Five Night Stand: A Novel (20 page)

Now Mundra pulls the films from the oversized folder, and even in the overhead light of the room, before the doctor makes his move to stand and walk to the light boxes on the wall, Agnes can see them. She can see the dark spots, their shapes like continents on a map, situated within her brain like unwanted guests—like mold, like stains. She owns a thousand similes. She can’t blink these spots away. He jabs the transparencies home into their clips and the sound is like a knife on bone. It’s a noise she’s come to loathe, one that tends to erase whatever comfort she’s found in a doctor’s smile. And there is her damaged skull. She wonders which continent is Dr. Mundra’s.

He talks in his soothing way, pointing with a royal-blue fountain pen—
It looks heavy,
Agnes thinks to herself—and says the words, the phrases, the theories she’s heard again and again and again. But he also has a hint of hope in his demeanor and appears excited by something. He opens a laptop on the examination table to show Agnes a website, one she hasn’t seen, though she thought she’d seen them all. There’s a study, he says, a procedure . . . experimental . . . clinical trials . . . medication. . . . Agnes is lost in his voice, the kindness is back and it’s in his eyes now as well.

And then it’s gone.

Temporary results . . . paralysis . . . permanent . . . side effects . . . percentages . . . He’s taken it away from her just as quickly as he gave it. He’s held something in front of her like a carrot and then cut the line so it falls into the mud at her feet, filthy and inedible.

The procedure—he isn’t recommending it, but neither is he ruling it out—could be done right here in the hospital. It could be done quickly and “It might . . . help,” he says, “though there are worries, there are effects, and it hasn’t been fully studied. It’s an operation on the neck, the spinal column at the C2 and C3 vertebrae, where the nerves enter the column . . .”

She is turning around to find where she put her clothes. She’s cold and hungry and has a date for breakfast she has no intention of missing.

“There could be paralysis and it could be permanent. Also, the positive effects could be temporary. They’re still studying it, but it does sound promising, Agnes. Agnes? Where are you going?”

She’s stood up to change into her clothes and pulled her thin, hospital gown off, standing naked in front of Dr. Mundra, who blushes. This man of science, married for four years with a newborn son, blushes in front of a thin, naked, and forward woman—a patient, a damaged person.

“Thank you, Dr. Mundra, really. I’ll think on it. I’m supposed to be leaving in the next day or two, but I’ll be in touch.” She walks to the door and pulls at its heaviness.

“Agnes?”

“Yes, Doctor?”

“Take care.”

She leaves the hospital and walks north along the park, trying to appreciate nothing but the beauty of the snow swirling about her feet and falling in the trees to her left. It had begun snowing the night before and hasn’t stopped, and parked cars and newspaper stands wear several inches of white like an old woman’s fox stole.

She’d left Oliver Pleasant alone in his apartment the previous night, having ridden uptown with him to see him safely home. When their evening had come to a close in the club, once the lights were up and the booze stopped flowing and their conversation had wound down, Oliver had rubbed his eyes with his meaty hands and said he was tired. As if on cue, Ben arrived with his overcoat. “Your car is upstairs, Ollie,” he said, slipping the overcoat onto his friend’s arms and over his rounded shoulders. Oliver shrugged it on and then stopped to steady himself on the table. “I’ll have a waiter see you home; you’re tired.”

“Tired shit, I’m drunk. And tired. I’m cool, Benji baby, I’m cool.”

“Ollie, please, let me send someone with you. Or wait and I’ll take you myself.”

“I’ll get him home,” Agnes offered.

“No, sugar, I’m all right, you go on. You get on back to New Orleans, hell of a lot warmer down there. Hot, as I recall, mosquitoes big as turnips . . .” He was rambling now, talking to his collar as he struggled to raise it around his jaw and button it all together.

Ben finished the buttoning for him and nodded to Agnes, who went for her own coat. She looked back to see the two men embrace and Ben slip a thick brown envelope into Oliver’s coat pocket.

The cab stopped in front of a brownstone building in south Harlem just off Malcolm X Boulevard at West 115th Street. Oliver stepped out first and thanked the driver by name but didn’t pay.

“You bet, Oliver. Take care,” the driver said.

Agnes looked from Oliver to the driver and back. “Oh, hey, I’ll get this.” She dug through her coat pockets for cash.

The driver waved her off. “Have a nice night, miss.”

Oliver’s front room was spacious yet crammed with dusty furniture from a long-ago era. It was elegant and racked with memories; it was stacked with magazines and newspapers, and framed photos with signatures hung on every wall. The carpet was worn with traffic patterns and the glass tops of tables were yellowed from years of nicotine. The flat was well lived in. The photos—of musicians, actresses, a president, activists, icons, and legends—looked back at Agnes, welcomed her, surprised as they were to see a woman in this room after so many years. On one wall there hung hats, porkpies neatly arranged with cards in the hatbands. As Oliver dropped his coat in a chair and slumped back on a sofa, she let her eyes wander over those hats and cards that read Sinatra, Count, Lester, A. Taylor, Mingus, Monk. There were others and Agnes’s head swooned, wishing her father were there to see them.

Another wall held books, a library’s worth of literature with spines of gold, green, faded browns and blacks. “Where are they?” she’d asked.

“What’s that, baby?”

“The missing books. Look at the shelves—some of them are empty except for the dust. Jesus, Ollie, you need to clean this place.”

“The hell I need to clean for? Who’s comin to visit old Ollie Pleasant these days?”

“Well, I’m here. Your kids, maybe?”

“Naw, they ain’t comin by. Charlene the one took them books. Took the ones she wanted anyways, left the rest for me, I guess. For the mice.”

“You got mice in here?”

“Naw, even the rats leavin Ollie be these days.”

The room was warm and comfortable and Agnes liked it. There was music in that apartment; it seeped from the books and photos, and faded back into the carpet and floral wallpaper. There was no turntable on, no stereo she could find, yet she heard the melodies just as clearly as she had in the club earlier that evening, just as mysterious as what she’d experienced in New Orleans. It was the rhythm of the room, the beat of Oliver’s heart, slowed now with so much time and fatigue.

Oliver had loosened his tie but didn’t remove it. “Can I get you anything?” Agnes asked.

“Tea. Please.”

She wandered into the small kitchen, a dingy room seemingly unused yet with a thin layer of grime on the surfaces; she found a teapot and a jar of loose herbal tea on the counter beside it.

They drank tea together and he shared more French cigarettes from a small box on an end table beside the photo of a beautiful woman. She sat next to him, feeling closer to the past than any history lesson or any Armstrong record could ever take her.

Across the room, a massive, black piano was wedged into the corner, its lid lifted just a bit, just enough for this room. It was an Imperial Bösendorfer, a wedding gift from Ira Greenberg. “Play for me,” Oliver said, tilting his head back on the sofa pillows.

“Oh, no, I couldn’t.”

“Please.”

Sitting at the piano, she brushed the fingertips of her right hand over the keys from end to end, trying to gather strength from them, trying to channel her father or, if at all possible, Oliver himself. She brought her left hand up and rested it on the keys, feeling the tremor there and willing it to stop, please, for just a few moments.
Let me have this,
she thought.
Let me play for him now, tonight.

She played his own songs for him. Bold, she knew, but when would she ever, ever have this chance again? She played low and softly, concentrating on her left hand, both amazed and grateful that it was accommodating her. She lost herself in the music, going from one tune to another, a transfusion of music that bled from the trinkets and memories of the room, trying to infuse into Oliver’s life a little of that which he’d given so much.

After fifteen minutes, or maybe it was an hour—Agnes had lost all track of time—her hand gave out in an ugly display when her knuckles crashed into the wrong notes and her arm dropped to her side. She was embarrassed and angry, but when she looked over at Oliver, he was asleep. With his head back, tie loosened, mouth agape, and a burning cigarette between his fingers, he seemed at peace. She watched him for a moment and then went over, took the cigarette from his hand and stubbed it out, covered him with an afghan, and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you,” she whispered.

She’d left Oliver’s apartment for the long walk back to her hotel and had lost herself in thought as she watched the snow. It had been beautiful as it fell in the dark where she stood on the Manhattan Bridge looking at the lights of the city she’d just left, and at Brooklyn on the other side of the East River. She’d been aiming for the Brooklyn Bridge, that’s the one she’s always heard about, but had ended up on its sister. It was pretty enough, though, and she could see the Brooklyn Bridge from where she stood, the lights that span the cables illuminating the water and the heavy flakes appearing and disappearing into the darkness. She was suspended there between two cities, in midair like an abandoned balloon. The traffic was light, which made her feel even more alone, the cars drifting into silence behind her.

The day and hour of her death, she thinks at times, might be something she wants to speed up, something to meet head-on under her own terms. It’s a bleak plan, yet it’s what she’d been thinking then on the bridge when she met Frank Severs. The East River had been inky, swirling foam and glitter on its frigid whitecaps, and Agnes could only stare into it, wondering what that freezing water might feel like against her skin and in her lungs.

“Hey, I’ve seen you. Over at the Capasso, right?”

“Do I know you?”

“No, but I saw you at the show, Oliver Pleasant’s, tonight, last night. . . .”

For a moment Agnes’s head swirled like the river below her, thinking of the performance she’d just put on privately in Oliver’s home. She cast her memory back into a river of liquor for any recognition of this man’s face or of a club in Midtown Manhattan. Anything before her time with Oliver had ceased to exist for her. She’d only wanted to end the night alone looking at the city and wondering if this was it, wondering if her life would end beneath the surface of a frozen river after having played piano for her idol, and after having her sickness take over that recital by the end so that she finished in frustration and humiliation, even if Oliver had been asleep.

“Who the hell are you?” she said.

“Name’s Frank Severs. I’m here to write a story about Pleasant. It’s for a newspaper. I’m a reporter. Was a reporter, now I’m freelancing I guess. Jesus, it’s cold up here.”

“Where’re you from?”

“Memphis.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“It’s true. Why? Why should I shut the fuck up?”

“Because that’s where I’m from. Well, Tipton County.”

“Still in my circulation area. Hey, were you at a bookstore in the Village yesterday?”

“You following me, you crazy fucker?” Her guard was up; she’d put many a bachelor party attendee and business traveler in his place in the Quarter.

“Following? No, no, the owner, Lucchesi, said I was the second Memphian he’d met that day. This is weird. Goddammit I’m drunk. What’s your name?”

She softens at the mention of Lucchesi, also figuring she has nothing to lose having come to this bridge to die in the first place. “Agnes Cassady. You were at the Capasso earlier?”

“That’s right.”

“I think Oliver pointed you out. He pointed to someone he called a ‘young man’ and said he’s from Memphis. You don’t look so young close up.”

“Thanks.”

“You want a sip?” She’d stopped along the way for a half-pint of Cutty Sark and produced the bottle from deep within her coat. Frank, who had been drinking beer and bourbon with Davis McComber all evening, and wasn’t sure how he ended up on the wrong side of Manhattan, nevertheless took the bottle and toasted New York with Agnes.

The whiskey warmed him, but only momentarily. “It’s cold as shit out; what are you doing up here?”

“Jumping.”

“Is that right?” He peered down over the railing and handed the bottle back to her. “What’s stopping you?”

She pulled from the bottle before tucking it back away. “Wrong bridge. There’s no poetry in jumping from the . . . what bridge is this?”

“Manhattan Bridge. I think? Don’t ask me, I was heading for the clear other side of the island.”

“Yeah, from the Manhattan Bridge.” She peered over the railing down at the water. “You know, I bought a book from Lucchesi today, a collection of architectural blueprints and drawings, and this bridge was on the front cover. Guess I should’ve recognized it.”