by Belle Boggs
“I can’t wait for tomorrow,” Janine told her after the reading. She was the founding member of the Tidy Up club and could be counted on to organize the leftovers, wash the dishes, and put away the chairs efficiently and uncomplainingly. Marianne thought it was too bad that Janine hadn’t read any of her own work—Manfred had taken forever to read his three poems, and Davonte read a similarly long, if strangely intelligible, PG-13 section of his novel—but Janine didn’t look disappointed to be on cleanup duty as the readers congratulated one another near the podium.
“What’s tomorrow?” asked Marianne, dumping uneaten pretzels into the trash.
Janine frowned. “We’re not having a service? I mean, I understood that we were all settling in on the first Sunday, but …”
“Oh, church,” said Marianne. “Church, of course.”
“I know there are different denominations,” said Janine. “But I think it would be better to have everyone together. We could have a folk service, with music. We have the fellowship group, they could lead us in prayer. And Donald is a very talented singer.”
“Right,” said Marianne, shaking out the tablecloth. How had she failed to consider that these people would want to have church? “Good idea.”
“I’ll start telling people,” said Janine. “I think a nine o’clock service is a good time, don’t you?”
Regina, who’d asked to be contacted with daily summaries, agreed that hosting a church service—a celebration of God, she called it—was a wonderful idea, and Eric congratulated Marianne again for her foresight. “I knew you’d be good at this,” he said, thumping her back as she typed up a program in the office. Something about him had perked up recently—he wasn’t complaining about his students, even about Davonte. His cheerful bustle reminded her of the manic time before they’d gotten engaged, when he was meeting with agents and strategizing about editors and publishers in his free time. Everything was possible, and every menial task was performed in anticipation of a reward. It was like wrapping presents on Christmas Eve or standing in line at an amusement park—there was bound to be a letdown.
The hastily organized service, held on the beach, seemed to satisfy everyone. Marianne counted, and every student was there, squinting from folding chairs sunk crookedly into the sand. Even Tom attended, bowing his head as Patty Connor, the tearful memoirist from his workshop, led the group in a confident and clear-voiced prayer. Davonte sang, unaccompanied, “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” and “Order My Steps,” hymns he must have carried with him since childhood. His voice was so pure and strong that Marianne felt a little swell of pride as beachgoers power-walked behind him, stepping into the surf to avoid disrupting the service while craning their necks to see.
It was wonderful, the students agreed when it was over, carrying their chairs back to the dining hall. They had the rest of the day to read and write, and they talked about how inspired they felt, after the service. Davonte gathered up chairs from some of the older women and carried them in a tall stack, and Tom and Patty hugged.
“Amazing,” Sophie La Tour said, linking arms with Marianne and walking back with her to the garden. Marianne hadn’t seen her since the session began. She wanted to tell Sophie everything—the feelings she was having for Eric, his romance with Regina, the fears she’d developed about their new funders. But she also wanted to seem successful—to feel successful. “You pulled it off.”
“We’re so happy it’s going well,” Marianne said, using the pleasant, cunning neutrality she’d picked up from GWGW. “And your sculptures are a hit—people have already asked me where they can get them.” That part wasn’t exactly true—they’d asked, a little skeptically, where she’d gotten them—but she felt she owed something more to Sophie, who’d done the work for free.
“You can give them my card,” Sophie said, after inspecting and approving the garden’s reverse chronological layout. She made minor adjustments, turning statues slightly, brushing away pollen, snapping branches that obscured vignettes. “Next Sunday, if you want a bigger crowd, I can put up a notice for my guests.”
“Next Sunday, they’ll be gone.”
“Gone!” Sophie whistled appreciatively.
“Back home, to write. They’ll work from home with their teachers. Then come back in late August.”
“Now it’s your time to write,” Sophie said. “And they pay you, all this time.” She bent to pull a sapling from the mulch.
“My time,” Marianne said. “Yep.”
“All from tuition? The reno, the teachers, supplies, your salary?” she asked, straightening and pocketing the weed. “Must be expensive, running this place.”
“We’ve got a little help,” Marianne said. “Some investors.”
“If you ever want to share the info,” Sophie said, “I wouldn’t mind some reno help.”
“Trust me, you wouldn’t want these people,” Marianne said quickly. “I’m not sure we want them, to tell you the truth. But here we are.”
Sophie opened her mouth, as if she might ask another question, then closed it with an appraising frown. “That’s okay,” she said finally. “You don’t want to say anything, I understand. But it wouldn’t be hard to figure it out, you know—if I wanted to. Anyway, you had a nice service, your students seem happy. You should be proud.”
Marianne thought she detected a faint note of reproach, or maybe suspicion, in Sophie’s tone. She knew Sophie wouldn’t approve of GWGW or the compromises she’d made, but wasn’t it true that things were going well, that the students were leaving their first session glad they’d come, and maybe even eager to return? Of course she was proud! She was reminded of how she felt on the next-to-last day of the school year, when students in her Brooklyn classes had their dance festival on the blacktop playground. None of it was really her doing—she hadn’t done the choreography or the costuming—but she was a part of things, a member of the community, bobbing her head in the sunshine and clapping like everyone else.
She moved through the rest of the day in a detached but not unpleasant fog. Everywhere she looked—in the dining hall or the garden, around the pool or by the picnic tables—there were groups of students trying to figure out God’s will, endeavoring to make that will manifest. And they were happy! They said good morning and good afternoon, they told Marianne to have a blessed day.
They were always communicating—with each other, with God, with their families via text or email. You could watch any one of them, alone at breakfast or walking along the beach, and see her mouth moving in a kind of permanent, ecstatic prayer. Even the ones whose lips were still, you could tell they were engaged in some kind of godly dialogue. And they were always praising each other—at readings, at prayer sessions, at croquet matches. Their whole existence enacted the kind of expression-reception-praise that writers, in Marianne’s experience, became addicted to. It was a wonder, Marianne told Eric, that they wanted to write at all.
On the last morning of the session, Marianne set out a buffet of fruit and cold cereal and coffee, but most of it went untouched. Packed into minivans and station wagons and SUVs, picked up by family members or delivered by cab to the airport, they left, bleary-eyed with hangovers from the punch Marianne concocted again, on their last night. They’d had a pool party and an interminable reading, had posed for digital snapshots outside their rooms, beside the pool, in the sculpture garden. Now they were gone, replaced by cleaning crews, by the sound of vacuuming and leaf blowing and edge trimming.
Marianne had work to do. There were so many vendors to pay—the housekeeping service, three different caterers, paper vendors and electricians and landscapers and computer technicians. There were students, also, who paid their bills in monthly installments, and because Marianne had not known any better back when they were accepted, they each had different pay-by dates, which were constantly being shifted or postponed. She propped the door to her office open and kept expecting to see one of them there, standing in the doorway apologetically, about to complain or make some sort
of complaining request. It did not seem possible that twelve days had passed so quickly, and yet it also seemed like the first day, when she’d handed over each student’s key, was a very long time ago.
Now was supposed to be the time she used to produce new work, the manuscript time she’d bought with every microwaved Lean Cuisine, with every box of tissues. But already applications for the second cohort, who would begin the following winter, made a tall pile on her desk. Regina had placed advertisements on a couple of prominent websites, and Mark emailed to say that they were now the first hit if you googled “Christian creative writing school.”
Why wouldn’t we be? Marianne had wondered. Wasn’t the Ranch the only Christian writing school in existence?
He hadn’t answered, but urged her to think of the guidelines Regina sent when she was reviewing applications (one of the new criteria was “telegenic,” which Mark assured her was a less stringent bar than “beautiful”; think of weight loss shows, think of Oprah or Ellen, he said, and just like that they’d started asking everyone for photos). They wanted more people—like Davonte—whose projects had media appeal.
Marianne reviewed the new applications alone. “Don’t worry, I trust you,” Eric said, when she asked his opinion on a comely writer of confusing, postapocalyptic fiction or a handsome, whiny memoirist. She could tell it wasn’t that—not trust but a lack of interest.
Eric arrived with the mail, which now came not in a rubber-banded sheaf but in its own corrugated-plastic bin. He set the bin down and took out his phone. “Look—I got two publisher responses to my query for Davonte.”
“You’re his agent now?”
“Davonte wanted to cut out the middleman,” Eric said, tapping quickly. “Though mostly all this project is made of is middlemen, to tell the truth.”
Marianne wondered how often Eric was in touch with his own publisher. In recent days Marianne had seen him smiling for no apparent reason, and once, walking from class to the dining hall, she’d heard him whistling. Maybe he’d gotten a good idea for the novel he was working on, she told herself. Maybe an encouraging line from his agent had made its way to his in-box. It could not be simply enthusiasm over a hack writing job that was probably unethical.
“They want to see it,” he announced. “Both of them.”
“Davonte will be pleased,” Marianne said, making her voice as neutral as possible. Through an agreement they’d made with his life coach, Davonte was staying at the Ranch indefinitely, exercising, going to bed early, and badmouthing other R&B artists to Eric.
“Everyone’s so busy,” Marianne commented, after Eric failed to tell her more. “Accomplishing stuff.” It was true: in less than two weeks, Tom had cured himself of sleepwalking, and said he felt so well rested that he wanted to extend his stay. Lorraine had learned to swim. Marianne, for her part, had gotten good enough at typing that she could type as she talked, could find (mostly) the correct keys without looking at her keyboard. “You and Davonte and your book together. Davonte looks so good—I mean, he looks more like his old self.”
“Things are pretty good,” Eric said. He sat down at the spare computer, which had been set up for student use, and logged in to his email. “I’m very proud of Davonte. He says he lost ten pounds. But none of those things would have happened without you running the show.”
“Ha,” said Marianne.
“So what are your plans then? For the break? Think you’ll make some more headway on ‘The Ugly Bear List’?”
She had just learned how to perform a mail merge and was about to send out the first batch of the next session’s rejection letters: Thank you for your interest in the Genesis Inspirational Writing Ranch … “I had this whole plan of things to do while the classes were in session, but it looks like I hardly did any of it,” she said. “I had this idea that the classes would just take care of themselves, that I’d have time, if not to write, then to do research.” Her notebook entries, which outlined these plans, read like a series of disobeyed commands from a child: Learn one new thing about an animal each day. Learn how to say good-bye in ten languages. Learn the names of some stars. How easy it would have been to learn those things! But she had not learned any of them, had not even tried.
“That sounds great,” said Eric. Over his shoulder, she could see a familiar blue-edged screen, with its cluttered, rapidly scrolling newsfeed. Usually checking Facebook only made him dispirited or annoyed, but Marianne saw him scrolling along as contentedly as a schoolgirl.
“Except I didn’t do any of it,” she told him. “What’s wrong with you? Are you humming?”
“Me? I don’t think so.”
“Well, I want to talk to you about some of the new writers I’ve picked. Tonight—I thought we could maybe go off campus, get dinner somewhere? We could talk about our books too.” She shuffled through a pile of menus she’d collected: Thai, Mexican, seafood.
“Sorry,” said Eric, shutting down the computer. “I’ve got plans tonight.”
“Come on,” Marianne said. “You don’t have to spend every waking moment with Davonte, you know.”
“It’s not with Davonte,” he said. He turned back to face her, crossed his arms. “I don’t spend every waking moment with him.”
“So where are you going, then?”
He shrugged. “I’m having dinner with Regina.”
“Again?” Marianne felt an unexpected, sharp pain in her chest; was this the source of his good mood? “Are you having dinner? Or a dinner meeting?”
“Dinner,” Eric said. “We’re having dinner.”
“How did that happen? Never mind, maybe I don’t want to know any more,” Marianne said. Twenty-five rejection letters today. She hit Print, but the printer remained silent, and an error message popped up on her screen.
Print, print, print. Error, error, error.
“Fine,” she said, her back to Eric. “Tell me. Why are you going to dinner with her?”
Eric drew a long breath. “It’s just,” he began, then stopped. “We talked, after the meeting with Davonte, and I don’t know, she’s just easy to talk to. We’ve got things in common.”
“Like your interest in competitive gingerbread house construction? Fuck,” she said, as a final error message froze her screen. She stood up and called to Tom, who was floating in the pool on an enormous gray shark raft someone had bought for the party, “Tom? Is it true that everything comes down to pussy, in the end? Is that what it’s all about?”
Tom gave her the thumbs-up sign.
“Davonte might hear you,” Eric reminded her. “And that’s not what it’s all about, thanks a lot. It’s not a date or anything.”
“What is it, then? What are your shared interests and experiences?” She squatted to open and close the copier’s paper drawer.
“Well, we’re both divorced. We both have had certain disappointments in life. Regina’s ex-husband took the kids, and—”
“Wait, she doesn’t even have custody of her own kids? How does that happen, Eric? You have to wonder.”
Marianne stood and turned back to face her friend. He hadn’t shaved yet today and was wearing a western shirt, one of Marianne’s favorites, with a fine gold thread woven into the faded plaid. How long had he owned that shirt? She thought it was perhaps something he’d worn on one of their early dates, those long subway rides to Inwood to look at moldy old tapestries, or out to Queens to eat searingly hot Pakistani food. Back then, Eric would go anywhere with her. It was strange how suddenly and how much she wanted to go to him, to touch him, to ruffle his hair and smooth his collar and feel the warmth of his body. She wanted to sit in his lap and smell him: deodorant and shampoo and something else, like fall leaves. But Eric shook his head, looked down at his feet; he had no idea how she felt, or maybe he didn’t care. “I didn’t expect you to understand, Marianne. It’s not easy to talk about that with someone who hasn’t been through it.”
Marianne blinked. “Sorry I didn’t rush into marriage. I didn’t realize it would make
me a better conversationalist. If I’d only known.”
“See?”
“Sorry, go ahead.”
“Regina really loves her kids,” Eric continued. “It’s hard for her to be away from them. Christine and I had just gotten to the point of talking about having kids when, you know.”
“When she cheated on you? Eric, you’re lucky you didn’t have kids. Lucky.”
“Marianne, it’s hard to explain it to you. Just because you don’t ever plan to get married and have a family doesn’t mean it’s not right for other people. You act like my marriage is something I escaped.”
“Who said I didn’t want to get married? Or have kids?” she asked, maybe a little shrilly. “I never said that.”
“Sorry,” Eric said. “I thought that was something you didn’t want.”
“No, I might want it. One day. With the right person. I definitely might.”
“Oh,” said Eric. He frowned as if he didn’t believe her, as if she’d expressed an interest in going to some strange or remote country, just for the sake of being adventurous or game. And in some ways that was how Marianne felt. Marriage had always been like a trip to Iceland or Slovenia. She wouldn’t say she was never going, but she wasn’t in a hurry to get there before she went to the sunny, fun Mediterranean countries, like Italy or Spain or Greece. But it didn’t mean never. “In that case.”