The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done

by Sandra Newman

  I could not, for the life of me, put the menu down.

  Its pages were embellished with sketches of Chinese coolies bearing bucket-laden yokes. I felt it was bad taste to depict the poor in a menu. It seemed like gloating. Those coolies would have liked a few seafood dishes.

  Of course I really was as good as starving. So these thoughts should have been had by the fat people at other tables, but that is the way of the world (I thought).

  I peeked at Ralph, who was a large-sized person. He ate plenty. Yet was a guru. Conclusion: eating plenty is not at variance with goodness, though of course that can’t be true. (I had eaten plenty before, and it was at variance with goodness.)

  What’s more, the idea of Ralph eating Egg Foo Yung – in any quantity – made him seem irretrievably unenlightened. Yet the sage must eat. Should he only eat lentils, locusts and wild honey? What if the sage is offered a Ding Dong by an innocent child, who would be desperately upset, should the sage refuse the Ding Dong? Dilemma.

  “Have you decided?” Ralph suddenly asked.

  I slapped the menu down. “Would you mind ordering for me?”

  He burst out laughing. I had delivered the punch line to whatever he’d been thinking: probably he had known all along I wasn’t choosing. I’m very transparent.

  When he settled down, I confessed: “I don’t like restaurants.”

  That struck him even funnier. He was actually handsome when he laughed, because of his beautiful teeth, though I later learned two were not his. Now he laughed and laughed, flashing his white teeth/dentures, until tears came out of his eyes. The great misfortune was that, watching him, I began to cry just at the very idea of tears coming out of eyes.

  I thought: Why is he so heartless to me? Et cetera. Once I start crying, I can think of hundreds of reasons to cry. Furthermore, years of therapy have trained me to home in swiftly on the most harrowing possible cause for my distress.

  “You’re crying,” Ralph noticed, still smirking with the tail end of his laugh.

  I said in a chokey voice: “I just need . . . I don’t know. I wish –”

  Ralph’s face went cold and he interrupted me: “You can’t carry on like this if you’re going to manage the institute.”

  We sat for a minute at loggerheads. I said, “But I couldn’t manage it.” I rubbed my eyes with the cloth napkin, shook it out, and spread it on my lap. Then Ralph got up and walked out of the restaurant.

  REASON TO CRY

  all I retain

  of my Peruvian prehistory is in

  a bad dream in which,

  an infant, I lie in dry earth in I

  between the inky-dirty feet

  of an itty-bitty

  Indian girl

  immersed

  and jay-blue in the jungle’s jade and bladed light: J

  the dream jumps

  it’s jolly old

  John Wayne

  jumping her, and

  in jabs jags fucks

  of his knife, kills K

  and fucks her till her head knock

  knocks

  loose, L

  she lolls, licentiously

  gushing her last

  blood, this lewd

  marionette of M

  my-real-

  mother I try to save

  most

  nights N

  and “Dad” a red gigantic interruption of my home, triumphing

  and rising, wipes

  blood and down there.

  The glade is still with dead people; the red man sings

  and there are oranges on all the trees,

  already peeled. They drip

  The Interpretation of Nightmares

  1The dream began when I was fifteen, long after my father’s death.

  1.1I don’t remember anything like this and it never happened.

  1.2In some versions, he sings “Ten Little Indians.”

  2My first psychiatrist would not shut up about the dream.

  2.1My second psychiatrist suggested hypnosis.

  2.2My third psychiatrist and I agreed it was a red herring.

  2.3Privately, I brood about the fucking thing, all the time.

  3Mom and Dad lied to me.

  3.1Something unspeakable.

  3.2Dad is dead and I will never find out what.

  3.3If you want excuses not to live, that serves, but then again

  Sitting in the velveteen booth of the Ping Pong, driven to this extreme of reminiscence to explain the gross crying that had so disgusted Ralph, it occurred to me that I was a fraud. I knew that never happened. I also once dreamed Eddie was a giant vampire bat, flapping about me tenaciously and taking bites from my head. As who doesn’t? Wake up – it’s just a bad dream!

  It was equally likely that what sent me off the edge was working on my deconstructive treatment of Dr. Faustus. I had heard similar stories about other students of poststructural literary theory who lost their minds. Many of the initiators of poststructural theory went nuts too. Guy Saint-Lazare even leaped off the Eiffel Tower with all of his books in his arms.

  Examining the actual contents of my crying, I found a quailing sludge emotion, with a foul insecticide taste. If it was a peanut, you would spit it out. Yet I was indulging this toxic goo, giving it its head and letting it dictate my actions. People had every good reason to despise me.

  Initially I was inclined to be angry and damn the people and be gloriously in the wrong. But, by a vast incalculable effort, for which I held my breath and strained and strained, I overcame this and ran out of the Ping Pong, letting my cloth napkin flutter away behind me.

  Denouement

  Ralph was standing on the sidewalk with his arms crossed. He turned on me as I came out. “So, are you going to manage the fucking institute?” he barked.

  Then we both smiled. He uncrossed his arms.

  And you know these tall men, when they get you out of doors on a spring evening, and you’re in a docile frantic state, and you can smell flowers.

  They stand over you looking warm. You’d tell them anything.

  DAHAB SECTIONS

  Argument

  Eddie and Denise travel to the Egyptian coastal village

  of Dahab, where they dally in the sun and sand. Love

  comes and is gone. Meeting a former colleague on

  the beach, Denise shares bad news. Her profession

  is explained: the lovers part.

  Facts for Tourists: Dahab

  A Bedouin village on the Red Sea coast, snug on the border of Israel, Dahab boasts deserted beaches and an unspoiled coral reef. There are no hotels: however, travelers can rent cabins from ‘Sheikh Ali’ (so the signs read, in honor of the Bedouin owner, though one deals exclusively with his local manager, Haisim). Not for the luxury-minded, the one-room cabins are furnished only with a hard bed and floored with gravel. The settlement has no electricity or plumbing. The outhouses have toilets made of stone, and all water, for flushing, washing, brushing teeth, has to be drawn from the well by hand. Bring your own toilet paper.

  Beer, soft drinks and simple meals (usually a choice of meat pie or vegetable pie) can be purchased from The Fighting Kangaroo, an easy walk down the beach. It consists of an open-fronted shack, in which the oven is housed and stores kept. On the beach, industrial spools, probably originally for heavy cable, are turned on one flat end and half buried in sand to serve as tables. Chessboards are available, on payment of a small deposit. The restaurant is also run by Haisim, with his nephew, who in addition will hire snorkeling gear by the hour.

  Though Cairene by birth, Haisim, as the name “Fighting Kangaroo” suggests, lived for many years in Australia. There he embarked on a scholarly career and was briefly married. He came to this remote place to complete his anthropology PhD on Bedouin culture. At The Fighting Kangaroo one may view a photo taken of him shortly before his departure from Melbourne. In it he’s crewcut, clean-shaven and bespectacled, shyly holding up his going-away present, a silver pen set.

>   14. Cairo: Loose Ends

  1“No, I’m not claiming it did come with the frame, that was a joke, I can be really unkind without meaning to be, but – abjectly, sorry.”

  “Why, then?”

  “Sheer utter not thinking.”

  “No, why do you have a picture of my father –”

  2He’d passed out in Groppi’s drunk. Was manhandled into a cab, and Deesey saw him back to the Raffles. Revived long enough to climb the stairs, he claimed to have lost his key, inveigled his way into her room, passed out again. They’d shared a bed – “Chastely, don’t worry.”

  3“Your father was . . . he worked with my mother. I knew him when I was a child. I guess I must carry his picture because I don’t have one of my mother. She died when I was small.”

  “They worked together where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t –”

  “I was small.”

  4“The coincidences are simply flabbergasting,” she drawled.

  – as if she’d said “flabbergasting” umpteen times in similar circumstances, until it had become a joke with her and her “crowd” –

  •unflabbergasted

  •killing the topic dead with that preposterous term

  5She would leave that day for Dahab. She told him, and raised her eyebrows. His heart sped.

  At last, finally, she said: “Come with?”

  6They travel there by overnight bus. The bus improbably plush, air-conditioned, roomy. TVs mounted in the ceiling screen silent football matches. The cabin lights are off and even small children sit muted, as if dumbstruck by the opulence.

  Deesey and Eddie read their twin copies of The Celestine Prophecy. They sleep. Then in the morning there’s the Sinai.

  7A cab for the last leg: they walk down to the sea.

  Its hoarse wash grows and falls with no apparent connection to the business of waves, their gleaming sprawl over the sand, white jumble of breaking. Everything trembles in the headlong sun. The breeze adds its note, and its distinct dry cleanliness.

  8“That’s that, Jack. One room or two?”

  Fucking

  They are alone in their cabin for the first time. On the gravel, every step makes a harsh crush, strange indoors, so there’s that self-consciousness added to the rest. She is crouched down over her briefcase, and he feels huge and conspicuous standing behind her. He feels discarded.

  His erection tortures him. It’s a gross assumption he can’t disown. Yet if she didn’t want it, what are they doing here?

  She rises and he takes her in his arms and because he has so exhaustively imagined taking her in his arms and the polite stages leading to the mind-bending blissfest itself –

  the real thing jars. She was going to resist and be cajoled, but doesn’t – laughs, kisses him fervently, matter-of-factly strips and lies down. Her breasts have tiny pale nipples unlike any nipples he’s seen before. The way she’s twisted to watch him, her stomach’s wrinkled up, and he realizes for the first time that, as you age, even your stomach goes to hell. How old is she? If she’s like ten years older, does that make this sick?

  It’s so all wrong. He’s very frightened.

  The sheets have a coarse weave. They feel greasy, and his eye keeps being drawn to the small screen window, whose mesh has gaps warped in it, as if burly local insects force their way through at night. From a lying position, he wrestles off his shorts, and as she turns to embrace him, he realizes she’s brought him here to kill him. The thing with Dad’s photo – luring him to this backwater – unfinished CIA shit – roped in by the oldest trick in the book. Her eagerness makes sense now: somewhere in her dumped clothes she has a blade secreted. What’s worse is that she’s going to slash his throat at the moment of orgasm.

  His prick’s hard as a rock: can’t back out now. Rolling on top of her, he shuts his eyes and surrenders himself to death.

  More fucking

  That was fantastic. They do it two more times. The sun’s going down and he nuzzles her tit and nuzzles her tit: his heart’s sailing. She too languishes and sighs the same delighted noise that’s like she read his mind. Like, how totally great is this?

  He will have another hard-on soon.

  15. Dahab: seven days, seven nights

  1She only had one change of clothes: K-mart-caliber shorts and T-shirt. Her ragged bathing suit had to be safety-pinned on.

  1.1When he said she was gorgeous, she said, “Plastic surgery.”

  1.2She washed her hair with soap.

  2The bars of soap were hotel minis:

  •Radisson, Istanbul

  •Hotel Benot, Monte Carlo

  •one in Chinese

  2.1She lit her cigarettes with bronze-tipped matches from the Ritz.

  2.2British Airways socks: Lufthansa pen: Flightbookers wallet.

  3“I don’t have to work because . . . I inherited money.” “Really? Who from?”

  “Relatives.”

  3.1She’d never seen that movie. She didn’t know the band. The name Henry Kissinger rang a bell, but.

  3.2When he talked about school days, she didn’t.

  4“If I say you don’t want to hear, I am not not not speaking just to hear the sound of my voice.”

  5She was a high-class prostitute in flight from her sordid past.

  5.1Her affluent husband beat her; his agents were on her tail.

  5.2In the false bottom of her briefcase she ferried

  •heroin

  •uncut diamonds

  •footage of rutting statesmen

  5.3She was a suburban housewife who wanted to appear mysterious.

  6The idea of making love to her never left him.

  6.1She was something held and naked and ecstatically pierced, even when she was sitting across from him munching pie.

  6.2Four times a night – they had welts, they scabbed.

  6.3It would never end. There was nothing else in life. Dark hair was food and God and the end of days. Skin hot with fresh tan was. Sweat was and her faint, infantine cries, her struggling.

  7In the mornings, Haisim treats everyone to tea. It’s served in an open shelter on the beach. Weathered rugs make a floor: the kettle perches on a blackened iron stand over a twig fire. Tea leaves and mint leaves lie in Ziploc bags to one side. The guests from all the cabins share their provisions: bread, watery yogurt, an occasional prized tomato.

  7.1Every day The Fighting Kangaroo and its pie. Every day beer: Eddie, still afraid, enjoys the secret that he’s risking his life for her. They swim, they sun themselves. Then there’s the reef.

  16. Paradise: what, ever after, Eddie pictures when you say “love”

  The coral is a wilderness of psychedelic fronds and luminous moss. Fish, improbably bright and many, pass under the swimmers’ bare stomachs. The fish are gorgeous and ingenious, like shoals of jewelry. Through the melee flutter huge rays, and the occasional fat eel dozes, draped in a cranny. The shadows of larger beasts speed over the bumpy coral, sometimes triggering a lightning scatter of small fry.

  Eddie and Deesey chase each other up and down the phantasmagorical cliff. They catch in embraces that plummet through alarmed fish – lapse into darkening blue for a long-held breath – break in a flash of bubbles. She takes her snorkel out to kiss him, the taste of salt and sweet and beer mingled with an electrifying sense of drowning.

  Staggering out again is an exile, the sun too frank and the air a loveless medium, a medium for golems, automatons, the dead

  Making Love

  It’s somewhere in there, about day five. Like always, they’re in bed. She’s reaching across him to knock the ash off her cigarette, and he sees the pale range of scars on the inside of her arm. He’s never noticed it before, and his first instinct is that it’s new, some rash she picked up from the reef. It takes a moment for the odd translucence, and the shapes, like mock-veins, to sink in fully. Suicide, he thinks, with a lightning flash of excitement. He has the smug sense of finding her out: this explains
her. The immediacy makes him catch her wrist, rough.

  “What’s this?”

  She twists her arm free, offended. “What?”

  “The – it’s scars, right?”

  “Oh.” She looks at her own arm, concentrating, as if called upon to explain some passage in a book. “Yes, old scars.”

  “Well, Jesus. But, were you trying to kill yourself?”

  “Oh, no.” She gives him a surprised, affronted look, her nostrils pinched. “No, it’s a sort of bullet wound.”

  He catches his breath with an adrenal rush: bullet wounds. Before he speaks he has to think how to sound caring.

  “God. How did you get shot? Who shot you?”

  “A robbery,” she says, and that’s all she says. She looks at Eddie with the thing she’s not saying in her eyes, then suddenly smiles – insolent. She turns her arm over, putting the scars away.

  His heart speeds with the craving to force it out of her, he is actually breathing hard. In the back of his head, he calculates the nagging required, the bullying, threats. There is the sexual twinge when he visualizes pinning her down and –

  She says, in a flat, commanding voice like a hypnotist’s, “Don’t press this.”

  Then he ducks to kiss her belly, wanting to call back the easy warmth. He doesn’t know how this fright happened, he doesn’t know how his delight has been so poisoned.

  She strokes his head, crooning, “Oh, no, you don’t want to hear, he didn’t want to hear, Jack Moffat Junior didn’t want to know anything about her. No, he didn’t want to hear, no no no.” When he looks up, she’s smiling. She says, “I’m joking.”

  He thinks, clearly and very distinctly from the enveloping love miasma, You have insect feelings. He stops and investigates her cool eyes. Then his thoughts absolutely get loose and he goes crazy, she can read his mind and when he’s sleeping she will tie him up and shoot him just shoot him, it’s a joke to her, but when she tries the magic horn will blow and the Benelia Lords will ride to his rescue, halloing on their dapper steeds and then the Insect Queen will sprout her real wings and buzz atrociously, but Eddie gets a grip. Her eyes are simply brown. She has crossed her arms, hiding the scarred patches: vulnerable. He takes a very very deep breath and croons, in a deep handsome voice he feels rising from some omniscient Jack self, prior and great: