Honestly, We Meant Well

by Grant Ginder

  “Write about what’s in front of your face,” she remembers him saying to her. They were in a room at the Embassy Suites in Walnut Creek, and her nose was buried in the tangle of his chest hair. “Write about what you know.”

  So she did. She wrote about a junior at an unnamed California university who was wrestling with insecurities over issues like the width of her hips and her moral worth. Her classmates hated it. They called the protagonist grating and self-indulgent, and said that the only character with whom they had really connected was the girl’s roommate—a bottle-blond twit who did nothing but preen and make fun of the narrator’s cankles. Perhaps worse than all that had been Dean’s reaction: as the onslaught progressed, he had done nothing to stop it. Instead, he sat back and watched. And at certain moments, Ginny thought she even saw him smile.

  When the massacre was over and class was finally dismissed, she had gone to his office and cried.

  “We all write things that don’t work,” he had said, stroking her hair as she sobbed.

  She sniffled. “You don’t.”

  “Not true. I do all the time.” He sat across from her and booted up his computer. “In fact, I’ll show you.”

  And now, sitting in front of the iMac in the Review’s office, she read the story a second time. When she finished the last page, she leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. She didn’t consider herself a religious person, but it didn’t take her long before she decided that the day’s events were a sign: an opportunity to use Will to reveal Dean’s whereabouts. It had been a month since he had disappeared, and he had stopped returning her calls. Maybe, she figured, someone was looking out for her. Maybe she wasn’t so alone.

  In the back of the cab, she chews on a fingernail. Pulling a single knee up to her chest, she thinks of the email she sent Will—the one where she fawned over his (Dean’s) story. In many ways, it had been fun to craft; she was, after all, a storyteller, and her enthusiasm for Will’s work was nothing short of fiction. Still, that excitement paled in comparison to the ecstasy she felt when, five days later, she discovered twenty-seven missed calls from him on her cell phone. She really had been at a silent retreat in Ojai—she hadn’t been lying when, upon finally calling Will back, she had told him that. Pregnancy, coupled with the burden of stalking Dean, had exhausted her, and so she had treated herself to a bit of R&R: some tofu nao for breakfast while overlooking a collection of shallow amber hills; a few oms in the afternoon while perfecting her downward dog. It rejuvenated her spirit and worked out the kinks from her bowels. It allowed her time to reclaim her center while Will, equipped with nothing but an iPhone and spotty internet, was left to panic.

  “I’m in Greece, with my parents.” Even now, as the cabbie pulls up to the curb next to the ferry terminal, Ginny can hear the unease in Will’s voice, the clip of his strained vowels. On the one hand, she had been shocked that she had so easily wrangled the Wrights’ location out of him; in a matter of two sentences, she not only uncovered the country to which Dean had fled, but also the exact locale—a rock called Aegina, moored in the Saronic Gulf. On the other hand, she had always suspected that Will only worked with half his brain, and the shoddy half, at that. The bigger surprise would have been if she hadn’t succeeded in manipulating him—if, somehow, he’d wised up and saw through her guile.

  “You walk from here?” the driver says, glancing in the rearview mirror.

  “I walk? I’m pregnant.” The fact that she admits this surprises Ginny—it is, she realizes, the first time she’s said it out loud.

  “The police, they stop me,” he says. “I’m sorry—you must walk.”

  She hands the driver forty euros and then digs through her purse, fetching the piece of paper where she had written down the name of the hotel where Dean is staying. Unfolding it, she says the word silently, then out loud: Alectrona. Finding it—the hotel’s name—was a bit more difficult. While Will wasn’t exactly bright, he would still surely become suspicious if, once he revealed his family was on Aegina, Ginny had suddenly asked for an address. So she had resorted to other means of investigation: calling the fifty or so hotels on the island one by one; impersonating a made-up classics professor, a certain Dr. Wendell, who needed to mail a rare manuscript to Sue Ellen Wright, posthaste; apologizing profusely, in an accent of vague European origin, for losing both the name and address of Dr. Wright’s lodgings. It was tedious and frustrating work—half the time the phones rang unanswered—but then she figured sleuthing often was. Thankfully, she had the constitution for it. She was good at sleuthing. Sleuthing, Ginny liked to think, was her middle name.

  * * *

  “Oh, hello, Dean.”

  She brushes hair away from her eyes and winks at herself in the mirror. The ferry lurches to starboard, and she steadies herself, bracing one arm against the bathroom’s wall and the other against the small steel sink. Once she’s regained her footing, she inhales, her eyes watering as she teases out notes of coffee, gasoline, and piss.

  Then, she tries again: “Oh, hello, Dean.”

  But no—that’s not right, either. Her voice sounds too languid, too bored, like she’s just stumbled upon him at the cinema, coming out from some tiresome Terrence Malick film. She should liven it up, let her words bounce a bit, give them a little air.

  “Dean,” she says, widening her eyes, “why, hello.”

  Better, she thinks. Not perfect—she needs to work on not looking like she’s getting goosed—but better. Pressing her shirt against her midsection, she turns and looks at the profile of her stomach. She’s not showing yet—at this point, she figures the baby’s just a coil of cells and veins and, depending on what right-wing pregnancy websites she tortures herself with, maybe a few fingernails. To some degree, though, she wishes she was; she wishes she could surprise him with a belly, some visual proof of why she’s there. The sheer drama of it would be delicious. Glancing down at her wrist, she unburies her watch from beneath a hairband and wonders how much time she’s got left before she reaches the island.

  She doesn’t like Greece. And while the country’s politically apathetic cabdrivers certainly don’t help the situation, this isn’t a new thing; she just never got into the classics. Antigone was a whiner, and she stopped reading The Iliad halfway through, when she discovered it was just a book about a bunch of boys. She tried to change this—she felt, as a thinking person, that the classics were something she should probably enjoy. She had even gone so far as to take one of Sue Ellen Wright’s classes during her sophomore year at Berkeley—a seminar on antiquity and feminist thought. The class had only mildly impressed her, and when it came time to review it at the end of the semester, she gave it a tepid score of 3. To begin with, in the middle of the term Sue Ellen slapped Ginny with her first C. The grade was for a small assignment—a response paper on the first sixteen lines of Euripides’s Medea—but it was a C nonetheless, and Ginny still counts it as one of life’s greater slights. She wanted to know who had managed to impress Sue Ellen; who had received an A. Or, maybe she didn’t—she suspected the answer might disappoint her. The fourteen other women with whom she had shared the class were complete bores—vapid little things with names like Lily and Kate, who considered themselves feminists because their favorite book was Pride and Prejudice and they knew Middlemarch was written by a girl. Meanwhile, here was Ginny, quoting Adrienne Rich and Rebecca Solnit; here was Ginny, turning in five pages instead of the required two. And for that she was laden with a C? The mind boggles.

  There was also the issue of Sue Ellen. Ginny often wondered whether she was too smart for her own good. Two years later, she can still remember Sue Ellen’s tendency to bluster into class five minutes late; her tendency to stare out the window, as if lost in thought, whenever a student was reading aloud. These observations both enraged and fascinated Ginny. On the one hand, she felt she deserved better from her professor; at the very least, she felt she deserved her undivided attention. While Ginny didn’t necessarily agree with the capitalistic
direction of neoliberal education, the fact remained that the American university was a business, ergo she, as a student, was a paying customer who deserved certain courtesies. On the other hand, she was mesmerized by the ease with which Sue Ellen embodied the image of a thinker. She wore her ideas like a pair of old jeans, slipping in and out of them with comfortable lucidity. She didn’t appear to be rankled by questions or uncertainty, and when she spoke, people listened—not just because she was the professor, but because her voice was buoyed by a sort of easy authority. Ginny, meanwhile, always feels like she’s muscling her way to respect; for as long as she can remember, she’s practically had to shout just to be heard.

  She holds none of this against the woman. Nor does it factor into her motivation for coming to Greece to confront her husband. Ginny’s not that kind of person. She’s not in the business of napalming marriages—she’s in the business of getting answers.

  There is, of course, the concern that she’ll encounter Sue Ellen before she finds Dean. This is a very real possibility that Ginny has considered, and that she considers again as she disembarks from the ferry and flags down a taxi. Luckily, she’s prepared herself for this curveball, too. If she runs into Sue Ellen first when she arrives at the hotel, she’ll fib. She’ll say that she’s just passing through. A quick jaunt in Greece before she moves on to somewhere more interesting, more exotic. Turkey, maybe. Turkey or Iran. Will mentioned that the family was on the island, she’ll explain, and given just how much she adored the Wrights—all three of them!—she would be remiss if she didn’t at least pop in and say hello. Then, at a moment that’s appropriate, she’ll pull Dean aside, tell him she’s uh, enceinte, and ask him what the holy fuck is going on.

  She takes a moment to collect herself once the cab drops her outside the hotel. After doing her best to flatten out the wrinkles from her shirt and the shorts she’s been wearing for the past eighteen hours, she looks up and takes in the Alectrona. It’s small—much smaller than she expected. Two stories of pale gray brick, topped with a red tile roof. A short iron gate leads to what she presumes to be the entrance, and as she passes through it she notes the rust coating its hinges, places where the white paint has flecked away. She doesn’t bother knocking or waiting for someone to help her with her bags; passing a fruitless orange tree and tangle of bougainvillea, she pushes open the front door and lets herself in.

  The lobby’s clean, small, and, above all things, empty. She stands there for a moment, waiting to see if someone will come to fetch her, and when no one does she begins to poke around. An étagère to the left of the check-in desk holds a hodgepodge of relics: an old blue-and-white teapot, a wooden pipe, a gold horse the size of Ginny’s foot. Examining them, she catches bits of her reflection in the case’s glass and tries to improve on what she sees: collecting and repositioning loose strands of hair, wiping the grease away from her forehead with an inch of her shirtsleeve. When she’s finished she returns to the desk, where she notices a small silver bell. The sort that you would ring at a deli counter, maybe, or an abandoned hotel in Greece.

  Looking to each side of her, she chimes it once, then twice.

  She clears her throat. She says, her voice cracking, “Hello?”

  Still, there’s nothing. No creaking footsteps from the second floor; no jolt of a door slamming. The only thing she can hear is the wind. Hiking her rucksack farther up on her back and tightening her grip on her suitcase, Ginny ventures onward, making her way through an empty dining room and an adjoining kitchen, a galley with a stove, a sink, and a looming white fridge. There’s an instant where she worries she’s going to retch again—the scent of garlic and fried onions seeps from the kitchen’s walls—but the feeling passes, and she goes back to wondering what she’s been wondering since she arrived: namely, if she had somehow spelled the name of the hotel wrong; if, because of a minor error, Ginny will be playing Whac-A-Mole with Aegean inns late into the night.

  But then she notices something: through the window on the kitchen’s back door, she sees a patio, and the blue of a swimming pool. Pushing aside the window’s yellowed lace curtains, she sees more: next to the pool, stretched out on a chaise longue, is a set of legs. Or, perhaps more specifically, a set of very recognizable legs. She feels her heart clutch in her throat and her palms begin to sweat. She breathes; she watches the legs twitch once and reposition themselves, and she recommits herself to her goal.

  She swings the door open. As she walks over to him, her rucksack bounces along the base of her neck and her suitcase swings from her left arm. When she reaches the chaise, she stops and waits while the wind kisses her cheek. Though his eyes are hidden beneath a pair of dark Ray-Bans, she can tell he’s sleeping: his hands are folded neatly across his chest, and his belly lifts and falls with a steady, smooth rhythm. She considers waking him with a kiss but thinks better of it—Dean detests being startled, and she would hate to kick things off on the wrong foot. Instead, she pulls out the tie that’s been keeping her hair back, freeing an explosion of curls. She says, in a voice that’s at once coy but assertive, sexy but controlled: “Hello, handsome.”

  Nothing happens, so she tries again. Repositioning her curls on either side of her face, she cranks the volume up a few notches and coos, “I said, hello, handsome.”

  Nothing. Dean grunts once and sniffles. Then, after licking his lips, his tongue darting in and out like a snake’s, he’s still.

  Overhead, a warbler dances on the branch of an orange tree and takes flight.

  Closer to town, a dog barks, and a cat howls.

  Her patience diminished, Ginny lets her rucksack drop from her shoulders before slamming her suitcase down on the pool deck. Dean wakes and leaps from the chair with a start.

  She says, “Goddamn it, I’m here.”

  Dean

  August 3

  Aegina

  He thinks, Maybe if he closes his eyes for long enough, she’ll disappear. She’ll just—Christ, he doesn’t know—evaporate. A sweating, red-haired mirage that gets sucked up by the unrelenting sun.

  But he blinks once, then twice. He sees that Ginny Polonsky has not vanished. He sees that Ginny Polonsky is, indeed, very much still there.

  “Oh, my God,” he says.

  “Are you surprised?”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “You’re surprised.”

  Dean looks at the luggage gathered on the pool deck. Her ubiquitous rucksack, its threadbare canvas covered with iron-on patches from Planned Parenthood, the Human Rights Campaign, and the Marin County chapter of the Sierra Club. The same rucksack that he’s seen balled up on the floor of his office, in the corner of her bedroom, and—on two occasions when Sue Ellen was out of town at a conference—at the foot of his bed. And then, next to it: a suitcase. A big suitcase. A suitcase bursting with multiple pairs of underwear, clean T-shirts, and whatever else it is that twenty-year-old women pack. A suitcase that, most important, portends a very long stay.

  Staring down at the mess, he says, “Ginny—”

  She smiles. “Yes, Dean?”

  “—what the fuck are you doing here?”

  She begins to answer him, saying something about Will, and a phone call, and a fateful if tedious visit from Claudia Min. But before she gets too deep (and Ginny, he knows, can get deep), he stops her. He shakes his head and waves his hands in front of his face until, finally, she shuts up.

  “I didn’t actually want to know why you’re here.”

  “Then why did you ask?”

  Her smile fades.

  “I don’t know. It was a rhetorical question.”

  She gathers her hair in a loose ponytail and drapes it over her left shoulder. Her neck’s already pink, well on its way to burnt. Ginny was not made for the sun.

  “You’re wrong,” she says. “It wasn’t.”

  He picks up her rucksack. He’ll throw her out if he has to, he figures. He’ll haul her to the port and put her on a ferry himself.

  “I’m not doing this,” he s
ays.

  “Doing what? Properly defining a word?”

  “Jesus Christ, Ginny.”

  “I’m sorry, Dean.” She sits on one of the patio chairs and folds her hands in her lap. “I’m sorry that I’m a writer and I like language. I’m sorry that me wanting you to use the term ‘rhetorical’ correctly offends you so much.”

  “You know that’s not what the issue is.”

  She stares up at him, and her scowl, her performative sternness, momentarily softens to a pliable confusion. Unfolding her hands, she rubs her palms against her bare knees and looks to either side of her, appraising the patio—its dead pine needles; its shallow pool—for the first time since she’s arrived. For an instant, Dean sees her for who she really is: a girl a third his age with wild and unkempt hair; a girl who’s suddenly found herself a long way from home.

  Then she says: “This place is a dump.”

  “It has a certain charm.”

  “That’s just a literary way of saying it’s a dump.”

  Her rucksack is heavy. It tugs against his left shoulder and, slouching against its improbable weight, he wonders what she has in it. A barbell, it feels like. A barbell, a pair of shoes, and—he hopes; he always hopes—a copy of his book.

  “You need to go, Ginny. I’ll help you find a hotel in town, and I’ll cover the ferry back to Athens, but … you need to go.”