We Wish You Luck Page 14

  For Bridget it was the sort of tacky spring break destinations that high school and college kids usually go to in clusters. Sometimes it was Panama Beach, sometimes it was Daytona. We thought this seemed a little beneath her, until we remembered that Penny Stanley told us Bridget had once confessed she’d never been on a group vacation and had always wanted to go on one. Bridget was always friendly enough to be sitting at the tables where the sorts of girls who went on these trips talked about them before and after they took them, but never friendly enough to be invited.

  For Mimi it was Seoul, which was still the prettiest place her father had ever seen, as much as he loved America. In her mind, the picture had been taken just after or just before they hiked Namsan, which accounted for the rosiness of Hannah’s cheeks. Mimi’s father had been to the city only once, as a child with his own father, and if he had found beauty in the grit and noise and chaos of a city that big and dense, she loved to imagine what his face might look like, seeing it from some remove, feeling like he could have all of it at once.

  Like the bits of ourselves that we started exchanging in the wake of what Tammy revealed in the cafeteria and Jimmy’s death, these destinations and their origins were far more intimate than anything we had originally intended to share with one another. We knew that personal histories took a certain amount of time to impart, and that they invited the person you were imparting them to into a relationship that takes a certain amount of maintenance. We had arrived on campus six months ago determined to avoid exactly this sort of commitment to anyone, having sworn to ourselves and the people we had left at home that we were finally going to finish or revise our novels in progress, and spend the time at hand on our work alone. And while these exchanges did eat away at the time we had to implement workshop feedback into the latest drafts of our stories, or sketch out the plots of our next chapters, this is not one of the things we regret.

  * * *

  Despite the care we’ve taken here, there are still plenty of missing details of the story that only Leslie and Hannah could provide. They never have. But they probably still don’t know that the pew from which they watched Simone and Pearl make their way across a snowy, frozen campus on the coldest day of that January residency is the same pew from which Margaret watched Jimmy and Hannah kiss the term before. Leslie might not even know that the kiss happened. Based on how close the girls are, we know this is unlikely, but still—it’s possible. That we take comfort in being in possession of facts like this, which place us inside the story, almost part of it, makes us only a little sheepish. We don’t love that we had to rely on Jiles Gardner for this piece of information, but we would’ve accepted it from so many less reliable, more detestable sources if we had to.

  The first floor of the barn that the pew was in had a porch. It faced the same lawn that the second-story pew overlooked. That anyone would be sitting on a porch in freezing weather would feel dubious in most cases, but hardly seemed a stretch for Jiles Gardner. He smoked more than even our practical fathers and the married accountants combined, and smoking was forbidden in all campus buildings. Jiles was one class ahead of us, and British, which had made him intriguing at first until we realized that other people on campus were of such little interest to him that to pursue any sort of relationship with him would’ve been pathetic in its one-sidedness. He rivaled Jimmy in the amount of time he spent alone, but where Jimmy seemed afraid of other people, Jiles just didn’t like them. Maybe it was because he was British, but he managed to be almost cheerful, or at least not unfriendly about it—by disliking everyone in equal measure, his dislike of each individual person felt impersonal, a given. He also served a purpose. Seeing him across campus, cupping his hands around a lit match, shielding it from the wind, or inhaling like his life depended on it before releasing everything with an almost postcoital satisfaction, was a good reminder that most writers are solitary creatures, and for good reason. And that maybe instead of meeting one another for that nine o’clock glass of wine at the student center, we should be using our free time to organize the scribbles we had made in our notebooks across the day’s readings and lectures, or to untangle the ideas that had come to us in the middle of the night before like a knock on the door of a cabin you had thought was completely remote. Because in addition to being one of the least social members of the community, Jiles was universally regarded as one of its best writers.

  Though he made it pretty clear he wasn’t looking for friends, or even companionship, and his work made it pretty clear how dim his view of human nature was, Jiles was never unpleasant in standard, nuts-and-bolts interactions such as “Do you need a light?” or “You dropped your mitten,” which was another reason most of us have fine enough feelings about him, even if he had never bothered to learn any of our names. He didn’t seem at all inconvenienced, for instance, telling Mimi and Sarah what he saw from the porch that night. It was a night so cold nobody but Jiles would be out in it if they didn’t have to be, which is probably the first thing that caught his attention about the two figures walking out in the dark in front of him, and the attention of the two interested pairs of eyes floating above him that he didn’t yet know were there. Mimi and Sarah and Jiles were huddled outside the commons after lunch the next day when he told them this, a single cigarette between the three of them. The girls looked less orphaned without their colorful wardrobes than they had the rest of the residency, now that a male gaze was upon them, even if it was one as withering as Jiles Gardner’s.

  Jiles told the girls that the two figures had been walking slowly, moving the way two people do when they’re walking toward a destination that matters less than their conversation, both of them struggling with the snow despite wearing boots designed for it. He said they almost didn’t seem human, dark as it was, and eerie out there on a campus so empty that it felt like time and God had forgotten it, the slow stroll of their gait wrong for the context. But their voices cut right through the thin, empty air. He knew right away it was Pearl and Simone, even though, having never been in Simone’s workshop, he hadn’t heard her speak much. He said she was enunciating theatrically, the way she did when she asked her postlecture questions, even though she was just speaking to Pearl. This wasn’t entirely surprising, especially next to the unexpected way Pearl was talking to her. He spoke so sweetly that Leslie and Hannah probably wouldn’t have believed it in the face of the empathy he had tried to show them just a day or two before in regard to Simone’s involvement in what happened to Jimmy, if they hadn’t heard it themselves. Jiles said he couldn’t be sure, but the two professors might even have been linked arm in arm.

  Mimi and Sarah asked Jiles if the exchange had seemed romantic, which he seemed tickled by, and which annoyed them in turn. We always felt like sticky, wide-eyed middle schoolers to his varsity quarterback in conversations with Jiles, even though a good half of us were older than him, so we sympathized with the girls even though we suspect they used their annoyance as a sort of flirtation. He ignored their full-body eye rolls long enough to tell them that, no, he didn’t imagine they were going off to the edge of the woods for a shag, and not just because it was too cold. There was some sibling quality to the exchange, or maybe a whiff of the father-daughter. It wasn’t lost on us that Simone was about the same age as the four-year-old in the picture would’ve been by then. The similarities between them didn’t go any further than that no matter how hard we tried to make them, but it’s impossible to say what will make one person remind us of another.

  The last thing Jiles told the girls before he turned away to light a new cigarette, which was burned halfway down to his fingers before they realized he was retreating, having told them everything he could, or would, about the night in question, was that when he had finally lost enough feeling in his fingers that he had to start walking back to his dorm, he turned back when he was only about twenty feet away. He said he couldn’t say what had made him do it—he said this preemptively, knowing they would want to know. There wa
s no noise or flash of movement he could point to. It was more of a feeling, as it so often is, that had made him look. The kind of sixth sense that feels heightened on nights and in places like this. He said when he looked back there were two faces in the second-floor window right above where he had been sitting on the porch, right about where the pew was, their faces so close to the glass that their breath left two little imperfect circles of condensation on it, and that two perfect little nose-tip dots floated above them. The glass was too thick and warped to make out who they were, but we didn’t need Jiles to tell us that part even if it hadn’t been.

  Who else could it have been?

  We’ve all sat in the pew that the girls must have been sitting in. We went there so often, in fact, that we immediately ruled the pew out as the place they had been hiding this whole time, as tempting as it was, because we would’ve seen them there long before this lonely frozen night. Either they’d been moving to various spots as their whims dictated, or they’d come out of hiding somewhere else to be at just the right place at just the right time. Or wrong, depending on how you want to look at it. We’ve spent enough time in the pew to know how creaky it would have been every time they so much as shifted their weight, especially on a night as empty and cold as that one, so neither of them would have moved for the entirety of the walk they witnessed, hound dog determined not to miss a word of it. Maybe they were grasping each other for solidarity, silently urging the other to hold still for just a minute longer, the way you lay a hand on someone’s forearm when you want them to stop speaking so you can verify a noise you think you’ve heard. They were connected physically—an arm around a shoulder, heads bent together—in most of the memories we have of them, so this, especially, doesn’t feel like a stretch.

  Even easier to imagine is how what they saw and heard must have made them feel, and the effect it must have had on what happened next. They must have realized that for all of Pearl’s compassion for Jimmy, and remorse at what had happened, Simone was going to get away with it. She already had. She was still one of his staff, someone he had vetted and presumably found impressive before approving, and they were just two of his students, like a thousand others who had passed through his classrooms by then. They must’ve felt angry, or at least disappointed, at Pearl. We certainly did, at first, though that’s mostly passed by now. We had all read Cactus and Dust, so there was no letting him off on the grounds that he didn’t know his way around a brutal, godless, impossible situation. In one of his scenes a man says his final words only after his head is two thirds of the way severed from his body. As violent and unflinching as his work was, though, that violence was there only so that he could reconcile it across the two hundred some pages of the book, the way all problems in novels are there to be solved, or should be. He was trying to make it right, it’s difficult not to think now, which makes us remember how safe we felt on campus, at least partly because he oversaw it, even if he was going about making it right by ignoring the problem, which has almost never worked in the human history of problems.

  It’s difficult, too, to forget that the thickness of the glass, and the windows being painted shut, probably made the girls feel as far away from what they saw happening out on the lawn as Jibs had from that kiss. Only where it had made Jibs feel lonely, left standing outside of something she could tell even from all that distance was wonderful, it made them feel insulated from something terrible and outside of their control. Almost like what they were watching was happening far enough away that they were safe from it.

  We can’t think of anything else that would’ve given them the courage to do what they went on to do.

  * * *

  Despite the doggedness with which we watched the girls, we didn’t look exclusively to them to tell us how to feel about what had happened. While the surprise of the news that had greeted us that first day of the term never dimmed entirely, it did evolve into something else without any help from them. Our first reaction, before even grief, had been confusion. Simone had been too harsh, maybe—maybe even harsher than we knew, in the private packet correspondence she and Jimmy exchanged—but he must have known how good he was.

  The assumption behind our confusion had been that his talent, or the beauty and wisdom behind Jimmy’s arrangements of words, should have been enough for him, despite whatever raw deal had made him the collection of awkward tics and strange mannerisms that he was in life. But in the blank pages of our free-write periods, and our inability to find arrangements to keep us warm in the dorm rooms that never seemed to be sufficiently heated, we started to see the flimsiness of even the arrangements we had until then held most dear. The very words that had brought us here in the first place. So that as the early, dark, cold lonely nights of January residency piled up, what Jimmy had done seemed less and less confusing.

  Though even the most arrogant among us would never have gone so far as to compare our work to Jimmy’s, until that point, none of us had paused in the pursuit of assembling our own perfect arrangements, no matter how steadfastly they eluded us. Like that one kid all of us had known in our hometowns who couldn’t turn away from the Rubik’s Cube at the end of indoor recess, we kept twisting and clicking the little plastic rows of images and plot developments and columns of pretty phrases and character traits, patrolling for repetitions and reading unfinished sentences and thoughts out loud, testing them on the tongue. But we found, that January—maybe even earlier, across the late nights we had spent putting the final touches on our first-term packets that we mailed out with some measure of doubt, and the knowing despair that we could’ve made them better—that the act of stringing words together was a dirtier, more demeaning and labor-intensive business than we had assumed when we filled out our initial applications. When it happened at all, the composition of sentences that made it all the way to the final drafts of our stories happened in the strictly glory-free realms of our kitchen table in the small hours of the night, or in cubicles the color of two-day-old snow after everybody else has gone home. We captured stray words at red lights and scribbled them in the margins of agendas distributed at endless corporate meetings. Always, always we were on the search for more. When we did hit on something good—something we knew was good even at the time—it was better than any drug any of us had ever tried (and between the babies and the married accountants, we had tried them all). But, like all drugs, when the high wore off, we were left worse than we had been before, grasping and desperate in our neediness.

  If the initial passages we loved had built a bridge between their authors and us, then our inability to put our own exquisite losses and brutal victories on paper only made us feel more alone. And while we loved our children and took pride in making it to work on time and sang in community choirs and were training for marathons and logging hours for pilot’s licenses, the progress toward which felt only more measurable next to the elusiveness of our unfinished, imperfect stories, the truth is that we had all been where Jimmy was. We knew how lonely a blank page was, and that for all the company a perfectly conveyed sentiment can provide, the words just outside our grasp and the gaps they won’t bridge are just as powerful.

  Two months after we left campus that first June, Jordan Marcum won the kind of unwinnable case a lawyer dreams of capping his career with, finally putting away one of Chicago’s most notorious criminals, a man as deft at eluding the law as he was cruel. And Jordan’s second thought, after the fact that he was finally going to be able to go on a real vacation with those Ivy League kids of his before they left him to start careers and families of their own, was how much easier it was to win a case like this than to write a short story in which his professor left a single line of unchanged. Of course the law was what he should be dedicating his life to. How silly to have thought anything else. And yet it was impossible to ignore, always there in the back of his mind, that it had been reading To Kill a Mockingbird at the age of eleven that made him want to be a lawyer in the first place. So he kept on send
ing out stories that came back to him cancerous with red scrawls and cuts and Really? comments in the margins, each mark a reminder that he had yet to make his readers feel what his jurors had.

  Those six months in between our first two residencies were the only stretch during which Melissa Raymond and Tanner Conover tried to have a proper, public courtship, before their correspondence descended into the stuff of third parties and flimsy excuses that embarrassed everybody. During that time he drank too much and she spent too much money and both of them thought they were more attractive than the other, but that they didn’t deserve them. They each introduced the other to only a single friend, not wanting any additional confirmation that their relationship was a terrible idea. But neither of them could forget that night during the first residency when they made cocktails in stolen cafeteria mugs after James Wood gave a lecture that pinpointed the exact, single word choice that broke your heart in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, right there in the middle of the paragraph—right there in the middle of the sentence—you least expected it. And they knew that until they could channel that magic into a story of their own, they were damned to make scenes in bars and hang up on each other midconversation like seventh-graders, all for makeup sex that wasn’t even that good.