Dear Cary - Dyan Cannon [84]
Most of our communication now occurred around the clippings from magazines and newspapers he deposited on my nightstand. Most were about child rearing. Some were about the brain and the mind. Many were about the miracle powers of LSD. Cary used to clip news items or other bits of reading that he thought I’d find interesting, and I always enjoyed discussing them with him. Now they were like homework, and I read them because I knew he would quiz me on them later.
Three or four days before he left for Tokyo, I was in the dining room when suddenly a black cloud spewed out from the wood, scaring the daylights out of me. I ran through into the living room and through the front door, and I felt certain it was chasing me. It was creepy and so disturbing I thought I was going to give birth on the front stoop. I called an exterminator from a pay phone, who later pronounced the house half-eaten by termites. We would have to vacate while the house was fumigated and renovated.
And so, Cary left for Tokyo, and I was left with the task of finding us a house to live in as fast as possible. I spent weeks looking at houses with Cary’s real estate agent. I airmailed photos to Tokyo for Cary to see. We wound up renting a home off Benedict Canyon recently vacated by the Beatles.
While Cary was gone, I found myself more relaxed but also more riddled with uncertainty. The time difference between Los Angeles and Tokyo made it hard for us to talk much by phone—or at least that’s what Cary said. Japan was across the international dateline, so practically speaking, it was just seven hours earlier there. I couldn’t really see why it was harder for him to call from Japan than from Europe.
But absence really does make the heart grow fonder, and when I thought of Cary, I thought of him at his best, in his warmest and most loving moments. I got butterflies when the news that I was pregnant broke in the press. Particularly, one headline in a New York paper made me chuckle: CARY’S FOURTH EXPECTS FIRST.
But he could be like a blender churning up mixed signals, and one of his letters left my head spinning like I had knocked back a pitcher of gin fizzes:
“Please come to me soon”? After he’d absolutely refused to let me accompany him on the trip? It was hard to reconcile one with the other. In a moment of despair, though, I had a flash of insight. I really had no doubt that Cary loved me. But maybe it was hard for him to love me at close range, and therefore when feelings of tenderness welled up in him, he could say things from a distance—and on paper—that were painful for him to express when we were face-to-face.
I wished I were in Tokyo, or that Cary was back home. I wished the baby would be born so we could stop seesawing between anticipation and anxiety.
One day my mother called to suggest that the two of us meet in Las Vegas for a weekend. “Why don’t we kick up our heels before the baby comes?” she said. “It’s the last time you’ll have the freedom to do that kind of thing for a while. Just us girls.” I loved the idea. And though here I was about to become a mother myself, I really felt like I could use some mothering of my own. By now, Cary had been home from Tokyo for several weeks, and the emotional climate had continued to be mostly cloudy with patches of sunshine.
“No,” Cary said when I told him the plan. “You’re not going.”
I followed him into the bedroom, where he was busy changing into his lounging clothes. “But, Cary, the plans are all made. It’s my mother, and it’s just for two nights.”
“I don’t want to argue about this,” he said.
“I mean, Vegas isn’t Tokyo. It’s just a forty-minute flight and they speak English there.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Cary, think of it this way. It’s the last time for a very long time Mom and I can go somewhere together, just the two of us. It would be a really meaningful trip for Mom and me.”
Cary sighed and softened. It was