Honestly, We Meant Well Read online

  “So when you were here forever ago—that’s when you met my dad?” Eleni says.

  It’s the only thing that comes to mind. Since they sat down, their conversation has circled around things like the color of the water and how much the island has changed, and she doesn’t know how much more of it she can take. For someone whose profession requires so much of it—or maybe, actually, because of it—she finds small talk particularly torturous.

  “Yes, that’s right,” Sue Ellen says. “I came here as a graduate student. I was supposed to spend the summer in Delos, but … for a number of reasons, I think, I ended up staying here. I studied Aphaía’s temple and wrote about it quite a bit in my dissertation. That’s the subject of my lecture, actually.” She wipes a bit of olive oil from the back of her hand. “I think I mentioned the lecture when you and I were emailing about my reservation, didn’t I? Yes, I thought so. It’s for Golden Age Adventures, which is one of those cruise companies for old people. God, wait, can I say that? I mean, I’m also old.” She feigns horror. “In any event, I stayed at the Alectrona. This is when your grandfather was still alive, and Christos was helping to run it.”

  Sue Ellen finishes dissecting the mullet and scoops a filet onto both of their plates.

  “Why’d you decide to study Greece?” Eleni asks.

  “Honestly? Because I knew it was sunny here.” She takes a sip of her wine, and Eleni laughs. “No, I’m serious. I grew up in Port Angeles—do you know it? It’s fine, not a lot of people do. It’s this tiny town on the Olympic peninsula, in Washington, just across the water from Canada. The weather there—God, it’s awful. It rains pretty much all the time. People like to say that it’s worse in Seattle, but they’re lying; in Port Angeles, you’re always a little bit cold and a little bit wet.

  “Anyway, from there I went to college at Amherst, in Massachusetts. It didn’t rain as much, but it was still cold. Freezing. I remember my first winter, there was this stretch of about three months where the high didn’t get above seventeen degrees, which is—what—something like negative eight degrees Celsius? I’m terrible at math. Whatever it is, I think it was actually the next semester when I took an introductory course in classical studies. I was so tired of being cold that I wanted to read about somewhere warm.”

  She refills both their wineglasses and empties some of the Cretan salad onto her plate.

  “And from there … I don’t know.” She smiles. “I guess I just fell in love with the whole idea of this place, you know? All those stories of goddesses and heroes. Homer, Thucydides, the Peloponnesian War. There’s a romanticism to it, obviously, but it’s more than that. I like uncovering things, I think. I like how you can look at something as distant as the past to explain a mystery like the present.”

  Eleni can’t help but grin—it’s a lovely thought, even if it is a little delusional. She suspects it must be easy to be nostalgic for the way things were, once you’ve managed to escape them. When history is the chains that bind your ankles, though—well, she would like to see what Sue Ellen says then.

  A fly lands on the table, and Eleni brushes it away. On the street next to them two boys chase a girl. Behind them their giagiá trails, yelling at them to slow down.

  “Listen,” Sue Ellen says. “Tomorrow I’m hiking up to the temple, just to get myself reacquainted with the space. How’d you like to come with me?”

  “That’s so sweet of you to ask,” Eleni says, and she means it. “Unfortunately, I think my whole day is going to be spent looking over contracts.”

  “Ah, yes. That’s right.”

  Sue Ellen picks at the fish, which is now a heap of scales and bones. She digs beneath them, as if she’s trying to uncover something.

  “I’m sorry,” Eleni says. “I may be totally misreading things here, but are you upset?”

  Sue Ellen looks up and shakes her head, like she’s suddenly woken up from a dream. She smiles.

  “Me? Oh, God. No, I’m fine.” She reaches back and gathers her hair with both hands. “If I’m being honest, I guess there was this part of me that thought maybe one day I’d end up here.”

  She lets her hair go, and she laughs.

  “But that was crazy,” she says, finishing her wine. “That was another life.”

  Sue Ellen

  Aegina and Berkeley

  Then and Now

  Then

  “I’m going to miss my ferry,” Sue Ellen said, glancing down at her watch for the fifth time that minute. “And the next one to Delos isn’t until tomorrow night. If I don’t get to the Stoibadeion by Wednesday, it’s not going to be pretty.”

  “You’ll get to the Stoibadeion by Wednesday.” Christos didn’t turn around when he spoke. He was a few yards ahead of her, and she watched his calves flex as they trudged up the hill. “We’re very close.”

  For a moment, she considered if she could escape. Lie about an injury, maybe. A pulled muscle that prevented her from hiking up old Greek roads to see old Greek temples dedicated to old Greek goddesses who no one really knows. It’s a rare thing, she imagined saying, but my doctor says Aphaía aggravates it. She grinned and looked down, stepping over a branch that had fallen onto the road. She would do no such thing, she knew; she would stay, and follow him up to the site, past the pistachio trees, the tiny parked cars, and the gift shop selling obscure ice-cream bars and not much else. And she would do it primarily because she was afraid. Ever since arriving in Greece thirty-six hours ago, she had felt more like an intruder than she had ever felt before—a feeling that only grew in intensity when she reached Aegina last night. On the plane to Athens, she had counted on her dread dispersing once she landed; she figured that once she successfully ordered her first meal in Greek, had her first glass of dry assyrtiko, any anxieties she felt about her future, about what she was doing with her life, would vanish. That, though, had been naïve thinking. She had slept a grand total of one hour the night prior, and those sixty minutes came in fits and starts, during pockets when her mind became too fatigued from worrying and slipped, however briefly, into twilight. Now, fighting exhaustion, she worried that if she were to bolt she would betray her own self-doubt. Suddenly, Greece would see her for the fraud she was.

  There was also, she knew, the matter of Christos. Lugging her suitcase through the inn’s front door, she’d found him standing next to a small ficus tree, pouring a glass of water into its deep pot. She hadn’t expected this: the sight of a handsome man her own age, watering a strange little plant. But then, what had she expected, exactly? She knew nothing about the Alectrona, only that she was to stay there for one night before continuing on to Delos. She had booked the hotel because it was cheap, and because the travel agent with whom she spoke said that it was a ways outside town; after twenty-four hours of traveling, Sue Ellen was keen to avoid the raucousness of the harbor.

  “Me léne Sue Ellen. Ékho kanéi krátisi.” She smiled, then said, “Póso eseís?”

  He glanced up at her.

  He said, in English, “More than you can afford.”

  Sue Ellen’s cheeks flushed, and he shrugged. “You ask me how much I cost,” he said, tilting the last few drops of water out of the can and smiling. “Though I think my name is what you want to know? It is Christos.”

  Handing him her suitcase, she wanted to tell him she knew that. She had been studying modern Greek, along with its ancient counterpart, for the past six years. She was fluent—she knew how to ask someone’s name. Instead, she followed him as he showed her to her room, wondering if she had made a mistake. Maybe she would have had better luck dealing with the cries of drunk tourists in town, the stench of their cigarettes. She had never been very good with desire.

  She was loath to admit any of this—she still considered herself to be above infatuation, above a schoolgirl crush. And yet, no matter how hard she steeled herself, his voice softened her; no matter how resolved she was to write him off, his eyes—old, knowing, set deep in too young a face—drew her back in. So much so that when h
e proposed he show her the temple the next morning—an offer made casually, dutifully, over breakfast—she had immediately said yes.

  “Okay,” he said now, stopping just short of the road’s end. “We’re here.”

  She circled to his left side and adjusted her sunglasses. A hundred yards ahead of them, the temple stood in a clearing of trees, and then beyond it, a panorama of the Aegean. She immediately recognized the structure as Doric; it lacked the ramlike volutes of the Ionic order or the baroque embellishments of the Corinthian. Its columns—their shafts striated with flutes; their tops crowned with simple, circular capitals—were arranged in a peripteral hexastyle fashion: a single row of twelve peripheral columns flanked each side of the naos, while a row of six lined the temple’s front and back. The entirety of the structure rested on a crepis, a plateau that lifted the temple a good six feet off the ground, where a group of teenagers—three boys and one girl in a yellow halter top—lounged, smoking cigarettes.

  “Late Archaic,” Sue Ellen said. “Reminds me of the Athenian Treasury at Delphi. A similar sort of distyle.”

  “I have never been,” Christos said.

  “You should go. It’s spectacular.”

  “It’s difficult.” He slipped his hands into the back pockets of his jeans. “My father needs my help.”

  She nodded, trying not to focus on how much she loved the sound of his Greek. How it smoothed over the harsh angles she associated with the language, the sharp consonants she heard being tossed around the streets of Athens.

  A fly landed on her shoulder, and she brushed it away before approaching the temple. Christos stayed where he was for a few moments, then followed her.

  “If you were to draw a straight line between here, the Parthenon in Athens, and the Temple of Poseidon in Sounion, you’d have an isosceles triangle,” he said.

  “Actually, that’s not true,” Sue Ellen said, studying the flutes on the column nearest to her. A few yards away the girl in the yellow halter top slapped one of the boys, and the others laughed. “A lot of people say that, but Schwandner maintains the distances are different.”

  “Schwandner?”

  “Ernst-Ludwig Schwandner. Ludovikos, in Greek, I think,” she said. “German archaeologist.”

  Christos scratched his arm. He said, “Oh,” and she now felt terrible for correcting him. She wanted to reach out and touch his shoulder, apologize, ask him to continue with his theories, his invisible triangles. She didn’t, though. Instead, she stepped up onto the crepis and wandered between a set of columns, toward the naos. Picking through the rubble, she thought of what little she had read about the site: how the architects devised a double colonnade to support the temple’s massive flat roof; how here, where she was standing, there used to be an ivory statue of Athena; how the archaeologists originally thought the site was dedicated to her until they found an inscription, tiny and history making, carved into the stone: APHAÍA.

  A moment later, she felt warm skin brush her right arm: Christos, standing closer to her than he had ever stood before.

  “They say she was fleeing from King Minos, on Crete, who was enamored with her,” he said. “And that to escape him, she threw herself into a fisherman’s net. Artemis made her a goddess, and she came here.”

  Sue Ellen bit her lip for a moment. Then she couldn’t help herself. She said, “Incidentally, that’s only one version of the myth. Another one says that she was once a nymph, and that there was a god who was trying to rape her.” What was wrong with her? “She came here, to this thicket, to get away from him. The name she was originally worshipped by—Britomartis—even means ‘Sweet Virgin.’”

  “You … are very knowledgeable.”

  “I guess,” she said. “But it’s also the only thing I know.”

  A breeze moved through the pines and whipped a strand of hair across Sue Ellen’s lips. Turning to face her, Christos reached forward to remove it before leaning in to give her a gentle kiss.

  “Then I am sure you know what her name, Aphaía, means,” he said, placing his fingers on her sunburnt cheeks.

  Sue Ellen closed her eyes.

  She said: “To disappear.”

  Now

  She doesn’t need to be here—at the temple, that is—and yesterday Dean was keen enough to point that out.

  “Why do you keep going back there?” he asked her. It was seven o’clock in the morning, and he buried his head in a pillow as she leaned over to tie her boots. “You’ve done all your research, and it’s not like these geriatrics from the cruise will be able to hear whatever you’ve got to tell them anyway.”

  Sue Ellen tightened her last knot and stood up. “Be kind to your elders.”

  “May I remind you that we, technically, are elders.”

  “Now you’re just being defeatist.”

  She walked to the mirror, where she buttoned her shirt and pulled her hair back.

  “It helps me think,” she said, finally.

  “Huh?”

  “You ask me why I keep going back there, so I’m telling you. It helps me think.”

  “Thinking,” he said, rolling over, “is something with which you’ve rarely had a problem.”

  She hadn’t been lying. Or, mostly she hadn’t been. There’s more to it than simply thinking, though. There’s the sound the wind makes as it rattles the pines; the way the morning light softens the brutality of the temple’s slow ruin. There’s the tug of the past, when she’s able to close her eyes and believe—at least for a second—that she’s twenty-five years old again, here for the very first time. In those moments she allows herself to imagine different realities, competing histories of what her life would look like if she had made this decision or forgone that choice; what her life would look like if, against all odds, she had stayed. Maybe therein lies the silver lining behind Christos’s death, she tells herself: for all the heartbreak that it’s caused, she can now, at last, move past it. She can stop thinking of what could have been, because what could have been is finally gone.

  Then

  She missed the ferry that afternoon, along with the one the following day, and the day after that. She would track the boat’s departure on her watch, a cheap black Timex with a broken second hand and a cracked face. The minutes would tick by—each one impossibly slower than the last—and she would imagine the lurching of the ferry’s hull as passengers crowded its deck, the belching of its exhaust as it coughed its way out into the gulf. She would close her eyes and picture herself there, among the suitcases and tourists and cigarettes, fighting that familiar mix of nausea and irritation as they inched toward Athens. But then that moment would pass; she would shake herself awake and smile.

  A week later, he took her north of town, to see the Tower of Markellos. That night, once they had returned to the inn, Sue Ellen found herself straddling him, pressing his shoulders into the new chaise longue his father had just set out by the Alectrona’s pool. His breath was sweet—a mix of honey, watermelon, and the lukewarm athiri they had been drinking all day: kissing him was like sucking on drugstore candy. To her surprise, he was also timid. The removing of clothes, the arranging and rearranging of limbs, the new ways of balancing on the chair’s taut plastic straps: all of this was left almost entirely to Sue Ellen. When they were finished, she laid her head against Christos’s bare chest and listened to the cicadas swarming in the branches above them, their hum rising and falling like a set of shallow hills. Running her tongue along her teeth, she licked away traces of wine, of sugar.

  “I should be on Delos,” she said.

  Christos was quiet and still for a moment. Then he began threading his fingers through her hair.

  “What’s that thing that Plutarch is famous for saying?” he said, his voice buzzing against her cheek. “‘Fate leads him who follows it, and drags he who resists.’”

  “Since when do you quote Plutarch?” she asked.

  “Since I read him as a teenager.” He kissed the top of her head. “America’s not the only p
lace they have books.”

  Another week passed, and it had become excruciatingly clear to her, to everyone, that she no longer had plans to leave. On that Tuesday, she snuck into the Alectrona’s office and phoned her adviser. Told him that her interests had changed, and that she would be staying here, on Aegina, to do her research instead.

  “But they were expecting you at the Stoibadeion almost two weeks ago,” he said, his voice delayed and detached over the long-distance line. “I spoke to Lambert yesterday. A group of Canadian volunteers just showed up, and he’s been fighting to keep your cot free. The poor old Frog is going to be heartbroken.”

  “I highly doubt that.”

  “Researching with the École Française. Spending the summer under one of the best classical archeologists in the business. You’re really missing an opportunity here, Sue Ellen.”

  She cradled the phone against her ear and pressed herself against the office’s wall.

  “I think I’ve found something better here,” she said.

  “Well, I highly doubt that.”

  “That sounds more like your problem than mine.”

  “Maybe, but that will change when it comes time to present your dissertation. I hope you’re prepared to defend whatever mess of pages this decision results in.”

  “I am.” She wrapped the phone’s cord around her finger. “And I can’t begin to tell you how much your confidence in me means.”

  “Well, Christ, Sue Ellen. What am I supposed to tell Lambert?”

  “Tell him whatever you want. My ferry sank. I’m lost at sea. I got kidnapped by Apollo and I’m living in Thebes.” She said, again: “Tell him whatever you want.”

  “Sue Ellen…”

  In the kitchen, a light flickered on. Leaning away from the wall, she saw a leg, then an arm, then a face: Christos, grinning at her as he rummaged through the icebox for a piece of fruit.