The Use of Fame

by Cornelia Nixon

  “Look,” he shouted, breaking through the blather. “We’ve already got a couple of poor confused grad students wandering around taking courses across this whole train wreck. If we can just off-load a couple of these weird requirements—”

  A coughing fit seized him, and he could not go on. Around the table, people watched him balefully, as if his coughs were blows. He left the room to get a drink of water, and coming back, he noticed his face felt hot. Feverish, or maybe just the weather getting to him—it was in the high eighties outside. Or rage. He adjourned the meeting and could barely walk the mile to where he’d had to park the car.

  And when he got in, the air conditioning did not come on—it seemed to have died of exhaustion. Driving home was like sitting in a steam room, and he was dizzy by the time he reached his driveway, panting for air, heart racing out of control. Tory would still be at work, and he felt too weak to open the car door. Windows down, he lowered the seat back and tried to catch his breath. Something was boiling in his lungs.

  It was at least an hour till Tory came home, riding her bike, in a blue sundress with a full skirt, showing off her narrow waist. He was in such a weakened state that he felt jealous of her healthy legs, pushing the pedals with such energy, and her young, perfect heart. Damn, his chest hurt, never so bad as this.

  She didn’t see him in the car. She opened the gate, closed it behind her, put her bike in the garage, and unlocked the door to the glassed-in porch. He heard Emile race out into the backyard.

  “Darling?” she called inside. “Where are you?”

  Finally he managed to raise one hand and press the horn. He had to tap it three times before she peered out of the front door.

  “Darling!” she cried, swooping down on him.

  His face must have told it all, because she immediately tugged him from the car. His stomach lurched.

  “Watch out, I may barf,” he groaned as she half-dragged him around to the passenger side, opened the door and flopped him on the seat. “Where are we going?”

  “The ER, of course, dummy. I’ll get my purse.”

  It was pneumonia, they said, his fever dangerously high. Soon he was delirious, emerging from vivid Technicolor dreams to see the inside of an oxygen tent. Abby was in every dream, sometimes attacking him, bitter and shrill. Other times he was back with her in Berkeley, his real life. Once he woke up sobbing. The tent refracted everything, but he was aware of people moving through the room, their faces warped and wrong. He felt encased in plastic wrap and had to fight down panic.

  As his fever backed off, they let him come out of the tent from time to time, and he could check his phone. Abby sent him a photo of her on the Golden Gate Bridge with Josh and Adam, his favorite Brown students, who had gone out there to a give a reading together, along with Aaron, another former student, all of them young hotshots now. Apparently she went to the reading and the party afterward, and the next morning they invited her to hike across the bridge with them, to cure their hangovers. It looked like a gorgeous sunny day, the three young men grinning around Abby, who was as tall as all of them, wind tossing her long blond hair into the air.

  “We saw a school of dolphins right below us, underneath the bridge,” she wrote. “They were trying to swim into the bay, but the tide was going out, and they weren’t getting anywhere. They kept leaping out of the water in the same spot.”

  Now he really did feel trapped, immobilized in bed, an IV in his arm, in a place he never meant to be, and a life that wasn’t his. Why wasn’t he out there on that bridge?

  When they let him out, Tory drove him home, and it just felt wrong. She should be out in the world, moving ahead like Josh, Adam, and Aaron, not stuck here taking care of him. He had messed with her life, and his own. His life wasn’t here, driving past high-rise hotels, as hot rain fell, hurricanes threatening. He should be on that bridge, with the cool Pacific wind in his hair, watching the dolphins leap in place, with Abby and the students who loved him.

  When he was well enough to drive downtown, he bought a notecard with a Basquiat on it and printed inside of it.

  Abby,

  I can’t help thinking of us last year, how we could have not split up and what we could have done to stay together, if either of us could have managed it. I don’t want to rehash, but much in my mind, well at least enough, proves your ambivalence to me—no blame, just the truth. I suppose you were so hurt, and offended, justifiably, there was no energy there for you to make much of an effort beyond tolerance, which acquiesced finally in my leaving. I love you, Abby, always will, and miss you so much it causes me tears. I am so much in mourning for you and our life, I don’t know what to do. I’m miserable here and was just in the hospital. Pneumonia. Enough.

  R

  When she got the letter, Abby called—he was in class, and it went to voicemail. He listened to it with his head against the cool wall of his air-conditioned office.

  “Sweetheart, I’m so worried about you. Is the pneumonia gone? Are you all right now? But listen, I was surprised by what you wrote, I really was.” She paused for a while and went on more slowly. “I probably should not admit it, and maybe I’m a masochist or something, because you were horrible to me. But the truth is you don’t really need to mourn for us. Because I’d be lying if I said I was completely over your rotten self.”

  He started to call her back, behind the locked door of his office—but what if Tory dropped by?

  He walked outside, into solid heat, across a part of campus where he never went, loud with redwing blackbirds in the trees, the air smelling of hot cement. Sixteen thousand students were just changing classes, on the move, a crowd he could get lost in. He sat on a bench in thin dappled shade and tapped the “Call Back” button, thrilled when Abby answered.

  “It was so good to get your call,” he said quietly. “Can you really not be over me, after all I’ve done to fuck us up? I don’t deserve it. It humbles me.”

  “Yes, go figure,” Abby said. “All these years you’ve been driving me nuts, and now I have the perfect chance to get away from you for good. No one would blame me one bit. But what am I doing? Waiting for you to call me back.”

  He felt himself start to shake. “I want to see you,” he whispered.

  She didn’t answer for a while. “Just break up with the girl. Then we will see.”

  Ray swallowed hard. Would he have to tell another woman he was leaving her?

  His voice was a croak. “My health is so fucked up, it might kill me.”

  Her voice was resolute. “You should quit or go on leave and come live here. You’re always better here.”

  By the end they were both crying, and they said they would talk soon.

  Later Johnny called, alarmed when he found out what was going on. “How can she not hate you? Be careful. She might knife you in your sleep. Christ, you’re screwed now, aren’t you?”

  Johnny didn’t say a word about Tory, since he understood the need to get away from live-in women, and he rarely spent a whole night next to his own wife. What he didn’t understand was Ray’s quest for home, for dinner with the beloved every night. Only which beloved would that be?

  At their house in Morgantown, Abby had planted Heavenly Blue morning glories and trained them up strings to the eaves. Now, in Miami, Ray drove to a nursery, bought a packet of their seeds, and stuck them one by one into a patch of rich soil he had prepared beside the house.

  It seemed important to make permanent documents now, so he wrote on paper to Abby again.

  Abby,

  It was great to talk to you. Well, upsetting, but in a good way, I think and hope. Johnny said today how could you not hate me? I wonder too but I will try to find out. I miss you and us every day, our life. Today I planted morning glories in the yard for you. I love you.

  Ray

  “Look,” Tory said one night a few weeks later, as she sliced carrots for salad. “I know you’re miserable. I know you may have to go back to Abby. It’s all right. I want what’s best for y
ou.”

  Ray was stunned with admiration for her all over again. This girl had moved thirteen hundred miles to live with him, and now she was saying it was fine, he could fling her back? Or wait—was she having second thoughts herself, half wanting to get rid of his decrepit old body? Insecurity lashed him. If she wanted it to end, he couldn’t blame her, and he deserved no sympathy.

  “Thanks,” he managed to say. “It’s hard for me to figure out what’s misery and what’s just my crappy heart. If I could go back to the way I used to feel, I’d be the happiest guy on the planet.”

  Clearly there were perils still to be survived, arrows he could fire into himself at will. He would have to tread softly, for all their sakes.

  Tory had her own room, with her stuff from Montreal, and after dinner she and the dog hung out in there, talking on the phone to her friends, surfing on her laptop, watching her own TV. When she came out she was friendly, a little wary, asked him how he was and could she get him anything. She pretended not to notice he was drinking beer. After a while she went to bed.

  He lay on the couch, trying to think, but it was hard with the pain building in his chest. He wished he could run. That used to be when he could sort things out, the sweat, the oxygen wiping his mind clean, sometimes leading to clarity. Something had to give. He couldn’t wait to get this part over with. In a year or two, it would all be different. Or he’d be dead. But yeah, one way or another, over with.

  Eventually he got in bed, where Tory was already asleep—he felt self-conscious lying there, like it was under false pretenses now. But he would probably feel that way in Abby’s bed now, too.

  In the morning, he went outside, into the dazzling heat, to check his morning glory vines, now twirling up the strings he had hung for them. They had no buds yet, but watching them grow was strangely comforting. He had also planted tomato seeds, and the shoots were poking up, growing vigorously and exuding a spicy scent if he touched them. All right. He would decide nothing till summer came.

  By the end of April, the bugs were already big enough to hear over the air conditioning, and one day he saw a bright blue lizard in the yard. Students had changed out of the pajamas they seemed to wear all semester, into their beach gear, girls in skimpy tank tops in class, even the hairiest boys in shorts.

  Before school let out, he had a bunch of trained-duck acts to do, reading gigs around the country, plus some local goofball palaver in a suit. He flew off to read in Washington, DC, and Tucson. In Miami, after finals, he gave the commencement address, no less, and the university presented Death Ranger to every graduate. At a fund-raising banquet for the local Poets in the Schools, he gave the keynote speech.

  Such events were harder since the pneumonia—clearly, his immune system was crashing, and other people were just walking petri dishes, double-dipping at the buffet. “Are you afraid of germs on doorknobs?” used to be a test for paranoia. But not anymore, in the age of AIDS, herpes, and antibiotic-resistant bacteria, when even strong men used paper seat covers in public restrooms and grocery stores gave out free antimicrobial wipes. Salad bars terrified him now, and reception lines were gauntlets of unwashed hands. Could he get a hazmat suit for ordinary life?

  Every day now he called Abby, and at her urging he went warily back to the Miami Dr. Death, to see if he had any new tricks. He did. The guy was young, with a Marine’s haircut and piercing green eyes, which took on a special gleam as he pulled out drawings of a thing he wanted to stick inside Ray’s chest. It was an electrical gadget about the size and shape of a hockey puck, and it would be wired to his heart, to make it work better.

  “It will also act as a built-in defibrillator if it stops,” the guy explained enthusiastically. “It’s an easy surgery, just a few hours, and you’ll be on your feet again in days, no sweat. You’ll feel better than you have in years. We can schedule it right now.”

  Ray shuddered, looking at the thing. It was supposed to go just under the skin, up near his collarbone, and he was so thin now, it would stick out like an oversize doorbell. And since his heart never acted as predicted, they had no idea what it might do to him. It could zap him all day long.

  “Thanks anyway. I’ll see if I can pull myself back up by less extreme measures.” He beat it out of there.

  Postcommencement, he gave a reading at Harvard, invited by Walt. The night he flew back to Miami, his plane landed just ahead of a giant storm, purple eyes on the weather-station map. Lightning revealed sudden statuary in the dark outside, thrashings of rain. In the morning it was in the low eighties, but it felt benign.

  He went out to check his morning glory vines. They were now producing four-inch bright blue blooms that would live only until that night, when they would wither up and die. It seemed important to appreciate each one, and he didn’t like to think of the ones he’d missed the day before.

  Tory was at work, and he took his typewriter out onto the porch and wrote a letter to Abby on the paint-color sample strips he had used after he bought the house.

  Six Heavenly Blues wide open this morning to the sun. Tiny hard green tomatoes on the vines. A wheelbarrow full of rain.

  And maybe I can get my life with you back together. Maybe you’ll never be able to forgive me. Maybe I won’t be able to forgive myself. But, Abby, you were my magnetic north for so long, I’m adrift now, close to the rocks.

  I know I’m going to ask Tory to leave, and that will be horrible since she has nowhere to go. Certainly I’m not asking you to feel sympathy for her. I’ve made this huge mess and everyone will suffer. I am so sorry.

  But maybe one day you’ll see this house that has your name misspelled on the title. And I’ll buy you a snow cone. I love you, always have, always will.

  Ray

  He put the strips in an envelope, addressed it to Abby, applied a stamp, and walked it to a mailbox before Tory came home—not to hide, but to observe a boundary.

  A few days later, the mailman brought a new issue of Poetry. The cover listed people whose work was to be found inside, and one of them was someone named A. Corbyn McCormick. What? Someone with almost Abby’s name? He flipped to the poem.

  Berkeley Performance Art

  In the park at dusk the very large black man

  comes up the dark cliff slope the same way

  that I did and sits on the bench where I do

  my triceps dips, facing the band of brilliant red

  above the Golden Gate, my white female

  body prone on yoga mat, crushing the grass, self-

  consciously not turning to look, but aware of his

  enormous height, the clothes all black, his muscles

  double mine, the empty park, the dark. He turns to see if

  I watch him, and what must that be like, to make people

  afraid because you take a walk? Both of us wear white

  ear buds, white wires to phones, and what if that is Bach

  in his, he on a research fellowship in music or psychiatry?

  I flip over to do push-ups, exuding strength, as I have been advised,

  though that did not work for the Central Park jogger, and I hate

  it that I think of her. He stands up, walks closely by, glances,

  self-consciously snapping his fingers to the music in his ears,

  neither of us person to the other, unable to use our common tongue,

  though we both understand the transaction that has occurred,

  as I move quickly to the bench to do my triceps dips and leave,

  and he slowly retreats into the dark—maybe to return

  in bright sunlight, tossing a Frisbee for a dog,

  to prove something, the same as I.

  That sounded suspiciously like Abby’s work of the old days, and wasn’t that more or less her name? And the shape of the poem, like a vase, like Keats’s urn. She had always cared about the shapes. And the prissily fastidious grammar, the I at the end instead of me—that was his Abby, too.

  Excitedly, he texted her. “Criminy
did you get a poem in Poetry and not tell me? It sure sounds like you. Way to go, Beanie! But what’s with the name?”

  She wrote back and admitted that she had, but she did not explain the name. Probably she had wanted to see what would happen if she was anonymous and did not use his fame, or her own from her first book.

  It seemed like an omen, or the clincher. That night at dinner, he told Tory he was going to California to see Abby.

  “I guess I’ll look for my own place,” she said. She had been offered summer teaching at a private school and would soon be making more.

  He felt a rush of fatherly protectiveness. “Take your time, no rush. Wait till you find something nice. And if the rent’s too much, I’ll help you for a while.”

  He flew to San Francisco, feeling extremely quiet inside, calmer than he had been since before Tory. He was completing the circuit he had started two years earlier, betraying Abby with Tory, now Tory with Abby. Or did this act, this doubling back, erase the other one, the errant stray off course?

  Abby waited for him past security, in attractive clothes he’d never seen, light summer draperies, her pale hair softly waved and longer than before. She looked thinner, but her blue eyes shone, and they locked onto his from fifty yards away. It was like it had always been for them in airports, since the early 1980s, back when they could meet each other at the gate. Both of them grinned.

  He stood in front of her, and she slid into his arms and pressed her lips to his. It felt so right, he just let everything fly from his mind.