Five Night Stand: A Novel (17 page)

He doesn’t know if she can play or not, doesn’t care. Oliver hasn’t heard anyone talk about jazz and the need—the ache and hunger—to play in a long, long time. Most of the musicians he’s played with toward the end of his career were more interested in when the paycheck would arrive and for how much, when the dope would arrive and how much, and the same for the women. But this girl feels pain and, he believes, she can play through that pain.

Not knowing just what to say and hesitant to drink from his own glass she’s filled with such sorrow, he tells her some stories of the old days and their characters. He tells her how the young cats, the idealists, the innovators used to meet at Gil Evans’s place on Fifty-Seventh not far from the Capasso where they sit now. “Everybody would be there,” he says, “Gil, Max Roach, George Russell, Lee Konitz, even Bird would stop by, usually just to impress us.

“Gil’s flat was in this old building right behind a Chinese laundry and all the pipes from that building ran through his little place that wasn’t more than a damn closet with a sink, toilet, piano, and bed. We’d bring in crates and boxes and whatever we could find to sit on. Bottles and stories got passed around. New ideas, Russell’s ‘Lydian Concept’—that shit was far out then but most a them cats dug it . . . or said they did.”

He gets her to laugh eventually with stories of the Chinese laundry owner’s wife, who would cook them something to eat, even at four in the morning when they’d all finished their sets and gathered to talk and blow and smoke the dope that the laundry owner supplied. “She didn’t understand a word of English, especially the shit we talked because that wasn’t exactly the Queen’s English. We’d ask her to blow, nudge each other, cacklin like a hutch full of goddamn hens until Bird or somebody offered their horn and she blew on it so it made a noise like a dyin cat. Then we’d all laugh and tell whoever’s horn it was they could learn some shit from Chen or whatever the fuck her name was.”

Agnes eats these stories up and washes them down with her scotch, the earthy taste quickly washing the sweet Campari from her tongue. She wants another cigarette and asks this time; Oliver obliges.

“How long ago did she pass, Ollie? Your wife?”

“Twenty years.”

“You said up there that you wish she was here, said you wish they all was. Who’s ‘they’?”

Oliver takes another cigarette for himself and takes his time lighting it, blowing the smoke, and tasting.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s none of my business. I just heard you say it.”

“Guess I was talking more to the piano than anybody.”

“It’s okay.”

“My kids. I got two boys—twins—and a girl. Don’t see them too much.”

“They live far?”

“Girl, Charlene, she in Brooklyn. Boys all over, musicianers, you know. Hell, you probably seen them in New Orleans.”

“I would’ve gone to see a Pleasant. Don’t recall them there.”

“Use their mama’s birth name: Zanone. Wanted to make it on their own. I respect that.”

“Pianists?”

“Trombone. Tenor sax. They good, both of ’em. Play here sometimes when they come through, thought I might see them one of these nights. Hopin to see all of them. Damndest thing, though, my grandson stopped in last night. Tells me he’s a musician and wants me to come see him and his boys play.”

“Jazz?”

“Please. Hip-hop. You believe that shit?”

“I don’t.” She thinks. “But then, I don’t get out much.”

Oliver laughs and drains his glass. “You ever been to Paris, Miss Cassady?” he asks.

“Ain’t been nowhere but Tipton County and Orleans Parish. Except here. What county is this?”

“Hell if I know.”

“What’s Paris like, Ollie?” She lays her head down on her arm, un-self-consciously and unaware now of her surroundings.

“Paris like a woman. Well, it’s like bein in love with a woman. You ever been in love, Miss Cassady?”

She shrugs as best she can in her position. “Most days. Nights, anyway. Tell me about her, tell me about Paris.”

“It was tamed by then, late forties, fifties and such. Men came before us, Bechet, Armstrong, and they tamed her, though it cost them all somethin. By the time we lay down with her, she was eager, swallowed us up, boy. We could play all damn night, any night, and she’d be clawin for us by lunch.”

“You live there?”

“Off and on. Kept a place there, anyway. Kept a woman there.”

“Francesca?”

“Hmm? No, no, Francesca was here. I kept a little fifth-floor flat and it’s where I stayed when I was in town. It was quiet and gave me and the other cats a solitude we needed. Musicianers seek spotlight and recognition onstage, but when it comes time to wind down, we want it quiet and out of the way. Maybe not so quiet, now that I think on it; it was a rare thing if any of us went to bed alone. This little apartment was in the center of the Latin Quarter, and the inside and out was wrought iron and plaster with good windows that caught the breeze from the Seine. It was high enough up off the street to filter out that early mornin sidewalk noise below, too. I sure miss that flat some days.

“I had this old girl name of Marie there and she’d wait for me to come back overseas like a dog waiting on a bone. That old girl was hungry. She wanted me to move there, which I wouldn’t; I couldn’t with so much of my life, Francesca and the kids, bein here. But if I was there for two weeks, four, two months, she didn’t care, she wanted us to live like husband and wife. She got it, too.”

Despite the family he had back in New York, Oliver looked forward to those times in Paris as well. Marie was beautiful and worldly, and when Oliver was away in America, she worked in Italy and Spain as a photographer for the fashion industry. Even in his infidelity, Oliver was monogamous—a taste of the same fruit, just from a different orchard. As much as Marie enjoyed her time with Oliver, the late nights at Paris’s jazz clubs and cafés; drinks with other musicians, artists, and writers; early morning walks along the river to their little apartment where they would make love as the pinkish light of day was just beginning to break over the horizon—as much as she enjoyed the life, Marie was a jealous woman.

“When me and Marie weren’t around, them other cats might stay there. There was this other little girl over there, Giselle,” he says, pouring a sip more of Campari into his glass. “Giselle looked after the flat and whatever musicianer might be there at any given time, makin sure they had food and drink, and that the place stayed clean. Her daddy owned the building and ran a patisserie on the ground floor. Giselle was legendary for fightin off American boys who ended the night alone, or those that didn’t but wanted a little extra taste anyway. ‘
Juste un peu plus d’amour, mademoiselle?
’”

Marie could cope with Francesca, the American wife, the public face of Oliver at home; that was the way it had to be. The other girl, however, the Parisienne, was a different matter. There was only room for one and Marie resented this intrusion. There were nights Oliver was in Paris and Marie had to be away, mostly for work or to help look after her ill mother. She fretted these nights the way Francesca must have back in the small Harlem apartment she and Oliver had at the time. Marie clung to wild fantasies of Giselle entering the apartment and of her slipping into bed with Oliver, who would still be wound up from the night’s show and all alone. The thoughts were enough to send Marie into a blind rage. To make her presence known, on mornings she was there, when Giselle would let herself in and spread food on the small table beneath the window and boil water for coffee, strong and thick like Americans take, Marie would rise and parade nude around the apartment. She would flaunt her beautiful body, her long legs and full breasts, inspecting the fruit Giselle had brought, “the pears are not so ripe”; stand full in front of the balcony doors and comment on the weather, “it will rain today”; and leave the door to the small water closet ajar as she washed the previous night away with a rough washcloth.

“Did you love her? Marie?”

“I did. I think I loved all those women at one time or another. They gave me somethin to play for, somethin to go on workin for. I knew I wouldn’t have them all, not for long, except Francesca. Almost lost her a time or two, but she stayed with me. She’s my muse.”

“What happened with Marie?”

Oliver stares again at the smoke from his cigarette, curlicues reaching for the light. He picks up the cigarette and sets it back down as though the weight of it is too much. Settles, instead, on another taste of liquor.

“Oliver?”

“Well, that’s another story, sugar. Another story for another time. Another time from another life.

“Tell me what you know about love, Agnes Cassady.”

Agnes has to think about this. She thinks about it every time it comes up, which is more than you’d suppose down there in the Quarter, though it’s usually in the form of “Are you married?” “Got a boyfriend?” “Want one?” She smokes the French cigarette, pulling it in deep without concern—it’s one of the perks of knowing life’s limit ahead of time. She blows the smoke out in a sharp stream, splitting Oliver’s tired cloud in half. “I loved every one of them,” she finally says.

Oliver laughs, a deep growl of a laugh. “How many?”

Agnes shrugs. “Not enough, not for a lifetime.”

“How old are you? Talkin about a lifetime. What you know about a lifetime?”

“Twenty-two. But I’ll be dead by the time I’m twenty-five.”

The words strike Oliver like a slap across the face; he doesn’t speak of death if he can help it. It’s a fear he carries around with him in his breast pocket. At eighty-five, Oliver lives in the same neighborhood as death, can see it sometimes out of his window, lurking across the street, hears its feet shuffling up and down the sidewalk outside his door. It sits on his stoop and waits. That knowing, deep in the soul, that there’s something swirling about in a room or out in the city that can take you any time it wants makes a man sober. Giving voice to it, the way that Agnes just did, is just inviting it to sit down with you, begs it to reach across the table and into your breast pocket to take what it wants.

“Dead?” he says, whispering without even realizing. He pulls his porkpie down low over his brow. “What you talkin ’bout, dead? You young, girl, the thick of your life.”

She mashes her cigarette into the crystal ashtray. “It’s eating me up, Oliver, killing me from the inside out. Look at it!” Agnes thrusts her hand up in front of his face and they both watch it tremble, the shadows changing and dancing between her fingers and on her palm. “There are times I can’t control it at all, times I can’t feel the fingers. And the pain that comes with it, from my neck to my shoulder and down that arm, back up to my brain. It’s blinding, it’s torture. There are times I just want the lights to go out. Goddammit, I just want it to stop. And I used to be able to stop it—that’s what scares me the most, because I can’t anymore. Time was I could sit down at the piano and play and the shaking would stop and the pain would stop and the wishing for death would stop.”

Oliver is nodding his head, but still staring at the hand, at the thing in front of him he thinks might just reach into his breast pocket. “I know it, darlin. I know what it’s like for the music to take some pain away. I’ve lived a long time, lived through pain and hurt, and I know what it is to have it go, how good it feels to have them scales take over the empty place inside, fill up what the pain left behind.”

“That’s right. That’s right, it fills you up so nothing else can get in there, not pain anyway. You known pain, Ollie?”

“I know pain.”

“You know what it feels like to want to die?”

“I know, baby. I know. But you ain’t got to. What the doctors say? What they call it? Got to be medicine for it. Shit, there’s medicine for everything now, head medicine, arthritis medicine, dick medicine, mood medicine. . . . They got somethin for you?”

“They don’t know. It’s why I’m here, see another doctor, another hospital. Shit, Ollie, I’ve spent years of my short life in hospital rooms, doctors looking at me, poking at me, fingers in here, fingers in there. I just want to live and love the last few years I got.”

“Live and love, ain’t that somethin. Some people live a hundred years don’t figure out the secret to it all is just livin and lovin. How many you loved, Agnes? You gettin close to a lifetime, ain’t you?”

Agnes laughs and sips her scotch. She looks across the room at Andrew Sexton stripping tables of their coverings, throwing spent silverware in a bus tub, and snuffing out candles. Church is over. “Every one of them. Every man I take to bed I’m in love with, love them just for being with me, helping me feel alive and making me forget the pain, the death for just an hour or two, same as music.” She chokes on the feeling in her throat and gulps her drink. “Same as music was.”

“Ain’t no more?”

Agnes slowly shakes her head back and forth. “Ain’t no more, Oliver Pleasant. I can’t hold it still enough to get through a song. Hurts worse than telling a man I’m not in love with him anymore, hurts more than the needle from my spine to my brain. It’s a pain I wouldn’t wish on anybody.”

“Agnes Cassady,” Oliver says to no one, almost whispering it to his glass. “Poor, poor Agnes Cassady.” He covers her hand with his again so she can feel the rough palm against her knuckles. He presses down, flattening it to the table firmly, yet gently, and stops the trembling.

A tear rolls down her cheek as the main lights in the club come on, exposing them in a harsh glare and signaling it’s time to go.

(INTERLUDE NO. 3)

NEW YORK CITY, 1938

a conversation between Oliver Pleasant and Winky

Central Park

New York, New York

“I ever tell you about my first night in New York? Winky? Where you at?”

“I’m here, Licoricehead. You never told me about it. When was that? Were there dinosaurs?”

“You got a mouth on you, boy. It was a cold night, colder than this here. January 16, 1938. I was seventeen years old.”

“You’re the dinosaur,” Winky said, laughing at his own joke, wittiness becoming a new taste in his mouth.

“We came in on the train and, first thing I know, my man Hamlet’s tuggin me out of Penn Station into a cab and up to Harlem. We go round to the Savoy and there must be ten thousand people outside that place. Looked like a revival, or a riot, except everybody’s dancin and drinkin and foolin on each other. Hamlet, he pulls me round back through an alley and knows the brother at the stage door who lets us in. And in we go, to church. You listenin? Winky?”

“You said ‘church.’ What church was it?”

“The Church of Jazz, the Church of the Music of the Day and a Lifetime. Our Lady of Perpetual Hep. Come over here now; I’m talkin about the Church of Swing of New York City, boy.”

Winky rolled his eyes and threw down the stick he’d been using to try to break the frozen crust of Central Park. His breath showed white and heavy in the frosty air, and he shoved his hands into the pockets of his thin coat and slumped down once again beside Oliver.

“Now, that night was a historic night. Me and Hamlet, we stood just offstage and watched Chick Webb and his orchestra and Count Basie and his in a cuttin contest like I ain’t never seen. It was a heavyweight bout, a title match.”

“Cuttin?”

“Cuttin, boy. Cuttin, to see who’s best, who could hold title to the King of Swing. Basie, he’d just been down at Carnegie Hall—that’s another church down in Midtown—playin with Benny Goodman and some other cats, but he’d hightailed it up to Harlem and was givin them people, all of us, a show. Givin Chick a show, too, son. They was cuttin each other with knives like you ain’t never seen.”

Oliver was getting excited and his breath came out in short, quick blasts of exhaust. He wrung his hands together, both for warmth and from excitement, and it looked to Winky like he’d left the park. It was like Oliver just lifted up and floated right out of there on clouds of exhale and memory. Oliver’s eyes bugged out and glazed over at the same time, and his foot tapped as though he had a beat in his head and in his heart.

“Who won?” Winky, too, was excited, as though he were watching a boxing match on television. “Who got cut the worst?”

“Well, that’s arguable, still talked about and debated to this day. Some say Chick, others say Count. I guess, I suppose maybe it was Chick—it was his house after all. Any tie gonna go to him. Hell, maybe it was the people won, those of us watchin, ’cause we witnessed history that night. We saw some of the best swing ever, some of the best musicianers in the world—then and now—playin that night. And it was my introduction to New York City. It was my first hint at what this could be, where the music could take us as a people—not just blacks, but all of us. Them people in the audience in the Savoy, and, hell, out in the street, them that couldn’t get in, it was like they was lifted up all at once. They danced and they laughed and they was sweatin like I ain’t seen since my time as a boy playin for the colored who came to my mama and daddy’s to dance and drink or around Longstreet’s piano down there in New Orleans. As a boy, I didn’t know if it was the music or the drink did that to them. That night at the Savoy, though, I knew. It was the music, the music has a power, son. It’s a power you can only find in the darkest saloon or the most holy church.

“After that show, Hamlet hustled me and a couple girls he picked up I don’t know where into the back of a cab and told the driver, ‘To the Village!’ That driver didn’t look so happy about havin a couple Negroes with white women in the back of his cab, but he drove on anyway. I didn’t know what village Hamlet was talkin about. Didn’t know how Hamlet knew to go to Harlem and the Savoy or how to catch a cab and where to go next, but he must have learned it somewhere between Vicksburg, Mississippi, and New York City.

“Manhattan opened up to me like an amusement park on that drive. The driver took us all the way down Broadway and the lights and people were like nothin I’d seen before. It was like they was all celebratin somethin and I asked the driver what it was was goin on and he just looked at me in the rearview like I was out of my mind. And maybe I was, because them lights was out of this world, son. It was all tinsel and gold and you could just feel the possibilities comin at us through the windshield.

“Anyway, them girls wasn’t white so much as they was Puerto Rican, even talked with the rolling
R
s and had big brown eyes and soft hair. We was all wedged into that cab half on top of each other and, God forgive me, but the smell of them big girls, their perfume, I guess, put me in mind of my mama’s church on Sunday morning. It might not have been the same musk, but it was close and hot as hell and stirred something inside me, that’s for damn sure.”

“They swear a lot? You swear a lot.”

“They was Puerto Rican, so yeah. All Puerto Rican girls cuss.”

“There’s a girl in my class at school, Rosie, she’s Puerto Rican but she don’t cuss.”

“She will, you wait.

“So we get down to Greenwich Village and find us a jazz club but there ain’t nobody down there. They’s all up in Harlem at the Savoy, so we get a good table, the four of us, and we have some drinks and everything’s feelin good. And then this cat gets up onstage and starts playin the drums. Real soft, too, with brushes, and the other folks in the club, what few there were, was just lookin around waitin for more. After a while, after quarter hour of this, a cat comes in wearin a suit and shades and he’s talkin to the bartender about what he just seen up in Harlem—the very same show we was at. And this cat gets onstage and takes a bass out of the case he was carryin and starts playin along with the drummer. They don’t even speak, just fall in together on some tune or other. Little bit more and another cat comes in, this one with a fat cigar in his mouth, and makes a beeline for the piano, where he sits to play. Then, later, some horns come in. The whole band filled in like that, all tricklin down from Harlem. I guess maybe that’s how jazz got to the Village—it trickled down from the top of the island like an hourglass, only with black sand.

“Time was another thing that got me that night. It was like it stopped, like the nighttime might just go on forever. There was no windows, of course, and the club was dark as hell and I spent most of that night with my face in one of them girls’ hair, I guess, and listenin to music, but the night was eternal. Forever, boy. Nobody asked what time it was, nobody seemed to have to be nowhere. Hell, maybe no place else existed outside that club.

“When that music finally did stop and we stepped onto the sidewalk, swayin this way and that from the drummer’s time and good liquor, it was
still
dark out. Hamlet found us another cab and we headed back uptown to Spanish Harlem; neighborhood was barely a couple blocks in them days and just a few streets up from here. Took them to their building, where we figured we’d invite ourselves on in—you know what I’m talkin about?”

“No.”

Winky wandered away as though he didn’t care to know. Oliver didn’t notice his audience had gone.

“You will, just wait.

“But here’s the thing. On the stoop of that building was a man, and that man said them were his girls. ‘Both of ’em?’ I said, and he just grunted. ‘How you gonna have two women?’ Hamlet asked, gettin up in that man’s face. Man stood up then, tall son of a bitch, and said that them girls worked for him and, near as he could tell, we owed him about twenty dollars each. ‘Twenty dollars?’ Hamlet shouted. ‘Where the hell I’m a get twenty dollars?’ And then Hamlet and I looked at each other and we just seemed to know, to understand—we was like brothers that way—and Hamlet gave that tall motherfucker a shove and he went backward onto them steps and we ran like hell.” Oliver doubled over in laughter at this. “But not before he gave one of them Puerto Rican girls a grab on her big ol’ ass. And that pimp chased us back to lower Manhattan. Don’t know how we lost him; he must’ve grown tired. Or maybe we sank back into the eternal dark.

“We wandered, ended up in Battery Park when the sun finally did show up. We watched the light come up there, over the water and shine off the lady out there in it, and you know what it was like, Winky?”

“Guess I’ll find out.” The boy had grown weary of so much talking, which became more difficult to hear over the rumbling of his empty stomach.

“It was like church, like the whole city was church.”

Oliver looked up into the light coming through the trees in the early morning, disbelieving it could be the same sun that had shone on him and his good friend. He couldn’t believe his friend wasn’t there with him as his life prepared to change once again.

“That was my first night in New York. It was holy and it was sinful. It was a blessed time in a searing pool of brimstone. I didn’t know it then, though I was startin to feel, that it was everything I wanted. Sure do hate to leave it all. Sure do.”

Winky, who had been alternately digging in the dirt, chasing squirrels, and only halfway listening to what Oliver said, climbed up on the bench next to that big, round man and stared, too, at the new light.