We Wish You Luck

by Caroline Zancan

  This is the first and only thing we ever knew Jimmy to hold an opinion on, a first and last as memorable and important-feeling as that lone laundry room smile. It feels strange to tie such a bright, shiny, three-dimensional word around a boy like Jimmy, but there it is. We do.

  Wonder.

  None of this gave Leslie any reason to pause. “It’s essentially just saying people who get bored are assholes, or maybe idiots, given how small a time we’re here, and how much there is to see while we are, which everyone already knows is true,” she said. “That’s what poetry is—it’s reflecting people’s experiences and observations back to them, making them seem cooler or more astute than they were.”

  Jimmy laughed, a timid little field mouse of a laugh that might not have qualified as a laugh for anyone else. For someone who laughed more often. We had only known Jimmy for four of the ten days we would know him by then, and we still didn’t know as much about him as we might’ve liked to, but it was clear he was no more a laugher than he was a smiler. Not because of any foul humor, but because he was too busy worrying, too alert to possible threats that needed his attention, even here, in what was perhaps one of the most coddled environments in the world. He had the kind of shrunken posture that promised something terrible had happened to him. Even though there wasn’t a single line in Jimmy’s work to point to as evidence of some troubled past or accumulated cruelties, you could smell it. From the way he kept his head down to the world, and how infrequently he laughed.

  When you kick a dog a certain number of times, one of two things happens—it becomes mean, and goes on the attack, or it becomes afraid, and keeps its head down from the world, hoping the world won’t notice it, shrinking into itself as far as possible.

  “I think people in all genres do that—look for meaning in the everyday and the banal,” he said, the field mouse laugh having scurried away. “But I don’t think you’re wrong.”

  No one is surprised that this was Jimmy’s answer, or that he didn’t take offense to Leslie’s critique of his genre, his mild manner aside. Among writers, having thick skin often just means you’re really good, and we all knew, by then, just how good he was. The whispers that had been trickling down from his workshop classmates had become shouts. He was good not in a polished, fourth-term kind of way, consensus had it, but good in an I would be good even if I lived in a cave kind of way. The kind of good you can’t teach.

  There is no way of knowing which moments any of us will remember as they’re happening. We’ve all hotly anticipated some event or meeting or date or celebration that passes pleasantly enough, but without any one part that you could grab on to and save somewhere safe for later. And then there are moments like this: ordinary, empty afternoons that present themselves with no warning that you’ll turn over again and again for years to come. We all thought of the first residency as a beginning, the start of something that would always hold some importance in the stories of our lives if only because it was something we were doing for ourselves, however good or bad our reasons were for doing it. And however many doubts or delusions we had about the quality of our own work, and where it might take us, there was no question about the caliber of Jimmy’s. He was talented, maybe exceptionally so, and because life still seemed simple to us then, or simpler than it does now, we thought that guaranteed him something, however small—some publication or piece of public praise—and that good things were ahead for him.

  The moment was a nothing conversation typical of school lawns, so standard, outside Leslie’s unconventional thoughts on poetry, that Tanner and Melissa stopped listening and gave themselves more fully to each other. But when we look back, we see now how important it was, this ordinary summit of theirs. If personalities had sizes, Jimmy’s was David to Leslie’s Goliath, and Jimmy had spent his entire life dodging Goliaths, knowing that while that was a nice story, for every fallen Goliath there were at least a hundred fallen Davids.

  Leslie was terrifying to most of us, who met the workshops and the lectures and the student center dance parties with pointed eye contact, ready for all of it, eager for it, even. Maybe it was because Leslie never had a thought that didn’t become a statement, and you didn’t have to guess even for a second where you stood with her, and after a lifetime of trying to figure out whom to trust—who would hurt him and who would not—Jimmy was more tired of guessing than anything else. Maybe it is because after a lifetime spent in the company of truly hard people, he knew that Leslie, for all her brass and candor, also had heart. Maybe Leslie was just one of the first people to start a conversation with him, unable to see that he was perfectly content in his silence the way the rest of us did. That he wasn’t alone because he hadn’t been able to find friends, but because he didn’t trust anyone enough to want to. Or maybe she saw and just didn’t care, just blazed ahead anyway. Maybe they both just loved Hannah enough to make it work. Whatever it was that bent in these two lone wolves to make them animals of the same Hannah pack—and it was bent by the time they had this conversation, or maybe during it—it was crucial.

  Because none of what happened later could have happened without all three of them.

  Tanner and Melissa knew, by the time they looked up and saw only three patches of flattened grass where Leslie, Jimmy, and Hannah had been, that they wouldn’t see them at any more committee meetings, though they didn’t talk or even refer to that hour in the sun until years later, during the third, or maybe fourth, to last of those hushed calls. Melissa had just had a baby, and was standing over a crib in a nursery already dark at a quarter to five, looking out at the first snowfall of the year. Out of nowhere, and without thinking about it first, half delirious from exhaustion and half genuinely happy in a way so few things before this had made her, she said “Wonder” right out loud, without even worrying that it might wake the baby she had spent the better part of the day getting to sleep. And it made her want to call Tanner, even though she had sworn she was through with all that. And even though she hadn’t slept more than three consecutive hours since the spring before, and her husband was late again, she felt it, and when she did call Tanner to ask him if he remembered that day, he said yes right away—simply “Yes,” knowing no expounding was necessary—without having to think about it, and none of us is surprised, because that’s the kind of effect this place and these people had on us.

  * * *

  We know it might seem, from the amount of time and close attention we spent studying Hannah and Jimmy and Leslie, that we didn’t take the program very seriously, or were easily distracted, or that we were wasting our time. But none of those assumptions could be further from the truth. We wanted so badly to be good. To write something good. Maybe even a little bit great. We wanted it more than anything else eight thousand dollars could buy us. Four months of mortgage payments. A weeklong trip to Paris for two, to usher new, promisingly electric relationships to higher ground or to try to strengthen delicate marriages. New parts for cars that ran poorly, time-shares on the shore, and braces for our children.

  There were a million different things that had drawn us to the pursuit and there were a million different motivations that kept us writing, but the one thing that we all had in common besides this wanting was that there was some arrangement of words in each of our pasts that had done something to us or for us that we weren’t yet good enough writers to explain, or put into words of our own. Those arrangements had made us miss subway stops and humbled us even as they gave us power. They made us switch majors in our junior year of college and inspired us to seek out other arrangements with similar effect. Each of our collections of words varied in length and tone and style, and we often judged one another on them. But we could agree that the effect of these arrangements was powerful enough to rationalize teeth that stayed crooked, or a long stretch of years without a real, proper vacation.

  Even the novices among us, and the doubters—the Patrick Stanburys and the Jenny Ritters, who worried that they were the
re for the wrong reasons—could still remember the way they felt, reading the passages that had first made them decide to try to assemble their own clusters of words. Every time they reread those passages (which they did often), it reaffirmed that they had made the right decision, coming here.

  And though we never talked about it, one thing we all could have agreed on is that the only thing more powerful or desirable than stumbling on an arrangement that felt like it was written just for you was writing one yourself.

  * * *

  Maybe the creepiest detail of a campus that felt almost designed for a horror film set were the nooks that seemed to have been installed solely for spying on people. There were dormer windows with lonely, retro 1970 school desks built into the floor in front of them, and dusty benches below some of the country’s oldest stained-glass windows. These creaky seats often looked out onto green pockets of campus that felt, when you were in them, entirely private. The perfect place for an illicit affair or private phone call home. The night after Jimmy and Hannah and Leslie’s campus lawn summit, Jimmy was sitting in perhaps the most claustrophobic of these hidden stations, a tiny computer cubby set apart by a thin half wall from the student commons, where the predinner cocktail hour was held. The wall made anyone in the cubby invisible to commons dwellers, but it was open at the bottom, giving the cubby occupant full access to any conversation or event conducted in the commons.

  It was 6:05 when Simone walked into the commons, five minutes past the end of cocktail hour.

  Sarah Jacobs, whose parents were funding her time at Fielding, and doing so without a lot of consideration for flourishes like cash bars on a weekday, had already done her evening lap around the room for any half-finished drinks that had been abandoned. Having seen her do this the night before, Jamie Brigham had bought an extra glass of Chardonnay that he left out for her, and not for any of the reasons Robbie or Lucas would have. Those of us who saw him do it forgave him for what he had said to Bridget about her fiction. Melissa Raymond and Tanner Conover had just walked up to dinner from the commons arm in arm—the first public physical gesture between them that any of us remembers—that bottle of wine in Melissa’s room apparently having been drunk after all.

  Carter was manning the drinks station that night. He was everyone’s favorite bartender, and the oldest son of one of the few black families in Fielding, a town that is 96 percent white. He was the only bartender whose name we all knew, and one of the few Fielding employees on whom we had managed to form a consensus, positive or not. By the time Simone walked in he was packing the unopened beers back into the red cooler and corking the half-finished bottles of wine.

  “Can I get a glass of Chardonnay?” Simone asked his back when he didn’t immediately turn around.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, looking over his shoulder to at least do her the courtesy of saying no to her face. “It’s after six.”

  We all knew by then that Vermont’s liquor licenses came with arcane rules about when, exactly, alcohol could be served in certain locations. It would’ve been illegal for Carter to serve her. By that point we had all been told no for this very same reason, an answer that sat unmoving even when we offered to pay cash, or turn our watches back five minutes. For show. We had learned not to take it personally. The kids who held these jobs knew which rules they could break and which ones they couldn’t, and Carter, of all people, would’ve looked the other way if he could have. He smiled more than the other bartenders, and always said “Ah, my favorite” whenever anyone ordered the local Vermont IPA, which made it more popular on his shifts.

  “You can’t be serious,” she said, completely serious herself when she said it.

  “I’m afraid so. I’ll get in trouble if I do it. The student center opens in less than an hour, though, so you don’t have long to wait. They have a better selection there anyway.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t care about selection. You have the wine I want right here. Can’t you just look away for a second? I’ll get it myself and be gone before you turn around.”

  He wrinkled his nose as if he had smelled something unsavory and shook his head, making it clear that, as unpleasant as his answer was, there was nothing he could do to change it.

  “Oh, Jesus, what is it with you people?”

  “Come again?” Carter asked, any traces of playfulness gone now.

  “See, that’s the thing. I really don’t have time to. Some people have jobs they care enough about to do more than the bare minimum, and you’d be surprised how time consuming that is.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t follow,” Carter said in a new, hard voice that we hoped made clear just how clearly he did.

  “Oh, I think you do.”

  It’s hard not to wonder what would’ve happened if Jimmy hadn’t coughed just then. Simone might never have seen him, and who knows how the rest of the term would’ve gone then.

  There are certain writers whom the program favored—Jo Ann Beard and Rick Moody were two of them, Anne Sexton another—and the result was that there were a lot of books that had sold fewer than ten thousand copies that all of us had read. We were all fond of Anne Sexton’s claim that “Love and a cough cannot be concealed,” and repeated it often.

  So maybe we should’ve known that there was never any real hope of Jimmy staying hidden for the entirety of this exchange. Maybe he was just so honest he thought it wrong not to let her know he was there, something akin to eavesdropping, even though he was there first. Maybe it was a small but noble gesture on Carter’s behalf, the closest Jimmy could get to defending him. We don’t really know enough about Jimmy, even now, to say.

  Accident or not, the cough made Simone twirl on her expensive, cobbler-made clogs to face the half wall and whoever was behind it. She stared at Jimmy’s feet, visible beneath the partition, for a moment before filling the uneasy silence that had fallen, giving him time to stand and face her instead of cowering in the cubby, or making her come in to confront him.

  “You’re in my workshop, aren’t you?” she said once he was fully in front of her.

  Jimmy coughed again before speaking. “Uh, yes, that’s right. I’m being workshopped the day after tomorrow.”

  This would have been more consecutive words than any of us can remember Jimmy saying, outside of the lawn conversation, which is maybe the thing that makes us feel the worst about all this. He wanted badly enough to end the exchange favorably that he was willing to go against every instinct his body had. It sometimes felt, when we did hear him speak, that each word cost Jimmy something, or physically pained him. Even though the conversation was a small one, we know the experience of it was not.

  “Yeah, okay. That’s fine. But I care less about our workshop schedule than why you’re skulking around down here, inserting yourself in conversations that have nothing to do with you when you should be up at dinner with everybody else.”

  “Yes, of course. I mean, no, I wasn’t—”

  “It’s really rude, and I think you’ll find in my class that I’m a real stickler for manners.” She didn’t quite brush his shoulder with her own as she passed him on her way up to the cafeteria like a proper villain, but she came pretty close.

  As desolate as the lounge was for this exchange, there was, of course, one other person not only close enough to hear it all and repeat it later but right there in the middle of it. It makes us uncomfortable to think that we might never have learned this crucial piece of the story—five lonely little lines of dialogue that set everything else in motion—if it wasn’t for a game almost none of us watched, never mind played.

  Carter had been a high school basketball star so talented that the sports section of the local paper ran his stats every Sunday. When he shattered his left shinbone in a car accident six weeks before the start of his senior year, he lost any chance of a basketball scholarship when he otherwise would have had his pick of them. Though the crash had happened late at nigh
t, and on the way back from a party where minors were drinking beyond the limits of the law or common sense, neither Carter nor the teammate of his who was driving had had anything to drink, which somehow made the whole thing feel that much worse. The deer they had swerved to avoid hitting was fine, though, and the only part of the story anyone could ever get Carter to talk about.

  Carter took all this a lot better than most of us would have. Maybe it was because deli ladies and bartenders in town always gave him an extra pickle or topped his glass off without asking, but he seemed happy enough, or at least not tormented by the other life that had wandered off just behind the deer. Though people around town still caught sight of him playing basketball at the court at the Y, and sometimes in the Fielding athletic center, it was almost always alone—layups and distant three-point shots—nothing that came close to the glory of the game played all out, chaos and heart and the occasional defiance of gravity.

  But when Patrick Stanbury arrived on campus, Carter finally found someone good enough to play with. Carter kept up, despite the three years Patrick had spent playing semiprofessionally in countries he would probably never see again, and the countless assists he’d had to teammates who went on to play with the Knicks. It was only catching sight of the two lone figures, one of them usually suspended in air, both of them still beautiful in that way that only young people are, that it was clear how much Carter must have missed the game. You would’ve thought Carter had lost that beauty years ago, watching him bartend, but when he played it was impossible not to see.

  The night after Simone was denied her drink was the first of many over four residencies that Patrick and Carter snuck into the school’s athletic facility after hours, Patrick skipping the last of this residency’s student readings once he realized that Carter’s employee key card got him just about everywhere on campus. After going several rounds, they might have smoked a little bit of the pot Patrick had managed to buy on campus, during which, in the haze of friendly, random observations and general inquiry, Carter asked what the hell Simone’s problem was. Patrick’s confusion at the question prompted Carter to tell the whole story. Carter might’ve taken one last hit after he finished and let it really settle in his lungs before he exhaled and said that maybe Simone had accidentally let Jimmy see a part of her she didn’t like people to know about, and wanted to scare him out of making too big a fuss about it, or telling anybody else, which seemed about as close to the truth as any of us is likely to get. Neither Patrick nor the rest of us were surprised to learn that Simone wasn’t the first person of respectable standing who had spoken to Carter the way she had, and it was almost always when he was alone with them. None of them were as subtle as they imagined.