My Juliet (15 page)

“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.”

“You're not going through with it, I am.” She pushed past him and stuck her head inside.

A solitary floor lamp, its shade denuded but for a couple of linen strips, shone in the middle of the room, and beneath it a young man lounged on a ripped leatherette sofa reading a magazine. He looked hardly older than she and Sonny were. He wore Chuck Taylor basketball sneakers, a plaid button-down shirt and khakis with a rip in the knee. Although his hair was well groomed, his stubble, especially around his mouth, looked stiff enough to pop a balloon.

He stood and turned off the light. “Adelaide's friend?”

“That's right. I'm Juliet and this here is Sonny.”

“Nice to meet you both. If it's all the same to you I'm not going to tell you my name. I'm sure you understand my reasons.”

“Should we just call you Doctor?” Sonny said in apparent seriousness.

“I'm not a doctor, but you can call me that if it helps.”

Sonny was looking at Juliet when he said, “I thought we were coming to see a doctor.”

“Fly to London if you want a doctor, Sonny. No doctor here will help you—at least none but those willing to sacrifice their medical licenses and ruin their careers.”

While Sonny seemed reluctant to walk more than a few feet from the door, Juliet hurriedly crossed the room and placed her overnight bag on the sofa, then she removed her raincoat and lay it out on the floor to dry. “If you're not a doctor then what are you?” she said, trying to sound as if she weren't at all concerned.

“Sorry. But telling you that wouldn't be wise, either.” The young man (she didn't think of him as her abortionist yet) had a high-pitched voice that seemed to emanate from the top of his head rather than from his mouth. “Let's suppose I were to tell you that I was a third-year medical student at one of the local universities and something were to go wrong today. Nothing is going to go wrong, but let's just say something did, for the sake of argument. Well, you could go to the police and they in turn would go to the dean's office and find out my identity and bring criminal charges against me. This is the scenario I want to avoid. What we're doing here is against the law, after all.”

Sonny stepped away from the door. His shirt was still wet from the windshield wiper episode. “Have you done many of these things?”

“Yes, quite a few.”

“Any problems?”

“No.”

“None? None at all?”

“Well, once there was an unusual amount of bleeding. But the girl was never in danger.”

Rain hammered the windows. Juliet looked up at the ceiling and the tiles stained brown from leaks. The sofa and several plastic waiting room chairs, hooked together, were the only furniture in the room. “What is this place?” she said.

“Once upon a time it belonged to a dentist. Through a source I was able to secure a key to this suite, but it's only for the time being. Should you decide to contact the authorities you won't find me here again after tonight.”

“We won't be calling any authorities,” Juliet said, “so stop it.”

“Good,” and now the abortionist clapped his hands together. “Did you bring the cash?”

By the time it was over the rain had stopped. Juliet, who somehow endured the ordeal without passing out, never knew such pain in all her life. It was the kind of pain that makes you cry and makes you vomit, both of which she did. She'd never sweated as much, either. Even the nylon straps of her brassiere, which the abortionist had permitted her to keep on, were soaked through. Lying supine on plastic sheeting thrown over a table, she kept her eyes on the windows, the streaks and beads of water that brought to mind the paintings at Dickie Boudreau's house. In all probability the baby had been his, resulting from a single meeting in his backyard swimming pool when Sonny was off fishing with his father. “Chlorine kills everything,” Dickie had said as he lured her to the steps at the shallow end. Determining paternity had been an easy calculation, as had Juliet's decision to come here today. “I feel so suffocated sometimes,” she said to Adelaide Valentine. “He calls me Julie. No one else does that.”

“My mother's sister left her second husband because she couldn't stand looking at his nostrils. The guy was a multimillionaire, but he had these big, hairy nostrils. They drove her crazy.”

“It's going to kill him, he's so sweet. But I can't live that life.”

“God, Juliet, the boy's only seventeen. He'll get over it.”

The abortionist removed his gloves and stuffed them in one of the Schwegmann bags he was using for trash. The gloves were canary yellow Playtex, the type for washing dishes. His speculum and curette—instruments he'd insisted on identifying, presumably to put her at ease about his experience—lay streaked with blood on the lining of an old valise, which he closed now with a snap.