We even began to understand the comfort Jenny Ritter must’ve taken from her word-a-day calendar and its Pablo Picasso wisdom. Each day’s sentiment was trite, maybe, and a little corny, but at least its author knew what it was he wanted to say, and knew how to express it to his audience in a way that left no uncertainty about how they were supposed to feel after they read it.
So as befuddled as we were over what Jimmy did, and as despondent, and as jealous as we were of his talent (if we’re being completely honest); as often as we had thought about what it might be like to trade places with him, and as senseless as we knew throwing away what he had was, never mind everything else that went with it, we also knew too well at least one of the thoughts in his mind, there at the end.
Words can fail you just like everything else.
* * *
It would’ve been a big night even if what happened hadn’t. It was Simone’s first evening reading. Each night one of the faculty read from their latest novel or memoir or poetry collection. There were only enough nights in each residency for a little fewer than half of the faculty to read, so each professor read roughly every other residency. The professors who didn’t read were expected to give one of the daytime craft lectures, which examined the way writers of their choice had achieved the effects we most admired in their work. It seemed unromantic, taking apart great works like some sort of science project, but the best professors left us only in more admiration of the works they had disassembled, showing us the strings and double-sided tape responsible for their magic, not less. Each professor’s reputation was at least partly influenced by how boring or insightful their craft lecture was, but even craft lectures didn’t compare to readings in the degree to which we measured our professors against them. It would’ve been impossible to read the entire body of work of everyone who taught in the program, so these readings were often the first taste we got of a professor’s work.
As much as our professor pairs might’ve disagreed on individual stories or rules, there is almost no creative writing program totally untouched by Gordon Lish’s general philosophy of less is more, if only because he’s edited a good fourth of the collective MFA community’s most esteemed faculty at one point or another, as well as half the writers that our professors assigned us to read, plus he had pretty much invented making students pay way too much for one person’s opinion on their writing, which, in our lowest moments, we’ve all silently accused the MFA of doing. He was the ghost of great novels past, especially the sort of novels we were encouraged to read and study and emulate, and we always looked for him at these readings, consciously or not. Our ears were always attuned to any number of Lishian sins that our professors were quick to point out in our own work—were there stock phrases or, God forbid, clichés? How many exclamation points were used? Or verbs of utterance? Or any word that wasn’t strictly necessary in conveying a single thought or action or emotion as clearly and directly and simply as possible? And perhaps most difficult of all, had the writer managed to make you feel anything in that vast Lishian sea of efficiency and barren functionality?
New professors were given a full term to listen to faculty craft lectures and readings before delivering one of their own, so this was Simone’s first public presentation of any sort. We were well acquainted with her expensive clothes and the perfume we couldn’t help but love regardless of how we felt about her, and she had become infamous for her strange mix of reserve and effusiveness, her multitude of questions, and the rafter chair she always sat in, but those of us who hadn’t read her novel had no idea what to expect from her work. By then, of course, what Tammy had told Bridget and Jamie had been dispersed widely throughout our class in the three days since she had told them, which only heightened our focus on Simone. We were all leaning forward in our seats by the time she started reading.
We had half expected Leslie and Hannah not to show, but they were literally front and center, in the exact middle of the fourth row of the auditorium. It’s the only event we can remember Leslie showing up for early. Hannah had forgone one of her blazers for a cashmere sweater that made us want to take a nap, it looked so soft. We assumed she had borrowed it from Leslie, because it looked expensive. There weren’t any runs in Leslie’s stockings, a first. She had even brushed her hair for the occasion. They might’ve looked like girls playing dress-up if their postures and facial expressions—arranged to tell us exactly nothing—hadn’t been so devoid of joy.
They weren’t the only ones subverting expectations. We had thought Simone would take her usual seat and walk all the way down to the podium after she was introduced, making us wait that much longer to hear her read. As soon as we spotted her in the front row, next to Johanna Green, the short story writer who had left Pearl with ten students the semester before, and who, as the second newest faculty member, would be introducing Simone, we immediately looked up at Simone’s empty chair, which we almost didn’t recognize without her in it. Usually professors who were about to read were chatty with the faculty who filled the first two rows of the audience—a way to remind themselves that they were in good, supportive company and that their own authority was made stronger by the collective authority of the faculty as a whole, which had two National Book Award finalists and countless PEN awards, and the various first-novel prizes that had been popping up over the last few years. But Simone was as committed to studying the space directly in front of her as Leslie and Hannah were.
Professors often made a big fuss over how generous or appreciated their introductions were, sometimes even hugging the professor who had given it. But Simone didn’t acknowledge Johanna’s opening remarks with anything more than a curt nod. She also managed to bypass the second bad habit we had all come to expect from professors at these things, which was to go on for too long before reading from the book or manuscript in front of them, which is what they were there to do. Some professors were shameless, talking for almost as long as they read, often trying to be funny, or ingratiating, which always smelled a little desperate, no matter how funny they actually were, or how much their remarks endeared them to us. No matter what they actually said, it was always clear they were really just asking us to like what they were about to read, and, by extension, them.
Simone said only, “I’m going to read from my untitled novel, which is being published sometime early next year.”
With these sixteen words alone Simone established several important facts that distinguished her from everyone else in the first two rows. First, that while her novel had been at least twice as successful as most of the faculty’s work with the exception of maybe Pearl, she wasn’t planning to rest on it. She was a novelist, not the author of one particular novel, even if it was the only one she had published. The paperback of Girls with Outdoor Voices had been out for less than a year—most of the readers who preceded and followed her would read from books half a decade old at least. Was she planning to have new material ready for every faculty reading she gave?
Second, and probably more important, by giving no introduction to this nameless, shapeless thing—not even any context for the section she was about to read, or a joke about how she’d better hurry and come up with a title, since it was coming out so soon—she was making it clear that she gave fuck all what anyone thought of it. Either that or she just knew it was really, really good.
And it was, for the most part. Though there was little in what she read that interested us as much as her opening remarks or, for that matter, her flawless skin and silky voice, which we had plenty of time to study as she stood there under the lights. It was only in the final five minutes of Simone’s reading, when she got to the final parting of the couple at the center of the material she was reading, who had been in the process of breaking up throughout, that our interest level returned to the height it had reached when Simone took the podium. The male half of the couple said, “I’ll see you at the end of the world,” which, from the rest of what Simone had read, clearly meant we
’ll meet again. And the woman said, “Oh, c’mon now, the end of the world is for lovers.” Which it was equally clear meant which we no longer are.
It was just the right amount of sentiment and heartbreak for a story as emotionally removed and technically impressive as Simone’s piece had been, and we were about to start admiring her for it when we were distracted by something in the front of the audience. We realized that the collective turning of heads was in response to something in the fourth row at the same time we knew it had to be Hannah. She got to her feet just as the low, involuntary moan she didn’t seem to realize she was making reached its summit. She searched the space immediately around her as if disoriented, or like she was looking for someone or something to break, as if that might stop the pain she was clearly in. Leslie looked as confused as we felt, but she was up just a moment after Hannah. By the time her hand reached Hannah’s shoulder, Hannah had focused her rage and panic enough to be looking directly at Simone, making no apology or explanation for her outburst, with an intensity in her gaze that demanded one instead. Half of us waited for Pearl to intervene while the other half of us prepared for Hannah to charge, though the actual, measurable response from both students and faculty alike was pure nothing. The silence of ticking clocks and dropped pins and empty forests.
Penny Stanley was sitting next to Pearl—the only professor other than Simone who sat with the general population instead of in the first two rows—and said that he only closed his eyes and dropped his head. Like he knew enough about what was happening that he didn’t need to be leaning forward trying to figure it out, but not enough to intervene, or provide its solution. Lucas White turned to Robbie Myers with wide, delighted eyes and mouthed, “Dude, what the fuck?,” which, as far as we know, were the only words exchanged for at least a full minute, silent or spoken. Jiles Gardner sat there rolling his eyes without actually having to move them, like, Oh, here we go again with humans and their tedious drip of feelings.
None of these reactions, or our collective lack of a reaction, were as surprising as Simone’s. Once we all realized that Hannah’s outburst was directed at Simone, we turned to her, expecting surprise or alarm or confusion, maybe even fear, but none of those things were anywhere on her face, which was as cool and unmoving as ever. She sat there drilling holes into Hannah with abundantly indifferent eyes, as if to say Done yet?
We turned back to Hannah to see how she would respond to this brick wall that Simone had put in front of her—if she would try to steer around it or just bulldoze straight through—but she and Leslie were gone.
* * *
The Empty Garden was a patch of land by the faculty housing that had been boxed in by dignified brick walls just high enough to prevent passersby from seeing what was inside. For years Fielding grad students assumed that there was some spectacular garden inside where the spoiled, unappreciative undergrads got stoned and probably screwed. We were always wondering what they got that we didn’t the way the oldest, most responsible child wastes time resenting all the freedoms and privileges the baby of the family has been afforded. The year before we had arrived on campus, though, Gabe Marcus, the handsiest of the married accountants from the class above ours, realized that in the southern-facing wall of the perimeter there were grooves in the brick that served as perfect stepping-stones—almost a ladder—for hoisting yourself over the wall. We were disappointed and then delighted to discover that there was absolutely nothing inside the walls, which seemed like a metaphor for something, though we could never say what. It was an ordinary patch of grass with nothing to set it apart from the other acres of green the campus was blanketed in. If anything, it was less rich than the other lawns, given how small the patch was, and the way the walls broke up the light.
When they weren’t trying to run into the girl they were both in love with, suggesting to the other an activity that would place them directly in her path without naming her, Lucas and Robbie used to get stoned in the Empty Garden, and said they always had to race Leslie and Hannah to get there first after mandatory lectures let out. They found the girls waiting there after lectures the girls had skipped, mandatory or not, talking in whispers even though there was nobody around to hear, other than the boys, who had other things to worry about anyway. Normally they would’ve taken the opportunity to invite the girls to combine forces—Lucas and Robbie not being the sort to miss a chance to pass an expertly rolled spliff to a pretty girl—but the girls’ posture and body language and refusal to look up at them, even when the boys were close enough that it would’ve been impossible for anyone else to ignore them, made them turn around in pursuit of another spot.
Despite the ease with which the Empty Garden was now accessible after Gabe’s discovery, most of the rest of us still considered it off-limits. Maybe we were made uneasy by how underwhelming its contents were, assuming that if there was nothing there that warranted the walls, perhaps the land had been set aside because of some unhappy event that had taken place there. It was the creepiest corner of a campus composed almost entirely of creepy corners, the kind of place that wears a history you can feel but not see or confirm with any certainty.
When we picture Hannah and Leslie there after the assembly, discussing what had made the ever-composed Hannah crumble the way she had, we picture their faces illuminated by firelight—they would never have been able to sit there long enough to discuss all the things they needed to without a fire to keep them warm. Though Hannah was probably too upset to be much help, and, between the two of them, Hannah was certainly the likelier to have any experience or ability in fire making.
Leslie, of course, would’ve been the one to break the silence. “You wanna tell me what that was about?”
“That line was Jimmy’s. She stole it from him.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
“I know because I read it in one of his poems.”
“What, you just, like, memorized all of his poems?”
“That one I did.”
Hannah fell silent then just long enough that Leslie probably thought that was all she was going to get out of her, and then started reciting the poem that still doesn’t have a title.
“There are truths universally, humanly known:
That beauty queens age badly, and
High school science teachers
Smell of formaldehyde.
Then there are things we’re born
Not knowing and never told,
Harder but no less true:
The end of the world is for lovers
And the great wars were fought
For the poets.
The real losses,
Too bright and unmanageable
For any page,
Crouch in the small days
Of the nameless many
Who never read the works of great men.”
She paused again here long enough that Leslie thought she was done. “Jesus, Jimmy. He was dark, wasn’t he?”
“That’s just it, though. He could manage to make something like this funny. I mean, not funny, but light. He was winking at you, too. God, how did it end?” Hannah asked, holding a closed fist to her forehead.
“This is no more your fault
Or your father’s fault
Or your father’s father’s fault
Than the placement of the
Stars in the sky.
But remember to say thank you
For the idling engines
And cracked soles
And attention that hasn’t
Been stretched so thin that
You no longer notice
The pebbles in your shoe or
The empty toilet paper rolls
In the caked, midwestern
Gas station bathrooms
In the walks and road trips
Across this
life.”
“Ha!” Leslie said, confident that this really was the big finish. “I happen to know a thing or two about midwestern gas station bathrooms.”
Hannah started to cry then. We might’ve said she wept, but she hated the word wept. So dramatic and fussy, almost self-indulgent. So she cried instead.
We have no way of knowing if Hannah actually cried over all this after she left the assembly—to herself, or to Leslie—but her face as she climbed over the mess of legs and backpacks, searching for the exit the way she would’ve in a fire, certainly made it seem likely. It was the face of someone who only just realized some horrible fact that had been true for a while. We also know that she must’ve been devastated enough that tears were irrelevant, the least of it. Otherwise Leslie would never have taken things as far as she did—she might’ve liked Jimmy, and she certainly disliked Simone, but she loved Hannah. This is the point, this point when we all saw Hannah lose it for just one second before she reapplied the blank face the two of them always wore, past which there was no return.
We like to think that Leslie let her cry that night, probably knowing that sometimes a good cry is the only way through it (despite the fact that none of us can picture Leslie crying). She’s soft on the inside, though, so we also suspect she started talking after a few minutes, not trying to present a solution to the unsolvable problem but to distract Hannah from her sadness, and to cover the sound of human anguish, which Leslie had never been able to bear.
We Wish You Luck Page 15