The Use of Fame Read online

  Priscilla happened to be in New York the night before, and she came to the reading—but she knew better than to bring Poore, since Ray was close to Hank, who was still crushed. After the reading, she came up to the podium and kissed Ray’s cheek, looking like a blond Audrey Hepburn, in a red dress and flats, her very short platinum hair freshly shorn and bleached. He had studied her face in fear—she had been married to Hank as long as he and Abby were. Was she happy now, or did she no longer recognize her life?

  He didn’t know Priscilla well enough to ask her that. But that’s what he was afraid of—that he would maim the marriage, be sorry, and never get it back.

  He pulled her new book from the Strand poetry stacks and showed Johnny her picture on the back. “Do you think she’s happy now?” he asked casually.

  Johnny made a pfff sound with his lips. “How would I know? I’m not one of her anointed.”

  Ray shoved the book back in its slot. “Neither am I.”

  “Oh, right. She gave you a big prize and a job for no reason.”

  Ray’s jaw tightened. This fall, he was teaching in place of Hank, who was on sabbatical, but that was unusual. “It’s only spring semesters. Fifty-two years old, and I don’t have a real job.”

  It was time for the bigger honors to start showing up, or at least for fuck’s sake full-time work. He wanted to teach all year, with power and prestige. Back home in Mules Ford, West Virginia, his mother bragged that he was an Ivy League professor, and he had to correct her all the time.

  Johnny picked up a book by a guy they knew. “And what would you and Abby do if they offered you full time?”

  Ray felt a slow burn in his chest. Abby taught at Berkeley now, a dizzying six-hour plane ride away from Rhode Island, and most years he spent eight months out there with her. Seven years before, he had tried to stop her taking that job, the same way Hank tried to stop Priscilla, and now the results were falling into place. Would he have gotten so hung up on Tory, if Abby had stayed where he was?

  He had always been proud of his beautiful wife. Abby had the kind of looks that meant guys had been hitting on her hard since she was twelve, and they all wanted to marry her. She had even said yes to two of them, briefly—it was back in the 1970s, when everyone else was taking lover after lover, but Abby had married them instead. Her first husband was a society bloke her mother had dug up, the second some doofus she met in grad school. Ray felt sorry for them, she’d unloaded them so fast. And since he married her, he’d had to fend off other guys, other poets, especially the older generation, famous men who could be sexist clowns.

  “Va va voom,” one of them had said to Ray, the first time he met her.

  One night at a party in New York, Ray had introduced her to a covey of four men, all literary heavyweights, and right in front of her and him, they had discussed her looks, as if she were an art object.

  “A young Grace Kelly,” one of them had declared.

  “I see Katherine Hepburn,” another said.

  Ray’d had to muscle in and put a stop to it.

  And where was she now? Three thousand miles away—anxiety raced through him at the thought. These days he wasn’t always exactly sure what she was doing, when. After she moved to Berkeley, she had started riding horses, out of nowhere. She claimed she did it as a kid and always wanted to again, but he’d seen no sign of it for their first twenty years. Now she was out of the house for hours at a time, taking care of horses, riding them, not giving a damn about their life. Full time. He couldn’t even get his marriage to go full time.

  “Hey,” Johnny said, now in the poetry stacks, and cuffed him on the shoulder, as if to wake him from a trance. “Any news from Miami?”

  Ray felt the urge to do a full-body shudder, like a dog shaking itself. That fall, he had been invited to apply for an endowed chair in Miami, and they flew him there for an interview. He was waiting for the short-list call now, hoping to use it to put the screws to Brown and get them to give him a full-time job—it was what he had been told to do, by his mentor, Walt. Walt was an older poet more famous than all Ray’s other friends combined, and he taught at Harvard and knew how things worked in academe. He said the way to get promoted was to apply elsewhere, whether you wanted to leave your present post or not, because if you got an offer, you could use it as leverage. It was like those experiments with monkeys, where they don’t want their own banana, they want someone else’s. He was going to become someone else’s banana and make Brown want him more.

  “What happens if Brown doesn’t fall for it, and you end up in Miami?” Johnny asked. “You’ll be closer to me.”

  Ray felt the worry knot up his forehead. “I don’t know. It would be more moola, and a bigger statue of me in the town square, for dogs to pee on. But it’s weird, there’s part of me that wants to stay at Brown, in a program run by marmots, because—can you see me inflating my frog neck?—it’s the fucking Ivy League.”

  Johnny cocked his head. “Yeah, I get that. But if you come join us peons down in the swamps, what will you and Abby do?”

  Ray shrugged. He knew one thing for sure, it was Abby’s fault. Abby’s fault he had ever looked at Tory Grenier. And whatever happened next, let it be on her.

  Suddenly he noticed a new book by that shit Whitney Ames, the incompetent jerk who had replaced Priscilla at Brown. He yanked it off the shelf and felt himself boil over like a pot of milk forgotten on the stove.

  “This asshole!” He shook the book at Johnny. “You know what he did? He had the goddamn nerve to flunk my best student, a brilliant girl. Tory, he flunked Tory Grenier and made her cry! I read that paper, too, and it was fucking great. She dropped out of the program because of it. One of these days, I’m going to go cut off his head!”

  And there was Ames’s picture on the back of the paperback, self-satisfied and smirking. Farrar, Straus and Giroux published this shit!

  Gripping the book in both fists, Ray tried to rip it in half. It was a slim volume of verse, but surprisingly well made. He tore off the back cover, then the front, took hold of the back pages and jerked hard—they came away. He yanked more handfuls, threw them over his shoulder, until the book was thin enough to tear in half.

  Johnny laughed. “Um, you going to purchase that?”

  “No way.” Ray ripped up what was left, threw the pieces in the air, and stalked out of the store.

  Two

  Abby stood in the Denver airport, gazing out at the fading light. On the runways, snow lay heaped, and more was coming down like rice tossed at a bride. The agent at the desk had just told her nothing was flying east, a blizzard all the way to Providence. They could get her there via Dallas and DC, arriving the next evening.

  But tomorrow was Thanksgiving Day. Johnny and Sarah were flying up from Florida, and Hank was coming, too, Ray no doubt already up to his elbows in rice and rosemary and chorizo, for his signature stuffing. The turkey would be brining in a mixture of kosher salt, sliced oranges and lemons, whole sweet spices, garlic, herbs, and gallons of water, double-bagged in a big cooler, weighed down with pounds of ice. He would have Brussels sprouts still on the stalk, ready to snap off. This was his favorite holiday, since it was solely based on food, and they had always cooked for friends.

  Abby was supposed to show up, too, of course, but she had taught that morning in Berkeley, and this was the fastest she could get here, what with taking a run to unwind after class. Okay, sure, she could have run at dawn, but before class she had to tweak her notes, trying to be less of a fraud. Who had time to read every word written about James Joyce and still remember all the details in that doorstop of a book? She’d wake up from dreaming that she had to give a lecture, naked, on something she hadn’t read, in a room she couldn’t find; get out of bed; make coffee and revise her notes; then scramble off to Wheeler Hall and try not to have a panic attack as she walked into class.

  Right now her big slouchy purse was
crammed with other people’s new research, and the only thing worse than reading it would be to do it at 4:00 a.m. in the Dallas airport. All to show up at Ray’s for the end of dinner, by which time the three male poets would be bellowing at each other like walrus beach masters, having put away about five bottles of red wine. Then they would grab each other’s necks, knock foreheads together, and declare, “You know I love you, man. You know I love you.”

  Now in Denver it was completely dark outside, and she could see her reflection in the glass—she critically examined it. The body was still mostly slender even in a heavy sweater, though she had stopped counting calories somewhere along the line and put on twenty pounds. And the face was like a history of everything that had befallen her: a deep furrow between the brows and a crease down the left cheek that could be mistaken for a scar, left by a six-year illness that had gone as mysteriously as it had arrived. (Doctors had called it lupus, but lupus could kill you, and Abby refused to believe that’s what it was.) Her hair was expensively maintained light blond to hide the gray, but its former rotini curls were now mere waves. It had started to relax after her mother died, and straightened more when her closest friend was killed—as if too much grief were chemotherapy, affecting your fast-growing cells, along with your brain. Her brain was definitely not the same.

  She turned away so as not to have to watch herself, and called Ray on her cell. She told him about the blizzard and the poor flight options.

  “No, don’t do that,” he said. “That sounds awful. I’ll be home next week anyway.”

  Surprise left Abby slightly breathless—she had expected irritation at least. “Are you sure? I could get there for the end.”

  “No. It isn’t worth it.” Now he did sound mad. “It’s because you’re so fucking far away. I told you it would be like this!”

  She let a beat go by without reply, not wanting to start a fight. He always blamed her for the distance between their jobs—when in fact, after she got the job at Berkeley, he was offered full-time teaching at San Francisco State but had turned it down—he said because it was too much teaching and not enough money, though probably it was also not enough prestige. At any rate, they had both chosen to live this way.

  His voice softened. “But that’s too long to spend on planes. Can you get a flight back to SF?”

  “There’s a seat on one about to go.”

  “Then you should grab it.”

  There was something odd about his reaction, but she was so relieved she rushed to the agent at the desk. Fifteen minutes later, she was buckled in the last remaining seat.

  It was a little dicey taking off from Denver in the falling snow, feeling the wheels slip, and bumpy on the climb over the Rockies to the west—Abby was not a placid flyer, and first chance she got, she ordered a stiff drink.

  Waiting for the drink, she suddenly missed Ray intensely. Out of her purse she took a talisman she liked to carry, a snapshot that was slightly blurry, like the past itself. It was of her and Ray from a quarter century before, two tall, skinny, young blond people who appeared impossibly happy, radiant and beaming, outdoors under a big tree. She had her back to Ray, his arms around her from behind, both of them suntanned and laughing, in matching white T-shirts printed with red strawberries, won when they ran the Strawberry Canyon race in Berkeley on their honeymoon—she with her T-shirt tucked into her jeans, which she couldn’t even remember ever doing. She had always been short-waisted and long-legged, and she had to diet hard to dress like that—these days she wore long shirts that deemphasized that area. The race had run from the Cal gym up a wooded fire road steep as a waterfall, to the top of the Berkeley ridge, and on the way Ray had contracted poison oak on his private parts by taking an alfresco whiz, which interfered with the honeymoon but made them laugh. The photo was almost frightening to look at, as if so much beauty and happiness were dangerous to see. They might have been a pair of tall white cranes or ibises.

  Still, she loved the way the picture brought back Ray in youth. The first time she saw him, her first semester at WVU, she was still reeling from the difference between Berkeley and Morgantown, where guys hung Confederate flags in the windows of their rusted nothing-to-lose-mobiles. She felt closer to the grad students than the faculty, who kept inviting her to terrible dinner parties, where there would be three of her new colleagues, all older men, with their wives and some poor single guy they had fished out of Morgantown to introduce to her. Most of the candidates they found were gay, and she and whoever he was would gaze at each other balefully from their separate corners of the table. She instantly forgot all of their names.

  After one such deadly dinner, she had gone to a grad student dance party, still in a proper skirt and blouse and heels, while jean-clad grad students parted around her like the Red Sea. Her students were all there, some playing poker in a side room, while the young male MFA poets goofed around, inventing a dance they called the Wandering Foot. About midnight, Ray blew in, tall, thin, and cool as David Bowie, with the same cocky, self-ironic way of walking, like he knew he had it but was also laughing at himself. Twelve-pack under one arm, he strode across the room so fast his old tweed jacket billowed behind him, all the other poets giving him high fives. Immediately, Abby thought, That guy’s trouble. So of course she couldn’t take her eyes off him.

  A few months later, she was lonely on a wintry morning, driving to the natural foods co-op, when she saw him standing on a street corner in falling snow, gazing down at a girl in a fuzzy pink angora cap so tenderly that it made Abby ache. Why didn’t she have someone to look at her like that?

  The final straw was the night she went on a blind date with a young philosopher who had lately published a border-crossing book about artificial intelligence and art, which was academically respectable and yet on the New York Times bestseller list. The philosopher had told one of Abby’s colleagues he was looking for “a tall blonde with brains and something sparkly about her,” and the colleague had arranged it. Abby hadn’t read his book—how could she, when she was teaching a graduate seminar on literary modernism, the reading list all monstrous tomes? She was supposed to know not only those books, but all the criticism on them. She was starting to realize she would never actually be prepared for class and would have to wing it. She wondered if her Cal teachers had winged it, too, but she doubted it.

  But she was lonely and agreed to meet the guy at a so-so restaurant, knowing at least he would be smart. Over dinner, the talk was heavy sledding—he didn’t drink or loosen up in the course of the meal, and nothing was fun or natural.

  Afterward he suggested they go hear jazz at a bar, and Abby wanted a drink, so she went. They sat at a small round table on a raised level of the floor, slightly frozen over beers, listening to a local quartet. They had been there half an hour, Abby hoping to find a way to go home soon, when five MFA students came tumbling in, laughing and exuding playful energy: two couples and Ray. One couple was a bit dressed up, the girl with a bouquet of pink roses, and Ray looked extremely good in an ironed white oxford shirt, black jeans, and high-top sneakers, with a pink rosebud between his teeth. The others sat, but he stood beside the table, half turned toward Abby—light seemed to shoot from his blue eyes. He kept the rose in his teeth and gazed at her with gentle comprehension, as she sat so mournfully with her stiff date.

  Within months they were lovers, thank God. Ray had made her laugh so often then, like the time he wrote her a letter while playing Copeland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” and said it was hard to type with both hands in the air, conducting all that brass. When they were apart, he wrote her every day, and he liked to hide little notes around the house. At first he had called her String Bean because she was five ten, and that had evolved to Bean. On their first Valentine’s Day, she opened her underwear drawer and found a drawing of a green bean and a lit match, signifying his incendiary self, and in the match’s thought balloon was a big red heart.

  People didn�
�t understand about commuter marriage, that it could be romantic, writing letters, then glimpsing the beloved waiting for your plane. Most years they were apart just one semester, and that was not so bad, since one of them flew across the country every few weeks. It helped to keep it fresh, something you could miss. Maybe in part because of it, Ray often made great declarations, even after all this time.

  “If we were ground to powder, our molecules would find each other,” he had said not long ago. Once from Providence he wrote to her, “My love for you did its sneaker wave on me again this morning. I felt a flush of joy and traced it to its source and there you were. Lucky me.”

  They never fought about the things that troubled other couples. Ray liked to cook and clean, and had ever since their second night together, when she briefly left him in her rented house and came home to find vacuum-cleaner lines in the carpet. He had a sense of humor in disasters, like the time a chicken he was roasting caught on fire—he grabbed it and ran it out into the snow. He was also a great nurse, who’d helped her through the mystery illness for six years. Nurturing seemed to give him a sense of purpose, as did housecleaning, a use for his dervish energy.

  “You’re not allowed to clean anymore,” he had long ago declared, after he watched her dust. “You go in with a flaming sword. It’s not worth that much.”

  It was true, she was a perfectionist, and it was hard for her to do anything halfway, no matter how trivial. Once she had asked him, “How did we ever make it this far, when you’re an ecstatic, and I’m OCD? Not exactly a match.”