The Use of Fame Page 8

  “Aren’t you toward me, too?” she asked. “You hate a lot of stuff I do. I bet nobody feels purely in love, except at first. At least we know the things we don’t like about each other. And it’s fun just to be with you, even after all our fights.”

  “Me, too,” he said gruffly, and pounded her hand against his thigh. “It’s fun just to go to the gas station with you.”

  Abby felt blasted clean by ocean air, and tired, cried out, ready to stop thinking. They stood and started back, just in time. When they reached the eucalyptus woods, the blue horizon had already swallowed the red sun, leaving a sky shading from rose to opal. They found the car and drove home in the dark.

  Seven

  Ray moved his return flight all the way back till the night before he had to teach—Providence was only three hundred and fifty miles from Montreal, and he wasn’t rushing back to temptation and loneliness. The only way to forget Tory would be with Abby right there, visible and real, reminding him of what they had. Even then, he wasn’t sure, but he had to try.

  He spent all the time he could with her—he talked to her as they watched movies, cooked together, held hands on the street, and made cautious, tentative love. From their apartment, he stood beside her as they watched a rare West Coast hurricane swirl across the bay, closing all three bridges. Their neighborhood went dark, all power off, but that night he built a fire in the hearth, heated the kettle over it for hot toddies, and slept beside her under a down comforter and the flannel crazy quilt she had made by hand, finishing a quilt top he had found for her in an antique store in Providence.

  He tried to be nice, even after a few drinks.

  But no contact with Tory made him testy, the same way it would have if he tried to give up the other pleasures he had left, like Bud Light and basketball and arguing with friends. All of it was necessary to the fragile balance of his mental health, and texting with Tory had held him together for months. Losing that was like being flayed, and he found himself barking at Abby every day.

  “This is a working kitchen, not a display kitchen,” he proclaimed when she brought home measuring cups in the shape of geese and wanted to leave them on the counter, in his way.

  “How can you use everything in the kitchen, every time you cook?” he snapped, exasperated as he did the dishes.

  “How can you leave your shoes all over the house? I trip on them everywhere.”

  “Do you realize there are crumbs under your desk all the time?”

  But he really was trying. He even went with her to the barn, a place he hated. Just the drive out there gave him the willies. They had to go east, to the backside of the ridge, into the vast expanse of suburbs, passing under highway signs that said Walnut Creek—it made him want to jump out of the car. Walnut Creek was a giant mall with bloated stores, glass-encased corporate headquarters, thousands of doctors’ offices and big fat houses, all set on a million acres of asphalt—a place to have babies and bore them to death. In desperation parents signed their kids up for a slew of after-school lessons, and Abby’s barn was full of them, snippy little girls reeking entitlement, as strong as the smell of hay and manure.

  But he was doing the right thing, and trying to be nice. So he let himself be immersed into that atmosphere, watching Abby groom her horse and ride, surrounded by wealthy women and their spoiled spawn, all on expensive mounts.

  When she got off her horse, he had to ask, “How can you stand it here, surrounded by this goon squad? I bet they’re all Republicans.”

  “Not all of them,” she replied.

  Imperturbably she took her horse’s saddle off, groomed him again, put him back into his stall, and swept the concrete floor in front of it—the sight of which made Ray snap again. “Gee, it would be great if you ever did that at home.”

  It was like his mouth had been kidnapped by a teenage shit who wanted what he wanted now and didn’t give a termite’s ass for anything so dull as friendship, loyalty, or commitment to the person he most deeply loved.

  But even knowing that didn’t help. A few days after his torment at the barn, they went to a party, where a man they didn’t know enthused about how wonderful it was that Abby rode. He added, “My first wife used to ride.”

  “Yes,” Ray observed. “It is a first-wife sort of thing to do.”

  Something was eating him, and it was not just Tory. He knew his wanting her was a symptom of something else—or something had made it possible, a vacuum of some kind. Every day that January, he walked down to the café in the early mornings and wrote, then went to the Cal gym and took a run or a swim or lifted weights. Workouts seemed to clear his head, and he had always done his best thinking then.

  While he sweated, he concentrated on the thought of Abby and their marriage, and tried to be honest. It was like a mental treadmill, almost the same sequence of thoughts and memories every time, to answer the question of how it had gone wrong and what he ought to do about it now.

  It hadn’t only been the taking jobs on separate coasts—if it was only that, they might have survived. No, Abby had gone wrong. It started after Gillian was killed, when she cried so much Ray thought he might have to have her locked up somewhere. She told him she cried in the swimming pool, silently into the water, and on long runs. Every night after a few glasses of wine, while he watched a movie or a game, she sat beside him with an open book, and tears ran down her face.

  When she did finally perk up, he was pretty sure it was because she had an affair. Soon after Gill had died, she started talking about one of her colleagues, Jacob something, a single guy, one of her new theory-spouting friends—though for him it was not Lacan, but Cixous and the rest of the French feminists. He worked on Virginia Woolf and taught feminist theory, and the chicks all ate it up with a spoon, including Abby, who sometimes had lunch with him.

  Then she got a fellowship to do research at the New York Public Library, and she spent a whole semester there, while Ray was up in Providence. It was an easy train ride, and they spent long weekends together in New York, walking to museums and restaurants, having some of the best times of their life.

  But it turned out Jacob was on sabbatical that semester, and where did he decide to do his Woolf research? Of course, the New York Public Library, and he rented an apartment in the village, same as them. How could Ray believe that was just a coincidence?

  All that semester, Jacob was underfoot. He was short and dark and thin, a Jewish guy, with black curly hair, like Gillian—he could have been her older brother, and maybe that explained something. If Ray went down midweek, he usually found him at Abby’s table in the library, or the two of them might be lunching on the steps, or strolling back from some intimate little restaurant when it was snowy out. One day when he knew the library was closed, Ray took the train down unannounced, let himself into their place, and what did he see? Jacob at their kitchen table, eating a bowl of soup. Now that was a nice little domestic scene. And was it all that had ever happened there?

  “He just dropped by, and he was hungry,” Abby said nervously.

  Jacob looked terrified and soon got out of there.

  When he was gone, Ray asked, “Does he know about my heart?”

  “Of course. All my friends know about that.”

  Ray nodded. “He’s just biding his time until I’m dead.”

  On the phone, Johnny said, “Of course she’s bonking the dude.”

  Hank agreed. Both of them came to New York, sniffed around, and told Ray what they thought. She was guilty as charged.

  She denied it, and claimed she often found Jacob annoying, because he liked to call her “Mrs. Stark,” though she had never used Ray’s name.

  “It’s because I say the word husband too often. I love it, and I say it all the time. It’s music to me, like saying your name. My husband this, my husband that, I say, and Jacob thinks it’s bourgeois and unfeminist. He doesn’t believe in marriage. He’s fathered two kids and never married anyone. I think there’s something very cold in him, or cold to women a
nyway. He may even be gay. He’s been with a lot of women, and they never stick around. Sometimes they move in with him, but soon after that, they always run for the hills.”

  So, all right, Ray tried to believe her—no one wants to think his wife is screwing around. And it was true that, back in Berkeley, Jacob was far less in evidence—though who knew what actually went on when Ray was out of town? He wasn’t sure he could trust her anymore.

  And then she went berserk in other ways. After her first horse died, she bought another, for the same price as the Porsche, and it cost so much to maintain she was buying it again, little by little, to rent its stall and buy its feed, take lessons and get it trained. Ray was sure that part of the appeal was how much time she could spend out there, out of his sight. Sure, he could see the fun in galloping over jumps, but she also had to scoop manure, and sometimes she got thrown. When she went back to riding in her fifties, she broke eleven ribs and a scapula and had her head smacked so hard she suffered three concussions, in spite of her helmet. If she had been a football player, someone would have made her stop.

  He had tried to be that guy.

  “No more horses,” he proclaimed. “We can’t afford it. It’s a rich person’s hobby, and we’re not rich.”

  And when she got hurt, he threatened darkly, “If you end up in a wheelchair, I won’t take care of you.”

  But she didn’t seem to care what he said anymore. It was like she wasn’t there. It was like living with a lunatic instead of his wife. Maybe a part of him had felt divorced for years, with a madwoman in his house.

  Or so it felt to him when he was working out. That was a natural irritant, sweating so hard—something physical, and it drew his anger out.

  But when he finished and stood for a long while under a hot shower, it could all float away. Then he might wonder, was it only a bad patch for Abby, another moment when he should take care of her? God knew, he’d had a few himself, and she’d been through a lot, more than he ever had. No one in his life had died, except his dad, and a cat he had in grad school. Certainly no friend of his was blown apart ten feet away. It was like she had survived a war or something, and a lethal diagnosis, too.

  Of course all that left scars in her, and maybe she needed to ride, for now, as therapy—he got that. A therapist would probably cost at least that much, and he supposed he should be glad she wasn’t throwing money away on that. Riding at least seemed to be surprisingly good exercise—Abby’s core muscles had gotten strong and visible. When she sat on top of him, naked in bed, he teased her, counting the ones in her abdomen.

  “And how many thousand bucks did this here muscle cost us, anyway?”

  So, as he dried off in the locker room and dressed again, he came to more or less the same conclusion every time. He wasn’t going to be the heel who left his damaged, sixty-year-old wife. Or not without putting up a damn good fight.

  But halfway through the month of no contact, he felt ready to crack. Ten times a day, he wanted to call Tory, just to hear her voice, let her know he was still there. He needed something to stop him calling her. A reminder of some kind, like his wedding ring but just for this, for not leaving his wife.

  So this time he didn’t ask Abby. He went to a tattoo parlor on Telegraph and let them prick him a thousand times, the pain his penance. He drew the design himself, chain links around one wrist, and on the tender underside, a tiny red padlock. It was something he could cover with his cuffs and keep secret, like self-inflicted stripes across his back.

  When Abby caught a glimpse of it that night, still raw and bleeding, she looked aghast. “Good God, what’s that? A tattoo? Why?”

  “To remind me of how I have fucked up my life.”

  She peered at it. “But chains? Is that what you feel like, that you’re in chains because of me? You’re not in chains, you’re free. I told you to go be with her!”

  She seemed overwrought, but there was nothing to discuss. He’d done it, and it was now part of him. He gently washed the wound and put on an old pair of soft, well-worn PJs, in case it bled. In bed, he left the wrist exposed, so it could ooze and breathe. It stung like hell, but he deserved it. If he could have crucified himself, he might have gone with that. He concentrated his whole mind on it.

  On January 20, the tattoo was not quite healed, but it was time for him to fly back and teach, and only eleven days till the month was up. It was a chore, flying in winter, with hours of delay at every connection due to snow, and it took all day to get to Providence.

  That was all right—he dreaded being there, so relatively close to Tory, though she might not be in Montreal right then. Last time he talked to her, she had made plans to spend time soon—he wasn’t sure exactly when—above the Arctic Circle, cross-country skiing with friends. It sounded slightly insane, like something he might have done when he was her age.

  When he reached his little house, he discovered that the pipes were frozen, and he had no water. Cheered by the emergency, he called a plumber, who couldn’t come for the next two days. So he took his biggest pots and went back and forth to the yard to scoop up clean snow and heat it on the stove. It felt good to work hard in the cold, breathing icy air. More penance, more distraction, keeping him on course.

  He taught the first two weeks of classes, met his new crop of scared little geniuses, before he heard from Miami. But finally he got the call, asking him to fly down for two days, to meet the deans and teach a class in front of the whole English Department.

  Next morning, he walked over to the department office and in on Whitney Ames, who as usual looked fat and misbuttoned, sitting at his cluttered desk in a sloppy cardigan. He looked so stupid, slack-jawed, breathing through his mouth, and he never seemed able to focus on anything Ray said—he tended just to drop papers, with a vague look in his eye that screamed, I am incapable, how did I get this job? Once Ray saw him asleep on a couch in the faculty lounge, abandoning all dignity. When Ray made an appointment with him, there was always a fifty-fifty chance Whitney would forget. So this time, he just walked in.

  He knocked on Whitney’s desk to wake him up. “I’m going to miss a class next week. I’ll be out of town.”

  “What for?” Whitney asked suspiciously.

  The piece of shit. But he did seem to pay attention now.

  “I have a flyback for the endowed chair at Miami. I’m going to take it if you don’t give me a full-time job.”

  “Oh, really,” Whitney said, not like a question, more a flat statement, or like he was trying ineptly to make fun of Ray. Whitney looked nervous, and he fumbled with a pencil till he dropped it.

  That felt good, excellent, as Ray left the office and walked back home. It was a cold sun-out morning, crisp, with cardinal chatter in the air and ice windows on the puddles he could break. Spring felt thirty paces off—he could feel it polishing its helmet, buffing the fender of its equipage. For a nanosecond the head of Wallace Stevens seemed to appear in Ray’s own frosty breath, and thank God he hadn’t put him on the syllabus of his seminar. Next time he would call the class Abundance, and there Stevens would be, white and photosensitive but with a poetics of cockatoos.

  As the time approached to fly to Florida, he ironed a few clean shirts, picked what he’d wear, the calculated look that said “Poet, but Civilized,” conversant with academe. That included a few neckties, but nothing old-school—he had a Miró print on one, a surreal Italian abstract on another. Black jeans, rubber-soled black walking shoes, and which jacket? It would be warm down there—he pulled out one Abby had bought for him some years ago, unconstructed black linen, high-end, though by this time it was baggy and respectably beat-up. He could play the game, but he was also his own man.

  That night he was about to switch off his phone, when it pinged for a text. His heart leaped—but he told himself it was probably just Abby, just his wife.

  It wasn’t. The screen said, New Message from Tory Grenier.

  He started to shake. What was she trying to do?

  Quickly he
checked his calendar—ah. It was February now. He touched the message, and it sprang to life.

  Only two words, in a gray bubble. “Snow fox.”

  Eight

  Valentine’s Day morning, Abby dreamed that Gillian lay in a coffin, as a stylist combed her hair into ringlets. Her face was just as it had been in life, lovely, smooth-skinned, and young, just a little plump, with a heart-shaped mouth and vulnerable eyes.

  Oh, thank God, her face wasn’t hit! Abby thought with joy.

  Then she herself was in the coffin, and it had a little window in the top. Ray looked into it and called to Johnny, “Come see how cute she looks in there!”

  She woke up and had to lie in bed for a long while, putting the world together the way it really went. She knew the dream was wishful, but she tried to keep the feeling. Somewhere, in some other universe, Gillian was still herself, intact. Abby sometimes felt her presence. At the MLA Convention, when she was about to read her paper to a packed hotel ballroom, she had lifted her hand and felt Gillian’s reach down to grasp it.

  Dreamily, still half asleep, she remembered one of the last evenings she had spent with her. It was late at night, after a movie, as they sat in Gill’s living room, Gill on the couch with her cat, Abby in a chair a few yards away. Abby was about to leave when Gillian gave her a long sultry look and said, “You know, I’ve dated girls some, too.”

  She wore dark red lipstick on her luscious mouth, and just for a moment Abby had considered what it would be like to kiss those lips. Certainly she loved her enough for that. But she let the moment pass, went home, and two weeks later, Gillian was dead.

  It had been almost five years now, and these days she could sometimes think of her without crying. But it was better not to dwell.

  So she got up and made coffee, read the notes for her survey class. It was a big lecture, and she had to use a microphone—she dreaded it, all those students arrayed up the slope in front of her, waving like palm trees in the breeze. Her aim would be to make them all stop moving at once, by saying something startling, or getting a laugh—which was relatively easy, since they were a captive audience. She picked out a wool skirt and high-collared blouse, stockings and heels, her power clothes.