She steps back out on the landing and Curly joins her, pulling the door closed. It’s a small space and they stand within inches of each other. She wonders if she spilled something on her shirt and it is a second before she understands what he’s looking at.
“Well, I guess I’ll be going back to the Lé Dale.”
“That’s a fine hotel.” Curly could back off a little, there’s room. But he seems to want to crowd her. “The Lé Dale, places like that. Give me a room where you don’t feel self-conscious peeing in the shower, I always maintained that.”
It isn’t easy walking back down the stairs. Juliet keeps both hands on the railing, looking back over her shoulder every few steps. When she reaches the bottom she spins around and offers a wave. “Made it.”
Curly clears his throat, preparing for a pronouncement. “I was digging around in the trash out back, this was a while ago. Guess what I found?” He takes a last sip before flattening his can underfoot. “I guess Sonny threw it out. You might not remember this but it was a movie and you were in there sucking off some boy.” He kicks the can and it sails past her, landing in the grass without a sound. “Boy had a dick on him, now.”
Juliet uses her hand to block his porch light, to try to see his face better. “The guy with the penis? That was my boyfriend.”
“What about the girl, that one that licked you?” He laughs and his shirt pulls up higher. “She reminds me of Florence the way she’s kind of scrappy.”
Juliet starts walking toward the street, through the damp weeds, past an iron pole on the top of which rests a rotten birdhouse, its roof a ragged, open maw. “That was another life for me,” she says. “I’ve straightened myself out since then.”
“I’ll give you fifty dollars you come let Florence lick you like you did that girl.”
Juliet stops and spins around and looks back at the light.
“Florence,” Curly shouts, flinging the door open wide. “Go wash your toot-toot, baby. Daddy’s got a surprise and it ain’t tuna.”
Days later the detectives invite Sonny back to police headquarters. He sits in the same room and at the same table as before, Peroux and Lentini present, their shirtsleeves rolled up, jackets thrown over chairs. The handwriting examiner, who identifies himself as William Ruben, a certified and court-qualified graphoanalyst, provides a pencil and sheets of plain white paper, each labeled on top with Sonny’s name and a case number.
“Mr. LaMott, now your name please. Write it as you normally would.”
“You want me as Cecil or as Sonny?”
Peroux says, “I was in the service with a guy from Toms River, New Jersey, name of Cecil. Cecil Bouchard.”
“Either one,” says the examiner. He points. “Here, if you would.”
“At Okinawa he gets this letter. It’s from his best buddy back home and the news isn’t good. Turns out his girlfriend’s been running around with a black dude.”
“Uh oh,” Lentini says, rubbing his face with his hands.
“So Cecil . . . Cecil has what I guess you could call a breakdown. He won’t leave his bunk. A black guy walks by—me, for instance—he stares like he wants to kill the brother. ‘What’s the problem, Cecil?’ And Cecil doesn’t answer. At night you could hear him wailing, all over the barracks.”
Sonny drums the pencil against the table.
“Now Cecil . . . now that boy wept.”
“Jesus wept, too,” Lentini says from the other side of the room.
“Yes, he did. Jesus is another one. Poor Jesus wept his ass off.You’ve wept, too, haven’t you, podna? Make him write that, Mr. Ruben.”
The examiner taps the paper with a finger. “Okay, Mr. LaMott. ‘Jesus wept.’”
“Not ‘Jesus wept,’ ” the detective says. “I didn’t mean that. Have him write ‘Sonny wept.’ ”
And so Sonny writes it, his hand shaking as it moves across the page.
The topless/bottomless is nicer than Juliet remembered, the owner more considerate and less heavily tattooed, the clientele not nearly as runty. The odor inside could use improving, however. Apparently somebody didn’t make it to the bathroom. Well, okay, Juliet concedes that maybe half a dozen didn’t make it. But overall the atmosphere is tolerable if not what she’d call homey. On the jukebox new songs have been added, most of them funk and disco classics. Although she can’t well afford it, Juliet dunks coins in the machine and punches in selections by Donna Summer and the Ohio Players. The music comes up with a warble then rights itself after she bumps a hand against the glass display.
Donna doing “Bad Girl.”
When Juliet returns to her stool another diet ginger ale is waiting.
“We all worried you’d run off with the schoolteacher,” Lulu says, picking up where they’d left off. “I personally wasn’t concerned myself but some of the girls had misgivings.”
“No,” says Juliet, “he was just needing a friend.”
“I know what he was needing.” Lulu sips her drink and forces her voice down an octave. “When you were done probably a shower.”
Juliet lights a cigarette. She’s wondering what tack to take when appealing for her job back. Should she mention the pain of losing the Beauvais? The death of her mother? Her desire to eat?
And then the unexpected. “I look forward to seeing you dance again,” Lulu says. “That is if that’s what you’re here for.”
Juliet’s eyes puddle with tears. She could hold Lulu’s face in her hands and kiss her dry, little mouth. Now here is a friend.
“You were good sliding down the pole. And your tits are above average.”
Juliet places a hand on Lulu’s. It’s like touching something dead on the side of the road, or maybe a strip of tire rubber. “You’re the mother I never had, Lulu.”
“Thank you, doll. That means a lot coming from you.”
The stage has two runways, each extending through the tables a distance of about ten feet. Juliet prefers to dance on the one with most of its footlights burned out. The bar today is empty but for Lulu and a big girl named Sandy, who might’ve been a guy not long before, or who might still be one now. Juliet is neither nervous nor self-conscious; this is old hat. Her three songs bleed together and become one and her ten minutes tick by like ten seconds.
She takes her break at the bar, alone with a cigarette and a tall glass of ice water. The air conditioner could be turned up but it’s early yet to start demanding improvements. She wipes the sweat off her face with a handful of cocktail napkins then fans herself using a takeout menu.
She picks up the telephone by the waiters’ station and calls Information. “Yes, do you have a lawyer listed name of Harvey? Nathan Harvey? Give me his office please.”
She writes the number on the palm of her hand then punches it out on the dial pad using her drinking straw. “Maria, please,” she tells the woman who answers.
“May I ask who’s calling?”
“Tell her it’s the client she owes a bunch of money to.”
The phone rings again and Maria picks up.
“Where’s my check?” Juliet says.
“Your check? Who is . . . ? Miss Beauvais? Miss Beauvais, is that you?”
Immediately upon hanging up Juliet feels better; it’s as if her load has been lightened. On stage again, she sends sweat flying on the little round-top tables crowding the runway. Lulu, shouting up from the footlights, is forced to move deeper into the room.
“Disco mama!” Sandy calls in a rich baritone.
As Juliet is sliding down the pole, sinew showing in her neck, bands of muscle in her arms tight against the skin, who but Sonny LaMott enters the lounge and takes a seat at a table by the door. Is she seeing things? Of all the strip clubs in the French Quarter how has he managed to find her at this one? It is an illusion, she tells herself. You are seeing things. But then Sandy, abandoning a fresh smoke, jumps to her feet and stalks toward him.
Juliet wheels into a tight spin, her momentum taking her down the runway, past a single hot bu
lb shooting upward. She could be in better shape, her lungs are about to burst. But somehow she completes the routine, finishing only a few beats before the song does.
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 al
ways 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 full 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.”
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