Honestly, We Meant Well Read online

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  For my mother, Deborah Ginder

  This is absurd,

  that mortals blame the gods! They say we cause

  their suffering, but they themselves increase it

  by folly.

  —HOMER, THE ODYSSEY, TRANSLATED BY EMILY WILSON

  It’s not the tragedies that kill us; it’s the messes.

  —DOROTHY PARKER

  Sue Ellen

  March 18

  Berkeley, California

  Ten minutes before the phone rings, Sue Ellen Wright—tenured professor of classical studies, beloved recipient of countless teaching awards, wavering wife, and mostly good mother—is wondering how, exactly, she got here.

  “Teach? You okay?”

  Blinking, she looks across her desk. There, one of her students slouches in a chair. His name’s Connor McFarland, and he’s a freshman, with a face still caught between the doughiness of adolescence and the resolution of everything else. Despite the weather (it’s cold and raining), he’s wearing a T-shirt, flip-flops, and a pair of mesh shorts. A San Francisco Giants hat is pulled low on his forehead, and from beneath its flat brim his eyes stare at her expectantly.

  “I’m sorry.” She tries to regain focus. “What were you saying?”

  “I was saying that I think you made a mistake. I’m pretty sure I got this one right.” Connor points to a picture on his midterm, which he’s come here, to Sue Ellen’s office, to dispute. It’s an artifact that he was meant to identify and, in his defense, he has, albeit incorrectly: beneath the picture, in sloppy, blue ink, he’s written: BONG.

  “That’s not a bong, Connor. That’s a Corinthian urn from the fifth century B.C.E.”

  He spins the paper around so he can look at it again.

  “But can’t you see how it could have been a bong?”

  “No,” Sue Ellen says. “Actually, I can’t.”

  He’s been arguing about his grade for the better part of an hour. Twice now she’s been tempted to kick him out. She wants to tell him that the 35 percent she gave him should have been a 25. That his answers were so dismal, so laughably bad, that halfway through grading the exam she actually began to feel sorry for him, and in turn padded his failing score with an extra ten points. (He spelled Argos correctly, she thought, as she added things up. That had to count for something.) Instead, though, she’s let him talk, hoping that he’ll hear himself when he tells her that the Agora was a movie theater. Hoping that, in that pivotal moment, he’ll realize just how ridiculous he sounds.

  “You’d put the weed here,” he says, pointing to the vessel’s base. “And then you’d drill a little hole and—”

  “It’s an urn, Connor. It can only be an urn.”

  He looks at her and twists his mouth to one side.

  “I could have gotten that if you’d given us a word bank.”

  “Well, I didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because this is college.”

  He’s in her biggest class—a fifty-student survey in classical archaeology. She’s volunteered to teach it for the past decade—a fact that earns her ribbing from both her colleagues and her husband, Dean. One of the most distinguished classicists on the West Coast, they say to her, and you spend your afternoons pointing to Sparta on a map. She laughs along with them; she says that she’s bad at geography, and she needs a reminder of where Sparta is each spring. The truth, though, is that she enjoys it—the wide-eyed energy that freshmen bring to the classroom, the way their optimism fools her into forgetting her own mistakes.

  Or, mostly she does; she kind of does. While she’d never admit this to her colleagues (she finds it tedious and cliché when they complain about undergrads’ laziness), privately she worries they might be right. She worries that kids like Connor are becoming less an anomaly than the norm.

  He sits in the front row every day. He comes to class in varying combinations of sweatpants and hoodies, and fills one seat with his six-foot frame and another with his backpack, a green JanSport whose label has been covered with a Giants patch. He is, she suspects, good-looking—not to her, but to the young women who always elect to sit behind him, a pair of blondes and a redhead named Kristen, Kristin, and Kristyn. Watching them watch Connor, she wants to tell them not to worry—that, in a few years, once they’ve learned to appreciate men who care about proper hygiene and wear proper pants, they’ll look back on this infatuation with a sort of hilarious disgust. Until then, though, they hang on Connor’s every word. And, as it turns out, they’re not alone. The whole class quiets when Connor speaks—never with a hand raised, always in a booming voice. More often than not, his questions aren’t questions so much as critiques or challenges: last week, he told her he was skeptical of her recounting of the Battle of Thermopylae, citing the movie 300 as evidence. She still remembers how he took off his hat and ran a hand through a mop of oily hair.

  “In 300, it’s just the Spartans who beat the Persians,” he said, disappointed that he was the one teaching her.

  Two rows behind him, she heard someone whisper: He’s right.

  “Three hundred?”

  “It’s a movie, teach. Check it out.”

  Later that evening, she recalled the incident for her colleague Charlene. Over a glass of wine she explained, with a bewildered excitement, how she had been forced to ditch her notes and spend the next hour teaching her students how to distinguish between Hollywood and fact.

  Charlene listened and shook her head.

  “There’s always one of them,” she said. “Usually there’s more, but there’s always one.”

  “One of what?”

  “Some entitled eighteen-year-old man suspicious of female knowledge. They want to know everything, but they’re not willing to work for it. And they’re angry that you did.”

  “I don’t want to turn this into some gender issue.”

  “Then you’re an idiot.” Charlene finished her wine. “You should see 300, though. Those guys have great abs.”

  Now, Connor slouches down further and folds his hands across his stomach. “Maybe you’re the one who’s wrong,” he says. “Maybe it actually was a bong, and you’ve been wrong this whole time. I mean, it’s so old, who knows for sure? It’s not like you were there.”

  He smiles, satisfied.

  Sue Ellen says, “I don’t think that’s likely.”

  “And why not?”

  Why not, Connor? Because there’s something called context—the necessity of interpreting an object’s meaning as part of a greater picture. Because as it turns out, pieces of old pottery aren’t so different from middle-aged professors or failing college freshmen: it’s only when we consider the sum of their stories that we can begin, maybe, to understand them.

  She says none of this. She waits for the Teaching Moment to pass before she flips back to the first page of the midterm, which she slides across the desk to him.

 
“Connor,” she says, “it wasn’t a bong.”

  He folds the papers in half, then in quarters, before shoving them into the pocket of his hoodie.

  Standing, he sighs. “I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree then.”

  “Yes,” Sue Ellen says. “Yes, I guess we will.”

  Shaking his head, he leaves, and Sue Ellen locks the door behind him. Then she walks to her office’s small window. Somehow, spring has crept up on me, she thinks. Back east, in places like Philadelphia and New York, the season arrives violently, in a single day. One moment sidewalks are slick, coated with gray, filthy ice; the next, they’re sprouting tables and chairs, the seasonal appendages of a thousand eager cafés. With these changes also comes an unspoken but certain urgency, a tacit realization that Everything Must Be Done Because This Cannot Last. Berkeley lacks such drama—it doesn’t muscle its way through the seasons so much as it slips into them, filling in empty corners over weeks and months. Gradually, the hills of Claremont Canyon become spotted with wildflowers; jackets are worn in the morning, then eventually left at home. When Sue Ellen first moved to the Bay Area, people warned her of this. She had just spent four years outside Boston, and her friends there told her that she would come to miss the way the seasons served to divide the year. They told her that without them her life would slip by—that, decades later, her memories, no matter what they contained, would all bear the same brassy hue. Twelve months ago, she would have told them they were right. The thirty years she’s spent in California have been a pleasant blur—a sun-drenched montage of teaching, researching, marriage, and motherhood. But then this year happened. Now she’d tell those same friends their reliance on the seasons is simplistic and naïve. You don’t need falling leaves or melting snow to mark time passing—mistresses and couples therapy get the job done, too.

  Sitting down at her desk, she looks at a stack of ungraded papers and then beyond it, to a small framed picture of her family. In it, her son, Will, is holding up a wonky, overly frosted cake, while she and Dean smile behind him, barely containing their hysterics. It’s an oldish picture; Will had baked that cake more than three years ago now, for Sue Ellen’s fifty-second birthday. He had just started his freshman year at Berkeley, and he had ridden his bike home from the dorms to surprise her; Dean kept her out of the kitchen while he spelled out HAPPY BIRTHDAY, YOU’RE OLD in red sugar letters. It’s an awful picture—Will, who’s now nearly graduated, has puffy, hungover eyes, and she and Dean are smiling like maniacs. She wouldn’t think of replacing it, though. It helps her remember how they were before.

  When the phone rings, it startles her. She can’t think of the last time someone called her on a landline, especially not the one in her office, and as she listens to the handset ring with what she imagines to be increasing urgency, she starts to worry that someone’s died.

  “Hello?”

  She saves the call right before it flips over to voice mail.

  “Yes, yes. Sue Ellen Wright, please.” The voice belongs to a woman, and it’s tinged with a heavy accent that Sue Ellen immediately pegs as Greek—Athenian, to be specific: quick, constant, pure.

  “This is she,” Sue Ellen says.

  “Yes, wonderful. Dr. Wright, this is Gianna Galanis. We had the pleasure of meeting at the Society for Classical Studies event last year in San Francisco.”

  Leaning back in her chair, Sue Ellen works through the roster of events she attended in the past twelve months. A series of talks and conferences and symposiums that form a trail of memories, all of which invariably end with an image of Sue Ellen standing alone next to a catering table, contemplating the calories in a cube of cheese. Closing her eyes and thinking harder, she finally finds it: a Friday evening at the Hilton near Union Square. An opening-night reception in a carpeted hall called the Continental Ballroom. Gianna worked in development at the National Archaeological Museum, in Athens. She was small—Sue Ellen remembers that, too—no taller than five feet. The way she carried herself, though, like she was poised on a chariot, coupled with her explosion of raven curls, created a formidable impression.

  “Yes. Yes, of course. How are you, Gianna?”

  “I’m well, thank you. The world is falling apart and my country is in ruins, but I am well.”

  “That’s lovely to hear.” Sue Ellen clicks her web browser and opens the history tab: she had spent the morning before Connor arrived looking at shoes. “Still at the National Archaeological Museum?”

  “I left the museum in October.”

  “Oh?”

  What she needs, she thinks, scrolling down the page, is a pair of nice red flats. Red, or maybe green.

  “I deserved more money than they could pay me.”

  “Isn’t that always the case.”

  Zeroing in on a pair of espadrilles, she wonders what Gianna wants and how fast she can get her to hang up.

  “What can I help you with, Miss Galanis?”

  “Yes, I am sure you are very busy.”

  Sue Ellen struggles for an excuse. “I’ve got a faculty meeting in five minutes.”

  “I will only need three,” Gianna says. “I left the museum to become the director of programming at Golden Age Adventures.” There’s a pause. “You’ve heard of it, obviously.”

  Sue Ellen opens a new window and types the name into Google.

  She says, “Obviously,” and watches as pictures of a small cruise ship load, its deck populated by gray-haired tourists in sun hats and synthetic T-shirts: a Cialis commercial at sea. On top of it all, arching along the shallow curve of a Photoshopped sunset, appears a slogan, at once perfectly inviting and devastatingly unaware of its own cruel irony: The Ancients Await.

  “It’s an expedition enterprise,” Gianna says. “We organize educational vacations, catering to an older, more distinguished clientele.”

  “It certainly looks like it.”

  “In the first week of August we will be launching a new cruise called The Grandest Voyage Ever Made.”

  Sue Ellen minimizes Google and returns to her shoes.

  She says, “Sounds ambitious.”

  “I came up with the title.” Gianna pauses. Somewhere down the hall, Sue Ellen hears a door open and close. “It’s a tour of some of the islands’ most important sites,” she explains. “With lectures occurring at each stop. We’re offering it to our most active clients.”

  “How … wonderful.”

  “I think so, yes.” Another pause, this time filled with something else: fingernails, clicking against a keyboard. “Last year when we met, you mentioned that you had done research concerning historical and religious memory in the context of Aphaía’s temple on Aegina.”

  “Years ago. It was the subject of my dissertation.”

  “Yes, I read it last night.”

  “Oh, God, it’s still floating around?”

  “Dr. Wright, the memory of the internet is older than the internet itself.”

  “What a terrifying aphorism,” Sue Ellen says.

  “Thank you.” Then: “I—on behalf of Golden Age Adventures—would be very honored if you’d join us at a welcome reception at the Hilton in Athens on the second of August, and then again on the third, when the tour reaches Aegina, to discuss your studies. The talk will be no more than an hour and will take place at the Temple of Aphaía on the island itself. We’ve found, Dr. Wright, that our clients are most impressed by location. Your travel expenses will of course be covered by the company, and we are also pleased to offer you a one-thousand-euro honorarium.”

  “You want me to come to Aegina.”

  There’s a beat of hesitation before she says the island’s name, and this fact surprises her—it is, after all, only a place.

  “Yes, that’s right. Athens, too.”

  “I’ve actually never been on a cruise before.”

  “Oh, you won’t be on the cruise itself. Unfortunately, we reserve our rooms for paying passengers—”

  “As opposed to passengers you’re paying.” Sue E
llen picks up a pen and twirls it around her finger. “So, I’m not going on a cruise so much as I’m giving a lecture.”

  “Correct.”

  “Where would I stay?”

  “We’ll provide a stipend to cover your lodging, and I’m happy to make a reservation for you at the Hotel Cosse, conveniently located near the island’s—”

  “No,” Sue Ellen says, cutting off Gianna. “No, thank you, but I … I actually know of a place.”

  “On Aegina?”

  “Yes. Not in the harbor, but close to it.”

  Gianna sighs, relieved. “Thank goodness,” she says. “The Hotel Cosse is above a fish market and their bedsheets smell like mackerel.”

  Sue Ellen sets down the pen and closes her eyes. She sees a red dirt road, cutting through the shadows of a late afternoon.

  “I’m flattered you thought of me,” she says.

  “I’m relieved to hear so. Our first choice declined the offer.”

  “How kind of you to point that out.”

  “Oh, no.” Gianna laughs. “Please don’t misunderstand me, Dr. Wright. You were always my first choice—”

  “Really, you don’t have to say that.”

  “—it was everyone else who wanted Peter Bollinger.”

  “Peter Bollinger from Yale? He’s brilliant.”

  “Brilliant, maybe, but ugly. You are much nicer to look at.”

  “Again,” Sue Ellen says, “how kind of you to say.”

  “I hope you’ll consider our offer.”

  Sue Ellen turns to the window, where an ash-gray cloud has eclipsed the sun. She thinks of ungraded papers and unwritten lectures; of dozing students and their chirping cell phones; of Connor and his flip-flops and his millennia-old bongs. She thinks beyond that: to a year spent flailing. A year spent plugging leaks and patching holes as she has tried to keep her family’s sinking ship afloat. And then deeper, to decades ago, when she was a younger woman, a student in her own right, boarding a crowded, sea-bound ferry. Closing her eyes again, she smells the island’s pine needles and cypress trees. She hears the sound, as constant as lapping waves, of Christos’s voice.