The Gulf Read online

  “Well, congratulations,” Marianne said, peering again at the letter in her own hands. “I don’t see how you turn a motel into a school, or what any of this has to do with my situation. Or, for that matter, how you and your brother will possibly run a school together.”

  Eric’s brother, Mark, was an investment banker who’d moved from Charlotte to an apartment downtown, just a few blocks from Ground Zero. Marianne had met him exactly once, at a trader’s bar with bras hanging from the ceiling.

  “That’s the thing, he’s just helping with the business side. I told Frances I need help, obviously—teachers and an administrator to start off—and she’s willing to invest.” He paused. “She’s willing to pay your salary. To run it.”

  “My salary? To run a school?”

  “There are some details we have to work out—she wants it to be a place for Christian writers, but that’s perfect, isn’t it? It’s what we always talked about.”

  “Eric, it’s what we always joked about. There’s a difference.”

  “I told her that you had this exact same idea years ago,” he said. “That’s why she wants you to be the administrator. The director.”

  This was the business they’d imagined together in grad school, after too many scotches for Eric and too many mojitos for Marianne: a low-residency master of fine arts program for evangelical Christians.

  The idea first came to her after she’d gotten a scholarship to a workshop on formal poetry at a little college in Pennsylvania. Tuition was over two thousand dollars, and the workshop had attracted more than a few Christian poets, who’d flown in from all over the country. They’d been good workshop participants, polite and deferential, dutifully taking copious notes about their poems. Though they were better dressed and more formally educated than the evangelical Christians Marianne had grown up with, she recognized the same placid countenances: self-satisfaction masquerading as serenity. During a discussion of process, Marianne had been surprised and a little horrified to discover that many of them wrote more than one poem a day.

  That was years ago, and the evangelicals, it seemed, had more and more to say. In Marianne’s hometown, religious signs, haphazardly stenciled onto primer-painted plywood, began to appear by the roadside, along with political messages, mostly veiled threats against President Obama. Letters to the editor, which frequently invoked God, now took up two whole pages of their tiny weekly paper. In many parts of the country, it was okay now to question anything put forth by science—evolution, climate change, black holes—as an attack on God. And they had money: you could turn on any television set to see as much.

  The motel was on the gulf, Eric was telling her, with a pool and a sculpture garden designed by his aunt. It was near Sarasota, a haven for artists of all kinds. What could be more inspirational to a community of inspirational writers?

  “But that was a joke,” Marianne said, twisting the coiled black phone cord around her arm. “A joke about taking money from Christians. Which I’m all about, but it was a joke.”

  “Think about it,” Eric said. “You’re getting kicked out of your apartment—where else will you go? You wouldn’t have to teach.”

  “I’d have to teach Christians.”

  “For two weeks at a time!” he said. “And it wouldn’t be Christians, necessarily. We could sell it as a place to work on inspirational writing.”

  “Inspirational writing.” Marianne scraped a kitchen chair across the linoleum and sat down near the fan. She’d found the chair on the street and always meant to fix it up—paint the rusty legs a cheerful color, replace the cracked vinyl seat. It was absurd to think that someone with so little follow-through, someone who couldn’t even do minor DIY projects or pay her bills on time, would be successful at running a school.

  “Right,” said Eric, apparently taking her silence for interest. “It’s really popular right now, it has been for years. Especially the Christian market. And no one is capitalizing on that. We would be the first.”

  “Listen to you,” she said. “Capitalize. Selling. We didn’t go to school to learn to sell our work. I didn’t, anyway. Clearly.”

  “I went to school because it was the best way to avoid ever having a real job, or so I thought,” said Eric. “And so did you. You could finish ‘The Ugly Bear List’—think about the inspiration you’d have.”

  Marianne felt a little electrical jolt at hearing her book-in-progress named, this book hardly anyone knew about but Eric. It had been in progress for a couple of years now, since the earliest days of the Tea Party, but wasn’t close to done. The title came from a private saying, passed down from her grandmother to her mother—you wouldn’t want to be on her ugly bear list—and referenced all the people and movements and decisions that made Marianne’s blood pressure rise. Climate change deniers, racists and gun nuts and abortion foes. The NRA as a whole. Big Tobacco. Republican legislators back home who sold out the coast, stingy school board members who wouldn’t take government money for a free school breakfast program, members of her own extended family who still loved that spunky former governor from Alaska. A shit list, a first-against-the-wall list, an accounting of all the people who’d one day have to pay, but also an examination of the incomprehensibility of those people’s minds and the fear it created, the bears gnawing away inside your mind. The way its existence changed you, made you vigilant and suspicious.

  She’d barely worked on it since starting her new job, a teaching gig at P.S. 150 in Brownsville, where she tutored kids in writing and sometimes taught poetry. Last school year she’d taught three days a week, and summer school wasn’t full time, either—but the long commute and the intensity of routinely performing her own incompetence had left her little energy or motivation to write, which had come to feel like a private admission of defeat.

  “You’re still working on it, right? Wouldn’t this be the perfect place to finish?”

  Marianne lifted the sticky hair off her neck and knotted it loosely into a bun. Three of her students lived in homeless shelters all year, and her baby sister was a registered Republican.

  “Yeah,” she said, “still working. How old is your aunt? Does she have all her … faculties?”

  “Great-aunt,” Eric said. “Somewhere north of eighty. But sharp as a tack! Really, you should see—”

  “Would she be looking over our shoulders all the time?”

  “No, she’s got a full life, over at the retirement home,” he said. “She said in her letter that she trusts my good judgment about teaching and writing. She’s getting older. She wants a legacy. We send her some of the students’ work, invite her to a few readings …”

  “What if the students aren’t any good?” Marianne said. “What if they’re terrible—unteachable?”

  “Of course they won’t all be good! Were all your classmates at NYU good?”

  “No,” she admitted, thinking of a beautiful heiress with an exceptional coat wardrobe who shrugged off the table’s harsh criticism each week, leaving the bar they convened in after class for dates with various washed-up celebrities. Marianne had liked reading her poems mostly for the experience of looking into a rich person’s life and point of view, but she had agreed with the class consensus that they were probably not publishable. There was a whole series, for example, written from the perspective of a variety of interchangeable Filipina maids. “I guess not. Did that make it right, though, for NYU to take their money? Our money?”

  “That’s a very paternalistic attitude, Marianne. I’m surprised,” Eric scolded. “We could find the next Manny Abrams.”

  “Who?”

  “Manny Abrams, the Holocaust survivor who wrote the best-selling memoir about having a heart attack and meeting Jesus, Muhammad, and the Buddha, and how they all agreed that Jesus was the one? He was on the Today show. Frances told me about him—she read him in her book club.”

  “That sounds terrible,” Marianne said. “Was it written well?”

  “Of course not! That’s the point,” Eric sai
d. “This stuff doesn’t have to be written well, or be believable. People don’t care about that. It’s like television. Frances has this idea that these people—these undiscovered, raw talents—are everywhere.”

  “But I thought you were going to Dubai. I thought you were waiting on your passport. Why don’t you have a passport, anyway?” Even Marianne had a passport, obtained after a solid day of line-standing on Jay Street. She’d gotten it in case the law professor she’d been halfheartedly dating wanted to take her on an elaborate, spur-of-the-moment trip.

  “I am going,” he said. “That’s the thing. It’s four months. You could go now, get situated, sit on the beach, read applications, meet with Frances, then we could start in the spring. Or the summer.”

  “Applications?” Marianne said. The phone cord made a tourniquet around her purpled arm. “We don’t even have something for people to apply to. Also, I have a lease.”

  “I put an ad up two weeks ago, and we already have thirty-five applications, forty dollars each. My brother is taking care of the business licenses and tax stuff.”

  “Your brother?”

  “We went over the plan, and he thinks it’s a winner. He even talked Frances into giving each of us a profit share in the school. He wants to take you to dinner, go over some things.”

  “I have a lease, I said.” She thought that maybe she could fight for her apartment, deny the existence of the impending condos.

  “I’m sorry to tell you this, Marianne, but your apartment is a dump. And they’re not going to honor your lease.”

  “I’m sorry to tell you this, Eric, but your brother is a stockbroker. And your great-aunt is crazy.”

  He was silent for a while, and Marianne regretted what her voice implied. He was touchy about his brother and his success, and maybe he was sensitive about Frances too. She turned off the box fan to hear whether Eric was still on the line. As its rotation slowed, she saw that the blades were gray with city grime. Eric was right: her apartment was a dump.

  “What about my sister?” she said finally. “I invited her to New York for Thanksgiving.”

  “Thanksgiving is four months away,” Eric said. Marianne didn’t point out how early she had to make invitations, now that Ruth was married. “Did she say she was coming?”

  “No,” she admitted. Her sister hadn’t made any promises.

  “Invite her to Florida,” Eric said. “Where would she rather be, anyway—Brooklyn, or a Christian writing school in Florida?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “You do know,” Eric said softly. His voice on the telephone, a gentle drawl, had always been irresistible to her. “What’s keeping you there?”

  Marianne thought of her things—what would she take with her, fleeing the city? Some poetry books, her clothes and shoes, the small framed watercolors by her mother. The snow globe. A brown pottery mug that once held her mother’s brushes. Ten years in the city, and almost everything of value she had was something she’d brought with her, something from home. She’d thought, years ago, that she could bring Ruth too.

  “You said your aunt was an artist—a sculptor?”

  “You’ll love her,” Eric said. “And your sister can visit you in Florida. She’ll love it,” Eric said, with so much certainty that Marianne believed him.

  “Tell me more,” she said. “About my salary.”

  She should have stayed, defended the apartment, piled her sparse furniture at its doorway. If her landlord kicked her out, put her belongings on the street, she could have dragged a sleeping bag and her few belongings down to Zuccotti Park, started some new poems, put her middle finger up if Mark walked by. In Florida she watched CNN’s mocking footage of the Occupy protesters in their zombie face paint and Uncle Sam drag, then found an internet livestream that told a different story: marches and daily meetings, vegetarian meals, people who spoke eloquently of the debt that broke them, their families. She imagined herself as one of them: organizing the books in the People’s Library, donating her own. If anyone asked, she could tell her story: forty-two thousand dollars in student loan debt, part-time work in a high-poverty school, newly homeless.

  Join us! the protesters chanted at an open-air tour bus plastered with Lion King advertising. The tourists leaned over the railing, snapping photos. No one got off the bus.

  Would Marianne have disembarked from her own comfortable perch? Would she have camped in a public park, shared food, brushed her teeth in a water fountain? Maybe not, she thought, but she kept the livestream rolling.

  Meanwhile the applications continued to pile up, in high, wavering towers. Besides, she had run out of Krantz and King—her own book collection, mailed from Brooklyn, had not yet arrived—and watching grainy protest footage in an abandoned motel made her feel guilty, and also like a squatter. She turned the sound off on her laptop and began to read applications seriously. Choosing the first one was hardest—a slim packet of poems, clipped together with a paper clip in the shape of a heart—and the process reminded her of the struggle she sometimes had with writing. The physical part, what novelists called “butt in chair,” was the hardest, but after a little while you forgot that you were doing it.

  Soon the piles began to take on a sort of order. A small subset of the writing was, as she had told Eric, truly crazy, and this was the work that was most recognizably religious. A few pieces were preoccupied with the Rapture and seemed concerned with actually bringing it about, if such a thing could be accomplished through punctuation and spelling errors. Marianne collected these applications with a thick rubber band and placed them inside one of the dresser drawers. But most of the work was not overtly religious at all.

  If the applications had been organized into a pie chart, semiliterate novels about chaste vampires and insatiable werewolves would have been represented by a healthy slice. These pieces, along with other writing with obvious technical or taste problems, made a tall stack by the door. A second, somewhat smaller pile that sat on the dresser was made up of writing that seemed to have been done for the sake of the act itself—she could see the authors, identifying themselves to family members as novelists and poets. The novels in this group tended to have boring car chases and a lot of hard-boiled talk, but the periods and quotation marks, the exposition and the action, were all where they should be. The poems were worse, in their way: obvious metaphors unfurled in careful, unbroken meter. Sonnet after fucking sonnet, she told Eric in an email.

  She gathered a third pile, much smaller, made up of work that seemed, if not promising or publishable, at least like something she could not easily toss into the other two piles. There were several stories about cults, and in each one, the abuse scene—there was always an abuse scene—was the most vivid and terrifying part. There was a memoir called “Baby Dust,” written by a preacher’s wife who’d had eight miscarriages. There was a novel from a washed-up R&B singer, about a washed-up R&B singer’s triumphant return to the stage. There was a series of poems whose speaker was the late Terri Schiavo, establishing the preoccupations of her locked-in mind. She braced herself for the experience of finding a story like Ruth’s and hers, a story of sisters separated by faith, but so far the closest she’d come was an application from a young woman, not yet out of college, who said a Christian writing program was the only one her dad would allow her to apply for.

  Marianne kept this pile in the room next door to hers. She visited them to reread the Terri Schiavo poems or add a novel excerpt describing a woman’s strained relationship with her gay adult son. Sometimes she separated them into their individual submissions and made up two workshop groups, one for prose and one for poetry. She sat the manuscripts in a circle on each of the two double beds, like a doll’s tea party, and imagined each of the writers, the conversations they could have.

  It was a delicate thing, putting a workshop together, and she thought of writing a letter of appreciation to the chair of her department, who in the winter carried a tote bag filled with applications everywhere she w
ent. She knew that her professor, a reserved and elegant woman who liked things just so, had considered not only the work but also the personalities of each of the workshop members she invited. Even then there were misapprehensions of character, risks that did not deliver reward. There was a very young woman who dropped out in the first week, and in Eric’s workshop, a hot-tempered Cormac McCarthy acolyte whose tantrums scared the rest of them.

  That would not do here. It was easy to picture the pastor’s wife crying on the phone to her husband, the Schiavo poet going postal.

  So she went back to read and reread the personal statements. All Eric’s form had directed was “Tell us something about yourself.” They went on and on about hobbies, a love of animals, a feeling that Jesus walked next to them, strange anxieties about their families. There was an essay by a woman who had been in jail for embezzlement. Marianne had placed her unremarkable memoir in the literate-but-no pile, but after reading her statement, which described coming home to find that her husband had left her and taken the children, she decided to move her, with equal parts sympathy and nosiness, into the maybe pile. It had grown to twenty manuscripts.

  When the personal statements were too vague, Marianne took to sniffing the pages, holding them up to her face and breathing deeply. She got a vague scent of cigarettes and suntan lotion, but that may have been the room. She closed her eyes, tried to imagine her professor, whose commitment to poetry was so stately and impressive that she had served two terms as U.S. poet laureate, doing the same. An earnest whiff of Harvard grad, a faint perfume of granddaughter-of-a-South-American-oligarch. Marianne envisioned herself at the university’s holiday party, describing her new role as the Oral Roberts of the MFA world.

  Driving Eric’s un-air-conditioned Jetta to the supermarket, its radio stuck on a staticky AM talk station, she suddenly found herself remembering a line from a poem or trying to picture the faces of the participants. Shopping for lettuce and oranges and avocados, she peered at the other customers, retired, pleasant-looking people, wondering if perhaps one of them might in fact be an applicant. It now seemed possible, after reading poems and stories from hairdressers and prison wardens, singers and preachers’ wives, for anyone to be an undercover Christian writer, a Manny Abrams in disguise.