Honestly, We Meant Well

by Grant Ginder

  Dean says, “It’s not a crime to look.”

  “Of course it isn’t. Lord knows I look all the time. But the thing is, Dean, it’s how you looked. Like you didn’t care who saw you. Like she belonged to you, and you were ready to eat her alive.”

  She clicks her wedding ring against the empty glass and continues. “You know, once I heard someone say that success doesn’t change a person so much as it teases out the person they were all along.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Sue Ellen. The people who say that sort of shit are business moguls and politicians, and the only reason they say it is so they can be quoted on some tear-away calendar.”

  “Maybe,” she says. “But that doesn’t mean they’re wrong. I mean, look at you, Dean. You’re hungry now. You’re hungry in a way where I actually don’t know how to make you feel whole. And I remember realizing it—that’s what I’m trying to tell you. I remember realizing on that night that, if you’d had the chance, if you were given another Jasmine, you’d do it again. And there’d be another Jasmine, of course. Because, really, there always is. The history of the world is one of men not keeping their zippers up in front of Jasmine. I mean, for Christ’s sake, that is why Troy fell.” She runs her hands over her hair. “Here we were, torturing ourselves with Connie, and the whole time I knew that, at the end of the day, you’d just end up doing it all again.”

  “Please don’t blame yourself for this, Sue Ellen.”

  “Oh, don’t worry, I’m not.” She looks at him. “I’m saying I was stupid, but I’m not blaming myself. Those are two separate things.”

  “Then why did you stay?” Dean asks. He’s feeling cornered, exposed. “Why are you still here?”

  “Will,” she says. “And inertia. I thought if we could just keep going, keep riding the wave, then things would work out. You’d stop looking—or, at the very least, I’d learn to live with it again. It’s why I agreed when you suggested we all come here. Somehow, I figured the sheer inertia of us would help us find our footing. But that’s not how it works, is it? Inertia doesn’t solve problems so much as it keeps broken things together.”

  There is, for a moment, a pure and perfect silence, a void in which he can’t hear the call of the warblers or the crunch of tires on gravel. But then, as quickly as he notices the quiet, it’s gone. A ferry blows its horn. Somewhere closer to town, a rooster crows.

  He says, “Sue Ellen, let’s get through today. Then we can work this out. We can go home.”

  She shakes her head.

  “I don’t think you understand,” she says. “I’m not going home.”

  Will

  August 3

  Aegina

  The harbor is a madhouse. One of the larger ferries—the Poseidon Hellas—has just delivered a thousand passengers to the island’s port, and it’s within this chaos that Will searches for Ginny. It is, predictably, impossible. On all sides of him, queues materialize haphazardly, hard-baked travelers arranging themselves into rows without knowing what those rows are actually for. Their luggage, inevitably, scatters: rollerboards are felled facedown on the stone sidewalk; duffel bags are trampled by sets of sandaled feet.

  He finds her, finally, not within the chaos but adjacent to it, lingering just on the outskirts of bedlam. She’s sitting on the curb along Leoforos Dimokratis, a hundred yards south from the dock itself. A little farther down, the red dome of Ekklisia Isodia Theotokou casts half-moon shadows over a rocky beach. Her knapsack rests on her knees, and in her right hand she holds a half-eaten nectarine, its skin broken and ragged, its flesh the color of marigolds. From a safe distance, he watches her, considering his next move as she stares down at the fruit, turning it slowly to let the juice drip down her fingers. Then someone knocks him—a woman carrying a purse on one arm and a leather weekend bag on the other. Whipping her head around, she glares at Will and shouts something at him in Greek.

  Ginny looks up, sees him, and sighs.

  She says, “You found me.”

  “I didn’t peg you as such a fast runner. Especially with luggage.”

  “I did track in high school.” Behind them, the woman who yelled at Will climbs in the passenger side of an idling Peugeot and slams the door. “Actually, that’s a lie. Once I got to the main road, I hailed a cab.”

  Ginny takes another bite from the nectarine, this time working her way around its pit. Readjusting her knapsack, she pulls her knees closer to her chest. Sweat forms rings beneath her armpits and flecks of sand mix with the freckles on her wrists. Will lowers himself to the curb and sits next to her. At the other edge of the harbor, the last of the departing passengers boards the Hellas.

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

  “I got a ticket for the Flying Dolphin. I don’t like the idea of a boat, which carries cars, which carry people. That’s too much carrying in one place.”

  “Jesus Christ, you’re weird.”

  She says, “Yeah, well.”

  Will rests his elbows on his knees and listens to the noises in the port: horns honking and the waves breaking against the quay. The squabble of gulls fighting over a plate of cold french fries. He wonders if he’ll miss these sounds when he leaves tomorrow, or if he’ll even be able to distinguish them from the waterfronts of Oakland, of San Francisco. He wonders if places have their own individual soundtracks or if it’s just his wishing that makes it so.

  “Why’d you do that, Ginny?” he says, finally.

  “Why’d I do what?”

  “I don’t know, sleep with my dad? Follow us here? Tell my mom that Dean fucking knocked you up?”

  He expects an apology, but she doesn’t give him one. Instead, she turns to him and wipes nectarine juice from her face.

  “What else was I supposed to do?” she says. “I fucked up, okay? Is that what you wanted to hear? Well, there. I said it. I. Fucked. Up. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to pretend like none of it happened, because I can’t. I can’t just pretend I’m not pregnant.”

  “You could have for five minutes in front of my mom. She didn’t have to know.”

  “Yeah, Will, she did—you said it yourself. She needed to know the truth, which, in case you haven’t noticed, your family doesn’t seem exactly adept at telling.”

  “You realize she’ll leave him, don’t you?” Will asks. “Like, you do realize my family’s totally fucked.”

  She says, “Two things: One, a family is more than a broken marriage. And two: I sort of get the feeling that happened long before I came along. No offense.”

  Will doesn’t respond. He knows she’s right, he just hates that she has to be the one to say it.

  Ginny sucks on the nectarine’s pit, then spits it into her hand.

  She says, “You’re not an asshole like your dad is, Will. I actually think you’re a sort of okay guy. I know you don’t like me—you’ve never liked me, and you probably really don’t like me now, but you’re not an asshole.”

  He closes his eyes. His lips are dry, cracked. He can’t remember the last time he had a sip of water.

  “I don’t not like you,” he says.

  “You hate me.”

  “Knock it off, Ginny.”

  “You do,” she says, her voice rounding at its edges. “You and Cassie both hate me.”

  “Maybe because you slept with my dad.”

  “You hated me before that.”

  He tears a bit of dead skin away from his lips with his teeth.

  He says, “The truth is I don’t hate anybody.”

  “By saying that you don’t hate anybody, you’re at the very least admitting you don’t like me.”

  She turns the pit over in the palm of her hand, letting it dry in the sun.

  “Ginny, I think you have more pressing things to worry about right now.”

  “Probably, but this feels weirdly important.”

  “Well, that’s too bad, because I’m not doing this.”

  She drops the pit and presses it against the pavement with her
foot.

  “Why’d you unfriend me on Facebook?” she asks.

  “You have got to be kidding me.”

  “Will, I’m twenty years old, single, pregnant, and sitting on a curb in Bumfuck, Greece. Humor me. Tell me why you unfriended me on Facebook.”

  He leans back on his elbows. Bits of gravel and sand press into his forearms.

  “Christ, I don’t know. Because I didn’t need to read every knee-jerk epiphany you had every time you skimmed an article on the Huffington Post.”

  “I don’t skim them.”

  He doesn’t acknowledge the correction. He decides that she’s asked, so he’ll tell her.

  “And you started doing that thing.”

  “What thing?”

  “That thing where you were posting the entirety of Moby-Dick, one sentence at a time.”

  “It was the one hundred sixty-eighth anniversary of its publication.” She presses her sunglasses, a pair of pink-tinted aviators, farther up her nose. “Besides, that book is one of the greatest contributions to American literature.”

  “It was annoying.”

  “It was art.”

  “No, Ginny. It wasn’t art. It was objectively annoying.” He looks at her and sets his hand against her shoulder. “You, actually, can be kind of annoying.”

  She doesn’t brush him off. Instead, she leans into him a little, letting first his fingers and then his palm press against her.

  “I think that’s probably true.” Then: “I’m sorry your father stole your life.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “I can’t believe I thought he was so incredible. I can’t believe so many people think he’s so incredible.”

  “Let them think it,” Will says. “Being incredible seems like a pretty shitty gig, anyway.”

  He watches a skiff bob in the water, its dock lines going loose then taut as it rises and sinks. He tries to imagine what he would say if, a month ago, someone had told him that right now he would be here, sitting on a curb in Greece, having this conversation with Ginny Polonsky. He would call them crazy, sadistic. And yet, here he is, settling into a fate that he regards now as inevitable. There are no surprises, he decides. Just futures he’s been too lazy to imagine.

  “Will?” she says.

  “Talk to me, Ginny.”

  “What am I going to do?”

  “I don’t think I’m the person to ask. I can’t even write my own thesis, let alone tell you how to live your life.”

  She turns to look at him, and he catches his reflection in her sunglasses: his hair is shaggy and disheveled, and his cheeks are patched with the uneven beginnings of a beard. He blinks, and it stings: salt crusts the edges of his eyes.

  “I was serious about what I said to Dean,” she says. “I’m going to publish it. No one’s ever going to know.”

  “It hardly seems like it matters now.”

  Ginny sighs and stares back at the water. The crowd from the ferry has thinned, and as he looks at the port Will wonders if Dio is among the stragglers still hanging around the docks. He hadn’t told Will what ferry he was taking back from Hydra, and as he was fleeing Will hadn’t bothered to ask. The fact that he had woken up next to him this morning now seems inconceivable, the memory already so faded, so blurred by other stimuli, that he would swear that years separated him from it, rather than a handful of hours.

  “Jesus, Will, what am I going to do?” Ginny says again.

  “Ginny, you and I both know that I’m not the person that can, or should, make that decision for you.”

  Her knapsack falls off her knees, and she makes no move to pick it up. The flap falls open, and a tube of mint lip balm rolls out onto the street.

  “You know, an hour ago, after I said all that stuff to your dad, I was feeling good. Really good, actually. Like that moment after you rip out a hangnail, and the sting’s already going away. I got in a cab to come down here, and I kept saying to myself that I had this. That I’d, like, Hannah Horvath or Gilmore Girls this shit, and I’d come out on the other side with a daughter, and a cute new haircut, and some grand understanding of what life actually means.”

  “No one actually wants to be Hannah Horvath,” Will says. “Or Lorelai Gilmore, for that matter.”

  “That’s not the point.” Ginny shakes her head. “The point is that no one can be Hannah Horvath or Lorelai Gilmore. No one can be them because life doesn’t have neat series finales where you get a resolution but also a digestible cliffhanger, you know? Life has mistakes and implications and consequences that aren’t fair and—I don’t know. When I was in the cab I somehow forgot that. Either that, or I’d never really realized it to begin with.” She reaches up, loses both her hands in her curls. “Jesus, Will. I can’t have a kid.”

  And then, for a third time, she says: “What am I going to do?”

  Will leans forward again, this time resting his hands on his thighs. Behind them, he hears the whir of a scooter, slowing as it prepares to round a corner.

  “Ginny, I’ve told you: I. Don’t. Know.”

  “Well, try.” She tugs at his shirtsleeve. She’s trying to smile, but it’s tight, labored. Her cheeks quiver.

  What, he wonders, is he meant to tell her? That things will be okay? That, through a few adjustments of chance, their courses will miraculously correct themselves and their lives—lives that suddenly feel somehow stuck between young and old—will settle back into the patterns that, for the past twenty-two years, they’ve been imagining for themselves? He’d be lying if he said that; he’d be hiding behind sentimentality.

  He says, “You’re going to go home.”

  “What?”

  “You asked me what you’re going to do, and I’m telling you. The first thing you’re going to do is go home. You’ll get on that Flying Dolphin, and then your Lufthansa flight. You’ll cross the sea like fucking Odysseus, and you’ll go home. Then, once you’re there, you’ll make a decision. Because I’ll tell you one thing: you aren’t going to make one here. Not when you haven’t showered or eaten in, like, thirty-six hours, and you’re sitting—to quote you—on a curb in Bumfuck, Greece.”

  He reaches out and gently tugs on her ear. “This is not a place to make a decision about the rest of your life.”

  Ginny leans forward. She pulls her knees to her chest and rests her chin upon them. Ten yards away, the tide churns in shallow loops, an endless feedback of salt and sand and ruin. She breathes, and the air rattles as she exhales.

  “What if I make the wrong decision?”

  “You won’t,” Will says.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because you’re smart. Because you’re Ginny Fucking Polonsky. Because even though you’ve made some massive mistakes, you’re still the bravest person I know, and whatever you decide will be the right thing for you.”

  “You’re just saying that.”

  He nods.

  “You’re right, I am,” he says. “I think what’s probably more likely is that, whatever you do, you’ll end up regretting it, or questioning it, at least once or twice. But then that will go away. It’ll go away because it has to, and because I think that’s how these things just work. Pretty soon, the thing you’ve done will become the only thing you can imagine doing.”

  Will glances over at Ginny and sees that she’s started to cry.

  “Besides,” he says. “I’ll be there to help you. Build a crib, go to a doctor’s appointment. Whatever.”

  “Why would you do that for me?”

  “Because I don’t have a job, and I’m bad at being bored.” She leans into him and buries her head against his neck. “Jesus, Ginny, because I’m not a monster, and it’s the right thing to do.”

  She’s quiet, and he feels the warmth of her breath against his skin, the dampness of her cheek on his shoulder. Around them, the island’s minor tumult continues, oblivious: mothers slathering sunscreen on antsy children, old men twirling their worry beads beneath the shade of pin-striped awnings. Ships, their masts
scraping the lower boughs of the sky, unfurling their sails and drifting out to sea.

  Sue Ellen

  August 3

  Temple of Aphaía, Aegina

  They arrive an hour late, at six forty-five in the evening, when the sun has begun to sink behind the Peloponnese and the temple is washed in the Hesperides’ golden light. A pair of buses brings them. Giant vehicles whose doors open with hydraulic hisses and upon whose sides are painted three triremes, the ancient warships the Achaeans sailed to the beaches of Ilium. Beneath these vessels is a name, stenciled on in a violent, muscular font: MYRMIDON COACHES, it reads. THE FINEST IN LUXURY TRANSPORT. The passengers unload slowly—they move deliberately as they descend the buses’ steps; they pause and gather themselves before huddling in groups. An hour earlier a few Golden Age Adventures staff members unfolded eighty-five chairs into a regiment of tight rows, and it’s into these rows that Gianna now tries to usher the cruisers, leading them to their seats with stiff pats to their backs. Her efforts are futile; they resist her. There’s too much to see, too many views of the Aegean. And so they scatter, fanning out among the temple’s grounds, tilting back their sun hats to get a better look at its pediment. Flustered, Gianna chases them. She barks out instructions like she’s commanding soldiers, their swords traded for flimsy gossamer scarves. As she passes by Sue Ellen, she apologizes, breathlessly, and promises she’ll be able to start her presentation shortly.

  From behind the lectern that’s been erected for her, Sue Ellen smiles and nods. She’s not listening. She’s not watching, either. She’s looking down at the notes she’s prepared, wondering what happens next. It’s an uncertainty that exists both in the short term and in the long term, the existential: What happens next? Dean had not reacted well when she said she was not returning to Berkeley; when she’d told him that, rather than repeat their cyclical mistakes, the same, prophesized sins, she would instead grasp at the single lifeline she had, the one Eleni had thrown her. At first, he cried. He begged her to come home, to stay. There were dramatics—the sort that, now, she’s uncomfortable recalling. He dropped to his knees; he held her waist and buried his head against her stomach. His nose nestled into her belly button, and she froze. She felt like she was watching a bad movie or reading a scene from one of his books. The sentimentality, the empty performance of his love, angered her.