“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, bum
ps 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.
But by now Sonny is asleep, too far gone to answer.
Five hours later, at a little after eight o’clock, a hard knocking at the front door awakens Sonny to an empty bed, sheets wrapped around his legs.
Sonny comes to with a fat headache that only gets fatter when he realizes Juliet isn’t there.
He throws on a robe and pulls the door open. Standing on the landing at the top of the stairs are two men in black plastic raincoats, both of them dripping water.
Sonny knows they’re cops before they identify themselves.
The older and more physically substantial of the two gives his name as Lieutenant Peroux. “Me and Sergeant Lentini here are NOPD, Criminal Investigation Division.”
Peroux looks to Sonny like one of those black Creoles Juliet lectured her mother about, his small, sharp features and fair complexion betraying more French than African blood. His hair, too, is straight and fine with comb lines sweeping from left to right. He’s so wet from the rain that even his mustache shines with glass beads.
Lentini, in contrast, is small and fat and sports just enough stubble to look stylish. He wears horn-rimmed glasses and a weatherproof golf hat. Sonny can’t decide whether he looks more like a fifties beatnik or an electronics technician on call for cable TV.
Neither he nor Peroux bothers to show credentials.
“Is Juliet Beauvais here?” Peroux begins. He has a Yat accent (as in the local colloquialism “Where y’at?”) and one almost as hard and flat as Sonny’s.
Talking carefully, tightening the sash on his robe: “Ah, no. I’m sorry, Lieutenant. Juliet’s already left.”
“Did she say where she was going?”
“No. No, she didn’t.”
Sonny’s head is pounding and he can barely speak for the dense, cottony weight on his tongue. “Would you like to come in?” He opens the door wider but Peroux stays outside, fingering a page in a reporter’s notebook.
Lentini, on the other hand, brushes past Sonny without a word, glaring from behind too-thick lenses.
“Any idea where she might of run off to?” Peroux asks.
Sonny needs a moment to answer. “She had a room at a hotel downtown.”
“What hotel was that?”
“The Lé Dale on Saint Charles. Just down the street from the Hummingbird.” Once again Sonny tries to swallow but can’t get anything down. “Lieutenant, can you tell me what’s the problem?”
Peroux lowers his gaze and quickly brings it back up, his muddy brown eyes exploring Sonny’s face as if for an answer to a question he isn’t prepared to ask.
Then from inside Lentini speaks with a tone so low and unaffected he might be describing the room’s thrift-store furnishings. “Somebody got in her mama’s house last night.” He waits until Sonny looks at him. “They killed her.”
Sonny leaves the doorway and crosses the room and sits on the sofa by the window. Nearly a minute goes by before he starts to cry, then it comes with an intensity that racks his body. The cops watch him without saying anything. Finally when Sonny seems to finish, Peroux knocks on the door as if they just got there. “Hate to interrupt, but can we have a look around?”
It is hard for Sonny to answer, hard for him to say anything at all.
“In the room back there . . . mind if we look? You don’t want us to look, just say don’t look.”
“You can look.”
But Peroux stays where he is. And it’s Lentini who looks. Sonny hears him opening closet doors, pulling back the shower curtain, rifling drawers.
“Are you sure it was Juliet’s mother?”
“Positive, Sonny.” The detective smiles and points a finger. “You are Sonny, right, podna?”
Lentini returns and flashes a pair of open palms.
Peroux takes a business card from his wallet and hands it to Sonny. SAMUEL PEROUX, JR., it says, and includes the phone number and South Broad Street address for police headquarters.
“We’ll be needing to talk again,” he says. “So don’t be going nowheres.”
Sonny keeps his eyes on the card.
“You see Miss Beauvais you have her call that number, you hear?” Sonny doesn’t answer and Peroux says, “Hey, podna, I’m talking to you.”
“I’ll tell her.”
As soon as they’ve gone, Sonny puts the police chain on the door. In the bathroom he forces a finger down his throat but nothing comes up. He kneels on the floor next to the tub and runs the water and tries a second time. Still nothing.
He can’t stop shaking and can’t seem to get warm and he lies on the rubber bathmat and holds his legs with his arms. He stays on the floor for nearly an hour then he remembers something and he gets dressed and walks downstairs to the street.
In the truck he starts with the passenger’s side. Finding nothing, he moves down to the driver’s side and feels under the seat. A Coke can. Paper candy wrappers and empty corn chip bags. Digging deeper, he finds the gloves and ski mask wadded together against the seat frame. He fi
nds a tire jack and an empty can of oil. But the club is gone.
Sonny is careful not to slam the door.
He looks back at the house to make sure Florence and Curly Bonaventure aren’t watching.
It’s no big thing to find a ride, even at this time of night. The old Pontiac rattles to a stop and the passenger door squeaks open. Juliet, standing in a wash of red from the brake lights, flicks her cigarette in the weeds and steps forward trailing smoke. She doesn’t think she can stand being kidnapped and raped just now, but her feet hurt. She bends in the door and spies a brother and his woman, their faces green in the glow from the dash. “Need a ride?”
“Did you see my thumb?” Juliet says to the man, then gives a loud, dishonest laugh. “Last I checked your thumb needs to do something.”
“I don’t play by them rules,” he says. “If you’re coming, get in. Otherwise, good night.”
The woman shoves over and Juliet sits on the torn rubber seat. The window is down and she sticks her elbow out. “I’m going up the street here ’bout half a mile.”
“On our way, then,” says the woman, as the car thumps over train tracks. “You starting the day or you ending it?”
Juliet likes the woman’s face, her smile. Also, she smells nice. Sweet, like cane syrup warmed with butter. “My days don’t start or end, sweetie. They just go on and on and on.”
“I hear you,” says the man, cackling with laughter.
Juliet wants to ask about their day, but here they are in Faubourg Marigny already. She gets out and bumps the car with a fist as it drives away. The brake lights flash in recognition, then the blinkers, both sides. It is always nice to make new friends, even at three-thirty in the morning when it is a brother and his woman and she wouldn’t be caught dead talking to them in the sensible light of day.
Her vagina’s sore, but nevertheless Juliet feels deep affection for all mankind.
She walks a block and arrives at Leonard’s club. Except for the handful of kids hanging out in front the place seems to have packed it in for the night. Inside a couple of boys are stacking chairs and folding tables. At the bar a woman is counting money. And over on the bandstand Leonard is coiling electrical cords.
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