“No. Thank you. I prefer something a little stronger, but only after dark.”
“I respect that,” she said. “But it’s probably bad luck not to drink at your own party, unless it’s to celebrate your AA anniversary. Though I’m guessing that’s not the kind of thing you’d worry about.”
“No,” he said. “I think I’ll rest easy on that front. Although I’m not completely without concerns this evening.”
At this, we suspended our chewing and dress rustling and champagne sipping.
So. He knew something was up. He probably didn’t know what it was, but Leslie’s name on a volunteer sign-up sheet and her assembly murmurings were hard to ignore, even she had to know. Only Pearl would use an occasion like this to press the issue, probably hoping the champagne would help, or maybe looking for a distraction from a spotlight that was blinding.
“What can I do to help?” she asked. She said it completely free of sass or petulance or irony, so that it almost sounded like she was really offering her services in earnest.
“I’ve noticed that certain unwanted attention has been paid to some of the faculty by some of the students.” He said this with a look so direct and piercing, it left no uncertainty about the students in question.
Leslie bought herself some time by finishing one of her champagnes in two thick sips, an improbably graceful, swanlike gesture that she capped with a smile that drew all of us closer still. Hannah stepped away from the small circle she had formed with Tanner and Melissa, where she had generously made a joke at her own expense to fill an awkward silence between them just before everyone stopped talking. She took a few tentative steps toward where Pearl and Leslie stood but then stopped, satisfied just to be close enough to intervene if she needed to.
“I hope you’re not implying it’s me,” Leslie said.
Pearl stayed silent, making it clear that he didn’t consider this an answer.
The party had fallen silent enough, waiting for Leslie’s response, that we could hear children laughing somewhere on the edge of campus, out of sight.
“Professor Pearl, I’m not here to cause trouble,” Leslie finally said, just after the last laugh had faded to nothing. “I’m here to drink as much free champagne as humanly possible.”
“Suit yourself,” he said. “But even the highest bar tab at the nicest restaurant is a hell of a lot lower than what this place charges these days. So I hope you’ll reconsider before your last residency.” He started to turn away from her.
She let her body collapse in frustration that he was ruining a perfectly good joke. Hannah opened her mouth to say something but Leslie spoke before she could, leaving Hannah’s mouth dangling, the only awkward, half-intentional gesture any of us can remember on her.
“Okay. Fine,” Leslie said. “I’m here to write the best thesis that this school has ever seen.” She closed her eyes on the word best, like she was savoring something delicious.
Pearl paused, but still didn’t turn all the way back toward her, appeased but not completely satisfied with this addendum. “Well, all right, then,” he said, before he started to walk away.
She almost looked disappointed that he hadn’t tried to talk her out of whatever she was planning with any more conviction, or even acknowledged more openly that he saw what they were doing. Leslie still liked Pearl, we knew, even after the betrayal she had witnessed from the barn the semester before. Maybe not in the same way she liked Hannah, or even Jimmy, but she respected him, and she was maybe even more like him than the others in certain ways. She could smell on him the exact sort of wisdom she most needed. She had a sort of wild, dangerous intelligence that was often at the root of the trouble she got into, and she saw in him a similar intelligence, a certain way of looking at the world, that had settled in him in a way that it had not quite settled in her, and in a way that she probably hoped it might one day, despite a confidence that was as wild as her intelligence. If there was anyone who might’ve inspired her to change course, it was him, despite her normal distaste and disregard for most forms of authority.
She waited until he was a good twenty feet away from her before finishing the second champagne and flagging down the waiter she had been laughing with to take both empty glasses away. It was only after she had dismissed him with her chin, his disappointment at not getting another opportunity to flirt with her as pronounced as the smudged fingerprints on the flutes he was holding, that she turned toward Pearl’s retreating figure. On the distant horizon of the direction he was heading, we saw a fugitive balloon floating up into the sky, and hoped the laughing children we still hadn’t seen had thought enough to make a wish before they let it go.
We kept waiting for Hannah to do something to fix this with the sort of grace only she was capable of—for her to bring everyone back together and make it all right. But while she was still turned to Leslie and Pearl the way the rest of us were, her mouth was firmly closed by then. We see now that while Leslie might have been acting largely on Hannah and Jimmy’s behalf, there are acts and words and turns in the story that belonged solely to Leslie—that she was doing simply because she needed to do them—and Hannah knew Leslie well enough to know this.
When Leslie called Pearl’s name to summon him back he stopped and bowed his head, almost like he was praying.
“Aren’t you going to wish me luck?” Leslie asked.
At this, he turned to face her.
“And why would you need that?” he asked.
“You know. On writing the best thesis this school has ever seen? You won’t be here when I graduate. So this is probably it. Your last chance.” She meant it playfully, we knew, but it came out wounded, like that middle child on her wedding day, waiting for a compliment from a withholding father.
He smiled at her, a smile more amused than happy, and not big enough to hide the kind of sadness that shows in the eyes, even from twenty feet away. “I wish you way more than luck.”
Fielding was a place where word choice matters. It’s the kind of thing people notice more than what you’re wearing or how long it’s been since your last shower. Maybe they notice, but they’re less likely to judge you on those things than they are by what you say, or write. Just as Joni had remembered Leslie’s exact word choice in Pearl’s office, Leslie would always remember the exact seven words Professor Pearl used, saying good-bye and setting her loose that day. Not just I wish you more than luck or I wish you far more than luck. Pearl had a rule against modifiers and informalities that might be defended as colloquialisms—the only rules he held you to every time. But he knew, it was clear to Leslie that day, that the rules for writing were different from the rules for life. Sometimes more was more, and you had to let someone know how much you really meant something.
She would always love him a little for that way.
She didn’t let it show that afternoon, though. She retreated to the discreet half embrace Hannah had waiting for her, then mingled with the remaining crowd with a friendly, extroverted relish that hung far less naturally on her than the gash-colored dress did. We pretended not to notice that for every third person she talked to, she looked up to search the crowd for Pearl, turning back to her companion of the moment only after she had successfully located him, the way we imagined the laughing children tracked that fugitive balloon until it had completely vanished from the sky. We assumed she was planning to talk to him again, to leave things on less wistful a note. She became looser—more fluid in her hand movements and bigger in her laugh—with every person she talked to. In our most generous interpretation of the day’s events, each person she talked to increased her goodwill toward the place, as did each glass of champagne, all of which she wanted to pass on to him.
As the final act of the sun’s descent began, reminding everyone that this party would have an end, she went just outside the glowing orb the revelers made to smoke a cigarette with Jiles against the horizon. It was an activity h
e preferred to engage in alone, but she was apparently the one person he didn’t seem to think was one long running joke. And though she returned to the party in a fit of champagne-and-nicotine giggles, and both she and Jiles smiled the smile of people who know where the after party would be, we all saw her shoulders slump when she looked around and found that, in a move only he could make inoffensive, Professor Pearl had left his own party twenty minutes before it was scheduled to end.
* * *
We all woke up the morning after the cocktail party with hangover melancholy, and while we knew these feelings were standard morning-after stuff, we also knew it wasn’t just the alcohol. We were also a little blue that the party had come and gone, and that we had nearly reached the halfway point of the residency. Now that we knew firsthand how much better Junes were than Januarys, we knew that we’d have to wait another year to see the campus in its full glory again, and by then we’d be graduating.
We were also starting to understand how singular this particular residency was, with all its glamorous touches and extra events. We might not have been the ones the program was trying to impress, but the effect it had was uncontainable, and floated freely around the campus and through our open windows. The program normally tried to keep the writing process and the concept of craft—what we were there to learn—separate from the publishing industry. They warned us over and over against the danger of focusing too much on what would become of our work at the expense of making that work as good as it could possibly be. As different as they all were from one another, every faculty member had a horror story about publishing something before it was ready to be read. They all assured us that the only thing worse than not being published was publishing something too early, and having to see anything less than your best work with your name on it for years after you had put it out into the world. They made publication seem like such a distant notion that it had nothing to do with what we were doing here, which was of course maddening even if we knew on some level that what they were saying was true. But here, now, people were coming from the city, where books were bought and fixed and made into real, tangible things that sat on bookstore shelves and made their way into people’s homes to give them the sort of solace and joy and confusion and anxiety and good company that the books on our own shelves had given us. These people worked in the shiny upper levels of the skyscrapers most of us had seen only on postcards and television shows and movies. They knew the exact coordinates of the Random House building and what the cafeteria there served. They weren’t here to celebrate us, fine, or even acknowledge us, but with all these spectacled people who looked far too pale for June among us, the fact that publication was a real thing seemed impossible to deny. This was all becoming clearer and clearer to us as the residency bore on and the champagne flutes and speeches mounted, but so, too, was the fact that this residency would be the only one of its kind. We were trying to figure out how to make last the unnameable feeling we all later pinpointed as hope when we remembered that the girls’ bonfire was scheduled for that night. Without saying anything to one another, we all realized that the only thing more elusive and titillating than the idea of publication was the idea of the kind of party Leslie would throw if she ever threw one or, more to the point, decided we were worth inviting.
She didn’t disappoint us.
We all went as one group, partly out of excitement, none of us wanting to arrive a minute later than anyone else, and partly out of skepticism, or an unwillingness to be the only one to show up for a party that wasn’t actually being thrown. Leslie hadn’t sent a follow-up email about the bonfire, or mentioned so much as a word about it to any of us who had seen her in the hours just before it. None of us wanted to arrive alone only to discover that of course the field where she had told us to meet was empty. She hadn’t been serious, or it had been a stray thought she had sent out into the world as soon as it occurred to her, never to think about it again once it moved from her brain to her mouth to our ears. We might’ve emailed Hannah to confirm, but there was no set of feelings on the planet we less wanted to hurt than Hannah’s, and given how reliable and kind she’d always been, it felt wrong to question something she’d told us directly.
Lefferts Field was the last man-maintained patch of land on campus before the woods that surrounded campus began. It was more of a clearing than a field, big enough for Lefferts Cottage, the most remote housing building on campus, and a semicircular patch of flat, uninterrupted grass that sat in front of it. Clusters of trees surrounded the building on all sides so that it looked a little like the building and the clearing had predated the forest, which was slowly but steadily migrating forward to swallow the building whole, even if the opposite was true. Admissions to the school grew every year, to both the graduate and undergraduate programs, and it was only a matter of time before more trees were cleared to make room for new buildings, and new patches of grass for students to sun themselves on.
Because we all went together, we all saw what the girls had turned Lefferts Field into at exactly the same time.
They’d somehow dragged colorful couches and retro lamps and organized it all so that the field looked like a rich man’s living room or a cocktail bar in Paris. It was impossible to tell, without closer inspection, which parts of the gentlemen’s parlor in front of us were natural, and which they had paid some lonely soul to help them lug halfway across the campus. What at first appeared to be a rug was actually a blanket of wildflowers, we realized only as we walked across it and felt the petals tickle the soles of our feet. By the time they lit the colorful Christmas lights they had strung throughout the trees that lined the perimeter of the clearing, we would’ve believed the light they produced was from fairies living in the trees. We noticed the giant stack of weathered books sitting just to the left of the flower rug only when Jamie Brigham kneeled to look through them and Leslie, who had been standing uncharacteristically silent next to Hannah in the middle of the clearing, shouted “Stop” with such urgency that he dropped an ancient-looking copy of The Comfort of Strangers so that it landed wide open and facedown on top of the pile.
Hannah gave Leslie a look that made her soften her message before any of us could react to it.
“Sorry—I just don’t want anyone to get the wrong book. They were chosen with such care by this one,” she said, popping her head in Hannah’s direction. “You know how she can be.”
Hannah smiled a smile full of the preternatural patience and Zen Leslie must’ve required of her often, but didn’t say anything.
“So, anyway, here’s the deal,” Leslie went on, not the sort to have patience for even patient smiles when she was as moved or energized by an idea or activity as she was by this one. “There’s a book here for everyone—either a book we think you’d like, or a book we think you embody, or an author we think reminds us of your writing. The intended recipient’s name is written on the title page.”
We all started fidgeting at once, each of us eyeing the pile for our favorite classics, already starting to get defensive that a certain title we spotted might be associated with us at the same time we felt indignant that others might be associated with someone else in the class. Leslie saw our restlessness and, firm in her resolve to make us behave the way she wanted us to, started talking louder and faster.
“Only open books you think might be intended for you. This is a guessing game, not a race to see who can open the most books in a certain amount of time, wearing out the spines of these books that were, quite frankly, kind of expensive, at least some of them.” She looked at Lucas when she said this, which the rest of us thought was fair, but to which he gave her What the fuck, me? eyes that she ignored. “And for the love of God, if you pick up a book that was intended for someone else, do not tip them off and ruin the fun for them. No one likes that guy.”
When she didn’t say anything after this, giving no explicit indication that the hunt should begin, it was Hannah we all looked at, knowing, som
ehow, that while Leslie was the face of whatever this was, and maybe even the brain, Hannah was the heart. She didn’t seem surprised by the attention, or that she was the one we came to. She nodded, and we all lunged at once.
They both watched us stumbling around like the loving parents of toddlers at an Easter egg hunt, but couldn’t have reacted more differently to our incorrect guesses, of which of course there were many. Leslie delighted in our wrongheaded notions about ourselves, and how far off the mark we inevitably were. When Patrick Stanbury picked up The Basketball Diaries she cackled a cackle we had never heard before, equal parts affection and wickedness before she said, “Uh, yeah, right. We’re at the graduate level here, P. It’s gonna be a little harder than that.” She relished in stumping us every time, never flagging in her evident joy even as we slowed in the pace at which we opened books, more pointed now in every guess.
Hannah was the patient, encouraging parent whom you go to at midnight the night before the big math test, when you’re out of time and you’re still getting the wrong answer to a problem after a hundred different approaches to solving it. She gave us clues without even making us ask for them, clues that weren’t condescending or insulting—clues that didn’t give away the answer, implying that we would never land on it ourselves, but that flipped the contexts and settings of our brains so that the answers descended independently of her, little gifts from heaven. When Tanner Conover picked up Romeo and Juliet, looking across the book pile at Melissa with something we might’ve called love if we didn’t know any better, she was gentle in her suggestion that he think about the masculinity of his prose, saying nothing to hint that whatever existed between him and Melissa, it was lesser or more ordinary than what Shakespeare had been trying to capture. Watching them together, trading off their responses to our guesses, careful that none of us went too long in our hunt without some sort of loving attention, be it playful or doting, without even making eye contact with each other, we saw, suddenly, why they made so much sense together.
We Wish You Luck Page 19