The other side of the building, originally conceived as a source of easy income, for thirty years has housed one alcoholic malcontent after another, the latest a wife beater with a habit of urinating on the banana plants from his second-floor bedroom window.
Chartres Street and the levee are all that stand between the house and the Mississippi River, an uncomfortable intimacy for many Bywater residents, but for Sonny one that informed his childhood with dreams of floating away on a raft and never returning. After years of living in cheap Uptown efficiencies he moved back to the house when his mother died and his father volunteered to check into a nursing home, and he plans to remain only as long as he has to. That is to say, only until he can attract buyers for his paintings or until he finds a girlfriend/wife with better digs—prospects that appeared unlikely until a few hours ago.
As much as Sonny likes the prospect of being alone with Juliet, he is uncertain about letting her stay over. Not that the house has changed much since she last saw it, but he still can’t get past the fact that she grew up in one of the city’s most important homes and, as he explains now, “this is more a glorified camp than anything.”
She’s parked her rental car on the street, and this is another concern. In New Orleans, and in this neighborhood in particular, the incidences of auto theft are so many that off-street parking often seems the very key to happiness. If his house isn’t embarrassment enough, how about having her car ripped off fewer than a hundred feet from his front door?
“I hope you don’t mind roughing it,” Sonny says, leading her up an outdoor stairway to the entrance on the second floor.
She shakes her head. “I just want to be with you, I don’t care where.”
It’s well past midnight and Sonny needs sleep. He totes Juliet’s bag into the living room and places it on the sofa, then he showers, brushes his teeth, rolls deodorant under his arms, sifts talcum powder on his groin and splashes cologne on his neck and chest. When he finishes, his body gives off a riot of scents that negates any possibility that she’ll take him seriously, and this recognition brings him to wonder if he should just start over and shower again.
“Sad sack,” he says to the image staring back at him in the lavatory mirror.
Sonny lies in bed under the covers wearing briefs and a T-shirt and he watches as Juliet strips naked and rubs lotion on her hands and legs and removes her makeup with cotton balls soaked in witch hazel. All these years apart and suddenly they’re an old married couple, executing their routines in silence before calling it a night. “You make me happy,” he says in a sleepy mumble. “You’ve always made me happy.”
“You make me happy, too.”
The last image he registers is that of Juliet dragging a brush through her hair, as she stands naked before the mirror on his closet door.
Toward dawn Sonny awakens to an empty bed and a river breeze from the window. A digital clock on the nightstand says 5:14 A.M., too early for him to get up, too late for her to still be awake. Across the room French doors leading to the porch are open a crack, allowing a tendril of smoke to drift in. Sonny shifts his weight to an elbow then reaches out and runs a hand over the other side of the bed. It’s cool enough to suggest she hasn’t been there for a while.
“Julie, what’re you doing? Come back to bed.”
He finds her on the porch sitting on a metal patio chair and gazing off at a sky stripped of stars and black with distant thunderheads. Her hair hangs in a yellow sheet and her skin radiates a color as weird and vivid as that of bones. Sonny recognizes the scent of marijuana smoke in the air, and this brings him stalking heavily across the wood floor.
“Julie, time for bed. Let’s go back inside.”
She is slow to respond, slow even to look at him. “Give me a minute. Let me finish this first.”
“Finish later. Come on, baby.”
“I’ll finish when I goddamn want to finish. Jesus, Sonny.” The remark is so dark and hostile, and so unexpected, that even she seems surprised by it. “Go back inside,” she says. “I’ll be there in a minute. I’ve got some things to sort out in my head.”
He sits at the foot of the bed and watches through the open doors as she comes to her feet and takes another long drag before dunking the joint in a plastic cup. She’s facing in the opposite direction now, out toward the city, and Sonny can see her breasts hanging full and thick by her rib cage, and down in the space between her legs an untamed tuft of hair illumined by a neighbor’s security light. It is immortal, this picture, and he vows to paint it one day. The light and the hair and the girl and his heart madly beating in his chest.
He will not be able to show the heart without confusing the image, but if he gets Juliet right you will see the heart anyway.
When she comes back inside she elbows the door closed and everything is dark and quiet and he watches her, afraid to talk for the risk of upsetting her again.
He lies on his back with his head in the palms of his hands, his lean, well-muscled body dark against his underclothes.
“I wish it were true,” Juliet says, standing at the foot of the bed. Her voice is as small and pitiful as a little girl’s. “I wish all of it were true.”
“You wish what was true?”
He waits but she gives no answer. Instead she crawls toward him on the bed, her breasts dragging across one leg and then the other as she weaves left and right. Sonny feels his breath go thin, then the burn when all the air seems to have left his lungs.
She pauses and lies flat against his cock and the dense, bound-up weight of her breasts momentarily pins him there. She settles beside him at last, and when he turns and presses his mouth against hers he tastes a salty wetness on her face.
Juliet lets out a sob and grabs him hard, digging her nails in his back. “What Anna Huey said to get me here,” she says. “I wish it were true. I wish she’d just die, Sonny.”
He doesn’t respond but to pull her closer. He wonders if any words can help a misery as big as hers, and he wonders if any act short of seeing Miss Marcelle slipped in a tomb will mediate a peace in Juliet’s mind. He’s just a fence artist, and before that he tended bar. Who is he to fix anything?
“She killed him, Sonny. She killed my father.”
“Your father drowned, Julie. He drowned in Lake Pontchartrain. We were dating at the time and I went with you to the funeral. For weeks after, it was the biggest story in all New Orleans. I clipped the stories out of the Picayune.”
“Sonny, I’d get everything if she died. I’m her only heir and that’s the law in this state. Help me, Sonny. I’d get the house.”
“I’m not sure I’m hearing you right, Julie. At least I hope I’m not hearing you right.”
“We could live there. It would be ours and I’d never need to leave again. I’m just so tired of running when all along I know where I should be, and that’s living on Esplanade. You don’t want me to go away again, do you, Sonny?”
A long time passes and neither of them says anything and Sonny watches as daylight shows in the cracks of the curtains and colors the walls.
“Tell me how it is Miss Marcelle is supposed to have killed him.”
“How? You mean the details how?”
“Yeah. How’d she do it?”
“You remember how Daddy’s big thing was the yacht club? Sure, you remember. He kept his boat at the marina. Well, one day he and Mother were out on the lake. It was a Sunday afternoon and they were sailing and they were arguing like they always did. My father was having an affair, and I share this with you now because I want you to understand why she did it. He was involved with a much younger person, and he was in love, and when he told her as much she flew into a jealous rage and hit him with something, an oar probably. He fell overboard, into that horrible water, and when he tried to get back in she hit him again.”
“With an oar?”
“I think that’s what it was. I keep seeing one, anyway.”
Sonny shakes his head. He knows this story. “You�
��re talking about a movie. Julie, I saw that one. It had Elizabeth Taylor.”
“I can’t believe you’d bring Elizabeth Taylor into this conversation. And here I am trying to explain to you the most important thing in my entire life.”
It also had Montgomery Clift and that horrible Winters woman, Shirley or Shelley, Sh—— something. Nowadays it often aired on Sunday-morning TV between church programs and cooking shows. The name of the film escapes him, however.
“Let’s look at it another way,” Sonny says. “The New Orleans Police Department must not’ve thought Miss Marcelle killed him. She’d be counting the hours on death row in the state penitentiary for women right now.”
Juliet gets out of bed and walks to the closet and stands watching him in the mirror. Knots the size of bottle caps throb in either side of her jaw and her eyes are narrow slits. It’s just a reflection, but that doesn’t make looking at her any easier.
“You know what?” she says. “Sometimes you piss me off you’re so naïve. Sonny, the police in this city . . . anybody can buy the stupid police. You’re such an innocent, you know that?”
“All right, I’m an innocent. But I still don’t think your mother killed anyone, let alone your father. She’s a lady, and a nice one.”
“You little ninny. You little Ninth Ward ninny. When are you ever going to grow up?”
“Me grow up? Why don’t you grow up? You’re the one who ran off to California and showed what you’re all about by making those movies.”
She wheels back around and faces him and her lips quiver and angry tears drain from her eyes. Why couldn’t she have just come to bed like a normal person? Does a normal person smoke a joint at five in the morning then accuse her mother of murdering her father?
She starts putting on her clothes, fighting each article as if it were to blame. “When they found him in Bucktown Harbor—God, you’re dumb! When they found him his head was all bashed in. You tell me, where are the rocks in Bucktown Harbor?”
“Juliet, you’re crazy.”
“There are no rocks, motherfucker. Maybe if they’d found him along Breakwater Drive, somewhere down by the Point, say, I could see it. You have a rocky shoreline there. But, Sonny, his body never came ashore. They had to fish him out. And with his skull like that.”
Sonny is leaning against the headboard, his eyes lowered in concentration. “Maybe a boat hit him. Maybe something in the water got to him—I don’t know, Julie, a lot can happen to a body out in that lake, especially a drowned one. And not only rocks.”
She’s got everything on but her shoes now. “Let me tell you one other thing before I go,” she says. “And let me say it loud and clear. Dickie Boudreau puts you to shame.”
“Dickie Boudreau? What does he have to do with anything?”
“Let me share something else with you, you goddamn creep—”
“Dickie’s a happily married man. He’s got a family and a home and his wife—let me share this with you. Dickie Boudreau’s wife never made any movies having sex with her boyfriend. Dickie Boudreau’s wife’s got class. She goes to Mass, she goes to her kids’ ball games. She doesn’t need to perform in front of people in a restaurant just to get off—”
“How do you know what she needs or doesn’t need to get off?”
“Oh, shut up. Just shut the fuck up.”
“One more thing . . .” And now, tears wiped away, she seems perfectly calm; his violent response was what she was angling for. “When I was looking at your pictures on the fence last night? Well, my first impression was that you’re an amateur. And I wonder why they even let you hang them there. I mean, there oughta be a law! That beautiful fence, and then all your weak shit cluttering it up. I’ll be honest with you, Sonny, I’ve never seen an artist as lame as you. Not ever. Not in my whole, entire life.”
“No?”
“More than no. More like fuck no. You’re pathetic.”
Juliet is no less kind to the screen door on her way out, nor to the stairs as she descends them.
He hears the door of her rental car slam shut, then her tires laying rubber, then the engine roaring as she puts a distance between herself and his shack in Bywater.
Every sound she makes has a concussive effect, but Sonny feels none of them as much as the silence when he stands at the window and looks toward the road and realizes she’s gone.
It isn’t easy to find a legal parking spot near Leonard’s weekly/monthly on North Rampart Street. Juliet navigates the blocks of the upper Vieux Carré a few times before stopping in a tow-away zone marked with metallic reflector stripes. She puts on the car’s caution lights and locks the doors, then files past a clutch of winos lounging by the entrance.
The Garden District and the Barbier family estate are only a few miles away, and yet Leonard lives in the kind of fleabag where heroin-addicted jazzmen go to die. The hotel, if it really is one, is named for its street address, which this morning is nowhere to be found on the building’s distressed façade. Hanging from the rafters of the second-floor gallery is a shingle, once white. “Rooms,” it says, “with Stove-&-Ref. WEEKLY-Monthly.”
Long considered an offbeat destination friendly to Bohemian types, the French Quarter today is home to scores of trust-fund babies who choose to slum it for a few years before resigning to their preordained lives of wealth and privilege. It isn’t uncommon to find children of the country’s most important families living there in pseudo-poverty, nor in other of the city’s dangerous neighborhoods. But it is strange to find a local boy living in such a place. Local boys tend to travel elsewhere, far away from Mom and Dad and old school chums keen to their pose, to prove that being a millionaire at eighteen doesn’t preclude them from being hip.
“Yoo hoo,” Juliet calls as she enters the building.
Past the door rotting carpet of an indeterminable color leads to a tiny office where a man is dozing with his head on a desk. He seems more comatose than asleep, no doubt owing to the near-empty jug of vodka at his feet. She has to nudge him awake to get Leonard’s room number.
“Leonard Barbier is a homosexual,” he says, slapping a hand on the desk and producing a hollow bang.
“I ain’t Leonard,” Juliet replies.
He seems to be trying to determine if this indeed is a fact or mere speculation. “A homosexual,” he says again, louder than before. “What would he want with a girl?”
“Shut up you old motherfucker and go back to sleep.”
Leonard’s room is on the second floor, the first to the right of the stairway. She knocks hard and calls his name, then adds after it seems he has taken too long, “C’est moi.”
He pulls the door open muttering under his breath and rubbing the crusty rim of whiskers on his face. He is shirtless and in the greasy half-dark his large, erect nipples resemble plum tomatoes way past ready to be picked.
“Hey, sweetie, you want to go out for beignets at du Monde? My treat.” She pushes past him and enters the room. “For some reason I got an envie for beignets.”
“Can we eat later? I’m sleeping.”
“Sure, Leonard. Sleep. Sleep all you want. Sleep so much you miss my whole, entire trip.”
He shakes his head and looks down at his bare feet, white like the rest of him. “Listen, I been up at the club all night. I hope you understand.”
“Yeah, sure. I understand. I understand you don’t care about me worth a good goddamn, that’s what I understand.”
He is quiet. “Juliet, I’m sorry but I’ve got to get back to sleep.”
“Look, I need a place to hide for a day or two. You don’t mind if I crash here, do you?”
“Juliet, you’re my friend and everything but one of the guys in the band just busted with his wife and he’s staying over. We got only my one bed and it ain’t even a queen.”
She manufactures a look of unutterable disappointment, and Leonard, shaking his head, says, “Ah, shit. Come on, then. I don’t mind the floor.”
She can see somebody under the c
overs. A male white, as they call his kind. The male white’s skin is so white that Juliet, even in the gloaming, can make out his tattoo: a single strand of barbed wire forming a loop around his upper right arm.
“I didn’t know where else to go,” she says, removing her clothes and letting them drop to the floor. “I can’t afford a hotel. I can’t stay with my mother.”
“This the mother that killed Johnny Beauvais?” Leonard asks.
“No,” she answers, rolling her eyes. “My other mother.”
The male white is lying in a trough in the middle of the mattress, covered by a sheet with curious stains that may or may not be something to worry about. He looks like a little kid, Juliet thinks, too young to break with his first girlfriend let alone a wife.
My Juliet: A Novel Page 10
