Dear Cary - Dyan Cannon [98]
“Cary’s in his sixties, and I’m in my twenties,” I said. “Cary has made ten zillion movies, and retiring isn’t the same as giving up your career. I’m just getting started.”
To which the doctor said, “Hmmm.”
The doctor said that a lot, and it unnerved me because I didn’t know if that meant I was on the wrong track or the right track. And it added to my already deep doubts about my own actions. I began to wonder if I really had been selfish, which is the message that seemed to underlie everything the doctor said . . . or didn’t say.
After my sessions, Connie and I would go out to dinner. I liked her, but she seemed like someone who’d been sent on a mission she wasn’t prepared for. “Cary is happy for the first time in his life, Dyan,” she’d say, patting my hand. “He’s absolutely crazy about you.” I wanted to say to her, “What makes you so sure? You don’t live with us. You hardly ever see us!”
For five days, I felt like I was getting up every morning and going out to stick my head in a blender. I broke down more than once.
“What is it he doesn’t like about me?” I asked pleadingly. “You seem to know all these details about our marriage. What has he told you?”
Beneath his doughy poker face, Dr. Martin looked uncomfortable. He said nothing for a minute, but instead of pressing him, I rushed in to fill the void.
“He seems to want to change everything about me,” I said.
“He cares about you, Dyan.”
“Then why isn’t he here? Why aren’t the two of us having this conversation with you?”
“Sometimes individual therapy is more effective than couples’ therapy,” he said. “I’ve talked to Cary at length, but we’re here now to talk about you.”
The dialogue went in circles, and so did my thoughts. Dr. Martin obviously thought something was wrong with me, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t say what. He would only say that I should consider my husband’s feelings. Whatever Cary thought was wrong with me changed from minute to minute. Was I so mentally disordered that I couldn’t find the signal in the noise? I began to feel more confused than ever.
One afternoon, I really lost my cool. “This is all so baffling to me. I zig when I should zag, I go left when I should go right, I look up when I should look down. I feel like I’m being . . . pushed over the edge.”
“You think Cary is trying, as you say, to push you over the edge?”
“When we were in Las Vegas, he actually suggested that a breakdown might be a good thing. Then he backed off it, saying he didn’t really mean it that way. What do you make of that, Doctor?”
“I don’t think Cary meant it in the way you took it,” Dr. Martin said. “What he probably meant is that he’d like to see you replace some of your old ways of thinking with new ways of thinking.”
“And who decides on the new ways of thinking?”
“I see we have a lot to discuss,” the doctor said.
That was our last session.
And if I wasn’t crazy before I had those sessions with Dr. Martin, I was probably as mad as a meat axe by the time they were done.
When we got on the plane, I think Connie was as ready to go home as I was. I settled back into my seat and accepted a cocktail from the stewardess. An hour into the flight, Connie dozed off and I was left to my own thoughts. What a strange journey this marriage has been, I thought. I remembered the women at my baby shower, all believing that because I was married to Cary, my marriage must by definition be wonderful. I’d thought at the time they were naïve, but maybe, just maybe, because he was “Cary Grant,” I had expected more. Maybe because he was “Cary Grant,” I’d done the same thing all those other women had done: made a god out of him, someone who could do no wrong. A perfect man. Poor Cary. What a load. After all, he was only human, with feet of clay just like all of us. He was one in a million and an amazing talent. But like the rest of us, he had problems waiting to be worked through. And I had been too self-absorbed to understand that.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Tripping and Zipping
If Cary hoped for me to come home transformed—which, clearly, he did—he was sorely disappointed.