Honestly, We Meant Well Page 10

  “Sure, olives, whatever.” Will looks up at him again. He’s handsome, in a way that Will suspects makes life easier for him—or, at the very least, gives him the confidence to offer olives to strangers.

  The waiter lingers for a moment, and Will worries that he’s been looking at him for a second too long and has been keeping him from his job. Glancing to each side of him, though, he sees that the rest of the outside tables are empty. The only other customer sits at the Taverna Karalis’s small bar—a woman in a pink sun hat, picking meat from the bones of a grilled barbounia.

  “From whence do you hail?”

  “Huh?” Will asks.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Oh, sorry. San Francisco. Or, not really. More like Berkeley.”

  “I’ve never been.”

  Will watches as the woman gingerly pokes at the fish’s head. When nothing happens, she sets the fork down, disappointed.

  He says, “It’s nice, mostly,” and wonders how many more likes Rajiv’s picture has won. A hundred, he bets. A hundred and fifty.

  “How long will you be on Aegina?” the waiter asks.

  “Like, three more weeks. My mother’s doing some work here.”

  “You don’t have a job back in Berkeley?”

  “That,” Will says, “is sort of a sore subject.”

  The waiter nods and bites his lower lip, as if to suppress a smile. Will wants him to leave—he wants him to bring him his fourth beer, then leave.

  Instead, he asks, “And what are your plans for while you’re here?”

  “You’re looking at them,” Will says.

  He turns away, looking toward the harbor. For a moment, neither of them says anything, and Will allows himself to get lost in the squawks of the gulls, the honks of motorists along the promenade.

  “I’ll go get you that beer—”

  “That’d be great.”

  “—but also, I give sailing lessons, when I’m not working here.” He sets a blue business card on the table. “If you don’t have anything else to do, you should come by sometime.”

  Will picks up the card. The paper is flimsy, hardly thicker than an onion’s skin. Across its top, large bold print reads THE SARONIC YACHTING SCHOOL, and then beneath that, in much smaller type, a name: DIONYSUS LOUKAS, INSTRUCTOR.

  “Your name is Dionysus?” Will says.

  “Dio for short. It’s basically like being called John in the States.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  He shrugs. “I don’t know what to tell you.”

  There’s a minor commotion from inside the restaurant, and they both turn to see that the woman in the pink sun hat has accidentally knocked her plate over; now, the barbounia lies twisted and broken on the floor, a heap of bones and skin and partially eaten flesh.

  “I’m not much of a sailor,” Will says.

  “I figured.” He smiles. “I wouldn’t be inviting you to take lessons if you were.”

  Will scratches the back of his neck and thinks for a moment longer.

  “I’m actually going to Delphi tomorrow,” he says.

  “For how long?”

  “Oh, just the day, I think.”

  “Perfect—the school’s closed on Saturdays, anyway.”

  Picking up the card, Will starts to hand it back. “Look,” he says, “I appreciate the offer, but—”

  “Just keep it.” Dio reaches forward and collects the empty bottles sitting in front of Will. “In case you change your mind.”

  Sue Ellen

  July 15

  Aegina and Delphi

  “Dean.”

  She shakes his shoulder once, then twice. Batting her hand away, he rolls over.

  “Dean, it’s time to wake up.”

  He grumbles something and moans.

  His eyes still closed, he asks, “What time is it?”

  “Five thirty,” she says. “The ferry leaves in forty-five minutes. If we miss it, we’ll miss the bus in Piraeus.”

  “Go wake up Will. I’ll get up once he’s up.”

  He buries his head beneath a pillow.

  “He’s up already.” She snatches the pillow away and tosses it to the floor. “He’s downstairs having coffee.”

  “We should get that boy a medal.”

  She flips on the room’s lights, and he covers his eyes with the backs of his hands.

  He says, “Christ, that’s bright.”

  “You’ll be okay.”

  A few minutes ago, she opened the curtains to the room’s single window. Now, standing before it, she watches as the lower edges of the sky light with dawn. Higher up, the tops of trees disappear into the last traces of night, pockets of black and indigo and the faint silver of vanishing stars.

  “Where are we going again?” Dean’s sitting up now, wiping bits of sleep from the corners of his eyes.

  “Delphi.”

  “How far away is it?”

  “It’s a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Athens.” He tries to hide again, but she pulls the sheets off of him. “Knock it off,” she says. “You can sleep on the bus.”

  “Remind me why we’re traipsing all the way to Delphi?”

  “Del-phee,” she says. “Del-phi is the English corruption.”

  “I love it when you correct me before sunrise.”

  “Here, put these on.” She throws him a pair of chinos and a gray polo shirt. “We’re going because we’re in the cradle of Western civilization for four weeks, and I’ll be damned if we spend that entire time drinking gin and tonics by the pool.”

  “What if that’s what they would have wanted?” He stands up, pulls on his pants. “What if Plato and Aristotle would have wanted us to drink gin and tonics by the pool?”

  “They wouldn’t have. You’re thinking of the Cyrenaics.” She kisses his cheek. “Be downstairs in ten minutes, or we’re leaving without you.”

  He looks at her and arches his left eyebrow.

  He says, “You promise?”

  “Listen, it was your idea to come.”

  “I know,” he says. “I was kidding.”

  * * *

  They arrive at one o’clock in the afternoon. The trip takes two hours longer than Sue Ellen had promised, and they travel there by taxi, by ferry, by foot, by bus. She had tried to hire a private car in Athens—she explained this to them while they were trekking across the concrete docks at Piraeus, dodging puddles and benches and napping backpackers. There were two drivers whom she often used when she was in the city: one, a civil servant who had retired when he heard rumblings about more austerity measures; the other, a thirty-year-old Albanian named Behar. Neither was available—they had both escaped the city for the summer, with the temperatures it brought. So, Sue Ellen had booked her family three spots on a coach, a fifty-eight-seat behemoth that shuttled visitors to and from the oracle with promises of air-conditioning, snacks, and a guided, hour-long tour. Despite the pockets of rush-hour traffic that ensnared them, the drive itself had been tolerable, if not a little pleasant. While Will and Dean dozed, Sue Ellen leaned her head against the window and watched as Athens awoke, caked in its peculiar golden light.

  She thought, intermittently, of Eleni. Of the way she greeted them when they arrived, like they were just another round of guests, a set of names to be remembered, then forgotten. How much, she wondered, did Eleni know? She hoped everything, but she suspected nothing, and this hurt her. Watching Eleni’s eyes glaze over her, Sue Ellen felt a swell of rage toward Christos for not having at least spoken about her, for not integrating their story into some larger narrative. He had, essentially, reduced her to a memory and confined her to a single summer. This was, of course, unfair. She had done the same thing.

  The bus departed the city on the E-75, heading north past Marousi and Kifissia and Agios Stefanos. After an hour, the Athenian sprawl became thinner; there was more space between suburbs, more stretches of highway framed by fields of dry brush, cypresses, and the distant promise of mountains. They pulled over onl
y once, at a rest stop north of Thiva, before they headed west on 48, across the plains of Boeotia toward Mount Parnassus. There, the driver smoked a cigarette, and Sue Ellen filed off with a few of the other passengers to get a cup of coffee. Will, bleary-eyed but awake, came to meet her, and she gave him a little cash to buy something to eat. Phyllo dough, wrapped in wax paper and stuffed with feta and spinach.

  “It’s still warm,” he said, licking grease from his fingers.

  She looked at it. A glob of cheese fell to the curb.

  “That’s because it’s been sitting under a heat lamp,” she said.

  Once they arrived, they stuck with the bus’s official tour for about half an hour. The guide, a woman named Dora, told them about the Castalia Spring, the Athenian Treasury, the polygonal wall. Then, as they approached the site’s official museum, Sue Ellen managed to escape, blending into the stream of another group of tourists, urging Will and Dean and join her.

  “We’ll have more fun on our own,” she whispered.

  Dean clicked his tongue and adjusted his sunglasses.

  “You’re being smug,” he said, grinning. “You think Dora’s dumb.”

  Sue Ellen shepherded them up a few stone stairs.

  She said, “I think no such thing.”

  Now, she stands with her son and husband in the orchestra of Delphi’s theater, looking up at the crescents of stone seats that form the theatron. The Phaedriades, the two cliffs of Mount Parnassus, rise on either side of them. Their surfaces catch the early afternoon sun, reflecting it in bursts of white.

  “They say they used to throw people off them,” Sue Ellen says, “if they committed sacrilege against the sanctuary.”

  Will shields his eyes, squints.

  He says, “That would … not be fun.”

  Standing behind her, Dean unzips her backpack and searches for the sunscreen. Once he finds it, he slathers some across the back of his neck.

  “I bet Dora would have told us that, too,” he says.

  Sue Ellen reaches out her palm. Dean squirts a bit of sunscreen onto it, and she smears it across her face, feeling it sting the undersides of her eyes.

  “Something tells me Dora’s tour is a little more G-rated.”

  “Well, that would never do.” He pokes her nose. “Everyone knows we’re an R-rated sort of family.”

  Dean wanders away, exiting the old orchestra and making his way back toward the Temple of Apollo. Watching him go, she thinks of the last vacation they had all taken together. It was three years ago. Will had just finished his first year at Berkeley, and they decided to spend the month of August in Espelette, a town in France’s Basque Country. Dean had planned everything. He leased a house and rented bikes, and, for one afternoon, enrolled the three of them in a semiprivate surfing lesson. Their instructor, she remembers, had been a Catalonian named Arnau. One at a time he would paddle out with them into the Bay of Biscay, shouting Now! and giving their foam boards a shove whenever a wave arrived. Will took to it easily—he had tried surfing a few times already, in Bolinas, and after half an hour of Arnau’s instruction, he took off on his own, catching crumbling waves, finding steady footing. It took Sue Ellen a bit longer, but eventually she, too, got the hang of things. She managed to stand up on the board three separate times, the last for a minute-long ride that took her straight onto the pebbles of the beach. Dean, on the other hand, was not as lucky. No matter how much coaching Arnau gave him, he couldn’t seem to lift himself to his feet. Time after time he tried and failed, getting rocked on each occasion by the foamy aftermath of a new wave. By the end of the session he had bruises, and his elbows were scraped and bloody from where they had collided with rocks. Still, he handled this humiliation with grace and humor. On the drive home to the house in Espelette, he even floated the idea of booking another session with Arnau, seeing how much fun they all had. From the backseat, Will gently cautioned against it. He suggested that instead they might go for a bike ride or a hike. An activity where there was less of a risk that one of them might drown.

  But there had been bad bits to that trip, too. Will got so sick, for example, that they had considered driving him to the hospital, and in retrospect, they should have. One morning they had taken a bus across the Spanish border, to San Sebastián, where they had spent the day eating pinxtos. When they returned to Espelette, he was complaining about an upset stomach; by dinnertime, he was confined to the bathroom, vomiting. It was food poisoning—salmonella, they feared, from a bit of undercooked chicken that he had insisted on eating, even when she and Dean warned him against it. Throughout the night, they took turns checking on him, making him drink sips of water, and wiping spittle from the corners of his mouth. At around four o’clock in the morning, after finding him curled around the base of the toilet, Sue Ellen dug through her toiletry bag and gave him some antibiotics—a year-old Cipro prescription she’d gotten before a dig in Pylos.

  She’s amazed by how easily she’s forgotten all that and has instead constructed her recollections of Espelette with halcyon snapshots: here they are surfing with Arnau; here they are laughing about how terribly they all speak French. Whenever she’s supervised a field excavation, she has warned her students against this sort of retelling: when you’re analyzing a shard of pottery, she tells them, the important thing is to look at it for what it is, not what you want it to be. When it comes to this trip, she wonders if she’ll be able to ignore that advice and let the heavier realities—the betrayals and suspicions; the puzzle of rebuilding her family—dissipate. She hopes she will. She hopes that, over the coming years, her memories will rearrange themselves. That they will find a pattern that favors forgiveness instead of truth.

  Will taps her shoulder and says, “So where did they get high and predict the future?”

  He’s rolled up the sleeves of his T-shirt. The skin on his shoulders has turned pink and dotted with freckles.

  “Down there.” She points to the ruins of the Temple of Apollo, where Dean is standing, looking at his phone. “In the adyton, which was basically just a chamber beneath the main temple. And they didn’t get high.”

  “I thought you said they did.” One of Will’s shirtsleeves unrolls itself, and he reaches up to fix it, securing it again high on his shoulder. “I thought you said that whatever woman was the oracle basically just huffed until she was gone enough to ramble off a bunch of shit, and then a priest put that shit into a tidy verse, and wham—that was the future.”

  Dean slips his phone into his pocket. He crouches down and inspects something at his feet.

  “It was a ritual, Will. They considered this place the center of the world. On the seventh day of each month, the Pythia was bathed in the Castalian spring, then led into the adyton, where she sat on a tripod chair and inhaled, possibly, either methane or ethylene fumes that seeped out of a fissure between two faults in the limestone directly beneath the temple. In small doses ethylene produces a disembodied, euphoric state, which can lead to incredible insight.”

  “So, basically, she got high.”

  Sue Ellen looks at her son. Sweat forms beads at his temples, and his curls hang loose and damp. High above them, a bird—an eagle, a hawk, a vulture—circles, its wings spread wide, motionless.

  “Yes,” she says. “Basically, she got high.”

  “How accurate was she?”

  “She was actually a lot of people. When one Pythia died, another was selected to take her place. This happened for centuries.”

  Will looks down toward the temple, with its ancient stone foundations and its six remaining columns, their sides creased and cracked like knuckles.

  “Thanks, professor.”

  Reaching over, Sue Ellen flicks his ear.

  “Ow.” He rubs the spot red. “That actually really hurt.”

  She says, “Yeah? Well, next time respect your mother.”

  Dean

  July 15

  Delphi

  He watches from a distance as Will laughs and pals around with Sue Ellen
. He wonders what they’re talking about, if they’re conspiring against him. It’s a fear that started when he was living in that horrid apartment in San Ramon and has never entirely stopped. Before, he was never aware of how delicate a balance existed between the three of them; with a single mistake, one of them could suddenly be on the outs. In exile, though, he often found himself concerned about what narratives were being created in his absence, the ways in which his family was evolving without him and because of him. Once Sue Ellen invited him back, this fear guided his parenting philosophy more often than he would like to admit; his decisions now are often prioritized by how much influence they might allow him to exert over his son. The goal is never to edge Sue Ellen out, more to make himself indispensable.

  He told Will about the affair—this had been another requirement of Sue Ellen’s, along with marriage counseling, and it terrified him. He sensed how his son had regarded him before, with an air of awe and reverence, and he worried that the news of Jasmine might change that. Instead of being worshipped, now he’d be despised, or, perhaps worse, pitied. His only hope, Dean felt, was that Will would look at his philandering as a sort of artistic inevitability: he loved Norman Mailer, and look how many times that son of a bitch cheated.

  They met at a pub near campus on a Thursday afternoon. Will found them a spot to sit in the corner, next to an ATM, and Dean went to the bar to order them two beers. His hands shook as he carried the pints back to the table; foam kept slopping over the rims of the glasses and trickling down his fingers. For a few minutes, neither of them said anything. Or, if they did, it was filler about the Talking Heads album the pub was playing and a desire for the barman to turn the volume up.

  Once he had finished half of his pint, Dean finally looked up.

  He said, while trying to think of the perfect words to say, “So.”

  “You’re having an affair.”

  “That is … very perceptive of you.”

  “Not really.” Will folded his coaster in half. “Why else would you have moved out?”

  “There are a lot of reasons marriages have problems.”