The Use of Fame Read online

  “Yeah, a little bit,” he said, and grinned. “How can you tell?”

  She snorted. “Because you always ask me what I want to be when I grow up, something like that.”

  He opened another bottle while he served dinner and kept their glasses filled. The piccata came out great, the salad a good balance of crisp and smooth, sweet and tart. He finished fast as usual, while Abby picked at it—she seemed to eat slower every year.

  But he jumped up and kept the music coming, on the living room system now. The DVD player was on the table, hooked to the screen, and he slid in the latest from Netflix and pushed “Play.”

  Abby tried to get between him and the screen. “Hey, if you’re going to watch a movie, could you turn the music off?”

  Instantly, unreasonably annoyed, he tried to ignore her. For five minutes, he didn’t move, and finally she got up and switched the music off.

  Why did she have to be such a killjoy anyway? She was always worried about the neighbors and what they thought. Why couldn’t she let him have his innocent pleasures? He let her have hers, and hers weren’t innocent. She’d spent how many thousands on that horse? And on a Porsche that gobbled up over a thousand bucks every time she took it to the shop. She drove the thing to the barn and left him stranded here without even a way to go to the grocery store. She stole his Stanford check!

  Calmly, keeping breathing, eyes on the screen, he thought it through. He was going to be the goddamn Harrington Chair of Poetry, and it was time he got some respect, at home as well as in the world. They would live by his rules. Starting with the horse.

  Not looking at her, he said, “Things are going to have to change. We’re not taking that horse to Florida. We can’t afford it. You should sell the thing. Every cent I make, you blow on that horse, or your fucking car. I’m sick of it.”

  With a clank, Abby put down her fork. “We’ve been over this. I spend my own money on riding. I’ll do that this fall, too.”

  “Oh, yeah? Well, what did you do with my Stanford check, and the one from McGill? I never saw either one of them, and you’ve spent them already. Where’s the damn checkbook?”

  “Where it always is, in my desk.”

  “Yeah, in your desk. You think the money is all yours.” He went to get it.

  When he came back, her face was red. Hotly, she said, “Do you live in the eternal now? I supported you for about ten years.”

  He laughed, as he flipped the check register. “You always say that, and it isn’t fucking true. I supported myself just fine before we met. You think you can live like a rich person. You have a rich person’s hobby. Jesus, look at this!”

  There was his check from McGill, fifteen hundred bucks, deposited, followed by checks she wrote, eight hundred to her trainer, six hundred to the barn, and who the fuck was Pete McLaughlin and why did she give him one-fifty?

  “My McGill check, and poof, you spent it all!”

  Abby stood up, looking agitated now. “That’s your account, too. You live here, remember? We have expenses here, and you get the benefit of all of it, including the car. And do you really think I could have made it through the last few months without my horse, while you’re off sending love notes to your girlfriend all day long? You do realize, don’t you, it’s illegal to do that with one of your students?”

  What a pathetic move that was, so low. “She’s not my student anymore. Don’t change the subject. I’m sick of how you take my money without even asking me. That has to stop right now.”

  Abby looked wild, like she was starting to lose it. “You live here, too. That’s a joint account. What, am I supposed to pay for everything and you can be a houseguest and spend all your money on CDs?”

  Hah! That dead issue again. “Will you ever shut up about that? A CD is nothing compared to what you’re doing, sitting in the saddle ripping up hundred-dollar bills.”

  She seemed to make a huge effort to calm her voice, as if that would mean she’d won the argument. “But they’re my hundred-dollar bills. You’ve never made as much as me. This coming year is the first time you will ever make more than I do.”

  Something exploded in his chest—he flung the checkbook past her, and it hit a wall. “Shut up about that! It’s not true. I’ve made more than you for years. People pay thousands to hear me read, and my books fucking sell. I make royalties.”

  Her face was pinched with the effort to seem calm. She stood three feet away from him, not moving. “You want to see the tax records? Half-time teaching is half pay. Your gigs don’t make up for that.”

  He stood up, retrieved the check record, and ripped it up. “You’re always fucking undermining me. You wonder why I talk to that girl? I’ll tell you why. She admires me. She thinks I’m wonderful. And you? What does my wife think? My wife steals my money, tells me I’m dirt. I’m sick of it. You sell that horse!”

  He slept maybe an hour that whole night in the guest bed. The pain in his chest was crushing him, but that was nothing to the pain inside his head. He was a monster, or there was something monstrous inside of him. Sure, maybe it was Abby’s fault. But now that was him, the monster husband, the monsband. The guy who tore up the check record and couldn’t stand the truth.

  Yeah, he hadn’t made much in the early years. He was a grad student, then a Poet in the Schools. The first year they were married, he thought he was going to make eleven thousand dollars, and it turned out to be six, while Abby brought home twenty-five. The job in Pittsburgh had started five years in, and no, it didn’t pay as much as she made by then.

  He knew all that, and it was not a nice day when he realized it. But back then she admired him, loved his work, and she was tactful about their finances.

  But couldn’t she see that it tortured him? It made him feel helpless. His dead father hovered over him asking how he could let his wife make more. But not support him, no, she was wrong there—he could have lived on what he made.

  And it broke his heart—was that what his chest pain was, a breaking heart?—the way she resented him. At first, they had been so tender together. He had a picture he had taken of her back then, holding a baby bunny she found in their yard in Morgantown, half the size of her palm, its eyes still closed, but trying to hop right there on her hand. It was on his desk—he turned on the light and looked at it. It made him want to cry—it was taken before the lupus, her hair a full blond cloud, her skin unlined and young, her perfect, sexy, cupid’s-bow mouth with no fine lines around the upper lip. He put it facedown and switched off the light.

  He was all ash inside, gray as the air in the room, graphite or lead. There was nothing he wanted to do, not even sleep. Sleep took too much energy.

  Finally the clock said six. He could get up.

  He washed his face and dressed. He brushed his teeth. He stood in the kitchen and waited till he heard Abby stir in their bedroom.

  He walked in and sat down on her side of the bed, hip touching hers. He had not made her tea.

  She sat up and quickly said, “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry for whatever I said last night. I had too much to drink.”

  Nothing in him answered that. He felt cold as ash.

  The words came from his mouth. “I don’t want to be married anymore.”

  There, he’d said it, asked for the steak frites instead of the sole.

  Her voice pleaded, “Sweetheart, I know that was awful last night. Please. You know this has been rough for me, the past, what, almost eight months, since you told me about the girl.”

  He looked at her, but he wasn’t there. He was somewhere else. He did not call her Bean. “I’m sorry, Abby. I just don’t want to be married anymore. We don’t have to rush into getting a divorce, and I promise you will not have to give up anything. You can keep riding. I’ll make sure of it. But I’ve had enough.”

  He got up, walked to the kitchen, and stood there while she dressed.

  She came in, pulling a small suitcase. “I’ll go somewhere until you leave, so you can pack your things.” She opened
the back door and stopped, looking at him, her face pale under the riding tan. “I think you’ve lost your mind.”

  He nodded. “Yes, probably.”

  But now there was nothing he could do. He was just ash.

  With three days until he was to fly to Florida, he felt too sick to do anything, the pain in his chest like a tightening vise, like he was on the rack.

  And how the hell was he supposed to pack his stuff, when he didn’t have a car? He couldn’t even get boxes to start. He couldn’t go buy food—not that he could eat. But of course she didn’t think of that, wrapped up in her narcissistic hurt.

  He lay on the bed and on the couch. His phone rang and he didn’t answer it. He did not check for texts. He didn’t want to talk to anyone or explain himself. He was in deepest mourning, crushed, giving up his life, his wife, the place he loved. Hell, it had all been taken away from him already, and he was just facing it. Every gift had a little tag on it that said, this too will be taken away. But this was a big one, worst loss of his life.

  Two days to go, he tried to pull himself together, put on shorts and a tattered singlet and went out for a run, just in the neighborhood. The trouble was, nothing was flat there, it was either up or down. Down, he could lope reasonably well, and he made it to campus and circled around.

  But up was something else, almost impossible. Struggling toward home, he had to walk the steepest part. When he reached the relative plateau after the worst hill, he could barely drag his feet, hoping his heart would slow down.

  He was a block away from their building, when suddenly he saw a small, familiar pale yellow car, a Porsche, top down, driving toward him, familiar fair hair blowing in the driver’s seat. Her face in large dark glasses didn’t turn his way—but of course she could see him, half dead, barely moving on the sidewalk.

  But did she stop and ask if he wanted a ride home? No—she did not slow down. She merely flicked one hand above the wheel and zoomed off down the hill.

  Twelve

  Abby felt like half her cells had been ripped out in one quick jerk, leaving an outline but no real substance. She would not throw a shadow in sunlight. For three long nights, she lay on her trainer’s couch, wept through the days.

  A lawyer at the barn was adamant that she file for divorce at once.

  “Divorce is about property, and you don’t want to get screwed,” she said.

  She gave her three names, and it was something Abby could do, a project, between her and the abyss. She interviewed the two women lawyers first, on the phone.

  The one man on the list asked her to come to his swanky eighth-floor office in downtown Oakland. He was handsome and neatly put together, with short white hair, crisp suit and shirt, and large brown eyes. He seriously interviewed her, about their marriage and finances, while Abby cried quietly. When the man found out Ray was about to move to Florida, he grew alarmed.

  “Listen, you don’t have to retain me. But even if you don’t, we should file the papers today. In Florida they tend to favor the good ol’ boys, and you could lose your condo. You might even have to pay alimony, because you partially supported him.”

  Abby protested. “He’s about to start making thirty thousand more than me.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Courts try to keep the same arrangement in divorce that applied in the marriage.”

  Aghast, Abby retained him on the spot, impressed that he was the only one who had thought of that. When the papers were ready, he sent them to the courthouse by courier and advised Abby to find a friend who was willing to serve them on Ray that day. She quailed at the thought, but called Sateesh and Gloria on their home phone.

  “We don’t want to be involved in that,” Sateesh said gruffly.

  “No, we don’t,” Gloria agreed on the extension phone.

  They said nothing else, and she soon hung up, embarrassed and ashamed. And yet it was Ray’s idea not to be married anymore, not hers.

  Who to call? Back in Morgantown, her hairdresser had asked Abby to serve papers on her husband, and the man had practically punched her. She didn’t want to put any of her colleagues or barn friends through that, and Joel was out of town.

  The man who lived downstairs was a sweet-natured playwright named Charles, who left lights burning in his place all night. He and his wife were the only post-adolescents in Berkeley who still smoked, which could make Abby’s bedroom smell like the bars in Providence. Charles also drank heroically, and when he had houseguests, he might go on a three-day bender, laughing and clinking ice cubes on his deck all night. He had once offered Ray a drink at dawn, when they met in the hall.

  But he dressed well, in clean pressed shirts and pants, though he worked at home, and he could be charming and helpful when it came to sandbagging their steep driveway in storms and rescuing lost fawns—the neighborhood being full of nearly domesticated deer, who could be seen munching people’s gardens down to stumps.

  She met Charles on the corner near their building. He had a mobile face that could scrunch up in a pained way like a chimp’s, and he grimaced as she handed him the fat white envelope, three lawyers’ names embossed in one corner. He was back in five minutes.

  “Was he there?”

  “Oh, yes. And not too happy to see what I brought.” He waved his arms. “I said, ‘Don’t kill the messenger!’”

  Charles signed an affidavit with the date and time, and Abby took it to the lawyer’s office and turned it in.

  Then she had literally nothing else to do, on the worst-timed sabbatical in history. The minutes until Ray left stretched endlessly, like tar, like taffy, each one an hour long.

  Finally it was the day of his flight, and in trepidation she went home, to the quiet, empty apartment—though he appeared to have left most of his things.

  On the kitchen counter was a hand-printed note, on yellow legal paper.

  Abby,

  Well—so much for slowing things down, and having that drunk hand me the papers was especially classy. Of course now that it’s turned over to lawyers it will become adversarial—that’s what they do, and after thousands of dollars it’ll just come down to the same division we would do on our own. We know whose stuff is whose.

  Of course I couldn’t take mine now. We’ll be able to work that out later I hope. I left the moth because I didn’t have the heart right now to take it and it looks good behind the orchid. And that jacket of mine you look so good in, it can be yours.

  I think this is something you’ve wanted for a while. We ruined this marriage together, and you had a big hand in ruining me as a husband. You’ll be fine even if you don’t get to take me to the cleaners. I love you but all I’ll be able to picture for a while is that backhanded ta-ta wave you gave me as you drove by.

  Ray

  She walked into his study and collapsed on the wood floor, one arm around his chair leg, and sobbed. She just could not believe that he was gone, that he didn’t care. He hadn’t even asked her where she went. Over a quarter century, he had made her account for every minute, and now he wasn’t even curious.

  It was too much to take in, and she had nothing else to think about. She was adrift in outer space. She was not a self. She was the wriggling cut-off half of a live creature. Those early years of making love three times a day must have smelted down her personality, making it part of his. Decades like that with him, and then nothing. She had no reason not to sob all day, all night. If only she could teach, go to faculty meetings, even serve on the college budget committee, it might anchor her.

  But now nothing was required of her beyond watering her plants. Even her horse was cared for by her trainer and the grooms.

  She drove out to the barn and stood with her arms around Beau’s neck, pressing his big heart to hers, while he tucked his long chin against her back, like he was embracing her. A horse’s heart radiates for sixteen feet, someone had said—radiates what, she wasn’t sure. But it was the only thing that stopped the stabbing in her chest.

  “No more thinking of Ray,” C
larice texted her, two days after he left. “Time to move on to other loves. He’s going to marry Tory. They will have kids, Abby.”

  That threw Abby on the floor again. Have children with Tory, when he had refused with her? She texted Ray and told him what she said.

  “No kids,” Ray wrote back. “Clarice is a snake. She knows nothing about me, and you seem to know less all the time.”

  Abby had been friends with Clarice since before they met their husbands. But she did not write back to her.

  It was too easy now to understand how a person went berserk. She imagined flying to Florida, buying a rifle, and staking out his house—say, from the roof of a garage across the street. But unlike Ray, she was good at picturing the future, and the inside of a Florida prison was nothing she wanted to see. They probably used the electric chair on wives who murdered good ol’ boys. Besides, it was one of those acts you would instantly regret and not be able to take back. No wonder Dieter killed himself.

  But what was she supposed to do? Day after day, and then week after week, there was nothing. She tried to write poems, but they came out lifeless, hollow with despair. Sometimes she made a plan, drove to a restaurant, and could not get out of the car. All her life she had been decisive, but now she could not follow through with anything. Some nights she slept for twelve hours, living instead in vivid dreams, always with Ray in them.

  As word of their separation spread, people she had known for years seemed at a loss for how to act or what to say. They looked away, like you do from someone missing a limb or with a deformed face—perhaps out of fear, of what could happen to a person just like them. Sateesh and Gloria lived half a mile away, but she did not hear from them. She called Gloria, who did not pick up at home or on her cell, and though she left messages, Gloria did not call back.