Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art (26 page)

Three weeks before she died, she pulled herself out of bed, put on a skirt and blouse, and was driven to a recording studio, where she made the audio copy of
It’s Always Something
. She was forty-three years old when she died, on May 20, 1989. I buried her in a nondenominational cemetery three miles from her 1734 colonial home, in front of a tall white ash tree.

I used to go the cemetery several times a week, to say a few
words to Gilda and to let Sparkle pee on top of her grave. I knew Gilda would love that. I don’t go to the cemetery for
her
sake anymore—as if she might know each time I came and would be hurt if I skipped a week. I know she’s not there. If I go now, it’s for
my
sake. I used to worry all my early life about being good enough to please God. Gilda didn’t think much about those things—she was just naturally good. I don’t want to be a better person than Gilda—she was just human, and that’s all I want to be . . . just human.

Before I met Gilda, I knew nothing about cancer. I was not only ignorant—I was dumb. Like many families, mine never mentioned the C word, as if by talking about cancer you could catch it. After Gilda died, one question kept intruding into my thoughts: if the blood marker they call CA-125 was used to detect tumor activity with women who had ovarian cancer, why couldn’t they use it as a screening test for women who had symptoms like Gilda’s, to
find out
if they had ovarian cancer?

I wrote to Gilda’s New York gynecologist and asked her if she had ever thought to give Gilda a CA-125.

Dear Mr. Wilder:

Gilda was a wonderful woman with a great spirit. We’ll all miss her. CA-125 is a blood test used
after
a diagnosis of ovarian cancer
.

I talked with the coinventors of CA-125—Dr. Robert Knapp and Dr. Robert Bast. Both said that they were trying to change the conventional wisdom, so that gynecologists would use CA-125 to help determine whether or not a woman had ovarian cancer. Both men also cautioned that CA-125 wasn’t foolproof—there could be false positives and false negatives—but it was the best available test until new ones were perfected.

Ezra Greenspan, the oncologist who gave Gilda hamburgers and a burst of hope to live on, for a while, said that if she had had a CA-125 when she felt her first symptoms, they would have found out that she was in stage three instead of stage four ovarian cancer, which would have given her a 20–25 percent better chance of survival.

With the help of my friend Bob Marty, who had his own video studio in downtown Manhattan, I made a Public Service Announcement that was directed to women over thirty-five, who had a family history of ovarian cancer. It was broadcast on all three major networks in the United States and reached ninety-three million women. Today, there isn’t a gynecologist in America who doesn’t know about CA-125 and its antecedents.

Of course, if any of the famous actresses had accepted the woman’s part in
Hanky Panky
before Sidney Poitier finally offered it to Gilda, I would never have met Sparkle, who wouldn’t have eaten the rat poison, which would have meant that Gilda and I wouldn’t have gotten married . . . and all of the Gilda’s Clubs in the United States, Canada, and England wouldn’t exist.

I didn’t know that Gilda was going to leave her beautiful 1734 home to me. It sounds stupid, but we never talked about such things. I also never believed that she was going to die of cancer—not until three weeks before she did die. I was a fool, and I’m grateful for that. My sublime ignorance gave her hope for a long while, and I know now that hope is the thing that keeps us going—allows us to laugh even in the worst of times.

After Gilda died, I thought that if I went back to Los Angeles, I would never return to Connecticut. So I wandered through the bedrooms and staircases and closets of Gilda’s colonial house, late at night, in the dark, hoping to get rid of any ghosts that might be lurking in the corners. I yelled out loud to Gilda, on the off chance that she wasn’t too absorbed with herself to listen. After a few
weeks, roots started to grow, and I realized that I didn’t want to live anywhere else for the rest of my life.

In September of 1989 I got a call from the receptionist at the New York League for the Hard of Hearing, saying that a Ms. Webb wanted to speak to me. “Please put her on,” I said.

While I was waiting for Karen to come to the phone, the image of the dress she wore on the day we met flashed through my mind—lavender and pink, with a touch of blue, swaying back and forth just below her knees as she walked towards me.

When Karen came to the phone, we talked about Gilda, and then she wanted to know how I was. I said I was doing well. “And how’s little Sparkle?” she asked. I told her that although I had lost a wife, I gained a daughter—a tiny one—who wouldn’t leave my side and who barks when strangers come to the door. Karen told me that she finally got the grant she was hoping for and that she wanted to know if I was still willing to help her make the video she had talked about. I said I’d be more than happy to help her.

Karen sent me the script she had written, with all the notes and statistics. Quoting Zero Mostel in
The Producers,
I told her, “This script will close on page four. Everyone will be asleep by then.” We arranged to meet at my favorite Italian restaurant in Manhattan—favorite not just because the food was good, but because it only had eleven tables and was always quiet.

When we got to the restaurant, she set a tape recorder between us, on the table, and while we ate, Karen posed common problems for the hearing-impaired, such as trying to read the lips of someone who is chewing gum, or who has a bushy mustache, or who is standing in a shadow—and then I would improvise. She divided
everything into short comedy sketches, which I thought was a brilliant idea.

The second time we met—at the same restaurant—we worked on improving the actual language that the characters in each sketch would use.

The third time we were going to meet, I asked her to leave the tape recorder at home. We had our first “actual” date on a beautiful fall evening, in the same restaurant, at the same corner table.

After we became lovers, Karen would drive to Stamford on most Fridays after work and stay with me for the weekend. She loved getting away from the city for a few days, and even though I lived on the edge of town, it was very much like being in the country: trees, deer, birds of all colors flying in and out of the bird feeders . . .and no tall buildings.

At dusk, when the deer came out to munch on the flowers in my backyard, Karen and I would watch Sparkle trying to chase the deer away from the rhododendron bushes. But the deer weren’t at all intimidated by this little pipsqueak—they just kept eating the luscious white-and-lavender blossoms. Occasionally one of the deer would even try to play with Sparkle—or so it seemed—and Sparkle would look at us as if to say, “Aren’t they supposed to run away?” Then she’d walk slowly back to us—obviously embarrassed—and the three of us would go in for dinner.

On those Indian summer evenings we ate on the screened-in porch at the back of the house. After dinner, when we were sipping our wine, I’d hold Karen’s hand while we traded stories about our families and our childhoods. As I listened to her talk, my brain was split in two—part of me wanting to interrupt her to say, “I love you,” and the other part warning me that once those magic words are spoken you can’t go home again . . . not without pain.

When Karen asked me about Gilda, I told her funny stories, and
a few sad ones. Karen told me about being on her own since her divorce sixteen years earlier, and about her father, Ira, who loved flyfishing and liked his steak
very
rare, and her son, Kevin, who loved fly-fishing with his grandpa and liked his steak
very
rare, and her mother, Elsie, who never went fly-fishing—even though she loved to eat the fresh trout that her husband brought home—and who would never eat a steak if it wasn’t cooked
well-done
.

As Karen talked, I kept flashing back to the first time she invited me to dinner in her apartment. Short phrases of the poem that she had tacked onto the cupboard in her kitchen kept popping into my head: “. . . the subtle difference between holding a hand and chaining a soul . . . you begin to understand that kisses aren’t contracts.” I thought,
Why would she put those beautiful thoughts on her cupboard door if they weren’t part of her own philosophy?
But my brilliant rationale didn’t stop me from hearing Gilda yelling in my ear,
“Hey! Don’t you hurt this woman,”
or my heart from answering,
“Don’t lose her. . . . Please, don’t lose her!”

March 1990

I walked into Margie Wallis’s new office, on the first floor of her brownstone on the Lower West Side. She was sitting in her same comfy chair, but both of her legs were raised, resting on the ottoman. She told me on the phone that she’d had a hip replacement. I leaned over and gave her a little kiss.

ME
: Long time no see.

MARGIE
: I keep track of you, Gene.

ME
: How are you doing, Margie?

MARGIE
: I’m doing fine. Talk to me.

ME
: I didn’t think I’d ever get married again. I’ve been seeing a woman who isn’t putting any pressure on me to get married—but I’m in love. Not just in love—I love who she is. Just saying, “I love you” isn’t enough anymore—not for me. I want her to know that I love her so much that I want to spend the rest of my life with her, and I don’t know how to say that in a better way than, “Will you marry me?”

MARGIE
: But?

ME
: If the tabloids start printing stories like,
COULDN’T WAIT: GENE’S HOT NEW LOVE AFFAIR!
—and they will—I’ll feel terrible. I don’t want to soil Gilda’s name, and I don’t want to soil Karen’s name with that garbage. It’s been almost a year since Gilda died, but everyone—on the street, in supermarkets, in cabs—still asks me about Gilda and my life with her. They keep saying, “Poor Gene—we love you both” I’m not poor Gene; I’m lucky Gene—to have found someone at this stage of my life.

MARGIE
: Mister Sensitivity . . . did it ever occur to you that just because you ask a woman to marry you doesn’t mean you have to get married the next day? If she knows and you know—you can tell Aunt Tillie and Uncle Harry and the rest of the world whenever you’re ready to tell them.

ME
: . . . I knew there was a reason why I came to you years ago—apart from your good looks and your total lack of sarcasm.

That night I stopped off at a tiny Russian restaurant, called Kalinika, on Eighty-second and Madison. It only had five or six tables, but if you called ahead, you could order most of their tasty dishes for takeout. I bought some cold beet borscht, Russian hors d’oeuvres, and a ginger chicken and took them to Karen’s apartment.

When she answered the door, she was wearing a lavender caftan. I had told her that I was bringing dinner. After she closed the
door, we had a lovely kiss, and then I said I wanted to talk to her for a minute before we ate. I think she was a little worried by the seriousness in my voice. I sat down on one of the three chairs in her small living room. She sat on my lap. I tried to breathe quietly for a moment and finally said, “Will you marry me?” Karen stared at me for the longest time, with a Mona Lisa smile that neither I nor Leonardo could have deciphered at that moment. Then she said, “You want to marry me?” I said, “I love you and want to be with you for the rest of my life.” She broke into a full smile and said, “Yes . . . I will marry you,” and hugged me.

On September 8, 1991, Karen and I were married in the backyard of the home in Connecticut that Gilda had left me. Seven people and a Yorkshire terrier were in attendance. Judge Gerald Fox—who had never performed a marriage service before—came to the house, wearing a heavy suit on this swelteringly hot, but beautiful day. He performed the short ceremony with sweat dripping off his happy face while his wife snapped pictures. Karen and I wrote, and spoke, the following:

U
PON
O
UR
M
ARRIAGE

We both believe in music and painting
and the truth that we can see all around us in nature.
We also believe that something, some fate,
brought us together at this exact point in both of our lives.
With appreciation for these exquisite insights,
and with the love and respect we both feel for each other,
we think we have the foundation for a happy life . . .
so long as we keep laughing.

I had turned down the script of
See No Evil, Hear No Evil
three times, and if my agent, Marty Baum, hadn’t said, “I don’t care what
you think of the script, I want you to meet these people at Tri Star,” I would never have met Ms. Webb at the League for the Hard of Hearing. And now I’m married to that cranky old New England biddy with the arrogant, raspy voice . . . but, boy, is she beautiful.