The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done

by Sandra Newman

  “Thank you very much. I was concerned.”

  He beamed with relief. Then he looked from me to Ralph to me as if he knew something. He sighed with paternal satisfaction, and Remember III stood up and did a circuit of the room, wagging maniacally in demonstration of José’s joy.

  I’d always liked to think José loved my mother from afar, in a hopeless, chivalrous way, which he certainly did not. I thought of this now, in my belfry vigil, recalling my fear that Mom would marry him while Dad was gone, and people would believe I was José’s child. Of course I now would welcome this, though shrinking from the exemplary Lorenzo as a brother; probably, pettily, because he was obese.

  There were still only five cars.

  I finally collected myself and went down the circular staircase to the tall cylindrical room below. Ralph was there in his white clothes. An uncanny fine veil of light, falling from a mock arrow-slit above, made Ralph appear angelic, even though it passed him by to illuminate a rider mower. Eddie walked by the window, smoking a fat cigar. I had spotted him before, pacing around and around the tower, in a neatly pressed Armani suit, two sizes too big.

  I whispered to Ralph: “Are you nervous?”

  He shook his head. “Eddie gave me a Valium.”

  I looked at him to see, was he kidding, and he bent and kissed me.

  He was so tall, it tipped my head back full to Dracula-victim posture. Then he held me against him. That shot me clean through, I caved in, I pealed for him.

  He let me go and caught his breath deep as if it had affected him. I said before I could stop, “I can’t believe this is happening.” He touched my cheek, blinking, and walked out the door.

  He crossed the yard with his same as ever unalloyed grace. I wanted to fuck him then and there in the grass.

  I walked out the door and looked at Eddie as if Eddie knew. The fat cigar had gone out, looked rained-on and clownish. I said, “How are you?” and grinned like an imbecile.

  “I’m so stoned,” Eddie said, “I don’t know how the fuck I am.”

  I said, “That’s good . . . I don’t think I can do this talk, though.”

  Eddie pointed at me with the cigar. “Do not even, I totally told you.”

  I said, “I’m just teasing.”

  For a few minutes we stood and stared at the main building. We couldn’t see the Land of the Lost from there. Eddie said:

  “You know, this is the wrong time, but I’ve been having these dreams where, Ralph can fly? Like, how unfair is that, when it’s my dream, right? So in the dream I go and steal his white clothes, and I can fly, too, only I go out of control and crash into a plate glass window, and I’m lying there with the mannequins but they have real cunts. And it’s like, I was not worthy.”

  I said, “I know. I have dreams too.”

  “Well, don’t tell me.”

  “No, I’ll just think it to myself.”

  “Thanks. I mean it.”

  Briefly, shyly, we smiled at each other like brother and sister.

  In my dream, Ralph had bought a new dispensation. He had it home, and we were assembling it in a warehouse/ garage. From time to time, Ralph would knock on it with a wrench and put his ear to the metal to admire its pure tone.

  “What if it’s a mower?” I feared in the dream.

  Ralph put his hand out then in a distinctive palm-first gesture of forestalling, the How! mudra.

  “Never mind,” he said: “We have still paid good money.”

  It looked like five cars were it, and I sighed loudly by way of goodbye, setting out toward the new Tibetan School of Miracles sandwich board announcing the title of the first talk in the free introductory series: “Tibetan Wisdom: Lives After Death.”

  Ralph crossing the courtyard, at the far end from the pool, where the olive trees are and the grass is careless with new daisies, thought:

  1There was something about me that was vanilla.

  1.1He would keep me safe, he could, it wasn’t that mad.

  1.2If only kindness came in instant, if kindness even worked.

  2People are ingenious machines. You don’t love them. The beloved is a graven image of what can be loved. How many times had someone made him a teddy bear, but I love you but I love you. Love took place between genitalia. This is what he knew, from his experience, to be true.

  Sidestepping one of Remember’s turds, Ralph looked up at a bent olive tree as if to say, compadre. He paused. He loved the tree and wondered why that seemed all right. Rita Perkins told him horseshit, male horseshit. Boy thinks he’s Jesus Christ, ain’t even found the damn on switch.

  It all came back to Denise Cadwallader. The white cat had met them off the bus: they were teenagers, they weren’t embarrassed to think it was a messenger. They’d followed it down a muddy path and up. It jogged along readily, with uncatlike stamina. They were still in Pokhara’s equivalent of suburbs, still meeting people with burdens on the road. Then the cat leapt and Ralph knew. He had not anticipated knowing anything. He fell down. He could see the mountains but they were a clumsy drawing. Denise was a crude figurine. That sense of the world being the lack of something dogged him for years, and when it stopped dogging him, he felt unmoored.

  3How do you lie to these people? He passed down the corridor into the dining room. By staying close to the wall, he kept out of sight of the open sliding door. Now he heard the audience, a discontented murmur. There must be enough people: otherwise they whispered. He remembered that he’d had a Valium but couldn’t feel it. The tendency to hard-on had gone.

  I came hurrying past, superstitiously avoiding his eye. I walked on and out into the Land of the Lost. He felt everything all over again. He understood how people gave up their souls for a moment’s pleasure.

  Listening to me begin the intro spiel, with a little nagging voice in his sub-brain reminding him what it cost me to do the intro spiel, keeping tabs on my unremarkable performance, which must seem to me like public humiliation, Ralph –

  4didn’t grow up in a mansion. No one put Ralph through Stanford.

  4.1No one could tell him I didn’t have my stash.

  4.2Once the deed’s done, probably just a comfort fuck.

  4.3But. But the word but is just why things hurt

  5and

  standing on the sidewalk that night outside the Ping Pong, driven spare by my opportunistic tears, he’d felt bitter and desperate; he’d smoked and watched traffic as if harshness was an antidote; been visited by the image of his mother, as she looked just before death, when her face was like a broken window; and he longed to see things grow and live, for a fucking change: and if he were God, he would rain on the forest, all night, just to make himself feel better.

  At best, he could do the wrong thing well. He heard his cue and just walked in like people walk into rooms and everyone looks at them.

  “What Happens To You After You Die”

  See Appendix B.

  “What Happens To You While You’re Still Alive”

  You sit on a folding chair in an empty conservatory. The floor is thin gravel, and because the sky is cloudy, it seems perverse to be under only glass, you feel exposed somehow: you think of lightning. A moment’s trepidation, too, about the stars in the roof: if that means alien worship, you’re out that door.

  There’s only like ten people here. The girl on the door said to “Enjoy the show,” which you couldn’t tell, was she kidding. Either way it doesn’t inspire much confidence. This was Marie’s idea. Shaping up to be like the Inner Angel people.

  You’re getting like an attitude. What you get put through for just wanting something more out of life. Makes you vulnerable. Inside, that tug of desperation, trying not to be excited, maybe this is it, and it’s usually freaks and you want to shout I’m not like you.

  A tiny little Mexican girl comes on to do the opening bit, though when she talks she doesn’t have any kind of an accent. You’re sizing her up for any signs of whatever this guy’s supposed to do. She’s well dressed, give her that.
As she talks, her voice speeds up and she’s looking at something behind you, you sense she can see the man himself waiting to come on. Her runaway happiness becomes infectious. You’re kind of leaning forward waiting for her to make a joke so you can laugh. But she doesn’t, it’s kind of a tease, you sit back and shift your feet as if your shoes are too tight. It’s that moment where you want to smoke.

  You’re bugged, too, wanting to peek back at the guy, but it’s like whatever she can see is big and you should wait for the moment. She’s so excited, this girl, you start to imagine some magnificent sadhu decked with psychedelic braids and amulets, in a welter of snakes. Then she sits down, the little Mexican girl abruptly goes and plonks in the front row, and, though she’s wearing that expensive dress, she curls her legs up Indian style on the chair. Then she slips the shoes off and bends down to place each on the floor noiselessly. It’s a kind of sweet performance cause she seems to think no one can see her.

  The man himself comes down the rows of chairs and he’s nothing like that. He’s just like, some handsome guy. Because he’s wearing pale clothes, he looks like the ghost of a movie star, and he has a way about him, but he’s just some guy. When he gets to the front, he turns to look at you and falls entirely still.

  While he speaks, he remains absolutely still.

  He’s telling you what’s going to happen to you when you die.

  Now, this is kind of weird because you’re not even listening. It’s stuff like, the green light and then you see the green Buddha. Now the blue light and you see the blue Buddha. All the time these lights, if you meditate on the nothingness in nothingness, you’re liberated from the cycle of rebirth, which by the end you’ve had so many chances you can hardly see how anyone could fail to be liberated, even just by mistake. It goes on literally forever.

  He’s so still. Whenever he moves his hands, you stare as if they’re something shocking produced by a magician. You start to imagine he actually hasn’t breathed. Without meaning to, you find yourself holding still. You want him to spot you holding still and be impressed.

  The voice is very deep and it’s normal but it’s not normal. It could be a hypnosis thing but not. Because the sky is overcast, he seems to shine against the gray glass and you don’t know how long you’ve felt very calm, like you just couldn’t feel forever, until you would think, I just can’t, and you couldn’t, and you were dwindling.

  It’s much too late, but you begin to listen. You strain to understand as if your life depended on it. You don’t know why but you need what he says. Because he knows what happens to you after death. Because it’s perfect. Because it inebriates you and

  You believe him like a fool. You believe him like a fool.

  Afterward the milling around.

  The drafted-in ex, Lynn, signed a few people up for residential weekends.

  She said, “Looking forward to seeing you again,” in a repeating loop, her real job was cocktail bar hostess.

  I stayed right in my seat until the last possible moment. No one talked to me thank God. They talked to Ralph but Ralph didn’t seem to say a word. One guy was saying that he knew some friends of his would be extremely interested. People spoke emphatically and much louder, after, than they had before. Two particular women laughed in shrill spikes of sound that made me think of spear flowers. They were the ones with makeup on, which somehow seemed related.

  Eddie was schmoozing an older woman, who later would become clear to us as Kate Higgins who deserved the name Kate Higgins. Then she was anybody. I even thought she better watch out and this whole fantasy where Eddie offered me her credit card and I was too noble.

  We knew without surprise that it had been a success. In our three distinct ways of understanding that.

  At last it was just Jasper (an artist friend of Mom’s who was bowled over and just wanted to move in there and then), me and Ralph and Eddie. Jasper somehow got melded into “us” and we all four together knew it had been a success, in the distinct group way of understanding that.

  We waited out Jasper, who finally left, backing out the door to keep looking at Ralph for the longest possible time. Then Eddie got out some cigarettes and we smoked and ground the butts out in the thin gravel. I went out first to make sure all the cars were gone. Then Ralph took off his shirt and we decided to take the Hyundai, because it seemed like the right car for these circumstances.

  We drove to Pizza Hut. From the back seat I was looking at Ralph’s bare shoulder. Out of nowhere, I said, “That woman –” and we began to laugh. We laughed, and shouted broken phrases, and laughed. The blue Buddha! That guy with the forked beard! Jasper’s face!

  In Pizza Hut we laughed, we drank a pitcher of margaritas. By the time we finished our pizza we actually felt happy.

  “You guys,” Eddie said, “Respect. But that was the funniest, single, thing. Like do not ever tell me you believe that shit, cause – my last illusion.”

  On the drive home we fall silent. The dusk hills pass under the car like brain waves: we part into our three distinct ways of not knowing what happens next. Parking, Eddie says something about having a coffee, but Ralph just says he’s tired and then he’s gone, up the stairs. Eddie and I shuffle by the door, staring around as if the place looks different. The night’s sunk in: stars and quiet. I say tentatively, I’m tired.

  “Whatever,” says Eddie. There’s him acting hurt.

  I linger to appease him, say, “Well, it was. Wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah.” He looks up, as if at the stars. “Maybe I’ll go out again. Lynn’s working.”

  I make a conscious decision to disregard the needs of others and say, “That’s a good idea: see you in the morning.”

  He blanks me as I stumble off.

  I get upstairs in a rush, to my room, then I just stand. I look at the partition door. I walk to the bed and back, noisily, so Ralph knows I’m there. I stand at the door again. Maybe he’s already asleep.

  It’s possible when he drew the door in, in the plans, that he already thought.

  He kissed me because it would lend an intriguing energy to my performance: that was the first and last time.

  If I get undressed and lie in bed, he’ll knock. If I begin to doze.

  Even if that was the first and last time, I’ll be all right. I’ll be all right. I’ll be all right.

  I put my palm flat against the door, as if I could feel him through it and learn something. Then I coil my hand up and look at the fist. I’m going to knock, I’ll get it over with, I’ll know. I’ll do it just because I would never do that kind of thing, it’s a breakthrough, it indicates growth. I’ll count to ten.

  There is a knocking and I jump. I have to wait for it to come again to make sure, which door. But while I wait, Ralph says, “Yeah?”

  It’s his door to the outside, the one that leads onto the balcony. And I hear Eddie say, “Ralph, dude. Like, talk to me? Honest Navajo blood vow, five minutes.”

  I back off silently from the partition. The door opens, I hear Eddie saying, “. . . talk to you . . . is not the coke talking . . . her her her, it just came up . . . Chrysa listening? DON’T LISTEN.”

  Ralph says: “Four minutes remaining.”

  Eddie: “NO, MAN: WHISPER.”

  I guess they whispered. I felt my heart beating in a weedy, pitiful way. I got out of my clothes hurriedly as if Ralph might throw the door open. Then I put on a blue silk nightgown, all the while mentally accounting for me putting on a nightgown. I wasn’t cold: I just felt vulnerable, after all that. Wearing a nightgown made me feel like a real manageress. I was trying to hone it so it would be honest, without giving any impression that I put on a nightgown for him. All the while he wasn’t coming.

  I got into bed and pulled the covers way over my head. It even occurred to me to go back under the bed so I would have to be rescued and Ralph would know why, and. Of course I couldn’t ever, but I stubbornly refused to be pleased that I was cured. It was a for what? reaction, as if someone had dangled Ralph/carrot, and
without my carrot I would rather be dysfunctionally insane.

  My mind drifted over to my father and began to gently worry his memory. My mind appeared to me as Remember, tugging at my father’s arm with her blunt muzzle open wide to fit his bulk. Dad was sitting in an easy chair, watching television, and he cosseted Remember, saying, “Hey, old girl, we got to roll with the punches.”

  My father kissed me deeply and I woke up in consternation.

  There was a knocking at the door. I didn’t wait to find out what door, I shrieked, “Come in!” pulling the sheets first up and then down, blind in a world of sheet.

  When I had my face clear, my brother Eddie was standing there. He’d centered himself exactly on the bare patch of floor, so there was something apparition-esque in his placement. I told him I had just had a creepy dream. Then I looked at Ralph’s door in shock and said, “What time – did I sleep for – how long –?”

  “Five minutes,” Eddie said towards Ralph’s door with amplified unforgiveness. Then walked to my bedside:

  “Look, your dream? I deeply care, but not now, cause Ralph’s been giving me this story like my old girlfriend’s from outer space. So I just need total nurturing, cause my being-nurtured thing has been subtracted from by that in a massive way, and I’m like needful? So, is that cool?”

  “I was in the middle of something,” I complained, though I was lying in bed. It occurred to me he’d think I’d been masturbating and I struggled to sit up.

  Eddie crossed his arms: “This. Is. Important.”

  He gave me an intense stare, somewhat marred by a peripheral cocaine sniffle. Standing so close, he activated my deep love for him. It was unfair but he’s my brother and I feel untold loss of him, though I might wish this were not the case.

  But then: as long as he was there I couldn’t find out Ralph didn’t want me.