The Use of Fame Read online

  Copyright © 2017 by Cornelia Nixon

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Nixon, Cornelia, author.

  Title: The use of fame : a novel / Cornelia Nixon.

  Description: Berkeley, CA : Counterpoint, [2017]

  Identifiers: eISBN 9781619022294

  Subjects: LCSH: Married people—Fiction. | Domestic fiction. | BISAC: FICTION

  / Literary. | FICTION / Family Life. | FICTION / Contemporary Women.

  Classification: LCC PS3564.I94 U84 2017 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017005018

  Jacket design by Jarrod Taylor

  Book design by Neuwirth & Associates

  eISBN 9781619022294

  COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

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  CONTENTS

  Title

  Copyright

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  One

  “What’s the use of all this fame if we’re not getting laid?” asked Johnny, leaning his chair back on its hind legs.

  Ray was eating, so he just looked at him. The night before, they had read together at the 92nd Street Y, and now they were at a deli in the Garment District, a place that made good grub, okay for a guy like Ray, who grew up on top of a coal mine and knew what he liked. He was scarfing a Reuben, salty grease of pastrami in his mouth, cut by the acidic crunch of sauerkraut and the sweet, creamy Russian dressing oozing down his chin. Between bites, he had just needled Johnny about the girl he saw him put into a cab that morning, outside of their hotel—she looked about twenty-three, Japanese and tiny, with long, silky black hair. There was a party for them after the reading, but Ray had left early, went back to the hotel, called Abby, and turned in. Johnny must have met her after that.

  Ray chewed fast and swallowed, so he could talk. “So, who was she anyway?”

  Johnny didn’t answer, only shrugged.

  Ray shook his head—it was like Johnny still wanted to be the guy he was decades ago, when he had hair, and Ray’s wasn’t shot with white. When Ray could run twelve miles in the hot sun, have sex three times a day, and his face was never gray, the way it had looked in the mirror this morning.

  Johnny pointed to the dressing on his chin.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Ray said.

  Jesus, Johnny was as finicky as Abby, who would have handed him a napkin. Johnny didn’t come from coal mines—his dad was some kind of lawyer, and he ate like a girl. He had barely finished a salad.

  When he polished off the Reuben, Ray whisked the bread crumbs from his fingers and wiped his chin with the back of his hand. “So. Why do you do it anyway? Aren’t you afraid of wrecking it with Sarah?”

  Sarah was the woman Johnny had been with for years, a nice outdoorsy nurse, and he had finally married her the summer before. Of course, Johnny was weird about his space and kept a separate apartment, so he wouldn’t feel crowded. In Gainesville, where he taught, he and Sarah had places a few blocks apart. Ray couldn’t imagine it. When he and Abby taught in the same city, they slept together every night, breathing in sync, parts of them touching, sometimes dreaming the same thing. They had been married almost twenty-five years, and he slept the best like that.

  Johnny set his chair down lightly and peered at him. “What? Don’t tell me you’re getting old. It’s a choice, you know. Women are big medicine. You should give it a try. What about that Tory girl? You know you want to.”

  Ray sat up straighter and ran both hands back through his hair, to make it stand straight up. Yes, he had told Johnny about one of his grad students, a lovely girl who was imprinted on his brain. But he wasn’t going to talk about that now.

  “You know I don’t do that,” he said, with a dragging in his chest, like chains pulled through.

  Johnny laughed. “You sure as hell used to. Remember when you couldn’t go to the Porthole anymore?”

  It was true, before Abby, yes. Ray had spent nine years in Morgantown, as an undergrad, then working, then grad school, and the place had many lively bars, which he got into at first with a fake ID. Often he picked up a girl, slept with her once, and never called, which could make it tricky to go into certain bars. In those days he had straight blond hair down to his waist, and chicks seemed to go for it. It helped, too, that he lifted weights, which gave him shoulders on an otherwise linear frame. (“Mr. Stark has a flat butt,” his first-grade students tittered later on, when he was a Poet in the Schools.) He was still skinny, but losing the shoulders—compared to the past, he could barely lift these days. His heart was giving out, with probably the same condition that had killed his dad in his forties.

  “Did you walk in here?” a new doctor had lately asked, the first time she saw his test results. But at age fifty-two, he could still swim half a mile and work out on contraptions in the gym, way beyond heart-patient level—no one could explain it. As far as he was concerned, that meant doctors were just guessing about his heart.

  But being sick was not his style, and he would fight it all the way. Just not how Johnny would.

  Johnny watched him with a grin, still living in the past. “I always thought girls went for you because they wanted your looks. Jesus, that hair you had? It made them think theirs might get better if they only slept with you. Plus, you had the moves. You told me your technique. Of course you were witty and charming, and after a while you’d lean back casually. If she followed you, she was hooked, and you could kiss her right away.”

  “And now that’s what you do?”

  “Learn from the masters. But really, you could still get away with it. You know the women in that audience last night were there to get a look at you and swoon. I bet half of them can barely read.”

  Ray sat up straighter, looked away—this was just Johnny’s way of needling him back. Johnny knew he hated it when anyone mentioned his supposed looks in connection with the work. He wanted to be a disembodied wraith, who left words like fairy shit on the page.

  It disturbed him, how readers wanted poets to look good, maybe because they all stood on stages, reading into microphones, giving talks at conferences. Still, this wasn’t Hollywood, but were there any ugly poets being read these days? Ginsberg in the fifties, yes, but no one he could think of now. Well, at least he was getting older and funnier-looking every day—he’d started to get nose hair he had to trim, and though he kept his mop short now, the coarse white threads made it extremely unruly. “What was his hair doing?” his students asked each other, about some sighting of him. If people bought his books anyway, that meant they really liked the
work.

  Johnny was still talking, not having noticed Ray said nothing back. “You know you haven’t changed. You’re still an ecstatic type. You just express it differently. Remember Fucking Houdini?”

  Ray suppressed the urge to smile—that was a night, all right. He had been what, twenty? Still getting into bars as Eugene Cassini. He and Johnny were in college then at West Virginia U, and that night they’d been doing shots and snorting coke. When the bar closed, they went out into an alley, where Ray took a piss against a wall. He was still splashing pee when a cop car turned in, and two guys got out and cuffed his hands behind his back, just as he felt the need to puke. He didn’t want it in his hair, so he crouched, lowered his bound wrists, stepped backward over them, raised them up his front over his head and down to the back of his neck, where he caught his mane into a pony tail and held it back.

  “Jesus, we’ve arrested fucking Houdini,” one cop said, and took him away to book.

  It was not the only time Ray ended up in jail. He had contempt for moderation then—he wanted to fly, and in fact did, jumping out of planes too many times to count. He’d get stoned on dope or coke, ride some rattletrap into the sky and be the first one out, screaming as he fell, and wait till the last second before he pulled the cord. There was nothing like it, and he never wanted it to stop. For a while, to finance it, he had sold dope to frat boys, till the night his supplier laid a gun on the table. That was his first whiff of mortality, but he’d had plenty since. These days, if he woke up in the night, he looked straight into death.

  Johnny squinted at him, like he was too far away to see. “You used to quote Baudelaire to me, as you ordered the eighteenth round for everyone. ‘One should always be drunk, with wine, with poetry, with virtue, as you choose. But get drunk.’”

  Johnny kept going on about that for a while—he could be a bit of a village explainer, and in his new hearing aid, way loud—his workshop students must have felt a bit browbeaten. Johnny was sure of himself for good reason—he was smart as a whip—but students didn’t respond that well to whipcracks.

  And women—how was he still getting them? Well, he did look pretty good. Johnny was a big, broad-shouldered Viking with impish eyes and a rueful smile, below a wide, full, platinum mustache that completely hid his upper lip. It was such a good mustache it seemed to make up for the fact that his formerly reddish hair had disappeared, leaving a gleaming head of skin, and young poetry wannabes tried to copy it. Some chicks were maybe willing to overlook a bit of explaining to get close to Johnny and his famous ’stache.

  When he finally paused, Ray said, “Notice he doesn’t mention girls.”

  Johnny shook his head as if in disbelief. “He doesn’t have to. It’s implied, whatever gets you high. For me it’s finding out about strange women, what they’re like, the endless possibilities.”

  Ray shuddered, imagining the complications, how scrambled he would feel. He needed an empty mind to write, every morning of his life, to let language grab hold of him and fling him into outer space. That was the ecstasy he needed now: the riot of words, their insanity, and what you could make them do or do to you. Johnny had reviewed his last book, and it was a great tribute—he had called him “a fire engine of language,” though Ray thought he’d rather be its arsonist. He wasn’t into rules, conventions, traditions—he liked to disrupt them. That meant people didn’t always get his poetry, but that was by design—he wasn’t writing for the bozos. Death-Ray Stark, that’s who he was, a suicide bomber in the marketplace of poetry.

  Funny that he and Johnny still liked each other. Johnny wrote more conventional stuff, often focused on the news, about some question like the overuse of therapy or climate change or consumerism in America. His style was plain and clear, no tricks—he thought everything in a poem had to have a reason, or possibly even be reasonable. Didn’t Wallace Stevens already make a debacle of the rational, not to mention Rimbaud?

  But Johnny made no sudden moves of the kind Ray liked, no experiments with words. Johnny tried hard to tell the truth, about whatever he observed, and his own unreliable feelings. He was cynical as hell, but at least he could be funny, too, in a sly, ironic way. The night before was the first time they had read together, and it went off pretty well. They had picked on each other and got some laughs.

  He felt Johnny scrutinizing him.

  “You know what?” Johnny said. “You were lucky. You found a woman as good-looking as you, who could be your twin sister, in fact, and she was not some dumb blonde. And you got to marry her. You got to marry the love of your life. Most people don’t.”

  Ray’s sick heart lurched—he reached for his glass of beer. Was Abby still that? It was true, when she had first showed up in Morgantown, as young Professor McCormick, tall and willowy in a pencil skirt, he had fallen hard for her. He had never wanted anyone so much as he did Abby then (or not till now—but he put that thought aside). Abby had liked the important stuff: beer, grub, sex, and him. She laughed at all his jokes and loved his work. He couldn’t get enough of her.

  She was eight years older than he was, but she had never looked it, and even at sixty, she was still pretty, and so deep inside of him he might never get her out. She was his life, in fact. She had anchored him for decades, and losing her would be like death, of who he was.

  So what the fuck was he doing now? For a year, he’d had it bad for Tory Grenier, and it felt like eating his own liver. Yesterday she took the train down from Montreal, where she had moved after leaving Brown. They had walked around the Upper East Side, holding hands, and kissed for the first time, on the street. But then he sent her back. He could never stand up to read into a microphone if she were there.

  Johnny shook his head. “I don’t get you sometimes. You’re a conundrum. A guy who flings himself out of airplanes, and sleeps with a hundred girls, then just one woman for half your life? I can’t imagine it. It would threaten the structure of my personality. I need more room to breathe.”

  “And you don’t think you’re a conundrum, too? Or an enigma, better still. It’s true of everyone, even to ourselves.”

  Johnny shook his head. “You’re no enigma, pal, and neither am I.”

  That cheered Ray up—he loved to argue with Johnny. “Oh, yeah? Tell me one true thing about myself.”

  “Sure. You’re a touchingly needy person. That’s why you’ve hung on to Abby so hard, and why you don’t, shall we say, develop other interests. You’re afraid you’d fly to pieces if you lost her.”

  That arrow hit Ray’s solar plexus, but he didn’t let it show. “That’s because you think personalities have structures. I’m already in pieces, and so are you. I can’t be contained in any envelope. I explode in all directions. And you? You’re nothing but contradictions. You need space, and when you get some, a whole hotel room to yourself, you find some girl to fill it up.”

  Johnny knitted his brows. “You’re taking that too literally. And you’re sure as hell contained in the envelope of your marriage. That’s the thing I couldn’t stand, and that’s always been true of me. And you’re the same person from one year to the next. I’ve known you, what, thirty-three years? And you’ve always been Ray Stark, a recognizable entity, not just physically. Something’s holding that together.”

  “I don’t think so,” Ray said. “There’s no structure in me. I might be needy one second, but also not needy at all, and the next I’m solitary as a turtle. I’m more like a tornado, a typhoon, colliding atoms and chaos. And the reason I don’t sleep around is so I can try to find the eye of the storm.”

  They left the deli and walked briskly south, in the cold November air. Ray was glad they could still walk at least, long-legged with big strides, both of them in jeans and beat-up running shoes. Ray had on a threadbare overcoat, while Johnny wore a cardigan, bald pate lidded with a black beret.

  They made it to the Strand, where it smelled of old paper and ink. They showed each other
books they liked or hated, and talked about the friends who had shown up at the reading and the ones who couldn’t, because they were too far away, teaching at Texas, Arizona, or Iowa—people Ray knew from writers conferences, and readings, and because other poets had introduced them to him. Some of them were as bad as Johnny when it came to women. They operated like the sloth brain of the poetry world.

  Hank, for instance, who was Ray’s colleague at Brown—Hank had slept with a lot of girl students. He used to work the oil fields in Montana, and he still drove a beat-up pickup truck, but now he wrote fine poems about the ocean and its mysteries, about dolphins’ songs and gliding, glinting schools of fish. They had helped him win Priscilla Duffield, a beautiful and elegant woman whose work got the kind of attention Ray didn’t even want. Who needed rave reviews in the lying New York Times? And poems in the New Yorker, with its bland suburban taste? Though Priscilla’s weren’t bland—they were dense and allusive, philosophical to the point of being almost impenetrable—Ray was sure they flummoxed matrons everywhere.

  Maybe the editors at the New Yorker just had the hots for her (and there it was again, the confusing of talent with looks). They had printed a full-page photo of her face, and Ray and Abby saw it once in a furniture store, cut from the magazine, framed, and propped on a side table.

  Priscilla was only five years older than Ray, but she had a lot more clout in the poetry world—she used to be in charge of the program at Brown. Hank had come a long way from the oil fields, and he and Priscilla led a glamorous life, with good-looking kids, a big house on a brick street in Providence, and a place on Martha’s Vineyard, where to be invited was almost as big an honor as the Guggenheim. But did that stop Hank screwing around? Ray knew because Hank talked about it. At Brown everyone seemed to know, and probably Priscilla did, too.

  This had gone on for years, until Priscilla had enough. She started her own affair, not with a student but with a Stanford poet named James Poore, and she conducted it right under Hank’s nose. Poore stayed with them on the Vineyard, bodysurfed with Hank, masqueraded as a family friend, and wangled a job offer for Priscilla at Stanford. The semester she decided to go, Ray and Abby had sat through brunches, dinners, late-night drinks with Hank and Priscilla as they argued, she maintaining she was doing it only to send their kids to Stanford free. The argument was still in progress after her first year in Palo Alto, and Hank got so worried he stopped chasing girls. And then, six months ago, Priscilla had flown to Jamaica, snatched a quick divorce, and married Poore.