We had thought the PO box might be ironic, the closely cultivated understatement of a hipster who had gone so far to one extreme of ostentation that the only thing left to do was circle all the way back to the bare beginning. But once we saw that he was completely free of ironic facial hair, with no flannel in his wardrobe, we realized the mystery was real. He was earnestness incarnate, more incapable of irony than even the squarest of our parents. No one had heard him speak, so geographical colloquialisms were no help, and we hadn’t been able to listen for an accent. His last name made it just as likely that he was Latino as Italian. Just as Hannah and Leslie eventually became a source of interest because of how they were always together, Jimmy was a curiosity because of how often he was alone. While the rest of us clumped off with other members of the class according to age and geography and, though we would never admit it, the caliber of our writing, no one had seen Jimmy outside of mandatory orientations and classes—not awake, at least, though his sleeping figure became something of a campus Where’s Waldo. He always arrived at and departed from the things he did attend by himself. He seemed to have more interaction with the service staff—the cafeteria workers and security guards—but even these were brief, nonverbal correspondences, a nod to say hello or thank you.
Then there were the whispers that had already started to trickle down to us from the people in his workshop, about how remarkable his poetry was.
If Bridget was hoping to learn something about Jimmy that day in the laundry room to report back to the rest of us, she would’ve been even more disappointed than when she realized Hannah wasn’t alone. Because Hannah was doing almost all the talking.
“I know it’s kind of weird to be down in the basement on a day as nice as this, but I’ve never been one of those people who can write or work or do anything that requires any real attention when I’m outside in a place as pretty as this. I get so consumed by the grass and the trees and the view that it’s kind of just what I’m doing, you know? There’s not much to distract a person down here.”
When Jimmy didn’t say anything Bridget looked away long enough to scan the room, which was, in fact, desolate. It was the kind of grim, cobwebby place that would’ve depressed her if she didn’t go on to associate it with Hannah for the rest of the residency.
“Don’t be fooled by the dryer,” Hannah went on, nodding over her shoulder at the machine humming gently behind her. “There’s nothing in it. Some people like to listen to music when they work, but I like white noise. And none of that over-the-top rain forest, ocean stuff. I like the pure, empty buzz of a dryer. The more high-powered, the better. These are pretty good for a campus laundry room, don’t you think?”
One of the things we would all learn about Bridget was that she was an excellent conversationalist, something close to a wizard at small talk. When Jimmy didn’t answer right away, she opened her mouth a second time, to save Hannah the embarrassment of pure, deafening silence in the face of her friendly overture, but Jimmy finally spoke before she could think of what to say.
“I don’t know,” he said, not looking at either girl. “I’ve never had a dryer before.”
Bridget might’ve been disappointed one final time that afternoon. Hannah didn’t follow up with a question about what Jimmy was doing down there. Bridget worried the question might’ve already been asked, before she arrived. But her disappointment was stayed, because just before Hannah turned to go back up the stairs, her empty dryer still running, she gave Bridget one little crumb to bring back to us after all. Hannah laughed at Jimmy’s answer, happy at such an odd, unlikely response rather than befuddled by it the way we might have been.
For this, Jimmy rewarded her with a smile. The first and only smile any of us would ever see on him.
* * *
After that first day of workshop, after people put faces with stories and sniffed out how gentle or not their professors were going to be. And heads were poked into dormitory neighbors’ rooms, and suitcases were either unpacked or shoved under beds. After Jibs had searched for and found the next closest bathroom, to avoid Leslie’s morning movements altogether, and Bridget had hung her red leggings across the back of her desk chair to let them dry, we finally had a few hours to ourselves.
We first-years used this time to explore campus while the rest of the student body sought out their favorite corners. Mimi Kim and Sarah Jacobs picked wildflowers in the field in front of the music building, which, from the outside, looked more like the sort of crumbling mansion that survives wars and keeps secrets better than even the best, most discreet humans can. Lucas White and Robbie Myers got stoned in the lobby of the ultramodern campus apartments that were reserved for undergraduate seniors and MFA students in their graduating term. They sat there exhaling languidly and talking around the girl they had met earlier that day and both thought they were in love with, a second-term student whose name eludes us all now. Penny Stanley, who was already trying unsubtly to win the unofficial role of class leader, even though we had already given it to Jordan Marcum by then, met Professor Salter at the student center to finalize the movie lineup for the film night they had planned for the one free evening of the residency. She hadn’t realized yet that, because the program didn’t give letter grades, and there was no honors program or valedictorian, her extra efforts and extracurriculars and all the tasks she invented for herself would culminate in nothing but less free time, which she wouldn’t have known what to do with anyway.
Walking alone, or clumped in twos or threes, it was easier to notice the eerie, abandoned quality of the campus and the side streets around it. Mimi noted that the mom-and-pop stores that lined these streets looked a lot like the barbershops and general stores and pharmacies that were always opening in Brooklyn and Portland and Austin, but with more dust and frumpier owners—authentic relics that the new stores were throwing back to. It felt like a place time forgot, even as the school brought the most of-the-moment writers and artists to campus. There was a Great Lawn, at the edge of which Adirondack chairs sat around a fire pit. There was a steep drop-off just after the chairs, and sitting in them, you could see all the way to the highway you turned off to get to campus, a lonely, cement-colored vein. The patch of grass the chairs sat on was called The End of the World for several reasons, not least the simple one that that’s what it felt like, sitting there.
It wasn’t just the vast, open stretches of campus that we graduate students—fewer in number than even the notoriously small undergraduate student body that had fled for the summer—could never fill that made the campus feel empty and apart from the rest of the world, and maybe a little strange. There was always a haunted quality about the place, even before anything bad happened. The hallways always felt as if someone had just passed through them, even when you were blowing off a lecture or reading everyone else was attending, so that you knew you were the only one in the building. It wasn’t a very well-lit place, electricity being no match for the advantages natural elements had on so remote a campus, and the sensor lights they did use went on only when someone walked directly in front of them except for the stray times they popped on or off when we were clear on the other side of the room. Often one of us would assume we were alone only to have the “gotcha” pop of a sensor light make us jump, even if we’d been the one to set it off.
The infrequency of our interactions with the locals made us pay more attention to them—the cafeteria workers and the bartenders who set up giant plastic bowls of stale ice and cheap lite beers mixed like confetti with stronger local brews each night in the commons room beneath the dining hall, for predinner cocktail hour. The program, we all quickly learned, ran on routine and tradition. We had workshop every morning at ten, craft lectures at two, faculty readings at seven, and, the prize for each day’s work: the five o’clock cocktail hour before six o’clock dinner. There was a different bartender each night, serving the same nearly tasteless but somehow irresistible trail mix. We could never find the
mix in any store off campus—even the massive wholesale places and the upscale specialty shops—leaving us with the distinct but doubtful impression that it was prepared each night by the bartender who sat behind it, who never did manage to look comfortable in the ties they were made to wear. These bartenders were always robotically polite and efficient in their work—friendly but noncommittal—but almost graceful in the speed and agility with which they took the caps off beers and held them out to us before we even had time to open our wallets. They were professionals. And though they were almost entirely immune to chatter or small talk, you could see in their eyes that they knew things. They could’ve shown us the houses where the worst things had happened—the house Shirley Jackson died in, or where Mary Rogers, the last woman legally executed by the state of Vermont, had lived when she rolled her husband’s body into the river a few miles from campus just before composing his suicide note. Their benign indifference to us made it clear that while we might have an education, they thought it sweet, all the things we didn’t know about this place. Which cafeteria workers sold drugs, or which quaint little blue cabin’s owner was building an arsenal for whatever postapocalyptic event would finally do the rest of us in. They were almost all young—younger even than the babies among us—but they had the placid air of someone who has already resigned themselves to being wherever they are for a very long time, even though there are a million other places that might suit them better, and nothing will age you quicker. They never gave us a single indication that they took our myriad differences personally, but if we’re being entirely honest, we feel a kernel of discomfort when we think of them now. Maybe because all of us loved to talk about how poor we were—it was a common exercise among us, to list all the things we couldn’t afford because of the money we spent on the program, on our art—and the bartenders and cafeteria workers, like the security team and the janitors who were their neighbors off campus, made it clear again and again, each night at the same time, that there are many different kinds of poor, not all of them equal in nobility or arrogance or actual hardship entailed.
The people who worked in the cafeteria tended to be a few years older than the bartenders, by our rough and often inaccurate eyeball estimations, and were split more evenly down the gender line. They made the hipster foodie bent of the meals the cafeteria served feel even stranger and more out of place than they would have anyway. There were corn and feta pancakes and sweet potato tater tots. Baked, not fried, so always a little limp. There was homemade red pepper hummus and crawfish benedict. Each meal’s contents read like the menu of an alternative CSA cruise, or a new Brooklyn bistro in the first floor of a Park Slope brownstone, but it all tasted the same, and was all served at the same five-minutes-too-cool temperature. The food was laid out in massive, troughlike quantities, and almost everyone gained a few pounds across each residency, even the people who opted for the salad with toasted pumpkin seeds and watermelon tossed in homemade raspberry lemon vinaigrette dressing. This could have just been because the food left everyone constipated, so severely that we all had to wonder how regular even Leslie ended up being. We never heard her utter a word on the subject after her initial warning, and bowel movements were so prized on campus that it seemed the kind of thing she would brag about.
That first night, after we had taken the trail through the woods into town, to buy cheap and surprisingly smooth wine, and after the third-years had drawn out maps for the first- and second-years that would lead them to the swimming hole a few miles off campus, we sat down for the first dinner.
Dinners at Fielding were part high school cafeteria, part extended family Thanksgiving. It was the only time the entire student body and faculty were in the same place without having to be quiet to listen to the lecturer or speaker. People dropped into breakfast and lunch on the way to or from the day’s events, so while you might pass someone you were looking for on your way in or out of the cafeteria, if you really needed to find them you’d look for them at dinner. It was the only time when we were all present but free to converse openly, and after all the hours spent listening, and taking notes, and living among our own thoughts and responses to the ideas and writing samples put before us, we always had a lot to say. Even though the days were long, the energy in the dining hall was always high during these final meals. The talk was animated and boisterous. If they could have captured it in a picture, it would’ve been perfect for the brochure—proof of how stimulating your time here would be, and how much it would evoke from you. There never were any pictures of the dining hall in the brochures, though, because it was the ugliest room on campus. All of the buildings on Fielding’s campus were different—different styles of architecture, different ages, and different sizes—and the dining hall felt like the one where they had finally run out of ideas. The one that seemed functional above anything else. The ceiling was one giant skylight, the room’s one nod to beauty or aesthetic, but that was another thing that couldn’t really be captured by a photo, which was maybe the other reason the cafeteria felt so safe. It was a secret—a place only people who’d spent enough time there would know to love.
Though there were more than a dozen tables in the main room of the dining hall, spread far enough apart that interacting from one table to another would’ve required shouting, there was often a shared topic across the tables’ conversations. Fielding was a lively campus, but it was also a small one that rarely saw more than one noteworthy event or development in a day. Sometimes the item of interest was that night’s fluke crostini, and how good or terrible it was, and sometimes it was a debate on whether the visiting octogenarian, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet who was going to read after dinner really was a misogynist or just being read out of context. Sometimes it was the pompous student whose work had been lacerated at that afternoon’s workshop.
That first dinner that first night of our first residency, it was Simone Babbot, the final star of our story.
Simone was the biggest deal the faculty had ever seen, in both the size of her profile and critical acclaim, making the more hopeful among us believe that her arrival signaled a spike in the program’s prestige. Six months before accepting a position on the faculty, she had landed a glowing cover review in the NYTBR for her first novel, Girls with Outdoor Voices, a nearly impossible feat for a debut. She was the kind of celebrity novelist that we had all come to accept had died in the eighties—the kind your best friend’s mom had heard of, was maybe even reading for book club, but who was also shortlisted for all the biggest awards. Brad Pitt had optioned her novel, but it was also required reading for freshmen at Princeton. No one could figure out how she landed at Fielding. She had the cheekbones of a Tom Ford model and she had just moved in with the sort of New York restaurateur who usually dated them, or so we had heard. Though only a fraction of us had actually read her novel, it was easy to claim we had, because a compilation of the death scenes in the film adaptation of the book, which had come out that spring, had gone viral a few months before we arrived on campus. The book was narrated by a group of dead girls who had all been victims of the same killer, and haunted the small town where they had died. Though the book had allegedly kept the grisly murders tastefully off the page, the film had not. A lot of flowy white dresses and blond hair were involved.
We’d had only one workshop by that first dinner, during which she’d remained disappointingly quiet, nodding brightly in agreement with the things that Gene, her teaching partner, said. Gene had begun his career as a memoirist who wrote in turns about falling off and getting back on the wagon, essays full of sad-funny anecdotes about rehab stints and the dark things that inevitably happened in between them, and had evolved, by then, into a marquee name in the narrative poetry world. Though Simone was a fiction writer and Gene was one of the five faculty members who made up the program’s poetry department, they were co-teaching a single workshop not because of an oversight by the administrative staff we all knew to be diligent but because together they were leading the pr
ogram’s first ever mixed-genre workshop. The thinking being that reading and studying poetry would lend a natural rhythm to the prose writer’s work, and that while not necessary, narrative and theme weren’t terrible things to incorporate into a poem. It was the first mixed-genre workshop in any program, as far as any of us knew, and it was only another reason we were all secretly glad Simone had joined the faculty, however withholding we were of an official verdict on how helpful a teacher she was or wasn’t, and how much she would contribute to the program outside of reputation.
We hadn’t had time, by that first night, to learn much outside of these biographical, on-paper statistics about her, but that only made the details we had been able to pick up feel more significant. She was overly nice in public—using the kind of verbal exclamation points she would never use on the page. She was silent and distant until directly engaged, and then almost embarrassingly effusive. She overenunciated, which we attributed to her failed acting career—we had spent the night before clustered in dorm rooms, searching for her Law & Order cameos and tampon commercials online.
Even if she hadn’t done what she eventually did, Leslie would have hated Simone. Because even though there was no one thing she had said you could point to as evidence of it, Simone’s words oozed condescension—Leslie’s kryptonite—and the certainty that while your work might be charming or thoughtful, it would never be any of the adjectives that had been used to describe Simone’s work. Masterful or blisteringly original.
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