My Juliet: A Novel

by John Ed Bradley

  A single hand of applause. A lone wolf whistle. And then her own moans, loud in the sudden humming quiet of the room.

  Unable to stand any longer, Juliet slumps to the filthy runway floor. A groan leaves her body. She looks in Sonny’s direction but his table is empty. At the bar Sandy sits where she sat before, her cigarette now half-smoked.

  “Juliet? What’s wrong, baby?” It is Lulu again. “God, you look like you saw a ghost.”

  Yes, she thinks, and now they don’t even have to be dead.

  Toward noon Sonny stops by the bank and closes his account. He takes the cash in small denominations, no bill larger than a twenty, and only two of those. There is much he never painted, this old building for instance, with its gilded façade, its canvas awnings faded and torn. The teller peeling off singles. The gleaming checkerboard tiles.

  “You have a great face,” he says to the uniformed guard at the door.

  The man smiles uneasily.

  “It’s epic. I should’ve painted you and that face.”

  Sonny drives along South Carrollton Avenue, columns of ancient royal palms ticking past, their upper fronds gold and desiccated, lower ones bright and green.

  Why did he never paint these trees?

  He stops at a gas station and parks next to a full-serve pump. “I’m treating myself,” he says to the attendant through his open window.

  “If you can afford to go full I say why not.”

  Sonny admires the man’s humility. The care he gives to running his squeegee over the truck’s bug-spattered windshield. “I’m going to be arrested,” Sonny tells him.

  “Ooh. Now that hurts.” The man stops and looks at Sonny through the sudsy iridescent film on the glass. “You did something wrong or what?”

  Sonny isn’t sure how to answer. “I got hooked up with the wrong girl. You know the Beauvais over on Esplanade?”

  The man stares at him a moment. “Women are the ruination of this country,” he says, then goes back to work. “Now you wanna pop your hood?”

  Sonny decides to take a last spin around the city, to search for images that he previously overlooked. He could’ve painted more churches, for example, and somehow he never got around to doing the mission downtown, the men standing in line for food and medical attention, the women crouched in the shadows. He never painted the tracks of defunct streetcar routes lying gray and broken in the asphalt, their years of service decades past. It might say something, a picture like that. “Boy, you’re a deep sonofabitch,” Sonny says, talking to himself.

  The F&M Patio Bar on Saturday night. Sailboats on Lake Pontchartrain. The infant asylum on Magazine Street, with its exterior ironwork rusty brown from years of neglect. The oyster shuckers at Casamento’s, their muscular forearms covered with chips and scales.

  Fats Domino’s funny-looking house as seen from the parking lot at Puglea’s Super Market on Saint Claude Avenue, nor the Fat Man himself, nor any other musicians for that matter but Elvis and one of trumpeter Al Hirt for a tourist from Dublin, Ireland, who gave him a hundred-dollar bill and said, “To be right frank about it the jazz makes me willie hard.”

  The old German chapel in the Irish Channel where his mother worshiped when she was a girl. His mother in her mink stole that Christmas morning when his father surprised her with the last thing he could afford. The Arabi nursing home where his father lives, with Agnes standing out front. Sonny, driving there now, parks on Mehle Avenue and walks in. He stands at the desk, waiting as she tries to ignore him. “Is he here, Agnes?”

  “No. He just left for the library to study up on rocket science. Or maybe it was molecular physics he was interested in. Of course he’s here, Sonny. God.”

  “I’d like to leave him a message, please.”

  “Why don’t you just go down the hall and see him?”

  “I don’t want to see him. I want to tell him something.”

  “What do you want to tell him?”

  “Would you mind writing it down? It’s important to me.”

  She can’t find any paper. No, someone has taken her pen.

  “Tell him I’m sorry I never painted his picture,” Sonny says.

  More trees and streets after the rain, more Catahoula hounds sleeping on wood porches, more sightseeing mules wearing straw hats, more paddlewheelers coming around the bend, more winter sunsets on the levee when the river burns orange on the surface, more women other than Juliet Beauvais, and truly this time. Yes, he thinks, and truly.

  Traveling now through Bywater and Faubourg Marigny, Sonny doubles then triples the speed limit. He downshifts as he crosses Esplanade Avenue and enters the French Quarter. So as not to disappoint, he floors the accelerator and uncorks a belch before braking and lowering the engine to a deep, dark rumble.

  “Whatever happened to that piece-of-crap pickup?” he imagines them saying after he’s gone.

  Oh, for the horror of his gutted muffler! Oh, for the stench of his exhaust!

  Why did he never paint the house he’s passing now, with its shutters missing slats, and its warm, weathered patina, its garden overgrown with sourwood and wild azalea?

  It comes to Sonny that most houses have better faces than the people who inhabit them. “Well, look at you,” he says, passing another he never noticed before.

  “And you,” passing a third.

  Many of his heroes in the field, those who came before him, for long periods could not see beyond that which obsessed them. Alberta Kinsey painted Vieux Carré courtyards, and Noel Rockmore the city’s jazz musicians, and Boyd Cruise, he was the one, went years painting houses only. Houses were all he saw: the grand ones with names enjoined by hyphens, the lowly shotguns.

  “And when you looked, what did you see?” Sonny says out loud.

  “Juliet,” he answers.

  When he gets there she’s sitting by herself at the bar, shouting encouragement to an enormous she-male lumbering around onstage. He waits in the lighted space of the open door until she turns and sees him, then he moves to his usual place, a table in the corner.

  “Crown and water?” Lulu calls from her perch on a stool.

  “Crown and water,” Sonny says.

  “Sonny, have you met Juliet? Juliet, that there is Sonny LaMott, world-famous French Quarter artist. Maybe you’ve heard of him.”

  “Juliet,” Sonny says with a formal nod, offering the chair next to his.

  It is easier than before, easier than the day several weeks ago when they sat consumed by silence at Café du Monde. It is warm in the lounge but not uncomfortable, and yet her face is damp with sweat, the golden hair on her forearms glistens.

  “You gonna be okay?” he says.

  “I guess I’m hot.”

  “I just thought of something,” he says. He waits until she looks at him. “Put us each in a puka shell necklace and platform shoes and it’d be like old times.”

  She brings an unlit cigarette to her mouth. “What do you want, Sonny? Don’t you think I’ve been humiliated enough?”

  “I’m not here to humiliate you, Julie.”

  “Sonny, this isn’t my life anymore. My life ended a long time ago.”

  “I’m not here to humiliate you,” Sonny says again.

  Lulu delivers his drink and he downs most of it before saying anything more. “Is it true in California they let the girls dance completely naked? I hear they don’t even have to wear pasties.”

  “California has too much to worry about than whether you’ve got your nipples covered.”

  “What about something to cover your bottom?”

  “California ain’t worried about that either.”

  “You’d think New Orleans, with its low reputation, would allow for anything goes.”

  “Yes, you’d think that, wouldn’t you? You’d think a lot of things about New Orleans. But you’d be wrong. You’d always be wrong.”

  She lights the cigarette and in the flame from her lighter Sonny can see that he never really got her right. Her mouth is less ful
l than he painted it and her chin is actually more round than square. And why did he have to exaggerate the size of her breasts?

  The way she wears her hair? He got that wrong, too.

  “I’ve decided to go back home,” she says.

  “Home?” and he lifts an eyebrow.

  “I mean to LA. I’m going to start over. It’s not too late to change. I want to be a better person. Do you think that’s possible, Sonny? Can a thirty-two-year-old woman who’s made every mistake there is start her life over again?”

  He should’ve painted that small cluster of acne on her forehead. In his Juliets her forehead was always flawless. Also, her eyes are older than he made them, the bones of her face less prominent. Why did he make her features so perfectly formed?

  “Maybe when I was a kid I fell off my bike and bumped my head,” Sonny says. “There has to be an explanation.”

  “For what?”

  “For why for so long I’ve been hung up on you.”

  “I was talking about California?” Juliet makes it sound like a question. “What I was saying before I was interrupted, and I hope you’ll listen, I’m not staying in New Orleans much longer. I’m just working until I can save enough money to buy a plane ticket and pay off my bill at the hotel. That lawyer, that bastard Harvey? He still hasn’t given me my check.”

  Sonny reaches into his pocket and removes the envelope holding the money from his bank account. He fans the cash out in a half-circle on the table. “It’s not quite two hundred dollars. It’s all I have left. I want you to have it, Julie.” He stops himself. His voice has betrayed him, the nervous cheer giving way to desperation. “I was hoping I could be alone again with you, Julie.”

  She looks at the money and sadly shakes her head. Her mouth, as she brings the cigarette back to it, reveals what might be a nervous tic. “You have come to humiliate me,” she says. “It’s that fat slob neighbor of yours, isn’t it? He told you.”

  “Let me go talk to Lulu, Julie.”

  “I must hate men. I know I hate you. Does it hurt to hear me say that, Sonny?”

  “It’s funny but hurt seems to feel like everything else lately.”

  “I hate almost everything about you,” she says. “I hate how you need me. Sometimes I think it’s my hate that you need because my hate is what confirms your opinion of yourself. It gives you a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Without it you could never go to that fence every day and hang your pictures. You could never accept the rejection. My hate—and I realize this might sound like a reach . . . but my hate defines you, Sonny LaMott. It defines you because it’s all that stands between you and what’s ordinary. The little ranch-style house in Saint Bernard Parish, bingo games every Wednesday night in the church recreation hall, the minivan, a barbecue kettle in the backyard. My hate has spared you that. Without it you join the rank and file. Just another working-class boy from the Bywater without a ticket Uptown. And certainly not an artist.”

  “Am I really an artist, Julie?”

  “Oh, shut up, Sonny. You’re an artist even in your sleep.”

  “They’re going to arrest me,” he says. “They’ve got motive and they’ve got opportunity. That’s what they look for, you know? Motive and opportunity,” he says again.

  She points to the cash on the table. “I really, really need this.” Cigarette clenched tight in her mouth, she folds the money and holds it in the palm of her hand, as if to weigh it. “We should have had us that baby, huh, Sonny?”

  “Yes.”

  “Everything would be different.”

  “Everything. Everything in this world.”

  Outside the streetcar moves past with a roar and squeal, wheels grinding, electric line overhead reflecting the last of the afternoon light.

  Juliet doesn’t hear the car doors slam. She’s in the middle of a dream. She’s in her yellow Ford Mustang rental car but she’s in California stuck in traffic on the I-5. Up ahead there’s a wreck and no one is moving. People are getting out of their cars and trying to see. They block the sun with the flats of their hands. Horns are blowing beep beep beep. The jam extends for miles in a single direction, while on the other side of the interstate there isn’t a car in sight. The lanes run forever, empty.

  Maybe she doesn’t hear the doors slam because in the dream people are slamming doors, too.

  “We should try the other side,” Juliet says in her sleep.

  “I don’t think I like it that way as much as just regular.” Sounds like Sonny LaMott, but what is he doing in California?

  “The other road,” she says. “No one’s there.”

  When they come through the door he rises to his feet and staggers to the middle of the room. He holds his hands out in front of him, as if at their mercy, ready to be cuffed. He is naked, his body washed yellow by the ceiling light.

  Several seconds pass before it comes to her that he in fact is Sonny and she Juliet, that they are back in her room at the Lé Dale.

  “And a happy good morning to you, podna,” the male black says.

  Behind him stand the male white and two uniforms. There is also a woman.

  “Put your clothes on,” the male black says.

  Sonny reaches for his undershorts, his trousers. He places a hand on top of a chair and carefully steps into them.

  “I didn’t mean you,” the male black says. And only now does she remember his name. Peroux. “I meant you, Miss Beauvais. Get out of bed. Let’s go.”

  Juliet props herself on an elbow and pulls a sheet up over her chest.

  The woman crosses the room and stands next to the bed.

  “Juliet Beauvais, my name is Patricia Kimball. I am a prosecutor with the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office, and you’re under arrest for the murder of Marcelle Lavergne Beauvais.”

  “Get up,” Peroux says again, stepping past Sonny. He grabs Juliet by the arm.

  “Tell them it wasn’t me,” she says to Sonny. “Tell them.” Sonny doesn’t speak and she says, “You’ll find the hourglass in his cart, Lieutenant. He hid it there, he told me.”

  “Is that true, LaMott?”

  Sonny steps back from the detective and looks at her—he just looks at her.

  “Only reason I ask, Leonard Barbier told me not two hours ago that a certain black boy from a certain housing project put it there, and that a certain Juliet Beauvais paid this certain boy to do it. Oh, and then we spoke to the kid.” Peroux lowers a hand into the pocket of his jacket and fishes out her mother’s wedding band. “This look familiar, Miss Beauvais? No? How ’bout this, then?”

  One of the uniforms steps forward holding the hourglass in a plastic evidence bag.

  “How long is forever, Sergeant Lentini?”

  “Oh, it’s a long time,” Lentini says, “especially where she’s going.”

  “Miss Beauvais,” Patricia Kimball says, “you have the right to remain silent. Any statements you make can and will be used as evidence against you.”

  “Get dressed,” Peroux says again.

  “You have the right to the presence of your own counsel. If you can’t afford your own counsel, the court will provide one for you prior to any questioning.” The woman hands Juliet a sheet of paper. “Miss Beauvais, this document is for you to sign. It states that you have been apprised of your rights under the Miranda Rule. Do you have any questions, Miss Beauvais?”

  “How long did you say forever was, Sergeant Lentini?” Peroux says. He has removed a dress from the closet, the same one Juliet wore on her trip in from California.

  Juliet offers no resistance as the detective squeezes it past her head and pulls it down over her upper torso.

  Lentini takes her shoes, the blocky ones, and checks them for contraband before placing them on the floor at her feet. “Forever?” he says, contemplating the possibilities. “Forever in Saint Gabriel? That’s about as long as forever is in hell, I’d say.”

  “Know where Saint Gabriel is?” Peroux says to Juliet. “That’s where we put our
women prisoners in this state. And that’s where you’re going.”

  “Saint Gabriel,” Juliet says in a whisper. “Gabriel was an archangel. Sonny, you were an altar boy. Wasn’t Gabriel an archangel?”

  From the pocket of his dress shirt Peroux removes Sonny’s postcard of the Beauvais Mansion, the sepia one describing New Orleans as an unexpected paradise. “Mind if I give her this?”

  Sonny shakes his head.

  “We went by your place earlier, thinking she might be there. I hope you don’t mind.” He offers the card to Juliet and she holds it loosely in her open hands. “Something to look at in case you don’t get a room with a view,” he says.