The Use of Fame

by Cornelia Nixon

  Three days later, she got a text from him about his scorn for all things Brown, written as he sat on a plane in Providence, waiting to fly back. How thank God he’d never have to be polite to those bastards again, and what a crook their realtor was, and how he was going to cut off her head. He didn’t trust the movers, either. “They’ll probably just lose our stuff. And I’ll never speak to Hank again.”

  “Oh, sweetie,” she wrote back. “Of course you will. You love Hank.”

  “Oh, I know,” he wrote. “I know it’ll be all right. I’ll just keep smiling my Tory smile, and everything will be just fine.”

  Abby screamed and dropped the phone onto the couch, but it rang.

  “I’m so sorry. I’m a jerk,” he said. “That wasn’t meant for you.”

  “No kidding. Were the others for her, too?”

  “No, I was writing both of you. But my fingers are too big. They hit the wrong message and I write back too fast. I had to let her know what’s going down.”

  Abby bit her tongue. I’ll just keep smiling my Tory smile?

  By the time she met him at the airport, she was determined not to mention it.

  But she was tense and suspicious, and when he went out to try to run, she unpacked his suitcase, looked for evidence. Had the girl met him in Providence? She could just see them strolling on Conimicut Point Beach, holding hands, and agonized, trying to decide if they could part for good. But she found no clues.

  A few days later, it was his fifty-third birthday, and Abby gave him an iPod, so he could easily take his music collection to Florida.

  That night she was in bed trying to sleep, which was still hard without the drugs. And Ray had a light on a few feet away, using her laptop to transfer CDs to the iPod.

  “Come to bed, sweetie, it’s late,” she said.

  He kept his eyes on the screen and let his fingers rattle the keyboard.

  She tried again. “Hey, sweetie, it’s midnight. Please come to bed.”

  His voice was calm. “I will divorce you. I’ll go live somewhere else.”

  Abby sat up, quivering. “What?”

  He didn’t answer, and she got out of bed in her nightgown. Crouching beside him, she tried to get into his line of sight.

  “You just said you would divorce me! Do you even realize that?”

  He refused to look at her, eyes unwavering on the screen.

  “I will divorce you,” he repeated like a machine. “I’ll go live somewhere else.”

  “Ray! You just said you would divorce me and go live somewhere else!”

  Still he did not look at her. In a monotone, he said, “I did not.”

  “Yes, you did. You said it twice!”

  “I did not.”

  “What’s going on? You said you would divorce me twice. You said it like a robot.”

  Eyes on the screen, he said, “I did not. You’re insane. I’ll have you committed for saying that. You won’t remember any of this in the morning. Why don’t you just pass out? It can’t be long now. I’m sick of your walkabouts. Now shut up or I really will. I’ll have you committed.”

  Abby crawled back into bed. Had she blacked out so many times he now assumed she would do it every night? Had he said things like that before and she had no memory of it? Well, now her mind was clear. She had heard every word.

  When he finally turned the computer off, he did not come to bed. She heard him get a beer and pop it open. His phone went ping as it received a text.

  In the morning, he brought her tea in bed as if nothing was wrong. She looked at him. “Do you remember what you said last night?”

  His face went neutral. “What did I say?”

  She told him. “You said it like a zombie, and then you denied saying it. You wouldn’t even look at me. It was extremely scary. Were you trying to drive me nuts?”

  He shrugged. “I’m surprised you remember it. Usually you don’t.”

  “Of course I remember it. I told you, I went off the pills. You’re the one who acted like you’d been body-snatched.” Involuntarily, her voice shot to a higher register, throat tense. “Do you mean you’ve said stuff like that to me before?”

  “If I did, you wouldn’t remember it. I’m sorry. I’ve had a lot on my mind.”

  “Like what, the move? Your heart?” She had to force herself. “Tory?”

  He had his daypack on, ready to walk to the café. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Are you still in contact with her?”

  “You have to give me time. She was important to me.”

  Abby clung to that past tense.

  He bent to give her a quick kiss. “Have a good morning.”

  She was afraid and mortified for both of them. What drove a man to torture his wife when he thought she would not remember it? It must be rage, at Brown, at the friends he thought were failing him, at himself for his stupid crush, and at her for not doing exactly as he wished, as if she were one of his arms. Maybe most of all, at his heart for what was happening to it, enraged and afraid. He was helpless against most of that, and there she was, six feet away, supposedly unconscious, like a fly he could pull the wings off of for fun.

  Outside, it looked like rain, though it never rained in August in Berkeley. She had promised the other condo owners she would dispose of the old paint people had left in the basement. They shared chores, and that was her summer assignment.

  But first, she got out her platinum pen. In this poem it would be February, the way it looked, and the lunatic she lived with would be Berryman’s tender, sad Henry, whom she had always liked.

  My Life As a Goat

  It’s gray and windy out, on the verge of rain

  and I can barely lift my arms because of the triceps

  dips I started with a sadistic trainer, or maybe sadistic

  trainer is redundant. “You can’t leave him alone like

  this,” his friend said. “We count on you to keep him

  calm. You’re the goat in the stall with the race horse.”

  Have you ever noticed “die” inside of “diet”? “Other”

  in “mother”? I wanted to mother an other, but my other

  wanted me to mother him, and now he wants another

  other. So let’s take the toxic waste to the dump and stand

  in a puddle while we pour it out. You once said it was fun

  to go to the gas station with me. Does that apply

  to the hazmat site? And is that why you were so mean

  to me last night? Chafing at the beloved because,

  well, she’s there, and the ones you want to lash

  or lay are not. Oh, Henry, come smell

  the Japanese mock orange trees as they riot

  outside in the February night, sweeter than lilac,

  more poignant than rose, like you and me and our long life.

  She thought of Ray’s face beaming as she walked toward him, when he met her in airports. When they got married, they had decided to do it privately, no families, just Johnny and one other friend as witnesses, in the Morgantown courthouse. She had worn a tan skirt suit and a pale sunhat and flats, Ray in an ancient gray wool jacket and slacks, Johnny as best man in a green polo shirt with a hole in one sleeve. But Johnny had brought a bouquet for her, and when they left the courthouse and stepped onto the street, people rushed out of stores to ask, “Did you just get married?”

  They had made lunch for the friends, and a few hours later, alone again, she and Ray had walked to the little bookstore downtown through the summer evening light. On the way they spied a pair of redheaded woodpeckers high up in a dead tree.

  You could mark off the stages of their life with birds: the baby jays, the rose-breasted grosbeaks in their West Virginia yard, which also showed up at their feeder in California, far out of range, seeming to follow them cross-country, like a cat walking to reclaim its former home. White pelicans and white-tailed kites out near Point Reyes, tiny screech owls in Providence.

  In Florida, th
ere might be pink flamingos and scarlet ibises. Roseate spoonbills. Swallowtail hummingbirds blown north by hurricanes. But she had not bought a Florida bird book, and now she supposed she never would.

  Eleven

  It was a cold, foggy August morning in Berkeley, the kind Ray loved, as he sat in his café and tried to write.

  They were leaving in four days, and he tried to imagine a journey he could take to paradise, and what it would be like. Not an actual place like Miami, or even the more crazy-named Florida towns, like Two Egg, Sopchoppy, Ocheesee, and Yeehaw Junction—but a utopia with infinite record stores, all free, and Salvador Dalí taking his anteater for a ride on the Metro. Where the cheesesteaks had no calories, and you aged backward after forty, till you got to twenty, then forward again, keeping what you knew and getting smarter all the time, and richer and handsomer. Where you could go to any time in history, converse with Keats or Rimbaud or Duchamp, and come right back. Where funny-looking guys like him were the most desirable, and girls wore bikinis all year round, because it was never cold. Not that he could take that now, when his heart felt swollen as a baked apple, ready to split open wide.

  He scratched all that onto a yellow pad, jumped up and strode out to the Ave, down to Moe’s and Amoeba. There would be book and record stores in Miami, but probably in strip malls, the stock all new and suitable for Christian youth. Nothing like the raunchy blast of Amoeba, with its barrio mural on an outside wall, its bins of mostly used CDs, and some vinyl, recycled by guys with kaleidoscopic taste. He could just imagine who they were, hanging out in garrets since the sixties, gray beards yellow from dope smoke, able to discourse on Nietzsche or John Cage or Mario Savio, who of course they knew, along with Julia Vinograd, who sold her poems one at a time to patrons in cafés. There might be one or two such characters in Florida, but inflected with an awful Southern twang, living in swamps and wrestling alligators, unaware of the twelve-tone scale or the major figures of Japanese jazz—toothless guys who played banjo and harmonica and knew where to find great black blues singers in remote shacks.

  There had never been a place that fit him the way Berkeley did, though Providence sometimes came close. And now Providence was off-limits forever. He would never visit there. Instead he was about to go live in a house he’d never seen, in a town he could barely picture, having been there only once. And while he had not snapped the string that connected him to Berkeley, it had never felt so tenuous.

  To distract himself, he bought every disk that caught his eye, stuffed them in his pack, walked to the Cal gym and lifted weights, showered and dressed again. He was having a farewell lunch with Sateesh, and he sent a quick message to Tory first.

  “Off to lunch with Sateesh. Saying good-bye to this place is sad.”

  “Yeah, moving is hell,” she wrote back. “But at least you’ll be on the correct coast then.”

  She added a smiley face wearing sunglasses. She had started sending emojis, and it made him feel like a pedophile. How young exactly was that girl?

  Sateesh picked him up outside the gym, looking the opposite of a Berkeley resident, in a shiny black Lincoln Town Car, like someone from the diplomatic corps, Sateesh in the driver’s seat smoking a cigar. He had on a fedora, for Christ’s sake, and a tweed overcoat. But Sateesh had read everything, and if you wanted to talk to someone about Rimbaud, or Simon Schama on the French Revolution, Sateesh was your man.

  They went as usual to Brennan’s, down near the highway, the least pretentious of old Berkeley dives, where you could get turkey and mashed potatoes with gravy any day of the year and wash it down with a selection of draft beers.

  They sat in a corner booth, out of everyone’s earshot, and as usual Sateesh spoke in a low, conspiratorial voice. “So how’s your home life?”

  Ray felt his chest constrict. “I’m being horrible. Sometimes I think the only way to stop it is to leave.”

  Sateesh shook his head. “You’re too hard on yourself, man. I still don’t understand why you stayed with her after that affair. If Gloria had the nerve to run around on me, she would be toast. And of course I’d kill the jerk, whoever he was. I still think you should let me do something to that Jacob fellow.”

  Sateesh claimed to be related to some Mumbaikar mobsters, and he had seriously offered to have Jacob “taken out” after that semester in New York.

  But while Ray often gave vent to feelings of that kind, that’s all it was. He sometimes had to express his wrath at some object, but he had never thrown a punch in his life. And seriously, have someone killed? Naaaaah. He was clear on that. It cheered him up to realize it. Maybe he was not such a bad guy.

  “Hey, man, look,” he said now, running both hands through his hair. “I’m not positive she had an affair. It looked fishy as hell, but never mind. It’s ancient history now. I’ve got other stuff to think about, like moving to fucking Florida. That feels like going over the falls backward. I mean, where the hell is Miami? I’m so sick of moving around.”

  “But you’ll be back next summer?” Sateesh said. “Maybe Christmas, too? You’re not renting out the apartment here, correct?”

  He shook his head. He and Abby hadn’t even talked about doing that, with things so uncertain between them. Some days he felt the way he did in restaurants, when he couldn’t decide what to order. At their favorite bistro, he could never choose between the steak frites and the crab-stuffed sole, and he wouldn’t know which one he was going to tell the waiter till he heard the words come from his mouth. He wasn’t sure which way he was going to jump. Take Abby to Florida, or go alone and see Tory? Tory, whom he didn’t know at all. He’d had lunch with her a few times, but he’d never seen her naked or slept next to her. They chatted electronically all day, but really what could you tell from that? She didn’t know him, either. It was like one long phone call before a first date.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” Ray said slowly. “I think Abby left this marriage a long time ago. It’s been years now since she really noticed me. She doesn’t realize that I’m half dead. The only time she pays attention to me is when we have a fight, and I think that’s having a bad effect on my health.”

  Sateesh was alarmed and wanted all the details, what his doctor was saying now. “Listen. If you need to leave Abby, Gloria and I will support you all the way. Whatever you have to do. If you want to come move in with us tonight, you can. We hate houseguests, but we’d do anything for you.”

  Ray nodded and fought the urge to cry. “I know you would. Thank you, man, I appreciate it. But if you want to know the truth, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ve never been able to picture the future. It seems to me like a laughable concept, when we all could die tonight. I certainly could. And one thing is for sure, whatever happens next will be different from whatever you thought it would be. So I mostly try not to imagine it.”

  That afternoon the sky cleared, and Ray and Abby went to Monterey Market to shop. After her run, they made chicken piccata and he put it in the oven for the final bake, while she got in the tub.

  Ray opened a bottle of sauvignon blanc and took it in the bathroom with two stem glasses, poured while he perched on a tall stool by the bath and handed one to her. The room had six-foot-tall French windows facing west, and when the sun sank over the coastal mountains, the light went gold, then pink, shading to blue. Ray held his glass up to the last pink rays to make it blush. He felt a rush of well-being.

  “Damn, Bean! I think it’s all finally happening for me. I think this job is going to do it. I’m finally getting what I deserve, a real endowed chair and some respect. I even think my heart is going to do better there, now that all that shit with Brown is done. Fuck them completely, even Hank. Things will never be the same with him. There’s a bitterness there now. He did nothing to get me the job, and you know he could have. He could have made it happen. His silence, that was the death knell. But damn, I’m going to be the Dudley Harrington Chair of Poetry at Miami. Fuck Brown!”

  He went in his study next door and
put on one of his new CDs. He had listened to them all that afternoon, and one of the Ryuichi Sakamoto was fine.

  “Here, listen,” he called to her. “There’s a killer riff in this.”

  A clarinet slashed through the air, attacked on the slant by a trombone. In the study, he opened the tin where he kept roaches, took one out, lit his Bic, and pulled on it, just a tiny hit to keep the euphoria going.

  Playing imaginary drums, he bopped back into the bathroom, where the air was filled with the smell of Abby’s pricey white gardenia soap, while she lay long and languid in the tub, pale hair bunched up and tied on top of her head to keep it dry. She looked lovely, but self-absorbed as usual. She didn’t say anything about the music.

  Instead she tried to tell him about some kerfuffle in her department, a New Historicist man who wanted tenure, though he was opposed by the ruling theory coalition. Ray hated the people she worked with. The last time he made the mistake of going to a Cal party with her, people had treated him like someone’s boring spouse. They called themselves literary professionals, and none of them read contemporary poetry.

  He tossed back his wine. “Those jerks you work with are just ignorant. They’re snobs and parasites with too much sense of entitlement.”

  She lifted her head and looked at him. “That’s a bit of a generalization. Some of them are all right.”

  He felt the lift as the dope came on—he decided to let that pass, what she had said. “What about you? What’s your next move? Any big plans for your sabbatical?”

  She looked evasive. “I’ve started something, actually.”

  Ray nodded. “Great.”

  They both believed in keeping their work hush-hush till it was done, when they would show it to each other. So he didn’t ask for more right then.

  He went to the kitchen and made salad, rubbing the big wooden bowl with garlic, slicing the intriguing purple radishes they’d bought. He changed the record, played another killer riff, stopped off for another hit of dope. Cranked, he whirled around the kitchen, washing, chopping, throwing things into the bowl.

  “Did you do dope?” Abby called over the music as she came into the kitchen, wearing a white yukata printed with blue flowers, its hem trailing on the floor, its flamboyant square sleeves balancing her height. Her fair hair was still piled on top of her head, and she left it there, showing off her long pale neck.