Five Night Stand: A Novel (22 page)

“I’ll be back, Stanton. You on my list. Don’t you go nowhere!”

“I ain’t leavin you.” Then, to Oliver, “She give me my diabetes medicine. I think she likes it.”

“Lucky, I guess. I got to stick myself.”

“So what you doin up here, Ollie? You just here two weeks ago. I know it ain’t the ambiance. They ain’t spruced the place up in never. Not even any music in these halls. You believe that? There should be music all up and down these hallways to cheer a motherfucker up.”

“You got it in your room?”

“Yeah, old son of a bitch I share it with grumbles, but I don’t give a good goddamn. He can grumble himself into the grave, I got to hear my boys play.”

“Who you listenin to these days?”

“All of ’em. Mingus this morning.”

“Ol’ Cholly.”

“Mingus!” Stanton shouts out at the checkerboard so the pair playing at the next table over jumps at the sound. Oliver laughs with Stanton.

The two old men sit in silence for a time, watching the board like it might get up and walk out on its own two checkered feet, each in his own thought. They rarely, at this age, think of the future. It might not be that afternoon, it might not be the next day, it might not even be in a week, but their time on this earth is limited. If they think in seasons, this might be their last. If they think in holidays, they might not live to see another wreath on the door. So they don’t think about it, or they try not to.

“Respect!” Stanton shouts after a time, and the pair at the next table jumps again.

Oliver doesn’t. He’s come to expect these outbursts during their time together. It’s something old black musicians feel they have a right to shout, something they’re sure is now a common denominator just as the music, women, and drugs once were. The invective this afternoon is fired with a good amount of vitriol, and not a little spit clings now to Stanton’s bottom lip and glistens on his side of the checkerboard like droplets of anger.

Oliver hands him a handkerchief. “Wipe your lip, Stanton. Respect for what?” Though he knows it’s coming, and he knows how long it will last, Oliver humors his friend. It’s a right his old sideman has earned.

“For us. For the colored man and musician. They took our music from us, Ollie; they took it and sold it out over radio and picture shows and television. Ofay bought our clubs and paid us shit. Shit, Ollie, that’s what we worked all them years for. We made that music, that
jazz
.” This last word is filled with as much rancor and spittle as “respect” had been. Stanton falls into the line of disenfranchised who don’t care for the name, a description given to the services sold in old-world New Orleans cathouses. The music started there, music played for men laying their seed and for a few coins to drown out the sound and keep the girls happy. But the white men needed to name it if they were going to sell it, and “jazz”—or, “jass”—just seemed to roll off the tongue.

“It’s why we ain’t got nothin, not shit,” Stanton continues. “Why I’m here in a old-folks home for coloreds. It ain’t changed; it’s segregation, it’s racism, it’s Jim Crow moved into a new century. Shit. I ain’t want their money anyway, but I do want some respect, respect for what we—colored men—gave to the world.”

By now the people at the other tables are watching and listening to Stanton. Oliver is sure they’ve heard it before, maybe the last time Oliver was there or when Stanton cries out in his sleep. Whether or not they remember his last outburst, he can’t be sure. Oliver figures there must be speeches like this one made on a regular basis—angry retired bus drivers, cooks, maids, deliverymen, foremen, and street sweepers. They just want to talk, but more, they want to be heard. And respected.
That ain’t much to ask,
Oliver thinks.

Silence falls again over their game and Stanton’s head nods, exhausted from his tirade and drawing up the past. This is expected as well, and Oliver looks up to the clock mounted on the green cinder-block wall. Three twelve it reads, though who can be sure? He takes the time to consider his friend, his grayed face and patches of white stubble where the nurses had trouble shaving, or didn’t care enough to attend to. Stanton’s nose is wide and flat and runs just a little, his head gleams in the fluorescent lighting, and his ears are enormous. Oliver has trouble remembering what this withered elf looked like back in the day, back when they were young men full of brass and piss who would eat an early dinner of steak and fries before playing and drinking all night long, scooping up women along the way like they were so many wildflowers before calling it a night and trudging back uptown or down into subways full of the pressed suits and creased newspapers of men going to work. The man sitting across from him now doesn’t even have a hint of that young man, and Oliver misses him. He wonders if anyone recognizes Oliver’s younger self, either. Probably not.

“What you doin up here, Ollie?” Stanton has looked up from his brief nap, unaware that he’d even had one.

Oliver leans back and mops beneath his hat brim with a handkerchief. “Stanton.” He lets out a long sigh. “Brother Stanton. Afraid I’m leavin these parts.”

“Leavin, huh? Where you goin to? LA? Gonna cut a record? Make a movie?” He chuckles halfheartedly at his own joke.

“Naw, shit. Headin south to Memphis, stay with my sister and baby niece.”

“Memphis? No shit?”

“No shit, brother.”

“You remember that time in Memphis when them crackers stopped us to ask what we had in the case? You remember? You was carryin my case and that one old cop says, ‘What you got in that case, boy?’ Remember that?”

Oliver laughs at the memory. “Yeah, yeah, I remember that.”

“And you says, ‘I’m a piano player, suh.’” Stanton laughs, baring the five teeth he has left in his mouth—four are yellow and decayed and the fifth is wrapped in gold, his gums run purple to black. But he laughs at his tale and doesn’t care what he looks like. He laughs for all of their times together and for the end itself.

Oliver laughs as well, but with a pang in his gut, a growing sense of apprehension at moving to the South. That instance was funny and even the cops had laughed as they told the musicians to “get their nigger asses off my street,” but there was plenty that wasn’t funny. The very fact that he has to move so far from his home isn’t funny and neither is his friend finishing a life of music and travel and swinging times in a concrete government-assisted facility that stinks like the bathrooms at Yankee Stadium.

“Hey, you get to leave here ever?” Oliver says.

“Can leave anytime I please, I ain’t a caged animal. You see any bars on these windows?”

Oliver does, in fact, see bars on all the windows and heavy locks on all of the steel doors, but those might be to keep people of the neighborhood out rather than the residents in.

“Still play piano any?”

“Sure, got one in the cafeteria. Need tuning, but she still plays. Ain’t got no bass, breaks my heart, not that my arthritis would let me play the damn thing anyways. Why?”

“If I set you up with teachin lessons, you think you could get there once a week? Maybe twice? Make a little scratch for yourself, get out and take some fresh air.”

“Lessons? Who?”

“Boy I know. I can’t teach him, I got to leave, but he wantin to learn somethin fierce. He lives in the apartment above me. His daddy went down in the towers.”

“That right? Huh. Lessons you say. Yeah, man, yeah, I’ll do it. You tell that boy I’ll start up week after next. Can’t go next week, got my dialysis and I ain’t never know on what day.”

That settled, the men make a couple more moves on the checkerboard and Stanton asks about Oliver’s recent shows. He wishes aloud that he could’ve gone to one, but they won’t let him out after dark, not to travel the length of Manhattan. Oliver says he understands and wishes Stanton could’ve come, too. Oliver tells him who all has stopped by, lies and tells his old friend that they all asked after him. Before long the nurse comes back down the hall, still pecking at her phone.

“Hey, baby!” Stanton shouts at her again. “You comin for me?”

“Here I come, Stanton, keep your pants on.”

“Come on, baby, and put it in me!”

Charlene has her father’s depth of skin color but her mother’s long Mediterranean nose and green eyes. She is, quite simply, striking, though it takes some time in her presence to realize this. Her features aren’t conventional, not by any stretch. Frank, sitting at the kitchen table and watching her prepare tea and pour it into two delicate cups, is put in mind not of a typical Park Slope wife and mother but of Madame Fairbanks in a New Orleans he’s never even known.

“What is it, exactly, that you want with me, Mr. Severs?” she says, placing a cup in front of him and taking the seat opposite for herself.

“Please, call me Frank. I’m from Memphis, and I’m writing a story on your father and his retirement. I was hoping to get some memories of growing up with him as a father.”

“I’m not sure how much growing up I did with Oliver. You may want to record the memories of bus drivers or club owners on the other coast.”

“He wasn’t around much, I take it?”

“Have you spoken with Oliver yet?”

“Oh, yes ma’am. I’ve talked with him at length and been to the past two nights of shows. Probably go again tonight.”

“Well then, you’ve just spent as much time with him as I did collectively as a child.”

The tension in the room is carried upward on steam from the tea, and despite the heat, Frank sips at it just for something to do. He looks around the well-appointed kitchen with modern appliances, granite, and exposed brick rising from the oven. The hallway he’d entered was gleaming hardwood and he can see it continues into the living area just off the kitchen. “This is a great house. Have you lived here long?”

“We’ve lived in Park Slope for twenty years. This was our first house and we’ve spent all of those twenty years restoring it to what it is now.”

“You and your husband?”

“And our son, Cedric.”

“Any chance you’ll stop in to hear your father before his five-night stand is over?”

“I’ve heard Oliver play.”

There are children outside in the snow—Frank can hear their calls and laughter in the awkward silences that punctuate his conversation with Charlene. What he notices, what’s been nagging at him since he entered the home but he just couldn’t place, is that there is no music. It may be the one place he’s visited in New York that hasn’t had some sort of music in the background. He suddenly wishes he was out there with those children, wishes he were anywhere else but in Charlene’s kitchen in this too-quiet home. Sensing she won’t open up, Frank decides there’s nothing to lose and pushes the issue.

“Mrs. Wilson, Oliver is about to give up his life in New York, the place he’s called home for more than sixty years, to move to Memphis with a sister he hasn’t seen in decades and a niece he’s never met in person. He’s broke and doesn’t want to die alone. Can I ask why you can’t, or won’t, help him in this hour? What is it that happened between you two that you can’t even cross the river to go hear him play one last time?”

The anger that flashes in those ancestral Italian eyes makes Frank wish he’d kept his mouth shut. Once again he slurps the scalding tea and feels the steam on his skin. Charlene’s upper lip stiffens and he prepares himself to be thrown out of her beautiful home, to be put out with those children building snowmen and throwing snowballs. But then her features soften and he sees some of Oliver’s playfulness come into her eyes.

“What’s your favorite Oliver Pleasant tune, Frank?”

He has to think about that, but offers “Blues for Chesca.” He loves the song, but he also thinks it might win some favor with Francesca’s daughter.

“That’s a lovely song. Would you like to know what my favorite is?”

“Please.” This is the kind of detail that works so well in stories.

“My favorite Oliver Pleasant song is ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.’ Have you ever heard him play ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’?”

“Well . . . no ma’am.”

“Do you want to know why my favorite song of his is ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’?”

Frank nods, feeling like a chastened boy in trouble with his mother.

“Because he only played it for me. Only me. He didn’t record it; he didn’t open a show with it or fit it into a set list. No one in California or Texas or Paris or Memphis, Tennessee, has heard his rendition of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ on piano because it is a song that he played for me while I sat on the bench beside him on those nights when he was home. Those very few nights. And on all those nights when Pops wasn’t home, I would step outside our house and look up to those stars and think that he was seeing them, too. He taught me that song, and to this day it’s the only tune I know how to play on piano.”

Frank wishes again for music, or any distraction at all to come crashing into the room. Charlene’s lip that had revealed such anger only moments earlier now trembles and she stands to retrieve the carafe of hot water, glancing out a window over the sink at the children outside before bringing it back to the table. Neither cup is low enough to need a refill.