My Juliet: A Novel

by John Ed Bradley

  “Where is Mama?” Mr. LaMott says when Sonny seems to have finished.

  “Mama died in 1982, Daddy. She had that stroke, remember?”

  Mr. LaMott seems to take this as a surprise. He reels in his line and sits for a long time staring at his artificial lure.

  “I been meaning to tell you something, Daddy,” Sonny says, “and I hope you can grab ahold of this.” Mr. LaMott doesn’t respond, and Sonny continues, “I been wanting to tell you you were right about most everything you ever said to me. You were a real good father to me.”

  Mr. LaMott just stares—not at Sonny, but at his lure.

  “After high school when the government didn’t draft me I should’ve been a man about it and enlisted and gone on to Vietnam or else enrolled at LSU like you wanted me to. You were right about me being just a so-so bartender and an even worse painter. I’m sure that wasn’t easy for you to say, and I’m sorry I didn’t listen. Because I realize it now, I realize all you said was meant to help me. Sometimes I think that that war, crazy as it was, might’ve helped me. Korea helped you, right?” Sonny reaches over and takes the lure from his father’s hands. “I wish you’d said something about Juliet, though. That time I brought her to the house for dinner? You should’ve talked to me about her then—you and Mama, both. Not that I’d have listened, understand? But at least now you could be saying ‘I told you so.’ ”

  “I told you so,” says Mr. LaMott.

  “No, you didn’t. That’s the point I’m trying to make. You didn’t tell me anything.”

  It had been his mother’s idea, to meet Sonny’s girlfriend and have her over for dinner. After she’d finished cooking Mrs. LaMott went down the hall to her bedroom and changed into an outfit heretofore reserved for weddings and holy days of obligation. As for Mr. LaMott, he wore his lone sport coat, the tweed one with elbow patches, even though it was a muggy spring evening. Sonny can still remember the meal his mother prepared: smothered pork chops, white beans and rice, wop salad crowded with black olives and artichoke hearts, French bread lathered with garlic butter and toasted to a crispy brown in the broiler, and sliced Creole tomatoes still warm from the sun. Juliet contributed the dessert, a pineapple upside-down cake studded with maraschino cherries. “You made that?” Mr. LaMott asked.

  “Yes sir. Well, me and Anna Huey did. She’s the lady who works for us.”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “It’s made from scratch. I didn’t even use a mixer to mix the batter.”

  “You mean you did all that by hand?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Now isn’t that something,” and he seemed truly amazed.

  Sonny was too nervous to say or eat much. How Juliet, a fancy girl from a fancy family, would take to his humble Bywater family had put his stomach in knots. He remembers little of what was said at the table, but afterward he and Juliet went for a drive in the Vieux Carré. They stopped for beer at the A&P on Royal Street and Sonny kept a bottle between his legs as he held the wheel with one hand and rested the other on her shoulder. “What did you think?” he said, anxious to know if he had passed muster.

  She looked at him with a dreamy expression and leaned over and softly kissed the side of his face. “Now I know why you’re so beautiful.”

  He was back home before 10:00 P.M., and his mother, having cleaned the kitchen, had already gone to bed. Mr. LaMott, however, was sitting in his chair under a lamp reading a day-old copy of the Times-Picayune. He had his pajamas on. “What did you think?” Sonny said. He had become hungry again, and in the dark kitchen he pulled the refrigerator door open and stood bathed in cold yellow light.

  “What do I think about what?” his father asked casually.

  “You know about what. About Juliet.”

  Mr. LaMott turned the page. “Oh, Juliet. Yes. Seems like a fine girl.”

  “Did Mom like her?”

  “Yes, she did,” Mr. LaMott answered. “Your mother did like her. In particular she seemed to enjoy something Juliet said when the two of us were out of earshot.”

  “Oh, yeah? What was that?”

  “Well,” and his father still seemed to be reading, “they were picking up in the kitchen before dessert, and your mother asked Juliet if she was ready for pineapple upside-down cake. Juliet—and even I was surprised to hear this—Juliet put her hand down around her midsection here and said, ‘If I eat another bite I think I’ll vomit.’ ”

  Sonny almost dropped his bottle of milk. “She said she’d vomit?”

  His father put the paper down and removed his glasses. Then suddenly, unable to maintain the guise any longer, he erupted with a bright roar of laughter. “Just pulling your leg, boy. Relax.”

  How had a girl who ate his mother’s smothered pork chops become an actor in dirty movies? It made even less sense then Mr. LaMott’s decline from the best and funniest guy Sonny knew to the halfwit sitting before him now. Sonny leans forward bringing his face up to search for something that hasn’t been in his father’s eyes for years. He’s looking for life.

  “Daddy, why didn’t you tell me Juliet would go bad like that?”

  Mr. LaMott, his cheeks growing red with blood, pushes past Sonny as he comes to his feet. Sonny anticipates a weighty declaration, something to hang on to forever. But his father unzips his pants and pokes his hand in the opening. “Hey, look, mind if I pee in your water?”

  It is dark when they start back for the city. Sonny, who’s run out of memories to share, drinks the last of the beer as his father sleeps on the bench seat beside him. No one is waiting when they pull up at the Maison Orleans. Sonny reties the tether between them and none of the staff says anything when they pad through the front door and enter the building.

  Sonny helps Mr. LaMott all the way down the hall to his room, the rope dragging the high-polished floor. “I think I’ve been here before,” Mr. LaMott says in a quiet voice as Sonny takes his clothes off and puts him to bed.

  He stops her as she’s crossing the lobby headed for the elevators. “May I have a moment of your time, Miss Beauvais?”

  “A moment? Sure, you can have a moment.”

  There are two important matters they need to discuss, he explains. First is the condition of the bed in her room. Did a child sleep over last night? The mattress was so saturated with urine that it had to be changed.

  He advises her to call Housekeeping and request a plastic sheet to safeguard against future accidents.

  Next is her credit card account, which has rejected more charges. Will she please follow him to the desk and make other arrangements to pay her bill?

  “Not now,” Juliet says.

  “Yes now,” says the man.

  “Suppose I don’t feel like it?”

  “Then I’m afraid I have no choice but to ask you to vacate the premises.”

  She gives him most of what she earned from the schoolteacher. But that only covers the balance and room charges for tonight and tomorrow. Was it her idea to fly to New Orleans and stay in an expensive hotel and rent a car and eat by herself in restaurants? Schoolteachers don’t make any money!

  Blood rising in her face, Juliet returns to her room and phones the mansion. “Anna Huey, it’s me and I want my money and I want it now.”

  “Yes,” says the maid, “yes, of course.”

  “Don’t you yes-of-course me,” Juliet shouts into the mouthpiece. “I want my money.”

  “And you’ll get it. Or get some. How much do you want?”

  Juliet, figuring, is slow to answer. “Five thousand should do.”

  “We think two’s enough. But you’ll have to come get it . . . come here to the house.”

  Anna Huey is silent, and Juliet can hear a clock ticking in the background. The Beauvais grandfather clock in the parlor. Her clock, goddammit.

  “Your poor mama,” Anna Huey says. “She’s upstairs now, crying her precious eyeballs out.”

  Juliet makes a sound that could be another laugh. “She should be in her room crying. The gu
ilt alone must be awful.” She waits a few seconds, then adds, “Mother killed him, after all.”

  It feels good to have said it finally, even if it is just the maid on the other end. Juliet has wanted to say those words ever since the truth about her father’s demise popped in her head as she was working on “The Proof” during the flight in.

  “Juliet, you can come get your money whenever you’re ready to sit and act like a normal person. Your mother has something to talk to you about. Until you can do that, let me advise you to keep the lid closed on your sick, deranged mind. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Hey, look, first of all you’re a maid—”

  But Anna Huey has already terminated the connection.

  Juliet walks out on the balcony and stands leaning against the railing with the bustle and roar of the Vieux Carré below. She hates that piss-and-wiener smell, hates the tap-tap noise of the dancing boys, hates the neon burning at all hours. They can romanticize New Orleans all they want but in her mind it will always be a lousy excuse for pretty.

  “You’re a maid!” she yells down to the crowd on Bourbon Street.

  A clutch of tourists looks up, squinting for the sun.

  “A maid!” she says again, then stalks back inside.

  Juliet soaks in the tub without using soap or a washcloth. She enjoys the water’s powerful healing effects. In fact, its powerful healing effects almost put her to sleep. When the water grows tepid she drains some then adds more hot. She lights a joint and it isn’t long before a memory of her father’s death, invented now for her viewing pleasure, plays out in her mind in the blurry Technicolor tones of a 1970s caper flick. Her mother with her precious crying eyeballs has perpetrated the crime of the century!

  Now comes another memory, to counterbalance the previous one. Whether it’s real or imagined Juliet can’t decide, but clearly she sees her father at home in the library, standing before the fireplace with his hands in the pockets of a pale linen suit. His shirt is open at the collar, and tasseled loafers cover his small, bare feet. Her father bears a strong physical resemblance to the young Cary Grant (“Yes, they’re both men,” Miss Marcelle said when Juliet told her this). And her father talks like the actor. “Darling,” he says, “you seem so sad today. Is something wrong?”

  “No. Well, yes, Daddy. It’s Leonard Barbier. They were saying things at school, some girls were.”

  “Leonard’s a fine young man from a fine old New Orleans family. Can’t your father have friends?” Then before she can answer: “Now what else is troubling you? If there’s a first thing there’s bound to be a second.”

  She can’t bring herself to say it. She sits staring at her hands.

  “Oh, you,” pleads her father. “I’m your daddy.”

  Juliet gets out of the tub and towels off and walks naked into the room. She lies in bed sucking hard on what remains of the doob, wet hair fanned out on the spread. Wouldn’t her father just die to know a colored woman is answering his phone, handling his money, condescending to an actual Beauvais?

  “Juliet, I’m here for you, sweetheart.”

  “Daddy, I heard what Mama told you when you got home last night.”

  “Your mother says a lot of things, especially when I’ve been out in the Quarter. We know that by now, don’t we?”

  It hurts too much to look at him. And in his presence she is unable to repeat her mother’s words.

  “I’m sorry you had to hear those things. None is true, of course. Will you let them go, darling?”

  “I can’t, Daddy. I try to but I can’t.”

  He leaves the room and when he returns he is holding a small shaving mirror. “Come with me,” and he signals for her to rise. He takes her by the hand and leads her through pocket doors and halfway up the mahogany stairway crowded with family portraits. “I have something to show you,” he says. “It’s something my father showed me when I was a boy. One day when you’re older and have a child of your own I’m sure you’ll want to continue the tradition.” He points to a face in one of the portraits. “Have a good look at your great-grandfather there,” he says. “Now have a look at yourself.”

  As he holds the mirror she studies her features: the chapped and peeling lips, eyes swollen from crying. “His name was Etienne Beauvais,” her father says.

  Somehow she manages a laugh.

  “They’re your eyes, aren’t they? They’re not your mother’s eyes. Now look at that painting farther up the stairs. That’s Etienne’s father, Jean-Jacques. Notice the mouth?”

  Juliet brings a hand to her lips and touches them with her fingertips.

  “Now where have I seen that mouth before? Oh,” and her father places the mirror closer to her face, “here we are. My heavens, you have that man’s mouth. Where did you get that man’s mouth?”

  “I stole it.”

  “You stole it!”

  They embrace and Juliet laughs and cries both at once as her father holds her head against his chest and traces a hand through her hair. He smells so much like himself, so uniquely like himself, that she feels strengthened and renewed simply by her proximity to this smell. “She was just being mean, wasn’t she?”

  “Right,” he answers. “Just being mean. But I suppose she can’t help it. Consider her limited experience and education. If I came from a yam farm in an outpost as spare and bucolic as Opelousas I suppose I would be intimidated, too. I’m not so easy to live with either, you know?”

  “You’re great,” Juliet says.

  “You’re the last of us, darling. Promise your daddy there’ll be more. Sons and daughters. There aren’t any portraits on the other side of this stairway. You’ve noticed that, I’m sure?”

  “I love you, Daddy,” Juliet says. And now in the hotel bathroom she is startled to hear a voice, and doubly so to discover that it is her own.

  Juliet is standing at the mirror, her face inches from the surface. The mirror, still damp with steam, reflects an image only vaguely similar to the one she saw earlier in her father’s glass.

  At this moment Etienne and Jean-Jacques Beauvais are not visible in her features, and neither, come to think of it, is Johnny Beauvais. Juliet hates to contradict the man she loves most in the world but her mouth today is just a mouth. And the same goes for her eyes. Everybody has them. Now as she looks more closely the reflection excites in her a sudden feeling of horror, for it is her mother who is staring back, her face gripped with the same contempt she once held for Johnny Beauvais.

  Juliet lets out a yell and flees the room, stumbles into the hallway. Where did they put the goddamned elevator? There are more yells as she propels herself down the hall to the nearest stairway exit.

  “Yes, I was hoping somebody might help me find my friend Leonard Barbier,” Juliet says to the concierge in the lobby.

  “Miss Beauvais, you’re down here in a robe.”

  “He’s a musician. Leonard Barbier?”

  “Leonard Barbier,” the man says, as if by repeating the name she’ll be mollified.

  “Yes, that’s the one. He plays saxophone in a jazz band. Or used to, anyway.”

  “Miss Beauvais? Miss Beauvais, you should go back to your room and put some clothes on.”

  “Big ’fro, gold in his teeth, chains.”

  Only now does it occur to Juliet that the concierge himself is black.

  “Leonard Barbier,” he says again. “Let me make a few calls and see if I can’t locate him. But please, Miss Beauvais, go back to your room.”

  Twenty minutes later the phone rings. “Good news,” the concierge begins, then tells her that after some determined sleuthing he was able to locate her friend Leonard. “His band performs three nights a week at a club in the Marigny,” the man says, referring to Faubourg Marigny, the neighborhood on the downriver side of Esplanade Avenue from the Vieux Carré.