Five Night Stand: A Novel (13 page)

Oliver finished what was in the glass in one gulp, feeling the same pinpricks and burn, before he was being pulled across the dance floor and in and out of gyrating, sweating couples like Oliver knew from his late nights at his parents’ secret dances. Leona pulled and wouldn’t let go, didn’t let go of his wrist even when she stopped him beside Marcus’s bench.

“Cousin Marcus, this here is Master Oliver Pleasant from Winona, Mississippi—son of freed slaves and piano player on the River Star Cruise Lines,” Leona said over the din of the crowd when Marcus had come to the end of his tune. “Why don’t you let us see if he any good on dry land?”

Marcus stood. He was much taller than Oliver had expected. He was dressed impeccably in a steel-gray suit and bowed deeply to Oliver, taking a handkerchief from his breast pocket and making a show of dusting the bench before gesturing for Oliver to sit.

Oliver began playing with a fever after too many days of not playing at all and studying books in the shadow of the Fairbankses’ piano. It had become too much for him; the wanting was a physical pain of the sort he’d felt lately lying in bed and wondering what the touch of a woman might be like, feeling his childhood urges strain against his bedclothes to reach into manhood. For the past twenty-four hours that need had found a face: Leona Thibodeaux. He played that piano for her as though she were the only person in the room. Feeling the keys at his fingertips and pedals beneath his toes was as satisfying a feeling as anything he could imagine, and he gave himself over to it, mind, body, and spirit. Oliver jumped when the horns came in to accompany him, the close report of the trumpet blast bringing him off the bench and eliciting laughs from Leona, Marcus, and Fairbanks, whom Oliver noticed just to the side of the bandstand, a whiskey in one hand and a woman in the other.

The crowd was moving again, all sway and black, jumping and hollering like the crowd he knew from Winona rather than the staid white faces of the riverboat. The cruise guests had cocktails on the upper deck every night before supper, and Oliver would play a lively number while watching the riverbanks roll by, catch glimpses of small towns in the fading light and boys out fishing for catfish. Dinner was less laid back, the diners retiring indoors to white tablecloths and black men serving with white towels draped over their forearms. Oliver’s music then became background, fading into guests’ semiconsciousness like the cocktails into their blood and passing fishing skiffs into the paddle wheel’s long, purple wake.

This crowd, though, was alive and Oliver fed off it until he thought he’d sucked that teat dry. He finished in a flourish, his confidence from the shoutbacks and those sips of whiskey growing into its own sort of manhood right there in his belly. He wanted to impress Marcus and Fairbanks, of course, but mostly he wanted to impress Leona. Oliver had found the reason that man takes up an instrument, a paintbrush, a pen, or a hammer and nail to create something out of nothing: sex.

He stood, sweating and breathing hard as though he’d just run a marathon, to the cheers of all around him. Even Marcus wore a knowing grin. Feeding off the crowd, Oliver felt invincible, unstoppable, his own music ringing in his ears. And then Marcus sat back down and launched into the very same tune—one of Jelly Roll’s—that Oliver had just finished. Marcus played it as though Jelly himself were on that bench, and when his horns came in there was no flinch, just a racing ahead, a sound so full that it lifted the entire room up over Oliver’s head and spun it around. In fact, he found himself looking up at the rafters and blue smoke hanging around there; he was dizzy from the experience. He heard the laughter, he the butt of the joke. And then he laughed along with them at a lesson learned. There would be many, he knew, and they would be carried out publicly as this one had been. Lesson number one from Marcus Longstreet:
You ain’t shit, boy.
Oliver laughed despite himself.

Oliver looked through the dancing, swinging masses and found Fairbanks’s eyes, saw the twinkle in them as his boss raised his whiskey glass in commiseration.

Then he felt Leona’s hand on his lower back, felt it slip around and into his pocket as she pressed in behind him. He felt the closeness of the crowd, her whiskey breath on his neck. He felt her hand in his pants pocket, groping, searching, and promising a lesson he’d been hurting for. It was a lesson he’d carry with him from New Orleans and into adulthood.

For the next few nights, Oliver and Leona managed to meet up—sometimes upstairs from the club where Marcus played in rooms meant for storage, poker, and whores, sometimes in the dark recesses of public places that make up a labyrinthine city like New Orleans. Once, right alongside St. Patrick’s Church. It was a passion that grew from that first night when Leona pulled him outside, just as she’d pulled him across the dance floor to the piano. Right out into the back alley they went, where the paving stones glistened with a recent rain and the light shot silver streaks from building to building. She pushed him back against the damp wall and fell to her knees. Oliver stood stock-still, trembling, so much more nervous than he’d been to play the piano in front of a crowd. His nostrils filled with the aroma of New Orleans after hours, its refuse and spice. He looked up and could make out the few stars in a hint of sky just past the yellow back-door light and wires strung overhead. He felt her crooked teeth on him, and what he felt then, and what he would recall for days after climbing back on to that big boat to paddle upriver, was music itself. It was a feeling he swore to himself he’d never let go.

During the days, Leona went to work with Lucille, and while Madame Fontaine was at her bridge club or her garden club, Leona would ask Madame Fairbanks if that strapping boy who was staying with her might come next door to help retrieve a pot and pan from way up high. They would fall into a bed unused for decades while Lucille, unknowing, was across the house scrubbing or hanging laundry to dry out back. With the afternoon light pushing through gauzy window coverings, they were fast and passionate, and when it was over, Leona helped him tuck everything back in place, arranging his shirt and tie as though he’d done little more than reach down a pot and pan.

“That girl taught me music,” Oliver says, “but it wasn’t so much her touch and taste, though that’s a damn big part of it. I learned what it’s all about when I left that city the first time, because she was still there. She was on that dock, not makin herself known, but just a face in a sea of faces. It brought out a whole new emotion in me, one of loss, and all good music, true music, has some loss in it. Love, to be sure, and sex, whole lot a sex give it tempo and drive, but everybody knows loss and so that’s what they connect with. It was somethin in my chest I didn’t feel even when I left my people in Winona. It was new, like Marcus’s music sounded new, like the taste of whiskey was new. And you know somethin? It was just as excitin to me as all that other shit.”

“Ever see her again?” Frank says.

“Naw. Looked, but them boats was slow goin and we went way up north with all the stops along the way. Made it up to Chicago then, my first time. By the time we made it back that far south, I was a year older and then some. And I’d had plenty more of some on that trip.” Oliver laughs and looks over at Winky, who’s working to cut his link sausage with a butter knife. “Boy, what I tell you? Pick it up.

“Anyway, that next trip to New Orleans I didn’t stay in the Fairbanks House, but with a trombone player name of Hamlet Giraud. . . .”

“He was in your quintet on the Verve recordings.”

“That’s right, young man, that’s right. We played all over together, too—New Orleans, Cali, Chicago, Europe, right here. I met him on that boat, headed down to New Orleans ’cause he had a place in Tremé, and I crashed there. Looked around for Miss Leona but didn’t see her. Marcus Longstreet still there soundin good as hell, though. He said she went over to Tallahassee see about a boy over there and he ain’t seen her since. I missed that old girl, but I found plenty new.”

Frank scratches in his notebook. He’s becoming an even bigger fan of jazz and had been up all night reading what he could find on the subject, and on Oliver in particular. He plans to go back to the bookstore in Greenwich Village this afternoon to browse the music section for more names and facts. More than anything, though, he loves a good story and an interesting character, and his experience and novelist heart tell him when he finds them.

“You can’t use none a this, can you?” Oliver says, finishing his coffee.

“May have to leave out the bit about the back alley, Oliver.”

“Hmm. Damn shame.”

He wishes he could use the story, that it was appropriate for a newspaper. He feels he could fill a dozen more notebooks with the history of Oliver Pleasant. He wants to know about Oliver’s arrival in New York, his other female and musical conquests, whether the mysterious story behind what happened to Hamlet Giraud is true, and who the hell this kid sitting with Oliver is.

“Him? He my neighbor, Winky.”

“Name ain’t Winky.”

Oliver laughs at what he considers their banter. It’s not what he’d had with Hamlet, but he’ll take any consistent call-and-response like he used to have on the bandstand.

“Can I call on you again, Oliver? Maybe we could get together and talk some more?”

“You call me anytime, young man. Come on out and see me tonight, too. Tell ’em you there for me, you on the list.”

Oliver loves telling stories, loves having his mind travel back down dusty roads and debris-littered waterways to moments he’d thought were forgotten. Leona Thibodeaux. My God, that was so many lifetimes ago, he thought he’d never remember it, despite his promise to his teenage self that those weeks in New Orleans would stay with him forever. How much has happened since then? Travel, Francesca, kids, recording, fame, music, music, music . . . and yet here Leona had been this morning, right here at breakfast in New York City.

“Some things, they never gonna leave you, Winky,” Oliver says to his guest after Frank takes his leave. “Good food, good drink, good woman, the right song. Never. Stick with you like them flapjacks on your ribs.”

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about, Licorice.”

“You will, son. You will.”

4.

Darkness. Closeness. Noise: loud clanging like the trolley on St. Charles or her friend Ché on his cowbell—such awful rhythm for a percussionist. A beating, in and out, in and out, in and out. Steady. Agnes retreats inside herself; it’s all she can do once slid into the MRI tube as she’s been over and over again the past few years. “You think I’d be used to it,” she’d said to the tech, but you never get comfortable with being buried alive. “Is it like being swallowed?” Sherman had asked her once when she’d returned after a trip to Tulane. Yeah. Yeah, it is. She swallows hard, knowing she has almost half an hour to go on the inside. She tastes scotch and cigarette tar on the back of her tongue, the grittiness of a fingertip full of Colgate in her teeth.
I can’t believe I lay around that shitty apartment fucking and drinking shitty Starbucks coffee all morning instead of going back to my hotel,
she thinks.
Smells like a bayou cathouse in this tube. I can’t believe he needs another scan.
Agnes had had all her records sent to Dr. Mundra, but, as he explained in that soothing, paternal voice of his, his preference is to have as up-to-date an image as possible.

The first time Agnes was slid into an MRI—swallowed, buried—she was sixteen years old. She’d been told that the machine was a giant magnet and asked if she had any metal inside of her. She thought then of her body as a machine with gear wheels and pistons, and the plugs and clamps she’d seen laid out on an oil-stained sheet her daddy spread on the driveway when he was taking his old truck engine apart. She thought of herself as bionic and with the invincibility of a teenager and, for the first time in a while, considered that the test might be routine, that the film might show that she was as healthy as any teen anywhere. “No,” she’d answered, “no metal.” Did she have any jewelry, any piercings that weren’t immediately visible? “No,” she said, smirking and glancing over at her mother, whose raised eyebrows showed mock horror.

She had been taken out of school midday that Friday, something almost unheard of and frowned upon so late in the school year as all focus turned to final exams—as if such benign tests were at all important. Her father had wanted to be there, but he couldn’t miss work with the cost of that scan, possibly the first of many and as expensive as a small used car, he’d said. While she waited in a thin cotton gown with a pattern of ducks in flight all over it, she watched her mother behind a levee of paperwork and the tiny vertical wrinkle between her eyebrows that would grow and become permanent over the next few years while the tests showed, just as that first one would, that what was happening in her young body was anything but typical.

That first time in the machine had been the scariest. It was the unknown, except for the familiarity of nightmares, and a nascent fear of enclosed spaces and the wonder of suffocation. The tech, a thin Hispanic woman not much older than Agnes, had told her to keep her eyes closed and breathe steadily and calmly. The first thing Agnes did after the mechanical whirring and movement stopped was to open her eyes. And then she pressed the panic button and the whirring began again, pulling her from the tube. When her head finally emerged, she was looking up at Rosario. “Fuck. That,” Agnes said, rising to go.

A smile spread over Rosario’s face and she pushed her back gently. She spoke in a near whisper, although they were the only two in the room. “Scary as shit, huh?”

“Scarier.”

“I know, baby. What you gotta do, you gotta find some happy place and go there. Close your eyes and sink down there into your mind and into whatever gives you comfort. I went into that tube a year ago”—she shrugged—“worked for me. You got one of those places? Something to calm you?” Rosario was still whispering.

Agnes nodded and Rosario patted her shoulder and reached for the button to slide her back in. Agnes held to Rosario’s wrist. “What was your happy place?”

Rosario glanced back through the window and into the control room before leaning down closer to Agnes’s face. “Oral sex. My boyfriend’s good at it so I just went back to that in my mind.”

Agnes was sent laughing into the machine and kept her eyes closed that time. She didn’t know much about cunnilingus then—her boyfriends still had an adolescent focus on their own parts—so she thought of sitting on the bench next to her father as he played piano. For the next twenty-seven minutes she went through a list of songs note by note, seeing her father’s hands and moving her own in her mind. Even as the clanging and pinging of the MRI’s engine filled her senses and worked to push her fear to the forefront of her thinking, the music of Garland, Pleasant, Monk, Evans, and Ellington filled her head and pulled her out of harm’s way. Before she knew it, her concert was over and she was being spit out again.

“Find it?” Rosario had asked, her face a blur in the white light of the open room.

Agnes nodded. “What did they find? From your MRI?”

“Migraines, no perceptible cause. I take Tylenol, try to get my boyfriend to work on me.” She winked. “Hope that’s all it is for you, too, baby.”

Agnes stands on the perimeter of the Great Lawn and looks in awe at the expanse of meadow, the trees, and the grand city beyond Central Park. It is the stuff of movies and the stuff of song, and never did a melody mean so much as when she hummed it under a winter-blue sky and with a view such as this. Anytime she’s left a hospital (how many have there been?), Agnes has felt the need to be outside, but never as much as after an MRI. To counteract the claustrophobia, she’s walked to the park as fast as she could to lie down on her back in the grass and look up at the sky. After the cold metal, the grass under the palms of her hands and against her neck feels like life itself; the sky is a dome of cerulean and the last leaves of color tumble over her as the wind picks up. The day before, she’d needed the grittiness of the Village and a walk through Manhattan’s streets to strip away the false sterility of the hospital and its odor of chemicals and industrial astringents. Today she just wants to breathe.

After her first MRI, her mother had wanted to do something special and took Agnes shopping. Her mother suggested they look for a prom dress; she was grasping then for a normal moment, for a classic, cliché mother-daughter moment because she was scared. Agnes’s mother didn’t know how many more of these moments she might be allowed. She didn’t know if she’d have the chance to see her daughter in a college gown or to plan a wedding. Because she didn’t know if she’d hold a first grandchild born to her only daughter, she wanted an afternoon of lunch and girl talk and shopping.

The idea was as out of character and out of context for the two of them as a sixteen-year-old with an incurable neurological disorder. Agnes and her tomboy ways, preferring to climb a ladder to a rooftop with her daddy or play a seventy-year-old torch song, her mother more comfortable with a clean white sheet of paper and stick of charcoal, and the mess such an afternoon of creativity might make.

But each went through with it for the other, each willing to suspend routine for an afternoon to make the other happy, until it all fell apart. She and her mama had picked out an armload of dresses at Goldsmith’s department store, laughing like sisters at the different styles and wondering how Agnes’s thin frame might fill one out, before carrying them back to the fitting room. In that small cube with its floor-to-ceiling door and overhead fluorescent light, the walls closed in around Agnes. She heard the clanging and whirring of the MRI tube she’d left only an hour before and believed the air had left that little room.

“What is it, Agnes? Sweetie? You look pale—are you okay?” her mother said, dropping the dress she’d been holding into a heap on the floor. “Oh, baby, you’re shaking like a leaf. Agnes?”

Agnes leaned back to feel the cool mirror on her bare back. She slid down until she was crouching and hugged her arms, skin raised with gooseflesh even as sweat beaded on her forehead and across her upper lip. Her mother opened the neck hole of her T-shirt and slid it back over her daughter’s head. “Agnes? Talk to me, Agnes!”

Her mind raced with possible causes for this erratic behavior. Was it an adverse reaction to the MRI, a side effect of the radiation or whatever was in there? Or was this it? The end? And she said over and over in her mind,
Please don’t let this be it, please don’t let this be it.

“Mama?” Agnes said, as evenly and coolly as she could, her eyes closed and her right hand trembling as much as her left.

“Yes, baby? You okay?”

“Mama, open the door.”

“But your shirt. Here, let me slip it over your arms.”

“The door, Mama.”

“Okay, okay.”

When her mother opened the dressing room door, Agnes shot out like a bullet, running into the prom dress department, past shoes and accessories, through menswear, and out the door into the parking lot. Her T-shirt flapped behind her like a cape around her neck, her bare torso attracting stares from people uncertain of her gender. By the time her mother found her, Agnes was sitting on the hood of their car chewing at a hangnail. Her mother leaned back against the car and they both stared off at the department store doors in the distance.

“I didn’t like those dresses,” Agnes said, and they both fell into laughter.

They told Agnes’s father the story at dinner and he laughed with them until tears came to his eyes, both at the comedy of his daughter streaking through Goldsmith’s and the tragedy of his daughter inside a medical machine—and, too, for the fear of the unknown. He didn’t laugh at all when his wife told him later that the boy who had asked Agnes to prom had backed out. Teenagers could be cruel, and when word got around that Agnes was having tests done in a hospital, and classmates noticed that her left hand never stopped quivering, rumors of cancer and AIDS and sickness and contagion and everything else children don’t know a damn thing about scared that boy off. He came up with an excuse not to go, though Agnes heard he was at the dance with a girl from Dyer County, a girl who may not have heard that he might already be infected.

Her father did finally laugh to himself, however, one day that summer when he came across that boy’s prized, restored Mustang at the Hatchie bottoms where kids went to ride four-wheelers and drink, and he slipped it into neutral and eased the front end of that car into the river.

Agnes thinks of all of this now, here, on her back in Central Park. She wishes her daddy were with her, wishes he could have heard Oliver Pleasant play last night. She thinks of how much she’s looking forward to hearing him play again tonight. Andrew said he’d reserve a table for her, though he looked hurt by her eagerness, knowing it wasn’t for him but for Oliver. Such a soft boy. So many feelings worn right there on his sleeve, tattooed across his thin wrists. She should feel guilty for accepting such kindness even though there are no feelings for Andrew, but she’s behaved worse, she supposes.

She suddenly realizes that Landon will probably be calling soon. She still smells Andrew on her and needs to shower, too. She should go. “Just a few more minutes,” she says, and stares up at one lonely cloud making its way across the sky, then closes her eyes to it all.