My Juliet (16 page)

“You might be done,” she said, “but I can still feel you scraping and poking.”

“The pain won't last. The pain won't last but the beauty will endure. Somebody said that.”

Just at that moment she thought she was going to vomit again. When the feeling passed, she said, “Will somebody please tell me where's the beauty in all this?”

“The beauty is in being able to make choices. You've made an important one today, and whether you realize it or not it'll probably shape the rest of your life. I hope for the better. I also hope that when you remember me you do so without regret.”

Her eyes were still on the window when she said, “I won't remember you at all.”

He helped her into a diaper layered along the bottom with feminine napkins, then into her jogging pants. Sonny, silent but for his weeping, held her hand as they took the elevator down. It was almost midnight and up above the city stars hung close in the sky. From a block away she heard a streetcar go by. Sonny helped her in the truck and on with the seat belt. Then when he turned the ignition to start the engine the windshield wipers came on. He was too preoccupied, and too upset, to notice the phenomenon, and he drove Juliet all the way home without turning them off, blades squealing and painting streaks against the dry glass.

That was 1971, the year when everything changed forever. Less than a week later Juliet left New Orleans in another storm. This time she took a cab to the airport. “Where you headed?” the driver said, meeting her eyes with his in the rearview mirror.

“LA,” she answered.

“What's that they say? ‘Go west, young man'? Something like that?”

“Today the young man stays home. It's me who's going.”

So this is what the rain does. It makes you remember something you'd meant to forget. It brings back your first abortionist and the taste of oil from the street and the look in Sonny LaMott's eyes when he put his arms around you for the last time.

Now in the weekly/monthly it's Leonard's turn to take a leak. He makes less noise then the boy did. But like the boy he leaves the door open. “Must be all that rain,” he says in a loud voice, apparently in explanation for his prodigious output.

“Wanna do it?” she's tempted to say to the little young one in bed, then hop on top of him again. But down on the street she notices metallic bars burning against black pavement, right where her rental car was formerly parked.

“Motherfuckers took it,” she says, more resigned than defiant.

“Took what?”

“Motherfuckers towed it.”

Juliet sees winos standing against the side of a laundromat, heedless of the fact that the rain has stopped. They look like people condemned to a firing squad, stunned to paralysis, and here at last is the moment for the bullets.

“Some people must not know who they're fooling with,” Juliet says, talking not so much about the cops who towed her rental car, but about her mother and the cleaning woman who live in the house that bears her family name.

The boy stirs in bed. He seems to look at her for the first time. “Are you that girl that Leonard said her mother killed his lover?”

Juliet thinks she understands, but rather than answer she runs her tongue over her mouth again.

3

SONNY'S BANK STATEMENT IS THE only piece of mail in the morning delivery. He has but three hundred dollars left in his account, almost half of that recent deposits. Take away the tourist portraits and the Young Elvises and he's broke, studying the want ads for a job, making novenas to whichever saint handles employment.

Sonny rarely entertains dreams of packing up and leaving New Orleans, but today he wonders how it would feel to live in a place where the smell of the rain didn't revive a memory of Juliet's smell, and where certain music didn't recall wild times at the F&M Patio Bar, and where when you woke in the night you didn't automatically reach for somebody who'd never really been there.

“I'm thinking about giving up the fence,” he says to Louis Fortunato in a telephone call.

Louis, who'd been asleep, mumbles incoherently, then says, “Do you need a lift?”

“A lift? A lift to a new life, do you mean?”

But Louis has already hung up.

Sonny visits a barber in the French Quarter for his shortest haircut in years, then he drives uptown to the Pontchartrain Hotel, his former employer. After warm greetings from staff Sonny is ushered into the manager's office situated in the suite of rooms directly behind the registration desk. Though oblivious to the irony, he sits in the same chair where, only a few years before, he announced his intention to resign his position as bartender and to pursue full-time his dream of becoming an artist.

The manager, a chunky, red-faced man named Royce Griffin, makes a great fuss over seeing Sonny again, and shakes his hand with such tenderness that Sonny has no doubts as to his sincerity. “And what brings you back to our neck of the woods?” Griffin says.

As Sonny describes his decision to return to “a real job,” Griffin regards him with equal measures of pity and discomfort, his complexion growing even more inflamed. Drumming a pencil against his desk, Griffin lets Sonny ramble to a finish before saying, “It breaks my heart to have to tell you this, my friend, but we don't have anything at the moment. However, if something in the bar does come up, I promise you'll be one of the first people we call.”

This satisfies Sonny until he gets outside and considers Griffin's remark more closely. How belittling to be called “my friend” by a man before whom he knelt for mercy! And what did “one of the first people” mean exactly? How many other “first people” were queued up in the hotel's breadline, desperate for charity?

And what is this “we” baloney? Will more than one be calling him?

Sonny considers removing Louis's club from under the seat and whacking Royce Griffin with it.
“Hey, fat boy, do you feel it? Do you feel the pain?”

He sits in the truck listening to the radio until his anger passes, then he returns to the Vieux Carré and stops in at Café du Monde. An attractive young black woman, who seems to be the highest-ranking employee in the restaurant today, gives him an application to fill out, and Sonny sits at a table not far from the one where he and Juliet were reunited only days before. This afternoon a group of tourists occupies his and Juliet's table, and the sight of them wolfing down beignets and slurping coffee is disagreeable enough to lighten the weight of Sonny's memory. Concentrating on the questionnaire, he manages to avoid seeing Juliet every time he looks up.

And then who but Roberts shows up. The old man, toting a Thermos and brown paper bag, engages the cashier in noisy conversation. Sonny lowers his head. How will he explain the close-cropped hair let alone the lengthy employment form detailing the history of his life in the American workforce? The café is swarming with diners, but too few apparently for Sonny to keep from being noticed. Roberts wheels around suddenly as if to address the source of a voice whispered in his ear, and his eyes cut through the crush of people and travel directly to Sonny, or that slim piece of Sonny visible from the front of the room.

“I thought that was you,” he says, working his way through the crowd.

“It's me, all right. Sonny LaMott, world-famous French Quarter artist.”

“Jesus, look at you. You're all cleaned up.” Roberts glances down at the application and his face registers first confusion then disgust. He might've tasted something sour.

“I guess I should've told you,” Sonny says. “I'm going back to work. To regular work, I should say. It's time I stop the dreaming.”

Roberts places the Thermos and paper bag on the table. “Back to work?”

Sonny is trying to come up with something to say, when Roberts takes a seat. “I've got a sack lunch here. It's a sandwich, a big one. We could split it and talk and maybe you could help me understand what's wrong with dreaming.”

In the bag Roberts has a muffuletta-to-go from Central Grocery and he spreads it out between them. The sandwich, as big around as a Frisbee, has already been cut into quarters. But Roberts, using a small pocketknife, saws it into even smaller sections and he and Sonny eat in silence, oil from the olive salad forming clownish rings around their lips and dripping down their hands and arms and staining the cuffs of their shirts. To help ingest the heavy Italian bread they gulp down steaming coffee from Roberts's Thermos.

“Only you would get to bring a muffuletta from Central Grocery in this place,” says Sonny.

“Yes. I suppose that's what one gets for being a legend in the Vieux Carré.”

“My point exactly.”

It is a pleasure to eat and drink in the open air with the music of tinkling silverware and murmured conversations, and Sonny's black, boiling sadness begins to dissipate.

When they're finished, Roberts lifts a hand and points. “Hear that horn?”

Sonny settles back in his chair and listens. Nothing.

“It's a Greek ship, probably passing under the bridge just now. Oh, it's a Greek, all right. I know my horns. They'll dock for a few days and give the clap to half the whores in town. The whores, then, will infect the locals. Then the locals their wives. Then the wives the milkmen. Then the milkmen the milk. Or the cows that produce the milk. Soon we'll all be sick. And this, Sonny, explains why I'm a Communist.

“Below the waist,” Roberts adds, “we are all of us connected, no one superior to the next.”

Sonny considers telling Roberts about his recent troubles with Juliet. Roberts with his wide experience and gift of gab might be able to help. But Sonny lacks language for how he's feeling, as well as the willingness to hear it spoken.

Roberts, nevertheless, seems to intuit what's troubling him. “If it's any comfort,” he says, “I'm just now recovering from my Mary. Only lately has it gotten that I can rest nights, and she's been gone fifteen years now.” He picks at his scalp. “Left with a neighbor with whom she'd been consorting, a man I despised.”

Sonny looks around to make sure no one is eavesdropping. For some reason he finds it important that only he hears Roberts's confession.

“After she left,” the old man continues, “I couldn't sleep for the dreams. I imagined the two of them in bed together, madly humping—his lovemaking infinitely more satisfying than mine had ever been. But eventually this picture began to fade and she left me alone—the bright memory, in any event, became a shadowy one. I knew I'd recovered when she stopped being the first thing I thought about when I woke in the morning. But now, invoking her name again, I admit to feeling a certain heat, and if I let myself I could cry. Does what's happened to you make you feel like that?”

Sonny nods his head.

“Your heart in your throat, eh?”

“Everywhere,” he says, “but where it should be.”

“Love is a torture and women the whip. Remember that.”

“I will,” says Sonny. “Because I do feel whipped.”

Roberts leans forward and places a hand on Sonny's forearm. “We're dealing with some weighty self-esteem issues here, am I correct?”

Sonny lets out a laugh. “I don't think I'm worth a shit if that's what you mean.”

They stay at the table half an hour longer, quiet except for their eating. Sonny listens but still can't hear any evidence of a ship on the river, a Greek one or otherwise. Finally Roberts slaps a hand against his leg. “Well, shall we head back to the salt mine?”

Sonny doesn't get up. He picks at the remains of his sandwich. “You go ahead,” he says. “I'm through.” He pauses to chew on a crust of bread. “The truth is I don't see the point anymore.”

Roberts is a long time before speaking. “Just for my enlightenment, what point is that?”

“The point of hanging pictures on a fence and waiting for people to come and claim them. Why do we bother, Roberts?”

“Why do we bother?” The old man smiles. “I don't know, Sonny, why do we bother breathing?”

“Nobody wants them, let's be honest. I used to think that if I didn't quit—if I just kept at it, you know—I'd eventually be discovered. Somebody would recognize what I was doing as smart and original and maybe even good, and he would introduce it to somebody else who in turn would show it to another. I'd find my audience this way. But lately when I turn and face that fence—when I see them there, all huddled together like that—it's terrible, old man, but I wonder if I've wasted my life.” Sonny looks over to make sure his friend is still with him. “Roberts, have I wasted my life?”

The old man rises to his feet and shuffles around the table, finally coming to stand a few inches away from Sonny. “If I weren't so old and worn out I'd hand you the worst beating of your life. How many years have you given to that fence, boy?
How many?”
He sucks in a breath of air. “Show me the place where Sonny LaMott's blood stains the flagstones.
Show me!”

Sonny doesn't speak—he doesn't dare to.

“Stand up, you little shit. Come on. On your feet.”

Roberts has attracted an audience. Diners watch as if trying to decide whether to be alarmed or amused. “What is it you want, anyway?” he continues. “Do you want to be an artist who sells paintings or do you want to be one who paints them?”

Roberts starts to shadowbox in place, then he yanks his shirttail free of his trousers, exposing his gut. Sonny looks at the old man's body with a mix of horror and fascination. Roberts is so thin a tight net of bones shows at either side of his rib cage.

“Hit me,” Roberts says. “Rare back and hit me. Okay, boy. Okay.” Roberts has braced himself. He's ready. “Let me have it. Hit me with all you've got. Come on.”

“Forget about it,” Sonny says, waving him off.

“I said
hit
me. Hit me, boy.” Roberts seems to mean it, and the crowd, or most of it, is laughing now, including the waiters who stand nearby hugging trays.

“Pretend I'm your Juliet. Pretend I'm the world that hasn't found you. Wallop me, boy. Be done with it.”

“No way,” Sonny says.

“You're a yellow coward. I'm telling you to hit me, coward.”

And so Sonny hits him. Still seated in the chair, he raises a fist and drives it into the old man's midsection.

“Harder,” says Roberts, clenching his jaw.
“Harder . . .”

Sonny stands and hits him again, hard enough this time to push Roberts back a step, but not hard enough to hurt him. A gasp comes from the crowd and a wash of tears fills Roberts's eyes and there is a spot on his belly equal in size to Sonny's fist.

“Happy now?”

“Happy,” replies Roberts, struggling to breathe. “Goddamned right I'm happy. Sonny, if you're not improved by morning I'll have you hit me again.”

“Can I hit you in the face next time?”

“Hit me wherever you like.”

“I'll hit you in the face.”

“Shit, no, you're not hitting me in my face.”

To dull applause, which Sonny refuses to acknowledge but which Roberts recognizes with a bow, the two men leave the café and shamble across the street to the square. Roberts carries himself as if fully aware that he alone created all that is good in the world. You should've punched him harder, Sonny says to himself.

As they near Roberts's kiosk Sonny realizes that the painters at the fence are staring at him, and he begins to feel uncomfortable in his clean clothes and neatly coifed hair.

He wishes he hadn't been so easily seduced by Roberts's dramatics.

“Just remember your Juliets,” the old man says. “So what if she's broken your heart, she's also given you a gift. She's helped make you an artist. Nobody else here paints the human form with such feeling as you, boy. Can you give that up?” He shakes his head. “You can't.”

Sonny doesn't respond. To do so would invite more, and he wants only to disappear.

“Thanks for the sandwich, old man. I need to be going.”

It isn't Roberts's fault Sonny has made all the wrong choices. It isn't his fault Sonny is a pathetic loser who can't give up what hasn't been his in fifteen long years.

“I love you, boy,” Roberts says.

“Yeah? Well, I love you, too, Roberts. Now leave me alone.”