Saint X (ARC)

by Alexis Schaitkin

  As the days without Clive wore on, a vision of who I was and would be from then on began to sharpen in my mind. I was not one of the city’s bright young things after all, but one of its invisibles. You know the kind of person I mean. You see me hauling myself up the subway stairs in the summer heat, or down them in winter with bags of groceries banging against my knees. You see my brown parka, which is not even utilitarian but actively—intentionally, it seems to you—ugly, and if you are a person with a full and busy life, you cannot even understand the logic behind such a sartorial choice, and the life behind such logic, except to feel sorry but also, well, irritated—all the lonely people clogging the world, making you see them when all you want to do is take the subway home and deal with your own problems and engage in your own small pleasures. Don’t you deserve that? Well, sure, you do.

  A WEEK later, when I looked in the storefront at the Little Sweet through a light snowfall and saw Clive sitting at his usual table, I thought I was imagining it. He looked up and spotted me through the glass. He smiled and waved.

  “You were gone,” I said as I took my seat across from him.

  “I had some things to take care of. Did you miss me?” He smiled jokily.

  “With all my heart.”

  “Did you hear about that flasher on the J?”

  “It’s always something with the J, isn’t it?”

  Just like that, we slipped back into our normal conversation. There had been a coyote sighting in Hamilton Heights—apparently it had scavenged a carton of General Tso’s chicken from a trash can. An abandoned Mickey Mouse suitcase had led to the evacuation of Times Square and snarled traffic all afternoon.

  When we finished our food, he proposed a walk. The halal butcher. Immaculee Bakery. The fruit stand (KUMQUATS FRESH!). Winthrop Hardware. The bookstore. (The mother puts the children to bed. He waits for the bus. They say goodbye.) What a relief it was, passing these familiar places with Clive again. When we came to a bench, Clive gestured at it, and we sat. It was a frigid night. Our breath left white contrails in the air. Clive said he’d heard on 1010 WINS that the Gowanus Canal had frozen over.

  “I guess now we know the freezing point of whatever the hell is in the Gowanus Canal,” I said.

  He laughed. Then his face became serious. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you, Emily, and I don’t want to put it off anymore. If I put it off I’m afraid I’ll never say it.”

  My chest tightened. “Yes?”

  “It’s about what you said on Christmas Eve. About how we both have secrets. I think I’m ready. I want to tell you. I want us to tell each other.”

  “I want that, too,” I whispered, half afraid that if I spoke too loudly I might shatter the moment. My eyes filled with tears. Bravo, Clairey. “I want that very much.”

  “I trust you. I know you would never do anything to hurt me.”

  “Never.”

  “But I’m afraid,” he continued. It’s not easy for me, what I have to tell you. “Maybe you could begin? With what happened to you in—what was it called, again, the town you’re from?”

  “Starlight.”

  “Where you skated all the time on the Wabash River.”

  I nodded.

  “That’s a lie, Emily.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I looked at a map this week while I was gone. The Wabash River is all the way across the state from Starlight.”

  I looked down at my lap. Snow had gathered there, and I brushed it off automatically. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’ve wanted to be honest with you for weeks now. For months, really. The truth is I’m from California. Pasadena. That’s where I grew up. You have to understand—when I talked with you that first night I had no idea you’d become part of my life the way you have.”

  He didn’t reply.

  “I said I’m sorry, and I am. But I told you I have secrets. So I tell people I’m from one place when I’m from another. Does it matter so much? Are you going to sit here and tell me everything you’ve shared with me is the whole truth?”

  He shook his head.

  “Please don’t be angry with me. We can still tell one another our secrets, just like you said. Forgive me?”

  He held me in his gaze. “Who would I be forgiving? Emily, or Claire?”

  SOMETIMES YOU close your eyes and you are back at the beginning. You are walking down the beach. The sand is warm beneath your feet. The water is aquamarine, a wonder, yet when you cup it in your hands it is clear, and this is the biggest mystery you know. Your hand is in her hand. You see the apricot freckles crowding her milky skin, her hair in its messy bun with the yellow elastic band, the billowy white tunic that hides her secret. She looks down at you and smiles. She is yours, a beautiful sister made only to receive and return your love.

  Somehow you understand that if only you can hold this moment firmly enough in your mind, if only you can plunge deeply enough into it, the two of you can break off from the world. You can erase the future through an act of will and live together with your sister in this moment forever, see the blue sea stretching before you forever, walk forever down the warm sand, the black rocks up ahead receding at the pace of your approach so that you never reach them. You can remain here until the world forgets you.

  But you can never quite manage it, can you? In the end, you always let the world back in. You could have everything you ever wanted, but you spoil it. You spoil it every time.

  “HOW DID YOU KNOW?”

  Snow continued to fall. Steam rose from a grate in the street. I kept my eyes fixed on the interface where the steam and snow melted into one another to keep me from slipping off the edge of the moment.

  “The thing you did.” He traced a finger through the air. “You used to do it then, too.”

  “I could never help it,” I said softly. I pressed a fingertip to a snowflake on my coat and felt it melt away to nothing.

  “There was a night a few months ago. I was walking home and I thought I heard—did you follow me? Did you call my name?” He bit his lip and squinted down at the sidewalk as if he could scarcely believe what he was asking me. Then he looked up at me, his eyes so full of foreclosed hope that for a moment all I wanted was to be able to tell him I hadn’t and have it be the truth.

  I looked back down at the sidewalk. “Yes.”

  He shook his head. “I thought I was losing my mind.” He was facing away from me, speaking to the sky, the snow, the brittle February night—and I understood that these words were not meant for me, but for someone else.

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “I’m sure you’ll think of something. You’re so good at thinking up things to say. All these nights. I hope you did have a fun time.”

  “No.”

  “Bullshit,” he whispered.

  “You think I wanted to do this? I’ve given up everything. All I ever wanted was the truth. For Alison.”

  “For Alison,” he echoed back. It seemed to me that his mind was far away, only the most gossamer of threads tethering him to this bench on this sidewalk here with me. He looked around—at the shop fronts across the street, the snow on the sidewalk, the black sky overhead. “Fuck,” he shouted, punching his fist into his open palm. His shout echoed down the deserted street.

  “I’ll go,” I said. I stood. “I’m going.”

  He grabbed my arm. “Sit.”

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

  “Sit.”

  “Please let me go. Please don’t—”

  “Don’t what?”

  “I’m sorry. I just wanted—”

  “The truth, Clairey?”

  I nodded.

  “The truth is you’re a fucked-up girl.”

  “I know,” I whispered.

  “Just like your sister.”

  “Please don’t do this.”

  “The truth is Alison destroyed my life, and from what I see, she destroyed yours, too.”

  “Please just let m
e go.”

  “No. You want the truth, Claire, and I’m going to give it to you. You’re going to sit here and listen to every word of it. And then I never want to see you again.”

  THE GIRL

  EVERY WEEK THERE’S A GIRL. Every week she’s pretty. Some weeks she’s tall, some weeks she’s short, some weeks her hair is blond and silky, other weeks it’s red curls. She has big tits or flea bites, it makes no difference to he. He does like them with freckles.

  He picks this one straightaway. I see it happen. She gallivants down the sand to the volleyball game and when she arrives she takes off she shirt. I was some distance away, but I saw it. He went still. I followed his eyes to she belly, where she has a big pink scar. Edwin and me have been breds since second grade. I know his mind and how it turns. He likes them with some twist to their pretty. He picks her then. I know even before he.

  On the sideline, the girl’s pale little sister spectates. She does something funny with she finger, waving it through the air. She’s burning, but it’s not my place to say so.

  AFTER WORK, me and Edwin smoke in the car park. We count up we tips on the hood of Edwin’s car. Me, twenty dollars. Edwin, thirty-four.

  “Figure,” I say.

  “What I tell you? You’re too serious. Yes, sir. Yes, ma’am. Yankees want to be your friend.”

  He’s right, but so? When I try to make chat, the guests’ faces go crooked. When Edwin tells a wife she looks lovely, her husband smiles because he loves to hear how his wife is pretty. When I say the same thing, the husband thinks it’s none of my business how pretty his wife be. I can’t do the job the way he does it. But I’m polite. I’m prompt. Some days, anyway.

  After, I bike to Sara’s house to see my boy. When I arrive, Sara’s standing in the doorway with Bryan in she arms and displeasure on she face. Agatha is on the sofa in the parlor, scratching at she scalp.

  “You’re late,” Sara says. I feel annoyed, though she’s right—I am late.

  She tries to hand Bryan to me, but my boy clings to his mum. When I take him he cries. I stroke he ringlets. My boy is handsome, and I’m not just saying so because he’s mine. His ringlets have light in them. “There, there, my Bry,” I say.

  THE NEXT morning I wake up to pounding on my bedroom door as usual. Gran.

  “What’s wrong with you? You late!”

  Shit, woman.

  I don’t say this. I get up and stumble to the toilet. How sad is it for a man to look forward so much to his morning piss? When that relief may be as good as his day will get? But it’s such a good feeling. It could have gone another way. God could have made a world where good things feel bad. Pissing, eating, banging. Maybe he would have been doing us a service.

  I bike Mayfair to work. I’m hungover as usual from liming at Paulette’s last night. My bike is old and rusted and squeaks with every pedal. When cars pass, they stir up the dust and leave me in it, and I hold my breath until it settles. But this hour, the streets are mostly quiet. The only sounds are roosters and women sweeping and cartoons inside houses. I feel myself on the bike, a big thing on a little thing. I’m of two minds on this ride, always. It’s a mortification, but so peaceful. When I set out, as long as I’m not running too late, the sky is still smoky blue, like something far away. As I ride, it turns the color of an oyster shell. The breeze still possesses some coolness. Dogs wake. The skinny black hound with the white belly trots alongside me sometimes. Early morning feels like church, when I did go.

  When I pass Arthur’s father’s store I’m close. I ride past the gas station on George Street where Keithley used to work, past the three-legged goat tied to a post in Daphne Nelsen’s yard, past the clinic where the antimen go when they’re deading. Past Prosser’s School Uniforms—pink for Horatio Byrd, yellow for All Saints, blue for Sir Northcote. Past the scrub that leads to the nameless cliffs. Past the house where my father was born. It’s abandoned now. The roof is more sky than galvanized. Chickens roost there. I crest a hill and the ocean appears, a color nobody can describe. Damien once told me science says mankind came up in the sea—we started as lizards with fur or some shit. It’s only recent we left the sea for land. Maybe that’s why the sea feels so, like a house in a dream you wish so badly to enter, but where’s the door?

  Indigo Bay is the last resort on Mayfair Road. When I look at it, I see it twice at once: the white buildings and the clean sand, but also as it was when we were boys, with wild pomme-serette trees and needles and condoms in the seaweed and the antimen who loved this spot. With its stink and sand flies, nobody bothered they. Well, nobody but we.

  Morning is morning. Edwin and me carry the lounge chairs out from the storage house and arrange them in a crescent, just so. Next, the chair cushions. I carry them four to a stack on my shoulder. Finally, the umbrellas. A bit later, the early birds arrive. By nine, the beach is crowded. Then it’s towel, bottled water, adjust umbrella, drag chair, fresh towel, fresh water, all morning long. Today, a man with dolphins on his swim trunks and a pretty Asian wifey orders a Red Stripe.

  “Peace, mahn,” Edwin says when he sees the bottle on my tray. Edwin thinks it’s fucking daft how Yankees love to order Red Stripe here. But Jamaica’s not so far from here. I see their point. Later, Edwin will chat this daft fucking Yankee up to see what else he likes. Guests who order a drink in the morning often turn out to be good customers.

  When I bring his drink, the man reaches in the pocket of his swim trunks, pulls out five dollars, and says, “Get yourself one, too.” He smiles.

  “Thank you, sir,” I say. His smile goes flat. He wants me to make some chat, but chat is Edwin’s thing.

  Midday, the girl’s daddy asks me where the locals eat. I’m glad he asks me and not Edwin. It pisses Edwin off when guests ask for recommendations for authentic island food. A few weeks ago we had a guest order only curry goat and conch creole for lunch all week.

  “Fucking dolt,” Edwin said to me one day after he took the man’s order.

  “Last week you say the same about the lady who only ate burgers and pizza. What would you like they to eat? How can they do right by you?” I thought I had him then.

  He shrugged. “Maybe they can’t. What I care about it?”

  “That sounds fair.” I rolled my eyes.

  He snorted. “Gogo, man, you so soft it get you someday.”

  When he takes break past the rocks at the edge of the beach I see she, gallivanting down the sand toward he.

  THIS JOB’S not so bad. The Yankees who go to Papa Mango’s and stay at hotels near the Basin and shop in Hibiscus Harbour where the cruise ships dock act like they’re royalty because they bought some budget Caribbean cruise package. The guests here are so rich they can relax about it. They’re polite, mostly. The food trays are heavy, the chairs are heavy, the umbrellas are heavy, but that’s just usual job shit.

  One thing I do mind. While I walk the beach, I feel the guests’ eyes on me. It’s like I’m onstage, but at the same time, the audience is not even interested in me. I feel so big under their gaze, like if I open my mouth I may swallow the world by accident and leave myself alone.

  Everybody knows Yankees are fat, but at Indigo Bay, most of them are thin. All day they eat and drink and sleep like babies. I walk back and forth carrying trays heavy with they cheeseburgers, coconut shrimp, and conch fritters. Food so oily it shimmers. So how are they thin? It seems like someone somewhere just decided it.

  Not all the guests are beautiful, but they all have a certain something. A wellness, maybe. Terrible things may happen to any person, rich or poor, white or brown, and I’m sure terrible things have happened to some of they, but they don’t appear so. They appear like they believe the universe loves them, and maybe it does.

  A few guests are not so well maintained. At present, we have a fat woman with skin like cottage cheese and a Frenchie man with a hard round belly. They don’t cover up; they lie out like everybody else. When we’re waiting at the bar for our orders to be ready, Edwin says, “
You check the belly on the old fucking Frenchie?” and puts a finger in he mouth like he’s gagging. I laugh. But when I’m not with him, laughing at they, it’s different. These fat, ugly people, almost naked under the sun—I’m amazed by they.

  FLEET. I learned this word from Jan, the old Dutchie we used to lime with when we ditched school. One day when Edwin and me were walking to Paulette’s, it started to pour. Edwin took off he shoes and sprinted through the rain and I followed behind, panting all the way. When we arrived inside, all soaked through, our school polos stuck to we, Jan said, “Edwin, how fleet you are!”

  English was not Jan’s first language or he second; first came Dutch, then German, then French, then English, but he still knew this word I didn’t.

  I never looked it up, but I have the idea of it. Fleet. A thing I’ll never be.

  WE HAVE a customer. The man with the dolphin swim trunks. Edwin chats he up after volleyball one afternoon. Turns out his lawyer wifey needs to relax. This morning, after my daily highlight morning piss, I reach under my bed and pull out the lockbox. The combination is Bryan’s birthday. First, so I don’t forget it. Second, to remind me I do this under under business for he. When I open the box, the ganja scent rushes out. Gran must smell it, but she’s given up being up in my business. This is why the lockbox stays at my place. Edwin’s sisters are nosy as shit.

  The lockbox is how I do my part. Edwin chats up potential customers. Edwin makes the sale. I keep the lockbox under my bed. We split the profits even. I weigh out ten grams. Most I put in one baggie. Enough for two spliffs, I put in another. This bag’s for we.