We Wish You Luck

by Caroline Zancan

  He had never published a single other piece of fiction—not even a short story—but there were rumors that he had written a second masterpiece, which he kept in the top drawer of his desk and took out only when he was completely alone. Some sources said he had actually finished it years ago but, too afraid to let it go, combed through it endlessly, changing just a word or two at a time or maybe the placement of a few commas. Others said it was incoherent.

  The irony of Pearl’s name had been delighting readers and reviewers for nearly as long as Cactus and Dust had been making them cry. While he wasn’t carrying a loaded rifle in his author photo, people usually remember him having one. His picture promised that he was the kind of man who killed his own dinner but didn’t take any joy from the killing; he always did it as quickly and humanely as possible. He had a somber, prematurely gray mustache in the picture that had only grown grayer since. There was a longstanding debate among Fielding students on whether a Republican could create great art, and it is no coincidence that the people who said they could are people who had been in Professor Pearl’s class. Not because he had professed affiliation with any political party or candidate, or even because of that gun he surely owned even if it wasn’t in his photo, but because he had the air of a small-town mayor or sheriff. Not in a power-hungry way, but in the sense that he believed people took care of their own and didn’t need any larger, more formal mandate to do so. People who swept in from far away generally only brought trouble. You got the sense he didn’t like suits. If the apocalypse hit, you’d want him around.

  Pearl had been married when his book was published, to an equally celebrated novelist name Joan Pasquale, who, unlike her husband, kept writing after her first success. She had been a finalist for the National Book Award twice, once for her debut novel and once for a collection of essays about a random group of women who happened to get their chemotherapy at the same time and place that tracked the members of the group long after their treatments. Though she had lost both times, her almost maniacal following couldn’t have loved her more if she had won. Even at the peak of their combined fame, the couple had apparently been wary of any sort of exposure or literary celebrity. The one interview we could find with either of them was a joint profile Life had done the year after Cactus and Dust came out. In the picture we all remember most vividly, one as iconic as his author photo, Pearl looks up at the camera from a mahogany desk in front of which a four-year-old girl with enviably shaggy locks and the lingering effects of a late-afternoon nap sits playing. The couple divorced a year later, after which Joan and their daughter relocated to California. We couldn’t find any evidence that Professor Pearl kept in touch with either woman—his office walls were notoriously bare of personal photos of any sort—but this seemed out of character for him, and we wanted all our characters consistent back then, both on the page and in life, not having yet considered that this was not only uninteresting, it was inaccurate.

  We know better now, though: good men falter all the time.

  While the details of Pearl’s personal life and the status of his second novel were in dispute, we could all agree that he was not the kind of person you disrespected by whispering to someone else while he was addressing the group, which is why what Leslie did on the first day of workshop was even more surprising than if she had done it in any other professor’s classroom.

  She and Hannah were the only two first-years in the class. Like most of us first-years, unfamiliar with the campus and hoping to make a good first impression, Hannah had arrived at Sunset Cottage ten minutes early. Leslie was three and a half minutes late, and not because she was lost. She pulled her hot pink ear buds out of her ears only after she had shut the door behind her, so everyone in the room got a few chords of Robyn’s demand that her new boyfriend call his girlfriend. The circle of students around the long table in front of her was small enough to appear informal, but the look her classmates gave her when they turned made it clear just how sacred they considered the ritual she was interrupting.

  “Sorry,” she said in a way that insulted the word.

  The look Professor Pearl gave her was direct but empty at once, a look as meaningless as her sorry.

  “Sit,” he said.

  And she did, but not in the chair he had nodded to, which was the one closest to the door. She directed her winking hips toward the table’s only other empty chair, right next to Hannah, which she had to pass most of the circle to get to. Four students had to scoot their chairs forward to make enough room for her to pass. The collective squeal of metal chair legs on the linoleum floor was more offensive than even the Robyn, but still he did not kick her out. He had already diverted his attention back to the rest of the class by the time he slid a copy of the one-page syllabus to her across the table, the graceful glide of his forearm totally divorced from the rest of his body. It finished its apathetic arc right as she finally landed in the chair.

  One of the few ways in which Professor Pearl’s workshop did not depart from those in adjacent classrooms was the first-day agenda. Even he used it as a throwaway day, dispensing the rules under which the workshop would be conducted and determining the order in which students would be workshopped. It was a soggy curriculum better suited for the first day of high school English, usually capped by the professor handing out a page or two of prose that was universally understood to be perfect. It was academic small talk, and Leslie had little patience for small talk of any sort.

  To be fair, Professor Pearl did try to curtail the condescension implicit in so basic a class by not insisting all the students go around the room reading a paragraph of his selection aloud. Instead, he had everyone take a Xeroxed copy of Alice Munro’s “Fits” to read quietly to themselves. Most of the other students in the class were still on the first page when Leslie bent over and unzipped her backpack to retrieve a pencil case—she didn’t even have the sense to be ginger in her unzipping or her case opening.

  She inspected each of the half dozen colored pencils she took out of the case before lining them up in front of her. She didn’t appear to put the colors in any particular order, but she did stop to make sure they were laid out evenly, so that their admirably pointy tips formed a perfect line, before she picked up the green pencil closest to her. Once she began working, she stopped only to change colors, so focused on her creation that she didn’t look up to note which color she was picking up in favor of the one she had just discarded, making everyone think there might have been some premeditation to the order she had put them in after all.

  With each new letter, she drew the attention of more of the students in the room. By the time she got to the second n, everyone had abandoned the story, their heads up in some mix of curiosity and outrage, including Professor Pearl’s. That Leslie had created a spectacle sufficient enough to distract from their reading would mean more to you if you’d ever read “Fits.”

  “Are you not going to read the story?” Professor Pearl asked, more amused than we would have been. “I think you’ll like it. It’s one of her best.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Leslie said, pausing only briefly in her exchange of a blue pencil for an orange one. “I’ve already read it. I’ve read all of her selected stories.”

  For a second or two the only sound in the room was the scratch of pencil on recycled paper.

  “Wellllll,” said Professor Pearl, leaning back on two chair legs, still considering how to proceed even as he spoke. “I suppose that makes sense. Just try to keep it down, all right?”

  Leslie nodded but wasn’t any less rigorous in whatever she was doing with the orange pencil.

  The students in the class who liked to see other people get in trouble exchanged What the fuck looks, but most people who know Professor Pearl wouldn’t be surprised. He was a man of logic, and Leslie’s was a logical explanation. He didn’t believe in wasting time or doing something just for the sake of doing it, like rereading a familiar story just because someone t
old you to.

  The students closest to Leslie had made out the six letters in Hannah’s name—from which several stars were now shooting, against a plaid backdrop—just before Leslie ripped her creation from the corner of the syllabus sheet she had written it on. She tried to be coy—her smile was small—but her manic, childish excitement was unmistakable. She slid the scrap of paper over to Hannah, who was the only person in the classroom still reading at that point, offering her friendship the only way she knew how, by trying to startle or scare or impress her intended into it.

  Instead of being impressed, or flattered, or nervously cowering into her seat, hoping not to get blamed for this further interruption, since her name was now at the center of it, Hannah turned to Leslie—with her entire upper body, not just her head—and said, in a voice that wasn’t loud but wasn’t entirely a whisper, either, “You’re being rude.” Without giving Leslie or anyone else a chance to react, she turned back to the page in front of her, and the story even Leslie couldn’t distract her from.

  After that, Leslie was completely in love. The kind of absolute, all-consuming love that distracts you from the tenets of life as basic as three meals a day, and conquers even the bleakest, most devastating strands of loneliness. Which was a good thing, because even before Hannah chastised Leslie, the eight other students in the class had marked Leslie as someone to be wary of, and promised themselves they’d avoid starting up with her the sort of instant close friendship that happens only at summer camps, freshman year of college, rehab, and low-residency MFA programs.

  What the other people in the workshop didn’t know, and couldn’t tell the rest of us when they recounted the story later, was that Leslie hadn’t chosen Hannah at random. She hadn’t written out Hannah’s name in her too-big, childish scrawl because she liked Hannah’s blazer, or the “bad spellers must untie” sweatshirt she was wearing underneath it, so dorky it was almost cool. She did it because she loved that first story Hannah had sent to the class the way she loved very few things—truly and purely, without satirical comment or a joke to distance herself from it. She had read it long before she arrived on campus and several times since. She had reread it just that morning—it was part of why she had been late—and would read it again before the story was workshopped. She loved it the way you can love only a certain number of arrangements of words across the span of a life. If we had known this then, we might not have been so quick to judge, and the rest of the students in the workshop might not have told everyone else what happened quite as quickly as they did or in quite such condescending terms. Because we had all loved something—some poem or passage or cluster of words—as much as Leslie loved Hannah’s story.

  It was the reason we were all there.

  * * *

  The first person Leslie made an impression on outside of class was Margaret Jibs. Everyone got their own room on campus, but the bathrooms were communal. Margaret’s and Leslie’s rooms were adjacent. On the way back from that first workshop, Leslie passed Margaret reading Mark Strand’s Collected Poems in the bay window at the end of the hall their rooms were on—probably getting an early start on her reading list for the residency, fully intending to include the book on her list of twenty-five titles for the term even though she was already halfway through and she and her adviser hadn’t met to set their list. Leslie didn’t hesitate before interrupting Margaret’s reading to ask about the duration of her morning bathroom routine.

  “Excuse me?” Later, Margaret claimed she had asked politely, as in I didn’t hear you, not What did you just say to me? But by then we’d all known Margaret long enough to know better.

  “You know, like, how long does it take you to put that eye makeup on?” Leslie said, allegedly nodding at Margaret’s face like an angry cabdriver when she said it. “Or, more importantly, are you regular?”

  “I have no idea what you’re asking me.”

  “You’ve seriously never heard that expression?”

  “I mean, I’ve heard the word regular before.”

  “Well, my system’s like clockwork. So every morning at about five after nine I’m going to need the bathroom for about ten minutes. And you’ll probably want to let it sit for a good five minutes after that.”

  The expression on Margaret’s face as she registered what Leslie was telling her is a detail she left out, but we could all picture it well enough, and understand why Leslie felt compelled to make some sort of peace after having been on the receiving end of it.

  “Sorry. I guess I’m not as shy as most people when it comes to things like this. Probably because I write erotica.”

  This is the first time any of us can remember Leslie naming this as her specialty, though it certainly wouldn’t be the last.

  “The program doesn’t really do genre fiction,” Margaret said, probably now wearing the look she would’ve had had she walked into that communal bathroom at a quarter after nine, a look she used in response to all sorts of things.

  “Oh, well, I don’t really need help with the sex part. I have all that down. Practice, you know.” There would’ve been a wink here, probably.

  “I need help with the story around it. I have notebooks full of sex scenes and only a handful of names and jobs and backgrounds for all the characters, you know, engaging. I’m gonna need a lot more for the series I have planned.”

  Though Leslie talked about her explicit sex scenes as easily as she did her morning bathroom routine, Margaret took this first mention of them as some sort of dirty little secret that Leslie had let her in on. Because it was Margaret, this only increased the speed and enthusiasm with which she relayed the conversation to other people. The news quickly looped around campus, merging mightily with Leslie’s appearance and wardrobe, and the uncontested story of what she had done in the first workshop, the start of a reputation she would never fully shed, even after everything else she would go on to do. If it had been someone other than Margaret reporting on the exchange, we might’ve been skeptical, but Margaret didn’t have the creativity to make up something like that and we all knew it. Her imagery and language were flawless, but she lacked imagination. She could never write about anything she hadn’t actually seen or experienced.

  “If you don’t know how to write, how did you get into the program?” Margaret asked.

  Knowing what we do about Leslie, it feels safe to say she winked again after telling Margaret, “Everyone knows erotica writers give good head,” right before turning and walking away.

  * * *

  In other corners of the campus, other introductions were being made.

  Bridget Jameson went down to the laundry room in the basement of her building after lunch without even stopping at her room first. Though she generally didn’t rely on expensive or ostentatious clothing, being the type who looked better with hair that’s been left to dry on its own and no makeup, she had worn a pair of red velvet leggings to dress up the ordinary denim shift she wore to meet the rest of us that morning. When she had thrown the milk at Jamie Brigham after his comment about her fiction at lunch, just after their first workshop, she had gotten some of it on herself, as we usually do when we sling something at someone else, and she was on just the wrong side of desperate to get the milk out of the leggings before it had time to set.

  Given that it was the first full day of the residency—too early for anyone’s clean laundry to have gone dirty—Bridget had counted on being the only person in the laundry room, so she was delighted to see that Hannah was leaning against one of the dryers. The afternoon’s desperation wasn’t solely on account of the milk, as much as she loved those leggings. Bridget didn’t have nearly as many friends as a person of her caliber deserved, we were all on our way to discovering. While most people make their close friends in high school or college, she had missed her window at both for reasons not entirely within her control—a work transfer for her father in her junior year of high school, and an 8:10 a.m. Latin class
in her freshman year of college that kept her from staying to the end of the early-morning parties where friendships in progress were cemented with bad decision making and incurable hangovers. So while she was justifiably secure in herself on most fronts, and would’ve made a perfectly solid, reliable friend, she was a little too eager in new group situations like this, which explained not only the velvet leggings but also why she had thrown the milk. Seeing Hannah felt like the promise of an immediate do-over.

  Bridget had just taken a step forward with an open mouth, ready to say hello too loudly, when she saw that Hannah was talking to someone who had been out of Bridget’s view until that step. We would be sad about the way she closed her mouth in defeat, sensing that the conversation in progress was an intimate one, designed for two, if the person Hannah was talking to had been anyone other than Jimmy, who was even less well acquainted with friendship than Bridget was.

  Instead of going back upstairs, Bridget picked a washer close enough that she could hear Hannah and Jimmy’s conversation but far enough away not to interrupt it. This wasn’t only because, having identified Hannah as a particularly strong candidate for friendship the moment she realized their dorm rooms sat side by side, Bridget wasn’t ready to give up on some sort of friendly exchange before going back upstairs. She was also as curious as the rest of us about Jimmy, the boy from nowhere.

  We had all received a first-year directory in the welcome packet that arrived just a few weeks before the residency. It included our street and email addresses, cell phone numbers and the occasional landline, and full names with a second line designated for any nickname we might prefer. Leslie’s was the only missing entry. Having found a way to be delinquent even before arriving on campus, she had failed to send the information in on time or at all. For Jimmy there was only a name and a PO box. After we all checked to make sure our own entries were correct, and to see what they looked like in this new context, trying to imagine how eyes that had never seen the information would process it, and what our street names and email addresses said about us, we set to work studying one another’s entries, looking up how close various zip codes were to big cities, and trying to guess how old people were based on the email servers they used. We all stopped at Jimmy’s entry, as intrigued by his lack of information as we were by even the most exotic and moneyed zip codes and the cleverest Gmail addresses.