“Excuse me, but is your truck the noisy one that woke me from my nap?”
“Sir?”
“I was sleeping.”
“It might’ve been. Forgive me.”
“I’d rather have my rest than your apology, young man. What is wrong with you?”
“My lord, are we cross today?” Juliet said to her father.
“Darling, have you seen Anthony?”
“No, Daddy. Daddy, you were rude to Sonny.”
“Was I? I didn’t mean to be. Sonny, was I rude?”
“No, you weren’t, Mr. Beauvais.”
“By the way, why do they call you Sonny? It’s a curse, isn’t it? Having to go through life as Sonny? It’s rather like being called Junior.”
“I don’t mind it,” Sonny said.
“My name is really Jean-Jacques. I’m named for my paternal great-grandfather. As a boy I couldn’t stand being called that, thus the name Johnny. Now I wish I could go back to the original. Sonny, what were you originally?”
“Cecil, Mr. Beauvais.”
“Wise choice, then, going with Sonny. Who would name their child Cecil? It’s cruel. Juliet, if you see Anthony send him up, please. I have a chore for the boy.”
“Another one?”
“Nice visiting with you, Sonny.”
“Same here, Mr. Beauvais. And I promise to do something about that muffler.”
Not until Sonny reaches the mansion’s second floor does he understand precisely where Juliet has taken him, and this knowledge stuns him to momentary paralysis, every part of him stilled. He looks around as if for a familiar landmark, something to spare him this reality and to safely place him elsewhere. What in God’s name has she made you do now?
Sonny moves past an antique étagère and a marble pedestal holding a vase of freshly cut Louisiana irises, the purple at the head of the stalks glowing in the semidarkness. The hallway is wide enough to accommodate an entire army of intruders, and yet Sonny feels the walls pressing in. Checking the map, he passes two doors and approaches a third. Juliet’s room.
As he swings the door open and steps inside he hears something altogether unexpected. There are voices and music, TV sounds, as well as the rumble of a window air conditioner. Sonny scans the room and finds Anna Huey lying in bed. Her crown of dreadlocks lies black against white bedding. A light summer throw covers her body.
He exits as quietly as he entered, but this is little comfort.
Why is Anna Huey sleeping in Juliet’s room?
Sonny stands without moving, his back against the wall, his breath coming in stinging gasps, bowels beginning to feel fluid.
From his pocket he removes the envelope with Juliet’s directions and studies the diagram by the glow of a night-light shining at his feet.
“Lou,” she’s written in her peculiar scribble, the word trailing an arrow that points between the first and second doors. Who is Lou? Sonny wonders.
Could Lou be loo, as in bathroom?
He moves on to the next room and slowly opens the door. A flood of relief washes through him as he discovers it empty and steps inside. Images from another time crowd the walls. Hendrix playing guitar, Joplin flashing the peace sign. “Chicken Little Was Right,” says a poster showing an atomic bomb explosion. “The Sky IS Falling.”
A corkboard holds a jumble of photographs depicting Juliet and friends celebrating at high school graduation parties, dancing at now-defunct French Quarter nightclubs, posing in cap-and-gown. Sonny recognizes many of the faces: Adelaide Valentine, Terri Edelstein, Brook McCaffety, Dickie Boudreau. Dickie looks even drunker than he usually did, an arm draped over Juliet’s shoulder as she holds him with an adoring gaze.
Then Sonny spots himself in one of the pictures, a thin, sad-faced boy with too much hair. “I remember you,” he mutters out loud.
Next to the corkboard stands a white plastic book unit and it, too, contains items from Juliet’s days at Sacred Heart. There, for instance, is the small hourglass that Sonny gave her the night of her eighteenth birthday. No more than four inches tall, the brass timepiece includes a metal plate on its base with an inscription that reads Forever.
Sonny traces a finger over the lettering, the word both too large and too small for him to comprehend at the moment.
Juliet, he decides suddenly, will have to come for the clothes later. He can’t do this and furthermore he won’t do it; let her pout and treat him badly again. The two of them can always go to Canal Street in the morning, can’t they? Once there Sonny will buy her whatever she wants, just as long as it’s less than three hundred dollars, which is all he’s worth. A new pair of jeans and a shirt, a dress from the discount rack. Leave the hippie duds in the dark of the closet where they belong.
Get out of the house. Forget the check. Go.
Sonny starts back down the hallway, moving more quickly than before, pressed by a sudden urgency to be anywhere but here. The portraits are in sight, the face of the dead father who knew Sonny only as the insensitive boy who disrupted his nap. But as Sonny is passing the door nearest the stairway a voice, too loud to ignore, stops him in his tracks. “Juliet? Darling, is that you?”
It is Miss Marcelle, and she seems to be waiting for an answer. Sonny must say something, but what? Against his will he reaches out and places a hand on the knob. Miss Marcelle is a friend. She’ll understand if he walks in and presents himself. “Oh, hi. Great to see you again!” Just that simple, and without any suggestion that his uninvited presence is at all out of the ordinary.
“Juliet, darling, will you ever forgive me? Not only for the way I acted this afternoon, but for the other day when you first came home? I’m sorry, I haven’t been myself lately.”
Sonny doesn’t speak, and Miss Marcelle says, “I can’t bear how we are any longer. Juliet, in the morning, darling . . . in the morning can we please start anew. Let’s be friends and forget everything. Can we do that? Is it really too late? Darling . . . oh, sweetie, I want so badly to be your mother again. I do, Juliet, I do . . .”
Sonny’s brain screams in the silence. He glances at the stairway and the odd, boyish face of Johnny Beauvais. If Sonny doesn’t say something Miss Marcelle will walk out and confront him. She needs an answer. Show yourself, he tells himself. Who better than Miss Marcelle to understand the might of her daughter’s will? But presently the old woman’s voice, weary with resignation, cuts through the darkness. “Go to bed, dear. Go to bed now. I do have something to tell you, but there’s no reason to trouble you with it tonight. Let’s talk in the morning. First thing.”
Sonny leaves the hallway and starts down the stairs, his hand on the banister. He is nearing the foyer when a sound stops him. He strains to hear, and there it comes again. Someone is pacing the floor of the library, his step slow and deliberate as if to suggest a contemplative state of mind.
Frightened now beyond caring, Sonny doubles his fists and gulps huge drafts of air. He bounds down the final few stairs and throws the doors open.
The chairs and sofas are empty, the fireplace a black hole behind a black screen. Tall windows reflect the rain.
Sonny closes his eyes and listens for the steps again. And this time when he hears them he has no trouble locating their source.
The ghost of Johnny Beauvais isn’t walking the floor after all, and neither are the long-dead Yankees of Juliet’s imagination unable to return home.
Of all the things, Sonny was hearing the sound of his own heart.
“You need to work on your directions,” he tells her in a rough tone.
“Don’t tell me you got lost. Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Juliet shakes her head and glances at the ceiling, the water stains that look oddly beautiful on the tiles, and that remind her of something, either a place or a time, that she can’t quite grasp at the moment.
The room is dark. She’s been waiting by the window.
Sonny shuffles into the bathroom and closes the door. He stays there for perhaps ten minutes and when he comes out he’s
wearing a fresh change of clothes and carrying the other ones bundled in a towel. He walks to the kitchen and, just past it, to the laundry room. He loads the washing machine, turns it on. “Weird time to wash, isn’t it?” she says when he returns to the bedroom.
He doesn’t answer and she says, “Do you have my clothes? What about my check? At least you’d better have that.”
He sits on the edge of the bed and winds an alarm clock. “Juliet, you said your room was the third door off the stairs. It was the fourth.”
“The fourth if you count the loo.”
“Since when do you call it a loo? Is that a California word?”
He’s jumpy and he seems to be having a hard time catching his breath. She stares at him, then says, “Yes it is, as a matter of fact. As soon as you get off the plane at LAX there’s a group of volunteers who come up and teach you the right words from the wrong ones. ‘We don’t call it bathroom here in California,’ they tell you.”
He keeps winding the clock, hardly paying attention. “I opened the third door,” he says, “and Mrs. Huey was snoring away on a little bed by the window.”
Juliet finishes her drink and puts the cigarette in her mouth, squinting as smoke climbs past her face. “I guess that means Mama moved back to her original room. When I was in high school she stayed in the one next to mine because she could hear through the wall if I brought anyone there.” She picks at a fleck of tobacco on her tongue. “Goddamn spy.”
Sonny tests the alarm. It gives Juliet a jolt and brings her hopping to her feet. She can’t make sense of his behavior. Maybe it’s for the best she didn’t give up the room at the Lé Dale, despite the expense. She takes a cassette tape out of her travel bag and slips it into the boom box on the table by the bed. She presses the Play button and a sax plays a lonely tune. It’s Leonard Barbier, accompanied by his band. She finds herself listening for the drums, trying to extract the beat from the rest of the music. The boy who gave her the tape the day before.
“Sonny, did Anna Huey see you when you went in her room?”
“I don’t think so. She had the TV on.”
He walks over and turns down the music. “I still have your house key. I’ll put it over here in your bag.”
She nods. “Thank you.”
“And I still have the map you drew on that envelope. I can show you where everybody is now, if you want.”
“Sonny, what’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with you, Sonny?” She dunks the cigarette in her coffee cup with all the others. It’s starting to fill up, the cup. She tries to count the stubs but is unable to focus for long. “Forget the key and forget the map and forget the clothes. If she wrote me my check, Sonny, that’s all I want.”
Half a minute goes by before he moves over to the dresser for his wallet. He fiddles around with his cash and removes a slip of blue-green paper and hands it to her.
The check is from a local bank. It is signed in the elaborate hand of Mrs. Marcelle L. Beauvais, and it has been issued to Juliet Beauvais in the amount of five thousand dollars.
4
JULIET LIES BACK ON THE PILLOWS with her arms thrown over her head and her eyes open. She lets out a low growl of pleasure. Does she surrender to another orgasm? Does she fake one? She’s starting to feel a little punch-drunk and a little detached from the moment, while Sonny, his eyes closed, no less, seems to be performing as much for her benefit as for his own. Anything for Julie.
She taps him on the shoulder and offers a defeated smile. “It’s starting to feel like the towering inferno down there.”
“What?”
“Sonny, my period doesn’t bother you?”
He rolls over with a sigh, and in the darkness Juliet can see the muddy cloak covering his penis.
“Do you want me to help you finish?” she says.
His head moves left to right on the pillow.
In the bathroom she closes the door and checks the medicine cabinet. A bottle of aspirin, a tube of ointment to treat poison ivy and a second one for muscle soreness. What else did she expect?
“I’m going to take a bath,” she calls out.
She fills the tub and squats in cool water until her bottom stops throbbing. A cloud of blood swims to the surface, shining and iridescent in the soap bubbles. Juliet has always wondered at the sense of God who’d make something, a woman, with a hole like that, a portal without a latch for a lock, conveniently open to whoever and whatever you please.
“Sonny, that was wonderful, sweetie. I’m sorry I pooped out on you.”
He comes in and sits on the floor by the tub, watching with a look of wonder as she soaps her breasts with a washcloth. “Did you clean all that stuff off?” she says.
“At the sink in the kitchen. I used paper towels.”
“Your mother would die.”
Sonny laughs but without much feeling. “If she hadn’t gone and done that already, huh?”
“Sonny, why are you always so serious, baby. Can’t you ever relax?”
“I can’t let go of anything, can I?”
“No. Now do your girlfriend a favor and grab her a towel, please.”
Juliet gets out of the tub and he lowers the toilet lid and instructs her to sit there. Clearly he’s trying to redeem himself. He dries between her toes, dries each finger, dries her armpits, behind her knees, between her legs. His face is filled with stubborn intensity; he could be outside washing a car. Sonny grows aroused by the intimacy and he leans forward so that his cock, still streaked in places with blood, bumps and bobs against her. “Endlessly fascinating, I’m sure,” she tells him.
“How’s that?”
“Your penis. It’s endlessly fascinating. It’s also quite large.”
He shakes his head but doesn’t say anything.
“You don’t think you’re big, Sonny?”
“I think I’m average.”
“Oh, if only that were so, sweetheart. If this is average there’d be many more happy ladies in the world. You men would give us nothing to complain about.”
Juliet puts on his father’s robe and although it’s one o’clock in the morning and she could sleep food is the greater priority. She can’t recall the last time she ate. A day ago? Two days ago? She and Sonny move to the kitchen and scavenge the cupboards. They find only noodles in a Tupperware container dating back to when Mrs. LaMott was alive. Hidden behind a forest of aerosol cans, the noodles are no less than five years old, but Juliet has Sonny cook them anyway. After they’ve finished boiling he splashes olive oil and sprinkles salt and crushed black pepper on them then adds half a stick of butter.
“This is the best pasta I’ve ever eaten in my whole, entire life,” Juliet says, although in actual fact she’s able to get little down.
Sonny says, “This is the same table where we sat that night you came for supper.”
“Yes. I liked my yellow plate then and I like it now.”
“I’m sorry there isn’t more to eat. I need to make groceries soon.”
“Only in New Orleans do people make groceries. Everywhere else they buy them. When I first got to LA I told this neighbor in my apartment complex that I needed to go make groceries and she thought I was asking for directions to the bathroom.”
“Julie, do you think we’ll ever get married?”
“I don’t just think we will, baby, I know we will.”
“I’d like children.”
“Mmm . . .” As if the noodles are really that wonderful.
After the meal they clean the kitchen and retire to the bedroom and huddle against the headboard watching an old black-and-white movie on TV. The movie features Ronald Colman as an artist who loses his sight and is unable to paint anymore. Ronald Colman with his skinny mustache, dapper clothing and fine, gentrified manner looks and acts nothing like any artist Sonny ever knew, and Sonny determines to change his approach if ever he returns to the fence. This is what he says to Juliet, in any case.
Maybe with a different style he’ll have more success selling
his work. Maybe if he sounds less like the Ninth Ward and more Uptown. Maybe maybe maybe.
The movie ends and Juliet looks at him, eyes draining tears, a trickle at her nose. “Sonny, don’t ever go blind.”
“Not me, Julie.”
They stay up until almost 3:00 A.M. The rain slacks off then stops altogether and a dense, eerie quiet settles in. Sonny opens a bedroom window and the cool, wet breeze cuts the fecund odor of fucking. “Don’t ever go blind,” Juliet says a second time, somehow loving and hating him both.
My Juliet: A Novel Page 17