Honestly, We Meant Well Read online

  Will turned to her again. He said, “I don’t think I can impress upon you how important this email is.”

  “And I don’t think I can impress upon you how quickly I can get you thrown off this flight.”

  Somewhere in the rows of passengers ahead of him, his parents sit, oblivious. Originally, his father had booked three seats together. Upon arriving at the airport and printing their tickets, though, Dean realized that he had mistakenly selected a middle seat for himself. When he asked the gate agent—a mousy boy about Will’s age with floppy hair and a soft voice—if there were any more aisle seats available, the agent immediately upgraded Dean and Sue Ellen to the last two first-class spots. Blushing, he murmured that The Light of Our Shadows had changed his life.

  Will finishes the first bottle and reaches for the second. Where, he wonders, is his email presently? Floating. Idling in digital purgatory. He knows Ginny—knows her well, in fact. It’s basically impossible not to: she’s a ubiquitous presence in Berkeley’s creative writing program. He can hardly remember a time when her voice wasn’t the first one he heard during a workshop, or when her laugh wasn’t the loudest at a party.

  “She’s always just, like, there,” his friend Cassie said to him once. They were smoking cigarettes on the steps of the gym, and as Will listened he let ash fall on the tops of his shoes. “It’s like she’s an amoeba or something. Like she can split and multiply at superhuman speeds so she can be a billion places at once.”

  “There are multiple Ginny Polonskys,” Will said. “That’s the only viable explanation.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Cassie said, leaning a bit to the left so a pair of tan legs and running shoes could pass between them. “Can you even imagine?”

  “It would be a lot of hair.”

  He knows what Cassie was getting at: Ginny Polonsky is, categorically, annoying as fuck. She is also a wholesale devotee of Will’s father. And she’s not alone: this past year there was a group of them, ten or so students who had been deemed, by Dean, to be talented enough to enroll in the one workshop he teaches. These Deaniacs, as Cassie called them, were of a certain type: sensitive gay men, primarily, and the headstrong women who love them. There was one straight male who was admitted. A ukulele-playing bro named Garrett, who considered himself enlightened, woke. He didn’t last long, Will was relatively certain. Or, if he did, he ended up fading into the background; he quickly became aware that, really, he was just part of the problem.

  Will works his jaw to pop his ears and rolls an empty bottle between his palms. Ginny Polonsky, he thinks. Of course she would want to publish the story; she probably just about wet herself when she read Will’s name on top of it. But then, that was the point: at the end of the day, the quality of the story itself had very little to do with her decision; he wouldn’t be surprised if Ginny hadn’t even read the whole thing. Rather, she’s probably publishing the piece to curry Dean’s favor. Look at me, publishing your son. Look at me, making you proud.

  For God’s sake, Will thinks. I can’t even plagiarize right.

  The plane banks to the left, spiraling downward. They’re meant to spend a few hours in Athens before catching the ferry to Aegina. His father explained this to him before they boarded the flight in San Francisco. They’ll see the sights, wander through some ruins, eat a gyro or two. It was important to Sue Ellen—she wanted Will to experience the city. The last time she brought him here he was five years old, and the only memory he has of the place is tripping and skinning his knee at the Temple of Hephaestus. While he cried, his mother led him into the bathroom of a nearby McDonald’s, where she washed dirt and gravel away from the wound. Now, pressing his nose against the window again, Will thinks he catches sight of the Parthenon, perched uneasily among the rubble of the Acropolis. At the mound’s base, past the Odeon of Herodes Atticus and the shaded streets of the Plaka, Athens radiates outward—a mess of new and ancient.

  “Jesus,” Will says aloud, and the man next to him stirs. “I’m so fucked.”

  Dean

  July 7

  The Acropolis, Athens

  He’s awful at red-eye flights.

  He shouldn’t be; after spending the last ten months crisscrossing the country to promote his book, by now he should have developed a system to ward off the gauziness of spending an abridged night on a plane. Drink two gins and eight glasses of water. Watch a rerun of The Big Bang Theory, listen to Elgar’s “Mot d’Amour,” do a Zen breathing exercise, and then pass out for six blissful hours. That sort of thing. He hasn’t, though. Instead, he’s just exhausted. While Sue Ellen had slept for nearly the entire flight, he spent the whole time trying to get comfortable, caught somewhere between an Ambien dream and the present. A few times he tried reading a book—a W. H. Auden biography that for the last five years he’s been ignoring—but each time he gave up, preferring instead to listen to the flight attendants heat coffee and gossip in the galley.

  They arrived here, at the Acropolis, twenty minutes ago. After clearing customs at eight o’clock this morning, they took a cab from the airport to a restaurant Sue Ellen knew of in Dexameni, near the city’s center. At a table beneath a broken ceiling fan, they ate bougatsas, then took turns using the bathroom so they could brush their teeth. If it were up to Dean, they would have stayed there, drinking thick cups of coffee until he felt like he was running on something other than fumes. His wife, though, had other plans. A quick walking tour of the National Garden and a visit to Hadrian’s Arch. To Dean’s credit, he didn’t protest, no matter how much he wanted to. Rather, he was well behaved, listening to Sue Ellen as she slipped into her lectures, not interrupting his son when he asked questions with obvious answers. He grumbled only minimally when Sue Ellen suggested they walk up Dionysiou Areopagitou, the pedestrian street that leads to the Acropolis, and was duly thankful when she negotiated for them to store their bags in the site’s ticket office. He is, he thinks, being a very good sport.

  Reaching into the back pocket of his jeans, Dean pulls out a worn white handkerchief, which he uses to wipe sweat away from his bald spot. He’s worried that it’s started to burn; he’d forgotten to rub sunscreen on it earlier this afternoon, and already he can feel the white patch of flesh darkening to a crisp pink. He wonders if Sir Arthur Evans had the same problem—if, when he was digging up Knossos, he was forced to take frequent breaks, ducking into the shade of an ancient temple to give his scalp a rest. Probably not, Dean thinks. Men were made from heartier stock back then. Sir Arthur probably baked out there without blinking an eye. He probably let his whole head get good and fried before the thought of a hat even crossed his mind.

  A few minutes ago, Will, unprompted, brought Dean a bottle of water (“You don’t look so good, Dad”) before wandering off toward the Temple of Nike. Now, drinking it, he looks down and checks his watch: it’s one forty-five, which means they’ve got another three hours before catching their ferry to Aegina, where he plans on downing a few poolside gin and tonics and signing off until tomorrow. Surveying the ground around him, he looks for a place to sit, some three-thousand-year-old piece of marble on which he might unload. He shields his eyes from the sun and looks toward the Erechtheion, where Sue Ellen is looking down, taking pictures of the ground with her phone. How many times has he heard her story about coming here as a teenage girl? How many times has she told him that, during her first visit to the Acropolis, she had sat on the steps of the Parthenon and cried? For this, he has persevered, he has sacrificed; he has ruined a perfectly good shirt with sweat and subjected himself to a sunburnt scalp in order to ensure his wife’s happiness.

  This is, after all, for her.

  * * *

  The sin for which Dean Wright is repenting was named Jasmine, and his agent, Sal, had been the person who introduced them. Two months before The Light of Our Shadows was released, he phoned Dean to tell him that, given the novel’s growing buzz, he had reached out to a few Hollywood types who might be interested in optioning the book for film. Three of them—big
studio guys whose tastes veered toward the superheroic, the high concept—had passed. The fourth, though, was interested. She was a fan not only of this current novel, but also of Dean’s earlier work, and she wanted him to come in for a meeting.

  “So, what, now I’ve got to fly down to L.A.?” he remembers asking Sal. He was sitting in front of his laptop, rereading a few prepublication reviews. In the kitchen, Sue Ellen was roasting acorn squash, and the smell—rich, nutty, thick with butter—wafted down the hall to his office. He cradled the phone against his shoulder.

  “I’ll pay for the ticket,” Sal said.

  “You mean you’ll deduct it from my next check.”

  “Hombre, that check’s going to be so big you won’t know the difference.”

  “Why does she want to meet, anyway? Can’t we just set up a call or something?”

  He was doing his best to sound nonchalant, annoyed; he didn’t want to let on that he had been practicing his red-carpet interviews for eighteen months.

  “She wants to meet because she’s a fucking fan, and she wants to turn your book into a fucking movie, and I already told her you’d fly down,” Sal said. “Stop acting like I’m asking you to trek across the goddamned Andes or something.”

  “Okay, okay.” Dean shut his computer. “I’ll go.”

  “Good. Do your best to be charming.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “And for the love of God, remember to tuck in your shirt.”

  “Fuck off.”

  She worked for a company called Tilt Pictures. It was a production house whose work, at least according to Sal, was often lauded at places like Sundance and Toronto, and whose offices were in the glassed-in upper floors of a skyscraper on Wilshire. Dean arrived in the afternoon and was greeted at the elevator by Jasmine’s assistant, an enthusiastic young man named Danny with a wide smile and bracingly white sneakers. He shook Dean’s hand, and by the time he had released it, he had already offered him a slew of beverages: water, coffee, Perrier, matcha. Dean declined them all, and Danny—smile still wide, shoes still blinding—led him into a glass conference room at the end of the floor. A fishbowl of sorts that looked out upon Tilt’s office on one side and the grimy headache of Hollywood on the other.

  She made him wait ten minutes. He remembers that now. Ten minutes of checking his breath, swiveling in his chair, and untucking and retucking his shirt. When she did finally enter, she did so carrying a copy of his first novel and a wineglass filled with sparkling water.

  “Oh, God,” he said, nodding toward the book. “Where’d you find that?”

  “Just a little memorabilia to start things off.” She sat across from him and offered him her hand. “Jasmine Ramos, by the way.”

  “Dean Wright.” Her grip was firm; he felt her rings digging into his fingers. “I thought I asked my publisher to burn all the copies of that thing.”

  “Looks like I got the last one, then.” She smiled. “And I don’t know what you’re talking about. My Baby Takes Taxis at Dawn changed my life. In fact”—she pulled the cap off a pen with her teeth—“I was hoping I could get you to sign it.”

  “You’re just buttering me up.”

  “Guilty.” Jasmine winked. “I had Danny order it on Amazon yesterday.”

  They continued like this—sparring, testing, flirting. She told him her vision for the book’s adaptation. They would find a writer with studio chops, but someone who would still honor the integrity of the story. Keep it quiet and thoughtful, but with a mainstream sensibility. “Dead Poets Society meets Scent of a Woman,” she told him, “but with a Bird Cage twist.” Dean worked hard to impress her, dropping references to the Tilt films that he had researched, while he complimented her tastes. He hadn’t expected to be attracted to her; when he walked into the meeting, he was mostly concerned with how wrinkled his shirt was and with the extra ten pounds he’d put on that year. And yet, here he was, laughing too hard at Jasmine’s jokes, letting his eyes linger too long as she sipped seltzer from her wineglass. She was taller than Dean by a good two inches and wore a blazer better than he could ever hope to. Her dark hair was cut to the chin, in the sort of severe bob that he typically associated with Finnish secretaries, not Hollywood development execs. And when she yelled at Danny to bring her more water, it was in a clipped, staccato voice—a tone that was laced with a sort of annoyed authority that terrified Dean and turned him on.

  After an hour and a half, she unbuttoned her blazer and leaned her elbows on the table.

  “You want to take this somewhere else?” she said. “That kid’s annoying me, and there’s an awesome, depressing hotel bar two blocks away.”

  It was called the Dirty Duck, and when they got there they both ordered whiskey sours. Jasmine said the bar was famous for them, but after the third one she admitted that might have been a fib; really, she just liked the taste of lemon.

  Later, he would swear he had no intention of sleeping with Jasmine—though this, of course, would be a lie. He knew within an hour or two of meeting her that, soon, they would end up in bed. He knew it in the way that a person knows certain things—that you’re paying too much for a burger, or that a buxom blonde will be the first to die in a slasher film. There are signals. Little signposts that point to the inevitably of an ending. The thing that did shock him, at least at first, was his capacity for it. While he suspected he was handsome (twice he’d been told he looked like Gary Cooper), he still never considered himself a person who was suave enough for an affair. In grad school, long before he met Sue Ellen, his friends used to call him Turtle, for his propensity to shrink and disappear in front of women. And yet, here he was, setting up secret weekend getaways on Catalina. Here he was, closing the door to his office whenever Danny called to say he had Jasmine on the line.

  Another thing that startled him: his remorse was surprisingly, almost addictively easy to ignore. Sure, he felt it, nipping at his heels whenever they checked into a hotel. It was, though, a minor emotion, an itch that, if ignored long enough, he didn’t need to scratch. More than anything, he felt empowered, as if he had been reborn into a new, invigorating shape. With Jasmine, he wasn’t the slob who left dishes in the sink or the taskmaster who scolded subpar grades; he wasn’t confined to husband or father—roles in which, despite his best efforts, he sensed he had grown limp. Rather, Jasmine treated Dean like the writer he dreamt of one day becoming. She hadn’t actually read The Light of Our Shadows (Danny, as it turned out, had a knack for giving great coverage), but still, when he talked about it, he felt like she was genuinely interested in what he was saying. She nodded at the right moments and asked him to clarify his more cumbersome thoughts. Instead of feeling like a burden or a hack, for the first time in a while he felt powerful—a man who held urgent opinions about topics like art, literature, and the future of Nordic cuisine.

  He got caught on the most beautiful day of the year—that is, at least, what all the weathermen were saying. It was October. The fog had cleared from the bay, revealing the infinite promise of the Pacific. For once, San Francisco didn’t look like the end of the world, but rather the beginning of it. In fact, it was so nice that Dean decided to go for a run. Lately, Jasmine’s taut body had made him aware of the inadequacies of his own: the way a pillow of flesh sat just above his waistband, how his chest had grown soft and mutable. His new fitness regime wasn’t some precursor for divorce; he wasn’t dropping two pant sizes just to leave Sue Ellen, nor, he figured, did Jasmine expect him to. To date, the subject of his wife had never been discussed. There was a tacit understanding between them that the very thing that made them work was the implausibility of a future. A joint realization that as soon as whatever they shared became real—as soon as it became fleshed out with all the scars and warts of domesticity—that would be the instant they would both stop wanting it.

  He entered the kitchen to find his wife sitting at the breakfast table. He was sweaty and parched from his run, so he poured himself a glass of water before coming over to give he
r a kiss. She didn’t let him, though. As soon as he leaned down, she stood up and walked away.

  “I know,” he said. “I’m pretty gross right now.”

  “Who the hell is Jasmine Ramos?”

  Her colleague Greta Weinstein had seen them—that’s what Sue Ellen told him. Two days prior, Dean had gone to see Jasmine in Los Angeles (he had told Sue Ellen he had a reading in Orange County). On Wednesday night, they had gone to eat at a Tex-Mex restaurant in Venice—the same restaurant where Greta, who was in town for a conference at UCLA, had decided to have a quiet dinner of enchiladas. Instead, she had seen them kissing. She learned Jasmine’s name when the hostess called them to be seated. Then she had phoned Sue Ellen. Dean was humiliated—for his wife, but also for himself. He had been an idiot and had gotten caught. Seconds earlier, his affair had struck him as exciting and original; now, he felt like just another schmuck.

  He begged Sue Ellen to give him another chance, first in the kitchen and then in the living room, where she retreated after ten minutes. His shirt, a ratty gray thing with a hole in the left shoulder, dried as he spoke. In the beginning, it was heavy with sweat; half an hour later, it was stiff and crunchy—ducking his nose beneath his collar, he realized he hated his own smell. He told her he had made the biggest mistake of his life, and he meant it. She cried only once, when she asked Dean what had attracted him to Jasmine and he answered that she wasn’t his wife. Aside from that, she listened, her hands folded resolutely in her lap, her eyes clear and trained on him. Then, around lunchtime, she stood up and made a sandwich. When she returned to the living room, she told him to pack a bag and leave.

  He found a furnished short-term rental in San Ramon. An alcove studio with wall-to-wall beige carpet and vertical blinds that never fully shut and that he never fully opened. He never cooked anything—never, in fact, checked if the stove even worked. His meals, rather, were of the deliverable or microwavable variety: pizzas and Lean Cuisines and cups of dehydrated ramen. Eating these things, he was reminded of how he had lived in his early twenties, though this time his choices felt disrespectable and uncouth: he wasn’t just being lazy, he was being a child. He called Sue Ellen twice—once on the first night he was alone, and then again four days later. Both times, he was redirected to her voice mail. Listening to her recorded voice, he would imagine her sitting somewhere in their house as she held the phone in her hand, staring at his number. Space, he intuited, was what she needed, though space was also the thing he was least inclined to give. He worried that in those stretches of silence, she would become more resolved in her disappointment, more certain of his sins. Still, he resisted his instincts and stopped calling. Forgiveness, he knew, could be a prickly thing.