The Gulf

by Belle Boggs

  “That was very good,” Marianne said, when she was finished.

  “So I got filled up with this powerful poem,” Janine said. “And I talked too much in class, which embarrassed me, and I was almost going to lie down during lunch but something made me go into the dining hall.”

  “Not the food, I imagine.” Marianne was about to apologize when Janine continued, urgently.

  “So I went into the dining hall and I sat with these two ladies, from workshop, Maggie and Lilian. They hadn’t talked much in class and I was afraid they’d think I was hogging the conversation, or showing off. But I sat down and they told me these horrible stories.” In the dimming light Marianne could see Janine frowning, as if remembering the stories pained her. She lowered her voice. “About divorce. And I felt so bad for both of them. And then Lilian left and Maggie told me something that just shook me to my core.”

  She sat back, as if satisfied and exhausted to have said this much.

  “What was it?” Marianne asked. “Do I want to know?”

  “Her husband,” said Janine, “who is a cheater—he was also one of Terri’s doctors. He consulted on her case. I went to the computer room and I looked him up. He wrote a report that said they should stop feeding her. He testified to that, in one of the court cases.”

  Marianne could see Janine closing her eyes. She tried to think what she should say—it was like trying to do something delicate while looking into a mirror: you had to remember that everything was backwards. You had to go slowly. She didn’t say anything.

  “I have nothing against Lilian,” Janine said. “It wasn’t her. But what are the chances that I would meet her here, and she would tell me a story like she told me?”

  “Very small,” guessed Marianne.

  “I think so,” Janine said. “I thought at first, I have to take these poems out of workshop. I even went to Ms. Kominski’s room and I was about to knock on the door, but then I thought, why? Lilian is obviously parting ways with her husband, but even if she wasn’t—even if she thought he was God—which apparently he thought he was—even then, why should I not write what I came here to write? The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it,” she recited. “That’s what today taught me. That’s what I think now.”

  “Civilization self-destructs,” Marianne said. It was nearly dark now. “Nemesis is knocking at the door.”

  “Yes,” Janine said. “Yes.”

  It was a remarkable thing, Marianne thought, to deliver someone to her purpose, especially if that purpose was not quite what you intended, or even believed in. When she thought of Terri Schiavo, which until reading Janine’s poems had not been very much at all, she mostly thought the opposite of what Janine thought. She saw an empty shell of a person, an empty, grasping, brain-dead—or at least brain-compromised—vegetable person. She saw a suffering and emptiness so deep that the only answer was an end to that suffering through death. She thought the doctors had made the best choice in a difficult situation, and that Terri’s husband, chosen in adulthood, had more of a right to determine what happened to Terri than her parents had.

  But that wasn’t how Janine saw things at all: Janine saw Terri’s parents as the rightful and righteous guardians of a life worth guarding, a life they had after all created. She saw a flickering of something in Terri’s brown, hollow-looking eyes; she saw smiles where Marianne saw accidental grimaces. The sacrifices being made on Terri’s behalf were not, in Janine’s mind, a loss of freedom or agency but instead the representation of a higher calling. She saw not base suffering, but noble struggle, in all of it, and truly believed she’d been sent here to write about it.

  How much better, or at least easier—happier?—might Marianne’s life be if she could think the same way Janine did? If she could think, here I am, alive, and be happy for it?

  The sun seemed to flatten before it disappeared entirely, and Marianne could hear gasps and appreciative murmuring. But there was no green light, no flash, just an ordinary sunset. Janine stood and folded her chair. “Eleven more chances,” she said, and didn’t sound displeased or worried about the clock ticking down. “Though I guess you get to see them all the time. Do you live here full time, Marianne?”

  “Yes and no,” said Marianne, who suddenly realized how strange that sounded. “I used to live in Brooklyn.”

  “With Eric,” said Janine.

  “Not with Eric,” Marianne corrected her. She’d wondered, if they did get back together, whether Eric would push to move in. But that was the beauty of the Ranch, wasn’t it? They could live together and apart at the same time. “He lived in Queens, actually. Then he moved back to Charlotte.”

  “I just meant, you went to school together? And were writers together, in the city? With agents, and publishers?”

  “That’s not really how it works,” said Marianne. “Not for poets, anyway.”

  “I think I met an agent the other night, or maybe a publisher,” said Janine. “At the opening night party? Her name was Regina Somers.”

  Marianne was fairly sure there hadn’t been any agents at the party. Maybe Mark had paid someone to pretend to be one? That would be low, even for him.

  “You must know her.” Janine waved her hand dismissively. “I just meant to say, this is all new to me. Completely new. And also that it must be nice to have a partner who understands what you do. My husband—he’s a contractor—he’s very supportive of my work, but I don’t think he understands it. Poetry. You must have a lot of readers, since you’re published.”

  Marianne thought about divulging the print run of her chapbook—two hundred and fifty slim copies, circulating mostly with friends and classmates—but decided against it. “It’s good to have a first reader who’s close to you. I actually send my poems to Eric first. I have since we were in school.”

  “That’s beautiful,” Janine said. “To have someone you trust, another writer, a partner …”

  “Novel writing is probably closer to contracting than you’d guess,” Marianne said. “And Eric and I, we’re good friends, that’s all.” She felt Janine looking at her in the near dark, and her face grew warm.

  “Okay,” Janine said. “I should go call Rick and the girls. See you tomorrow.” She hoisted her chair under her arm and began the trip back to her room. Marianne wanted to call her back, to explain that they really were just complicated friends, but she knew that would only make the opposite case. She turned back to the gulf, where just a faint line of pink hovered over the horizon, and wished that someone would join her.

  7

  In the first year after Copper Creek’s publication, Eric Osborne could not enter a bookstore without looking for it. Spotting its handsome sepia-toned cover among the primary-colored jumble and clutter of other titles was like spotting a fellow fan of your college’s basketball team in some faraway locale. Or it was like seeing a long-lost family member who shared a feature you were glad to have inherited, the same straight nose or square jawline or enviable height. He looked forward to that moment of recognition and even, in a way that he could not explain, felt that it was mutual, felt that the book recognized him. Because he liked to shop for few things other than books, Eric experienced these moments often, both in large, impersonal chain bookstores and small, charming independent ones; for a short time, when he was traveling long distances to read to tiny audiences, he even had them in airport bookstores, with their rotating kiosks of neck pillows and clip-on book lights, their gilded bookmarks and pillow-sized bags of trail mix. Sometimes he’d find copies in a promising stack among the front tables, but more often, especially as that first year approached its end, he’d find a single copy of Copper Creek shelved alone, along with more successful writers’ paperbacks: between Vladimir Nabokov and Cynthia Ozick, or, in less literary bookstores, in the airport ones staffed by neck-tattooed teens with little concept of alphabetical order, between Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne. For a while Eric would quietly remove the book from its rightful or wrongful home and reshelve it on a “s
taff favorites” table, or even with the “coming soon to a theater near you” titles. He felt like it was his duty to the book, and even to the publishers, with whom he was still on good and familiar terms. It felt like introducing a shy but very worthy and witty friend around at a party: how could you not?

  But now, three years out, Copper Creek’s very presence in a bookstore embarrassed him. Not because he thought it wasn’t a good book—that hardly seemed to matter, somehow—but because he was pretty sure, whenever he did see it, that it was one of the same copies he’d seen the first time he’d looked. He was pretty sure he’d seen the same two or three thousand copies, and according to his royalty statements was seeing them still. Copper Creek was remaindered in hardcover, and its paperback release—a small run—had not been reprinted. So it was now like going home and seeing some high school friend who used to brag about big plans hanging around at a Sheetz gas station, or watching a graying hometown band play the same seedy bar. He felt like hiding the book now, or buying it at whatever discounted cost it was offered, taking it home, and peeling off the discount sticker. Sobering it up, like a drunken, bawdy aunt, among the O’Connors and Orwells and O’Haras on his own shelves. Sometimes he did this, and he wondered if he could deduct the cost of ashamedly buying his own novel from his taxes as a professional expense.

  Occasionally—very occasionally—a bookstore clerk would notice that the name on his credit card and the name on Copper Creek’s spine matched, and would make a comment. “They don’t give you extra copies? Damn,” one particularly observant airport clerk had remarked. The worst and most common comment went something like this: “I gotta write a book one of these days” or, head-shakingly, “Man, if I ever write my book …” as if whatever book the clerk might write would obliterate every other existing book, as if Eric’s book—the handsome, remaindered Copper Creek—was actively interfering with the clerk’s book writing. If only the clerk didn’t have to sit around putting sale stickers on Copper Creek all day, he or she might actually get some writing done. Eric was always tempted to say, “Well, why don’t you just write the goddamn book?” or “No one cares why you got a neck tattoo!” But, being the mild-mannered book author he was, he would instead say thank you, no he did not need a bag, and yes he would like a receipt.

  This feeling of outrage and disappointment was not something he could confess to anyone at the Ranch, not even Marianne, who had diligently worked on the same manuscript for years, without expecting anything in return. It was not a feeling he could share with people whose only goal was to write their one book and have it published. They would have to find out for themselves how each goal opened up into a bigger one, like hideously distorted nesting dolls, how ever-elusive publication became ever-elusive praise, prizes, more publications, bigger advances, a movie deal.

  Eric worried, most of all, that Copper Creek, meant to be his auspicious debut, might become his one and only book, when it was not what he had to say about life at all. He was beginning to realize that this was the same fear he had about his marriage, which, embarked upon in the year after his book’s release, had essentially the same shelf life. One could compare the engagement to the period of prepublication—both had lasted about six months, felt exciting, and involved the design and selection of a number of glossy publicity materials. The marriage itself, beset with unsatisfying travel, ever-present anxiety, and attacks on his self-esteem, was like the first year of publication.

  He had rushed into things, had been too eager to prove that he was a real adult and a real writer. He had competed with other people, had noticed, on Facebook and in his own mailbox, that other people were blissfully (smugly) getting married and publishing novels. He had developed a preoccupation with the ages of people who were marking milestones in their lives—book, marriage, child—and calculating how far behind he was falling. He had signed on with an agent before his novel was really finished, and had felt obligated to turn it over to her quickly.

  Likewise, he had proposed to Christine after only three months of dating, without a ring or any real forethought. They had been to a concert by a popular nouveau bluegrass band. The band had returned to the stage for a ten-minute encore, and everyone in the audience had sung along:

  Baby take off your apron I’ll get my hat

  Come on, it’s just as simple as that

  We’re going to townnnn

  Accustomed to standing motionless at interminable experimental performances, or vaguely keening at indie rock shows, or crossing his arms across his chest at rap concerts, Eric had been stirred by the band’s easy, welcoming harmonies, by how good it felt to like something that everyone else agreed was worth liking, worth going out of your way for and even looking a little silly for (the band members, guys in their twenties, all wore straw hats and suspenders, but no shoes). He resolved then and there that he was through with things that were pointlessly difficult, unreasonable, hostile. How could he mark this moment? he wondered. Several of the band’s songs were about weddings, and the idea of proposing came to him as they were walking back to their car with a large, jolly crowd of fellow concertgoers. He’d gotten down on one knee in a patch of gravel spotlit by an amber streetlight, and the crowd had slowed to watch him deliver his proposal, which even now he remembered as powerful and sincere. They clapped when Christine said yes, and did not seem to notice the lack of a ring.

  It was not the first time he’d proposed.

  Or even the second.

  “You’re a serial proposer,” his brother accused, around the time he started thinking about married life—not with Christine, but with Marianne. By then Eric had already asked two women to marry him—the first time was in college, the second a confused, underemployed time just before he moved to New York. Both said no right away, though both times he’d been prepared, with romantic evenings out and specially selected engagement rings: a lumpy silver Claddagh for Denise, the shocked college girl, and a half-carat diamond in a white gold Tiffany setting for practical, pharmacy-school Julie, who forcefully told him that she needed to get her own career started before she settled down.

  He’d kept Julie’s ring in its black velvet box at the back of his sock drawer. A few years later, it was perfect for Marianne—pretty and elegant, exactly what he would have chosen for her—and he didn’t see any reason to buy a new one. “Thrift,” said Mark, when Eric told him of his plans. “Probably a good habit in an artist.”

  Looking back, Eric saw that the ring was part of the problem. If he hadn’t had a ring ready to go, he might have thought things through a little more. He remembered holding his breath after he asked her, in a dim corner of their favorite Brooklyn restaurant, the familiar, slightly terrified look on her face.

  “Please,” he’d whispered, holding his breath. “Say yes.”

  Marianne had not said yes but had nodded, laughing and even crying a little, and held out her hand—the wrong one, he remembered—and he’d gently taken the correct one and had slid the ring onto her finger, where it was a perfect fit, as if the ring as much as Eric had simply been looking for the right person. It was just like in the movies: fumbling and sudden and joyful, patrons around them breaking into cheers and applause. Their waiter brought them their favorite dessert, crème brûlée, and two spoons to crack the caramelized sugar.

  Mark called him from work the next afternoon. “How’d it go? I was waiting for you to tell me.”

  “She said yes,” Eric slurred, halfway through a fifth of whiskey. Marianne had left hours ago. “But then she changed her mind.”

  His brother—the asshole—reminded him that at least he hadn’t bought a whole new ring. “You’re better off anyway,” he’d told Eric, before taking another call.

  Eric wondered what he meant—was he better off not getting married, or better off without Marianne? At that moment, only hours after celebrating, then ending, their engagement, Eric could not imagine life without her. Beautiful, crazy, capricious Marianne. Every annoying habit was suddenly endearing
and precious—the way she underdressed for the weather, in filmy dresses and ridiculous shoes, her terribly decorated apartment, her foul mouth and open atheism. Eric rooted through his CDs and found The Essential Leonard Cohen and played “So Long, Marianne” on repeat until Mark showed up after work.

  “I’m no English major, but listen to the song, dumbass,” Mark said, turning it up. “The fucker was glad to be rid of her.”

  What other choices did she have? Did she really want to wind up alone, in some crummy fourth-floor walk-up? What were her goals, her prospects? She did not seem to want any of the things he wanted so desperately, not publication or marriage or a permanent address, or at least did not expect them. Perhaps she knew something that he did not—he was too good for her, maybe that was it. Eric began to catalog Marianne’s faults obsessively. Aside from part-time teaching, she hardly even worked, while Eric had taught, temped for a medical supply company, answered phones for an escort service, and worked in social media consulting. Marianne never had any decent furniture and spent her discretionary funds on psychoanalysis and vitamins instead of health insurance. She was a connoisseur of the pointlessly difficult—long readings held at inconvenient hours, meals so spicy you could only bear to take two bites, exhibits of ephemeral art—and everything she wanted to do was far away, so that what you remembered, instead of the actual experience, was how hard it had been to get there. She canceled plans, she was self-absorbed and argumentative and petulant. She was pretty in a way that he told himself would not last—her hair would grow frizzy and coarse; her pale, freckled skin would wrinkle early.

  For almost two months, they hardly talked. At the end of the summer, he moved to Charlotte, and soon they were dating other people. They began their Sunday-night phone call ritual, and Eric thought, so this is how we’re meant to be. Then Eric was married—he had pictured Marianne at the country club wedding, tearfully but powerfully reading a poem composed just for him and his bride, but she didn’t show.