The Best Thing in the World

 

by Michael Chin

Upon retellings, Heather and I called him The Texas Oil Tycoon. I don’t actually know that he was in the oil business or that he was a tycoon within it. But I do know that he sat at the next table at Battista’s Hole in the Wall, a second-tier Sin City tourist trap—the kind of place that’s off The Strip where first-time visitors aren’t likely to find it, but people on their third or fourth Vegas vacation have heard of it and are liable to give it a try for its famed sense of atmosphere, decadent red-sauce dishes, complimentary table wine, the charm of the roving hunch-backed accordion player with liver-spotted hands who makes the rounds each evening and takes requests. The whole place smells of garlic and olive oil.

And I do know the Texas part of our moniker was on point. He’d namedropped his home state a half dozen times before our antipasto arrived. He had the Texas drawl, his voice loud, his personality unable to resist asking us each what we did and honing in on our then-year-and-a-half-old son Riley, face lit in the glow of the phone I’d handed him to occupy him with PBS Kids games on the prayer we might get through this rare sit-down-restaurant meal. The Texas Oil Tycoon asked what Riley was watching. Riley was too immersed in aDaniel Tiger bathtime game to notice. Young enough for The Texas Oil Tycoon not to prod him further.

The Texas Oil Tycoon was big by every dimension, not just the voice, but the body wide enough to span his side of the table while his wife and adult daughter shared the opposite side. “You enjoy these days.” He studied Riley. “It all goes by too fast.” He seasoned the cliche with a sprinkling of specificity. “Next thing you know your kid’s a goddamn Democrat.”

I gleaned from the exchange to follow his daughter had entertained voting for Beto O’Rourke the year before, articulating he had some good ideas, and The Texas Oil Tycoon had never let her hear the end of it, even when, of course, she voted for Ted Cruz in the end.

I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but our neighbor was loud and large enough to become an irresistible force, even more so when he kept including us in exchanges, not as strangers at an adjacent table, but more like quiet relatives at the family dinner who needed coaxing to take up space in the conversation. For my part, I fought the urge to roll my eyes, watching my son pour cartoon water over a baby tiger’s dome instead. I was annoyed with this man. This was, after all, supposed to be my night. It was the Saturday before my weekday birthday. Plus, we celebrated our cross-country move at one of my favorite restaurants, where the meatballs were just about the best thing in the world. In two days, I’d teach my debut class at UNLV.

But there The Texas Oil Tycoon was.

#

I’m prone to contriving ideal circumstances. Not just a nice Italian dinner to toast a new life, but the time I had such specific designs on reading War and Peace on a transatlantic flight—Philly to Charles de Gaulle by way of Heathrow—immersing myself in rich history and in my beloved late grandmother’s favorite book, never mind the impracticalities of lugging a 1,500-page tome along a week’s vacation.

I hadn’t been seated long—left aisle seat in a row of four—when I had my first misgivings about where I’d spend my seven-hour reading session.

There was a woman and there was a man, each of whom I placed around my age, mid-twenties. I think she said she was a dental hygienist. I don’t remember what he said he did for work, but I do remember him commenting on the sleeping pill he popped with the intention of passing out for most of the flight. That was before he happened upon their flirtatious chemistry. She was pretty, with straight brown hair and an olive complexion. He wasn’t bad looking, the kind of loud energy I could muster in short spurts for wedding receptions and karaoke nights, but that I more often found grating in others because it interrupted my work at the office, my attempts to write at a coffee shop, my attempts to read Russian novels on planes. In the seat closest to me, a nineteen-year-old college kid I had the least objection to, who seemed content to keep to himself, though the mid-twenties guy coached him he’d be allowed to order drinks once we were over international waters.

The woman speculated the airline had planned for us to sit together. The young row, the fun row, inviting me into their good time.

I burrowed deeper into Tolstoy.

Then: a minor miracle.

After a flight attendant had taken our drink orders but before beverages arrived, the man fell asleep. Not just asleep. A deep unconsciousness, a product of his pills, that left him slumped not so much next to as on top of the dental hygienist, open-mouthed, threatening to drool into her hair at any moment.

She tried to nudge him, a hand on his upper arm escalating to an elbow to his ribs, discomfort mounting. The nineteen-year-old tried a half-hearted, hey man.

Finally, the hygienist pressed her call button. It was a stern flight attendant who jostled the man awake, speaking sharply, straight into his ear, “You need to sit up, sir.” He roused enough to move. I imagine he felt an amalgamation of annoyance at having his nap interrupted, embarrassment at having fallen asleep on top of his new friend, resentment at the hygienist tattling on him to plane authorities when surely she could have asked him to move herself.

These two didn’t speak another word to each other. I breathed easy in the newfound quiet, sipping a cranberry juice, clearing over a hundred pages before I drifted into my own nap.

#

I slept more in France.

The five-hour time change took a toll on me. Also draining: I was surprised by how, even after four years of high school French, I felt so disoriented, immersed in the language on the crowded streets of Paris, the sidewalks too narrow, so I felt as if I were constantly bumping into someone or almost stepping into traffic.

The beauty of the Louvre courtyard struck me, though. The sparkling fountains, the glass surfaces turned bright white in the sun. Breathing it all in while I held hands with a lover.

But about that lover. Elizabeth and I dove headlong into the whirlwind romance after making out at her birthday party. We were mere weeks in when she revealed a secret—she’d been admitted to a grad program in Edinburgh but didn’t have enough money to make it work.

I hesitated. I didn’t think then and still don’t think now she was trying to take advantage of me. Still, when I floated the maximum sum I could realistically loan her from my savings, she nodded eagerly. That would be enough.

So, I’d sent Elizabeth to Scotland and so I’d flown to Europe to be with her on her spring break. She didn’t hide her annoyance about how tired I was those first days, though, or about my insistence on studying a map to get my bearings on the Paris street. She claimed that to navigate this way made it obvious we were tourists. Even after a sweet moment, kissing at the base of the Eiffel Tower, she fumed ahead of me on the walk back to the hotel, certain my caution, my willingness to ask for directions, was going to get us mugged.

Things eased when we left Paris, though. In the Loire Valley countryside, we toured Chateau de Chambord. It was beautiful and surreal in all the ways walking through a European castle when one’s never set foot in Europe, nor a castle before is bound to feel. The conscious thought registered it should have been even more magical to share this moment with a pretty girl who threaded her fingers through mine at each window, taking in these romantic views of a blue sky and sprawling, vibrant green grass.

I read a placard describing the salamander insignias carved into stone around Chambord, the symbol of one of the castle’s owners. He’d died before the etching project was complete. The symbol of him—his vision—outlived the man himself. As we set foot outside on an overlook, smelling the spring air, I thought it a metaphor for this trip, for this moment, to exist in a space this special with someone I already didn’t see a future with. My idyllic younger self would’ve thought any girlfriend might be a wife. What’s the point otherwise? There were a lot of reasons to be with someone, I said to him, across time, across an ocean. Because it gets you to finally take that European vacation. Because it would be callous and impractical to end the relationship while we were on this trip. Because it was hard to swallow the thousands of dollars I’d loaned her as a sunk cost. (She’d already paid me back hundreds of dollars, she’d said the night before, apropos nothing, in putting most of our vacation lodging on her Visa.)

When the wind blew her hair in front of her glasses and she swept it back in a sort of careless way, it was easy to see her the way she’d looked when she was a girl I’d met at a work function and immediately crushed on, just hoping that when she invited me to her birthday party it might lead to anything at all.

And I kissed her at Chambord. She smelled of the pastries the B&B had served that morning, all butter and cream.

#

My grandmother spoke some French. Threw in a de rien in place of you’re welcome on the regular. I think that’s what prompted my sister to take French first, and I felt left out of their exchanges to follow, so I took French classes too.

My sister read Les Miserables, a book almost as long as War and Peace, and grew obsessed with the Broadway musical soundtrack, so I grew obsessed with it too—“A Little Fall of Rain” my favorite song, a hopelessly romantic vision of a country blossoming in my mind.

#

I had the lasagna at Battista’s. Too much gooey cheese for my taste. I’m the anomaly, Heather reminds me. So many people order lasagna as a vehicle for as thick a layer of mozzarella as possible. I’m the weirdo for scraping it off. The beef and sausage beneath were good, though, the ricotta only a little excessive.

Cheese never bothered Heather, her carbonara white with the stuff, stretching strings from the plate with every bite.

Riley ate spaghetti in red sauce. No parmesan. No meatball. (I ate his meatball.) He picked out chunks of tomato. He ate the noodles with his fingers, gluttonous handful after handful.

“Look at him go.” The Texas Oil Tycoon watched our son with delight. “Look at him go.”

#

Look at him go, I imagined my grandmother murmuring to herself when she read my stories.

I liked writing before I liked reading, drafting my own stories rooted in eight-bit Nintendo characters—Simon Belmont from Castlevania, Link from Zelda, Mario—before graduating to derivative stories of princes who fought dragons and often as not fell in love with princesses along the way. I was precocious if not so much skilled at writing as dogged in my pursuit of it.

As far as Grandma Jean was concerned, I think my talents peaked at eleven, my first earnest attempt at a novel that topped out around sixty pages. The best I can recall, she and my mother were the only people who read it start to finish, but Grandma wrote me a note afterward in the style of a capsule review—fifty-ish words on how great it was; all the encouragement I needed to give her copies of the next novels I drafted just as soon as I’d finished typing from the longhand manuscripts.

Her encouragement grew less effusive. She labeled my high school basketball romance a teenage fantasy in a way that felt a little dismissive. The last book I gave her, Beginning Abby O’Brien, was drafted between my senior year of high school and the summer after my first year at college.

When my grandmother moved into a nursing home, and my parents cleaned out her belongings, I wound up with the copy of Abby O’Brien I’d gifted her. Her only response to the book had been that it dealt with very adult themes. I’d been a little hurt at her not saying more, but also recognized at twenty-ish that not only her physical, but mental acuity were slipping—the predicate for the nursing home move. I was skeptical she’d actually read to the end.

I came upon that copy of the manuscript —to my knowledge, the only extant copy of the book unless a digital version remains on a dusty floppy disk somewhere I no longer have the equipment to access—summer 2025, and in a fit of nostalgia, gave all 386 pages a read. The plot and pacing were OK, and I was struck by how well I remembered most of the major story beats, so deeply had that story lived within me.

The prose were not good, though. Flowery, overly complicated in ways that alternately read pretentious or constipated. And the adult themes. There was sex in the first chapter. An orgy later. Lesbian sex. I’d written an incestuous one-sided infatuation and, mercifully, at least that hadn’t led to intercourse.

For the first time, seventeen years after her passing, I actively hoped my grandmother never read that book. I reframed the memories of Grandma Jean: less cheering on my accomplishments as a young author than indulging a child the way I did when I watched my son’s video projects, splicing home video with screen recordings of Peppa Pig off YouTube. Grandma might have wondered if I’d ever outgrow gifting her these longer and longer tomes she’d have to be polite about afterward.

#

It’s a kindness to indulge children in their creative works and passions. And who hasn’t pretended to like a band a little more because someone we cared for liked the sound, or sat through a movie we wouldn’t have picked, gone to a sporting event we had little interest in?

Elizabeth returned to the States and moved in with her parents while she sought a job. We carried on with a long-distance relationship that was now defined by a two-hour drive up or down I-95 rather than an international flight. In hindsight, as months ticked by, I think she may’ve waited for me to invite her to move in. But I still wasn’t sure about us.

In the year to follow, I came to understand Elizabeth as a great team player. She accompanied me to hear my friend’s band play at a dive bar and she joined me for parties with my friends even after she’d made it clear she didn’t enjoy their company. A better boyfriend, I probably would’ve compromised more. I think she understood I was going to these parties either way, though. If she wanted to see me, she had no choice but to come along.

Elizabeth read my stories. The period of our relationship was when I garnered my first publications with a series of online literary journals destined to go defunct a couple years, if not months, after sharing my work. She read my rough drafts too.

But there came a breaking point. A quiet Scrabble night when I suggested we put in the Counting Crows concert DVD I’d bought months before but never got around to watching.

“Come on,” she said.

I didn’t know what she was getting at.

“I’ve put up with a lot.” She wore a pout I’d distinctly remembered finding cute early in our coupling, when she complained about her roommates. When I was the one she complained to, not about. “Can we just not.”

I hadn’t realized she didn’t like Counting Crows. Of all the favorites I’d subjected her to, this didn’t even register as a thing she’d put up with, an indulgence for this man-child who didn’t know how to meet halfway.

We played the board game in silence. I don’t remember if we finished it. I don’t remember if anyone won.

#

The Texas Oil Tycoon leaned close to his wife. “I’d like to buy this nice family’s dinner.”

I suppose this is where the Oil Tycoon part of his identity took shape in our collective imagination. Money to throw around. Heather and I insisted it wasn’t necessary as his wife removed a sheaf of bills.

“Don’t worry about it,” she told Heather. “He loves to do this.” The wife handed the waiter back our check and a stack of bills, instructing him to keep the change.

“That’s very generous.” The waiter swallowed hard. I wasn’t sure if he meant the gratuity, picking up our tab, or the combined gesture. He looked young. Maybe the age of the students I’d start in with in two days. For all I knew, he was one of them.

The Texas Oil Tycoon waved him off. He looked pleased with himself, the performance of benevolence had landed the right way, establishing his opulence and generosity alike. I wondered if the gesture weren’t always received that way. His wife sipped from the white table wine, his daughter the red while she scrolled in the dim glow of her phone.

#

Three or four months before I dumped Elizabeth—waiting things out so she could give me a ride home after I had my wisdom teeth extracted, waiting out the holiday season, waiting out her mother’s cancer scare, and finally waiting out her thirty-first birthday—I had a nightmare.

In this dream space, she told me she was pregnant. No options registered but a life with her. She’d move in. We’d get married. Even if we didn’t stay together until death did us part, we’d always be tied then, sharing family.

It was a dream powerful enough that I genuinely breathed easier in the minutes after waking, realizing none of it was real, registering I was alone. The dream scared me off sleeping with her those final months. Elizabeth tried to initiate more than once.

I have to imagine a certain sinking sensation of inevitability for her. She still wanted the relationship to work. I asked her to meet me for lunch at a Panera halfway between her parents’ house and my apartment. We’d never met halfway before. I paid for lunch. I can’t imagine she was surprised when I ended it outside.

#

There are those nightmares a person doesn’t wake from. I picture Grandma Jean in the nursing home. The transition into the new space jarred her. She’d been growing more forgetful, prone to falling asleep at odd times, then a big fall outside her door in the senior apartment building.

It was only a couple days before she told my parents she’d made a mistake. She wanted to move in with one of them—her daughter, her son-in-law (they were separated by then, though not legally divorced)—independence and concerns about not imposing be damned.

I visited with Grandma. Not as often as I should have, but I’d moved out of town by then, and I’m still pretty sure I came to her more than anyone besides my parents. She’d only lived in the nursing home a couple months when I witnessed her argue with another woman for reasons I couldn’t follow. The confrontation culminated in Grandma Jean striking the other woman’s forearm with something like a slow-motion judo chop, before orderlies scolded them both like children to keep their hands to themselves.

This was the rest of my grandmother’s life. Disorientation. Discontent. No end until—

#

I saw The Texas Oil Tycoon on his way out of the men’s room after dinner. It was impossible not to recognize him. I’m six-foot-one, an above average but not overwhelming height; the kind of height such that it’s not uncommon for me to be the tallest person in the room, but I’ve found it also makes me look at anyone taller—even by an inch—as a colossus.

The Tycoon was taller than me and staggering, maybe with old football injuries, maybe with gout. Maybe it was just the table wine. It struck me how much older The Tycoon looked then, and maybe I should’ve helped him back to his table. When I smiled and offered a friendly nod, he didn’t return the gesture, though. I’m not sure he recognized me in the brighter light. We all fill in blanks with our imagination. What had he thought I looked like? He soldiered forward, the rhythm of his steps invoking childhood memories of a fatigued Andre the Giant, lumbering around a wrestling ring after Hulk Hogan had pummeled his head, old and beaten.

#

I was the victim of a stick-up the first day I worked the register at McDonald’s the summer after I graduated from high school. A frail old man pointed the tip of a closed umbrella at me and told me to empty the register.

I didn’t know what to do. Did the man think he held a firearm? Or did he mean to ram me with the point of his umbrella if I didn’t comply?

It turned out George was a regular who picked up two hamburgers, two hot coffees each day sometime between eleven and noon, lunch for him and his ailing wife. They lived across the street. George would pull variations on the gun gag—usually using his bare hands, index fingers extended to the shape of a pistol—when he didn’t recognize someone staffing the counter, a ritual hazing I’d see him pull on some staff two or three times before he remembered their faces.

I thought of George recently and got to wondering if he were still running this game. If the more experienced workers at the grill still prepared his order—one hamburger with extra ketchup, the other with no onions—the moment he walked through the door, or if he still made this venture out the door, rain or shine, each day in service of his spouse, the love of his life.

A beat later, wading through nostalgia to get to the mental math, it occurred to me George and his wife would have to be at least a hundred by now, and she’d been sick then.

No, then, George was not still at it. It was unlikely either of the two old burger eaters were still alive.

Melancholy of mortality aside, it feels as though there’s a lesson there, to enjoy simple things right up to, maybe especially at the end.

#

When I think of Elizabeth now I tend to think of her through a smudged windshield, one of those weekend drives to see her, highway dirt and dead flies browning the glass. I think of the money I never recouped. That, all things being equal, I wish it were Heather, instead, I’d experienced The Louvre and The Eiffel Tower and Chambord and a thousand other moments large and small with.

But Elizabeth and I shared happy moments too, even if I didn’t think to appreciate them in the end. Inside jokes about the cat I took care of for a period of months, who became a third party to our transatlantic Skype calls. Sipping the Scotch she brought back to the States for me. An afternoon, those interceding weeks between our first kiss and when she went abroad, when we drove through the Pennsylvania countryside and a mix of bright red and burnt sienna leaves rained from both sides of the road just as the opening piano flourish of Regina Spektor’s “Us” played from the speakers of my Civic. I stopped to take a deep breath and thought this was one of the best moments I could remember living.

I—we—had these simple pleasures too.

#

My last memory of The Texas Oil Tycoon was not one of bombast or annoyance. It was common ground. It was simple pleasure.

As he stood from his table for the last time, his wife under his arm to support him, he fixed his eyes on my son again. Riley gnawed at the edges of an Oreo. We’d brought along a small package for him to savor at the end of the meal.

The big man hesitated, propping a meaty hand on back of Riley’s chair. My son’s attention was fixed on the white innards, the sweetest part of the cookie. Moved by a fit of nostalgia or kind-heartedness or profound truth, The Tycoon said, “That’s the best thing in the world, isn’t it?”