Five Night Stand: A Novel (12 page)

2.

Agnes awakes in the apartment of Andrew Sexton. It is amazing for its closeness; she’s never seen anything like it. The room is only slightly wider than the queen mattress she lies on, yet the ceiling is so far from where she rests that it makes her head spin. Though perhaps that’s the scotch. She pulls her hand from under the covers to remind herself of its slight tremor. With her other hand—her good hand, as she’s come to think of it—she reaches for a pack of Nat Sherman Reds on the cinder block next to the bed and lights one with a brass Zippo lying nearby. Sitting back against the wall, cold against her bare shoulder blades, she blows a stream of smoke the same color as the sheets she’s tangled in. She belches and feels better.

There is no clock as she looks around the room and blinks the night back into focus. There was a shitty little bar after the sophistication of the jazz club and an exuberant Irishman named Tommy serving shot after shot of whiskey, whether asked for or not. She was introduced to people, so many she could never hope to remember their names. And then there was dancing. Christ, that music was awful, the throb of it coming back to her temples and making the room swim even more—such awful music. They had walked for what felt like miles through the night, a cold night along city streets still alive with clatter even at what must have been a late hour. The light from cafés and all-night bodegas spotlighted individuals and groups of people as though she were meant to take notice of them, though she knew she’d never be able to recall their faces. Like the ornately framed and spotlighted paintings, centuries old and thick with oil, that she’d stared at on the walls of the Brooks Museum of Art in Overton Park as a child in Memphis while on school field trips. Her classmates ran around her, ignoring the treasures in front of them. She is unable to recall a single detail of those paintings now—not a face, not a body, not a gesture, artist, or title.

There had been music everywhere last night, not just the mindless, tribal bass of the clubs, but music in the streets and coming from hidden doorways, from passing cars and apartment windows near enough to the sidewalk to be scratched by the naked branches of trees that fought to survive in the unlikeliest terrain. It had reminded her of New Orleans. Her ears ring with it all now and she closes her eyes to make one melody come through clear, but all she can summon is Oliver Pleasant playing “Crepuscule with Nellie.”
Thelonious Monk, you beautiful, crazy son of a bitch!
she hears her father shout the way he would some nights.

A few feet away a toilet flushes and her waiter comes through the door wearing only blue briefs with a trickle of his business on the front; he pulls his hair back into a ponytail, exposing the two hoop earrings he wears. She grimaces as her stomach turns over again. He is tall, seems even taller from her perspective, lying as she is practically on the floor, and his rippled skin has become a broad expanse now released from the constraints of clothing. He is tattooed. The left arm, from shoulder to just below the elbow, is a series of designs in crisp reds and blues with highlights of white and yellow. An octopus, all black and gray, covers his wealth of muscled back, its curious tentacles reaching up and over his shoulders to his chest, the tip of one tentacle—becoming blacker where it narrows down to its pointed end—teases the silver barbell speared through his right nipple. “Turn around,” she says, and he does, because it’s more demand than request. “Let me see what all you got there.” The tentacles wind down and around his hips and disappear into the blue briefs. Agnes is certain she knows just where those tentacles end, yet she can’t, for the life of her, remember where or how. She shifts her weight below the sheets, and the soreness she feels lets her know those tentacles grasp an impressive treasure.

“Good morning,” he says. “Everything look okay?” He falls back into bed beside her and picks the cigarette from her fingers, taking a long, dramatic drag from it. She takes another from the pack and lights it.

She shrugs and says “Hello,” and thinks what a stupid, simple thing it is to say, as close as they’ve obviously been. Outside, a garbage truck’s hydraulics squeal as it fills itself with an entire building’s worth of refuse. “I’m cold,” she adds.

“Do you want some coffee? I mean, I don’t have any, but I could run out for some. Starbucks is just on the corner.”

She looks to the window, the building across the narrow street almost close enough to touch, and up to the gray sky beyond. “My apartment in New Orleans is about sixteen times this size. The doors open right up to a balcony that overlooks Royal.”

“Sounds nice. I’ve never been.”

She thinks of Sherman, up by now and shuffling through the Quarter with his saxophone over his shoulder, heading to one of his regular gigs where tourists will drop money at his feet as they wait on beignets and alligator hash. He’ll be distraught that he hasn’t heard from her; he’s like a little boy. But then, Agnes has never noticed much difference between her boys and her men. “You should go. Sometime.”

“What are you in New York for? You never did say.”

She shrugs again.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a girl drink as much as you did. Jesus, downtown is going to have to re-up on booze before tonight. And you talked, too, a lot about music—‘the music of the city,’ you called it.”

She blushes at the thought and tries to recall the night again, purge it into the present, but only comes up with the taste of bacon. “Bacon.”

“You’re hungry?”

“Did we already eat breakfast?”

“Yeah, well, about 3:00 a.m. we stopped at Junior’s. Not sure I’ve ever seen a girl eat like that, either. You put away an entire number four and then ate half of mine. Caitlynn and Eric loved that.”

“Who?”

“We met up with them last night. My friends?” He stares into her blank face. “You don’t remember much of anything at all, do you? Maybe you shouldn’t have mixed the rotgut I bought you with Ben’s high-end scotch.”

“Maybe you should mind your own fucking business.” She looks back toward the gray sky, smokes some more.

The first time he’d seen her in the club, Andrew had thought Agnes to be frail. That was a mistake, the pale skin and thin frame equating to weakness in his mind. Now he knows her as someone comfortable in the night. She’d moved along New York’s streets at ease, to the point that he sometimes had to rush to keep up with her. Outbursts like this one, telling him to mind his business, appear to be the norm for her; she takes nothing off anyone. He’s not sure he’s ever known a woman with the inner strength and conviction of Agnes, certainly not any women in his family. It’s that strength, he thinks, this inability she seems to have to give a shit what anyone might think about her, that is sexier than any physical attribute.

He falls back on the bed to stare up at the ceiling. “You want to eat?”

The thought of food makes her queasy and she rises to go to the bathroom, naked in the dim light of his apartment, which she realizes consists of only the one room and a bathroom. He watches her walk away from him.

“I want coffee,” she says. “Why don’t you be a dear and reach across the street there and see if your neighbor’s got any.”

In the bathroom, little more than a closet holding a toilet and stand-up shower with a
Star Wars
curtain, she looks at herself in the mirror beneath a bare bulb. She looks at the circles under her eyes, her thin lips cracked from the cold night, and her hair knotted from wind and fucking. This isn’t the image of her New York self that she’d pictured back home. In the hospital, yes, maybe, but once outside those hallways, she’d expected only glitter and glamour. She straightens up and notices the angry purple and red of a hickey next to her left nipple. “Great,” she says to her reflection. She lowers the seat and pees, self-conscious of the sound with Andrew on the other side of the door. All she wants is a shower, but she’s scared to even look behind the curtain at what hygienic atrocities R2-D2 and Princess Leia might be hiding there. She thinks of her spotless hotel room with its clean sheets and toilet sanitized for her protection and lets out a sigh that tastes of bacon, cigarettes, and scotch. No toilet paper. “Great,” she says again.

“I thought you said you’re from Memphis,” he says when she returns and begins searching through the sheets.

“I am. Where are my panties?”

He pulls them from under a pillow and holds them out to her. When she reaches for them, he grabs her wrist and pulls her down on top of him. “What about New Orleans? You said, ‘my apartment in New Orleans.’ . . .”

He has his hands on her ass and she feels the cold metal of his thumb ring against her skin. “I’ve been there the past couple of years.”

“Doing what?” He kisses her neck.

“Andrew, come on, I need to go.” She tries to push her way up but is no match for him.

“What do you do in New Orleans?”

“I play piano.”

He stops his aggressive affections and looks at her. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” She’s giving in to his kisses and touch and feels him stiffen beneath her, the smell of sex from the night before everywhere.

“You any good?” He pulls her legs apart and strains against her.

“Good enough.” She traces one of the octopus’s tentacles with her finger. She doesn’t have a tattoo of her own and has always found it odd that people are so willing and quick to alter their bodies permanently when her own body is being altered beyond her control.

“Why did you come to New York?” he says.

She licks the sterling-silver jewelry piercing his chest. “Shh . . .” And she begins the quest to remember where those tentacles might lead.

3.

The riverboat didn’t immediately point north. It traveled south to New Orleans as though siphoning blood through a vessel back to the heart, enriching it before pumping it out once again. The trip farther south made Oliver feel as though the captain had taken his musical career into consideration on the trip’s itinerary. Oliver didn’t know about jazz other than what he’d heard the man playing in his parents’ restaurant and what the train porters spoke of at their stops. He’d never even been outside of Winona.

“When that paddleboat pulled up to the port of New Orleans,” he tells Frank, who is sitting across from him at Junior’s Diner, “it was like my spinal cord had finally connected to my brain so that all my senses came alive. There was music playing from the very minute we tied up. Music coming from the docks and the saloons and whorehouses, almost from the murky water itself—it filled the air and gave me a place. It felt like home, I guess is what I’m sayin. It put me in a mind I never had except those nights in my folks’ restaurant when the joint was shakin and everything just seemed to hum and stomp with the music. But it wasn’t only in the cover of dark like when we had to sneak around back home; no, it was during the blue early morning hours, the bright white of day, and suppertime, too. Music—always, baby, and forever.”

Mr. Fairbanks, the musical director of the River Star Cruise Lines, and his wife had a house in New Orleans, in the Garden District, and it was there that they took young Oliver when they disembarked. The trolley—it was Oliver’s first time on a streetcar; New Orleans would become a treasure chest of firsts for the boy—carried them down a street called Canal, though there was no water.

“It was a grown-up street with buildings and men in suits and hats,” Oliver recalls, “but there was still music, even on this workday. In the middle of the day!”

The music was accentuated and brought to life by the swaying and rocking of the trolley car.

Madame Fairbanks ushered him off the trolley and to a low, ornate iron fence and gate. Oliver didn’t enter right away; he could only stand, staring up at the towering lady in front of him. “Lady” was the only term he could think of for that austere house, so strong yet so fragile with its pale blue coloring and white gingerbread details. A porch the width of the house held rocking chairs and was shaded from the midday sun by an overhang. The rest of the small front yard was protected from the summertime sun by a massive oak tree in the neighbor’s yard, its Spanish moss hanging from branches and trying in vain to reach the coolness of that porch.

“Come along, Oliver,” Madame Fairbanks called from the porch. She was a light-skinned mulatto with a hint of the islands around her eyes and nose. Oliver was unsure of her age—Madame Fairbanks seemed ageless in her high-collared dress and smooth skin—but she was beautiful at any age. Beautiful, yet stern. Once Oliver entered the house with its formal rooms and towering ceiling, he was welcomed by a wide and low piano. It was the only grand piano he’d ever seen and he stood for a moment and stared into its mouth and the rows of teeth and muscle there, just as he’d stood and stared up at the riverboat when he’d first arrived at the docks, at the skyscrapers from the trolley, and at the roofline of the Fairbanks House. New Orleans would hold him in awe the rest of his life, upon every return and with every memory no matter where he laid his head at night. When he couldn’t stand it any longer, when his fingers itched until he feared they might fall from his hands, he slid onto the bench to pound a rag, one of Mr. Fairbanks’s own compositions. He was stopped midway through the first bar by Madame Fairbanks pulling the cover over the keys, nearly severing Oliver’s fingers. “Not here, not a note of that devil music in this home.”

“It was made known to me right off that, while Fairbanks was lord over the boat and the music and his musicianers while on the water, it was the madame who ruled in her house. And she wasn’t havin none of my shit in her parlor. Always thought it odd since it was the music that paid for the house in the first place,” Oliver says. “But that was her castle and she was the moat between me and any pleasure while under her roof.”

Frank laughs, as he has several times already, feeding Oliver’s need to tell a story just as Oliver feeds his face with a plate of his usual bacon. Frank has hung on every word, ignoring his own plate while his coffee has gone cold, and is practically falling on the table as he leans in, scribbling to keep up with Oliver’s voice. Oliver seems to have a renewed vigor in the morning, not the tired, slightly slurred speech of his postshow reverie. This story is everything Frank had hoped for, everything he’d told Karen it would be, meeting the inflated expectations he’d given her in their kitchen that night over spaghetti.

He’d spoken to her on the phone the night before, when he’d returned to his hotel from the club. Drinks with Oliver had gone late, later than he’d expected, but he wanted to check in with her, to get points for the call whether she answered or not. If she hadn’t, he thought, the subsequent points would be worth more when he pouts about missing her. But she had answered and they’d talked of mundane daily events—he told her about his flight and she of the hormones making her feel cramped, as though she were having her period. He didn’t tell her specifically what he and Oliver had talked about, only that he’d spent time with him after the show and he’d talked of the past.

As Oscar talks now, Frank makes mental notes of highlights to feed to Karen.

Mr. Fairbanks was as light skinned as his wife, and though the two didn’t have any children of their own, Oliver was sure that if they had, their offspring would have been as white as the passengers on the River Star Cruise Lines. It was this paleness of skin, Oliver would learn, that allowed Fairbanks his exalted position on the line, the home in the District, and the couple their place among New Orleans high society.

“The Fairbankses, they had a neighbor, a widow several times over, name of Madame Margeurite Sherman Ragghianti Fontaine, and she had a girl named Lucille worked for her. Lucille used to hand me corn bread over the fence from porch to porch. That corn bread was better than my own mama’s, though I’d never say so in public and you better not put that in any newspaper, neither. Anyway, Fairbanks, he’d take me into neighborhoods I never even dreamed of, whole blocks full of colored folks doin as they please—shootin dice, drinkin, howlin at each other. And in one of them neighborhoods there was a club—hell, there was a club on every goddamn corner, some barely more than a Chinatown bodega in size—but only one of ’em had Marcus Longstreet on piano. Marcus was the husband of Lucille with the corn bread.”

“Marcus Longstreet?” Frank repeats, making sure to spell the name correctly on his notepad. “I’ve never heard of him.”

The waitress comes around to refill coffees and Oliver winks at her, taking a moment to smile and see that she notices him.

“That’s because you learned what you know from books and the television,” he continues once the waitress has laughed and touched him on the shoulder. “Now, I don’t mean no disrespect because that’s all Marcus Longstreet ever got. Ain’t nobody heard of Pops Longstreet, but he was the best New Orleans had. Shit, he’d a been the best New York had, better than Basie, better than Tyner, me, Gil. . . .”

“Better than Duke?”

“Watch your mouth, boy. Don’t you blaspheme in here.” Oliver takes a long pull from his still-steaming coffee. Frank wonders how it doesn’t burn the skin off his tongue, it’s so hot. “Marcus was like nothin I’d ever heard or seen at that point, a real showman talkin and laughin with everybody in the room. Not like the man at Sheffield’s I first saw; he played the piano. Marcus, though, he played the
room
. He sat stick-straight, sippin on liquor and maybe havin a better time than anybody else. There was a real joy in him and it came out in his music. And there I was, all of sixteen and sittin in a cramped little saloon with Mr. Fairbanks, who, I think, had to get out from under Madame’s hand and knew I probably did, too. And I did. Lord, I did, and I thank him for that escape to this day. Didn’t know how much I needed it until we walked into that club, neither, and that music hit me in the face like a slap. We was in New Orleans for a couple weeks while the boat resupplied, cleaned up, and signed on new passengers. That was one long stretch, though most of it, as much as I could get away with anyway, was spent at Marcus Longstreet’s piano.”

This isn’t entirely true. Oliver spent much of that time in the Fairbankses’ parlor laboring over textbooks and Madame Fairbanks’s favorite book, the Holy Bible. She’d made a promise to Oliver’s mother, she’d told Mr. Fairbanks, “and I can’t let his lessons get away from him.”

It was on those afternoons in their home, so humid and with windows open, ceiling fans barely moving the heat around, that Oliver would slip away from his books and out onto that grand and shaded porch that felt to him like a stage to the world. There, he’d take a square of corn bread wrapped in wax paper from Lucille. He’d eat that bread while Madame took her daily bath upstairs or met with her garden club in the backyard under the shade of a wisteria trellis. He would fold the paper neatly when finished and tuck it away in one of those books. He often wondered if Madame ever came across all that wax paper.

Madame disapproved of his trips to the bars with her husband, but Fairbanks insisted it was as much a part of his education as mathematics or Deuteronomy. And it was, Oliver knew. Longstreet’s piano was more instructional than any dusty book off any library’s shelf. His most important lesson of those weeks in New Orleans, though, began one afternoon when Oliver sneaked to the front porch, his mouth already watering for Lucille’s corn bread, and was handed that oily package, not by Lucille herself but by her eighteen-year-old sister, Leona.

“She was somethin, Leona. Not so much to look at, I guess, thinkin back on it. She had dark eyes that bugged out some, and rough skin with a wide nose. But when her full lips parted to smile and she showed off her teeth, just as white as piano keys and crooked as garden path stones, son, I knew I was sunk. Thick trunk, too, just like that old oak tree out front Fontaine’s house.” Oliver laughs at his own words and memory. “And then she leaned out to hand me the bread and I caught sight of some flesh hangin from her apron top—she helped her sister with the wash every Thursday—and I thought I was gettin a free glimpse of heaven. I was, too, boy. Our hands touched when she passed off the bread and it was electric. She smiled again and went back inside. She smiled like she knew exactly what she’d done to my sixteen-year-old self. Christ, all I wanted to do then was go back inside and play that piano.”

“What’d she do to your sixteen-year-old self, Licorice?”

“Shut up, boy; eat them home fries.”

Frank looks across the table at this duo—an elderly, broke, overweight living jazz legend with diabetes and the skinniest kid Frank has ever seen.
Is this boy part of the story?
he wonders.

The very next night was the next time Oliver saw Leona, and the first time he spoke to her. It was at the bar with her brother-in-law’s piano filling the room, mixing with cigarette and cigar smoke, and the laughter and call of men to women and back again. She was dancing, her body moving like pine trees against a wind. She held a highball of whiskey in one hand, its coppery color catching the low light, and a cigarette between her plum-colored lips. He watched her slide over to Marcus and expected him to tell her to go home, maybe stop the music altogether to tell her she’s too young for this music, for the liquor and dancing like that. But she backed up close to him, the wide hips of a young girl already a woman swaying this way and that, and Marcus leaned into her and grinned. His smile was all teeth and squinting, and made Oliver feel happy from across the room. The music didn’t stop, never did, and instead seemed to be played just for Leona. The crowd moved in around the piano, its player, and his wife’s little sister until Oliver lost sight of it all so that he had only the calls of the musicians and the heat of the room to orient himself in the darkness and smoke.

And then she was sitting beside him. “What you drinkin, sugar?” Her voice carried an age beyond her years. Her body, with its scent of sweat and smoke, smelled like experience itself.

“Root beer.”

“Root beer? Ha!” She threw her head back the way Marcus did when he played and let out a bark of a laugh. “Drink this.” She slid her highball over to him.

He looked around and didn’t see Fairbanks anywhere. Oliver picked up the glass and sniffed. The amber liquid smelled metallic, as though it had been mined from the earth just to be trapped in a bottle. He sipped and swallowed, and the pinpricks burned down his jawline and throat but were warm and comfortable in his belly. He coughed, only once, and wondered if this had the same taste and effect as his grandma Hillbillie’s home brew.

“Where you from?”

“Winona.”

“Winona. And in what part of the world would I find Winona?”

“Up in Mississippi.”

“Mississippi? Y’all still slaves up there?”

Oliver thought of Sheffield and the hungry men standing around his mama’s back door for a piece of fatback and a broken-off hunk of bread. “Mostly.”

“Well, you in N’awlins now and free to be. Free to be . . . what they call you, sugar?”

“Oliver. Oliver Pleasant.”

“Pleasant. Well it’s right there in your name, ain’t it? I’m Leona. What you do, Oliver Pleasant, besides eat my sister’s corn bread and drink my whiskey? What you doin in my city?”

“Play piano on the River Star Cruise Lines with Mr. Fairbanks. We layin out, gettin back on board next week to see Memphis.” Oliver sat up straighter, puffed his chest out the way his grandson would almost seventy years later, and he felt for the first time like a man seeing the world and making his own way.

“Piano, huh?” Leona got a gleam in her eye then, a near smile on her face that showed off half her crooked teeth. “Drink that up, baby, and come with me.”