Saint X (ARC)

by Alexis Schaitkin

  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 transposed onto the streets of Starlight, Indiana, which were surrounded, in my telling, by endless fields of corn), Clive chewed his lip and said, “My mates 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 loo
ked 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.”

  I didn’t move.

  “Come on, Em, get your butt downstairs and get changed.”

  “No.”

  “No what?”

  “I’m not going with you.”

  “Of course you are. I have a whole day planned. After barre class there’s brunch at this amazing vegetarian place on Bedford. They do a homemade chai that is life-changing.”

  I tried to walk around her, but she reached out and put her hands on my shoulders.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  “What the hell? Are you seriously going to walk away from me?”

  She held me firmly and our eyes locked. In that moment I saw many things clearly that had previously been opaque to me. Jackie was a basically good person, but I did not like her and I never had. It wasn’t just Jackie. It was all of my friends. They were dramatic, self-absorbed, ridiculous people, and I had always thought so. I had cultivated friendships with them not for intimacy and connection but to be able to judge them, and to extract from our every interaction a sense of my own superiority. Look what I had been through! And still I was better than the lot of them. What was wrong with me? Why was I the way I was? Alison, Alison, the answer was always Alison.

  “Excuse me,” I said again.

  Jackie’s eyes filled with tears. She released me.

  As I hurried down the street I heard her call after me. “I’m trying to help you! Can’t you see I’m trying to help you?”

  WHEN A person you love dies, the calendar becomes a minefield. Anyone who has lost someone knows this. There is the loved one’s birthday. One’s own birthday. Various national and religious holidays, if one is religious. All of these days are difficult in their own ways. The loved one used to call you and sing happy birthday over the phone, awful and tone-deaf. Cranberry relish was the loved one’s favorite Thanksgiving food, they used to eat and eat. But the anniversary is different. On the anniversary of the loved one’s death, you slip backward through time to this same day one, five, ten years ago. (Eighteen years … How could it be? She had been gone as many years as she was alive.) You live it all over again, minute by minute.

  I made my way to Clive’s apartment building just before noon. I was sitting under the faded blue umbrella then. We were sorting through the woman’s basket of beads together, picking out purple and white beads, colors I had chosen not because they were my favorite but because they were hers. As I walked east on Cortelyou, I felt the brisk, delicate movements of the woman’s hands braiding my hair.

  The light was on in Clive’s window. I walked to the end of the block and sat on a front stoop diagonal from his building to wait. I’d left my apartment in such a hurry, what with Jackie’s unexpected appearance, that I hadn’t even grabbed my coat. I wore jeans and a sweatshirt, and within minutes my ears burned with cold. Alison pecked me on the forehead. She walked down the beach and was gone.

  More than two hours passed before the light in Clive’s window finally went off. A few minutes later, the front door opened and he stepped out onto the sidewalk. He walked first to the bodega a few blocks away. He was inside for just a minute and emerged empty-handed. We headed south on New York Avenue, passing block after block of red-brick midrise apartment buildings, interrupted occasionally by a blip of row houses. Clive turned onto Nostrand at Avenue H. I expected him to loop back up after a few blocks as he often did, perhaps to stroll the lawns and brickery of Brooklyn College and then take Flatbush back to Farragut back to New York. But he continued south. We passed Avenues I, J, and K. At Avenue L we briefly left the city behind and entered a mirage-like stretch of Japanese car service centers—Acura, Honda, Toyota, Hyundai—which we exited to find ourselves deep in Jewish Midwood. Men draped in prayer shawls sporting enormous fur hats, girls in long dark dresses and black loafers crossing streets blanched white with salt. It was midafternoon. She was lying on the beach, sipping a Diet Coke in the sun. I wanted her to play with me, but I didn’t want to annoy her, so I didn’t ask, I waited. My, you a patient child.

  We walked through Sheepshead Bay on Avenue U, the
n took Coney Island Avenue down into Brighton Beach. While the neighborhoods we traveled through each had their differentiating features—Hebrew giving way to Cyrillic on shop signs, Kosher then Georgian then Russian bakeries—it was the landscape’s repetitions that began to take hold of me, the endless cycling of deli, slice joint, Key Foods, MetroPCS, and the thousands of thousands of brick apartment buildings. The farther we walked, the more disoriented I became by the on and on and on of the borough, by its vast peripheries and the impossible number of people living their lives out past anyplace I had ever wondered about. We passed Avenues X, Y, Z. Neptune. We had been walking for nearly two hours. It seemed the brick apartment buildings would go on forever, and when we turned onto Oriental Boulevard and, after a few more minutes, found ourselves standing on the sand of what I now know to be Manhattan Beach, the sight of the ocean stretching before me was like stepping into a dream. I clung to the perimeter of the beach while Clive walked forward. The sand was a gray crescent, the sea a sheet of shale. A man in a parka sat on a bench, tossing shards of bread to the gulls. The sun was already beginning to go down. We were in the water, one last swim before the flight home the next day. The salt water stung then soothed the bites on my legs. Alison dove into the waves, surfacing and disappearing again and again. Clive stood at the water’s edge for a long time, staring out at the ocean.

  Before he turned to go, he pulled something from the pocket of his jacket. From where I stood, it took some squinting to discern that it was a chocolate bar, which must be what he’d purchased at the bodega. He removed his gloves and unwrapped it. The sun set without fanfare, its weak light spilling briefly and colorlessly across the clouds. Clive ate the chocolate bar slowly, never turning from the water. Then he crumpled the wrapper, stuffed it in his pocket, and headed home.