My Juliet Read online

  Sonny stares out at pedestrians and passing traffic, but what he sees are women in G-strings and high-heel shoes bumping and grinding against firehouse poles and sashaying along runways pulsing with colored lights. In the restaurant Pavarotti’s voice soars from hidden speakers, and yet Sonny hears the points of stilettos making contact with parquet.

  “It’s Frank,” Louis says when half a minute has passed and Sonny still hasn’t said anything.

  “It’s Frank? Frank who?”

  “Frank my Siamese.”

  “Oh, yeah. All right. Frank.”

  Louis nods and only now does Sonny acknowledge what an absolute ruin he is. Louis’s eyes are shot red, his hair is an oily nest, and his stubble is several days in the making.

  He removes a slip of paper from his shirt pocket and places it on the table. “I took him to the vet—a guy named Coulon over on Esplanade? He’s been taking care of Frank a few years now. I took him there to get spaded. Well, Coulon, the bastard, he spaded my Frank, all right. Spaded him but good.”

  “It’s spayed, bubba. You spay it.”

  “I don’t think I ever told you Frank was a female. He was Frankie to start. Anyway, the vet says it’s no big thing. A day at most he’ll need to keep him. Forty-five dollars with tax, simple procedure, piece of cake. That morning I take Frank in and kiss him good-bye. I wave as I’m leaving the room, give him one of these.” Louis makes a windshield wiper of his arm, moving it left to right.

  Sonny studies the bill as Louis continues talking. A list of unintelligible items traces down the middle of the page, accompanied on the right by an equally unintelligible list of figures. The total is clear, though. It has a box scribbled around it and the dollar sign needs no less than four slashes.

  “Later that afternoon the phone rings on the wall here and it’s the clinic. ‘Mr. Fortunato,’ comes a voice, ‘I’m afraid there’s bad news.’ ‘Bad news?’ I’m not even imagining.

  “What happened, the vet cuts him open and Frank’s hot as can be. You’d think the man, a doctor, would be smart enough to know you don’t operate on a cat in heat. Everybody knows that—shit, I know that and who the hell am I?”

  Louis seems to expect an answer. Sonny folds the paper and slides it across the table.

  “Murdering bastard,” and he looks outside now. “What I oughta do . . . what I . . .”

  “Relax,” Sonny says.

  Louis folds his hands in front of him. “So a couple of days go by, and I get this bill in the mail for three hundred bucks, I get this thing. I call the vet but the vet can’t come to the phone. What I have is this secretary telling me about kennel fees, about the doctor having to suture Frank again after the first sutures burst, about this, about that. I’m thinking, I’d like to do to that vet what he did to my Frank.”

  “I’d want to whack him, too,” Sonny says.

  “Whack!” Louis says, clapping his hands together. “Just like that I’d like to whack him.” He shakes his head with black, murderous resolve and it isn’t hard for Sonny to imagine what he’s thinking. Louis is seeing the vet on his knees pleading for mercy. He’s seeing a stick or a club or some other weapon going up and coming down with a force powerful enough to crush a human skull.

  “Whack!” Louis says, then claps his hands again.

  “Be quiet for five seconds and go get me my Crown,” Sonny tells him.

  Louis obeys. He returns and puts the drink on a paper coaster. Sonny could never understand why the place uses coasters when the tables are so badly scarred anyway. He takes a sip and Louis puts his hands on the top of Sonny’s chair and brings his mouth to within an inch of Sonny’s ear. “You think you could help me with the vet? You think you might consider that?”

  “No.”

  “But I thought we were brothers, Sonny. Ninth Ward boys.”

  “We are, Louis. I’m not whacking the vet.”

  “And I thought we’ve known each other since first grade. What about you and me serving as altar boys at Saint Cecilia until we outgrew the priest and had to quit? What about carpooling to Holy Cross every single day of high school and me having to drive most of the damned time because your daddy needed his pickup? What about our birthdays being two days apart and always celebrating with a bottle of Veuve Clicquot on the one in between? What about the times I lighted votive candles and said novenas for you when you were sweating out the draft and me saying maybe there really is a God after all and you saying, “Yes. Yes, there is. And he listens to Louis Fortunato’?”

  “Louis, you’re giving me a headache.”

  “It’s just that I thought we had a commitment here. And I thought you were a man of loyalty, of blinding, stupid, unwavering loyalty. Your family, your church, your city. Even your lunatic girlfriend who’s been missing in action for fifteen years. Everything and everyone but Louis, huh, brother?”

  “You can’t whack him yourself? I’d think you’d want the satisfaction.”

  “Yeah, I could whack him. Sure I could whack him.”

  “Then whack him. It wasn’t my cat that got killed.”

  “Coulon will recognize me. That’s the problem. I guess I could wear a disguise or something. But he’d figure it out. There ain’t many people in this city dragging around a fake leg.” Louis brings his hand down hard against his prosthesis, producing a deep, hollow sound that turns several heads in the room. “If you love me, Sonny. If you love me, brother . . .”

  And all Sonny wanted was a drink, a view of the street, some opera on the stereo. “Okay, Louis,” he says. “All right. If you promise it’ll make you feel better.”

  “Yeah,” Louis says. “It will. It’ll make me feel just fine.” But there is no conviction in his voice, and no hint of gratification either.

  Louis staggers away making as much noise on the leg as possible, and Sonny drinks the rest of his Crown vainly trying to recall the girls at Lulu’s topless/bottomless.

  She isn’t sure where she stands in terms of a credit line, but nevertheless she hands her credit card to the man at the desk. He says he needs it to make an impression on her registration form, and she figures her luck has turned when he gives it back along with a passkey to a room.

  “You look familiar,” he says.

  “Yeah? We all do, I guess. To someone.”

  “No, I mean it. I’ve seen you before.”

  “You ever watch soap operas? I was in one once. They had me as a waitress in a café that really was just this set in Burbank. I didn’t get to talk.”

  He studies her face, his own expression revealing nothing. “Maybe that’s where.”

  Juliet knows better than to count on her mother and Anna Huey to reimburse her expenses, so she’s decided to try to scrape a few dollars together, if she means to eat. The one-way airline ticket cost her nearly four hundred dollars. Or cost her card. The distance between the gutter and her rear end, she often says to herself, is the width of that Visa.

  “Have a nice stay,” says the man at Check-in.

  “I did some adult films, too,” she says. “Maybe it was there you saw me.”

  “I’d have to think about that.”

  “Spanish Fly Reunion, Sindy’s Gotta Eat, Days of Wine and Hormones. Any of them ring a bell?”

  “I’m a married man, Miss—” he checks the registration form—“Beauvais.”

  In the room she looks up Boudreau Exploration in the business section of the White Pages. The listing includes nineteen different numbers; Juliet counts them. She chooses the one set off in bold type. “Boudreau Oil and Gas,” a female voice answers.

  “Juliet Beauvais for Dickie Boudreau, please.”

  “Let me see if Mr. Boudreau is available, Ms. Beauvais. Hold, please.”

  But Juliet doesn’t get Dickie Boudreau. She doesn’t even get the one who answered the phone. “Ms. Beauvais,” comes a voice, “this is Mr. Boudreau’s secretary. May I help you?”

  “I haven’t talked to Dickie in years. I’m in town and wanted to say hello and
see how he’s doing.”

  “He’s fine, thank you,” the secretary says. “But he’s tied up at the moment. However, I will make sure to tell him you asked after his well-being. Now is there anything else I can help you with, Ms. Beauvais?”

  Juliet puts the phone down. She gets the picture. Dickie Boudreau, who once vomited at her feet while on the dance floor at the F&M Patio Bar, doesn’t want to speak to her.

  She hasn’t dialed her mother’s number in years and yet she finds herself doing so now. Anna Huey answers after a few rings and Juliet listens to her say “Hello” half a dozen times.

  Catching on finally, Anna Huey says, “That you, sugar?”

  Juliet says, “Your husband dies and you move in my house and now you act like you own the place. When was the last time you actually cleaned anything?”

  “Do you want to speak to your mother, Juliet?”

  “Not necessarily. Just tell her she owes me my money.”

  “And what money is that?”

  “Money for my flight, money for my car, money for my room, money for the food I’ll have to eat. You know what money!” Juliet hangs up.

  They seemed such an odd pair: her mother in her Joan Crawford makeup, Kmart housedress and rubber flip-flops, Anna Huey in her Hazel-the-maid uniform and white hose that whistled when she walked. “Must be turning over in your grave,” Juliet says out loud. “And you,” she adds, “an actual Beauvais.”

  Juliet opens the door to the balcony and lets the noise from Bourbon Street spill in. Across the way she sees Houlihan’s Restaurant and a run of bars and souvenir shops. Juliet smells the aroma of boiled Lucky Dogs, along with the equally nauseating odors of urine and throw-up.

  She hears the little black boys dancing for tourists, zydeco music way far off, the insectlike buzz of neon lights burning even in the daytime. She’s home, all right.

  In the room she picks up the phone and dials the Beauvais again. This time her mother picks up.

  “You’re a Lavergne,” Juliet says. “Your father grew sweet potatoes on a thirty-seven-acre farm in Opelousas. Your mother sat on the porch all day shelling peas in her dirty bare feet.”

  “Is this you?” her mother shouts.

  “Yes, it’s me. The one that blew cigarette smoke in your house. The one you owe five thousand dollars to. Where’s my money, woman?”

  Miss Marcelle stammers to speak, and Juliet says, “I want you out of my house and I want you out now,” then slams the phone down.

  Every morning they’re forced to listen to Sonny’s pickup as it comes plowing through Bywater and Faubourg Marigny at a speed twice the posted limit. In the Vieux Carré they hear him even before he’s crossed the neutral ground on Esplanade Avenue. It’s a muffler problem, but it’s also an attitude problem: Sonny’s.

  Up on the galleries of the old town houses, and in adjoining courtyards where for most of the day the only sound is that of water trickling in great stone fountains, they lower their morning newspapers and demitasse cups and squeeze their eyes shut against the wretched intrusion. Oh, for the poetic clip-clop of horses on the macadam! Oh, for the fruit and waffle and Roman candy vendors in mule-drawn lorries!

  Oh, for any time but this one and for anything but that truck!

  “How’d that rusted-out piece of crap ever get a brake tag, anyway?” Sonny likes to imagine them saying.

  Even at high speeds he drives with headlights on, as if to inform other drivers that, lead foot notwithstanding, he is cautious and self-protective, a person to trust. But the headlights, like his smiles and waves and shouted hellos, are artifice. For months now Sonny has been wondering if the day will come when, unable to resist the impulse any longer, he steers straight into a tree or a wall of stalled traffic and ends his life at once and forever.

  Sonny is an artist. Or perhaps more accurately he’s a former hotel bartender posing as an artist. In any case, he owns a mayoral permit licensing him to ply his trade in the French Quarter, and there he reports each day and displays his paintings on the tall iron fence that surrounds Jackson Square. In earlier days Sonny had dreams that involved wealth and fame beyond measure—dreams that found him hanging for sale in the city’s best galleries, a Sonny LaMott right alongside other desirables with exorbitant price tags. But it’s been more than five years now since Sonny, sure to be an immortal, left his job as a bartender at the Pontchartrain Hotel, and he’s succeeded in selling only a handful of his more ambitious creations. Tourists want portraits of themselves and the occasional rendering of Elvis before he was fat.

  “Would you have a look at my stuff?” Sonny says to the gallery owners.

  “Sorry,” they tell him, “we’re not taking anyone new at the moment.”

  When Sonny isn’t stationed at the fence, he drives around the city looking for things to paint. He carries with him a tablet of cheap paper and a box of charcoals and he likes to perch on the tailgate of his pickup and sketch whatever his eye travels to. Other times he sets up an easel and paints on location, hours given to applying oils and acrylics to canvas, Masonite, odd shapes of tin, corkboard, newsboard and crude lengths of burlap fitted onto homemade stretchers. Sonny’s choice of subject matter tends to be images too often conferred on the city, and ones that he himself once regarded as hackneyed.

  “This city,” he said to Louis, “it really is different from all others, isn’t it?”

  “It’s New Orleans, Sonny. You need to find a better word than different.”

  Sonny paints the jazz halls and monuments, the Carnival balls and parades, the funeral marches and the food and music festivals. He paints fruit vendors selling Sugartown watermelons and Creole tomatoes from the backs of dilapidated pickups, and shotgun shanties all in a row, each a different color. He paints cemeteries and historic buildings and parks and oak trees and river bridges and bayous and swamps and ships and schools and warehouses and petrochemical plants.

  Said Louis, “You actually expect someone to hang a picture of a refinery in their living room?”

  “Sure,” Sonny replied. “People like pictures of cows, why wouldn’t they like pictures of refineries?”

  Rather than an original talent to be reckoned with, Sonny has become perhaps the biggest cliché going: a man in filthy, paint-stained clothing and a fuzzy beret, whose stomach growls from hunger as he tries to hustle pictures that nobody wants.

  Today he has dared to present himself to an elderly gentleman named Royce Michaud, who’s wearing a tan crepe suit with food droppings on the sleeves, and around his neck a tie decorated with Tabasco peppers. Michaud’s gallery is in the Warehouse District, one of several in the upstart arts enclave on Julia Street. Sonny and Royce Michaud stand together in a poorly lighted storage room, unrolling canvases and sheets of paper, carelessly spreading them on a table. “You want advice, Mr. LaMott? I’ll give it to you straight.”

  Sonny nods.

  “Well, to begin, your scale is off.”

  “My scale?”

  “Yes. But your palette is rich and bold, I’ll grant you that. I see talent here, Mr. LaMott, I do, but, sadly, and this is difficult for me to say . . . I don’t see enough to take you past the fence. Your work is uninspired, Mr. LaMott. It lacks passion, and what is a painting but an expression of individual passion? It’s as if you paint in your sleep. Wake up, you somnambulist, you listless man. Wake up and show thyself!”

  Royce Michaud is holding an eight-by-ten watercolor depicting a Mardi Gras parade on Saint Charles Avenue. “Take this one as a case in point,” he says, studying the scene so closely that Sonny feels himself growing warm and uncomfortable. “Your perspective here, Mr. LaMott . . .”

  Sonny nods.

  “The Carnival is moving away from the viewer. See that? The people on the street, those on the floats, the ones on the balconies here, even the animals on the sidewalk . . . everyone is turned away, there isn’t a single face to make out. Where is the emotion? An artist must emote, Mr. LaMott.”

  “Yes. Yes, he must,
Mr. Michaud.”

  “Has the world passed you by, Mr. LaMott? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “The world? What world?”

  “I ask you, do you feel like an outsider, separate and apart from everyone else?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “All the time, more like. Of course you do. You are totally disengaged. That is what you’re telling me with your work. That is the statement you’re making to the world. ‘I could give a fuck.’ You’re standing there at the epicenter of one of this country’s most popular tourist destinations and you’re saying, ‘Hello, my name is Sonny LaMott, and I could give a fuck!’ ”

  “I could give a fuck,” Sonny repeats.

  Royce Michaud stuffs the parade painting in Sonny’s open rucksack and removes another, this one a portrait of Juliet. “Now now now,” he says, thrusting the small canvas under the green glass shade of a pharmacy lamp. “At last I see it.”

  “Did I get the scale right?”

  “No, Mr. LaMott. Passion! I see it. And, oh, how delighted I am. You are not a somnambulist, after all. You are not dead on your feet. Oh, how nice.”

  Sonny clears his throat. “That’s Juliet.”

  “It’s more than any one girl,” says the dealer. “It’s love. It’s sex. It’s longing and desperation. It’s also very beautiful. Now this is art, Mr. LaMott. Perhaps you do give a fuck.”

  “Juliet,” Sonny says quietly. “Sometimes I think that if not for her I might’ve been a real artist, and a successful one. She’s made every other painting unimportant.”

  “Nonsense,” says Royce Michaud. “Who taught you to talk like that?”

  “That woman ran me over like a dog in the road.”

  The dealer continues to study the image, his fingers delicately following the lines of Juliet’s voluptuous form. “Yes, but of course she ran you over. This is clear now. And that is precisely why you will never be able to place this painting. More bad news, Mr. LaMott.”

  “Just say it.”

  “Nudes are a hard sell to begin with, and one such as this, though compelling, is particularly difficult. It’s your best work, far superior to anything else you’ve shown me, but every woman who encounters this picture will find herself lacking in comparison to your Juliet. She’ll sense her own inadequacies, and I don’t mean simply tits and ass, Mr. LaMott. She’ll feel as if she doesn’t measure up. She’ll know only frustration at never having experienced the obsession of a man equal to that which is so evident here. You’ve made your love a prison, my friend. No”—Royce Michaud puts the piece away—“I’m afraid I have but one suggestion.”