The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done

by Sandra Newman

  4.2“Selling point: I’ve been practicing blackjack for ten years.”

  30. Singapore – Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

  “Okay, say you didn’t do the sitting-together deal, like total coincidence. I’ll give you that one just to show I’m a team player. But I’m saying, why you asked me here?”

  “There aren’t reasons,” Denise said, stiff. And scowled down, hiding her reasons, drawing a finger down the spine of her airplane reading, Stanford Wong’s Professional Blackjack. Then the plane picked up speed, forcing its way into takeoff, and Eddie lay back into the thrust, just frightened: just risking everything for this asshole mistake.

  And he remembered benelia, his pretend all-healing grain: he saw a streaming mental banner with REMEMBER BENELIA printed on it in handsome gold. But old hags dragged it, through a wasteland of rotting stalks, it was a funeral march for Eddie’s heart. A uniformed monkey led the cortege, cradling a rusty horn. The instrument drooped in the hairy arms, dust ran from its dull bell . . .

  Ten years. He’d got to know she’d be older, but not fucking old. Not, not the same shape. And yellow and baggy and the toadskin thing. Could he even get it up, you’d have to drink so much you’d be first principles impotent. And would she still take him gambling, NO, even if he played the homo card, NO. Go back to Ralphie’s House of Horrors, NO FUCKING NO. The suicide thing loomed, except he never felt like dying in planes, it was totally Murphy’s Law.

  “At least we can give Kuala Lumpur a miss,” she said, with a polite effort, attending to business. “As we’ve met. I thought of the beach, because I have to teach you blackjack, and it makes no odds where. And, after all, our beach in Egypt.”

  “FUCK that. Just, why you had that picture of my father in your briefcase?”

  FRENCH SECTIONS

  Argument

  John Moffat secretly a professional blackjack player, also.

  6. Café Casino, Avignon, France, 1973

  John burst into the café resoundingly, like he’d come to do something about this damn situation. A man’s man with the demeanor of a coach, his dyed black hair gross against his ruddy skin, wearing cheap eyeglasses and an unpressed suit, he was also drenched and dirtied with rain. He’d had a run of luck at cards, and beamed with that mania. Among the elegant clientele of the staid café, he was disturbing like a loudmouthed drunk.

  He strode through, grinning to the whole room as if they were his favorite people. Some of the diners shot him reproving looks, at which he nodded. Then it was over, he dropped into a chair and neatly out of the mirrors, the draconian French sense of what is seen erased him:

  Denise looked up from her reverie, surprised.

  “Hey, there, Dees. Look at the drowned rat, it’s raining like a Noah’s flood.” He passed a hand over his wet crewcut. “Oh, boy, I need a coffee.”

  He made his gesture to the waitress – who, an Austrian, adored him, and knew his usual by heart, and was laughing as she already brought his café au lait – then turned to Denise again:

  “Your dad’s not coming to lunch because I threatened to cut his throat. I said, Peter, in so many words, I will cut your dang throat.”

  The waitress set down his cup, and he asked her to marry him. She said she would be pleased but her husband would not. He clutched his broken heart as she left and added, to Denise:

  “I wouldn’t ever really cut his throat.”

  “I would,” she said, taken. “I would, I detest him.”

  “Whoa. Don’t you talk that way about your dad,” John said uncomfortably, and looked at the floor as if something had hurt his feelings.

  “But, you wanted to cut his throat?”

  “Well, never mind what I want to do. I’m a big fool for telling you.” He sat back and crossed his arms, unhappy. “Look, Dees, I gotta ask you a favor. It’s a kind of a favor.”

  “Oh, I actually wanted to ask you something,” she said, startled. Then she’d already said it – it just came out. She was frightened again, although of course he wouldn’t say yes.

  He said, “I think maybe . . .” and interrupted himself; with a thoughtful face, he asked, “I guess you’re looking forward to going back to school?”

  “Oh, no,” she said factually. “I’m not going back to school. I did tell Daddy but I guess he never listens.”

  “Sure, no kid likes school, I got you.” He fooled with his napkin, embarrassed. “Yeah, thing is, looks like Peter and me are splitting up for a while. I guess he’s tired of my company’s, the way it is.”

  “He’s tired of you,” Denise said contemptuously.

  John laughed, fake and big: “Hey now, you’re gonna make me think you like me or something, that’s no good.” Then he put both hands on the table, squaring up to her, man to man. “Thing is, I was wondering if you might want to team up with me for a wee while. Cause I’m going on to Spain, you know. Try to make some money for a change, but your dad’s got his heart set here. I thought you could keep me company, I don’t speak any of that Spanish talk.”

  Offended, she plucked her napkin from her lap and began to fold it with brisk, adult gestures. “Dad asked you.”

  “Heck, no! I asked him. Honest Injun, that’s how the whole riot started, him fussing and puffing. Should have seen him, steam coming out of his ears!”

  “Oh, I do believe you,” she said, sarcastic. “Daddy would be just miserable to lose me.”

  “Oh, well, if you’re going to be like that,” he said, mock-grumpy. “You just give it a good old think, and when you’re ready, tell me yes or no.”

  The waitress brought him his Croque Madame, he told her “Gracias.” Pointedly forlorn, Denise turned to the window, to the other, serious world of rain.

  Boxed into the pavement, so its mean pen of earth had puddled around its scaly roots, stood an old plane tree. It had fresh boughs low on its trunk, and the shadows of the leaves lay purple on the wet bark. They convulsed like fish in the poking rain: they couldn’t stand it:

  Context: Unhappy Childhood

  1In her summer holidays, Denise joined her father

  1.1• in that year’s country

  •on the cheapest flight, via two third-world airports

  •the in-flight meal a hard-boiled egg in a damp napkin

  •no one met her, she carried her own bag, directed the cab

  •“I thought it was next week,” Peter sighed at her mistake. He turned away, he turned the television on.

  2He drank most nights, that was a different ordeal.

  2.1“This is just my daughter, I’m not robbing the cradle,” he winked to the barflies.

  2.2To her, sotto voce:

  •“That girl’s a little well-developed for a Chinese.”

  •“Aren’t you old enough to drink yet? Why not?”

  •“Oh, you look at me with those cold, judging eyes.”

  •“I know you must hate me for giving you that face.”

  2.3As she grew up, she repaid him with impassioned scorn.

  2.4She stole 10,000 dollars from him and went adventuring in the Himalayas. She came back haughty as ever. At Peter’s demands for the cash, she sighed: “It’s gone, it’s gone, you’d best forget it.”

  3Peter told her John Moffat was:

  •“An old friend of your mother.”

  •“He said he gave you a lobster once and you might remember it, I don’t know what that’s all about.”

  •“I taught him all the cards he knows. He looks up to me – don’t look as though that’s so incredible.”

  •“Maybe she was having an affair with him,” he concluded with the air of a man philosophically inured to life’s blows: “He has a good physique.”

  4She remembered Mr. Moffat holding the lobster by its waist, Mum wheedling, “Don’t cry, Deesey-beast, it can’t bite.” She remembered him singing to her on a carousel, sidesaddle on a static kangaroo. At some point in her childhood he had kneeled to hand her a square of pink frosted cake on a napkin. He’d taught her “See ya
later, alligator,” at some point.

  4.1“I remember him,” she said, stunned: “They played tennis.”

  “Well,” Peter ended the topic: “He’ll be in France.”

  5. Casino Avignon, France, 1973

  5John was 2,000 up when Peter tapped on his shoulder. He turned from his stack of chips, smiling his habitual hello – and saw the suitcase.

  “I’m clearing out. You know I still owed you 500 when we last divvied up: I’m here to settle that.” Peter put his suitcase down and scowled as he counted the money out of his pocket. The other players stilled to watch; the croupier frowned, waiting.

  “Well, I know we had our differences, Peter, but I’m sorry. And I’ll sure miss your Denise.” John put his hand out to be shaken.

  “No need,” Peter said, as he pressed the notes into John’s hand. “She’s staying here.”

  John cocked his head at Peter. The memory of a previous conversation passed through his eyes, narrowing them.

  Peter said tartly, “I told you, I’d had enough.”

  John stood up. “Well, if I didn’t know you’re just blowing steam.”

  “I don’t think she’ll starve,” Peter said, and picked up his case. “She’s got ten thousand dollars of my money.”

  6. Café Casino (cont.)

  “So, yes or no?” John said, wiping his mouth. “I was going to give you some time, but you just broke my secret rules.”

  “Your secret rules?” she said, ridiculing him—although she didn’t want to ridicule him and she instantly looked her fear, to show – she didn’t want to ridicule him.

  He said, “I’d be beholden to you. If you came.”

  “You wouldn’t make me go back to school?”

  He said, “Plenty of time to lock horns over that. Worst happens, you could end up a bitter old gambler like us.” He put out his hand: “Shake on it?”

  When she took his hand, it was damp with sweat: a mysterious, adult anxiety passed through his eyes. Then it was blotted out in his usual corny grin. She let go his hand, and she’d been tricked, it was something – Daddy was up to something. They were ganging up.

  John cleared his throat: he had his fork up for attention. “Now, you, I recall, were going to ask me a question?”

  “Yes,” she said listlessly, “I was going to ask you the same thing. So I can be honest, at least, if no one else can.”

  He laughed loudly, looking away at the waitress as if he might repeat the whole thing to her, for her appreciation. Skewering the last corner of his sandwich, he said, “Well, partner. Touché.”

  1John looked after Denise until his death, four years later.

  1.1They ran into Peter once, at the tables.

  1.2The three stopped to chat but no one suggested lunch.

  2The first year, she did nothing, she was in the hotel.

  2.1She studied French, she studied Dutch, she studied Spanish, from books.

  2.2She walked the streets sometimes, but disdained sight-seeing.

  3Then she was in the casino, working-playing. She proved to be a dogged, gifted player:

  3.1she was lucky.

  In Depth: Denise Cadwallader’s Luck

  The first, iron-clad rule of professional blackjack is, there’s no such thing as luck. Mathematical rules govern the game. Your play is determined by those rules. Any straying results in the gradual loss of all your money.

  In some ways, it’s a solid training for life. You proceed on the knowledge that you have, though that knowledge is slight. If you know, from your count, that there are many high cards remaining to be dealt, you place a large bet. You cannot know whether you will get any of those high cards. You may feel deeply, in your gut, that you are not going to get a single one of those high cards. But you place the large bet.

  No intuition, no high or low spirits can change your actions. Every move is born of your imperfect knowledge.

  Denise, too, played a disciplined, textbook game: as if her knowledge was of the same kind and degree as John’s. She counted cards, and placed bets based on the count. But when she had good luck, she won much more than he did. When she had bad luck, far less. And, worst of transgressions: she knew ahead of time.

  Since it fluctuated, and consisted not of stunning, but at best 11% wins, a normal player might never notice the phenomenon. 11% was well within the bounds of an average “run of luck,” and would only be plain after hundreds of consecutive hands. Her bad luck was even less marked, tending towards 7–8%.

  Because she and John monitored their wins, they were constantly reminded of her luck. Still both treated it frivolously, as an oddity which sooner or later would “work itself out.” Sometimes Denise even lied, predicting that she would lose when she knew she would win. And when she did have bad luck, she played on obdurately, and John encouraged her, cheerily describing it as “grace under fire.” In such small ways they conspired to dismiss it, as not really real. Over years, they ungrudgingly threw away thousands of dollars in gaming losses on this mental luxury.

  The only time her luck became outrageous, and defied them, was in the final period before John’s death. Denise felt the difference in her own mind: she was manic and more than usually compulsive. The lucky streak was also accompanied by a rash of coincidences: stories in the newspaper about a Denise Cadwallader who had won the lottery; a croupier dressed in the same clothes John was wearing; chance meetings; freak accidents.

  She and John both remarked on it, unnerved. Coincidental events seemed weighty, insistently significant. The urge to interpret them became irresistible. “This means God wants me to –” sprang perennially to mind.

  There was a sense that anything could happen, that you could not predict, and –

  4In Casino Atlantic, Ecuador, she won every hand.

  4.1Ten thousand, twenty thousand, only Denise laughed.

  4.2An hour passed and the mood grew threatening.

  4.3When they left, three “security guards” left too:

  Emotional Digression: Before It’s Too Late “The only good thing anyone has ever done”

  1He took her in place of any woman or friend;

  1.1down to Perth and up to Rotterdam, holding her cold hand;

  1.2where the four winds blew, bearing passenger aircraft;

  1.3he took her wherever blackjack was played.

  2This is her myth, what Denise held sacred in her life; the unreflective goodness of Jonathan Moffat. When she was ugly and uncouth and could not be loved, he loved and rescued her. He never wanted anything in return.

  3It wasn’t one good deed, it was four years;

  3.1when people thought he was a pedophile,

  3.2Denise got ever crazier, took all his time, and cost him real bucks.

  3.3He never had a day’s peace after that.

  4Well, there were certainly some folks who needed an easy life, but he was Texan. You did what you had to do. He wasn’t breaking his neck to be liked, and he personally never had a day’s regret for doing a human being a good turn. Most folks would do the same, in his shoes: he was just that kind of a man.

  4.1– he would explain, genuinely naive.

  5When he died, that kind of a man died out. The world became a lightless sewer, as he closed his door behind him.

  5.1“I’ve mourned him, that’s all it is. That’s what I’ve done with the rest of my life.”

  8. Casino Atlantic, Quito, 1978

  When she recognized the danger, the parking lot suddenly became beautiful and strange, an arena for great events. One of the men threw down a cigarette as she and John approached. John said: “Don’t look now.”

  They’d tied their shirts around their faces, but she recognized the fat one. They spoke in Spanish, barking as if rushed. She should have translated for John.

  And she had already seen in her mind, how he would empty his pockets for them and the men would search him roughly for concealed cash. How they would search her and make obscene jokes. She would remain stiff until it was over. She and
John would have to walk to their hotel, and make excuses at reception for the lost key. “Ladrones, ladrones,” she would explain, to general tuts and sympathy.

  John swung at the gun. The man fired. It was bright and then much darker. Blinded, she lunged for John, as the man fired three more times. Then it was hitting a loud wall. It spun her onto her back.

  She still didn’t believe it had happened. It was all right, she could see John’s leg kicking, his shoe’s gleam on and off. She was thinking of what might have actually happened, one hand feeling the dry asphalt curiously, as the pain hit and she blacked out.

  31. Airplane Sections (cont.) / Waiting for permission to land

  “So that was how the plastic surgery began. Because my jaw was shattered, I’d lost five teeth. And I was back with Peter, I had nowhere else. He paid for all that, and he wanted a beautiful girl. It really was that simple.”

  Eddie stared inconsolably at his tray table. Suddenly the stewardess reached in and snapped it shut, latched it, and was off, saying “Excuse me!” brightly.

  “Oh, God,” said Eddie. He tried to shift his weight of self-pity, which possibly Denise didn’t see the humor of. His Eeyore schtick.

  She said, low and apologetic, “I’ve gone too far, of course. Really forgive me. Ah, I think we’re slanting. I get nervous now. Should I distract you with the story about my plane crash?”

  He said, “But, like, you’re saying he was totally this gambler? You know, cause we grew up, he was supposed to be some fucking CIA guy.”

  “Oh, that’s so not important. He wasn’t an agent. He just worked with them, after Vietnam.”

  “But – not an agent? What did he work with them on?” Eddie caught his breath, thinking biological weapons, and she said, lightly,