The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done

by Sandra Newman

  7:00 P.M.Exercise #9 in the series “Alternative Sense” Pin the Tail on the Donkey

  The seekers stagger in their blindfolds, paper tails hopefully extended, straining to activate their inner sight. Ralph looks on calmly, with real eyes.

  I take no part in this refinement of sadism.

  It’s painful to watch, like beggars being made to grovel for a muddy penny. I think, he’s trying to prove something – what jerks they are. He is making them caper for him, to fuel some grudge.

  On this issue I finally confront him, while we are

  8:30 P.M.Driving to Dunkin’ Donuts in civvies

  and Ralph and I have an argument, which I find grueling. No matter how right I am, he won’t admit I’m right.

  I cry, in gross misery, “You don’t even think it’s funny.”

  Ralph laughs, belittling: “Anyone who can believe that Pin the Tail on the Donkey is a spiritual exercise, deserves what they get.”

  “But they’re all petrified of you. They’d believe anything you said.”

  He returns my gaze coolly, unfooled. “That’s just the point.”

  10:00 P.M.Not to give the appearance of hypocrisy

  Ralph and I don’t sleep together anymore.

  We still have sex – some nights – in my bed.

  Afterward, he leaves to sleep alone in his room.

  On lone sleepless nights with my Jackson Pollock, I fantasize sleeping with Jackson Pollock, who would never faint-heartedly deny his mistress. In the fantasy, all the other artists jeer at him: “Jack! How can you want that weird midget chick? You, an artist, who prizes beauty?”

  He grins, untroubled, and squeezes me at the waist.

  “Kiss my ass,” says Jackson Pollock.

  4:00 A.M.

  I woke to the sound of clashing below. Putting on a T-shirt, I set off downstairs thinking fuzzily from my dream, It might be Ralph back from the replacers. I wonder what they gave him.

  The lights were on in the kitchen, and Eddie was sitting cross-legged on the floor, separating Oreos and setting the halves on a plate, cream-side up. The silverware drawer lay beside him, surrounded by silverware. As I came in, he turned his face up to me with his eyes shut. Then he opened them – maroon with bloodshot.

  “Hi,” I said. “You look pretty sick.”

  “Never try to take your contact lenses out when you’re on speed and you haven’t got any contact lenses in.”

  I sat on the floor too. I looked at his Oreos, jealous.

  He said, “Yeah, I’m sleeping here, cause I can’t sleep in my room anymore, but I couldn’t sleep really cosily here so far, cause it’s a kitchen and the floor. Only today I’m on speed. I don’t know how that will affect it - do you want these Oreos?”

  “No.”

  “Yeah, I thought you were vibing me out for them.”

  “No.”

  “Okay.”

  He shoved the plate around behind him. I instantly regretted not taking them, if he wasn’t going to eat them. Furthermore, it was probably a game he was playing with me: he almost certainly knew I still wanted them.

  Then I wanted to laugh. I felt so affectionate it was festive.

  I said, “I’m going to go and get some blankets.”

  “Whatever. I can sleep here alone. It’s cool.”

  “No, I want to sleep here,” I bleated, suddenly threatened.

  “Yeah, sleep in the refrigerator, I’m the last person. But – you want to see why I’m on this speed?”

  28. Montara Beach, California, April 1999

  As ever, Eddie’s room is knee-deep in mess. Every concave thing has become an ashtray. The clothes will now have to be thrown away.

  The mattress has been shoved against one wall, slumped to an L as a makeshift sofa, and on the bared bedstead, empty Pepto-Bismol bottles are ranged like sentinels. Eddie needs one more to have one for each oak slat, and because I know my brother, I know he thinks of emptying that final Pepto-Bismol bottle as an achievement, which will mark a watershed in his life.

  A lamp, set at a tilt on a bundle of towels, has burned a hole into its skewed shade, and sends a searchlight beam across the room at a battered audio cassette. It’s a 90-minute Woolworth’s brand, with orange stickers, labeled in felt-tip pen: Soul – various. It gives me a start because it’s mine.

  I taped it from my friend Dina’s record collection, when I was fourteen. The selections are therefore slushy, and by no means all Soul. There are, for instance, three BeeGees tracks in a row, which made Side A unplayable, once I had matured in reason.

  Eddie had borrowed it sixteen years ago, as a tool in his campaign to seduce his first girlfriend. He’d then refused to return it, because “You were stupid enough to lend me anything, in the first place.” I step forward instinctively to retrieve it.

  “NO, behind you, Chrysa. You’re actually blind.”

  I turn around: there are ten-odd cartons stacked against the wall. They’re pasted over with Federal Express stickers and stamped FRAGILE FRAGILE. For some reason I’d expected something like cartons, and nodded pompously as if it was old news.

  “Ralph’s stuff,” Eddie said.

  I balked: “Ralph’s what stuff?”

  “From Colorado. Cause we put his possessions and shit in storage. Only I paid the storage people, so it’s my name on the account?”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “But, you mean, he doesn’t know?”

  Eddie smiles. Then for a few minutes we both laugh gaily, unconvincingly, like a brother and sister horsing around in a dishonest ’50s movie.

  Then I say, “Oh, God, I must be as sick as you.”

  “You’re on my side now?”

  I’m thinking about it when he suddenly ducks and grabs a whiskey bottle from his pile of laundry. He unscrews the cap and swigs, then gestures with it at the wall of cartons: “I’m just basically looking for an address of someone. So it’s address books and letters and shit. If you want to –?”

  I suddenly feel wide awake.

  We begin to manhandle cartons down and rip tape away. Since Eddie simply empties them onto the pre-existing mess, I follow suit. It’s mostly newspaper-clad ceramics, although there are appliances at random, books, and puzzling unRalphlike articles: a basketball, love beads, Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal. At first we hold these “finds” up and giggle, but we’re quickly jaded. The taboo recedes, and we’re just digging through someone’s crap. It becomes work. Then it becomes hard work. At last it is becoming “the kind of thing I really hate,” when Eddie says,

  “Yeah, if this fucks up, I get to drink myself to death.”

  He continues delving in his carton. Finding a baseball cap, he puts it on and looks at me. He shrugs at the expression on my face, says, “Chicago Cubs, why?” and goes back to digging.

  “Don’t you hate,” I say, “how the people you love are the ones who oppose you in everything, and if they were dying of thirst and you gave them water, they wouldn’t drink the water because it was you?”

  “Yeah, I wouldn’t know, I never loved anyone.”

  “But that’s exactly the kind of thing I mean.”

  “Ha! Paydirt! BOOKS never means fucking BOOKS.”

  Reaching into his carton, he withdraws a wad of creased handwritten pages.

  “Oh, God,” I say, sidetracked. “Do you think we really actually?”

  He looks at me and time stops. It teeters and yields a brief peaceful Eddie who:

  “You know what it is?” He puts his finger to his temple, serious. “It’s just weird someone as small as you being so intelligent.”

  We are struck and exalted by this wonderful non sequitur. I say equally truly:

  “I like talking to you.”

  We grin at each other in congratulation. It’s so good. Then Eddie looks down and says,

  “Wait. Shit. This is to Mom.”

  The 1001 love letters Dad wrote Mom

  They’re called that, although no
one has counted them – 1001 meaning, just, fabulously many. Mom kept them in a suitcase under the bed. Family legend states that, when he was away from home, Dad wrote a page every day. The letters are genial, tending toward anecdote and travelog.

  Writing from the Vietnam War, Dad

  •calls insects “critters” and warns, “these brutes would laugh at Raid”

  •includes a line drawing of his potted orchid mascot “Bud”

  •tells “The Sorry Tale of Private Pinching and the Shrinking Trousers”

  •loves her on every page; more than ever, like a madman, too damn much

  •never hints at any warfare

  Therefore the post-Vietnam letters are near-identical. His friends still have military ranks. He carefully avoids place names. Since the envelopes have been discarded, there are no telltale postmarks. It’s “hotter than heck” and he doesn’t know the “lingo.” That rules out Scotland.

  The letters are, on average, four pages long. They have dates, but they’ve gotten out of sequence under Mom’s curation. Many pages are embossed with her signature maroon rings, where a tumbler of wine once rested. Some are torn in half and mended sloppily with Scotch tape.

  The exemplars in Ralph’s belongings are mainly unfinished, unsigned. They have not been folded to fit in an envelope. It seems fair to presume they are rejected “manuscript” letters Dad never sent.

  They are among a bundle of letters and postcards which, on inspection, prove to belong to Denise Cadwallader. The first evidence of which Eddie registered by blurting,

  “OH MY JESUS FUCKING CHRIST!”

  and holding up a glossy photograph.

  “What? What?” I squalled feebly back.

  “NO. Just a second!” He was shaking his head at the picture as if actually telling it no. He turned it over and I saw:

  A gawky thirteen-year-old girl in pink dungarees, hugging my father aggressively around the waist. They are in that seedy Chinatown, she is that hound-nosed Denise, beaming with wild love.

  “Listen,” Eddie said, suddenly hoarse. “This is on the back.” He handed me the snapshot, reciting unsteadily: “Me with Corporal Channing’s daughter. Ate sea cucumber here. Plenty ketchup!”

  I stared at the photo for a minute although I already knew what it looked like and I didn’t want to. I read the back. And winced: it was written in the same faded pencil in which Eddie’s photos were signed LOVE, DC.

  “Funny,” I said.

  “Okay,” said Eddie. “Okay. Don’t panic. Right?”

  “Well,” I half-wailed. “Well, maybe it is Corporal Channing’s daughter? And that’s why, you know – she looked different when you knew her?”

  “NO! Fuck off! That is fucking Denise! Ralph identified her! Ralph identified her!”

  “Well, I didn’t do it!”

  Eddie leapt to his feet, almost slipping on a blazer, and shouted for all the world to hear,

  “LYING PRICK! LYING FUCKING PRICK!”

  I shouted, “Calm down! WHY are you so angry? Calm down!”

  Eddie goggled at me, breathing hard. He rasped: “Don’t you see what this – I mean, the bastard was fucking her. Gotta be.”

  “That’s stupid.”

  “No. Don’t tell me. Cause it’s that kind of lie. I mean . . . that picture? That shit? That’s what I do. That’s exactly the kind of shit that I do, send the fucking picture of my new chick, and say . . .”

  “That’s stupid. Really.”

  “Yeah. He wrote that to Mom, okay? Just, shut up and don’t talk to me. I’m going to sit down and fucking deal with my head.”

  He didn’t sit down. When I tried to catch his eye, he waved my gaze away with an actual fly-swatting gesture. Forlorn, I lay down amid the interwoven junk.

  I wanted to tell him that Dad didn’t matter. Mom didn’t matter: Eddie was the one I loved. They were just parents, they were bad, dead parents. Eddie was my comrade, who’d been through hell with me and back. We’d been captives together, of the harrowing Mother, who raved and dashed her glass to the floor, and drove off crowing I should jump off a cliff, and the Father popped up fleetingly, saying, “Kids, for Mom’s sake, you have to be brave.”

  I loved you best, I wanted to tell him. I always always loved you best.

  Eddie sat down. Kicking for purchase in the slippery mess, he maneuvered himself against the wall and slumped. He groped to find the whiskey bottle, and took it in his lap.

  “Could you kind of leave me alone now?” he said, surly. “Cause, no offense, but suddenly I feel like you’re contaminating in my space?”

  I looked at him, uncomprehending. He said, “Like – now?”

  “Yes . . . but. Do you want me to help –”

  “No, I’ll clean it up or not, when I fucking feel like it, thanks.”

  I got up hurriedly, and went to the door almost scrambling to appease him. I could take a few kicks. It was actually a luxury of being halfway sane, that Eddie could take things out on me. I wanted to tell him: look, just take things out on me. I got outside with the expression on my face that I would have had, if I’d actually said that aloud.

  The bright day was strange and lonely. I balked and looked back:

  Eddie was crouched low beside the bed. His lips were moving, and as I watched, he grasped that orange Soul – various tape. A strange chill came over me, and I froze as if that would make me invisible. He was just holding a cassette. He was just holding a cassette. But lingering on the step with my mouth hanging open, stalled, I had a stirring vision of a strange pale beach. Eddie was standing in the sand, with his back to me, one hand raised as if waving. He was unnaturally still, like a cardboard cut-out.

  The sea moved in the background. The moon flowed, too, if you watched it closely – it was only masquerading as a moon – it was something worse. Even the sand gently guttered. Only Eddie was stock still.

  It wasn’t our beach but I felt certain I had seen it somewhere, it was a real beach somewhere. And it was The End.

  My gut kept insisting this was a true and urgent premonition.

  I pulled the door shut. It was too much, finally. My premonitions never came true, no matter how they trumpeted themselves as “really true this time.” All such tub-thumping from my brain was sheer agenda. This was a thinly veiled excuse to go back and emote.

  I turned neatly (while my heart remained at 180 degrees to me, aimed steadfastly at my brother) and walked away, back into my life with Ralph.

  AIRPLANE SECTIONS

  Argument

  Two weeks later,

  Eddie receives a letter from Denise Cadwallader.

  Per its instructions, he flees to Malaysia, where he dies

  for no reason, all alone.

  29. Changi International Airport, Singapore

  The guy tore off the LAX and SIN tags and stuck on KL. Eddie considered that an actual sign. He’d, like, even got through that whole flight without drinking, and he’d had to swallow his last pills with no water. Then they were duds, so that was massively backbone. He felt like fourteen hours in the trunk of a car.

  And it was this next flight, and a cab to the hotel, which, by that time he’d need a whole day in the shower. Like, oriental girls beating him with loofahs, or an actual autoclave was really what would work. Cause, at this moment, Denise even seeing him was like, he lost his whole fear of jumping under trucks.

  As he crab-stepped down the aisle of the plane, he just let his fucking briefcase bang people, he felt that shitty. God just don’t let the other person talk to him. And he was totally shutting the window and sleeping, none of that view crap. He was 24A, he had absolute window reign, no kowtowing to the scenery fascists.

  It was a frumpy middle-aged woman in 24B. She was stooped over a book, oblivious to the baggage and potbellies grazing her ear. Eddie addressed her, curt:

  “I’m the window. Excuse me?”

  She looked up and smiled. She said, “Hi, Jack.”

  27. Rotterdam, the Netherlands (three wee
ks earlier)

  1Recently, Denise had realized she was going to die.

  1.1From nowhere, from a clear blue sky, she felt certain she could not live a year more.

  1.2She went to play as usual, the croupiers greeted her. The same faces and the same rote cries, like the opening credits of a dull-beyond-belief TV show, the gaming employees introduced another day.

  1.3As usual, she lunched alone. It was a workers’ café with plasticized check tablecloths and empty vases on the tables. She looked up from her sandwich, awed and curious:

  1.4she was going to die.

  2Then the pains and vomiting, the nagging greed for air. She could not get clean, she could not eat certain foods anymore. She faltered, close to tears, on the steps.

  2.1In her grueling, super-real insomnias, she traced the pain to her bones and traced her bones to moon, a xenophobic stone, too solitary gladly to wear living flesh: too cold-loving.

  2.2In pain, she fancied these things, and unevenly laughed.

  3She saw a doctor, just, to cross all the t’s. There was a series of hospital wards; chipper nurses explained the machines. In the last act, a specialist sat at the foot of her bed, stumbling over the sad news:

  3.1Her cancer was grave but not inevitably fatal. A range of treatments could be tried. Although complete recovery was rare, her tumor was not too advanced to exclude hope. There was reason for cautious optimism,

  3.2said the old man, and rubbed his veined, alcoholic’s nose. She smiled cordially:

  “Oh, I won’t despair. After all, my mother died of cancer.”

  He patted her ankle and rose, she put on her old clothes.

  3.3She left the hospital and there was no one who would mourn her left, she had no goodbyes, she could step right out of life – without trifling.

  4The letter from my brother was waiting for her at home.

  4.1“God, whatever you do, just don’t not answer this. I won’t even briefly survive you not answering.”