The Use of Fame Page 3

  Chuckling, he had replied, “It’s only physical.”

  Or was perfectionism just another form of immoderation, like ecstasy? On a deeper level, it was possible they had recognized themselves in each other, both of them excessive, wanting too much, expecting too much, giving too much or not at all. Irresistible forces crashing into immovable objects.

  And these days, if the sex wasn’t what it used to be—well, Ray was in his fifties and a heart patient. But it was still good, and they probably had more of it than couples in their third decade who lived together all the time.

  At SFO, she retrieved her car, drove home to Berkeley, and called Ray. He’d been out for pizza with Johnny and Sarah, and he sounded like he’d had plenty to drink. He told her what he still needed to do for the dinner tomorrow.

  She felt overwhelmed with guilt. “God, I’m so sorry I’m not going to be there.”

  “Never mind,” he said, briskly. “You tried. How do you make that great cranberry sauce of yours anyway?”

  “Don’t cook the cranberries. Just put them in the Cuisinart and whir them up raw with a quartered orange. Leave the peel on. Then add a little sugar, maybe a quarter cup, and some chopped walnuts.”

  Suddenly he flipped into rage. “Jesus, I’m going to kill Whitney Ames. I can’t believe he had the nerve to flunk my best student! She dropped out of the program because of it. That asshole will be lucky if I don’t cut off his head!”

  Abby was puzzled—every late-night phone call lately had gotten around to this. She tried to use a soothing tone. “Sweetie, you’ve said it all before. Why don’t you write him a letter or something?”

  “Oh, that creep, forget it. I read that paper, and it was great.”

  “What’s going on, sweetheart? You say that every night now, and you sound so angry and arrogant.”

  Right away he said, “I’ve always been angry and arrogant. You used to like it.”

  Well, at least he wasn’t mad at her, and eventually she talked him down enough that he could go to bed.

  When they got off the phone, she made herself a nightcap and sat on the couch, worrying. Why was Ray so irascible lately? There was his heart, of course—he said he was in pain all the time. And they were having to be apart too much this year, both semesters instead of only one. Maybe that could explain the late-night rants.

  But other odd things had been happening. A few weeks ago, he had asked her to go to New York with him, for the reading with Johnny, and of course she wanted to be there. She loved his poetry—it was the thing that had really hooked her on him. When she heard him read, she fell for him all over again.

  “It’s quite an experience sitting next to her while you’re reading,” Walt had told Ray, one time when he and Abby were both there. “She vibrates like a lightning rod.”

  So she had bought a ticket for New York. But a week before the reading, Ray had called and said, “Don’t come. There are people I need to see. I won’t have time for you.”

  So she canceled the reservation just in time to get her money back.

  And then, two days before he was to go, his voice was panicked on the phone. “You have to come to New York with me! You have to!”

  “But I canceled the reservation. It’d cost a fortune to get there now.”

  “I don’t care!” he cried, like he was hyperventilating. “You have to be there!”

  So she had priced a new ticket—thirteen hundred bucks. Certainly not worth it, since she’d have to fly right back to teach.

  So she didn’t go. And what was worse, she had planned to get to Providence tonight, just a week later, for Thanksgiving tomorrow, and now she wasn’t going to be there, either. She felt another rush of guilt, and knew why—she was secretly relieved. There was knowing what Thanksgiving dinner would be like, Ray no doubt defaming Whitney Ames and forcing Hank to promise him a full-time job, though Hank was not in charge the way Priscilla used to be. And Abby would have at most three days before the long flight back.

  And best of all—most guiltily—not going meant she could take care of her horse. The grooms had holidays off, and if owners did not show up, horses spent all day trapped in their stalls, with their blankets on, even if it got too warm. But now she could take Beau out and let him run around.

  Before she went to bed, she sent Ray a text so he would wake up to it. “I’m so, so sorry not to be there, sweetheart. I miss you so much.”

  Funny that Ray texted now—he had always been a Luddite technophobe who used a manual typewriter for his poems, banging them out with two fingers. He didn’t own a laptop or even use a copier. He retyped his work every time he sent it out, always changing it. Sometimes when a magazine accepted a poem, he didn’t know which version they had until he saw it in print.

  Then suddenly that fall he had started texting all the time, and he taught Abby how. She liked the way it made no demands but let you get to it on your own time, like email only more immediate, on the phone—he said his students had taught him how. He also started using her laptop when he was at home, sometimes late at night. Well, it was 2007, and Brown, like Berkeley, expected profs to be on email every day of the year.

  * * *

  That night she slept well, glad to be in her own bed and not in some airport, drinking bad coffee as she plowed through other people’s research. In the morning she made outstanding coffee in the French press and dispatched two articles, before putting on her breeches and driving a half hour east of Berkeley, to the barn.

  The stables lay in a narrow valley, hills on three sides rising up so high that black cows grazing near the tops resembled poppy seeds. Gold in the summer, the pastures were now green from the first rains, with dark oaks in the ravines and sheer rock on the steepest slopes, under blue sky and white clouds.

  The barn had stalls for ninety horses, and most stood with their heads over the gates, watching for humans. Beau was close to the parking lot, and his big shining brown eyes followed her, ears pricked, as she left the car. When she approached, he called with a deep throaty rumble, ducked his head and pressed it to her chest, nuzzling her hands with his velvet lips as she kissed his broad forehead, taking in his clean horsey scent.

  “God, that horse loves you,” Ray said the first time he saw that, and it always made her heart feel hot.

  Quickly she removed Beau’s blanket. He was a beautiful dark bay, brown with black mane and tail, long slender legs, a white star on his forehead, and one white sock.

  The horse in the next stall was freaking out. Still with his blanket on, he reared on his hind legs and looked longingly over the top of his stall like he wanted to jump out. Abby took his blanket off and led him outside to a paddock, where he immediately bucked and reared and ran around. She led Beau to the next pen to keep him company, then went in search of other horses equally stir-crazy and took them out, too.

  Soon a general festival of bucking and rolling was in progress out there, horses with happy ears, forward and alert.

  And it was not just fun for them—it was important, more so than most people knew. Horses could die of colic, caused by eating standing still, trapped in their stalls. They were supposed to walk as they grazed, and if they didn’t, their guts could twist.

  It had happened to Abby’s first horse, one terrible night. She and Ray were eating dinner when she got the call, and he refused to go with her.

  “You don’t give a damn about our life!” he had yelled as she rushed out.

  But he had no idea how fragile horses were, how fast they could succumb. After midnight, she called him sobbing from the large-animal ER at UC Davis, where they said the horse would not recover, and lethal injection was the humane thing to do.

  On the phone, Ray had started to cry. “I am so sorry I’m not there with you, I could kill myself.”

  Today she left the others outside while she clipped Beau into a set of crossties in the stab
le, to pick his hooves and curry and brush him, as her mother had taught her when she was five. She had always loved the peace of barns, the sound of swishing tails, sighing nostrils, flat teeth crunching hay, and the green smell of fresh manure and piney woodchips in the stalls. High up in the rafters, sparrows flitted through, chirping as she tacked Beau up and led him outside to a mounting block, where she swung into the saddle and walked him out into the sun.

  In the biggest outdoor arena, size of a football field, she warmed him up through walk, trot, canter, then let him open up and gallop for a while, before she took him for a cool-down walk on a hilly trail. He was angelic the whole time, clearly feeling privileged to exercise, when most of his herd could not.

  It was almost dark by the time she got them all in, groomed and blanketed and in their stalls. But she drove home content and called Providence.

  “Heeeeeeey, honey,” Ray said, expansive and happy, men laughing around him. Music throbbed on his sound system, some kind of independent rock.

  “Jeez, do you have a wife, guy?” Johnny yelled over the singer’s voice.

  Johnny’s wife, Sarah, wrestled the phone away. “Where are you, lady?”

  “Didn’t he tell you? I was snowbound in Denver, and the only way out was west.”

  Sarah made an exasperated sound. “How could you leave me here alone with all these lunatics?”

  Behind her, walruses were barking.

  “They’ll never give me a full-time job!” Ray wailed.

  “Yes, they fucking will!” Hank shouted back. “Even if I have to kill someone!”

  “You? You’ve never killed anything,” Ray said scornfully.

  “Ah, man, you’re wrong. I wish you weren’t,” Hank said, sounding drunk.

  “What did you kill?” Ray cried, in a way Abby had seen many times—no one upset, because it was their sweat lodge, where they’d tell each other things they had held back before. “What did you fucking kill?”

  Hank’s voice cracked. “I had to kill my dog.”

  “What? You had to kill a dog?”

  Johnny cut in. “Of course he did. Don’t you read anything he writes?”

  “Sarah?” Abby said.

  Sarah grunted, obviously listening to the guys as well. She was a no-nonsense person, who wore hiking boots under her long white wedding dress, when she and Johnny married on a cliff top in Maui. It was a small event, and Abby and Ray had rented a white convertible to be the getaway car, blasting a tape of Pavarotti as they swooped along high cliffs to a hotel lunch with the families, before the four of them went snorkeling at Honolua Bay, chasing sea turtles. Best wedding ever, they had all agreed.

  She could hear Ray in the background. “How does a guy who grew up eight thousand feet high in the mountains end up writing about fish?”

  “Man,” Hank exclaimed. “That high up, it is the ocean. It was the ocean floor. And you know it’s that extreme we’re going for. The edge. The farthest out.”

  “The fucking limit!” Ray said ecstatically.

  Then it got quiet, probably because he and Hank had grabbed each other’s necks and were silently butting foreheads.

  Johnny got on the phone. “You can’t leave him alone like this. We count on you to keep him calm. You’re the goat in the stall with the racehorse.”

  Abby knew racehorses had animal buddies, often a goat. Why a goat? she wondered, though they did seem wise, if you looked into their small green eyes.

  Three

  Ray loved his funny little house in Providence. It was about a hundred years old and had belonged to a fisherman—so simple, there were no halls, just rooms that opened into each other, a staircase straight into his bedroom, a tub in the kitchen. But all that meant little privacy, and Johnny’s need for space made it too much for him. So he and Sarah had booked a room at a B & B, and they were leaving in the morning to cross-country ski in Maine.

  So Ray had the day after Thanksgiving to himself. He slept late, snoring with his mouth open, shaking off the wine, then got up and contemplated the kitchen, which they had all just abandoned at God knew what hour the night before, turkey grease and cranberry sauce across the counters, empty wine bottles. He was pleased with how the meal had gone, turkey moist and succulent, good as it got, his dressing damn good, too. If he trusted his instincts, his cooking worked, because he obeyed no rules, took the top off the rice and stirred it while it cooked, never measured anything, and fuck the prissies who predicted otherwise.

  He put on the CD of John Zorn, Naked City, cranked the volume up, and buzzed around, cleaning up the kitchen. A few leaves of Brussels sprouts had gotten ground into the maple floor he and Abby had installed, and that she had quickly ruined, in her impatient way, carrying a dripping broiler pan across it, leaving a line of black grease imbedded in the wood.

  They should have had the new floor shellacked, the way they did in their first house, in Morgantown. When they bought that place, it had ugly cigar-brown shag carpeting in every room, but Abby had pulled up one corner and thought she spied hardwood beneath. When they went to Berkeley for the summer, she had someone come in, rip out the carpet, refinish the floors, and shellac them. When they got back to Morgantown that fall, the house was filled with gleaming light oak floors.

  That place was beautiful, small but peaceful, on a dead-end street with a huge yard. He had planted thirty-six flowering trees and bushes and five hundred bulbs, pink frilly daffodils and black irises and Emperor tulips that came up magnificently every spring, and red, white, and pink peonies that flourished their ruffles in June. He missed it and their life in Morgantown, walking through the alleys of his youth.

  Why had it not been good enough for Abby? When he finished grad school, he had landed teaching in Pittsburgh, just seventy miles away, and they had a decent life, together almost all the time, though he kept a room in Pittsburgh to cut down on the drives.

  But no. Abby had to go back to the Bay Area, to her family in Pacific Heights—as if Ray wasn’t her family now—and Berkeley, where she did her PhD. She needed to impress her former profs and spew theory jargon. And when her mom died and left her a pile of money, she bought a pricey condo in Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto, where you could get twenty kinds of mushrooms, strawberry papayas, and organic frisée even in December, when only iceberg and apples might be had in Morgantown. She threw around another bundle on a Porsche, color of a buttercup and far too pretentious for West Virginia, so she could style around with the top down. And after a while, there were the horses, too.

  And if Ray ever objected, she would put her perfect retroussé nose in the air and say, “It’s my money. I can do what I want with it.”

  And yes, Ray loved Berkeley, too, the way the fog crept in all summer long, chilling the nights even if it was scorching at noon. August, when it stayed gray and cold, like morning all day, no pressure to do anything but write in his café. Views of the bridges, San Francisco white and hilly across the bay, sailboats drifting by. Yeah, yeah. Everyone was so cool out there, Ray felt instantly more suave the moment he arrived. Sometimes he even loved the Porsche.

  But that wasn’t who he was. Not one goddamn other person out there grew up over a coal mine. Berkeley people all had perfect teeth, but his family could not afford dentists, till they had to have their teeth yanked out and wear dentures. No one in Berkeley ate even the best venison, let alone the roadkill kind (though it was lean, high protein, free of additives, and economical), or fried catfish, or all-the-way dogs.

  But all right, when Abby got her dream job and took off, he landed one almost as good at Brown, a big step up from Pittsburgh, even at half time. And there were working-guy bars in Providence, places where he felt at home. Real people, too, some of them his grad students, guys who’d scrambled up from some godforsaken place like him. And yeah, Tory, a petite brunette with a tiny waist, from Montreal. Her father was a butcher, who had stopped school at fourte
en and never really learned English.

  Quickly he checked his phone.

  “Beignets for breakfast. Yum,” Tory had texted him. “Did you survive the night, darling?”

  “Barely,” he thumbed quickly back. “Tackling kitchen now. Wish you were here. I’d take off all your clothes so fast.”

  “Send,” he pressed, and stared at the kitchen counter, imagining how he would start, if she ever came in through his door. After New York, he had sent her a silk blouse, pale pink to set off her coloring, and he pictured her in it, how it would feel under his palms as he stroked her small round breasts.

  He thought of how he had walked around the city, holding her slender hand. The top of her head came up to only about his heart, her smooth dark hair trimmed neatly at the bottom of her jaw. He had sat across a little table from her, trying to memorize her face. The big intense brown eyes, the beautiful nose, not like any he had seen before. A little long, a little arched, but soft and tender-looking, like a baby’s. Her mouth was wide, lower lip more full. The way she lifted her light hand and let it fall open in an explanatory gesture was the most graceful human act he’d ever seen. He had missed what she was saying, watching that.

  To steady himself, he pulled Abby’s worn-out copy of The Joy of Cooking off the top of the fridge and flipped to a recipe for beignets. He would never make them—he made guy stuff, though not just kick-ass pizza and burgers—he did risotto and paella, too. He loved cookbooks, the only tales with happy endings guaranteed. But he never consulted them, except to catch an idea, blow it up, and make it new.

  You could say that was, right there, the difference between him and Abby: she read recipes and measured everything. She also used perfect grammar, tried to make him learn it, too, and she could spell—she broke his balls over that all the time. He was dyslexic, okay? And his relationship to language was alive and real—he wanted to dive into the flaming magma at its heart and let it spit him out. Who cared how the fuck you spelled the words? Someone had just made that up, a couple hundred years ago. It was not a moral issue. It was arbitrary, dead.