“That Renaissance guy with the big red nose? He reeks of Brussels sprouts.”
“That woman is all one note, pissed off. Everyone needs more than one note.”
When Abby said something she liked, Gill wrote, “You rock!” and underlined the words.
At school, Gill took care of her, brought her tea in mugs, or a turkey sandwich from the Bear’s Lair. And on weekends when Ray was back east, they went to chick flicks and lounged around in front of each other’s fireplaces.
Gill had left a boyfriend in New York, a German physicist, which seemed like a neurotic choice for her, and pretty soon she broke up with him for another baby English prof. That maddened the German physicist—Dieter was his name—and he called her up every night to say he was going to kill her.
“If you have a child, that child will be an orphan,” he said. “If you get married, that man will be a widower.”
When Abby told Ray, he tried to reassure her. “Nah, he’s three thousand miles away. And guys who talk about it don’t do it.”
Then one spring during finals week, Abby was in her office grading papers, and Gill was in hers, with the new boyfriend down the hall. Suddenly what sounded like a bomb went off on the other side of the wall, and then more down the hall. Heavy feet ran thudding outside her door.
“Everyone, stay where you are,” a man shouted. “Don’t move.”
Abby had crouched under her desk for hours, listening to voices cataloguing gore.
“Brain tissue,” one said clearly in the next room, and she plugged her ears.
It was not until they let her out that she learned for sure that Dieter had driven all the way across the country with three guns, one of them a big Glock, which he had used to blast Gillian, her new boyfriend, and himself to kingdom come.
* * *
To stop the memory, Abby got up, heated water for coffee, and noticed Ray’s mug in the sink—the sight of it made the night before come rushing back. She started to wash it out, but it slipped and crash, shattered on the porcelain. When she picked up the pieces, one cut her finger, and blood welled up. She started to lift it to her mouth to suck, then stopped. Blood meant HIV! You didn’t suck it off!
Of course that was absurd—she knew what was wrong with it. But she stood still, body clanging like a gong—it was as if the world had blown to pieces, and nothing was reliable. Even the day after Gillian was killed, she hadn’t been this nuts.
She went over it rationally: if her blood had HIV, so did her mouth, which was unlikely, with one partner all these years. When she had the mystery illness, her white blood cells had tanked, along with her T cells. But the doctors said it was her own body attacking itself—that’s what lupus was, a berserk immune system, reacting against your own DNA, like an allergy’s attempt to grow up and kill people. And if she’d ever been exposed to HIV, that same ninja immune system would probably have just gobbled it up.
Of course, Ray could have gotten it from someone else and given it to her. People sometimes implied that he was too close to two women poets, who sent him little gifts, droll things they found in antique shops or made themselves. But even in love, Ray said he hadn’t slept with Tory. Besides, his body’s defenses were nothing compared to hers, and if he’d been exposed to HIV, he’d probably be dead by now.
She threw away the shards of mug, made coffee, and took it to her desk. It was in one corner of the bedroom, with a west window high above the bay and a view of the Golden Gate Bridge. On her laptop was another paper on Ulysses, but that seemed stupid now, to keep pointing out what anyone could see who read the thing. Joyce once said he “wrote to keep the professors busy,” and she was tired of dancing to that tune.
She was also sick of literary theory, its insinuation that the art of any time sustains the conqueror—as if the artist meant to do that, when a person on death row will scratch frescoes on the wall with a plastic knife. Not from any hope of fame or glory, but to make something where there was nothing, to say “I was here.” Best of all if you could make something beautiful. But the farmer who plows a field in particular lines is responding to a similar urge.
She refilled her fountain pen, the black and gold Montblanc Ray had given her as his first present, twenty-five years before. She took a sheet from the printer and wrote.
Dear Romeo
I will not be the obstacle to your romance
the Capulet to your Montague
the thing that makes it burn white hot, while
you have sex with me and think of her—no thanks!
You should get closer to that belly-button ring
that shows so fetchingly between her short-short
cutoff jeans and midriff tank, the winged bird
tattooed in green and blue across her butt.
Eat her cuisine of cereal and milk, the frozen pizza
like cardboard, bottled dressing sloshed onto iceberg
and for a gourmet reach, slices of orange cheese
melted on top of broccoli.
Find out how she hogs the bathroom and what she does in bed
that you can’t stand.
This is an imperfect universe, as learns everyone who gets what he most wants.
In other words, please go fuck her for a while and then get back to me.
She turned on the laptop and typed it up, fooled around with the enjambment and spacing. It was far from a good poem—it was doggerel. But something about it felt just right. Poetry was a way to think, work through, make sense, and this one said exactly what she meant.
Should she print it out and leave it on Ray’s desk? He might be a snob about it—it was nothing he and Johnny would admire. No, she’d keep it to herself. He’d had a secret life all these months. She could have one, too.
There was something else she needed to do now, and she went online, to social media, and searched Tory Grenier, finding several photos easily. A slender dark-haired girl, she had also posted pictures of her tall white standard poodle, Emile, along with cheerful comments in French and English containing too many exclamation points.
Wincing in advance, Abby shifted to the Brown website. Their house in Providence was not equipped with Internet, and when she was there, she had to go to the Brown library or Ray’s office to keep up with her email—she used his university account and password. She had never thought to look at his email, though she could have any time. But Ray was so technically naïve, he had probably never thought of that.
Sure enough, in his inbox was a new message from Marie-Victoire Grenier, and attached to it was the entire stream, with his replies to her, going back for months. Grimly Abby hit “Print.” She wasn’t going to read them, but sometime she might need to, to combat her own naïveté.
As the printer spilled the pages out, she couldn’t help but notice that the salutations on each message were the same: “Darling,” they called each other, as if they were afraid of using the wrong name—as if he might call her Abby and she might call him Steve. In grad school, Abby had lived a thin wall away from Lorelei, a zaftig young woman with a string of lovers, whom she called exclusively “Baby,” for the same reason. Often thumping sounds issued from her place along with protracted cries of “Oh, ba-a-a-a-a-a-by!” Lorelei had said things to her about sex, like, “Sometimes it’s a banquet, and sometimes it’s a picnic.” Once she brought over a rotten chicken for Abby to sniff and decide if it was okay to cook. Wistfully, wanting to be anywhere but here right now, she wondered where Lorelei was today.
Finally Ray came back and walked into the bedroom. She could tell by the set of his face and shoulders that he hadn’t changed his mind—he wasn’t going anywhere.
“I told Tory we can’t have any contact for a month.”
Surprised, Abby looked at him. What was this supposed to mean, that he wanted to drag the whole thing out, torture all of them?
She didn’t answer, and he walked to the kitchen. When she left her desk and went out to the dining room, he had put carrots, olives, radishes, crackers
, and cheese onto a cutting board and set it on the table in the sun, as if it were any other lunch. She didn’t think she could get through an hour in his company, let alone an afternoon. She wasn’t going to let him give her the details. She wasn’t going to help him shred a quarter century.
But for that matter, what would she do, if he left? The days ahead looked empty and hopeless. Maybe she shouldn’t think too far ahead, just imagine what she could stand to do right then. On an ordinary New Year’s Eve, they might drive to the coast to hike on rugged, isolated cliffs once favored by the Trailside Killer. Outside it was a piquant day, sun out after the rain, and a hike was about the only thing she could imagine doing now with Ray. So she suggested it.
They put on hiking clothes and got into the Porsche. Ray drove, with Abby navigating, because he never knew where he was going. She got them across the longest bridge, with its two peaks and the valley in between, then south to Mill Valley, with Mount Tamalpais looming green above. The Porsche zoomed up the winding mountain road, under a heartbreaking blue sky.
She kept her eyes ahead. “When you saw her in New York, did you really not sleep with her?”
“No, I swear. We only had a few hours together, walking around. We did hold hands, and I kissed her once, on the street. But that was it.”
“And that’s why you asked me to come with you, then told me not to, then begged me to come after all, when it was too late to get a reasonable flight. That’s why you sounded panicked when you changed your mind. I should have gone. I should have gotten there for Thanksgiving.”
Guiltily she remembered her relief. But no, by that time, he had already been to New York and kissed the girl.
He waved one hand as if to try to wipe away those words. “For God’s sake, don’t apologize. It’s not your fault! I’m the weak one here. I should have never let her come.”
Abby felt surprisingly calm. “Why did you let her come?”
Quickly he said, “I wanted to find out if it was real.”
“If what was real?”
“The way we felt about each other.”
“And was it real?”
He looked straight ahead, hands on the wheel. “I wouldn’t have told you if it wasn’t. It would have been just a fantasy, and I would have dealt with it by myself.”
How could she still feel jealous? She should forget him right this second. It was not too late to make him drive to the airport. “Did you always want to do this? Did you just wait till you found someone who wanted you, too?”
He gripped her shoulder. “No, sweetheart, never. You were the only one for me.”
“Your bad-boy buddies do it over and over.”
“No, they haven’t, not like this. They just go ahead and sleep around. Give me some credit here. I’m telling you about it, and I haven’t slept with her. I’m trying to do the right thing. I just can’t help the way I feel.”
They crested the ridge and smelled the tang of the Pacific. The air was so clear they could see the Farallon Islands, barren rocks thirty miles offshore, dark silhouettes jutting out of shining blue water, home to cormorants, harbor seals, and great white sharks. The sight of them cleared Abby’s head. God, she loved this place! It was her home, and in a way she must have loved it more than Ray. She had insisted on moving here, when his job was on the other coast.
On impulse she said, “I wish we lived under polygamy. I could be the senior wife.”
Beside her, Ray said nothing. But he put one hand over his face.
They descended the backside of the mountain, to a narrow country lane through wind-warped Monterey pines. It led to cliffs above the beach, the final miles on pale dirt road, and ended at a muddy parking lot, eucalyptus forest towering beyond.
They set off on a wide fire road, where gold light glanced off leaves that shimmered in the breeze. It was cold in the shade and warm in the sun, with puddles they had to skirt. Old eucalypti lent a hint of menthol to the air, some with girths too big for their four arms combined to reach around.
Leaving the woods, the trail skirted cliffs, white combers hundreds of feet below, blue water dazzled with sun. They walked in silence, gazing out to sea. Up the hill above them, a white-tailed kite hovered upright, white wings with black tips, white tail forming a cross, and all that beauty just stabbed Abby in the chest. A hundred times they had come here. In the old days, when they lived in Morgantown, they had spent summers in Berkeley, and always, on the day before they had to return, they came out to Point Reyes and made love on some beach, observed by seals and gulls. And now he thought he was in love with someone else?
The fire road was about to turn inland, down a ravine, and Abby stepped to the cliff’s edge, the pain in her chest almost like ecstasy. She needed to stand above the long drop to the beach—it was the thing that answered how she felt. How absurd it was, the idea of lifelong marriage, when everyone changed. Ray had told her that all cells in your body were replaced every five years, including the ones in your brain. In their marriage, that had happened to each of them five times. What if there were tiny missteps in the DNA?
“Hey,” Ray said, and grabbed the back of her jeans, like she might jump. He pulled her away from the edge. “What are you laughing at?”
“I was just thinking how you and I have both mutated over time. God knows, you’re not the person I first met, and neither am I. I can scarcely remember who I was back then. I was terrified of speaking to more than ten students at a time. And you were getting arrested for peeing in alleyways. Now you’re on CNN.”
They had interviewed him once, during National Poetry Month. He had also been on NPR and the cover of American Poetry Review. Devastation swept through her. How would she deal with that, seeing him everywhere, when he was gone?
She strode away, taking the trail as it curved down the ravine, toward a creek at its bottom lined with trees. She couldn’t stand it. He was the person she wanted to tell whatever she thought. If she had an idea, or saw a hawk, or read something that made her laugh with surprise, she needed to share it with him—with him, and no one else. He wasn’t just her husband, he was also her best friend. Marriage is conversation, Nietzsche said, and she had been in conversation with him almost half her life.
Tears slid down her face as she trudged resolutely, brushing them away. She heard him coming fast down the hill behind her, and soon he fell in next to her, matching her stride for stride. It was better than nothing, just to have him there, available to talk. There must be a way to salvage that.
“Maybe,” she said. “If we really work at it, we can figure out a way to stay best friends.”
Side by side they crossed a bridge over the creek, footsteps hollow on wood. Below them on both sides grew beds of cress, in water that did not appear to move.
Ray’s voice came out strangled, as if his throat were tight. “Maybe, if we really work at it, we can figure out a way to stay married.”
Abby felt reprieved from a nightmare—it might not mean much, but it was something, that he’d said that. She had given him the perfect out, with implied forgiveness and a promise of friendship—and he didn’t take it. He did not want out. He wanted to stay with her.
They took the trail past two big lakes, then turned onto a narrow path, where they had to edge past walls of poison oak and wade through puddles of cold water, ankle-deep. After a scramble down a sandy, eroded cliff, they reached an icy torrent that arched over a granite lip and plunged a hundred yards down to the beach.
The rocks on either side were wet with spray, but Ray leaped across and held out his long arm to her. Recklessly, she took his hand and jumped, feeling like she could fly.
And it worked—she landed fine, and soon they were sliding down beside the waterfall, through terraces of crumbling red rock, until they reached the sand.
No one else was there, except a flock of brown pelicans, resting in thin sunlight beside a creek made by the waterfall, as it carved its way down the sloping beach and disappeared into blue waves. The air was cold
. But when they sat in the shelter of a driftwood log, sides of their bodies pressed together, the sun felt almost warm. All those times they had made alfresco love out here, it had been August and was usually warmer even in the fog.
Ray seemed to feel the same relief that she did. “I promise not to have any more contact with Tory.”
All right, if they were going to try this, it was time to give things up, promise for good this time, to love, honor, cherish, wash out each other’s puke buckets, or whatever was required.
“I can quit riding,” Abby said.
Ray looked scared but shook his head. “Don’t do that. You love it, and it’s part of who you are now. It’s a package deal, you and the horse.”
Bleakness overtook her, as she stared at the ocean. “Yesterday I thought you were in love with me, but now you’re in love with her. What about that?”
He watched the ocean, too, looking grim. “I can’t help the way I feel, but I’ll get over her. I promise you. That can’t compete with us.”
“What if you can’t?”
He enveloped her hand in his warmer one. “That in-love feeling is crazy compelling, but you know it never lasts. We got lucky. It turned into something better for us, the only time it’s ever done that for me. Or something better for me, anyway. Sometimes I wonder about you, how you feel. I think you’re ambivalent about me. I think you always have been.”
Well, yes, she had married him too fast, before she understood how his coal-mine manners would clash with her upbringing. And, yes, he could be controlling and angry, then the world’s sweetest man—but that sort of worked for her. “You have big needs,” a man once said to her, meaning that she needed too much male attention. Ray gave it to her, all right, sometimes too much and the wrong kind, and yet she stuck around. And he was the same way, hungry as a baby bird with open mouth, needing to be filled with her attention all the time.
The Use of Fame Page 7