The Use of Fame Page 14

Finally, a month later, Gloria called twice, both times when Abby was riding and couldn’t hear the phone. (Did Gloria remember when her lessons were?)

  The first message said, “Oh, I’m so sorry, I just got your message on the home machine. I never listen to those, because it’s usually Sateesh’s father, calling to say how much he hates the nursing home. He calls fifteen times a day.”

  The second message said, “Oh, hi, just got your message on my cell. I never listen to those, because only Sateesh uses that number, and I know I’m going to see him soon.”

  Neither time did she suggest they meet.

  And it was not only Sateesh and Gloria—all the people she and Ray had seen as a couple in Berkeley either did not think of her anymore, or felt they had to choose between her and Ray, and they went with him. For years, they had gone to dinners and parties with a wide circle of friends, but now she saw no one at all, except the women at her barn. Weekend nights filled her with dread. It had felt a bit like that with Ray in Providence, and yet each night she could look forward to his call.

  She tried to distance the issue, make it theoretical. Was it just some sort of deep, basic preference for men, in a world where they were masters of the universe? Where king and queen, master and mistress had such different second meanings, the sleazy underside of the female nouns suggesting the cultural distrust of women that had been around since Eve. Did that mean a man could mistreat his wife and have it make no difference to their friends?

  After all, the nation went on being friends with Bill Clinton, after his multiple adulteries. But just think, if Hillary had been caught having sex with an intern in the White House—or even if Bill had claimed she was—would she have a snowflake’s chance of ever being president? And if Bill left her and married Monica, would Hillary be invited anywhere?

  One day her phone rang, just its ordinary ring, “Bad to the Bone”—it was Johnny, asking how she was. She told him she was being shunned and asked him why.

  “Uh, well, Ray blames you quite a bit. It’s only natural. No one wants to be the bad guy,” Johnny said. “And after all, you did have that affair.”

  Slowly, carefully, Abby explained: she did not have an affair. Ray just thought she did. “And in this country, we assume innocence until guilt is proved. Isn’t it obvious he’s trying to deflect his own guilt? He can’t stand being in the wrong.”

  Ray was from a blame culture, as Johnny probably knew. His family argued over who did what to whom, and no one ever blamed themselves when bad things happened.

  She doubted Johnny was convinced, his loyalty to Ray too deep—even if they sometimes fought, Johnny would take Ray’s word over hers. That rumor felt like quicksand, impossible to fight. She was Ann Boleyn, one day the queen, the next convicted of adultery she did not commit, in a dungeon waiting for the sword, while her husband bedded ladies-in-waiting.

  She heard it again a few days later from Ray’s friend Pete, calling from Maryland. Pete was a good guy, with a droll wit, and he had always made it clear that he was as much Abby’s friend as Ray’s. He had been to Miami to give a reading. Tory was there, and he had talked to her at the party afterward.

  “I’m quite surprised,” Pete said. “She looks like a little French doll, but she doesn’t act like one. She’s kind of prickly. More like beef jerky than a pillow.”

  Abby tried to laugh, but it came out a whimper—Ray showing off his little trophy girl, who was somehow tough and salty and high protein? Abby felt like she’d gone down a zip line and smashed into a tree.

  Pete went on. “Johnny said a year ago that Ray was running amok. I told him to snap out of it, that it wasn’t worth wrecking his life. You guys were married a long time.”

  “A year ago?” Abby gasped. “Are you sure?”

  A year ago, he hadn’t told her, but he had told Johnny? And probably Hank, and they talked about it with Pete. But no one had told her, though she considered all those guys her friends. She felt like a child the grown-ups had been lying to. Yes, there’s a Santa Claus. No, Ray didn’t sleep with Tory while he was with you. But would a man leave his wife without test-driving the other woman—a man who had grown up in the sexual free-for-all of the 1970s?

  Pete cleared his throat. “Abby? Are you there? How are you taking all of this?”

  Abby snorted. “Well, I’m getting over the urge to buy a gun.”

  Pete gasped. “Wow. You’re giving me some insight into how Susie must have felt about Charlotte.”

  Abby laughed half hysterically. Susie had been Pete’s longtime wife, mother of his kids, Charlotte the much younger woman he was now with. “What, when you left her for a grad student, you thought she wouldn’t mind?”

  She felt the urge to tell Ray, who at least understood that much. It was a reflex, wanting to share everything with him.

  Pete groaned. “I guess I wasn’t thinking about her. A common male failing.”

  Abby mused, “What I know about you poets makes me think about our affinity with chimps. They have mates but screw around as much as they can get away with. It might just have to do with opportunity, I guess. If women threw themselves at used car salesmen all the time, the way they do with you guys, they would do it, too.”

  Pete demurred. “I wouldn’t say all the time. And some of us resist those chimp-like urges.”

  “Thank God for that.” Abby paused. “Pete, is he telling people I had an affair?”

  He sounded troubled. “I always thought that was unworthy of him, saying that. But, yeah, he said it again a few days ago.”

  She tapped out a text to Ray but did not send it. She would write a letter instead. Once and for all, spell it out on paper, something he could keep, what had and had not occurred between her and Jacob. Yes, Jacob was an attractive guy, and they had flirted in the beginning. But didn’t Ray flirt, too? It was harmless, and anyway, Jacob might be gay. He seriously dieted, and the first time she saw him, when he walked into her office with late gold sun beaming through her window onto his face, she had thought at once, Oh, too bad he’s gay. It was just an instinct, but she thought she might be right, whether he knew it or not. It might explain why every woman he dated ran for the hills.

  But he had been a good friend, especially after Gillian was killed. The whole department came together then, and they were especially kind to Abby, as Gill’s friend. After that, Jacob had signed his emails to her with an x and sometimes even love. But that was the most torrid thing that had ever happened between them.

  She wrote that out for Ray, went for a run, and shoved the letter in a mailbox up the hill. Then she took a long route up the steep Berkeley ridge. Running could always make her angry, and for months now she had lectured Tory as she ran, about stealing another woman’s man. Now she wanted to rant at Ray, as she pounded uphill, loped along the ridge, then down another way.

  Back home, she texted Ray. “It’s great to hear from your friends that I was the last to know you were ‘running amok,’ as one of them said to me today.”

  He wrote back instantly. “Running amok? I sold a book, got this job, taught full-time, and was on the cover of APR. Who was the asshole who said that?”

  “Johnny to Pete last fall.”

  “That’s it for Johnny, I swear. I hate everyone. Leave me alone.”

  But even after that exchange, he texted Abby several times a day, as if the habit were hard to break. They knew better than to speak on the phone, but it was hard to become hysterical with your fingers. Some nights he wrote bitterly, about how little attention she had paid to him and how upset he was that she had filed for divorce.

  In despair, especially after a few drinks, Abby bit back. “Do you really not care at all about me now? We were not junior-high-school steadies, we were husband and wife.” Or, “Is it just a coincidence that you stuck around while it was to your economic advantage, then vanished the second it was not?”

  Some nights they did not fight. Once he wrote, “I am so sorry I broke the most important thing in my life. I could
not unbreak it. It was twenty-five years of my life, too, and I will be bereft of us forever. But I couldn’t go on being a husband worth a damn. Maybe it’s my fault but I was desperately unhappy. I have been going through hell for a long time and dragging you with me. I don’t want you to suffer, you who I promised to protect and broke that promise because I couldn’t even protect you from me.”

  That sounded too glib—this was a guy who rarely apologized for anything. Had someone told him that was the way to manage her? He sounded like he felt just great.

  “Are you with Tory right now?” she wrote back.

  “Yes, I have seen Tory and I’m seeing her again.”

  She imagined running into them together. What would she do? Spring at Tory like a puma and rip off her face.

  Angrily she wrote, “So glad you’re getting laid tonight. Instead of imagining her while you’re with me. Instead of texting her while I’m asleep.”

  “Yes, I was talking to her. So many of the awful things you say are true and I have been living with them. Peace, please. I don’t need updates about how horrible I am.”

  Was it because he was afraid of getting old? One night that summer they had been in North Beach sitting over cioppino. For some reason, her run that day had made her left knee hurt, and she popped ibuprofen with her wine.

  “Boy, it’s hard getting older,” she had ventured to say.

  Ray had visibly recoiled. “Why the hell do you want to talk about that?”

  Now she wrote wistfully, “I’m sorry I’m getting old. You must have felt like death was getting into bed with you.”

  He replied at once. “You didn’t make me feel like that, dummy. Chalk it up to my horrible character, but not that.”

  Some mornings she apologized. “There’s a program that blocks you from sending email written late at night. Needed also for texts. I should not have said what I did.”

  “Beanie, let’s make one thing clear. You never, ever have to apologize to me.”

  He let her know when he bought a house and when Tory moved down there to live with him. But even after that, he sometimes texted Abby half the night. He often seemed to be awake, though it was three hours later there. It could feel like old times, the two of them talking intimately in the night, as they always had.

  “Just don’t marry her the second we’re divorced, okay?” she wrote. “That would be an insult to our marriage.”

  He didn’t seem to notice what she’d said. Instead he answered, “Sometimes I miss having a life, being surrounded by people who cared for me even if it was an illusion. As illusions go, it was a good one. You I know are real.”

  “Yes, I am. I always loved you. But you have a life now, right, with Tory? Why aren’t you answering my question? It’s urgent to me.”

  “I won’t marry her as soon as we get divorced. My new life, we will see, but yes, it’s obviously, considering what I’ve done, worth a real shot.”

  So he was going to marry her. Abby did not write back.

  Ten minutes later, her phone pinged.

  “Sorry I fucked everything up and made you feel bad.”

  Abby almost laughed as she wrote back. “I’m sure you don’t mean to trivialize what either of us feels. But ‘feel bad’ is a ludicrous understatement.”

  “Well, texting has its limits. How about horrible, bereaved, betrayed, deserted, suicidal, sick, furious, befuddled? At least you can blame me. I feel all that, too, and have only myself to pin it on. Now try to get some sleep.”

  “I did not desert or betray you,” she wrote. “I’m sorry if you feel that way.”

  “A person can desert and betray himself. Now good night, Bean.”

  She tried to think of him as dead.

  “No texting the dead,” she wrote on a Post-it and stuck it on her phone. It worked for a few days.

  At some point, Ray must have talked to Walt, because Clarice wrote to her, “Quit texting Ray. He doesn’t need to be demoralized by you.”

  Where did Clarice get the nerve to order her around, intruding into her private life? Abby would never say a thing like that to anyone. She did not write back.

  As the long empty weeks of sabbatical dragged on, Abby was ambushed by memories—not of angry, shouting Ray, but of his real self, the guy he’d been with a healthy heart. He had written poems she knew were secretly about their life, with lines like, “Today there will be increasing clowns and very high humility.” Once she found a drawing in her copy of Ulysses, of a ladybug and a Sugar Smack, with a heart in the thought balloon of the ladybug and the caption “Love Stinks.” He had total recall of every elementary school laugh line, every elephant and knock-knock joke, every pun. When her nieces and nephews were little, they had all spent holidays at Abby’s mom’s, and Ray liked to sit at the kids’ table and make them howl with glee and cries of “Nooooooo,” as they begged for more.

  In her study was a copy of the Irish Catholic Bible Joyce had used, and one day she noticed an inscription Ray had printed in the front: “Presented to Abigail McCormick on Her Release from Prison”—a joke he must have waited years for her to find. Others he had let her in on right away, like when he tested the search engine on her computer by typing in every possible version of “naked women.” No matter how illiterate or abbreviated (“nekkid wimin,” “nek wim,” “nk wm”), it took him straight to porn, as if the web had been invented just for that.

  And then she would recall the, what—ten thousand times?—they had made love. She could still see his perfect Christlike body and feel his silky skin, his energy and passion, his desire to please. He liked to wrap himself around her in the grocery store. He claimed her sweat did not stink. When she cut herself, he expertly bandaged it. He peeled her apples, because she was allergic to something often sprayed on them.

  All of that was gone forever now, and that thought left her dazed, unable to function, in a fog of regret.

  “Sometimes our job is only to survive,” Ray wrote to her, and for a while she took that as her motto. She survived.

  But as the fall limped on, she was forced to wake up and notice what was happening in the present. She could not afford her life. Ray was right—she was too broke to ride as much as she had been.

  She started to keep track of her expenses and trimmed everywhere she could. She half-leased Beau to a little girl and rode less often herself. She gave up buying clothes and books, giving to charity, and going out to restaurants. Two rotted windows in the dining room had to be replaced, but she put off plastering and repainting the ruined wall beneath. Her ancient refrigerator barely worked, but that also had to wait. She canceled the cable and did without TV. She quit getting pedicures and waxing and haircuts, though she had to color the roots—this was no time to go white overnight.

  After a while the vacuum of her life seemed to make room for new friends, in a way her marriage had not. She started hanging out with two professors who rode horses, neither of them Republicans or goons. Ginger was a Cal biologist, a feisty blonde who drove a pickup truck, had been riding continuously since age five, and had never fallen off. She was skeptical of trainers and had a bit of a big mouth, which soon got her kicked out of Abby’s barn. But she and her husband lived in Berkeley, and they invited Abby over for pleasant meals.

  The other new friend was Nell, who taught French at Columbia and knew Joel. When Joel went to Paris for the school year, Nell showed up in his apartment, on sabbatical. She had ridden in competition as a teenager, and she was excited to see Abby in her boots and breeches in the hall. Nell was a slender brunette, almost as tall as Abby and exactly her size, and Abby lent her gear so she could start taking lessons at her barn. The two of them drove out there together, talking all morning and spending many evenings reading by each other’s fireplaces. Nell, like Gillian, was twenty years her junior, but they were instant friends.

  It seemed odd that Nell and Ginger did not know Ray, when Abby thought of him as her life, and they were fast becoming her closest living friends. She wished he co
uld meet them, to show him he was wrong about the goon squad at the barn.

  And thank God, they were both more supportive than Clarice.

  Nell declared, “It would be easier if he had died.”

  Ginger was more aggressive. “If I ever see the guy, I’m cutting off his legs.”

  Having friends seemed to make it possible for Abby to go back to work. She wrote more poems, and one afternoon, she typed up envelopes to eight literary magazines. Selecting sheets out of her stack, she thought about what name to use. Poetry editors knew Abigail McCormick was married to Ray Stark, and how they felt about him would color their response, for better or worse, since he made enemies as often as fans. She was tempted to use a young man’s name—say, Matt Green, MFA student. The poetry world was very male, and young male poets got lots of encouragement. But she didn’t want to create a lie she’d have to clear up later.

  Her middle name was Corbyn, her mother’s maiden name. In the top left corner of each page she typed A. Corbyn McCormick, added her address, and typed the same onto the return envelopes. The envelopes were fat, and she put on lots of stamps. When she went out for a run, she carried the whole stack to the mailbox up the hill.

  Colleagues invited her for Thanksgiving, people she had rarely seen outside the office—but they took pity on her, kindly. It made her see how thoroughly their social life had been Ray’s, even with people she had known before she married him, like Sateesh and Clarice. These days, Sateesh never called, and Clarice only sent her bossy messages.

  Christmas week, she tried again with Sateesh and Gloria. In the past, she and Ray had baked cookies and delivered them to friends, wearing Santa hats. This year she wasn’t up to cookies or the Santa hat. But she saw a display of blooming Christmas cactuses, bought one for Sateesh and Gloria, and took it by their house.

  Gloria answered the door and seemed startled. “I thought it was the UPS man.”

  She looked like she wanted to slam the door.

  But Abby stepped inside and heard Sateesh rattling silverware in the kitchen. “I miss you two. Can I say hi to Sateesh?”