The Gulf

by Belle Boggs

  Davonte lifted one of his forearms off the table.

  “Only that we must remain vigilant in case he is the Antichrist. You see, it’s far too early to tell.”

  “President Obama is not the Antichrist,” Eric snapped.

  “Goddamn right about that,” muttered Davonte.

  “How do you know? None of us can know for certain,” said a woman at the end of the table.

  “Oh, please,” someone else moaned.

  “Again, President Oliver Hussain is a composite of various …”

  Eric was already rounding the table on his way to show Marianne and her visitors the door.

  “That was one of our more challenging pieces,” he said, once they reached the hallway. “I firmly believe workshop can be a place where we all learn about each other’s views and treat them with respect, where we can learn not only about writing, but also about other people. Other people are so fascinating!”

  “Thanks, Eric!” Marianne said, turning away with her GWGW guests—she was certain they would be on their way soon, never to return, taking their polo shirts and tote bags and Frisbees with them. Marianne wondered how they could make up for the money they’d be losing—maybe enroll more students, solicit more applications? She hoped they would let her keep the Rubik’s Cube.

  “There are some tweaks to be made, for sure,” Regina said, as they made their way back to the office. She was still tapping things into her tablet; the screen reflected the Florida sun in such a way that Marianne had no idea what she could be noting. Perhaps she was texting her boyfriend or ordering shoes online. “Some adjustments. But there always are. You should have seen the school of cosmetology when we got there!”

  “Goth city,” Matt said.

  “Stripper city,” Christopher said.

  “We’ve found that a set of guidelines helps,” explained Regina, waving her hand in a gesture that said, to Matt and Christopher: shut up. “About conduct, appearance, and expectations. It sets the tone for the students.”

  “Right,” Marianne said. “Wait—you’re not leaving? You’re still … interested in us?”

  “It’s a process,” Regina said. “We are prepared to help you in this time of growth and transition. That’s why we’re here.”

  “We’re not exactly talking about beauty school students here,” Marianne said. “And I can’t really see Tom in a polo shirt. No offense.”

  “None taken!” Regina said, though Matt and Christopher both looked down at their shirts, perplexed, as if they were part of their own poly-cotton skins. The four of them reached the office and stood for a moment at its cracked cement steps. Marianne was reminded of the awkwardness after a bad first date, how much you wanted it to be over so you could have your regular self back.

  Regina carefully set down her tablet on one of the steps and held her hand above her eyes, scanning the campus like she was sizing the place up for demolition. She bent down and made another tap or two with her stylus, then smiled brightly at Marianne. “We’ll be talking about becoming publicity-ready, and also market-ready.”

  “Market-ready?”

  “Remember what you said, about not being able to find a job?” Regina didn’t wait for Marianne to answer. “What if you didn’t have to find a job? Can you imagine selling enough books that you could support yourself, your family?”

  “No,” said Marianne. The idea of a collection of poetry supporting a family sounded like a kind of suspicious trickery. Like stone soup.

  Regina held up her tablet, made two taps with her stylus, and angled the screen for Marianne to see. “Do you know what that is?”

  “A spreadsheet?” Marianne guessed.

  “It’s a spreadsheet of best sellers,” Regina said, in a pleased, teaching tone that was at once impersonal and intimate. She tapped to show Marianne the way it was organized, a basket weave of numbers. “Organized by year.” Tap. “By genre.” Tap. “By sales region.”

  Marianne squinted at the screen. “I have a mental block for charts and graphs,” she admitted. “It’s one of the intelligences. I was born without it. Sorry.”

  “Well, to summarize,” Regina said patiently, “four years ago, the Christian share of the best seller market was six percent, averaged across genres, though it’s slightly higher in memoir. Two years ago it was nine percent. Last year it was twelve and a half. If you look back ten years, you see the same thing.” On the screen, she opened a graph that made a staircase pattern on the screen, the steps getting steeper at the end.

  “What do you mean by Christian share, though?” Marianne asked. “I mean, couldn’t those Mormon vampire books count?”

  “We did not count books by writers who happened to be Christian,” said Regina. “We counted only specifically, deliberately Christian-themed, Christian-messaged books, bought by Christians. Like the Resurrection series, or the WWJD novels.”

  Marianne remembered seeing the author of the WWJD novel series on the Today Show. She had been a wild-eyed, unkempt woman who had come from somewhere Marianne had never been: Nebraska? Oklahoma? The premise was brilliantly boring: a choose-your-own adventure series for middle grade readers. At the end of each chapter, you were supposed to ask yourself What would Jesus do? then choose that option, but reading the books, choosing the less Jesus-y path, and guessing its outcome had also become a popular teenage drinking game. One teenager had died, and another was hospitalized—this was the reason Matt Lauer interviewed the author, and the reason Marianne knew the series.

  “Half of these books start out as self-published,” said Regina, opening another screen, this time pie charts. “Until they get market share, your average New York City editor doesn’t want anything to do with them. Typical, right?” She looked at Christopher and Matt.

  “Typical,” said Matt.

  “Completely,” said Christopher, with more venom. “It makes me sick—”

  But Regina had turned back to her screen. “We’re thinking GWGW can find the great ideas first. Or,” she said, lowering her voice conspiratorially, “grow the ideas, right here. We, at GWGW, can train your educators to work on the kind of exercises and programs that will help your students achieve this type of success. Or we can help you find new educators … you look sort of pale, Marianne. Do you need some water? Christopher, Matt, please get Marianne some water.”

  “No, I’m okay,” Marianne said. She was trying to imagine holding such a workshop with Tom and Lorraine. “My head hurts a little, that’s all.”

  “It’s the sun!” Regina said, as Christopher handed Marianne a bottle of water branded with the GWGW logo. “Also, this must be a lot to think about. Why don’t you let me email you with some of this information, and we’ll formulate a plan of attack?”

  Marianne nodded, chugging GWGW water like a teenager in a drinking game.

  • • •

  Some of the students were hosting an after-dinner reading in the dining hall, offering snacks they’d frugally saved from the salad bar. Apple slices browned next to bowls of toppings and vegetables: fried ramen and clumped golden raisins and sliced carrots and broccoli florets. The meager snacks, the atmosphere of expectation and nerves reminded Marianne of her first NYU readings, but something was different here. Though she had always searched the crowd at school functions for her professors, the Ranch’s poets and memoirists and novelists did not appear to mind that half the school’s tiny faculty ducked out of their reading before it even began. Lorraine and Tom, sitting helplessly near the back, looked pleadingly at her as she dragged Eric by his shirtsleeve toward the door. Stay, she mouthed, like they were dogs.

  “Maybe they’re onto us,” Marianne suggested, when no one asked her where they were going. “The students know we can’t really help them.”

  She opened the office door with one of the keys she now wore all the time, on a lanyard around her neck, though weeks ago she’d discovered that it was openable just by turning and yanking the knob. It was important to keep up appearances, to preserve the idea th
at everything was as it should be. Doors closed and locked properly. Writers were learning something.

  “I don’t know,” Eric said. “I thought my class had a pretty good discussion going today—not the part you saw, of course, that was sort of a mess. But after you left, I think we got Louis to understand something about the power of subtlety.”

  “The power of subtlety,” Marianne repeated, peeling, from her computer screen, some of the sticky notes she’d left for herself, mostly phone messages she’d forgotten to deliver. “Well. I hope Manfred remembered to take his medicine. Also: I think we’re back to square one.”

  “Didn’t you talk to Mark? They loved the tour. They think there’s a lot they can do for us. So, good job. Really, I’m proud of you.”

  “This was not what you or your brother said it would be,” she said. “These people had charts, and graphs, and a plan of attack. They had facts and figures. They had promotional materials.” She scrambled the Rubik’s Cube and handed it to Eric.

  “They’re businesspeople,” Eric explained. He turned the cube this way and that, then set it down again on the desk, as if it were an objet d’art rather than a puzzle he was meant to solve. “They have an interest in the bottom line. They also oversee six or seven other campuses—”

  “They have a Christian cosmetology school, Eric,” said Marianne. “That’s where they were headed next, after they were done with our tour. Doesn’t that strike you as strange? Shouldn’t a Christian cosmetology school be, like, soap and washcloths?”

  “Ha,” said Eric. That was the most he was contributing these days, in terms of laughter. He’d been this way, serious and preoccupied, right before his divorce. Marianne had worked overtime to be amusing and distracting, sending dirty postcards and performing her famous Bill Clinton impression over the phone, but all he’d give her was a wan ha, or maybe ha-ha, if something was really funny. When it was over—next Friday, when the students left—he’d be able to relax.

  “And they have a Christian medical billing school, and a Christian law school, devoted, I’m guessing, to the replacement of the Bill of Rights with the Ten Commandments,” Marianne went on. “None of this bothers you?”

  “Marianne,” Eric said quietly. “What do you want me to do—fire Tom and Lorraine? Cut their pay? Send everybody home?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Did you see that reading the students were having? The bowls of raisins and cookies? Their manuscripts under their chairs? Nothing GWGW wants to do is gonna change that spirit they have.”

  “A Christian medical billing school,” Marianne said again. “You can’t tell me our students won’t see through an organization like that. You can’t tell me they won’t smell a rat.” She didn’t want someone like Janine to think—to realize—that she was a scam artist, but neither did she want to fire her teachers, who’d made and canceled various complex plans just to come here. “They want to train you and Tom and Lorraine to teach people how to write YA best sellers.”

  Eric truly laughed at that one, doubling over in his chair: “Ha-ha-ha-ha! Best sellers! The nerve!” he said. “That doesn’t sound like knowledge that’s going to hurt anyone. In fact, maybe it could help all of us. But if it makes you feel better, I’ll take a meeting with them, okay? I’ll listen—I’ll listen critically—to their whole spiel. Okay?”

  “Maybe,” Marianne said.

  He nodded, satisfied. “That’s what Mark and I thought. I’ve got a meeting scheduled Saturday night. With Regina and Davonte.” He patted Marianne on the wrist. “Sound good?”

  “Okay,” she said, though she wondered why and how he’d already scheduled a meeting. “Why are you taking Davonte?”

  “He’s our most high-profile student,” Eric said. “Mark looked it up, and his first album went platinum—”

  “I told you.”

  “Well, you were right. You were right, Marianne, and the GWGW folks think his comeback story could be big. Apparently Regina is also a fan of his.”

  “A Davonte Gold fan? Really?”

  “She thinks that getting the student perspective, from someone with market potential but limited writing experience, someone like Davonte, will help us understand something about where the school needs to grow.”

  “Okay,” said Marianne. She was glad, at least, that Eric wasn’t going to dinner alone with Regina.

  “Listen to that,” he said, cocking his head toward the unlockable door. From across campus came the sound of applause, beginning as a faint patter, then growing stronger, like a rainstorm.

  The next afternoon, while the students took an “inspiration-gathering” field trip to the Ringling Museum (the tall, air-conditioned bus was hastily chartered by their friends at GWGW), Marianne met with Tom, Eric, and Lorraine to go over some of the charts and graphs Regina sent her. Marianne hoped that Tom and Lorraine might express their concerns to Eric, but they were less resistant than she had imagined, dutifully reading the numbers and charts projected onto the wall. Tom even whistled appreciatively at some of the sales figures.

  “I didn’t know anyone was selling that much these days,” he said. “What did you say that book was about?”

  “It’s a young adult choose-your-own-adventure series,” Marianne said.

  “Young adult choose-your-own-adventure,” Tom repeated slowly.

  “It was in the news a lot?” Eric suggested. “You really never heard of it?”

  “I hate the news,” Tom said vehemently. Lorraine shrugged.

  “Well, that’s one thing GWGW is suggesting,” said Marianne, clicking through to another PowerPoint slide. “Awareness of current events, current trends, can make something more likely to catch an editor’s eye, though I don’t know if it does anything for a book’s longevity. GWGW thinks they can also help us choose our next writers more carefully, so that we’re looking for people who are already producing work that is likely to be successful. For example, young adult and middle grade fiction—it’s a huge market right now.”

  “Middle grade,” Lorraine mused. They looked at her expectantly, but she did not continue.

  “Like Harry Potter,” Eric said. Lorraine looked confused but unperturbed by her confusion.

  “I just don’t like the look of that cross,” Tom said, shaking his head at the GWGW logo at the bottom corner of the screen. “It creeps me out, that big shadow.”

  Marianne nodded encouragingly. “You are resistant to some of their corporate imagery. What about you, Lorraine?”

  “A curriculum would be helpful, on the other hand,” Tom continued. “I mean, it’s hard to know what to do with some of the submissions. I’ll be honest with you; I’ve got a lot of criers in my group. I don’t think photocopying Norman Mailer is gonna do much to turn that around.”

  “I’m meeting Regina Somers for dinner tonight,” Eric said. “I can talk to her about our curricular needs.”

  “Was she the hot one on the tour yesterday?” Tom asked. “With the updo and the fuck-me heels?”

  Eric reddened. “She’s one of the specialists.”

  The hot one? The fuck-me heels? Marianne thought, looking down at her flip-flops and chipped blue pedicure. “Davonte’s going too,” she said.

  “Davonte Gold?” Tom said. “Freaky.”

  “My workshop was going quite well, I thought,” Lorraine said finally, turning over the GWGW water bottle Marianne gave her as if calculating exactly how much vodka-and-cranberry it could store. “We started from scratch and have been accessing primal memories. Productive work, in writing and in life. But of course I agree with Thomas that I want my students to be successful in whatever … arenas seem most compelling to them. They are not readers of Poetry magazine. They are not readers.”

  “Yeah,” said Tom. “I agree with Lorena. At first I thought, ‘What if this gets out and people think I was working for right-wingers? How will this affect my teaching career?’ But then I realized, how will this get out? And also, who am I kidding?”

 
“Okay then,” Marianne said, a bit hesitantly. She was surprised by their compliance, by how easily they gave up. Then she recognized the conversation. It was the same one actual teachers of actual students had everywhere, from university composition programs to elementary school faculty lounges. Let’s make the best of what we have to work with, the line went. Also: this isn’t my fault, it was going on long before I got here. And finally: if we can’t solve the problems we set out to solve, can’t we at least be relevant? She’d once heard a sixth-grade teacher explain, in exasperation, that fractions had many uses. Drug dealers needed to understand fractions, after all …

  “And bonuses,” Lorraine said. “Those are very motivating.”

  Marianne turned off the projector. “I guess that ends our meeting.”

  She wanted to talk to Eric again, but Tom had already overtaken him. “Did I ever tell you about covering the whole Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker scandal back in the eighties, the women I met at PTL? Their supporters? Their secretaries?” He lowered his voice obscenely. “I mean, I was drowning in it.”

  Marianne excused herself, saying she had to speak to the caterers. She walked purposefully across campus to the dining hall, which was never locked. It was empty, as she knew it would be—there was no lunch service because of the field trip, and the caterers weren’t due until late afternoon. The hall’s big windows faced west, so this time of day, late morning, the whole place was church-dim and shadowed, even though outside it was bright and sunny, eighty degrees. Marianne was glad she’d decided to keep the room’s wood paneling and Frances’s kitschy gilt-framed prints of manatees and alligators and herons. Though she’d complained to Eric about living in a motel, there were times when she was filled with the deepest kind of affection for this place, like fondness for the face of a homely child or an ungainly animal.

  Near the door, on a collapsible metal table, someone had left the things they must have borrowed for last night’s reading’s refreshments: a white tablecloth, unevenly folded, and cups and bowls they’d washed and stacked. A cut-glass punch bowl and a thin metal ladle. Marianne picked up the lumpy tablecloth and shook it out, then folded it, bringing the corners precisely together, then together again, into a neat square. After their mother died, her father had left all the laundry, especially the sheets and towels, crumpled in baskets near the washer and dryer until he needed them, and when Marianne was home she ironed and folded them, set the linen closet back to rights.