Five Night Stand: A Novel (3 page)

She walks out into the cold New York night and the lights and sounds—more music than noise to her ears—greet her.

Agnes stands now at the window overlooking what she thinks must be all of Manhattan. She can’t imagine there might be more of it out of her sight; that would be just too much concrete and steel for one island. She’s already undressed, tired of the feel of the clothes she’d put on so long ago in New Orleans.

Early that morning she’d stood at the open doors of her balcony as the sun greeted the French Quarter and cast its light on the evils and beauty of the streets and sidewalks where late-night revelers still staggered about. She’s lived there for three years with her roommate, Terron, an old friend from Memphis, now a graduate student at Tulane whose father has the means to buy the entire top floor of a building for his daughter to live in and complete her studies. Agnes had gone to New Orleans for the music, the connection to Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Sidney Bechet, Buddy Bolden, and a time past. She’s been playing piano in bars and hotels throughout the Quarter, up and down Canal, and the occasional private reception in Garden District homes. Though she’d been recruited by music schools nationwide, these haunts and corners are her graduate program.

“How long will you be there?” he’d asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, what does it say on your ticket?”

“It doesn’t. It’s one way.”

“So you’re going to stay in New York.”

“For as long as it takes, yes.”

She’s been seeing Sherman off and on for nearly a year. He’s a saxophonist who spends most mornings on café patios playing his baritone for the lovers who have only recently stumbled from bed for beignets and chicory coffee; the low tones of his instrument hit their solar plexuses and remind them of the rumbling from the night before.

Agnes and Sherman drank thick coffee. He had taken the morning off to see her go, though hoping she wouldn’t, selfishly wishing she’d change her mind. He lay on the bed, still rumpled and warm from their goodbyes the previous evening and early that morning, and watched her in the open doors of the balcony, the sunlight making her lightweight nightgown transparent.

She was having her moment with the city, a hello to the new day and goodbye for who knew how long, maybe forever. There was a chill in the air that rippled her skin. She held the coffee cup with the fingertips of her right hand, her arm resting against her hip. Her left hand held the door latch, that hand always grasping something in an attempt to hold it steady.

“I’ll go with you.”

“Don’t be silly—you have to work. No work, no pay.”

“Just like you.”

She didn’t say anything.

“So he’s paying for it all? Travel. Hotel. Food. It’s his doctor, so he’s paying that as well?”

She shrugged. “I can’t let myself worry too much for that.”

“What does he expect from you?”

“Nothing.”

“I find that hard to swallow,” he mumbled.

“What would you have me do?” She turned to face him and the look on her face was not how he wanted to remember her. She held her left hand up for him to see and he looked away. “What? I’m losing control, Sherman. It’s eating my arm, my spine, and what else? My brain? Heart?” She turned back to the sunlight. “It’s eating my soul,” she whispered to the city below.

“I’ll miss you is all,” he said, and she didn’t answer. Sherman liked to think he was her only one, and she went ahead and let him think that—it was a parting gift. She wasn’t sure what would become of her in New York, whether the hospital there could work some miracle, or whether she might disappear into the night, into a river she’d never seen before.

Instead of more conversation, he took up his saxophone from the floor beside the bed and played “Mean to Me,” her favorite Lester Young tune, for her and for what he feared would be their last moments together.

But tonight she’s on her own in New York and stands naked in front of her hotel window, thinking she can hear a tune brought up from New Orleans. She wonders if anyone can see her here. With so many other lives in a place like this, does anyone notice just one more, whether it’s new and full of possibility, or winding down and dying? The window doesn’t open, so she imagines the glass isn’t there. If she concentrates, she can feel the cold from outside against her thighs, stomach, and chest. If she leans forward, she can picture herself falling, falling through that cold to the sidewalk below. Certainly the fall would cause her to black out; surely it would all end as in her dream, the same dream that has followed her for years. Though it isn’t a river far below but concrete and metal and peace. She holds her hand up to the window to feel the nighttime chill, presses her fingertips against the glass to try and stop the tremor there.

3.

He’s pulled to the curb this evening instead of into the driveway around back for no other reason than to gain a different point of view. He sits in his car, the engine off and ticking in the cool air, and looks up at the house. The trees brushing against the upper windows are bare in the white winter sky; he’ll need to cut them back in the spring. The house looks empty. He knows there is no one inside; Karen is still at work and here he is sitting in his car. The second story is never used anyway, save for a small bedroom in the back that he keeps as an office and only rarely visits. Even if he and his wife were inside, he thinks, any passerby on the sidewalk would look up and think the same thing:
empty
.

He’s returned home from an interview for a story he’s writing for a local business news daily. It’s a fluff piece, a profile on a twentysomething attorney who’s just signed on with an old-money firm in Memphis. He’d let his imagination wander several times, distracted by a riverboat’s wake far below on the Mississippi and a pigeon making a home on the granite ledge just beyond the window glass, as the kid told how he would be bringing fresh eyes—and social media—to the firm. The newspaper’s editor has a hard-on for social media stories. This one will pay next to nothing, fifty dollars, and be read by no one other than that attorney and his proud mother.

Such is the life of a freelancer, though, a new title for Frank Severs, having only recently been laid off by the newspaper he’d worked at for nearly seventeen years. The severance will carry him through much of the year if he skimps and stretches it, but the idle time at home is driving him mad, so he’s begun taking on work with local publications and editors he’s met over the years. Be careful what you wish for, he’d laughed to Karen when the assignment had come through. Work is work, she’d said. He said this qualified as a student internship. But he went anyway, if only to break up a day.

The kitchen is just as quiet as the street had been. Details. Winter seems to be that way, though, doesn’t it? Quiet, whether indoors or out. He looks at the trees through the large window in the breakfast nook and thinks of how much colder it feels seeing them without leaves on their limbs, without that blanket of color. Details. As if thinking only of the cold and wanting to warm himself, he turns on a stove top burner, the sweet smell of gas in his nose before the blue flame catches. He puts a pot of water on to boil.

Details. It has been his mantra since college when a journalism professor had told him, “Your job will not be, simply, the who-what-when-and-where, but the details. In time, everyone will consider themselves journalists. Let them glom on to the generalities and speculation; you be there, feet on the ground, and use your senses to let the readers know everything you see, feel, taste, and hear. Details.” Old Professor Jordan seemed to know about blogs, social media, and “citizen journalists” before there were such things. Frank still respects that old-guard way of thinking, respected it even as he’d packed up his desk in a cardboard box, handed over his press card, and kissed his sobbing editor on the cheek. He wonders where Jordan is these days, retired half a dozen years or more. “I should look him up,” he says to the empty kitchen, and takes a notebook and pen from his pocket to scratch “Jordan” on a page.

He’d forgotten to take sausage out to thaw this morning and does so now, putting it in the microwave, the hum aggravating the quiet of the room like an itch. He rubs his hands together over the stove top and finally relaxes into his house as the chill leaves his bones.

At forty-one, Frank had been a reporter with
The Commercial Appeal
newspaper in Memphis for most of his adult life. He and Karen have been married equally as long. They are a couple complacent in their lives, content with each other; the passion has left. It’s a relatively recent development, within the past year or so. The lack of intimacy is punctuated by something else, though, and he’s wondered off and on, as he pads around the house in the middle of a workday, if his wife might possibly give him his walking papers as well. Perhaps he will become that tired movie cliché of the middle-aged man who loses everything at once—career and wife—his life laid out to be inhospitably sifted through in dank bars and filthy one-room apartments.

Something has revealed itself within their union and managed to push its fingers into a crag in their foundation. He suspects an affair. Nothing overt to give it away, no men’s shoes left under the bed or charges to motels across the city in the bank statement. Little things, though: a faraway look in his wife’s eye as he tells her about his day, extra time spent in front of the mirror some mornings, a jumpy close of her e-mail when he enters the room. Perhaps it’s all in his mind, his overreacting imagination, that tickle in his veteran reporter’s brain in the numbing absence of any real breaking news. But then there is the lack of intimacy, and that’s real. And there’s the complacency, the soft-around-the-middle contentedness that every marriage seems to grow eventually. Details.

It’s spaghetti night. Many dinners are themed, a tradition carried through the years since their first year of marriage, a stab at normalcy amid Frank’s ever-changing, unpredictable work schedule. Even now, though, when he might spend the whole day reading a novel or in front of the television wallowing in unemployment, it is spaghetti night. He chops onion and garlic, and hums a tune to himself. He wishes he’d thought to stop by the music store to pick up that CD he’s been thinking of since lunch. He laughs to himself, wiping the stickiness of garlic from his fingers with a stained dish towel, and flips his laptop open where it sits on the table. It is all so easy in 2006, to get what one wants with the click of a mouse. He shakes his head at the fact that he hadn’t immediately thought of downloading an album. He recalls the human resources administrator who’d done the actual dirty work of laying him off describing Frank—and anyone else who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see the industry tide changing—as a dinosaur. The administrator hadn’t meant it as an insult—he was making a joke—but Frank had told him to shut the fuck up and then apologized to his own boss, his longtime editor and friend, who had begun to cry silently beside him.

He opens his laptop and searches for “Oliver Pleasant.” He blinks back tears, not realizing how the onion has affected him. Moments later, the soft piano, bass, and brass of the Oliver Pleasant Trio fill the kitchen and mingle with the smell of sausage and onion in the air.

He leans on the table, an antique he and Karen had picked up at a flea market when they were first living together and broke. The cold of the tin top pushes against the heat of his palms. Music rises up to his face the way the scent of chopped onion had. That afternoon, the idea of writing about Pleasant had sparked something within him that has been missing for some time. It touched off a flintlock of inspiration that’s been soaking so long in apathy he is afraid it has become nonflammable. He can’t explain such an instinct; no one can—it’s something that comes with being in the business for so long and with having writing in the blood. It’s that first scent of gas from a stove top burner, the crackle of a first kiss, a first touch. And just like that he was itching to go to New York and talk to the pianist himself.

Frank first considered Oliver Pleasant a subject earlier that afternoon while sitting at a favorite lunch counter in south Memphis. It’s a small, close diner situated on the interstate and frequented by the surrounding blue-collar workers, passing truckers, cops, and the odd lost or adventurous tourist. It has been rumored—as it’s been rumored about every dive in the city—that Elvis Presley used to eat there. Tourists are powerless against such a pedigree.

Frank and his friend Hank (the rhyme was endless fun for others in the newsroom) sat at the chipped and stained counter eating barbecue and chili burgers with fries. The room smelled of grilled onions, smoked pork, and boiling greens. The chatter of the patrons shoulder to shoulder at the counter and at scattered tables, along with the clatter of plates and utensils, made it hard to hear your neighbor talk, so they shouted to each other as they ate.

Hank is a photographer for the Associated Press and keeps an office, an old and unused darkroom the size of a dry-goods pantry, at
The Commercial Appeal
. He’s frequently called to disasters, murder scenes, and political gatherings throughout the region for the wire service. He felt bad for Frank’s layoff and had asked him to lunch. Hank cursed the publisher, the nameless and faceless powers that be, and the decline of their industry up one end of the lunch counter and down the other. Between bites and swearing, he worked and reworked a math equation in his notebook with a felt-tip pen.

Frank finally couldn’t stand it any longer. “Let it go, Hank, we’re all doomed. I’ll be treating you to lunch in a year, you dumb bastard. What are you working on there?”

Hank held up a finger to tell him to wait a minute, finished some multiplication, and then scratched it all out before throwing his pen on the counter in disgust.

“What is it?” Frank wanted to know.

“Plumbing. Trying to figure out what I can afford per foot to run a new sewer line from the house to the street.”

“What’d you come up with?”

“About fifty cents a foot. Give or take.”

“You better give. Hell of a lot more expensive than that.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

Hank, twice divorced, has recently bought the duplex he’d rented for five years, finding himself as landlord and home owner all in one day. He’s in the process of extensive home renovations and looks to Frank, who spent a year renovating his and Karen’s old home, as somewhat of a guru.

“I didn’t have to do much in the way of plumbing, but Rachel here helped me find a carpenter and electrician—both cousins of hers. Rachel, you got a plumber?”

The lanky woman behind the counter, arms all bone and sinew and hands like a man’s, held her finger up as Hank had while she slid an order slip through the window into the kitchen. A bright white and blue Memphis Grizzlies ball cap sat atop her head, over a hairnet, and listed slightly to the side. “Teddy, my uncle. But he working with Lavelle on a house now over in Harbor Town.”

“How is Lavelle?” Frank said, and then to Hank, “Her cousin, my carpenter.”

“Good. He adding a room to my girl Freda’s house. Her grandma lives with her, and now her grandma’s brother coming from New York City to live. Need a room to hold a bed and piano. Bathroom, too.”

“Piano?” Frank said.

“Mm-hmm. His name Oliver, plays piano. Been playing damn near forever. Oliver Pleasant, that’s his name. Nice name.”

“Was he with Stax? Sun?” Hank said.

“No,” Frank answered for her. “No, Oliver Pleasant is a jazz pianist. He’s still alive? He played with everybody, all the greats. He’s from here, Rachel?”

“He’s originally from Winona, in Mississippi. Freda said he cut out early for New York, leavin all his people down here.”

“And he’s living here?”

“Will be my cousin ever get done with that room. Shit, I need him over here, fix that back door. Oliver’s takin retirement. That’s what I need more than a new back door, I need me some retirement.”

Frank scribbled notes in his notebook while Hank consulted his math. “Can I get dibs on your uncle? What’s his number, Rachel? I need a plumber. I need a damn sewer line.”

“I’d help you out, buddy, but somebody has to go interview this infant lawyer,” Frank said. “Call me later and I’ll see if I can get by there.”

When they first bought the home fifteen years earlier, Frank and Karen’s house was nearly a hundred years old and in need of upgrades and care. The foundation, however, was as rock solid as anything else built in the late nineteenth century. Frank, with the direction of Rachel’s cousins, plastered and painted the upstairs bedrooms, put in new light fixtures, and sanded and stained the wood floors. Those rooms were furnished and decorated with an eye toward hosting visiting friends and family, but Frank and Karen both knew which room would one day become the nursery. Van Morrison called from the stereo, and they each, separately and to themselves, imagined those rooms full of children, the sound of little feet running through the hallways and up and down the stairs. They worked together for weeks with paint and spackle, laughing at each other’s splattered faces and passing mental shopping lists for furniture, lamps, and wall hangings back and forth. Workdays ended as the sunlight faded, casting long parallelograms of light across the walls, and they would make love there on the paint tarp surrounded by cans and brushes and ladders.

After Karen lost that first pregnancy, Frank put the crib they’d picked out, still unassembled, in the attic before Karen returned from the hospital. After the second and third miscarriages, the second floor was ostensibly sealed off, if not physically, then in Karen’s mind. Frank eventually put new hardware on the bathroom cabinets and a new faucet in the sink, but it was without the camaraderie and talk of the future that had gone into the rest of the redecorating. Karen maintained hope and still does, though it’s waning, but does not dare to decorate that nursery for fear of tempting a fate she’s already danced with three times.