Honestly, We Meant Well

by Grant Ginder

  Tequila always wins

  Hard lesson to learn. When you back?

  Soon—4 weeks

  More like soon-ish

  Whatever. Eleni chews on a strand of her hair. It tastes bitter, then floral: the faint traces of her shampoo. She types: Last guests just got here.

  How many?

  3. Mom, dad, son.

  How olds the son?

  Our age but gay I think

  Why?

  Because he’s hot and polite

  Fair. Find out for sure though

  How?

  Show him your tits and see if he blinks

  Goodbye Sophie

  Eleni sets her phone down and returns to the passports, opening them one by one, reading the names inside: Dean, William, Sue Ellen. The photos are of them, but also not: they show them as who they were, as opposed to as who they are. Fewer gray hairs. Fuller faces. A perm. She thinks of her own passport—she hasn’t looked at it in years. Would she recognize herself, she wonders? Or would she look like an artifact—someone she used to be? The last time she left the country was four years ago, before Christos died. She had gone to London, as a member of her university’s delegation to an undergraduate economic conference that was being hosted at King’s College. There had been four of them—two men and two women—and the university had paid for them to stay in a hotel just across the river, on the other side of the Waterloo Bridge. She tries to remember what the United Kingdom’s immigration stamp looks like, but she can’t. Oh, well, she thinks. In less than a month she can go back and get another one. She can go on a world tour, if she feels like it, bopping around to different countries, collecting as many stamps as she wants.

  She opens her laptop and begins recording the information she’s required to collect. Names, birthdates, places of issuance. On the other side of the door, in the foyer, she hears the Wrights’ voices echo against the tile. The sound startles her at first; the last guest to stay at the Alectrona left a month ago, and in the time since she’s grown accustomed to silence, mixed with the churn of her own thoughts. Lifting her fingers from the keyboard, she stops typing and listens:

  “Why do they always do that at European hotels?”

  “Do what, sweetie?”

  “Take your passports.”

  “It’s an EU thing.”

  “You’re making that up, Dad.”

  “How would you know if I was?”

  “Did she mention what the Wi-Fi password is?”

  “I swear to God, Will, you’re going to die with that electric dildo clutched in your hand.”

  “Dean, please.”

  “Sue Ellen, did you hear what she said?”

  “About what?”

  “About the showers.”

  “Mom, what are these?”

  “They’re sour cherries.”

  “They’re not bad.”

  “Sue Ellen.”

  “Yes, Dean, I heard what she said about the showers.”

  “Did you know that was the case?”

  “Yes, and I thought I’d surprise you with it. No, of course I didn’t know that was the case. Will, honey, go easy on those cherries.”

  “Well, are you even the least bit concerned?”

  “About the showers? No. I am not concerned about the showers.”

  “I mean, that is sort of inconvenient, don’t you think?”

  “Mom, how warm do you think the pool gets?”

  “It’s July. It’s had time to heat. I bet it’s pretty warm. We can go swimming later on if—”

  “Do you think she’ll be sharing the shower with us?”

  “She lives here.”

  “So—”

  “So, yes, I’m assuming she’ll be sharing the shower with us.”

  “What’s Alectrona mean, anyway?”

  “She was a daughter of the sun god, Helios. She died a virgin.”

  “Not a very promising name for a hotel, am I right?”

  “Will.”

  “What, Dad?”

  “Help me out here.”

  “With what?”

  “The shower.”

  “I mean, is it really that big of a deal? Flint, Michigan, hasn’t had clean water for, like, a thousand days or something.”

  “Yes, but that’s drinking water. They still have water they can shower with. In multiple showers, no less.”

  “With all due respect, Dad, your priorities there strike me as a little bit off.”

  “Unbelievable.”

  “I’m serious about these cherries. Try them.”

  They stop, silent, when Eleni pushes the door open and steps back into the foyer. Will pops another cherry between his lips, and Dean looks at her with red cheeks, his eyes cast downward as if he’s just been caught. She smiles and wonders if the Wrights know she could hear them. Despite all the weird things she’s experienced during her stint as an innkeeper, this always surprises her the most: how quickly guests begin to ignore her. How willingly they go about their private lives forgetting that she’s there, watching them.

  She hands the Wrights back their passports.

  For the last time, she says: “Welcome to the Alectrona.”

  Will

  July 14

  Aegina

  He’s naked when the phone rings. He’s just come up from the shower on the inn’s first floor and for the past two minutes he’s been standing in front of the mirror in his own room, trying to make sense of his curls.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Will?”

  “Ginny. Yes. Hello.” He sighs, relieved. “I’ve been trying to get ahold of you.”

  “Yeah, I can tell. I’ve got, like, twenty-seven missed calls.”

  He sits on the bed and feels the stiff quilt scratch at his bare thighs.

  “In all fairness,” he says, “those twenty-seven calls have come over the past five days.”

  He lies back and stares up. A deep crack begins in the left corner of the room’s white ceiling and stretches to the middle of the square space, where it inexplicably vanishes.

  Ginny says, “Well, I’ve been gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Yes. I’ve been gone. As in, not here.”

  “I know what gone means. Was your phone not allowed to go with you?”

  She says, plainly, “I was at a silent retreat in Ojai.”

  He shuts his eyes. He had forgotten Ginny’s ability to respond to rhetorical questions with legitimate—and wholly infuriating—answers.

  “A silent retreat in Ojai,” he repeats back to her.

  “Yes. A silent retreat in Ojai. Phones weren’t allowed.” For good measure, she adds: “On the drive back I stopped in San Luis Obispo for a Paul McGregor reading. Goddamn marvelous.”

  A drop of water works its way from the underside of his groin to the back of his left knee. He wonders if he should put on some clothes.

  His eyes still closed, he says, “My father says Paul McGregor’s a hack.”

  “Well, some people say your father’s a hack,” Ginny bites back. “So.”

  “Do you think my father’s a hack, Ginny?” Will says, laying his free hand on his stomach. “Would you like me to tell my father that you think he’s a hack?”

  There’s a pause during which Will listens to Ginny’s breathing meld with the cicadas buzzing in the mastic tree outside.

  She says, “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t.”

  “I won’t,” he answers, feeling—to his surprise—a little sad for her. “I was joking.”

  Sitting up, Will glances out the window. Dead pine needles blanket the Alectrona’s small garden. Beyond it, Dean slumps, asleep, in a plastic blue patio chair next to the inn’s bean-shaped pool. An old paperback sits open on his lap, and at his left is a wineglass filled with gin and tonic. Will looks at the clock hanging above the room’s pine dresser: it’s eleven eighteen in the morning.

  Ginny asks, “Where are you, anyway?”

  “What do you mean?”

&nbs
p; “When I called you, your phone had one of those weird foreign rings. Why do they do that, I wonder? Like, why can’t every country have the same ring?”

  “I don’t know. People like to be different.” He runs a hand through his wet hair. “I’m in Greece with my parents.”

  “That sounds nice. Where in Greece?”

  “Why does it matter?”

  “Because I’m curious, Will. I’m a curious person.”

  He weighs the consequences of just hanging up.

  He says, “Some island.”

  “You don’t know the name of the island?”

  “Aegina,” he says, suddenly standing. “It’s called Aegina, okay?” Reaching forward, he shuts the window’s curtains. A midday twilight blankets the room. He cuts to the chase: “Look, Ginny, I need you to do me a favor.”

  She says, “Aegina’s in the Saronic Gulf, right?”

  “Maybe? I think so? But goddamn it, Ginny, listen to me.”

  She sighs. Will’s certain that he can hear the sound of her eyes rolling. “A favor. Oui. Dis-moi.”

  “I need you not to publish my story.”

  “Um…”

  He begins to pace, making half circles around the bed. “I just—frankly, I don’t think it’s ready yet, you know? Like, it still needs a lot of editing and I’m just … I’m not really comfortable with it being out there for people to read.”

  “Okay … I mean, you know that every thesis automatically gets submitted to the journal, right? Like, Claudia obviously told you that when you turned it in.”

  “No, I know, and she did. I’m just asking you to publish someone else’s, instead of mine.”

  “That’s weird.”

  “No, it’s not. Or, fine, maybe it is, I don’t care. Just don’t publish it.”

  “Will.”

  “Ginny.”

  “You’re selling yourself short, okay? For the past four years your stories have been…”

  “My stories have been what, Ginny?”

  “Not unoriginal, per se, but just not entirely inventive.” Will hears a pop: a bubble bursting in Ginny’s chewing gum. “No offense.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But then you turn in this! This masterpiece! And you say you won’t let me publish it? You’ll prove everyone wrong! They’ll call you the second coming of Mailer, or Updike, or—”

  “My father.”

  “That’s your Freudian bullshit to work out—not mine. Me, I just need content.”

  “Ginny, I’m literally begging you.”

  “Oh, c’mon, Wright. Have a little chutzpah.”

  Will pulls at his curls until he feels them tug against his scalp. For a moment, he worries that he’s lost her, that the line’s gone dead.

  “Ginny?”

  “Yeah,” she says, “yeah, I’m here. Sorry. Was just reading an email.” His shoulders slump, and she continues, “Look, Will, we need the story, all right? We’ve already worked it into the layout. Besides, without it all we’ve got are a couple of shitty sonnets written by some lesbian from Roger’s poetry workshop and a story about a pair of crickets. Literally—a pair of crickets. I get that you’re nervous. Honestly, I do. I promise, though, it’ll be great. Totally and awesomely great. In the meantime, I’ve got to jet. I was supposed to be at Fertile Grounds for this party, like, ten minutes ago. It’s, like, one o’clock in the morning here. Anyway, amuse-toi bien in Greece.”

  “Ginny, no, wait. You don’t understand. You—” Will starts, but the line goes dead.

  “Shit,” he says, and tosses his phone on the bed. He stares at its darkened screen and considers calling her back. He could beg her, plead with her; he could feed her some contrived line about his process and try to appeal to her pseudoartistic sensibilities. But then, what would happen if she began to suspect something? What would happen if, in his own attempt to save himself, he actually revealed that he’s become the thing he fears becoming most: a fraud? He imagines Ginny pointing at him and laughing, dropping her obnoxious little French bons mots as she explains what makes a real artist legitimate and Will not. No, he thinks. No, he can’t call her back, at least not today.

  Two nights ago, he almost told his mother. They were sitting on the Alectrona’s back patio, drinking scotch and watching the sun dip behind the Peloponnese. This had become something of a tradition—at least, a tradition in the week that they’ve been in Greece. After dinner, the three of them gather here to have a drink and dissect the day and play dominos with the inn’s old, chipped set. On this night, though, it was just Will and Sue Ellen. Twenty minutes earlier, after having lost his third consecutive game, Dean retreated to his room, taking the dominos with him.

  “They’re faulty,” he had said to them, standing. “There are too many threes and not enough sixes.”

  Crickets had replaced the cicadas, and Will listened to them while he counted the stars. Earlier that afternoon, Sue Ellen had taken them to the monastery of Agios Nektarios in Kontos, a mile or two from the inn. She had been doing this since they arrived—filling their afternoons with excursions, acquainting them with the island’s culture, its history. Two days from now, she had scheduled a more ambitious trip, this one to Delphi, on the mainland, to see the ruins of the oracle. He’ll go along dutifully, just like he went along dutifully to the monastery. He listened as she told him that Agios Nektarios was a relatively recent saint—he died in 1920—and that the monastery was still run by a cadre of nuns. Hearing how excited she was, the way her voice lifted and increased its cadence, he encouraged her; he asked questions about what the nuns do all day (I don’t know—sweep, I guess?), and if he could buy something from the gift shop (I know we aren’t candle people, but get a few anyway—they really are lovely). She hadn’t told him much about the time she’d spent on the island when she was his age, but watching the way the place transported his mother fascinated Will. For the past year he had watched her wrestle. Now, here she was, happy.

  “Mom,” he said now. Gnats were gathering over the Alectrona’s pool. “I need to tell you something.”

  “Hit me,” she said.

  Will watched as she closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the wicker chair. She sighed and rested the glass of scotch on her stomach. He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen her so relaxed.

  “Nothing,” he said. “This place is just really great.”

  Her eyes still shut, she reached out her right hand and wiggled two of her fingers, which Will took hold of and squeezed.

  Now, glancing out the window again, he sees that his father has woken up, at least nominally, and is staring with a sort of half-drunk vacantness at his book. He normally isn’t a heavy drinker, though, from the looks of it, he has committed himself to being a vacation alcoholic. Reaching down, he grasps blindly for his gin and tonic, his fingers shaking as they wiggle through the open air, searching for the glass. Finally, after a few frantic moments, he finds it and his chest heaves with relief. He’s wearing a white linen shirt that he hasn’t bothered to iron, and even though he’s positioned himself in the shade, it’s evident that he’s started to sweat: damp spots pool around his armpits, the center of his chest, the dip of his belly button. Will continues to stare, right up until the moment when he senses his father can tell he’s being watched. Just as Dean cranes his neck to look up, though, Will steps away from the window. He slips on a T-shirt, a pair of shorts, and his espadrilles. Then he grabs his backpack and his laptop, and he leaves.

  In Aegina, he finds a place to lock up the old bike he’s borrowed from the Alectrona and walks toward the harbor, where the cafés and restaurants are just beginning to seat tourists for lunch. He stops in front of a few of them and inspects the menus they’ve got on display, laminated photo cards displaying identical versions of grilled xtapodi and shrimp saganaki, the dishes’ names written beneath them in seven different languages. He’s not hungry—he realizes this while staring at a picture of souvlaki atop a plasticky mound of french fries—he forg
ot to eat breakfast this morning, but still, somehow, he’s not hungry. Instead, he decides what he really wants is a beer, something to wash away the taste of Ginny, while he scours the internet for jobs. He finds a place with the fewest customers—a small bistro called Taverna Karalis—takes a seat outside, connects to its Wi-Fi, and waits for someone to realize he’s there.

  And finally, after ten minutes, someone does. He’s just responded to another job posting—this one to write grant proposals for Friends of the Sea Otter—when he hears someone say, “Greek or English menu?”

  Will looks up to see a waiter standing next to his table, holding two menus. The man’s about his age—maybe a few years older—with dark hair that sweeps across his forehead.

  “I’m American,” Will says.

  “Okay,” the man says. “So, English.”

  “Actually, I’m not planning on eating anything.” He pushes his sunglasses farther up his nose. “Just a beer, please. A Mythos.”

  “One Mythos.” The waiter nods and tucks the menus under his arm. “You got it.”

  After he’s gone, Will shuts down his computer and reaches for his phone. There, he finds a picture that Rajiv has posted to Instagram—a maddeningly attractive shot of him and Logan in Bernal Heights. Since the picture has been up, it’s garnered forty-eight likes. There are also, Will notes, two comments, one from Rajiv’s sister, Seema (“how cute are you 2?!”), and one from someone called @RichForYou (“lookin good studs”), whose profile picture features a backward baseball cap, a toothy grin, and a set of sexless abs. Will clicks the name and decides he doesn’t know the guy. That doesn’t stop him, though, from scrolling through his feed, a procession of sculpted pecs and dead eyes (here is @RichForYou surfing in a Speedo; here he is half naked in the snow) that at once infuriates and tantalizes Will: he’d happily hate-fuck him, he thinks, if he lived in a world where people like @RichForYou gave him the time of day. He knows he should stop here—after spending two minutes interrogating a picture of a baby koala perched on @RichForYou’s left biceps (“makin new friend down unda”), Will knows he should put his phone down and focus on numbing himself with beer. And yet, he can’t. Once he’s done with @RichForYou, he returns to Rajiv’s profile to see what other marsupial-bearing beefcakes he’s opted to befriend.