My Juliet: A Novel

by John Ed Bradley

  “Sonny?” It is Anna Huey. “Sonny, you two need to be going.”

  “Come on, Julie,” he says. “Let’s go.”

  He places his hands on her shoulders and guides her to the street. She tries to push him away again but without success. Sonny is holding on so tightly now that his fingers turn white from the effort. “Let me go, you bastard.”

  “Settle down, Julie.”

  He lets her in on the driver’s side but not before she’s hurled a final invective in the direction of the house: “You want the proof, Mother? I’ve got the proof!”

  Sonny drives toward the French Quarter, pushing the truck harder than he has in years. After hurtling through the intersection at North Rampart Street he finally glances over at Juliet, expecting to confront a tearful face, lips pale and quivering. He sees neither.

  “Still didn’t get my check,” she says, now the picture of composure.

  Somewhere on Dauphine Street Juliet removes her shoe and “The Proof” from under the insole. She unfolds the slip of paper and lays it on the seat between them.

  “Sonny, you got something to write with?”

  He checks his shirt pocket. “Look in the glove compartment.”

  Under old receipts and tubes of paint she finds a ballpoint. She tries to write but pokes a hole in the paper. She gathers together a couple of road maps and places them on the seat, then she puts “The Proof” on top and tries again. “And to complete the picture you have bad hair. I don’t know which is worse: having to look at that rat’s nest or smell your coffee breath. Pee-you!”

  “Julie, what are you doing?”

  “Giving proof why I’m in my rights to hate her.”

  Sonny takes the paper and holds it flat against the steering wheel. He glances down at the list, then up at the road ahead, then down at the list again. Something that might be a smile comes to his face. “Is it writing? What is this?”

  “Proof for when they try to pin it on me.”

  He’s squinting, his face filled with disbelief. “It doesn’t make sense. You can’t read it, the writing’s just a bunch of squiggles. Is it a code? If that is writing, Julie . . .”

  She shakes her head. “I know what it says.”

  “You can read this?” He seems frightened by it. Or maybe it’s Juliet who scares him. “Better put it away,” he says, then drops the paper on the seat. “And don’t let anybody else see it. Shit, Julie, they’ll really think you’re crazy.”

  She folds the paper and puts it back in her shoe, then she slumps in the seat, lifts her feet up and spreads them wide apart on the dashboard. She’s wearing a short skirt and the air from the open windows gives some relief. “Sonny, it feels like my pussy’s on fire.”

  He looks at her the same way he did when he tried to read “The Proof.” “Juliet, is there anything you won’t say or do? Is there anything?”

  “I’m on my period. And my pussy burns today for some reason.”

  “You want me to stop and get you something?”

  She closes her eyes and slips farther down in the seat. “Why can’t men say a word like Kotex or tampon without being embarrassed? It’s men who started calling them feminine napkins, you know?” When he doesn’t respond, she says, “Say Kotex for me. Say the word.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Kotex. Come on, Sonny. Let me hear it.”

  “Look, I’m trying to drive, all right?”

  “Since when can’t you drive and talk at the same time? Say tampon, baby. If you say tampon I’ll give you a blow job.” She claps her hands together. “Let me hear it.”

  “Juliet, what the hell is wrong with you?”

  “Ever wonder how they thought up that word? To my ears it sounds almost Chinese. I bet they stayed up all night thinking up that one. Bunch of guys in a room with their sleeves rolled up. You still won’t say it, will you?”

  “Tampon,” he says suddenly, then faces her with a smile.

  “Bunch of guys with their sleeves rolled up.” And she nods, certain now that this is how it happened. “Cigar smoke everywhere. Big bellies wanting to pop their shirts open. Sansabelt slacks all thin where their thighs have rubbed together. Can’t you see it, Sonny?”

  “I see something.”

  “Grease stains on their shirts . . .”

  She doesn’t burn as much downstairs, although now that general area does seem to have its own private pulse. She wishes she were soaking in a tub of hot water, enjoying its powerful healing effects. She fiddles with the radio knobs and finds a jazz station, someone playing a mournful piano.

  “They’ve had Chinese delivered,” she continues. “Egg rolls, Kung Pao chicken, moo goo gai pan, fried wontons. They’re so tired they can’t think straight. Guy with rolled-up sleeves says, ‘Pass me the tampons.’ He’s so exhausted, you see, he’s got the names of the dishes mixed up. Everybody’s eyes pop open. ‘Yes!’ ”

  Sonny keeps driving. He’s smiling the whole time, shaking his head, rubbing his jaw. “Tampon,” he says again.

  She reaches down to the floor at her feet and comes up with Louis’s club. “What is this?”

  “That?”

  She grips the handle and acts as if she’s going to hit him. “It’s a club, isn’t it? What in heavens are you doing with this club in your truck, Sonny LaMott?”

  “I used it one day to whack an old man on the neutral ground.”

  “You did that?”

  “Actually I pretended to do it. I wasn’t really hitting him. I did it to satisfy a debt I owed a friend of mine who was watching nearby.”

  “What kind of debt?”

  “The old man killed my friend’s cat.”

  “Well, of course he did.”

  For blocks cars idle in a long, unmoving procession, and now in theirs—a 1963 GMC pickup truck with running boards and a collage of faded stickers on the back bumper—Juliet Beauvais scuttles over in the seat, unzips Sonny LaMott’s jeans and lowers her head to investigate.

  To their left stands the palatial Monteleone Hotel with crowds of visitors loitering near the gilded entrance, and to their right the Hurwitz Mintz furniture store, which today has drawn hordes of its own to its magnificent show windows.

  “You missed this, didn’t you?” she says.

  “I missed you.”

  “Tell me you missed this.”

  “I missed this.”

  “Say you missed having your girlfriend suck your big, beautiful dick.”

  “I missed having you do that.”

  “You didn’t say it right. Say it how I told you to say it.”

  “I missed having my girlfriend suck my big, beautiful dick.”

  “Again. Say it again. Say it until I tell you to stop saying it.”

  Sonny finishes as the bottleneck clears and traffic starts to move. A liquid sound comes from the back of his throat and he bucks forward in the seat and punches the horn with his chest. Soon other drivers are blowing horns, the whole area seeming to trumpet Juliet’s daring indiscretion.

  All done now, she sits up and examines her face in the rearview mirror. Her cheeks are dark and swimming with blood and her lips seem twice their normal size. She opens her mouth and studies the stalactites inside. It’s always amazed her to see how little actually comes out. No more than a teaspoon and men lose everything over this.

  She leans over to kiss him and when their mouths meet she passes it on, the oyster thick and warm in her mouth, now thick and warm in his.

  They sleep for a few hours and when he wakes the light is gone and a stormy darkness fills the room. Outside a breeze stirs the palms and banana trees and a shutter slaps against the house. Occasional rain flicks against the windowpanes. “What time is it?” he says.

  “Nine, ten. I’m not sure.”

  She is sitting by the window, looking out at the weather. What remains of the boy’s doob juts out from her mouth, its tip flaring when she takes a last sip before putting it out. “White girl thinks by keeping my check she’s keep
ing me. Bitch forgets I still have a key.”

  It isn’t immediately clear to Sonny what she’s talking about.

  “You’ll just have to go back and get it,” Juliet says. “That’s all there is to it.”

  He rolls over and hugs a pillow. The rain has begun to fall in hard gusts, in sheets that look white against the streetlights. Lightning splinters and reveals the sky, the endless banks of clouds meeting the black expanse of the river.

  “Wait right there while I go pee,” she says.

  In the dark of the bathroom she sits on the toilet without closing the door. Sonny can see her when the lightning flashes. She keeps her head down and her hair hangs between her knees. He wonders if they taught her that in California, too.

  She finishes and wipes herself and looks at the wad of paper. They know how to do it in California. Sonny has to give them that much. They know the tricks.

  He turns his head away so as not to think about it.

  “Bad weather—that ozone smell?—reminds me of when I was a little girl,” Juliet says from the bathroom. “Nights like this, when there’s thunder and lightning and rain, I can hear Daddy pacing the floor downstairs in the library in the dark. I used to think it was the most miserable sound in the whole, entire world. Mainly because he was so miserable.”

  “I remember,” Sonny says.

  “We talked about that?”

  “A long time ago we did, after the funeral. You told me everything.”

  “Yes,” she says. “I suppose I did tell you a lot.”

  Sonny sits back against the headboard, wondering what more there could be to know. He likes the rain but he isn’t sure what it reminds him of, not that the past even matters at this moment. Sonny keeps hearing the sound of Juliet’s water meeting the water in the bowl, keeps seeing her expression when she brought the wad of tissue up from between her legs.

  “Just let yourself in,” she says. “Just go upstairs and get her out of bed. She sees you up there she’ll know we’re not playing.”

  “I’m sorry, Julie, but I’m not going to do that.”

  She is laughing as she leaves the bathroom. “I’m going back to the Lé Dale then.”

  Sonny, his penis stiff, angling up past his navel, gets out of bed pulling the sheet around him and shuffles across the room. He wants to show her something, a postcard depicting the Beauvais Mansion that he’s kept on the dresser for years now. It’s stuck in the mirror between photos of his father sitting outside on the lawn with his eyes on the sky and one of his mother as a girl standing on Annunciation Street in the Irish Channel. “Remember this?” he says.

  Juliet moves to the bed and rolls over on her back, holding the card close to her face. “Oh, my gosh. Where’d you find it?”

  “Bookshop on Magazine.”

  “Bookshop?”

  “George Herget’s. The guy’s so nice, he offers you a can of Coke as soon as you walk in the door.”

  “You don’t even have to buy any books?”

  “Nope, but you want to, mainly on account of that Coke.”

  Juliet places a finger on the small block of text, the delicate print. “The Beauvais Mansion,” she reads out loud. “Built by Creoles in the years before the Civil War, this gracious example of French Colonial architecture has been in the same New Orleans family for more than a century.” She waits a moment before finishing. “An exotic, unexpected paradise.”

  Now she examines the other side, the photo in grainy sepia. “Look how little the trees were,” she says, laughing but in a sad way. “They were babies, all of them babies.”

  Tears pool in her eyes and slip down her face, and Sonny takes a corner of the bedsheet and wipes them away. “We should have had our own babies,” he says. “It makes me sick sometimes, Julie, I actually get sick. I can’t believe we did what we did. It was the biggest mistake of my life and I will go to my grave regretting it. Who did we think we were, Julie?”

  Juliet doesn’t answer for a long time. “The Beauvais Mansion,” she whispers, still studying the card. “It says so right here.”

  Juliet sits at the kitchen table and draws a diagram on the back of Sonny’s bank statement. Anna Huey occupies the first room to the right at the top of the stairs, her mother’s room comes next, then after that is Juliet’s. Or what once was Juliet’s. All the rooms to the left of the hallway are either empty or used for storage.

  “Don’t let her trick you,” she says, scribbling with such purpose that the tip of her tongue pokes out of her mouth.

  “Julie, listen, I don’t think I can do this.”

  “Don’t let her go without signing the check or putting the date. A check is worthless without that and she might pull a fast one. She’s capable of anything.”

  “No, Julie.”

  “At a bank the thing they look for on a check is not the numerical amount in the little box on the right-hand side. It’s what’s written out on the long line under the line that names the payee. So you want to make sure that the numerical number in the box is the same as the amount she writes out. This is another way she might trick us.”

  “Julie?”

  “Yes, my baby?”

  She turns and faces him and it is a long moment before he speaks: “Does the Beauvais have an alarm system?”

  She shakes her head, careful not to push any harder. “While you’re inside,” she says, “will you do something for me?”

  She walks over to where he’s standing by the sink and offers him the envelope. He hesitates before taking it, and when he does she sidles up close to him, her breasts grazing his chest. “Go in my bedroom and get me some clothes, please.”

  “Will those old clothes still fit?”

  “They’ll fit.” She lightly touches him with her breasts again. “You know my body better than anybody. Do you think it’s changed any in the last fifteen years?”

  “No,” his breath beginning to shallow. “But don’t you think the style of clothes hanging in your closet might be a little dated?”

  “Sonny, you need to remember something, sweetie.” Now she presses up close, her chest flat against his. “When you look like I do everything you put on is in style.”

  The earliest painting, an imposing neoclassical oil on canvas signed by antebellum portraitist Jean Joseph Vaudechamp, hangs on the wall at the bottom of the stairs, ambient light from the foyer making it possible to observe its nattily dressed subject, a Creole gentleman wearing eyeglasses that rest low on his nose. Just to the right of the Vaudechamp is one by Jacques Guillaume Lucien Amans, and directly above that an Ellsworth Woodward, legendary founding instructor of the art department at the city’s Newcomb College. Even without reading the signatures Sonny is able to identify the paintings’ creators: they easily are among the most important to work in New Orleans in the last two centuries.

  Pausing at the first step, Sonny runs his fingers over the thinly painted surface of the Vaudechamp. He sniffs the Amans. When he passes the John Genin showing Etienne Beauvais (as the small plaque on the frame identifies the sitter), Sonny blows against the canvas and inhales the master’s celestial dust.

  As he ascends the carpeted stairway each step groans louder than the one before. Or so it seems to Sonny, now more than halfway up. He takes his time not only to admire the artwork but also to consider the best way to announce himself. Does he simply nudge Miss Marcelle awake and tell her what he’s come for? “Just dropped by for Julie’s check, ma’am. Will you get up and write it, please?” Or does he show good manners and begin with an apology? “I know this shows poor judgment on my part, madam, and I want to say at the outset that I’m as disappointed in myself as you are. But at the same time your daughter does need her money.”

  Higher up the modern era of portraiture as practiced in the southern United States is represented by the likes of Arnold E. Turtle and Henry Casselli, who painted the masterwork at the top of the stairs, depicting Johnny Beauvais. Here Juliet’s father is shown wearing the uniform of the prototypical so
uthern gentleman: white silk suit, panama hat, polka-dot bow tie, wing tips with laces as thin as fishing line. Casselli somehow managed to get Johnny Beauvais just right, down to the downy texture of his yellow hair and the carefully trimmed fingernails coated with clear polish.

  Sonny leans back against the balustrade and trains his eyes on those of the vividly painted man, who seems to stare back as if curious to learn Sonny’s reason for being here tonight. “Couldn’t tell you myself,” Sonny whispers under his breath.

  Sonny dated Juliet for seven months before Johnny Beauvais’s death at Lake Pontchartrain, and though the man was generally cordial (he was always good for a hello, in any case), only once did he and Sonny have what might qualify as a conversation.