Five Night Stand: A Novel (2 page)

Oliver’s apartment is on the ground floor of an old crumbling row house on West 115th just off Malcolm X Boulevard in south Harlem. The area had been full of good musicians at one time—Fletcher Henderson, Eubie Blake, even W. C. Handy.

He stops at the bottom of the stoop and takes in the buildings on either side before he heads inside his own. The state of Oliver’s home stands out in contrast to those surrounding him as younger folk move in with their ideas of coffee shops and sushi restaurants, Asian-infused soul food—whatever that is. Oliver knows the gentrification will take his place over soon as he’s packed up his suitcase and is gone. Won’t be long before it takes the whole of the second and third floors as well.
Coming along nicely,
he thinks, climbing the steps.
Won’t be long before this whole block looks as pretty as the first time Francesca laid eyes on it.

Once inside, he removes his hat and hangs it on the wall with the others. He loosens his tie and drops onto the sofa, then puts his feet up on the ottoman and takes a cigarette from a box on the end table. Before striking a match, he picks up a framed picture from the same table and looks at it.

It’s been almost twenty years since Francesca passed. He looks at the beauty in the picture, the olive skin that had seemed so pale in contrast to his midnight blackness, the thin red lips, green eyes, and jet-black hair.

He had met her at her father’s club in Sacramento when he was a young man on tour with Bechet. Her father was an Italian immigrant who’d farmed the land, selling his produce to markets before scrounging enough money to buy his own market. From there he’d bought a nightclub at the urging of his wife, an artist and native Californian who’d become enamored with the bands and musicians passing through town from Southern California, San Francisco, and points east. The last thing her father wanted was for any daughter of his to marry one of those musicians, so Oliver hustled her back to New York and married her right onstage in a little Harlem club long since gone.

The memory of Harlem as it was, as he and Francesca were, briefly lifts him up before the twinge of regret pinches and pops that balloon, deflating him once again. “I wasn’t perfect,” he says to the photo, “not even close. Not like you, Francesca. My sweet Chesca.”

He sees their daughter’s face in his wife’s and thinks then of who else was missing from the night’s audience. He thinks of his daughter and sons, missing them and hurt by their absence, though he knows he has no right to be; he’s made his bed. He puts it all aside, not because he doesn’t want to think of his children but because he is a superstitious old fool, and conjuring up reasons for them not to come to any of his final shows might jinx the next four nights and make it so. He still has hope they’ll come. In all his life, it was the music and that honest-to-God hope that he’s counted on.

He smiles and touches his fingertips, still raw from playing all night, to the glass. “Good night, Francesca.”

2.

The club is packed, and she could see each patron’s face from where she sits if she wanted to, but she’s there for him and can’t take her eyes away. In order to see him, to be able to watch his hands, she’s pulled her chair away from that shitty little table—sticky on top from whatever service it had been in before being dragged from a utility closet for her—and leans far to the right until she nearly tips over the wobbly cane-back chair.

Agnes feels she has been put in her place, both physically and metaphorically, with this table. A moment of apprehension washes over her; she worries that the attitude of the hostess might be the rule in Manhattan. Ultimately, she won’t let herself care, but it still makes her feel better when the elderly woman at the next table leans in to say, “Don’t let her get you down.”

“What’s that?” Agnes says, her eyes fixed on the piano.

“Marcie. The hostess.”

At this, Agnes turns to find where the hostess is. She can see Marcie across the room ignoring another patron who tries to get her attention.

“We’re not all like that,” the woman continues, holding up her own glass for a toast. She is elegant looking with steel-gray hair and diamond earrings that lie against her neck.

“Who?”

“New Yorkers. You’re not from here, are you?”

“It shows?”

The woman merely smiles, still holding her glass up, tipping it just a bit to hurry the toast along, and Agnes finally takes the hint, clinking her highball glass. “To Oliver Pleasant,” the woman says. “Good music to blot out a condescending bitch.”

Agnes grins at her new friend—she’s always felt more comfortable with people older than her peers—and then turns back to Oliver, watching intently, her own hand absently mimicking his across the table. She watches his frame on the bench like an Easter Island monolith and the way his shoulders dance, his body swaying with the melody. She picks it all up at once, the sight, the sound, the beat of his heart and of those around her. Her new friend at the next table sways as well.

“You play?” Agnes asks.

She shakes her head, still watching Oliver. “No. Well, for about a minute when I was a child. My mother made me take lessons. I hated it. Now, of course, I wish I’d kept up with it. You?”

“I do—my daddy taught me, and old Ms. Gaerig. My daddy always told me, ‘Agnes, if you want to do anything well, you got to practice.’ And I did, too. Practiced my ass off.”

“I’m sure you’re very good.”

Agnes shrugs.

“Do you play concerts? In clubs like this?”

“Oh, no ma’am.” Agnes laughs and gulps from her glass. “I play in small places back home in New Orleans, but nothing like this”—she looks around the room—“no, this is nice. It’s almost like a church in here.”

She’s come to the basement bar of the Capasso Hotel in Midtown Manhattan as though it is a speakeasy and she a skid-row drunk. It’s her first time in New York and she brings along only scenes from movies with their syncopated and scattered dialogue as reference, and a fervent love and respect for the music.

The club is well-appointed and elegant, sconces in all the right places to highlight only what needs to be lit—white tablecloths, sepia walls, mahogany bar, and the bandstand—while all the rest is thrown into darkness and shadow. The patterned carpet is soft and she’d sunk into it with each footfall as she was led to her table. Couples sit in booths of oxblood leather, intimate and alone in the crowd, and sink just as comfortably into the darkness.

If she were to admit it, Agnes would say she had expected a bolted door in a dark and grimy alley to greet her; a password spoken through a slot would have opened that heavy door so she could descend a staircase into a world that smelled of cigar smoke and whiskey. There is a staircase in this club, but little else from her black-and-white, James Cagney imagination.

Agnes feels as though she’s made her entrance into a film and the sound track ties the scene together. She’s come to New York for other reasons entirely, but discovered Oliver Pleasant was playing and needed to be here with him, to be near him the way the devout flock to the Vatican if only to breathe the same air as their pope. As she settles in with her drink and the music, she becomes more at ease and thinks that this is where she belongs, that all of her father’s talk of jazz and the holy land of a New York City club has led her to this night, to this room as beautiful to her as any saint’s grotto.

If she closes her eyes and allows herself to melt into the air, the room, the very music itself, she will find it isn’t the twenty-first century any longer but the simpler, newly awakened days of the early 1900s. She’s never been drawn to celebrity, but rather to nostalgia’s sleight of hand and its ability to cast a shadow across any situation. As her life changes now from day to day, as the mechanisms within her deteriorate and short out (terms her father would be comfortable with and know how to fix), she finds her thoughts receding to childhood and those nights beside her father, or dancing with her mother across their kitchen linoleum, where the music found them. She’s unapologetic for such feelings of nostalgia and, at times, it seems to her that she’s numb to the world and that these are the only feelings of which she’s capable.

She’s never traveled quite so much as she has today to reach the past; the time spent in airports and waiting on tarmacs has left her feeling just as numb on the outside as she does within. Her flight from New Orleans this morning had first stopped in Houston, then taken her through Detroit, where she’d wandered the airport on a three-hour layover, pulling her black bag on wheels behind her like a nylon terrier and poking around souvenir shops. She sat in a Chili’s and ate french fries while reading the
New Yorker
, and that’s when she saw that Oliver Pleasant would be playing at the Capasso Hotel while she’s in town.

These are to be the final live appearances of his career. It will be a five-night stand.

It is something he doesn’t see here too often—a young woman, alone, so obviously enjoying the jazz and drinking top-shelf, single-malt scotch. He doesn’t see much of her kind and he’s certainly never seen her here in his ten months of waiting tables at the club. But then, they do get a lot of tourists, people coming from all over the country, the world, to hear New York–style jazz, swallowing it up like it’s a slice of pizza.

She looks pretty if not frail. He is first drawn in by her eyes, large and brown, but it’s the graceful lines of her long neck that intrigue him. She reminds him of Audrey Hepburn. He thinks maybe he’s seen her someplace else, maybe in the park where he likes to rollerblade on Sundays, though she looks as though she hasn’t been outside in a decade of summers; her skin is smooth and clear and nearly as white as the tablecloths.

She sits, staring at the bandstand and steadily swirling her drink, marrying the scotch and splash. She doesn’t seem to notice him—he is just her waiter—yet he goes back again and again just for her eyes. But no matter how often he goes back to her table, that table that hadn’t even existed in his station until that bitch Marcie had a busboy drag it from a closet, he gets no reaction from Agnes. And he likes to be noticed. He usually is, too, with his thick brown hair and natural blond highlights that the women he dates covet, his high forehead and stony cheekbones. He takes the audience’s attention from the act onstage as he moves around the room, making drink orders, pulling out chairs for women or offering lights for their cigarettes. Most of the staff are women—girls, really—whose erupting cleavage and short skirts distract the men, leaving their bored wives and dates to watch him instead of the musicians.

He stands at the service bar and waits on another scotch for his mystery table. He leans over to pour a shot of vodka into a coffee cup, drinking it down without taking his eyes off of Agnes. She grows on him, mainly for her refusal to allow him to grow on her. The vodka burns and makes his head swim momentarily with a new challenge.

“Your scotch.”

“Thanks.” She doesn’t look away from the stage, and cranes her neck as though trying to see the keys themselves.

“From out of town?”

She nods.

“Where?”

She breathes an exaggerated sigh and looks up at him full on for the first time. “Hmm?”

He falls into those eyes. “Um, I was just wondering where you’re from?”

“Memphis.” She considers this boy, different from any of the boys she knew growing up. The boys back home have dirt under their nails and on their sunburned necks. They wear ball caps and apologize for spitting dip in front of her. This boy is fine; he’s fine like a girl with magazine hair, nose thin like a cuttlebone and a fat, silver ring on his thumb.

“Tennessee?” It’s all he can think to say, lost for the moment in those eyes.

“That’s the one.”

“Is there another?”

“You tell me.” She is put off by the distraction, yet can’t help but wonder what a man like that might offer her, what he might be like in bed. She knows the feel of the hands of a farmworker or mechanic, all rough and gritty with the faint smell of motor oil and Budweiser. She even knows how a musician moves in bed and over her body like a fret board. But what about this boy? He smells vaguely of cologne and has probably never known a day’s hard labor with hands as smooth as her ass, she imagines. Still, she considers him, conjures up images of them together. But he has a ring on his thumb and she just can’t see her way past that.

After the final number finishes in a crash of the cymbal and Oliver takes numerous ovations, Agnes leaves the club floor with her head swimming in the music and scotch. She hasn’t spoken with Oliver Pleasant, though she wants to. She might have talked to him when he passed her on his way to the backstage door; he’d had to brush against her as the rest of the band had, sitting in the doorway the way she was. She’d steeled herself for it all night, thinking of what to say, plying her confidence with more and more alcohol. She wanted to say hello, tell him what the show had meant to her and maybe mention that she plays, too, taught by her daddy who’d shown her how to play Oliver’s songs with the love and tenderness they deserve. Or maybe she’d just reach out and touch his hand. Those massive, poetic hands, she thought, might even have some healing in them.

But she didn’t get that chance. He’d left the stage by the front, and not the side where she sat, and was swallowed by the crowd. She considers stopping at the table where he finally ends his journey, if only to say thank you for such a fine performance. As she approaches on her way out, though, that hostess leans over the table to whisper something to him. Her cleavage spills out all over the white tablecloth and her skirt rides up enough so Agnes can see the garters of her thigh-high stockings. Agnes keeps walking.

As she collects her coat and sole piece of luggage from the coatroom, the waiter catches up with her. He wipes his hands on a bar towel. “Hey, I didn’t see you leave. Have a good time?”

“Yep, the music was perfect.”

“Where are you going now?”

“Manhattan. Is it far?”

He looks confused for a second, cocking his head to the side. “Up the stairs and through that door. Where are you staying?”

“The Algonquin, if they haven’t given my room away.”

“Can I get you a cab?”

“I’ll walk.”

“Hey, um, do you want to get a drink? I just need to finish up, probably another half hour. You could wait in the bar or I could come by your hotel.”

“I just had some drinks, lots of them. You should know—you charged me for every one. Besides, I don’t even know your name.”

“Oh. Andrew. Andrew Sexton.”

“Oh my, it’s right there in your name, isn’t it?” she says, affecting her best, and most insincere, Blanche DuBois charms. “I’m Agnes Cassady from Memphis, Tennessee, by way of New Orleans, Louisiana.” They shake hands, and she considers him again. Andrew, with the face of a statue and inflated confidence and expectations to match. It’s her first night in New York—does she want to be alone? She thinks of the music that still fills her head, and Oliver’s radiant face as he moved back and forth with his playing. She isn’t alone at all, she realizes. This night is all she wants to take to bed with her. “No, thanks. I’ve been moving all day. You take care, Sexton.” She touches his hand, right there at the silver ring on his thumb.