We Wish You Luck

by Caroline Zancan

  “It just didn’t really work the same without him.”

  And it was impossible, when she said this last part, not to feel sorry for her, as beautiful as she was, and as poised, too full of fire and her own supply of Leslie brass and guts to need our pity or anything else. Because we saw how much she missed him, despite how spectacularly she had called him back in the books we were all holding.

  “Anyway, I hope you’ll all come tomorrow,” Hannah said, turning to us.

  Every single one of us went, of course.

  We assembled in the center of campus the next day, at the spot just between the library and the bookstore where the flagpole stood, and where anyone who needed to travel from almost any one point of campus to any other would have to pass. We must’ve looked out of place in the formal ensembles Leslie had told us to put on for the occasion. Leslie herself was wearing a billowy white dress that looked like a nightgown Emily Dickinson might’ve worn in her self-imposed isolation if it had been designed by Alexander McQueen.

  Anything more expensive than off-brand dormitory housing soap was considered a luxury to us during residency, but we had all managed to get our hands on an iron, or a hanger we could put next to a steaming shower. Everyone’s outfit was crisp. Even Patrick Stanbury looked like someone’s mother had had five minutes with him. The girls had finally brought us into the plan directly, and told us what to do and why it was important that we do it instead of just making sure we were there to witness whatever it was they were doing, and this was part of what made us stand up straighter and comb our hair and create the first ever shower line the program has probably ever seen. But we also did these things partly because we had spent the twenty-four hours since the girls had gathered us into the barn marveling again and again, over and over, to both ourselves and one another, at what they had made from Jimmy’s words.

  When we first started handing out books like Mardi Gras revelers distributing beads it was a festive, celebratory morning. A ceremony that unfolded in bits and parts we couldn’t plan, not knowing who would be walking by when, but fluid at every turn. Recipients thanked us for the books with smiles that were clearly genuine. Even the cafeteria workers and the random students and the Lindas of cross-stitch mastery, whose preferences and opinions on the books we spoke about in precious, elevated terms we never got to know, seemed happy to be handed what we gave them. When Johanna Green, the short story writer who had abandoned Professor Pearl that first term in order to tend to her orphanhood, accepted her copy, she oohed like it was an early review copy of Jonathan Franzen’s next novel, which we appreciated. The books were bound in plain black cloth with no text or type on the cover, which seemed only to increase the intrigue in the people we handed copies to. In a rare moment of uncertainty, Tammy turned to Hannah when Jude Morgan approached, unsure if he was worthy of so coveted a good, and Hannah urged her on with an of course scootch forward of the chin—like all great texts, this one was for everyone.

  We might’ve been starting to sag a little by the time the one-hour mark came and went, but we kept our top buttons buttoned, and not even Jibs complained. By the two-hour mark, though, it was really starting to get hot, and it seemed intentional that Simone was one of the few people on campus who hadn’t walked by. Maybe she was less vulnerable to this attack than we thought.

  We had started to lose hope, but none of us had admitted it out loud yet. Patrick was sitting on the curb trying fruitlessly to arrange his body gracefully, as clearly consumed by the heat as a panting dog, though he kept his tongue in his mouth and his head between his knees the way athletes do. Lucas and Robbie were playing kick the can like the grown children they were. Bridget Jameson had pulled a tattered paperback copy of a Camus novel in its original French and started reading it—we weren’t sure which novel it was, none of us versed in Camus’s mother tongue. Those of us who hadn’t found anything to pass the time with watched the bead of sweat at Bridget’s temple that grew with every page she turned and waited for it to fall.

  It was Leslie who saw her first, of course. She didn’t say anything—we knew the moment was upon us only when she walked over to Jibs, who was leaning against a telephone pole in a slouch that left little doubt about the extent of her agitation, to hand her a copy of the book, and said, “You do this one,” giving no indication what made this one different, or even that anything did. When we looked over and saw who was approaching, it made us each think that maybe the earlier honor of lighting the match hadn’t been random after all. And that in Jibs Leslie saw something of a wounded bird—or even a broken egg not unlike the unnamed narrator of Hannah’s first, beloved story—a tinny little voice that wasn’t afraid to say whatever it felt or thought whenever it felt or thought it where the rest of us saw only a nuisance. We realized that maybe Jimmy hadn’t been the first person Leslie would look after and defend, even if by questionable means, even if she did the looking after too late, and probably wouldn’t be the last.

  We didn’t have too long to consider this thought. Simone was now close enough that we could read the expression on her face, which gave exactly nothing away. Her normally untouched skin was a collage of purple clouds and exclamation marks of scrapes, calling attention to her for all the reasons she would’ve hated. Only Hannah gave her the kindness of looking down as she approached.

  It’s tempting to come up with some clever way to say she looked at us the way you speak to telemarketers when they call during dinner or the good part of a show, but the truth is she couldn’t be bothered to rise to nearly that level of passion. She simply walked by us, holding up her hand in a hostile thanks, but no thanks gesture that didn’t require her to take her eyes off the phone she was clutching in her other hand. We all turned to Leslie, of course, who was patting Margaret in a motherly, comforting way, or the pantomime of the way she’d seen other mothers do it—a seventh-grader playing the mother in a school play.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, once Simone was out of earshot. “I have plans for that one.” She turned to the rest of us then, making it clear that what she was saying was meant for all of us, not just Jibs, however dignified her role was to be in all this. “Thank you all for your help. This next part I’ve got.”

  * * *

  Simone had a western-facing corner office on the second floor of the most distant classroom building on campus. Its walls were so white you could almost feel the light bouncing off of them when you closed your eyes. They weren’t eggshell white or taupe, just pure, blank slate white. That Simone hadn’t hung a single picture or postcard or book jacket, even her own, made them seem even more impossibly pure and saturated. When the sun set, the office filled with light as surely and tangibly and physically as it would have with people if Simone ever had visitors, which she almost never did. The effect was something like a thousand tiny points of light converging in the center of a blizzard, something good where you least expected it, which of course was all wrong for Simone.

  One of our favorite images from this story, real or imagined, remembered or constructed, is Leslie making her way toward all that light in her Emily Dickinson dress. She waited just enough time after Simone had rebuffed us before setting off toward her office. Simone would have just settled into the chair she had had shipped from her favorite furniture designer’s studio in Brooklyn. She would’ve just shaken the last of the fading stills on the backs of her eyelids of a good third of the student body hawking books of unknown origin at her like Bible salesmen. Leslie walked without any urgency—she would get there on her own time—but with the steady gait of someone who knows exactly where they’re going.

  The image we have begins with a wide angle, zoomed completely out, and looks a little like a video game maze with an avatar that is mostly gauzy white nightgown dress and rock-and-roll sex hair and an end zone that is mostly just flashing rays of light, promising every association from heaven to gold. Leslie kept the book behind her the whole way, always positioning her entire
body between it and Simone, safe and out of sight until the exact right moment.

  The focus narrows slowly as Leslie makes her way across the field with wildflowers in front of the music building and on past the Empty Garden, where the burned remains of her January fire still probably sat, and continues to narrow until you can see things like her disastrous eye makeup—smudged as always—but eyes as white and pure as Simone’s office walls, unblemished by even a single red vein, clear and alert and completely seeing. If Leslie didn’t have the perfect shoe to pair with an outfit, she went without, calluses and rusty nails to hell, and since this dress floated outside of time or season, it had no footwear companion. She had painted her toenails the color of eggplant, but the polish was chipped, revealing the pink of toenails cleaner and better manicured than we would have guessed of Leslie, the pink of a baby fresh from the bath.

  Arriving at the end of her maze, Leslie didn’t knock on Simone’s open door, but arranged herself lazily, comfortably against her door frame, so that when Simone looked up, she was simply there, no lightning or fire in her pocket this time, but something better. How long she had been there, Simone had no way of knowing.

  While Leslie found Simone’s insistence on having this office childish and distasteful, she had to admit that the campus laid itself out magnificently on the other side of all Simone’s windows. Facing her head-on and from only a few feet away, Leslie saw that Simone’s bruises had the swollen, tender look they take on after a day or two, which must have made her look small in front of so much uninterrupted space.

  Leslie began, as she always did, without any preamble.

  “Did you go to public school, Simone?” We imagine her asking this as casually as if she were braiding Simone’s hair at a sleepover party. “You seem like the kind of person who went to public school for a year and then always called herself a public school kid at cocktail parties because of it. You know, for, like, the cred?”

  “I’m sorry, why do you care where I went to school?” Simone was learning—you couldn’t pet the animals on this ride.

  “Not that there’s anything wrong with private school. I went to Catholic boarding school myself. You hear boarding school and you think fancy, probably, right? And mine was expensive, to be sure, but it was run by nuns, so it was hard knocks, too, you know? Austere is the word I think they would use for it.”

  “I see your semester with Professor Pearl has imparted the importance of word choice to you. I’m sure he’d be proud.”

  If this was meant to soften Leslie with its flattery or scare her with its mention of Pearl, it had neither of its desired effects. Leslie didn’t even bother to bat it away with a response before she went on.

  “They taught us all sorts of things there with their tough love. They taught us to cross our feet at the ankles and always sneeze into the V of our arms. To never wear navy blue with black, or stockings with runs. It sounds more like finishing school, I know, but they taught us some things that stuck, too. You know, things that still seem to matter, all these years later.”

  “Okay.”

  That was all Simone would give her, Leslie would tell us later. She was still trying to figure out the rules here, or maybe locate the speediest exit.

  “They taught us to protect the weak, and always have appreciation—gratitude—for the miracles constantly at work around us. Grace, I think it was called.”

  “Well, you’re just full of information, aren’t you?”

  “No,” said Leslie, still ignoring her. “Not grace. Wonder.” And it’s here that something must have narrowed just enough in Leslie’s eyes that Simone knew this wasn’t a ride that ended with fluorescent exit signs, and Simone tried something else.

  “Wonder?” she said, like she might’ve said the word genocide, or colonoscopy. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “That’s what they called it—the feeling you were supposed to have for the unstoppable, magical forces of good at work in our lives. You know, for David Bowie, and banana pudding from Magnolia—the West Village in its entirety, really—and freshly painted yellow walls. For the first sip of your favorite wine after a twelve-hour day, or Shelley Duvall’s sweaters in The Shining. And those few weeks in late April and early May when cherry blossoms come to the end of their bloom and it rains flower petals, and there are blankets of pink and white everywhere. Or—here’s one you’d appreciate: reading the last line of a perfectly written book. The kind of line you never saw coming but know, as soon as you read it, is the only line the book could’ve ended with. I mean, those aren’t the miracles the nuns would’ve used as examples—those are mine. But we all have to find our own miracles in this armpit life, right? You don’t really seem like a drinker, do you? It’s no good for the skin. And you’re probably more of a Springsteen girl than Bowie.”

  Simone would neither confirm nor deny, no longer pretending to be complicit in whatever this was.

  “Anyway, I didn’t come here to bore you, I just came here to give you a copy of this.”

  Leslie had started her speech in the frame of Simone’s doorway, and had been inching steadily closer. By now she was leaning against the edge of the desk Simone sat behind, close enough to hand the object she had been hiding behind her back to Simone upon its big reveal. It was the same book we had been giving out on the lawn, only this one was leather bound, and had Simone’s name embossed in gold. Simone only blinked at it.

  “If there’s one thing graduate students appreciate, it’s free things,” Leslie said. “So I’m happy to tell you that when you make a hundred copies of something, they give you one embossed in gold for free. I knew right away the gold one should be yours.”

  “And why’s that?” Simone finally asked, probably relieved to finally be at the part of this exchange where someone handed her the bill.

  “Well, since you’re the star of the book, of course.”

  And here, finally, with this line, Leslie got the reaction she’d been aiming for all along.

  “I don’t want it,” Simone said, completely terrified now, staring at the book Leslie was still holding out to her like it had the time and date and means of her death written inside it.

  “Oh, I think you do,” Leslie said, close enough by now that Simone must’ve been able to feel Leslie’s breath on her face. “You seem like the kind of person who likes to see her name in print, and there’s quite a bit of it here.” She placed the book gingerly on top of the pile of student manuscripts that sat in the center of Simone’s desk before she turned to go.

  Leslie was pretty much already gone, having turned left out of Simone’s office with only the tail of her white dress flapping behind her, when she popped back in like a human afterthought. She leaned only her head and shoulders into the doorway, letting the rest of her body hang outside its frame, promising that whatever she had come back to say was only a postscript.

  “I almost forgot the best part about this. I paid for three copies of the leather-bound version—only one was free, which you can imagine was a bit of a pinch on my graduate student budget, but I think it will be worth it. I sent one to your agent and one to your editor, along with Xeroxes of Jimmy’s packets. Maybe I should drop a few copies off at Lefferts, too, now that I think of it—all your guests must be here by now.”

  Simone’s “No!” to this was the most impassioned word or gesture that Leslie or any of us would ever get from her, and her last word on all of this, disappointingly brief coming from a woman of so many words.

  “Jimmy wasn’t only sending his packets to you, thank God. He sent them to Hannah, too. You probably haven’t given her much thought, but she’s the girl I’m always skulking around with. Anyway, he loved her and she loved him, and he showed her by giving her his words and she showed him by reading them right away. Like, the very second they arrived. I bet you always waited a day or two to open your students’ packets, huh? There was always some party or
opening to go to, right? It’s a shame they’re probably not going to let you teach here anymore, because you’re going to have a lot more time. No more parties.”

  Leslie was so happy by this point, the smile she gave Simone was almost genuine.

  “I don’t want to blur the point by going on too long. The point is that they were each other’s wonder, and he hadn’t had a whole lot of it in his life. So little, in fact, that even the word got him excited. But I bet you knew that better than anyone, having read so much of his work, which I still think is the best way to get to know somebody. And just to tie it all back in with the nuns, pretty much the one thing they and I would agree on is that there’s no greater sin in all the world than to steal someone’s wonder.”

  Leslie looked out beyond Simone, maybe to whatever would come after all this was finished. She was in no rush for final words. When she finally turned back to the room, the cost of her visit must have been all over Simone’s face.

  “What’s the matter, Simone?” she asked, seeing Simone’s despondency, and noting that she looked almost as desperate as Jimmy had been that day she and Hannah went to his room after his disastrous workshop. “It’s just words on a page, right?”

  By the time Leslie finally left for good, her question trailing just after the hem of her dress, Simone’s mouth was a perfectly round, dumbfoundedly gaping O, and the sun had started its descent. How long it took the O to shrink into a tight line of pinched, resigned lips, and the degree to which its shrink kept pace with the wilting sun and anything else that transpired in the last burst of sunlight in a room that collects it, is something no one can tell you. Leslie had skipped back down the hallway and out across the lawn back to Hannah and the rest of us by then.

  Maybe it was a bit too tidy, the way Leslie left Simone perfectly, completely defeated—destroyed, even—not to mention the speed with which Simone was subsequently dispatched from the program after that. After a closed-door meeting with Pearl early the next morning that not even Joni Kleinman knows the contents of, she left campus immediately. Her second book was discreetly canceled by the publisher. She never did make that comeback, even after the alumni magazine interview and the short story publications. She tried to write for TV for a while, for pilots that never saw the air. The last any of us heard, she was living quietly in New York, one of countless other artistic souls there who know their work to be underrated. Even her first, celebrated novel is out of print.