One Night Stand
a short story
by Angus Brownfield
***
Published By
Copyright © 2015 by Angus Brownfield
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One Night Stand
Built in the Fifties, it could have been an apartment building in Orange, New Jersey, or Green Bay, Wisconsin: narrow interior corridors lined with unsociable doors, each making a single unrevealing statement: ‘I am apartment 204,’ ‘I am apartment 206.’ Lighting hardly generous, barely reaching the carpet of deep red with perhaps a pattern—or wear. The air is stagnant with odors from a handful of conflicting meals, cooked who knows when.
—Do I really want to do this get-together thing? Half past nine. I’m surely the last to arrive.
At the door of apartment two-ten I hear voices—not words, just voices. A laugh, a burst of soprano laughter. Then, softly, music, a piano. The piano lifts me.
—I will. I’ll go in. But where will I put my coat?
I knock. Someone’s standing just on the other side of the door, a woman with a drink in hand.
“No need to knock, mister: just come on in.” After muffled footsteps in the hall and party sounds muffled by walls and doors, her tad-tipsy voice jars me. But no worries, she’s turned back to a tête-à-tête with a fellow who talks just as loudly. Soul mates.
Ten degrees warmer inside. So many persons, voices all loud, crowding my field of vision. I have a hard time focusing on individuals.
Just to my right a bedroom, a woman’s room, a bed with coats thrown over it. I go in and shed mine, adding to the wooly heap at the head of the bed. On the opposite side of the bed stands a woman in a black, sleeveless dress, smoking and talking on the telephone. She half turns to eye me, not really seeing me. I see her, though. She’s wearing pearls. She taps the ash off her cigarette into a glass ashtray on the night stand. Her fingernails are blood red.
Back in the living room I spot the piano. The hostess, a friend from work, crosses the room to greet me. I hand her the bottle of scotch I’ve been carrying.
“Put it with the rest of the poison, over at the bar. But you didn’t have to, you know.”
“Hey; this way I don’t have to worry about how much I drink.” This is a remark I’ve rehearsed, anticipating she’d tell me I didn’t have to. When it comes out I realize how lame it sounds.
Freshly poured drink in hand, I turn to the piano. The pianist, her fingers negotiating the keys like an artist sketching, is about my age, blondish, with maybe some white at her temples. She’s entertaining herself with little riffs, playing tag with different melodies—hints, not statements. She looks up, her face solemn but not threatening.
“Do you take requests?” I ask. There’s something about her—worn but not worn out, craggy but not sharp. This something makes it easy to speak to her.
“As long as it’s not ‘Melancholy Baby.’” She continues to noodle.
“I heard Fats Waller do a pretty good ‘Melancholy Baby’ once.”
“Really? Fats died before you were a gleam in someone’s eye.”
“A recording. But I did hear Art Tatum live. The Blue Room, in Hollywood.”
She segues into a stride version of “Tiger Rag,” not at Tatum tempo, but creditable.
“You’re older than you look. That would have to have been in the Fifties.”
“A year or so before he died. I was a precocious brat who got away with haunting jazz clubs long before I was twenty-one.”
“So what’ll it be?” She’s stopped noodling and dropped her hands into her lap.
“How about, ‘It Had To Be You?’”
She’s looking me in the eye, sizing me up. One beat, two beats, then goes into an intro that takes a full minute before she gets to the chorus. It’s pretty and it’s original. She plays in the tempo Diane Keaton sang it in Annie Hall. It’s so perfect I want to sing it.
When she’s done I set my drink on the piano and clap.
“What else?”
“Gee, I don’t know—”
“—‘Gee, Baby, Ain’t I Good To You?’”
“Great. Can I get you a drink first?”
“Sure; whatever you’re drinking.”
It’s scotch over ice. Not a single malt, just a good blend. She takes a sip and sets it on a coaster atop the piano. Then she does “Gee, Baby, Ain’t I Good To You” with a lot of top spin, bluesy flourishes and arpeggios at the top end of the piano, a little like “After Hours,” played by Erskine Hawkins. Again I want to sing. “A fur coat for Christmas, a diamond ring.”
She looks up at me and smiles a smile of understanding, wistful. “You’re a frustrated shower singer. I saw your lips moving as I played.”
I nod.
She pats the piano bench next to her. I raise my eyebrows, a query. She pats the seat again.
“What’ll it be?”
I take a sip of my drink. “Do you know ‘I Didn’t Know About You?’”
“I’m sorry, what’s your name?”
“Quincy.”
“I’m Annalee. People call me Annie. —So what key, Quincy?”
“I don’t know. I really am a frustrated shower singer. Sometimes I have to hunt around for the right key.”
“So sing me a few bars and I’ll catch up with you.”
I start in, “I ran around with my own little crowd . . . ,” and she comes in after a couple of bars, playing in my key, whatever it is, and her accompaniment takes out the bad overtones and undertones, the way the hiss of the shower does, only ten times better; I’m singing and it sounds pretty good to me.
People quiet down for the length of the song, turn and look at us, and I’m looking at Annie, who reminds me a little of Marian McPartland but younger and with a squarer face, and I think, Gee, I’ve met the girl of my dreams. She does an instrumental interlude, a solo improvisation, and I reprise the final chorus. She ends with a cute little flourish and a couple of people clap.
She’s smiling. She says, “Time for one more. The hostess promised the neighbors I’d stop playing at ten o’clock.”
“How about, ‘I’m Beginning to See the Light?’”
Without a word she does an intro, and when it’s coming to an end she nods and I start in: “I never cared much for starlit skies. . . .” It’s better than the first song, whisky’s relaxed my vocal cords, only this time the other guests don’t pipe down, the new has worn off, so I’m singing only to Annie. My heart is in the words and I don’t want the song to end.
But it does end. When the last note dies she sits for a moment, an amused look on her face, then shuts the keylid and turns to look at me.
“Do you like my singing?” I ask. “Be honest.”
She laughs. “I like it that we have the same repertoire.”
I say, “Besides Duke Ellington I do Billie, I do Peggy Lee.”
She laughs again. “You don’t have much range, I take it.”
I laugh now, too. “How’d you gu
ess?”
“Don’t get the wrong idea, but I have a piano at my place.”
“If you promise to throw me out when you get sleepy, Miss Annie.” And I think I’m in love.
*****
She didn’t throw me out. She played into the wee hours and I sang until I was hoarse. Then she put on a CD she’d mixed, and we danced cheek to cheek until the music ended. I said, “Better throw me out, Miss Annie; you better.”
“I’m not sleepy,” she said, her mouth near my throat.
We still had our arms around each other. I could smell her perfume and a hint of Annie sifting through it, and I was delirious.
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