My Juliet (7 page)

For a prime spot on the fence you have to arrive early and stake your claim or else settle for a location that puts you closer to tarot card readers dressed like genies than to customers with money to spend. The best spots are near trees and restaurants on the upriver and downriver sides of the square. The trees provide shade and keep people from squinting in the sun, and the restaurants have bathrooms. The worst spots are those situated in the middle of a row of painters, away from the shade. There the competition for tourist dollars, intensified by the heat, is so fierce that fistfights have been known to break out. During his first week on the job Sonny watched in amazement as two of his more genial colleagues went to blows on the flagstones. The brawl, Sonny later learned, started when one man's beach umbrella, aided by a sudden gust of wind, brushed up against the other's.

Sonny's favorite spot is under the magnolia tree across from the French bakery on the corner of Saint Ann and Chartres streets. The spot, however, is everybody's favorite. And in order to claim it you have two options, neither pleasant: hire a drunk to leave his midnight bottle and reserve the space or get up before dawn and secure it on your own.

Having no funds to waste and little faith in bums, Sonny sets his alarm clock for 4:00
A
.
M
. and endures the agony.

He's at the fence today when a couple of charter buses lurch to a stop on Decatur Street and deposit loads of Japanese tourists in front of Jackson Brewery. After brief experiments with beignets and café au lait, the tourists drift into the park and tour the pedestrian mall.

“My forehead is too big,” complains the subject of Sonny's latest portrait.

Sonny almost forgot she was there. “What's that?”

“My nose too small, too pointed. My eyes are not blue, and my hair is yellow? When is my hair yellow?”

The woman glares at the image Sonny has just finished painting on a perfectly nice sheet of Saint Armand's Sabretooth. It looks nothing like her, but as far as his interpretations of Juliet Beauvais go, Sonny has never been more on his game.

“Look,” he says, scumbling chestnut into the hair. “I'm fixing it. All gone. Hair brown. Hair black.”

Suddenly a crowd has gathered around them, and Sonny does his best to look as if everything is under control. It is rare to hear a complaint, and the worst possible luck to get one now. He's already done three pastel portraits at forty-five dollars a pop, all of them featuring Japanese from the buses. And he hoped to paint six or seven more.

Sonny can oblige those who want their pictures matted and framed with the supplies he keeps in his cart. Add to that the likelihood of gratuities . . .
Jesus, what has he done
?

And now the woman begins to cry.

“You're absolutely right to be upset,” Sonny says, trying to sound sensible. “Here, darling. Picture free. Take. No charge. You handsome woman. Very handsome.”

She's sobbing now with such intensity that people begin leaving the shops of the Pontalba Building to investigate the commotion.

“Lovely brown hair,” he continues. “Most lovely brown hair . . . picture free . . . here . . . picture . . .”

Sonny LaMott is a jingoistic ass, he's proven that finally. Dreaming about a woman he hasn't seen in years, he's turned a nice-looking Asian into an American Barbie doll, and now he's further humiliated her by trying to imitate a foreigner with little command of the English language.

She doesn't talk like that!

The woman's husband removes a wad of cash from his pocket and throws a fifty on the flagstones at Sonny's feet.

“You want me to frame it?” Sonny keeps on. “Don't you . . . ? Wouldn't you . . . ?
Please!”

The couple is helped away finally. And along with them goes the crowd. “Way to go, LaMott,” mutters the painter next to Sonny. “You scared them all away.”

Out in the street the buses cough and roar, their front and rear doors cocked open. And from the fence come the calls of other artists:

“Thanks a lot, Sonny!”

“Three cheers for you!”

“Nice work, buddy boy!”

Even Roberts the caricaturist offers a few rough words, Roberts who is never rough on anyone. It is almost enough to make Sonny wish he were still mixing cocktails at the Bayou Bar in the Pontchartrain Hotel. At least then no one complained when he botched a drink, using Beefeater's instead of Tanqueray, green instead of red cherries.

“Sorry,” Sonny calls to his compatriots on the mall, only to hear them shout him down again in response.

The buses with the visiting Japanese storm away, and Sonny wishes he'd brought a blanket along. His cart, painted fire-engine red, displays his name in big block letters: SONNY LAMOTT: WORLD-RENOWNED FRENCH QUARTER ARTIST. With a blanket he could cover the cart. Or cover his head.

Roberts shambles over and points a finger. “Stop hanging your lip.”

“Sorry, old man,” Sonny says.

“It's a little late for sorry. And don't call me old.”

Roberts stands barely five feet tall but he carries himself with the swagger of an NBA basketball star. Though born and raised in the Mississippi Delta, the son of a black sharecropper, he speaks with an accent more Continental than American, and he's rarely seen without a crisply starched white dress shirt and conservative necktie—the clothes, he once told Sonny, “of a professional at the office.” No artist gives Roberts any grief because his tenure at the fence dates back forty years and nearly doubles the next most senior in line, and because Roberts holds a status in the French Quarter equal to few but the truly legendary. There's entertainer Chris Owens. There's trumpeter Al Hirt. There's Banjo Annie and Ruthie the Duck Girl. And then there's Roberts, who now is wagging a finger in Sonny's face.

“Listen to me, LaMott. LaMott, are you listening to me?”

Sonny nods.

“People come to this fence and hand themselves to you. They give you a face to paint, but in actual fact they're asking you a question. ‘Am I worth it?' they ask every time they sit down in your chair.
‘Am I worth it?'
And you sit or stand there, boy, with your blank paper and tray of Cray-Pas chubbies and try to find that which makes them most themselves, too often having to correct a bent nose, a chin rolling with flesh, teeth all gone to ruin. Yours is a great responsibility. Do you understand what I'm saying?”

“I won't let it happen again,” Sonny says.

“Am I worth it?” Roberts repeats, nearly shouting. “Am I worth it?”

Things quiet down and Sonny returns to work. Tired of portraits, he doesn't bother to try to recruit another tourist to paint. Instead he turns to his sketchbook and traces pastel sticks over a blank sheet of paper, and as if by magic an image appears. It's the Beauvais, a picture he's made so many times before that he doesn't need reference photos. Sonny shows the columns and the rows of green-shuttered windows and the upper and lower galleries crowded with wicker furniture. He shows the iron fence with the gate open, and above it the legend BEAUVAIS in a rusty crescent barely visible past clumps of morning glory.

Sweat trickles down his face and dampens his shirt and he feels the rush that comes with being lost in the work and unfettered to the world around him. “Keep her out of it,” he says to himself. “She doesn't have to be there. Just the house, for once. Come on, goddammit . . .”

It wasn't until May 1971, months into his love affair with Juliet, that Sonny saw the house for the first time as the artist he dreamed of becoming. Parked by the curb in his father's pickup, he studied the mansion past the fence and crape myrtles and wondered at the fortune of one born to a destiny that included a home such as the Beauvais. A thin sliver of moon hung up past the slate rooftop, and he saw it as a yellow blip against the heavy impasto of a cobalt sky. The stars burned like Van Gogh's, each a pinwheel. He saw the wind in the movement of the chimes dangling from the eaves of the rear carriage house and the leaves skittering in waves across the lawn. “The birdbath in the lilacs,” Sonny said out loud, providing details to the image as he would reproduce it. “Plantation chairs as pale as ghosts. Shutters shut on every window but yours.”

Short of living there himself, Sonny would paint the mansion and that way make it his own.

Juliet appeared finally on the upper gallery and began her descent using drainpipes and a trellis bound with bougainvillea. She moved fluidly and quickly, and despite the height seemed sure of herself.

In the light from the street Sonny could see the white of her buttocks, the dark fist between her legs. Her summer dress hung up on the vines, fifteen feet up.

“The garden path,” he said out loud, providing even more details for his painting. “The magnolias and the privet pink against the lanterns by the door.”

She made a last short jump to the lawn and ran to meet him. He heard the gate creak open then clank closed and that would do it, watch if Miss Marcelle didn't come out now.

As she crossed in front of the pickup Sonny pulled the knob for the headlamps, throwing light. This was his favorite part, Juliet did it every time: yanked her skirt up and flashed him. But tonight she failed to include the gesture. Eyes cast down, she entered the truck without a word.

“Julie? Julie, what's wrong, baby? Are you okay?”

They brought their mouths together and he felt the dampness on her face and the back of her neck. “Oh, Sonny,” she said, then lunged at him and forced her body close to his.

Only now did Sonny register the swelling around her eyes and her mouth cracked and raw.

“What's wrong? Darling, what's wrong?”

“Nothing. Can we just go?”

“Sit by me,” he said. “Come sit by me. Tell me what's wrong.”

She shook her head and began to cry and he asked her again to talk to him. “I can't take their fighting anymore,” she said. “I can't. She calls him names. Queer and pervert and ninny and reprobate—think of the ugliest things imaginable and she says them. She called one of his friends on the telephone and shouted at him and told him to leave Daddy alone.”

“His friend?”

“Yes. And this is a married man from one of the finest old families in town.”

Sonny started the engine and pulled into the street. As they were crossing the intersection at North Rampart Juliet said, “What she doesn't tell him, Sonny. What she doesn't say.”

They drove on in silence. By the time they reached their place by the river Juliet had settled down and become quiet. She reached for his hand and brought it to her mouth. “Sometimes I think I'd go crazy if you weren't here to help me.”

“I'll always be here, Julie. Always.”

“I know,” she said, tears bright in her eyes.

Hours later when they returned to Esplanade Sonny sat parked at the curb watching as she moved under the trees along the path to the house. It was both the loveliest and the loneliest image he'd ever seen and he felt an overwhelming desire to paint it so that others might see what he saw, the beauty and the sadness. He would place her there in the moonlit garden beneath the Van Gogh stars. Upstairs lace curtains fled her open window and flapped one next to the other like flags of surrender, and he would show this and the viewer would feel the wind and find it repeated in the chimes and the leaves and her summer dress. From the avenue came horns bleating and the calliope of a passing ice cream truck and Sonny felt an ache of regret that seemed to intensify the moment she turned and sent him off with a wave.

Sonny finishes the painting and signs his name in the lower left corner. He uses a black Othello pencil and includes looping flourishes to show his satisfaction. Lastly he adds the date to inform future generations exactly when the work came into being. He sprays the picture with a fixative and fits it in a gilded, prefab frame and hangs it on the fence with all the others.

Sonny sits in his chair and watches his compatriots at the fence, each absorbed in his work. Half an hour goes by and he wonders at his weakness and his inability to forget what obviously meant nothing to her. “You shouldn't have put the girl in the picture,” he says out loud.

Certain now that no one is looking, he takes an oil stick and blots out both his name and the date, leaving in their place a black rectangle the size of a postcard.

She doesn't recognize the waiter who shows her to a table by the window. He's gimp-legged and she doesn't know any gimps. He hands her a menu and stands waiting to take her order. The place is empty and she can't figure why he'd want to rush her.

“I'm not hungry,” she says. “How about a beer?”

“You still like ponies, Juliet? Those little baby Pearls used to be so popular?”

She drops back in her chair and examines him more closely, and his name flashes in her head at the same moment it comes to her lips: “Louis.”