Saint X (ARC)

by Alexis Schaitkin

  I knew what I had to do.

  IT WAS an evening of brewing winds, the Brooklyn night an inimitable hazel. I arrived at my station across from the Little Sweet earlier than usual and pretended to examine the shelves in the grocery as I waited for Clive. At the usual time, I saw him coming up the sidewalk. A few moments after he entered the Little Sweet, I crossed the street. When I reached the entrance, I hesitated. Then I opened the door and stepped inside.

  My nights following Clive had not prepared me for this proximity. I took my place behind him in line, inches away from him. I could smell his aftershave. I could see where the cuffs of his windbreaker were worn thin. His hands—fingertips drumming lightly against his pant leg as he waited his turn. I couldn’t do this. I was about to turn and run out the door when I heard a voice, clear as anything, in my mind. Get ahold of yourself, Clairey. It’s like this: He is just some dude who found your phone a few weeks ago and you are just some girl who digs authentic ethnic food and you’re just going to get to know each other. I stayed where I was. I forced myself to stare at his hands until I was able to convince myself that they were not his hands, not the hands, and as I did this, I felt my terror subside. In the coming months, I would play this game over and over. I split Clive Richardson in two: there was the man with whom Alison had spent the last night of her life on Saint X and there was this man in this restaurant in Brooklyn, and they were not the same.

  When he looked up, I smiled at him politely and vaguely, then pretended to do a double-take, as if I’d just recognized him.

  “Clive, right?”

  “Yes…”

  “Emily,” I said. “You found my phone last month?”

  He exhaled. “That’s right. Nice to see you again.” He squinted at me, and I could feel the question in his gaze: what was I doing here?

  Come on, Clairey. You know the words.

  “After I met you here I looked this place up on Yelp and saw the rave reviews. I figured I’d better come back and try it.”

  I was surprised by how convincingly this explanation came out. Who was to say I wasn’t the sort of girl always on the lookout for the city’s best arepas, curry, dim sum? Maybe I should have been alarmed by my facility for lies, by the ease with which I spun myself into someone else, but I wasn’t. Alison beamed. Well done, Clairey.

  “Pepper pot and Carib, my dear?” the woman behind the counter asked Clive when he reached the front of the line. She was short and heavyset, and her natural hair was close-cut.

  “Yes, Miss Vincia,” Clive said.

  “Pepper pot and Carib, pepper pot and Carib,” the woman clucked as she ladled crimson stew onto a plastic plate. “And who do you have with you tonight?” she asked, her gaze hardening as it shifted to me.

  “Oh, we’re not—” Clive began.

  “I’m Emily.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “And what would you like, Emily?”

  I looked up at the illuminated menu. I wanted to pick something quickly and confidently, but with the exception of jerk chicken, the items were mysterious to me, and I was determined not to order jerk chicken, which I was certain would mark me as a rube. Buss-up-shut. Roast bake. Souse. Aloo pie. Accra. As I scanned the menu, I could feel my face heating up and Vincia’s eyes on me, and sensed (or perhaps imagined) her annoyance. Oxtails dinner. Doubles. Festivals. Sea moss. Peanut punch. “I guess I’d better trust the expert,” I said finally, smiling at Clive. “I’ll have a pepper pot and Carib, too, please.”

  Vincia filled another plate, and Clive and I slid our trays down the counter side by side to the register.

  “My treat,” I said when Clive pulled out his wallet.

  He looked at me uncertainly.

  “Please? You’d be doing me a favor. I’ve been feeling totally guilty you wouldn’t accept any reward.” I smiled my best silly-me smile.

  “Okay,” he relented. “That’s very kind of you. Thank you.”

  After I paid for our meals, Clive lifted his tray from the counter and looked at me. He hesitated. “Won’t you join me?”

  By paying for his meal I had hoped to create in him a sense of obligation, and it had happened just as I expected.

  “Oh, I don’t want to disturb you,” I said, looking down shyly at the floor.

  “Please. I insist.” He said this without conviction. He didn’t want me to sit with him. That much was clear.

  I smiled. “Okay, then. Thank you.”

  I recognized this turn as absolutely crucial. Because now, if Clive ever began to wonder about Emily, and why she was so interested in him, he would remember that he was the one who had insisted that she join him in the first place. She hadn’t even wanted to—had tried, at first, to refuse.

  He gestured to the table beside the potted palm tree, and I took my seat across from him. He wiped the table clean of straw wrappers and grains of rice. The table was covered in a yellow oilcloth and adorned with a vase of artificial carnations. A mural on the wall depicted a party on a tropical beach. On the television mounted on the wall, a game show was on—people in costumes competed to win bedroom sets and Jacuzzis.

  “You must come here often,” I said.

  He looked alarmed. “Why would you say that?”

  “I mean, because she knew your order by heart.”

  He shook his head and chuckled at himself. “Right. Of course. Well, it’s a good place to pass the time.” He picked up his fork and began to eat, and I did the same.

  I swooned when I took my first bite. “Mmm. This is amazing.” In truth I was too full of adrenaline to notice the taste. My reaction was a performance, and I could feel the falseness of it—the theatrical Mmmm, the big eyes.

  “Vincia’s food is the best in the borough.” His manner, too, was performative. He was saying what he thought he ought to say to me.

  What now? Keep it simple, stupid.

  “So are you from the Caribbean?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “Cool. Which island?”

  He said the name and I squinted as if it were unfamiliar to me.

  “It’s small,” he said hurriedly. “Most people here don’t know it.”

  “How long have you been in the U.S.?”

  “Seventeen years.”

  He’d left less than a year after Alison’s death.

  “So what made you decide to leave home?”

  He rubbed his hand back and forth against his cheek. Guiltily, or merely uncomfortably?

  “It became difficult to find work.” He bent his head toward his plate, scooped a forkful of crimson stew neatly into his mouth, and chewed silently, mouth closed. Was there something off about these tidy habits? An attempt to distract, or to mask, or to convince oneself of one’s own tidiness of character? I wanted to ask him why it had become difficult to find work and see what he would say, but I was wary of pressing him.

  “You miss it?” I asked instead.

  For a moment, a distant look came into his eyes. I imagined that in his mind he was back—the crystalline water, the sandy roads, a small white house that had once been his.

  “You get used to things.”

  “Do you visit often?”

  “Never.” He said this quietly and definitively. He yawned.

  “Long day?”

  “My partner left the car with a flat. I went to a garage on Forty-fourth to get it fixed, but the nut was stuck and they couldn’t repair it. I had to go all the way back to Queens. It used to be any garage could fix this.”

  “Nothing works the way it used to, does it?” It was a false stab at commiseration, and I cringed inwardly. But he seemed to appreciate the comment. Or maybe he’d merely grown very good at appearing to appreciate comments like this from people like me.

  I sipped at my Carib, and for a while we ate in silence. I wanted to move the conversation forward, but I understood that above all I must not do anything to make him suspicious. But why would he be? Wouldn’t he just assume I was exactly what, in a way, I was—another whit
e interloper in the new Brooklyn, my interest in his life motivated by a desire for self-assuagement, to prove to myself that I was a good community member, I cared about lives unlike my own, et cetera?

  He cleared his throat. “What about you? Where are you from?”

  “Nowhere. Well, pretty close to it. Indiana,” I said with droll self-deprecation. “Starlight, Indiana, to be precise.”

  My response was not premeditated. The location rose to my lips by instinct. In the fourth grade we did a unit on the fifty states and, much to my disappointment, I had been assigned Indiana. (I’d had my heart set on Louisiana. Wild alligator swamps. Dark mystical voodoo.) I made a diorama on foam board with Crayola cornfields, brown sand for the plains, plastic cattle. I remembered Starlight because this name had seemed to me to be the state’s single redeeming characteristic.

  “Starlight. That’s beautiful.”

  “Yeah, well,” I said, rolling my eyes. I leaned toward him. “I don’t visit, either.” I conjured an expression of guarded sadness, designed to intimate some deep ocean of painful personal history: my childhood difficult, my reasons for leaving Starlight, Indiana, equally so, as if to say to Clive Richardson, See? I have secrets, too. I, too, live in exile. “It’s funny. I’ve been in New York four years now, and it still feels sometimes like this is someone else’s life I’m living.”

  It was only after I said this that I realized I really did feel this way. Though I didn’t know it then, this was to become my method during these evenings at the Little Sweet. With Clive, I confessed to feelings I had not previously articulated even to myself. Yet these emotional truths were presented within a fictional architecture. My feelings of alienation from my own life, for example, were not caused by some banishment from Indiana. It was Alison’s death that had cast me into the simulacrum.

  “Just so.” He tucked back into his food.

  “I can’t believe your partner left you with a flat. People,” I said with a scoff.

  “People.” With his spoon, he gathered the last of the crimson sauce.

  We stood in unison and threw away our trash, slid our trays onto the stack on top of the garbage bin. On the television, a woman dressed as a squirrel had just won an all-expense-paid trip to Bermuda. From behind the counter, Vincia watched us as we walked out of the restaurant and onto the street.

  I’M NOT sure I will ever be able to explain what it was like to sit across from Clive Richardson at the Little Sweet. I had never felt anything like it before and I haven’t since. I suppose it might best be called clarity—a sense, bestowed as if from some source outside of myself, that I was exactly where I was supposed to be, doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing. On my walk home that first night I was breathless, the danger of what I’d just done swirling with euphoria at how skillfully I’d managed it. I didn’t delude myself that he’d especially enjoyed our interaction, but it was a beginning. I would figure out who he needed and I would become that person. I would gain his trust, insinuate myself into his life. And I wouldn’t be alone. Alison had been with me that night, giving me words I would never have found on my own. The closer I drew to Clive, the more powerful her presence became, as if they were a unified system, the two poles of a closed circuit, amplifying themselves within me.

  All of this sounds crazy, I know, and when I look back on it, on how far things went, it’s difficult to understand how I allowed myself to be pulled under so deeply. But I had stepped into Clive Richardson’s taxi. One can understand how such an unlikely occurrence could make a person believe she had a purpose, a fate, that transcended the ordinary realities of her world. Even all these years later, knowing what I do now, I cannot disabuse myself fully of the notion that forces were at work that season that defy easy explanation. At times I wondered, and wonder still, if Alison hadn’t strung all of this together from some perch beyond this world.

  As the city released itself from the showy burdens of fall and grew quieter and colder, my life steadily reduced until it revolved entirely around two intertwined rituals: I could not stop listening to Alison’s diaries and I could not stop seeking out Clive. Her voice and his, that was all.

  SO LAST night at dinner, my parents were having this totally riveting conversation about the dead patches on the lawn and my mom gets that Very Nice expression on her face that means exactly one thing, which is, I’m about to say something positive about a black person, and she goes, “It’s never looked the same since John died,” and my dad says, “That man was a miracle worker.” Then my mom turns to me and says, “You remember John, don’t you, sweetie? You loved him. You were so sad when he died. You cried and cried.” She smiled her sweet little smile. Whatever, it’s not worth getting into with her because it’s beyond her limitations to understand, so I just smiled a sweet little smile back, but in my head I was thinking, Wrong. Incorrect. That is not even remotely what happened.

  Maybe you don’t even remember John anymore, Old Person Me. I don’t know what you still remember and what’s been crowded out by the fascinating life I really, really hope you’re living. John was our gardener when I was really little. He died when I was maybe four. Cancer, I think. I remember he had this pure white, lamb’s-wool hair and extremely dark skin. He came once a week to mow the lawn and every week my mom took me outside to say hello to him. He always tried to talk to me, but I always hid behind my mom’s legs. My mom would say, “She’s so shy,” which wasn’t true, I was a really gregarious kid, and obviously my mom knew that. I remember being completely terrified of John but not knowing why. My fear of him was totally inexplicable to me. I just felt it.

  I remember when my mom told me he died, and I wasn’t crying because I loved him. I was crying because here was this really nice old man who had just wanted to be friendly to me, and on some level I got that my fear of him was bad, and maybe it hurt him, maybe I hurt him.

  My mom just drives me crazy. Like, you do not get to choose to raise your family in a place with only white people plus a few Indian and Chinese doctors and then convince yourself that your kid desperately loved the black gardener who you took her outside for some beneficial interaction with, and that this love is proof that even though you made the choices you made, it doesn’t matter, because your kids are good and you are good and you are all just so very, very good.

  I RETURNED to the Little Sweet again a few nights later. Clive looked up when I walked through the door. He did not acknowledge me, and I pretended not to notice him. I got in line. I could feel him watching me. Vincia was curt with me, all business. I paid for my food. Then I turned and let my eyes fall on him as if I’d just spotted him. I walked over to his table.

  “Back again,” he said.

  “You caught me. I think I’m officially hooked. May I?” I gestured shyly at the empty chair across from him.

  My request flustered him. But I figured he wouldn’t be so rude as to say no, and I was right.

  “Please.”

  In the weeks that followed, I went to the Little Sweet many times. Each time I feigned sheepishness when I asked to join Clive, and each time he said yes. I grew quite adept at playing the role I had created for myself, that of a lonely exile in New York, a girl from far away, all alone. While Clive did not exactly seem to welcome my presence, it seemed to me that, gradually, he was warming to me, or perhaps I should say to Emily.

  What did we talk about? We traded stories from work—a boorish passenger, a temperamental author. We commiserated over the various urban creatures making incursions into our apartments—silverfish in my shower, mice in his ceiling. I told him about my short-lived kickball career, and he told me he’d played in a cricket league until a shoulder injury a few years earlier sidelined him. But mostly, as New Yorkers are wont to, we talked about the city itself, which provided for us a language of common approval and disdain: De Blasio’s carriage horse crusade—a lost cause. The MTA—abysmal. Pedicabs—a nuisance.

  I told stories composed of inventions and half-truths about a childhood in fl
yover country, hoping that these confessions would elicit some from Clive in return. I would try—carefully, so carefully—to ask questions that might lead to a revelation of some kind. Did he plan to go home someday? Did he miss his family? What was he like as a child? Nothing. Often, I caught him telling small lies. For instance, take this exchange, from our third night together:

  “Have you been driving a taxi since you moved to New York?”

  “Yes. Though I only switched to the day shift a few years ago.”

  “I hope you won’t think this is weird, but I looked up the island you’re from online. It looks, like, ridiculously beautiful.”

  “Yes, it was quite beautiful.”

  “What’s it like, like, living in a tourist destination?”

  “New York is also a tourist destination.”

  “I guess that’s true. Did you drive a taxi down there, too?”

  “No.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Odd jobs, mostly.”

  ANOTHER EXAMPLE, from a few weeks later:

  “How was your day?”

  “The traffic was terrible.”

  “This time of year must be the worst, huh, with the holidays coming?”

  “There’s always something. In spring, it’s the parades. In fall, it’s the UN summit. The tourists are quite bad now. Today I picked up a family at St. Patrick’s that barely spoke English. They asked me to take them to Rockefeller Center. I tried to tell them it’s just around the corner, but the mother kept saying, ‘Skating! Skating!’ Finally I just drove them there.”

  “I haven’t been skating since I moved here.”

  “I’ve never been.”