“Show me that mouth of yours again.”
But Juliet is somewhere else, her head is, and he was rude, anyway.
It was coming down just as hard that day when she and Sonny went to the abortionist on Gravier Street. Sonny borrowed his father’s truck and as they were headed uptown on Basin Street the windshield wipers suddenly stopped working. “Must be a short in the wiring,” he said. “Or maybe a fuse.” Intending to wait it out they stopped in front of Saint Louis Cemetery Number 1 and parked by the curb, but the weather only intensified. Finally, with the appointment minutes away, they had no choice but to head back into the storm. Juliet remembers the drive past the Iberville housing development, and how black kids, naked to the waist, played in mud puddles under the trees, oblivious to the lightning crashing overhead. Along the sides of the Saenger Theatre and Krauss Department Store people stood with their backs to the wall, a few under wind-lashed umbrellas, but most without any covering at all. Desperate to see the road better, Sonny stuck his arm out the window and tried to make it function as a wiper. Back and forth the arm went. Now the rain came in through the window, blinding him and soaking his shirt, some of it reaching Juliet in the form of swirling mist that stuck to her hair and shone in the tangles like glass beads. She licked her mouth and tasted oil from the street. “If we die in a wreck then we just die in a wreck,” she said. “At least I won’t have to go through with this.”
“Let’s turn back. It’s not too late.”
“No way.”
“Please, Julie.”
She just shook her head.
Juliet remembers the old office tower with its torn and faded canopy in front, the ride in a hot elevator that strained to reach their designated floor, a long hallway with exposed fluorescent tubes overhead dripping water from open housings. It was after-hours and the place was deserted, although she got the feeling it was always deserted. When they found the right door Sonny put his hand on the knob and hesitated before turning it. “I don’t think I can go through with this.”
“You’re not going through with it, I am.” She pushed past him and stuck her head inside.
A solitary floor lamp, its shade denuded but for a couple of linen strips, shone in the middle of the room, and beneath it a young man lounged on a ripped leatherette sofa reading a magazine. He looked hardly older than she and Sonny were. He wore Chuck Taylor basketball sneakers, a plaid button-down shirt and khakis with a rip in the knee. Although his hair was well groomed, his stubble, especially around his mouth, looked stiff enough to pop a balloon.
He stood and turned off the light. “Adelaide’s friend?”
“That’s right. I’m Juliet and this here is Sonny.”
“Nice to meet you both. If it’s all the same to you I’m not going to tell you my name. I’m sure you understand my reasons.”
“Should we just call you Doctor?” Sonny said in apparent seriousness.
“I’m not a doctor, but you can call me that if it helps.”
Sonny was looking at Juliet when he said, “I thought we were coming to see a doctor.”
“Fly to London if you want a doctor, Sonny. No doctor here will help you—at least none but those willing to sacrifice their medical licenses and ruin their careers.”
While Sonny seemed reluctant to walk more than a few feet from the door, Juliet hurriedly crossed the room and placed her overnight bag on the sofa, then she removed her raincoat and lay it out on the floor to dry. “If you’re not a doctor then what are you?” she said, trying to sound as if she weren’t at all concerned.
“Sorry. But telling you that wouldn’t be wise, either.” The young man (she didn’t think of him as her abortionist yet) had a high-pitched voice that seemed to emanate from the top of his head rather than from his mouth. “Let’s suppose I were to tell you that I was a third-year medical student at one of the local universities and something were to go wrong today. Nothing is going to go wrong, but let’s just say something did, for the sake of argument. Well, you could go to the police and they in turn would go to the dean’s office and find out my identity and bring criminal charges against me. This is the scenario I want to avoid. What we’re doing here is against the law, after all.”
Sonny stepped away from the door. His shirt was still wet from the windshield wiper episode. “Have you done many of these things?”
“Yes, quite a few.”
“Any problems?”
“No.”
“None? None at all?”
“Well, once there was an unusual amount of bleeding. But the girl was never in danger.”
Rain hammered the windows. Juliet looked up at the ceiling and the tiles stained brown from leaks. The sofa and several plastic waiting room chairs, hooked together, were the only furniture in the room. “What is this place?” she said.
“Once upon a time it belonged to a dentist. Through a source I was able to secure a key to this suite, but it’s only for the time being. Should you decide to contact the authorities you won’t find me here again after tonight.”
“We won’t be calling any authorities,” Juliet said, “so stop it.”
“Good,” and now the abortionist clapped his hands together. “Did you bring the cash?”
By the time it was over the rain had stopped. Juliet, who somehow endured the ordeal without passing out, never knew such pain in all her life. It was the kind of pain that makes you cry and makes you vomit, both of which she did. She’d never sweated as much, either. Even the nylon straps of her brassiere, which the abortionist had permitted her to keep on, were soaked through. Lying supine on plastic sheeting thrown over a table, she kept her eyes on the windows, the streaks and beads of water that brought to mind the paintings at Dickie Boudreau’s house. In all probability the baby had been his, resulting from a single meeting in his backyard swimming pool when Sonny was off fishing with his father. “Chlorine kills everything,” Dickie had said as he lured her to the steps at the shallow end. Determining paternity had been an easy calculation, as had Juliet’s decision to come here today. “I feel so suffocated sometimes,” she said to Adelaide Valentine. “He calls me Julie. No one else does that.”
“My mother’s sister left her second husband because she couldn’t stand looking at his nostrils. The guy was a multimillionaire, but he had these big, hairy nostrils. They drove her crazy.”
“It’s going to kill him, he’s so sweet. But I can’t live that life.”
“God, Juliet, the boy’s only seventeen. He’ll get over it.”
The abortionist removed his gloves and stuffed them in one of the Schwegmann bags he was using for trash. The gloves were canary yellow Playtex, the type for washing dishes. His speculum and curette—instruments he’d insisted on identifying, presumably to put her at ease about his experience—lay streaked with blood on the lining of an old valise, which he closed now with a snap.
“You might be done,” she said, “but I can still feel you scraping and poking.”
“The pain won’t last. The pain won’t last but the beauty will endure. Somebody said that.”
Just at that moment she thought she was going to vomit again. When the feeling passed, she said, “Will somebody please tell me where’s the beauty in all this?”
“The beauty is in being able to make choices. You’ve made an important one today, and whether you realize it or not it’ll probably shape the rest of your life. I hope for the better. I also hope that when you remember me you do so without regret.”
Her eyes were still on the window when she said, “I won’t remember you at all.”
He helped her into a diaper layered along the bottom with feminine napkins, then into her jogging pants. Sonny, silent but for his weeping, held her hand as they took the elevator down. It was almost midnight and up above the city stars hung close in the sky. From a block away she heard a streetcar go by. Sonny helped her in the truck and on with the seat belt. Then when he turned the ignition to start the engine the windshield wipers came on. He was too preoccupied, and t
oo upset, to notice the phenomenon, and he drove Juliet all the way home without turning them off, blades squealing and painting streaks against the dry glass.
That was 1971, the year when everything changed forever. Less than a week later Juliet left New Orleans in another storm. This time she took a cab to the airport. “Where you headed?” the driver said, meeting her eyes with his in the rearview mirror.
“LA,” she answered.
“What’s that they say? ‘Go west, young man’? Something like that?”
“Today the young man stays home. It’s me who’s going.”
So this is what the rain does. It makes you remember something you’d meant to forget. It brings back your first abortionist and the taste of oil from the street and the look in Sonny LaMott’s eyes when he put his arms around you for the last time.
Now in the weekly/monthly it’s Leonard’s turn to take a leak. He makes less noise then the boy did. But like the boy he leaves the door open. “Must be all that rain,” he says in a loud voice, apparently in explanation for his prodigious output.
“Wanna do it?” she’s tempted to say to the little young one in bed, then hop on top of him again. But down on the street she notices metallic bars burning against black pavement, right where her rental car was formerly parked.
“Motherfuckers took it,” she says, more resigned than defiant.
“Took what?”
“Motherfuckers towed it.”
Juliet sees winos standing against the side of a laundromat, heedless of the fact that the rain has stopped. They look like people condemned to a firing squad, stunned to paralysis, and here at last is the moment for the bullets.
“Some people must not know who they’re fooling with,” Juliet says, talking not so much about the cops who towed her rental car, but about her mother and the cleaning woman who live in the house that bears her family name.
The boy stirs in bed. He seems to look at her for the first time. “Are you that girl that Leonard said her mother killed his lover?”
Juliet thinks she understands, but rather than answer she runs her tongue over her mouth again.
3
SONNY’S BANK STATEMENT IS THE only piece of mail in the morning delivery. He has but three hundred dollars left in his account, almost half of that recent deposits. Take away the tourist portraits and the Young Elvises and he’s broke, studying the want ads for a job, making novenas to whichever saint handles employment.
Sonny rarely entertains dreams of packing up and leaving New Orleans, but today he wonders how it would feel to live in a place where the smell of the rain didn’t revive a memory of Juliet’s smell, and where certain music didn’t recall wild times at the F&M Patio Bar, and where when you woke in the night you didn’t automatically reach for somebody who’d never really been there.
“I’m thinking about giving up the fence,” he says to Louis Fortunato in a telephone call.
Louis, who’d been asleep, mumbles incoherently, then says, “Do you need a lift?”
“A lift? A lift to a new life, do you mean?”
But Louis has already hung up.
Sonny visits a barber in the French Quarter for his shortest haircut in years, then he drives uptown to the Pontchartrain Hotel, his former employer. After warm greetings from staff Sonny is ushered into the manager’s office situated in the suite of rooms directly behind the registration desk. Though oblivious to the irony, he sits in the same chair where, only a few years before, he announced his intention to resign his position as bartender and to pursue full-time his dream of becoming an artist.
The manager, a chunky, red-faced man named Royce Griffin, makes a great fuss over seeing Sonny again, and shakes his hand with such tenderness that Sonny has no doubts as to his sincerity. “And what brings you back to our neck of the woods?” Griffin says.
As Sonny describes his decision to return to “a real job,” Griffin regards him with equal measures of pity and discomfort, his complexion growing even more inflamed. Drumming a pencil against his desk, Griffin lets Sonny ramble to a finish before saying, “It breaks my heart to have to tell you this, my friend, but we don’t have anything at the moment. However, if something in the bar does come up, I promise you’ll be one of the first people we call.”
This satisfies Sonny until he gets outside and considers Griffin’s remark more closely. How belittling to be called “my friend” by a man before whom he knelt for mercy! And what did “one of the first people” mean exactly? How many other “first people” were queued up in the hotel’s breadline, desperate for charity?
And what is this “we” baloney? Will more than one be calling him?
Sonny considers removing Louis’s club from under the seat and whacking Royce Griffin with it. “Hey, fat boy, do you feel it? Do you feel the pain?”
He sits in the truck listening to the radio until his anger passes, then he returns to the Vieux Carré and stops in at Café du Monde. An attractive young black woman, who seems to be the highest-ranking employee in the restaurant today, gives him an application to fill out, and Sonny sits at a table not far from the one where he and Juliet were reunited only days before. This afternoon a group of tourists occupies his and Juliet’s table, and the sight of them wolfing down beignets and slurping coffee is disagreeable enough to lighten the weight of Sonny’s memory. Concentrating on the questionnaire, he manages to avoid seeing Juliet every time he looks up.
And then who but Roberts shows up. The old man, toting a Thermos and brown paper bag, engages the cashier in noisy conversation. Sonny lowers his head. How will he explain the close-cropped hair let alone the lengthy employment form detailing the history of his life in the American workforce? The café is swarming with diners, but too few apparently for Sonny to keep from being noticed. Roberts wheels around suddenly as if to address the source of a voice whispered in his ear, and his eyes cut through the crush of people and travel directly to Sonny, or that slim piece of Sonny visible from the front of the room.
“I thought that was you,” he says, working his way through the crowd.
“It’s me, all right. Sonny LaMott, world-famous French Quarter artist.”
“Jesus, look at you. You’re all cleaned up.” Roberts glances down at the application and his face registers first confusion then disgust. He might’ve tasted something sour.
“I guess I should’ve told you,” Sonny says. “I’m going back to work. To regular work, I should say. It’s time I stop the dreaming.”
Roberts places the Thermos and paper bag on the table. “Back to work?”
Sonny is trying to come up with something to say, when Roberts takes a seat. “I’ve got a sack lunch here. It’s a sandwich, a big one. We could split it and talk and maybe you could help me understand what’s wrong with dreaming.”
In the bag Roberts has a muffuletta-to-go from Central Grocery and he spreads it out between them. The sandwich, as big around as a Frisbee, has already been cut into quarters. But Roberts, using a small pocketknife, saws it into even smaller sections and he and Sonny eat in silence, oil from the olive salad forming clownish rings around their lips and dripping down their hands and arms and staining the cuffs of their shirts. To help ingest the heavy Italian bread they gulp down steaming coffee from Roberts’s Thermos.
“Only you would get to bring a muffuletta from Central Grocery in this place,” says Sonny.
“Yes. I suppose that’s what one gets for being a legend in the Vieux Carré.”
“My point exactly.”
It is a pleasure to eat and drink in the open air with the music of tinkling silverware and murmured conversations, and Sonny’s black, boiling sadness begins to dissipate.
When they’re finished, Roberts lifts a hand and points. “Hear that horn?”
Sonny settles back in his chair and listens. Nothing.
“It’s a Greek ship, probably passing under the bridge just now. Oh, it’s a Greek, all right. I know my horns. They’ll dock for a few days and give the clap to hal
f the whores in town. The whores, then, will infect the locals. Then the locals their wives. Then the wives the milkmen. Then the milkmen the milk. Or the cows that produce the milk. Soon we’ll all be sick. And this, Sonny, explains why I’m a Communist.
“Below the waist,” Roberts adds, “we are all of us connected, no one superior to the next.”
Sonny considers telling Roberts about his recent troubles with Juliet. Roberts with his wide experience and gift of gab might be able to help. But Sonny lacks language for how he’s feeling, as well as the willingness to hear it spoken.
Roberts, nevertheless, seems to intuit what’s troubling him. “If it’s any comfort,” he says, “I’m just now recovering from my Mary. Only lately has it gotten that I can rest nights, and she’s been gone fifteen years now.” He picks at his scalp. “Left with a neighbor with whom she’d been consorting, a man I despised.”
Sonny looks around to make sure no one is eavesdropping. For some reason he finds it important that only he hears Roberts’s confession.
“After she left,” the old man continues, “I couldn’t sleep for the dreams. I imagined the two of them in bed together, madly humping—his lovemaking infinitely more satisfying than mine had ever been. But eventually this picture began to fade and she left me alone—the bright memory, in any event, became a shadowy one. I knew I’d recovered when she stopped being the first thing I thought about when I woke in the morning. But now, invoking her name again, I admit to feeling a certain heat, and if I let myself I could cry. Does what’s happened to you make you feel like that?”
Sonny nods his head.
“Your heart in your throat, eh?”
“Everywhere,” he says, “but where it should be.”
“Love is a torture and women the whip. Remember that.”
“I will,” says Sonny. “Because I do feel whipped.”
Roberts leans forward and places a hand on Sonny’s forearm. “We’re dealing with some weighty self-esteem issues here, am I correct?”
Sonny lets out a laugh. “I don’t think I’m worth a shit if that’s what you mean.”
My Juliet Page 11