The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done

by Sandra Newman

  “It’s not that I wouldn’t have told you, I just have the habit of not. From playing so long, and we never know anyone and you mustn’t trust anyone, and then you just do leave town. Finally. It’s not conducive.”

  Eddie objected: “Bottom line, you’re saying I was going to hit you over the head and steal your money? Thanks.”

  “No, in fact I don’t even have my money on me. I’m just trying to explain to you, the one thing players never do tell anyone is that they are professional gamblers. It’s really taboo, really. Plus I just did find my father dead, I am so awfully sorry.”

  She said, glib and hateful. And added, with the air of someone wrapping up a task: “I can see in your eyes that you find this exciting. Though it’s hard for me to see, I know others do find it glamorous. And I would take you with me if I didn’t know what it did to people.”

  “You don’t know what I’d be like. I mean, what?”

  “People become greedy. Stingy. Isolated. Really, it’s not a normal life. I can’t recommend it.”

  “Well, who ever said I wanted a normal life?”

  She shrugged and carried on walking. Eddie stayed behind. Eddie let her walk away from him, let her carry on several meters along the beach. He was angry in a way that made him sure of getting his way. It was wrath, it was a power. His need was beyond any possible little wish of hers. For an instant, he even pitied her: she didn’t realize enough to be afraid.

  Her slight back receded to an even beat, she didn’t look back for him or slow, but what she didn’t see was that he would do anything, sink to anything, anything for her. He had risked his life. That thought triggered it and he came on, shouting

  She Left with Michael the Following Day

  “You think I’m really stupid, don’t you? Don’t you? Just say it. How bored you must have been, sitting with me day after day.

  “You realize I have a lot of money? I don’t know why I bring it up now, but I do know why, cause you never asked? Or what I’m doing here or anything about me? Or if I have a fatal fucking illness and I’m dying?

  “The reason I say that, right, it comes to me, cause I do have a fatal illness. Like, not fatal instantly fatal, but maybe soon fatal. That’s all. And you – it’s just a creepy fucking feeling when,‘I love you, I love you’ and, all the time, I could just die for all you bother.

  “You know, I really thought I was falling in love with you, so that was sincere. But now I just wonder what you’re doing with me at all. Cause it has to go both ways, I can’t be a puppy dog for anyone. So if that’s what you’re about, I just feel sorry for you. I honestly just feel sorry for you.

  “Are you just going to fucking stand there? Don’t you have anything to say? You’ve got nothing to say to me? I’m begging you, okay. I’m begging you even just to say one thing and not just stand there looking at me like I don’t mean shit to you, I don’t mean shit –”

  1The morning she left, he found three identical snapshots of Denise as an ungainly kid, in a row on his briefcase.

  1.1Each was signed on the back “LOVE, DC.”

  1.2“DC” might be “Deesey” in a cute shorthand.

  1.3Or the initials of “Denise Cadwallader.”

  2She might have signed all three the night she left, in a ritual of thwarted passion.

  2.1She might have signed them all long before, when she got the prints, intending to hand them out as keepsakes.

  3Were some men walking around with four, five, six photographs of DC?

  3.1Or had the best pre-Eddie garnered only two?

  4She is ugly. On one arm she has a grimy band-aid. Her skin is blotchy and her dungarees don’t fit. Looking directly at the camera lens, she grins, and her eyes gleam with big-time, shameless love.

  4.1This is the girl Eddie loves for the rest of his life.

  4.2Often he considered getting the photo printed in the New York Times with a plea for information on her whereabouts.

  5Though for years he boozed and smoked dope and took pills by the handful, some designed for cancer patients, some for our animal friends,

  5.1Eddie never had another epileptic seizure.

  6He never mentioned gambling to my mother or myself.

  6.1But he bought a deck of cards, standard Bicycle pack, and, in his cups, he sometimes dealt to himself, doing a basic high-low count in his head, as prescribed by Stanford Wong’s classic tome Professional Blackjack.

  “You Can’t Go Home Again Without Me, I Will Be Desolate”

  WE SELL/WE BUY

  (May–August ’98)

  1Ralph sold Mom’s art.

  •Via ceramics, he knew the rudiments of the trade, and got real money even for less favored artists.

  •Soon the house began to fill with blank walls.

  2I sold antiques.

  •I made a tent of blankets and went in there with the phone and a glass of straight vodka. Then I had to crawl out again for the phone book.

  •The guys at Half Moon Bay Antiques knew Mom of old. “Oh, how is Lannie?” they cried, happily reminded, and I told them she was doing super.

  •I sold furniture and jewelry. I sold an old computer and a dusty guitar. I sold my mother’s Mustang to her cocaine dealer, Spiz, who had known me since I was a tot and called me “Crispy-lips.” I found Eddie’s watch beside the swimming pool and sold that.

  •I sold the doors Mom bought to replace the old antique doors she sold when her mother and father died.

  3It was Ralph’s idea that we three should move to the guest wing. Since the kitchen was there, the practical advantages were plain. Also, we would then be sequestered from future residents.

  He made a sketch of his plan and all I cared about was that Eddie was downstairs in the guest bedroom, while Ralph and I would have what was now a single huge upstairs room, once my father’s weights room. He sketched in the partition and then drew a door in it, though without saying it was a door. I held my breath over, was it a door? But he didn’t say. I was feverishly imagining.

  3.1In the fullness of time, a partition wall with a door was built.

  3.2The door locked on Ralph’s side, not on my side: that was another long day in my head.

  4Eddie came to throw a fit.

  We’d been raising cash on his assets, which was stealing. He stalked around Mom’s office going, “This is all mine! Mine! Eddie’s stuff! Do we have hearing people here? Hands up, the hearing people!”

  This produced whimpering in me while Ralph stared out the window. Social dynamics in groups of three are of course notoriously awkward. Eddie wore down to a low, steady hum of martyrdom, and sat:

  “Twist my fucking arm . . . right, twist my fucking arm. Pen!”

  Ralph tossed him a pen. Eddie pulled a checkbook out of his jacket pocket, picked the pen up off the floor and wrote a check for 20,000 dollars in favor of the Tibetan School of Miracles. Tearing the check off, he held it out to Ralph, saying, “You realize if this kills me, that makes you guys murderers?”

  “What are we supposed to do with that?” I said.

  “Look under rocket scientist in the Yellow Pages,” Eddie said, “Maybe someone there can tell you how to open a bank account. And this is out of the buckaroo’s salary,” he said, making a face at Ralph.

  “No,” said Ralph. “And we’ll need more.”

  “More?” Eddie posed with both hands on his throat. Then he let his throat go, and stood up with a villain’s sneer: “Whatever. See you later, I gotta go pick up this stewardess.”

  5I woke in the dark to decisive banging.

  5.1“Chrysalis, I’ve just turned the hot tap on, so you’ve got about five minutes before the bath overflows. See you downstairs.”

  5.2I couldn’t get out of bed. When I got out of bed, I couldn’t face leaving the room. When I’d left the room, I couldn’t concentrate on whether I wanted a bath or a shower. When I got in the shower, I just wanted to stand there forever, with my eyes shut, and I was going to tell Ralph all this at breakfast, to wear a
way his resolve.

  5.3You can only not care about your appearance if you have jeans, but all I had clean were dresses, so I had to care. I couldn’t do that, either, and lay on the bed looking at the ceiling for a long time, like a jammed mechanism.

  5.4“That’s how everyone feels in the morning, Chrysa. I feel that way right now.”

  5.5Every morning just like this, for the rest of my life.

  6Ralph reproved me for forgoing popcorn when I really wanted popcorn.

  6.1“You look smart today,” he said if I did not.

  6.2Meeting my remaining friends, he dubbed them “pain-loving ghouls” and told me everything they’d ever told me, was shit.

  6.3“It’s good, clearing out this Unhappy Childhood Museum.”

  6.4Once, when I had failed to greet the builders, Ralph introduced me to them as the maid.

  7We spent money and we placed orders and chose. We signed for deliveries and instructed workmen. We opened an account.

  Because I gave them money, people treated me with respect. I felt magically better. I combed my hair and cut my fingernails so they were all the same length. My voice was louder and when the waitress snubbed me, I considered the possibility that it was not a very good restaurant.

  The house smelled of paint and all day you heard men shouting.

  Then all the walls were white and some walls were gone and some were new; it seemed like overnight.

  There were ten toilets, there were male and female shower rooms. There was an elongated dinner table, like a bowling alley on legs. We ordered 50 chairs because it was a round number. The upstairs bedrooms were packed with shoddy beds.

  Ralph bought a Spartan mat to sleep on, thinner than even futons. It smelled like grass and was the only furniture in his room.

  I put off moving into my new room for total eons. Then one day I came home to find my bedroom stripped. I crossed the courtyard to the guest wing with beating heart, irrationally certain they were giving me my walking papers.

  But in the window of my new room I spied the Pollock, all blue and black and wallpaperlike at that distance. I went up the stairs and sat on my bed, which had been set against some random wall that felt lopsided. Through the partition I was not sure I heard Ralph. I thought I would never be able to sleep again.

  8Ralph spent 5,000 dollars on white clothes. They were near-Amish in their austere cut, and some just ‘said’ white, though they were beige or charcoal. Eddie took one look at the brand name on the shopping bag and put his hand to his pocket as if wounded.

  8.1In them, Ralph looked iconic, like the right actor cast as Christ. When you saw him with a bag of Doritos, it jarred.

  8.2We made cracks –

  (Eddie: “So what is it? A tennis cult?”

  Me: “Now you can’t roll on the grass anymore.”)

  – at which no one laughed and we sounded jealous.

  9We decided to hold lectures in “The Land of the Lost,” once a conservatory Mom built in a brief fad for horticulture and orchid-rearing.

  9.1Brief history thereof:

  1974

  Extension ordered and blueprinted, estimated cost 40,000 dollars.

  1975

  Conservatory complete, 100,000 dollars and three contractors later. Novelty glass stars in roof, guests ooh, ahh.

  1976

  Plants in place. Excitement of heiress. Her domain: Remember-II-the-mutt / young children barred. José the gardener under strict orders, keep out. In main building, glossy gardening manuals proliferate.

  1977

  Dusty gardening manuals move to shelf. Plants return to natural state. Psychiatrically troubled daughter tries to save world in person of tropical conservatory species, feeds, waters in untutored way. Resulting jungle. “Land of the Lost” monicker inspired by children’s TV series about young family stranded by time machine prang in Jurassic rainforest hell.

  1978

  Dad dies.

  1979

  Plants die.

  1980

  Stench from unfrequented glasshouse. José the gardener requests, gains admittance. Room cleared, ammonia smell. Solitary folding chair forgotten, left on bare expanse of tile. Chain w/padlock on door suggests folding chair as hostage in exquisite glass prison.

  – present

  “Land of the Lost” nickname sticks.

  9.2On his last ever evening at home, my dad was standing with me in the dining room, looking through the glass sliding doors that led to the Land of the Lost. The dining room was intact then, a genteel room in the belabored style of the French eighteenth century. It even had ornate brass torchères, twice my height. There was a smell of beef cooking, it was a summer evening. Dad had one hand on my head as we peered into the dense jungle. Dimly through the plants and the leaded glass we could see a spidery magenta sunset, and in that light the various pots and trowels were invisible. Dad had just been told about my campaign to save the abandoned plants.

  And he said, almost whispering, a just-between-us Dad ploy that made me squirm, irked, under his cajoling mitt –

  “Tell me. You and Mom get along okay?”

  I muttered, “Yes.” But then, shrugging in that shirt-too-tight kid way, I said, “Sometimes I go and hide in there, when she’s drinking.”

  He took his hand away from my head. “Is that so?”

  I said, “Yes, she calls me names, so I go in the Land of the Lost till she . . . falls asleep.”

  “What kind of names?”

  “I don’t know. She doesn’t like me.” I didn’t feel like crying for some reason. He would tell me I was silly. Of course your mother likes you, your mother loves you. Sometimes Mommies say things they don’t mean. So I blurted, risking all – “She keeps calling me the fat bat. Only, really cruelly. ‘You fat bat.’” I looked at him and then quickly back at the jungle. I could maybe run in there now.

  He crouched down to face me, eye to eye. Gripping my shoulders so I had to look at him, he said, “Listen up, bugaloo, how’s about me and you go off together some time? That sound like fun?”

  “We couldn’t really go anywhere,” I groaned, miserably yearning.

  “Couldn’t we? No? Couldn’t we?”

  Then we both turned, again drawn to stare into the hothouse, whose brutish foliage seemed to lean out over us, gloating –

  and Dad said, muted, “Well, we couldn’t go there.”

  So he saw them too, the phantom

  O

  ocelots, orangutans, opulent Orinoco

  P

  parrots, smorgasbord of panthers, my

  Peru pure and unpeopled where I’m princess, all-powerful

  Q

  queen

  of one too-quiet quarantine

  R

  for wrong children and remorse;

  responsibilities

  S

  shed

  and when Dad died I hid there till nightfall, unsought, with each neglected hour more certain Mom would send me back to starve, vulture-torn, on my birthright’s soiled rope

  When I came out, there was Eddie in the kitchen.

  He was pouring milk into a bowl of Count Chocula cereal, and when he saw me

  he threw the milk carton on the floor

  he knocked over the cereal bowl all over me

  and said

  he wouldn’t be my friend anymore if I was going to be that selfish, disappearing,

  and I said,

  FINE.

  THE BIG DAY

  From the belfry I can watch for cars pulling in. It’s already ten to, and there are only three cars. I’m painstakingly groomed, and the dearth of cars is making me ugly again, it’s infuriating. I imagine the gaffes Eddie’s drafted-in ex-girlfriend, Lynn, is making as she greets and seats the too-sparse audience.

  This is José’s tower. The stone walls are unfinished, and heaped junk gives it a shed ambiance. Fishing tackle, paint tins, rakes and buckets lie in drifts. Photos of his son, Lorenzo, are glued to the stone walls, and a stack of empty Twink
ie boxes betrays José’s lifelong, ungardenerlike predilection.

  Some weeks after my mother’s death, Ralph and I were eating our 6:00 A.M. porridge when José appeared. He had two dogs in tow: his own springer spaniel, Libros; and Mom’s pallid mongrel, third in the line of Remembers. By an invisible sleight of foot, José permitted Remember III to enter the kitchen while remaining outside with the gorgeous, albeit aged, Libros, who was really Champion Libros O’Shaughnessy, once Best of Group at the Malibu Dog Show. She had been called Libros by the son Lorenzo, whose dog she nominally was. Then a four-year-old, Lorenzo was puzzled at the task of naming his new puppy: his mother prompted, What do you like best in all the world? The now sixteen-year-old Lorenzo was recently accepted at Caltech to study astrophysics.

  Ralph and I put down our spoons, rooting them in the porridge mass. We were sitting on packing crates, because we kept forgetting to ask Eddie about the chairs. Remember walked up to me matter-of-factly and sat at my feet, looking back toward José for further instructions. José stood with pretty Libros, embarrassed. At last he cleared his throat and lied,

  “I took Remember for a couple weeks because your mother asked me, I should take her if you’re very ill. I’m sorry I made you worry.”

  I had forgotten Remember. For the first time it occurred to me the name might be short for “Remember to Feed Me,” as my mother too was absentminded and might remain so through many canine generations. This sort of thing was incomprehensible to José, who must have found the crying mutt and rescued her from my neglect. These things were beyond him: all he asked was that we should not acknowledge them. And though I needed to say that I would certainly have fed Remember, and I had been grieving and confused, I was not one to starve dogs, I said to honor his solicitude that my face be saved: