Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art (23 page)

I smelled something strange after dinner the next day and thought at first that some food had gone rotten and was sitting in the garbage pail. Then I heard the faucets being turned on in Gilda’s bathroom, and then a little gargle. Then she came out of her bathroom, looking clean—as she always did—and smelling sweet. Not a trace of vomit when she kissed me.

It always happened after dinner, never after lunch or breakfast. She ate so sparingly and sensibly at those times. But after dinner, when she had indulged her cravings for food, she had to get rid of it quickly so that she wouldn’t get fat. If I were reading in the living room, I could hear her vomiting in the bathroom, but I knew
that I had to keep my mouth shut and pretend that I didn’t hear or smell anything, as much it went against my natural instinct to try and help. In a restaurant she would excuse herself shortly after eating her main course and go to the ladies’ room. She was always back in no time, cheerful as ever. She was losing her teeth, slowly, because of the acid in her vomit. When she did get professional help, specifically for the bulimia, she would talk to me about all these things. But that was months away, as was her divorce.

Now Gilda started a campaign to get us married. The psychiatrist she was seeing in Los Angeles told her to leave it alone or she might drive me away. I told Gilda that we weren’t ready for marriage; that my reason for not wanting to get married, yet, was not about love, but about her dependency. I could hardly make a move without her wondering where I was, where I would be, why didn’t I want to do this instead of that.

We went to her house in Connecticut for a short vacation. One afternoon, when I hadn’t seen her for a few hours, I began searching the house—inside and outside—calling out her name. I called, “Gilda”—softly at first, and then I got worried and started hollering her name. No answer. I went up to her pink dressing room on the third floor . . . nothing. Then I went to every other room in her beautiful 1734 colonial house, then to the basement, then back up to her third-floor dressing room. I looked at the closet doors where she kept her dresses. The doors were closed, but some instinct led me to open one of them . . . and there she was, lying on the floor, in the dark. I knelt down beside her.

“What is it, honey? Please tell me. What are you doing in here?”

“I want to go home.”

“You
are
home, Gilda.”

I kissed her on her forehead, in the way that I assumed her
Dibby used to kiss her when she was a little girl, then held her for a little while and rocked her. Then she got up. Fifteen minutes later she was bouncing around the kitchen, singing a song, talking about what we should have for dinner—without even a mention of the closet.

I wouldn’t say she was romantic—“How’d you like to just stick your thing in here right now?”—but she was
a
romantic in the sense that she always looked for a pair of rose-colored glasses to help her tolerate life. When she gave advice to other people, she was brilliant, and a realist, but she couldn’t do the same for herself. I began to resent how much energy she poured into her fears and childish needs. She had to be first to order food (understandably, considering the bulimia); first to be served; first to say what
she
wanted, about anything, in any place. She was a little girl who needed attention, all of the time. We didn’t get along well, and that’s a fact. We just loved each other, and that’s a fact. After living together for a year, listening to her talk about marriage day and night—I left Gilda.

I flew back to Los Angeles to continue writing. Gilda rented an apartment in New York, on the East Side, and asked her cousin Duane—who lived in Detroit and used to raise Yorkshire terriers—to please pick her out a good one and find someone who would bring it to New York; she would pay anything. A few days later Duane called her to say that he’d found a beauty—a little curly-haired female Yorkie named Sparkle. He had also found a young college student who was going back to NYU and who said she would be happy to take Sparkle on the plane with her, no fee, just as long as Gilda sent a car to pick them up at the airport.

After three weeks without her I was having a difficult time. I decided to fly to New York to see Margie . . . and perhaps Gilda.

It was nice to see Margie again—like seeing an old friend after
many years. When I told her my situation with Gilda, she said, “You do what you have to do, but you should know that it’s as difficult to conquer bulimia as it is to kick a drug addiction.”

I went to the Carlyle Hotel that night and got my old room back, on the nineteenth floor, where Gilda had thrown me down on the bed and said, “I have a plan for fun!”

Gilda and I had a nice talk on the phone. She was in her apartment in Manhattan but was going back to her house in Connecticut the next evening, after her dog arrived. She sounded calm and very healthy. When she heard that I was staying at the Carlyle Hotel, she said that she’d meet me there the next evening, just for a short while before leaving for Connecticut, and that she would arrange for the college student to bring Sparkle to the lobby of the Carlyle.

When Gilda arrived, I thought she looked radiant. She was calm, cheerful, sensitive. We talked for half an hour and then Reception called to say that there was a limousine downstairs. We both went down. The young lady who had brought Sparkle from Detroit handed her over to Gilda. Sparkle seemed very content to be hugged and kissed by this new person. Gilda instructed the limousine driver to take the young lady home and then come back to pick her up for the trip to Connecticut.

When we got back to my room, Gilda gave the dog a bowl of water and set some newspaper down in the bathroom for her to pee on. After that was taken care of, I ordered the cheesecake and coffee that Gilda said she had a yen for, and then we continued talking. Sparkle didn’t make a sound—no barking or whining or heavy breathing—she just sat on the floor and looked at the two of us. It must have been strange for her. She was a year old and had been taken from a farm by a stranger, put on an airplane, driven in a limousine, and then hugged and kissed by another stranger. Even when the doorbell rang, she didn’t bark. I thought perhaps she wasn’t able to bark. The waiter brought in the cheesecake and
poured out some coffee for us. When Gilda and I started eating the cheesecake, we heard a little peep from Sparkle. She sounded more like a bird than a dog—a very polite bird—but it was obvious that she wanted her share of cheesecake, which Gilda gave her. So the three of us polished off the cheesecake—“One piece, three forks, please.”

When we finished our dessert, I took Gilda down to the lobby and escorted her and Sparkle into the waiting limousine. We had a short kiss, and then I closed the door. We waved good-bye through the car window, and they drove off. Seeing Gilda looking strong and healthy and so happy with her little dog, I thought,
Maybe things between us can work
.

When I returned to Los Angeles, I went to see Gilda’s psychiatrist, whom she used to see once a week. I wanted to talk to him about Gilda and marriage and my fears about living with her for the rest of my life, even though I loved her. He was kind and very understanding, but I sensed him pushing me gently towards marrying Gilda. I think he just wanted her to be happy.

During the fifty minutes I spent with him, the word “neurotic” came up a few times, and I asked him what that word meant to him. He said, “Trying to correct a wrong.” I saw him again a week later, and we talked about Gilda a little more. Towards the end of that meeting, I said, “By the way, I like your definition of neurotic very much, but I would add one thing to it.” “What’s that?” he asked. I said, “Spending
too much time
trying to correct a wrong.” He said, “I would accept that.”

*  *  *

My daughter attended the University of Arizona for part of a year, until she got into a terrible accident. Before the accident, I met the young man she was attached to. I assumed they were living together, and my most generous opinion of him was that he was a dumb punk. I said to myself,
Be tolerant. They’re just kids—
she’ll grow out of this stage
. A few months later she rode up a steep hill, sitting on the back end of the punk’s motorcycle. They were sideswiped by a big Buick, and Katie’s knee was smashed.

Gilda had a close friend who was a doctor at Toronto General Hospital, in Canada. When she told him what happened to Katie, he recommended a great knee specialist in Toronto. I passed the information on to Jo, who made an appointment with the specialist and then took Katie to Toronto.

Gilda wanted me to meet Dibby—of noisy bran muffin chewing fame—who lived about an hour outside of Toronto. I met Dibby and thought she was wonderful. The next day Gilda and I went to visit Katie in the hospital. I was a little taken aback at the glow in Katie’s eyes when she saw Roseanne Roseannadanna walk into her hospital room. I had only seen Gilda a few times on
Saturday Night Live,
but Katie had probably watched her every week. Gilda jabbered away and made Katie laugh, and then she gave Katie a pair of grotesque black-and-pink panties that she’d picked out in a porno shop.

The operation on Katie’s knee was technically successful, but Katie had to walk with a cane for a long time after. That terrible accident changed her life in many good ways. She moved back to New York, got a job at
Good Morning America,
enrolled at Hunter College . . . and never wanted to see the dumb punk again.

You may have heard that Gilda and I were married by a dog. That’s just silly. How could a dog possibly marry us? Sparkle didn’t even have a license. It was probably just a rumor that Cousin Buddy was spreading around, although what actually happened is not really that much different.

We were living in Los Angeles, having just finished filming
The Woman in Red
. Gilda and Sparkle and I got ready for a grand vacation in the South of France. It was also going to be my birthday celebration. Then I received a call informing me that my sister had just found out she had breast cancer. Corinne lived in New York with her family. Gilda and I decided to take an early-morning flight to New York, see Corinne, and then fly to France the following day.

We got to Los Angeles airport early, and because we had Sparkle with us, the airline kindly put us in a private passenger lounge to wait for our flight to New York. We had the whole lounge to ourselves. Gilda took Sparkle out of her carrier case and set her on the floor, so she could bounce around and check things out before being cooped up on the plane. Gilda saw Sparkle sniff at something in a corner. When she went over and knelt down, she saw little blue pellets that had spilled out of a box that had
RAT POISON
clearly printed on the front. I said, trying to sound like a vet, “Now stop worrying! Sparkle would never eat that stuff. She’s so finicky about everything she eats—why on earth would she want to eat some blue shit that she sees lying on a dirty floor?” The travel agent who was with us called the poison center and gave them the number on the box and the name of the poison. “Get her to a vet immediately,” said the voice on the other end. Gilda grabbed Sparkle and said, “I’m going to the vet. I’ll meet you in New York later.” She kissed me good-bye and ran off with the travel agent. Gilda jumped into a limo that had just dropped someone off, and she screamed at the driver, “Take us to the nearest vet!”

In the meantime, my plane went out on the runway, had mechanical difficulty, and had to come back. Someone from the travel agency handed me a telephone number where I could call Gilda. When I reached her, she said, “The vet just gave Sparkle an injection that caused her to throw up a blue pellet. She did eat rat poison! She’s shaking and scared and has to go on a program of
vitamin K for two weeks. I have to take her back to the vet every day for the injections.”

Well, so much for the straight line. Now here’s the punch line. Before hanging up—after her sobbing and my apologizing for being so stupid—Gilda said, “Go see Corinne and then go to France. You’re so tired, and you need a rest. I know you love me. You know I love you. I’ll be fine. There’s a little birthday present for you in the green suitcase. And don’t worry about me—I’ll be fine.”

“Don’t worry about me—I’ll be fine.”
It may seem like small potatoes, but I had waited so long for her to say something like that.

I got to France, and on the morning of my birthday, I opened the green suitcase and found a small package wrapped in multicolored paper. Inside the package was a block of watercolor paper and a little palette with eight watercolor pots and two brushes, along with a note: “Happy Birthday, darling.” That afternoon I painted my first watercolor. I’ve been painting watercolors ever since.

When I returned to Los Angeles, I proposed to Gilda. We were married on September 18, 1984. The irony is—and you have to believe me—if the dog hadn’t eaten the rat poison, I honestly don’t think that Gilda and I would ever have gotten married.

Gilda was making great progress with her bulimia—seeing a specialist who came to my home every week—and slowly, slowly, she was adjusting what she ate so that she wouldn’t have to throw it up. She was thirty-eight years old.

Now she wanted a baby—“desperately,” of course. I never had a strong desire to have children. Katie was enough for me, and I wasn’t one of those men who felt that having your “own” baby was
the important thing. But Gilda wanted a baby, and, as the song goes, “Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets.”

After seeing her gynecologist, Gilda found out that her tubes were closed and that the only way she could ever have a child was by having a major operation, or by trying the in vitro fertilization procedure. I said that our relationship was more important than having a baby, but most of the decision was hers. I was against the major operation.

So every evening at six I gave Gilda hormone injections. I had learned how to give injections when I was in the medical corps, but I thought I’d better practice on a few oranges and grapefruits—the way I had been trained—before sticking needles into Gilda’s buttocks. Actually, the skin of a grapefruit and the skin of buttocks are not that different, as far as toughness is concerned.