Saint X

by Alexis Schaitkin

  I wasn’t trying to “control the narrative” by taking that douche journalist from Esquire to the Station. Sure, the kids in this town love the deli because it’s a dive; they show up after lacrosse practice, or late night, six-to-a-Beemer, and chat up the counter guys like they’re just regular kids. The thing is, I like these kids. For all their privilege, they’re mostly unspoiled. It’s a town of Nice Kids, really, just a couple of sniveling “My dad is a lawyer and blah blah blah” pains in the ass here and there. But none of that has anything to do with why I suggested we meet at the Station for the interview. It’s just my usual place. I’m a teacher. Where else in this town am I supposed to go for a two-buck egg sandwich?

  So, no, I wasn’t trying to “control the narrative.” But there are things I didn’t tell him. Things I didn’t trust some sleek journalist with. (Horn-rimmed glasses and a tweed blazer, and I’m the one trying to manipulate the optics? Please.) Things it wouldn’t have done anybody any good to see in print.

  I didn’t tell him about her essays. Alison always developed these wildly contrarian thesis statements. Macbeth can best be understood as a feminist work in which Lady Macbeth is the true hero. Catch-22 glamorizes war. Or my favorite: While it might seem to depict human nature as savage and anarchic, Lord of the Flies ultimately works against the author’s own intentions and conveys the endurance of civilization and order. She was one hell of a writer, and she did crazy acrobatics in the essays to defend what were, basically, incorrect readings of the texts. Intentionally incorrect. She seemed to be under the impression that the best essay is the one that gets people to believe whatever it wants them to believe, even if that thing can’t possibly be true. I always wanted to tell her in my comments that just because you win an argument doesn’t make you right. But I always felt a bit nervous critiquing her, to be honest. She was smarter than me, I have no qualms about admitting it. She knew it and I knew it. I wanted to tell her that just because you’re smarter than someone doesn’t mean they don’t have things to teach you, but I didn’t tell her that, either. I gave her her A’s and figured somewhere down the line of her education she’d figure out how to apply her talents in a way that went beyond hot-dogging.

  I didn’t tell the journalist about the time I closed the classroom door on that poor chubby kid when he was late on test day, and Alison got in a confrontation with me about it, which was entirely inappropriate. The longer the argument went on, the clearer it became that she had the whole class on her side and I was at real risk of losing their good faith in an all-out mutiny that would screw up the classroom dynamic for the rest of the school year. I’ve always been a really popular teacher, too. Everybody wants to be in Conti’s class. That’s the sway she had with her classmates.

  I didn’t tell him about the way she rolled her eyes at these same classmates when they made a comment in class that she found obvious or dumb.

  I didn’t tell him about the time I went to the Station for a late-night grading session and she was there, alone at a table in the back, eating cheese fries. She must have come from dance rehearsal—she wore leggings and a sweatshirt unzipped over a black leotard.

  “Care to join me, Mr. Conti?”

  Fool that I am, I sat.

  “Fry?”

  I ate.

  I asked her how college applications were going.

  “Fine,” she sighed, as if she hardly cared, which I knew couldn’t be true, not a smart, ambitious kid like her. “Can I ask you something, Mr. Conti?” she said.

  I told her she could.

  “Doesn’t it bother you, spending your existence with a bunch of high schoolers?”

  I said if it did, would I have become a high school teacher? I felt pretty smart about that response.

  “It would make me crazy.” She stared right at me as she said that. Under the table, she brushed her foot against my leg.

  I told her I had to get going. She smirked, like she thought I was a wuss or something. I was totally freaked out to see her in my class the next day, but she acted completely normal, as if nothing had happened. After a few days, it started to feel that way.

  After she died, the last thing she said to me that night kept coming back to me. It would make me crazy. What was her game with that, exactly? She was not admiring my capacity for working with young people, that’s for sure. No, she was telling me she could never do what I did because she was different from me. Better.

  The thing is, from then on teaching did start to drive me crazy. Before, I’d spend hours writing comments on my students’ essays, and then I’d see the kids flip straight to the back, look at the grade, and chuck the papers in the trash, and I’d shrug it off. After, stuff like that enraged me. I started to see very clearly the way my life’s work was just “second period” to the kids. I started seeing it the way she saw it, I started seeing me the way she saw me, and the foundational satisfaction of my life was chipped away at. Not completely, but some.

  This is a town of Nice Kids, but Alison Thomas was not one of them. She had talent to burn. She could be very passionate. She had a personal power that she often used as a force for good. But she was not Nice.

  EVIDENCE

  HOW FRIGHTENED CLIVE RICHARDSON had been when he heard me call that name! The secrets of his past were there, submerged but still hot to the touch. If I played things out right, I was certain I could bring them to the surface. But what then? Was my end game public punishment? Private vengeance? Did I imagine Clive Richardson in handcuffs? Brought to his own watery end in the Gowanus? These possibilities and many others floated in my mind, but I dared not envision any of them too fully. The truth. First I must have the truth.

  Autumn continued: the sidewalks grew cluttered with fallen leaves and the pink fruits of ginkgo trees, which released their bilious stink as they rotted on the pavement. I spent an evening battling with Time Warner over my spotty Wi-Fi. Jefe the dog had an accident on the faded green carpet in the hallway. It was determined that Astrid’s latest novel would be titled The Girl from Pendeen; the fact that the titles of two of her previous novels contained the word Girl was decided, after much discussion, to be a non-issue, even a boon. I continued to call my parents every Sunday, conversations that increasingly became exercises in dissembling. I told them I’d begun attending yoga classes in the evenings.

  “That’s wonderful, sweetheart,” my mother said.

  “Yoga is supposed to be great for your alignment,” my father said.

  (I’d intended to convince them, but was still irritated by how easily they’d been fooled.)

  The reality was that my evenings were now almost wholly devoted to Clive. I would linger around the Little Sweet until he departed, then follow him. Clive Richardson, I learned quickly, was a walker. He might stroll for an hour, even two, before heading home. When he reached his brick apartment building, I waited until a light on the fourth floor turned on and then, some twenty or thirty minutes later, turned off again; only then did I make my own way home. On my walk back, I would realize that I was soaked in sweat. I was terrified as I followed Clive—of being seen, of what I might see—but it was a terror that held itself at bay until I was away from him, when it came over me all at once.

  On these walks, I experienced what might be described as a state of hypervigilance. I attended to every detail, every movement, searching for any scrap that might provide insight into the man Clive Richardson was and the secrets he was guarding. What ought I to make of the routes he chose? Or of the way he scuffed his black loafers against the pavement? Back at my apartment late at night, I would try to get myself to read through the mounting backlog of manuscripts in my work in-box, but I quickly found myself lost in imaginative labor: What did he think about before he fell asleep? What was in his refrigerator? What did his bedroom look like? (I pictured a stark, simple room—a rough-hewn wood floor, a simple twin bed, a small wicker chair. This mental picture had arrived fully formed, which I took as a testament to my imaginative powers; a few years later, on
a visit to the Orsay, I would realize that the image was not even mine—it was Bedroom in Arles, Vincent Van Gogh.)

  It wasn’t only Clive’s actions I attended to. Everything I passed seemed anointed by his presence. Graffiti on a brick wall: Rochelle, marry me?? A man in a dastaar selling incense on a street corner. A fruit stand with a handwritten cardboard sign: BANANAS 4 FOR 1$! The sweet and sour rivulets of liquid eroding the sidewalk in front of a halal butcher. Did he notice these things? If he did, what did they make him think, want, remember? Clive’s world became my evidence—a rush of details, almost unbearably vivid, the landscape infused by a sense of the significance of all things.

  From “Secrets on Faraway Cay,” Dateline, July 12, 1996:

  JANE PAULEY: You worked in security at Indigo Bay.

  HAROLD MOSES: [nods] For seven years. During which time I was employee of the month on four occasions.

  JANE PAULEY: You saw Alison Thomas on the night of her death?

  HAROLD MOSES: I certainly did, Ms. Pauley.

  JANE PAULEY: Tell me about that.

  HAROLD MOSES: [sips coffee] It was eight P.M. I know so because I just return from my toilet break, which I take nightly at seven-forty P.M. precisely. It does take me longer now. [Grins.] I was doing my rounds. By the swimming pool I see the girl dipping she toe in the water.

  JANE PAULEY: Did you say anything to her?

  HAROLD MOSES: [shakes head] I didn’t want to disturb she. She appeared quite peaceful, like she was having some special time to she self. I saw clearly she had a sweet soul.

  JANE PAULEY: What happened next?

  HAROLD MOSES: [shakes head sadly] She walked away, over to the bar. This is the last time I see she. But everybody know after that she went out with those two good-for-nothings. I have a theory about what happened to she, Ms. Pauley. Would you like to hear it?

  JANE PAULEY: Please.

  HAROLD MOSES: I believe it is a crime of passion. That girl was pretty. Oh, she was pretty pretty. I have one more thing I wish to say, Ms. Pauley. I want your viewers to know that I carry it heavy in my heart that for this girl I may be the last kind face of this world.

  Statement to the Press, for Immediate Release, January 12, 1996:

  While on a recent vacation in the Caribbean, I participated in a day trip to an uninhabited island. On this island, as has been widely reported, myself and a companion discovered the body of a young woman who had been missing for several days. Contrary to several grossly misleading recent reports, I had no involvement in the disappearance of Alison Thomas. I have participated in the local investigation to the full extent of my ability. I am not a suspect in this case. Reports suggesting otherwise are an assault on my character. I would like to extend my deepest sympathies to the Thomas family. I ask that my privacy be respected during this time.

  From Tragedy in Paradise: The Untold Story of the Alison Thomas Murder by Craig Sheppard:

  … The frantic hunt for the beautiful teenager continued, transforming the sleepy island with an all-out search that left no stone unturned. Unbeknownst to the police, at this same time, a Haitian man by the name of Siméon Payen was flying from Saint X to Miami, where he owned a palatial beachfront property and was well-known to law enforcement as a key player in La Petite Haïti, a small but notorious Miami cartel. By the time you turn the final page of this book, dear reader, I think you will agree that these two events were anything but a coincidence, and that on a small island, corruption can run deep.…

  From the “Unsolved Mysteries” subreddit, Reddit.com:

  I’m totally new to this sub, so bear with me, but this case is one of my first memories of being totally obsessed with an unsolved mystery and it remains one of my favorites to this day. I’ve read a LOT about it over the years, and I have to say I’ve always questioned the Haitian cartel angle, which first came out in the Sheppard book (his book on Thomas is in my personal opinion one of his weaker efforts, and I’m usually a big fan of his). I mean, doesn’t it seem like a huge stretch that Payen would involve this girl in a run, with the risks that would entail for him? I know a lot of you here subscribe to the Payen theory, but I’ve always believed that the simplest and most elegant solution is usually the right one.

  Stick with me here. Imagine the police know pretty much beyond a doubt it’s Richardson and Hastie. Or it doesn’t even have to be them—maybe it’s some other local, maybe it’s a police officer’s kid. A PR disaster for the island, in other words. So what do they do? They fabricate evidence that these two dudes were actually locked up in jail by 1 a.m. or whenever, and once that’s done, it’s, “Sorry, the timeline doesn’t work and there are no other suspects. Case closed, island open for business.” This theory works on So. Many. Levels. Think about it. I mean, doesn’t it seem just the tiniest bit convenient that the thing that gets those guys off is coming from the police?

  That message board alone had over nine hundred posts. As I continued to search, I found countless other boards on other websites dedicated to Alison. Across the digital underworld, people were still trying their hands at solving her murder. Scrolling through these posts, reading theory after theory, I felt physically sick. There were thousands of them—these dudes (they were almost all men) using Alison’s murder to distract them from their basement-and-weed lives, crafting some loser fantasy that they might be the one to solve it.

  It’s difficult to separate things out. To determine how much of my disgust at these men was genuine, and how much I was drumming it up, seizing upon an easy opportunity to feel disgusted, indignant, violated by anonymous people I would never know or have to confront. These online forums. Craig Sheppard lining his pockets. The memoir that actor’s ex-girlfriend published where she described Alison’s body. Dying for Fun’s absurd version of her death (Apollo! My god…). The whole razzle-dazzle enterprise of the Alison Thomas Economy—did these things actually pain me, did they really touch the heart of my own personal trauma? Yes and no, they did and they didn’t, and this is what made it so hard to parse my own feelings, to separate what I did feel from all the things I could feel. At times, it could be very difficult to distinguish where my authentic pain over my sister’s death ended and where a performative emotionality, a giving over to the drama opened up by Alison, began.

  * * *

  AS MY surveillance spread so, too, did Clive Richardson’s power over my life. Before I began to follow him on his walks, he had been contained by the Little Sweet. It had been possible for me to leave him behind not just physically, but also mentally and emotionally—to go to the gym, for instance, and spend forty minutes on the elliptical feeling inferior to the cellulite-free woman on the machine beside me, and wonder what it must be like to have thighs like that, and remind myself that everybody has problems and surely this woman was no exception, and ponder what they might be, and imagine her cowering on a staircase as a girl, listening to her parents yell and throw things, and then, when she wiped down her machine and our eyes met briefly, to smile at her with great sympathy, and only afterward, as I engaged in some perfunctory stretching on a mat strewn with unnerving hairs, realize that I had not thought of Clive in over an hour. But once I began to follow him, he broke free. His routines became my routines, his patterns my patterns.

  One night, he stopped at a church and went inside. I sat on a bench at a nearby bus stop to wait. He was not inside long, maybe ten minutes, and when he emerged, his face was composed. Whatever he had been praying over, I could discern no trace of it. Another evening, he walked by a bodega with buckets of rot-edged roses and blue daisies out front. As he passed them, he reached out his hand and skimmed his fingertips ever so lightly against the flowers.

  * * *

  ALISON HAD kept a diary. It wasn’t the usual thing, no lock-and-key notebook with KEEP OUT!!! on the cover. It was an audio diary, recorded on one of those cassette players for children with a pink plastic microphone. The player had been mine originally, a birthday gift loaded with parental intentions for the shy child�
�Look how much fun you’ll have singing, Clairey! I never used it and at some point Alison appropriated it for her own purposes. Many nights she retreated to her bedroom and recorded. I think she enjoyed hearing herself talk. I don’t mean she was vain, nothing like that. I used to sit on the floor outside her room, letting her muffled voice wash over me with the distinct sense that on the other side of the closed door something sacred was transpiring—my sister’s soul, bared to the night.

  I knew my parents had the cassettes because when I was eighteen I had asked my mother what happened to them. She told me they were in the box on the top shelf of the hall closet, along with Alison’s dance trophies and yearbooks and jazz shoes. When I asked if my parents had listened to them, my mother’s face tightened. She was going to cry, and I felt at once guilty and angry. Guilty because I had known my question would upset her and had asked it anyway, angry because I was the child and she was the mother and shouldn’t she be making things easier for me, not the other way around? “I started to once,” she said. “But I only listened for a minute or two. It wasn’t right.”

  On an evening in late October, I called my mother; it was just after six P.M. in New York, dark and cold.

  “It’s so good to hear from you, sweetie.” This was what she always said, as if I were doing some extraordinary kindness by calling her. I winced. I pictured her in their sunny kitchen, living a falsely warm, bright existence—didn’t she know it was really night? Didn’t she know it was almost winter?

  “You caught me in the middle of making white gazpacho. I rediscovered the recipe in this ancient cookbook I bought after college. Very woo-woo.” She laughed self-deprecatingly. “You marinate cucumbers, green grapes, bread, and almonds in salt and let it sit a few hours. Then you puree it and whisk in some yogurt. Isn’t that a neat technique?”

  My mother could always be counted on to prattle about something we both knew neither of us cared about—the plot of a movie she’d seen with my father, a charity auction she had attended and the offerings donated by various local businesses, a nifty trick she’d learned for chopping onions without crying. (She would send me the YouTube.) My mother was not a superficial woman. She was, in fact, in possession of a piercing intelligence, but for some maddening reason she seemed determined to keep this a secret. She’d been a literature major in college. According to family lore, she was solely responsible for getting our father through his own college coursework. (“Your mother’s so smart she tricked me into being the breadwinner,” he was fond of saying.) On our bookshelves at home, dispersed among our father’s legal procedurals and thick biographies of great American leaders, were my mother’s volumes of poetry and the slender, peculiar novels of a female Brazilian writer with whom she was enamored. On Saturday mornings when I was a child, as our family life went on noisily around her, my mother would sit on the couch in the living room with her feet curled beneath her and read as if she were alone in a quiet room, which, in her mind, I think she was. But she never spoke to us about the things she read, and when she set down the book she became our mother again, concerned with locating shin guards and checking worksheets, a woman so ordinary and unglamorous that I remember Alison once theorizing to me that she and Aunt Caroline couldn’t possibly be blood sisters—one of them must have been switched at birth, or the product of an illicit affair. I think Alison and I both grew up feeling that our mother kept the best of herself to herself, that she was guarding something, protecting something, from us. So, no, my mother was not a naturally superficial woman; superficiality was a thing she had chosen, and after Alison’s death she chose it more and more. I think she was terribly lonely in Pasadena, despite the busy social life she maintained there; it was an existential loneliness that had everything to do with Alison and that therefore could not be cured. With her bland chatter, I think she was trying to talk her way out of the loneliness, to paper over all the unspoken things, but it never worked, it was all still there, and so she went on talking, and hoping, and talking.