The Gulf

by Belle Boggs

  Just how happy are clams anyway? Ruth had asked. In her youth and her earnestness, she’d been serious, though for a moment she’d sounded just like their mother, had brought her back to life, performed a miracle.

  Sometimes it made Marianne angry, not believing in God.

  2

  The storm arrived on Thursday, as the woman in the supermarket predicted, but aside from a brief loss of power and general strewing of detritus—brown rafts of seaweed, torn palm fronds, the contents of an unsecured trash can—there was little damage. Marianne spent the storm in what Eric later told her, during their weekly check-in, was the least advisable part of the Ranch—the big rec room with its plate glass window, which could have easily shattered into a thousand flying shards. Marianne said he might have told her that before the storm, but Eric said everybody knew that you should stay away from big windows during storms. “Do not assume I know what everybody knows!” Marianne had shouted into her computer. “I do not have that sort of knowledge!”

  But she had not felt threatened sitting in the chintz-cushioned wicker armchair she’d dragged near the window, a plate of peanut butter sandwiches and a flat of bottled water at the ready. Even after the power flickered off in the late afternoon, the room felt cozy and familiar and safe, with its shelf of ravaged board games and terrible novels. The gulf disappeared behind rain that splashed in gray sheets, but other than a brief screeching of wind that happened at full dark, there was little to send one running for cover. The next day everything sparkled with raindrops, even the plastic cups and bottles and grocery bags that littered the beach.

  On Monday, workers arrived to do some of the work she’d requested: a crew to fix the roofs, a crew to repaint the buildings and outbuildings, landscapers to weed-whack the sculpture garden and clear away overgrown brush. Though she was glad to see things getting done, Marianne felt crowded by their vehicles and paint cans and coolers and half-empty bottles of Gatorade. She felt even more crowded by their general busyness, which was measurable and obvious, while she sorted piles of paper into different stacks in an air-conditioned motel room with daytime television on mute.

  She found a bicycle in one of the tool sheds, powder blue, with rusty fenders and fat, deflated tires she managed to mostly inflate with a small hand pump. It had been years since she had been on a bike, though her Brooklyn neighbors tootled around helmetlessly, the soles of their flip-flopped feet black with dirt. This bike had a wide seat and graceful handlebars that didn’t require you to hunch over. It was the perfect vehicle for cruising the neighborhood. Marianne waved good-bye to the roofers as she rode past the front entrance.

  Across from the Ranch was a Kangaroo gas station where Marianne sometimes bought snacks and tampons. A few miles to the north was a stretch of identical T-shirt-and-beach-towel warehouses, dimly lit shell shops, the Publix—but turning right, then left, she could ride through a development of new houses that sat on the east side of the beach road. Even before she made the turn, past the elaborate pale-brick entrance, she could see that they were still under construction, the plywood a garish orange against the cloudless sky, the shingled roofs draped with tarps. On closer inspection, she realized none of the houses had workers hanging Sheetrock or laying flooring. They were all large, empty, half-finished shells. The tarps held standing water. Sun-faded trash littered the short weedy drives.

  Marianne’s crews worked until dusk, then packed up with the speed of a television home-improvement show. They picked up all the bottles and coolers before they left, and Marianne noticed that things were looking neater, less abandoned. She figured they were glad to have the work. “Back tomorrow, miss,” the landscape boss called to her cheerfully. Marianne waved good-bye.

  “How’d it go?” Mark asked on Skype later. It was his custom to pace around with a headset, doing other things while she struggled to keep his attention. The computer’s camera faced an empty chair, and through his window Marianne could see the early-evening skyline.

  “I guess it went fine,” Marianne said. She told him about the empty development.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That developer ran out of money—too bad. Someone else will come along. Look how close it is to the water.”

  “How much is our renovation costing?”

  “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “You just take care of whatever you have to take care of on the school side. Finding students and teachers. That’s really the priority here. The school stuff.”

  “The school stuff.” Marianne wondered, watching the window behind Mark’s chair, if she missed New York. She thought she could make out the graceful arches of the Brooklyn Bridge, but it may have been a trick of the light. How much time had she spent on the Brooklyn Bridge anyway? Maybe once she’d walked across its wide pedestrian walkway. Most of her transriver experiences involved the subway or the ugly Manhattan Bridge, or the absolutely ordinary Pulaski Bridge, which crossed only a greenish creek.

  “Yes,” Mark said after a long pause. “Eric thinks you should stay in more of an administrative role. You know, hire someone else to teach the first poetry workshop.”

  “Oh,” Marianne said. “Could you sit down, please? In front of your computer?”

  “You can, you know, focus on your writing.” His voice was still faraway and tinny. What was he doing? Tidying up? Most likely, she realized, he was working on a desktop in another part of his office. She strained to hear the decisive tap-tap-tap of number typing, which was what she assumed he did all day.

  “My writing is not going well,” Marianne said, rather loudly, so she could not take it back. (She hoped that if she announced it often, like a recovering alcoholic, it might help.) “What does an administrative role entail? Could you move over to your computer, please?”

  “You know,” said Mark. “Interacting with the students on a personal level, making sure things go well. Mediating between the interests of the students and the teachers, who may not be used to some of the same … thought processes? Of the students.”

  “So, like a religious concierge,” she said. “Or an activities director on a religious cruise ship. Or an admissions director at a religious college.”

  “Yes,” Mark said happily. She could definitely hear a keyboard’s busy clacking. “Like that.”

  The Ranch was not accredited. It did not have an endowment. It did not have a beautiful campus or a quad, though the gardens and pathways were less treacherous after a week of landscaping. It did not have classrooms or a photocopier. And yet the applications, mostly generated by a few well-placed advertisements, continued to roll in. Marianne added a few more applications to the yes? pile—a memoir from a remorseful maker of slasher films, a speculative novel from a 9/11 truther, poems by an escaped Scientologist who’d moved to Hollywood to write a screenplay about being an excommunicated Mormon. Although she maintained, to Eric, an outward hurt at being asked not to teach, on the inside Marianne was deeply relieved.

  She began contacting possible poetry professors from an old email list she’d saved from graduate school. Ha ha, wrote some of her old classmates, who’d remembered her drunken thought experiments. Marianne did not try to prove anything to these people, who had their own problems. A tiny minority had teaching jobs, mostly in small, Midwestern towns with winters that were beginning already. Others had moved on to real jobs: lawyer, accountant, graphic designer. A great many had gotten married, had children, and taken up fake jobs: cupcake baker, jewelry maker, graphic designer.

  It was one of this latter set, a beautiful girl whose family owned wineries in California and who had married the scion of a Kentucky horse-breeding family, who suggested that they were barking up the wrong tree. Her poems and workshop comments always had something of the bluntness afforded to people of her class. This is a job for the desperate, she wrote. You need to find someone experienced, but who has made some career mistakes. Someone always on the visiting circuit. What about Lorraine?

  Lorraine Kominski had spent a semester teaching at thei
r school. Her first book had won the Yale Younger Poets prize, but that was a very long time ago, before Marianne was even born. Years of low-grade alcoholism and erratic workshop behavior had bumped her several rungs down the teaching ladder, from an Ivy League college to a SUNY school to the occasional visiting writer post offered by a sympathetic friend. She showed up late to class and was occasionally threatening or belligerent with her students. Sometimes she disliked a student’s poem so much that she would place it on the floor, cross her arms, and shake her head at it. Every now and then she published a poem about one of her cats in the New Yorker.

  “No,” Eric said. “I don’t think she would be right. For our students.”

  “She’s a very good writer,” Marianne said. “Landlord Death Chants was a great book. And I like those cat poems. I always cut them out and put them on my fridge.”

  “Marianne.”

  “And I think her teaching style might be what the students are looking for,” she continued. “Like fantasy baseball. Or space camp. You don’t go to space camp expecting not to throw up at some point.”

  “You think these applicants are expecting to throw up? You think they want to be told how bad they are?”

  Marianne thought for a minute. “Yes,” she said. “They want to wear a space suit, but they also want to throw up. They want to be nurtured, but they also want to be abused. Haven’t you ever been to church? Lorraine would be poetry’s holy roller.”

  “Well, who even knows if she’s available?”

  “She is,” Marianne said. “As a matter of fact.”

  OKAY, Lorraine Kominski had typed back, four minutes after Marianne’s email, like she was waiting for exactly such an invitation. She’d detailed her modest salary requirements and the airport and flight times she most preferred. I LIKE TO FLY DELTA FOR THE DELTA MILES. NICE TO HEAR FROM YOU. HOPE YOUR WRITING IS GOING BETTER.

  A few days later, Eric had warmed up to the idea of Lorraine as poetry teacher, or at least accepted it, and Marianne, for her part, felt more and more relieved to be in an administrative role, to avoid the actual teaching.

  Can’t wait to get to FL with you, he texted her. This is really going to work out.

  Excited to see you too, she wrote back, laboring over the buttons on her flip phone, which Eric said looked like something an old lady might use to call an ambulance. I hope so.

  She wasn’t sure what they were talking about—the school, or living in proximity again—and guessed that Eric wasn’t either, but it was better, easier, than clarifying.

  He was still in love with Marianne. She knew this and had encouraged it in small, mean ways: wearing certain dresses (low-cut, shoulder-baring) when he visited her in New York, brushing against him in the narrow aisles of the Strand, reaching across restaurant tables to take food from his plate like a girlfriend. And sometimes she was in love with parts of him too—the sound of his voice on the telephone on Sunday nights, the funny emails he sent her from work about his students, memories of lying in bed with him in his tiny Astoria walk-up, her head on his chest, his fingers in her hair.

  Marianne was good at the early stages of a relationship—dressing up for dates, flirting, doing thoughtful things that required only a small, un-intimidating, spontaneous kind of effort. She was not good at the things required by a long-term relationship (visiting other people’s families, planning trips or holidays or extravagant surprises), but this was something that was difficult to make someone else understand; they had to see for themselves, over time. Early on, when she told Eric that she had never lived with a man and never intended to, he wasn’t dissuaded. “A Woody/Mia thing then,” he’d said gamely.

  “Sure,” she said. “That turned out great.”

  Love. It wasn’t much, but in the absence of other options she counted on it to get her through, like a tax refund. From Eric, it came to her automatically, unearned. Why her? she sometimes wondered. It was true they had some things in common, it was true she was often available, and, yes, her looks were what some people called striking. She had a heart-shaped face, green eyes, cupid’s-bow lips. Her nearly black hair had started turning gray when she was eighteen years old and moved away from home—gray with relief, she always said. She’d hoped that she would grow a thick white feminist streak, like Susan Sontag’s, but instead it came in evenly, forming a kind of veil over the rest of her hair when she pulled it back. She liked the way her graying hair contrasted with her young face, but knew that one day her face would catch up and she would just be old.

  “You’re a poet,” Eric accused on the night she first met him. He reminded her of someone—she couldn’t remember who—but the question nagged at her. They were at a university-sponsored mixer, and Eric was standing by what passed for the bar, alternating between cheap tequila and cheaper beer. There was a bowl of nuts and a bowl of Chex Mix with the liquor on the folding table: that’s what twenty thousand a year got you, party-wise. “I can tell by your hair.”

  She wasn’t sure then if he was gay or drunk, but she liked both drunk guys and gay guys, so she let him monopolize her for the rest of the night. She’d been surprised when, at the West Fourth Street subway entrance, he’d pulled her in for a kiss. “Get a room,” she’d heard someone walking by say to them, not angrily but casually, as if it were a helpful suggestion. “What a good idea,” Eric said into her ear. He was never that bold sober, but Marianne didn’t know that then.

  The next morning, she realized who he reminded her of—a fictional character in a computer game she played in her college French class. “À la rencontre de Philippe!” she announced, in bed.

  “Qu’est-ce que c’est?” Eric asked. “That’s actually the only French I know.”

  “A game I used to play,” she explained. “In the language lab. You remind me of Philippe. He was a depressed journalist, and you were supposed to help him with his problems.”

  Eric frowned. “A depressed French journalist. Very flattering.”

  “Oh, Philippe was very handsome! But he really was a jackass.”

  What kind of problems did he have? Eric wanted to know. So many, Marianne explained: his girlfriend had kicked him out because he was au chomage—unemployed—and on the aide sociale. He needed a new job and a new apartment, but all he wanted to do was go to cafés and smoke cigarettes. You were supposed to help him by looking in the petites annonces.

  “He was animated?”

  “No, a real person—an actor. You watched videos and typed in these … exhortations. Demands? Encouragements? In French.” Marianne sat up and looked around at Eric’s tiny apartment, the single bedroom window that opened to a dim air shaft. “Maybe it’s your apartment that reminds me of the place I finally found for him: 11 rue Saint-Honoré.”

  “You remember the address? I hardly remember anything from college.”

  Marianne leaned back in bed and thought—why did she remember it so well? She was no longer close to fluent in French. But she could recall the maddening café conversations with Philippe almost word by word. She understood now that Philippe probably dismissed every French II player’s advice with the same prerecorded, café-swilling disdain, but at the time it felt like he was actually her friend, and it was strangely comforting to have a friend who was such a fuckup. “I remember sitting in the language lab after Philippe blew off this job interview I’d gotten him, and just cracking up. Everyone looked at me but I couldn’t stop. It was the first time I laughed, like really laughed, after my mother died.”

  Eric sat up and looked down at her, gentleness and sorrow on his face. “How did your mother die?”

  “Cancer.” She took a long breath and blew it out. “I’m not over it.”

  “Of course not,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  Telling him about her mother felt like a bigger intimacy than sex or sleeping side by side. It was in some ways the truest thing she knew about herself—that she had not recovered, did not expect to recover. This was behind all her choices—living in an unsustainable c
ity, on unsustainable loans, in pursuit of an unsustainable career. Immediately, she regretted telling a near stranger this truth she could barely admit. Had she thought he was like Philippe, someone she could just abandon in a café?

  She found herself arguing with him as they decided what to do next—where to get brunch, whether they needed to shower before brunch, whether they should keep their dalliance a secret from their fellow students. When she said good-bye to him at the entrance to the L train, Marianne figured they would be awkward and silent the next time they saw each other.

  But that wasn’t how it went. “Marianne!” Eric called across the next MFA gathering, his southern lilt splitting her name into the more familiar Mary-Anne. Her name in his mouth was urgent and delighted. Like she was special, remarkable, someone to scan the room for.

  They went home together again, to Eric’s apartment, where instead of falling into bed (to Marianne’s slight disappointment), they talked: about workshop, their hometowns, living in New York as southerners. It started to get dark, and Eric began making dinner, referring disconcertingly often to a recipe in a cookbook. “The way people won’t even wait for a less-crowded train!” Marianne insisted. “They’ll just cram themselves in. Elevators too—the hurry to do everything, shoveling snow as soon as it falls!” Eric agreed with her; at least, he didn’t argue, just looked at her slyly, slightly adoringly, waiting for the next pronouncement. “Not that I’d want to go back,” she clarified.

  “Not eventually?”

  No, she insisted: she loved New York, and feared living the life her mother lived, putting her art second, or third—really last of all the things she had to do in a day, in a week, in a year.

  “But if she hadn’t moved to Virginia,” Eric said. “If she hadn’t met your father.”

  “I know,” Marianne said. “You can appreciate something without wanting it for yourself. Don’t you ever go home and feel—at the grocery store, or wherever—proud of living here?”