“This city,” he said to Louis, “it really is different from all others, isn’t it?”
“It’s New Orleans, Sonny. You need to find a better word than different.”
Sonny paints the jazz halls and monuments, the Carnival balls and parades, the funeral marches and the food and music festivals. He paints fruit vendors selling Sugartown watermelons and Creole tomatoes from the backs of dilapidated pickups, and shotgun shanties all in a row, each a different color. He paints cemeteries and historic buildings and parks and oak trees and river bridges and bayous and swamps and ships and schools and warehouses and petrochemical plants.
Said Louis, “You actually expect someone to hang a picture of a refinery in their living room?”
“Sure,” Sonny replied. “People like pictures of cows, why wouldn’t they like pictures of refineries?”
Rather than an original talent to be reckoned with, Sonny has become perhaps the biggest cliché going: a man in filthy, paint-stained clothing and a fuzzy beret, whose stomach growls from hunger as he tries to hustle pictures that nobody wants.
Today he has dared to present himself to an elderly gentleman named Royce Michaud, who’s wearing a tan crepe suit with food droppings on the sleeves, and around his neck a tie decorated with Tabasco peppers. Michaud’s gallery is in the Warehouse District, one of several in the upstart arts enclave on Julia Street. Sonny and Royce Michaud stand together in a poorly lighted storage room, unrolling canvases and sheets of paper, carelessly spreading them on a table. “You want advice, Mr. LaMott? I’ll give it to you straight.”
Sonny nods.
“Well, to begin, your scale is off.”
“My scale?”
“Yes. But your palette is rich and bold, I’ll grant you that. I see talent here, Mr. LaMott, I do, but, sadly, and this is difficult for me to say . . . I don’t see enough to take you past the fence. Your work is uninspired, Mr. LaMott. It lacks passion, and what is a painting but an expression of individual passion? It’s as if you paint in your sleep. Wake up, you somnambulist, you listless man. Wake up and show thyself!”
Royce Michaud is holding an eight-by-ten watercolor depicting a Mardi Gras parade on Saint Charles Avenue. “Take this one as a case in point,” he says, studying the scene so closely that Sonny feels himself growing warm and uncomfortable. “Your perspective here, Mr. LaMott . . .”
Sonny nods.
“The Carnival is moving away from the viewer. See that? The people on the street, those on the floats, the ones on the balconies here, even the animals on the sidewalk . . . everyone is turned away, there isn’t a single face to make out. Where is the emotion? An artist must emote, Mr. LaMott.”
“Yes. Yes, he must, Mr. Michaud.”
“Has the world passed you by, Mr. LaMott? Is that what you’re saying?”
“The world? What world?”
“I ask you, do you feel like an outsider, separate and apart from everyone else?”
“Sometimes.”
“All the time, more like. Of course you do. You are totally disengaged. That is what you’re telling me with your work. That is the statement you’re making to the world. ‘I could give a fuck.’ You’re standing there at the epicenter of one of this country’s most popular tourist destinations and you’re saying, ‘Hello, my name is Sonny LaMott, and I could give a fuck!’ ”
“I could give a fuck,” Sonny repeats.
Royce Michaud stuffs the parade painting in Sonny’s open rucksack and removes another, this one a portrait of Juliet. “Now now now,” he says, thrusting the small canvas under the green glass shade of a pharmacy lamp. “At last I see it.”
“Did I get the scale right?”
“No, Mr. LaMott. Passion! I see it. And, oh, how delighted I am. You are not a somnambulist, after all. You are not dead on your feet. Oh, how nice.”
Sonny clears his throat. “That’s Juliet.”
“It’s more than any one girl,” says the dealer. “It’s love. It’s sex. It’s longing and desperation. It’s also very beautiful. Now this is art, Mr. LaMott. Perhaps you do give a fuck.”
“Juliet,” Sonny says quietly. “Sometimes I think that if not for her I might’ve been a real artist, and a successful one. She’s made every other painting unimportant.”
“Nonsense,” says Royce Michaud. “Who taught you to talk like that?”
“That woman ran me over like a dog in the road.”
The dealer continues to study the image, his fingers delicately following the lines of Juliet’s voluptuous form. “Yes, but of course she ran you over. This is clear now. And that is precisely why you will never be able to place this painting. More bad news, Mr. LaMott.”
“Just say it.”
“Nudes are a hard sell to begin with, and one such as this, though compelling, is particularly difficult. It’s your best work, far superior to anything else you’ve shown me, but every woman who encounters this picture will find herself lacking in comparison to your Juliet. She’ll sense her own inadequacies, and I don’t mean simply tits and ass, Mr. LaMott. She’ll feel as if she doesn’t measure up. She’ll know only frustration at never having experienced the obsession of a man equal to that which is so evident here. You’ve made your love a prison, my friend. No”—Royce Michaud puts the piece away—“I’m afraid I have but one suggestion.”
Sonny waits, his Adam’s apple throbbing in his neck.
“Now, now, Mr. LaMott, it isn’t easy for me to say this. But don’t give up your day job.”
She knows she’s good. Her stomach is flat, her hips and thighs devoid of cellulite, her boobs as fat and pointy as when she was fifteen. She likes the sassy Veronica Lake haircut her friend Wade gave her back in LA (whoever Veronica Lake is). She likes her feet. She likes her eyes, nose and ears. When she was young, a little thing yet, friends often teased her about the size of her lips. “Inner tubes,” they called them. And as much as she hated them then, Juliet likes her lips now. These days big lips are in; they’re all the rage. Models on magazine covers have big lips, and people pay good money for collagen injections. Ask anybody: a big mouth beats out a skinny one any day.
Once at a place off Ventura Boulevard a man paid her five hundred dollars to run her tongue over her lips while he sat in a chair and played with himself.
An hour later she was at an electronics store on Sepulveda buying a VCR.
They don’t need dancers at the first two clubs she tries. They do need waitresses, however. Does she have any experience waiting tables? This she figures is a polite way of saying she doesn’t look good enough to dance, that her look is too old or too hard, too something. The third place is too sleazy, the fourth too dead. They seem to like her at the fifth place. A woman called Lulu runs it.
She and Juliet sit at the bar and drink diet ginger ales.
“You say you’re originally from here?”
“Ever hear of the Beauvais over on Esplanade? I grew up in that house. That’s my family it’s named after.”
“You’re one of them Beauvais, are you?”
“My people go back to the earliest Creoles who settled in the city. You know what a Creole is, don’t you, Lulu?”
“A high yellow?”
“Well, it could be a high yellow. But your earliest Creoles were foreign people—Europeans—who came from France and settled in New Orleans. Some of the wealthier and more distinguished ones built big houses along Esplanade. How your mulattoes came to be Creoles is the white Creole men had light-skinned African women as concubines on the side and they had babies together and your babies grew up and learned who their daddies were and they started telling everybody they were Creoles, too. It used to be a very special thing to be a Creole. In Louisiana at one time it was like being royalty.”
“Everybody’s got to be something,” says Lulu, who couldn’t seem less impressed.
“The Beauvais will be mine any day now. My mother’s sick, riddled from head to toe with inoperable cancer. I’m her only heir—and the last o
f my particular branch of the Beauvais—so I’ll get the place and everything else that’s been handed down from one generation to the next for going on two hundred years now.”
“I had an uncle left me an old Buick once. I sold it for scrap for forty-five dollars.”
Juliet, not sure how to respond, sips her beverage.
“You know how at them retarded schools they teach those kids shop?” says Lulu. “Well, at this one school over in Chalmette they make barbecue pits out of barrels and I went there with that car money and I bought myself one. I still got it. It cooks some beautiful meats.”
“Let’s make a deal, Lulu,” Juliet says. “Let me dance here at your club and once Mama dies I’ll make sure to invite you and the girls over to the house for an afternoon tea party?”
“Sorry, dear, but I’m afraid I’ll have to pass.”
Juliet lets on a look of disappointment and the woman says, “It’s on account I have this phobia about old houses. Them and antiques. Stand me by an antique chair, for instance, and I like to faint.”
Lulu lets her start that same day, and after Juliet has danced a few songs she sits with a man in a business suit who identifies himself as a schoolteacher from nearby Saint Bernard Parish. Like a lot of men his age, which is about forty, the schoolteacher’s wife doesn’t understand his needs. Juliet is tempted to ask what those needs are, but she’s not sure she wants to hear them. They’re about all talked out when the schoolteacher leans in close and says, “I think it would be neat to get some lady to pee on me. You ever think you might like to urinate on an individual?”
“I only do that in the normal place,” Juliet answers.
This seems to be devastating news for the schoolteacher, who sits in silence hanging his head and picking at the label on his bottle of near beer.
“Well,” she says, “I did squat and do it behind trees before. Do trees count?”
“I know now where I’ve seen you before.”
She smiles in a disinterested way, not wishing to share her filmography with another one.
“Ever been to the Napoleon House?” he says. “It’s that place across from the back of that hotel, the Royal Orleans; I forget the street. I think they got your picture hanging on the wall.”
“What kind of picture?”
“Some painting. Ever pose for a painting?”
“Long time ago I did.” She laughs. “Boy was always doing me naked.”
The schoolteacher says, “Breasts and everything.”
Juliet uses her straw to push her lime wedge down under her ice. “This famous movie producer in California paid me five hundred dollars once to run my tongue around like this.” And now she demonstrates.
“You got yourself some monster lips, all right.”
“They’re just like some others in my family. I inherited them from the Beauvais, I guess. Kiss them too long and you know what happens?”
“I’d like to find out,” says the schoolteacher.
“They turn a color too pretty for words. Us of my stripe don’t even need lipstick.”
Sonny has painted other women, not a few of them nude. But the funny thing is—funny to him, anyway—most of his models end up looking like Juliet, and those who by some fluke actually come out resembling themselves never fail to own at least one of her features: the smart eyes, the puffy lips, the thick yellow hair. Sometimes, when unsatisfied with a picture, he’s even substituted her large breasts and generous snarl of pubic hair.
“She’s not me,” a model told him once, “but I think I know this person.”
They were at his home on the back porch, and the girl, whom he’d managed to have his way with a few hours earlier, was standing with a paint-stained sheet held close to her chest. Her own body was small and angular, while the nude in Sonny’s painting was fleshy enough to draw comparisons to Marilyn Monroe.
“Okay, I know now,” the girl said. “It’s Juliet Beauvais. We went to the Academy together. Oh my God, Sonny! You’ve gone and made me a slut!”
Over the years Sonny’s enjoyed his share of girlfriends—a few easily as pretty as Juliet, and all of them more kind, more generous—but somehow none has been able to keep him. These women simply were not meant for him, he decided, after casting them aside. The hours on the telephone, letters written and letters received, weekend dates to movies and coffeehouses. It all died away finally. His relationship with Polly Bienvenue, for example, reached the point where they were shopping for antique wedding bands in the French Quarter before he realized that he could never marry a woman with such stubby hands. “She was really quite lovely,” he explained to Louis after crushing the woman, “but the one thing I could never get past were her hands.”
“She’s not missing any fingers, is she?”
“No. They’re all there.”
“What’s wrong with them, then?”
“Besides their being stubby, you mean?” Sonny thought about it for a while. “Nothing, I guess, short of the fact that they’re not Juliet’s.”
In his mawkish hours with strangers in Decatur Street bars, Sonny has confessed to looking for Juliet in every mouth he ever kissed, and the same went for her sex. The more he experimented with other women the more he became convinced that only she could make him happy. At night when he went to bed he imagined the two of them holding vivid conversations, Sonny employing a gift of gab that he in fact did not possess, while Juliet nodded admiringly and listened for a change.
“Sounds like she put some powerful voodoo on your ass,” a fellow beer drinker told him once.
“That could be it.”
“It also sounds like you need some counseling.”
“Why do you think I’m talking to you?” Sonny answered with a laugh.
Sonny dreams about the perfect children they might’ve produced together. And he envisions the one who, had they chosen to let the pregnancy run its course, would be a teenager now. When he imagines this person Sonny sees either a son in his image or a daughter in Juliet’s, and he sees his own life as he was meant to live it. As a family man he’d have discovered a happiness that is nowhere near him now, and his days, given to others, would have a greater meaning, a higher purpose. Every aspect of his existence, both large and small, would be improved. Collectors would covet his paintings; he would not have to paint Young Elvis and tourist portraits. Roaring through the French Quarter on his way to the square, his presence would elicit excitement. “Ah, yes, here he comes. The great man!”
“I was wrong about something,” Juliet told him. “Remember how you said it only takes one drop and I said there was nothing to worry about?”
“Oh, Julie.”
Had he only been more brave. Had he then said, “Okay, now, let’s think about this,” or, better yet, “No, we’re keeping it,” the whole world would be different today. To begin, Sonny would not be such a brokendown thing. His mother would be alive, his father well and prospering. Sonny might even be driving a car, a new one, instead of his father’s twenty-three-year-old pickup truck. He would have a house in a neighborhood with trees, central air instead of window units, a lawn without weeds.
It also occurs to Sonny that, had he not agreed to the procedure (Sonny still can’t call the abortion by its name), he would be nowhere near the situation in which he finds himself tonight.
No way would Sonny be waiting for an old cat doctor to leave his office and make his way across the Esplanade Avenue neutral ground.
“On the one hand you seem like such a normal, well-adjusted guy,” Sonny is saying to Louis Fortunato. “You give good, smart advice and you’re trustworthy and you can make more sense than anyone I know. Then on the other hand you think it’s okay to whack a vet for allegedly killing your Frank. Please help me with this picture, Louis.”
“Blame it on my leg. Everyone else does.”
“Your leg is what made you a weirdo?”
“That’s what they tell me.”
It is almost 8:00 P.M. before the vet emerges from th
e building. Small and humped over, he’s wearing a baggy seersucker suit with a black bow tie drooping at the neck. He is much older than Sonny imagined he would be; in fact, he is so old that his hair and mustache are bleached white.
“Bloody, murderous bastard,” Louis says, sipping from a bottle of whiskey.
My Juliet: A Novel Page 4
