The Use of Fame

by Cornelia Nixon

  “Abby, Ray’s heart has crashed. They’ve got him on life support. He’s been unconscious since this morning, apparently.”

  Agitated, Abby shot out of bed and hobbled to the living room, where she called Nell in New York.

  “Are you going to Miami?” Nell asked right away.

  Abby wondered why she didn’t think of that—she must have been in shock. She called the airlines, tried to get a special fare, told them it was her husband in the ICU (close enough! They’d been divorced for what, three weeks?). They wanted to know the name of his doctor and the hospital, and she cursed herself for not asking him. Couldn’t she have seen this day coming?

  She called Johnny’s cell—Johnny would know. He might even be there already.

  “I’ll ask Tory,” Johnny said. “Let me know where you’re staying when you come. We can have dinner.”

  Abby choked on the words. “What’s Tory doing there? She went to Harvard!”

  “She came back. He was just too sick. He needed someone to take care of him.”

  Outrage flooded her. “Why didn’t he tell me? I can’t believe he’d ask a stranger to do that, after all these years. He should let me take care of him!”

  Johnny’s voice was mildly impatient. “What, and drop your teaching job? You know you can’t do that, Abby. But listen, I’ll ask her who his doctor is and call you back.”

  All right, fine. She and Tory could forgive each other, think only of what was best for him. She imagined tearfully embracing Tory in the hospital, both of them loving him, and he so close to death.

  While she waited to hear back from Johnny, she called the knee surgeon—flying was on the list of things she wasn’t supposed to do for a few days.

  The surgeon called her back himself. “It’ll probably be fine. Just drink lots of water and stay off of it whenever possible. Use the wheelchair option. Roll through the airport in style.”

  With the focus of a mom about to lift a truck off her toddler, she hobbled to her closet, pulled out a suitcase, and threw clothes in it.

  Johnny called her back, sounding bemused and hesitant, which he never was.

  “Um. Did you know they were married?”

  Impossible. Ray had promised he wouldn’t marry her the second they were divorced. And he would have told her, wouldn’t he? He would have told!

  Her voice had to fight through a series of Houdini locks. “Did you know already? Did he tell you?”

  “No. I just found out, from Tory. And, Abby?” Johnny said. “You can still come. Tory knows it’s a fucked-up situation. But I have to tell you, she has talked to his doctors and gotten you barred from the ICU. So you won’t be able to see him.”

  An eagle had ripped out her heart, leaving torn arteries, lungs sucking air from the wrong end. And yet it was Ray’s heart they were going to do that to, and she would not be there. Some girl had barred her from his hospital.

  She could not take it in. She was exactly where she had been before he ever told her about Tory, in the dark, prepared for nothing. And he was gone, unconscious, maybe never to wake up.

  Johnny sent her an email, misspelling her name as he always did. He put it into lines like a poem.

  Dear Abbie,

  I am so sorry for your grief and how complicated and paradoxical

  and tragic all this is. I know Ray loves you and always will love you.

  Never through the last two years did I hear Ray say anything but

  that he loved you—through some hard times.

  That said, I don’t think you should go to Miami.

  You seem too turbulent in your emotions, too full of too many strong, mixed feelings

  for it to be useful, either to you or Ray or Tory. And his life is

  so precariously balanced right now, that the slightest upset could turn it.

  Of course, you’ve got to do what you have to.

  I told Tory that you plan on coming.

  She called Johnny and said, all right, she wouldn’t go.

  “Why did she do it?” she managed to ask. “Bar me from the ICU?”

  Johnny sounded impatient. “Because of all those angry text messages, of course. She assumed you were coming to have some sort of confrontation with him.”

  She still had Tory’s cell number, from the days when it appeared six hundred times on her phone bill. That night, in grief and despair, she sent her a text.

  “Tory, I feel for what you’re going through. But you have misjudged me if you think I needed to be barred from the ICU. Ray is not good at describing people, and he has given you a scary image of me. I was coming there so that you, Ray, and I could make peace before he dies. And if you wonder why I would do that, there are things you don’t understand.”

  Like that Tory had loved him for ten minutes and Abby for a thousand years. She probably didn’t know that he and Abby were still in constant touch. And that Ray had said when Tory went to Cambridge, that would be the end.

  Ten minutes later Johnny called, incensed.

  “No! You are not to text Tory! Don’t do it! No!” he shouted, as if she were a dog he was swatting on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper.

  Stunned with disbelief, Abby lay facedown on the couch, weeping.

  Walt called from Cambridge. “Tory’s sending email bulletins. I asked her to put you on the list, so check and see if you got them.”

  She checked and called him back.

  “No,” she whispered, unable to muster greater breath.

  “Okay, I’ll forward them to you. I’m sorry, Abby.”

  She thanked him, clinging to that thread, all she was allowed.

  The emails came from Walt. In the address box was a long list of people she had never heard of, friends of Tory, she supposed. She herself was not on the list.

  As the days went by, Ray was still out cold, machines pumping his blood. From the forwarded emails, she learned that he had been rated 1A for the transplant, top of the line. But when his heart failed, so did his liver and kidneys, which made him too sick to withstand surgery, so he had been downgraded. He needed to recover first.

  “He’s still unconscious,” Tory wrote. “But his color’s getting better. He’s recovering and getting stronger. They slightly upgraded his rating today. He’s at 1B now, still waiting to become 1A. When he gets there, we just have to wait for a match.”

  One day when Tory was too busy to write, one of her young friends did it.

  “I got to see Ray for the first time in here,” the other girl chirped, sounding like she would dot the i’s with hearts. “And his hair looked great! As soon as he wakes up, I’m going to tell him that!”

  Walt sent that to Abby and called her. “Have we turned him over to the kids? He seems to be surrounded by strange teenagers. Is there anyone he actually knows with him?”

  “Maybe Johnny,” Abby said. But she wasn’t checking in with Johnny, since he slapped her on the nose.

  Finally, after ten days, her phone went ping.

  It was Ray. “Awake again and more robotic than ever. Ticker did a belly flop and isn’t coming back. So I’m on this damn machine till I get a heart. How’s the knee?”

  How could he care about her knee? She had already gone for a hike with Ginger, while he was still hanging in the balance, unconscious, almost dead.

  She didn’t have to think about it—she knew she’d never mention what went on when he was out. The time for complaints was done.

  “OMG, I’m so glad you’re awake,” she wrote. “That was extremely scary, sweetheart! Don’t do that again!”

  That night Walt sent the latest from Tory. “He woke up today and got moved up to 1A! So now we’re in constant surgical readiness, just waiting for a match.”

  Abby didn’t often pray, but now she did, on her knees beside the bed—meanly, selfishly, for a motorcycle accident near Miami and the death of a strong young man with a perfect heart and no helmet.

  Walt asked Tory again to put Abby on the email list, but she did not.

>   So Abby wrote to Ray. “Honey, could you ask Tory to put me on the email list? I need a source of news when you’re unconscious. Walt’s been forwarding them, but he shouldn’t have to.”

  He did not reply, nothing that could be construed as critical of his new wife. But next day, like magic, she got two copies of the email, one from Walt, the other from Tory.

  Weeks later, Ray wrote to her that he was still waiting for a match. But they let him leave the hospital, with a portable version of the machine that was keeping him alive.

  When he got home, he emailed Abby himself, and often texted her, sounding much quieter than usual. She asked him to describe the machine. Size of a big canister vacuum, he said, and he had to take it everywhere he went, even into the shower, because if he wasn’t hooked up to it, he would instantly die. But he didn’t call it the fucking machine or the damn device or anything like what he used to say. He didn’t curse at all.

  “Thing tocks all the time,” he wrote. “And the tubes go right into my chest. But it’s keeping me alive, so I can’t complain.”

  “I’m praying for a heart,” she wrote.

  “You, praying?”

  “Yeah. It’s come to that.”

  It made her cry, just to get a text from him, any text, because it meant he was still alive. Every day she expected to hear he’d gotten a new heart. Every day she did not hear that. Every day he had to drag around that canister vac.

  Walt sent her a link to a new website, set up by Sateesh, asking for donations for Ray’s heart transplant. It included a moving essay by Johnny, who told of Ray’s accomplishments and the nature of his condition, which he called “hypotrophic cardiomyopathy”—when it was the opposite, hypertrophic, too big rather than too small, though the result was ventricles clogged up with muscle. Had Johnny even asked Tory? Or did Tory have it wrong herself?

  Johnny wrote that the transplant would cost seven hundred thousand dollars, and though Ray had health insurance through his job, it would stop far short of that. So he needed money, and fund-raising events were being organized across the country, with major poets reading Ray’s work and suggested donations by those who went. One was set for UC Berkeley, organized by the college librarian.

  Abby sent him an email. “I was married to Ray for twenty-seven years, until two months ago. I understand his work as well as anyone, and I would love to read from it.”

  She did not hear back for weeks.

  Finally the librarian wrote, “No. The participants have already been set.”

  Period. Not one word after that. Was it Tory blocking her again? Or Sateesh and Gloria? Did everyone they know think she was evil now?

  At least Walt and Clarice were still her friends, and they were flying in to read at the Berkeley benefit. Walt wrote to ask if she was going to be there.

  “Of course,” she said to that.

  But when the night arrived, her flag flew about an inch above the floor, and she knew she would just be a spectacle, weeping, distraught. So she stayed home, though half a mile downhill, people were celebrating the books Ray wrote when he was with her.

  Next day, Clarice and Walt took her out to lunch. At close to seventy, Walt was still handsome, tall and dark, and he had courted the beautiful Clarice when his first marriage fell apart. They took her to Chez Panisse and told her about the reading the night before.

  Proudly Clarice said, “I read ‘Say Cheese,’ and I started out by saying, ‘This poem is from a book that’s dedicated to Abigail McCormick, to whom Ray Stark was married for almost three decades.’”

  Walt had also gone to the benefit in Miami, and he described it to Abby. “Afterward there was a party at his house, and I sat next to him on the couch for a long time, but he wouldn’t talk to me. It was really strange. I called him several times after that and he never called me back. I sent him emails, too, asking what was going on, why he wasn’t talking to me anymore, and he finally wrote back. Know what he said? He said when I was there in Miami, I talked too pointedly about you.”

  Abby felt oddly humbled by this, sort of shrunken, like she was Thumbelina now. Ray almost worshipped Walt and loved him as much as any of his friends. But he had cut him off simply for talking about her—as if he should not have to be reminded she was still alive. As if his friends had to take a loyalty oath and never speak to her again.

  “How did he seem?” she asked in her new tiny Thumbelina voice.

  “He’s not the same person. He holds himself completely differently, protectively. It’s as if he’s trying to keep everything extremely quiet, like a loud noise could kill him. And of course he has to drag that machine everywhere. He doesn’t even play music now.”

  Abby was amazed—Ray without music? He really must not be the same person.

  Walt had brought along a copy of Miami Living magazine. The cover photo was of Ray, looking pale and wan and very young, like a sick teenager, taken on what she recognized as his front porch. But it was a close-up, only of his face, not showing the vacuum cleaner or the tubes attached to him.

  Inside was an interview with him and Tory Grenier Stark, the heroic young wife who never left his side, and Abby skimmed it in the restaurant. There was no mention of how long they had been married (three months). As they talked about their trials, she and Ray used we constantly, meaning the two of them. They sounded plucky and happy, as if adversity had made them close.

  Walt studied his wineglass for a while. “Why did he do it? Do you understand? Why did he cut you off like that?”

  Abby had no answer at first. But she tried. “I think he felt he had permission, like a dying heart means never having to say you’re sorry. And he needed something big, a great male fantasy, to get him through it. Of course he also needed someone to take care of him. I should have figured out a way to be the one.”

  Walt shook his head. “It wasn’t because he needed a nurse. He told me he wanted to marry her a couple of years ago.”

  Abby hid behind her water glass, sorry he had felt the need to clear that up. She could see the shine begin in her own eyes, light refracted through salt water. So marriage meant nothing.

  Eventually she said, “So he’s happy now, with his young wife.”

  Walt looked surprised. “Happy? No. He’s not happy. I bet he wakes up every day and thinks, ‘Where am I?’”

  She didn’t think that Walt was right—if Ray had gone on wanting to marry Tory, why did he ask her to move out and come back to Abby for a while?

  But Abby blew it after that—she had been delusional, she could see that now. After she left Miami that last time, she had really believed he would come back, and it had sustained her, for almost a year. But it was a year in which he got too sick, and Abby wasn’t there. She’d abandoned him, for what? For failing to introduce her one time as his wife, when she should have gone on leave and moved to Florida to care for him. She should have put up with Tory’s proximity. Maybe then when Ray moved her to Harvard, she would have stayed.

  Abby hated when people used fight and struggle and battle in reference to something personal, an overblown military metaphor. But she should have fought for him. She should have put away her hurt, armored herself, and waded in to fight to save his life. Instead she was the princess with the pea under her mattress, and because of that she was alone at sixty-three, childless, and close to washed-up socially.

  But she had friends, a few—Ginger here, Nell in New York, Clarice and Walt in Providence. One thing for sure, she would never take anyone for granted again. She would appreciate every second that she spent with friends.

  “Maybe he’ll get a heart that works this time,” her friends liked to quip, long after that ceased to be original.

  Late January, three months after his heart collapsed, Tory’s updates were about complications from the vacuum cleaner, which had put him in the hospital several times. “We have expanded the parameters for a heart. Because he is so thin, he could take a woman’s heart now, and we’ve widened the age range.”

 
; Abby texted him anxiously. “This is going on too long. It’s horrible to think of you hooked up to that machine every second of the day, making that tocking sound.”

  “Yes, it’s obnoxious. But I’m alive and this ordeal could end anytime. Thank you for your concern. I hope you’re well,” he wrote back, just as he probably did to unknown well-wishers and donors every day.

  February 15, Abby was in New York. Her publisher was hosting a benefit for Ray at St. Mark’s, and this time she was invited to come read his work. Three hundred people showed up, lots of them his friends or hers, and all the friends hugged her.

  Exhausted from weeping and hugging and grinning, she had just returned to her hotel room, about to meet people in the bar downstairs, when her phone rang.

  It was Walt. “He got a heart.”

  Abby started to cry all over again, grinning wide. “When? How? Tell me!”

  “Last night. Twenty-two-year-old guy from Tallahassee. They had Ray on the table with his chest open by the time they flew it down, and when they put it in him, it started beating on its own right away. Very good sign, apparently. It was an eight-hour surgery, and he’ll be unconscious for a while. But it’s about as good as it can get.”

  Abby raced downstairs, eyes streaming, wanting to tell the world.

  She had a vision of Ray, on the day when they would let him stand up from his wheelchair, feeling better than he had in years. She could see his face, just the way it was in a picture his mother had showed her. He was six years old and sitting on a chair by a Christmas tree, in candy-striped feet pajamas, grinning with delight.

  His face had looked that way again on a Christmas eve thirty years later, in Morgantown. A few months before, they had gone to Boston, and at the Museum of Fine Arts they saw a little elegant bronze snake from ancient Greece, which Ray had loved. Abby had secretly ordered a replica of it, hid it away, and wrapped it for Christmas.

  She could never surprise him with a gift—he always figured them out. Curious as any kid, he’d snoop around wrapped packages until he knew. But the little narrow box under the tree stumped him, though he had poked and sniffed at it for days.