CHAPTER 33
HER MARK
POV: GIDEON
On the first of December, at noon, Clémence Boudreaux walks into the nave of Saint Casimir's with an envelope in her hand, and I watch her do it from the choir loft with my wife in my lap.
Noemi's idea.
"I want to see it," she said at breakfast. "The first one. In person, you said. I want to see what he does."
"Ansel won't do anything."
"I know." She peeled her satsuma in one spiral. "That's what I want to see."
So we're in the loft. In my chair, in front of the screens. She's sideways across my knees in a grey cashmere sweater with her legs over the arm of the chair and her head on my good shoulder, and she's eating the last of the satsuma, piece by piece, and watching the nave feed like it's a film.
Down below, Ansel is standing by the font.
He's been standing there for twenty minutes. He came at twenty to twelve and took up his place with his hands folded in front of him and hasn't moved. He's wearing a tie. I've known him nine years and I've seen him in a tie twice. Both funerals.
At noon, the side door opens.
She comes in out of the grey December light in a long black coat, with her hair cut blunt at her jaw and her father's three rings on the chain at her throat.
She stops just inside the door. She looks around the nave at the crates and the pale crosses on the walls where the Stations used to be. Then she sees him by the font.
She comes toward him between the crates.
She doesn't hurry. He doesn't move to meet her.
She stops in front of him with the font between them. Rainwater, dark, with a skin of dust. The font where I held Tee-Jean's cousin under until he told me where Noemi was.
She holds out the envelope.
"The tithe," she says. The microphone in the font's base picks it up clearly. "December. Four slips. In full."
Ansel takes it.
He doesn't open it. He doesn't count it. He puts it in the inside pocket of his jacket without looking at it.
"Thank you, Mademoiselle."
"Clémence."
He doesn't say anything.
"You can say it," she says. "It's only a name."
"Your father wouldn't have let me."
"No." She looks at the font. At the dark water. "He's in the Boudreaux tomb in Saint Bernard now. With a wreath from the Deacon's wife, white lilies, very tasteful." Her mouth twists. "The card said With deepest sympathy. In her handwriting. I recognized it from the papers."
On my knees, Noemi goes very still.
Then she laughs, silently, into my shoulder.
Down in the nave, Clémence looks up at Ansel. He's a head taller than she is. She has to tip her head back to do it.
"You held my father's papers," she says. "In the café. You held them out to me, and when I took them, you didn't let go right away."
"No."
"Why not?"
He doesn't answer for a long time. The feed is so quiet I can hear the rain starting on the roof of the church, on the far side of the rose window.
"Because your hand was shaking," Ansel says finally. "And I didn't want anybody to see."
Clémence looks at him.
She doesn't say anything. She looks at him for so long that Noemi takes the last piece of satsuma out of her own mouth and holds it in her fingers, forgotten.
Then Clémence reaches up and straightens his tie.
It doesn't need straightening. She does it anyway. She pulls the knot a quarter inch to the left, and smooths the silk flat against his chest with her palm, and leaves her palm there, for one second, two.
"The first of January," she says. "Noon."
She turns around and walks back out between the crates to the side door and out into the rain.
Ansel stands by the font.
He doesn't move for a full minute. He stands there with his hand over the envelope in his inside pocket, over his heart, looking at the door she went out of.
Then he looks up.
Straight up. Into the lens in the corner of the nave where the choir loft feed comes from. He knows exactly where it is. He helped me put it there.
He looks at me.
He doesn't say anything. He doesn't have to.
I switch off the feed.
"Oh," Noemi says softly into my neck. "Oh, Ansel."
"Don't."
"He looked at the camera."
"I know."
"He looked at you like—"
"I know," I say. "I know how he looked."
She lifts her head from my shoulder and looks at me, and there's gold in her eyes from the screens, and something else.
"Are you going to let him have her?" she asks.
"She isn't mine to give."
"That isn't what I asked."
I look at the blank screen.
"He paid for his sister's funeral with nine years of his life," I say.
"He stood at my shoulder while I did everything I've ever done.
He never once asked me for anything." I put my hand on the back of her neck, under her hair.
"If he wants the Boudreaux girl, he'll take her.
He won't ask me. That's how I'll know he means it. "
She's quiet. Then she puts the last piece of satsuma in my mouth.
"Good," she says.
***
In the afternoon, I take her to Chalmette.
She doesn't know where we're going. She sits beside me in the back of the car and watches the city go by, Elysian Fields, Saint Claude, the Industrial Canal bridge, and when we come down off the bridge onto Saint Bernard Highway, she goes quiet.
When we turn onto Paris Road, she stops breathing.
"Gideon."
I don't answer.
We pass the Anchor, with its gravel lot.
We pass the road that goes down to the shrimp plant at the end, the one with the cold room and the twenty-two hooks, which I bought in November and had torn down to the slab.
We pass a strip of storefronts by the canal, a laundromat and a bait shop and a boarded-up barber.
We stop in front of the fourth one.
It was boarded up too, until last month. The windows are clean now. The door is new, old oak, stripped and oiled. Over it, on the glass of the transom, there's lettering.
Gold leaf. Twenty-three karat. Laid by hand, by an old sign painter in the Quarter who does the lettering on the streetcars and who cried when I showed him the photograph of what I wanted.
NOEMI VALCOURT
Gilding & Restoration
She doesn't get out of the car.
She sits in the back seat and looks at it through the window. The door. The gold. The old building by the canal where she swept floors for five dollars a day at seventeen, where her father came to the screen door in the rain three years ago and shouted at her to put on her blue dress.
"Thib's shop," she says. Her voice is very small.
"He sold it to me three years ago," I say. "In July. After he closed. He needed the money and nobody else wanted it." I look at the lettering. "I didn't know what I'd do with it. I just didn't want anyone else to have it."
"You bought it three years ago."
"The same month I bought you a cell."
She turns and looks at me.
"My father offered you Florence," I say.
"Your own studio. Your own name on the door.
I saw him do it at the Beauregard, out of the corner of my eye, while the Archbishop talked to me about the Relief Fund.
I watched you fold his check into a square and put it back in his pocket.
" I look at the door. "I don't have Florence. I have this."
She doesn't say anything.
She opens her door and gets out. She walks across the cracked sidewalk to the new oak door, and she puts her hand flat on the glass under her own name, and she stands there.
Then she takes the key out of my hand without asking and opens it.
Inside, it smells like new plaster and linseed oil and, very faintly, under everything, the old smell of the place. Rabbit-skin glue. Gesso. Gold.
It's all there. I had it put back. Thib's long workbench, sanded and oiled.
His cushions and knives. His rows of brushes in jars.
The racks along the wall for drying panels.
And on the far wall, under the window that looks out on the canal, a scaffold, and on the scaffold, waiting, a panel from the Saint Veronica's altar screen that the bishop wants regilded before Easter.
She walks through it slowly. She touches everything. The bench. The brushes. The cushions.
At the far end, on the windowsill, there's a tin.
Old. Dented. The paint worn off.
She picks it up and turns it over, and in the grey light from the canal, I watch her read the ghost of the pencil on the lid.
"You put it back," she says.
"It's his shop. It's his tin."
"There's nothing in it."
"No," I say. "You used it all."
She sets it down on the windowsill exactly where it was.
Then she turns around and comes back across the shop to me and puts both her hands on my chest and pushes me back against Thib's workbench, hard, so the jars of brushes rattle.
***
She doesn't let me touch her.
"Hands on the bench," she says.
I put my hands on the bench.
She undresses me herself. Slowly, the way I undressed her the night of the wedding.
My coat, my jacket, my shirt, careful of the shoulder, which is healing now, a pink puckered star front and back.
She finds the gold still caught in the scars on my back, in the deepest ones, where it hasn't worn away, and she runs her thumb along it.
"Turn around," she says.
I turn around.
I put my hands flat on Thib's workbench and bend over it, with my back to her, and the whole shop is silent except for the canal lapping outside the window and a gull somewhere.
She puts her mouth on the back of my neck.
On the crest. The Valcourt crest, a tower and a crowned V in black ink, that my grandfather started putting on every Valcourt boy on his sixteenth birthday. My father has it. Remy had it. It's under the hair at my nape, where I looked at hers from the last pew.
She kisses it.
Then she opens her mouth and bites.
Not a nip. Not a love bite. She bites the way I bit her the day she went over the magnolia, the way I bit her at the mirror before the ball.
Her teeth close on the skin over my family's mark and hold, and hold, and bear down, and I feel the skin give, and I feel warm run down the back of my neck, and I don't make a sound.
I grip the bench so hard the wood creaks.
She holds on.
When she lets go, she presses her tongue flat against the place, and I shudder all the way down.
"There," she says against my neck.
"What did you do?"
"I put my mark on your family." She kisses it again, softer, on the wound.
"Every Valcourt boy for three generations got that at sixteen.
It meant they belonged to your grandfather.
To your father." Her hand spreads flat between my shoulder blades, on the gold.
"Now it's under mine. Now it means you belong to me. "
I turn around.
I pick her up with my good arm and put her on Thib's workbench, among the brushes and the cushions, and she pulls her own sweater off over her head and pulls me down.
I'm careful of my shoulder. She isn't.
She pushes me onto my back on the long oak bench and climbs over me, and takes me inside her, and rides me there in her own shop with her name in gold on the door and the canal going by outside the window, and she doesn't take her eyes off my face the whole time.
The bench is hard under my back and the jars of brushes rattle with every stroke, and there's blood from her bite on my neck and on her mouth, and she puts her hand on my throat, lightly, the way I taught her.
"Whose?" she says.
It's my question. She's asking it.
"Yours."
"Say the rest."
"Yours. Your name on the door. Your mark on my neck." I grip her hips. "Your monster."
Something goes across her face at that. Fierce and bright and absolutely unashamed.
"Mine," she says.
She comes with her head back and her hand on my throat, and I come with her, and a whole jar of Thib's squirrel-hair brushes goes over the edge of the bench and scatters across the floor like dropped straw.
***
Afterward, she sits on the edge of the bench in my shirt with her bare feet hanging, looking out the window at the canal.
I'm standing behind her with my hand on the back of her neck. The bite on mine is throbbing. I can feel it when I turn my head. I'm going to feel it for a week.
"Does it hurt?" she asks, without turning around.
"Yes."
"Good."
I smile. She can't see it. I don't think I've done it in front of anyone since I was a boy.
"The sign painter," she says. "The one who did the door. What did he say?"
"He asked who you were."
"What did you tell him?"
"I told him you were the girl who gilded the saint at the Blessing of the Fleet three years ago," I say.
"He'd been there. He remembered. He said nobody's laid a halo like that in Delacroix in forty years.
" I run my thumb along the side of her neck.
"Then he cried. Old men in this city cry about gold. "
She's quiet.
"The Blessing's in April," she says.
"Yes."
"Somebody has to do the saint. Thib can't anymore. His hands." She looks at the scaffold under the window. "Somebody has to go up the ladder."
"Yes."
She turns her head and looks up at me over her shoulder, and the canal light is on her face, and there's my blood on her lower lip.
"Will you be at the back of the crowd?" she asks.
"I'll be at the back of the crowd."
"Bleeding?"
"If you want."
She laughs. She turns back to the window.
Behind her, I put two fingers on the back of my own neck, on the crest, on the place where her teeth broke the skin. They come away red. Three generations of Valcourt men wore that mark to say who owned them.