Five Night Stand: A Novel (26 page)

There were other similar instances. Similar in the sense that she was only expected to lie there naked while Landon touched her. He still didn’t penetrate her or undress himself, but he did request that she go to a particular bedroom, undress, and wait for him. And other times there was someone else there as well, different women or young men—eighteen- or nineteen-year-olds—and they, too, would lie naked beside Agnes. Landon would touch them in the same chaste, inquisitive way. He seemed to look at the bodies as though they were art, and indeed they were in their own ways, the boys hairless and smooth and the girls like Agnes herself, with a lack of curves and her angular hip bones and shoulder blades—androgynous. They must have appeared delicate side by side, like fine china or most lifelike sculptures. Several times Landon took photos with an old Polaroid camera; Agnes never asked what became of those photos.

Agnes isn’t sure Landon Throckmorton is capable of feeling guilt, living as he does on the edges of society, within a world he’s created for himself and peopled with those who look the other way from his eccentricities. But she feels they have a connection and that this connection is why he arranged for her to go home and escorted her there. And she feels he took advantage of that by touching her body, yet she feels some culpability, as though perhaps she crossed a line by accepting what he would offer for those nights of lying still while he became familiar with her. She shrugged it off. It is whatever it is and all part of the experience of being Agnes Cassady for as long as that being exists.

She turned from the windows and lay back down beside Andrew, closing her eyes and drifting to sleep.

“You talk to your wife?”

“Yeah, yesterday, that’s why I was late to your show. I wanted to talk to you, too, beforehand, but time got away from me trying to rush back.”

Frank and Oliver are back at the diner. It’s the morning of his last show and Oliver assumed he’d be eating alone after sending Pablo upstairs to listen to records. Frank has shown up, though, and Oliver is grateful for the company.

“Rush back? Where’d you go to call her?”

“I was in Brooklyn. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, but your show had already started and then with the excitement of Agnes playing and Cedric’s show, I just never did get around to it.”

“Brooklyn? What you doin there?”

“I went to see Charlene.”

“My Charlene?” He stops salting his food, the shaker held in midair. “What for?”

“I wanted to ask her a few questions for the story, and to get to know someone you’re close to.”

“Guess you found out how close we are.” He puts the shaker on the table and slides it, crashing it into a bottle of ketchup and mustard. “Talkin to me is one damn thing; I don’t know how I feel about you snoopin around, though.”

“Oliver, I wasn’t snooping.” Frank pushes the food on his plate around with a fork. “I just went to talk to her.”

“What she tell you?”

Frank gets uncomfortable and is growing testy; he looks around for the waitress. “Where is she? This coffee is cold already.”

“Answer me, boy. What Charlene have to say about her daddy? You so goddamn anxious to tell a story, tell me a story.”

“You probably know, don’t you?”

“Why don’t you go on and tell me anyway?” Oliver says. Then, more to himself, “Can’t believe you just run off and talk to my Charlene. Not even bother to come to me with it first.”

Frank sighs and loses more of his patience. He’s spent the past few days in a disorienting haze away from Memphis and his home, and Karen. Hell, if he is honest with himself, he’s been in this haze since leaving work and without the comfortable, familiar grid pattern of the newsroom with its familiar voices and focus on tasks to right him. And now he’s taking it out on Oliver. He wants to stop, but he can’t help himself; the anger feels good, the vitriol is cathartic. “She talked about your time away, how lonely Francesca was, and how much your kids missed you. But that’s not news to you, is it? What would you expect, that you’d win father of the year?”

“I don’t expect nothin but maybe just a little respect for a old man who spent so much of his time and gave so much of his life to music.”

“Respect? From Charlene? Come on, Ollie, it was all for shits and fucking giggles. It’s only music.” He knows it’s wrong even as it leaves his spittle-covered lips—Charlene wouldn’t even agree with such a statement. Frank has a lifetime of uncertainty built up within him—with his writing and his marriage, and the family they’ve tried to start, now with unemployment—and he knows that music has given Oliver the only certainty the old man has ever known. And now Frank, petty and envious, is trying to take that from him.

Oliver begins to drink his coffee but stops and sets the mug down on the table harder than he means, the saucer beneath it clattering. “Only music? What you say? Who told you that, ‘only music’? Charlene say that? Let me tell you about ‘only music,’ son. Let me tell you about ridin that bus from New York to Chicago down through Missouri and Tennessee and Ken-
tucky
in the middle of a summer tryin to get to New Orleans, the one safe place we know of in the South, but then our goddamn bus driver gettin lost in Alabama. Nineteen fifty. You know what it is for a bunch a sweaty Negroes to get lost in the backwater of Alabama in 1950?” He’s staring into Frank’s eyes now, and Frank thinks he sees a hint of an Oliver Pleasant in his twenties all full of hellfire and yearning.

Frank feels small and tries to look away, but he can’t.

“No, ’course you don’t. And you know what for? For to take that music to the people. The one goddamn thing them people had, the one thing they could call their own. They couldn’t get their fingers into it, no, but then again, neither could the white man. So they held on to that music, that ‘only music.’ And no, I know Charlene didn’t say nothin about ‘only music,’ neither. You know how I know? I know ’cause Charlene remembers what it’s like to be told you can’t eat here and you can’t piss there. She knows what it means to be second class and she knows that what we was doin was takin a first-class music to them people as just a taste of somethin they didn’t think they could have. Just like at my Hillbillie’s on them nights. It’s a taste of freedom. Even my children know what that taste like. You know what it means to have your children get a taste for that so late in life, Frank? Hmm? Frank, you know about children, or you just think you know about
my
children?
My
life? What you know about it all? About bein a father and havin to travel from place to place to support a family. You think that shit’s easy? You think it’s all one big party?”

Frank finds it difficult to swallow. He finds it even more difficult to speak, but manages to choke out a sentence. “No, Oliver, I wouldn’t know anything about it. We can’t have kids.” It’s the first time he’s phrased it in such a way to Oliver. He gulps down his cold coffee and feels it churn in his gut. “But I’ll tell you this, if I did have any, I’d be with them right now.”

“Instead of up here in New York? Your wife up here with you, Frank?”

Frank slices into his eggs, but he only manages to move them around even more without taking a bite, his appetite having suddenly vanished. The days have been stressful away from Karen and not knowing where they stand or where she’s slept, and what his future holds.

“She told me about Hamlet, too.” He’s not sure why he says it, but, again, he can’t help himself. “That sounded like a real party, Oliver, a fine time. Why was Marie Broussard with Hamlet that night and not you? Why was she even here and not in Paris where you kept her? Marie Broussard part of your freedom ride, Ollie?”

The waitress comes by with coffee, but she turns before reaching their booth to avoid the storm blowing there.

“Hamlet, huh? You ask her about that? Got all up in my business, didn’t you, boy? The hell gives you the right to go askin my family questions about me? Who the fuck you think you are comin from down south to put your nose where it don’t belong? What the hell you think you’d get?” Oliver’s appetite is undiminished and he pushes a forkful of pancakes into his mouth.

“You know what I got from Charlene, Ollie? What a selfish prick you could be. When I asked her why she wouldn’t help you out, why she was sending you a thousand miles away to live, she talked about hurt and grown-up anger, but she should have just said, ‘Because my daddy is a selfish prick.’ Would have made my day a lot shorter.”

They both sit and stew in their anger and this surprise argument. Neither leaves, both too stubborn, but Frank hasn’t finished. “I can’t believe I felt sorry for you, all alone and broke and giving up your life, forced to move away.”

“I don’t need your pity. I don’t need you to feel sorry for me. I been around a long time, son. I seen shit you only read about in history books, if you even paid attention to any of it. Livin this long is work and I sinned a lot, but maybe my greatest sin is pride, and my pride don’t need you goin around to my kin to ask for help on my account.” He stabs his index finger in the air at Frank. “You dig? My business, not yours.”

“Got it.”

“Good. Now go on.”

Frank reaches for his wallet. “I’m paying for this.”

“I don’t need you to pay for shit, just go.”

Frank gets up to leave and takes his time to wrap a scarf around his neck but fumbles with it, looking down at Oliver. He’s angry and reluctant to leave it this way. He waits a beat, then two, but Oliver won’t even look at him, so he turns to go. At the door, though, he turns to come back and stops halfway. By now, the other customers in the diner are paying attention to the scene.

“One more thing. I came up here to see you, just to see you. Agnes came to see you, and a club full of strangers have paid to see you and listen to you play for the past four nights. You aren’t alone; you’ve got a world of people who are willing to help if you’ll only ask. Pride? Pride isn’t your greatest sin, old man—a lack of faith in the people around you is your sin. The people still here, Oliver, not Duke, not Dizzy, not Coltrane or Monk.” He turns and hands the waitress a wad of cash, and says back to Oliver, “I got this,” before storming out the door.

Frank walks blindly down crowded sidewalks, brushing against people without turning to offer a southerner’s apology. He loses his scarf somewhere around Sixty-Fifth but doesn’t even notice, he’s still so hot with rage. He turns into the park on a whim. Without a grid pattern and iconic buildings to orient himself, he loses his way. The scenery of trees dusted with white powder and joggers whizzing by slowly begins to relax him and the anger leaves, the void now filled with regret.

By the time he’s traversed most of the park, he’s already ashamed of himself. He’d never meant to lash out at Oliver that way. He’s taken out his anger with his own situation on this old man who already feels alone, spewing his bottled-up rage at an unsuspecting friend instead of at the newspaper’s publisher or Karen when he’d felt it. He’ll make it up to Oliver somehow, he knows he will.

How the hell do I get out of here?
He sees light glinting off a flurry of cars and heads for a break in the trees, an exit that dumps him out at Columbus Circle. He turns left, unsure of where to go, but thinking he might just find his hotel and lie down until it’s time for Oliver to play one last time.

Agnes sits and watches New York glide past her as though it’s slipping through her fingers. She’ll miss it. The cab she’s in will stop at Mount Sinai and wait while she runs in to leave a note written on hotel stationery for Dr. Mundra. She’d written it with the same finality of a suicide note. Possibly with the same outcome, but this isn’t the first suicide note she’s written. While writing it, she sat at the small desk in her room, her left hand laid out before her and trembling, fingers twitching out of control, and she didn’t work to stop it or hide it as she might have normally. Instead, she let it lead her way.

Doctor, thank you for all you’ve done. I’ve decided to return to New Orleans and live out what time I have left the best that I can, if I can. Take care of your wife and little boy. Treasure them. —A. Cassady