My Juliet Page 12

  They stay at the table half an hour longer, quiet except for their eating. Sonny listens but still can’t hear any evidence of a ship on the river, a Greek one or otherwise. Finally Roberts slaps a hand against his leg. “Well, shall we head back to the salt mine?”

  Sonny doesn’t get up. He picks at the remains of his sandwich. “You go ahead,” he says. “I’m through.” He pauses to chew on a crust of bread. “The truth is I don’t see the point anymore.”

  Roberts is a long time before speaking. “Just for my enlightenment, what point is that?”

  “The point of hanging pictures on a fence and waiting for people to come and claim them. Why do we bother, Roberts?”

  “Why do we bother?” The old man smiles. “I don’t know, Sonny, why do we bother breathing?”

  “Nobody wants them, let’s be honest. I used to think that if I didn’t quit—if I just kept at it, you know—I’d eventually be discovered. Somebody would recognize what I was doing as smart and original and maybe even good, and he would introduce it to somebody else who in turn would show it to another. I’d find my audience this way. But lately when I turn and face that fence—when I see them there, all huddled together like that—it’s terrible, old man, but I wonder if I’ve wasted my life.” Sonny looks over to make sure his friend is still with him. “Roberts, have I wasted my life?”

  The old man rises to his feet and shuffles around the table, finally coming to stand a few inches away from Sonny. “If I weren’t so old and worn out I’d hand you the worst beating of your life. How many years have you given to that fence, boy? How many?” He sucks in a breath of air. “Show me the place where Sonny LaMott’s blood stains the flagstones. Show me!”

  Sonny doesn’t speak—he doesn’t dare to.

  “Stand up, you little shit. Come on. On your feet.”

  Roberts has attracted an audience. Diners watch as if trying to decide whether to be alarmed or amused. “What is it you want, anyway?” he continues. “Do you want to be an artist who sells paintings or do you want to be one who paints them?”

  Roberts starts to shadowbox in place, then he yanks his shirttail free of his trousers, exposing his gut. Sonny looks at the old man’s body with a mix of horror and fascination. Roberts is so thin a tight net of bones shows at either side of his rib cage.

  “Hit me,” Roberts says. “Rare back and hit me. Okay, boy. Okay.” Roberts has braced himself. He’s ready. “Let me have it. Hit me with all you’ve got. Come on.”

  “Forget about it,” Sonny says, waving him off.

  “I said hit me. Hit me, boy.” Roberts seems to mean it, and the crowd, or most of it, is laughing now, including the waiters who stand nearby hugging trays.

  “Pretend I’m your Juliet. Pretend I’m the world that hasn’t found you. Wallop me, boy. Be done with it.”

  “No way,” Sonny says.

  “You’re a yellow coward. I’m telling you to hit me, coward.”

  And so Sonny hits him. Still seated in the chair, he raises a fist and drives it into the old man’s midsection.

  “Harder,” says Roberts, clenching his jaw. “Harder . . .”

  Sonny stands and hits him again, hard enough this time to push Roberts back a step, but not hard enough to hurt him. A gasp comes from the crowd and a wash of tears fills Roberts’s eyes and there is a spot on his belly equal in size to Sonny’s fist.

  “Happy now?”

  “Happy,” replies Roberts, struggling to breathe. “Goddamned right I’m happy. Sonny, if you’re not improved by morning I’ll have you hit me again.”

  “Can I hit you in the face next time?”

  “Hit me wherever you like.”

  “I’ll hit you in the face.”

  “Shit, no, you’re not hitting me in my face.”

  To dull applause, which Sonny refuses to acknowledge but which Roberts recognizes with a bow, the two men leave the café and shamble across the street to the square. Roberts carries himself as if fully aware that he alone created all that is good in the world. You should’ve punched him harder, Sonny says to himself.

  As they near Roberts’s kiosk Sonny realizes that the painters at the fence are staring at him, and he begins to feel uncomfortable in his clean clothes and neatly coifed hair.

  He wishes he hadn’t been so easily seduced by Roberts’s dramatics.

  “Just remember your Juliets,” the old man says. “So what if she’s broken your heart, she’s also given you a gift. She’s helped make you an artist. Nobody else here paints the human form with such feeling as you, boy. Can you give that up?” He shakes his head. “You can’t.”

  Sonny doesn’t respond. To do so would invite more, and he wants only to disappear.

  “Thanks for the sandwich, old man. I need to be going.”

  It isn’t Roberts’s fault Sonny has made all the wrong choices. It isn’t his fault Sonny is a pathetic loser who can’t give up what hasn’t been his in fifteen long years.

  “I love you, boy,” Roberts says.

  “Yeah? Well, I love you, too, Roberts. Now leave me alone.”

  As the boy sleeps, Juliet, standing by the bed, rests a finger on his tattoo. It doesn’t bite, but its teeth look almost as sharp as the barbed wire that her mother, in the weeks after her father died, wrapped around the drainpipes to keep Juliet from slipping out at night.

  “The Proof” is now in her shoe, folded flat against the leather insole. She removes it and finds a pencil on the dresser. Sitting on the edge of the bed with the moist, crumpled piece of paper leveled against her thigh, Juliet writes: “You claimed the wire was to encourage the path of your bougainvillea when all along we both knew it was meant to thwart my efforts at escape. Liar! I still have scars on my hands and legs. You could have bled me to death up there, Mama, killed me like you killed your husband and my father, Johnny Beauvais. Maybe that was the plan.”

  Juliet seems to have finished, but then adds: “They use barbed wire to train animals to keep within their bounds. I will die bleeding on drainpipe before you train me.”

  She puts the list back in her shoe and, still barefoot, walks to the bathroom on the balls of her feet to minimize the risk of contamination. The floor is gummier than slick, the odor not so bad that she has to cover her nose. Determined to avoid contact with the toilet seat, she squats over the bowl and misses the mark just as badly as the boy and Leonard did. Urine bounces off the rim and splashes against her bare thighs and ticks against her calves. In a reflexive response she squats lower and rings her bottom, which makes her pee more, and splash more.

  “Is this my life?” Juliet shouts, but no answer is forthcoming from the bedroom.

  She cleans herself with a towel thin enough to see through, then places it back on its hook over the lavatory—readily available to her roommates when they brush their teeth later on.

  In the mirror over the sink, its surface spotted brown and spidering with age, Juliet stares at a stranger. The features are hers, but the face belongs to someone else. Where is the girl who once stood on a stairway and compared her eyes to those of Etienne Beauvais? And where is she who so inspired an artist that he hardly is able to paint anyone else? “Wanna do it?” Juliet says sadly to the face, and no sooner has she spoken than the face shoots back a reply: “Not with you.”

  Piece by piece she picks her clothes off the floor and puts them on. Although she makes plenty of noise, Leonard and the boy are too dead to the world to hear. On the dresser there’s a ceramic plate holding Leonard’s wallet. Leonard seems to collect credit cards the way some losers collect souvenir baseball cards. She fishes out a collection of bills and receipts and counts sixty-eight dollars cash. In the pockets of the boy’s jeans all he has worth stealing are a half-smoked joint and several pills whose color vaguely resembles that of her long-expired prescription for Stelazine.

  She swallows the pills and saves the doob for later.

  “Thank you both for making me feel even worse about myself than I already did,” Juliet says
on her way out the door.

  The city lot for impounded vehicles is about twenty minutes away by foot. Surrounded by a towering chain-link fence, it occupies a narrow patch of ground under the elevated I-10 at North Claiborne Avenue, and borders a pocket of housing projects, abandoned shotgun shanties and blacks-only bars and pool halls. Juliet would invest in a cab ride if not for her financial situation, which, now that she considers it, is really the fault of one person only, a person other than herself.

  As she makes her way along the neutral ground dividing the street, the thunder of traffic beating down from the elevated roadway, Juliet encounters plenty of people to worry about. But everybody’s cool. Juliet is cool too, striding along with the unlighted stick of marijuana in her mouth, the boy’s pills beginning to make her heart flop around like a big, excited fish in her chest.

  Despite the danger posed by the neighborhood, she stops and contributes another notation to “The Proof.” Although it is her longest entry yet, Juliet needs only seconds to write it, as the markings she applies to the page owe less to the English language than to a language she alone understands. “You were soft once, Mama, way back in the beginning. I’m charitable enough to admit that. But time made you hard. Time set loose the softness and the hard took hold.”

  An ancient black man pushing a shopping cart loaded with cans clatters by in a miasma of dust and BO. He stops to observe the white girl sitting in the weeds. “What are you doing, mama?”

  Juliet looks up. “Giving proof for when I kill her. What are you doing?”

  “Doing what I do,” the man says, then continues on.

  “Shall I remind you, Mother, you once were the kind of woman who warmed baby oil and poured it in your daughter’s ear when she complained after swimming practice? Or that you were the kind who fed your child chicken soup and saltines in bed when she had the flu? Mama, your little daughter loved you soft. She loved it when you put your hand on her forehead and checked for fever. She would’ve stayed sick forever to keep you soft. As soon as you left the room, she put a pillowcase over the lamp to warm it then she put the pillowcase on her face to warm her face. ‘Come check my temperature,’ your daughter said. When you saw where the lamp had burned the pillowcase and left a brown spot—when you realized the trick your daughter had played—you didn’t even beat her. Tears ran from your eyes and you leaned forward and kissed your dear, precious child right smack on the mouth. The child tasted those tears and tastes them today.

  “Now, Mama, your baby has a question and here goes: Where the fuck is my goddamned check?”

  To recover the Mustang she pays with Leonard’s money in the tin shed that serves as an office. The car is dirtier than when she left it in front of the weekly/monthly, its hood smudged with oily handprints from the tow-truck driver. She flirts with the notion of returning it to the rental agency and demanding a refund for its quirky steering and/or sticky accelerator. But doubtful that she can prove these nonexistent problems, and afraid that Hertz double-checks her ability to pay, Juliet decides to count her blessings and accept the car as is/where is.

  Blowing pea gravel in a wide arc, zydeco on the radio blistering the big, water-soaked night, Juliet wheels onto North Claiborne Avenue and drives to the Beauvais.

  “Where is it?” she shouts after letting herself in at the front door.

  Her mother and Anna Huey, sitting in the parlor just past the doors to the right of the foyer, jump to their feet as if for battle.

  “Hello, girls, y’all got my money ready?”

  Miss Marcelle, wearing nightclothes and slippers, and holding a paperback novel of the Harlequin variety, ventures to within a few feet of Juliet. “Sweetheart, give me the house key. I’ll have Anna Huey write you a check.”

  “If I stuck my hand in your face and said give me my mansion back do you think I could expect to get it? Forget the key, Mother.”

  From the hallway comes the ticking of a clock, and from the street the irregular rush of traffic headed to the French Quarter. Juliet hears them past a constant echo whose origin she cannot determine. Did the boy’s pills come with sound effects?

  “Something’s been bothering me and I’d appreciate an answer,” she says, moving past her mother deeper into the room. “How’d you find me and get my telephone number?” She glances at Anna Huey. “Did you pay Anthony for that, too?”

  “We hired a detective agency that specializes in missing persons,” her mother answers. “They filed a complete and comprehensive report.”

  “Since when was I missing?”

  “Please, darling. Don’t shout.” Her mother’s hands are already shaking and Juliet hasn’t slapped anybody yet. “We were concerned for your well-being and quite frankly we were at a loss as to how to find you.”

  “Maybe I was missing to you,” Juliet says, “but I wasn’t missing to me. Believe it or not, I knew where I was the whole time.”

  “Juliet, why don’t you relax and have a seat?” Anna Huey pats the back of one of the chairs. “I’ll run to the kitchen and get you something cold to drink.”

  “Why don’t you run to the bank and get me some cash?”

  “Please sit for a few minutes,” her mother says. “Juliet, there’s something we need to talk about. Please, darling. Sit.”

  The echo sounds louder than before, its reverberations no longer isolated to the space behind her eyeballs. She feels it bouncing around her upper torso as well, and distracting her almost as much as the just-caught fish that is her heart. She figures the boy’s tablets weren’t antipsychotics, after all. Speed, maybe. Amphetamines. Why else would she feel like this? “I’ll talk to you, Mother,” she says, “but first you have to answer a question.”

  Miss Marcelle answers with a nod and Juliet says, “Why aren’t you dying?”

  “Now, Juliet—”

  “Mother, Anna Huey lied to me. She promised me, she promised you were dying.”

  “Juliet, I’m going to have to ask you to lower your voice.”

  “All the time I’ve been out there,” Juliet says, “all that time I kept thinking something cataclysmic would happen to tell me which way to go with my life. An earthquake or a fire, and I’d come out stronger than before. Don’t you hate survivors, Mother? Mother, of all the disappointments I’ve endured none has been greater than walking through that door and seeing you ain’t sick.”

  “That might be the meanest thing you’ve ever said to me,” Miss Marcelle says.

  “I know you think I’m crazy. I can tell by how you look at me. You think I’m sick, don’t you? You think I’m like he was.”

  “Juliet, I don’t think anything.”

  “Oh, yes, you do.”

  “Juliet, I needed to talk to you, darling. That’s why we conspired to bring you home. If it means anything I apologize. Feel better? Juliet, I’m sorry. I’m sorry and I regret the subterfuge.”

  She regrets the subterfuge. Juliet tells herself to add that to “The Proof” when she has a minute. To sit down and write: “You and your big words. Whenever Daddy had enough and took off and wouldn’t come home you were always practicing them on me. Carrying your dictionary around. Wanting to sound smarter than you are. Hey, lady, a big heads-up: Daddy’s gone for good and you and your subterfuge can go fuck each other.”

  Juliet drifts over to a rosewood console standing against the wall. A lamp with a stained-glass shade stands in the middle of the table. She rests a hand on its heavy brass base. “I’m going to count to three,” she says, “and if I don’t have my check something here takes a tumble.”

  Miss Marcelle lifts the paperback to her face and begins to read in a powerful voice. The book describes a conversation in which two lovers are expressing how they feel about each other.

  How Juliet feels is telling her mother to shut the subterfuge up.

  “One . . . two . . .”

  “Juliet, are you holding that lamp hostage?” Anna Huey says with a laugh.

  Now in the book the man and the woman have s
topped talking and moved to a bedroom. Juliet likes the way the man’s expression remains serious, revealing nothing, even as his beautiful seductress undresses in front of him.

  “Know what happened to me once?” she says. “I meet this guy in LA and he pays me five hundred dollars to do this.”

  “Go get her the money,” her mother says to Anna Huey.

  But Juliet, who’s really begun to enjoy herself, has already given the lamp a push. She steps back as it falls to the floor, the glass shade exploding on impact. Somehow the lightbulbs are spared and keep burning as bright as when the lamp was on the table.

  “Look at what you went and made me do,” she says. “I’m breaking lamps, all because you owe me five thousand dollars.”

  “We agreed it was two,” says Anna Huey, showing the appropriate number of fingers as she starts toward the back of the house.

  “Mother, I know what you did that day on Lake Pontchartrain,” Juliet says.

  “Darling, I’m going to have to ask you to leave now.”

  “Beat him with an oar. Beat him and then sat there and watched him die.”

  “Miss Marcelle,” Anna Huey says, “I’m sorry but I’m calling Nine-one-one.”

  For a place with a maid, the Beauvais isn’t very clean. This comes to Juliet as she’s searching for something else to destroy. Particles of dust float in the light of a chandelier, and mildew is the predominant odor. A solitary ring is visible on the surface of the console where the lamp stood. In the dust Juliet writes: “Clean me, please!”

  “The police are coming,” Anna Huey calls from the kitchen.

  Tired of its ticking, Juliet spins around and kicks the tall case clock, striking its delicately carved door and sending more glass to the floor.

  Miss Marcelle walks over and places her hands on Juliet’s shoulders. “Darling, won’t you let your mother help you?” she says quietly. “I know you can’t feel good about yourself right now. Please, darling, let Mama help you.”

  Juliet knocks her mother’s hands away and tries to push the clock over. It’s heavier than she anticipated and doesn’t easily budge, so she uses her foot for ballast and pulls at the crown. “Now that’s the trick,” she says in the moment before the clock crashes to the ground.