Five Night Stand: A Novel

by Richard J. Alley

  The kitchen is just as quiet as the street had been. Details. Winter seems to be that way, though, doesn’t it? Quiet, whether indoors or out. He looks at the trees through the large window in the breakfast nook and thinks of how much colder it feels seeing them without leaves on their limbs, without that blanket of color. Details. As if thinking only of the cold and wanting to warm himself, he turns on a stove top burner, the sweet smell of gas in his nose before the blue flame catches. He puts a pot of water on to boil.

  Details. It has been his mantra since college when a journalism professor had told him, “Your job will not be, simply, the who-what-when-and-where, but the details. In time, everyone will consider themselves journalists. Let them glom on to the generalities and speculation; you be there, feet on the ground, and use your senses to let the readers know everything you see, feel, taste, and hear. Details.” Old Professor Jordan seemed to know about blogs, social media, and “citizen journalists” before there were such things. Frank still respects that old-guard way of thinking, respected it even as he’d packed up his desk in a cardboard box, handed over his press card, and kissed his sobbing editor on the cheek. He wonders where Jordan is these days, retired half a dozen years or more. “I should look him up,” he says to the empty kitchen, and takes a notebook and pen from his pocket to scratch “Jordan” on a page.

  He’d forgotten to take sausage out to thaw this morning and does so now, putting it in the microwave, the hum aggravating the quiet of the room like an itch. He rubs his hands together over the stove top and finally relaxes into his house as the chill leaves his bones.

  At forty-one, Frank had been a reporter with The Commercial Appeal newspaper in Memphis for most of his adult life. He and Karen have been married equally as long. They are a couple complacent in their lives, content with each other; the passion has left. It’s a relatively recent development, within the past year or so. The lack of intimacy is punctuated by something else, though, and he’s wondered off and on, as he pads around the house in the middle of a workday, if his wife might possibly give him his walking papers as well. Perhaps he will become that tired movie cliché of the middle-aged man who loses everything at once—career and wife—his life laid out to be inhospitably sifted through in dank bars and filthy one-room apartments.

  Something has revealed itself within their union and managed to push its fingers into a crag in their foundation. He suspects an affair. Nothing overt to give it away, no men’s shoes left under the bed or charges to motels across the city in the bank statement. Little things, though: a faraway look in his wife’s eye as he tells her about his day, extra time spent in front of the mirror some mornings, a jumpy close of her e-mail when he enters the room. Perhaps it’s all in his mind, his overreacting imagination, that tickle in his veteran reporter’s brain in the numbing absence of any real breaking news. But then there is the lack of intimacy, and that’s real. And there’s the complacency, the soft-around-the-middle contentedness that every marriage seems to grow eventually. Details.

  It’s spaghetti night. Many dinners are themed, a tradition carried through the years since their first year of marriage, a stab at normalcy amid Frank’s ever-changing, unpredictable work schedule. Even now, though, when he might spend the whole day reading a novel or in front of the television wallowing in unemployment, it is spaghetti night. He chops onion and garlic, and hums a tune to himself. He wishes he’d thought to stop by the music store to pick up that CD he’s been thinking of since lunch. He laughs to himself, wiping the stickiness of garlic from his fingers with a stained dish towel, and flips his laptop open where it sits on the table. It is all so easy in 2006, to get what one wants with the click of a mouse. He shakes his head at the fact that he hadn’t immediately thought of downloading an album. He recalls the human resources administrator who’d done the actual dirty work of laying him off describing Frank—and anyone else who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see the industry tide changing—as a dinosaur. The administrator hadn’t meant it as an insult—he was making a joke—but Frank had told him to shut the fuck up and then apologized to his own boss, his longtime editor and friend, who had begun to cry silently beside him.

  He opens his laptop and searches for “Oliver Pleasant.” He blinks back tears, not realizing how the onion has affected him. Moments later, the soft piano, bass, and brass of the Oliver Pleasant Trio fill the kitchen and mingle with the smell of sausage and onion in the air.

  He leans on the table, an antique he and Karen had picked up at a flea market when they were first living together and broke. The cold of the tin top pushes against the heat of his palms. Music rises up to his face the way the scent of chopped onion had. That afternoon, the idea of writing about Pleasant had sparked something within him that has been missing for some time. It touched off a flintlock of inspiration that’s been soaking so long in apathy he is afraid it has become nonflammable. He can’t explain such an instinct; no one can—it’s something that comes with being in the business for so long and with having writing in the blood. It’s that first scent of gas from a stove top burner, the crackle of a first kiss, a first touch. And just like that he was itching to go to New York and talk to the pianist himself.

  Frank first considered Oliver Pleasant a subject earlier that afternoon while sitting at a favorite lunch counter in south Memphis. It’s a small, close diner situated on the interstate and frequented by the surrounding blue-collar workers, passing truckers, cops, and the odd lost or adventurous tourist. It has been rumored—as it’s been rumored about every dive in the city—that Elvis Presley used to eat there. Tourists are powerless against such a pedigree.

  Frank and his friend Hank (the rhyme was endless fun for others in the newsroom) sat at the chipped and stained counter eating barbecue and chili burgers with fries. The room smelled of grilled onions, smoked pork, and boiling greens. The chatter of the patrons shoulder to shoulder at the counter and at scattered tables, along with the clatter of plates and utensils, made it hard to hear your neighbor talk, so they shouted to each other as they ate.

  Hank is a photographer for the Associated Press and keeps an office, an old and unused darkroom the size of a dry-goods pantry, at The Commercial Appeal. He’s frequently called to disasters, murder scenes, and political gatherings throughout the region for the wire service. He felt bad for Frank’s layoff and had asked him to lunch. Hank cursed the publisher, the nameless and faceless powers that be, and the decline of their industry up one end of the lunch counter and down the other. Between bites and swearing, he worked and reworked a math equation in his notebook with a felt-tip pen.

  Frank finally couldn’t stand it any longer. “Let it go, Hank, we’re all doomed. I’ll be treating you to lunch in a year, you dumb bastard. What are you working on there?”

  Hank held up a finger to tell him to wait a minute, finished some multiplication, and then scratched it all out before throwing his pen on the counter in disgust.

  “What is it?” Frank wanted to know.

  “Plumbing. Trying to figure out what I can afford per foot to run a new sewer line from the house to the street.”

  “What’d you come up with?”

  “About fifty cents a foot. Give or take.”

  “You better give. Hell of a lot more expensive than that.”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  Hank, twice divorced, has recently bought the duplex he’d rented for five years, finding himself as landlord and home owner all in one day. He’s in the process of extensive home renovations and looks to Frank, who spent a year renovating his and Karen’s old home, as somewhat of a guru.

  “I didn’t have to do much in the way of plumbing, but Rachel here helped me find a carpenter and electrician—both cousins of hers. Rachel, you got a plumber?”

  The lanky woman behind the counter, arms all bone and sinew and hands like a man’s, held her finger up as Hank had while she slid an order slip through the window into the kitche
n. A bright white and blue Memphis Grizzlies ball cap sat atop her head, over a hairnet, and listed slightly to the side. “Teddy, my uncle. But he working with Lavelle on a house now over in Harbor Town.”

  “How is Lavelle?” Frank said, and then to Hank, “Her cousin, my carpenter.”

  “Good. He adding a room to my girl Freda’s house. Her grandma lives with her, and now her grandma’s brother coming from New York City to live. Need a room to hold a bed and piano. Bathroom, too.”

  “Piano?” Frank said.

  “Mm-hmm. His name Oliver, plays piano. Been playing damn near forever. Oliver Pleasant, that’s his name. Nice name.”

  “Was he with Stax? Sun?” Hank said.

  “No,” Frank answered for her. “No, Oliver Pleasant is a jazz pianist. He’s still alive? He played with everybody, all the greats. He’s from here, Rachel?”

  “He’s originally from Winona, in Mississippi. Freda said he cut out early for New York, leavin all his people down here.”

  “And he’s living here?”

  “Will be my cousin ever get done with that room. Shit, I need him over here, fix that back door. Oliver’s takin retirement. That’s what I need more than a new back door, I need me some retirement.”

  Frank scribbled notes in his notebook while Hank consulted his math. “Can I get dibs on your uncle? What’s his number, Rachel? I need a plumber. I need a damn sewer line.”

  “I’d help you out, buddy, but somebody has to go interview this infant lawyer,” Frank said. “Call me later and I’ll see if I can get by there.”

  When they first bought the home fifteen years earlier, Frank and Karen’s house was nearly a hundred years old and in need of upgrades and care. The foundation, however, was as rock solid as anything else built in the late nineteenth century. Frank, with the direction of Rachel’s cousins, plastered and painted the upstairs bedrooms, put in new light fixtures, and sanded and stained the wood floors. Those rooms were furnished and decorated with an eye toward hosting visiting friends and family, but Frank and Karen both knew which room would one day become the nursery. Van Morrison called from the stereo, and they each, separately and to themselves, imagined those rooms full of children, the sound of little feet running through the hallways and up and down the stairs. They worked together for weeks with paint and spackle, laughing at each other’s splattered faces and passing mental shopping lists for furniture, lamps, and wall hangings back and forth. Workdays ended as the sunlight faded, casting long parallelograms of light across the walls, and they would make love there on the paint tarp surrounded by cans and brushes and ladders.

  After Karen lost that first pregnancy, Frank put the crib they’d picked out, still unassembled, in the attic before Karen returned from the hospital. After the second and third miscarriages, the second floor was ostensibly sealed off, if not physically, then in Karen’s mind. Frank eventually put new hardware on the bathroom cabinets and a new faucet in the sink, but it was without the camaraderie and talk of the future that had gone into the rest of the redecorating. Karen maintained hope and still does, though it’s waning, but does not dare to decorate that nursery for fear of tempting a fate she’s already danced with three times.

  Frank keeps an office in a spare room next to the nursery. It’s an office rarely visited, where an unfinished novel manuscript sits neatly stacked in the center of a neglected desk. He’s been thinking again of the novel since being laid off, but isn’t that part of the progression? Denial, anger, sadness, revisiting old hopes and dreams . . . It’s there, waiting for him whenever he’s ready. He’s stopped at the bottom of the stairs on more than one morning since his “sabbatical,” as he’s come to joke about it with Karen, to look up and strain to feel the pull of what he’d written so long ago, to perceive that need to write in his bones. It’s there, he knows, waiting and incomplete the way the whole top half of the house feels incomplete, like a life still waiting to be conceived.

  Only a matter of days after the conversation in their kitchen, Frank is thinking of the house as the plane leaves the runway and banks left over the darkened canopy of Midtown, where streetlights and the glow of storefronts and porch lights give him his bearings. He imagines he can see his house, a speck of light in so much darkness, and then leans back in his seat and closes his eyes. He’s still haunted by the quiet of his home and thinks of it now with only Karen in it, walking from the living room to the kitchen for another glass of wine and back into the living room and her favorite chair. He wonders if she thinks of the house as quiet and whether or not she misses him yet. He wonders if her sister will visit while he’s gone or if Karen will have a change of heart and catch a plane to New York to spend time with him holed up in a hotel room eating food brought to them and making love in clean white sheets. Or maybe she has plans for a visitor that he doesn’t know about.

  He’s running these scenarios through his head as he drifts into sleep somewhere ten thousand feet above his house and his life below, while in New York, Oliver Pleasant is putting his career to bed and Agnes Cassady is considering an act far more permanent.

  (INTERLUDE NO. 1)

  BEGINNINGS

  as told to Frank Severs by Oliver Pleasant

  Junior’s Diner

  East 103rd, New York, New York

  I was six years old, what they might call a prodigy these days. Back then, though, in 1927, they just said I was “in the way.” I was always in the way, up under my mama’s skirts, runnin through the legs of my aunties and uncles, wantin to see just what everybody was up to. Guess I was a curious sort, but then, ain’t all kids? Should be, anyway. I was always tryin to help my daddy out with whatever it was he was doin—choppin firewood, skinnin a raccoon, guttin fish.

  My family ran a home-cookin restaurant just off the Panama Limited line in Winona, Mississippi, where the railroad men would come in and eat. Some of them travelers would come in, too, dressed fine from cities all up and down the line. That is, if they thought to ask the porters where to get the best meal in three counties. My mama, she cooked up the best goddamn groceries you ever put in your mouth. My whole family, all of us—my mama and daddy, aunts and uncles, my granmama, little cousins—was fed and clothed from whatever little revenue that lunch counter brought in feedin white folks.

  The man who held the lease on the building—Mr. Sheffield—wouldn’t allow coloreds to eat in the main room, so my mama fed them out the back door and didn’t charge them nothin for it. Mr. Sheffield, he owned that whole block, damn near the whole town and, in addition to payin that motherfucker collectin rent and demandin my daddy buy his dry goods from Sheffield Wholesale, he got a percentage of the take, too.

  Now, I’m only talkin ’bout the take that son of a bitch knew about. The other take, the one he didn’t know about, happened late at night when Daddy would roll an upright piano from the pantry and my uncles would move the tables to the far side of that big room, stack the chairs up and out the way, and Mama would take money at the door. Colored money.

  At night, the field hands, the house girls, the janitors, and ditchdiggers, every Negro in the county—all black and beautiful as night—paid a quarter each to dance on that white man’s floor. You could feel the evening comin alive as clouds parted to show us the moon, and inky figures would come out from behind houses and trees to line up at the door. Those nights were raucous, boy, with song and sweatin bodies gyratin across the floor and in the sawdust Daddy had put down there. They shimmied and shuffled, all fueled by pent-up energy and my granmama Hillbillie’s mash she made out behind the shack where we lived with her—me, my folks, and my nine brothers and sisters.

  You know, I don’t know why they called her Hillbillie except maybe that she grew up in the foothills of the Ozarks in Arkansas, where it was she’d learned to make that liquor, and that her given name was Billie. I never met another woman named Billie until the night I met Miss Billie Holiday at a house party up in Harlem.
I told her about my granmama and we toasted that old woman all night long. Lady Day was such a sweet woman, to me anyway. I was young when I met her, wasn’t but twenty or so, and she took me under her wing, watched after me and told me to stay the fuck out of trouble. That’s what she said: “Ollie, baby, you stay the fuck out of trouble tonight”—and then she’d laugh and drink some more. Sweet lady. Hillbillie, though, she was mean as a snake. She’s the trouble everybody shoulda been warned about.

  The dancin at my mama and daddy’s restaurant lasted all night, them makin a little extra scratch to live on with the quarter at the door and a ten-cent pour. The money helped, made my folks feel like they was gettin ahead, I know. But I think they also liked takin that money out from under old Mr. Sheffield’s nose.

  Me and my siblings, my cousins, we’d steal away some nights down the dirt road, movin in and out of shadows made by a full moon and them trees covered in kudzu, to the restaurant and we’d look through the grimy, dust-covered windows at the action inside. We giggled and nudged each other, not knowin exactly what we was lookin at then—least I didn’t, I suppose my older brothers did—as them men and women in their Sunday best moved the way we ain’t never seen them move in church. The men thrust at their partners, all up on their legs, and the women hiked up their skirts so the smooth suede-brown of their thighs showed.

  We watched it all. Well, they watched it all. You want to know what I was watchin? I was watchin the man at the piano. He was young and dressed sharp, boy, not like any church clothes I ever seen before. He wore a brown suit with vest, watch chain, green tie all shiny, and two-toned shoes. Had a beautiful brown bowler, not a speck of dust on it, on the back of his head and held a thin cigar in the whitest teeth I ever seen. I saw them teeth so clear, I remember them like I was lookin at my own in the mirror, because of the way that man smiled. That’s what stood out more than anything, his smile. A room full of poor Negroes goin nowhere, spinnin their wheels for the white man, and every one of them had to sneak in there at night just so they could laugh and talk and move like human beings. But here this man was sittin up on that bench and grinnin from ear to ear as his long black hands pounded out a tune.