The Gulf

by Belle Boggs

  “Yeah,” he said, his voice now muffled and indistinct, as if he were cradling the phone between his shoulder and neck so he could do something else. She hated this, though it wasn’t as bad as being put on speakerphone—both practices made things easier for the people on the other end, while you had to strain to understand them. It was like what her mother always said about call waiting; what did it take to be someone’s first priority? “Late March. I’ll be there in plenty of time to read manuscripts and help you out. But I know you have things under control. Mark is really happy with your management of everything.”

  She didn’t know how to tell him that his brother’s approval meant far less to her than it did to him—it had almost a negative quality, in fact—so instead she said she had to go, they could talk again next week.

  “Okay,” he said. “I really am sorry I won’t be there sooner. I was looking forward to being with you.”

  “Do you have seasons in Dubai?” she asked, suddenly anxious to stay on the line. “Without them, I feel like time moves indiscriminately. Like a cartoon clock. Every week is the same as the last. Before we know it—”

  “We don’t have seasons here either, if by seasons you mean leaves falling from deciduous trees,” he said. Marianne noticed, jealously, the way he included himself among the Emirates. Dubaians? He must be doing well there, she realized, to have been offered a second contract. What if he was offered a third? What if he never came back, what if he left her alone with the Ranch? “You have to tune in to subtler signs. You have to get out—are you getting out?”

  “I have a date,” she said. “Later this week.”

  “A date!”

  She was pleased by Eric’s slight alarm, but she clarified anyway. “With a woman. An older woman. Drinks on the lanai, probably something with pineapple and rum.”

  “Pineapple and rum,” Eric said fondly, and then repeated his wish to be in Florida, maybe one too many times. Marianne got off the phone before she could gauge his sincerity, and began missing him at once.

  Though Sophie LaTour, proprietress of the Manatee Inn, was practically Marianne’s next-door neighbor, they’d met in the birdwatching section of a used-book store in Sarasota, ten miles away. There were no bookstores or coffee shops near the Ranch, or anywhere else you might meet someone new. The beach was always full of people, but they were usually paired off or obviously busy with something solitary—speed walking, shell collecting, metal detecting. But in the birdwatching section—labeled, on a yellowing index card, ornithology—she thought she recognized one of the early-morning shell collectors. A fifty-something shell collector who sat in the narrow aisle of a used-book store, her lap stacked with bird books—that was her best option, and she’d seized it.

  After a brief discussion of their island and the hazards of innkeeping, Sophie invited her over for drinks. “Just casual,” she’d said from under her pile of books, though Marianne bought the wine she would bring at a shop in Sarasota rather than in the Publix spirits section, with its cheap and vulgar-sounding bottles. Marianne dressed up, too, though she had to take off her strappy sandals for the beach walk. In Brooklyn, she’d avoided her neighbors’ parties, with their talk of international travel and community gardens, but it had been months since she’d been invited anywhere.

  “Hello!” Sophie called from the elevated deck that stretched from the inn to the beach, as if Marianne could have missed the weathered, manatee-shaped sign. Sophie wore the same paint-spattered overalls and white T-shirt she’d had on when they met, but her short blond hair was pulled back from her face with a twisted silk scarf and mascara stiffened her lashes. With her light hair and her delicate features, she looked a bit like Sissy Spacek, if Sissy Spacek had spent a good deal of time in the sun. She held a glass of wine and was leaning against the railing, facing the inn. “I’m trying to decide if I should repaint the whole thing. Do you think I should?”

  Marianne climbed the steep steps and scuffed on her sandals. The Manatee Inn was closer to the beach than the Ranch, but the steel-gray color made it appear to recede behind the palms. “A different color? Maybe. Gray is sort of—”

  “Blah,” said Sophie. “I know. But it’s the color of manatees. Poor things. Propeller bait. I bought this place for the name, if you can believe it. I was just divorced and sort of identifying with the manatees, their sweet, dumb helplessness. Now I know that was a trick—neither one of us is as sweet or dumb as we look.”

  Marianne was never sure what to say when people announced their divorces: I’m sorry? What if the divorce was something they really wanted, or the correction—as with Eric—of a mistake?

  “It was already gray then,” Sophie continued. “Sort of a dispiriting color for a resort. It looks prison-like, doesn’t it?” She produced a bottle from an ice bucket and poured a glass for Marianne, sat down on the built-in bench. The Manatee’s decking was gray too, the boards worn and softened like driftwood. “I’ve got some guests at the pool. We’ll stay here until they tromp out for the sunset, okay?”

  Marianne handed her the bottle she’d brought, which Sophie plunged into the bucket—no saving for later. “What about a lighter blue-gray?”

  Sophie tilted her head. “Maybe, but it’s a lot of expense for a small change. I was thinking a yellow”—she pointed to a blotch of sunflower paint on her overalls—“like this. You’ve been doing a lot of work at your place; it’s nice to see. It had been going downhill for a long time. Are you set to reopen soon?”

  “In March. We still have a lot to do.”

  “March! Too bad you’ll miss the holiday traffic. Well, more for me.” Sophie stretched her legs in front of her. “I take it you’re new to the exciting world of hotel ownership.”

  “I’m not the owner,” Marianne said, surprised by how happy that made her. “I’m just the caretaker, I guess.” She took a long sip of wine before admitting: “It’s not really a hotel, either.”

  “Even better!” Marianne wasn’t sure if it was novelty or lack of competition that made Sophie happy. “What is it then?”

  “More of a school and … a retreat, for writers. When we open in March, that’s when our students arrive.”

  “Brilliant! What’s it called?”

  Marianne hesitated, remembering the bumper stickers—Coexist, Marriage Equality, NOW—she’d happily spotted on the back of Sophie’s Subaru. “Genesis Inspirational Writing Ranch.”

  “Huh. Genesis, like in the Bible?”

  “Like the genesis of an idea,” Marianne said. “But also like the Bible. We’re marketing to Christians, mostly. It’s a niche market.”

  Sophie cocked an eyebrow.

  Marianne turned her face toward the water, where the sun was sinking, fiery orange. “It wasn’t my idea. Well, it was my idea, originally, but I didn’t mean it.”

  Sophie raised the other eyebrow.

  “I moved here from New York. Basically, I had nowhere else to go. My apartment was being turned into condos, and I didn’t have steady work, and the owner of the motel invited me to be the administrator. Hired me. I guess you could say I missed certain boats—relationship boats, career boats—and I wound up here.”

  “It’s not the worst place to land,” Sophie said, pouring more wine for them both. “Those boats can leak. They can sink.” She told Marianne about her divorce: a cheating husband, a cross-country move, the new financial reality of going it alone. “You’re not married?”

  Marianne shook her head.

  “No significant other?”

  “Not exactly.”

  Sophie nodded, as if this answer satisfied her. “It gets lonely, but that’s when you make your discoveries, right in the middle of your loneliness. People these days can’t be lonely for a second. I see it with my guests—every one of them wants to know about Wi-Fi, or the cell reception on the beach. They can’t bear to be with their thoughts. Also the repeat offenders—people married again and again. What are they looking for?”

  “Wasn’t Frances—
the owner of my inn—married a few times?”

  “More than a few,” Sophie said. “Five? Six? She outlived them all, and good for her, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t lonely. I mean, she always had some project. Like the school, I guess. I haven’t seen her since she moved into the old folks’ home.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “A little. Her inn was getting a little crumbly when I bought the Manatee, and her last husband had died by then. She started a walking group, and I went once or twice. She had a Christmas cookie exchange. Then she had a book club, and I thought, well, that’s nice to see. But the books got weirder and weirder—she picked all of them herself. That was maybe two years ago? After that she moved. I assumed she’d sold. It’s not an easy business to keep up as you get older.”

  It was a relief to hear Frances identified as a reader, though Marianne wondered about the strangeness of her choices—she hadn’t seen Sophie’s own bookshelf, so it was hard to know what she meant. “I’ve been thinking about visiting her,” she said. “But Eric says she wants everything to be hands off. He says she’s busy.”

  “She loved being busy, that’s what I remember. Eric—he’s the not-exactly significant other?”

  “He’s my business partner. We used to date.”

  Sophie turned away to look at something happening down the beach, and Marianne felt the sudden desire tell to her the whole Eric story—how they met, their engagement, his marriage and divorce. How now she got anxious before she Skyped with him, a nervousness that stretched hours before the appointed call. Suddenly she remembered her first boyfriend, a soccer-playing stoner, and how her desire to talk about him was constantly at war with her other desire, to keep everything about him private.

  “I’ve been here since September,” she said, drawing her knees up to her chest. “And it is lonely, but I expected that. New York was lonely too. I thought if it felt more like I was choosing the loneliness, if it was deliberate, it wouldn’t be so bad. It would feel heroic, maybe. That’s what I’m waiting for.”

  “I can tell you this: being lonely is a lot better than pretending to be someone you’re not,” said Sophie. “Though I guess you’ll have that problem once your Christian soldiers get here.”

  “I’m a poet,” Marianne said. “The idea is that I’ll write, when the students aren’t here, and do the administrative stuff. I get paid, but I don’t pay rent. It’s like a retreat for me, too.” She took another sip of wine. “It’s really a great situation.”

  “I figured you were some sort of artist. There’s a community of us here, you know,” said Sophie. “I paint. For a long time just ocean mammals, especially manatees, but lately I’ve been doing the birds of Florida.”

  Whenever people told her they were artists, Marianne used to say that her mother was an artist too, but invariably this involved telling them about her mother’s work, and then the fact that she was no longer alive, and then accepting the requisite sympathy or ignoring the clueless “she’s in a better place” comments. So she’d fallen back on “I wish I could paint,” which was not exactly true. What she wished was that she could watch her mother paint again, could sit in the studio breathing the earthy smell of linseed oil, listening to the scratch-scratch-scratch of her brush.

  “I show every spring at the art fair in Sarasota, and getting time away from here is hard,” said Sophie. The guests had begun their trek to the sunset, slowly toting beach chairs and surreptitious drinks across the sand. “These guys take a lot out of me. Some of them have been coming since before I even owned the Manatee. I never thought of having them here for just a short time. Genius idea if you can make it work. Hey, want to see my paintings?”

  There was no way for Marianne to say no, so she poured another glass and followed Sophie. The boards made a hollow, uncertain sound under her sandals, and she wondered about insurance and liability. The Ranch had plenty of similar threats, and she was never sure what to do about them. You couldn’t eliminate risk entirely.

  “Here it is,” said Sophie, leading Marianne down a path that tinkled with wind chimes. “My home, office, and studio.”

  Unlike Marianne, she had a cottage apartment, small and separated from the main inn by a garden planted with hostas and ferns. Just inside the door was a pale-yellow room filled with paintings in various stages of completion, abstract and figural at once, and the strong smell of turpentine. The ones hanging on the walls were clearly manatees, purplish-gray shapes bending and twisting underwater. You had to look to see it, but there were the eyes, plaintive and sorrowful as marbles, and in some of the pieces, near the top, there was the suggestion of a boat’s menacing propeller or careless hull. Propped against the walls and on easels were incomplete canvases, with still more lumpish, oily creatures, but instead of underwater things she recognized tree limbs, sky. These were the birds, Marianne understood, but they looked like manatees too.

  She murmured what she hoped sounded like appreciation as Sophie crouched and rotated some canvases to the front of a large stack. “Birds are harder,” she said. “Birds are the hardest thing I’ve painted.” She turned to Marianne. “Now it’s your turn.”

  “My turn?”

  “Give me a poem! You can’t tell me you don’t know any of your own poems by heart.”

  “Oh,” said Marianne, feeling her face go hot. “I really don’t.”

  “You do!” said Sophie. “You must!”

  “I really don’t. I’m not that kind of poet.”

  Sophie pushed until Marianne finally relented, with a poem she remembered from a six-year-old at her school in Brooklyn: “Swimmy lives / in the corner / like a scared / cloud.” The boy, in a class for the emotionally disturbed, had accompanied his poem with a drawing of the class pet. It looked like an M&M with six legs, but it was supposed to be a hamster. She had told him how to write the words corner and scared, and she had helped him make the spaces between the words by placing one finger there to hold the words apart. She had not asked, as she wanted to, why is your class hamster named Swimmy? She had concentrated on reading the words as he wrote them, knowing them rather than guessing them, and when she read it out loud to him, with a poet’s pausing, he had nodded, satisfied, then bitten her on the wrist.

  Sophie repeated the poem to herself. “I like it. Simple, but haunting.” The sun had set, and they could hear the guests coming back from the beach, like sea turtles in reverse. “I better go. I set out cookies and wine—cheap stuff, not this—after sunset.” She drained her glass, pointed at Marianne, who felt a little lightheaded from the wine or the paint thinner. “That’s the boat that’ll take you somewhere.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Art,” Sophie pronounced, shaking a bag of dry-looking cookies onto a platter, Marianne’s wine bottle tucked under her arm. “What else is there?”

  The beach was empty for the short walk home, and she passed the Ranch, quiet and lightless, in favor of the busy hotels down the strand. It was the time of day—after sunset, before dinner—that she reserved for thinking about Eric. He’d sent her an email earlier with a funny story about his students, and a promise that he’d send her new chapters from his book. As soon as they’re done, he’d written. I just have some polishing left to do. She’d sent back a photograph of one of the naked statues, two MoveOn petitions about climate change, and a promise to send work in return.

  But she had no new poems to send. She’d been making tiny changes to the same old drafts every day. Lately she’d been on a deletion kick, carving her poems into their sparest forms yet, as if she hoped they might disappear.

  She found a padded chaise that had been left out at the White Sands Resort, the nicest hotel on the beach, and sat down. The padding was thick and springy, covered with smooth navy cotton. She stretched out and reclined the chaise so that it was almost flat. The stars were just visible, and she wondered what time it was in Dubai; she could never keep track. Very late, she thought, or very early.

  Eric knew the time where she
was—even in his sleep, she felt sure he was tuned in to her life. When she started teaching at P.S. 150, he knew her schedule better than she did, remembered the names of her students. From Charlotte he sent them little gifts: erasers and pencils and pocket-sized notebooks with glittery covers. Mr. Eric, her students called him when they wrote the thank-you note together.

  “Ma’am,” said a voice behind her. “Ma’am?”

  Marianne sat up, then turned around to see a teenager in a White Sands windbreaker. The windbreaker suddenly reminded her that she was cold.

  “You can’t sleep here,” he said. The apologetic tone in his voice made it worse.

  “I know,” she told him. “I wasn’t.”

  In her room, Marianne turned on her laptop and refreshed her political news sites while a frozen bean burrito rotated in the microwave. Not much had happened today, but still the alarms sounded: some dumb things said by a couple of dumb governors, legislation moving forward in Marianne’s home state that would require every abortion seeker to have an ultrasound (their governor, too, had higher ambitions). One of the more popular candidates for president owned a chain of pizza restaurants, and each outlandish statement he made increased his popularity, according to polls. Every hour or so there was something to make your heart pound with anxiety and disbelief—it was addictive, that sickening, stomach-dropping feeling. Checking email was the same: who knew what could be in there? Maybe a prize, the kind you earned without knowing it. Maybe a missive, or the promised chapter, from Eric.

  No prizes today, only a dozen or so email petitions, which she dutifully signed and forwarded, and new profiles, still New York–based, selected by match.com. She switched to another tab on her browser, an online version of À la Rencontre de Philippe, which she’d found and begun playing again. Philippe looked the same—she was repeating the same series of grainy videos she’d seen in the language lab more than a dozen years ago—but she found helping him more frustrating. He didn’t think the apartment she found was close enough to the Metro. He didn’t like only a standing shower; he preferred a bath. He didn’t want to work on Saturdays. Her French was no longer convincing; they’d been sitting at the same café for days.