The Gulf

by Belle Boggs

  Now, of course, he understood that it had all been a mistake—proposing to Denise and Julie and Marianne, marrying Christine. He worried that the rest of his life would be lived in the wake of these mistakes, that they would influence his future chances at happiness, the same way his poor novel sales would influence the sale and marketing of a new book. He did not want to look back on another Copper Creek, another failed marriage. He was done with serial proposing.

  Dimly, he was aware that all of his efforts—pursuing a writing career, getting engaged and married and even buying the house in Charlotte—had been, in some ways, about succeeding in areas his older brother overlooked. Mark didn’t care about art, he didn’t care about relationships—money was his muse and his wife and his children. “Mark does very well for himself”: that was how Eric’s mother put it, when someone complimented a bracelet or noticed the cruise line brochures on her coffee table. Of course she’d been proud of Eric too—both of his parents had dutifully come to readings, and dragged cousins and neighbors and friends along too. But Copper Creek had never provided anything tangible to his family, no tennis bracelets or winter vacations. After he took the high school teaching job, they studiously avoided talk about his career.

  And so Eric wanted the next book, the next relationship, the next thing, whatever it was, to be about something bigger and truer than what he’d done so far. He wanted something that would last at least as long as Mark’s portfolio. Longer.

  He still had Marianne’s diamond solitaire (Christine, after their impromptu engagement, wanted to design her own ring). Just the other night, after Marianne kicked him out, he’d rummaged for it in the pocket of his suitcase, pulling out a lint-covered black velvet box, which traveled with him everywhere, even to Dubai. It opened with a familiar snap, and he was relieved to see that inside, everything was pristine. The white gold band had not been nicked or scratched, and the ring still had a satisfying heft in his hand. Long ago, a jeweler told him that the diamond quality was exceptional, but who could really tell? Eric turned the ring this way and that, watching as the stone caught and reflected light.

  Eric sat grimly in the Ranch’s office, his laptop on Marianne’s desk, the door locked and the bank of fluorescent lights turned off. In the small Skype box that showed his own image, he saw a tired-looking, sallow-skinned, slump-shouldered man. Next to his laptop, a cardboard box spilled its contents across the desk: two large black smartphones and their various chargers, headphones, and GWGW-themed accessories—blue cross-embossed cases and blue styluses and microfiber screen cleaners.

  “So I’m gonna give it to you straight,” Mark told him. Mark believed in bad news first, let’s-get-this-over-with, no sugarcoating. Nothing to cut the sting. Mark liked the sting, the risk of teetering, then toppling failure. It was what allowed him to do what he did, Eric assumed, all that financial roulette playing. But Eric didn’t like things straight—couldn’t Mark remember that much, at least, from childhood? His medicine had to be hidden in yogurt, the bad news of pet deaths or new schools or sick grandparents softened with ice cream or merry-go-rounds.

  “Things are not looking good, bro,” Mark continued, leaning toward the screen. He looked healthy, ruddy, as if he’d just come back from tennis or a beach vacation. “You are way over budget. Way over.”

  Eric picked up one of the smartphones—he supposed it was meant as a kind of softening-up, a toy to distract him, but its expensive heft gave him a sick feeling. He set the phone down again. “We can cut back on photocopying. We can advertise more, get more applicants. Getting more applicants would be great—”

  “That doesn’t touch the kind of deficit I’m talking about,” Mark said. “We’re gonna have to think bigger here. Leveraging what we do have.”

  “Okay,” Eric said, straightening and blinking. “I can go see Frances. She believes in our—”

  “It’s beyond her means. Way beyond.”

  “How can we be so behind? I mean, I know we went over budget on some things, but looking through all the paperwork, I just don’t get—”

  Mark leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Eric, you’ve uprooted your whole life, right? You quit your job, you moved to a shitty motel. In Florida.”

  “It’s not that bad.”

  “Sure, but sometimes opportunity knocks, and you get a chance to make up for all that effort. I’m talking about the chance to make real money here. It’s like payback—like karma.”

  “Karma,” Eric repeated.

  “Right, but first we have to show that this thing is scalable, a good return on investment for GWGW.”

  “Yeah, about them.”

  “About who?” Mark had turned away from the screen and was clicking away at another computer.

  “GWGW,” Eric said, louder. “I don’t know that they fit the mission Marianne and I have for the school. Our instructors are asking questions.”

  “The mission you have for the school, hmm, let’s see if I can remember it,” Mark said, turning theatrically back to the screen in his rolling chair. Eric wished he had another computer to be busy with, or even a chair on wheels. “Was it, let’s see, exploiting the Christian literary market?”

  “Mark—”

  “Was it also financing the renovation of our great-aunt’s busted hotel so that she doesn’t lose it in foreclosure? Something like that? Rescuing yourself from total financial meltdown? Getting ahead, for once in your life?” Mark said. “Also, your instructors: they are your employees. You ask the fucking questions. Not them.”

  “Got it,” Eric said. It was pointless to argue with Mark when he got all Glengarry Glen Ross.

  “Eric,” Mark said, looking directly at his laptop’s camera. “This was your idea. Christian creative writing program. Remember? Taking money from religious nuts? Remember that?”

  “It was Frances’s idea, actually.”

  “Frances’s idea was a fucking bookstore with readings. You talked her into this school idea. To impress Marianne, your ex-fiancée, the woman you’re still in love with?” Mark said. Eric watched himself wince onscreen. “Look, bro. These are the richest Christians I could find for you, and frankly, I’m hurt that you are rejecting them. They are a growing regional company, with international interests and holdings, overseeing campuses in three states. They have the resources to completely remodel the Ranch, get it out of hock, plus pay tidy bonuses to you, Marianne, and whatever literary snake-oil salesmen you want to hire. You’re telling me you don’t want to take their money?”

  “Wait, are we really in trouble, or are you just trying to make more money? What do you mean by ‘overseeing campuses’?” Eric picked up the phone, snapped it into its GWGW case, and held it up to the screen. “I mean, what the hell is this—some sort of tracking device?”

  Mark shook his head, laughing. “All smartphones are tracking devices, bro. And what’s wrong with more money? So they spread their logo around, they advertise, they bring you students. Maybe they do a little training of your instructors. They add legitimacy to the idea that you are a Christian creative writing program, and not a scam.”

  “Right,” Eric said. “But is that just an idea, or is it true?”

  “Don’t ask me,” said Mark, turning back to his other keyboard. “I went to business school.”

  This was the real problem, he told Marianne, after finding her down by the beach. They hadn’t decided where they stood, exactly, relative to the students.

  It was dark and damp and chilly, but Marianne was still wearing a sundress, no sweater, and was curled up on a beach chair. He handed her his jacket, which held the phone meant for Marianne in one of its pockets. “Let’s walk,” he said, gesturing up the beach, where the hotel workers were stacking chaises. Far down the beach, lights twinkled from a fishing pier.

  “So do we hate them?” he asked. “Do we just want to take their money?”

  “No,” she said. “Yes? Can’t we not hate them and want to take their money too?”

  “But how do
we feel about them, and what they’re supposed to get out of this? Are we really teaching them to write Christian novels and poems and memoirs? Do we expect them to publish them?”

  “Oh God,” Marianne said, hugging his jacket to her body. “You don’t know how to teach them that. Lorraine doesn’t know how to teach them that. Tom—”

  “Right,” said Eric. “So if that was the case, why didn’t we just run their credit reports instead of spending weeks arguing about this one or that one? Why didn’t we just pick the richest vampire novelist and get it over with?”

  “Damn,” Marianne said. “Running a credit check would have been a lot easier.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I know, I’m sorry. Let me think.” Marianne had a serpentine walking pattern—she’d walk away from you, then suddenly, her hip would be bumping against yours. Eric put his arm around her, and she leaned into him.

  “When we started out, you told me I’d get inspiration for my book. A whole ugly bear list to choose from—homophobes and anti-environmentalists and pro-lifers and self-righteous bootstrappers. So when I read the applications, everyone was on my list. But there was so much of it, I started sorting it, and some of the pieces, they stood out. They weren’t good, maybe, not in the sense that you could publish them—”

  “But they were interesting.”

  “Yeah, they were.” Marianne broke away, walking diagonally into the shallow tide. “The personal stories of the writers, they were interesting too. I mean, Davonte Gold—he’s different than I expected. He’s a pain in the ass but, I don’t know, he’s also completely honest. I guess the list changed.”

  “It wasn’t a shit list.”

  “No. Tonight when I came down here, I was mad at you,” she said. “I felt like you were pushing me away from running the school, like you were dismissing me. Then one of the students—Janine Gray—she was here. The Terri Schiavo poet. Earlier today, I was rude to her. Okay, I was very rude—I didn’t know who she was, you know I’m bad with names.”

  Marianne looked up at him, as if seeking his forgiveness, or maybe an admission that he’d done the same with someone else. He’d actually been gentle with his class, though twice already he’d had to intervene in an argument between Davonte and another student who seemed determined to provoke him. Eric could picture things escalating to fisticuffs before the session ended. “It happens,” he said. “She probably didn’t notice.”

  Marianne crossed her arms and shook her head. “She noticed. But then she came down here and we talked about—poetry, I guess, and relationships, and her family. She has a job teaching home ec, and two daughters, and her husband doesn’t really get her poetry, even though it’s religious.”

  “That doesn’t sound so strange.”

  “That’s what I mean! She’s a totally normal person. Do you know she told me that she met an agent at the welcome party? Was there an agent here?”

  Mark had told him that some people from GWGW might stop by, incognito, but he didn’t say they’d be posing as agents. It wasn’t such a bad idea, really—it could make the students more hopeful, even confident, to think they had attracted an agent’s attention just by being here (at least, until they had the inevitable misfortune of being ignored by one). But he decided, absent confirmation from Mark, to keep that to himself. “Agents? I don’t remember any agents.”

  “Because I’m just thinking that the manipulation, the game playing, is just not right for this crowd. I should have picked the worst ones, or just the richest ones, but I was alone and I didn’t, and now we’re stuck with these people, and I don’t think I can take advantage of them. I don’t think I can screw them over while I’m living with them.”

  “Nobody said we had to screw anybody over.”

  “You said, when you told me about this, that it would be good for everybody. We’d make money, your aunt’s hotel would get fixed up, we’d finish our books, and the students would have a chance to feel like writers. I thought I wouldn’t care about the students—I thought I just cared about our needs—but I don’t know that I can do it if they wind up hating us, if they find out we’ve invited in an organization that is clearly problematic.”

  “How is GWGW—”

  “Averse to our values, Eric. Just a scheme. Promise me that won’t happen.”

  Eric stopped walking and turned to Marianne. Without her heels—she wore flip-flops all the time now—she was a whole head shorter than him, and she was appealingly small, even frail, in his jacket. He put his hands on her shoulders and bent down to look into her eyes. “Marianne, I promise we can do this right, okay?” he said. “Can you just trust me on that?”

  She shook her head but did not remove his hands. “No, Eric, I cannot just trust you. I have to be involved. You can’t just go having meetings with your brother and leave me out. This was partly my idea, and I feel responsible.”

  Your idea was taking money from Christians, he almost said but didn’t. He knew this wasn’t the way to convince her. He took a breath, let go of Marianne’s shoulders, and started walking. “Okay, so, going back to the goals of the students and how they connect with, say, the expertise of our faculty. We have a problem there, right?”

  “Ugh,” she said. “We have a big problem there.”

  “And operating expenses—we need those for copiers and paper and keeping the students in electricity and toilet paper and chili mac, right? All GWGW is talking about doing is taking a tour, meeting some of our students, and suggesting—just suggesting—some techniques and strategies that might help us. That might help our students. That doesn’t sound so bad, does it?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Then, let’s just try it, okay?” he said. “We’re doing something completely new here, and people are gonna want to help us. They’re gonna want to get involved. We have the power to say yes or no. It’s up to us.” He told her what Mark told him—that some investors and curricular experts from GWGW would be there in a day or two, touring the campus and assessing how they might help—without mentioning his suspicion that Mark was just profiteering. He made their visit sound the way Mark made it sound to him—like an honor and a favor both—and the more he talked about it, the more he believed it.

  They turned back without reaching the pier. As they made their way up the path to school, Eric felt Marianne leaning into him. The heavy phone bumped against his side, but she didn’t mention it. She stopped before they reached the end of the mangroves, while they were still—promisingly—alone.

  “I should give you your jacket back.”

  “Keep it. It looks good on you,” he said, though it was his only nice jacket and far too big on her. She shrugged her arms out of the sleeves so it hung loosely on her, like a cape. Eric felt the awkwardness before a first kiss, the magnetic pull of two faces, the anxiety of possible rejection. It was his favorite part—one of his favorite parts, anyway—of a relationship, something he’d missed out on, in his drunken, grad-student boldness, with Marianne. Maybe that had been their problem.

  He cupped the back of Marianne’s head and stroked her long neck with his thumb. He was about to kiss her when they were interrupted by a loud splash and hooting, far up the darkened path.

  “We should go before someone spots us,” she whispered. “You should check on them.”

  “What could they be doing that needs checking? It’s not like we told them not to use the pool.”

  “People already think we’re a thing.” She was still whispering. “A couple.”

  “So? It’s not like the Bible says people can’t date each other.”

  “What do you know about the Bible?” Marianne slid out of his jacket and folded it over his arm. She held her hand there a moment, and Eric felt its warmth through the scratchy tweed. Then she reached inside the pocket and pulled out the smartphone. “I didn’t know you had one of these.”

  “Mark sent it. There’s one for each of us, to make work easier—emailing and stuff.” He didn’t mention the GW
GW accessories in the office.

  “To make work more ever-present,” she said, handing it back. “If that’s even possible.”

  “We’ll have time soon,” he said. “Just us. I promise.”

  “I should go. I want to write something before bed, and I’m getting tired. But we can take another walk tomorrow?”

  So that’s how it would be, he thought: a rewinding, a return to the courtship they should have had. He could do that. He knew all about romance: it was just a story, after all, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. He and Marianne, they were back to the beginning.

  8

  To: RuthandDarrylBoyette@healingwaters.org

  From: MarianneStuart@gmail.com

  Subject: Dear RUTH

  (Darryl, this is an email between sisters, so please give Ruth some privacy. Thank you for understanding!)

  It is really kind of absurd that you share an email address with Darryl. You should get your own—you had one in high school, remember? Superrgirl15@gmail.com? When I type someone’s address that starts with S into my email, that one still comes up.

  Anyway, I’ve already started off on the wrong foot, which is becoming a pattern for me. I guess I could go back and delete all of that, but I want you to see: I recognize that I’m being a jerk. The school I would have told you all about at Christmas, if you’d had more time (or Thanksgiving, when you were invited to see it for yourself), is in full swing and I am beat—look, two clichés in a single paragraph, “wrong foot” and “full swing.” But what are clichés if not tired metaphors? That’s the only kind I have to offer right now, I’m afraid.

  It’s a school for inspirational writing. Dad says he told you about it. I know writing wasn’t your favorite subject—you were better at reports, projects, being in charge of a presentation. But I still think you would like it here, Ruth. Being with our students reminds me a little of going to events at your church—all these middle-aged, earnest people, everybody so community-minded. At the opening-night gathering, people didn’t just stand there waiting for their beverages to be refilled (well, I guess some did)—they actually went on ice runs for me without being asked. At NYU, that never would have happened on the first night. We all would have been too busy checking our own reflections in the available shiny surfaces, or thinking about what pretensions to lead our conversations with.