The Use of Fame

by Cornelia Nixon

  Just to spite her, he got out the milk carton, put it to his lips, and poured it in his mouth. Abby was voluntarily three thousand miles away, and that meant he did stuff his way. He spent all the money he wanted on CDs, though she sometimes ragged him about that. He said, “The lawn needs mowed.” He said, “I’m going to go lay down.” He said, “Give it the fuck to Hank and I.” He spelled the sink implement spong. He’d had to train Abby: if he yelled from his study to hers, “How do you spell perception?” she was not allowed to lecture him on Latin roots or handy rules to help next time. She was just supposed to shout, “P-E-R,” et cetera, though Ray thought preception made just as much sense.

  In their early days, she had been stuck up from her la-di-da grad school, and he had to call her “Berkeley” and beat her down in arguments. It helped that he had published fifty poems by the time they met, while she had nothing but a contract for an academic book. Sure, his were in tiny magazines with names like Blue Porch and Fish, some of which folded soon afterward. But they still got into print.

  He also had to correct her attitude about her colleagues in the English Department at West Virginia U. She thought they were all idealistic people, who could have made a lot more money as doctors or lawyers but chose to teach because they believed in it—when actually they were Ivy League shits who hated Ray for being working class. One of them had ripped up his paper on experimental poetry and tossed it like confetti at his head, shouting, “Quit! Just quit! You can’t do this!”

  But soon after Ray finished his MFA, his first book was bought by a major press, something the confetti guy could only dream about. He also married Abby, Confetti’s prized new colleague, and snubbed the man every chance he got—until, at a party for young faculty, Confetti had apologized and asked Ray to dance. Ray accepted the apology, though he declined to dance.

  Now, in Providence, he changed the CD and blasted Van Morrison as he washed every dish by hand. He didn’t own a dishwasher—didn’t want one in the house. Abby probably used the one out west when he was gone, but he didn’t believe in it—those things wasted water and did a lousy job. And if there was a spot of food left on a plate after washing it, he rubbed it off with a dish towel. Towels went in the washer, didn’t they? But when Abby saw him do that, it drove her mad.

  “You don’t believe in the germ theory,” she had said to him accusingly.

  He had laughed at that. “It’s not a theory, it’s a fact.”

  He had started out as a premed, and he loved the human body, its heart like a big knot, a plucky pump that shoved blood cells through hair-thin capillaries and back to itself too fast to watch. He loved the microscopic creatures that lived all over him, and the frass that bugs left on the molding he had painted white with loving care when they first bought this house. Poor Abs, parts of the place gave her the creeps, it was so far from Pacific Heights. In the basement a toilet seat sat on a hole in a cement block, leading to a sewer pipe. It still worked, but she never went near it. She used the prissy little powder room recently stuck on the back of the house, and she disinfected everything. She refused to eat his mother’s cooking after she watched her taste gravy then stir the pot with the same spoon.

  “I’m just not afraid of bugs, is all,” he told her. “You shouldn’t be, either. They’re all over us in billions. They are the stuff of life. Relax.”

  When he finished the kitchen, he used lemon spray on a rag and dusted everywhere, stopping once to check his phone—nothing more from Marie-Victoire Grenier. He loved it that she spoke two languages—he himself was a second-language speaker in English, his first being Grunt and Squawk. But Tory could rattle off in French the same as English, and it sounded slangy, joking, imitating voices—he’d heard her on the phone with her dad. That was the way to speak two languages, not like Abby (who had studied four, all of them correct), but the way that people talked. Language was alive. People changed it all the time, and to nail it down was to kill it, like it would a snail.

  Abby had understood that once, or had a prayer of doing so. Before she went to grad school, she wrote poems. It was all she wanted to do, and when she showed up in Morgantown, she revered Ray’s work and him because of it. She’d gone to get the PhD only because some shithead professor told her she was better at research than poetry, and she believed him. But her poems were damn good. She didn’t want to show them to Ray, but when she finally did, he was impressed.

  “You’ve just never put the energy into it the way you do with literary criticism,” he told her then. “You can’t do it on the side. You have to give it all you’ve got.”

  Abby had looked scared when he said that, but she started doing it. Right away, her stuff was accepted by good magazines and made The Best American Poetry twice, before Ray was picked once. She still had to sweat out getting tenure, but she was a very disciplined worker, and she got the Joyce book done on time. On her tenure sabbatical, she wrote only poetry, and magazines took most of it.

  Then suddenly she had won a contest, had a book of poems published, got good reviews. Johnny read it, called her up and said, “You are so good, you should not be let out on the street. You should be chained to your desk.”

  So then people started asking Ray and Abby to read together, and to teach at the same writers conferences. They were turning into some sort of goddamn literary power couple, and the future had looked great. If they’d stayed in Morgantown, it might have been.

  But then one of her old Cal professors had finagled a job description perfectly fitted to her and told her to apply. He put together a coalition of English profs and got her the job—without tenure but with two years to the decision.

  Abby couldn’t pass it up, though it meant virtually the end of poetry for her. To get tenure at Berkeley, she needed another book, and Cal was so heavy into literary theory it could not be poetry.

  So instead, as soon as she took the job, she read truckloads of French crap and spouted lines like, “The name is to the psyche as the erect penis is to the body.” And far worse shit, sometimes in such heavy jargon he couldn’t translate it. By the time she got tenure again, she had a fifth language, literary theory, and friends who spoke little else. Positionality, they said. Discourse, semiology, phenomenology, subjectivity, patriarchy, and, oh yes, gynesis. God, how he hated stuff like that.

  He threw the tablecloth, napkins, and kitchen towels into the washer and ran it, removing all trace of Thanksgiving. He paced the house, furiously running hands through his short, bristly hair. He stared out all the windows with a sense of menace, something coming toward him. But all he could see was gray sky, patchy snow, gray trees.

  Next week, when he went to Berkeley for the break, it would be only December, but the pink magnolias would start to bloom, and camellias. Some roses never stopped. Dungeness crabs would vigorously fight each other in the fish markets, and in the backyard of their building, the Meyer lemon tree would be loaded down with thin-skinned fruit that was almost orange, almost sweet.

  God, he wanted to be there. That much would be clear, the pure pleasure of the place, in early spring. And the wonderful used book and record stores where he could browse for hours every day—they were an education in themselves. Thanks to Moe’s, he had devoured unknown books of poetry, and big volumes on art, atomic physics, the French Revolution, outer space. Berkeley made him feel like a hummingbird, zooming around, ready to grab a new idea, or make love, burst into song.

  Why didn’t he go west for Thanksgiving? He could be at his desk right now, with its slot of San Francisco view, typing up what he had scrawled by hand that morning in his favorite Berkeley café. In a few hours Abby would quit working, go for a run, take a long hot bath, and Ray would pour them wine and sit beside the tub on a tall stool, mulling it all over with her. They would cook together, drink more wine, maybe watch a movie, or he would, while she read by his side.

  The thought filled him with warmth and peace, then dread. What
was he doing here, three thousand miles away? What prize made it worthwhile to wager Berkeley and Abby and their life together? It was who he was.

  Bing, went his phone, where he’d left it, on the kitchen counter, and he jumped away from it, the snake in this garden. He turned it facedown, so he wouldn’t have to see what it said: New message from Tory Grenier. Did the people who invented texting know what it would do for infidelity? He had sat next to Abby, texting Tory. Abby slept later than he did, and he and Tory wrote back and forth before she stirred. Was it a game, to spite Abby, like drinking milk from the carton? Or did he really want to ruin everything?

  He was a loon, married for life. Where he came from, if you found The One, you stuck with her. The search was over. She became your family, more even than a blood relative, because those you didn’t choose. You picked your wife, and that made it indelible.

  Abby’s views were lighter, flightier—she came from San Francisco, where it was a wonder anyone stayed together long. There had been those two early divorces, and whenever it got rough with him, she was always ready to pack her bags. She claimed her move to California had not been that, that it was just the job, just loving Berkeley, and being closer to her family. But this was the result. This was the result!

  He pulled out the heavy vacuum cleaner, fired it up, and shoved it around to work the anger off. By the time he stopped, his head was clear, and he felt an old familiar ache and glumness, missing Abby. In a week he could put his nose in her hair. Would it be enough to make him forget the girl?

  He checked his phone again, but there was still only the last message from Tory (“I miss you, too, darling”). Of course it wasn’t Thanksgiving in Montreal, and she had a bookstore job all day. But they talked now every night, and he had been dreading what it would be like with Abby there and having to sneak out on some excuse to use the phone.

  When the house was clean, he made decaf, since he was no longer allowed caffeine, put on a new CD, and sat down at his ancient kicked-in desk, trying to write, but it all just came out crap. Waiting for the inner peep, which had been drowned by the speaking peep, the night before. Feeling stupid and dull, late November in his head.

  So instead he read the pile of stuff for his grad workshop. There were some surprisingly fine poems in it, a few of his students strange beginning creatures with lanterns in their skulls. They needed only to get both feet a half inch off the ground at once for them to make a miracle.

  But this semester, every one of them was a chicken in the workshop except Zack. They were all afraid of him because (a) they thought he’d read everything, because he made wild generalizations and said something about Chaucer or the Pre-Socratics; (b) they’d probably read nothing; (c) Zack was arrogant and without tact (but when he said something was “sloppy writing” in Jonah’s poem he was right!); and (d) they thought of themselves as tiny flowers.

  Ray’s job was to convince them they were dragons. They were saddened by the thought that not only were they insignificant, but it was hard to write poetry, and writing poetry was insignificant. But, hey, then what did they have to lose? What was there to be afraid of?

  He wasn’t going to scribble on their work just yet—something Johnny said last night was rankling him. He had made a crack about Ray’s latest book, that it was full of poems he’d done before, all the same moves, and why didn’t he try writing in a different mode? Ray blew it off at the time, it was so absurd, but now it made him mad. Johnny thought he was predictable, good grief! Had he looked at his own work lately? No surprises there. The nerve of the big galoot!

  He put on a crazy Corigliano symphony that featured duck calls and police whistles and God knew what else, rolled a clean sheet into his beat-up typewriter, and banged out a letter with two fingers, holding nothing back. Johnny’s work was all bloody identical, the mixed emotions, self-doubt and deprecation, irony and insight and awareness of evil. But the sameness didn’t matter—it was brilliant, and sometimes it made Ray feel like the top of his head was coming off. By the end of the first page of his letter, he was praising Johnny’s work, while rejecting the terms of Johnny’s criticism of his own, along with his understanding of language and poetry in general. He needed to be set straight about that for sure.

  The letter felt cathartic, therapeutic, and when he finished it, he put it in an envelope, addressed it to Johnny and applied a stamp. Changing into sweat pants, a T-shirt, running shoes, and a windbreaker, he took off out the door into icy air that smelled like snow, ran to the nearest mailbox, and shoved it in. Then he loped across the ridge above the town, to where Brown sat, all haughty red brick on its hill, across dry grass and patchy white on campus lawns. The sight of his building made him instantly angry—fucking Whitney Ames, he could strangle the guy with his bare hands. But maybe he’d show him, if he got the job in Florida.

  He ran down the hill on the other side, dodging traffic through old streets, and kept going till he could see the docks.

  He was almost there when something grabbed his heart, hard like a boney hand, and squeezed. Pain shot through his core—he fell to his knees. He couldn’t breathe. Was this the moment his heart quit? All right, so be it. At least now he couldn’t wreck his life. He stayed there gasping, on his knees, waiting to black out, as cars whizzed past, stuck-up academic swells in Volvos and frat boys with ski racks on their Jeeps, no one noticing.

  From a sooty brick building across the street, a dockside bar, a big-bellied man rolled out, scratching his beard, two others behind him in the dark doorway. “Hey, mate, you all right? You want we should call 911?”

  He could barely make out the guy’s accent. But thank God for the working class, always there when you needed them. He struggled to his feet and waved.

  “Nah. Just hungover,” he called, and the guys laughed and raised their mugs.

  He made a note of the bar’s name, the Jolly Whistle, to come back sometime. Or who knew, the stiffs in there might beat him up, if they found out he was a pantywaist poet, making his living at that great sow on the hill.

  He walked home, not pushing it, turned into his untended yard, through the busted gate in the weathered picket fence. Maybe he’d paint it all come spring. Or not.

  When he opened the front door, the house felt suddenly too empty, cold, and echoing with loneliness. He dropped onto the couch, picked up his phone.

  “Cleaned up the mess,” he texted Abby. “Heart not worth a crap today. Feels stupid to be here. Miss you. Wish I was there with you.”

  She didn’t answer—she was probably not looking at her phone. She was probably out on her horse, not even thinking about him.

  So instead of waiting for an answer, he sent one to Tory, too. “Cleaned up the mess. Heart not worth a crap today. Feels stupid to be here. Miss you. Wish I was there with you.”

  Four

  A month later, on the night before New Year’s Eve, Abby flew back from the MLA Convention in Chicago, where she had given a paper on “James Joyce and the Female Sublime.” Ray picked her up in the Porsche at SFO, and they drove back to Berkeley, to their favorite French bistro. It was cold and raining out, but cozy in the half dark of the restaurant, with its open kitchen tended by chefs in tall white hats, warming the room with smells of cassoulet and crème brûlée.

  They ate crab-stuffed sole in cream sauce and sautéed spinach with currants, and drank a bottle of Frog’s Leap sauvignon blanc. Ray seemed in a good mood, but he did not say much—Abby studied him in the candlelight. He’d become very thin lately, and tonight he was all in black, black long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans and a black jacket. He looked slightly manic, blue eyes shining, the emerald in one earlobe twinkling. He’d always wanted a tattoo, and she had talked him out of it. But she had given in on the earring and bought it for him one birthday.

  Once she might have asked what he was thinking. But he always claimed not to be, that if they weren’t talking, his mind was like a silent cave, whe
re a water drop occasionally fell. Plink. Her own mind was never blank. It might only sing some golden oldie, daydream, or argue with a stupid question about her work. But empty, no.

  Suddenly his eyes filled with tears—she saw his contact lenses start to float.

  Alarmed, she touched his hand. “What is it, sweetie?”

  He shook his head—his voice was choked. “Remember the baby jays?”

  She gripped his hand and grinned. It was in their early days in Morgantown, when they were those two impossibly young and happy people in the blurry photograph. Their first house was a small rental backed by woods, and one spring they heard what sounded like a dot-matrix printer in the yard, going eek eek eek. Then one dawn, sunlight threw the shadow of a nest onto their bedroom wall, four tiny heads weaving with open beaks. Later the babies grew blue fluff and learned to fly, three of them staying off the ground, with one poor fellow down too low, making feeble hops.

  “Yes. Hoppy,” she said. Until Hoppy found his wings, they had rushed out to shoo off cats that came into the yard.

  Ray shook his head, as if trying not to cry. “Remember how they talked to each other?”

  “Yes, of course.” It wasn’t in commanding caws, the way they sounded usually, but in the softest coos.

  Ray caught the waiter’s eye, ordered an Armagnac for himself and a Lemon Drop for her. His eyes were still suspiciously shiny, and she wondered if he was about to start his evening rant. She almost wished he would.

  Quietly she asked, “Are you okay, honey?”

  He shrugged. “I feel like shit most of the time.”

  “I’ll make you an appointment with Dr. Death.” That was what they called the cardiologist who had given them the awful news, ten years ago.

  Ray’s face went hard. “He can’t do anything. He’ll just talk about a heart transplant. I’d rather die.”