My Juliet: A Novel

by John Ed Bradley

  She slips in beside him and brings her face up against his back. He smells like an old wet dog, but Juliet has always liked old wet dogs, even when they’re as young and dry as this one. More than that, she finds his purple tattoo strangely beautiful against his pale skin, the pink bedding.

  “I guess we all can fit in here,” Leonard says with high optimism.

  He climbs in on the other side and faces the opposite direction.

  “What instrument does he play?” asks Juliet.

  “Drums.”

  She thinks about this for a while. “He smells like a drummer, and a good one.”

  It isn’t but a few minutes before all three of them are asleep, Juliet lost in a world of dreams that doesn’t make a bit of sense, that never did.

  It is late afternoon when Sonny leaves the Bywater. The night before he had only stale French bread and a can of beans to eat. Now he makes Tujague’s his first stop.

  He sits alone at a table by the street and orders a green salad, sliced garlic potatoes and an off-the-menu item called bonne femme chicken. He has a Crown-and-water and he reads the Times-Picayune in the splash of light falling through the picture window.

  It is nice in the restaurant with the fans slowly rotating and the view of Decatur Street and Café du Monde where waiters on break cluster by the curb smoking cigarettes and watching tourists walk by. Most of the waiters are Vietnamese-Americans. They wear paper hats shaped like canoes and aprons splotched brown from coffee spills. Using his index finger, Sonny makes a sketch of the scene on the linen cloth covering his table. When he finishes, he signs his name, but instead of “Sonny” he writes it this way: “Cecil LaMott, Jr.”

  The world, if you can believe the newspaper, is going on as usual. Even in New Orleans people are robbing banks, surviving car crashes, getting married, delivering babies. They have exercise equipment and used furniture to sell. They are interested in what the weather is going to do.

  The waiter brings the check and Sonny pays with cash, a sum large enough to cover a week’s supply of groceries, but one he doesn’t mind paying under the circumstances. He needs this: the white tablecloth, the fans, the smell of newsprint and roasted garlic. He needs the waiter clearing away the plates and raking up the crumbs and helping Sonny from his chair and saying what a pleasure it was to serve him.

  Sonny, standing now, says to himself: See there, big man? You did all that and you didn’t think about her once.

  But, in praising himself for not thinking about her, of course Sonny has thought about her. And what he allows himself to recall now as he leaves Tujague’s are those weeks immediately after her father died. They were a nightmare for Juliet, but Sonny remembers them as the most intimate they shared together. She seemed to surrender to him at last; her grief left her too weak to resist. The two of them sat up late when she needed to talk. And when she needed silence they took long drives in his father’s truck with the windows rolled down and the radio dial dark. Their lovemaking, whether at their secret place by the river or at the Beauvais in the parlor after Miss Marcelle had gone to bed, gained an intensity and confidence that had not existed before. And always afterward there was the quiet sobbing, the hot tears against his chest. He was foolish enough to believe that he could absorb her pain simply by placing his body next to hers and holding her when the inevitable spasms came. “Don’t leave me,” she told him.

  “I won’t. I won’t ever leave you.”

  His fate was sealed then. For after all it wasn’t the sex that kept him. Nor had it been the house past the trees or the name in iron above the gate. What kept him was the feeling that his love was big enough, that he alone could save her. “Promise me,” she said.

  “I promise you. I promise you, Julie. I promise you.”

  It is almost dark now. Sonny walks to the parking garage and retrieves his cart and he pushes it along the street to the square and sets up across from a gift shop that has already closed for the day. He hangs his pictures on the fence and he tries to ignore the stares of his colleagues along the row. But everyone seems to be looking at him, looking as if for an explanation.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Roberts calls from a few spots away.

  “Nowhere,” Sonny answers. But then after a moment he says, “Everywhere.”

  Roberts has a customer, and in caricature her nose has become an alpine slope with snow skiers tumbling down, mouths open wide, equipment flying everywhere.

  “How do you expect to sell paintings if they’re locked away in a parking garage?” Roberts asks as he continues to work.

  “Good point,” Sonny says with a nod.

  “Everybody’s got to take care of business, even an artist.”

  “That’s true,” Sonny answers.

  When half an hour passes and nobody comes for a portrait, Sonny walks over to Café du Monde and fills his Thermos with black coffee.

  “Y’all make a lot on tips?” Sonny asks the woman at the register.

  “Okay, I guess.”

  “What do you have to do to get a job here?”

  “Go talk to man in charge. He no here now. Sorry.”

  By the time he returns to his kiosk all the artists have gone, Roberts included. Glad to have the place to himself, Sonny leans back in his chair and watches the last of the day bleed out of the sky. So as not to think any more about Juliet, he thinks about dead painters and their trees. He recalls their names as he does those of lost family members. Charles Reinike, Clarence Millet, Colette Pope Heldner, Knute Heldner. At the end of his life Knute, a transplanted Swede and former WPA easel painter, was trading his paintings for booze—pieces that a few decades later would bring thousands at auction.

  They gave Knute a mimosa that miraculously blooms all but three months of the year, its blossoms fat and pink and forever weeping.

  By nine o’clock the mimes and futurists abandon the square and the pigeons roost in the eaves of the buildings and the benches stand empty under the ancient lampposts. Sonny lights a citronella candle to keep the mosquitoes away and he chews on the stem of a tobacco pipe. He sips coffee from the cap of his Thermos and he wonders if Johnny Beauvais even bothered to keep an oar in his boat. It was a sailboat, after all. Sonny knows nothing about sailing, but he can’t imagine a boat such as the Beauvais’s needing oars. A mast or two, maybe. But oars?

  “Come on,” he says out loud. “Who do you think you’re dealing with here?”

  An occasional tourist strolls by, hardly giving him a glance.

  “Would you like a picture?” he asks a woman.

  She has been straining to see his work by the dim, broken light of the Pontalba Building.

  “That picture,” Sonny says. “Would you like it?”

  Her face registers surprise. “I don’t have any money.”

  Sonny removes one of Lulu’s cabaret on Bourbon Street. “It’s yours.”

  She holds the picture at arm’s length and studies it for a while. “It’s lovely, but I can’t just—”

  “Take it.”

  “May I have one, too?” comes a voice. It belongs to a man Sonny has seen before. He runs a jewelry store over on Royal Street. “That one depicting Preservation Hall. May I have it, please?”

  Sonny and the man look at each other, neither speaking. Sonny nods finally and the man removes the painting from the fence and hurries off, only once throwing a glance back.

  “What about me?” asks another fellow.

  Sonny gives him a streetcar.

  “And me?”

  The Saenger Theatre on Canal Street.

  “May I have one, too, please?”

  Flambeau carriers leading a Carnival parade.

  “Mister! Mister!”

  Giant elephant ears in an Uptown garden.

  Sonny gets rid of them all—all, anyway, but the ones of Juliet. A few people try to put money in his hands, but he refuses it.

  Short of tearing the paintings into tortilla-shaped pieces and eating them with salsa, he wants hi
s collectors to hang their Sonnies over their Barcaloungers and waterbeds. He wants them to study their Sonnies the way art students study the old masters, always with an eye for some highfalutin unmeant meaning. “Here is my Sonny,” he wants them to say to those who visit their homes.

  A teenage girl drifts over. “Just the other day I had people lining up from here to Esplanade,” Sonny tells her, “some willing to pay any price.”

  “I should pay, too,” says the girl. She has accepted Sonny’s offer of the old Falstaff Brewery, with its famous weather ball brightly shining against a hurricane sky. “Look, mister, I feel kind of bad about this. Is there something I can give you?”

  “Something like what?”

  In seconds the girl turns on a heel and runs away, too, apparently having seen more in Sonny’s expression than he intended to show.

  Sonny feels better now that his paintings are gone. He can start over and do something else with his life.

  The little young one wakes up not long after Juliet does. To leave the bed he has a choice to make: climb over Leonard or climb over this Marilyn Monroe–looking person he’s never met before. He chooses the Marilyn Monroe, just as Juliet figured he would.

  She doesn’t watch him on his way to the bathroom, but her eyes do snap open at the sound of his violent pissing. God, he makes such a racket as to rouse the dead. At first he seems to be hitting more bowl than water, then more floor than bowl.

  Juliet sits up on her elbows and takes in the bathroom. The door is open a crack and inside a bare bulb shines over a sink. The boy is standing at the toilet, bird chest sticking out, penis a different color than the rest of him. His tattoo is badly done, more crooked than straight, and she makes it for a jailhouse job.

  It comes to her that the color of his penis is almost identical to that of his tattoo.

  When he returns to bed Juliet pretends to be just now waking. She stretches her arms up over her head and lets out a yawn. “You should shake it better next time,” she says.

  He seems surprised to hear a voice, surprised to see from whom it originated. “Maybe there won’t be a next time,” he says.

  “How do you plan to relieve yourself then?”

  “I got my ways.”

  She turns her head only enough to see his face. Except for the pockmarks he looks no more than eighteen. “I’m sorry, I was just trying to be helpful,” she says. Her smile is as friendly as she can make it. “You peed everywhere but where you were aiming.”

  “It’s over with, at least.”

  “They should teach little boys in first grade how to pee at the same time they’re teaching them the alphabet. Train them young and spare a lifetime of accidents.”

  “Peeing ain’t something you teach, lady. It’s something you do.”

  “Not peeing straight it isn’t.” This inspires a laugh, but not from the boy. When he looks at her again she says, “I don’t know why but I like hearing a man. Something about it arouses me.”

  “My ex-wife was like that, too,” he says.

  She’s staring at him now. “Since when are you old enough to have an ex-wife?”

  “Since yesterday when I left her. Before that I just had a wife.”

  She reaches under the sheets and places a hand on his monster prick, all the while holding his eyes with hers. In seconds he comes up as thick and firm as her forearm. “What is the meaning behind this tattoo?” she says.

  “Lady, that ain’t a tattoo.”

  “I mean that wire. You supposed to be an inmate or something?”

  His breathing is slow and heavy. His eyelids flutter. “I really wanted it around my heart,” he says, swallowing, “but the tattoo artist couldn’t get inside my chest.”

  It shocks her past speaking to hear him talk like that, to hear such poetry. Most musicians she’s ever met could barely string a sentence together, let alone spin words into something pretty. She wonders about the ex-wife: how old she is, how pretty, what happened between them. Juliet pushes up closer. She likes this little young person, this drummer boy with a loud case of BO. He has one of those mouths that are more teeth than lip, and thus not so good to kiss. But she presses her mouth to his, anyway. Then without bothering to ask permission she crawls up on top and reaches back and puts him in.

  She holds on as if afraid to let go, like someone on a trapeze with a great distance to fall.

  She leans forward and dumps her breasts on his chest. “One time in LA,” she whispers in a sexy way, “this famous movie producer paid me five hundred dollars just to do this.” And she runs her tongue over her lips, trying to be true to the memory.

  “Endlessly fascinating, I’m sure,” the boy says, shaking his head.

  “What?”

  “I said you got a big mouth.”

  “Thank you. I got myself some inner tubes. You aren’t the first to accuse me of that.”

  Juliet can’t believe she can take someone like that. It feels like it’s way up in her belly, and for some reason it makes her want to cough. “If I had a tattoo like yours chewing at my arm,” she says, “I don’t think I could ever get to sleep at night.”

  The boy, in the dark, is watching himself going in. “My wife has a man mowing the grass.”

  “Who?”

  “She shaves a strip of her pubic hair at a diagonal, ’bout a quarter-inch wide.” For all the activity it isn’t easy for him to talk. After every few words he lets go with a grunt. “At the top of the shaved part she has a tattoo of this little yardman pushing a lawn mower. You can see clips of grass coming out from where the blade is—there’s tattoos of that, too.”

  “Can we finish?”

  “Don’t let me stop you. I’m just trying to make conversation.”

  When it’s over, Juliet gets out of bed and stands at the window. It feels as if someone fucked her with a fence post.

  To her surprise it’s nighttime and pouring rain outside. How long did they sleep? She has no good sense of the world outside the room, outside the pulse loudly beating in the space between her legs. She gazes out in the direction of Congo Square, the old park where back in the 1700s slaves used to gather on Sundays to sing and dance. Forbidden to congregate anywhere else, the slaves came together independent of their owners and practiced voodoo and tribal rites, and now Juliet imagines herself among them, the lone white chick, raising hell with the sisters by a big roaring bonfire.

  Would Dickie Boudreau’s wife go to a voodoo ceremony? Of course she wouldn’t. Dickie Boudreau’s wife is too busy going to Mass and to her children’s ball games.

  The weather pounds against the window, rattles the glass. New Orleans manages to attract storms such as this one so frequently that locals take them as a matter of course, while in any other American city a disturbance of similar magnitude would close schools and public buildings and have the governor ordering the National Guard to start filling sandbags.

  “What’s it doing out there?” the boy says.

  “Making almost as much noise as you did in the bathroom.”

  “Show me that mouth of yours again.”

  But Juliet is somewhere else, her head is, and he was rude, anyway.

  It was coming down just as hard that day when she and Sonny went to the abortionist on Gravier Street. Sonny borrowed his father’s truck and as they were headed uptown on Basin Street the windshield wipers suddenly stopped working. “Must be a short in the wiring,” he said. “Or maybe a fuse.” Intending to wait it out they stopped in front of Saint Louis Cemetery Number 1 and parked by the curb, but the weather only intensified. Finally, with the appointment minutes away, they had no choice but to head back into the storm. Juliet remembers the drive past the Iberville housing development, and how black kids, naked to the waist, played in mud puddles under the trees, oblivious to the lightning crashing overhead. Along the sides of the Saenger Theatre and Krauss Department Store people stood with their backs to the wall, a few under wind-lashed umbrellas, but most without any covering at all. Desperate to see
the road better, Sonny stuck his arm out the window and tried to make it function as a wiper. Back and forth the arm went. Now the rain came in through the window, blinding him and soaking his shirt, some of it reaching Juliet in the form of swirling mist that stuck to her hair and shone in the tangles like glass beads. She licked her mouth and tasted oil from the street. “If we die in a wreck then we just die in a wreck,” she said. “At least I won’t have to go through with this.”

  “Let’s turn back. It’s not too late.”

  “No way.”

  “Please, Julie.”

  She just shook her head.

  Juliet remembers the old office tower with its torn and faded canopy in front, the ride in a hot elevator that strained to reach their designated floor, a long hallway with exposed fluorescent tubes overhead dripping water from open housings. It was after-hours and the place was deserted, although she got the feeling it was always deserted. When they found the right door Sonny put his hand on the knob and hesitated before turning it. “I don’t think I can go through with this.”