The Gulf Read online

  Advance Praise for The Gulf

  “A smart, funny, and hugely entertaining tale about the gulf between expectation and reality, integrity and profit, and faith and uncertainty.”

  —Jonathan Evison

  “A new work by Belle Boggs is a cause for celebration. In The Gulf, she leaps across perspectives with ease, bridging America’s political divide with compassion and comedy, clarity and insight. The Gulf is a hilarious and healing novel for these polarized times. Reading it consumed my nights, and gave me hope.”

  —Tania James

  “Belle Boggs takes the term ‘high concept’ to a whole new level in her brilliant comic novel, The Gulf. A satirical send-up of the whole business of commercialized Christianity and also for-profit ‘creative writing’ workshops, The Gulf is literally a DIVINE read—it’s also smart, profound, very funny, and finally redemptive.”

  —Lee Smith

  “Belle Boggs puts her keen eye on the writing workshop as a kind of lab for examining differing parts of America, and the result is a wildly engaging exploration of characters finding their way through connection, and through language.”

  —Aimee Bender

  “The brilliant humor in Belle Boggs’s The Gulf comes from a kind of clarity that only the best writers possess, an ability to look so closely at the world that you can see the absurdity without getting lost in it. These characters, because Boggs takes such care with them, feel so real, so wholly unique. And then there is the story itself, moment after moment, that took my breath away. It’s an amazing novel. You have to read it.”

  —Kevin Wilson

  “Wit and humor abound in The Gulf, and so do great wisdom and compassion. With her wonderful short stories and essays, Belle Boggs has established herself as both a stellar writer of fiction and a brilliant voice on important issues within our society; in this fine novel, her many talents come together, delivering a community of memorable characters and a compelling story as suspenseful in its emotional twists and turns as the approaching hurricane.”

  —Jill McCorkle

  Praise for The Art of Waiting

  “Boggs has done something quite lovely and laudable with The Art of Waiting: She’s given a cold, clinical topic some much-needed warmth and soul. The miracle of life, you might even say.”

  —The New York Times

  “An eye-opening, gorgeously written blend of memoir, reportage, and cultural analysis.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Boggs joins the ranks of great American essayists, writing fearlessly about the personal and the political and where they intersect.”

  —O, The Oprah Magazine, Top 10 Books of 2016

  Praise for Mattaponi Queen

  “Boggs has a knack for capturing both the comedy and the absurdity in all levels of human relationships.”

  —The Millions

  “[An] impressive debut collection…. These linked stories reach toward hope when they aren’t heading for heartbreak.”

  —Elle

  “Belle Boggs has created funny, but understated, characters and her sharp, clear voice seems suited to stories relatives swap on slightly rickety wooden lawn furniture…. A bewitching debut.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Boggs knows her landscape—how the mildew smells, what the frost looks like on a badly tended garden, how trees around an old house look different from one decade to the next. Reading these stories is satisfying, like going to a concert in which the musicians, you can just tell, have given everything for the moment: your unforgettable evening.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  The Gulf

  Also by Belle Boggs

  Mattaponi Queen

  The Art of Waiting

  The

  Gulf

  A Novel

  Belle Boggs

  Graywolf Press

  Copyright © 2019 by Belle Boggs

  The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the authors imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Published by Graywolf Press

  250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

  Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-1-55597-834-1

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-882-2

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

  First Graywolf Printing, 2019

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018947086

  Cover design and illustration: Kimberly Glyder

  For Richard

  And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence.

  Luke 16:26

  The Gulf

  Part

  One

  1

  The applications arrived, first in a trickle that Marianne could have read in an afternoon, then all at once, in alarming, mailbox-stuffing sheaves. She spent all day avoiding them, swimming in the Gulf of Mexico instead, or reading the stubby, water-damaged Judith Krantz and Stephen King novels she borrowed from the paneled-wood study. The applications covered every horizontal surface in her room: the oak-veneer bureau, the top of the boxy, old-fashioned television, the round Formica dinette table. They splayed across the second double bed’s glossy navy-and-orange bedspread, and blocked the heating and air vents that jutted out below the heavy floral curtains.

  They were Christian poems and stories and novels, or rather the novels and stories and poems of Christians, and Marianne could hardly bear to look at them, much less read more than a page or two at a time. First off, a good number of them had been printed on pastel paper, pinks and blues and yellows and creams. Easter egg colors, baby blanket colors, three-pack-of-panties colors, clashing, in their ever-growing stacks, with her room’s dark-and-bright seventies decor, the grainy wood furniture and the demented cabbage roses on the upholstery. And they smelled, some like talcum powder and others like a cloying, familiar perfume, many like menthol cigarettes. Together the smells blended into a noxious, headache-inducing sweetness that drove Marianne outside, into the hazy light of Florida’s late summer.

  The Genesis Inspirational Writing Ranch—or the Ranch, for short, suggestive of a mix of industry and ease, Republicans and wealth—was a collection of white stucco buildings set back from the road and obscured by a stand of live oaks with twisted gray trunks and dusty, rubbery leaves. It had two long rows of guest rooms, perpendicular to the beach, behind a central building, which had since been turned into the common areas: a room for pool and darts, a library, a caterer’s kitchen. These would comprise the school’s office and dining hall, its spaces for readings and public functions. There were two large rooms in a single building, and a smaller
cabana near the water, that would serve as classrooms. The grounds included a kidney-shaped pool, a sliver of beach, a garden—but groundskeeping, or any other kind of upkeep, had not been a recent priority. Broken things—the pool filter, some of the air-conditioning units, most of the minifridges—had gone unfixed, while everything else took on an air of seaside decay. Screen doors made an uneven seal with the rooms. Giant bugs lurked in corners. Almost every room had a spreading stain on the ceiling, marking the many places where the roof shingles had dislodged. Outside, vicious sand burrs crept onto every footpath, and the statues in the garden, a collection of half-naked nymphs and satyrs thoroughly unsuitable for a Christian writing ranch, groped each other in long tufts of switchgrass.

  “This was a bad idea,” she told Eric over Skype, her laptop screen angled to show a recently scrubbed fridge and a towering pile of manuscripts. “Here is what you should do: sell this place for the land, then refund all these application fees.”

  Eric Osborne—her best friend, ex-fiancé, and business partner—had recently abandoned her for the United Arab Emirates, where he had a semester-long gig teaching fiction. Marianne pictured him lazily eating figs and pomegranates, sunning himself next to a pool uncontaminated by algae or raccoons.

  Skype’s slight delay, made worse by the way the internet here cut in and out, gave Eric’s normally calm and reassuring voice an annoyed and impatient edge. “Everything is mortgaged, we need to make money with what we have. Plus.” The screen froze for a moment. “Where will you go?”

  “Maybe Dubai,” she said, squinting at the screen. The room behind Eric’s head glowed with an opulent golden light. She could see a bookcase filled with leather-bound volumes, and a sparkling chandelier. What kind of a fool did Eric think she was? “Do you know what I found in that minifridge behind me?”

  “Trust me,” he said, and the screen froze again. “You wouldn’t. Like it here.”

  “A condom,” she said. “Full of sand. I thought it was a penis, and I screamed, and there was no one here to hear me. Also: the applications,” she said, putting her eye up close to the camera so that all he could see of her was a big, staring eye. “They are crazy.”

  “How many?”

  “One hundred and twenty-three,” she said. “But I haven’t gotten the mail today. Or yesterday.” She groaned and lay back on the bed, remembering the last time she’d neglected the mail. The mailman had simply left a stack of envelopes on the ground.

  “There are bound to be some good ones,” he said. “In a sample that large. Some. Interesting ones. Have you read. Them all?”

  “Yes,” she said. “No.” The day before she’d tried to read a few, but stopped after coming across a series of poems that had been conceived, both in manuscript length and creativity of the punishments inflicted upon sinners, as a contemporary Inferno.

  “Don’t worry about cleaning fridges or fixing stuff. Mark is working on getting some people out for that. Just read, interview the teachers, and I’ll be there in December to help you make the final decisions.”

  “Tell him to get the pool fixed,” she said. Eric was never able to talk long, and she pictured him logging off to take his students—demure, kohl-eyed women—on coffee dates where they asked him about their manuscripts, which he would have mistaken for good because they described a world so foreign, and because the women themselves were so pretty. While Marianne scrubbed odiferous minifridges and took notes on poems (poems!) about serial killers.

  Just a month ago, Marianne had her own place in Brooklyn, a miraculously cheap railroad apartment on the top floor of a four-story walk-up in the treeless and newly trendy neighborhood of Greenpoint. Not that she cared about trends (and she would have preferred some trees), just the cost of things, which needed to be bargain-basement low. Marianne wasn’t cheap; she was just a poet. Really? she thought each year at tax time, totaling the measly grant or teaching payments she’d collected. She felt like someone on a calorie-restricted diet, looking over a list of what she’d eaten in a week: shock and a little pride that she was even still alive.

  It was, in its way, the life she’d imagined for herself, growing up in rural Virginia: the sparsely furnished apartment, the neighborhood buzzing with unfamiliar languages (Polish, mostly, but also Russian and Spanish), the clacking of grocery and laundry carts along the street. A job she didn’t have to go to every day. Time, hers alone, for writing.

  Her mother, an art teacher at the local high school, had fed Marianne this vision when she was very young, with books like This Is New York and Eloise and later with stories of her own time at the New School, studying painting. “Every artist requires a New York experience,” Theresa used to say, her soft coastal Virginia accent mixing with a slight Yankee nasality. For Marianne’s fifth birthday, she’d given her a heavy glass snow globe with a pewter cityscape, and had pointed out the crowded-together landmarks: the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, Central Park. Though Marianne couldn’t draw or paint or act or sing, she had loved books and words even before she could read, and was relieved to learn that writing, too, was an art that could provide you some entrance to that fabled city, some reasons for being there.

  But those reasons, in her thirty-fourth year, were beginning to dry up like the slowly evaporating water in her snow globe. Her mother died before Marianne made it to the city, and she was no longer so sure she was honoring her memory by living there. Yes, she’d been the recipient of various grants, had published a chapbook, and was working on a full-length manuscript of poems, but her career had not exactly taken off. She took her turns reading to dispiritingly small crowds at coffee shops; at the post–high school level, she could only get hired to teach remedial composition at vocational schools. Unlike her mother, who met Marianne’s father, in town for an academic conference, in a seedy East Village bar, she had not found love. Or else—and maybe this was worse—she’d found it and had thrown it away.

  Even her neighborhood, never the bustling, glittering, taxi-crowded place of her childhood imagination, was not what it had been when she moved there. She watched its best features disappear: the brutal but effective Russian aestheticians, the Italian bakeries where everything tasted of amaretto, the bocce courts with shuffling men in guayaberas and straw hats. Now androgynous twentysomethings walked their dogs across the bocce courts, whimsical boutiques lined even the dingiest blocks, and you were lucky to get a tepid facial for less than a hundred bucks. And yet the harshness of New York—heavy winter snows, hot summers, human feces on the subway—felt unabated to Marianne. But as long as she had her apartment, she told herself, she could stay.

  Then one afternoon, in early August, she got the letter from her landlord that she’d long feared was coming. Her building was being turned into condos, which the current tenants could buy instead of rent. The landlord referred to the condo sales as an exciting opportunity, except in his haste or lack of English fluency, he’d written exiting opportunity. Which, given the anticipated cost of the condos (not mentioned in the letter), Marianne supposed it was.

  On this very same day—at the very same moment, in fact, that she was learning of her impending homelessness—Eric called Marianne with his news. She’d come in from a walk in one hundred–degree heat, ripped open and read the letter, and heard the strident, old-fashioned ring of her telephone, four floors above. She ran to get it in case it was her landlord, calling to say that she could stay. She was breathing hard, holding the torn envelope and badly spelled letter in her hands, as she told Eric what it said.

  “That’s terrible,” he agreed. “But you had to have known it was coming.” He’d moved away from the city years ago, back to Charlotte, where he’d planned to make the advance on his two-book deal last as long as possible. But he’d gotten married instead—not to Marianne—and bought a ring and a house and had then gotten divorced and found himself teaching English at a high school hard up enough to hire someone without a license. The things that happened to him there—insults hurled lik
e chairs, followed sometimes by actual chairs—eventually led him to sign on to the job in Dubai. He had yet to write the second book.

  “I thought I had another year, at least,” she said, scanning the letter again. She turned on the box fan in her kitchen window and took in a great, vibrating lungful of air. Would she ever find another apartment with a window that so perfectly fit a box fan? “It says I have to move out by September 15. That’s fifteen days into my new lease. I already signed it. I was about to send it back. Doesn’t that count—that I signed it?”

  “This is perfect, actually,” Eric was saying over the roar. “Perfect timing.”

  “Thanks for your concern.”

  “No, really,” he said. He explained things slowly, savoring the story like a person talking himself into something.

  In July, a large brown envelope had come in the mail for him. Inside, Eric found a long, handwritten letter rubber-banded atop a thick stack of papers—the deed to a seaside Florida motel his great-aunt Frances closed down years ago.

  Eric began to read from his aunt’s letter, in a quavering drawl: “I always thought the property could be used for something more creative than a place for beach bums to watch television, which was all the imagination my late husband could muster. I’m too old to take this on, but I can finance it.”

  “Don’t do the voice, Eric. The voice is weird.”

  He continued: “It would bring me the greatest pleasure to help my nephews begin what I’m sure would be a successful and personally rewarding business venture. She wants us to start a school, Marianne. A school for writing.”