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 club 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 kil
ling 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.
Sonny lifts himself out of the chair. He can feel his heart hammering in his chest, and the sudden swelling of the veins in his neck, and a hollow ache down deep in his gut.
“Well if it ain’t Juliet Beauvais,” he says.
She curtsies and holds a hand out, which he accepts with too limp a shake.
“Sonny,” she says, edging closer, “I was afraid you’d gone and forgotten me after all these years, especially now that you’re world famous and all.”
The line sounds rehearsed, and it’s poorly delivered. But Sonny forgives her that when she comes to her toes and presses her mouth flush against his. He doesn’t want to respond, doesn’t want to like it. But that was always his problem when it came to Juliet. It never really mattered what he wanted.
2
THEY WALK TO DECATUR STREET AND sit at a table in the fan-blown shade of Café du Monde. Juliet orders beignets and café au lait and Sonny a black coffee.
Sonny can’t seem to make himself speak. A fist has seized his larynx and holds it tight. His brain has gone to mush.
The silence, at first uncomfortable, quickly gains a more complex dimension, that of suffocating embarrassment.
“This is hard,” she tells him.
“You’re right.”
“Harder than I ever dreamed it would be.”
“Yeah? For me too.”
Unable to bear looking at her any longer, Sonny seeks comfort in the familiarity of their surroundings: the old neon sign at Tujague’s Restaurant, a fire-eater on the sidewalk, sightseeing mules wearing straw hats crowned with plastic flowers. Lifting a hand, he attracts the attention of a busboy. “Ice water, please.”
“You gonna be all right?” asks Juliet.
“I guess I’m hot.”
He wishes he were still at the fence, alone in the dark, watching the trees blow in the sky. It’s too hard loving anyone. Too hard having to look at them again.
“You know what just came to me?” Juliet says. “Give us each a puka shell necklace and put us in platform shoes and polyester and it’d be like old times.”
“Was that 1971? I thought those things came later.”
She inhales cigarette smoke, then noisily blows it out. “Yeah, maybe you’re right.”
Their order arrives and Juliet folds one of the beignets and dunks it in the coffee and eats with her head tilted close to the marble-top table, her hair dragging the surface and picking up traces of confectioners’ sugar. “I’d nearly forgotten,” she says with a satisfied groan.
“Not bad, huh?”
She holds up the beignet, what remains of it. “This little piece of fried dough is the most incredible thing I’ve ever put in my mouth.”
Against his will a smile comes to Sonny’s face. He knows exactly what she’s getting at. “I can place another order,” he says.
Juliet shakes her head, her mouth still white with sugar, cheeks fat and lumpy. “No. I’d better save room for the oysters.”
“Oh? Are you having oysters too?”
“We both are,” she says. “Oysters at Acme then a Lucky Dog on Bourbon Street then hurricanes in the courtyard at Pat O’Brien’s. After that we’ll stop by the little Takee Outee stand for egg rolls and beef-on-a-stick.”
“I’m not sure the Takee Outee is even there anymore, Julie. You might want to consider something else.”
“Fine. Then I’ll just have you.”
A surge of heat inflames Sonny’s face. He resists an urge to jump to his feet and topple the table over and storm away. “You’re being a little presumptuous, aren’t you? Forgive me for bringing up anything unpleasant, Julie, but you must take me for a fool. I saw one of your movies. Is that what you call them, by the way? Are they movies?”
Juliet puts the half-eaten beignet back down on her plate. “You’re going to hurt my feelings, aren’t you? Yes, I think you are.”
“You’ve got some explaining to do, Julie. You can’t just waltz back home and pick me up for beignets and not expect to answer questions about where you’ve been for the last fifteen years.”
“There’s a picture in my head, Sonny. A picture of Mama sticking a cassette in the VCR, returning to her chair and punching the Play button on her remote control. Does that explain it?”
Sonny stares into her eyes but he can’t tell whether she means it. “That’s pretty damned sick. I hope to God you’re not serious.”
She wets the tip of her finger and dunks it in the drifts of sugar on her plate. When she brings the finger up to her mouth it leaves a mark on her upper lip. “There weren’t but a handful of movies,” she says, “all of them for the same production company. It was such a bush-league outfit I never really thought anyone would see them. Before agreeing to appear on camera, I signed a contract saying that I work with one actor only, and that was my boyfriend—now my ex-boyfriend, of course.” Juliet nods to emphasize how important this is. How Sonny should pay attention. “Believe it or not, I did it because I wanted to eat, and because I had rent to pay, and because I was stupid. It was the worst mistake I ever made in all my life. I don’t think you’d want to be judged by every mis
take you made in the past. The difference between your mistakes and my mistakes is that mine are on videotape. It was a long time ago anyway. I can’t believe we’re talking about it now.”
Sonny can feel himself cooling off. And it seems he’s breathing better. He can hold her eyes with his eyes without much effort. “Exactly how long ago was it?” he says.
“Oh, a year, year and a half.” From the way she sounds it could be a lifetime.
They finish and walk parallel with the river on Decatur, passing cafés and souvenir and praline shops, squeezing past tourists who, mesmerized by competing jazz combos stationed every few hundred feet, crowd the sidewalks and make the going slow.
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