My Juliet (2 page)

“Yes,” she said. “Oh, yes, Sonny. Everything. Give it to me. . . . Yes . . .”

Now when Sonny cries he doesn't care how loud he is or who hears.

She comes home finally. It is April 1986, nearly fifteen years since she last saw the place, now as her plane descends a mossy green pod surrounded by fields of black water, still spooky as shit. “Oh, you,” she whispers sadly to the view from her oval window.

She comes home wearing a light summer dress and big, blocky clogs with three-inch soles. Her Walkman plays a compendium of dance tracks from the decade before: the Bee Gees, Donna Summer, K. C. & the Sunshine Band. She doesn't look like a girl who once acted in dirty movies but rather like one who's just finished exams at college and who's coming home for semester break. Sleep past noon, catch a tan by the pool, eat a plate of red beans at Mother's then sip a few at Pat O's. That's Juliet. She carries a dog-eared paperback on self-actualization that a fellow traveler left on the seat next to hers, and she reads half a page before encountering a trash can in the main concourse and throwing it away.

As Juliet strides through New Orleans International, her shoes clopping on the dull, gum-pocked tiles, people look at her in a way that she considers unkind if not outright rude. If they know about her time in front of the camera, however, nobody says anything. She would like to tell them all to go fuck themselves. Never does it occur to Juliet that they're staring because she is beautiful. Some people have a natural aversion to anyone who has sex, she has decided, and it doesn't matter with whom that person is having it—whether a marriage partner or, as in her recent case, professionals.

Every now and then, feeling exhausted by things, Juliet has an urge to walk up to a stranger and say, “Wanna do it?” And today is one of those times.

Cutting through Baggage Return, she focuses on an elderly man sitting by himself with a sports magazine and a packet of trail mix. Juliet strides to within a few feet of the man but the words that leave her mouth are not the ones she'd intended to deliver.

“It's not the heat so much as the humidity,” she says.

“No, it isn't,” the man answers, smiling a mouthful of nuts and yogurt-covered raisins. “But that's Nawlins for you.”

She comes home with ten dollars in her pocket and one good credit card. With the cash she buys a cheese sandwich, a mound of fries, a family-size jug of Coke and a copy of the
New Orleans Times-Picayune
. With the card she rents a yellow Ford Mustang convertible at the Hertz counter. “Where will you be staying during your visit to New Orleans?” asks the clerk at the desk.

“I'm a Beauvais. Wanna take a guess?”

Confusion colors the young woman's face. In the end she says, “I wouldn't know where to begin. You look like a French Quarter B-and-B.”

“Try the Beauvais Mansion on Esplanade,” Juliet says. “You aren't originally from here, are you?”

It is oppressively, stupidly hot this early afternoon, and Juliet drives in heavy traffic through suburban Kenner and Metairie before entering New Orleans proper. A warm Gulf storm is sweeping over the area, lashing rain against her windshield with a force that makes Juliet wonder if she should pull over on the shoulder and wait it out. She almost forgot how shitty the weather can be in southern Louisiana. By the time she pulls in front of the mansion the sky has cleared and the sun is shining. And it comes to her that this is yet another item her memory has obscured: one minute you can be in a giant toilet bowl getting sloshed around and the next in a natural paradise too glorious for words.

Juliet comes home happy. Just the day before, the family maid phoned her in California with news that her mother was eaten up with cancer and close to death, and so she comes home believing that a large inheritance will soon be hers.

She is thinking about this fortune when she steps out of the rental car. And she thinks about it as she walks up the macadam path to the front door and lets herself in with a key she's kept all these years.

Money is on her mind, in fact, all the way until she sees her mother come charging down the hall.

Her mother isn't dying. Her mother is the picture of health. Nobody who moves like that has cancer or any other disease. The damned cleaning woman has tricked her. The tearful story on the phone was nothing but a ruse to get her to come home.

“Why aren't you dying?” Juliet says.

“I'm too much a woman to die,” her mother replies.

Juliet's eyes seek out the maid on the other side of the room. “Anna Huey, you lied to me.”

“Oh, sugar, we're all dying.”

The house is haunted, or so Juliet often told Sonny. Some time in the 1920s it appeared on a widely circulated picture postcard depicting New Orleans as an exotic, unexpected paradise, and in the image one seemed able to make out the silhouette of a man hanging by a rope in a window upstairs, the noose tight on his neck. In all likelihood the silhouette was just a part in the curtains, but Juliet, who first showed Sonny the postcard, claimed that one of her ancestors had lynched a rival there. “What kind of rival?” Sonny said. “And how'd he get in the house?”

“What do you mean, what kind of rival?” She obviously was stalling for time.

“Why were they rivals, Julie? What were they at odds about?”

He knew she was having fun at his expense; he could see the mischief in her eyes as she tried to come up with a response. “How serious you are,” she said. “That's very appealing, you know? When you're serious your temples throb and your eyebrows bunch together. They're like a caterpillar, those eyebrows, and just as fuzzy. Do you believe everything I tell you, Sonny?”

“I just want to know about this rival.”

“Oh, you. Shut up and kiss me.”

During the Civil War the house served as a hospital for Union soldiers wounded in battle, and this was how Juliet explained the many apparitions that allegedly resided there. They were Yankee boys who died on the grounds and whose spirits had not returned home. They showed up suddenly in doorways, then as suddenly vanished. At night they cried in empty rooms, and their wanderings were loud on the wood floors and stairway. One night Juliet woke to find a being in her room. (That, Sonny recalled, was how she referred to the ghosts, as “beings.”) His uniform was stained with blood and his saber dragged the floor as he moved toward her in the bed. He didn't want sex, she explained. He was pleading to be set free.

“Free from what? Free from you?”

She didn't answer and Sonny said, “You're trying to tell me that you dream about other boys.”

“Oh, but he wasn't that kind of ghost,” she protested. When she raised her mouth up to his face he could see past the top of her blouse and her breasts loosely bound in a thin white brassiere.

“I don't believe in ghosts anyway,” he murmured, staring.

“Tell me that when I'm gone and return to haunt you,” she whispered, then kissed him so softly that it was a long time before he was able to open his eyes again.

Haunted or not, the house by any measure is a mansion, and Sonny has always heard it referred to as such. The Beauvais, people call it, pronouncing the word “Boo-vay” as the family likes to. Once a showplace in an affluent area, and the finest example of French Colonial plantation architecture in the southern United States, the house today backs up to a corridor where illegal drugs are sold and murder is commonplace. And yet Juliet's mother has continued to live there as if the neighborhood doesn't recommend burglar bars on every window and a team of Dobermans in the yard.

“Miss Marcelle, you think you'll ever move out to the suburbs?” Sonny asks her today. “Get yourself a town house maybe with all the modern conveniences?”

She stares at him, as if waiting for the punch line. “Not unless Anna Huey makes me,” she answers at last in all apparent seriousness, then allows a dark trickle of laughter.

Sonny knows Miss Marcelle to be a hermit, as one too tired and dispirited to have much to do with the world, and as one too smart to trust a stranger. For years he has made a point of visiting her on those days when he's on a painting expedition in the neighborhood or out shooting reference photos for later use. He and Miss Marcelle sit in the parlor and, careful as to the scope of their conversation, talk for hours about subjects that hold little interest for either of them.

“Ever try Funyons, ma'am?”

“No, Sonny, I haven't. What are Funyons?”

“They're this food, somewhere between potato chips and Styrofoam. Don't be put off by their appearance. They're actually pretty good. You should try them.”

Today instead of tea Anna Huey has served a substitute, a fruit brandy with a high alcohol content, and inside of an hour Miss Marcelle and Sonny are working on a second bottle.

“My favorite is still barbecue corn chips,” he continues. “I like a bag at lunch with my ham and cheese sandwich. Sometimes I eat two ham and cheese sandwiches.”

“Corn chips were popular even in my time, if you can believe.”

“What time was that, Miss Marcelle?”

She looks at him as if he's just asked the most personal question a man can ask a woman. “When I speak of my time I mean the days when I first met Juliet's father, when I was young and in love. A person's time is always the time when he or she was happiest.”

“Would you please tell me about Juliet's father, Miss Marcelle? I didn't get to know him too well.”

“I met Johnny Beauvais in 1953 when he came to Opelousas to judge the Miss Yambilee beauty pageant, in which I was a contestant. Apparently he was a last-minute selection; the first choice, a radio personality for KSLO, our hometown station, took sick with gout and his doctor confined him to bed. Johnny happened to be visiting Saint Landry Parish with one of his fraternity brothers from Tulane. How he was recruited to judge us beauties I never really knew, but there suddenly he stood at the foot of the stage in the old World War Two Quonset hut where the event was being held. Girls swooned for him, and not a few boys. He selected me Miss Yambilee. Toward the end, when we fought, he still called me that.”

“Miss Yambilee?”

“Yes. And Miss Sweet Potato Pie. He thought he was so funny.”

“What else can you tell me?”

“He never really cared for me. In the beginning he responded to my looks, my naïveté. But that didn't last long. Johnny was searching for someone to bear his children. He didn't want a wife.” She hesitates, the brandy at her lips. “Johnny was a Beauvais to the very last, Sonny. I could tell you more, but that would still be the best description I could come up with.”

“He used to wear white suits.”

“Yes. And white bucks with them. Even his socks were white.”

“He drowned in Lake Pontchartrain. Fell out of a boat.”

“Fell
, did you say?”

“Yes, fell and drowned.”

“Fell and drowned,” repeats Miss Marcelle, in a way to suggest that she herself isn't quite sure about the facts connected to the incident.

Sonny admires Miss Marcelle's carefully made-up face and hairdo, and how she always seems to dress even though she has no plan to leave the house. She is lovely for a woman her age, which Sonny puts at about sixty-five. When he lets himself, as he does now, he can see past the paint and the wrinkles and find the face of Juliet. And he understands that this, and not companionship, is the real reason why he continues to visit the mansion.

“Miss Marcelle?” he seems to hear himself ask this day. “Miss Marcelle, do you think Julie loved me? If she loved me,” and he still can't believe he's hearing it, “how could she leave like she did? How could she do it, Miss Marcelle?”

Sonny has barely spoken when he realizes that, looped or not, he's made a terrible mistake. Miss Marcelle shifts in her chair. “Sonny, you've had too much to drink.”

“Please, Miss Marcelle, I'm tired of the mystery.”