Honestly, We Meant Well

by Grant Ginder

  “Sue Ellen,” Eleni says, once she’s standing before her. “I was wondering if we could talk.”

  Eleni

  August 2

  Athens

  She doesn’t know where to look as they ride the elevator down from the Hilton’s roof, so she fixes her eyes forward, at the car’s twin mirrored doors. Above her, a small screen counts down from fourteen, chiming each time they pass another floor. It’s a pleasant sound, a nice sound, one that fills the space between Eleni and Sue Ellen unobtrusively but fully; each time Eleni worries the silence is growing too dense, it’s there—bing—saving them both from making the sort of stilted, stale conversation that elevators uniformly demand. As she stares forward, she tries to catch a glimpse of Sue Ellen in the door’s reflection. As they descend past the seventh floor, she reaches up to fix her hair; somewhere between four and three, she picks a piece of lint from her dress.

  The elevator reaches the ground floor and the doors slide open. Initially, Eleni thought they might go to a restaurant or a café—something a little more personal than a hotel. It’s hot, though, mercilessly so, and the idea of asking Sue Ellen to abandon the Hilton’s air-conditioning for the city’s shadeless sidewalks feels like too much of an imposition, particularly now, when Eleni has already interrupted her at work. Instead, she leads her past a wide gold pillar to an empty leather sofa tucked away in a corner of the lobby. In front of them is a glass table, on top of which sits a vase containing a bushel of white hyacinths and a magazine called Athens NOW! Beneath the cover model, printed in a sleek, modern font, is a headline in English: NOT YOUR GRANDMOTHER’S ATHENS.

  “What are you doing here?” Sue Ellen says. “I thought your meeting was yesterday.”

  A woman in heels pulls a rollerboard suitcase across the lobby, and its wheels clack along the marble floor.

  Above them, trickling out from unseen speakers, there’s the lobby’s Muzak, a hybrid of acid jazz and bouzouki. “Ta Daxtilidia,” set to a track of synthesized drums and a Casio keyboard.

  Eleni says, “Things didn’t exactly go as planned.”

  “Apparently not. You told me you were heading back to Aegina last night, and here you are, still in Athens.”

  “I couldn’t sign the papers,” she says.

  “I’m confused.”

  “I didn’t sell the Alectrona, Sue Ellen.”

  “Why not?”

  Eleni takes a deep breath.

  She says, “Because I think you should buy it instead.”

  She explains how the idea came to her last night, a few hours after she left Oskar in Lugn’s conference room. Once she had fled the building, she had gone to Syntagma Square. The sun was setting; the sign on top of the Hotel Grand Bretagne glowed in the dusk, and outside the Old Royal Palace flags hung slack in the still air. She found an empty bench near the square’s center and, not knowing what else to do, she sat, fixing her eyes forward on an old fountain. It was empty, but a group of people her age sat on its edge, their legs dangling into the basin as if there were water to cool them. To her east, periodic mobs emerged from the metro stop below the stairs leading to Amalias Avenue, and as she watched them flood the cafés that surrounded her, she realized that she was hungry—starving, actually; the only thing she’d consumed in the past eight hours was a single swallow of Oskar’s parsnip drink, the taste of which still lingered, coating her tongue with a persistent film. Opening her purse, she found the sandwich that Stavros had made for her and, tearing away its foil wrapper, she ate it, first slowly and then with increasing urgency; the last half she took down with two monstrous bites. It was, she realized, a delicious sandwich—or, more delicious than any sandwich had the right to be, the ham and cheese and tomato perfectly proportioned, the mayonnaise spread with care. As she chewed, she began to cry, though this was something she didn’t realize until a few moments later; when she had finished eating she brushed her cheeks and found that they were wet.

  “I sat there for so long, I missed the last ferry,” she says. “I had to sleep on my friend Sophie’s couch.”

  This was true: she had texted Sophie from Syntagma Square. It was a short message (does your sofa have any vacancies?), which earned her a short reply (as a matter of fact it does), though from the simple exchange Eleni derived an extraordinary amount of comfort; while the rest of her life crumbled around her—while she cried over ham sandwiches and second-guessed decisions—she still had this: friends who were willing to put her up for the night, who could be asked favors without demanding to know their contexts.

  “And that’s where you had this idea?” Sue Ellen asks. “On your friend Sophie’s couch?”

  “They want to tear it down, Sue Ellen. They want to turn my parents’ bedroom into a juice bar that makes these shit-colored drinks out of raw parsnips.”

  “From my experience, that sounds like most of Swedish cuisine.” Eleni doesn’t laugh, so Sue Ellen continues: “I’m not sure what you expected. They’re developers. They develop.”

  “I understand that. What I don’t understand, though, is why letting go of something also has to mean letting go of everything it used to be.”

  Sue Ellen leans forward and rests her elbows on her knees. On the glass table between them, the mohawked model on the cover of Athens NOW! stares up.

  “I think you’re grossly overestimating how much university professors get paid.”

  “As it turns out, I’m a very motivated seller.”

  Sue Ellen drums her fingers on the glass table, then reaches out to straighten the magazine.

  “How would I care for it?” she asks. “I live in California.”

  “You could move to Aegina.”

  “I have a career—”

  “You said you were bored with it.”

  “—not to mention a husband and a son.”

  Eleni rolls up the sleeves of Stavros’s shirt. This morning, after Sophie had left for work, she had given it a thorough ironing, but still it bears the indelible creases of a second-day wear. She listens as, on the opposite side of the lobby, the elevators chime and their doors slide open. The truth is she had not considered this: the fact that Sue Ellen’s life extends beyond the four weeks that she’s spent on the island and the boundaries of their friendship; the fact that Sue Ellen was like her, like anyone: a person who existed in too many places at once; who was burdened with obligations and responsibilities from which it was impossible to extricate herself. To this end, Eleni’s grand plan, which just this morning had the clarity of a solution, now takes on the opaqueness of a hypothesis. A theory formed in the hermetic universe of Sophie’s apartment: a place where all she had to worry about was what she needed and what she suspected Sue Ellen wanted. Where the concerns weren’t opposing forces and unpredictable variables, but rather whether Sophie had a second bottle of Syrah.

  Still, Eleni keeps her focus. You don’t balk when an investor points out an obvious glitch in your product. You offer an easy solution, and you move on.

  “Your husband’s a writer,” she says. “He can live anywhere.”

  “He hates when people tell him that.”

  “And Will’s graduated. He’ll have a job of his own soon, anyway.”

  “That is … proving to be more difficult than expected.”

  Sue Ellen shakes her head. She reaches forward and adjusts the magazine, leaving it half an inch askew.

  She says, “It’s not going to work. Go back to Lugn, or whatever that company is called. Tell them that you’ve reconsidered.”

  Eleni hears her, but she refuses to listen.

  “These Swedes, they want to run my family’s hotel into the fucking ground,” she says. “You, though … you understand why the Alectrona matters, why it’s important—not just to me, but to you. A week ago, remember what you said? You were telling me that a part of you always thought that you’d end up here. You said that in another life you did.”

  She takes a breath.

  She says: “Just picture it, Sue Ellen.
”

  For a moment, Eleni thinks that she’s managed to convince her. Sue Ellen’s eyes drift away from the magazine, landing eventually on an undistinguishable point beyond the lobby’s front door. And in her gaze, Eleni thinks she catches traces of what she’s seen in the past, when Sue Ellen has talked about her first summer on Aegina: longing, wrapped in a quiet, defiant happiness. But then, as quickly as it’s there, it’s gone. Sue Ellen looks at Eleni and sets a hand on her knee.

  “I have pictured it,” she says. “In fact, I’ve been picturing it ever since your father made me a similar offer almost thirty years ago, and I think it’s about time that I finally stopped.”

  Ginny Polonsky

  August 3

  Athens and Aegina

  “The problem,” Ginny says, “is that Athens and its foreign lenders took way too long reviewing whether Greece had met its European bailout terms.”

  She’s yelling, she realizes. But then, she’s got a lot to compete with: two of the cab’s windows are down, and the city’s soundtrack—its honks, crashes, and strange, foreign sirens—assault her from all sides. There’s also the driver’s music, a medley of electro Europop that, at least to Ginny, sounds like variations of the same bad Cardigans song. Finally, there’s his driving: the man can’t seem to decide which part of the road he prefers, and each time he turns it’s with such force, such ferocity, that her first inclination is to clutch her stomach. I know there are a lot of options, she wants to say. But would it kill you to pick a lane?

  And yet, she presses on: “Yannis Stournaras said as much last year, when he spoke to Parliament’s economic affairs committee!” she calls out as they barrel through a tunnel. “The delay hurt economic recovery—that’s what he claimed. He said that because everyone dragged their feet, Greek markets weren’t able to bounce back. I’m inclined to agree with him.”

  In the rearview mirror, Ginny sees the driver nod and raise both eyebrows. She sits up a bit straighter and leans forward to catch his response; instead, he reaches down and turns up the volume—now she can feel the stereo’s bass, vibrating against the back of her bare thighs. Leaning her head against the window, she lets the wind flip her curls across her eyes. She wants him to engage; she wants him to acknowledge, at least tacitly, how much she knows about his government’s problems. Over the past three nights she’s committed herself to studying the chaos unfolding in Greece. And while she may not entirely understand the wonky nuances of budget compliance, sectoral balances, and monetary union guidelines, she’s nonetheless thrilled by the country’s capacity for procedural drama. So much so, in fact, that she’s obliged herself to form unshakable opinions about how the government should proceed. This, though, is routine for Ginny. Whenever she travels abroad, she accepts a moral responsibility to research and take stances on her destination’s social, political, and economic challenges. Last March, before she went to Paris, she spent every morning for two weeks reading Le Monde on her phone. The same was true when she traveled to Chile, South Africa, and Iceland, and she pored—respectively—over translated editions of El Mercurio and the Mail & Guardian and Fréttablaðið. But then, that’s just the sort of person she is: a global citizen. A member not of a single country, but of the whole of humanity.

  Frustrated, she pulls a few stray strands of hair away from her lips and adjusts her sunglasses, which have started to slip down the bridge of her nose. She wishes that she still had Twitter. If she did, she would fire off commentary about what she’s just observed. Birthplace of Democracy? she imagines punching into her phone. More like birthplace of #APATHY. She doesn’t have Twitter, though; she deleted it a year and a half ago when, after spending an entire Saturday scrolling through Donald Trump’s old tweets, she decided she couldn’t occupy the same space as him, digital or otherwise. Reading his rants was like feeling his hot breath on the back of her neck—the precursor to a horrifically incompetent attack. It was also, she conceded, a drain on her productivity. She was so busy telling people what she was thinking that she couldn’t reflect on what she actually thought. And so, she got rid of it. She fired off a straightforward goodbye forever to her 693 followers and nodded, satisfied, as the app vanished from her screen.

  A space opens up in the traffic, and her driver lays on the gas. Ginny watches as, alongside the highway, regiments of billboards welcome her to Athens.

  “How much longer to Piraeus?” she asks.

  “One hour,” the driver says, changing lanes.

  “You said ‘one hour’ fifteen minutes ago, when we were at the airport.” She takes off her glasses and squints. “I’ve got a ferry to catch at one o’clock.”

  The driver shrugs. He says, again, “One hour.”

  She slips her sunglasses back on to shield her rolling eyes—she knows how she can get when she’s feeling pressed for time. Sinking deeper into the backseat, she thinks back to the beginning of June, when Claudia Min knocked on the door to the Berkeley Review’s office and asked if Ginny had a moment.

  “For you, Claudia?” she had said. “Anything.”

  Two falls earlier, Ginny had taken one of Min’s courses—an introduction to fiction that was a prerequisite for more advanced workshops. At first, she had been intimidated. She had seen Claudia’s name on the cover of three novels, the last of which got her on the long list for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Two weeks into the semester, though, she happened upon a short story Min had published in Granta—a woeful character study about a woman deciding whether she should sell her apartment in Flushing. Ginny—gleefully—hated it. After that, her intimidation faded. Faded to the point where she had no qualms about saying things like For you, Claudia, anything.

  Now, Min smiled and pulled up a chair. The Review was housed in an old utility closet on the sixth floor of the English Department: two desks, a Nabokov poster, and a ten-year-old iMac stuffed in a space the size of a California King mattress. When Claudia sat, her knees touched Ginny’s and, for a moment, she tried to reposition herself, shifting her seat, adjusting her silk shawl. For her part, Ginny stayed put—this was her turf. Besides, she liked watching Claudia squirm.

  She said, “So, what’s up?”

  “I was just wondering…” Claudia trailed off. She was always trailing off. Starting thoughts and not finishing them, letting half-bred sentences hang like flimsy clouds. Her prose was the same way, bloated with unbaked, doughy ideas. Ginny couldn’t figure out if pregnancy had lessened her patience (she’d taken her test two weeks earlier) or if she was having a bad day. Either way, Claudia was driving her nuts.

  “You were wondering what,” she said.

  “I was just wondering if you’d decided on what fiction you’ll be publishing in the next issue of the Review.”

  Ginny leaned back; their shins touched, and Claudia flinched. The truth was she hadn’t—to date, she had received only two submissions, a pair of stories by the same inept freshman. Drivel that she would have aesthetic qualms with publishing on a roll of toilet paper, let alone in the pages of her journal.

  “We’re doing final reads now,” she said. “It’s been a competitive pool, as I’m sure you can imagine. We’re going to have to make some tough calls.”

  Claudia uncoiled her shawl and folded it across her lap.

  “I figured that might be the case,” she said.

  “Why do you ask? Just, you know, out of curiosity.”

  “I’ve got this student. An advisee, really…”

  Claudia’s eyes drifted up to the ceiling. Behind her, the iMac’s fan began to whir. As she counted the seconds, Ginny’s blood pressure peaked.

  “Claudia,” she said, finally. “Focus.”

  “I’m sorry. My mind—it drifts.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  Claudia eyed her, the vacantness giving way to quiet indignation. For a moment, Ginny worried that she had gone too far.

  But then Claudia looked down. She folded her shawl once more and said, “I’ve got an advisee who turned in a rathe
r lovely thesis. Or, perhaps lovely’s not the right word. Haunting, maybe? Yes. Haunting. Or, hauntingly lovely. I think that’s probably best. In any event, I thought if there’s room, or if you were in need of submissions, you might like to consider it for the Review.”

  Ginny dug a fleck of grime from beneath one of her fingernails—she didn’t want to seem too eager.

  She said, “Well, like I just told you, we’ve already got a very competitive pool. But if you want to send it over, I suppose I could give it a look over lunch.”

  Claudia stood. “You’ve always been so gracious.”

  Ginny ignored the tinge of condescension, the lifted eyebrow. She said, “Whose is it, by the way?” And then: “Don’t forget your shawl.”

  Claudia reached down and snatched the silk from the seat.

  “Will’s.”

  “Wait, Will Wright’s?”

  “Is there another senior named Will in the department who I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting?”

  Ginny stood up.

  She said: “Send it over immediately.”

  Five minutes later, she had the story up on the iMac’s screen and her suspicions were confirmed: the son of a bitch had plagiarized it. This was not a surprise in itself. Will was a purple and clumsy writer—inarguably the worst in the department. Despite Claudia’s simpering taste, her dangling prose, the fact that he had impressed even her was cause enough for alarm. So, obviously Will didn’t write the story. The thing that did shock Ginny, though, was that the story he decided to plagiarize was his father’s. She recognized it immediately. Dean had shared it with her in April, after she had suffered through an especially grueling workshop in which a story she had been particularly proud of had been eviscerated. Typically, harsh critiques didn’t bother Ginny: she was an artist, and being an artist meant having thick skin. But this particular submission was personal. A month earlier, after having turned in two stories that were along the lines of her normal work (a cosmonaut named Nina wakes up one day and discovers that she and Vladimir Putin are the last two people on earth; a tenth-grade physics student stumbles on an equation that inverts gravity in men’s restrooms), Dean urged her to submit something a little closer to home.