“No, I’m not.”
“You totally are.”
“I’m totally not.”
“Why haven’t you made a move on me then?”
“A move on you? You can’t be serious. You … you’re young enough to be my daughter. Maybe even granddaughter …” I faltered here, struggling with the math. “If I had a kid …”
“If you had a kid at fifteen and the kid had one at fourteen.”
“Exactly.”
“I guess it’s because you’re used to Parisian women. Anorexic high-society women, rich divorcées who … who’d meet you at sidewalk cafés and take Gitane cigarettes out of their alligator handbags or meet you on the Champs Élysées or some bookstall along the Seine or some famous bridge or …”
I was determined not to smile, let alone laugh, which would make her stop the tour. “Or where?”
“Or in the Louvre or Luxembourg Gardens or at the Flore or the Dôme or the Récamier, wearing dashing capes or foulards with …”
I waited.
“… fancy logos.”
I furrowed my brow, wanting her to know that I was giving this due and proper consideration.
“Don’t you dare laugh at me,” she warned.
“I’m not laughing.”
“I want a cigarette, Nile. Now. You’re torturing me. I want a carton of Gitane. Or Gauloise. Like your old girlfriends used to smoke.”
“My girlfriends in Paris, or rather girlfriend singular, didn’t smoke.”
“Oh please. Don’t make me laugh. Every woman in Paris smokes.”
I let this pass.
Céleste let out a long sigh. “So it’s because I’m ugly and overweight that you’re not hitting on me? Because my teeth are all crooked and my eyes are all bloodshot and I’ve got more scars on me than a practice corpse?”
I began to pace back and forth, thoughts muddled, tongue-tied, a headache derailing my train. It is tact that is golden, not silence. “I repeat, you are not ugly. And your teeth are … eccentric. Which is a good thing, it makes you different, interesting.”
“Eccentric? Interesting?”
“Yes. And you are not overweight—”
“What am I? Pleasantly plump?”
“Not even. Not anymore.” From a hundred and plenty, she’d gone to a hundred and a hair. And she was getting prettier and prettier as her bruises faded, her hair grew out, her skin regained its lustre.
“You know what they used to call Gran and me? Ten-ton and two-ton. The whale and the baby hippo.”
“What’s wrong with whales and hippos? Fabulous animals, both.”
“Oh, so I guess it was all meant as a compliment. Silly me.”
“You’ve probably lost thirty pounds in the last month. Or more.”
“Gee, maybe I’ll write a book. How to Lose 30 Pounds in 30 Days—I Did It and So Can You!”
“You’re going to have men crawling all over you, wait and see. You’ll probably marry some future Nobelist. Or be one yourself. After getting your PhD, your second one, after finding the key to universal field theory or something. Or becoming a famous painter. Or sculptor. Or poet.”
“No I won’t.”
“Yes you will.”
“No I won’t.”
“Yes you will.”
“No I won’t.”
And so on. Like the conversations I used to have with Brooklyn when she was eight.
“Why would I ever get married?” she said. “So I can have a car, get fatter and raise lazy surly kids?”
She had a point. “It’s not always like that.”
“Besides, I’m not interested in universal field theory.”
“You’re not? What’re you interested in?”
“I’m not interested in anything. Not anymore. And I’m not that smart, okay? And I never was. It was an idea my grandmother had, that’s all. To make me as smart as she was. Because I hated going to school, because I hated everybody there because nobody would go near me and I had no clue about what they were talking about and everybody was fatsophobic. So I got interested in animals instead and tried to save them and all it did was get Gran killed and me nearly killed and you next in line and now all I want to do is kill myself.”
In the afternoon I took a long thoughtful shower, with a mind as clogged as the shower head. Instead of gushing, it trickled, and its proper mix of hot and cold was hard to compound. While brooding over Céleste, I saw a pair of hands washing themselves against a green medicinal cross with Sauberkeit! underneath, a word from the institution that used to braid its way through my open-eyed dreams. As I was drying myself, the sound of kitchen cupboard doors slamming distracted me, displacing the word and cross. I wrapped the towel around me, tiptoed down the hall and peeked round the door.
Céleste was sitting at the table in front of a bowl of soup, a plate of peas, and a family-size bottle of Diet Coke. She was holding up a box of Count Chocula, with its buck-toothed vampire on the front panel, and looking into the chrome mirror of a toaster. “Who do I see in here?” she said, with what I took to be a vampirish voice. “A girl who’s pretty in a way. In a way that doesn’t hit you over the head. She’s probably had a rough life.” She set the box down, picked up a soda biscuit and licked it absently, like an infant learning to eat. Then nibbled it with a rapid movement of her front teeth, like a squirrel.
I walked quickly past the door and was halfway up the stairs when she yelled out, with her mouth full, “Nile? Can I talk to you for a sec? Nile?”
Back down the stairs and into the kitchen. “What’s up?”
She swallowed. “Still like me?”
The question caught me off guard. “Of course I do. Why do you ask?”
“No reason.”
I nodded, not knowing what to say. “Okay. So I’ll just … let you finish your … lunch.” I took a step toward the stairs.
“You’re not going to leave me, right?”
“No, of course not.”
“You kidnapped me, I mean rescued me, so now you’re stuck with me, right?”
“Right.”
“I wasn’t serious about … you know. I mean, I was serious about not being smart and wanting to kill myself. But I wasn’t serious about the other things. I’ve never … you know.”
“Never what?”
“I’ve never drank alcohol before.”
“Never drunk alcohol before. But I thought you said … I thought you said you liked whisky.”
“My grandmother did, I can’t stand the stuff. And I’ve never done crystal meth either—or any other drugs. I smoked grass once when I was like, ten, and got so paranoid I thought a tree was trying to strangle me. And I’ve never made love to an older man, or a younger man or … well, anybody. I’m sorry for lying. It’s my third-worst fault according to my grandmother.”
“What are the first two?”
“And I’m sorry for asking why you haven’t tried to hit on me. Did I say anything else? Stupid, I mean?”
“I think that just about covers it.”
“We could just, like, delete the stupid stuff, right? Or rewind?”
“Okay.”
“I don’t necessarily agree with everything I say.”
I nodded.
“Pals forgive pals, right?”
“Right.”
“I was just sort of, you know, being like a duck.”
“A duck?”
“A female duck. They always hit on the first male closest to them. You’re the only half-decent male in my postal code. Which isn’t saying a lot. No offence.”
I stopped to think about this.
“It’s just, you know, social pressure,” she added. “Something called l’hypersexualisation des jeunes. You may have heard about the phenomenon.”
I had seen it first-hand with Brooklyn, who was tossing her hair and wiggling her hips like Shania Twain at seven, plucking her eyebrows at nine, wearing kid-sized thong underwear at ten. When I made the daring suggestion that she spend some time readin
g good books or jumping rope instead of watching music videos, she asked what jumping rope was.
“You mean how advertisers are brainwashing young girls?” I said. “Sexualized marketing targeting younger and younger audiences?”
Instead of eating the peas on her plate, Céleste was rolling them around the racetrack of the rim. “It’s all part of the shifting sexual tectonics.”
The shifting sexual tectonics? “I see.”
“But I’ve decided that men are a waste of time. And sex too.”
“Good call.”
“I understand how it’s being packaged and sold, and it leaves me cold.”
I nodded. Geniuses always have trouble in the sex department.
“Besides, as Aristotle said, copulation makes all animals sad.”
How would he know that, I wondered. “You’ve read Aristotle?”
“And Spinoza associated desire with disconnected thinking.”
I nodded again, knowingly.
“No, I’ve not read Aristotle, or Spinoza either. These are just things I’ve picked up and can rattle off. Like a parrot. Or trained seal.”
Was this exaggeration, self-deprecation?
“But Nile, I am not your daughter, and don’t ever think I am, okay?”
“Okay. Can I be like, a godfather?”
Céleste put her head on the table as if it were to be chopped off. “A fairy godfather, just what I always wanted.”
“How about an uncle, then, an honorary uncle?”
She propped her head lazily up on an elbow. “No.”
I was an only child and used to badger my mother about bringing a sister back from the hospital. “How about a brother then, a wayward orphan brother?”
She thought this over with a fresh saltine sticking out of her mouth, while absentmindedly flicking peas across the table like marbles. « À la limite, » she said grudgingly, crunching the words along with the cracker. She swallowed. “Oh, and one other thing before you go.”
I braced myself. “What’s that?”
“There’s someone living in the church.”
I was planning on going to the church anyway, it being Christmas and all, but I wasn’t planning on taking a Sig Sauer with me. Loaded, seven in the magazine. The first thing I noticed about carrying a pistol was how heavy the damn thing was. Céleste had shown me how to work the slide and snap the safety off. And how to press a button to pop the clip out of the bottom of the grip. All that was left, I suppose, was to pull the trigger.
Céleste was vague about who she had glimpsed through her telescope coming and going through the back door of the church. He was wearing a ski-mask, she said in her matter-of-fact way. And carrying a sleeping bag. How does she stay so calm? Did her grandmother keep a stash of Valium? Or Quaaludes?
With my back to the wall and gun raised beside my ear, as they do in the movies, I shot two glances through a side window of the church, one quick, one lingering. I saw nothing but blackness the first time, two faint orange lights the second. And then heard something just as faint: a whistling sound. I paused to follow the melody. “Good King Wenceslas.” I shifted my gaze toward the rectory, and saw Céleste’s head sticking out the attic window. Courage, show courage. The non-Dutch kind. I peered through the window again. The orange lights were now extinguished and the whistling had stopped.
I was heading for the back door, my ring of keys in one hand, my revolver in the other, when the squeak of wood against metal made me jump. The sound of a resistant door being pushed open. Then a man stepping through it, with a black balaclava over his face.
“Mr. Nightingale, how are you this lovely afternoon? Enjoying Boxing Day? A good time to relax, they say, after all the hurly-burly. Not for me, though. I must remain active, even during the holidays, or else I go stark raving mad.” He slowly peeled off his mask.
I slipped the gun quickly into my parka’s side pocket. It was Myles Llewellyn. Wearing the same outfit, more or less, as the last time we met at the church: reddish tweed coat, reddish jogging pants, black galoshes over laceless shoes fastened with duct tape. “I’m fine, Mr. Llewellyn but …”
“Stop right there. Call me Myles.”
“But … today’s not Boxing Day. Myles.”
“No? There I go again. At my age all the days begin to blur, shuffle like decks in a card. I mean cards in a deck. Oh well, no damage done. I can come back tomorrow. Any day you like, in fact. Unless you’ve changed your mind—or perhaps forgotten—about our … agreement?”
“No, I … not at all.”
He was walking back toward the door. “Come with me,” he said, crooking his finger and narrowing his eyes. “I’ll explain my plan to you. My vision.”
The church interior, I saw once my eyes adjusted to the light, was as stark and bleak as the first time I’d seen it. Not a single pew remained, let alone altar, crucifix or pulpit. Even the floor was bare, with only yellowing glue or rusty nails to suggest where the altar carpet and wide-slat pine flooring had been. There were partially frozen puddles here and there, fed from the holey roof. By the sacristy door were two space heaters and an unrolled sleeping bag. And on the pulpit steps was a large clock radio, which, I would soon find out, also housed a cassette player.
“I hope you don’t mind,” he said, following my gaze. “I’m setting up some sleeping quarters, à l’improviste. So I can get cracking first thing in the morning. Avoid the to and fro. I have to face facts: I’m getting old, I can no longer draw on reserves.”
I hadn’t noticed any vehicle outside. How did Llewellyn get here, with all this gear? And how did he get inside? With a skeleton key? “How did you get here, Mr. Llewellyn?”
He didn’t answer. He simply smiled and pointed up. “Look at those lights. The last time I saw that colour—peacock blue, I suppose you’d call it—was at Chartres. The most beautiful things in the world are the most useless: peacocks and lilies, for example. Ruskin said that, or something like that.”
He was pointing at some unremarkable side windows, or “lights” as they are called, which had been broken by children’s stones or bored hunters’ bullets and half-heartedly mended with masking tape. One displayed the familiar image of the Good Shepherd holding a sheep in his arms, the other Saint Davnet herself with a sword in her hand and fettered devil at her feet. The blue light shone through her.
I pointed. “That’s Saint Davnet, right?” I knew this because her name was inscribed along the bottom.
He nodded. “Better known as Saint Dymphna. Davnet’s an Irish version of her name.”
“And who was she … exactly?”
“Patron saint of the insane.” He paused as we both gazed up at her. “And incest victims, runaways, that kind of thing. It’s over a hundred years old, that window—almost as old as I am. Robert McCausland is my guess.”
“The artist?”
“The firm in Toronto. The oldest stained-glass company in North America.”
I looked closer at the saint’s sad face. “Was she—Dymphna—insane?”
“No. Her father was the insane one.”
I waited for him to go on. “And … who was her father?”
“An Irish king—seventh century, pagan. When his wife died he scoured the countryside—not just in Ireland but all over Europe—for someone to replace her. Someone just as beautiful. But he couldn’t find anyone up to the mark so he, well … ‘turned his attentions,’ as they say, to his beautiful daughter. Who was fourteen. She fled to Belgium, trying to get away from him. But the king tracked her down, in Geel, and when she refused to go back with him he went into a blind rage and decapitated her.”
Good God, was any of this true? I was about to ask him more but was distracted by his arms, which he raised in a gesture that struck me as oddly papal.
“This project will immortalize my name in the annals of ecclesiastical architecture. How good is your imagination, Mr. Nightingale?”
“It’s … good. It’s beyond good, it’s out of control.”
“Rectangular plan. Raised pulpit, projecting chancel and vestry. A transept suggested by gables on the north and south elevations. Gothic influences, you see. Gabled roof clad with ribbed copper sheeting, double-ridge ventilation. The chancel—similar roof, but at a lower height, with a small section of clerestory. The vestry—skillion roof. The western elevation will have twin stone entrance porches, three lancet windows and a stone cross at the top of the gable. Dressed stone work around the windows and to the top of the gable, and an inscription reading NUNC ET IN HORA MORTIS NOSTRAE. Three lancets, two quatrefoils and a rose window on the chancel gable, surmounted by a vesica. The eastern nave gable—surmounted by a carved stone bell-cote from which a new bell will be hung.”
So far so good. But his words took a sharp turn, becoming harder and harder to follow. Links and linear logic fell by the wayside, and yet somehow, like an abstract painting or mosaic, it all made sense. And even had a certain beauty. His phrases, in any case, stayed with me for weeks on end, reverberating inside me like a … bell.
“You disagree?” he said.
“No no, I … it’s not that, it’s just that I’m no real expert in—”
“Do you remember the uproar over the Sistine Chapel? Or when they suggested the Earth was round? I am building you a dream emporium, Mr. Nightingale. I am meticulous—I believe in the absolute power of detail. A ladder-back chair and some kickshaws, that’s all we need for now. And we shall adopt the Walmart model: no unions, no grievances …
“This is not about handouts, about making money, this is about survival. This church is all I have left. Why? Because the love of my life left me after thirty-two years with a note of two lines. I will do this work gratis …
“Stop right there. I do not know the word no. I do not grasp its meaning. It impinges on my retina, it races into my auditory canal, but to my brain it is gibberish. No, I will not brook refusals, Mr. Nightingale, I am quite deaf to them you know …
“I showed myself, I thought, to be a man of oak and iron. I put my hand to the plow and did not look back. And yet …
“‘My name is Deborah,’ she said to me, holding out her hand. She came onto me, you see. I was cool as Labrador. I’m thinking, place the tennis ball back in her court …