Five Night Stand: A Novel (25 page)

The mass of arms and legs feeds off of what’s happening onstage, and those onstage take their cues from the people. It’s just like Harlem 1938, Oliver thinks, except the faces tonight are white and black, not just black, but the same feeling is here, the power is everywhere. He’s transported back; it’s something he hears in his ears, sees with his eyes, and knows in his heart. He is completely overwhelmed and thankful to his grandson. And it’s what he’s thinking as the music winds down, and as the people gasp for air and return to their tables for a sip at their drinks.

“That’s for my pops,” Cedric calls out, shielding his eyes from the glare of the lights. “Where he at? I saw him. There he is, my pops, everybody, Oliver Pleasant, best damn piano player in New York City. Give it up. Let’s all give it up for Pops Pleasant!”

The crowd applauds, looking around, but no one knows where he’s pointing or of whom he’s speaking. Agnes knows and she squeezes Oliver’s hand. Frank slaps his shoulder and Oliver lifts his hat to wipe his brow again. It’s a night of firsts, a night when those who never expected it are being recognized and praised by audiences they never might have known.

Davis McComber, leaning on the bar across the room, scratches furiously in his notebook.

Frank stands in Oliver’s kitchen with Agnes while she prepares his tea. He notices it’s the same brand and flavor he’d had in Charlene’s kitchen that morning. Watching Agnes in the small space between the sink and stove, waiting for the water to boil, Frank feels as though he’s been given a glimpse into an earlier time in this home, the way these rooms must have lived and breathed back when there was a whole family living here. From all the stories he’s heard, he can picture Francesca in this kitchen, telling her daughter to get the cups down for tea, chasing after her twin boys as they scamper back and forth from kitchen to living room. She’d tell them to quiet down, not to disturb their father, who would be leaving soon for work, or for the road. She’d have a glimmer in her eye as she thought of the unfinished novel on her bedside table, the one she would finish later that evening, and about the bookstore she’d visit in the morning to pick out new novels for the week. She’d have coffee at the café next door to that shop, and she would have company.

“Take this in to Ollie if he’s still awake. If he’s not, don’t wake him, just let him sleep,” Agnes orders, and Frank feels like a child himself, careful not to spill the tea on the carpet.

Entering the living room, the sight of the bookshelves jars Frank and he nearly does spill the tea. The empty spaces on the shelves are like slots in a puzzle, and Frank has seen the pieces that fit into those slots. A part of him wants to tell Oliver all about it, to let him know that Francesca wasn’t so lonely all those years, let him know that while he was in Paris with Marie Broussard or in a hotel room in Memphis with someone whose name he can’t remember now, or possibly never knew, that Francesca was having coffee with, talking for hours with, and making love to a man that would make all the pain and loneliness disappear for a time. But the night has had enough emotion, enough surprises, and Frank lets the old man be, keeping the story to himself.

They sit in the presence of Oliver’s piano and memories, listening to the awkward shouting from the apartment above. In the room—a small, mid-twentieth-century museum of jazz and popular culture—the smell of herbal tea and Oliver’s cigarette smoke permeates the air. They are all exhausted and grateful, it seems, for what silence the room allows.

They had left during the show—reluctantly, for Frank and Agnes, who were beginning to set off that spark that two new lovers might make. Not that such a relationship is in their future, not as far as Frank is concerned, but that spark, he has to admit, feels good. The crowd had been thick when they left and they’d had to weave through, making way for Oliver to get to the door. He’d grown tired and weak during the show, yet enthralled with his grandson on the stage.

The thing that has been lost over the years is passion, missing from Frank’s work, his marriage, his very existence. It’s that thing he found in college at a small, smoky bar, surrounded by friends and Karen, alongside a set of tracks that sped away to some diminished point in the future. And it’s that thing regained in New York City over a matter of hours, through the course of days. He sees it in Agnes and saw it briefly sated this evening, that need and want that make her very limbs twitch with anticipation. And it’s there, in the old soul of Oliver, who has lived in a state of creation since the earliest days. He even saw it in little Pablo, a boy who wants nothing more than to be an adult, yet in a state of suspended childhood. And did he not witness, only that afternoon, while standing on the precipice of a grave holding more than two thousand souls, the spirits of men and women who would never know a life complete? Do we not owe it to those gone, to those still with us, to ourselves, to live to the fullest of our capabilities? To the extent of our passion?

Frank has gone back in his mind, again and again since arriving in New York, to that little office alongside the unfinished nursery, back to stories untold, and he has felt a guilt like a pinching in his heart for those pages. He’s felt, as well, a void for Karen and what it is they’ve tried to accomplish. A guilt, too, over his thoughts about Agnes and his wonder at what her body might feel like even as his loving and comfortable phone call from earlier that afternoon still buzzes in his ear. But it all goes back to the passion, to a muse as explained by Oliver and his life on the road, to his Parisian mistress, and to the devotion, still, that he feels for Francesca.

(INTERLUDE NO. 4)

THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF HAMLET GIRAUD AND JANE DOE

by Davis McComber

davismccomber.com

In 1966, forty-four-year-old jazz trombonist Hamlet Giraud was driving north on the FDR, presumably heading for Harlem. It was a wet spring night, not raining, but the thunderstorm that had passed earlier that evening left the road slick and dangerous. The danger would prove very real as his car, a ’62 Plymouth Fury traveling at a high rate of speed, crossed the median and hit an oncoming delivery truck. Dead were Giraud and his passenger. The driver of the truck, fifty-two-year-old Max Shropshire, a Brooklynite heading home to his wife and five children after a long day of dry goods deliveries, escaped with a broken femur, wrist, and clavicle and a concussion.

A police report from that night stated, “Dead: Mr. Hamlet Gerad [sic], Negro male, 44. Dead: Jane Doe, Caucasian, age unknown . . . at a probable high rate of speed, the driver [Giraud] crossed the median and struck an oncoming vehicle . . . strong odor of alcohol from wreckage . . .”

Little else is known regarding the wreck and Giraud’s death. The woman in the car was not his wife, who was at home with their two children in the Bronx at the time. Giraud had recently returned from Europe with the Oliver Pleasant Trio, a tour that, by all accounts, was a success.

The jazz writer Jackson LeDuc was with Pleasant in a Greenwich Village jazz club when he received word of Giraud’s death. LeDuc wrote in his 1971 memoir,
An Angel on a Train
, “Oliver was drinking gin pretty hard that night and we were sitting at a corner table listening to the band. A gig he’d been playing earlier had ended in a brawl and he’d left before the set had finished and happened in to where I was. He seemed distraught and even more so when Little Jimmy Scott came over and said, ‘You hear about Brother Giraud?’ Oliver said he hadn’t, neither had I, and then Jimmy told us that Hamlet had died in a car wreck not an hour earlier. It was a shock to both of us, to all of us in the club. Oliver looked like he’d lost a family member. He took a drink straight from the gin bottle and asked a question I never did understand. He said, ‘What about the girl?’ Jimmy hadn’t mentioned a girl, but then he said they were both dead. I’ve never seen a man so upset. . . .”

Giraud’s passenger, “Jane Doe,” has heretofore been unknown, a mystery both in legal circles and jazz circles, and of trivial interest to pop-culture enthusiasts for decades.

Unknown until now.

Marie Broussard of Paris, France, had come to New York to visit a friend—a lover—and her life would end here as well.

Bassist Stanton Harris, eighty-three, is retired and living in the Bronx View Convalescent Center. He fills in the gaps of the night: “I was there. We was playin Fig’s, halfway through the second set and it was good. We was on fire that night, hard to believe it was so long ago, when this white woman comes in the club like a hurricane and makes straight for the bandstand, straight for Ollie on piano. From where I was standin, I could see the front door clearly and I liked to keep an eye on all the pretty ladies that came in. And this lady was the prettiest, but she had somethin on her mind; she was in a bad way with drink or drugs or somethin. Anyway, she come straight toward Ollie and he don’t see her because he’s full into whatever melody we was playin. But we all see her, all of us up on the stand, and it was Hamlet that jumped off the stand to stop her. I believe she aimed to do Ollie some harm, but everything came to a stop and this woman was screamin about Oliver this and Oliver that in an accent. She was talkin about Harlem and Paris and mamas and I don’t know what. The whole club was watchin like it was a part of the show. Anyway, they got her into a corner someplace to calm her down, and then Hamlet left with her. They put her in Hamlet’s car and I never saw her again, which is fine by me. That broad was in a bad way.”

Marie Broussard was the longtime mistress of Oliver Pleasant and the two lived as husband and wife when Pleasant was working in Europe, as he frequently was in the 1950s and ’60s. Broussard’s mother, her only known relative, had been in bad health and had recently passed away. Broussard was a freelance photographer working in the fashion industry and when she failed to arrive in Italy for an assignment, the designer inquired and eventually filed a missing-person report in Paris that reads, in part, “Marie Broussard, 32 years old . . . photographer . . . mother recently passed . . . address uncertain” and a handwritten note on the file obtained via e-mail makes note: “known drug user, in frequent company with American jazz musicians.” The file was left dormant and closed, unsolved, sometime later.

But why was she in New York? Had she ever been before? By all accounts she was here for Oliver Pleasant, and the most striking account has come to light recently to once again focus attention on this dark trail. Charlene Pleasant Wilson, the forty-eight-year-old daughter of Oliver Pleasant, said in her Park Slope home recently that Marie Broussard came to her parents’ home the night she died in the wreck with Hamlet Giraud.

“She was half out of her mind and my mother, worried for her children, wouldn’t let her past the threshold,” Wilson explained. “My brothers were in bed, but I came out of my room when I heard the commotion. Miss Broussard was drunk and demanding to see Daddy, said she’d been with him all this time in Paris but her mother had died and she was alone now. She said she wanted him for good. I can still see her in the doorway—it was storming then and lightning flashes lit her silhouette and her frantic, angry face. My mother finally had enough and I watched from behind as she squared her shoulders and got full in front of Broussard and said, ‘I don’t know who you are or what it is you think you’re owed, but it is not in this house. This is the home of me and my children, and you will leave its doorway now. My husband—
my
husband—is working at a club in Greenwich Village, and if you feel you are owed something by that man, then you take your business to him.’ I’d never heard my mother speak like that and I don’t know that I’d ever been as proud of her as I was then. But then I got in trouble for being out of bed when I laughed as she followed that speech with, ‘You dig?’”

The Pleasants have remained silent on the reason why Marie Broussard was in the car that night with Hamlet Giraud until recently, and have left the Giraud family to bear the pain and wonder for all these years at his dying in a car with an unknown woman. The Giraud children refused to speak on the matter, as did Oliver Pleasant, who has retired and moved to Memphis, Tennessee.

Charlene Wilson, however, carries the weight of the decision by her parents not to speak out. It’s a weight that, she’s ashamed to say, “has become easier to bear over time, but no less wrong for having done so.”

It’s a mystery answered, but a tragedy still.

Special thanks to freelance reporter Frank Severs (Memphis) for his help with this story.

NIGHT FIVE

1.

Oliver greets Pablo on the stoop the next morning with a stack of record albums.

“What’re these?” the boy says.

“Records. Shit you don’t know could fill up this street.”

“Ain’t got a record player.”

“Boy, I got to carry everything to you? You young—come up and get it.”

Pablo has never stepped foot inside Oliver’s apartment. It’s laid out the same as his own, but more lived in. Where Pablo’s floors are wood, warped and stained in places from the neglect of a woman still too heartbroken and tired to keep up and a man that uses the place as a rest stop, Oliver’s floors have lush carpet and furnishings everywhere. The sofa in the apartment upstairs features a secondhand decor with edges gouged and frayed. There are very few pictures, one or two of the boy’s father, who had worked in the kitchen of the restaurant at the top of one of the towers, and a few of Pablo as a bald-headed baby. But nothing like this. His eyes take in black and white faces that look like they go back to the beginning of time. He recognizes some from his history textbook at school.

“Go on, you can touch it. Ain’t gonna bite you.”

Pablo had been standing at the edge of the great expanse of piano, all black and gleaming. He eases up onto the bench and picks one key to depress. The tone that comes out fills the room and makes his scalp tingle.

“A,” Oliver says.

“Hmm?”

“That’s an A. A good one, too—you’ll make a fine musicianer.”

“You gonna teach me, Ollie?”

Oliver sits on the bench beside him and the wood of it groans beneath his weight. Pablo fears it might crash to the floor, but he sees that Oliver pays it no attention. Oliver sighs as he had with Stanton. “Can’t. I’m gonna be leavin soon, son.”

“Leavin? Where to? Vacation?”

“Naw. Naw, no vacation, it’s for keeps. Goin down south to a place called Memphis. You heard of Memphis?”

Pablo shakes his head.

“Well, it’s there, and it’s far as hell from here so I can’t cart all this shit with me. Want you to have some of it, startin with them records. I can’t teach you, but I’m gonna make sure you taught, you hear me? You keep that music with you.

“Pablo, you remember how I talked to that man at the diner about why somebody might start to playin music? How I started and why? You recall that?”

“No.” Pablo is upset but can’t explain it. He’s become used to loss in his young life, has known people to go, so why would this man, this relative stranger, talking about leaving upset him like this? He can’t explain it and doesn’t yet know the key ingredient of loss in the recipe of music. It was a lesson learned by Oliver in New Orleans seventy years earlier after he left Leona Thibodeaux behind on the docks of that city. Pablo wipes away a tear with the back of his hand.

“Well, I did, and I been thinkin it’s because it must have filled somethin up inside me, somethin I needed but didn’t even know I needed at the time. It’s the only way I can explain it. Like when you sittin around watchin your television or whatever and you want to eat a pear just out of nowhere. That’s your body tellin you that you
need
that pear. You like pears?”

“No.”

“Now, you remember when I told you about church? When we’s in the park, you remember?”

“Yeah, I remember that. You said your preacher cussed you.”

“That’s right. That was at my mama’s church when I was a boy your age. In New York and out on the road I found a different kind of church, but I’m gonna tell you a secret now. You listenin?”

In a near whisper, his voice thick with saliva, Pablo answers, “I’m listenin, Ollie.”

“Church inside you. All the time it’s inside you and it can be whatever it is makes you whole. It can be love, it can be hurt, it can be laughter, music, maybe even some poetry. For me, church is that sweet swing, boy, that soft, soft music. And maybe it is for you, too, I don’t know. But I do know that you heard it night fore last. You say you heard it and what did you do? You got down out of bed and got on your knees, ain’t that right? You got on your knees and put your ear to the floor just to get closer to it. I’m gonna tell you somethin else now. Your daddy? He’s in there, too.” Oliver puts his thick, sausage-like finger to Pablo’s chest. “And I know if you fill up your insides with whatever it is makes you whole, and maybe it’s music, then your daddy will have somethin to know you by.”

Oliver plays a soft song, “God Bless the Child,” for Pablo, who sits and watches those massive hands move over the smoke-stained keys. It’s the first time he’s seen Oliver play. He finishes with another song, one for a little boy. “You know that one, don’t you?”

Pablo nods. “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

“That’s right, son. That’s right.”

Oliver sends the boy back upstairs with an armload of jazz records, a head full of thoughts, and a portable phonograph he carries by the handle like a lunch box. At the top of the stairs, Pablo looks back and nods. “Thanks, Ollie.”

Oliver nods back at his protégé.

In Oliver’s apartment the previous night, Agnes had taken his shoes off and loosened his tie, having again taken the burning cigarette from his fingers, and then walked him to his bedroom down a long, narrow hallway with walls covered in picture frames. She eased him back onto his bed and then took a moment to look around and gain perspective on where and how an icon spends his sleeping hours. It looked like any senior citizen’s bedroom anywhere, an environment decorated in rumpled clothes, a small television with rabbit ears on a nearby cane-back chair pulled from the kitchen, a night table with its surface filled to capacity with pill bottles, a clock, wadded tissues, and a lamp. On a table on the opposite side of the bed, though, Agnes saw only a lamp, a silver hairbrush, a picture of three young children playing in the snow, and a Bible. It looked as though it had been left untouched since the day Francesca died. There was profound sadness in this tableau, an unoccupied side of a marital bed being the loneliest desert in the world, she thought. She had the sudden urge to crawl into that side of the bed and give her own loneliness a home, to slide in beneath the sheets and occupy it just for a few hours, just so it could know again the warmth of flesh and dreams on its pillow.

She was pulled from her fantasy by Oliver, eyes open, watching her. “Charlene? That you?”

“It’s me, Ollie, it’s Agnes. Agnes Cassady. Frank and I were just leaving; you get some sleep.”

“Agnes. How you? You sounded good tonight, sweetheart, real good. I want you to have something. There, on that bureau there, by the mirror, take that hat there.”

“The brown one? Here?”

“Yeah, that’s it. That’s for you.”

“Whose was this one, Ollie?”

He closed his eyes again to sleep. “That one’s mine.”

She bent and kissed him on the cheek, and whispered, “Thank you.”

After she said goodbye to Frank and left Oliver’s place, Agnes had gone straight to Andrew’s. When he opened the door, she realized he wasn’t alone. There was a wariness in his eyes as though the past might be standing on the dark and smelly landing to his apartment instead of a still-glowing Agnes Cassady. She glimpsed someone behind him, rising from the mattress on the floor. It was the bartender from Ben’s, the tall and graceful black woman with the Afro and earrings. She still wore the earrings, but nothing else. Agnes was momentarily caught off guard when the woman stopped and turned full to the door as though daring Agnes to enter. It wasn’t that she’d expected Andrew to be alone; she hadn’t really thought about it. It was the grace and elegance of this nude woman—her skin shining, purple nipples pointing outward, and jaw set firmly—in the midst of Andrew’s filth and disorganization that stirred something in her. Not a jealousy over Andrew, but an envy for having such a perfect body with so much self-control.

“Hey, Sexton,” Agnes said, “you were supposed to meet me at Tommy’s an hour ago for that tattoo. He said we could use his office. The fuck?”

“What? Oh yeah, right, the tattoo. Shit, I forgot. . . .”

The bartender had gone to the bathroom, the only other place she could go, and came out almost immediately fully dressed. She looked just as elegant in clothes, and she made a point to kiss Andrew heavily on the mouth before leaving.

“I’ll call you,” Andrew said halfheartedly after her as she disappeared into the shadows of the stairwell. Then, to Agnes, “Hey, look, I’m sorry about that.”

“Shut up, Andrew.” She entered his apartment and flung her coat onto a small wooden chair. She left an oversized, brown porkpie on her head and kissed him just as his last guest had. “Did you see me tonight?”

“See you? You were amazing. I had no idea you could play like that. How did it feel?”

She kissed him again. “How did it feel? There’s nothing to compare it to.”

“Like a good meal, or love?” he said hopefully.

“It was like a great fuck,” she whispered, slipping to her knees and taking him into her mouth, tasting the tall, graceful woman on him.

They lay in his bed afterward, not speaking. She was tired but didn’t feel like closing her eyes. She didn’t have long left in New York and she didn’t want to spend it in darkness. Andrew breathed steadily beside her until she was sure he had fallen asleep, and then she got up to stand in his window. She put Oliver’s hat back on and stood looking across the street at the brick building where it was mostly quiet and some lights glowed warmly inside apartments, and she could see movement in still a few others. Below, on the sidewalks, there was no one. New York does sleep.

She thought of New Orleans and of her apartment. She thought of Sherman—she’d told him she’d call yet hadn’t. The cold coming through the single-pane glass touched her skin and it occurred to her that she missed the heat and humidity of the South. She thought of Landon Throckmorton, who had sent her to New York to visit his doctor. Or was it something more? Had the old man foreseen all of this or planned it as he had the train ride to Memphis? Had he known she’d go to hear Oliver play, that she would meet him and eventually play for him in his home and onstage in front of an audience?
Maybe Landon is fate,
she thought.
He’s in control of all of this.

She’d told Sherman that Landon was paying for the New York trip simply out of kindness, because that was the truth. She didn’t know just what Landon thought of her, or what he might expect from her when she returned, but maybe Landon did know all; maybe he was a specter flying over her, then sitting on her shoulder to help guide the way just as the muse might. She’d let it happen and was curious if there might be more. Stranger things had come from New Orleans.

He hadn’t touched her at all on the train ride to Memphis or back to New Orleans, perhaps out of respect, or for the circumstance of that funereal trip. It wasn’t until the following New Year’s Eve when she’d played at his party, one that would last until well into the morning and see groups breaking off to find bedrooms or soft indentations where the illusion of privacy might be had in that massive Victorian home, that he placed a hand on her. Exhausted from the long night, she’d fallen asleep in an upstairs bedroom, recalling only the last sip of scotch and moonlight that fell through the window. She’d awoken sometime just before dawn with a start and the feeling that she wasn’t alone. She wasn’t. Landon lay beside her, fully clothed in a tuxedo that contrasted against her nakedness. She’s not a modest woman, but she was startled by the company. She lay on her stomach, arms crossed beneath her head, and looked at him and he smiled back. And then she felt his thin, cold fingers at the small of her back. He ran his flattened palm up her spine and over her shoulders, back down over her ass and bare backs of her thighs. He didn’t ask her to turn over; there was no overt sexuality. He didn’t touch himself. He seemed to get whatever it was he needed from palm on skin, and she let him. It was as though he were inspecting his porcelain or the fabric on an antique settee; perhaps he was looking for any damage. She drifted back into sleep at some point, and when she woke up, she was in the same position but with a soft afghan pulled over her, and Landon was gone.