“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “You just take care of whatever you have to take care of on the school side. Finding students and teachers. That’s really the priority here. The school stuff.”

“The school stuff.” Marianne wondered, watching the window behind Mark’s chair, if she missed New York. She thought she could make out the graceful arches of the Brooklyn Bridge, but it may have been a trick of the light. How much time had she spent on the Brooklyn Bridge anyway? Maybe once she’d walked across its wide pedestrian walkway. Most of her transriver experiences involved the subway or the ugly Manhattan Bridge, or the absolutely ordinary Pulaski Bridge, which crossed only a greenish creek.

“Yes,” Mark said after a long pause. “Eric thinks you should stay in more of an administrative role. You know, hire someone else to teach the first poetry workshop.”

“Oh,” Marianne said. “Could you sit down, please? In front of your computer?”

“You can, you know, focus on your writing.” His voice was still faraway and tinny. What was he doing? Tidying up? Most likely, she realized, he was working on a desktop in another part of his office. She strained to hear the decisive tap-tap-tap of number typing, which was what she assumed he did all day.

“My writing is not going well,” Marianne said, rather loudly, so she could not take it back. (She hoped that if she announced it often, like a recovering alcoholic, it might help.) “What does an administrative role entail? Could you move over to your computer, please?”

“You know,” said Mark. “Interacting with the students on a personal level, making sure things go well. Mediating between the interests of the students and the teachers, who may not be used to some of the same … thought processes? Of the students.”

“So, like a religious concierge,” she said. “Or an activities director on a religious cruise ship. Or an admissions director at a religious college.”

“Yes,” Mark said happily. She could definitely hear a keyboard’s busy clacking. “Like that.”

The Ranch was not accredited. It did not have an endowment. It did not have a beautiful campus or a quad, though the gardens and pathways were less treacherous after a week of landscaping. It did not have classrooms or a photocopier. And yet the applications, mostly generated by a few well-placed advertisements, continued to roll in. Marianne added a few more applications to the yes? pile—a memoir from a remorseful maker of slasher films, a speculative novel from a 9/11 truther, poems by an escaped Scientologist who’d moved to Hollywood to write a screenplay about being an excommunicated Mormon. Although she maintained, to Eric, an outward hurt at being asked not to teach, on the inside Marianne was deeply relieved.