Dear Cary - Dyan Cannon [99]
One night, in desperation, when Cary was in the den watching television, I went into the bedroom and called my mother. “I’ve tried absolutely everything and now I don’t know what to do,” I said, and spilled my guts. “He hardly touches me anymore. He’s gone all day and when he comes home, it’s silent. The atmosphere in the house is like a tomb. Everything he tells me to do or not to do is supposed to be for Jennifer’s benefit, but he spends as much time away as possible. I’ve tried everything I can think of and nothing changes things between us. Mom, I’m worried about raising our daughter in this atmosphere.”
“She’s only a baby.”
“It doesn’t matter. You know that, Mom. Kids feel those things.”
“Have you tried telling him all this?” Mom asked.
“He doesn’t hear me. And I’ve started tuning him out too, because I can’t take any more criticism. I’m having trouble eating, I can’t sleep. He’s not the same man I married.”
I went on for at least fifteen minutes, lying on the bed on my stomach, hanging my head over the edge with the phone. When I took a breath and rolled over on my side, there was Cary standing next to the bedroom door. I could tell by the look on his face that he’d heard every word.
“I’ve got to go, Mom,” I said abruptly. “I’ll talk to you later.”
Cary and I looked at each other for an unbearably long time. Finally, he broke the silence. “You need help,” he said.
“Cary, we need help.”
“I don’t feel the same about you anymore, either.”
“You mean you don’t love me anymore?”
No answer. Finally, he said, “You’ve changed.”
Something in me died. “But that’s what you wanted. You wanted me to change. So I tried. Now you don’t want the change anymore. So now what do I do?”
“I’ve told you so many times how I did it. It’s up to you.”
“Do you mean LSD, Cary?”
There was another long silence. “It’s up to you,” he repeated. “I can’t do it for you.”
“LSD didn’t work for me, Cary. And I don’t think it works for you either. I think you just think it does.”
It was like I’d stepped out of a heated room and into a freezer.
“We have it all,” I said. “Why are you throwing it away? You finally have the family you’ve always wanted. But it has to be a two-way street here, Cary. You can’t govern with an iron hand. It’s hard to bend under that.”
“It’s up to you.”
Up to me. I lay awake that night thinking it over. If I went along with Cary and tried LSD again . . . really, what choice did I have? If that’s what it took to bring peace to the family, how could I refuse? He said he didn’t feel the same way about me anymore. For Jennifer’s sake, we couldn’t go on like this much longer. Every day, she was becoming more aware, and the dreadful cloud of unhappiness that hung over us would, sooner or later, start to affect her, too. There was only one way to turn it around. I’d give it my all. Again.
That Saturday, Cary and I began the first of a dozen or so stay-at-home space odysseys. “The family that trips together zips together,” I said, raising my water glass in a toast and swallowing my microdot.
“It’s good to keep your sense of humor, but you’ve got to be open to the experience,” Cary counseled me. We were wildcatting—that is, taking LSD, the two of us, without the dubious “monitoring” of Cary’s “wise mahatma.” On the days of our trips, the nanny would take Jennifer to the park for playtime and then bring her back for her nap. I would spend the morning with her before she’d go and then hopefully be in shape to look after her by dinner. I was trying to have a good attitude about this experiment. I was truly feeling desperate, and I really hoped that some kind of light would go on and dispel the infernal darkness that was swallowing me and my marriage. My mind was a tangle of contradictory thoughts about the whole thing. I tried to have faith that the wisdom of the ages that Cary