Honestly, We Meant Well Read online

  “I’ve got to go,” she said, and hung up.

  He was busy on weekdays. His father relied on him to help keep the Alectrona afloat, and Sue Ellen felt guilty whenever she willed him away. Still, sometimes she did. She’d be reviewing some new research at a table in the corner of the dining room, and she’d look up to catch his eye as he poured coffee for another guest. He would wink and say something pleasant, and an hour later they would be on two of the inn’s bikes, stifling their laughter as they pedaled away. They went to Kipseli, and Pachia Rachi; they spent long afternoons at Souvala, where they read and drank lukewarm cans of Pils Hellas and sunned themselves on the rocks. Weekly, Sue Ellen would hand Christos an envelope containing twenty thousand drachmas, which was less than what she owed for the room but was all she could afford. She had never been a freeloader, she told him, and she wasn’t about to become one now. Christos protested at first, but eventually relented, with a single condition: he would take her money, but he would only use it to buy the retsina they drank each Saturday, when they hiked up to watch the sun set behind Aphaía’s temple.

  “Won’t your father catch on?” she asked him. They were sitting on the pool’s edge, their legs floating.

  Christos drew slow circles on the water’s surface.

  “I do the books,” he said. “Besides, the old man’s terrible at math.”

  A month more slipped by: soon it was August, the heat growing infernal before surrendering to autumn. On one of those thick evenings, Sue Ellen lay in bed, a copy of Pausanias’s Hellados Periegesis propped open on her chest. Beside her, collected in a loose stack, were a few drawings she had done of the temple. Three weeks ago, her camera had stopped working. She couldn’t afford to buy another one, so she committed herself to producing a series of sketches—diagrams, really—that she hoped would somehow inform her dissertation. For the past hour she had been flipping between them and Pausanias, unable to focus; every time she had a halfway decent idea, her thoughts drifted to a week from now, when she would be leaving Aegina and returning home. Twice she had brought the subject up with Christos, but both times he’d batted it away. For this, she was thankful. Leaving him wasn’t inevitable, so long as it was just another joke. She started to doze, the book still splayed across her, when there was a light knock on her door. Rubbing her eyes, she said, “Come in.” She didn’t need to ask who it was; she knew it could only be him. His parents only spoke to her when they were required to; for the most part, they left her alone. They regarded her with a mix of deference and suspicion that struck Sue Ellen as both sweet and uncomfortable, and with which she dealt by acting overly, if not performatively, gracious.

  “What’s the book?” Christos asked, quietly closing the door behind him.

  “Pausanias,” she answered, showing the cover to him.

  He crawled onto the bed and slipped a foot beneath the thin sheet. She was wearing an old pair of plaid boxer shorts, and his toes felt warm as they brushed against her calf.

  Taking the book, he dog-eared her spot and flipped through a few pages.

  “Looks like a lot of work,” he said. Reaching over her, he picked up the sketches. “You draw these?”

  “My camera’s busted.” She stole the book back from him and set it on a bedside table. Linking her leg around his knee, she pulled him closer to her. “If I don’t draw what I see, I won’t remember what I saw.”

  “They aren’t finished,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?” Sue Ellen took one of them back. “In this one you’re looking east from the opisthodomos, into the naos.”

  Christos retrieved a pen from the bedside table and removed the cap with his teeth. Using Sue Ellen’s thigh as a surface, he drew two stick figures into her drawing, leaning against a column.

  “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” she said, and didn’t stop him.

  “You want them to be accurate, don’t you?”

  She took the drawing from him.

  “You made my hair look like Doris Day’s.” Reaching beneath the sheets, she found the button of his shorts and unfastened it. “If accuracy is the goal, I’ll guess I’ll have to draw one of me leaving.”

  Christos wiggled out of his shorts and kicked them to the foot of the bed.

  “What, you can tell the future now?” he said. “It’s not like that’s happened yet.”

  Sue Ellen propped herself up on her elbow. He was smiling, the corners of his eyes creased with shallow crow’s-feet.

  “Christos,” she said, “I love you, but I’m leaving.”

  “That,” he said, “would be a very complicated picture to draw.”

  “Seems like it would be a pretty necessary one, though.”

  Christos brushed hair away from her eyes.

  He said, “How about we start with something easier? Like a kiss, maybe. I could draw a kiss.”

  Sue Ellen collapsed backward, her head falling on the pillow.

  “Stick figures don’t have lips,” she said.

  He pressed his mouth against her cheek, then her chin. He continued working his way downward, stopping for a moment at a spot on her neck. She wondered if he could feel her pulse, how it quickened.

  “No,” he said, before he dipped his head beneath the sheets. “No, I guess they don’t.”

  It rained the morning she left. Not a downpour—that would be unthinkable in August—but a spritz. Enough to dampen the docks in the harbor and send waiters scrambling to move their tables inside. She remembers standing on the quay with soggy hair, watching puddles evaporate and smelling old, wet wood. Beside her, Christos fidgeted, rocking back and forth on his heels as he twirled a set of keys around his finger.

  “I can call someone to pick you up at Piraeus,” he said. “It is … it can be such a madhouse there, it might be nice to have someone to meet you.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  With her right hand, she reached up and twirled a cheap gold necklace looped around her neck. He had bought it for her yesterday, after he drove her around the island on the back of a scooter that wasn’t his. At the end of it hung a small pendant with a picture of Hermes. The patron protector of travelers, he reminded her.

  She felt something brush the fingertips of her other hand: Christos, taking hold of her.

  Two hundred yards offshore, the bow of the ferry emerged from a curtain of fog. It blew its horn once, then twice, sending bellowing vibrations from Sue Ellen’s toes to her kneecaps. Reaching down, she grabbed her backpack and slung it over her shoulder.

  “It’s twenty minutes late,” Christos said.

  “In this country that’s right on time.”

  He twirled his keys faster.

  He asked, “You’ll call?”

  “I told you I would,” she said, and allowed herself to grip his fingers tighter.

  “Promise me.”

  “I promise you I’ll call.”

  And she had. She’d called him from a pay phone in Piraeus, where a line of other people yelled at her, telling her to hurry up, and then again from New York, where she waited for her connecting flight back to San Francisco. She called him the second after she dropped her bags in her apartment in Berkeley, and another time the next afternoon, once she had met with her adviser to get a dressing-down for her summer antics. She had called him, in fact, every day for the next week, until the moment she remembered she was a grad student—or, more specifically, a grad student without a budget for countless long-distance phone calls—at which point she suggested that, maybe, they should write letters instead.

  At first she regretted this decision; she had become so accustomed to the sound of his voice, and she feared how much she would miss him in its absence. This fear, though, turned out to be ill founded. His letters carried a fullness that she hadn’t realized their phone conversations, addled with the crackles and delays of long distance, lacked. Pressing her nose to the paper, she imagined smelling him; in the curves of his letters—his alphas, and omicrons, and omegas—she saw th
e soft contours of his ears, the subtle fullness of his lips. They were also, she soon realized, able to take their time. Free from a ticking clock, from the counting of so many dimes and nickels, they were able to return to the languid, rambling discussions with which they had filled their days on the beaches of Aegina. They could debate, again, the role of myth and regret—the sort of questions that seemed too distant, too unanswerable, when Sue Ellen was imagining her phone bill.

  Another thing: the weeks between letters also allowed her to escape. Whether she wanted this or not is now a moot point, because the fact is that it happened: without hearing from him every day, without the constant pull of his presence, she was able—however regretfully—to return to her life in Berkeley. Slowly, her thesis began to take shape—began, in fact, to impress her adviser, who, up until spring, had still been treating her as something of a bête noire. And suddenly, there were also other men, lovers who slipped in during the increasingly long pauses between Christos’s letters. At first, she dated as a form of retaliation; Christos told her that he had met someone, a woman named Teresa, and Sue Ellen felt a sudden need to prove that while she ached for the past, she, too, had a future. For two months, she saw a stockbroker who lived in Pacific Heights—a man named Gary with sharp suits and slick hair, who she dumped when she found out he’d voted for Reagan. There were also Reggie and Malik and Steve. A horticulturalist named Charles who taught her how not to kill her plants. She didn’t love any of them—she knows that now, and she knew that then—but she hardly considered that a problem. She wasn’t interested in love—she was interested in distraction.

  She assumed Dean would fit the same bill. When she met him at one of the university’s graduate-student mixers, she singled him out as someone she could have a little fun with, another body who would fill the hole in her life left by Christos—a space that changed daily, depending on what shape her memories took. But then a strange thing happened: she fell for him. It was a product of his curiosity, his earnestness, his uncertainty. For the previous three years, she had been dating men who were nothing but sure—about their work, about their lives, about their sex. It didn’t matter if their thing was botany, or the Soviet Union, or cunnilingus; when they talked to her, she felt like she was sitting in the back row of a lecture. Dean, on the other hand, listened. He didn’t interrupt when she talked about California politics, nor did he try to correct her understanding of trickle-down economics. And when they slept together, he was genuinely interested in what pleased her; when he asked her if she liked something, it wasn’t a statement, but an honest question. Other men had called her difficult—actually, she just needed to be heard.

  A year later, when they got engaged, she sent Christos an invitation to the wedding. It was a rash move; after polishing off a bottle of wine one night, she wrote his address on an envelope, fixed it with a few extra stamps, and slipped it into the mailbox outside her apartment building. For a moment she stood there, her hand on the rusted handle, the streetlamps flickering above her. She told herself she was being friendly, mature; they had both moved on, and she wanted him to know what was happening in her life. Beneath that, though, was something else: the giddy terror of self-sabotage. A message, written between lines of calligraphy on cheap, white stationery: Here’s your last chance, maláka. Come and get me. When she awoke, hungover, the next morning, she held a hand over her eyes to block out the light. She calmed her nerves by telling herself the invitation wouldn’t make it to Aegina in time. And even if, by some miracle of the Greek postal system, it did, it would be too last minute; Christos would never be able to afford a flight.

  But then he showed up. Not to the wedding itself, but to her apartment two days before it. He knocked on her door with the same rhythm that he used to knock on her door at the Alectrona—one short rap, two long ones—and when she opened it, he was there, holding his hat in both of his hands. For a moment, they stood there, staring at each other. Christos offered a timid smile, and Sue Ellen threw her arms around him. She held him an unnaturally long time; twice he gently tried to pull away, but she clutched him harder. She didn’t want him to see her face. She worried that if he did, he would immediately see what she was feeling—the sudden regret of getting what she thought she wanted.

  Finally, once she had gathered herself, she said, “Jesus Christ.”

  “Actually, it’s Christos.”

  She laughed and wiped her eyes.

  “That’s not funny,” she said.

  In the apartment, she cleared a spot on her futon for him to sit. Then she brewed a pot of coffee and filled two mugs. His she kept black—after four years, she still remembered how he liked it; hers she topped off with two fingers of whiskey.

  “I just—” she started. “I just can’t believe you’re here.”

  “I got your invitation,” he said. “I called the airline and reserved a seat an hour later,” he said.

  “What were you thinking? That must have cost a fucking fortune.”

  “I don’t know.” He shook his head. He looked foggy, tired. “I just—I just did it. I was somewhere over the ocean when I realized that you might not want to see me, and that, maybe, it was a bad idea.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, of course I want to see you.”

  “But you think it was a bad idea.”

  “No,” she said, too quickly. “Or, if it is, it’s not your fault. I—it wasn’t fair of me to invite you.”

  He nodded. “I hadn’t been on a plane in so long. I kind of forgot that you couldn’t tell the captain to turn around if you changed your mind.”

  They were both quiet. A siren passed outside, and Christos blew a cloud of steam from his mug.

  He said, “I was hoping that you might reconsider getting married.”

  Standing, she sipped from her coffee, swishing it around until she felt the whiskey burn her gums. She ran her hand through her hair, then over her face. She kept it there for what she knew was too long, blinking her lashes against her knuckles, listening to the clock as it counted the seconds on the wall.

  “I have an idea,” she said to him, finally.

  “What?”

  “Let’s go to the city.”

  They ended up in Golden Gate Park. There was a pair of windmills there that, for all the years she had been living in the Bay Area, she had never been motivated enough to visit. Then, two years before, she’d read a story about them in the Chronicle and was reminded that they existed. Apparently, they had been built in the early 1900s as a cheaper way to pump groundwater to the park. A few years later, though, electricity replaced the need for air, and the windmills were left to crumble. Now, an effort was under way to restore at least one of them—the so-called Dutch windmill, in the northwest corner of the park. She explained all this to Christos, in the same way that she might explain the excavation of Pylos or Troy. She hadn’t mentioned his proposition since they had left Berkeley, and now she hoped that, in cordoning it off with some other history, she might escape it altogether.

  “The sails are one hundred and two feet long,” she said.

  Christos wasn’t looking. His head was turned west, where the park ended and the ocean began.

  He said, “Fascinating.”

  It was a breezeless July day. Clouds hung idle in the sky, and the windmill loomed, frozen. Ten yards away, down a small slope of grass, a group of twentysomethings sprawled out on a bedsheet, drinking bottled beer and toggling with the knobs on a portable radio. After a minute or so they landed on a station, and Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” began drifting through the park. Leaning back on her elbows, Sue Ellen worked her feet out of her Keds and focused on the music—she had heard that song everywhere this summer, and now she wanted to see if she could forget the words. Next to her, Christos sat with his legs crossed and plucked blades of grass. He had on the same shirt that he’d worn when Sue Ellen first checked in to the Alectrona four years earlier, a blue oxford with a pea-size grease stain on its bottom hem. She wondered if he remembered,
and then decided that he did. It was easier that way, to paint him as a person capable of such petty manipulations, even when she knew that he wasn’t. Even when she knew that he owned a total of six shirts, three of which he actually wore.

  “Where are you staying?” she asked him.

  “At a hotel.”

  “Which one?”

  “The Roadway Inn, in Oaktown.”

  “Oakland. How is it?”

  “The soap is wrapped in plastic,” he said. “But at least I don’t have to iron the sheets.”

  “You can’t win them all, I guess.”

  “Tainted Love” ended and was replaced with a DJ’s voice. You’re listening to KFRC. Nonstop hits for a nonstop city.

  Christos asked, “Do you want to marry this man?”

  “That’s a shitty question.” She pressed her heels into the soil. It was hot, and the earth beneath the grass felt cool. “How’s Teresa?”

  “She’s gone. There’s— I’m seeing someone else. Agatha is her name.”

  “Does she know where you are?”

  “I said I had business up north. In Thessaloniki.”

  “That’s convenient.”

  Sue Ellen dug through her purse for her cigarettes before remembering that, a week ago, after promising Dean that she would quit before the wedding, she had thrown the pack away. Now all she could find was an old stick of gum. She broke it in two and handed one half to Christos.

  “What would you do if I told you I didn’t want to marry him?” she said.

  “I would tell you to come back with me.” He chewed, the gum cracking between his molars.

  She listened for another song but heard nothing. The twentysomethings were gone; they had packed up their radio and their blanket and left.

  “Well, I can’t do that,” Sue Ellen said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because.”

  There was more to say, a flood of explanations that churned against her teeth. Why not? Because, Christos, we are too late. Because I have fallen in love with someone else; because I have made a choice. Because despite what our poets tell us, we contain no multitudes, no alternate endings. We are like Homer’s Dawn, who was not marigold, or violet, but was rose, and only rose. We are epithets. Dean the Lost, Christos Who Regrets, Clear-Eyed Sue Ellen. Singular reductions that strip us of all the people we wish we were but can never truly be. And to forget this is to truck in fantasy. A life of second chances that call to us, luring our ships closer and closer to the gun-gray rocks.