The Gulf

by Belle Boggs

  “Oh,” she said, set down again and turning back to the copier. “I’m happy as a clam.”

  “I can show you your room,” Eric suggested. “Where’s your luggage?”

  “Just this,” he said, hefting a knapsack. “The Sandinistas taught me to travel light.”

  Marianne rolled her eyes at the copier, then remembered the manuscripts.

  She handed him the two thick packets. “These are up for discussion tomorrow. Ten o’clock. A.M. Breakfast is at eight.”

  Tom looked wearily at the pages.

  “Point of view problems,” she offered. “Among other things.”

  He sighed and flipped through the manuscript on top, turning the pages so fast they fanned air into his face. “I used to work at Princeton,” he said.

  “Well,” she said. “This is not Princeton.”

  “What’s this?” he asked, pointing to the “GWGW” logo on the manuscript’s cover page. The logo had been printed on pale blue card stock, according to Mark’s instructions, and added to each manuscript. It was this card stock, mottled like old paper money, that originally jammed the copier.

  “That’s one of our funders,” Marianne said, fitting a fresh copy of “Flower Herding” into the feeder. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “It’s the funder,” Eric said. “Other than tuition. God’s World God’s Word. They pay your salary.”

  “Such as it is,” Tom said.

  “Right,” said Marianne. “And for all of this wonderful office equipment.”

  “Say,” Tom said, peering at the logo, which featured a globe with a cross planted at the North Pole like a moon flag. It cast a shadow across North America. “This isn’t some right-wing organization you’re fronting?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “God’s World God’s Word is a faith-based organization involved in education and outreach efforts,” Eric explained. “They’ve been very generous.”

  “No, I suppose I don’t want to know,” Tom said. “I’m beat. Where’d you say my room was?”

  “This way,” Eric said, opening the screen door.

  “Needs to lock from the outside,” Marianne heard Tom instructing him as they rounded the corner toward the dormitories.

  After locking Tom into his room, Eric helped Marianne copy and bind the last of the packets, then walked her to her own room, deliberately sited all the way on the other side of the Ranch, just across from his. Sitting across from each other on her two beds, they shared the last of the punch, which seemed to have gone through an additional fermentation process since Marianne had funneled it into her thermos.

  “To a successful opening night,” Eric said, raising his paper cup.

  “To no one getting permanently lost,” Marianne said. “Or into any fights.”

  “That’s true,” Eric said, pouring himself another. “Though I wanted to deck Tom when he picked you up and kissed you.”

  “Me too,” Marianne said. “Yuck. Why didn’t you?”

  Eric shrugged. “I didn’t think you wanted to teach nonfiction. Also, I think he would have knocked me out.”

  “That’s probably true,” she said. The punch in her cup was down to its syrupy dregs, and she stretched her tongue to reach a maraschino cherry stuck to the bottom. Dislodged, it exploded alcohol into her mouth. “Anyway, you did a good job of evangelizing GWGW to him.”

  “I didn’t evangelize,” he said. “I wouldn’t know how.”

  “You did! You called it a faith-based organization involved in education and outreach.”

  “But that’s what they say they are,” Eric said. “I was just repeating—”

  “What the hell do you think evangelizing is?” she asked. “I’d really like to know where your brother met these people. And I thought Frances paid our salaries.”

  “It was getting expensive. With the property taxes, and all the fees—”

  “But when we talked it seemed like she was happy to pay for it all! Like it made her proud!”

  Eric stood slowly and moved to her bed. He sat very close and poured more punch into her cup. “Frances is eighty-two years old,” he said. “Largo Shores is almost four thousand a month. And that’s in the independent-living section. She can’t spend all her savings on our project—”

  “Her project,” Marianne said. “This was her idea.”

  “Her project,” Eric agreed.

  Marianne suddenly felt very sleepy. She rested her head on Eric’s shoulder. “Does she know about them? GWGW? I mean, she didn’t seem like someone who would appreciate some corporate group coming in and taking over everything.”

  “They’re not. And she doesn’t know much—she doesn’t need to. GWGW is Mark’s thing, a supplement. You know that.”

  “I feel so reassured. So supported!” She sat up.

  “I’m going to talk to him,” Eric said. “About the copier. Okay?”

  “That would be helpful,” she admitted. “But I don’t like the idea of them. God’s Word God’s World. God’s World God’s Word. It’s hard to keep straight. Plus, what the fuck are we doing? I think that, all day long. What the fuck are we doing?”

  “Probably best not to think about it,” Eric said.

  “Best not to think about what?”

  “About what we’re doing, or about GWGW. We’re doing it. It’s going okay. It’s going great, considering.”

  “But God’s World—”

  “They’re a Christian organization, just like us.”

  “Not just like us,” Marianne said. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “We’re not serious about what we’re doing. We’re … taking advantage of certain expectations. We’re exploiting certain ideas.”

  Eric laughed. “What do you think they’re doing?”

  “Fuck,” she said. She hadn’t thought of it that way—there were so many ways to be cynical and exploitative. It didn’t seem so bad, when the profits were keeping her own friends afloat, paying back student loans. But a corporation? “I guess you’re right. As long as they’re just paying for copiers and card stock. Just promise you won’t let things go too far, okay? Promise it’ll still be us in charge?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Of course.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise,” Eric said. He stared into his cup, turning the viscous liquid around the edges. “I think this is my last chance, Marianne,” he said after a while, his voice quiet and pleading. “I need this to work.”

  “Last chance,” she scoffed. “You’re an internationally published, internationally traveling novelist and teacher. This isn’t about last chances.”

  “I sold fifty e-books in New Zealand. I didn’t finish my novel in Dubai. I need this to work.”

  “Your book came out two years ago,” Marianne said. “There’s no rush. It’s not a race.” This was something she often told herself when she was notified, via email, of publication news from their program.

  “Three years ago,” he said.

  “What?”

  “It came out three years ago. And I’m on the hook for another one.”

  “Oh,” she said. No real money exchanged hands to mark the publication of poetry, no promises of a second book made to eager publishers. At the end of each of her grants, Marianne had typed up reports to the funding organizations, but had heard very little back other than reminders that they were one-time grants. It was hard for her to imagine herself in Eric’s situation. But she did not want this idea, which she’d dreamed up in her twenties, to be a career maker for either of them.

  “You can always teach—”

  “I want this to work,” he said. He set his cup on the nightstand and lay back, on top of the bedspread, and closed his eyes. Suddenly she saw him as he must have seen himself: a washed-up, divorced novelist who’d quit the only job he’d ever had that offered benefits. A financial failure who desperately wanted to impress his older brother in a get-rich-quick scheme. A jealous ex-boyfriend who backed away from confrontations with push
y older men.

  Marianne put a tentative hand on Eric’s shoulder, and he didn’t stir. She knelt on the bed next to him, gently shaking him until his eyes opened.

  “Hey,” he said sleepily. He reached up to brush a strand of hair away from Marianne’s face and let his hand come to rest on her bare shoulder, where it felt solid and reassuring. For a moment she wanted nothing more than to lie next to him, in the comfortable curve of his arm, and let him stroke her hair and her face, tell her that she was beautiful. It would be easy to reach for the lamp and turn it off, to concede to whatever might happen in the dark.

  But this moment, drunken and confused and slightly pitiful, wasn’t the right one. It was too much like their first time, and nothing at all like what she’d imagined in his absence. They couldn’t fall back into old patterns, not now, anyway—it would be better, more fulfilling, to wait. Wasn’t that what the Christians told themselves? Twelve days, that was all. “You have to get up,” she said briskly, moving away from him on the bed. His hand dropped to his side. “You can’t stay here.”

  “But I’m comfortable,” he said, closing his eyes again. She turned on the overhead light.

  “If you want this to work, you can’t have people here thinking we’re cohabiting.”

  “Cohabiting?”

  “Fornicating,” she said.

  “Ah,” he said, slowly sitting up and squinting. He took his cup, smoothed his shirt and hair, and made his way to the door. “It’s been a long time since we did that.”

  From her window Marianne watched him walk, in a slow and dignified zigzag, back to his room, and resisted the urge to call him back. She was right to send him home, she told herself. They had a big day ahead, no time for distractions. There would be plenty of time to figure out where they stood after the students left.

  Eric fumbled his door open and turned on the lamp next to his bed. Marianne waited for him to pull the curtains closed, but he left them open. She wasn’t sure if the open curtains were a gesture of innocence or a rebuke, but eventually she grew tired of watching and climbed into her own bed, alone.

  5

  Janine’s mind had always compulsively imagined terrible things happening to whomever she most treasured. It started when she was young and her parents would leave her with a babysitter. Waiting for the sound of tires crunching gravel, the splay of headlights through the curtains, she’d played unending games of Monopoly with her sister while she visualized car crashes, abductions, murder, even though she’d grown up in a town where hardly anything like that ever happened. In fifth grade, her good friend Cindy’s mother had died of a brain aneurysm, and suddenly that was what Janine thought of, when she worried—a narrowing and bursting in each of her parents’ brains, her own self, small and helpless, finding them slumped over in the garden or on the kitchen floor. She never told anyone about this compulsion—truly, it felt like something her brain was doing to her—not even Rick, whom she married just a year out of high school.

  It grew worse when she became, at twenty-two, a mother. For the first two years of Beth’s life Janine would not allow anyone to drive her except Rick—not even herself. It got a little better with Chrissy—she was too busy with a three-year-old and an infant to do much imagining—but her anxiety increased when Beth entered kindergarten and she had all day long to think about perverts lurking in the schoolyard, someone posing as an uncle and signing her out of school. Beth was an open, trusting child, and the secretary at the primary school was nearly seventy years old, half-blind, and it wasn’t hard to see how such a thing—a terrible thing—could happen.

  So Janine confessed. Told Rick about the visions, worse than any nightmare, admitted the sickness of a mind that could picture such awful things. She’d held her breath, expecting Rick to scold her or accuse her of willing evil into their life. Instead he told her, in a sorrowful voice that was much older than his twenty-seven years, “It’s not your mind, it’s the wicked world we live in.” After performing some calculations on the pad of yellow legal paper he kept next to the phone, he allowed Janine to pull Beth out of kindergarten and enroll her in the Christian day school down the street, where Janine and Chrissy could stroller the sidewalked half mile to meet her for lunches Janine made at home. Janine admired the tiny schoolyard’s high wooden security fence, the small size of Beth’s class. Strolling home again, she’d think of Rick, who poured concrete six days a week to make sure his family had everything they needed. He was her rock, she told people, assuaging her fears without writing them off as silly. Though Janine questioned the workings of her own mind—why did the images have to be so disturbing? why couldn’t she imagine something nice?—Rick had never suggested she see a therapist or that in any way she was sick, and for that she was grateful.

  They got through soccer camp and swimming lessons, a vacation Bible school instructor who seemed a little too eager to take the children to the church basement arts and crafts room. They endured the transition to a public middle school, with its nighttime dances and questionable curriculum, survived even Janine’s transition to the workplace. They lived through Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, the fashion for bare midriffs and jailbait music videos. They made it through 9/11, the anthrax mail scare, the D.C. snipers, and various child abductions. Because Rick did the instructing, she even got through Beth’s first tentative driving lessons, which Janine thought were given earlier than necessary.

  Beth was fourteen years old and in her first year at the public high school, a long-legged blond girl just beginning to receive phone calls from boys who already seemed to anticipate her turning sixteen, an age Rick and Janine (too long ago! what were they thinking?) had deemed old enough to date. That was when Janine first heard about Terri Schiavo, a woman who, at the age of twenty-six, the very flower of her life, collapsed in the hallway of her St. Petersburg home and was rushed by ambulance to the hospital, where she was intubated and ventilated and pronounced comatose. Janine did not know about this woman until she had been in a coma for more than a decade, when the fight between her parents and her husband made national news. Her husband had not wanted to take her off life support (she could breathe on her own), but to remove her feeding and hydration tube, essentially starving and dehydrating her to death. Her parents, devout Catholics who believed it was wrong to interfere with God’s will, opposed him.

  Michael Schiavo, Terri’s husband, and the lawyers and politicians and even the doctors, who stood against Terri’s parents and against God, seemed to represent something about the world Janine’s daughters would be growing into. A world in which, instead of praising God for sparing his wife’s life and giving him the opportunity to care for her alongside her devoted parents, a man might kill her with the full participation and support of a hospital staff and court of law. A world in which a life only counted if it looked, on the outside, like everyone else’s. Janine could not imagine releasing either of her sweet girls, still as tender and uncertain as kittens, into such a world.

  Janine had never been a political person. She voted in presidential elections and kept the evening news on while she made dinner, but she was aware that most of her ideas about politics came from other people, namely Rick. The Schiavo case was different. Unlike taxes or gun control or war or even abortion, issues that were merely theoretical in Janine’s life, this seemed wholly within her realm of experience and power of imagination. It was a case that struck at the very heart of what people meant when they told you that you were a mother for your child’s entire life, that you would protect them always, no matter what. Terri’s openmouthed, beatific smile (was it a smile?), her head lolling against a wheelchair’s cushioned neck support, was an image that flashed across every television screen while the likes of Jesse Jackson and Jeb Bush and lawyers from the ACLU talked on and on in the background.

  Janine could do little but pray for her and put her name in the church bulletin’s prayer list, but her prayers felt like an occupation. She prayed when the feeding tube was removed, and when
it was reinserted under Governor Bush’s orders. She prayed when Terri left the hospice for the rehabilitation center, and prayed when she was returned to the hospice again. She prayed for Terri’s parents, held at arm’s length by the courts, and prayed for Jesse Jackson to please go back to Chicago and mind his own business. She prayed when the tube was removed again, prayed when Terri was given something called a swallow test, and for the efficacy of a therapy called VitalStim, which was supposed to help Terri swallow on her own. She prayed on her knees, after making each of the beds in the morning, prayed in the car on the way to the supermarket, prayed in the produce aisle, while pondering the phrase “persistent vegetative state,” which did not seem to touch the miracle and mystery of a human life lived without communication or the expression of need.

  Then the president came back from a round of golf or a bike ride to sign emergency papers (Janine did not trust grown men who rode bicycles or vacationed at odd times of year) and the Florida memo surfaced, describing Terri’s case as a “great political issue” for firing up the “base”—people, she assumed, like herself, dumb fools who went to church and voted as they were told. Terri became an issue, not a person, and Janine could hardly pray at all. She fell into her own vegetative state, a state of spiritual entropy, and as she moved through the routines of her day, she imagined that her brain would show the same blank expanse of inactivity as Terri’s own CT scans. Food was dull as ash on her tongue, her body a sluggish piece of meat, her daughters’ voices, asking for this or that, as grating and needy as animals’ cries. Chrissy wanted to know what was wrong, Beth heedlessly answered calls from some boy, Rick patted her good-bye each morning with sympathy that did not communicate understanding.

  Janine did not start praying again until the final standoff, which began on a cool rainy day in March and lasted for thirteen days. She prayed for the police officers who had to stand guard against intervention, prayed for the nurses forced to deny Terri the comfort of a sip of water or an ice cube held against her lips, prayed for an understanding of God, who let such a thing happen. She prayed for forgiveness for the days when she had withheld her prayers, and she prayed in gratitude for the ability to pray again.