Five Night Stand: A Novel (14 page)

5.

Frank sits on the bed in his hotel room and types the notes from his morning interview with Oliver. He laughs to himself remembering stories of Leona and Madame Fairbanks and wishes he had someone here to share them with. Oliver and the boy were an odd pair; he makes a note of the way Oliver treated him like a doting, though distant, grandfather might. He made the kid eat his eggs and sausage, handing him a napkin and ordering him to wipe his mouth, but then would seem to forget the kid was there beside him for some time while telling lurid stories.

After breakfast, with Oliver’s gravelly voice and laughter still in his head, Frank had walked back to the bookstore to see what was on the shelves regarding jazz. “Do you believe in fate?” the old man said from behind the counter when Frank walked in. He was sitting at a wooden desk piled high with paper invoices, catalogues, reference books, and a tall stack of novels at his elbow that he went through one by one, taking notes on them in a yellow legal pad.

“Fate?” Frank said once he’d found the source of the voice among the clutter. “Yeah, sure. I guess.”

“I saw you at Pleasant’s gig last night.”

“You were there? I didn’t see you.”

“You were busy talking with Davis McComber; I didn’t want to interrupt.”

“You know Davis?”

“Sure, sure. He’s a customer. Good writer, too.”

“He is, and young. Did you enjoy the show?”

“Oh, sure, I’ve never been disappointed. And I sat, as it happens, with the other Memphian—a gracious young lady.”

“Is that right? Weird. I’ll do you one better: I just left Oliver. I was interviewing him for a story.”

“Newspaperman? As endangered a species as jazz artist. As rare in the wild as a seller of books.”

“You don’t have to tell me; I was laid off last month. This is freelance work.”

“No shame there, young man. Talent is talent regardless of the medium.”

Frank has
Wikipedia
, of course, and can summon up any artist with full bio and audio clips with the click of a mouse, but he still enjoys flipping through books and the thrill of not knowing what he might find on the next page. As he walks through the bookstore slowly, pulling out books and taking his time finding the section labeled “Music,” he appreciates the heft and density of the objects on the shelves. He values the effort that someone put into researching and committing a biography to paper; it is something that can’t be changed at the whim of someone else, somewhere else, with their own click of an anonymous mouse. A book is as permanent as our past, as lasting as ink.

As it happened, the music section was large, more than Frank had hoped for, and situated against the far wall from the front counter and door. Frank stood in front of it, staring up at vertical and horizontal spines, some books as large as coffee tables and others mere pamphlets. Bare, World War II–era brick was visible through gaps in blues, opera, and rock and roll. His eyes drifted to the street through the large plate-glass window speckled with flyers advertising readings, poetry slams, and music revues to passersby. The wind had picked up and he watched a small cyclone whip down Bleecker and lift leaves and trash, tossing them into the air before laying them all down again on the hood of a cab. The driver looked irritated, more at the fact that there was no one to blame than for the mess itself. Something was blowing in out there.

“Looks like snow,” Lucchesi called from across the store.

Frank had asked about the other Memphian. A young woman, Lucchesi had told him. “Young and pretty, though pale, as if she might benefit from an afternoon outdoors.”

“What does she do?” A reporter’s questions are like a chef’s knives or a cop’s pistol, always there by his side and at the ready; always sharp, always loaded.

“Didn’t say, though she loves the music. Perhaps she’s a musician herself?”

“Here alone?”

“Appeared to be, at least she was last night, though the waiter seemed taken with her. I don’t believe I’m so old as to have overlooked that.”

“Are you a longtime fan of Pleasant’s?”

“Oh my, yes. His wife as well, I guess you could say. I used to sell her books. Francesca Pleasant was a voracious reader.”

“She died, didn’t she?”

“Yes, twenty-two years ago.”

Lucchesi had slipped away from him then, through the transom of the door, taken away on the brisk air blowing through the streets like a wind tunnel. He’d gone back in time someplace where Frank wasn’t invited, left the bookshop with only a shell where his body had been. It didn’t take an investigative reporter to see that there was something more than books and music between this man and the Pleasants.

“You were close?” Frank said, bringing the old man back to the shop, but slowly, allowing him to lower himself to the floor at his own speed.

Lucchesi smiled and his blue eyes twinkled a bit behind his glasses. “It shows?”

“Most people would have simply said ‘about twenty years.’ I’m sorry to pry; it’s none of my business.”

The old man looked to the windows as if Francesca might be there. “She was lonely, Oliver was gone a lot. She seemed to take refuge in her books, as though the characters were more than just paper and print. They’d become her friends, I believe.”

“And so had you?”

He nodded and puckered his mouth in further thought. “We had a common interest in literature and we both believed in the magic of good writing to take one away. My wife had passed only a few months before Francesca began coming in, and conversation was easy; we were both lonely. We talked about books, of course, and our favorite authors. The talk led to a weekly coffee at a little shop that used to be next door, and that soon became twice weekly. It was more than a year before I invited her to my apartment just around the corner. Even there we were slow, still talking about books and her children or my late wife, even Oliver and music. It was another month before we both summoned up the courage to go to bed. It’s a short distance, it turned out, from the magic of literature to the magic of love.”

Frank’s scalp was tingling with the story and the pain in Lucchesi’s voice. He was touched and thought then of Karen and the distance between them. “You loved her?”

Lucchesi nodded and removed his glasses, wiping his eyes. “And she loved Oliver. And her children, her family. But he spent a lot of time away, months at a time, and, as I said, she was lonely. Oh, I don’t mean to say I was
used
only for physical intimacy. There were feelings there, very real feelings, but she never would have left her husband. Even when that woman came from France and threatened everything that Francesca held dear, she didn’t leave him. And I knew that, I understood. She filled a void for me, just as I did for her. We became such close friends and were in love on some level. I miss her now.”

“Did he ever find out?”

Lucchesi shook his head and put his glasses back on. “I don’t claim to understand what happened between Oliver and Francesca. Sure, there were stories of him on the road, of musicians a long way from home—everyone’s heard them. Francesca heard them and dealt with them in her own way. It wasn’t my place to interject or let him know how his wife spent her time. The man is a great musician and, I believe, a good man. He was lost for a time, but who isn’t?

“And all this, by the way, is off the record. Both for your story and for general knowledge. I hope you’ll respect the wish of an old man, and a long-deceased woman?”

“Of course. But, I’m curious, the French woman who you said ‘threatened everything that Francesca held dear’? Who was that?”

Lucchesi smiled again. “The intrepid reporter. That, I’m afraid, is not a tale for me to tell. But I wish you luck with your story, young man.”

Later that day, Frank lies across his bed on top of the spread and thumbs through an encyclopedia of jazz published in 1967. Like cutting through an old-growth tree, he believes he’s found a ring closest to the fire with this tome written while so many of the players were still playing, still so alive. He turns to the
P
s and there he is:
Pleasant, Oliver (1921– ); b. Wynona
[sic]
, MS; performed with
 . . . and they’re all there. Dizzy, Teagarden, Armstrong, Billie, Coltrane, Miles, Cannonball, Hawkins . . . the list goes on.

He flips through a biography of Thelonious Monk, a newer book thick with the thrill of genius and chronology. Oliver and Monk wouldn’t have played together on the same stage, of course, but Frank has always been fascinated by the latter’s eccentricities.
Solo Monk
was one of the first jazz albums Frank ever bought. The first, thank God, was
Kind of Blue
. Without Miles Davis’s record, Frank may never have stuck with jazz. He was raised on his parents’ Beatles and Motown. His father had a thing for Chuck Berry and that led Frank to the Stones. Hendrix came a bit later, followed by Led Zeppelin and Van Morrison. He moved through punk fairly rapidly and took from it the Clash and the Velvet Underground. New wave was a lean trend for him, but Elvis Costello saw him through it until he landed on the other side with REM, U2, and the Cure.

Jazz, though, took a concerted effort. It was sought out. He’d heard it, as people do these days, in the background, at weddings or in department stores. It was the sound track of film and passed by somewhere on the lower end of the radio dial. But along with college and his want of creativity and his newfound passion for writing came a curiosity and craving for knowledge. So he snuck away from his friends and their Nirvana and Pearl Jam to a used record store down the Highland Strip and picked out names he’d heard . . . where? Someplace over the years. Everywhere, it seemed, once he saw those names on album sleeves: Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, John Coltrane, and Thelonious Monk.

He closes the book and lies back on the bed. He hefts it up to feel the weight of it, opens it and sniffs (he’d done this in the store as well, before he’d even paid for it), and then places it on his chest. He can feel his heartbeat against it. He looks over to his laptop, still open, and at the letters there on the open document, that crisp white “page.”
Times New Roman, 12 pt.
The type crawls across the page like insects. He reaches back over his head to find his phone among the pillows and presses Karen’s icon. It rings and he waits and he knows it isn’t her he’s thinking of, but the novel sitting on an unused desk in an unused room of the unused second floor of his house. He thinks of what Lucchesi had said about “the magic of good writing to take one away” and the power some people, Frank included, place in books.

“We had a habit, Francesca and I,” Lucchesi had said, not wanting to end his reverie, just as one might want a favorite novel to go on and on, for those characters to live long after the book is shut. “In the books I gave her, not those she purchased of her own accord, but the ones that I personally chose from my shelves or sought out at other bookstores and from scouts and dealers, I would inscribe with a small ‘ML’ in a top corner of the inside cover. And she would, upon finishing the book, put her ‘FP’ on the final page. Whatever was in between, I suppose, whatever world had been created and populated by those characters, belonged to us. It was silly, really, but I like to think of those books, of our initials and our stories, living on today, long after she’s gone.”

It isn’t silly, Frank told him. Reading and literature had brought the shopkeeper and Francesca Pleasant together, two people who were lost and lonely in the world. They had brought Frank and Karen together as well. Fiction, the landscape of make-believe and romance and fantasy, is a force to reckon with and still makes Frank’s heart beat quickly when he considers what it might all mean for him.

He first met Karen in the bar near the university. It was the early nineties and she’d worn a flannel shirt tied around her waist and a Nirvana T-shirt—the uniform of the day. She’s tall and her height was what he’d first noticed, followed by her hair, strawberry blond hanging down her back and over one eye. He and his friends sat at a small table crowded with empty beer bottles and spent cigarettes, talking of the future and past as if those bottles and cigarettes held the answers. He noticed her when she’d pass by, combat boots heavy on the tile floor, on her way to the restroom. She went a lot.

“I wanted you to notice me,” she told him later. “I’d go in there and stand around, check my makeup, and read graffiti—the other girls probably thought I was some kind of pervert—and then I’d hold my breath as I walked past you again, just hoping you’d look my way.”

“I figured it for a urinary-tract infection,” he’d said, and they both laughed. “Either way, I guess it worked.”

That semester was filled with laughter. Frank and Karen would walk the train tracks from the bar, past the university, to the sloping lawn behind the water-pumping station. Karen told him she liked the old building with its soaring windows and WPA-era art deco ornaments. She told him she was majoring in accounting because it’s what her father did—“Figures and sums are the family business.” But she had a streak of color in her, a coppery stream that cut through the unmoving stone of mathematics and statistics. That stream floated art and music and literature. She had a nascent interest in abstract paintings and alternative music, and a great love for Jane Austen and nineteenth-century prose. Frank helped to guide her, channeled that stream just as his high school love had for him—through easy conversation both in and out of bed.

His high school girlfriend had left him for a greater love—education, and Sarah Lawrence College. A long-distance relationship wouldn’t work, she’d said, and he’d taken her on her word just as he’d trusted her in all else. Even as he moved on with his life, he ached for her. She left him, but left him with a greater understanding of who he was.

It was Karen who showed him who he wanted to be. They would lie back in the grass, the motors from the pumping station vibrating the ground beneath them, and look down at their school, and they would talk of writing and literature and very little of accounting. They would kiss and touch and he would find the courage to say, “I want to be a writer.”