My Juliet Read online

  Sonny waits, his Adam’s apple throbbing in his neck.

  “Now, now, Mr. LaMott, it isn’t easy for me to say this. But don’t give up your day job.”

  She knows she’s good. Her stomach is flat, her hips and thighs devoid of cellulite, her boobs as fat and pointy as when she was fifteen. She likes the sassy Veronica Lake haircut her friend Wade gave her back in LA (whoever Veronica Lake is). She likes her feet. She likes her eyes, nose and ears. When she was young, a little thing yet, friends often teased her about the size of her lips. “Inner tubes,” they called them. And as much as she hated them then, Juliet likes her lips now. These days big lips are in; they’re all the rage. Models on magazine covers have big lips, and people pay good money for collagen injections. Ask anybody: a big mouth beats out a skinny one any day.

  Once at a place off Ventura Boulevard a man paid her five hundred dollars to run her tongue over her lips while he sat in a chair and played with himself.

  An hour later she was at an electronics store on Sepulveda buying a VCR.

  They don’t need dancers at the first two clubs she tries. They do need waitresses, however. Does she have any experience waiting tables? This she figures is a polite way of saying she doesn’t look good enough to dance, that her look is too old or too hard, too something. The third place is too sleazy, the fourth too dead. They seem to like her at the fifth place. A woman called Lulu runs it.

  She and Juliet sit at the bar and drink diet ginger ales.

  “You say you’re originally from here?”

  “Ever hear of the Beauvais over on Esplanade? I grew up in that house. That’s my family it’s named after.”

  “You’re one of them Beauvais, are you?”

  “My people go back to the earliest Creoles who settled in the city. You know what a Creole is, don’t you, Lulu?”

  “A high yellow?”

  “Well, it could be a high yellow. But your earliest Creoles were foreign people—Europeans—who came from France and settled in New Orleans. Some of the wealthier and more distinguished ones built big houses along Esplanade. How your mulattoes came to be Creoles is the white Creole men had light-skinned African women as concubines on the side and they had babies together and your babies grew up and learned who their daddies were and they started telling everybody they were Creoles, too. It used to be a very special thing to be a Creole. In Louisiana at one time it was like being royalty.”

  “Everybody’s got to be something,” says Lulu, who couldn’t seem less impressed.

  “The Beauvais will be mine any day now. My mother’s sick, riddled from head to toe with inoperable cancer. I’m her only heir—and the last of my particular branch of the Beauvais—so I’ll get the place and everything else that’s been handed down from one generation to the next for going on two hundred years now.”

  “I had an uncle left me an old Buick once. I sold it for scrap for forty-five dollars.”

  Juliet, not sure how to respond, sips her beverage.

  “You know how at them retarded schools they teach those kids shop?” says Lulu. “Well, at this one school over in Chalmette they make barbecue pits out of barrels and I went there with that car money and I bought myself one. I still got it. It cooks some beautiful meats.”

  “Let’s make a deal, Lulu,” Juliet says. “Let me dance here at your club and once Mama dies I’ll make sure to invite you and the girls over to the house for an afternoon tea party?”

  “Sorry, dear, but I’m afraid I’ll have to pass.”

  Juliet lets on a look of disappointment and the woman says, “It’s on account I have this phobia about old houses. Them and antiques. Stand me by an antique chair, for instance, and I like to faint.”

  Lulu lets her start that same day, and after Juliet has danced a few songs she sits with a man in a business suit who identifies himself as a schoolteacher from nearby Saint Bernard Parish. Like a lot of men his age, which is about forty, the schoolteacher’s wife doesn’t understand his needs. Juliet is tempted to ask what those needs are, but she’s not sure she wants to hear them. They’re about all talked out when the schoolteacher leans in close and says, “I think it would be neat to get some lady to pee on me. You ever think you might like to urinate on an individual?”

  “I only do that in the normal place,” Juliet answers.

  This seems to be devastating news for the schoolteacher, who sits in silence hanging his head and picking at the label on his bottle of near beer.

  “Well,” she says, “I did squat and do it behind trees before. Do trees count?”

  “I know now where I’ve seen you before.”

  She smiles in a disinterested way, not wishing to share her filmography with another one.

  “Ever been to the Napoleon House?” he says. “It’s that place across from the back of that hotel, the Royal Orleans; I forget the street. I think they got your picture hanging on the wall.”

  “What kind of picture?”

  “Some painting. Ever pose for a painting?”

  “Long time ago I did.” She laughs. “Boy was always doing me naked.”

  The schoolteacher says, “Breasts and everything.”

  Juliet uses her straw to push her lime wedge down under her ice. “This famous movie producer in California paid me five hundred dollars once to run my tongue around like this.” And now she demonstrates.

  “You got yourself some monster lips, all right.”

  “They’re just like some others in my family. I inherited them from the Beauvais, I guess. Kiss them too long and you know what happens?”

  “I’d like to find out,” says the schoolteacher.

  “They turn a color too pretty for words. Us of my stripe don’t even need lipstick.”

  Sonny has painted other women, not a few of them nude. But the funny thing is—funny to him, anyway—most of his models end up looking like Juliet, and those who by some fluke actually come out resembling themselves never fail to own at least one of her features: the smart eyes, the puffy lips, the thick yellow hair. Sometimes, when unsatisfied with a picture, he’s even substituted her large breasts and generous snarl of pubic hair.

  “She’s not me,” a model told him once, “but I think I know this person.”

  They were at his home on the back porch, and the girl, whom he’d managed to have his way with a few hours earlier, was standing with a paint-stained sheet held close to her chest. Her own body was small and angular, while the nude in Sonny’s painting was fleshy enough to draw comparisons to Marilyn Monroe.

  “Okay, I know now,” the girl said. “It’s Juliet Beauvais. We went to the Academy together. Oh my God, Sonny! You’ve gone and made me a slut!”

  Over the years Sonny’s enjoyed his share of girlfriends—a few easily as pretty as Juliet, and all of them more kind, more generous—but somehow none has been able to keep him. These women simply were not meant for him, he decided, after casting them aside. The hours on the telephone, letters written and letters received, weekend dates to movies and coffeehouses. It all died away finally. His relationship with Polly Bienvenue, for example, reached the point where they were shopping for antique wedding bands in the French Quarter before he realized that he could never marry a woman with such stubby hands. “She was really quite lovely,” he explained to Louis after crushing the woman, “but the one thing I could never get past were her hands.”

  “She’s not missing any fingers, is she?”

  “No. They’re all there.”

  “What’s wrong with them, then?”

  “Besides their being stubby, you mean?” Sonny thought about it for a while. “Nothing, I guess, short of the fact that they’re not Juliet’s.”

  In his mawkish hours with strangers in Decatur Street bars, Sonny has confessed to looking for Juliet in every mouth he ever kissed, and the same went for her sex. The more he experimented with other women the more he became convinced that only she could make him happy. At night when he went to bed he imagined the two of them holding viv
id conversations, Sonny employing a gift of gab that he in fact did not possess, while Juliet nodded admiringly and listened for a change.

  “Sounds like she put some powerful voodoo on your ass,” a fellow beer drinker told him once.

  “That could be it.”

  “It also sounds like you need some counseling.”

  “Why do you think I’m talking to you?” Sonny answered with a laugh.

  Sonny dreams about the perfect children they might’ve produced together. And he envisions the one who, had they chosen to let the pregnancy run its course, would be a teenager now. When he imagines this person Sonny sees either a son in his image or a daughter in Juliet’s, and he sees his own life as he was meant to live it. As a family man he’d have discovered a happiness that is nowhere near him now, and his days, given to others, would have a greater meaning, a higher purpose. Every aspect of his existence, both large and small, would be improved. Collectors would covet his paintings; he would not have to paint Young Elvis and tourist portraits. Roaring through the French Quarter on his way to the square, his presence would elicit excitement. “Ah, yes, here he comes. The great man!”

  “I was wrong about something,” Juliet told him. “Remember how you said it only takes one drop and I said there was nothing to worry about?”

  “Oh, Julie.”

  Had he only been more brave. Had he then said, “Okay, now, let’s think about this,” or, better yet, “No, we’re keeping it,” the whole world would be different today. To begin, Sonny would not be such a brokendown thing. His mother would be alive, his father well and prospering. Sonny might even be driving a car, a new one, instead of his father’s twenty-three-year-old pickup truck. He would have a house in a neighborhood with trees, central air instead of window units, a lawn without weeds.

  It also occurs to Sonny that, had he not agreed to the procedure (Sonny still can’t call the abortion by its name), he would be nowhere near the situation in which he finds himself tonight.

  No way would Sonny be waiting for an old cat doctor to leave his office and make his way across the Esplanade Avenue neutral ground.

  “On the one hand you seem like such a normal, well-adjusted guy,” Sonny is saying to Louis Fortunato. “You give good, smart advice and you’re trustworthy and you can make more sense than anyone I know. Then on the other hand you think it’s okay to whack a vet for allegedly killing your Frank. Please help me with this picture, Louis.”

  “Blame it on my leg. Everyone else does.”

  “Your leg is what made you a weirdo?”

  “That’s what they tell me.”

  It is almost 8:00 P.M. before the vet emerges from the building. Small and humped over, he’s wearing a baggy seersucker suit with a black bow tie drooping at the neck. He is much older than Sonny imagined he would be; in fact, he is so old that his hair and mustache are bleached white.

  “Bloody, murderous bastard,” Louis says, sipping from a bottle of whiskey.

  “I pictured him different,” Sonny says. “He looks about a hundred. Poor old geezer.”

  “Sorry, bubba. But being a hundred don’t make him immune from being a cold-blooded killer.”

  Sonny has come to this event “dressed for success,” as he himself described his outfit earlier. He is all in black save for the surgical gloves covering his hands, which are white.

  “I dream a thousand pictures,” Louis says. “Frank on the windowsill at home watching cars go by, Frank batting a ball of yarn across the kitchen floor, Frank on his birthday eating a platter of fried chicken livers I bought him at Popeye’s.”

  “Do you dream one of Frank squatting in his litter box?”

  “Frank was a saint,” Louis says. “And saints can speak directly to God. They have the power. As long as you have Frank in your corner there’s nothing to worry about.”

  “You think if I pray to Frank people will start buying my paintings?”

  “I’m not sure Frank can perform miracles,” Louis says, “but it wouldn’t hurt.”

  Sonny stares out at the wide boulevard, its trees and footpaths and solitary lamps. He’s heard stories about the neighborhood, some of them hard to believe to look at the area now. In the years before the Civil War New Orleans had more millionaires per capita than any other city in America, and here in the district populated by French Creoles there lived some of the wealthiest, Juliet’s people among them. One of the first families, true pioneers, the Beauvais helped settle three miles of rich farmland from the Mississippi River up to Bayou Saint John, building the magnificent homes that still stand today. In 1872 and 1873 French Impressionist painter Edgar Degas lived for five months with relatives in a nearby Greek Revival. Many of the original Creole houses on Esplanade, like the one that belonged to Degas’s family, later became blighted property. Plywood covers the windows; graffiti marks the ancient façades. Still others, inhabited until only recently, have been abandoned as the criminal element digs in. And who is this criminal element?

  Sad sacks like Sonny LaMott and Louis Fortunato, as it turns out.

  “I guess it’s time,” Louis says.

  “Guess so.” Sonny takes in a deep breath. “If nothing else today proves that we’re the two most pathetic sonsabitches in the entire city of New Orleans.”

  “And that we lead the emptiest lives, don’t forget that.”

  Louis hands Sonny the club he spent the better part of the day putting together. It’s a piece of PVC, about two inches in diameter and two feet long, and he’s filled it with something dense and heavy. Both ends are capped, and one is wrapped with electrical tape. The handle, Sonny presumes.

  “That’s sand in there in case you were wondering,” Louis says. “I tried kitty litter but the sand proved more effective. It felt harder in the pipe than the kitty litter did. This’ll really hurt but it’s not likely to kill him. Hit him in the shins, Sonny. Make him feel it.”

  “Feel what?”

  “The pain, brother. Make him feel the pain.”

  It’s hot to be wearing black clothes, let alone gloves and a mask, but Sonny figures that half an hour from now he’ll be back home in shorts and a T-shirt, lounging under the little window unit in his bedroom, absorbed again in a life without a whole lot to do.

  He gets out of the truck and looks around to make sure no one is watching.

  “Dr. Coulon?” he calls, striding toward the old man. “Dr. Coulon, I’m here on behalf of Frank.”

  The vet wheels around and looks at Sonny with as much resignation as terror. Maybe it’s the clothes Sonny’s wearing, or maybe he’s kept abreast of the city’s crime statistics, because in either case he doesn’t seem altogether unprepared for this moment.

  “There isn’t much,” he says, reaching for his wallet.

  “You killed Frank,” Sonny tells him.

  “I killed who?”

  “Drop to the ground after I pretend to hit you,” Sonny demands. He takes a step closer. “Come on, you old fart, fall to the ground.”

  “Hey, look. I’m an animal doctor. I didn’t kill anyone.”

  “Tell that to Frank,” Sonny says, raising the club. “Now I’m going to act like I’m hitting you and I want you to act like it hurts. Come on. Fall down, you bastard.”

  Sonny levels the club against the vet’s shin, barely bumping him. “Fall!” Sonny says, taking another phony swing. “Come on, old man. Fall!” And down the vet goes, really hamming it up now. He screams and writhes in the grass, his arms stretched out over his head.

  “Grab your leg,” Sonny says. “Come on, old-timer. Grab it.”

  The vet does as he’s told and Sonny pretends to whack him a few more times. He lifts the club high and brings it down, each time stopping just short of making contact.

  “That’s for Frank,” Sonny says.

  The old man shrieks.

  “For Frank from the one who loves him. You cat-killing bastard. You murderer. You . . .”

  By the time Sonny returns to the truck Louis has already s
tarted the engine. Louis, pounding both hands on the dashboard, is all nerves; even his eyes seem to wobble in their sockets.

  “You killed him!” he calls as Sonny makes a U-turn and roars away. “You killed my Frank!”

  From beneath the trees the vet yells again, louder than before.

  They drive a few blocks before Sonny pulls over and removes the gloves and ski mask and stuffs them under the seat. He says nothing until they reach the painted lady on Prytania where Louis rents a small apartment. Originally built as a single-family residence, the grand but tumbledown Victorian now houses a dozen small units. Sonny stops beside a collection of overflowing trash cans standing in the rear alley.

  “Now that is one old guy who’ll think twice before neutering another cat,” Sonny says.

  Louis gets out of the truck and staggers to within a few feet of the cans before, skidding to a halt, he throws up violently at his feet.

  Through his open window Sonny says, “Listen, you lunatic, if you call that man or go by his office again we’ll both end up in jail. I’m not serving time for you, buddy. I’m not.”

  Louis, bent over, rests his hands on his fake leg, a rope of saliva hanging from his mouth.

  “So don’t be gloating about this tomorrow,” Sonny says, “and don’t you ever mention it again. Do you hear what I’m saying?”

  Louis cleans his mouth with his shirttail and gives a nod. “I owe you,” he says.

  “No, you don’t. You don’t owe me anything.”

  “I owe you,” Louis says again.

  “You color-coded our lives. Daddy was blue, I was red, you were green. My piggy bank was a glass bottle with a red lid. My dinner plate was red plastic. My glass was red glass. You gave me that sweater that Christmas and guess what color? I told you I wanted yellow but goddamn if you didn’t go and make it red.