Honestly, We Meant Well Read online

  He says, “I don’t know how we could have stopped him, even if we wanted to. He’s twenty-two years old.”

  She plays along: “You’re right. It’s not exactly like we can send him to his room.”

  “You were never a fan of doing that, anyway.”

  “Grounding a kid feels so unimaginative. There are more creative forms of torture.”

  “Remember when you made him research the history of child labor in Mesopotamia?”

  Sue Ellen smiles. “Remember when you made him write a book report on that Bill O’Reilly screed? What was it called?”

  “Killing … I don’t know, Killing somebody. I sort of feel bad about that, actually: in punishing my kid, I earned Bill O’Reilly two dollars in royalties.” He leans against the table. “Christ, Sue Ellen, when did we get so old?”

  “I don’t know.” She runs a finger along the rim of the coffee cup. “I really, really don’t know.”

  “I mean, this cruise you’re lecturing to—are we going to do that? Are we going to go on an old person’s cruise?”

  “You’re acting like it’s a requirement or something. It doesn’t look half bad, though.” She adjusts her laptop so he can see the screen, where she’s pulled up the Golden Age Adventures home page. “I mean, if you go on the Italy trip, you get unlimited gelato with every meal.”

  “Of course you do. It’s the only thing you can eat without your dentures.” He leans down so he can get a better look at the company’s offerings. “Ooooh, Fun in the Fjords sounds promising—I’ve always wondered whether walkers work on ice.”

  “You’re awful.” Sue Ellen giggles and scrolls down a bit. “Personally, I’m partial to Enchanting España.”

  “Oh, so what, you’re planning next year’s vacation now?”

  “You bet your ass I am. Get your Depends ready.”

  And then, suddenly, they’re both silent; the future is another minefield. A place filled with plans they dare to only half make.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to say to these people,” she says finally. “That’s why I was looking at the site, I mean. I’m just—I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to say to them.”

  “When’s the reception in Athens?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon.” She takes off her glasses and rubs the bridge of her nose. “I’m headed in tonight, though, on the six o’clock ferry.”

  “I’m still happy to go with you, you know.”

  “No—I mean, thank you, but don’t worry about it. I’m going to be spending most of tomorrow morning at the museum, anyway. You’d just be bored.”

  He picks up the bougainvillea blossom and presses it against his palm.

  “Hey,” he says. “Let’s go do something.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know—something other than sit around and talk about being geriatrics on boats.”

  “Okay…” She leans back in her chair and laces her fingers behind her head. “There’s a set of ruins over at Kolona that you’ve never seen. We could go there, and then maybe to—”

  “No. I’m tired of looking at old, broken shit.” He lifts her to her feet and kisses her cheek. “Let’s check out something new instead.”

  * * *

  They decide on Paralia Klima, a cove that forms a shallow dimple in the island’s southern tip. A few days ago, Sue Ellen mentioned that she wanted to do some snorkeling—she hadn’t seen a single live fish when she was here forty years ago—and after doing a little research Dean decided this was the place to go. A taxi drops them off between two cypress trees, and he surveys the beach, a mixture of coarse sand and pebbles lined with rows of umbrellas loaned out by the hour. For the middle of the week, he’s surprised how crowded it is, even for the high season: nearly all the prime real estate has been claimed by a towel or a lounge chair, and the water, clear and placid, is dotted with bodies. To their left, a hut with a thatched roof sells Heineken and potato chips, and from its insides a speaker blares a tinny recording of an old British pop song. They look around for a few minutes before finding an open plot, and then, once staking it, they crouch down in the sand and unload two sets of rented snorkeling gear.

  “I don’t remember the last time we did this,” Dean says. He hands Sue Ellen an orange mask and slips a green one over his head.

  “Seven years ago,” she says. “We were in Kauai. Will was a freshman in high school—we went for his spring break.”

  They begin to undress, both of them peeling away their shirts, their sandals, their shorts.

  “How do you remember this shit?”

  “Do this, it stops it from fogging up.” She spits on the mask’s lens and rubs it around with her finger. “And I remember because we let him bring that girl with him—the one he was dating.”

  “Yes.” Dean nods. “Yes, you’re right. Alana Rothstein. She decided she was vegan the night we went to that luau where they roasted the pig.” He spits in his mask. “We let them stay in the same room and everything. Because, like—”

  “Because what was possibly going to happen.” Sue Ellen grins. “God, I don’t know how parents with straight sons do it. I mean, with Will all we had to worry about was acting surprised when he finally told us.”

  Dean bites his lip for a moment. He spreads his saliva against the plastic, pushing it up into the mask’s corners.

  “Yes,” he says, finally. “I guess we really lucked out.”

  They wade into the surf, and Dean lifts onto his toes, doing his best not to slip on the smooth stones underfoot. The water’s lukewarm, but he shivers as it climbs his thighs and circles his waist. Once they’re ten meters out, they lower their masks and glide onto their bellies; with slow, deliberate strokes, they make their way toward the rocks. He had forgotten, he realizes, how bewildering and alien the experience of snorkeling actually is. The tide swirls around his ears, creating, with its quiet roar, a sort of paradoxical silence, a whiteness punctuated only by his breath, which, at first, comes unsteadily, in anxious gasps. He finds himself clenching his jaw and grinding his teeth into the plastic mouthpiece. Every so often a spoonful of water will splash down the snorkel’s tube as he tries to breathe. He exhales against these intrusions, propelling them back into the air in sprays of mist and salt.

  The strangest part is the mask itself. Looking through it he feels like he’s not swimming but floating, somehow detached from the space around him. The scratches and grime on the inside of the lens remind him that, as much as he’s here, in the water, he’s somehow still outside of it. Every so often Sue Ellen will tap his arm and point to something—a mullet darting between two rocks, or a clump of urchins forming a bed of black spines. There aren’t many colors; this isn’t the Caribbean, and the fish they do see come in muted shades of silver, blue, and gray. Still, they chase them when they see them. They kick their feet faster and occasionally dive down beneath the surface, peeking into places they aren’t meant to be.

  He had been stupid with Ginny—worse than stupid, he had been careless. In terms of both his stumbling again so soon after his affair with Jasmine and also the brazenness with which he had conducted himself. Twice he’d thought that they had been caught: the first time when he ran into Ginny’s roommate while leaving her apartment; the second when Chip caught them sitting an inch too close on a bench. At the end of the day, though, he managed to emerge unscathed. He’d ended things and escaped the girl; now he’s floating in the Aegean alongside his wife.

  Will he tell her? No, he decides, watching Sue Ellen as she propels herself with a lazy flutter kick. No, he won’t. For as much as Connie extolled the virtue of radical transparency in a marriage, he’s always believed that the most compassionate thing a lover can do is lie, particularly now, when they’re finally getting back to stable ground. Does this dress look good? Yes. How’s the meat loaf? Delicious. Did you sleep with your student? No. The only rationale for answering otherwise, he thinks, is a sort of selfishness—a need to unload your own guilt by telling your
wife the thing she doesn’t want to hear. Connie pushed him on this. Once, when he came to her alone, she’d asked him if he would ever consider admitting something to Sue Ellen even if he knew it would hurt her. It was two weeks after he had started sleeping with Ginny and, looking back now, he hardly considered the question a coincidence. Connie, he gathered, had a sense about these things.

  “No,” he said, crossing one leg over the other. “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “And why not?” Her voice was cool, free of any music.

  “Because I think I’ve probably hurt her enough.”

  They’re in the water for nearly an hour before they remove the snorkels from their mouths and decide that maybe they’ve seen all there is to see. Back on the beach, Dean unfurls two towels and spreads them out next to each other on the sand. Reaching deeper into the backpack they’ve brought, Sue Ellen retrieves an apple and a bottle of water.

  “Thirsty?” she asks.

  “Actually, yeah,” Dean says. “But how about I get us two beers instead?”

  He does, and when he returns Sue Ellen has reclined back on one of the towels. Her bathing suit is already dry—now, faint tracks of salt form whirls on the Lycra. Dean lies down next to her, propping himself up on an elbow and opening the beers.

  Handing her one, he says, “That was fun. Not a lot to see, but it was fun.”

  Sue Ellen takes a sip of beer and holds it in her mouth for a moment.

  “Greece,” she says, swallowing. “Good on ruins, bad on fish.”

  Dean laughs. Resting his beer in the sand, he reaches out and sets his free hand on top of Sue Ellen’s. She doesn’t brush it away, so he leaves it there, letting his fingers fall in the spaces between her own.

  “I’m glad we’re here,” he says. “I’m glad we came.”

  Next to them, a woman haggles for a free half hour beneath an umbrella. He listens to the sharp clip of her voice alongside the other, smoother sounds of the beach: gulls squawking, swimmers splashing as they dive into the water.

  Slowly, Sue Ellen rotates her hand and begins lacing her fingers around Dean’s. She leans her head against his shoulder and tightens her grip. Pebbles—bits of the beach caught between their palms—press into the creases of his skin.

  She says, “Me, too.”

  * * *

  She showers when they return to the Alectrona, and because the inn is empty and he feels the promise of connection, Dean waits an excruciating five minutes, then goes in to join her.

  “I, uh, thought I might come in there with you,” he says, opening the shower door. Sue Ellen turns her back, raising her arms to cover her breasts. Water streams from the back of her head and down her spine.

  He stammers—he didn’t realize fixing a marriage could make him as nervous as a first date. “I—er, it’s the only shower that works.”

  She takes a bit of water in her mouth and spits it out.

  “Uh, sure. If you want to.”

  Closing the bathroom door, Dean removes his trunks and squeezes inside the stall alongside her. It’s a tight fit, and only one of them can be under the showerhead at once. Standing half-dry at her rear, he covers his hard-on with both hands and catches the splashes as they bounce off her shoulders. At their feet, water spirals around the drain, carrying shampoo suds and stray hairs with it. Inching his toes forward, he tickles the backs of her ankles.

  “Oh, sorry,” Sue Ellen says, turning to face him. “I didn’t realize you weren’t getting wet.”

  She moves to trade places with him, but he stops her and pulls her body into his. He wraps his arms around her and, immediately, she goes rigid; her arms return to shield her breasts, and she ducks her chin into her shoulder. He expects this, but that hardly helps. Of all the horrors of the past year—the second glances and mixed messages; the strained, existential silences—the way his wife recoils from him is, bar none, the worst.

  And yet now something shifts. Her shoulders relax, and her hands, once balled into tight fists, open. Without guidance, she walks her fingers across Dean’s waist and around to the small of his back; she buries her head against his chest. Reaching up, he adjusts the showerhead so water hits both of them, and as his wet hair mats against his forehead and eyes, he leans down to kiss a curve of flesh along her neck. She tastes like soap, and salt, and something else—a flavor that’s specific to her skin, and that he’s unable to describe as anything other than Sue Ellen. Now, her hands still against his back, she holds him with a bit more force, digging the tips of her blunted nails into his ass. This, though, causes him to slip; jutting out an arm, he braces himself and catches Sue Ellen before they both go tumbling through the glass door.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” she says, switching off the water. “Before we break our necks.”

  They’ve had sex in the past year—this is not the first time. The night he moved home from the apartment in San Ramon they slept together, for instance, and again the night after Dean suggested that he and Will join her in Greece. Both of those occasions, however, had a feeling that was undeniably political: sex as a treaty, or a marker of some minor marital success. Neither of them carried the sort of passion that he’s presently sensing as he watches his wife jog up the stairs and toss the pillows from the bed. And while yes, there is still some hesitancy—a look that lasts a second too long; a timid so—Dean will take whatever fire he can get. He will latch on to the tiny smiles and satisfied murmurs, the little signals that Sue Ellen has, finally, at least sort of, relaxed.

  They will allow him, at the very least, to rediscover her body—a block of bones and flesh and neurons that, over the past year, has been less a person than a crisis to address. Feeling her weight upon him now, he is reminded of the subtle joys she possesses: a scar on the inside of her left thigh; the way her hair always manages to escape the hook of her ears. She’s not as young as Ginny or Jasmine, and this fact is inescapable: her skin is tough, and she’s hardly acrobatic in bed. Still, he finds himself at first relieved and then excited by her age. Ginny’s softness was cloying, the pockets of flesh like unbaked meringue. Besides, while her youth made him feel powerful, it also made him feel old; when she walked her fingers across his stomach on the way to his groin, he always wanted to apologize for his paunch, for the hairs sprouting from his belly button. Sue Ellen, though, knows these things about him. She has seen him submit to time and is now familiar with him—in the way she touches him, and kisses him, and whispers the same, practiced words in his ear.

  When they’re finished, she turns on her side and he holds her from behind. They’re still above the bedsheets, though beneath them are strange imprints—not their full bodies, but rather parts of them: an ass cheek here, a scapula there. Neither Dean nor Sue Ellen says anything. He suspects they’re both worried that if they comment on the past thirty minutes, that if they acknowledge it happened, something will shift, and this tiny step forward will be erased. So instead, they lie there, trying—with some success—to match the rhythm of each other’s breaths as they watch dust motes swirl in pillars of afternoon light.

  After twenty minutes of silence, though, Sue Ellen breaks away. Wrapping her towel around herself, she stands up and leans over to kiss the top of Dean’s head.

  “Where are you going?” he asks her. He was dozing, and he blinks away sleep.

  “It’s five o’clock,” she says, slipping on her pants. “If I don’t leave now, I’ll miss my boat.”

  Ginny Polonsky

  August 2

  Frankfurt, Germany

  She locks the stall door and turns to stare at the toilet: a hair floats in its water; a single square of paper clings to its base. From the center of the automatic flusher a red light blinks at her, taunting her, she thinks, with its detached all-knowingness. Doing her best to ignore it, she considers her next move: if she lays her suitcase flat, she’ll have nowhere to put her feet, whereas if she leaves it standing up, balanced on its twin black wheels, she’ll have nowhere to put her knees. Sighing, she gathers her
hair into a loose fist and secures it with one of the hair bands she keeps looped around her wrist. This is the problem with airport bathrooms: they’re always too small. They’ve hardly got enough room in them to fit a body, let alone a body and a suitcase and, when it comes to Ginny, a moderate size rucksack—which, at the moment, she’s doing her best to wiggle out of without knocking down the stall’s two walls. Thank God she doesn’t have a coat, she thinks, looking around for a hook (there isn’t one). If she had a coat, she’d be really fucked.

  She stands for a moment longer, and then she unbuttons her shorts. Stacking her things to the left, she folds her knees in the opposite direction and squats, hovering an inch above the toilet’s seat. In the world outside the stall’s scratched door, a faucet turns on, then off, then on. A cell phone rings and a woman sneezes. Inside, Ginny Polonsky closes her eyes. Then, just before she’s set to pee, she spins around and vomits.

  There isn’t much there, she sees, once she opens her eyes. She supposes that makes sense; the last thing she ate was a salad in San Francisco, before she boarded the red-eye to Frankfurt. Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she checks her watch. It’s ten thirty at night. That means she’s been here, on her German layover, for ten hours, and she’s got another seven to go; her connection doesn’t take off until tomorrow. She should probably get something to eat in the meantime. Then again, maybe not: from what she’s seen so far, all German airports have to offer are pretzels and bratwurst and beer.

  The puking started a few weeks ago. And it happened so often, and with such vile force, that her roommate had finally asked her if she’d bit the bullet and turned bulimic. She—the roommate—was blond, and was called Scarlett, and was a junior in the university’s Media Studies Department. They hadn’t lived together for long. Only a semester, really, ever since Ginny’s old roommate—a political science major named Karen Liu—left to study abroad in Ghana. They hadn’t been friends, exactly (Karen liked live music, whereas concerts gave Ginny hives; Karen worshipped the 49ers, whereas Ginny was categorically opposed to football’s brutality), but they nonetheless shared an interest in basic decency and responsibility. Karen knew not to leave the lights on when she left the apartment and to shop local instead of at the big chains in El Cerrito Plaza. She knew that banana peels should always go in the compost bin below the sink and that feminism wasn’t feminism unless it was intersectional. Scarlett, though, knew none of these things—or, if she did, she certainly didn’t care about them. At least one morning a week since Scarlett had moved in, Ginny found herself digging empty tubs of Greek yogurt out from the garbage and transferring them to the recycling bin. Twice, she had opened the apartment’s front door to the television blaring to an empty house.