My Juliet Page 7

  “Hey, look, first of all you’re a maid—”

  But Anna Huey has already terminated the connection.

  Juliet walks out on the balcony and stands leaning against the railing with the bustle and roar of the Vieux Carré below. She hates that piss-and-wiener smell, hates the tap-tap noise of the dancing boys, hates the neon burning at all hours. They can romanticize New Orleans all they want but in her mind it will always be a lousy excuse for pretty.

  “You’re a maid!” she yells down to the crowd on Bourbon Street.

  A clutch of tourists looks up, squinting for the sun.

  “A maid!” she says again, then stalks back inside.

  Juliet soaks in the tub without using soap or a washcloth. She enjoys the water’s powerful healing effects. In fact, its powerful healing effects almost put her to sleep. When the water grows tepid she drains some then adds more hot. She lights a joint and it isn’t long before a memory of her father’s death, invented now for her viewing pleasure, plays out in her mind in the blurry Technicolor tones of a 1970s caper flick. Her mother with her precious crying eyeballs has perpetrated the crime of the century!

  Now comes another memory, to counterbalance the previous one. Whether it’s real or imagined Juliet can’t decide, but clearly she sees her father at home in the library, standing before the fireplace with his hands in the pockets of a pale linen suit. His shirt is open at the collar, and tasseled loafers cover his small, bare feet. Her father bears a strong physical resemblance to the young Cary Grant (“Yes, they’re both men,” Miss Marcelle said when Juliet told her this). And her father talks like the actor. “Darling,” he says, “you seem so sad today. Is something wrong?”

  “No. Well, yes, Daddy. It’s Leonard Barbier. They were saying things at school, some girls were.”

  “Leonard’s a fine young man from a fine old New Orleans family. Can’t your father have friends?” Then before she can answer: “Now what else is troubling you? If there’s a first thing there’s bound to be a second.”

  She can’t bring herself to say it. She sits staring at her hands.

  “Oh, you,” pleads her father. “I’m your daddy.”

  Juliet gets out of the tub and towels off and walks naked into the room. She lies in bed sucking hard on what remains of the doob, wet hair fanned out on the spread. Wouldn’t her father just die to know a colored woman is answering his phone, handling his money, condescending to an actual Beauvais?

  “Juliet, I’m here for you, sweetheart.”

  “Daddy, I heard what Mama told you when you got home last night.”

  “Your mother says a lot of things, especially when I’ve been out in the Quarter. We know that by now, don’t we?”

  It hurts too much to look at him. And in his presence she is unable to repeat her mother’s words.

  “I’m sorry you had to hear those things. None is true, of course. Will you let them go, darling?”

  “I can’t, Daddy. I try to but I can’t.”

  He leaves the room and when he returns he is holding a small shaving mirror. “Come with me,” and he signals for her to rise. He takes her by the hand and leads her through pocket doors and halfway up the mahogany stairway crowded with family portraits. “I have something to show you,” he says. “It’s something my father showed me when I was a boy. One day when you’re older and have a child of your own I’m sure you’ll want to continue the tradition.” He points to a face in one of the portraits. “Have a good look at your great-grandfather there,” he says. “Now have a look at yourself.”

  As he holds the mirror she studies her features: the chapped and peeling lips, eyes swollen from crying. “His name was Etienne Beauvais,” her father says.

  Somehow she manages a laugh.

  “They’re your eyes, aren’t they? They’re not your mother’s eyes. Now look at that painting farther up the stairs. That’s Etienne’s father, Jean-Jacques. Notice the mouth?”

  Juliet brings a hand to her lips and touches them with her fingertips.

  “Now where have I seen that mouth before? Oh,” and her father places the mirror closer to her face, “here we are. My heavens, you have that man’s mouth. Where did you get that man’s mouth?”

  “I stole it.”

  “You stole it!”

  They embrace and Juliet laughs and cries both at once as her father holds her head against his chest and traces a hand through her hair. He smells so much like himself, so uniquely like himself, that she feels strengthened and renewed simply by her proximity to this smell. “She was just being mean, wasn’t she?”

  “Right,” he answers. “Just being mean. But I suppose she can’t help it. Consider her limited experience and education. If I came from a yam farm in an outpost as spare and bucolic as Opelousas I suppose I would be intimidated, too. I’m not so easy to live with either, you know?”

  “You’re great,” Juliet says.

  “You’re the last of us, darling. Promise your daddy there’ll be more. Sons and daughters. There aren’t any portraits on the other side of this stairway. You’ve noticed that, I’m sure?”

  “I love you, Daddy,” Juliet says. And now in the hotel bathroom she is startled to hear a voice, and doubly so to discover that it is her own.

  Juliet is standing at the mirror, her face inches from the surface. The mirror, still damp with steam, reflects an image only vaguely similar to the one she saw earlier in her father’s glass.

  At this moment Etienne and Jean-Jacques Beauvais are not visible in her features, and neither, come to think of it, is Johnny Beauvais. Juliet hates to contradict the man she loves most in the world but her mouth today is just a mouth. And the same goes for her eyes. Everybody has them. Now as she looks more closely the reflection excites in her a sudden feeling of horror, for it is her mother who is staring back, her face gripped with the same contempt she once held for Johnny Beauvais.

  Juliet lets out a yell and flees the room, stumbles into the hallway. Where did they put the goddamned elevator? There are more yells as she propels herself down the hall to the nearest stairway exit.

  “Yes, I was hoping somebody might help me find my friend Leonard Barbier,” Juliet says to the concierge in the lobby.

  “Miss Beauvais, you’re down here in a robe.”

  “He’s a musician. Leonard Barbier?”

  “Leonard Barbier,” the man says, as if by repeating the name she’ll be mollified.

  “Yes, that’s the one. He plays saxophone in a jazz band. Or used to, anyway.”

  “Miss Beauvais? Miss Beauvais, you should go back to your room and put some clothes on.”

  “Big ’fro, gold in his teeth, chains.”

  Only now does it occur to Juliet that the concierge himself is black.

  “Leonard Barbier,” he says again. “Let me make a few calls and see if I can’t locate him. But please, Miss Beauvais, go back to your room.”

  Twenty minutes later the phone rings. “Good news,” the concierge begins, then tells her that after some determined sleuthing he was able to locate her friend Leonard. “His band performs three nights a week at a club in the Marigny,” the man says, referring to Faubourg Marigny, the neighborhood on the downriver side of Esplanade Avenue from the Vieux Carré.

  The concierge says he took the liberty of calling the club himself and, this is wonderful, the woman on the other end gave him Leonard’s address. It’s a place, a weekly/monthly, down on North Rampart Street.

  Juliet couldn’t be less interested in the man’s detective work, but she lets the militant bastard have his say. He probably thinks the more he talks the more she’ll be obliged to tip him.

  “So I call and speak to Mr. Barbier,” the man says.

  “You talked to Leonard?”

  “As it happened, I caught him as he was walking out the door. I told him to expect an old friend at his show tonight. He kept asking for a name, he seemed excited, but I wouldn’t tell him.”

  “Tell me where he lives, and what was that c
lub again?”

  The man provides names and addresses. She writes them down.

  “Are we done yet?” Juliet says when the concierge seems to have stopped.

  Silence at last. She can hardly believe it.

  Daylight fades, the last of it gold on the buildings of the French Quarter. The old streets teem with pedestrians heading to nightclubs and to supper. In the windows of the oyster bars shuckers in black rubber gloves pry shells open and lay them twelve to a serving on platters covered with shaved ice. In the strip joints women dance on lighted platforms, their soft bellies scarred from cesarians and appendectomies, their beauty lost to all but the sailors in from sea and the fraternity boys on holiday. Here and there a preacher waves a book. Here and there a transvestite tries gamely to navigate in heels.

  Sonny sits by the fence facing the square, the park in front of him closed and padlocked for the night. In front of the cathedral a lone futurist flips tarot cards and mutters at the horror of things to come. From the Presbytere come the haunting riffs of a clarinet. Sonny watches the wind stir the oaks and magnolias. Past the boughs he can see a faint sprinkling of stars.

  Whenever a fellow painter dies, Roberts told him once, those who survive him plant a tree in Jackson Square as a living memorial. The square is crowded with trees, Roberts said, and this is proof that nobody, not even someone as important as an artist, leaves this earth alive.

  “See that beautiful crape myrtle? Why, that’s Clarence Millet. The banana tree next to it? Miss Alberta Kinsey.”

  Sonny always liked that story. Tonight it makes him feel a part of something, not just a solitary sort with no one but an Alzheimer’s patient for a father and a mentally unstable waiter for a friend.

  Feet planted on the fence, he tilts slightly backward in his chair and studies the blue forms of the trees, the oleander and camphor and mimosa, wondering which of them belong to the memories of dead artists. Surely these people suffered rejection, too. Surely they gave blue eyes to Japanese women, and white-blond hair when the color called for was black.

  “The live oak there, the big one, that’s Drysdale,” Roberts said. “Who else, Sonny, but Drysdale? He painted so many, some ten thousand in his lifetime, we all just knew he’d come back as one.”

  Sonny has yet to witness the ceremony where artists turn out to plant a sapling, and now that he considers them none of the trees looks to be very young. Maybe Roberts’s story is something he made up to help make Sonny feel better. Maybe the truth is nobody really cares about artists anymore.

  Forget the trees, Sonny says to himself.

  From his chair he watches through the windows of the bakery as chefs empty display cases of breads and pastries. It is a picture he thinks he should make one day. The brown loaves, the fruit tarts, the men in stovepipe hats, the women in hairnets. It will be yet another record of the time when Sonny LaMott was alive, and that alone is reason enough to paint it.

  I like you, Sonny, Sonny tells himself. I like you even when you’re leading your own cheers.

  “Where y’at, my brother,” Juliet says as Leonard Barbier (or the one the bartender identified as Leonard Barbier) comes bounding off the stage and joins her between sets.

  “Juliet? Good God, Juliet, is that you, baby?”

  She stands and gives him the right side of her face to kiss, and his mouth sounds fat and wet smacking against her ear. “You look nice, Leonard.”

  “Yeah, well, thanks. You too, sweetie. You too.”

  Leonard has lost his big bowl of hair and slim physique, but it’s clear he’s still holding fast to his program of self-improvement. Though born to local aristocracy, Leonard never wanted to be an Uptown blueblood, nor for that matter did he want to be white. “I realize we all have to be something,” he once said to Juliet, “but why did I have to be so pasty?” As a teenager he rejected all invitations to Carnival balls and debutante parties and instead hung out in the blues clubs of the Seventh Ward where the only other white patrons were occasional air-conditioning repairmen on emergency call. Under his school uniform Leonard was known to wear bikini briefs with red, green and black stripes, the colors of the African nation. Even his diet was black. If a menu failed to offer fried chicken, black-eyed peas and collard greens, Leonard wasn’t likely to frequent the restaurant. “Racism sometimes comes disguised as nouvelle cuisine,” was how he saw it. Juliet always said he was the best black friend she ever had. Careful not to rile him, she knew better than to admit he was the only one.

  “Hey, Leonard, let me ask you something.”

  “What you got?” Wha-choo-gah?

  “You ever run into Sonny?”

  “Sonny?”

  “Sonny LaMott.”

  On the table, compliments of the house, a glass of whiskey materializes. Leonard takes a swallow and licks his mouth.

  “You see Sonny, right? You see him around.”

  “Well, yeah. Everybody sees Sonny around. Is that why you’re here, to ask me about Sonny LaMott?” Leonard laughs and whiskey leaks from the side of his mouth. “Sonny’s got himself a cart at Jackson Square—‘Sonny LaMott,’ it says, ‘world-famous artist,’ or some shit like that. But let me let you in on a secret. Sonny LaMott is world famous in no world but his own.”

  Juliet smiles at her friend, her ridiculous friend.

  “I used to see him behind the counter at the Bayou Bar at the Pontchartrain Hotel,” Leonard says. “He waited on me a few times. He had on his red coat, his black pants, his black bow tie, his shirt with all them ruffles in front. He looked like an ass. Now when you see him he’s wearing a little beret and dirty clothes and jackboots colored from where he dripped paint. He could be one of them beatniks you drive by waving a thumb on the side of the road.”

  Juliet feigns disinterest, her expression suggesting a particular attitude: Like who got the nappy-headed motherfucker started on Sonny LaMott? “Can you keep a secret?” she says.

  “Me?” As if that is answer enough.

  “My mother’s being investigated for the death of my father. I thought you should know, since you and him were so close.”

  Leonard nods. He seems uncertain what else to do. “I appreciate you letting me in on that. I was very fond of your father. I had what they call a deep, abiding affection for the man. And I admit I always found his death suspicious. He was an interesting person, always in his white suits and all. A little conflicted in certain areas but not the type who would go jump off a boat and drown hisself.”

  “My plan is to call a press conference and make a statement when the task force completes its investigation and local authorities get their indictment.”

  “God, they’re going to indict her, too? Jesus.” He shakes his head. Sips again. “What do you mean by that, Juliet? What do you mean they’re going to indict her?”

  “They’re going to officially charge her with first-degree murder. She’s going to face a trial and she’s going to go to jail and the dyke guards there are going to rape her ass.”

  “Wow.”

  “Ever have an epiphany, Leonard? I had one the other day when I was on the plane flying in. I saw how Mother did it. My eyes were open, I was looking straight ahead, but instead of seeing stewardesses and passengers I saw my mother killing my father.”

  “Okay.”

  “This is how she did it. They were sailing on Lake Pontchartrain and she got him in the water somehow and she beat him over the head with an oar.”

  Juliet seems to have lost him somewhere along the way. “Tell me that word again.”

  “Oar?”

  “No, that epipha word, however you called it.”

  Juliet buys him another drink, and when he returns to the stage she has the waitress bring him a few more. The band might rank as the alltime worst she’s ever heard. To start, the singer is unable to remember most of the lyrics and subsequently she hums a lot. Juliet finds it funny at first, then tedious beyond measure. Between sets, she decides to get to the point with Leonard.

  �
��While we’re on the subject of epiphanies,” she says, “I thought I’d mention the one I just had.”

  “You had another one?”

  “You were up there playing, and I closed my eyes and I saw somebody, Leonard, I saw him hitting my mother with an oar.”

  “You saw somebody hit your mother? Why would they do that?”

  Juliet leans closer until their mouths are almost touching. “They did it because, like me, they wanted what is right. They did it to avenge what she did to your friend, Leonard, and to my father. They did it because the indictment and jail and bull dykes aren’t enough. Why else would they do it?”

  Leonard takes on a puzzled expression, his face squeezing into a fist. Juliet understands that she’s lost him. “I better get back on stage,” he says.

  “Epiphanies,” she says again.

  “I’ll have to remember that,” Leonard replies. “But you better make it something different than an oar. I don’t swim, for one. You won’t never catch me in no boat.”

  Sonny nods off after a time. It isn’t a deep sleep because he can hear things: the mournful clarinet, pigeons murmuring in the eaves of the Pontalba Building, transit buses on Decatur.

  He also hears footsteps on the flagstones, coming toward him.

  The beat of the steps mesmerizes, and eventually Sonny hears nothing else. Slightly in advance of the steps comes a smell, and the smell is familiar. Maybe he’s dreaming. Sonny hopes he’s dreaming. But at last a voice fills the darkness.

  “This old plantation house I know,” she says. “Come to think of it, I grew up there.”

  For half a minute Sonny doesn’t move.

  “You forgot to put the dead guy in the window, the one hanging from the rope? That’s my only criticism.”

  He sits up and opens his eyes and there she stands. She’s studying his painting of the Beauvais with a hand delicately placed against her chin, in the thoughtful manner of a seasoned art observer. She’s wearing a short skirt and a pair of blocky shoes that look big on her feet. Her peekaboo hair catches the moonlight and shines a new bottled yellow, pretty if you go for that.