We Wish You Luck

by Caroline Zancan

  Maybe it was that we had all thought them complimentary, those times our professors told us that our short, less narrative stories reminded them of Lydia Davis, or that our violent Westerns had something of Cormac McCarthy in them. But her classmates understood, rereading Leslie’s story, that the only thing better than writing the next Varieties of Disturbance or The Road was to write the first of something else, and that our professors hadn’t meant we were cut from genius mold, but that we were writing by number. Whatever the reason, everyone in the room realized, as Leslie sauntered in with a swagger that felt so much less empty, after that second read-through of her story, how little anyone knew of her. Or maybe it’s not that we knew so little, but that so many of the things we thought we knew about her were wrong.

  We knew that Bridget Jameson’s boyfriend was picking her up on campus in a few hours and taking her to a bed-and-breakfast in Poughkeepsie that had been featured in national travel magazines, and we knew that Patrick Stanbury’s mom would welcome him home with ten-layer dip that had three kinds of meat and no vegetables, but we couldn’t have produced a state for Leslie, never mind a city or a zip code. For all the talking she did, and all the personal trivia she dropped that we wouldn’t have shared with our closest friends or relatives, we knew almost nothing about her that wasn’t directly related to the bubble of residency. She was a campus ghost. All the Leslie wisdom and authority the people in her workshop had found in her story that morning made them realize that, for all her Leslie blowharding, she might actually have something to say. And just when they—and we—were ready to listen, she had stopped talking.

  We originally thought it was during the second residency, when we came back and learned what happened to Jimmy, but we realized on maybe the second or tenth or nine millionth telling of this story, that this was actually the moment we started to pay attention. An entire roomful of people having to turn their focus to Leslie’s now-legendary story so soon after what happened at the student center demanded it in a way we’re grateful for, because we realize now that 70 percent of being a good writer is paying attention.

  After Professor Pearl reminded his students of the address to which their packets should be sent, and told them how much he looked forward to continuing working with them, and Leslie reluctantly pulled her pink earbuds out of her ears and read aloud the creepiest passage in her story, the second-term girl Lucas and Robbie were both in love with, whose name we still can’t remember, raised her hand before Jude Morgan could. Too tired to bother with the pretense of having to say anything about the merits of the story, or not addressing the writer directly in order to treat it as a published piece of work she was encountering from some remove, she simply said: “I thought you wrote erotica.” She was wearing last night’s shirt, which seemed a little sad, even if there was more than one person in love with her on campus.

  Though it had been firmly established that the writer being workshopped was not allowed to talk until after their session, Leslie spoke before Professor Pearl had time to reprimand Walk of Shame for not sticking to what was on the page.

  “Yeah, well, she feels so guilty after he gets sick that she fucks him anyway. I’m not just gonna give you the best scene in the story right up front.” She turned to Professor Pearl for reinforcement, not at all concerned that he would reprimand her for talking during the precise moment she was not supposed to. “Isn’t that a thing you say, Professor Pearl? Make the reader want something, and then make them wait?”

  His silence still didn’t tip her off to the fact that he wasn’t happy she was talking, it just made her angrier. “I mean, come on, guys. This isn’t fucking rocket science.”

  And that was the last anyone remembers of Leslie until the next residency.

  * * *

  We can imagine your disappointment, having reached the end of our first residency without any other word on the kiss between Jimmy and Hannah, and what it might have meant. But we can only tell you things we know, or think we know, and none of us can remember a single snippet of conversation overheard that, even in our most presumptuous and far-reaching interpretations, could be configured or imagined into a conversation about the kiss. We’ve taken liberties and stretched truths and looked for meaning in the most routine, mundane memories and moments and conversations, and still: nothing. Though this is one part of the story we can’t tell you with any authority, we have thought often, each of us to ourselves, about the conversation they might have had about that moment years later, if he had lived. Maybe just after he had finished mowing the lawn for the arrival of one of their grown children, or in those precious few minutes under the sheets, before sleep and after a three-glasses-of-wine dinner.

  “Why did it take you so long?” he would ask. “Why nothing after that first kiss?”

  “Why should it have been up to me?”

  The excited incredulousness she would’ve asked this with would’ve been mostly for his amusement.

  “You knew I was never going to make the first move.”

  “I was afraid.” She would’ve waited a moment or two before admitting this.

  “I can’t imagine a girl like you being afraid of anything.”

  “Ha! Leslie was always the one acting recklessly, without thinking or worrying.”

  “Being reckless and being brave aren’t the same thing.”

  They would have paused here just long enough to feel bad for exchanging words less than wholly pleasant about their friend.

  “And what makes you think I’m brave, or ever was?” Hannah would ask, once an amount of time sufficient to their guilt had passed.

  He wouldn’t have to think about his answer for very long, because it was a moment he would’ve thought about often, the first time he ever saw her. It was the last meal of the first full day on campus, after an afternoon of rain so aggressive it seemed to have an agenda. The kind of rain that made everything feel quieter and smaller after it had blown through. Hannah was late to dinner that night, because she and Bridget had been leaving their rooms for the dining hall at the same time—a coincidence that had been orchestrated by Bridget, who by then wanted to be friends with Hannah more than any of the other girls she’d wanted and failed to be friends with in the past. They didn’t realize how hard it was raining until they got to the door of the building, and while Hannah was ready to make a run for it, Bridget didn’t want to get her hair wet, which we understood, given that she didn’t own a hair dryer. Neither girl had an umbrella, and the bookstore that sold them was closed for the day. Between the delay this caused in their arrival and the fact that the storm’s soggy aftermath had rendered impossible the sort of outdoor quad dining that made the June residency so pleasant, there was no table with enough space left to accommodate them both.

  Realizing that she and Bridget weren’t destined for best-friend-ship but sensitive to the extent to which Bridget was putting herself out there, which Hannah always found admirable, and not wanting to suggest they split their fledgling union up in so public a place, Hannah turned to her hall mate and said, “Let’s just go to the yellow room.”

  The yellow room was a promised land of pretension—the physical manifestation of correcting someone for saying who instead of whom. The teachers all sat there while, presumably, reinforcing how accomplished one another’s most recent publications had been, and how far their students’ work would need to be pushed to match their own. So it was no surprise when Bridget said, with the wrinkled nose of a little girl saying Mommy, I’d rather not, “Um, isn’t that reserved for faculty?”

  “Let’s be bold,” Hannah had said, looking straight ahead, toward whatever horrors or rewards waited in the yellow room. “I think it’d really be better all around, if we can commit to being bold.”

  Jimmy—who ate as voraciously as he wrote and slept, despite his slight frame—had just gotten up for a second helping of red pepper hummus quesadilla, and was standing beside them just outsi
de the serving area, close enough to hear her. As the girls pivoted, ably managing loaded backpacks and piled plates, his heart rose in a way completely new to him, in the way of stories he could never quite believe, having lived the life he had.

  “How could a girl like that be afraid of a boy like me?” he’d ask, in the future that never happened.

  She’d exhale the happy, tickled sigh that people in love exhale in bed, and maybe lie back on her pillow for a moment before answering.

  “Oh, Jimmy,” she’d say. “I was talking to you.”

  January

  The drawback of the firm boundary we drew between campus and home was that we lost track of one another’s lives between residencies. We’d come back to a solemn, snowed-in campus that we had left almost too green to believe to discover that happy marriages had crumbled since the last time we saw the half of the couple we knew. The really good short story writer who was in our workshop last term was missing, we’d notice on our second day of the ten-day stretch. At home, seven months pregnant, we’d learn. Sometimes it felt like the bulk of our relationships was the slow falling away of intimacies that usually happens to friendships only once, at their end. Each term we would ingratiate ourselves in one another’s imaginations just deep enough that the absence would hurt after parting. Maybe it hurt more each time, the way a scab bleeds more each time you pick it open. We didn’t know, that first January, because we had parted only once, and we were just then going through the bashful, half-affectionate, half-wooden you again moments with one another that felt a little like running into a rather pleasant one-night stand at the grocery store just a few hours before we were planning to call them.

  Though we had been prepared for some unavoidable catching up—for weight gains we would have to pretend not to notice and impressive, unexpected losses that the married accountants would make too much of, and news of small publications and the successful completion of short stories that had been occupying their authors for years, maybe an engagement or two—we weren’t prepared for the news we got that first morning, half hungover, half still drunk from all the complimentary wine at the welcome party the night before.

  We know enough by now to know that the only way to avoid being overly sentimental and dramatic about the news we all sagged visibly under so simultaneously it felt choreographed is to just come out and tell you the plain facts of what happened. The fact is that two months and four days before we were scheduled to return to campus for our second residency, Jimmy hanged himself with a scrap of old rope in his sometimes-father’s garage. We don’t mean to seem callous or unsympathetic by telling you this way, abruptly and without the cushioning of euphemism or the familiar clichés of loss. This is the way we were told, too, so we know how it feels.

  If this had been a suicide written in a first- or even a second-term student’s story it would have been big and dramatic with some romantic explanation—an unrequited love affair, or a terminal diagnosis. But because it happened in life it had the quiet, nobody-noticed-for-a-while underdrama that permeates so many of the big moments you always thought would feel like more. Part of the reason nobody from the program had told us earlier, in an email or a letter, or even a small, discreet mention in one of the many pieces of mail they sent us in between residencies, was that they hadn’t known about it much longer than we did. It was only when they called the last number they had on file for him to warn Jimmy that the copies of whatever writing sample he wanted to have workshopped had not arrived on campus, and that if they didn’t have them within the week they would have to ask him to withdraw from the semester, that they learned why Jimmy’s work hadn’t arrived with the rest of ours.

  And he did it not for a girl, or to finally dodge some insufferable person he owed money to, or to opt out of a stage-four cancer battle, but for the same reason that most of us do most of the dark, lonely things we do: plain old human desperation, and the certainty that there’s nothing else to do.

  After the 8:00 a.m. all-student orientation that followed the new-student orientation, they asked us second-termers to stay for a final announcement. They waited until we were all together, huddled in the first two rows of the auditorium, to tell us why they had asked us to stay. Professor Pearl, looking uncertain for the first and only time that we can remember, waited until we were fully quiet before saying he was sorry to have to be the one to tell us that Jimmy wouldn’t be joining us on campus this residency, because he was no longer with us. He encouraged us to ask any questions we had, in the name of discouraging gossip. He and the program felt obliged to tell us as much as they knew, to the extent that we wanted to know it. What had happened was very sad, he said—maybe the only obvious, unnecessary words that he had ever spoken in his life—and we didn’t need to make it any sadder by turning it into a soap opera or scandal. “So let’s keep it all aboveboard,” he finished. None of us thought to be suspicious of this transparency until much later, though at that point, not even Pearl could have known half the truth of it, nobody’s fool though he was.

  Robbie asked how he had died, and then Lucas asked how he did it, a question probably only Professor Pearl could answer with no evident horror or judgment. He answered as simply and straightforwardly as he had the first question. It was only when Jenny Ritter raised her hand to ask if Leslie and Hannah knew all this that we realized they were the only two people from our class not there, other than Jimmy. As our resident mother of two, Jenny had probably asked out of some maternal instinct, immediately stopping to consider how any piece of news, good or bad, would affect those more vulnerable to it before she finished processing it herself, rather than out of morbid curiosity, the way the question would have been asked had Lucas or Robbie asked it. In this answer, too, Pearl was concise.

  “Yes, they know.” For how long that had been true he didn’t say.

  Without any further questions to keep us there, at least not any that we were willing to ask out loud, we all walked out of the rows and then the building and into the snow, single file, without a word. In the forty-three minutes that remained of the free hour we had in between orientation and the first workshop, we wrote emails to our spouses and siblings and roommates, telling them what had happened even though it would mean less to them than it did to us. We had come to the news so long after the fact that it felt too old to acknowledge with a moment of silence or a makeshift monument; it felt like something that had slipped our vigilance, so wasn’t ours to mourn. Instead we took comfort in telling someone else, the smallest form of acknowledgment, maybe, but something, even though we knew it would leave our Real Life people searching their memories for some mention of a classmate named Jimmy on and off through the rest of the day. Some of us cried, not just for Jimmy, but for the feeling—that absence of anything at all—that he must have been staring down not too long after we had seen him last, and that such a feeling lived in the world at all, right there alongside love, and sex, and happy coincidences too strange to be anything but plain magic, and Coen brothers movies, and chocolate chip cookie dough, dog parks, and the smell of spring. Some of us just looked out the windows of buildings that were even quieter and felt even older in the snow, and took comfort in the reliability of its falling that far north in January.

  We never intended not to discuss it when we reconvened. We were as compelled by the feelings and motivations humans have for doing the things they do as any other group of writers. But we quickly learned how impossible it was to discuss Jimmy without descending into cliché or petty gossip, both of which we thought ourselves above. So after a few days of hushed cafeteria speculation, we silently, collectively decided that the best, only thing to do was to go back to telling stories the way we had been. Stories that, no matter how dire or depressing or tragic, had some sense of beauty or art to them, even if it was just an arresting image or moving line. Virtues that, as hard as we looked and as eager as we were to apply them, couldn’t be found in what Professor Pearl had told us that first morning
.

  * * *

  It would be difficult to overstate the difference in tone between June and January residencies. Junes were boundless and open, full of short chunks of free afternoons that felt like whole days, because the light was so full you couldn’t picture it dimming. It promised to go on forever, and that there was plenty more where it came from. We were outside as often as we could be—splayed out on lawns and tromping indelicately, inexpertly through patches of forest like the suburban and city kids we mostly were.

  We didn’t love one another any less in January, but we did keep to ourselves more. There weren’t many buildings open to us at certain hours, and our rooms weren’t big enough to accommodate many more than one. There were small consolations like fires in the dorms’ common room fireplaces, the occasional snowman marked as complete with someone’s stolen reading glasses. But these activities were often more work than their novelty seemed worth, so we did them halfheartedly to start, and then not at all. The parts of us that had worn sundresses and not enough sunscreen and read parts of our stories out loud to one another after too much wine inevitably froze in the January windchill of a place that far north. Sarah Jacobs and Mimi Kim managed to find heavy puffer coats in colors other than black—olive green for Sarah and navyish royal blue for Mimi—and both of them cut through the snow in bright red Hunter Wellingtons that reminded us of being young. And even though these items popped against our drab wardrobes and the muddy snow, they really only reminded us how much more colorful the girls’ clothes had been in the summer—handmade muumuus in every shade and palette and pattern imaginable, often times all at once, that seemed more like costumes for making flower crowns or catching fireflies than clothes.