We Wish You Luck

by Caroline Zancan

  She had cautioned us against this very kind of neat, bow-wrapped ending in the same workshop in which she eviscerated Jimmy’s poems, we never did forget. It was the clearest warning any of us had ever been issued and the most directly we had ever been instructed on what our fiction should aim to achieve, by someone whose opinion we surely courted at the time. And no matter how terrible a person she was, and how spectacularly her career combusted after these events, it was hard to argue with her storytelling or her line-by-line skill. Maybe Leslie was used to ignoring instructions like this and blazing right ahead, but not the rest of us. So it’s no small thing, our decision to end things this way, in what we all consider to be the closest thing to an official record of these events.

  But we know better by now. From our time in the program, yes, but also from the books we read and loved both before and after that, and the parts we have figured out about the books we’re still planning to write. From the very things we saw across these three residencies we’ve reported to you, and all the countless other things that Hannah and Leslie and Jimmy showed us.

  Fiction is meant to achieve all kinds of things.

  Everything After

  We hope you’ll forgive us for taking liberties that must be clear to you by now, and plugging in the holes with the sometimes mismatched materials we had at hand. We like to think we’re a creative body, capable together of what we could never do alone. We inevitably got some parts wrong, but so what if we did? Maybe it’s for the best. No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. That isn’t us, of course. It was Shirley Jackson first, and then Leslie, who got it tattooed on her forearm the first semester she taught at Fielding, bringing the tattoo count to ten. We like to think her decision to commit to the sentiment so permanently means she wouldn’t mind these liberties that we mention.

  Here’s another one for you: A story was nothing more than a lie you got away with, or maybe Tell a lie long enough and it will turn to truth. Both are from Yaa Gyasi, a very successful, highly paid MFA graduate, we’d like both you and our practical fathers to know.

  We all lost touch after graduation, of course. But after Sarah Jacobs married Robbie Myers, who we were all shocked to learn wasn’t already married, and the girl both Robbie and Lucas White were in love with came to the wedding and he felt, upon seeing her in a gold sequin dress that must have been custom-made, absolutely nothing. After Melissa Raymond had a second child with the husband she became more faithful to over time instead of less, and finally shook Tanner Conover for good. And the small stir that Patrick Stanbury caused when he emailed to tell us that, paging through a celebrity rag someone had left in the seat pocket in front of him on the flight to a coaching interview at a D-3 school in Pittsburgh, he had spotted an item about the pop star whose heart had been broken by one Jiles Gardner, now an acclaimed British novelist. We started exchanging bits of news with one another.

  By then we all had tidy little stacks of rejections wishing us luck in our writing endeavors, right next to regrets about being unable to publish us. Though this was a very different kind of luck from the luck Pearl had wished Leslie, that line, which might’ve stung otherwise, deceptively cheerful and optimistic as it was, made us think of him, and the program, and Leslie and Jimmy and Hannah, and one another, too. Which made us grateful to him for having said it all over again.

  Once we got the marriages and divorces and babies and publications out of the way, we turned our attention to finally sorting through and pinning together what happened those first three terms we were all together. It was incredible, the things we all remembered the same, and the things we remembered differently, and the things that each of us had seen and heard alone without thinking to tell the rest of us. Most incredible of all, maybe, was how much time we were willing to spend trying to figure out which overheard conversations and which after-hours meeting of two spotted across campus were the most important, and which parts of each varying account had the most credibility, and the methods we used to determine this.

  Bridget Jameson is the one who finally suggested we write it all down. To elevate it above petty gossip or whispers, yes, but also because the one thing we all have in common, she reminded us, is that we’re all writers. She was tireless in her answering and gathering of our emails. She picked up more late-night calls than any of the rest of us probably would have, and patiently mediated the squabbles that inevitably erupted between us. When it came time to actually start writing the story, once we had the facts and the timeline down, we were prepared to just let her tell it, but, being Bridget, she refused, insisting the story wouldn’t be complete—wouldn’t even make sense—without the exact piece each of us had contributed. We finally agreed on the communal we simply because it was clear to us, by the time the story was ready to be set to paper, that she was right.

  Without any one of us, the whole thing falls apart.

  Leslie and Hannah are the only two classmates who weren’t consulted. Bridget managed even to track down Jamie Brigham, whom she had stayed friendly with even after he dropped out of the program after our third term, the milk incident something of an inside joke between them by then. We had thought the timing of his departure might mean what happened on campus that second June had been a factor in it, but we learned he had left when his wife became pregnant with twins before either of them had planned on parenthood. He was living in Paris by the time Bridget emailed him, and happy to contribute what he could remember even if it was less than he would’ve liked, given that two more children had followed the twins in rapid succession.

  At the outset we plotted how best to get in touch with the girls but stopped when we realized that any answers they could give us would be akin to reading the CliffsNotes to a novel we were meant to savor. Or maybe we just couldn’t bear to hear them tell us no. Though they weren’t directly included in the project doesn’t mean, of course, that they lost the intrigue they had held for us, or that we stopped collecting the small bits of information about them any one of us was able to find and report back to the rest of us.

  We never saw Hannah again after that third residency. Leslie saw her off at the train station the day after we distributed our class gift. She didn’t return to campus for the next residency or even for our graduation, not even to celebrate with Leslie. She was done with the program. She didn’t need it, we knew, after reading what she had done with Jimmy’s work. She had only come that second June for Jimmy, and she would leave and do whatever came next for herself. It felt good to read what she had made, because we realized that part of why she had given so little of herself to us wasn’t snobbery, or timidness, or even Leslie. She had been there to work, and now she was done. That she would’ve given any piece of herself that could’ve been working to Jimmy only showed how much she really did love him, or could’ve, given half the chance.

  She published only one novel, a five-hundred-page sweeping family saga that spans Boston and Mumbai, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer. Determined as she had been to get Jimmy’s poetry the praise it deserves, it surprised no one when she gave up her urban planning work to become a critic for the New York Review of Books.

  Leslie borrowed Linda’s Honda to take Hannah to the station that last residency Hannah was part of, but insisted on dropping Hannah off right as the train was pulling out, because she refused to miss Professor Pearl’s final lecture on melodrama in contemporary fiction. She started a standing ovation before he finished his last line and then started running for the car, where Hannah was already nestled between her bags, sunglasses on at dusk.

  She took her time seeing Hannah off despite the rush leading up to it. She held her hand up to the outside window of Hannah’s seat. Hannah wouldn’t hold her own hand up to it, not willing to aid and abet so uncharacteristically sentimental a gesture on Leslie’s part. This did nothing to deter Leslie. She kept her hand up un
til the train started moving, and even after, walking slowly, calmly, looking straight ahead. She stayed until well after the train was out of sight, until she saw the kind of Vermont dark that Jimmy had seen that first night, after falling asleep on the train. Then she walked back to the car to turn her headlights on—two lone beams to cut through all that dark—and drove back the way she had come.

  Professor Pearl didn’t retire after all. How could he, after his most prestigious professor left in disgrace, jeopardizing the program’s legacy? He took a year off as planned to promote his second book. His daughter got the dedication—For Ana, always—but the first acknowledgment in the back went “To Leslie, who believes in miracles.” It outsold Cactus and Dust in a month. His first decision in his new, old role when he returned to campus was to hire Leslie to the faculty to teach genre-bending writing. Literary sci-fi and mystery and, yes, erotica. Because some things—sometimes the best things—can’t be put in any one box, and are everything and nothing we can name or imagine at once. He pushed her start date back a year, so that anyone who had been a student on campus with her would graduate by the time she took her post, but she said yes immediately. Her student reviews were so unanimously positive her first two years in the position that she was asked to stay on full time, as a professor in the undergrad English program as well.

  She planned to stay only for a few semesters. Wanderers have trouble staying put, after a certain amount of wandering, even when they’ve wandered somewhere good. She learned halfway through her second term as an associate professor that she was going to have a baby boy, though she didn’t know he was a boy until he arrived, because Leslie likes to keep even herself guessing sometimes. No one has ever gotten the name of the father out of her. It’s not that she stays silent on the subject, but that she has a different answer for everybody who asks.

  At first, having learned she was pregnant, she stayed on only because she needed the insurance. But after Fielding’s lone ob-gyn held up the squirming, almost-too-alive tiny human, who was furious at the indignity of birth, and announced it was a boy. And after Leslie looked at him with a tilted head and eyes so tired she struggled to keep them open long enough to determine what he should be called with a level or certainty only Leslie is capable of. And after deciding that this Jimmy would get the home—home in a permanent, physical, doormat-in-front-of-a-door kind of way—that the last one didn’t, she resolved to stay for good without telling anyone, and simply began to do the things that lend themselves to tenure with Leslie relish. This created friends and enemies, of course, neither of which Leslie had been a stranger to, and adoring students and long nights of reading and writing and drinking syrupy wine out of plastic cups. And publications and reviews good and bad, and favorite students Leslie never took too many pains to hide were her favorite—they were the weak and meek and broken and strange ones, always—and to whom she would tell the sort of incredible, over-the-top, unbelievable tales that only Leslie is capable of telling, only she tells them so well you start to believe they might be true. And it was very rarely a raw deal for her, at least the way it had been the first fifteen years of her life, or as raw as she had thought it would become again, at some point or another, sooner or later.

  She kept teaching even after the kinds of successes other teachers often retired after to write full time. She’s published stories in The New Yorker and Harper’s. Her second novel was a bestseller and her third was optioned by Sofia Coppola. We have yet to find a single sex scene in any of them. We all eagerly await the fourth, not least because we think this might be the one.

  Hannah is the last of the Hannah-Jimmy-Leslie trio to take up the role of living ghost. The whispers these days have her coming to campus once or twice a year to see Leslie, whom she hasn’t managed to shake after all these years. She came alone at first, then with her timid, handsome husband, a law professor who fills a white-shoe firm’s pro bono quotient, helping the weak in slightly more aboveboard fashion than Leslie, and finally with their two daughters. She doesn’t make herself any more available, or even visible, when she’s on campus these days than she did when she was a student here, but there are rare sightings reported by undergrads and MFA students alike. It’s hard not to wonder what she felt, seeing Jimmy’s namesake for the first time, or what the women themselves whisper about these days.

  But those are different stories.

  Acknowledgments

  I owe huge thanks to my editor, Laura Perciasepe, and my agent, Monika Woods, both of whom made this book much better than the one I originally wrote, and made what could be a daunting process good fun at every turn. Thank you to the entire Riverhead team for sprinkling their book magic on my work, especially Geoff Kloske, Jynne Martin, Kate Stark, Lydia Hirt, Mary Stone, and Delia Taylor.

  Thank you to my publishing fairy godmothers, Deborah Garrison, Ann Close, Gillian Blake, and Maggie Richards, for teaching me invaluable lessons about storytelling (and life). And to my work wives Katie Freeman, Josie Kals, Sarah Bowlin, Leslie Brandon, and Serena Jones, thank you for reminding me again and again how fun the work of telling stories really is, and how lucky we are to get to do it.

  I was fortunate enough to get to pursue a low-residency MFA at Bennington College, and I’m grateful to both my professors and classmates there. Few things have been more inspiring to me as a writer than the passion I found on Bennington’s campus, and I hope that’s apparent on these pages. Special thanks to Louise Munson and Sarah Fuss for making my time there so magical. To MFA students there and everywhere, past, present, and future: keep writing.

  Thank you to my Brooklyn and Kenyon families for being so insanely supportive of my work, and for making their moms buy my book. Special thanks to Ben Wasserstein and Julia Turner for their support of my work (and reliably good company).

  Thank you to my family family—of all things I’m glad to have done or be, being a Zancan and a ZML will always top the list. Thank you especially to my parents and siblings, and Emma, one of my own greatest sources of wonder, who I love getting to watch grow up even from far away. And to Ben, who combed through numerous drafts of this novel with me, and humored even my most insane queries about it—there’s no travel companion I’d rather have for this adventure we’re on, and I can’t wait to learn how the rest of our story unfolds.

  About the Author

  Caroline Zancan is the author of the novel Local Girls. She is a graduate of Kenyon College and holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. A Senior Editor at Henry Holt, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their children.

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