Saint X (ARC)

by Alexis Schaitkin

  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.

  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, explained 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.

  “Mom?” I said finally.

  “Yes, sweetheart?”

  “What happened when I went to Paris with Aunt Caroline? When I came back everything was different, but I never knew why.”

  My mother pursed her lips, and I feared she was going to give me the kind of evasive nonanswer I was used to from her.

  “I told your father it had to stop. Not just him with the police. Me, too. Both of us.”

  “But why? Why did you just give up?”

  “We didn’t give up, sweetheart. But we had to leave it behind. Because we had you, and you were everything. You are everything. We wanted you to have a life.”

  I think Alison was wrong about our mother. I was, too. We thought she was a fragile, timid woman. But as I looked at her on the bench, a smile flickering in her eyes as a young boy toddled unsteadily past us holding a small pink ball, I saw her differently. It took strength not to allow oneself to be subsumed by a thing that loomed so large.

  (Not long after my parents’ visit to New York, a Hollywood agent drove out to Laurel Canyon, let himself into a mid-century modern house nestled among eucalyptus trees, and found the actor, dead in his bed. Foul play not suspected. Oxycontin, Ativan, and cocaine found on the nightstand, according to an anonymous paramedic. Most of the articles about his death were accompanied by the same photograph, a recent paparazzi shot in which the actor gave the impression of abundant unwellness: long unruly hair, a too-big suit and sandals, gin-glazed eyes and coffee-yellow teeth. I would stare at that photo, looking him in the eyes across time and space, life and death, and he would seem to look back at me.)

  IT HAS been several years since I stepped into that taxi. I live in Charlotte now. I work in ad sales. My condo is spacious and bright, the walls painted an institutional peach I don’t really mind. I drive a little red Honda that gets great mileage. A few weeks ago, a coworker sent me an old article from The Onion, “Horrified Man Suddenly Realizes He’s Putting Down Roots in Charlotte,” and I laughed because it reminded me of me. I go by Claire here. At first hearing that name on the lips of my coworkers and new friends unsettled me. But I’ve grown used to it.

  Clive Richardson has disappeared from my life as completely as he entered it. I find comfort in not knowing where he is. Sometimes I close my eyes and send messages to him. I tell him I hope he’s found a place beyond the grip of his past. I tell him it wasn’t all a lie. I ask him not to judge me too harshly. The winter I spent with Clive is a locked room inside myself, one which, I’m reasonably certain, I will never open again. (Though still, now, when I find myself back in the city, I will climb into a taxi and hope that when the driver says hello it will be Clive’s voice I hear. And when, inevitably, it isn’t, I summon that voice, those nights, the city as it was that winter, and I tell myself, almost sternly, Remember this.)

  I can see now that during those months, I fooled myself into believing I was after closure, when all I really wanted was never to let go. Because, as Alison’s scar was her most sacred vanity, her death was mine. Because I needed a murder mystery. Without one, what choice did I have but to be angry at Alison for making herself so indispensable to me, to all of us, and then being so careless with herself? (Drinking and drugs, a reckless swim, a stupid accident. The police had suggested this basic scenario from the beginning, but my parents had refused to accept it. Why would they have? Why would anyone accept such a sad and pointless story, a tale that was not even cautionary but simply tragic, a shame?) What choice was there, finally, but to admit that I hated Alison every bit as much as I loved her? I hated her while she was alive for the way her dazzling, spectacular self took up the entire spotlight, and I hated her even more for the oppressive shadow she cast with her death. How could I ever be enough? How could I possibly compare to someone who never had to grow up?

  Had she lived, perhaps in her twenties Alison would have been like Jackie, a person who might say to her friends, over craft beer or picklebacks or whatever beverage would have been de rigueur then, “I need to find time for my dancing,” in a way that suggested that her dancing was something the world needed. If I was visiting her, in Williamsburg or the Mission or Silver Lake, say to celebrate my sixteenth birthday, then I would have rolled my eyes when she said this, and I would have gotten to experience the wrenching, liberating moment when your idol becomes just another person. She might have grown to be a woman like Nika, preoccupied by her children’s homework assignments and video game habits. Perhaps she would now be living a life not so dissimilar from our parents’; maybe she would take her own children to Caribbean resorts and reflect, as she read a memoir beneath an umbrella’s shade, on the trade-offs she had made for a life that was, it turned out, more than enough.

  I still haven’t told my parents—not about Clive, or Alison, or what happened to me that winter. Maybe someday I will. The thing is, I haven’t decided if telling them would do them any good. For so long it was all I wanted. The truth! The truth! Good, fine, but for what? With the truth we will do what, become what? And in gaining the truth, what do we lose? It seems to me now that some truths will never be enough to seal the mysteries that precede them. I think in her own way my mother understood this all along—that there is nothing the truth can give you that you cannot give yourself. That in the end, you just have to decide. To live. To continue.

  SAINT X

  LOOK DOWN UPON SAINT X from above and it will appear as if little has changed. In the Basin, children in pink and maroon uniforms still run and shout through the yard of Horatio Byrd Primary. Her Majesty’s Prison, eggshell-blue, still stands beside the bank. Along the winding ribbon of Mayfair Road there are now billboards for Digicel and FLOW broadband, but the white stucco churches remain, as does Perry’s Snackette, and the radio tower with its flaking red paint, houses with galvanized roofs and sandy yards. Float up and over Devil Hill and there it is—Little Beach. It is late afternoon, and everyone has gathered here. They have their umbrellas and picnic baskets, their coolers filled with cola and Carib. Constellations of families float in the se
a. Children clamor out of the water and run onto the pier, not even pausing before leaping off the edge back into the water, again and again in an unbroken loop.

  Search among the faces and you will see a woman seated on a blue and white cloth, a point of stillness amid a lively family gathering. Her eldest grandchild dribbles a football down the sand. The youngest is curled asleep in the shade cast by the woman’s own body. Her daughter-in-law hushes and soothes and doles out kisses and tamarind balls. Her sons, Bryan and Eddie, laugh together as they let the workweek’s troubles lift from their shoulders. Sometimes she cannot quite believe that all of this is hers. Sara Lycott is neither as young as she once was nor as young as she still feels sometimes, until she catches herself in a shop window, startled by the silver flash of her own hair. It has been years since she first laid lisianthus on her mum’s grave. Remarkable, isn’t it, that a woman her age, who has not been anyone’s daughter in a long, long time, still, hearing a funny story on the news, or picking the first ripe sugar-apple in the yard, opens her mouth to call out, “Mum”? On some nights, she is still laid low by a longing for her mother’s house. She longs for bedding that smells human and that has grown soft as oil with unwashing. The plink of a sink that leaked throughout her whole childhood. The odors of old fruit in the refrigerator, of her mother’s urine in the bathroom. In her own house, she washes and presses the sheets on Tuesdays. She keeps the bathroom scrubbed and smelling of bleach. When a thing breaks she fixes it. When a thing is empty she disposes of it.