Saint X

by Alexis Schaitkin

  On the morning of the Grand Parade, we had found ourselves deep in the mud of this same fight once again. She had come into the parlor to find me scratching at my scalp. She grabbed my elbow.

  “Stop that. Where are your manners?”

  “‘You’re a minister’s daughter,’” I mimicked. I wrenched my arm free and went right back to sliding my fingernails beneath the irresistible dried skin on my scalp.

  “Don’t you mock me.”

  “And you’re a minister’s wife. Must be some other lady I saw in we house yesterday itching she pum pum.”

  “It’s a good thing your father’s dead. How ashamed he would be to hear you speak this way to your mum!”

  How many times had she said this to me? A dozen? A thousand? But this time the anger I felt was different, feral and hopeless, sharp as teeth.

  “You never tell me again whose daughter I be!” I shouted. “The only person I see I’m the daughter of is you. A sket like everybody say!”

  I screamed so loudly my throat would be raw later that day, when I told Clive Richardson he could walk me home. I held my mother’s gaze and sucked air through my teeth. I swear the whites of her eyes turned black.

  Her hands fell to her sides. “You think I’m nothing but your mum,” she whispered. “But someday you’ll see.” Then she turned and walked slowly to her bedroom at the back of the house and pulled the stained curtain across the doorway.

  Oh, what a fine actress, my mum, playing the victim of my cruelty. Where did I learn how to lash with words if not from her?

  I changed into the shortest dress I owned. I snatched my purse and slammed the front door behind me. At the end of the parade, when Clive Richardson stumbled up to me and mumbled his invitation, it was like God or fate or whatever thing I lacked the time or proclivity to wonder about then was handing it to me, just giving it to me for free: a chance to take my life into my own hands and spoil it before it could disappoint me; to break my mum’s heart and free myself from our suffocating life together; to prove I was every bit my mother’s daughter. Though in the end, the cost would be more than I could have imagined.

  THE SECRET CITY

  IN MID-DECEMBER, a food deliveryman on a bicycle turned the corner by my apartment too sharply and mowed down pitiful Jefe mid-elimination. I was at the other end of the block when it happened, returning home from work. I did not see bike and pup collide, but I heard Jefe’s high-pitched yelp and witnessed the aftermath: The man in the NASCAR hat gathering Jefe in his arms like a baby. The deliveryman putting his hands up defensively and repeating, “Sorry,” in heavily accented English as the old man berated him in Spanish and passersby craned their heads to watch, sometimes pausing as if they might intervene before averting their gaze and hurrying along. The deliveryman backed slowly away and got on his bike (plastic bags of takeout still hanging from the handlebars). He rode quickly around the corner and out of sight.

  The old man carried Jefe to the front stairs, sat on the lowest step, and rocked him. I’m not sure whether the dog was still alive or whether he’d already departed this mortal coil. As I approached them, I thought I ought to say something, but when I reached the steps it seemed that to intrude in their final moments together would be obscene, so instead I walked quietly past them up the stairs.

  As I disappeared into the vestibule, I heard the man whisper, “Nos vemos pronto, viejito.”

  When I was underground in my apartment, it occurred to me that now there was not a single soul in the building whose name I knew. So began winter.

  An entire season had passed since I found Clive Richardson. I had been conversing with him for several weeks, and an ironic reversal had transpired. In the beginning, our proximity had terrified me. Now it was just the opposite. When I was away from him I became unnerved, agitated, itchy, feelings that festered until I was sitting across from him again, our trays of stew and beer before us. I’d catch myself prolonging our evenings despite being aware that he was ready to leave, because once he was out of sight the dread would set in all over again, and I would face the long night hours alone with it.

  When I was not with him, I was thinking of him. On the surface, I could be conversing with my mother on the phone about which produce it was most important to purchase organic (blueberries: essential; bananas: not), or racing past the travertine-and-glass grid of the Grace Building in the sleet on my way to work, or eating a lunch of anesthetized midtown falafel with my fellow bright young coworkers, and I might pull all of this off convincingly, but really I was with Clive, imagining hypothetical interactions we might have that would lead to his confession. I imagined, for instance, that there might be a fire at the Little Sweet, and that after making our escape I would dash back into the building to rescue Vincia; afterward, as I breathed through an oxygen mask in the back of an ambulance, Clive would be so stricken by my self-sacrifice and my goodness, and by his own shame, that he would prostrate himself at my feet and tell me everything. Another scenario found us at the Heidelberg on the Upper East Side, washing down käsespätzle and sauerbraten with steins of Dunkel. I would remark that the saying about the impossibility of stepping into the same river twice could be applied just as aptly to New York, a place as transient as it was eternal, the Germans of old Yorkville disappearing into the sediment and making way for new inlets and curvatures—Little Brazil, the Nepalese of Jackson Heights. This comment would strike Clive as so utterly insightful that he would decide that he had finally found a person worthy of being entrusted with his secret.

  During this same interval, winter took firm hold of the city. It was the coldest winter anyone could remember, global warming be damned. Icebreakers turned the Hudson to shards. At crosswalks, pedestrians maneuvered around moats of frigid, gravy-colored slurry. The subway trains smelled of the particular sweat of overheated young financiers in puffer coats. That winter in New York was a period of collectively borne brutality, the sort during which it is possible for a passing glance between strangers on the sidewalk to contain an entire conversation about the awfulness of the season. Yet I had never felt more distant from my fellow urban denizens. As December wore on, I came to feel as if a pane of glass had slid between me and the rest of the world, a division so impregnable that when I collided with a man coming out of my office building one evening, I was so bewildered that I made my way to the subway at a near-gallop.

  * * *

  I SAID earlier that in general Clive did not speak about his life before New York and, in general, that was true. But there were a few exceptions to this rule, and I’d like to set those out here, because I can see now that they told me everything I needed to know, though I didn’t understand this then. There were small things, mentioned in passing: I learned that Clive had worn a pink and maroon school uniform. I learned that he was raised by his grandmother, though he did not say what had become of his mother and father. I learned that when Ghostbusters came to the island’s only movie hall, he snuck in at three forty-five every afternoon, just in time to watch the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man stomp through Columbus Circle (though he didn’t know it was Columbus Circle then—New York, he said, had seemed to him a blur of traffic, graffiti, and crazy characters, an impression that remained unchallenged until he touched down in the city himself over a decade later).

  Clive shared these stories with me in his reserved way. He chose his words carefully, set each scene with a minimum of detail. Sometimes he would begin to tell me something, then shake his head and stop. “Never mind,” he’d say. “It’s boring.” I suspect he didn’t think I would understand, and maybe I wouldn’t have. Often, he paused for long stretches, during which I supposed he was reliving unspoken aspects of the stories privately, and I understood that these gaps were where it all resided, that my challenge was to parse these omissions, to decipher the negative spaces carved out by his stories.

  One evening, after I told him a story about the late-night joyriding of my youth (a story lifted from the freeways of Southern California and transpos
ed onto the streets of Starlight, Indiana, which were surrounded, in my telling, by endless fields of corn), Clive chewed his lip and said, “My friends and I used to take a boat out and party on beaches all around the island. Drink a bit, smoke a bit. I remember one night, we went to this cay called Faraway…” He paused. Smiled. “I used to know how to have a pretty good time.”

  He uttered the name of that place as if it were nothing at all.

  In one of Ian Mann’s novels, the private investigator explains to the parents of a victim that most murderers return to the scene of their crime, and this is how a surprising number are caught. They can’t help it, the investigator explains. The place tugs at them and they can’t resist. Was this what Clive was doing? Was saying the name of that place to me a way of returning to the scene? Did he reap some perverse pleasure from conjuring it indifferently, as if it were nothing more than the site of some fun party from his youth? For the first time in a long time, I felt afraid.

  “That must have been super-fun,” I said, forcing a smile.

  “Super-fun,” he repeated, laughing. “You’ve no idea.”

  * * *

  THE GALLEYS of The Girl from Pendeen arrived. On the cover, a woman in a flowing white dress strode barefoot along a cliffside path, her hair in a long, windswept braid down her back. It was my job to compile a list of twenty or so authors at least as well known as Astrid, track down their addresses, and mail them copies for endorsement. My boss had also acquired a debut novel—a thriller set on a commune in the New Mexico desert—which we had agreed a few months earlier I would edit. When the manuscript came in, just before the Christmas holiday, she called me into her office. The manuscript sat on her desk, a stack of paper six inches high. She drummed the stack with her fingertips. “I wanted to be sure you feel up to this?”

  “Absolutely!” I said too loudly.

  “It’s just—you’re behind on things, Emily. The backlog is piling up. You seem … Is everything okay?”

  “Everything’s great! I’m super-sorry I’ve gotten behind, things have been a little crazy, but I promise I’m going to catch up.”

  “Okay, then,” she said with a strained smile. She nudged the pile toward me and I carried it back to my cubicle. I opened my locker and placed the manuscript on the bottom, next to an umbrella and a growing accumulation of Tupperware that needed to be washed and taken home. I piled the early copies of The Girl from Pendeen on top of the manuscript and closed the locker door.

  * * *

  I ALWAYS went to Pasadena for Christmas, but this year I could not tear myself away from New York. I told my parents the only lie I could think of that was big enough to justify missing the holiday, but which would not cause them to book the first flight out to New York. I said I’d met someone, and we had decided to spend the holiday together in the city. Oh, my parents were so happy! Yes, I absolutely must stay in New York! We should enjoy Christmas just the two of us! How giddy they became, how altogether unable to conceal the things they hoped for: That I would marry, and give them grandchildren, so that they might enjoy the sweet pastures of old age. After all, I was their only hope. Their enthusiasm made it utterly transparent that they feared they would be let down by me, that they worried I would remain alone. I was furious with them, and yet my heart broke for them, for the ordinary happiness they still hoped would be theirs.

  “Tell us about this guy,” my father said.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Throw us a bone, Em, what’s he like?”

  “I guess he’s a lot like me.”

  I ate a hefty cancellation fee on my flight and bought a knee-high artificial tree, which only made my apartment even more dismal. Two days before Christmas, a package arrived—panettone and peppermint bark from Williams-Sonoma.

  For you and your “special friend.”

  With love, mom.

  * * *

  CHRISTMAS IN New York: tinsel snowflakes on lampposts, holiday markets popping up like toadstools, infinite off-key renditions of “Silver Bells” on subway platforms—saxophone, mariachi, marimba. On Christmas Eve, I went to the newly opened Whole Foods in Gowanus and purchased the fixings for a Christmas dinner for one: a single filet mignon, a potato, sprigs of rosemary, a handful of haricots verts. A ruse, a performance for my own audience—I had no intention of staying home. I halfheartedly snapped the ends off a few beans, then grabbed my coat and headed out.

  The Little Sweet was open, though nearly empty. Vincia stood behind the steam table as usual and a few men hunched over their regular tables. In the corner by the potted palm, Clive sat reading the Daily News.

  I’d thought that seeing I had nowhere to be on Christmas might soften Vincia to me, but I was mistaken. (You do have somewhere to be, you just chose not to go, I scolded myself, but I believed completely in my own sorry aloneness.) She took my money with the same cordial displeasure as always. Though I had been hoping for a reprieve from her surliness, I found myself grateful not to receive it. I took my tray, nodded my thanks, and made my way across the restaurant to Clive’s table.

  “You, too?” I asked.

  “Afraid so.”

  We ate in quiet fellowship. When Clive finished his Carib, he bought two more, one for each of us. We smiled and bounced our heads when “Feliz Navidad” came on the radio, belched softly as we drank our beer. It grew late. Across the street, eerily quiet on this night, a man pulled the grate down over the storefront of the grocery. One by one, the other patrons departed the Little Sweet, until Clive and I were the only ones who remained. When Vincia began wiping down the steam table, Clive looked at me hesitantly. “Would you care to walk?”

  We stopped at a bodega to buy tallboys of Bud Light.

  “A toast!” I declared, raising my can with a wry smile.

  “Happy bloody Christmas,” Clive said.

  We tapped our cans together and drank.

  We walked without speaking, choosing our route by silent accord. Light seeped onto the street from every window: families and trees and carols sung in warm rooms. It was on that Christmas Eve walk I finally understood that I had begun to care for Clive Richardson. I don’t mean that I had become any less suspicious. When I forced myself to imagine what he might have done, my blood ran cold. Yet when I did not force myself to imagine it, I was able to believe the lie that Clive was just a taxi driver with whom I’d struck up one of those unlikely urban friendships you hear stories about. (A hair colorist officiating at the wedding of a client who has become a dear friend. A manicurist and an Upper East Side mom brought together by a passion for mah-jongg.) A few months earlier, I had to exert tremendous mental energy to convince myself that the man before me was not the same man Alison had known, simply to bear being near him. Now that same process was effortless—the separation of one man into two was total, complete.

  As we walked, it began to snow. The light from the streetlamps caught the falling snow in big, soft halos.

  “Beautiful,” I said.

  He shrugged.

  “But not home, right?”

  He didn’t respond.

  “Why don’t you go back? I can tell you miss it.”

  Clive’s face tightened. “It’s for the best.”

  “But not even once? Not even to see your son?”

  He shook his head.

  “You have secrets.”

  He stopped walking. “Pardon?”

  I took his hands in mine. “It’s okay. I just mean, you have your secrets and I have mine. That’s why I know I can trust you. Because you understand what it’s like.” He started to protest, but I continued. “You don’t have to tell me I’m wrong. We don’t have to say anything about it. Not unless we want to.”

  * * *

  ONE NIGHT I dreamed I was riding with Clive in his taxi. We were in New York, but it didn’t look like New York. It looked like Saint X. We drove down sandy streets lined with palm trees, past fish-fry stands and pink motels; I understood that this was the secret city, a submerged
place that existed beneath the city where harried workers and dithering tourists cluttered the sidewalks—if I listened, I could hear the shuffle of their footfalls filtering down from some distant, forgettable world high above. On a long straight stretch of road, we came upon a girl crossing the street. It was Alison, though in the dream this meant something different—my heart did not leap to see her, she had not been dead and was not now alive; she was simply a girl taking her sweet time in the middle of the road. Clive honked. She idled. He explained to me that this was always happening, that it was one of the primary aggravations of his job, these girls in the road. He honked again, but Alison was not the least bit concerned, and I started getting annoyed. I shouted, “Move! Move!” Clive honked and honked, and as I surfaced from sleep I realized that the honking was my apartment buzzer. It was eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning.

  “Who is it?” I asked groggily.

  “Emily, thank god. It’s me. Please, please let me in.”

  Jackie. I looked around my apartment—it was a disaster, an easy visual symbol Jackie would be eager to latch on to, physical disorder as a sign of emotional disorder, and so on. “Wait there. I’ll come up.”

  I threw on some clothes and met her at the vestibule, where she at once threw her arms around me.

  My body went rigid. “What are you doing here?”

  “Don’t you know I would never, ever forget? I’m not just going to leave you alone today of all days, even if you have been a totally awful friend lately. You and I are going to a barre class that starts in twenty minutes.”