My Juliet (19 page)

“Sonny LaMott.”

The man, gnashing red hots, picks up the phone and dials a number. “Yeah. You have Sonny somebody down here in the lobby. You want me to send him up?” The man nods and puts a hand over the mouthpiece. “She ain't dressed. She says to wait.” The man nods again. “I'll tell him.” After he puts the phone down he says, “She says she'll call me soon as she's decent.”

Sonny feels like telling the man he finds it odd that he has to wait for Juliet to be decent after all they've experienced together lately, particularly at the Royal Sonesta. But the man doesn't look like the type you complain to. He looks more like the type who makes others complain.

Sonny sits on a couch with yellow sponge poking through tears in the fabric. On the wall behind him hang a crucifix, a pay phone and a small, hand-lettered sign that reads
YOU ARE TO BE FULLY DRESSED WHILE IN THE LOBBY
. Three different fans churn at high speed, all failing to dent the heat. Nearly twenty minutes go by before the phone rings at the desk and the clerk gives Sonny the room number and tells him he can go on up. As Sonny climbs the stairs, he passes a boy who is coming down them, and who seems to speak Sonny's name under his breath as he walks by.

“Did you say something?” Sonny is standing in the middle of the dark stairway.

“I didn't hear nothing.”

Sonny starts to climb again, and the boy says, “What would I say? Do I know you?”

Sonny looks at him. The pale, stringy hair, whiskers not nearly as plentiful as pimples. The whites of the boy's eyes are shot red, while the irises are so clear as to seem diluted of color. He is wearing jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt similar to the one Curly Bonaventure had on earlier. A tattoo, made to resemble a strand of barbed wire, encircles an upper arm.

Sonny says, “I thought I heard you say my name.”

“How could I say your name? I don't even know you.” The boy laughs and pulls at his nose. “You think I guessed it—I just picked your name out of all the names in the English language and all the other languages—out of Japanese, Russian, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese. There's a lot of fuckin' languages, man. And, holy moly, think of all the names.”

“You're right,” Sonny says.

“Todd, Tim, Bill, Brent, Jeff, Tarzan, Tonto, Coco, Mojo, Bobo, Toto. That would make me a mind reader, to come up with your name.”

Sonny has the impression the boy would name names all day if he let him. “Look, I'm sorry. I must've been mistaken.” But as he starts back up the stairs, and the boy starts down, Sonny hears him say it again. “Sonny,” he hears him say, louder now than before.

Bath towel in hand, Juliet is waiting for him on the second floor, the door open to her room. “Where on earth have you been?” she says. “I went by the square, I went by your house.”

They embrace and she kisses him. Despite the stage prop, it is plain that she hasn't taken a shower. Her skin is hot and damp with sweat, and her hair needs to be washed. Her clothes smell of smoke and grease, the cloying stink of a hash house like the Hummingbird. Neither does her makeup look right. It appears to have been hastily applied—there's just enough color to mask whatever needs to be hidden, but not enough to fool whoever might be looking for it.

“There was a boy on the stairs who said my name,” Sonny says.

She looks at him expectantly, as if waiting for the rest.

“I thought maybe he was coming from your room.”

“A boy was coming from my room? What boy would that be, Sonny?”

“He had a tattoo on his arm.”

“What kind of tattoo?”

“Barbed wire, looked like.”

“Oh, no, that one wouldn't have been coming from my room. The guy coming from my room had a tattoo of a big, red heart with his mother's name plastered across it.”

Sonny steps past her. The room, though far from elegant, isn't the pit that Sonny imagined. The bed doesn't take coins and vibrate, in any case. And the hotel has provided a TV set. A black-and-white model, but a TV no less. “Look,” Juliet says, throwing a door open, “I even have a bathroom.”

“I'm impressed.”

“It's cozy,” she says. “Fifteen bucks a night, you can't beat it.”

“Not for fifteen you can't,” Sonny says. “But think of what sixteen will get you.”

His attempt at sarcasm doesn't seem to register. “Sonny, I was just watching this episode of
The Andy Griffith Show
that reminds me of us. Do you like Andy?”

“Andy's all right.”

“Andy has his high school reunion coming up, and his old girlfriend is going to be there. She's gone off and made a big life for herself in Raleigh or someplace. Well, they get together at the reunion dance, and everything is like before. They're happy as can be, and Andy's wondering what broke them apart. They go outside and sit on a bench under the stars and they get to talking. And before you know it they're arguing over some little nothing. She's upset and so is he, and Andy's screaming and she is screaming. Then all of a sudden it comes to them why they didn't make it together way back when.”

Sonny has never seen that particular show, but his recollection of events that broke Juliet and him apart differs dramatically from those she just described. “Why didn't they make it?”

“They were different people. Different people like that never last. One wants Mayberry, the other Raleigh. If not for their differences they wouldn't have anything.”

Sonny walks over to the window and looks down on the avenue. Streetcar rails lie in silver ribbons against the blacktop. “Did that girlfriend of Andy's ever ask him to kill her mother?” he says.

“What did you say?”

He doesn't answer and she makes a noise meant to imitate a buzzer going off; it takes Sonny a few seconds to understand that this is the sound of a game show contestant giving the wrong response to a question. “Sonny, listen to me, sweetheart. I'm going to say something now and say it once and that's it; you won't hear it again. Sonny, the other night in the wild heat of an argument I said some terrible things—things I didn't mean of course and would gladly take back if only you let me. First and foremost were my comments about your work. Just for the record—and you must know this; you have to . . . Sonny, I think you're a genius, an absolute genius.”

“Thank you.”

“Your paintings smack of immortality. I mean this.”

“Yes. They smack, all right.”

“What's the point of my being nice if you can't take a compliment?”

“They smack butt, that's all they smack. Forget about my work, Julie. It's what you said about your mother that I can't stop thinking about.”

“Sonny, what I said about my mother isn't true. Happy now?” When he doesn't answer, she says, “Happy? I need to know you're happy. If you're happy, I'm happy.”

“I'm happy,” Sonny says.

“Good. Now let's get out of here.”

He follows her into the hallway then down the stairs. He wonders about Andy pining away for the same girl for so many years, and whether his love was anything like Sonny's. Did Andy ever bump into a boy leaving her hotel room? If so, how did Andy feel about it? Did he feel like throwing up? Did he feel like taking his fist and slamming it into the wall?

“Can we go riding in your truck? I could use the air.”

“Sure, Julie.”

“Riding like we used to ride.”

“However you want.”

“Remember the levee? We always went there, didn't we?”

“Yes, we did go there.”

“Remember that blanket you used to keep behind the seat? God, whatever happened to that thing? It belongs in the Smithsonian.”

“That's funny, Julie. That's very funny.”

Sonny also wonders what Andy did after the reunion dance, when it was clear he'd wasted so many years of his life on dumb, empty longing. Did Andy mute his telephone and run a box fan in his living room and play the radio too loud and take his meals from the can? Did he sit in the dark and the quiet of his porch and weep into big, open hands? Or did Andy take a more assertive approach and plot ways to win his girlfriend back, to prove that he was worth another try? Andy never seemed the type of guy to quit on anything. Why quit on the only girl he ever loved just because they had a small disagreement after a dance?

Juliet stops at the door to the lobby. “Bye, Leroy,” she says to the clerk at the desk.

“Bye, sweet thing,” he replies, smiling a mouth gone red from candy.

“Bye, Leroy,” Sonny tells the clerk.

But the man doesn't answer.

They circumnavigate Lee Circle in another loud silence, Sonny following the troughs of the streetcar tracks, the tires of his pickup popping against the iron rails. After half a dozen turns he veers onto Saint Charles Avenue and the road straightens. New Orleans is Sonny's home, the only one he's ever known, but it occurs to Juliet that half the time he seems lost and in need of directions, worse off than a tourist.

“Where are we going?” he says.

She slides over and waits until he looks at her. “Sonny, are you upset with me?”

“I just want to know where we're going.”

“Be honest with me, baby. Is it over Mother and Daddy and Lake Pontchartrain or is it the boy you met on the stairs? Sonny, don't be mad.”

“You want someplace in particular,” he says, “or someplace in general? If you want someplace in particular you'd better speak up.”

“Particular or general,” she replies, falling back against the door. “Today it looks like one is as bad as the other.”

And so they go everywhere and nowhere, both at once. They drive along Magazine Street passing block after block of Victorian and Greek Revival buildings that now house secondhand and antique stores, then head to Prytania Street and the Garden District where leafy mansions and luxury apartment buildings rush by one after another. After doubling back and driving several blocks to the north they tour a blighted but historically significant area called Central City, where urban renewal has been kicked hard in the crotch by urban decay and it seems the old, mistreated homes stand but for the grace of Formosan termites.

“Sometimes I can't decide if New Orleans is the most beautiful city I've ever seen or the ugliest,” Juliet says.

They explore Canal Street up to the cemeteries then take City Park Avenue to Moss Street and Bayou Saint John for a long loop and finally they're driving down Esplanade Avenue headed to the Mississippi River and the Beauvais.

“I want to take back some of what I took back earlier,” Juliet says, watching the great house approach through a dense blur of trees. “That business about Mama killing Daddy? I wasn't making it up. Sonny, I meant every word.”

She doesn't think she can take more of his whining, but some things need to be said. That is just one. Now comes another: “Stop the truck, Sonny. Stop it now.”

He pulls over and parks directly across the street from the house. His hands are gripping the steering wheel, arms extended, elbows locked.

“Sonny, I have a favor to ask. It isn't a big one but it's important.”

“What is it, Julie?”

“Sonny, my mother owes me some money. I'd go to the house and get the check myself but she and I had a terrible argument the other day and I just refuse to let her treat me that way again. Sonny, the favor I need to ask—”

“You want me to get it.”

“That's right. I do, I do want you to get it. If it's not too big an imposition, of course. I hope you understand, Sonny, I'm trying to avoid another argument.”

“Walk up to the door, Julie. You don't have to go in. Just walk up and have Mrs. Huey—”

“Trust me, Sonny. Mother will be there, and we'll only fight again.”

“It's too embarrassing,” he says. “I won't do it.”

“Please, Sonny. Help me with this. Is it really so big a deal?”

“You honestly expect me to walk up there and tell your mother I came for your check?”

“I honestly do.”

“Jesus,” then, no real surprise to Juliet, he gets his act together and steps outside.