We Wish You Luck Read online

  We have as many details about every other Fielding pair and every solo silhouette that crossed campus the four terms we were there. But even before the things we’re about to tell you started to happen, no pair interested us half as much as Leslie Spencer and Hannah Arya, and eventually Jimmy Fiero, their unlikely third—the heroes of this story, we think, at least, and the strangest, most singular people any of us had ever met, even at the outset of all this. We’ll forgive you for forgetting any of the rest of us, but it’s important you remember these three. We aren’t arrogant enough to consider ourselves more than the story’s background at worst, its keepers at best. But there is no story without them.

  Part of the reason we lingered on Leslie and Hannah from the very beginning of our time at Fielding was they were the only two people who didn’t fall, even partly, even imperfectly, into one of the three groups. They rarely went to the student center, which gave us plenty of time to talk about them—and there was plenty to discuss. Both of them were well liked enough, but we couldn’t figure out what they saw in each other. And we were writers, so we tried.

  Leslie spoke four languages and had nine tattoos but would reveal the location of only five of them and said there were only three people who had seen the others but no one single person who had seen them all. She had lived all over the world. Not in an army brat kind of way, but in an I got kicked out of three boarding schools one. She said she was an orphan whose parents were still alive, which only made about as much sense as most of the other things she said.

  Everyone else in the program talked about the New York Times Book Review and small literary presses. Leslie talked about sales and money. It was clear from her shaggy, sloppily worn designer clothing, tossed on so that the shoulders never lined up where they were supposed to and the seams always fell at a diagonal, that she already had plenty of the latter. She said that if she actually needed money the last thing she would do was try to become a writer, because she wasn’t a fucking idiot, but if she was going to take the time to write something, she wanted to make sure other people would read it because otherwise, what was the fucking point? No one could get out of her where she lived when she wasn’t on campus. When she asked Patrick Stanbury, the six-foot-three basketball player from UConn who was writing a collection of essays about playing semiprofessional basketball in Asia, to define what he meant by “where she lived” and he said “the place where her mail was sent,” she told him that if he still received paper mail he was at least partly to blame for our current ecological crisis, even though in addition to being a D-1 basketball star, Patrick Stanbury also had a master’s degree in environmental science from Duke, though he had never had a job that paid health benefits.

  Hannah was the human embodiment of hospital corners, which we later learned was in her blood—both of her parents had been physicians, and her older sister still practiced medicine. And though she had been born and raised in Boston and still lived there most of the year, she had spent a lifetime of holidays visiting family in Mumbai, which she had fallen so completely in love with that by the time we met her, she spent her summers there working for an urban planning firm that had offices in both Mumbai and Boston. After decades of American teachers and classmates butchering her given name of Aahana, she introduced herself to us with the closest American equivalent. Privately acknowledging how unnaturally her real name sat on our own tongues was one of many things that made us feel like bumbling, sunburnt cowboys next to her.

  Hannah wore her hair in a tidy, low-hanging ponytail every day, and while she wore the ripped jeans and secondhand T-shirts the rest of us did on campus, she usually paired hers with a black or gray blazer that was best characterized the way we suspected a lot of her wardrobe in the Real World was—well made by a well-known, dependable brand but never trendy or overtly stylish. While she was generous in workshop and friendly in downtime, she was often too committed to whatever was at hand, whether it was a fellow student’s story or a ranking of every film Paul Thomas Anderson had ever made, to smile, but when she did it was the part of the class or conversation you were most likely to remember. Her smile was as unexpected and magical as seeing your kindergarten teacher at the grocery store when you were five, the kind of pure embodiment of joy most human faces lose the capacity for at puberty.

  Hannah’s poetry had been published in The Paris Review and Tin House. She had done her undergrad at Oxford and could recite most of the soliloquies that Shakespeare had ever written. It sometimes felt, in fact, like she naturally spoke in iambic pentameter. She had a beautiful face—the kind of face you couldn’t help but stare at, sometimes unconsciously, and had to force yourself to look away from—but it felt like she tried to keep this a secret, lest it would make anyone take her less seriously.

  Leslie always looked like she was on her way back from a rave at dawn, no matter what time it was: smudged mascara and purple bra straps peeking out from sleeve holes. While we couldn’t imagine, and never dared to fictionalize, what Leslie and Hannah talked about in their private conversations, we became well acquainted, that first term, with the sight of the two of them making their way across campus, heads drawn in close, arms linked, mouths open in conversation that required the entire body—flailing limbs and wide eyes. Everywhere they went they were always laughing.

  Both women were too able and worldly to count as babies, too cultured and bohemian to be married accountants, and though Leslie had never said anything that confirmed she wasn’t an industry person, she seemed to be amused at the exclusivity that the group was known for, reflecting their insider smiles back at them in a way that clearly rattled the professionals, even if they wouldn’t admit it.

  We didn’t know any of this on that first train ride up, which neither girl was on. Hannah had carpooled to campus with a third-year from Boston, and wherever Leslie lived it was somewhere you had to travel to and from by plane, because she was on the second airport shuttle, getting onto campus two hours before the last train of the night stopped in its tracks in Albany. We were all first-term students that June—five long residencies away from a degree. Each of our first four residencies would commence a term of off-site work with our professors. We’d come to campus for one final residency after that, but only to deliver our graduate lectures and readings and then walk in the graduation ceremony that would culminate the residency, with plenty of revelry in between.

  Jimmy was one of the ten first-termers on that train, though, probably tucked into the last seat of the last car somewhere in the back, the most nondescript person any of us had ever met, from his five-eight height to his 172 pounds. From his dirt-brown eyes and hair and completely unreadable complexion to his name. No one in our program ever would’ve given a character—protagonist or peripheral—a name like Jimmy. It was too ordinary. Too forgettable. Too obviously everyman. Not that there weren’t stories full of everymen. All of us had read workshop stories about woodcutters named Rex and factory men named Simeon. But a name like Jimmy was way too on the nose.

  He was probably sleeping on the train, something he did in just about every building and outdoor landmark of campus during the only residency he attended. He was a greedy, desperate sleeper, adjectives we would never have paired with sleep if we hadn’t met Jimmy. It was like he had gone his entire life before campus without closing his eyes for more than a moment or two, and had to spend the rest of his life making up for it. When any of us spotted him curled into the fetal position on a bench at the back of an empty lecture hall or slumped against a tree out on the main lawn, it was impossible not to notice how active he made what seemed dormant and passive when anyone else did it. He slept like a screaming baby heading openmouthed toward a nipple, or a runner sucking water down at the end of a long race.

  As strange as it was, his habit of impromptu naps is not what we remember when we think about him now. It’s that whenever he was awake, he was writing. Not doodling or taking notes about the lectures or a novel he was readin
g that he thought he might learn something from, but writing. Like he had just then come up with some million-dollar-story idea. He wrote even more urgently than he slept. None of us could understand it, watching him. The next six months would be filled with deadlines and late and early hours spent making them. Those days on campus were supposed to be spent girding yourself, giving you the tools you would need to make the stories you submitted at those deadlines better, worth something. If he only wanted time to write, he should’ve just applied for a MacDowell fellowship.

  We were jealous, of course. Because even as we nudged one another, passing him nose-deep in a cracked faux-leather journal that never seemed to run out of pages, we knew that, for all our undergrad awards and Pushcart Prize nominations and contest honorable mentions, the way he spent his time meant that Jimmy was the only one among us who could call himself a real writer across those ten days that we knew him.

  * * *

  Though none of us could figure out the elements at work in the chemistry between Hannah and Leslie, the story of how they met was legendary. It was on the first day of workshop, the morning after Jimmy woke up on the train ten minutes after it had stopped, the interior lights already dimmed, having made himself into so tiny a human ball that even the conductor didn’t notice him. And he saw for the first time that dark at the top of New England is completely different from dark in rural Michigan.

  After all three of the airport and train shuttles had landed safely on campus and all the students who had driven, carpoolers and solo missions alike, were accounted for. After Jimmy had managed to convince the ticket booth operator to let him use the back-office phone to call a local cab to take him to campus, having missed the shuttle and not being in possession of a cell phone. After all eighty-seven of us from all four active classes, including all seventeen of us first-years, plus the fifth, graduating class, had checked in and collected the keys that would unlock our square, stuffy dorm rooms, which were sticky with an uncountable number of paint jobs and lit by bare lightbulbs that stank of 1960s mental institutions. After syrupy wine and limp vegetables dipped in runny ranch dressing at the welcome reception at the student center. After late-night I made it calls to loved ones, conducted by pacing silhouettes outside the dorm buildings with imperfect reception, and the fitful sleep of people who have traveled all day only to end up in unfamiliar surroundings and scratchy, starched bedding intended for much younger people. After morning showers in communal bathrooms so grimy they required flip-flops, and too-hot coffee that was already stale even as it steamed out of the steel industrial thermoses, and chewy tater tots and flabby pancakes. It was finally time for the first workshop of the first day and, more important, time to put faces with stories and the names that had been written across the top of them.

  Six weeks before the start of each residency we were supposed to send eleven hard copies of the story we wanted workshopped to the MFA office on campus—one for each of the other nine students in our workshop and one for each of the two teachers leading it. About three weeks before everyone was due on campus, when just enough time had passed since we had sent copies of our stories off that the anxiety and uncertainty about them had dimmed to a manageable level, we each got a package in return, filled with copies of the nine stories that the other students in our workshop had sent in. Some of us tore into the stories right away—as eager to engage with others’ work as we were to improve our own—and some of us didn’t read each story until the night before it was workshopped. What was uniform across the arrival of these packages was that they reminded us that our own work was arriving on other doorsteps across the country, the closest most of us had ever come to being published.

  Normally there were two teachers for each workshop of ten students. Each student had one designated professor for the semester that followed the on-campus residency, with whom they would establish a reading list before leaving campus and to whom, on the first of each month, they would send twenty pages of new fiction, twenty pages of revised fiction, and annotations on two of the five books they’d read that month. Each professor had five students per semester, and because you can’t do a workshop with only five writers, each professor and his five students was paired with a second writerly cell, for a combined workshop of ten students and two professors. Though it wasn’t stated in any of the promotional literature on the program or acknowledged in any formal way, it seemed clear to anyone beyond their second residency that teachers were paired because of how in or out of sync their teaching philosophies were. And the more extreme or prescriptive a teacher’s philosophy was, the likelier it would be that their partner’s philosophy would be the complete and utter opposite of their own. You can’t have two highly esteemed adults telling you with any sort of authority that adverbs and exclamation points are strictly forbidden, because there is no such thing as a rule that fiction cannot transcend. But you can have two adults at the front of the classroom agreeing that if you break chronology, there should be a good reason for it, and it should add a narrative element, and that stakes are generally a good thing to have in a story if you want readers to keep turning pages. The students who were in workshops with harmonious professors almost always became frustrated by the extent to which their professors ganged up against them, creating a combined authority it was impossible to overrule. They loved hearing about the sometimes acrimonious sidebars that teachers in disagreement had to take. Meanwhile, students in the workshops with warring teachers often grew tired of leaving each class totally confused, after two of their favorite writers had offered completely contradictory advice on how to better their work. We all loved the idea that there might be one perfect answer to the problems in our stories, and made the students in the workshops with simpatico teachers tell us more about the consensuses that had been reached.

  Lucas White enjoyed a brief period of campus-wide notoriety just after our second residency when he illustrated a series of celebrity death matches between professors on campus based on the rules or maxims they were known for. The outcome of each match was determined by the number of master works the application of each professor’s rules could be found in. Though brilliant, the graphic novel that the matches amounted to was far too controversial to publish, but lived online and as attachments in our emails for years after we graduated.

  Leslie and Hannah’s workshop was the first of its kind at Fielding, because it was the first ten-student workshop led by only one instructor, Professor Sam Pearl, who, with a name like that, could never have been anything but a writer or actor. This hadn’t been planned. Professor Pearl was originally paired with Johanna Green, a short story writer twenty years his junior, but her widowed mother had died suddenly two weeks before residency and, being an only child, she had no one to pawn the estate-settling responsibilities off on, and pulled out of the term.

  While it was generally understood that even six students would have been too many for a single thinking mind to attend with any rigor, it was also understood that if there was one person who could manage it, it was Professor Pearl. The long-standing director of the program, he had written one novel in the seventies to such great acclaim that it was still in print. Originally published in Spanish, the English translation, Cactus and Dust, was required reading in high schools across the country. It was impossible to read the final lines without tears blurring the words, and many of us could still remember the first time we had. A good half of us who had taken Spanish in college to fulfill a language requirement had done so in the vain, naïve hope that we could learn enough Spanish in a single semester to read the book in its original language. It was set in Mexico, where Pearl was from.