My Juliet (32 page)

She doesn't have health insurance, so they take her to Charity Hospital. The EMS unit travels with interior lights on, one man at the wheel, a second in the rear with Juliet. She hears the siren only faintly but its effects are obvious as cars pull over to let them pass and pedestrians rubberneck with faces creased and dark.

Juliet sits up on her elbows and watches through the windows as an old bomb station wagon jumps the curb and barely avoids a group of onlookers. “Idiot,” she says. “Did you see that?”

The attendant smiles.

“I bet you see some wild shit.” She glances back at the man. He's sitting on a metal stool at the foot of the bed. “I knew this paramedic in LA,” she says. “One time him and his partner get this call. It's a guy with a Barbie doll stuck up his behind. My friend showed me the X rays.”

The attendant is quiet. He doesn't seem impressed.

“You ever see anything like that?”

The man looks at the front of the vehicle, as if to make sure the driver isn't listening. “Only thing, we had this woman once with a lightbulb broke off in her vulva.”

“Her vulva? What do you mean, her vulva?”

“Deep inside her private areas, miss.”

“Okay. All right. I gotcha. I thought for a second there you'd said her Volvo.”

The man looks up front again. “She bled a lot,” he says. “Apparently she and her boyfriend were high on crystal meth and he wanted to see if you could see the light shining through her belly.”

They drive on awhile, Juliet imagining it. The world is full of crazies. And Barbie dolls and lightbulbs are just the beginning. “Well, could they?” she says, unable to wait for the punch line any longer. “Could they see that light shining from inside her volvo?”

“I couldn't answer, miss. By the time we arrived on the scene it'd already gone out.”

They wheel her into the emergency room, the gurney fixed so that she can lounge in a sitting position. A cop shows up and listens without saying anything as somebody who must be a doctor looks her over, asks questions, barely responds when she answers. He flashes a small light in her eyes. He reaches under her clothes with a stethoscope and places a cold, flat piece of metal against her back and chest. His hands, covered with rubber gloves, explore her chest and rib cage, and pinch her skin as he examines her mouth and teeth. They grab at her hair when he feels for the contusion on top of her skull.

“I'm at the auction barn,” Juliet says. “I'm a heifer.”

The doctor, touching and probing, doesn't seem to hear.

She gives him a loud moo, and even this fails to get his attention.

“So he just hit you?” the cop says. “Just came out of nowhere and hit you?”

“Hit me with a pipe.”

“You think you could ID this person?”

“His shoes maybe. They looked worn at the heels. He must be on his feet a lot.”

The cop looks at her and says, “You sure it was a pipe? Must not've been a very hard pipe. A hard pipe would've cracked you open like a watermelon.”

“I think it was plastic like the kind plumbers use. It broke and I got sand all over me.” She pulls at the ends of her hair. “See this? This is sand. I guess it's sand.”

The cop leaves and the doctor removes his gloves. “You're a lucky young woman,” he says. “I can find nothing broken. This bump here on your skull, a few cuts where you appear to have bitten yourself, but the bleeding has stopped. Cosmetically there's no evidence of trauma. No bruises or lacerations.” He shakes his head and bunches his lips into the shape of a snail. “Still couldn't have been a pleasant experience. Are you in any pain?”

“I'm in a lot of pain,” she says, “but to be right honest I've been hurt worse.” Juliet knows she should leave it at that, but the cop has left the room and something compels her to give voice to the picture that occupies her head. “In 1971, when I was a recent honors graduate of the Academy of the Sacred Heart and mere months away from being crowned a debutante queen, I underwent an illegal abortion in an office building downtown. Now
that
hurt.”

The doctor removes an instrument from her ear.

“This happened not long after my father drowned in Lake Pontchartrain in a, quote unquote, sailing accident. Long story short, my boyfriend took me to an abortionist who fixed me so that I could never have children again.”

The doctor puts his instrument away. “Are you kidding me?”

Juliet gives her head a shake. “The abortionist, I learned later, was a former Tulane medical student who apparently liked raiding hospital pharmacies more than he did sawing the bones of cadavers. The school gave him the boot for this. Want to know who my boyfriend was?”

“Miss Beauvais?”

“You're a doctor, so let me ask. What do you think hurts more? Having a dirty speculum and a dirty curette rooting around in your volvo and spreading all variety of infection or sticking a Barbie doll up your rectum?”

The doctor seems to have completed the examination. He refits his eyeglasses on his face and touches his mouth with the sleeve of his lab coat. Another gurney rolls by, and he spends a long time watching after it. “Are you allergic to anything, Miss Beauvais? Any kind of medication?”

“No.”

“Percodan?”

“Nope. Me and Percodan are like this.” She shows two fingers entwined.

The doctor excuses himself and leaves the room. When he returns he's holding in one hand a soufflé cup half-filled with water and in the other two pale green tablets. “You have anyone to drive you home, Miss Beauvais?”

“No,” extracting the pills from his palm. “An ambulance brought me here.”

“I can arrange for a cab to drive you.”

“I'll just catch one out in the street.” As she swallows the medicine, he watches from behind the flat, opaque reflection on his glasses, watches as if trying to decide where they've met before. You look familiar, he wants to say. How do I know you?

“Ever get a girl pregnant, Doctor?”

“Well, yes. Yes, I have, as a matter of fact.” He adds, after a pause, “I'm married to her. My wife and I have three children.”

Juliet squeezes the cup flat and hands it back to him. “Up until I was sterilized, and even for a long while after, I dreamed about having children myself. I'm from a famous family—as a matter of fact, I'm the last of them. I'm sure you've heard of the Beauvais Mansion on Esplanade?”

The doctor's hand comes up and touches his mouth again. He looks around to make sure no one is listening. “Miss Beauvais,” he says in a dry, conspiratorial tone, “would you like for me to arrange for a private consultation with someone here?”

“You're a doctor,” she says.

“I'm an emergency room physician. I'm talking about a specialist.”

“You've helped plenty.” She slides off the gurney and spends a moment straightening her clothes. “Thank you for listening, Doctor.”

“You're welcome,” the doctor says in a frail whisper that suggests exhaustion. “I have patients now.” But a minute goes by before he turns and walks away.

Toward dusk the jangling telephone shakes Sonny awake and brings him charging off the little sofa by the window. He bumps against a lamp and nearly knocks it to the floor, then he bangs his shin trying to hurdle the coffee table. A pain bright and screaming drops him to his knees, but closer to the source of the miserable noise.

“Wait,” he mutters.

He stops the ringing and holds the mouthpiece to his chin. He grunts a rough greeting.

“Hi, sugar. It's Anna Huey.”

“Mrs. Huey,” he says with only a dim understanding.

“Sonny, they'll be reading the will day after tomorrow. Miss Marcelle's will?”

Where he hit the table his leg beats in time with his heart. “Okay.”

“Sonny? Sonny, are you all right? You don't sound well.”

“Yes, Mrs. Huey?”

“I'm sorry to wake you, sugar. But it's my duty and responsibility to call. They're reading the will, Miss Marcelle's will? You know Nathan Harvey?”

“Nathan Harvey? No. Who is Nathan Harvey?”

“Nathan Harvey is a lawyer on Poydras Street, Sonny, in that Shell Building. You know the Shell Building where they have all those offices?”

“Are you talking about One Shell Square, Mrs. Huey?”

“Right. He's the one handling madam's estate. You should be there, at his office, at three
P
.
M
. this coming Friday. You don't have to, it's not the law or anything, but you should be.”

Sonny looks around for a clock. “Why me?” he says.

“Miss Marcelle put you in her will, sugar. Mr. Harvey . . . well, they call it bequeathing. Something like that. You know what they call me?”

Sonny waits.

“Executrix. Isn't that a word?” She gives an embarrassed laugh. “I like it.”

Almost three hours. Past the open door to the kitchen Sonny sees the digital clock on the face of the microwave oven. He slept that long. It's past seven o'clock suddenly.

“Mrs. Huey,” Sonny says, his head thick and cottony. “Mrs. Huey, those two detectives . . . ? They took my fingerprints and now they're saying I have to stand in a lineup.”

She lets several seconds pass before speaking. “If you didn't do it, then you have nothing to worry about. That's how it works, right?”

The remark, though spoken plainly, isn't quite the vote of confidence Sonny was hoping to hear. “I guess so,” he says.

“Listen, sugar, if it makes you feel any better they haven't been so nice to me, either. Had me answer their questions and do the lie detector and write on some paper. Had me give my fingerprints. Don't feel bad, Sonny, you ain't the only one.”

“I wish I'd never gone that night for Juliet's check. None of this would've happened.”

Another long pause. Too long. “How do you mean, sugar?”

“I don't know. I guess I don't know what I mean.”

“Friday at three,” she says. “Nathan Harvey's on Poydras.”

Sonny hangs up and lies in the heat and the dark watching occasional pieces of light float across the ceiling.
“If you didn't do it, then you have nothing to worry about.”
Weren't those Louis's words as well? Sonny wishes he shared such a pure and noble faith, but the picture of what awaits him isn't any good: prison and death row, a tomb nobody visits, an eternity of regret.

A breeze, smelling of river sludge, stirs the curtains and riffles the pages of his father's fishing magazines. When the next horn blows you will get up, he tells himself. But several horns blow and Sonny remains unmoving on the floor.

He seems to sleep again but after a time he understands that it isn't sleep at all but a sort of paralysis. His nervous system has shut down. His brain . . .

The next horn, he tells himself.

The microwave tells him it is eight, then nine, then ten o'clock. At ten-thirty Curly and Florence Bonaventure entertain him with a festive argument that culminates in a noisy fuck. Curly's groans, never louder, are like those of a dog at its bowl. For her part Florence alternates shouts of pleasure with ones of pain, her constant nattering laced with obscenities that Curly answers with epithets of his own. Against the common wall they share with Sonny their headboard beats a rhythmic tattoo. In the background Sonny hears a second set of voices, and these are muffled somewhat but no less agitated. Have the Bonaventures brought in another couple? Music plays, if the noise produced by an electronic synthesizer and canned drums qualifies as music.

Sonny understands finally that his neighbors are screwing to porn.

“I'm innocent,” he yells at the top of his lungs. “It wasn't me! I didn't do it!”

A silence follows, then the couple, louder than before, goes at it again.

Sonny comes to his feet. Aiming to shut them out he turns on his boom box and raises the volume way past his personal comfort level. It's the tape that he and Juliet listened to the night she stayed over. A saxophone explores a haunting melody to a live audience that erupts in warm applause at song's end.

On a hunch Sonny stops the recorder and removes the tape, which isn't labeled. He and Juliet listened to the “B” side only, and now Sonny flips the tape over to the “A” side, rewinds it to the beginning, and punches the Play button.

An announcer is introducing the group.
“Messieurs et mademoiselles,”
he says, then ticks off names to a riot of shouts and whistles.

“And on alto sax,” the man announces at last, providing the name that draws the loudest cheers of all.