The Use of Fame Read online

  She was about to drive downhill when she heard the hollow rumble of a UPS van out front, bringing a package from Ray. Inside was a US Navy sailor’s jumper that looked barely big enough for her, and a hand-printed note.

  Got this in the same store as our quilt top. Real WWII Navy—those fellows were small. Cold, cold morning, me about to trudge forth into the white heap of Saturday, squirrels humping through the snow, beating their diagonals to the feeder for what I’ve spilled and the cardinals kicked out. If you were here we could just get back into bed. I would hate to leave this house but if we keep it, we definitely need to do some things to make it snugger, new doors and windows will be big, maybe a couple big rugs—it’ll be fun, or we’ll be getting some place in Miami with gators in the yard. Florida daffodils? Why not, and certainly wisteria. I’m ready though to get out of the blender, for us to concentrate on being together and knowing where that will be. I’m pretty much sure if I get the offer, I go, don’t think the mouth breather and a brick wall are capable of getting an appropriate response together. Part of me hopes nothing happens in a way, just to avoid the crisis and the rejection I won’t be able to help but feel from here. Oh well, I don’t know how much I can prepare for that—just try to put myself together for this week’s trip, which I think could be kind of fun, I’ll certainly be in the center ring of the circus there for a bit. Clown? Lion tamer? Acrobat? I guess it’s my pick and I’ll try to be all of them. I miss you, String Bean. I do so so love you you you

  Ray

  She checked her calendar—just as she thought, it was his day to fly to Miami.

  By the time she finished her lecture, he had texted her from both airports, and that night he called from his hotel, cranked up. He’d had lunch, cocktails, and dinner with his potential colleagues and deans, and he’d been talking fast all day. He couldn’t seem to slow down now, though it was after ten in Florida.

  Almost chattering, he said, “It’s a new position, donated by this visionary guy, to start a program in experimental poetry, and I’d get to design it. I’d only have to work with grad students, people I could pick. So it doesn’t sound so bad, with the money and all. Do you realize what kind of bucks we’ll have if I come here? We could buy a house. The English Department’s big. They said they could probably offer you something, too. Oh, yeah, and the dean’s wife rides. He said there are excellent stables around.”

  “Sounds like they want you,” Abby said.

  “The chair told me I was in. Not that I want to leave Brown.”

  “Well, wait till you get the letter, then tell Whitney Ames.”

  “That fucking mouth breather. I did send him an email asking for a meeting with the heavies in the program.”

  A week later, back in Providence, he got the formal offer from Miami, and he called her. “I decided to push as far as I could. I asked for a bigger salary, and they agreed like it was nothing.” He giggled. “Oh, and they mentioned a job for you again. We could live together all the time. Of course we’d keep the Berkeley place for summers. So think about it, okay?”

  The day of his meeting with the senior faculty at Brown, they texted back and forth from the time Abby woke up. When he didn’t write back for a while, she knew it must be happening.

  Ray’s ring on her phone was ducks quacking, and finally she heard them.

  “Fucking mouth breather wouldn’t know an idea if it bit him on the ass. And Gumby just licks his boots and swallows hard.” Gumby was what he and Hank called another of their colleagues, a pudgy guy who always agreed with Ames. “Wags his fat tail the whole time. One of these days I’m going to get a gun and blow them all away.”

  “Please, honey,” Abby said. “Take a deep breath. You might have to work there for the rest of your life. Better practice putting up with them.”

  “I’m tied in knots. Hank says it’s in the bag, but I don’t think he’s right.”

  She thought about it for a while. “You know, you hate those people. You might still want to walk away. But it should be your choice. So please, try to tread cautiously until it’s figured out.”

  He had to answer Miami in ten days, and Brown promised to let him know by then. When the time was almost up, Abby flew to Providence, where it was deep winter. She made beef stew and listened to Ray fret, to her and on the phone with Hank and Johnny. He seemed too tense to sleep, and the second night she was there, she woke at 3:00 a.m. to find him upright downstairs on the couch, fiddling with his phone. He gave her a furtive look.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “Nothing. You were flopping around, and you woke me up.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  Abby felt guilty. Since New Year’s, she had been so anxious she had taken Ambien every night, and it seemed to make her restless in her sleep. She knew she ought to stop, but she just couldn’t right now, the way things were with Ray. Though she still refused to believe she’d had lupus, her doctors said it could come back any time she was under stress, and that a full night’s sleep was the best defense—especially in spring, when it was most likely to kill a person. Quietly she went back upstairs to bed.

  Abby had gone to grad school with a woman named Clarice, who was now a well-known poet and a colleague of Ray’s at Brown. When Clarice found out Abby was in Providence, she called and said, “We need to talk.”

  They arranged to meet at a little soup and sandwich place, and Abby dressed for it warily. Clarice was a loyal friend, but she had a tendency to mother people and give unwanted advice. Had she found out what was going on with her and Ray? She was married to his mentor, Walt, and he and Ray did talk sometimes. Abby put on jeans and a cashmere turtleneck, snow boots, and a down vest that turned out not quite warm enough for the icy day outside, so she walked fast to the lunch spot.

  Clarice was from New York, and she arrived bundled in an ankle-length down coat that dwarfed her small frame, a close-fitting knit cap, and a series of wool scarves. It was overheated and steamy in the restaurant, and as Abby gradually warmed up, Clarice unwound her scarves, used one to rub the steam from her wire-frame glasses, and finally pulled off her cap, releasing long straight hair, the red of which changed shade every time they met. Today it seemed to have cotton-candy highlights and beet undertones.

  “God, this hair. It gets all staticky in wintertime.” She tried to smooth it down.

  As soon as they had ordered, Clarice wasted no time. “So, listen. I have to talk to you about Ray. What’s up with him? I heard him yelling in the office the other day.”

  Abby was alarmed. “In the office? His office?”

  Clarice stared at her without blinking, skillfully applied mascara fringing her brown eyes. “No, that was what was strange. He was in the department office, yelling at Janet.” She glanced around and dropped her voice. “Nobody yells at Janet.”

  Janet was the departmental administrator, popular with faculty and students.

  Clarice shook her head. “I don’t think anyone ever has, and if they did, they wouldn’t get away with it. Whitney is very protective of her.”

  “Was Whitney there?”

  “No, but I’m sure he heard about it. All the secretaries heard, and Ray called him a mouth breather, just like that, in front of everyone! It wasn’t a good move.”

  “Could you tell what it was about?”

  “Something to do with one of his students. But he doesn’t seem to need a reason. He gets mad now in every meeting. That’s not going to do him any good around here.”

  Abby tried to make light of it. “He’s under a lot of pressure, what with having to decide about Miami, and I think his heart is getting worse. He’s in pain all the time, in his chest, and no one seems to know why, though it obviously has to do with his heart.”

  Clarice gave a little worried nod. “I wonder if his brain is getting enough oxygen, because of the weak heart. Doesn’t it seem like his personality has changed?”

  Abby had thought that herself, but she wasn’t going to say so to Clarice,
who presumably would get to vote on Ray going full time.

  When the soup arrived, she changed the subject to their work, and they talked about the poetics study Clarice was trying to write and how bored Abby had become with Joyce studies. They decided they should change places, teach each other’s classes for a while.

  Two days later, Abby flew back to Berkeley, and next morning, Ray called. “This is it. The mouth breather wants to see me. Wish me luck.”

  An hour later, he called back, shouting. “He fucking fired me! He can’t do that. He isn’t even qualified to hold that job. He doesn’t have the chops, and he knows it. And I do! Half the students here come to work with me. How many come to work with him?”

  “What? Wait,” Abby said. “He can’t fire you. You have a contract. No, you have tenure. You have tenure at half time.”

  “Well, he did. He told me to take the Miami job.”

  “But he didn’t fire you. He can’t fire you.”

  “Quit saying that! It’s the same thing. I can’t stay here, not after that. And fucking Hank—I could kill him. He knew about it, and he didn’t stop it. I’ll never speak to the two-faced jerk again. And now I have to fucking go to Florida.”

  “You sure? You could still stay at Brown. What’s changed, really?”

  “I’d rather kill myself, and all of them,” he said.

  “Poet goes postal,” Abby said. But today she couldn’t make him laugh.

  Ray said yes to Miami, and Abby flew back to Rhode Island and put their house on the market, both of them sad to see it go.

  “I fucking cry every time I swim, the same as you,” he told her bitterly.

  She hadn’t realized it, but they both must have counted on Brown to come through in the end. And she had misgivings about the move. Could they really live in Florida? She knew nothing about the place, except that it was full of retirees in high-rises along the beach, and former Cubans angry at Castro. There was that corrupt election with the hanging chads, and megachurches that sent people out to attack Planned Parenthood. But she had seen a photo in a riding magazine of a house somewhere down there, with an outdoor living room on grass, and a horse with its head over one couch, having its ears stroked. She would cling to that.

  Ray flew to Berkeley for spring break, seeming tense but subdued. A few nights later, their friends Sateesh and Gloria came over for dinner, as they often did, the couples dining back and forth. Sateesh was a tall, thin poet with a mane of shaggy black curls, who often wrote about his immigrant family. He had gone to grad school with Abby, written a dissertation on the literature of the Indian diaspora, and might have taken an academic post. But instead he married Gloria, blond heiress to a Chicago trucking dynasty, and neither of them had to work. Now Sateesh read widely, wrote poems, and designed software for fun. Gloria spent most days riding her three horses, and Abby suspected her of being a Republican, though when they met, they talked horses instead of politics. Gloria was plump, with a formidable bosom, large pale eyes, and graying hair kept bobbed and restrained in a ponytail. She liked to refer to herself in the third person, as in, “Nine thirty is when Gloria gets up,” and, “Gloria needs a cheeseburger for lunch.” Once she had nursed Abby through the flu when Ray was out of town.

  Tonight, when Sateesh saw Abby, he cried joyfully, “Look how she’s dressed!” Gloria shot him a glance, like he should stop, but he went on. “Look at her!”

  Abby blushed—what was so unusual? It was true, she was dressed in Gloria’s style tonight, flats and narrow pants with a silk tunic. Did that mean Gloria disapproved of her usual weekend wear? Too young, too sexy, she supposed. Too un-Republican. At home she and Ray still dressed the way they always had, since their respective college days—hers in the late sixties, his in the seventies—jeans and cotton sweaters, Ray in running shoes, Abby in wedge-heeled espadrilles. Some of their clothes were literally from college days, a few sweaters at least.

  But now it seemed that Gloria had embraced her middle age and was critical of Abby for not doing so—and not of Ray? No, Sateesh and Gloria adored Ray, always had. She could hear the different tone in their voices when they talked to him. “Darling Ray,” Gloria called him.

  Well, Abby was not uncritical of Gloria, who flatly refused to have dinner with some of their other friends, academics who talked over her head. But Ray was deeply loyal to both Sateesh and Gloria and never offered to murder them—probably because they adulated him. They listened respectfully and never argued back when he held forth—they almost took notes. Abby supposed that was Ray’s model of ideal friendship, at which Johnny and Hank—and she herself—had often failed.

  Then, too, she supposed their preference for Ray might be based on class. Despite their current wealth, Sateesh and Gloria had roots in the proletariat, like Ray. Sateesh’s father had stowed away from Mumbai rupeeless, worked the docks in New York, made foreman, and sent Sateesh to MIT to become an engineer, though he had veered instead toward books and poetry. Gloria’s grandfather had won his first truck in a poker game and eventually founded his own company.

  Well, that’s how money was made in America. And yet, even in a supposedly classless society, it mattered how many generations you were removed from honest sweat, since someone could resent you over it. Abby’s forebears had been scruffy pirates in the Gold Rush, but now they’d gone to college for a century, and all her life, people had said of her, “Thinks she’s better than the rest of us.” Her first semester as a professor, when she had felt profoundly like a fraud, some kid wrote on his evaluation, “Thinks she’s God, but I see no connection.” Whatever gave him that impression might be what put off Sateesh and Gloria.

  Ray liked to cook with other people there, relegating Abby to the sous chef role, and tonight he produced a paella of chorizo and shellfish, while Abby made a salad of sugar snap peas and pocket arugula, with basil and burrata. Their kitchen was small, but they moved easily around in it, one of them washing something at the sink while the other chopped or stirred, trading places, never getting in each other’s way, while Sateesh and Gloria sat on stools at the bar, tasting the wine they’d brought.

  “I love watching you two cook together,” said Sateesh. “It’s like ballet.”

  Abby and Ray glanced at each other and smiled, and the mood of the night seemed saved.

  The paella was excellent, and as usual the four of them sat for a long time at the table afterward, drinking wine and telling stories in the candlelight. Gloria had brought dope, and Ray rolled a joint and smoked it with her. Sateesh preferred wine, and Abby had never liked marijuana, not even in college, when it was in style. And what was available these days was just too strong—the one hit she had taken the past few years had made her giddy for fifteen minutes and then useless for a day.

  Gloria seemed giddy, too, once the joint was smoked, and she could not seem to stop talking, about her mother in a mansion on the Chicago North Shore, how difficult she was, how stingy, how none of her siblings spoke to her anymore and she, Gloria, had to shoulder the burden by herself.

  “Gloria,” Sateesh said sternly several times, trying to make her stop. But the dope made her impervious, and after a while he gave up, stood, and commanded her to come with him, though he practically had to carry her out the door.

  “Poor Gloria,” Abby said, elated by comparison—Ray tried to control her only when they were alone. With others there, he seemed especially loving and often bragged of her supposed accomplishments.

  Dope cranked Ray up, too, not so much to talk as to want to have fun. When he smoked, he might bounce on the bed at 3:00 a.m. and say, “Let’s do something!”

  Tonight he put on Frank Sinatra and asked Abby to dance. The living room was dark, lit only by streetlight outside, and in the shadows they danced slow to “Strangers in the Night,” “It Was a Very Good Year,” and “When Somebody Loves You,” and twirled to “New York, New York,” until Ray was finally tired enough to sleep.

  Next morning, she didn’t have to teach, and when R
ay walked to his café, she sat at her desk, facing her big bay view. It was a beautiful spring day, rain chasing sun. Fluffy white clouds soared, their shadows darkening the blue water. She wrote another surreptitious poem, about Ray and marriage, called “The Emergency Was Over.”

  After an hour on that, she decided to tackle the monthly bills—the one for their phones was larger than usual. Somehow, in February, they had used more data than their family plan allowed.

  Online, she clicked a link to the details and found about six hundred texts from Ray’s phone, some to herself, but most to a number she didn’t recognize—four of them that morning before she woke up.

  Quaking like an eight on the Richter scale, she called his cell. “Have you been texting Tory Grenier?”

  “I’m coming home right now to talk about it,” he said in a monotone, and hung up.

  Abby typed in the number from the data-usage file.

  “Get your thumbs off my husband,” she wrote, and pressed “Send.”

  Things she had been trying not to see washed over her. In January, she had spoken at a memorial for one of her Cal mentors, with Ray in the audience. It went on for three hours, and afterward, at the reception, he had oddly declined a drink and said he needed air. He went outside on the Cal campus for half an hour and came back all sparkly eyed. He had taken his phone with him, but she did not question it.

  She pawed through the calendar—the memorial had been January 19. Did he call Tory and say he couldn’t bear a month with no contact?

  The apartment door burst open, and Ray rushed in. “Did you text her? Jesus, you freaked her out. ‘Does your wife know my number?’ she wrote to me.”