The Gulf

by Belle Boggs

  She was good at repetitive, precise tasks, and she could fold anything, even a fitted sheet, as smoothly as paper. It was something her mother taught her—if you’re going to have a lot of stuff, you have to learn how to put it away properly. The family linen closet was given over to Marianne to arrange when she was only eight or nine, and Marianne announced that she’d like to be a professional organizer. This was before such a job existed, or was widely known. “You mean a maid?” her mother laughed.

  Now she supposed that was only the first in a long line of inappropriate ambitions that practical reality revealed to be less desirable than she’d imagined. A professional organizer was really a maid. A poet was actually just a teacher of other poets. Director of an inspirational writing program? Try coconspirator with modern-day Jims and Tammy Fayes.

  Marianne took out her phone and typed a hasty message.

  To: RuthandDarrylBoyette@healingwaters.org

  From: MarianneStuart@gmail.com

  Subject: Question for RUTH

  Hey, did those GWGW people actually help you with fund-raising? Did it all work out?

  Immediately, the phone pinged.

  To: MarianneStuart@gmail.com

  From: RuthandDarrylBoyette@healingwaters.org

  Subject: Re: Question for RUTH

  Thank you for your email! Darryl and Ruth Boyette are on retreat with Healing Waters Baptist Church, with limited access to email. Please be patient, and they’ll get back to you soon. Peace and blessings, R&D

  9

  Davonte would have preferred to stay back at the Ranch, but he boarded the bus with everybody else, all the racists and crybabies and rich old ladies he’d been avoiding at meals. He was sure that his time here, limited as it was, would be better spent exercising or working on his manuscript—on Eric’s advice, he’d started telling the story into his digital voice recorder—or checking in with his life coach. He didn’t care much for museums, the hushed snootiness of them, the way you were expected to file through, looking at one painting, then the next, reading from a tiny plaque on the wall and nodding your head as if the dates and names meant something to you. And a circus museum sounded even worse. Davonte hated clowns, acrobats, tall men. Painted faces spoke to him of hidden agendas, deviance. Cirque du Soleil, which his agent made him see in Vegas, had given him weeks of nightmares.

  “No, trust me, you’ll love it,” Marianne told him at breakfast, when he said he thought the trip was optional. That was the other thing—he hated to have his plans changed, and there was also the matter, arranged yesterday, of some kind of special dinner tonight. “It won’t be all day,” she promised. “I think you’ll love it.” It was true that Marianne had been good to him so far, accommodating. The special dinner suggested that finally, they saw him for the talent he was, though he’d been warned about these kinds of—what did Coach call them?—self-aggrandizing thoughts. Plus she seemed a little stressed, and Davonte figured it wouldn’t cost him much to go along with the group. That’s what Coach was teaching him to do, measure things in terms of costs and benefits, which basically meant pretending things weren’t all about you, just so you could get what you want. He spends a morning ambling around a museum? In return, he gets more attention for his admittedly significant needs.

  So here he was, sitting next to a plump woman who looked happy to be going anywhere. She had a little girl’s haircut and wore a T-shirt and green shorts that showed her pale, veiny legs. As soon as the bus got moving she was digging through her purse for a book of poems, all underlined and highlighted and marked with ragged sticky notes. Reading in moving vehicles made Davonte so sick he couldn’t stand the sight of anyone else reading, and he considered how to ask her to please put the book away.

  She didn’t read long before she wanted to talk. “The house—the Ca’ d’Zan Mansion,” she pronounced the name slowly. “I’ve heard it’s incredible. But I think our tickets are just for the museum. Too bad. My name is Janine, I think I heard you read last night? From a memoir?” She took out a tin of candies from her purse and offered one.

  “Donald Goldston,” he said, shaking her hand and refusing the candy. If he ate so much as a mint he had to write it down and look up the calories later. Too much trouble. “It was fiction, actually. A novel.”

  “Sorry. It must have seemed very realistic to me.”

  Davonte got that response often enough—a resistance to fiction, like it might be the same as lying—that he sometimes thought he might be better off writing a memoir. But the plot of his book, about a dissolute R&B singer who turns his back on old ways and returns to the stage reformed, and newly adored, was still in process, as far as real life went. That was what was exciting about the book, he’d told Coach: the chance to envision life as it should be. As it could be, Coach reminded him. It made him want to sit down and write every word—almost.

  He wondered if this woman knew who he was, but guessed against it. If she did, she probably would have taken another seat. He waited for her to say something about his reading—he’d felt compelled to read from one of his favorite scenes, when Damian is tempted by a groupie who is a dead ringer for a young Vivica Fox—but she didn’t mention it again.

  “I think it’s good to shake things up,” she said cheerfully. “You know, to experience another art form. Paintings, sculptures. Maybe it’ll help our work. I think that’s the idea.”

  “You write about paintings?”

  “No,” she admitted. “But I do write about God, our relationship to Him. I think that a lot of the paintings are very old, religious paintings.”

  “Not circus art?”

  “I think there’s a wing devoted to that, but it’s mostly baroque paintings that they collected. European art.” She pointed at her copy of the pamphlet Davonte had already lost, back at the Ranch.

  “I’ll skip the circus art,” he said. “But I don’t get that—the idea that just because you’re writing, you should be looking at paintings or sculpture or whatever. My mother thought that. Used to drag me around to art museums, got to where I dreaded Saturdays.”

  “She wanted you to be cultured,” said the woman.

  “She read this book about raising gifted children. She checked it out from the library and carried it around so everybody could see what she was going through, having to raise someone gifted. Sometimes people acted like because she had only one child, her life was easier. The book told her that if you were gifted in one area, you were likely to have gifts in another. So she had me taking piano, going to museums, stuff like that.”

  “That’s what mothers do,” she said. “My mother didn’t, of course—I don’t think it would have occurred to her, but I’ve tried to encourage my daughters in all of their gifts. Your mother saw your writing talent when you were a child?”

  “Not writing,” he said. “Singing. I used to sing in church. Solos, even, before I was in kindergarten.”

  “So the book was true! Singing and writing, all for God. That’s wonderful.”

  Davonte wasn’t sure writing was, in fact, among his talents—unlike making music, it went very slowly and didn’t usually turn out the way he’d imagined it. But he had ideas, and that was the important part, wasn’t it?

  They pulled up in front of a great house. Disembarking, he was separated from the talkative woman, but that was okay. He had a strange shameful feeling, new to him but frequent, since he’d come to the Ranch, that he had said too much. Why had he told a stranger about those museum visits with his mother? It was none of her business. He edged away from the rest of his classmates in line.

  • • •

  They met up again in one of the galleries. By then Davonte was impressed with John Ringling—the museum was like a big empty house, with polished wood floors and plush carpets and gold wallpaper and painting after enormous painting. Passing through the open terraces between galleries, you could see elaborate gardens, marble sculptures, a distant, turreted building that must have been the mansion. No tents or clowns or fun
house mirrors.

  The woman was sitting on a narrow bench before a large painting of the Christ Child. Mary was holding back a sheet to show him off, and he was being admired by a cherub and a couple of old men. His skin, and Mary’s skin, glowed white as the moon.

  Janine—that was her name—was bent over a notebook, furiously scribbling, when suddenly she began gasping and heaving. Afraid she might be crying or struck by some sort of religious feeling, Davonte started edging toward the next room, but then she stood and pointed to her throat. She was choking.

  Shit, he thought. He looked for someone to help, but the adjacent galleries were empty. Her face was turning purplish-blue.

  He stood behind her and whacked her back, but she continued heaving and gasping in a terrible, airless way. He conjured an image from a poster he’d seen, positioned himself behind her, and wrapped his arms around her waist, just below her ribs. He clasped one hand over his other fist and thrust upward once, twice, and she was suddenly sputtering and wheezing, her hands on her knees.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Candy,” she gasped. Her eyes were shining with tears, and she still looked terrified. Her voice was scratchy and raw. “I was sucking on a candy, and it went down the wrong way. If you hadn’t been here—”

  “Everything all right?” A guard came in, worriedly checking the big paintings but not Janine, who was still gasping. The guard was short and slow, an older woman. Davonte thought she probably wouldn’t have been able to help, even if he’d called her.

  “I’m okay. This man did the Heimlich on me.” Janine put a hand on Davonte’s arm and squeezed. “He saved my life.”

  A small crowd was forming and the guard retrieved a butterscotch candy from the corner of the painting, where it had landed and stuck at Jesus’s pale, curled feet. “Why we don’t allow food in here,” she said, frowning as she handed it over in a tissue. Janine accepted the candy as if it were a relic or work of art, some sacred or holy thing.

  “I almost died,” she kept saying, and for the rest of the tour, Davonte kept overhearing her tell and retell the story. He wondered if he could work it into his book somehow—except in his book the threat should be more dramatic than a butterscotch. Maybe Damian saves someone from drowning? Or rescues her from a fire? Or pulls her from a wreck? A Halle Berry type, he thought. She was a terrible driver.

  “You are meant for big things,” his mother used to say to him, on the way to piano lessons or the ballet—she even took him to the ballet! She would look at him as she said it, but with a stern expression, as if to say: Don’t mess it up, son. Giftedness, in her world, was the same as a limp or a bad eye or some other affliction—something that had nothing to do with you. It was how you dealt with it that showed who you were.

  10

  Eric called his brother while he got ready for dinner, shaking out his rumpled button-downs one by one and hanging them in the shower. He didn’t have a tie, or even an iron. He should have taken a polo shirt while he had the chance.

  “I just want to make sure, Mark, that the expectations are clear,” Eric said, when his brother finally answered. He set the phone on the vanity while he got out shaving soap and his badger brush and a razor and filled the sink; he could at least be clean-shaven. “The deal we’re entering into—Frances is still going to be the majority owner of the school, right?”

  “Frances has never been an owner of the school, per se. She owns something better.” Mark’s voice, echoing off the bathroom walls, sounded distant and tinny; he was probably doing something else too.

  “Which is what?”

  “A significant equity interest in the offshore LLC that now owns the hotel property, and that we believe will soon be party to a very lucrative ten-year commercial lease with the school as sole tenant.”

  “Mark. Who owns the school at this point? At least tell me you still own it.”

  “We have something better: lucrative consulting contracts with a separate offshore LLC I set up to manage the school’s intellectual property assets, which it’s leasing back from another offshore LLC, giving us a massive tax advantage for a for-profit institution. I’ve already entered into mine, and soon you’ll have one too. The lawyers are drawing it up.”

  “Who owns the school, Mark?” Eric’s razor wasn’t sharp enough; he rinsed it in the sink.

  “The school isn’t one thing, and it never was. There’s a parcel of real estate. There are tables, chairs, a stack of smartphones, a couple of tablets. And the intellectual property: the curriculum, the marketing data, but more importantly, the trademarks, the overall concept, the accrued goodwill, the word of mouth, the brand. That’s the important thing. We still control that. Our contracts say so. And the last major asset is the accounts payable: our contracts with the students.”

  “And who owns those?” Eric kept his voice calm, low: it was necessary for the close work of dragging a blade across your skin.

  “A consortium of investors, mostly in the greater New York area. I’m not sure I’m at liberty to say more than that. But if you heard their names, you’d probably recognize—”

  “Jesus Christ.” He nicked himself just below his right nostril.

  “Not him.”

  A watery droplet of blood ran over Eric’s upper lip and into his mouth. It tasted like soap.

  “So as soon as you could, Mark, without explaining it to us, you sold the school to the Illuminati. To a bunch of snake-people.” He leaned in closer to the mirror, trying not to cut himself under his other nostril.

  “You don’t want to own companies like these. You want to be a vendor. You want to be a creditor. You consult: you agree to give them whatever bright ideas you have and you get paid for them on long-term contracts. Or you’re their landlord. Better yet, both. If you own equity, stock, whatever, when the whole thing goes belly-up, the value of what you own evaporates. If you’re a creditor, you at least get to participate in the bankruptcy.”

  “When the whole thing goes belly-up?”

  “You always have to anticipate failure. For-profit education is a volatile sector of the economy. Fads come and go. You have to expect there will be economic downturns, government investi—anyway, things happen.”

  “Goddamnit, Mark, are we breaking the law?” Another nick.

  “Education laws, lending laws, they change all the time.”

  “Of course,” Eric groaned. “And so do tax laws … probably campaign finance laws …”

  “You can break the law without knowing it, Eric. Most educational institutions do at one time or another, with no way to predict how much it’s going to cost, and no way to stop the bleeding. Tuition hikes are unpopular. Even if the balance sheet is in the red for a decade, they just have to … keep educating people.”

  “Whereas the moment our school starts losing money, it can fold up like a Halloween store on the first of November. Nobody ever finds out who the investors were, Marianne and I can slip away in the night, and everyone can pretend the place never existed. Everyone except the students who paid thousands of dollars toward a certificate—not even a degree, a certificate!—that will never be issued, unless the laser printer happens to still have some ink in the drum on our last day.”

  “That’s not going to happen, bro. Your school—our school—is going to succeed! And even if it doesn’t, our students are positive-minded, resilient, optimistic people. With generally good credit.”

  “Our students! We don’t have students. We don’t actually have anything—it’s all in your snake-people’s hands. GWGW has a sack of hamsters. That’s it.”

  Mark didn’t reply.

  “And that’s why people like you are so eager to sell things to people like them. You see them as easy marks. To you they’re a bunch of suckers.”

  “Eric, listen to me,” Mark said evenly. “They are a bunch of suckers.”

  “I know,” Eric sighed. “I know.”

  “I mean, there are studies on it.”

  “At least now I understa
nd what they teach you in business school. How to use studies to find suckers.” He splashed his face with cold water, closed his eyes. Marianne had warned him, hadn’t she? But this was beyond the limits of her considerable paranoia. How would he explain it?

  He looked in the mirror. His cheeks and chin were speckled with blood.

  “Look, I have to take this other call,” Mark said. “Let’s do more on this another time.”

  A hero, Regina called Davonte at dinner, beaming at him across the basket of rolls the waiter had been asked not to bring. She wore her hair down, in loose and shining waves she tucked behind one ear, and had on a dress that managed to be modest and snug at the same time. She wore simple pearl earrings, the same high, glossy pumps she’d worn on the tour. Eric wished he had saved someone today. He wished he had on a tie. He wished most of all that he’d never talked to Mark.

  “I knew there was something about you,” Regina said. “When we stopped by Eric’s classroom and you were so passionately engaged in discussion.”

  Davonte shredded his roll into fine crumbs, making a mess of his plate and the tablecloth. He was clearly uncomfortable talking about the rescue, which had been widely discussed around campus. Louis, the one-world-government novelist, had even given Davonte a gruff handshake.

  “She probably would have been okay,” Davonte said. “The candy probably would have melted in her throat. Butterscotch is kind of soft.”

  “Some butterscotch is hard!” Regina insisted. “We are lucky to have you as a member of the GWGW community. In more ways than one! I understand from Eric that you are a talented novelist.”