Honestly, We Meant Well Read online

  They rarely spoke—Scarlett had treated Ginny like a ghost ever since they got into a fight over foam coffee cups—but this hardly bothered Ginny. Whereas Scarlett celebrated her privilege, Ginny had the good sense to loathe her own. And frankly, she wouldn’t have it any other way. Otherwise, what’s to keep her in check—what’s to keep her from throwing away recyclable yogurt tubs—if not the cultivation of her own, deliberate guilt? This, Ginny wagers, is the unbearable burden of being aware, of being conscious. It’s a responsibility to which she’s committed herself happily, dutifully: she will persist as recompense for the Scarletts of the world, those latte-loving hordes, content to brunch into oblivion. And if she’s painted as earnest or sanctimonious, she’ll shrug it off: sometimes, being friendless is the price for being Good.

  Standing up, she buttons her shorts and zips up her fly. Behind her, the toilet wheezes and chokes before finally flushing. Then, slinging her rucksack over her left shoulder, Ginny leaves the restroom and goes to find a corner where she might nap. Her stomach churns and gurgles once, then quiets itself. She’ll buy something to eat, she decides. A bag of almonds, or one of the weird yogurt drinks she always sees Europeans drinking. Kefir, she thinks it’s called. God knows what they serve on Olympic Air, and she’s got awhile yet before she reaches Athens.

  * * *

  “Bloody Mary mix,” she tells the flight attendant, a man her father’s age with graying hair and a pink ribbon pinned to his vest.

  He offers a weak smile and begins rummaging through the steel drawers on his cart, pulling out tiny bottles one by one, searching for the makings of Ginny’s drink.

  “And hey,” she says to him, once he’s found the can. “Take it easy on the ice.”

  This time he doesn’t smile; he sets the items down on her tray, along with a creased napkin and a pack of pretzels, and then lurches his cart onward, pushing it farther into the bowels of coach. Once he’s gone she opens the can of Bloody Mary mix and empties it, watching as the red slop climbs the sides of the cup. Two ice cubes crackle and pop, and she sloshes them around a bit, giving them time to melt. Then, raising the glass to her nose, she sucks in a peppery, restorative breath. Finally, she takes a sip.

  Reclining her seat, she lets her eyes wander up, past the heads in front of her, the mess of hair and scalp and dandruff, until her gaze settles on the plane’s ceiling. She traces the outlines of the small air vents in the ceiling above her row, the reading lights wedged between them, the genderless flight-attendant call buttons. She doesn’t mind flying, the taste of recycled air, the constant pop of pressurization. In fact, she might even like it.

  There’s something communal about cheating gravity in such close quarters. Part of it, she figures, also has to do with class. She can think of no other place where the distinction between the haves and have-nots is so strikingly clear as on an airplane. She imagines what must be happening in the patrician environs of first class: the champagne being served in crystal, alongside fresh cookies and warm nuts. She thinks of the decadence of real flatware, versus the plastic forks being rationed out in coach. The divide thrills her. Or, if not the divide itself, then the mutual bitterness it breeds. Looking around, she feels a swell of pride for her fellow seatmates in steerage. A bond that she attributes to the resentment they all must feel toward the indulgence unfurling at the front of the plane, behind that gilded curtain that shutters off first class from the rest of them.

  She remembers how, a few years back, she flew on a Cubana Airlines flight from Mexico City to Havana. The plane was old; while she’s since read that the newer jets in Cubana’s fleet have designated classes, this one certainly did not. At first, this excited Ginny: Communism! she recalls having thought. How lovely. She had always considered herself more or less a Marxist, and seeing that ideology play out in the world of aviation tickled her. Quickly, though, that excitement faded; instead of angry or agitated, the other passengers just looked sad. Watching them trudge to their seats, she decided she would rebook her return flight on another airline—Air Canada, maybe, or AeroMexico. She hadn’t wanted reality so much as something to resent.

  But anyway, she makes her best decisions on planes. It’s got something to do with being that much farther from earth and that much closer to death. A mix of rising and falling, of physics and ontology, that strikes a certain chord of clarity in her mind. Take last week, for example. She was on a Delta Shuttle back from visiting her sister in Los Angeles when she decided, with a lucidity she had lacked since summer’s beginning, that she would fly to Greece and find Dean.

  “You need to forget about him,” her sister had said. They were at a restaurant in Silver Lake—a kitschy Mexican place called El Cóndor, where the napkins were folded to look like fans. Elsa had ordered for the both of them, and Ginny watched as she dunked a papa brava in aioli. “He sounds like a schmuck.”

  “Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s that simple.”

  “Don’t be melodramatic. Anything’s that simple if you want it to be.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  Ginny took a gulp of water and chewed on bits of lime. She hated how her convictions evaporated in front of her sister—how, suddenly, she questioned her hard-won beliefs about politics, art, and sustainable agriculture. Or, that’s not entirely true. Half of her hated it. The other half welcomed the respite, the opportunity to be indifferent and agnostic.

  “Of course I’m right,” Elsa said. She pushed the plate toward Ginny and added, “Are you going to have any of these or what?”

  “I’ve stopped eating eggs.”

  “They’re potatoes, Ginny.”

  “There’re yolks in the aioli.”

  “Of course.” Elsa looked down and poked the sauce with the tip of a papa. Bits of garlic jiggled on its surface. She said, “Berkeley’s got to be crawling with guys.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m saying that if it’s a guy you’re after, you’ve got plenty around you.”

  Ginny stabbed the remnants of her drink with her straw. She said, “I’m not interested.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’re mindless slobs.”

  Elsa leaned forward, planting both her elbows on the table.

  “Ginny,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “Are you a lesbian?”

  “How passively homophobic of you.”

  “Because if you were, I’d still love you, you know.”

  Ginny smiled—it was what her sister wanted—and then she threw an ice cube at her. It was easier than getting into an argument about what she knew Elsa was already thinking: that Ginny didn’t have her long legs, or her lean hips, or her manageable hair; that her rejection of the boys at school was born from self-loathing, as opposed to the fact that she—actually, really—found 99 percent of them to be repulsive.

  “Maybe it’s an older-guy thing,” Elsa said, once she’d brushed the ice from her lap. “If you hate all the dudes your age, maybe it’s an older-guy thing.”

  “Dudes,” Ginny parroted. “You need to stop working in Hollywood. You need to leave L.A.”

  “Well, is it?”

  She said, “No, it’s not an older-guy thing.”

  Next to them, a mariachi band started playing “Happy Birthday” to a table of teenagers. Elsa rolled her eyes and looked back at Ginny.

  She asked, “Why aren’t you drinking?”

  “I am drinking.”

  “You’re drinking water.”

  Ginny shrugged. “Since when is water not drinking?”

  “Oh, my God.” Elsa leaned over the basket of bravas. “You’re pregnant.”

  Ginny fished out a second ice cube and threw it, this time knocking her sister right between the eyes.

  “Knock it off,” she said. “And no. I’m not.”

  * * *

  Except yes. She was. Obviously, she was. It was an unfortunate discovery she’d made two weeks ago, the day before Scarlett
accused her of being bulimic. In addition to feeling a new and unshakable queasiness (they were right, Ginny now realized: morning sickness didn’t just happen before lunch), there was also the matter of her Mooncup, which, just when she thought her period had started, remained bloodless and empty. She had gone to the drugstore and bought a pregnancy test, even though she knew already what the result would be; she and Dean had hardly been careful when they had sex in the bathroom of that diner he had taken her to, so she knew what she was up against. Still, though, she marveled at the awful cliché of it all—the peeing on a stick, the watching of a timer, the squinting at two pink marks. Holding the completed test in her fist, she recalled, strangely, the time her father had taken her and Elsa to see the Grand Canyon, back when Ginny was in grade school. She remembered standing at the lip of the crevice, looking down, and being perfectly satisfied: the sight, while amazing, was exactly as she expected it would be. Discovering she was pregnant was very much the same. The collision of horror and pride, of helplessness and power—it all coincided perfectly with how she had imagined this situation would play out, should she ever find herself in it.

  Her first thought was to take care of it—this, she’ll proudly admit, also met her expectations. She would call her gynecologist and make an appointment. But then something happened: the world, or fate, or chance decided it had other plans for Ginny. For starters, it was Saturday, which meant the soonest she could call her doctor’s office would be in two days’ time. There was also the issue of the book—Dean’s book—which she’d stumbled upon that evening, after googling the best foods to eat before an abortion. Picking up the book and cracking its spine, she thought back to the first time she happened upon it, just two days shy of her twentieth birthday. She had come into San Francisco with her mother to go fabric shopping; Cece, motivated by nothing but suburban ennui, had recently decided to reupholster a sofa, and there was a bolt of Japanese silk being held for her at Sal Beressi’s shop in the Mission. At some point, Ginny broke away. She told her mother that she had some errands of her own to run and that she would meet her at two o’clock at Delarosa, in the Marina, where they had a reservation for lunch. After that, she wandered, eventually making her way to a bookstore on Valencia where, while browsing the new releases table, she happened upon the bloodred cover of Dean Wright’s novel. She must have read a hundred pages in the hour that followed. She bought the book and read a hundred more. She sat on the curb outside the store, she remembers, her knees pulled to her chest as she gripped the cover in both hands. It was an eye-blue day, the sort that turned every street corner into a postcard, but Ginny didn’t care; it could have been pouring rain and she still would have sat there, devouring his words. She felt herself floating, unmoored and unsettled, but also understood—finally, finally understood.

  Now, as she sucks Bloody Mary mix away from ice cubes, she thinks back to the passage she flipped to on that Saturday night—the one that would redirect her fate. It was a scene she knew well. The protagonist’s girlfriend—the troubled (but actually misunderstood), bisexual Belinda, awash in lust and longing, realizes the person she’s meant to be, while trapped on a stalled BART train. As she drank in his words alongside her own annotations, Ginny’s thoughts coalesced around a perfect singularity. In that moment, she forgot about Monday, and consuming a fiber-rich meal before having her procedure. She forgot about her own devastation and the scourge of a vanishing man. Now she had but one goal: she would find Dean, and she would go to him. She would confront him and demand an explanation.

  Will

  August 2

  Hydra

  The island of Hydra is some forty-seven miles away from the Port of Piraeus in Athens and a twenty-minute ferry ride from the eastern coast of the Peloponnese. When you approach it from the north, it’s not much to look at: a craggy collection of rocky hillsides, cypresses, and olive trees, all washed out in the same muted sepia, the colors fading like those in a painting that’s been exposed to too much sun. About halfway down the northern coast of the island, something shifts: a small cove appears, along with a harbor, the white masts of sailboats, and a crescent cobblestone quay. As Dio guides them to port, Will scrambles to the bow and takes in the view: houses—not just in the predicable white, but in varying shades of gray, red, and blue—climb the surrounding hills. He stares at them until his eyes cross. Until their tile roofs reflect in bursts off the water.

  The sail here had been easy—or at least that’s what Dio says as they tightrope down the gangplank onto the harbor’s stone dock. Will did his best to keep up, hauling in sheets as they tacked, coming about when he was told. It came easy to him—he seemed to have an instinct for interpreting wind, for anticipating gusts by the way they lifted mist from the tops of waves. And the boat was spectacular—even with his anemic knowledge of sailing, he knew enough to notice that. A sixty-five-foot yacht called, regrettably, Finja’s Fantasy, with teak decks and a cobalt-blue hull. A floating penthouse, Dio had called it. Not the kind of boat that you’d want to race, but not a bad place to spend a weekend.

  “Let’s get beers.” Now, Dio drapes his arm around Will’s shoulder and leads him off the dock. “Lugging that much boat around makes me thirsty.”

  The port is small and hugs the narrow crescent of the cove. Souvenir shops, jewelers, and restaurants dot the waterfront, their tables and patrons spilling out onto the stone quay. There are no cars on Hydra—the only way to get around is on foot or by pack animal—and outside a bar called the Pirate, Will nearly collides with a donkey with a white LG washing machine strapped to its back. On the west edge of the cove, atop a slope crowded with villas and steep stone stairs, are a pair of windmills with skeletal fans. Watching them turn, just barely, Will breathes in the familiar scent of salt and petrol, but also something else: fish, he thinks, and lemons. A pocket of alarmingly fresh air.

  Outside a small market wedged between a bank and an alley, Dio stops them. Later that evening they’re meant to attend a dinner that the owner of the boat, Klaus, is hosting, he explains, but they’ve got hours until then. In the meantime, he’s hungry.

  “I figure we can buy some food,” he says. “Take it somewhere and go for a swim.”

  He hands Will a basket and fills it with two oranges, a loaf of bread, and a block of halloumi cheese. Then, making his way past a crate of cucumbers, he opens a case filled with cold drinks and grabs two tallboys of Alfa.

  “You think this will be enough?” he asks.

  “Uh…”

  “You’re right.” He puts the cans in the basket and grabs two more. “We’ll get some sour cherries, too.”

  They walk west along the quay, following the curve of the harbor past a clock tower, a statue of Andreas Miaoulis, and a harem of stray cats. At the lip of the port, the path leads them up a small incline to a point where, as they stand in the thin shadow of a windmill, the Aegean stretches out before them. The sun blazes—Will’s shirt is sweaty; the cotton clings to his back—and as he stares at the water he shields his eyes with his hand, trying to gain a sense of their position. Directly north across the water, Dio says, is Metochi, a small village on the mainland that provides ferry service to Hydra, and where, at the age of seventeen, he drank too much cheap gin and vomited on his crush, a girl named Callie who he only saw twice more.

  “Once when I gave her back her shirt, which I washed,” he says. “And once when she dumped me.”

  “That hardly seems fair,” Will says.

  On the opposite side of the slope Dio guides them down a crumbling stone staircase. At the base of it is a small concrete platform the size of Will’s bedroom in Berkeley—a smooth slab of rock that, aside from a few names graffitied on its surface, is empty.

  “If we keep walking we can get to Vlychos Beach,” Dio says. “To be honest, though, it’s not that great. It’s pretty, I guess, but it’s just always so crowded.” He pulls his lips to one side, thinking. “Besides, the restaurant that’s there is always blasting the worst music. Like,
old American pop from five years ago that you forgot about and didn’t want to remember.”

  They set the grocery bags down and Dio points to a swim step to his left—a metal ladder that reminds Will of municipal pools.

  “Just be careful of the top step,” Dio says, peeling off his shirt and unbuttoning his pants. “Last year some kid busted it trying to do a backflip. Broke his nose and everything.”

  A trail of dark, coarse hair runs from his chest to his abdomen, following a topography of lean muscle. As he bends over to lay his shirt and jeans down on the rocks, Will notices more: a freckle on his left shoulder; a twin set of shadows formed by the sharp angles of his hips; sweat gathering in the grooves of his lower back, dampening the waistband of his briefs. Then, as Dio stands up again, Will—worried that he’s staring—looks away.

  He reaches into the bag of food, cracks open one of the Alfas, and takes a long swig. Setting the can down on the rocks, he reaches into the bag again, this time retrieving an orange. For a moment he holds it to his nose, trying to pick up the bitterness of the rind. Then he begins to peel it. He digs his fingers into its skin and winces as acid bathes the cuts on his hands.