The Use of Fame

by Cornelia Nixon

  “So what did you tell them at the barn?”

  “I told the truth. Those are my buddies there.”

  He could just imagine what that crew of harpies, her trainer and the other women riders, thought of him.

  But as for Abby, he felt longing shoot through him, to be where she was, put ice on her cheek. It was the only thing that could make him feel all right.

  Abby’s voice sounded hard now, stern. “I really think you should go be with her. I’ve had enough of this. Go to Montreal.”

  Panic made him shake—he didn’t even want that now.

  “Oh, Bean,” he whispered. “Don’t give up on us. We’ll get through this. It’s just a crazy year, with the job and everything. I love you. You know I love you. I’m going to get over her, I swear.”

  “Did you send that text to her, after I talked to you?”

  “No.” It hadn’t even occurred to him. In fact, he hadn’t actually sent anything to Tory since he left Montreal. “I’ve broken it off with her. Don’t you realize that? It’s over with. It’s you I love. Isn’t it obvious? I’ve been frantic all day. You’re my wife. It’s very hard, but it’s finished with her.”

  She didn’t speak for half a minute, and when she did, she sounded disgusted. “Well, if that’s true, you should tell her so, but don’t declare your eternal love for her at the same time. You can’t have it both ways. You should tell her you love me, if that’s why you’re doing it.”

  Ray felt a rush of, what—anger? Or guilt? She shouldn’t tell him what to do. Yet she was right. For once he tried to let it blow through him and dissipate. “I know. I just wanted to give her something on my way out. I feel like I’ve toyed with her. And that’s when a man’s most likely to say stupid stuff like that, over-the-top stuff. It doesn’t really mean anything.”

  Abby was quiet for a while, not contradicting him. “Well, if it is over with her, we’ll have to see what you and I can manage. I really have had enough of this. I’m not going to take much more.”

  Chastened, he said, “I know you have, sweetheart, and I’ll make it up to you. Just give me a little time.”

  He didn’t write to Tory—he put it off from one day to the next. Instinct said even to touch her name in the message app would be to play with fire. He spent as much time as he could with his favorite grad students and packed boxes to ship to Berkeley and Florida.

  Because he was leaving, his students organized an evening tribute for him, with testimonials and readings from his work. Johnny flew in for it, and several other poets drove there or took the train, Walt coming from Harvard, his old friends Pete up from Maryland and Ellen from Pittsburgh, where they used to teach together.

  The event was in a big elegant room, and it was packed, with about five hundred people listening, some students sitting on the floor. One by one his friends stood at the microphone, took turns telling stories about him and reading their favorites of his poems. All of his colleagues showed up, too, except for the Mouth Breather and Gumby.

  When Hank went up there, his eyes became shiny, and he seemed genuinely heartbroken to see Ray go. When they finally led him to the microphone, Ray had to struggle to hold back tears himself.

  This time Abby had not even seemed to consider flying in, and that made him sad—it was like he was on probation now. At the grad student party afterward, he gave her a call, so she would not wait up for him. She sounded cautious, and when they signed off, he felt sudden urgency.

  “I love you,” he said. “You know that, right? I love you.” This time, he did cry.

  Late that night, when the party broke up and everyone else went off to find some place to sleep, he ended up with Ellen in an all-night diner downtown, waiting for biscuits and gravy to show up. Ellen was an old salt from a fishing village up in Maine, and the only person he knew who still smoked cigarettes. She was also a decent poet and good friend. He could always count on her to hit him with the truth.

  He had put away a vat of beer at the party, and in a sudden fit of alcoholic weepiness, he told her the whole sordid story, about Tory and Abby and himself.

  Ellen laughed and lit a smoke. Dragging on it, she exhaled above his head. “Christ, Abby is a saint. I would have sliced your dick off a long time ago.”

  Ten

  Abby swore off Ambien and Xanax, after that night in the ER. She iced her cheek and told herself she could leave Ray, just to see how that would feel. But did she want to be alone in her sixties? It was like looking down a long, empty corridor. The thought of all that echoing loneliness was frightening.

  Ray sent her his new manuscript, Star Viscera, filled with poems he had been working on for years. The first warm week, she took it to a bench in the backyard and read it, corrected his spelling, and made notes on the lines that worked and the ones that needed another try. The poems made her ache, they were so good, even when she laughed—it was clearly going to be his best book yet. Working on it gave her a sense of purpose, a mission. She had always done that for him, since his first book, tried to make him the best poet he could be. Sometimes she had even given him titles and images, a line here and there, and she wasn’t ready to relinquish that. She wanted to be part of it.

  The truth was, there was glamor in the poetry world, and she didn’t count much on her own, with one puny book, especially not since the Joyce study came out. People liked to slot you into one genre, and when she defected to literary criticism, it was as if the Joyce book ate the one of poems. Most of Ray’s were dedicated to her, and almost no one knew about the crack in their façade, as a literary power couple still. She wanted to fly wherever he read from the new book and bask in the glow of his fame, be at the parties afterward with friends. She wasn’t giving up their poet friends! Not Johnny, Ellen, Walt and Clarice, Hank and Priscilla, or any of the rest, all of whom she liked, no sir.

  After she sent Ray her notes, she felt a strong new urge to write more poems. Mornings when she didn’t have to teach, she walked down to his café, ordered lattes like he did, though his were decaf, cardiologist’s orders—“unleaded,” she and Ray called that, and hers had lead.

  She wasn’t going to write anymore about the marriage—she would write about things she thought or saw. She found a poem she wrote in grad school days, when she lived alone in a first-floor studio. At Ray’s favorite table, up on the promontory over the front door, she did another draft of it with her Montblanc.

  Rattlesnake

  You would not have thought I could change

  my stride in time, running so hard past the dark

  glen where anyone could hide that I was off

  the ground, in low earth orbit, when I saw my ankle

  inches from its head, shoe about to mash

  its tail. But eye to brain to spine to thigh, a million

  quick cells cocked to fire, arching my leg an inch

  to miss the snake.

  New-hatched blackjack body, rusty diamonds

  gleamed, three milk-white rattles fresh as baby

  knuckles. It did not move, and wondering if it

  was alive, I leaned my face closer. Blithe scales

  prickled, changing shape. I froze, a reflex.

  I was not afraid of it, not enough afraid, I think,

  though I am afraid of many things, like Stinky,

  the famous rapist on my street, who hides in single

  women’s houses till they fall asleep, his smell

  of gasoline and sweat. Or the bull-size man

  who not quite killed a woman running on this trail.

  Afraid of atom bomb, cattle prod, retrovirus, legs

  cut off in car crash, rain-soaked mudslide pouring

  in my windows in the night.

  But I was not afraid of this snake.

  I crouched there till my legs went numb,

  its round, flat, black eyes watching me.

  I could have looked at it forever, held it,

  let it bite me, swallowed it, worn it around

  my neck
like a lavaliere—but that wouldn’t

  be enough. What I wanted was to be it

  or another like it, next to it in the warm dirt,

  be it and still see it, its lover, a killer and so fine.

  One of Ray’s manual typewriters sat on his desk, and when she walked home, she used it to type another draft. It was tough on the fingers, but it felt more authentic to hammer for it, rather than to glide with the computer’s grace. Clack clack clack, she filled the air with sound like Ray did, though she wasn’t blasting music at the same time, a change the neighbors must have liked. Once when he was there, a woman from downstairs came up to say her teenage daughter couldn’t stand the music anymore.

  “And she’s a teenager!” she had exclaimed.

  Ray came home for the whole summer, and after a while he had declared his love for her enough that she started to relax. Though she watched for signs of change, he still lit up at the sight of her, if they hadn’t met for a few hours.

  But he was pale and thin, his face gray if he had to walk back up the hill, and most days she picked him up outside the gym. With his shirt off, she could see the beating of his too-big heart, under his left pec.

  They went to see Dr. Death, and as usual Abby sat in the examining room and took notes. The doctor said Ray was doing much better than expected—though he also mentioned that it might be time to put him on the transplant list.

  Ray left his office in a rage. “They have no idea what’s wrong with me. I’m supposed to be a cripple now, and I’m just not. I can still swim half a mile. Okay, I have to stop at the end of every lap, but that still makes me superman, if my heart’s as wrecked as they say. They can’t explain it, and I’m not letting them cut my chest open. Indigestion. That jerk thinks my chest pain is indigestion!”

  Abby looked at him anxiously. “But the guy in Providence admitted it might be your heart.”

  “Yeah. They don’t even agree with each other. Until they do, they can just keep those big knives to themselves.”

  The house in Providence sold, and they planned the move. U of Miami had found them a house to rent, home of a math professor who would be away, and Abby would be on sabbatical that fall, so she could go along and look for a place to buy.

  She would also visit local barns and have Beau shipped if she found one she liked—though Ray was getting vocally opposed again, complaining about her “hobby” and how much she spent on it. He had given several readings that spring, and when the paychecks arrived for them, she had deposited them in their joint account, out of which she paid for all of their Berkeley expenses, including Beau’s stall and training fees, but also their mortgage, condo dues, property taxes, insurance, utilities, and food. But Ray seemed to think that money should be handed to him, though he was living there.

  “You stole my Stanford check!” he shouted at her one night.

  She looked at him cross-eyed. “Stole it how? It went into our joint account.”

  Had living apart so much that year made him think their finances were separate? But they weren’t—they had been pooled for a quarter century, during which Abby had usually made more than he did.

  And she couldn’t take him seriously when he objected to the horse, in part because half the time he was generous about it, telling her to go to a horse show and have some fun—though A-class shows like the ones her trainer went to cost thousands of dollars for less than a week.

  “Why don’t you go to Pebble Beach?” he said enthusiastically one night. “It’s your vacation. We can stay in Carmel again.”

  They had done it a few summers in a row, and though Ray was quickly bored with the show itself, he liked running on the white sand beach, eating in the restaurants, and browsing little shops on Ocean Avenue. In one of them he had almost bought a nearly fifty-thousand-dollar Dürer woodcut, a brush with extravagance that gave the lie to his equine objections now.

  In June, the day before their anniversary, Abby went to the Bone Room to buy a gift for him. Ray loved bugs, and the shop had a collection of framed moths and beetles, as well as intact skeletons of bats and lizards. An enormous, live blond python lay draped along a shelf, flesh as dense as gold bullion, its eye on the patrons. From time to time its yellow tongue flickered out.

  She picked out a giant pale green moth with slender tails at the bottom of each wing like a medieval lady’s trailing sleeves and had them wrap it in the black skull-and-bones paper she knew would gladden Ray’s heart.

  She shopped for a card and bought one with a tiny white silk wedding gown on a real wire hanger pasted on the front. Inside of it she wrote, “Happy twenty-fifth to the love of my life.” For too long, she had not said that to him, out of resistance to his craziness. But maybe it was time to say it now.

  Next morning, they made love, wistfully, aware of all they had been through.

  Afterward she handed him the skull-and-bones package. He clutched it, blue eyes bright. “Not till we get something for you. Let’s go to the city.”

  The day was fine, sunny and warm. They put the top down on the Porsche and drove across the bridge to San Francisco, parked near Washington Square, and had brunch at Mama’s: crab benedicts, strawberries with whipped cream, and champagne. They prowled through North Beach and Chinatown, looked at hand-painted Florentine crockery, dollhouse miniatures, and embroidered linens.

  “Hey,” Ray cried, inspired. “You need a new pen!”

  The Montblanc she had loved for decades, Ray’s first present to her, had lately fallen from her car at the barn and been crushed by a passing tractor. Since then Ray had made more than the usual remarks about barns, horses, and tractors, but now he seemed to light up and glow. He led her to the Montblanc store near Union Square and picked out a silver pen, though the price tag said nine hundred and fifty bucks. Over a thousand with taxes.

  “It’s perfect for our silver anniversary,” Ray said, holding it out to her.

  “Actually, it’s platinum,” the saleswoman said. “And it’s refillable. No cartridges required.”

  It was lovely, gleaming, and it fit perfectly in Abby’s hand.

  “We’ll engrave it for free,” the woman said.

  Abby wanted it to be her married name, Abigail McCormick-Stark. She wrote it out on the pad for testing pens.

  Ray’s face went a shade more pale. “What? No. You’ve never used it.”

  In fact, they had both used it that first heady year and called themselves the McCormick-Starks. But he seemed to have forgotten that.

  The saleswoman looked at it on the pad. “It’s too many letters, I’m afraid.”

  “All right,” Abby said. “Just my first initial then. A. McCormick-Stark.”

  Ray’s face was mulish. “You can’t use that.”

  Abby refused to absorb what he had said.

  The saleswoman stared at them. “We may just be able to fit that in.”

  She scuttled toward the workshop in back.

  * * *

  For the next month, when Ray walked down to his café, Abby used the beautiful new pen to write a poem. One morning he went out for a run first thing, leaving his phone behind, and on impulse she checked his texts, no password required.

  “I’m so glad you’re out getting fresh air,” Tory had written just after he left.

  He had sent her three messages while Abby was asleep, nothing of significance, remarks about the weather and a joke he’d heard—no plans to elope, not even any fond remarks. It meant nothing, surely, when Abby was there, moving to Miami, sleeping beside him every night. It was a habit, checking texts and sending them all day, just chatter, and of course he was concerned for Tory. She had been his student, and he felt guilty. He wanted to make sure she’d be all right.

  As the time before they were to leave began to shrink, they invited friends over, Sateesh and Gloria, other local poets, and a few of Abby’s colleagues. They took hikes along the coast, and spent an afternoon at the San Francisco Zoo. In the aviary, they held cups of nectar as lorikeets landed a
ll over them. The tiny bright parrots enraptured Ray, who let them peck his buttons, pull his hair, a look of childlike wonder on his face. They spent an hour in the new giraffe house, with its extremely tall and narrow doors. Abby had once dreamed that a herd of giraffes had chosen her as their human, and it was a luminous dream, one of her best ever. Today at the zoo two babies had just been born, wobbly miniatures of their moms, who licked their coats with long blue tongues.

  Next morning the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle ran a photo of one mother giraffe, who had dropped dead, hours after they watched her.

  Abby started to cry. “How could that happen?”

  A peculiar look crossed Ray’s face. “That neck’s a bitch to pump blood up, and she just gave birth. Heart strain.”

  Abby pressed a hand to the left side of his narrow chest, where it was shuddering. “How do you feel?”

  He shrugged. “The usual. Midline pain. Not worth a shit.”

  “We’ve got to get someone to listen about that. Maybe your Miami cardiologist will have a better idea.”

  He looked away. “They’re all the same. They can’t do anything for me.”

  “Well, next summer, we at least need to get you a car for here,” Abby said. “Or a scooter if you’d rather, so you don’t need to walk up the hill.”

  She had tried before to get him Berkeley wheels, and once they had gone to look at Vespas in Oakland, all of them in cute pastel colors. But Ray had said he didn’t want to have another big thing to take care of, with two houses and two cars already.

  Now he said only, “We’ll see.”

  He flew to Providence to finish boxing up his things and meet the moving van.

  The night before he left, they made love in the dark at bedtime, though these days they rarely did it then. But she knew he liked the idea of doing it at night, and after his plane left, she texted him. “We should do it at night more often.”

  As soon as he landed, he wrote back, “Don’t get used to that.”

  But he must have meant he was usually too tired then.