Five Night Stand: A Novel (8 page)

He sees her there again, the young woman with a tremble in her body, sitting now with an older, white-haired man. Her grandfather? He saw her when he came up for air, mopping the sweat pooling in the band of his porkpie. He’d only meant to warm up but got carried away, full of pent-up energy from his afternoon nap and memories of Francesca and the kids. He notices, too, that the large table he’d asked Ben to reserve for his family is empty again, its stark white tablecloth illuminated by an overhead spotlight like a deserted island in the middle of a sea of swaying heads and smiles.

And then he notices the boy. At least “boy” is the first thought to jump into Oliver’s head. The second is familiarity. He
knows
that boy standing near the front of the club, just inside the doorway. In fact, Oliver thinks he saw him slip inside when the hostess turned to check for lipstick on her teeth in the mirror.

The quintet finishes the first set the way they’d begun, with each player leaving the stage in turn, this time to applause, the audience having seen what they could do. Oliver is even more impressed with this band on the second night. He’s worried over the years about this new breed of jazz musician with their computerized tones and desire for instant gratification. Where are they coming from? The band has been good, made him sound better; he knows just how many beats he missed and isn’t afraid to admit it. Even so, he isn’t sure what the next generation will do, isn’t even sure there is a generation coming up behind these cats that are onstage with him. The schools are putting out some decent enough musicians, sure, teaching them about scales and theory. “But you can’t learn this shit in no classroom,” Oliver would say. “This ain’t no textbook music, ain’t even for the radio no more. Hell, I heard of a damn jazz show in an art museum last week. A museum!”

He had been brought up alongside the architects, the greats, and is old enough to have learned the craft down in the swamps, inside the swaying of train cars and on riverboats. Up through Kansas City, Memphis, Chicago, and New York, he’d traveled to find a sound, his voice. The kids coming from Juilliard and this conservatory or that, what do they know of life and love and heartbreak? Hearts of glass beat within their chests and shatter like crystal at the slightest touch of pain. Their hearts aren’t malleable, won’t bend to bridge that gap between life and loss. It’s on that bridge, over a rushing current of uncertainty and inevitable anguish, that the best tunes are written, the ones that touch the people in that same hidden place that holds all their love, fear, and hate.

People drawn to making music are instruments themselves with strings of sinew, but these kids today are taut and rigid with technology. They’re unable to be tuned like a piano with its wood soaked through in gin and tears. That piano of old has been played for years in late-night, smoke-filled dungeons of lost hopes and dreams. Those are the places Oliver moved through—not even as a second home, having practically abandoned his first for the road, for strangers and their pieces of silver. Have these kids coming up today and looking to take his place on the bench, Dizzy’s on horn, and Roach’s on drums given anything up? Anything at all other than the safety of an office to work in with their daddy’s name on the door?

Oliver’s kids had been the victims of his work ethic, drive, and passion, and it is he who pays for it now as he stares down at that empty table. He’d left them all word that he was retiring, and Charlene, living just across the water in Brooklyn with her own family, knows he’ll be moving away. He’s asked her to help him, to come to his rescue, but gets only stony silence and empty chairs in reply. His eyes sting with the hurt but are distracted by the kid who keeps moving as though he doesn’t want to get caught too long in any one spot—long enough to be asked if he needs something, where his seat is, or how old he is. This boy who watches him with his own daughter’s eyes and from a face with Francesca’s light complexion. Yes, he knows this boy.

Once Oliver’s seated in his booth, he motions the boy over, pointing at the seat across the table from him. The boy slides in, his pressed suit cartoonishly big by one size. He looks down at the table while Oliver pours himself a Campari, taking his time to speak.

“Cedric? That you buried in that suit?”

“Hey, Pops.”

“Look at me, boy. Grown up into a handsome one, ain’t you? How old are you now? Fifteen? Sixteen?”

“I’m seventeen.” He looks up at Oliver and thrusts out his chin, proud of his age.

“Seventeen? Shit, still too young to be in here. What you doin here?”

The boy shrugs, a movement barely detectable coming from inside the jacket. “Came to see you.”

“How’d you know I was playin?”

“Mama.”

“Your mama? Charlene here?” Oliver looks around the room, hoping he’s missed sight of her.

“No, just me, Pops.”

“Pops. Who told you to call me Pops?”

“You ain’t like it?”

“‘Pops’ what we call our elders out of respect, those who come before us and show us the way. Pops Armstrong. Pops Blakey. Pops Bechet. You know them names?”

Again Cedric shrugs, more with his mouth this time than his shoulders.

“I don’t expect nobody younger than that band onstage there thinks to call me Pops. Maybe not that drummer, though, he don’t look no older than you. Where you hear Pops?”

“Mama.”

“Mama? She say Pops?”

Cedric nods sheepishly.

“She comin?”

Cedric shakes his head.

Oliver sighs. “Why you here?”

“See you, Pops, like I said. I got a band now, calling it Storyville. I want you to come see us.”

“You? You a bandleader now? What kind of band is that? Rock and roll?”

“Hip-hop.” Again, the same pride he’d shown with his age, the same jut of his chin.

“Oh shit. Ha! Hip-hop?” Oliver has to take a moment to compose himself and uses the time to light a cigarette. “Hip-hop. Oh Lord, son, that ain’t music.”

“It’s good. Me and my boys, we’re good, just come hear us.”

Oliver shakes his head, blows smoke from his nostrils, and watches it pool blue around the light over the table.

“It’s like bebop; it’s our music,” Cedric continues.

“What you know about bebop, boy? What you heard about Storyville? You know much about bop as you do Pops.”

“Just come hear us, Pops.”

“Who is this?” Ben slides in next to Oliver, smiling.

“This my grandson, Cedric. He was just leavin.”

“Charlene’s boy?”

Cedric nods.

“I see the resemblance. A little Francesca, too.”

Oliver beams at this despite himself. “Say hello to Mr. Greenberg, Cedric.”

“I didn’t think Charlene would have a son old enough to be in a nightclub.”

“Like I said, he was just leaving. Came to see his pops play some hip-hop. Boy don’t know his hip-hop from his bebop. Run on now, Cedric, before the man come in here and take Ben’s sandals away from him.”

Cedric stands to go. “Come see us. Please? Around on Third all week, any night after your show.” And then, to Ben, “Nice to meet you, sir.”

“Cedric.”

They both watch him go.

“Your suit he’s wearing?”

“Shit, I ain’t got one that nice no more.”

“Seems like a good kid, came to see his grandpa play. Broke the law to see his grandpa play, even invited you to hear his own band.”

“Yeah. Yeah, he did. Shit, Benji, I’m the openin act for a boy’s hip-hop show.”

The men sit and watch the room. Oliver takes another few sips of Campari.

“Crowd’s getting restless. You better get up there and give them what they came for.”

Oliver stands with a groan. “I’ll see if I got any more in me.”

Frank grew up as part of a middle-class family in east Memphis within walking distance of his Catholic elementary school and church. It was a pragmatic upbringing based on the theory that hard work deserves a dollar. It was the 1970s and Frank’s father regularly held forth over pot roast and potatoes about the gas shortages and interest rates. The dollar Frank was told he would one day earn was to be expected and he was expected to earn it through smarts and sweat. “There is no simple way,” his father would say.

His father was an engineer, his mother the school’s office manager. Little, if no, thought was given to the idea of inspiration; art as a vocation never even occurred to him. Not in elementary school, anyway, with its brick foundations laid out in syllables, prime numbers, dates, facts, and parts of speech. Not during those dinners when his father would speak of sums and overtime, and how a mortgage might be reduced. And not in the first few years of the all-boys Catholic high school that his father and uncles had also attended. It was an institution preparing boys to become the pliable material that would eventually be turned into men. The Jesuit order of Brothers ruled with a firm hand that would pull a boy up from his lazy, idyllic, hormone-laden ways by a haphazardly tied Windsor knot and march him along a path that led to finance, leadership, business, and loyalty. Responsibility! Catholicism was the faith, but pragmatism was the religion.

Frank first saw her sitting under a tree and reading Vonnegut.
Bluebeard.
She was dressed in the plaid skirt and white uniform shirt of her own private school; her black-and-white saddle oxfords were marred with a blue ink pen in an attempt to make the uniform her own. Her fingernails were painted black, and tiny, silver hoops ran the length of one entire earlobe, visible below a closely shaved strip of hair. This girl did not give a shit, not about that school, not about the nuns or their rules, not about her classmates, and not about Frank—not yet. She didn’t say anything to him that day; it was simply the look on her face that told him she was uninterested in her surroundings, with the compass point of her nose in that unassigned book. Frank only came to know her later—she was the friend of a friend’s girlfriend. He was correct about her disdain, yet wrong about the order of such a list. At the top was not the nuns or school itself. The list began with athletes. Jocks. White-bread boys who spent more time concerned with defensive plays and stats and scores than with what she called “the poetry of the world.” (The very fact that she spoke that way made Frank dizzy.) Literature, art, social equality, and beautiful men and women were where she cast her youthful, inexperienced lot. Frank was intrigued. He considered himself popular, well liked and sought out by girls and boys both for companionship and for his opinions, filtered as they were from his father’s. Her lack of interest was the most interesting thing he’d come across and he began to seek
her
out, this shadow, this pixie, this ripple in the calm tidal pool of high school.

Her name isn’t important. It’s been kept closed up for decades in a worn copy of
Bluebeard
, along with her virginity, and placed on Frank’s shelf of favorite books. What lingers is his love of literature and art and beauty, his senses awakened in public parks, libraries, his parents’ living room, and the bedrooms of friends whose parents had left town for the weekend. For this awakening, he is eternally grateful to that nymph under the tree.

Frank began reading—a lot—for pleasure. He couldn’t get enough of the authors, their stories and characters. He couldn’t get his fill of the ensuing discussions with her after school, over the phone late into the night and half naked in bed, delirious with a youthful familiarity. They listened to cassettes, flipping them over and over until the magnetic tape became faded and slack. Her music—the Cure, REM, U2, the Violent Femmes, Elvis Costello—were new sounds to him and with lyrics like poetry. It became his music; it became the sound track to young love and his awakening. It is her voice in his ear even now when he reads poetry and wonders, when a new and eagerly awaited novel is released, what she thinks of it, wherever she might be.

He neglected learning defensive plays and working with his teams. The coaches noticed. His father noticed as well, and those dinnertime lectures turned from national politics to very local threats and consequences. His grades, however, soared—she found intelligence deliciously arousing—so his parents were torn on discipline. His longtime friends fell off one by one, disinterested in alternative music, magical realism, or the legacy of Andy Warhol.
Fag,
they called him behind his back.
Pussy whipped,
he was declared. So Frank absorbed her friends, scant as they were, and a new persona of his own. In the style of the eighties, he grew his hair long on one side only, pierced an ear over the summer so it had time to heal before the Jesuit Brothers could get hold of it the next fall. He wore bangles on his wrist and shuffled his feet with caustic emotion in worn canvas shoes. Once, at her urging, he let her paint his lids with heavy, black eyeliner.

And he began writing.

It was an urge as primal as eating or sex for him, and one he couldn’t explain. But it burned with a warmth in his chest, an ember he could only liken to the feeling of the first time he’d seen her beneath that tree on the campus of her school and, oddly, the sense he had on Sunday mornings when the priest would hold the Eucharist high overhead. There were tongues of fire, yellow halos, black fingernails, sex, literature, hymns, poetry, guitar riffs, creativity, gospels, and inspiration. Isn’t it all the same? He speculated on this; he woke up with it at midnight and wrote it down within stanzas of bad poetry and worse prose. He was unaware that what he wrote then was poor, only the feeling he had when the words were pouring from him. It was the sense of something being built, something created.