Honestly, We Meant Well
Page 31
“Get up.” She softly pushed his head away. “This is embarrassing.”
“Don’t you care how I feel?” he asked, standing.
“No,” she said. “And neither do you.”
He asked her again to reconsider, and again she told him no, she wouldn’t. If anything, his hysterical pleading reaffirmed her decision. For the past year, Dean had made her feel like she and Will were burdens to his success. Chains, more or less, that held him back from the pleasures fame provided. Staring down at the top of his head and feeling his body convulse against her thighs, she realized that she had this equation in reverse. Without her, without Will, Dean was lost. He was a name on a bright red cover. A stack of books among a hundred others, waiting on a discount table to be bought.
He turned cruel, then. Before storming upstairs to pack his bag, he told her she was living in a fantasy that would end in disaster. He mocked her with the same high-pitched laugh she had often heard him use to patronize his students and their son. What the hell did she know about taking over a business? he asked. What the hell did she know about running a hotel? Nothing, she told him. Nor did she know anything about moving abroad, or escaping a marriage, or abandoning the only career she had ever had. But then, twenty-two years ago, she had also known nothing about being a mother. She had known nothing about cutting food small enough for a toddler to eat or worrying late into the night until a teenager came home. She had known nothing of the daily and colossal frustrations, the unending terror and joy. But she did it. She learned on the fly. And while she wasn’t perfect—she couldn’t have been—she raised a son who was thoughtful, compassionate, and good.
She sees him—Will—now. He’s standing behind the last row of chairs, just to the left of center. He’s changed clothes since she last saw him. Now he wears a freshly ironed shirt and a pair of slacks she bought him last summer. He grins and gives a clandestine wave. She winks back, then smiles. Tonight, over their last glass of scotch, she’ll have to explain her decision: that she’s leaving one home to return to another. She wonders what those words might sound like. She wonders if she’s even capable of saying them.
A placard with the Golden Age Adventures logo hangs from the front of the lectern. With two fingers she smooths down the tape that holds it in place, pressing air bubbles out from under the adhesive.
She looks down at her notes again.
What happens next?
* * *
Gianna finally wrangles the cruisers, herding them into the rows of chairs. Once they’re seated, she passes out small blue notebooks emblazoned with the company’s logo, along with matching ballpoint pens. She encourages them to take notes and to jot down any questions they might have during Sue Ellen’s lecture. There won’t be a test, she promises, to a response of polite laughter, but still, she encourages active engagement. This isn’t just any cruise—this is a Golden Age Adventure, and they came here to learn. Watching this, Sue Ellen wonders how much they’re paying for this, how much they’re paying for her. If what she has to offer is a pop commodity, in the words of Charles Winkler, she wonders just how expensive it’s become. Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. This is the first time she’s doing it, but it will also be the last. She’s done resurrecting worlds for everyone but herself.
But then—is she? Gripping the lectern, she feels her throat tighten; she worries that Dean was right. She worries that she’s giving up everything she has for a fantasy, a life that wasn’t meant for her. She doesn’t know what she’s doing—that’s definitely true. She admitted as much to Eleni, who she called once she left Dean. The last time she had seen her was that morning, at the Hilton. She’d told her she could stay the night in her hotel room after she declined her offer to buy the Alectrona—it was late, and she doubted she would be able to get in to see anyone at Lugn Escapes that evening. She had left just after dawn, while Eleni was still sleeping on the rollaway cot she had ordered from the front desk—there was a breakfast Gianna had asked her to attend, and Sue Ellen hadn’t wanted to wake her. Before she slipped out, though, Sue Ellen ironed one of the shirts she had brought and laid it out on the bed. Next to it, she placed a note: For your meeting, it read. Don’t take no for an answer.
“I got late checkout and ordered room service,” Eleni said, when she picked up the phone. “I’m sorry.”
“Where are you now?”
“I’m about to get on the metro. I’m supposed to meet Oskar in an hour—he said he couldn’t see me until six o’clock. I spent the whole day practicing my groveling.”
“Cancel it,” Sue Ellen said.
“What?”
“Cancel it. The meeting.”
She listened as, upstairs, Dean stomped and threw suitcases.
“Look,” she continued. “You should know I don’t know the first thing about running a hotel.”
On the other end of the line, there was a siren, then a trio of car horns.
Eleni waited for the sound to clear, then said, “I’ll help you. I’ll come back from Athens on the weekends for a while. I’ll do whatever you need.”
“The only C I ever got in college was in microeconomics, and for the past twenty years I’ve paid someone to do my taxes.”
“Stavros does all the accounting. I taught him how to use Excel, and it turns out it’s the only thing he’s good at.”
“My cooking sucks, and I don’t know how to make a bed with hospital corners.”
“No one actually likes hospital corners, anyway. They make it impossible to get comfortable.”
A door slammed, and Sue Ellen swallowed. “What if I’m beyond help? What if this is a mistake?”
“It’s not.”
“How do you know? You hardly know me.”
“Because I know,” Eleni says. “Because my father loved you, and I know.”
Now someone in the audience coughs. She looks out at the bodies assembled in the chairs in front of her. On the terrace of the Hilton in Athens, she had obsessed over the physicality of getting old, the way the human form succumbed to years. How silly that had been. Aging—real, honest-to-God aging—has so much less to do with the physical burden of years than it does with the cumulative weight of experience. If anyone knows that it’s her. Never has Sue Ellen felt so old as when she sat in Connie’s office, watching Dean cry. Finding a gray hair, watching her skin sag—those were comedies compared to dealing with the wreckage of her husband’s affair. Now she tries to imagine the individual histories these people shoulder—the triumphs and the inexorable defeats. This woman in the front row has mourned one lover and deserted another. The man next to her—the one doodling—he’s still hoping the pieces of his life will hold together; he’s still grasping the anemic threads of fate.
She worries that the weight of experience is crushing—that, no matter how far you run, you’re stuck with the mess you make. She worries it’s impossible to escape a buried life.
* * *
There is a final memory, one that’s escaped her until just now: Sue Ellen is lying on a blanket in the eleonas with Christos, her hands folded behind her head. She’s just told him how, earlier that day, she had received a letter from a friend in her doctoral program, a woman named Gayle who was spending the summer in Rome, assisting with the excavation of the Crypta Balbi. It was fascinating, Gayle had written—in a neglected site on the Campus Martius, they’d managed to uncover imperial porticos, along with renovations that were made centuries later, in the medieval period, when it became the Chiesa di Santa Maria Domine Rose. On top of that, there was evidence of a Renaissance-era convent and artifacts from an eighteenth-century church. A time line, Gayle wrote, rooting itself deep into the dirt; the whole of Rome’s history, preserved in a single city block.
Her eyes fixed on the olive leaves above them, Sue Ellen explained to Christos how she read the letter once, then a second time, and then began to cry. How many times did Rome, the Eternal City, need to be destroyed and rebuilt? How many times did Athens? Despite her training, it
was a thought she had often, whenever she was in a place with any history, and occasionally it saddened her. Civilization was not poetry, heroism, or myth; it was, instead, a sort of layer cake. City foisted upon city, life foisted upon life. The newer iterations replacing the old ones, burying them with their collective mistakes and regrets.
“You’re looking at it wrong,” Christos said to her once she had finished. “It’s not destruction—it’s rebirth.”
She rolled her eyes and folded her hands behind her head.
She said, “Rebirth. How romantic.”
“Maybe.” He propped himself up on his elbow. “But that doesn’t make it wrong.”
A bowl of olives sat between them, and she reached for one.
“You’re telling me that all the head shops next to the Agora are a rebirth, not a destruction.”
“No,” he said. “Or, yes.”
She threw the olive at him. He brushed it from the front of his shirt.
He said, “Knock it off, I’m serious.”
“All right, then,” Sue Ellen said. “Explain yourself.”
Above them and to the north, two thunderheads merged.
Christos repositioned himself, brushing his arm against Sue Ellen’s.
“Take Aphaía,” he said.
“I thought we were talking about cities.”
“Just—bear with me here.” He repeated himself: “Take Aphaía.”
“Fine.” Sue Ellen closed her eyes. “Taking Aphaía.”
“Well, first, according to you, and at least in some myths, she was living on Crete, as Bretomartis—”
“Britomartis.”
“—when she fled from King Minos, threw herself into a fishing net, and disappeared.”
Sue Ellen sat up.
“That sounds more like a death than a rebirth,” she said.
“Yes, fine, but then, in addition to being called Britomartis on Crete, she emerged here, on Aegina, where they called her Aphaía and worshiped her as a mother goddess. A temple is built to her.”
“Which, later on, gets mislabeled as the Temple of Jupiter Panellenius. Another death.”
“Which then gets relabeled years later as, indeed, a sanctuary to Aphaía.” He picked the olive from the blanket and threw it back at her. “And now you’re studying it as the subject of your dissertation.”
Sue Ellen was quiet. She stared up and watched the clouds darken.
“To disappear and reappear,” Christos said. “To be born, to die, to be reborn. Re, re, re: an implication that something existed before, in another form, and now has the opportunity to live again. You can tell me that cities, and history, and life are about destruction, and maybe that’s true. But they’re also about something else. They’re about re-creation. Re, re, re.”
She pulled her knees to her chest. There was wind, and when it picked up she could see the velvet undersides of olive leaves.
“But how do we know what phase we’re in?” she asked him. “How do we know if Rome’s rising or falling? How do we know if the flames we see are flames of civilization’s failure or the beginnings of something else?”
Christos shrugged and ate an olive. “We don’t, I guess. Or maybe we do, and it’s a matter of perspective. Maybe it’s a matter of picking where you are, in the rise or in the fall, and saying that—regardless of what the historians and philosophers decide to call it—for you, this is a beginning.” He spat out the pit in the palm of his hand. “What is it that Homer tells the muse at the beginning of The Odyssey? ‘Start from where you will.’”
Sue Ellen looked at him and reached for his hand.
She said, “I think it’s going to rain.”
* * *
Start from where you will. Pick a point in the epic of the hero’s wanderings, and call that the opening of your story. It’s a deceptively simple instruction, she thinks, looking at the expectant faces before her. For any beginning she chooses won’t really be a beginning at all. It will carry with it the baggage and histories of the many lives that came before it, and when it’s gone, the lives that come after it will be built upon its back.
Sue Ellen turns and looks up at the temple behind her. She knows these columns better than she knows herself. And yet tonight she feels like she’s seeing them anew—not for the first time, but through another lens. She feels like she could spend the next twelve hours learning them all over again, running her fingers along the rough stone until the moon has been charioted clear across the sky. Beyond the sanctuary—beyond the hillcrest, and the mastic trees, and the pointed tips of pines—lies the Aegean, the wine-dark sea, now turned brassy as another day dies. Rising from it, even farther off, are the shadows of the Peloponnese, dark reliefs of mountains emerging from the twilight. Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story.
She hears the creaking of chairs and a chorus of intermittent coughs. They’re waiting for her, she realizes, turning back. They’re trading perplexed looks and whispering in one another’s ears. Their pens are readied in their ancient hands, and their notebooks sit open on their laps, empty.
Will, her son, catches her eye and nods.
A few feet to his right, Gianna taps her watch.
Sue Ellen smiles. She thinks, Ruins are not endings—they are the foundations for lives that have yet to come.
She says, “Let’s begin.”
Acknowledgments
and Author’s Note
There are a number of people who helped in the creation of this book, and who thus deserve my deepest gratitude. Before I thank them, though, I’d like to offer a quick note: while most of this novel operates in the real world, I have taken a handful of small liberties. To begin with, ferry schedules between Aegina, Athens, and Hydra have been altered for the purposes of the story. Likewise, while Berkeley certainly offers creative writing courses, the only undergraduate degree it grants in the subject is a minor, which is under the auspices of the Interdisciplinary Studies Department.
I’d be remiss if I also didn’t point out that while Eleni may be bored with life on Aegina, it’s actually a very beautiful island and an extraordinary place to visit, as is the rest of Greece.
Finally, Ginny Polonsky dismisses The Iliad as a book about a bunch of boys. This isn’t an opinion that I share.
Now, on to the main event …
Thank you to Richard Pine, Eliza Rothstein, and the rest of the team at Inkwell Management for more than a decade of support and advocacy on my behalf. Jason Richman and Sam Reynolds at UTA have also been tireless advocates, and deserve buckets of gratitude and appreciation.
At Flatiron Books, I’m indebted to James Melia. Every author should be so lucky to have an editor who works with such dedication and, more important, humor. Thanks also to Amy Einhorn, Bob Miller, Patricia Cave, Marlena Bittner, Nancy Trypuc, and Greg Villepique.
I was fortunate enough to have a wonderful group of early readers whose guidance helped shape this book into what it’s become. Ali Bujnowski, Chris Rovzar, Gerold Schroeder, Peter Schottenfels, Yona Silverman, Clare O’Connor, and Elizabeth Dunn—thank you, thank you, thank you.
My parents, Deborah and Steven Ginder, taught me that reading was something necessary and vital from the time I was old enough to crack open a book. I wouldn’t be writing if it weren’t for them.
Edith Hamilton’s classic Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes and Emily Wilson’s wonderful new translation of The Odyssey were both essential reading as I tried to create my own world of wandering and regret. I recommend them both.
Finally, to my husband, Mac McCarty: thank you for keeping me sane, even when it seems like insanity is imminent. I love you.
Recommend
Honestly, We Meant Well
for your next book club!
Reading Group Guide available at
WWW.READINGGROUPGOLD.COM
ALSO BY GRANT GINDER
The People We Hate at the Wedding
Driver’s Education
This Is How It Starts
About the Author
Grant Ginder is the author of The People We Hate at the Wedding. He received his MFA from NYU, where he teaches writing. You can sign up for email updates here.
@GrantGinder
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraphs
Sue Ellen
Eleni
Will
Dean
Sue Ellen
Eleni
Will
Sue Ellen
Dean
Eleni
Sue Ellen
Eleni
Will
Eleni
Dean
Ginny Polonsky
Will
Sue Ellen
Eleni
Ginny Polonsky
Dean
Will