Still Me (14 page)

Summer and Smoke
in Los Angeles, 1988.

Enjoying a few days in Colorado.

Dana and I shared wonderful times together and with friends, cruising the coast of Maine in
Chandelle.
At first she wasn't much of a sailor. In fact, her father often told me about his frustrating attempts to teach his three daughters to sail on Long Island Sound when they were kids. Dana usually felt fine on deck and soon learned to steer extremely well, but two minutes below in any kind of a sea would make her absolutely miserable. But she never complained and was always game for another trip because she knew how much I loved it.

Once she and Kevin and I sailed nonstop from Portland, Maine, to Shelburne, Nova Scotia. In the middle of the second night we were becalmed in dense fog off Cape Sable, not far from Blonde Rock, a navigational hazard that I had circled on my chart with three exclamation points, to be avoided at all costs. Of course at that moment our normally reliable diesel engine decided not to start. I had no choice but to call the Canadian Coast Guard at Clarke Harbour and hope they could get to us before we drifted into serious trouble. A forty-foot cutter arrived within an hour and towed us back to shore at such a high speed that I thought we would turn into a submarine at any moment. The next morning we met just about everybody in town, and Dana served coffee and breakfast to the Coast Guard crew who had helped us out.

Dana at the helm on the way to Nova Scotia.

This adventure didn't put her off in the least, so in 1989 we sold our beloved
Chandelle
and bought a Cambria 46, which we named the
Sea Angel.
She was built from scratch especially for us by David Walters in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. We would spread out blueprints on the dining-room table and talk about the shape of the galley or the main salon. At least once a week we flew up to Portsmouth to go over details with David and watch “our baby” being built.

Finally she was launched in July of that year. Dana presented me with a photo album titled “The Birth of a Sea Angel,” which showed every stage of the process from the first design meeting to the champagne celebration after our sea trial. Creating this boat with Dana was a complete joy and a new kind of experience for me. I was feeling more and more that we were meant to be together.

By 1990 we were living together on Seventy-eighth Street, but it was a place I had shared with Gae. Dana felt that we ought to start our own life in our own place, but I wasn't quite ready to do that. I still couldn't get past the issue of marriage. Our relationship nearly went on the rocks in '91, when I was shooting a movie called
Morning Glory
in Vancouver. It was a summer of many phone calls back and forth. Dana finally said that she'd had enough, that there was no future for us.

We had planned a weekend on Galiano Island, a few miles off the mainland. We were going to charter a boat and sail out there, then stay at the Galiano Inn, one of the most romantic spots in the world. Even though Dana had decided it was over, she ended up coming out for the weekend. We were supposed to be breaking up, yet we couldn't keep our hands off each other. It was the most agonizingly bittersweet time. After that weekend we realized that we couldn't be without each other, but something had to change. So I agreed to go into therapy as soon as I got home. During the fall of 1991 and for most of 1992, I finally talked through everything I had always feared about marriage.

The finished product, our pride and joy. Cruising Narragansett Bay with friends in August 1989.

Suddenly it spilled. And in very short order, I realized that I would be a fool to lose this woman, this relationship. We had moved down to East Twenty-second Street by this time, to an apartment without ghosts and memories. I'd always liked living on the Upper West Side near the park, but Dana is nine years younger than I am, and she wanted to be a part of the downtown New York scene. So we found a wonderful apartment near the Flatiron Building. It was fun—a beautiful atrium upstairs, great restaurants, and the farmers' market at Union Square on weekends.

And then one night we were having dinner, and about halfway through the meal I just put down my fork and asked her to marry me. We didn't finish dinner, we went straight to the bedroom. I have never been happier, never. It was tremendously exciting to say those words. We hadn't planned it; it was a moment whose time had come. I have never looked back.

We were married in Williamstown in April 1992, although I still think of our real anniversary as June 30, the night I first saw Dana at the cabaret. I still feel that I met her yesterday. A crisis like my accident doesn't change a marriage; it brings out what is truly there. It intensifies but does not transform it. We had become a family. When Dana looked at me in the UVA hospital room and said, “You're still you,” it also meant that we're still us. We are. We made a bargain for life. I got the better part of the deal.

Chapter 4

On June 28 I was taken to Kessler to begin the long process of preparing to go home. I no longer needed to be in intensive care, but I still required a great deal of help and attention. I had an infection in my lungs and had lost a lot of weight because I couldn't eat. At UVA a tube had been inserted into my stomach, and though I absorbed 2,000 calories from a gastrostomy tube every night, it was not enough to keep me from looking gaunt.

My body, devastated by the injury, was still very fragile. I learned that I had never fully recovered from the malaria I'd contracted in Kenya in 1993. My hemoglobin, normally at 13 or 14, was down to 9, which is alarmingly low. My protein levels were also low, about 2.7 rather than the normal 4.0. I was given several blood transfusions during the first few weeks, yet there were no signs of improvement. My blood seemed to be disappearing, and Dr. Green was concerned because he couldn't understand where it was going. There was a possibility that my bone marrow was not producing red blood cells, and this required a further series of tests. I also needed chest X rays almost daily because there was still fluid in both lungs, and I was in danger of developing pneumonia. The process of rehabilitation had to be delayed until all these problems could be resolved.

I was emotionally fragile as well. Kessler is a first-rate institution—light, open, and spread out among lawns and trees—but it is still a place for the ill, and it bears the inner harshness of all such places. I looked around and saw nothing but green walls, linoleum floors, and damaged people. I had a hard time realizing that I was going to spend quite a long time in an institution devoted to the disabled. I couldn't accept myself as one of them.

It seemed surreal, even though I instantly took to many of the people assigned to my care—particular nurses, certain aides—and even though I was in one of the nicest rooms in the hospital. I had a single room, while many others were in rooms of four to six people. They had no privacy; they could hear everybody. At least in the beginning I'm not sure I would have been able to stand that.

I'm fairly sure I was given a private room because I was a celebrity. The staff went way over the top in their efforts to protect me. It was almost funny. I was assigned security guards who dressed like Secret Service agents; they sat outside my room and made detailed entries in a logbook of everyone who came and went. They followed me everywhere, although they never lifted a finger to help.