Honestly, We Meant Well

by Grant Ginder

Suddenly, Stavros thumps against the door.

  “You’re going to miss your ferry,” he says.

  She emerges from the bathroom and finds him standing in the living room. He’s draped his jacket over the card table and loosened his tie. In his left hand, he holds a small paper bag.

  “Keep the shirt,” he tells her. “It looks better on you, anyway.”

  “You’re lying.” She makes a final adjustment to the sleeves, pushing them up so they cuff just above her elbows. “What’s in the bag?”

  “I made you a sandwich. Tomato and cheese and a little bit of ham.”

  “Stavros—”

  “What? You might get hungry.”

  She knows she won’t, but she takes it anyway.

  “Thank you,” she says.

  “Come on, I’ll give you a ride to the boat.”

  His car is parked on the street, and when she ducks into the passenger side the heat is assaulting; even through her jeans, the seat scorches the backs of her legs. She stuffs the paper bag into her purse, which she rests on her lap. Then she rolls down the window and drapes her arm outside.

  “Put that up,” Stavros says, starting the car. “I’ll turn on the AC.”

  “I will in a second, once it stops blasting hot air.”

  He looks at her for a moment.

  “That necklace,” he says. “I’ve never seen you wear jewelry before.”

  “It’s new,” she says. She doesn’t know why she lies. When she recalls this moment in ten years, and then again in twenty, she still won’t know why she lied.

  Stavros shifts into first and pulls away from the curb.

  “It looks old.”

  “It’s not old—it’s just cheap.”

  The air from the vents begins to cool and, feeling it flush against her face, Eleni reaches down to crank up the window.

  “Stavros,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know. I’m sorry if I disappointed you. If I am disappointing you.”

  He banks the car around a corner and doesn’t say anything. Then, releasing his grip on the gear stick, he takes her left hand and brings it to his lips.

  He says, “You couldn’t, koritsi mou. Not even if you tried.”

  * * *

  In the corner of the conference room there’s an essential oil diffuser, and every sixty seconds it burps up a cloud of eucalyptus-scented mist. She knows this because she times them—the burps, that is—watching a clock on the wall as it counts down to the next fragrant emission. Ten minutes ago, they left her alone, they being Oskar, a lawyer named Hugo, and a tall, striking blonde in a black pantsuit—a woman called Freja who, from the way she whispered directives to the two men, Eleni gathered is their boss. Someone had forgotten a signature page in the closing documents—this is what Freja explained to her with clipped English and a joyless smile—and now they had to go find it. Why it required three people to retrieve a single piece of paper baffled Eleni, but she didn’t dare ask questions; instead, she begged Freja not to worry, going so far as to apologize for any inconvenience that she might be causing, as if the forgetfulness of Lugn Escapes’ staff was somehow her fault. Freja didn’t correct her. Instead, she played along: she waved away Eleni’s apologies as if she were too gracious to accept them, then offered her something to drink.

  “A little something to hold you over,” she said. “While we fix this … mistake.”

  Eleni looked at Oskar, who winked.

  “Uh, sure,” she said. “That sounds nice.”

  She was presented with an octagonal plastic bottle filled with a silt-toned sludge. Before drinking it, she tried reading the label on the bottle’s back (she was, at this point, alone), but to no avail—the ingredients, along with whatever else the label advertised, were written in Swedish. She tasted it, swishing the concoction around like a mouthful of pudding before promptly spitting it out, back into the bottle. She wanted to like it, but as she searched through her purse for some gum, she couldn’t think of a time when she had tasted something so awful. Compost, mixed with gull shit and spoiled chocolate milk.

  The diffuser hiccups, and Eleni stands. A few minutes ago, she thought the smell was relaxing—luxurious, even, in the way she imagines most day spas to be. Now, it strikes her as overpowering; tears gather in the corners of her eyes. Trying to escape it, she moves to the opposite corner of the room, where there’s a large window overlooking the street and, beyond it, Syntagma Square. She’s been here, in this building, before—she recognized it as soon as she stepped into the lobby. Alpha Bank has offices on the second floor, and when she worked as a research assistant for Maragos, he used to send her here to deposit checks. Now, though, she’s higher up—on the twenty-seventh floor—and as she looks down she thinks of how she’s never seen Athens from this vantage. Pressing her nose against the window, she thinks about what color she’ll paint her new apartment once she moves in. She thinks about what life will be like when she doesn’t have to worry about plumbing or lost dry cleaning. When she doesn’t have to wear Stavros’s old blue shirts.

  “I’m sorry about the delay.” She turns to see Oskar, standing at the entrance to the conference room. He’s wearing the same white dress shirt that he wore when he came to the Alectrona—or, at the very least, a similar version of it—except now the sleeves are rolled up a bit higher; instead of just the edges of his tattoo, Eleni can now see the final six inches. A bird, she thinks it is, its beak tangled in a thicket of thorns. In his left hand, he holds an iPad, encased in a black leather portfolio. Raising it, he says, “In the meantime, I thought you might like to see this.”

  “What is it?”

  He smirks. “A present.”

  “Can you just tell me what it is?”

  “How impatient we are today!” Oskar slides the iPad across the conference table. “They’re mock-ups. I thought you’d get a kick out of seeing how we’re going to renovate the property.”

  Eleni looks at the first image, and as she does she feels her heart clawing at her throat: the Alectrona is unrecognizable. Not just remodeled, but entirely gone. In the old structure’s place now stands a collection of single-story bungalows, laced together by a fern-lined path. In the mock-ups that follow, she sees blond women in bathrobes, sipping tea as they dangle their ankles in warm baths; Pilates instructors, realigning sets of thin hips on a bamboo floor; moneyed couples laughing, enjoying the brown sludge she just spat out. And then, finally, at the end of the road where Christos taught her to ride a bike, a sign: LUGN ESCAPES: RETURN. RELAX. REDISCOVER.

  “You said you were going to renovate it,” she says, looking up, “not demolish it.”

  “I think demolish is a pretty strong word. We’re just building something else.”

  “Yes, by destroying the thing that came before it.”

  He looks at her strangely, but not unkindly. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I guess I’m having a difficult time understanding what you expected would happen. When we first met you seemed so eager to get rid of the place.”

  Eleni’s cheeks flush—suddenly, she feels very foolish. She knows that he’s right: she’s finally doing the thing she’s been waiting so long to do. She shouldn’t be concerned about what happens in the Alectrona—nor, in a matter of minutes, will she have a right to be. Both of those facts should elicit within her a profound and palpable joy. And yet, all she can seem to focus on is the sound a wrecking ball makes as it collides against a wall. The pile of rubble and debris that follows, wrapped in the phantom smell of dust.

  “This is where my room was,” she says, pointing to a bungalow with a bright green roof. “And this is where my father’s room was. That’s where he and my mother slept, when they were alive.”

  Oskar cocks his head to get a better look at the image.

  “Ah, yes,” he says. “The Gökotta.”

  “The what?”

  “The Gökotta. It’s a Swedish practice of rising early to hear birdsong.” He says this sl
owly, satisfied with the description. “We’ll sell breakfast goods there. Seed bars and acai bowls. Smoothies, too, like the one you drank.”

  “I didn’t drink it.”

  “You should—it’s very good for you. Delicious, too.”

  “It tastes like a dirty puddle.”

  “That’s just the raw parsnips. You learn to love them.”

  He smiles, the same smile he gave her when they first met and he was appraising the Alectrona. Looking at him now, though, she sees something different. Whereas earlier he had struck her as mildly charming, now he seems slick. The sort of person who could weaponize a wink and bend life to his will; who spent summers in places that were cool and winters in places that were warm; who referred to those seasons not just as set times of a given year, but also as verbs that he owned—actions existing in his past, his present, and his bright, unblemished future.

  Eleni says, “I think I should go.”

  “But we haven’t even—”

  “I know, and we’re not going to.”

  “Eleni.”

  He reaches a hand out to her shoulder, but she ducks away.

  Grabbing her purse off the conference room table, she says, “I’m leaving.”

  Dean

  August 1

  Aegina

  He finds her on the Alectrona’s back patio, staring at her laptop at a table overlooking the pool. She’s built a makeshift desk for herself: at her right are two open books, stacked on top of each other; at her left is a forgotten cup of coffee, along with the old Rubik’s Cube she plays with whenever she’s trying to think. From the door where he’s standing he watches her for a moment, marveling at the way she manages to re-create herself wherever she goes: this desk, or some iteration of it, he’s seen in at least four different cities on just as many continents. His wife is, above all else, a creature of habit. For all her exploring and searching, her summers spent among the dusty ruins of forgotten worlds, one of her most remarkable talents is this—an ability to create patterns and routines, to suss out order from any breed of chaos. Setting the Rubik’s Cube down, she leans closer to the laptop’s screen, an inch from the computer. Still watching her, Dean smiles: twice now he’s told her to get a stronger prescription for her glasses, but on both occasions she shooed him away.

  “One of these days you’re going to fry your eyes,” he remembers saying to her the last time.

  “So, let me.” Her nose was basically touching the screen. “At least when I’m blind I’ll be able to say I saw life up close.”

  Above her is a trellis—a lattice of splintered wood and nails that supports, along with two empty pots, an enormous bougainvillea vine. Looking away from Sue Ellen, he studies it for a moment: the way its blossoms cluster in tight bouquets, how the midmorning light gets tangled in its knots. For the first time since they arrived, there’s a breeze—finally, Dean doesn’t feel as though he’s being swallowed by the heat—and during one of its stronger moments it knocks away a few of the vine’s petals, sending them spiraling toward the ground. One of them, the smallest, lands on Sue Ellen’s left shoulder, at the exact spot where the neck of her T-shirt sags, revealing a patch of pink skin. She ignores it—she goes on staring at the laptop, scrutinizing whatever image has caught her attention—and after a minute more of watching her, Dean approaches and plucks it away.

  “Hey,” he says, and hands her the petal.

  “Jesus, you scared me.” She pinches the bloom between two fingers and turns it over once. “And hey yourself.”

  He takes a sip of her coffee, which has grown cold.

  “What’s doin’?”

  “Working. Or, trying to, at least.” She stretches her arms over her head. “You?”

  “Same.”

  This is only partially true: a half hour ago he was, in fact, trying to work, though he suspects his efforts were noticeably less admirable than his wife’s. Earlier that morning, he had set up his laptop in the Alectrona’s dining room, whereupon he announced, to no one but himself, his intention to write. Before he acted on that intention, though, he had to check his email. In April, he had gotten word that a small liberal arts college in the Northeast had assigned The Light of Our Shadows to all of its incoming freshmen. This was a disappointment: Why was it always the teeniest of institutions that were putting his books on their syllabi? What did he have to do to be required reading at, say, Michigan State? His agent tried to convince him otherwise. Sales beget more sales, he had told Dean, and if his next royalty statement didn’t prove that fact, then, by God, he would eat his hat. And so, after breakfast, Dean had fired up his laptop and signed into his email. Surely the statement would have been sent to him by now, he figured, along with whatever other news had managed to trickle in from the outside world. This had been a mistake. There was no royalty statement, no sign of how many dollars he had added to his name. Instead, there was a note from one Madison Assendorp—a character claiming to be the new bookkeeper at the agency. In it, Ms. Assendorp explained that she had just taken over the tracking of royalties last month, and that, given the volume of work before her, statements would be arriving two to three weeks later than usual. Irritated, Dean fired off a quick reply—Lovely—and then decided it was probably safer to just google himself instead. It had been a few weeks since he reread the reviews of his book, and he figured he could use a little pick-me-up.

  Somewhere around the thirteenth page of results, though, after he’d reread raves from the Argus Leader (“Provocative, engaging, and—most importantly—humane”) and the Idaho Statesman (“A thing of breathtaking beauty. This is Wright at the top of his craft”) he began to feel anxious. What if he didn’t have another book in him? What if he’d said all he had to say? His own experiences, after all, were hardly literary. He was a guy, a dude. Caucasian, and heterosexual, and from Abbottsville, Ohio—a town whose defining characteristic, at least while Dean was growing up, was its ability to breeze through national crises, be they economic, social, or cultural, unscathed. This changed in the eighties, when the food-processing factory outside of town closed, and half the men in Abbottsville lost their jobs, and bowling leagues were replaced by opioids and malt liquor. By then Dean had left, had trucked out west to Berkeley, where, instead of experiencing the dereliction of middle America, he was reading books—just books. Even his politics are uninteresting—he’s liberal, with digestible socialist tendencies, and any conservative opinions he does have tend to be vague and innocuous. A suspicion of trigger warnings and a preference for purebred dogs—that sort of thing. He supposes he could write about being a teenager again, but that feels a little dicey. The goal is to be taken seriously, and he doesn’t want people to think he’s dipping his toe into YA.

  Opening up a new search window, he typed in a few terms: book ideas, ways to rewrite Ulysses, and then, finally, painkiller withdrawal. Yes, he left Abbottsville without any plans to ever return, but did that mean he couldn’t write about the place from the safety of the West Coast? Did that mean he couldn’t infuse that particular brand of poor, American suffering with the insight and experience he’s gained from, well, living somewhere better? One of his best friends from high school—an electrician’s son named Bo Reynolds—died from an Oxycontin overdose. Dean had, in fact, attended the funeral. He didn’t last long—twenty minutes into the reception, after struggling through conversations about things like duck hunting, Paul Ryan, and automotive repair, he’d slipped out the back door and drove to a Burger King. There, sitting in his rental car, he ate two Whoppers and cried—because of Bo, yes, but also because of the overwhelming mix of relief and guilt he felt for having escaped. Now he wonders: Is there a story there? Would he—could he—write about Bo, as Bo? From a market perspective, it wasn’t a terrible idea: white poverty was chic now. Readers—the same ones who read Wallace, Franzen, and Knausgaard—were ravenous for accounts of the forgotten middle class, that marooned segment of the population which, despite its basic whiteness, they now regarded with the same ex
otic fascination that they had typically reserved for ethnographies of cannibalistic Guineans or fundamentalist Mormons. Still, when he set his fingers on the keyboard—when he was confronted with the despotic brightness of a new, blank page—he realized he couldn’t. Instead, all he could think about was the life that he, Dean, had managed to avoid: Bo, and his pain, and his opioids. His nights wondering how the American Dream had eluded him and his mornings spent vomiting and shitting out his addiction—the one thing that, before it killed him, managed to provide him with momentary relief.

  Sue Ellen’s still reaching her arms up, and now he reaches down and sets his hands against her ribs. She flinches, and he does his best to ignore it.

  “It’s quiet here without Will asking us if he should work at Friends of the Sea Otters,” he says.

  “Our son the sailor. Who knew?”

  “Should we have let him go?” Dean releases her and takes another sip from her coffee. “I mean, he went on a boat to some island with a total stranger.”

  “You don’t think going on a boat to some island with a total stranger sounds a little romantic?”

  “No, and I don’t think you do, either.”

  Sue Ellen considers this for a moment.

  She says, “No, you’re right, it sounds like hell.” She takes the coffee back from him. “But I think at his age a person’s notions of romance are a little … I don’t know, less tainted.”

  “Tainted by what—reality?”

  “That, and the inevitability of being disappointed.”

  She swirls what’s left in the cup and lets it settle before drinking it.

  “This is cold,” she says. And then: “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—”

  “It’s fine.” He scratches a mosquito bite on the back of his neck. Conversations have become like this, like minefields. They’ll be skipping along at a clip that feels just close enough to normal when a word will suddenly carry a new and treacherous connotation. Then, in a blink, they’ll find themselves retracing their steps, picking through scraps and collecting broken pieces.