The Use of Fame Read online

  Abby tried not to shout. “And I’m supposed to worry about her feelings? You’ve sent her four hundred messages in the past month. You said you were going to have no more contact with her. You’ve been lying to me!”

  Face pale, he collapsed onto the bed. “I did not lie. I said I would have no contact with her for a month, and that’s what I did.”

  “You’ve heard of lies of omission? You didn’t tell me you were back in touch. And emails, too, I bet, all of it white hot, as only Romeo and Juliet can be, separated by the ogre wife. Please, now will you go sleep with her? That’s how to find out if it’s real. Sleep with her, wake up with her, see what she’s really like. There’s nothing the slightest bit real about what you’re doing now.”

  “Jesus, Abby, it’s only texts. I need time to work through it.”

  “Four hundred messages is working through it?”

  He looked at her grimly. “I told you I was in love with her. I’ve been going through hell over it, on top of all the shit at Brown. It takes time.” He closed his mouth in a straight determined line and just gazed at her for a while. “And I am going to McGill in April. I’ll see her one last time.”

  Abby felt like she might faint. She knew he had been invited to read in Montreal, but she thought he had canceled it, because Tory was there. Speechless, she stared at him.

  He sighed. “I know. But it’s just professional. I won’t see her alone. She’s coming with several of her friends.”

  When she still said nothing, he rubbed his face with both hands. “Bean, I’m doing my best. I want to stay with you. But you have to let me work through this my way.”

  When he flew back to Providence, Abby lived in dread, powerless to stop his trip to Montreal. Had she ever had any influence on him? If she had, it was now stretched too thin, with the distance between their jobs. She didn’t think she could ever get it back.

  And yet Ray called her every night and sent her texts all day. When it was time for him to go to Canada, they texted back and forth. That night, after the reading, he called her late, half asleep in his hotel room, and said it all went fine.

  “Was Tory there?”

  “Yes,” he said tensely.

  “Did you talk to her?”

  “In a group, with her friends. But I will see her alone tomorrow for an hour. It’ll be the last time. I owe her that.”

  Abby wanted to reach through the phone and wring his neck. Had he planned that innocent hour all along?

  “For what? She tried to end our marriage. Tell her thanks a million and get lost!”

  “Easy, Bean. She’ll drive me to the airport and that’ll be it. I won’t see her again.”

  There was nothing she could do. She needed to prepare for class, and she could not sit still. Reading as she paced the living room, she was too miserable to take much in. Finally she set the alarm for 6:00 a.m., took a Xanax and an Ambien, and washed them down with vodka, hoping for oblivion.

  Nine

  The next night, when Ray got back to his house in Providence, he barely had the strength to stick his key into the lock and turn. He felt sick, his whole body in pain, not just his chest—he was used to pain around the heart, but this radiated out to all his veins. Saying good-bye to Tory at the airport felt like the hardest thing he’d ever done. She had cried as he held her, her sweet-smelling, silky hair against his lips. He had not been able to say he would never see her again.

  “I know it’s not the end,” he had said fiercely. “It’s not the end. I have to see you again.”

  Jesus Christ, did other men go through this kind of shit, to stay married? Was that how it was done? It was exhausting to think about, the amount of pain smeared across the landscape, men staggering like zombies, stricken to their kidneys, the image of some girl engraved onto their hearts. It was bad enough when you just wanted them, and they were oblivious to you. But when they loved you back? Man, that could kill a guy stronger than him.

  In his mailbox was a postcard from Johnny, made from the cover of Ray’s latest book, Death Ranger, modified to read Death Deranger. Collaged onto it was a photo of Ray with a demented grin and a subtitle, New and Selected Tantrums. That was probably because of an argument they’d had lately through the mail, Johnny maintaining that language could and should refer to things and not go off ravening across the landscape, ripping up trees and spawning new life-forms, the way Ray liked. On the back of the postcard, Johnny wrote, You should listen to your friend Johnny, not yourself.

  Well, thank God for Johnny, even if he insisted on lining himself up with the most boring bourgeois pundits. He was good for a laugh anyway. And Ray seriously needed a laugh right then.

  He called Abby, gave her a terse report, then drank five beers, staring miserably at basketball on his small TV, hoping the alcohol would knock him out. It didn’t. He wished he could have the next few months surgically removed, so he wouldn’t have to go through them, the withdrawal cold turkey from love—Why cold turkey? Better cold octopus, cold clam, cold platypus—withdrawal cold platypus from love. But the sooner he got it over with, the sooner he could start recovering. Time to rip it out.

  At 3:00 am, tears running down his face, chest throbbing, he started on his sixth beer. Who cared? He couldn’t help himself—he had to say something to Tory, one last time. Just one more text.

  “My dearest, only darling,” he wrote. “I will love you forever, and you had better love me, too, forever and ever, you got that? With all your heart. But it has to be the end. It has to be. It can’t go on. I love you with my bone marrow, my spleen, my toenails, but it has to be the end. I’m sorry.”

  Weeping harder, he pressed “Send.”

  Half a minute later, his phone lit up, making cricket chirps—Abby’s ring. What was she doing up, at midnight in Berkeley? He answered it.

  She sounded alarmed. “Was that a suicide note?”

  Panic lashed him. “Was what a suicide note?”

  “You said you would love me forever and I had to love you, too, but it had to be the end. You said you can’t go on.”

  Ray tried to speak and had no voice. He cleared his throat. What the hell had he just done? On his phone were messages from Tory but also from his wife, right next to each other, because he often wrote them both at almost the same time. His clumsy finger must have tapped on the wrong one, before he started to write.

  “My God. That was not for you. That was for Tory.”

  Her voice hit a high C. “You love her with your bone marrow, your spleen, your toenails? You’re going to love her forever? What do I have to do to make this stop, kill myself? For God’s sake, go be with her. I’m done. Good-bye!”

  She hung up, and Ray immediately called her back. Had she just said she was going to kill herself?

  He listened to her phone ringing. On his end it sounded like an old-fashioned ring—but not on hers. On hers, it would be that absurd and hateful duck quacking. Was she laughing at him, setting it like that? The call went to voicemail, and he hung up, called back. Quack quack quack.

  For an hour, he continuously tried her phone. He wanted to scream, fling his through the glass French doors that led nowhere, just to two uncomfortable, overlong steps down to a cracked patio and bare brown lawn, traumatized by winter and not yet spring, like a scene from hell. In Berkeley it would all be green and blooming by this time, roses and wisteria spilling over trellises, mock orange trees half drowning you in cloying sweet scent as you passed.

  Why was he here, in a place where no one wanted him? What had he done to deserve this exile from his life, so far away he could not stop his wife from whatever she might do? Pills, probably—she had a deep stash. The last few months, she had been hooked on Ambien, and after she took it, she would fall asleep and then get up and walk around, doing and saying things she would not recall in the morning. The bottle said not to drink on it, but of course she did. She scoffed hubristically at labels that said not to, as if getting past the lupus made her a medical expert.

 
; It actually crossed his mind to call the cops, which was insane, after the nights he’d spent in the drunk tank in Morgantown, when he had nothing to lose, and he was a guy. Abby was too vulnerable, both as a professor with a reputation to protect and a chick who could be hurt in ways they’d never try with him. But, good God, he had to do something.

  It was almost one o’clock in Berkeley, but the hell with that. Their downstairs neighbors seldom seemed to sleep, lights blazing in their place all night. He called them, but they did not pick up.

  So he called Joel, their friend across the hall. Joel was a divorced, aging historian, expert on intellectual trends in France, and a very measured guy, who had never done anything impulsive in his life. He kept his white hair trimmed precisely at three-quarters of an inch and never looked as if he’d had it cut. He worried about the correct attire for any occasion, what restaurants were trendy and which passé, and if drinking wheatgrass was still in fashion with the young? He was not asleep, and Ray asked him to please go check on Abby.

  “Our key’s in the lockbox if you need it,” Ray reminded him. The lockbox was in the basement, and all the owners’ keys were in there, and they all had keys to open it in emergencies.

  When Joel didn’t call back right away, Ray almost went insane.

  Finally his phone rang. Joel sounded nervous, like he could not decide the proper way to negotiate such a call.

  “Uh, Ray? I’m sorry to have to tell you, but I found Abby lying in the hall right outside my door, looking like she’d been beaten up. She was moaning, and I couldn’t rouse her. So I called 911. The ambulance just left.”

  Ray felt the blood drain from his brain—he almost passed out. “Where have they taken her? Is she all right?”

  “Well, she had this ugly purple bump on her cheekbone, like she’d slammed it into something. A hematoma, I guess you’d call it, like a big black knob. Black eyes, too, I’m guessing, by this time. The most disturbing thing was—”

  Joel stopped, as if embarrassed to go on.

  “What?!” Ray demanded.

  “Well, it’s just that she was in her nightgown, and it’s kind of sheer, and they wouldn’t get her a robe. I asked them to go into your place and get one, but they said, ‘We take them as they are.’”

  Ray couldn’t stand it. Abby had always worn these thin cotton gowns, white or pale blue, made of something called batiste, like for a little kid. And now she’d been hauled off like that and manhandled by a bunch of firemen and EMTs? And the lump on her head—how did she get that? What was she doing in the hall?

  He called the nearest hospital in Berkeley, but they wouldn’t tell him anything—maybe they didn’t have her yet. He waited half an hour and called again, but they didn’t recognize her name. Was she still out cold and couldn’t tell them? The place was incompetent—he and Abby knew two women whose husbands had died there unexpectedly, after botched surgeries. The summer before, Abby had spent two days there in the CCU, after a concussion when her horse threw her—though it wasn’t her head they were interested in. They had decided she had an ectopic pregnancy, when she was almost sixty—they wouldn’t stop giving her tests for it, and they kept her passive with a morphine drip. Finally Abby had asked Ray to take out her IV and go demand her clothes. As they walked out together, her doctor had protested that she had not been released. But the next day, she was fine.

  Every hour now, he called the ER there, still no luck, as the sky got light in Providence. Finally it occurred to him that, if they wouldn’t fetch her robe, they also didn’t get her purse, so they probably had no idea who she was—if she was there at all. He called all the other hospitals in the East Bay, but no one was treating her. What if she had run away from them and made it to a bridge somehow and jumped? Or got mugged on the way? He called her cell phone for the hundredth time.

  Ravaged from lack of sleep, he felt something yawning in his solar plexus.

  Trying to distract himself, he walked through the cold spring morning to his Providence café, got a decaf latte, and pulled out an article he had clipped from the San Francisco paper, about a supermassive black hole that had lately been confirmed by X-ray observations on satellites.

  He put it into lines to start a poem:

  Scientists concluded that the telescopes had witnessed

  the overpowering gravity of a black hole

  as it tore apart a star and gobbled up a hearty

  share of its gaseous mass. It was an act of stellar

  mayhem known as a stellar tidal disruption.

  It removed any lingering doubt that the reputation of black

  holes as star destroyers was fully deserved.

  The most awesome black holes, with densely packed

  masses equivalent to millions or billions of suns,

  are found at galactic cores. This one is estimated

  to have a mass of about 100 million suns.

  Don’t look at me like that.

  My wife has killed herself.

  Nothing else attached itself to that—he felt too sick to go on, even without that last line. Space always made him queasy, with that view of the blue marble glowing in black emptiness, black nothing without end.

  And what was a black hole but death, in its most violent form? And that was the core of every galaxy, the big black hole of death. Black holes had swallowed ninety billion humans in the past, and now they salivated for the rest of them, to suck them in, not only their lives and bodies but their minds, their thoughts and loves, every good thing. Like his marriage. Like his beloved Abby, who might already have been vaporized in one.

  How could people stand it who did not believe in God? Not the patriarch of Genesis, no, some guy spying on them from his throne and counting his time in days. But what about this infinity of species, all this consciousness and beauty, springing out of nothing on this rock, in just a couple of hundred million years? How could you think it did that by itself?

  Abby would say: “Spina bifida. HIV. Crib death. The guinea worm. What kind of god would allow all that? It’s only bearable if it’s just chance and no one’s fault.”

  That rock-bottom atheism seemed to sustain her somehow. But if that was all he had, he would go nuts. He was too aware of exploding stars and the billion galaxies you couldn’t even see. And when one hypothesis went belly-up, it didn’t mean the question was wrong. Only the answer you found. You had to try again.

  He put away his notebook—he’d come back to that on another, better day, to black holes and God and atheists, the one blue shining planet in the sky, and his beautiful wife. Just not today.

  Somehow, that afternoon, he had to lead a graduate workshop. He got himself to class but could barely speak, he had so little life-force left. On the break, he called Abby, but she did not pick up.

  After workshop, he dragged his body home, lay on the bed with an arm over his eyes as the early dark came down.

  He tried Abby again, and this time he shouted onto her voicemail. “How can you be so fucking irresponsible not to call and let me know you’re okay? You don’t have one shred of decency! You say you’re going to kill yourself, and then you get dead drunk, knock yourself out, and get taken off in an ambulance, and you don’t fucking let me know that you’re not dead?”

  Finally his phone rang.

  “I wasn’t drunk,” Abby said calmly. “I didn’t even have a hangover today. I just OD’d on tranquillizers and sleeping pills. I kept taking more, trying to feel better and calm down, but I ended up taking too much. I have a bruise on my cheek, and a black eye, but that’s it.”

  “And where the fuck have you been all day? Why haven’t you called me?”

  “I had a jumping lesson this morning. It was a good ride. And then I had to teach.”

  He wanted to scream. “You went to the barn and rode instead of calling me to say that you weren’t dead? What the hell were you thinking?”

  “Because I was through with you, of course. How dumb do you think I am? You told your girlfriend you wo
uld always love her and she was your only darling. That was a love letter posing as a breakup note. And I didn’t say I was going to kill myself. I said something stupid like ‘What do I have to do to make this stop, kill myself?’ Maybe there’s a threat in that, but it’s not very direct. And Joel did call this morning to see if I was okay. You could have found that out from him. Thanks a lot, by the way, for getting him involved and invading my privacy.”

  Ray was breathing too hard to answer for a minute. “I will not apologize for trying to save your life.”

  Her voice softened. “No, you don’t have to.”

  “What happened at the ER? What did they do?”

  “Nothing. They just let me sleep it off.”

  “How did you get home?” Ray suppressed a sob. “Joel told me you were just in your little nightie.”

  “They gave me three big flannel blankets and put me in a cab. They said I should keep the blankets.”

  Ray started to cry—God, how had he ever thought he did not love his wife? What had he done to her, and them? He had so fucked up his life!

  His voice was wobbly. “Why did you OD? Were you trying to kill yourself?”

  “No, not at all. I think I only took two of each. I was just trying to feel better. But my judgment was pretty impaired by then.”

  He wiped tears off his face with his bare hand, salt stinging the skin. “And how did you hit your head, do you know? You do tend to check out after you take your pills at night, even when it’s only one.”

  “I know. It’s really embarrassing. I have no idea how I did it or why I was in the hall in my nightgown. I might have gone down to get something from the laundry room, but why I didn’t wear a robe, I’ll never know. Or maybe I was trying to ask Joel for help, because I knew I’d taken too much, and I passed out on the way. I’ll tell you one thing, I’m getting off of pills, all of them. Never again.”

  “And you taught today with a black eye?”

  “Yes.” She sounded almost amused. “I said my horse tripped and fell on his head, and when he surged back up, he smacked my cheek with his hard noggin. You remember, that did happen once, but my helmet protected me. Any rider would see right through that.”