The Use of Fame

by Cornelia Nixon

  He sat up quickly, looked around. But it was just the dark and quiet apartment, him exiled to the doghouse as usual. He tried to get mad—that would feel better. But the doom didn’t go away.

  On the bedside table, his phone glowed briefly, and he felt a twinge of fear—it would be a text from Tory, sent from Montreal, where it was three hours later than it was in Berkeley. That was what was wrong, the stake driven in his heart. He grabbed the phone and turned it off. He had to think.

  He pulled on the same black jeans and T-shirt from the night before and went to the kitchen quietly, bare feet. But the door to their bedroom was closed, so Abby wouldn’t hear him anyway.

  In the kitchen he turned on the small light above the stove, throwing shadows over all their fucking yuppie equipment: the Cuisinart, the blender, the stand-up mixer, the ceiling rack swaying gently, hung with copper pots, the paella pan, the crab and lobster boiler, stainless-steel turkey-roasting pan, a wok, blue Le Creuset. On the walls were overloaded spice racks, a bird clock that sang different calls at each hour, the magnetic strip with fourteen knives. On shelves sat five kinds of graters, a little butter melting pot, gravy separator, ravioli press, a marble mortar and pestle. On counters, olive-wood cutting boards, French press, the Swiss burr coffee grinder, ceramic garlic pot, a vase with a bunch of fresh basil and another with wooden spoons and spatulas and ladles, a Chinese wire spoon, whisks, and a cheese plane. In drawers the melon baller, cherry pitter, lemon squeezer, turkey baster, instant-read thermometer, and several clever metal tools he had never figured out.

  And on an open stretch of wall, the only sign of him in the whole room: a sampler he had made, embroidered with flowers in between the words:

  ✿❀❁✾

  GO

  ✿❀❁✾

  FUCK

  ✿❀❁✾

  YOUR

  ✿❀❁✾

  SELF

  ✿❀❁✾

  It was the only thing he’d ever sewn, and usually he enjoyed the sight of it.

  But today he was so anxious, his hands shook—hot decaf might help. He tried to fire up the gas burner under the kettle, and it took three tries, but he got it going finally, brushed out the beans he had ground the night before, a habit he’d developed so as not to wake Abby when he first got up.

  He made coffee in the press and sat with it in the dark dining room, looking south toward Oakland at the vast expanse of city lights, strips of white fog laid over them like veils. As his coffee cooled enough to touch it with his lips, the sky showed the first sign of gray. Usually he walked to his café soon after dawn and wrote a draft of something on a yellow legal pad, in the pterodactyl scratch that was his handwriting, though even he could not always decipher it. When he wanted someone else to read it, he had to print or type.

  (“That is the writing of a crazy person,” a friend of Abby’s had once said, on catching sight of it. Yeah, yeah. Maybe he was, so what. He certainly felt that way right now.)

  The walk downhill to the café was one of the high points of his day, through the cold clean salty air off of the bay, the early silence unsullied, almost no one else out of their beds. And with the time difference, he could text back and forth with Tory as he went, and no one would ever know.

  But this morning something kept him home—he didn’t even want to check his phone, still facedown in the study. He had thought he might feel lighter, freer now, but it was the opposite. It was like he’d lost his innocence, and texting Tory would no longer be a game, but serious, life-threatening. Maybe Johnny and Hank were right not to tell their wives. They’d just take the girl, keep mum, and any guilt was at most a pinprick in their happiness.

  That was the problem here—he, Ray Stark, was turning out to be a Puritan, coming clean instead of running naked through a field of flowers with the girl. Far from being a pinprick, the guilt felt like the thick end of a wedge jammed in his chest. But Hank just wasn’t right, that it was better to cheat and lie. Hank had hurt a lot of girls, and Priscilla, too, and finally himself. Ray was hurting Abby now, and God knew he felt sick, after telling her. But at least he was honest.

  And what did he want next?

  He could call Tory, tell her to go to Providence, into his house, and wait for him in the silk blouse.

  But for some reason he didn’t even want to think of her. He sat quiet, listening for the sound of Abby breathing in her sleep. She had awful dreams, and he often had to wake her up. Sometimes she even sleepwalked, dreaming with her eyes open, seeing things. Once it was a pit opening in the floor, about to suck her down. She was standing in the middle of the bedroom, making little high-pitched screaming sounds.

  Another time it was a baby she had lost, and she was searching for it all over the house. He knew Abby had wanted kids, but he never did, afraid they’d be fucked up like him, or that he’d fuck them up. And Abby had mostly seemed to understand and be okay with that. She was too busy for kids anyway.

  Besides, he’d never knocked up anyone—he was pretty sure that he shot blanks, though he didn’t want to check. Who needed to know a thing like that? Once Abby had brought home a silly plastic cup he was supposed to jerk off into, so her doctor could check and see if they really needed birth control at all. But forget it, he wasn’t doing that. He threw the cup away.

  He remembered when he first saw her, in Morgantown. She had been over thirty, but she looked about nineteen, with shining blue eyes and blond curls down her back. At school she had dressed primly, to suggest professorial authority, and when he tried to talk to her at the water fountain in Colson Hall, she always skittered away. Her first-semester seminar included a week on The Cantos, a week on Four Quartets, two weeks on Ulysses, another on A Vision, then on Woolf, the Dadaists, the Futurists, Surrealists, et cetera, a reading list that was evidence of insanity. Ray almost took it anyway, just to see what she would do.

  Then one night two of his friends got married, and afterward Ray went with them and another couple to Bear’s, a pizza joint and bar with live music. As soon as they walked in, he spotted Abby sitting stiffly with a local celebrity—she looked extremely pretty but was clearly bored. His friends slid in a booth across the aisle, but Ray stayed on his feet, looking down at her, wondering if there was something he could do to rescue her, and she shot him a look of such longing that it sent a dart of heat to his heart. Maybe he had a chance after all.

  Another English prof was a fortyish guy, divorced and hip, famous for his cooking, and he liked to hang out with grad students and junior faculty. Abby’s second fall in Morgantown, the fortyish professor dug a pit, buried a whole suckling pig over hot coals, roasted it all day, and invited a big crowd.

  Ray went and managed to get Abby as his partner in lawn darts. They had beaten everyone, and when the hot, succulent pig was served, with coleslaw and potato salad and beer, she sat beside him on the grass. She didn’t take a paper plate, because she claimed she had to go get ready for her seminar.

  Ray held his plate out to her. “Here. You have to have a taste.”

  And she did. She lifted shreds of tender pork right off his plate and ate them, as if they were already lovers. When she went inside to the bathroom, he waited in the hall nearby, planning to kiss her. But before she came out, other people crowded in there, and she ducked easily out of reach and slipped away.

  A few weeks later, an English grad student and her husband had a party, invited some of the younger faculty, and Abby showed up in loose silk pants printed with red roses, a creamy silk blouse, and open-toed lizard-skin sandals with stiletto heels—looking, in other words, like she was tired of being remote and professorial. All the guys in the place tried to get near her, including Ray. In heels she could be slightly taller than he was, and he loved it that she was fearless about wearing them. He danced with her, mugging at his own awkwardness, the way he could only fling his limbs around.

  He was pretty sure it was time to make his move, and when they stopped to drink a beer, he mentioned a poem about a f
lea that bites two lovers, mixing their blood.

  “I’ve seen Blake’s drawing for that poem,” Abby said. “At the Tate in London.”

  Ray’s heart pounced. “Yes, Blake did a drawing of a flea, but that was not his poem. It’s by John Donne, and for that mistake I will have to kiss you.”

  She gave him a sweet, bemused look but did not resist—her lips were firm and smelled of roses. Johnny was there, too, saw what was happening, and he stepped close to them, turned his broad back, and raised his arms to shield them from the crowd.

  When Ray stopped kissing her, Abby looked straight across at him, their eyes on the same level, and said, “Who wrote Hamlet?”

  They had been together only a few weeks when she went west for Christmas break. She was out there for a month, and he was amazed how much he missed her. He spent hours every day on the phone with her or writing her letters, and he could hardly think of anything else. His friends got tired of hearing about her.

  “Jesus, dude, she’s got her hooks into you or what?” Johnny said one night, hoping to change the subject for a while.

  The night she got back, he lay naked on top of her and said, “I missed you so much I started to think we should get married.” Then he panicked and added fast, “Don’t say anything!” which made her laugh.

  They were married five months after that.

  It was stupid to be sentimental now. It had been her brilliant idea to take jobs on separate coasts, and that had worn them down. Something went slack, and they’d been coasting now for years.

  And lately he had realized something else, that she had always been ambivalent toward him. She could take him for only so long, just like his mom. He’d been a hyperactive kid, unable to sit still or shut up—Abby blamed his mom for hitting him, but he was pretty sure he had driven her nuts. On evenings when she’d had enough, she used to lock him in his room with a jar for pee, sometimes before the other kids even had to come inside. On summer nights, he watched them through the windows, out there playing hide-and-seek.

  And Abby could get exasperated with him, too, when he was being squirrelly or talking too much about something. And she could be pretty damn dismissive about it, too. Back when she had tried to convince him about their taking jobs on separate coasts, and how they could handle that, he talked about it every night and would not be put off. Sometimes she tried to bring the discussion to a close by saying something like, “Time to hood Ray’s cage,” as if he were a canary that needed to settle for the night.

  That memory started a slow burn in his chest, and to stop this line of thought, he put on running shoes and a down vest, got his day pack and phone and left the apartment, strode downhill toward his café. The sun was now above the Berkeley ridge, the sky clean blue, washed by rain, and he looked around, already mourning this place. New England was old and dirty, expelled from the garden long ago, and back there winter would be sinking icy fangs into trash heaps underground.

  But here it was already spring, on New Year’s Eve. On one slender pink magnolia tree, a bloom about the size of his head hung low, and he put his face in it. It smelled clean and fresh, and felt like baby skin.

  By the time he crossed the Cal campus and got to his café, he felt better, brain newly supplied with oxygen, his face possibly pink instead of gray. The two Latino guys behind the counter greeted him, and without being told, they made his decaf latte with a pile of hot sweet foam on top. With the students mostly gone, his favorite table was available, at the end of an L up in the loft, overlooking the front door and the deadbeats sleeping on the sidewalk outside, some of them white suburban kids who gelled their hair up like the statue of liberty and begged for handouts they could get more easily from Mom and Dad.

  Before he lost momentum, he sent Tory a quick text. “We can have no contact for a month. No texts, no calls, no emails. I love you, but this has to happen. Don’t reply.”

  He pushed “Send” and sat barely breathing till his heart slowed down. A month. Thirty-one days. He’d give his marriage that clear shot. And if he still wanted Tory on January 31? Well, he did not expect that actually to go away. But at least she was out of Providence now, no longer a constant temptation. And if he never saw her again, wanting to wreck his life might end.

  He took out a yellow legal pad, its top page scored with deep impressions from his ballpoint pen on the sheet above the day before, top sheet now gone, transcribed into the typewriter yesterday afternoon. It seemed good luck to use the impressed page, already half destroyed, like him, like his mind, his heart. He preferred his pens half broken, too, and always got the cheapest kind, let them stain his hands and shirts. Nothing fancy here, just like his father’s dynamite and pickax in the mine, the soot he brought back on his clothes and in his lungs. He wanted his hours here in the café to leave something visible like that, blue smudges all over him.

  He scribbled a few lines, the orts and scraps he had stored in his brain since yesterday. His cryptic cursive kept it private, no one able to read over his shoulder.

  The Sayings of Ray-Fu

  Beware the new haircut.

  Shirt color always lighter than pants.

  Err big or not at all.

  When you err big, repeat and call it jazz.

  Give money whenever asked.

  Don’t wear that dress with that bra.

  Beware any enterprise requiring new clothes.

  No, wait, that’s Thoreau.

  Steal, then give it back, enlarged.

  Climb the orchard fence, eat all you can, and leave the rest.

  Keep trees on your side, and ants.

  Choose wisely between crow and raven.

  Never let a frog into your bed.

  Know your Chinese, Choctaw, and Martian names

  but keep them to yourself.

  Do not disclose the source of your voodoo.

  On the first day of abalone season, fourteen divers

  needed rescue though they had been warned

  of massive surf. Chutzpah or death wish?

  The first year of marriage, you just try to figure out

  what kind of death grip to put on each other.

  Better to leap than look.

  Better to nap than sleep.

  Write all you know onto a paper airplane,

  climb the tallest building you can find,

  and set it free.

  It seemed like he might almost get this one to fly. Blow some hot air in there, lift off and drop sandbags. Soar for a while, then gradually let hot air out like flatulence, fart, fart, drift down and fart some more, until he found a spot to perch, alight.

  The balloon conceit was promising. Maybe he’d keep it around and find a way to work it in a poem of its own sometime.

  Stashing tablet and pen in his pack, he slid his arms through the straps and stalked out to the Ave, as everyone called Telegraph—because, like Frank O’Hara, he needed record stores and bookstores to prove he didn’t actually regret life. Restlessly he prowled down to Amoeba and went through his favorite bins, looking for unknown discs with John Zorn or Ryuichi Sakamoto sitting in with someone else’s band.

  He bought two, used, crossed the street, and rifled through the stacks at Moe’s to see what had come in since yesterday, found a hardly touched first edition of Ashbery, Flow Chart, which he of course already had, but it was too good a deal to pass up—he could give it to someone (not Tory, not Tory, not this month). One of his best guy students, Adam or Josh.

  He went to the Cal gym and swam, pausing to catch his breath every few laps, like an old man. Jesus, he was such a piece of shit these days. But he made it over half a mile, took a long hot shower in the steamy, soap-smelling locker room, and dressed again.

  Then it was time to face the walk home. It was all right at first, across the deserted campus, with its monumental marble buildings, Japanese tourists taking pictures of each other in the California sunshine, with the Campanile in the background or under Sather Gate. But past the Greek-temple-looking library w
as the first steep ramp, a forty-five degree angle, his chest on fire by the time he could see the bronze saber-toothed tiger in front of Paleontology.

  There was a brief flat stretch, out the north gate of campus and across Hearst. He loitered as long as possible on the first block of Euclid, with its funky shops, some of them different each few months, only La Val’s Pizza and Bongo Burger and the Seven Palms market the same from year to year.

  After that, the climb was gradual for three blocks, before the awful hill began. When they had first moved here, he could run up it and often did, starting from the Cal gym, up the hill right past their place and on to the top of the ridge, hundreds of feet of elevation higher up. One day he had been running on the main road of the ridgetop, Grizzly Peak, wearing nothing but nylon shorts and a tattered tank, feeling good, springy, bounding along, when two black guys in a convertible drove up beside him and slowed, both looking at him.

  “Looking tough, dude,” one of them said.

  Ray was thrilled but tried not to show it, just lifted his chin in acknowledgement.

  Now, not quite eight years later, he almost had to crawl on all fours up the two-block rise from Hilgard to Buena Vista, his heart feeling crucified. Still blocks from home, he was so dizzy he had to stop, sit on a bench, and pant, face clammy with cold sweat, hoping the blood would make it to his brain.

  Six

  Abby dreamed of her friend Gillian, that they were ice skating and laughing together, as they had done just a few years before. When she woke up, she lay in the spell of the dream awhile, wishing it was real. Gillian had been her junior colleague at Cal, and twenty years younger, but when she moved into the office next to Abby’s, they became great friends and kept each other company, especially when Ray was gone.

  Gill was sweet of temperament, with a quick wit, and she liked to gossip about their colleagues, how pretentious some of them could be. She was short and dark, Jewish, with a pretty face, and though she was not thin, she favored miniskirts with patterned black pantyhose, cowboy boots, and backward baseball caps. She could charm anyone, from homeless people to the department chair, who was soon taking her to lunch. Gill wrote to Abby in meetings, as if they were in junior high: