Honestly, We Meant Well

by Grant Ginder

  “I don’t know what that means,” he says.

  “You drank your horns. It means you’re wasted. It’s just an expression.”

  “Yeah, well, whose fault is that,” Will tells him. “Anyway, I don’t speak Greek even when I’m sober, and like I said, I’m going to bed. So.”

  “Oh, come on, don’t be so sensitive.” Dio’s voice warms again, and now he grins. “Sit back down and let me teach you some.”

  “Forget it.” Will shakes his head. He’s tired of smiles and winks and tiny nods, he decides. Of all the insignificant ways that over the past twelve hours Dio has managed to keep him hoping, even when he suspects that all hope has been lost.

  “Please?” Dio asks.

  “I appreciate the offer, but it’s a lost cause. My mother tried to teach me but it was useless. To me, it just sounds like a bunch of people screaming at each other.”

  Dio props himself up on his elbows. “Repeat after me: kaliméra.”

  “I know how to say kaliméra.”

  “So, you can speak Greek. Now, try this: eímai amerikanós.”

  Will folds his arms. “Eímai amerikanós.”

  “Close,” Dio says. “Close, but the k is a bit softer. Try it again.”

  He does, but the syllables don’t work; they get tangled up somewhere between his lips and his tongue and emerge as a pile of mush.

  “See? Pointless. Can I go to bed now?”

  Dio laughs.

  “Don’t get frustrated. Here—” He reaches forward and touches Will’s face, placing a finger on each side of his mouth. “Do you mind?”

  Will shakes his head.

  “Okay, good—now try again.”

  He takes a breath, and Dio gently pushes on the corners of his cheeks. Then he begins; as he speaks Dio presses harder, manipulating the shape of his mouth, the movement of his tongue. It works—for the first time, Will feels he’s actually speaking Greek. Except, he’s not able to finish the sentence. Before he reaches the end, Dio has his lips pressed against Will’s, coaxing his mouth open, catching the words as they tumble out.

  * * *

  He can’t sleep. Each time he starts to drift he opens his eyes again to look at Dio’s body: the way the moon, glowing in the cabin’s porthole, turns his shoulder the same pale silver as the sea; the way his hair looks like it’s been carved from stone. At around three o’clock in the morning he slips out of bed and into the yacht’s main cabin. There, in the galley, he finds a chart table stacked with maps and a GPS locator; two framed pictures of Klaus holding just-caught fish; and, against the opposite wall, a set of shelves lined with books. They’re technical volumes, mostly, guides for sailing in places like the Caribbean and the Côte d’Azur. Among them, though, are a few novels—a German translation of The Alchemist, a mass-market printing of some John Grisham thriller that Will’s pretty sure he’s already read. And then, between The Magus and Travels with Charley, he spots a familiar red spine, emblazoned with his own last name. He stares at it for a moment; he wants to make sure he isn’t seeing things. Then he reaches for it. He tucks the book beneath his arm and takes it with him up to the deck.

  It’s cooler outside, and the air is fresh. It’s not until he’s sitting with his back against the mast that he realizes how stuffy it was down below. A few lights still shine along the quay, but otherwise the island sleeps. The houses that climb the hillside are now quiet; the moon casts their roofs as dark silhouettes. Will props his knees up and rests the book against them. The jacket is already worn—the upper right-hand corner of it is actually torn off—and on the title page there are stains from three drops of coffee. Still, the spine is curiously smooth and uncracked; it’s like instead of reading the novel, Klaus has been using it as a coaster.

  Now he reads the first bit, which is mostly exposition: here is a boy named Trip; here is his family, here are his friends, and here is his house. In the hands of a lesser writer, it’d be boring, prosaic stuff. Given the Dean Wright treatment, though, the chapters sing: his sentences surge with an undeniable electricity; his insights cut sudden and deep. Once again, Will succumbs to a mix of despair and wonder. He’ll never achieve this degree of genius, but at least it’s responsible for half his DNA. Somewhere around the fourth chapter, though, after a particularly graphic scene of Trip masturbating to thoughts of his fifty-year-old cello teacher, Will’s eyelids become heavy. He’s been reading for the better part of two hours, and now it’s nearly morning. He’ll head back belowdecks, he decides. He’ll take the book with him and finish it back on Aegina. Tell his father he read it, and how proud he is to be his son.

  Standing up, he stretches his arms above his head and feels a light breeze prick at his bare chest. He looks at the novel one last time, flipping through the pages, fanning himself. As he does so, though, he notices something. Two words, to be specific. Blinking at him like a pair of headlights, parked in a dense fog of sentences: Dolores Park. He stops his flipping here and looks closer. He thinks, Huh.

  Will opens the book again. He breaks its spine, and he reads:

  James held his breath as the man approached. His limbs felt as if they were floating, hovering an inch above his towel and the park’s grass. His heart beat as if it were not his own. He could see it, pounding and thrashing in his own caged chest. The man stood above him now, his broad shadow darkening the European history textbook that James had brought to read, and that he now endeavored to hide. James could smell him: sweat and patchouli, the musky scent of lust. The man cleared his throat and spoke. “I’m François,” he announced, in an accent that James would soon learn was Quebecois.

  He goes back and reads it again, and then again. It is, he soon realizes, all there: the clandestine trips to Dolores Park, the car rides to abandoned gravel parking lots: all described in his words, the prose that he labored over as a sixteen-year-old. He looks at the pages with the same detached fascination that he imagines someone who’s just had his arm ripped off looks at the stub where the limb used to be—a terrifying sense of wonder that hovers for a moment before the pain and horror set in. And then? And then. He becomes startlingly aware of how naked he is—both in the literal sense (he’s only wearing his underwear) and—worse—the figurative one. He thinks of mannequins in department store windows before the employees have gotten around to dressing them. He thinks of himself standing there, with the rest of the world gathered on the other side. He’s got nothing to cover himself up, just a bunch of fumbled seductions and stinging humiliations: instead of clothes, the horrible accuracy of his youth.

  Now committed, he reads more, his fingers leaving wet prints as he flies through the pages. He is not the entire story—The Light of Our Shadows is always billed as an ensemble drama, and the book certainly contains other plots. Between all those moments, though, is Will. The Barnes & Noble he used to cruise in Danville and the YMCA in Oakland. The parking lot outside the town hall in San Mateo, where a married councilman asked to kiss Will’s neck and then started to cry. His secrets, pinned to the pages like butterflies, wings brittle and outstretched. He thinks of what reviewers kept saying about the novel after its release. They called it a chorus, and Dean a master of voices. Yes, Will thinks, that’s right: a master of voices. The praise appeared so often—on the pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post; during an interview Dean did on NPR—that, as a joke, Chip Fieldworth went on eBay and bought Will’s father a ventriloquist’s dummy. A creepy wooden guy in a suit with a mouth that didn’t stay closed. It sat in the corner of the Wrights’ living room for two weeks, joining them for Sunday dinners and nights in front of the television. Finally, Sue Ellen said she couldn’t stand looking at it anymore and threw the doll away. Leaning against the boat’s mast, Will shakes his head. How stupid he had been for reading those reviews and not putting two and two together. For not realizing that one of the voices Dean had so adeptly mastered was his own.

  It’s nearing three o’clock in the morning, but still he forges onward, unable to stop.
Here are the protagonist Trip and his girlfriend, Belinda, having sex in the Lazy River of a water park in San Jose; here is his mother, Diane, demanding her husband watch as she chases a handful of off-market Quaaludes with a bottle of Sancerre. Then, after fifty more pages, he finds himself again—or, if not himself, then at least himself as James—riding BART. It’s a moment he doesn’t recognize; for the first time, he inhabits not one of his memories, but rather his father’s fiction, and for this he feels a momentary sense of relief. It’s an ordinary scene—James (or Will) is on the red line, his ears plugged with headphones as he rides from Embarcadero to Oakland. But then Dean pulls the rug out from under his readers: an earthquake hits, and the tunnel collapses. In total darkness, James listens as children scream and their mothers hold them close, whispering assurances. Pushing his nose to the pages, Will finishes the chapter by the faint glow of the anchor light rocking slowly above him:

  “Everything will be okay,” the mothers said, and “we’ll be home soon.” These were empty promises—above them, cracks in the tunnel were widening, and soon the bay would swallow them whole. Closing his eyes, James listened, thankful for their capacity to lie in the face of certain death. This would be his final thought: as the walls collapsed and crushed his fragile body, he would wonder whether he had lived his life with the purity of these mothers. Whether, despite the lies and the betrayals, the selfishness and the deceit, he could say that he honestly meant well.

  Then all was black.

  Will slams the book closed and looks up.

  He says, “That son of a bitch killed me off.”

  Sue Ellen

  August 2

  National Archaeological Museum, Athens

  There’s a group of teenagers huddled around a statue of Hermes, and they’re using their phones to take pictures of his dick.

  From where she’s standing, near a case of Minoan pottery, Sue Ellen watches as they snicker, zooming their lenses in and out, comparing the results of their handiwork. Had she ever done that? Not that she can remember. Or, no—maybe once, during her freshman year at Amherst, when she enrolled in her first art history class, and every Tuesday and Thursday morning became a parade of tits, testicles, and plump Renaissance asses. Thinking a bit harder, she can recall the piece that had sent her into hysterics. A Neroccio de’ Landi painting of the Madonna and Child, where the infant Christ bore a striking resemblance to her aunt Bethanne. She had pointed this out to her roommate, Elaine, and they’d spent the better part of two minutes biting their lower lips, trying to contain themselves. When the next slide held a more detailed image, though, they lost it, doubling over at the sight of Christ-cum-Bethanne’s potbelly, chunky thighs, and olive-shaped prick. After class, she had received a scolding; the professor, a humorless medievalist named Calhoun, told her that he didn’t tolerate giggling girls, and if he caught her acting so childishly again he would expel her from the lecture.

  She shaped up after that. Not because she had any respect for Calhoun—she hated the man; he looked like an iguana—but because she was insulted by the implication that she was some tittering coed, another girl who had come to Amherst for a ring instead of a degree. She committed herself to being serious and stern. Nakedness became nudity, and encounters with genitalia a sort of high-minded challenge. Once, during a trip to the Met in New York, she came across a carving of Perseus and, just to prove to herself—and to Calhoun—that she could, she stared at the hero’s penis for nearly half an hour, willing the thing into namelessness. A slab of stone, swept slick and smooth by time.

  “Falla finita!” A young woman—a teacher, Sue Ellen guesses—scolds the group and begins snatching up their phones, dropping them into a deep, black purse. “Vi comportate come i bambini.”

  Still laughing, they scatter into one of the museum’s adjoining galleries, a room dedicated to early Cycladic funerary work. Sue Ellen watches them and, once they’ve disappeared, turns her attention back to the piece of pottery she’s been pretending to inspect. It’s drab and unimpressive: a squat terra-cotta pot flanked by two vases adorned with lilies and papyrus. Listening to the shuffle of whispers around her, she pulls herself away. She links her hands loosely behind her back and glides over to the statue of Hermes. Once she’s there, the god’s belly button aligned with her nose, she digs through her pack for her reading glasses: she decides, finally, that she needs a better look.

  It’s a nice dick—she can’t deny that. Around her, the room clears of people—for a moment, she’s alone—and before she can overthink it, she reaches for her phone and snaps a picture. Maybe she’ll send it to Calhoun, she thinks, if the old lizard is still alive. She’ll keep the email simple—no subject line or text. Just the photo, grainy and out of focus, of the messenger god’s package, dressed in nothing but dust and Attic light.

  Pinching her eyes shut, she rubs her temples: last night she accidentally got drunk, and now she can’t seem to claw herself out of her hangover. This had not been part of the plan. Her ferry arrived at Piraeus at seven o’clock and in the middle of a cloudburst. Using her bag as an umbrella, she leapt over puddles and fought through a thick crowd gathered at the port’s gate. She found a cab, which, after sitting in rush-hour traffic for nearly an hour, finally delivered her—damp, but not soaking—to the Athens Hilton. She had stayed at the hotel once before, for a conference she’d attended in ’97, and her room was exactly as she had expected it to be: clean, boarding on sterile; impersonal, air-conditioned, and cold. Usually when she traveled she preferred to stay somewhere more authentic, or with a little character (dirty is what Dean would say. Dirty and ill-managed). Now, as she sat on the bed—as she felt the crunch of the stiff sheets beneath her—she decided she was glad she was here, as opposed to some B and B in Lycabettus. She liked the anonymity of the place, the way a person could stay at a hotel like this and completely forget herself. For two nights, she could pretend she was someone else. She could pretend she wasn’t Sue Ellen Wright, Professor of Classical Studies, but rather a room, a number—724, specifically. A faceless customer that did things like watch pay-per-view and binge on room service and drink overpriced bottles of sauvignon blanc.

  She opened the thick green curtains hiding the windows and stepped out onto the balcony. There, set in the middle of a plastic patio table, was an ashtray. Looking at it, she wanted a cigarette. She hadn’t smoked in twenty years, but being here alone, she wanted nothing more than to suck one down. Looking out at the patchwork of roofs, avenues, and awnings, she remembered how, a few weeks ago, she had taken Will’s Parliaments while they were on the ferry—had confiscated them, along with his lighter, and buried them beneath her wallet. Now she reached for her purse and dug through it for the pack. She smoked one and lit another with its butt.

  She took a shower next. A long one, without fear of using too much water or hogging time in the bathroom. Then she threw on a fresh pair of khakis and a clean shirt and headed out for the evening. There was a long line of cabs waiting in front of the Hilton’s lobby, their drivers leaning against the cars’ hoods, arguing and smoking, so she opted to walk. First west, toward Syntagma Square, and then northeast, rounding the southern edge of Mount Lycabettus and into the quieter, posher streets of Kolonaki. It was a clear night—the clouds from the afternoon’s storms had vanished—and as she walked the streetlamps above her began to buzz and flicker on. She ate at a restaurant she loved in the neighborhood—a French place; she needed a break from feta—and when she was done, when she had polished off a plate of passable coq au vin and a half liter of Bordeaux, she smoked two more of her son’s cigarettes and set about walking again.

  She thought, strangely, of Jasmine. She tried not to, but she did. Questions emerged from the place she had learned to bury them, a corner of her mind that she only allowed herself to access on nights like this one, when she was alone and a little drunk, wandering the streets of Athens. She remembered the phone call from her colleague and the fights that followed; she remembered Connie. The past yea
r hadn’t felt like life so much as a challenge. A test to see how capable she was of creating an equilibrium in which they all might survive.

  Maybe, though, she had been unfair to Dean. She thought of how he nervously asked to join her in the shower, the boyish hesitation with which he took her hand on the beach. In dwelling for so long on how he had wronged her, she had turned him from a partner to an adversary—an enemy whose words she needed to parse and whose motives were inherently suspect. It was a thought that had first dawned on her during one of their last sessions with Connie. Watching him speak from the opposite end of the couch, she found herself recoiling from his apologies, rejecting them for the sake of rejection. She left that day more disgusted with herself than with him; in the name of self-preservation, she had turned her back on resolution. The next morning, she called him and invited him to move back in. “I’ll buy the moving boxes,” she even offered. “I’ll help.” Forgiveness, she decided, wasn’t forgetting someone’s sins. It was remembering who they were before they committed them.

  Near the corner of Skoufa and Iraklitou she ducked into a bar without bothering to look at its name. She needed a nightcap, she decided, something to help her get a little rest. Inside, it was a typical dive: too dark in some corners and too light in others; so many lit cigarettes that the bitterness of burning nicotine drowned the stench of smoke. At the end of the bar she found an empty stool and, after flagging down one of the two bartenders, she ordered a whiskey. As the man prepared her drink, she glanced forward, where she caught her reflection in the scratched mirror that served as the bar’s backsplash. She wasn’t whole—all she could make out were bits of her cheeks and wisps of her hair; fragments obscured by half-empty bottles of vodka, gin, and rum.

  The bartender set her drink down, and before she took her first sip, she knew she needed another.

  “Swiss.”