My Juliet: A Novel

by John Ed Bradley

  Juliet was barely listening when Sonny said, “My family’s all of three people, Julie—Mom and Dad and me. I never even knew my grandparents—both sides, they were dead before I was born. Family, Julie—it’s everything around here. Let me ask you a question: In New Orleans when you run into somebody you haven’t seen for a while what’s the first thing they ask?”

  “The first thing?” She paused, standing on one leg, and glanced at him. “The first thing, after tonight, will be why did you break up with your beautiful boyfriend? That will be the first thing.”

  “ ‘How’s your mama and them?’ ” Sonny says. “It never fails. It’s not ‘How are you doing?’ Or ‘How’s life?’ Or ‘How’s work?’ Or ‘What do you think of the weather we’re having?’ It’s none of those. ‘How’s your mama and them?’ History, Julie, where you come from—that’s all that matters. . . .”

  Down on the street the children scatter as rain begins to fall, and Juliet moves away from the window. From a pocket she removes a slip of notebook paper containing a list which she started on the flight in and titled “The Proof.” Now she adds to it, using a ballpoint at the secretary. “How’s your mama? Well, let me answer that question. My mama ain’t so good. My mama has bionic ears. My mama hears spiders on the window screen and thinks it’s somebody trying to break in. My mama screams and wakes the whole house up and Daddy is in a bad mood in the morning because he didn’t get his eight hours. Is this your fantasy, woman? Do you honestly expect to satisfy the natural sexual desires of your assailant any better than you satisfied those of your husband? Scream all you want, see what I care. One day it won’t be spiders. It just might be me.”

  This is entry number forty-two, and it requires the last of the space on the back of the page.

  “I don’t appreciate being duped,” Juliet tells Anna Huey as she trudges back down the stairs.

  Juliet has lighted a cigarette and she makes a point now of depositing clouds of smoke in both the foyer and the parlor. (Her mother, after all, claims to be allergic to tobacco.)

  “It was for a purpose I asked you back,” Anna Huey says, stumbling out onto the gallery in pursuit. “For one thing your mother’s scared, sweetie—she’s scared for your health and for your life. We found out all about California, sugar—your friends and bad habits, the visits to the emergency room, even the time in that club they gave you mouth-to-mouth. Juliet, have you been taking your medicine?”

  Juliet smiles. “Oh sure.”

  “You’re gonna catch yourself something you don’t want, Juliet. I’ve seen it happen. Juliet, we’re gonna lose you at too young an age.”

  And this from a cleaning woman.

  Out in the street now, in the rain, Juliet opens the car door and turns to face the house, pale and gray in the watery sunlight, a battleship. “The Beauvais was stolen by the enemy before. Anna Huey, do you remember your history lessons from school? The Yankees had it almost three years before we got it back.”

  “The way you talk. Nobody ever studied about this old house in school.”

  “How’s your mama and them?” Juliet says, not sure herself where it came from.

  “God, baby. Them drugs really have fried your mind.”

  Juliet flicks her cigarette in the direction of the house, halfway wishing it would catch the grass on fire and burn everything down, people and all.

  The blue hour of twilight, the hot, narrow streets, tourists filing past. Sonny LaMott, his step uncertain after too many highballs, leaves a topless/bottomless called Lulu’s and walks to the corner of Chartres and Saint Louis streets and the fabulous Napoleon House.

  Louis Fortunato greets Sonny at the door and escorts him to a table with a view of the street.

  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.