Saint X

by Alexis Schaitkin

  “It’s a ruin,” Alison replies. “We’re building something ancient.”

  A ruin, Claire whispers to herself as she fetches more water. A ruin. A ruin.

  * * *

  A CELEBRITY has arrived at Indigo Bay. He is an actor, a man in late middle age known for playing offbeat characters, mostly sidekicks, with a signature misanthropy. He has brought with him a supple young girlfriend, black-haired and splayfooted.

  News of his arrival spreads quickly among the guests, who go intensively about the business of pretending not to recognize him. The chairs to either side of the actor and his girlfriend at the pool remain unoccupied. When the newlyweds (the wife by now recovered from her bad langoustine) find themselves in the hot tub with the actor, the husband goes so far as to ask him what he does for a living.

  In the actor’s vicinity, the guests laugh more loudly. The men stand straighter and touch their wives more. The women sway their hips. (They tell themselves, though, a bit smugly, that they would not go to bed with him. He was handsome once, but he has let himself go and turned flabby and dissipated. They’ve heard rumors for years that he is in and out of various rehab facilities in the California desert.)

  Though he has been a public figure for more than three decades, the actor has never grown accustomed to the way people adjust themselves in his presence. He can feel it, a shrill solicitousness like a current in the air. While his girlfriend gets a massage, he takes a seat at the poolside bar and orders a vodka with a twist. The couple at the barstools next to him hush. Then the man says loudly to the woman that he wishes there were bigger waves here; he would love to go surfing. He begins to recount a story from long ago. Hawaii, a big wave seized at the perfect moment and how he rode the white curl of it to shore. The actor understands that this is one of the man’s moments of personal greatness. One of the unusual features of his life is how often such stories are offered up for him to overhear.

  This man could not know that the actor himself possesses a paralyzing fear of the ocean. This trip is his girlfriend’s idea. (Whose idea his girlfriend is, is anyone’s guess. He has a way of finding problems and holding tight to them. Always has.) If it were up to him, he would vacation in the comfort of his own house, just take a week away from people. After all, it is people, not work, from which he craves respite.

  When they arrived here, his girlfriend flung open the curtains in their room and urged him out onto the balcony. Beyond the sand, the ocean arranged itself in bands of deepening blue. The sun blinked on the water like infinite strobe lights.

  “See? Not so scary, right?” She patted his arm as if comforting a twitchy dog.

  Then it happened as it always did. The sea rose into a wall, higher and higher, until there was no end to it. He opened his mouth and the water flooded him.

  * * *

  EVERY FAMILY has its documentarian. Say it is the father. He squats in the sand, a position his sorry knees can barely handle these days, and captures his girls at work on their castle. At dinner, he nabs an action shot of Alison cracking a lobster claw with her hands. He snaps Clairey marveling at the whorls of a seashell. This task falls to him because his wife never takes pictures; she says she will but she forgets, or doesn’t bother, he’s not sure which. Anyway, it has worked out. He has found an avocation and become, if he says so himself, a pretty decent amateur photographer. What a relief to find, in middle age, that there are still interests waiting inside you to be discovered, that you just might have more artistic heft than you long ago made your peace with having.

  At home a family’s walls are decorated with photographs from their travels. The father and mother went on an African safari last year to celebrate their twentieth anniversary. A black chain of elephants against an orange sunset. A flock of birds like a vast swath of silk in the sky. A gathering of local children craning their faces up at the camera. Their guide, Buyu, kicking at the embers of their campfire with his black rubber boots.

  And what a disappointment it is to see, on the walls of their friends’ homes, their fauna silhouetted against the sunset, their gathering of enthralled local children, their diminutive guide in black rubber boots. (All over the world, it seems, in Tanzania and Vietnam and Peru, short, wiry men lead tourists across savannas and through jungles and up mountains in these same black rubber boots.) For fleeting moments, he bore witness to something beautiful; to see these moments of personal sanctity duplicated—a father knows it shouldn’t matter so much.

  It’s a relief to be on a straightforward beach vacation. No endangered species or ancient city walls to capture. Clairey at play. His wife, modest and lovely in the whisper of early evening. After many days of disinterest and outright refusal, he prevails upon Alison to let him take some pictures of her. She takes her hair out of its ponytail and lets it fall around her shoulders; she leans against a palm and looks at the camera with a pensive expression, her lips slightly parted. He is so touched by her effort to style herself that for a moment he pulls the camera away from his face and simply looks at her.

  In the distance he sees the fat one and the skinny one coming up the beach. He catches the skinny one’s eyes on his daughter. If the father is honest, if all the fathers of teenage daughters here are honest, they do not like the way this man looks at their daughters. He is so informal. There is an unconcerned quality in his gaze, as if the father’s daughter, while appealing, is not special.

  They can acknowledge that their concern has at least partly to do with the color of this man’s skin. But they aren’t even concerned, really; they are merely entertaining the possibility of concern. It is nothing. The people here are simply very friendly. It is their culture, the warm and open way of people on a small island. You know you’ve gone too long without a vacation when you start seeing friendliness as some kind of problem.

  * * *

  ONE AFTERNOON, the blond boy from the volleyball game stops by the family’s chairs on the beach. The mother watches Alison wave at him as he approaches, a gesture she executes with delicious casualness.

  “What happened to your leg?” he asks when he is standing beside Alison’s chair.

  The mother looks over and sees that her daughter’s calf is scraped and bloody.

  “Tripped,” Alison says, and shrugs.

  The mother wants to tell her daughter to get bacitracin and a Band-Aid at the front desk and clean out the cut; she wants to get the bacitracin herself and patch up her daughter’s scrape, but she holds her tongue.

  “I’m going to hit some golf balls into the lagoon. Thought you might want to come,” the boy says.

  The mother watches him. His hair falls shaggily around his face—he wears it long and a bit disheveled. His skin is golden, like the outside of a perfectly baked vanilla cake. He wears his swim trunks slung low on his waist. On his chest, she sees a few strawberry blond hairs.

  “Sure,” Alison says. “Why not?”

  The mother watches her stand. She walks beside the boy down the beach with an aloof strut, just right. This age, this moment. A woman flares in ultraviolet bursts on the hot surface of her child.

  * * *

  BY THEIR fourth day at Indigo Bay, the mother and father doze on the beach with ease. Sometimes they nod off with their books still in their hands. The longer they are on the island, the more easily and frequently they slip into sleep. All around them, other guests experience this same psychic loosening. In their regular lives, they make choices with high stakes every day: forty million dollars, the life of a patient, a thousand manufacturing jobs in the Midwest. If you catch her in a vulnerable moment at the bar, the wife of the man in the dolphin swim trunks will confess that by the time she leaves the office at night, sometimes the choice of where to order takeout is enough to crumple her. At Indigo Bay, they unwind into a world of choice without consequence. Beach or pool? Beer or margarita? They submit to the tonic regiment of such days gratefully. They begin to fantasize about saying goodbye to their lives back home. They could quit their jobs, buy
a little villa down here, and never look back. They could spend every day on the beach and never tire of it. They could remain here forever.

  * * *

  “DON’T LET them get into any trouble while I’m gone,” Alison tells Claire, nodding at their dozing parents. Claire watches her sister until she disappears down the beach, then she turns her attention to the bucket of seashells she and Alison collected earlier in the day. She spreads them out in the sand and sorts them into rows according to size, then piles them together and sorts them according to shape, color, favorite to least favorite. She goes down to the shore and spells her sister’s name in the sand. She watches a wave wash the letters away. She returns to her seashells. She holds her favorite tightly in her fist and closes her eyes.

  The mother opens her eyes and yawns.

  “Where’s your sister?”

  “Bathroom?” Claire says, though her sister has by now been gone a long time. When she finally returns, their mother asks her where she has been.

  “Just went for a walk. It’s really beautiful down at that end.” She points to where Indigo Bay ends at a barrier of black rocks. “Hey, Clairey, I’m going on a treasure hunt and I’m bringing a lime.”

  Her sister has told a lie. On her breath, as she says lime, Claire smells smoke. It’s her turn, but she can’t think of a word.

  * * *

  “I’LL BE back,” Alison says the next day. It’s the in-between time after the beach and before dinner, and Claire is coloring at the coffee table in their room. After her sister leaves, Claire counts to ten, then follows.

  She keeps her distance. Her sister walks back to the beach. She moves along the water’s edge, skimming her toes in the froth. Claire takes big steps, planting her feet in her sister’s melted footprints. Alison does not go to the pool, or to the bar. She walks past the water-sports cabana, the kayaks and Sunfish lined up tidily on the sand. She walks to the end of the beach and continues onto a narrow path, then disappears into the sea grape.

  When Claire reaches the path, she hesitates. It is getting dark. What if their parents open the door that connects their rooms and find that they are gone? She takes a deep breath and steps onto the path. After a minute or so, it ends abruptly at an asphalt parking lot full of small shabby cars, their windshields covered with accordions of silver foil.

  She hears laughter, a man’s, and follows the sound. The asphalt burns her feet, but she stays quiet. There, next to an eggplant-colored car, her sister stands between the fat one and the skinny one. The skinny one digs into his pocket. He pulls out a small box and, from it, a cigarette. Her sister leans toward him and he slides it between her lips.

  * * *

  HUSBANDS AND wives have lost track of time. It is Tuesday or Wednesday, but perhaps it is only Monday. They have been on the island four days, no—five, possibly six. Within these lost days are lost moments, hours, mornings. Minutes diffuse like perfume into the air. The passage of time is of consequence only for the spectacles it reveals: The sea transforms to liquid silver as the day draws to a close. Sunset yields to the lavender fleece of twilight. Stars blink awake.

  * * *

  NIGHT. AT the hotel bar, couples drink elaborate cocktails as the lilting cadences of reggae float through the speakers. An elderly widow steps into the pool for her nightly swim. (She doesn’t swim during the day. The pool is too busy then with the splashes and laughter of people together with their people.) A security guard with a corona of white hair plucks an empty chip bag from a bed of portulaca and deposits it in the trash.

  In their room, the sisters lie together on Claire’s bed. Alison weaves her sister’s hair into a loose braid, unspools it with her fingertips, then braids it again.

  “I’m going on a treasure hunt and I’m bringing a pearl,” Alison says.

  “I’m going on a treasure hunt and I’m bringing a pearl and a pizza.”

  “I’m going on a treasure hunt and I’m bringing a pearl, a pizza, and the stars.”

  “You can’t bring the stars.”

  “Why not?”

  “You can’t carry them.”

  “I’ll bring whatever I want.”

  * * *

  A RAINY day. Guests flip fruitlessly through the television channels. They sit on balconies and watch the rain. They order room service. They doze and make love, make love and doze. Some perceive the rain as a personal slight from the universe, a tax on their happiness. Others are secretly grateful. The rain absolves them from the burden of spending the day well; they hole up in their rooms with peculiar relief.

  In the afternoon, Alison finds a cartoon for Clairey on TV.

  “I’m going to the gift shop to poke around. Back soon,” she says, not asking if her sister would like to come along.

  Though she does not like cartoons, Claire watches dutifully. When the show ends, Alison is still not back. Claire walks out to the balcony. The rain falls in silver curtains. Palms toss in the wind. She looks out at the ocean. There is a person out there, swimming—she can see the head bobbing in the waves; it glints in and out of visibility in the surf, there and not there, back then gone again. Far out, the swimmer stops. The head bobs in place, facing away from shore, in the direction of the little island that is shrouded in mist, like a place in a fairy tale. As Claire looks at it, her heart flutters, and she remembers again the disappointment of mist—how you can never be in it; how as soon as you walk into it, it vanishes through your fingers, so that the little island as it appears from here is a place you can never, ever reach, no matter how you try.

  The swimmer begins to stroke again. Claire watches as the figure moves around the black rocks that jut out from shore at the edge of Indigo Bay and disappears.

  “Got you something,” Alison says when she returns to the room later.

  From a shopping bag she removes a puka shell necklace. Claire bends her head and her sister slips it over, twisting it into a double strand.

  “Look at you, pretty,” Alison says.

  Her hair is wet.

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT, Claire is awakened by the sound of a key rattling in the lock. As she surfaces from dreams, she watches the door to the hotel room open. Her sister tiptoes across the room and slides into bed. In the morning Claire wakes at dawn to find her sister’s bed empty. She is on the balcony, her eyes fixed on something in the distance. It seems her sister is hardly sleeping at all.

  * * *

  THE ACTOR cannot set himself at ease. The ocean is too near. His girlfriend tests him. She frolics in the waves, dives into the crests. Each time she disappears, fear grips him. She knows this and enjoys it, and the pleasure she derives from his fear makes him want to wring her.

  She keeps pestering him about chartering a boat to Faraway Cay. The concierge has advised against this, on account of the goats, and recommended Tamarind Island instead, but she has decided this makes Faraway Cay off the beaten path and, therefore, more desirable. She says the beach is supposed to be even more beautiful than at Indigo Bay. (Is Indigo Bay not beautiful enough? Is there no such thing as enough beauty, as all of it you could possibly need?) In Faraway Cay’s interior there is a waterfall. They must see it. He must overcome this silly fear once and for all. She will help him. (How nice for her.)

  At night he dreams of death by water. A whirlpool sucks him into its maw. The deep seas swell and swallow him. Dead, underwater, he feels his body bloat and stiffen. He hears the roving cries of gulls.

  * * *

  ON NEW Year’s Eve, Indigo Bay holds a dinner barbecue on the beach. There is a live calypso band—three men in matching tan fedoras and short-sleeved floral button-downs, the cheerful reverberations of a steel-pan. Tiki torches. A buffet of local specialties—roasted sea crayfish, conch creole, mashed dasheen; chicken nuggets and spaghetti for the children. The guests drink piña coladas. They pick and suck the crayfish clean and lick the sweet ocean juice from their fingers. Small children toddle, woozy with happiness, before the torch-lit faces of the band.


  When the band begins to play “Day-O,” Alison sings along.

  “Come on, Clairey. You know the words,” she prods.

  Claire is tentative at first, her voice barely a whisper, but as the song continues, it grows louder.

  Six foot, seven foot, eight foot bunch.

  The mother and father smile. Their shy little Clairey letting her voice be heard. Alison seeming finally to have unclenched. The mother and father join in. For a moment they are a family, singing.

  Daylight come and me wan’ go home.

  A father knows it already: this is a memory.

  As the night deepens, people kick off their sandals. Husbands reach for wives. They dance and drink and feast beneath the star-crammed sky. All the while, though they don’t feel it, sand flies devour their flesh. The next morning at breakfast the guests scratch furiously at their limbs.

  “I didn’t feel a thing.”

  “Sneaky little suckers.”

  Claire is bitten terribly. Her legs and feet are covered. A bite on her eyelid causes it to swell so that she can hardly open her eye. The mother purchases Benadryl at the resort shop and Claire spends the day in a groggy haze, scratching.

  Alison takes her sister’s hand and pulls it away. “Don’t.” She presses her palm to her sister’s skin. For a brief moment Claire is soothed. “Poor Clairey. You’re just too sweet.”

  * * *

  DURING THE last days of vacation, adults begin to speak of their return.

  “When we get home, remind me to take the car in.”

  “Let’s be sure to call the Vitales about dinner.”

  “Don’t let me forget to sign the boys up for Little League.”