Honestly, We Meant Well Read online

  Two weeks later she came to see him. He was lying on the couch, reading The Day of the Locust, when he heard her knock on his door. He was embarrassed to let her in, though he did, promptly. The apartment’s furniture looked like it had been stolen from a Hilton Garden Inn, and there were half-empty takeout cartons in the sink. He hadn’t managed to buy a laundry hamper yet, so his dirty clothes—socks, underwear, a pair of old khakis—formed a pile in the corner of the bedroom. He offered her some water, and when she accepted he considered it a promising sign. Leaning against the kitchen wall, she held the glass against her cheek. He watched her as she considered the apartment: the old television, the Formica counters, the splashes of marinara sauce on the floor.

  Then she turned to him.

  “I’d like for us to go to therapy,” she said.

  It was not so much a request as a demand; in the same breath, she told him that if he wanted to stay married, seeing a marriage counselor was nonnegotiable. And so they went, on Monday and Wednesday afternoons. Before long, these sessions fell into a predictable pattern: Sue Ellen would find refuge at the opposite end of the couch as Dean held his breath, terrified that, at any moment, she would announce that she was through with him. The counselor, Connie, had been recommended by a woman Sue Ellen knew in the Latin Studies Department. She was good, and not at all what Dean had expected. Connie wore no shawls, and her office boasted no collection of plants. Instead of sitting in some hideous recliner, she positioned herself on an ergonomic kneeling chair—a squat pedestal with a sleek, Scandinavian aesthetic that kept her spine long and erect. Mostly, though, she was easy to talk to. Her voice hovered near a deep contralto, and—much to Dean’s delight—she only rarely mentioned feelings.

  And it worked: a month later the space between them on the couch had diminished. Sue Ellen was accepting Dean’s apology, and Dean—his eyes filmy with tears—was reaching out to take her hand. The next day, they drove to San Ramon, where Dean canceled his lease and Sue Ellen brought boxes to help him pack his things. That night, he ate dinner with his family at the same Vietnamese restaurant he and Sue Ellen had gone to the evening she discovered she was pregnant with Will.

  * * *

  A tour group gathers along the eastern face of the Parthenon, a horde of twenty or so teenagers led by a stout woman holding a yellow umbrella. She points at something—one of the columns, Dean thinks, but from where he’s sitting he can’t be sure. Reaching down, he tugs a weed out from underneath the stone on which he’s sitting and begins to tie its stem into knots. The Ottomans turned the temple into a mosque, he remembers having read, before deciding to store arms in it at some point during the 1600s. This turned out to be a bad idea: when the Venetians bombarded the city at the tail end of that century, they ignited the stored ammunition and blew off the roof.

  He ties another knot in the weed’s stem and, as a few drops of sweat work their way down his spine, he reminds himself that it had been his idea to come. And while his motivations may have been a hair less than pure, the fact remains: He was the one who, two months ago, first proposed to Sue Ellen that he and Will accompany her to Greece for the summer. He was the one who suggested that all the Wrights needed was a good family vacation.

  It was midweek, a Wednesday afternoon, and he had surprised her at her office with lunch. The forecast, he remembers, had promised sun, but there was nonetheless a light drizzle, and by the time he reached the Classics Department, he looked shaggy and wet. After shaking himself off and removing his windbreaker, he began shuffling through the department’s hallways, where there were stacks of flyers advertising study abroad opportunities in places like Naples and Alexandria and Rome. When he got to his wife’s office, he didn’t knock. Instead, he sat down, unloaded two turkey sandwiches on her desk, and said, “I think Will and I should come with you. To Greece, I mean.”

  “Uh, hi,” she said, and set down the exam she had been grading. She took off her glasses and looked at the sandwiches, wrapped in white deli paper. “What are those? And why are you so wet?”

  “Turkey. The one on the left doesn’t have pickles.” He pushed his hair out of his face. “And it’s raining.”

  She spun in her chair and looked out the window, nodding. Spinning back, she said, “And to what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “I just told you: I think Will and I should come to Greece with you this summer.”

  Sue Ellen unwrapped her sandwich and lifted up the top slice of bread, inspecting its contents. “You hate Greece.”

  “That’s a lie. I love Greece.”

  “When we were there in ’97 you flew back a week early.”

  “I had copyedits to work on,” he said. “And besides, the Welsh weren’t made for the Mediterranean.”

  She tore off a scrap of turkey and popped it in her mouth. “And you’re suddenly no longer Welsh?”

  “I’ve since learned about the magical properties of sunscreen.” His phone buzzed in his pocket, and he reached down to silence it. “Come on,” he said. “It’ll be great. Our last chance to be together as a family before we release Will to the wolves.”

  “What if he gets a job by then?”

  “I think the likelihood of that is less than convincing.”

  Sue Ellen tucked her hair behind her ears. “And you? What will you do?”

  “I’ll write.”

  “You’ll write?”

  “Yes, I’m a writer. I’ll write.” He took a bite of his sandwich and said, with his mouth still full, “Also, I’ve had a new book idea.”

  “Oh, really.”

  Dean said, “Yes, really,” though this was far from the truth. He had experienced a few, precious bursts of energy since finishing The Light of Our Shadows, though he hadn’t elected to invest in them with any reasonable degree of effort. Publicly, when his colleagues asked him when they might expect the next novel from Dean Wright, he complained about fear of failure, of not being able to write something that might live up to his past work. These anxieties, he would go on to explain, boxed him in creatively: his words had lost their rhythm. He appreciated the sympathy he got whenever he offered up this explanation—the pats on the shoulder, the assurances that the juices would start flowing again. The issue, though, wasn’t writer’s block; the issue was laziness. Putting together a novel was hard—impossibly so—and, despite how much he glorified the writing process for Jasmine, he often questioned whether he had the constitution for it. Sitting down at the computer, trudging through the awful monotony of prose—it was all such a tedious slog. The problem was that there was little else he was good at; he had endured the boredom of writing novels because it seemed like the only viable thing to do. It was for this reason that the most recent book’s success brought such euphoric relief. Finally, there was an opportunity to rest on his royalty checks. Finally, there was an opportunity to stop.

  Sue Ellen knew all this. Knew of his laziness, his keen desire to do nothing but watch reruns in his underwear. And that—all of that—was precisely why her smirk irritated him so much. If she really loved him, he thought, she would play along. If she really loved him, she would let him lie.

  Sue Ellen peeled a piece of lettuce out of her sandwich, folded it in half, and ate it. She always deconstructed her sandwiches before eating them. She asked, “So what’s it about?”

  “A gorgeous classics professor giving a talk about a temple to a group of touring octogenarians.”

  “Oh, that’s rich.”

  He wiped mustard from the corner of his mouth. “It’s still in the early stages. I’m not really ready to talk about it yet.”

  Outside, the rain picked up, growing from a drizzle to a steady downpour. Sue Ellen said, “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

  “You’re right. I was the second shooter on the grassy knoll.” He waited for a beat, then smiled. He said, “Why is it so unbelievable that we want to come and support you in this?”

  “It’s not. It’s just—”

  “I know.”
He cut her off. He knew what she was going to say, and he couldn’t stand to hear her say it again.

  Instead, he set his sandwich on the desk and leaned over to kiss her cheek.

  “We need this,” he said. “I think this could be good for us. It’ll be the final push to get us through this year.”

  She looked at him for a moment, then stood up. After pacing to the window and back, she shoved her hands into the pockets of her pants and said: “You promise not to complain about the sun?”

  Dean raised both his hands. “Now I’m afraid you’re just being unreasonable.”

  Sue Ellen sat down and tore some crust away from a slice of bread. Chewing it, she smiled.

  She said, “Okay, let’s go.”

  * * *

  “Dad, I’m dying.”

  He glances up and sees Will standing over him. Trails of sweat dampen the front of his shirt.

  “What?”

  “I said I’m dying. Like, this place is cool and all, but the heat is killing me.”

  Dean looks at his watch. He says, “I don’t know what to tell you. We’ve got another two hours until the ferry.”

  “What are we going to do until then?”

  Dean stands and brushes off the front of his jeans.

  “Jesus, Will, I don’t know. Go find some shade. Buy another bottle of water. You’re an adult—figure it out.”

  “Whoa.” Will holds up his hands like he’s under arrest. “What’s gotten into you?”

  “Nothing.” Dean lowers his voice and rubs the bridge of his nose.

  He wonders if it’s possible to ever really escape his mistakes, or if he’s just particularly good at repeating them.

  He says, “Nothing’s gotten into me.”

  Sue Ellen

  July 7

  The Acropolis and the Saronic Gulf

  She rests her chin on her knees and looks south, where a cloud of smog chokes Athens. Squinting, she tries to make out the shapes of ships flooding in and out of the city’s port, at Piraeus: the sharp angles of a sloop’s mainsail as it catches the breeze; the broad, rusted girth of a tanker. She can’t, though—the smog’s too thick—so instead she lets her thoughts drift.

  As the sun scalds the back of her neck, she lets her eyes cross and uncross, and the sea blurs in and out of focus. She thinks of its name, rolling its syllables over on her tongue, their impossible combination of vowels: the Aegean. Whenever she teaches her survey course on classical archaeology, she begins here, in the deep indigo, where Odysseus wandered homeless and homesick, where Poseidon sired Pelias and Neleus. She explains to her students how the etymology of its name is up for dispute; how some scholars say that Aegean is a derivation of aiges, the Greek word for waves, while others point to an ancient town, Aegae, where the name was supposedly born. She offers up other, more fantastical explanations, too: a fierce Amazon queen named Aegea, who perished sailing back from Troy; an old Hecatoncheir called Aigaion—a giant of insurmountable strength who helped the Olympians oust the Titans. Finally: a king of Athens named Aegeus who, mistaking his son Theseus for dead, threw himself from a cliff into the churning surf.

  “We can’t be certain why we call it what we call it,” she says, always, “which, actually, is half the fun.”

  Scratching a mosquito bite on her ankle, she shifts her gaze from the water to the city, its thousands of mismatched roofs and honking cars. Then she works her way back to the sight that has been fascinating her for the past ten minutes: not the Parthenon or the Temple of Athena Nike, but rather a woman. Italian, she’s guessing, but she could be wrong; Sue Ellen’s estimate is based solely on her raven hair, her perfect waist, her choice to wear a pair of kitten heels to a place whose name translates roughly to “The Rock.” Whoever she is, she’s taken about a hundred photos of herself with a selfie stick. It’s an odd procedure to watch, one that’s at once self-conscious and detached. The adjustments the girl makes in her arm are minuscule—not more than a single degree or two in terms of angle—and yet the results must be colossally different. Why else would she continue standing there, pouting her lips and making peace signs? Why else wouldn’t she have just stopped?

  Sitting on a bench facing the Acropolis’s south slope, she wonders if the Greeks anticipated this. She wonders if, when Pericles instituted his marvelous plan for the reconstruction of the sanctuary, he had considered that, in two and a half millennia, a girl named Alessandra might trample through the Propylaea just to get a few shots for Instagram. She wouldn’t be surprised if he did, Sue Ellen thinks. The Greeks were, after all, the people who gave us Narcissus. The only difference, she figures, is that while we have reality television stars, they had the gods; while we’re stuck reading about Kim Kardashian, they had Aphrodite. But then, those two things aren’t entirely separate, either: Greeks gossiped in the same way about Aphrodite’s affairs as her students do about Kim’s ass; both, as it turns out, are worshipped.

  Glancing up once again, she notices the girl is looking at her—has, in fact, been watching Sue Ellen stalk her the whole time. Quickly, she looks down. She spreads her toes in her sandals and, a moment later, hears her name being called. Looking to her left she sees her husband, waving his pale arms above his head and pointing at his watch.

  “Just a minute!” she calls out to him, and ventures another glance around. The selfie stick girl is gone, replaced by someone else: a man with a beard and a backpack, a comically big Canadian flag sewn onto it.

  “We’ve got to go!” she hears Dean say. His arms still wave at her. “The boat leaves in an hour!”

  For a final moment, she stares up at the Erechtheion. There, along the Porch of the Caryatids, six young maidens, carved from limestone, prop up the temple’s roof. They’ve been there for two and a half thousand years. Ever since Phidias sculpted them to carry history on their shoulders.

  * * *

  An hour later, on the top deck of the ferry to Aegina, she grasps a bottle of Mythos between her thighs. Wedging the lighter against its neck, she flicks her wrist and pries off the cap.

  “Where’d you learn how to do that?” Will asks her as she hands him the beer.

  “I went to college, too, you know. Besides, we don’t have a bottle opener, and needs must be met.” The ferry lurches out of Piraeus, past the mouth of the harbor, and begins to pick up speed. Below her, deep in the boat’s bowels, the engine rumbles and whines. In the row of seats to her rear, some French tourists show each other pictures they’ve taken on their phones.

  She looks down at the lighter—blue, with a San Francisco Giants logo printed along its side.

  “Is this yours?” she asks.

  “Uh…” Will stutters. “I mean, I guess? I gave it to you.”

  “Yes, I know you gave it to me. I’m sorry. That was a stupid question. I should have said ‘This is yours.’”

  “Er…”

  She turns the lighter over on her palm. Its paint is starting to chip.

  She says, “Are you smoking again?”

  “No.” Will gulps from his beer. “Or, mostly no. Hardly ever.”

  Sue Ellen glances down at her son’s backpack, where she sees a pack of Parliaments peeking out from the exterior pocket.

  “Will, you know I hate it when—”

  “I know.” He cuts her off. “I’ve just— I’ve been stressed.”

  He leans his head against her shoulder and scratches his right ear. She does this, too, whenever she’s got something on her mind. It’s one of the countless tics, along with biting her fingernails and puffing her cheeks, that she seems to have passed on to him.

  “Did you ever get a chance to look at that grad school stuff I sent you? I didn’t realize there were so many M.F.A. programs in the Bay Area.”

  “I’d never get in,” he says.

  “What are you talking about? You got an A minus on your thesis.”

  He lifts his head and drinks from his Mythos.

  “I don’t want to be a writer,” he says.

&nb
sp; “Then don’t be. There are a million other things you can do.” She tries to pull him back toward her, but he resists. “Have you thought about the Peace Corps? Two of my colleagues have sons who did it and—”

  “Mom.”

  She looks at him, but he doesn’t look back. He keeps staring down.

  “I’m not helping, am I?”

  “No,” he says. “I mean, I know you’re trying to, and I appreciate it, but no. You’re not.” He leans forward and rests his elbows on the back of the bench in front of him. Reaching up, she runs her hand through his curls. He needs a shower—they both do.

  Will says, “I’m going to end up, like, delivering pizzas for the rest of my life.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that,” she says. “And besides, I think you’d be great at delivering pizzas.”

  “You have to say that. You’re my mom.”

  “I suppose that does put me under certain obligations.” She tugs lightly on his curls once, then lets them go. “But in this case, I’m speaking objectively. You’ve got a great smile and a flawless driving record. Domino’s would snatch you up in an instant.”