Saint X

by Alexis Schaitkin

  He walked down the street and disappeared into the falling snow.

  * * *

  FOR WEEKS after that I circled the Little Sweet hoping to find him. Maybe we could reconcile. Maybe it wasn’t too late. But he never came back.

  One night when I was walking past, Vincia spotted me. She left her post behind the counter and came outside.

  “He’s gone,” she said.

  “Gone?”

  She nodded. I expected her to be angry. Instead her expression was sharp with loss. It occurred to me that I might have misapprehended her prickliness toward me; maybe Vincia had harbored her own ideas about two lonely people in this city who might have found happiness together. “I heard he left in the middle of the night.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “As if I would tell you if I knew!” She turned and marched quickly back inside.

  I suppose that in the days before he confronted me, Clive must have been settling his affairs in New York and making plans for wherever he was heading to begin again once more. I stopped returning to the Little Sweet after that. It was as Clive had said: I’d wanted the truth and now I had it, as much of it as I would ever have. It was enough, wasn’t it? There are many versions of the Alison Thomas story and I suspect there always will be. The police have theirs. So do the interweb conspiracy theorists and Dying for Fun. Now I had my own. One I could accept. One I could, perhaps, move on from.

  * * *

  ALISON WAKES from her stupor on the cliffs to the sounds of lovemaking. She turns and sees them, these men for whom she has performed her spectacular self all week.

  The fuck you staring at, little girl?

  Suddenly she feels very young and very foolish. How impressed she had been with herself! How pleased their approval had made her and how convinced she was of her appeal to them. How clearly she had seen it: she would get their groans of pleasure, their black skin against her white skin, the night a souvenir to remind her who she has the capacity to be. How humiliated she is to realize this night isn’t about her and it never was, to see Edwin and Clive together beneath the stars and to know with corrosive, painful clarity that there is not a thing in her own life as true as this moment between them.

  She gathers herself up and she runs, sandals in her hands, through the scrub. When at last she breaks through to Mayfair Road, she continues to run along the ditch on the road’s shoulder, not caring how the rocks cut her feet, wanting it, even. Up ahead, she sees the lights of Indigo Bay. The illuminated fountains and the perfect lines of palms. She smells the floral air, feels the road turn smooth and loving beneath her feet. And then?

  Some months after my last night with Clive Richardson, a package arrived from Philadelphia, a slender bubble mailer addressed to Claire Thomas.

  I’m sorry it’s taken me such a ridiculously long time to send this to you. I hope it’s helpful. Sending you all my best.

  Inside was a color copy of a poster for the Princeton Modern Dance Ensemble’s “Winter Extravaganza.” Polaroids from parties. Messages scrawled on scraps of notebook paper: “12:15, just left for dining hall. C u there?” “Free ice cream at student center tonight. Let’s do this!” A postcard. On the front, a consummate sunset, lilac infinity over a tropical sea. On the back:

  Nika Nika,

  Greetings from paradise! Haha, not exactly. Hope your parents aren’t driving you as crazy as mine are. On the bright side, I met the cutest boy. Guess we’ll see!

  Love ya,

  A

  Where does she turn after everything with Clive and Edwin falls apart? Isn’t it obvious? She finds him at the bar doing tequila shots as “Redemption Song” is piped in over the speakers, or sipping a Red Stripe on a lounge chair by the pool, or participating in a game of beer pong on the Ping-Pong table off the lobby, his enthusiasm changing to cool boredom the instant he spots her. Better than nothing, she tells herself. Even before it’s over she knows it isn’t enough, not even close. It is worse than nothing. It is all wrong. This boy whose baby-blue eyes match his baby-blue polo shirt match her baby-blue manicure. It only makes her feel more acutely the exact problem of her life: No matter what she does, no matter how she tries, she cannot get out beyond herself. She can only ever be Alison.

  But suppose you told her she could have a different life, swap out hers for one she’d deem more acceptable as an offering to this beautiful, brutal world? Though it would be pretty to think she’d say yes, she knows what she would really do: She would snatch up her cute dresses, her A’s, her orthodontia-sleeked teeth, the many dappled lawns of her life … the gothic dormitory washed in eventide bells, flip-flops in autumn, fresh powder on the mountain. She would take it all and she would run. There it is, her most shameful secret: She loves her life. Oh, how she loves it.

  It is very late now, and she is desperate for something, anything, with which to salvage this night, this vacation that has gone so awry from her carefully cultivated plans. It’s then that she looks out into the water and sees Faraway, a black silhouette etched against the sky. She hears the soft wash of waves. She walks across the beach to the water’s edge. She unties her halter top, unzips her skirt, shimmies out of her panties, and lets them fall to the sand at her feet. She considers moving her clothes higher up the beach in case the tide should rise and carry them away. Instead, she leaves them. Let the sea do what it will. What a story it would be, what a thing to be able to remember. She steps into the water.

  Maybe, as she strokes through the sea to the cay, she believes she is being lured there by a black-haired woman with hooves for feet who has chosen her, and into whose wildness she can finally lose this self she loves and hates in equal measure. Or maybe she does not believe any of that. Maybe her strokes are powered by a desire she can’t name, a need going unmet and unmet and unmet. Maybe she simply wants to give herself her wildest wild night; proof, to some older, duller version of herself, that she was young once and didn’t squander it.

  She follows the starlit path inland, her feet sensing their way over roots and rocks. In the darkness, the spray cast off by the waterfall is a vaporous fog, soft as a caress on her skin. Maybe she slips on the moss-slicked rocks close to the water and falls in. Maybe she dives, the water appearing deeper than it really is in the dark, and hits her head. This version, too, has its blank spaces. Things I’ll never be able to know. These are the secret moments. Hers alone.

  * * *

  BUT FIRST …

  In the dead of night, a little girl opens her eyes. As she surfaces from dreams, she smells the tang of blood. She has been scratching in her sleep. Then she hears rustling. She calls her sister’s name and her sister comes to her.

  “Where were you?” she asks.

  “Shhh.”

  Her sister crawls into bed with her and wraps her arms around her. When the little girl is on the edge of sleep, her sister kisses her on the back of the neck and slips out of the bed.

  “Where’re you going?” the little girl mumbles.

  “Far away.”

  “But—”

  “Shh. Don’t tell.” She pads across the room, opens the door, and is gone.

  The little girl doesn’t tell. Not when her parents ask. Not when the police question her. At first she doesn’t tell because it’s a secret, and she is good at keeping secrets. She is patient. Later, when her sister has been missing too long, she doesn’t tell because she is scared she did something wrong by not telling and everyone will be angry with her. Later still, when they tell her that her sister is dead, she knows she will keep the secret forever, because it is the last thing she has of her sister and she wants to keep it for herself. She keeps it so long, unspoken, that it becomes difficult to believe it happened at all.

  Don’t go.

  If she had said this, maybe her sister would have listened. Her sister would have rubbed aloe over her itchy skin, and in the morning she would have woken to her sister’s warm body beside her in bed.

  Feeling better? her sister would ask.
<
br />   Don’t go. That was all she had to say. But what kind of thing is that to know, really? Because to have said those words, she would have had to be a different person altogether. So, in the end, what is the tragedy of her life if not being, again and again, the person she is?

  “It will feel good.”

  I actually said that to her. Like I knew better than she did. Like she was under some naïve misapprehension that sex might be unpleasant and here, let me clear it up for you. She had found me at the bar and we had gone out to the beach. We were alone, it was late, and we were pretty drunk. We were doing what, for lack of a better term, I’ll call making out. She was taking the lead and I was just happy to be taken along for the ride. At Yale, I was not exactly a Casanova or a Vronsky. I was a German major in the orchestra; I played the cello, for Christ’s sake—these are not cool things now and they were not cool things then. But sometimes when you go someplace where people don’t know you, they get an impression of you that’s different from who you are in your regular life. I remember thinking that this girl was way out of my league, but lucky me, she hadn’t figured that out yet. I’m not talking about the night she died. This was before, on her first night at Indigo Bay.

  I wouldn’t call her aggressive, but she was forward. There was no coyness to what was happening between us, no game being played. When I put my hand on her thigh and she pulled away from me I was genuinely confused. I thought we’d both been pretty clear where this was leading and, like I said, she was the one doing the leading. I was moving my hand up beneath her skirt, and she stopped me. She said she should go. She looked nervous, which threw me because until then she had seemed so confident. That’s when I said it. I stroked her hair and said, “Are you sure? It will feel good.” Then—Christ, this is embarrassing—but I sort of, not sort of, I did, I nudged her hand toward the crotch of my shorts, toward my boner, if you want to call it that. I hate the language we have for this stuff: boner, horny, making out, feeling up, eating out. It’s so crass and graceless. Hanna teases me; she calls me a prude because I can’t say these words out loud. I’m not a prude. But these words make me feel like I’m an animal.

  After I said that, I was actually relieved when she didn’t give in to me, when she said good night and left. Turns out all I really wanted was to go back to my room and jerk off and pass out. But there’s this script, a script all boys know, and I didn’t write it and I didn’t even really want to say it, but there we were, and it’s not like I was some player with a stockpile of great lines, so that’s what I said. It scared her. I scared her.

  For months after she died, I was terrified something would surface and my life would be destroyed. When everyone thought those men raped and killed her and I knew they didn’t, I felt terrible. But what could I do? When the police came to question me, it wasn’t even a conscious choice—I simply told them she’d been doing drugs and who gave them to her. When I told them I saw her early on the night she disappeared, and only briefly, and they asked if I was sure I didn’t see her again, I nodded my head and said, “Yes, I’m positive,” so decisively I almost believed it. It was not a choice, but something I knew I must do. To tell the truth, to tell them she had been with me after those men had already been put in the drunk tank, would have been unthinkable, tragic, foolish. It would have yanked me into this horrible mess, and for what? My life wasn’t meant to be derailed by one night on vacation.

  It was late, and I was making my way back to my room from the bar, scuffing my Top-Siders against the pool deck, when I saw her. Her hair was a mess. Her mascara was smudged around her eyes.

  “I promised, didn’t I?” she said. She smiled that sly smile that had teased me all week. Something was different, though. She was agitated, I might even say frantic. I was pretty sure she’d been crying. She grabbed my hand and I let her lead me to one of the beach cabanas. She wasted no time. She pulled off her top, her skirt, and her panties with a pragmatism that both chilled and aroused me. She pointed at my khakis with her chin. I unbuttoned them.

  It was unlike any sex in my admittedly slender library of experience. She pinned my arms above my head and held my wrists so hard they still ached the next day when the police questioned me. (There were faint bruises there, which they would have found if they’d looked.) Then I moved on top of her. She placed my hands around her neck. At first I jerked them away, but she grabbed them and wrapped them around again. I squeezed. She closed her eyes and smiled faintly, like I wasn’t even there. So I squeezed harder, and her eyes popped open. I’ll never forget it. The violence she unearthed so easily in me, like she knew it was right beneath the surface.

  It was about something other than pleasure for her. Something was wrong but I didn’t know what and I didn’t ask. When I remember it, my dick goes limp, but I was twenty years old—capable of enjoying all kinds of misguided sex. When it was over, she dressed and ran off so quickly I was still dribbling cum into the sand when I lost sight of her.

  At first I felt horribly guilty. Maybe if I’d asked her what was wrong, or if I’d done something different, then … I played that game over and over until it nearly drove me crazy. Back at Yale, I paid penance in all kinds of ways. I tutored a low-income New Haven kid. I called my parents more. For a brief period during my senior year, I seriously entertained joining the Peace Corps. But with time, I grew comfortable in my life again.

  I’ve never thought of myself as a secretive person, but I am practical, and practically you can’t tell this story, and I never have. I lead a good life. It is not as grand as the life I assumed would be mine when I was young—I haven’t changed the world with my goodness or brilliance or bravery. I haven’t made a giant splash with my existence, but I’m well respected in my field. I’m an architect. Hanna and I own a boutique firm together. She’s Dutch. We met during a summer studio in Budapest in graduate school. I love her frankness, which can come off as arrogance to those who don’t know her because she is beautiful, tall and slender and erect. I love the space between us, the gap our different native tongues and cultures opens, and the privacy this affords.

  I read somewhere—okay, not somewhere, I saw it on this fairly lowbrow pop-psychology website—that each of our lives is anchored to a single moment, whether disturbing or traumatic or euphoric or inscrutable, from which we never move on, and that the age at which this moment occurs is our Eternal Age. This strikes me as true. Hanna’s Eternal Age, for instance, is twenty-eight, when she gave birth to our son. But mine isn’t thirty-two, my own age when he was born. My moment came years before I met my wife, and maybe that explains the distance between us: I shared her moment with her, while she doesn’t even know mine exists. My eternal age is twenty. I see him, this lanky kid I was, with a mop of unruly hair, so erudite and charmingly, forgivably assured, and I’m a bit in awe of him, to be honest.

  “It will feel good.” Sometimes I wonder whether this thing I said, this juvenile horndog pressure I put on her at the beginning of the week, is to blame in some small way, like it set her on a course. Then I scold myself. I tell myself that it’s vanity, thinking something I said was powerful enough to do all that. I tell myself that just because I didn’t behave perfectly doesn’t make me responsible. I remind myself, finally, that I barely knew her. Still, sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and the darkness is full of her.

  REMEMBER THIS

  I ONCE READ THAT EVOLUTION has predisposed us to see ghosts and spirits, to find signs and omens in the ordinary: a sudden swell of wind, answers revealed in dreams. This impulse toward the mystical has its basis, so I read, in neurology. Our brains hunger for order. The early man who could make sense of the patterns of deer, the migration of birds, the movement of clouds, lived. From the beginning, our survival has hinged on our ability to look at the miscellany of the world, to sift through its deluge of details, and find the story. Stories, this article claimed, are the essence of human endurance.

  But on the radio last week another expert, a neuropsychologist, explain
ed it differently. Stories, this woman said, are our Achilles’ heel. Our desperation for them leads us to live in a perpetual state of delusion. Early man, at the mercy of animals, weather, each other, invented Artemis, Ra, Vishnu. Our hunger for stories leads us to mistake a distracted spouse for an unfaithful spouse, an earthquake for divine punishment. A death for a murder.

  Aren’t they both right? Stories lead us to the truth and they lead us astray, and how are we to know the difference?

  * * *

  SLOWLY, THE city began to thaw. The air turned wet and clean. Trees unfurled vivid newborn leaves. The man in the NASCAR hat sat on the front steps with a fluffy white puppy beside him.

  “Isabella,” he told me with a grin.

  I took Jackie out to brunch to apologize for my recent behavior. She forgave me quickly, and over mimosas and eggs Benedict she updated me on her drama of the week.

  My parents flew out for a visit. We did the things we always did when they came to New York—the Met, brunch at Sarabeth’s, a show. One afternoon my father had plans with an old college friend, and my mother and I found ourselves in Central Park. Lines of girls in powder-blue pleated jumpers and sneakers followed teachers onto the park’s muddy fields. The last gray snowbanks were almost gone, and the melt from them darkened the footpaths. We bought ice-cream bars. (“Naughty us,” my mother said with a conspiratorial smile.) We sat on a bench to eat them. We talked about the television show everybody was watching that spring. About the vacation my parents had planned for October, a two-week river tour, Basel to Barcelona. Then we fell into the uncomfortable silence of a mother and daughter who know that mothers and daughters ought to be able to speak to one another endlessly.