Dear Cary - Dyan Cannon [95]
He spoke under his breath. “Of course I do, Dyan. But you have to remember who you’re with.”
“You weren’t more than a hundred feet away. How was I going to forget?” Cary didn’t answer but continued to look at me accusingly.
“I don’t know how much longer I can take this,” I said. “Honestly, Cary, I feel like I’m losing my mind.”
“You see how you’re talking? Can’t I say anything without you feeling attacked?”
“I’m feeling like I’m about to have a breakdown, Cary. That’s how I’m feeling.”
“Then why don’t you have one and get it over with? It might be a good thing.”
“I can’t believe you said that.”
Cary took a step back, shrugged, and exhaled softly. “I didn’t mean it the way it may have sounded, Dyan. I’m thinking you just need to let it all go.”
I broke free of his arm and ran to hide in the ladies’ room. A few moments later, Mia Farrow came in looking for me. “Is everything okay?” she asked. “Cary said you were feeling sick to your stomach.”
“I’m okay. I’m better now.”
And I was. I’d realized something. I had gotten into a terrible habit of beating myself up for not meeting Cary’s expectations—whatever they were. I decided that for the rest of the weekend, I would let go of the idea that I could do anything at all to satisfy Cary. I would refuse to let anything he said get to me. It actually worked. He came at me a couple of times with one disparaging remark or another, but I smiled and pretended not to hear them. Remarkably, he eased off.
We partied like college kids for the rest of the weekend.
Just when things seemed like they couldn’t get any worse, they did. Right after we returned from Vegas, Cary stayed home to devote a full day to me—or at least to pointing out my flaws and imperfections. He practically trailed me around the house from morning until night, calling out my shortcomings. He had developed an obsession with knobs and handles. It seemed that I turned them too hard or not hard enough. I overtightened the knobs on the shower and stripped them. I didn’t turn the knobs at the kitchen sink tightly enough, so they dripped. I was ruining the stove by not turning the burners on gently enough. I was ruining all the doorknobs in the house by forcing them instead of jiggling them. I pointed out that we were renting the house temporarily, but Cary said that was all the more reason to treat things with respect. I hadn’t learned to treat things with respect, he said, because I had no respect for myself. And because of that, I had no respect for anyone else, especially him. All of these were acts of rebellion, he said. I resented him, he told me—again—because I had set him up as an authority figure when he wasn’t.
On and on and on it went. I didn’t place a coaster under my water glass. I parked my car in the driveway crooked. I shouldn’t be so friendly to the mailman because he could get the wrong idea. I shouldn’t be so friendly to the maid because it was good to keep a distance.
I needed a solution, a coping mechanism, similar to the one I’d used in Vegas. It was on that day, about the time he was pointing out that my wardrobe needed an organizing principle, be it by color, style, or weight—the choice, unbelievably, was up to me—that I started experimenting with the art of disconnection. In a way, this had been where it was leading for some time. It was impossible to field Cary’s criticisms one by one—impossible. But if I didn’t find a way to deal with them, I would surely die the death of a thousand cuts.
Really, I’d begun to see the assaults as an energy form, a kind of entity, and I could tell when the entity was taking over. It was black and menacing. I thought of the black cloud of termites that had chased me from the dining room in the old house. It was like that.
“I want you to look at something,” Cary had said, taking me by the arm to my bedroom closet. “You see, this indicates no sense of order whatsoever. You need to . . .”
It happened spontaneously. I stopped hearing him. His lips moved, but all I heard was the sound of wind. It was