Five Night Stand: A Novel (18 page)

NIGHT FOUR

1.

Frank is pulled from sleep as though from under water. Breaking the surface, he gulps air and then, realizing where he is, feels foolish, feels the other side of the bed, but finds he’s alone. This is nearly as surprising and disorienting to him as the sense of breathlessness he’d felt only moments before. He and Karen have spent only a handful of nights apart since they were married seventeen years ago. It makes this trip all the more difficult and, Frank has thought the past couple of days, necessary.

The first night they spent apart after the eve of their wedding day came within the first year of marriage. Frank was a young reporter then and his work hours erratic as he paid his dues at the beck and call of police scanners, murderers, victims, and their inconsistent states of consciousness, and editors’ even more inconsistent nerves and bowel movements. He’d worked a week and a half straight of late nights, staying in the newsroom until just after the presses ran in case there were last-second corrections to be made. He was young and eager to please, eager to show his worth. Many of those nights he’d ended at the P & H Café just down the road from the paper in a smoke cloud where the copydesk, designers, and reporters too locked into routine to not work that last shift met for beer and commiseration.

Karen was lonely, Frank sees that now. He rolls over and counts the skyscrapers visible across Manhattan from his bed and thinks that Karen didn’t have as many friends then as rooftop spires he counts. She was working just as hard as he was, but it was “regular work,” as he called it—nine-to-five, grab-a-lunch-at-noon-with-the-girls kind of work. And that one guy. His name was Chad and he worked in Karen’s firm. Chad.
The fuck kind of name is Chad?
he thinks even now. She’d gone out that Friday night with everyone from the office because she knew Frank would be working late, and because she didn’t care if he was working late or not by then, she was going out. She’d sat at home for eleven nights counting and wasn’t about to have another dinner alone, did not intend to watch
Law & Order
and then drift off to sleep with Jane Austen instead of her husband again.

So she went out. And it was early the next morning when she came home. She said the girls had all ended up at Amanda’s house and that was probably true. He knew back then that it was probably true and as he looks at his fleshy, lined, forty-year-old face in the bathroom mirror of an inexpensive New York hotel now, he still knows it’s probably true. But he didn’t care then; he had just wanted to hurt her and had accused Karen of spending the night with another man. Chad. They’d argued and she’d told him to call Amanda if he didn’t believe her and then flew into a rage when he picked up the phone. He wasn’t going to call her; he was bluffing. They didn’t speak that day and slept apart that night, though under the same roof. They were in their small apartment then and he’d fallen asleep in a chair in the living room where she left him. Eventually they made up, but the scar was there. It became a raised white line of suspicion that, over time, they may not notice, but every once in a while a fingertip grazes it or its ugliness is caught in the reflection of a mirror.

But it’s not all cold, the scar has faded, and Frank and Karen do love each other. They wanted to have that baby together and to fill up their house with children. A family would help to erase the scar even more, they both know, and so they’ve tried and tried and tried until they’ve both grown so very tired of trying, and yet they still do.

He lies back down on the bed, dripping water from the shower. He just wants to crawl back under the covers, sleep for a day and a night, but he’s got a breakfast date and knows he shouldn’t skip it. His notebook is peeking out from the back pocket of his jeans, which are lying balled up on the floor. He reaches for it and sees written in a handwriting that resembles his own, but not quite: “Internat.”

“Internat?” He says to the notebook. “What the hell is an ‘Internat’?”

He’d gone out with Davis McComber after Oliver’s show the previous night. Frank had wanted to sit and talk with Oliver some more, but he had company, a young woman who was pretty but so very pale and thin. Davis took Frank to all the haunts of lower Manhattan, rushing past some to tell him who’d played there—Van Morrison, Morrissey, Elvis Costello, Blondie, Miles Davis, Nirvana, and Mos Def—and into other clubs where he was greeted at the door by name and never charged a cover, and he seemed to know everyone everywhere. Those in the crowds, young and old, said hello, holding up beer bottles with apathetic acknowledgment, as if they knew he was only passing through. Catching and holding Davis in conversation last night would’ve been like catching water in your bare hands. He read handbills posted on doors and strained to look over heads to see who was onstage before turning around to dart out the door again with Frank following. Davis kept apologizing and cursing the fact that they were sticking to the Village and SoHo while completely disregarding Harlem. “Harlem’s got some good shit going on. Good shit. Not like the old days, of course, no house parties and all-night cutting contests, but some decent clubs with old-timers and new guys. It’s making a comeback. But what the fuck am I talking about, you’re from Memphis, you know from good music. Clubs on every corner there, every half corner, I bet. Soul, rock, funk, R and B, alt country. Home of Ardent down there—Big Star, ’Mats, Jim Dickinson. I got to get down there.”

Davis seems to think any city, any area of a city, with a musical heritage oozes with chords and a backbeat, that simply by having a front door and an address, whether a dry cleaner, grocery store, diner, or bar, they are obligated to host live music shows. He expects it. The world, he believes, expects it, and it is, by God, that city’s duty to accommodate.

And it is Davis McComber’s duty to report it all. Frank watched as Davis scribbled notes and asked questions. There was a story everywhere, in every dive, on every stage, and in every note. “Is this how it is? Is this the life of a freelancer?” Frank had asked, his head swimming from alcohol and environmental stimuli.

“Nah. Well, yeah, for me,” Davis said. “All this could be written from my apartment using Google. I know the fuckers who do it that way, but I’ve got to get out. I need to put my feet on the street and get my ears onstage with the players. That’s where you find the details.”

Details. Frank’s mind flew back to journalism school and Professor Jordan, who must’ve seen all this coming—Frank’s career, his being laid off due to a decrease in ad revenue and proliferation of online news sources. Had he also seen Frank’s malignant contentment and his laziness adding up to little more than a still-empty sheet of typing paper in an unused home office? Davis is excited, and excitable. He sees the details in the stories and the stories in the details the way that Frank used to on those late nights in the newsroom and nicotine cave after work.

“Why?” It was all Frank wanted to know. “Why do this when people can just Google and fill their cloudy heads with the crap that ad executives are telling us to consume these days?”

Davis shrugged. “I figure it’s the least I can do for them.”

“Them? Who?”

“Readers.” He shrugged again. “Music fans. Little dudes sitting in Iowa or some other fucking place who don’t have clubs or live music, places that aren’t the beginning of anything. Except maybe corn or something. This shit goes out everywhere.” He wiped his open hand across the sky for Frank. “Every-fucking-where. Don’t need a subscription for this, just electricity. Figure they have electricity even in Des Moines.”

The electricity of Davis McComber shocked Frank. It was like time travel back to his own first years as a reporter when the story was the thing. He’d forgotten what it was like to give people a story just for the story’s sake, just because they might not be able to experience whatever it was he’d just experienced. Maybe all his colleagues had forgotten that as well. Getting it back might not make up for lost ad revenue or increase circulation, but Frank was done with all that anyway. Maybe, though, that electricity could jump-start his own heart, kick-start his own writing. He pulled his notebook from his pocket and, in a boozy, bleary-eyed hand, wrote: “Internat.”

Frank had followed Davis’s meandering walk and talk for as long as he could, his head a mash of jazz, alternative, punk, postpunk, grunge, and straight-ahead rock and roll. They’d had a beer at every stop and Davis had produced a half-pint from his jacket at some point for the walk between locations. At 2:00 a.m., Frank had wandered away. He simply didn’t turn a corner when Davis had and, instead, kept walking straight ahead. He called out, he’d tried to tell Davis goodnight, but Davis was already on to the next thing, the next sound, scribbling words of detail into his composition book and sipping from a nearly empty bottle of bourbon. Frank, disoriented and half drunk, was heading in the opposite direction from his hotel.

And now Frank is on his way to breakfast at Junior’s. It seems a long way to go for eggs and bacon, but it’s really the coffee he’s after. The coffee and the company.

Oliver and Winky sit on their bench at the top of the park. It’s cold and the light is just starting to spread through the trees at the far south end, just beginning its reach into this sanctuary where animals and leaves and people are coming to life, grateful for its warmth. Winky watches a nearby squirrel and spots a rock at his own feet. He thinks maybe he can snatch up that rock and throw it before that squirrel knows what’s happening, but Oliver breaks his concentration. “You ever go to church, Winky?”

“Church?”

“Yeah, you know about church?”

“I know about church.” He shrugs and adds, “Don’t go.” The squirrel has moved on, scared away by a jogger in spandex puffing like a freight train through the frosty air.

“I used to go with my people down in Winona. Little wood building, one room, woodstove to keep us warm in winter, ladies with hand fans movin hot air around in summer. Preacher would get up on that stage and scream and dance, sing to the Lord and curse at us.”

At this revelation, Winky whips his head around to face Oliver. “Cursing? A preacher?”

“Shit yeah, cursin. God in the South is angry, boy. I was thinkin this morning about that smell, though. That smell of church I think is what I miss. Perfume and dirt from the fields, tobacco, and maybe a little hint of Saturday night’s sin.” Winky has wandered off looking for more squirrels to toss a rock at, or maybe a jogger. He’s come to learn during his mornings with Oliver that Oliver isn’t really talking to him. He doesn’t know whom it is Oliver is talking to, but it isn’t a little kid from Harlem. He’d stuck around the first couple of mornings but couldn’t make heads or tails out of what Oliver was going on about. Moonshine, dice, dancing, girls, cats, swing. None of it makes much sense to a ten-year-old boy. He just wants to learn to play the piano and he sure as shit doesn’t know what church has to do with it. So he’s let his imagination and then his feet wander, and Oliver becomes just another crazy old fool of the city, sitting on a park bench talking to himself.

“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, no. When was that? Were there dinosaurs?”

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

“You’re the dinosaur.”

Oliver tells him about a wild ride in a New York City taxicab that takes him from the glass and steel splendor of Penn Station, he says, to the brick and soot stylings of Harlem. It was his first time inside the Savoy and his eyes were opened, he tells Winky. “And in we went, to church. You listenin? Winky?”

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

Oliver tells him about churches, about a religion the boy didn’t know, that of music and heart-stopping swing with people who all feel the same way, believe in the same god. There it is again, cats and booze and girls, and Winky’s mind flies away with the pigeons.

“You ain’t even listenin,” Oliver says, disgusted with this disinterested boy. “When’s the last time you made it to church?”

“Papi’s funeral,” he says in a hushed voice as though mass has begun, and fills his cheeks with air to help hold his emotion in.

“Papi?”

“My daddy.”

“Your daddy dead?” Oliver looks down at him now and it’s as though he’s seeing this little boy for the first time.

Winky nods and wipes his nose with the back of a gloved hand.

“How he die?”

Winky squints up into the sunlight coming through the trees. He looks south and points, as if toward the sun. It’s cryptic, but Oliver knows.

“Towers?”

Winky nods again.

Oliver recalls that day. He was home, in the relative safety and the dark warmth of his sitting room, when he heard the commotion from outside. He looked out to see people talking on the streets, people who never would have given each other the time of day normally, all excited and pointing. Then he saw the crying and the fear on their faces. The small television on his kitchen counter told him the rest.