Five Night Stand: A Novel (16 page)

It’s a normalcy Agnes feels is due her. She’ll be dead by the time she’s twenty-five. This she knows. How? From a dream. A premonition. A high priestess in a low place along oily voodoo streets of New Orleans who reminded Agnes of the things that come to a person in and out of hospitals, lonely in those examination rooms or as a budding teen when ostracized by her peers. Holding to any one of these men for too long—for a month or a season—would mean giving them a lifetime: her life. She wants experiences, craves the myriad spices, tastes, and sensations. Dr. Mundra can’t help her, none of them can; only her own will and curiosity can make her whole.

Now, as Agnes sits in the bar at the Capasso, Andrew aches for her. He watches her, taking in her bare calf and the way her shoe hangs from her toes. He wants those legs wrapped around him again. She flips her hair to look back at the front door and he lets slip a moan from his throat for the tendons there, bending and twisting with her backward glance. In her hand is the scotch and he sees the slight ripple of the glass, the faintest vibration he’d noticed that morning in his bed as her hand moved down his chest, his stomach, and between his legs. He can’t purge the memory of this woman’s body and touch and smell from his mind.

And she knows it. Agnes can feel his gaze on her and it only makes her less inclined to look for him among the crowd. But she does wonder where he is, and as she scans the room back to the front door for any sign of Oliver, she lets her eyes wander to the periphery.
There he is, by the bar waiting on a drink order but watching me.
Sweet boy.
She wonders how lonely she is, whether she’ll go back for more tonight, though this time it would have to be in her hotel room and not the dungeon of his flat. She can almost see them together once again, feel his weight on her, moving more and more quickly, when suddenly the piano catches her by surprise. It’s something slow and light played in C. Where had he been? She’s been watching intently for Oliver Pleasant but hadn’t seen him at his booth or crossing the room. She’d been distracted by her tattooed lover. She decides to forget Andrew Sexton for now, for the duration of this tune, this show. She’ll decide on him later, after the music has washed over and through her. That might, once again, be all she needs.

When the set is over, it’s the bearded man in sandals who brings a scotch to Agnes. She sees up close that his beard is shot through with gray and he wears a small gold hoop earring. He smiles familiarly as he greets her. “My name is Ben Greenberg and this is my club. My friends call me Benji.” He offers his hand and she takes it, noticing the small tattoo of a music note on his wrist. She feels nothing at all for this man and can sense it is mutual, and she is at once relieved and at ease. “I’ve seen you here every night of Oliver’s show,” he continues. “I can’t get busboys to show up so regularly.”

“I’m here for Mr. Pleasant, for the music.”

“We all are. Would you like to meet him?”

“Oh, I couldn’t. He seems tired tonight.”

“I’m sure he is. You’re a musician, right? A pianist?”

“How did you know that? I mean, I do play piano, but not in New York, not like Pleasant.”

“One doesn’t spend as long in this business as I have without being able to recognize a player. Come on, let’s get you over there, Ollie always has time for a fellow musician.”

Ben introduces her to Oliver Pleasant, who sits like a boulder, a backdrop to the still life of Campari, foreign cigarettes, and silver lighter in front of him. He beckons her to sit and thanks Ben, who makes his way to another table.

“Where you from, Miss Cassady?” Oliver says.

“Memphis?”

He blows a tired stream of smoke. “Is that right?”

“Well, Tipton County, just outside Memphis. Close enough to smell the barbecue, though.”

“Memphis. You know that young man there? The one with the notebook? He from Memphis, too.”

She follows the direction of his index finger across the dimly lit room. “No. No, I don’t know that man.”

Oliver manages a smile and says it again. “Memphis. W. C. Handy . . . The Peabody Hotel.”

“Now those I know. Yes sir.”

“What you doin in Manhattan?”

She shrugs, glances sideways, and sips at her scotch in the same manner as she’d noncommittally answered Andrew’s question earlier. But Oliver is more worldly and has communed with women in faraway places, and he knows when an answer isn’t.

“Ain’t nobody’s business. You like the show?”

“Like it? It’s been wonderful, every night of it.” She wants to tell him that she plays piano as well, that she grew up with her father playing Pleasant’s songs and that hearing them again, here, live, is like having her daddy back, if only for a night. She wants to thank him for those songs, for what he’s given the world. She feels all of these things bubbling up in her, but Oliver is someplace else, looking down at the smoke as it curls off his cigarette. “It means a lot to me to be here,” she finally manages, gulping from her glass and looking for a passing waitress, Andrew, or Benji to have it refilled—even Marcie at this point, such is her discomfort with being here while Oliver so clearly is not.

It’s the same beat and weary look that was in his eyes when he’d taken the stage earlier. He’d sat there alone and merely played with a few keys in C here and there, pushing at them like a child with a plate of unrecognizable food, not knowing if it might taste good or even be edible. He talked in circles; he spoke low so that the crowd hushed with him, not completely mute, but respectfully quiet so they could hear what it was he was talking about. He talked about books and about California; he spoke of cold-water flats and babies and loss. The words meandered as much as the tune until the melody finally started to coalesce, as did the talk, and he spoke of his wife.

He said he’d married so long ago, he believed that maybe he’d always been so. “I been knowin her forever,” he said. “I ain’t never not known her, but I lost her and that feels new to me, like it just happened this night. Wish she was here. Lord, I wish for that. Wish they all was.” The tune took more shape, like a balloon filling with air, and there was a palpable fear in the room that it might overfill and destroy itself. Agnes had seen the man in sandals—the man she now knows as Benji—standing close by, his eyes on his friend. The song was so slow and beautiful that Agnes had only wanted to put her head down on the table and close her eyes to it. “I brought Francesca back from Sacramento, California, and married her. That was a beautiful week for me and I wrote this here song for it, for her. Guess I ain’t played it since she left us. When was that? Benji, baby, you know? You recall? Today? Was it today or was it two decades ago? Let’s see now if I can get this song out, see how she goes.” The room had quieted more so that even the servers stopped, and it was understood by everyone that they would wait on drinks and food. The silence was such that even the kitchen seemed to have halted its industrial gears.

When he’d finished, he’d pushed his porkpie back on his round head and mopped his brow, his chin, his eyes with that blindingly white handkerchief. No one applauded because it wasn’t for anyone else. This was Oliver talking to Francesca, and there only happened to be a room full of people by accident, a room full of people giving those two their moment together. The band stood just offstage and seemed to await his invitation to enter that space of the piano. The horns held their instruments in folded arms and each of them bowed in reverent silence until Oliver nodded to them, and only then did they join him.

And when they did, Oliver led them in a wild swing as though to shake the sadness from his mind and air out the room, as though it would shake the plaster from the walls and ceiling. Those young guns on horns, drums, and bass sucked wind for the better part of an hour trying to keep up with that old man.

Now, in his booth, a neglected cigarette burning down to ash and Campari going to water in his glass, he still looks as though he’s with Francesca someplace, maybe back in Sacramento or up in that cold-water flat. He looks to Agnes as though it’s exhausted him, all of it—the frenetic pace, the long hours, the booze, and the memories.

“You play?” He says from nowhere, as though that’s what he’s been wondering as he sat there in silence.

“Oh, well, a little, yeah. My daddy played and I took lessons as a kid.”

“That’s nice. Nice. Jazz?”

“That’s what my daddy played, yes sir. I was raised on it, all the best—Bill Evans, Brubeck, McCoy Tyner, Duke, Peterson, Basie . . . you.”

“That’s fine, real fine. You got to have that foundation and it sound like your daddy did right by you. He still with us?”

“My daddy? No sir. He died a couple years ago while I was down in New Orleans. That’s where I live now, playing in the Quarter and places.”

“New Orleans you say?” He seems to perk up at this and she notices his slight gesture to a passing waitress at Agnes’s empty glass. “I spent some time in New Orleans now, yes ma’am. Good times.”

“Did you live there?”

“Well, no, not so I had an address or nothin, but I think we all live there, part of all us musicianers. Don’t you think? Ain’t all this”—he moves his thick hand across the table as if to take in the room—“born from New Orleans? Wouldn’t be no Capasso, wouldn’t be no Benji Greenberg, wouldn’t be no Oliver Pleasant or Agnes Cassady without New Orleans. Wouldn’t be no jazz.”

A waitress sets a fresh scotch in front of Agnes just as Oliver holds his glass up for a toast and the two clink glasses. “To New Orleans,” he says.

“To jazz,” Agnes offers.

The two talk of music and lightly of travel and New Orleans. She talks of the past—not hers, but the music’s. She tries to speak knowledgeably about history and make it clear that it comes from so much study, so much curiosity, and her father’s vault-like memory of names and numbers. Oliver had lived through these times and she wants him to know she respects that. Oliver nods and smiles. The girl knows her stuff, he can hear that. Once the scotch has worked itself through her tough exterior and stiff nervousness, loosened her up so her mind moves more like a wave machine than a grandfather clock, she talks almost nonstop. She takes one of his Gitanes from the pack on the table without asking and lights up, laughing and apologizing only when the thick smoke chokes her and she realizes what she’s done. He waves the apology off, always happy to sit in public with a pretty girl.

Oliver has come to know loneliness like a growth, something he has to deal with every day, always there and up front when he looks in his filmy morning mirror. He’s relished these past few nights with other musicians and his friends who have stopped by to pay their respects—Sonny Rollins stopped in, as did Jimmy Heath, Joe Lovano, Diana Krall, even Tony Bennett and the Marsalis boys—but he misses the touch of a woman. He’s afraid he may forget that warm sensation eventually, just as he’s begun to forget his earliest compositions. Forgotten, even, what he’d had for breakfast or just how bad his morning piss had hurt.

Sitting and talking with Agnes brings back that warmth like the first sip of whiskey taken in forever. He’s enjoyed the nights in his oversized round booth in the back of the club, plush and comfortable like nothing he knows of in his own home and the world outside Benji’s. He wears his ever-present porkpie atop his head, covering the baldness there. He’s not vain, but has always liked the hats and has a collection he’s taken from friends over the years, stolen them until they came to expect it, hope for it, even. It was like a badge of honor for Oliver Pleasant to be wearing one of your lids onstage or in an album cover photo. He has one from Count Basie, Ornette Coleman, a couple from Oscar Peterson, and even one from Frank Sinatra.

As people wander to and from the bar, and in and out of the club, they stop to say hello to Oliver and introduce themselves as fans. He accepts their hands politely but does not acknowledge Agnes to them until his band drifts past from backstage. He calls them over one by one to introduce “a fellow player,” a phrase which flushes her face more than the liquor or the French cigarette. Each member leans in too close to her, sits right up next to her with their thighs touching, putting their arms around her to say hello, ask her where she’s from, ask her where she’s sleeping, before Oliver sends them on their way like a mother shooing her kids away from a freshly baked pie.

When they’ve gone and the room has cleared a bit, he offers her some of his Campari. She sips from his glass, lingering and swirling the fragile aperitif glass in her hand, stopping to watch the whirlpool she’s created. She tells him then about pain, about a dusty hand-me-down piano back in Memphis so infused with the blues of the South that some nights she’d swear she heard it crying in the other room as she tried to sleep. She tells him about the disease that’s consuming her slowly, gripping her nervous system like the law stepping on a criminal’s neck, how unfair it is that it would begin its death march with her left hand and bring with it a pain in her skull, loss of feeling, and tremors. She places the glass back on the table and he covers her hand with his large paw, holds it there to feel the trembling. She, in turn, feels the warmth, not just the physical heat of his hand but the tenderness he feels toward this woman who will never know her potential, a music that will never find its natural height. A music unknown is one of the most melancholy things Oliver has ever considered.