We Wish You Luck Page 8

  What Carter and Patrick had no way of figuring out that night to report it back to us was that the problem wasn’t just that Jimmy had seen a piece of Simone she never intended to show anybody. Worked actively, in fact, to hide. Though that was certainly part of it. There was something in Jimmy’s poetry—some wild, living thing—that scared people. Jimmy’s writing was everything he wasn’t. It was graceful and confident. Effortless. It grabbed people’s attention immediately and wouldn’t let go. Maybe the problem Simone had with him was that he was too good. Or maybe it was the kind of good he was. It wasn’t just that the rhythm and flow of the language felt as natural and effortless as waves breaking on sand, or that each word he chose was just the right amount fresh, unexpected, but not so strange that you couldn’t picture or feel right away what he was talking about. It was the moment of realizing some private little thought that had always made you lonely—the kind that seems to fall from empty air on hungover, rainy Sundays spent in bed, or in the middle of the night, when you wake up running through the list of people you love the most, ticking off all the ways they might be in trouble—was actually as common as speeding tickets and spring allergies. He put a finger on all the things that you had spent your entire life discovering were true but were only just starting to try to find the words for. There was power in writing that good, and authority in being able to feel your way through the world like that, even if it was the only authority he had. It was one of the few great equalizers in life, a kind of authority or ability that doesn’t correlate with how attractive you are or how much money you have or even how smart you are otherwise. The problem is that the people whose power is derived from those other sources, the impeccably fashionable, connected, pedigreed Simone among them, want to keep that power for themselves, not realizing that there has never been less of a zero sum game than storytelling, or someone you have never met reading your own brain and heart back to you. There are as many different stories and feelings and thoughts and ways to tell them as there are freckles on all the redheads who have ever lived.

  And someone like Simone Babbot should have known that.

  We understood this part of why Simone reacted to Jimmy’s cough the way she did because it’s something every writer, at every level, every aspirant and every National Book Award winner, rubs up against at some point. Just after a perfect page of prose catches your breath in admiration and changes the way you see the world for one bright, blistering second, it makes you want to write one yourself, to re-create the world for someone else.

  It’s not that we wanted our colleagues or classmates to fail, or that our professors wanted their students to—we liked one another for reasons outside of proximity and shared interest, enough to send the occasional email in between residencies, or even grab a drink if one of us was passing through another’s hometown on a business trip or college reunion. When Tammy’s father died at ninety-seven, a month after our third residency, and Lucas and Robbie caravaned to Virginia for the funeral, meeting at a rest stop in Ohio, Tammy almost didn’t recognize them when they stepped into the vestibule of the church, eyes freshly Visine’d, unnatural looking in their ill-fitting accountant suits, even if they wore them every day in the Real World. We like to think that at least some of the patrons of the midtown Starbucks where Mimi and Jordan met when he was in town on business so he could look over her prenup the fall before her wedding speculated that they might be a couple. When we pointed out to Mimi that prenups aren’t exactly what district attorneys do, she scoffed at how little we knew.

  There were also more selfish considerations to take into account, outside of friendship or loyalty. Any one of Fielding’s students or faculty landing a glossy book deal or prestigious award made us all look good. Not to mention the simple, selfish fact that it’s more pleasant to read good writing than bad, and we spent at least as many program hours reading one another’s work as we did our own. It’s just that to be the best—which we all wanted, on some level, to be—someone else had to be the worst. Not to mention all the people who would have to be worse, and there was no applying either of those adjectives to Jimmy’s work, no matter what you thought of him otherwise, or how deeply his silent demeanor unsettled you.

  Or how badly you wanted him not to have heard what he had.

  * * *

  Simone didn’t hesitate long before acting on whatever reservations or regrets she had about her interaction with Carter, and what Jimmy might’ve made of it. Two nights later at dinner, the conversational thread that weaved itself through all the tables in the cafeteria was not the stray dog two third-years were trying to domesticate in their dorm rooms, or the keg that the graduating married accountants had apparently ordered for the evening’s festivities. It wasn’t even the peanut-allergy scare that lunch had witnessed, a close enough call to make even Lucas and Robbie go quiet. It was the poor first-term student who had been completely eviscerated in that day’s new mixed-genre workshop.

  Gabe Marcus said that not only the student in question but all nine of the other students in the workshop had gone directly to their rooms, forgoing lunch entirely, too rattled by the class for massive, salad bar portions of poorly prepared luxury foods. Sally Windsor said that she saw Gene Witter, Simone’s co-teacher, shaking his head and talking to himself on the way back from class, and that it looked like he needed a drink. What we all knew for certain without anyone having to confirm it for us was that the professor had been Simone and the student had been Jimmy.

  According to the stories the cafeteria told, it was the most substantial and fiercely held opinion Simone had ever contributed to the class. She waited until the exact moment the last of the ten students in her workshop took their seat around the table and the door had been shut to begin. When she did, she didn’t even make any pretense about wanting the workshop on the pieces Jimmy had submitted to be a discussion or a conversation. It was a lecture, if you wanted to be generous; a takedown, if you didn’t. The strange thing was, Jimmy was a poetry student, and Simone was the fiction expert in the class. It almost seemed rude to poor Gene, who everyone knew was due for a relapse, to take the authority on his form away from him.

  Despite the number of reasons she listed for why “the poet” should put his poems in a drawer and never take them out again, and the intensity of her dislike for his poems, she had clearly read them a number of times—her critiques were very specific. Somehow the fact that she kept calling him “the poet” instead of by his name made it seem crueler and more brutal—like he wasn’t even a person to her—even if she was only following the rules. She was very efficient in her work, almost cheerful in the confidence with which she listed off point after point that she wanted to make, like a flight attendant going through a safety checklist before takeoff.

  Apparently she was smiling the whole time.

  Maybe it’s the smile that makes some of us think that this is where it all began, instead of with that cough. Like maybe Simone enjoyed reestablishing who had the advantage in this fight. Or felt emboldened by how easy it was to do. Maybe the horror in the ten little faces in front of her—eleven, counting Gene’s—was no match for the satisfying, if fleeting, confirmation that whatever Jimmy had discovered about what kind of person she was underneath all the poise, and whatever he was or wasn’t capable of on the page, she was still the one in charge, and her voice was still the one that mattered.

  None of us has ever spoken to Simone about any of this, and probably never will, so we’ll never know for sure. And while all fourteen of us did our part in cobbling together the bits of the workshop we do know, Jimmy was the only first-term student who was actually there. We can’t be sure how much of what the cafeteria had to say to each of us was true and what was merely speculation or hyperbole, but we do know that this was the only term the school offered the mixed-genre workshop it had hyped so proudly in all the program literature leading up to that term, and no one disputes that the Jimmy debacle is the reason why.


  Mimi Kim had carpooled to campus from Brooklyn with a second-year named Danny, resourceful enough to avoid public transport even as a first-termer. Danny was the only person in Jimmy’s workshop any of us knew, even slightly. When he stopped by Mimi’s room after the now infamous workshop to pick up the snacks she had been squirreling away from the cafeteria for their journey home in two days, he said it was because he wanted to get a jump on packing, but Mimi said his hands were shaking. She ushered him in and discovered he was more rattled by what Simone had said after Jimmy’s turn at workshop ended, at which point the critique of a short story by a fourth-term fiction writer began.

  The short story had a happy ending, Danny reported. It was all tied up in a neat little bow, so that the insufferable, controlling boyfriend of the protagonist not only lost the breakup, he lost his job and most of his friends because of what a dick he had been to his girlfriend. All this happened in the nice, tidy span of a week, even though he’d presumably been a dick his whole life, and certainly for the three years the couple had been dating. While Simone liked the story considerably more than she had liked Jimmy’s poems, she had a problem with the ending.

  “Look,” she had said, “we all like a happy ending. Something that might lead us to believe that we’ll all get what we have coming to us, and that things tend to work out in the end. But unfortunately, that’s not always the way life works, is it?”

  It had seemed, Danny said, like she actually wanted them to confirm this for her here, but she went on before they could.

  “Life is messy,” she continued. “Life is complicated. And while it might feel good, in the moment, to have things work out in the tidy way they so rarely do in life, you have to trust that your readers can handle more nuance than that. More complications. More honesty. Some people hate ambiguous endings, or stories left open-ended, or downright tragic endings, but a truly honest story will find its readers. People want the truth, not a lesson.”

  She stopped here to survey her work and evaluate from the looks on the faces in front of her if her point had been sufficiently made. She must’ve decided it hadn’t been, because she hit her note again, as certain in what she was saying as ever.

  “Fiction is meant to capture the reality of what it means to be a human being, which as we know entails all kinds of contradictions and complications. There are no true villains or heroes. The villains in novels don’t know they’re the villains, or don’t think they are. Readers want the gray area and all the uncomfortable questions that live there and the fact that things almost never work out the way we want them to. Sometimes the good guys do lose, or realize they weren’t as good as they thought they were. Sometimes the evil corporation wins the lawsuit. They don’t catch the whale at the end of Moby-Dick. The Great Gatsby dies and the people who kill him go on with their lives as if nothing happened. And we know all too well what happens to poor Lenny.”

  She gave the class a second here to recall it themselves.

  “There’s a reason why these endings strike such a chord in readers, and why these books have lasted. Because people recognize the truth in them, however much we might wish we didn’t. And capturing that truth is what real, literary fiction is about. That’s what good fiction is meant to achieve.”

  By then their faces must’ve reflected back how befuddled they still were, Danny said, but she didn’t give up on convincing them even then.

  “If there’s one thing I want all of you to remember, it’s this. Not how to create a lasting, memorable image or the importance of striking every hint of cliché from your work. But this: achieving what fiction can achieve at its best sometimes means embracing an unhappy truth over a happy, naïve lie.”

  And in this way, Simone got what she wanted. Because none of us has ever forgotten that she said this.

  Mimi had the same distant fondness for Jimmy that the rest of us did, and asked, as soon as Danny’s tale ended, his hands still too unsteady to successfully arrange the considerable number of bags Mimi had for him, what Jimmy’s reaction to all this had been.

  To this, Danny shook his head. Jimmy had stopped listening. His eyes never left the table immediately in front of him after Simone had given her final word on his poems. It was clear to everyone in the class that he had had his fill of program wisdom by then. Which is too bad. Because of all the pieces of this story that we’ve put together after the fact, the easiest detail to pin down was that it was clear that even during that second half of the workshop, Simone was still speaking mostly to him.

  * * *

  That first dinner after Jimmy’s workshop, we didn’t recap the nastiest, most horrifying bits of the debacle again and again out of gossipy instincts, or at least not only on account of them. Our own work was implicated in it, too. If Jimmy’s poems weren’t good enough to be above this sort of public humiliation—every writer’s worst nightmare—none of our work was. So while we exchanged the pieces of information we had each managed to gather, since that’s what people do with information of this sort, given enough time, it was also a sort of unconscious search for some detail about the exchange that made it feel less personal to the rest of us. No one was surprised when Robbie, who didn’t bother to swallow the bite of truffle meatball in his mouth before speaking, was the first one to say out loud what everybody else was thinking, if in somewhat less delicate terms than we had been thinking it.

  “Well, look, I mean, as brutal as this all sounds, and as bad as I feel for the guy, isn’t this just how things go here?”

  Robbie always seemed five degrees harsher when Lucas wasn’t around, as if trying to compensate for his absence, and Lucas was missing from dinner.

  We were all tempted to nod our heads even if we never would’ve said it ourselves—yes, yes, everything is fine, the workshop process is working as it should. If what had happened to Jimmy was simply standard operating procedure, rather than a personal attack, it meant that the fact that we had been spared similar fates was a credit to our work. It meant we didn’t have to think about it anymore, or consider the darker, unspoken implications of the whispers, or even acknowledge just how subjective this art form we were all sacrificing our time to really was, or the fact that, even if we did work hard enough to become as good as Jimmy, there might be someone around to deny us our accolades. Most of us were ready to let Robbie’s words be the final, accepted consensus on the matter, but Jenny Ritter, who was in the habit of asking her two- and five-year-olds what they meant by the vague or nonsensical things they said, aware, by then, of the habit young children have of repeating things they’ve heard in a totally different context, pushed Robbie.

  “What do you mean, That’s how things go? I don’t know about the rest of you, but this sounds like it was a hell of a lot more intense than anything that’s happened in my workshop.”

  This was not the first time Jenny asked Robbie to clarify what he meant, and you could hear his impatience when he answered: “Like, that’s what workshop is—a critique of your work. You know, if you can’t take the heat . . . right?”

  It was clear even to Jenny, who almost always had a follow-up question, that when Robbie said this he meant it rhetorically. With the exception of Jenny, we all tended to nod our heads blandly at the empty or throwaway things he said, which was generally good enough for Robbie. And there was still the fact that we wanted him to be right, and for Jimmy’s problem to be his alone and something the rest of us didn’t have to worry about. But instead of the nod Robbie would have settled for, Jamie Brigham, who had been less vocal at meals since Bridget threw her milk at him, said something that struck us as strange as he was saying it, but seems like the only thing that could have been said by now.

  “Well,” he said, “this seems to me like a case of rain.”

  It was the first of many times he would say just the right thing at just the right time, an ongoing attempt to make up for his initial misstep with Bridget, who he quickly learned
was smarter and more interesting than his first impression of her had measured. It sounded right even when he said it, even though we had no idea what he meant by it at the time. We sometimes remember him being part of conversations that he wasn’t present for, because we wish he had been. None of us can remember now what he did or where in the Real World he lived, though he wasn’t brooding enough to try to keep this sort of information from anyone, or to try to make the answers to those questions sound more glamorous or novel than they were. He’s the only one besides the girls and Jimmy not to graduate with our class, so he’s not around to ask. We figure he must’ve been one of the married accountants who actually liked his job—was good at it, and took satisfaction from the order and sense of the numbers he worked with.

  Robbie looked over at Jenny Ritter to see if she was going to hold Jamie to the same standard of clarity she had held him to. When it was clear she wasn’t going to, he only shook his head and did it himself. “Okay, how do you figure that?”