My Juliet (14 page)

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 covers. 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.

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 his 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?”