Five Night Stand: A Novel (15 page)

Karen, with a warmth spreading through her chest, would encourage him, wallow in this dream with him as though they were skinny-dipping in the water that flowed behind and below them. “But you should be a reporter, finish journalism school,” she said, her bloodline of net pay and bottom lines still coursing through her newly engorged heart. Neither could have predicted the slow crumbling of the fourth estate in their new springtime of love.

In the bar, on the lawn, in her dorm and his apartment, they grew closer, made love, dreamed, and planned. They became inseparable and married only weeks after graduation. He began a novel that same summer, it coming to him in bits and pieces on their drive to the Gulf Coast for a honeymoon. He stayed up late nights typing on an electric typewriter in their small apartment in Midtown Memphis. She went to work for her father’s firm and Frank was hired as a copy clerk for
The Commercial Appeal
. When he was eventually hired as a reporter, he saw it as a stepping-stone that would lead him to a larger market or a career as a novelist. He never expected to be there seventeen years later, still as a reporter. He never expected to earn less than Karen, who worked the corporate world as though she were fly-fishing, tugging a line here, dropping bait there, until she’d hooked some of the grander species in the small pond of Memphis. Neither had he expected to be unemployed in his forties.

He
had
expected to finish that novel, and she’d expected to have a baby.

When the first miscarriage occurred, Karen had been devastated. It had taken so long just to get pregnant that she believed she was owed that baby. The early days of pregnancy were spent planning and dreaming and took them both back to those warm spring days on the hill of the pumping station behind the university. They even went there one afternoon with cheese and bread to lie on a blanket and take turns pressing their eager palms to Karen’s newly inhabited belly. They volleyed names back and forth—literary names from their favorite novels, musical names from a decade, five decades before. They were run off by a security guard like a couple of college kids, laughing and stumbling down the hill.

When she lost it, when the hummingbird heartbeat had stopped, so did the dreams, the plans. Frank would try to engage Karen, suggesting she read a newly released book or one of her old Jane Austen friends, but she waved him off, saying she had work to do. She seemed annoyed by his constant need for music in every room of the house or the way he could disappear into thought and take notes on scraps of paper or napkins about what he found there in his mind.

They would try again. And again. There were two more pregnancies lost, each met with lower and lower expectations. Those lowered expectations seemed to extend to each other, and one another’s needs, over time. Frank still loved Karen with all he had, and she him, but it was a love emptied of passion and spontaneity. As empty as the second floor of their house, as empty as the unfinished nursery and the sheet of paper still scrolled into Frank’s college typewriter.

“Hello?”

He’s calling from habit and out of a sense of obligation, and he’d hoped to let the phone ring until just before Karen’s voice mail picked up, knowing she’d see he called. He puts the phone back to his ear. “Hey! I was about to hang up. What’re you doing?”

“Working. Where are you?”

“Hotel. Typing up notes from an interview this morning.”

“Oscar?”

“Oliver. Yeah, interesting guy. Where’re you?”

“On my way to a client’s.”

“Which?”

“Spillman.”

“Hey, little lady.” He says it as caricature in a growly, musky voice.

“That’s the one. I’m late, can I call you back?”

“Yeah. I’ll be going to his show again, but it won’t be until later.”

“I’ll be going to bed early anyway.”

“Feeling bad?”

“A little nauseous. Hormones don’t agree with me so much.”

Hormones. She’s started a round of shots again.
Dammit,
he thinks.
I forgot.
“Two shots so far, huh? Since yesterday?”

“Yep. I’m all hopped-up, crazy and pukey as ever. So come on home so you can get some of this.” It’s Karen’s way of making light of the situation, but it always leaves Frank in an awkward place. He never knows what to say when she detours down that road, whether to console or play along. But he always tries, and usually to disastrous effect.

“I’ll want some by the time I get back.”

“It’ll take you that long?” Karen is always quicker and always more vicious.

“I’m ready now,” he says, trying to salvage this, trying to climb his way up. “I’ll be ready tonight if you want to get a little dirty online.” He says this yet finds his mind is wandering, not to their bedroom but just down the hall, up the stairs of their house, and into the office he hasn’t entered in months. He’s sitting at the desk and there it is: a clean white sheet of typing paper.

“Too sick, like I said. Sorry.”

He is relieved. Relief is not the feeling he wants to have, but it is the one that emerges and he breathes easier.

“Here I am,” she says. “I’m late so I really do need to go.”

“Okay. I’ll talk to you soon. Love you.”

“Bye.”

6.

Guests are filing in and Ben signals to Marcie to get off of her phone. She turns her back to him and continues her low-volume argument. Ben shows a couple to their table. He should fire Marcie, he knows, for a myriad of reasons, but it is an asset, he also knows, to have guests greeted at the door by those breasts and then escorted to a table by that ass. Marcie is as much a decoration and fixture as the deco wall sconces and ornate millwork on the bar.

“What is it you’re waiting on?” Ben asks Andrew as he crosses back to the hostess stand. Andrew is leaning against the bar and staring at the door with a steaming cup of coffee at his elbow.

“What? Nothing, just watching the customers.”

“She’s coming back tonight?”

“Yeah.”

“Does she know your auspicious beginnings yet?”

“Shut it, Ben.”

Though Andrew Sexton knows who to ask for when he enters the hushed womb of Brooks Brothers, he never goes there anymore. He knows where and how to order off-menu from Midtown to Chelsea to SoHo. His favorite restaurant, though, serves Vietnamese off the books from a converted apartment over a donut shop in Alphabet City. If he ever needs to get someplace, a car service could be at his door in minutes, yet he’s memorized the subway and crosstown bus schedules.

Andrew Sexton was raised among privilege, attending the best schools and running with the most starched of Upper West Side boys and girls. His grooming was looked after and impeccable, and he was raised to take over the investment banking of his father and his father before him. It is a pedigree that boasts founding fathers of banks, foundations, a city, and a country. Andrew wants none of it. “What is it you want, Andrew?” a girl once asked him, a lily-white girl of seventeen in her pink bedroom with fresh linens and a view of Central Park. She was astride young Andrew in name-brand bra and panties, but she wasn’t talking about sex. She knew Andrew wanted her—they all did. She wanted to know what he wanted from life, what he might provide her from those steel and glass buildings at the southern tip of her island. She ran the manicured nail of a long finger down his hairless teenage chest and asked again: “What is it you want?”

“I’m going to be an artist.”

It was the answer she wasn’t expecting; it was the first time he’d said it out loud and surprised even himself when it came from his lips. It would be the last thing anyone expected to hear from a Sexton. And what sort of artist? They would ask. Fine arts? Studies in Rome and Paris? Days spent copying the masters in the Louvre and Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, champagne-filled nights in the arms of a baroness? That was all acceptable, though barely—a distraction and hobby for his early years. Abstract expressionism? A bit more difficult to swallow, to convince Mother and Father’s friends that it is worthwhile. A rogue figure in the family, yet manageable with a loft in SoHo that is both residence and studio, and a white-walled gallery in Chelsea selling his work for the cost of one of those Brooks Brothers suits. Perhaps a profile in the
Times
’ Arts and Leisure section, certainly a mainstay on page six.

“What sort of artist, Andrew?” that young, nubile kept-woman-in-waiting asked.

“A tattoo artist.”

All hope is lost. The suits, the restaurants, the cars, the business, the legacy. He has brothers—the legacy of name isn’t an issue—but where did it all go wrong? The schools were the best money could buy, as were the friends. The blood, certainly, is top tier. A tattoo artist? “Why, I’ve never heard of such a thing,” his mother said. “No son of mine . . . ,” his father blustered. And Andrew, to his credit, didn’t ask for suits or food or cars. He didn’t ask for help. He didn’t even ask for their understanding. Andrew Sexton, of the Upper West Side Sextons, instead held a series of restaurant jobs, paying for his own art lessons, equipment, rent, and board. While a large sum of money sat in trust until he “came to his senses,” Andrew was sucked into a whirlpool of drugs and hustling, living for a time off what he could steal or scrounge, and still he didn’t go back to his family. Two years were spent in the gutter, making his way from tattoo parlor to tattoo parlor, offering to sweep up or wash windows for an apprenticeship. He’d keep one job for a while before losing it when he showed up to work high, or not at all. Despite the snowstorm of cocaine and, later, heroin, he learned a thing or two. He practiced and got better before losing a week or more to the streets, having to work—or steal—twice as hard to buy his tattoo rig back from hock.

It was a low time for Andrew, the lowest being a four-month stint at Rikers, a fortress his parents probably didn’t even know existed. It cleaned him up for a time, but he scored soon after release. Soon after that release, while sleeping days away on a concrete ledge beneath the Manhattan Bridge, he went to work for Ben Greenberg, washing dishes and taking out trash. Ben saw more to the boy than such work, and he also recognized the stench of despair and hopelessness. He reached out and rescued Andrew; the heart of Ira Greenberg still beat within his son.

Ben pulled Andrew up and out of the sewer, cleaned him off, and cleaned him out. He stayed after him to go to AA meetings, to get out in the fresh air of parks, and to work toward his goals. Ben knew talent, not only when he heard it onstage but also when he saw it on a canvas, whether that canvas held oils or was a scar on skin. By staying clean and staying employed, Andrew was able to make new friends, a different sort of friend than he’d ever known—true friends—and he became happy again. It was a happiness not even his father’s money could buy; he’d found it on his own. He tried to keep his pasts—both of them—from these friends because he didn’t want to know if they were or were not the kind that money could buy, or the type who would run from weakness.

Andrew, of course, didn’t marry the girl in the pink bra and panties. A tattoo artist? She was having none of that in her perfect future, though she did that day. It was the best sex she would have for years to come, while leaving Andrew with a taste for something more exotic.

He watches the door like a puppy waiting for his master to return home. It has been five years since that girl asked what he wanted and he’s coming close to getting it, working by day for a tattoo parlor in Times Square, inking “I ♥ NY” and “9/11—Never Forget” on tourists. He feels he was on the right track, so close, and then he met Agnes Cassady and now he has a whole new want.
Day to day,
he thinks to himself.
That’s how things change.
If he could go back in time and again find himself beneath that perfect and poised girl going moist atop him, he would say, “I want to be an artist, and I want
Agnes
.”

Andrew greets her before she’s completely seated, having been shown to her table by Marcie, who gives him a bored look. “Hey,” he says, words failing him. This is new for Andrew, a young man who, though he’s shaken the ornamentation of status from his surface and had it scrubbed with asphalt streets and broken concrete, can’t rid himself of the confidence that comes with wealth. It soaked into his skin like summer sun during a childhood spent in the Hamptons and on tennis courts along the Hudson. Yet in the presence of Agnes, whose indifference he finds so alluring, worn on her collarbone like a fragrance, he has trouble with the simplest greeting. “Good day?” He’s missed her, longed for her the minute she’d left his tiny apartment, leaving him alone in his warm, damp sheets.

He doesn’t hear her reply; she appears to shrug, to toss her hair, to rub her bare shoulders for warmth. It is all exhilarating to him. “You left pretty quick this morning,” he says.

“I was late.”

“Meeting?”

She shrugs again. “Scotch? Please?” She puts Andrew Sexton back in his place.

The room is at capacity again. A buzz fills Agnes’s ear. It’s the excitement and music of the previous nights that has managed to penetrate Manhattan’s thick concrete crust, calling to people who want to know for themselves what forces have been moving beneath the surface of their streets and their safe day-to-day lives. Her attention is drawn to the door, where Marcie is turning away a party of four. The man, the leader of his pack, is irate. He is obviously not used to being told no. Marcie, also obviously, is taking great pleasure in being the first to do so.

Despite the standing-room-only crowd, there is the same large, empty table beside Agnes’s that has been there the past two nights. The small “Reserved” placard in the center acts as a beacon for the angry silverback at the door who gestures toward it. He is finally intercepted by the bearded man in sandals and directed back outside.

For Agnes, it’s the music. Always the music. She hasn’t come to New York for the pageantry, to gaze upon the fashions and fashionable or to drink in the elixir of celebrity. The music, ever since she was old enough to reach the keys from a piano bench, has been her life force. In those earliest days, the sound of the piano was intertwined with the closeness of her father. Memories of his music from that bench and his smell of coffee and sawdust are all the same to her. It’s what she missed the most back at home for the funeral. She sat on the bench in the family room of the old farmhouse playing the slow numbers that were her father’s favorites. She slowed them down another half step for the day. Still dressed in cemetery black, her mother sat beside her. Agnes laid her head on her mother’s thin shoulder and they both cried silently while Agnes played, the music the embodiment of a husband and father who had left the room too soon.

The two women had traveled to downtown Memphis, whisked away from Tipton County and the buzz of cicadas by a Town Car, to a white-tablecloth restaurant and Landon Throckmorton. He charmed her mother, rising when she arrived and gently kissing the back of her hand. He expressed remorse for the passing of her husband and asked after him, and he listened intently and genuinely as Agnes and her mother traded stories.

Her mother described a simple man, a handyman by trade who was good with his hands. She’d meant at his work and the way he could repair anything, but she blushed all the same. She spoke proudly of her husband, unashamed of his simplicity or his work measured more in the sweat of his brow than any pay by the hour.

Agnes told Landon that the evenings were her favorite when he’d come home from a long, hot day of patching rotted windowsills and changing locks. He was tired, his hands mottled with paint or grease, and he’d sit at the secondhand Cable-Nelson console piano and play tunes by McCoy Tyner or Bill Evans.

“How was work, Daddy?” Agnes was always on the bench beside him as his head would sway, tilted back just a bit. Sometimes he closed his eyes.

“Crows cawing.”

“What about?”

“Don’t matter, just listening to themselves. Each one trying to be louder than his neighbor. Look at me! Look at me!” He’d imitate a bird, flapping his arms out to the sides like wings and nudging Agnes, who giggled in delight. She could picture her staid and heavily rouged piano instructor perched on the music stand in her conservatory, shrieking like the big blackbirds that alighted on the barn where Agnes’s father kept his tools and the small, green tractor he used to mow the lawn.

Her daddy played soft on those evenings, maybe to counter the volume of his day spent with ripsaws and hammers, and the incessant complaints and demands of his clients. Agnes liked it. Loud or soft, she loved listening to him play.

Agnes was as grateful to Landon for the night out and her mother’s much-needed distraction as she was for the passage to Memphis and all else he’d arranged. But her mother questioned Agnes’s relationship with the older man later at home as the two women lay curled in Agnes’s parents’ bed watching a late-night talk show. “Friend,” Agnes said. “Sometime employer.”

On the train back to New Orleans, she sat cross-legged on the bunk of the train compartment and watched him as he read, just as he had for the entirety of the trip to Memphis. Her book, one suggested and loaned by him, lay open in her lap while she watched this man, almost fifty years her senior, and wondered what he wanted, what the needs might be for a man who seemed to have everything. She grew restless and left the compartment to walk the length of the train, stopping periodically to sit in vacant coach seats and stare out of windows at passing towns that vanished into thin air, she imagined, as soon as they flew from sight. Landon had brought a bottle of wine and they shared that back in the compartment, watching the kudzu-covered trees and lampposts glide by. They discussed Memphis and New Orleans and all that lay between the two. Landon never touched her on the train, never asked for more than conversation and company.

To grow so close to a man without the inevitable physical play was anathema to Agnes, who collects men and wears them like a carnival mask—not to hide who she is from others but to show herself who she might be. The doctor’s wife one week, a long weekend as the judge’s girl, the mistress of a venture capitalist, and plaything to a chef. She’s had them all. She gathers them in and holds on to them until she’s finished. And by then, they want her. They want to hold to her, to lock her in a room to play piano for them, to love them like their wives or girlfriends or boyfriends can’t, or won’t. She doesn’t need them; she needs the music and the fleeting feeling of being in control. She wants to be an adult while she can, to learn what it might be like to be married to any one of them just as her mother wanted to know what it was like to shop for a prom dress with her daughter and to give her away as a bride.