: Then you are married.
Eduardo: My wife and I, we have been living apart for a year, and we have both agreed to make it final . . . and final it is!
Blah, blah, blah, and blah.
I’d had my share of unrequited schoolgirl crushes, but Eduardo was the first man to throw a dagger into my grown-up heart. And it hurt. What made it hard, really hard, was not the death of our romance but the puncture wound he inflicted to my hale and hearty sense of trust. I grew up believing in the basic goodness of people, and happily, I never completely lost that. I hadn’t flung myself into the tryst with Eduardo before doing what I thought was due diligence on his marital status. It was just unfathomable to me that any man could misrepresent himself with such utter and unflappable consistency. Trying any harder to pin him down would’ve meant handcuffing him to a chair beneath a bare lightbulb.
I’ll say this for him, though: when he broke my heart, he certainly did it with style.
You can’t imagine being given such a rush. Limousines. Champagne. Candlelight dinners. “Mea amor,” he would ask me, “would you mind to live in Brazil half of the year?” I pictured myself managing a jungle plantation at the edge of the Amazon, though of course I had no idea what type of plantation it might be. Bananas? Mangoes? For all I knew, we’d be breeding squirrel monkeys.
Oh, how’d he fix me with eyes as hot as the equator and set my blood to simmering. Finally, I relented and to my mother’s horror (we kept Dad in the dark about it as he would have turned it into an international incident) moved into the sybaritic splendor of the Excelsior Hotel with him. I felt like one of the Medicis. Each night seemed more magical than the one before it. I would just look at him and lose myself in his big, green eyes.
By dating Eduardo, I’d really put myself out on a limb emotionally. My father was the sternest enforcer imaginable of feminine virtue and rarely passed an opportunity to proclaim, “A woman who sleeps with a man before she gets married has lost her self-respect!” That condemnation stuck in my mind like tar on the sole of my shoe. I overrode it, though, because I was so certain that Eduardo’s intentions were of the highest order. I wasn’t his wife, but I knew I would become his wife.
In keeping with the whole operatic Roman atmosphere, Eduardo’s unmasking as a cad was high melodrama. A letter was slipped under the door. The letter was from Rio. Eduardo’s name was written on the envelope in a distinctly feminine hand.
Yes, I opened it.
An investigative committee comprised of the plump chambermaid and the scrawny bellboy parsed the Portuguese words from their Latinate roots and strained them through Italian into sort-of English. “Ees from Mrs. Wife of Eduardo!” the chambermaid exclaimed.
“Eet es-sez she is messing [missing] with him and the boys they mess him too,” the chambermaid said.
“An’ she ees asking him for when he come home,” the bellboy added helpfully.
At the bottom of the letter, Eduardo’s wife had even drawn a tiny heart.
I sat on the edge of the bed, gasping for breath. I felt like I’d been stabbed. I don’t know how long I sat there, but I know I was so numb I couldn’t even cry. Eduardo showed up an hour later, kissed me with great passion, and told me to dress. “We are going to a wonderful place for dinner tonight,” he said, oblivious.
I acted as if nothing was wrong. We went to a bustling restaurant where everyone sat at a very long table that reminded me, somewhat appropriately, of the table in The Last Supper. Finally, I turned to him and said, “You’re not really separated, are you?” He just looked at me, saying nothing. “A letter arrived at the hotel, from your wife.