And them tunes sounded like magic to me, son. I was young and naïve enough back then to think it was only that magical music that made all them people forget their lives for a time. I didn’t know shit about sex or what it was Hillbillie was scoopin out of that pan, so I thought all that smiling and laughter and thrustin, all them thighs and sweaty faces, was because of the man at the piano. Hell, maybe I still do. I played in Harlem and the Village, in Kansas City, Chicago, Memphis, and New Orleans; I been to three different continents with my piano and I see the same movin, the same grins, and the same sexin goin on in everyplace. Saw it last night. Ain’t no difference in that crowd so long ago and the one last night, except last night the blacks and whites sat together, knee-to-thigh. But there was that same hidden magic, the same simmerin sex and tension that only comes when you got the music around. That ain’t changed in jazz in over a hundred years. So maybe it is the music, the fuck do I know? I’m just a old man bein made to retire.
Anyway, before first light, as the last of them good revelers stumbled out for their walk home, Sunday shoes covered in mud from dusty streets and dew, or to work, my daddy and his brothers would put the place back in shape, sweep out the floor, arrange tables, and push that piano—so alive as though to buzz with electricity—back into storage so it could sleep and rest for the day.
By the time old Mr. Sheffield came over from the next county for his coffee and grits, and to collect the previous day’s take, it looked like nothin had happened. Wasn’t no sign that colored men and women had been grindin to piano rags only hours before and so close to where he sat his fat ass with righteous indignation in his heart and a Bible verse in his head, havin a side of hypocrisy with them grits.
I never did see that piano player during the daytime. I looked for him on my walk to school with my cousins, in the faces of the men who came to the back door for a meal and from nearby farms when they hauled in sweet corn, tomato, okra, and peppers for sale from their bosses. But he only showed up at night, like my uncles had packed him away with the piano early in the morning. Maybe that old boy was the night itself. I wished I could’ve found him, asked him to teach me how to play, asked him what his secrets were of the magic he knew.
I’d watch him playin and I’d feel my own hand movin like I wasn’t in control of it, like maybe some spirit had overtaken it come from the night or from inside that piano. At night, lyin in bed with three brothers, I’d hear them tunes playin back over and over in my head and feel my fingers itch. I didn’t have a name for them then, but the notes just seemed to make sense the way they fit together, like the way our family fit together or those men and women on the dance floor. I don’t know—I don’t know that I can explain it right outside my head, but them notes was just a right place for me to be. Be years till I saw them written, pictures on paper, but even then they wouldn’t make no more sense to me than they did as a boy outside that window. I just knew I could make them same tunes back, note for note, come the next morning if only that man would show me where to put my hands and how to move them like a magician.
Like I said, never did find him, not in the daylight anyway. So, eventually, when the want in me became too much, I made my way to the back of that pantry between closin time for the food and openin time for the dancin. I lifted the heavy quilts that covered the piano up over the keys and moved my little fingers the way I’d seen the man do. Mama and Daddy paid me no mind—I was out from under foot, and the piano sounds sunk deep into the quilts and the sacks of flour and cornmeal lining the pantry walls.
Nobody could hear but the rats and me. But boy, it sounded real to me; it was natural like what I was supposed to be doin. And I liked playin. Hell, I loved it, and I was good at it. I played there in that food cave every afternoon and into the evenin, givin a voice to the songs I’d worked over and over in my mind while lyin in bed or sittin bored in school. Sometimes I played even before school when the memory was fresh, if I could find a spare minute or two.
And eventually I took over from that piano player. He split and I never did find out what happened to him, never ran across him again nor heard of him in all my travels. Just know that one night I was in his place, my mama havin kept up with my progress without my knowin. She knew when I was good and ready; it was her let me know. So there I was, twelve years old and surrounded every night by Granmama Hillbillie’s handmade liquor, dancin, and sex. It was something inside me I’d never known. Pride, I guess I’d say it was now, but back then all I knew was that I was makin people dance, I was makin them smile, just like that man I’d watched before. It was a feelin I didn’t get anywhere else, not in school, not in playin stickball, nothin.
Wasn’t but a couple years later I won a talent show at school. I won it playin some Joplin and not even knowin there was a man from the riverboat in the audience that night. That old man needed a piano player, his last one lost somewhere down in New Orleans again. “I’m too damn tired to go lookin for him, neither,” the riverboat man told my daddy. He’d keep an eye on me, he promised my mama. His own wife was travelin with him and would look after my meals and even make me read a book or two. There was money in it, sure, and the man assured my daddy it could be sent back home to Winona.
So that was that, and on the day before I turned fifteen I boarded a boat big as any house I’d seen at that time, wasn’t sure how it stayed floatin. We pushed out onto the Mississippi River and I left Winona for good.
NIGHT TWO
1.
Ben arrives early in the morning. No matter when the club closes, he always waits for the final patrons to leave, then is back again at the same time every morning to unlock the door and turn on the overhead lights. He inspects every inch of the room—the tables without their cloths, looking for nicks and gouges, the padded seats for wear and tear, the carpet for traffic patterns and stains. He walks behind the bar for an inventory of needed liquor. The inspection is intimate; it’s his communion with the past, whether it be the night before or half a lifetime ago when his father told him to always pay attention to the details, to accept nothing less than perfection.
He will even step up onto the bandstand and wipe down the Steinway grand with a lambskin hand towel, marveling at the way white light skids over its black surface. Standing on the stage, he looks out over his club, his house, and imagines a crowd, fantasizes, sometimes, that it is there for him. He will also picture his father there, leaning against the bar in a dark suit, crisp shirt, and smoking a cigarette, looking so proud to see his son up on that stage. The mornings are ritual; the fantasy is beyond his control.
Reality finds Ben sitting at a table with an oversized checkbook and bills scattered about haphazardly; he immerses himself in the ugly side of the business. He couldn’t become a musician as his father had hoped—tone-deaf, his teachers said—but has found himself a niche, a bridge from the creative world his father had tried to nurture in him with the help of his musician and artist friends and the business world in which he has been so successful.
Once the checks are signed, invoices filed, and that ugliness put to rest, he turns the lights down low and has Antonio, always the first in the kitchen, prepare two eggs Benedict, toast, and a carafe of coffee. Ben eats slowly, beginning his day as impresario while his staff prepares the tables all around him for guests.
Agnes is awakened by the quiet. She’s used to the clatter of heels on pavement and the squealing brakes of delivery trucks below the second-floor balcony of her French Quarter apartment. The din of the day coming alive in New Orleans has always moved through her subconscious to let her know she is still alive and adds a sound track to the final act of the morning’s dream.
The air-conditioning of her New York hotel room has been running nonstop and its white noise creates a deafening silence. This unnerves her, panics her at first, until she can recall where she is. The bed is soft and warm within the frigid air of the room. Yet still she turns over to find a cool spot on the pillow,
a habit from childhood. Her bed back in New Orleans is a single mattress on an iron frame. The springs and loosened bolts creak and groan with every move she, Sherman, or whoever might make. This bed is so unbelievably comfortable that she laughs at the luxury of it.
As she has done every morning for six years, as soon as she wakes, she pulls her left hand from the covers and holds it out in front of her face. The tremor is still there, of course, but she knew it would be. It has been with her every morning, slowly getting worse. So slowly, in fact, that she thinks perhaps this will be the end and the progression will stop. It is mostly constant, though it can be stymied for a bit when she plays piano, like the stutterer who is able to sing perfectly. So she will sit and play for hours at a time, until her mind and body swoon with fatigue and rage against the upright position and perpetual movement. Still she plays on. It’s how she’s improved so quickly and why tourists and locals alike in the Quarter have come to know her by name. She plays until she is carried offstage, until the last patron leaves and the delivery trucks start their rounds for the day.
But not even the playing is controlling it every time now, and that scares her. Agnes isn’t scared of much, but the thought of not being able to play anymore outweighs every other fear—even the fear of death. The piano has become as much a part of her as her memories, and as it fades, she’s afraid her childhood and any adulthood she has left may go with it.
She rises and showers, standing under the spray to wash away the previous day’s travel. She thinks of Sherman and of Andrew Sexton, the waiter, and finds herself lonely. Agnes likes to be immersed in people, to sit in a café and watch faces and bodies pass by. New York is a big city with lots and lots of bodies, and there is no reason for her to be alone.
Her appointment isn’t until the afternoon, so she finds an honest-to-God 1950s diner for a breakfast of eggs and bacon, and to read the Times from front to back. She is still a newspaper reader, another habit picked up from her father. “Newspaper reading takes as much time and patience to learn as piano playing. They’re both a dying art,” he’d say.
She looks through the entertainment section for anything about Oliver Pleasant’s show the night before, for anything at all on his retirement, but there is nothing and this pisses her off. There is half a page, above the fold, on a long-haired band out of Seattle that they say began the grunge sound twenty years before. There had been a tribute concert for them and grunge music the night before in Madison Square Garden. Just the name—grunge—like a guttural belch passed and lost on the wind, sounds dull to Agnes. Oliver is a national treasure, as much as any other composer or entertainer who’s worked for more than half a century—as much of a national treasure as breakfast diners, yet there is not a whisper of him on the pages.
“Gonna be another cold one,” the waitress says as she refills Agnes’s coffee cup. Waiters and waitresses, no matter their place on the map, are some of the friendliest people Agnes has ever known.
“Warm in here.”
“You stay as long as you like, hon.”
Agnes wishes she could stay here in this booth all day long and work the crossword (again, her father’s pastime). It is warm and comfortable, the people just as much so, and the coffee is good. Those passing outside look harried and miserable, and she has no desire to join their ranks and be carried along on that current to a place she doesn’t even care to be. She’s had her fill of hospitals and doctors and nurses poking and prodding her body. The sterility of hospitals, even in a place like New Orleans, the dirtiest place she can imagine, is always blinding. She finds it hard to breathe in such places, and she isn’t at all looking forward to this day’s visit despite the promises it holds. She wishes she could put her body in a cab and send it to Mount Sinai while her mind and soul stay in this vinyl booth to polish off another plate of home fries and a whole pot of coffee, as she watches the city walk by through the plate-glass window beside her.
“Excuse me, ma’am?” she asks the waitress, who buses the next table up from Agnes. “Do you know what grunge is?”
“It’s that shit the sink drain won’t even take.” The waitress looks tired, but Agnes admires the red scarf holding her hair in place.
Agnes smiles at the validation. “Okay, thanks.”
Oliver leaves his apartment when the last purple of night is giving itself over to blue skies crisp with winter and a promise of snowfall. He pulls the collar of his coat tighter around his neck against this chill and is surprised to see Winky sitting on the stoop at such an hour and in such a temperature. There’s no reason it should surprise him—the kid is always there. “You ever go inside, boy?”
“Hey, Licoricehead. I like it out here; it’s quiet.”
Just then a garbage truck rumbles by in front of them, steel and rubber leaving a dent in the still morning air.
“Quieter’n what?” Oliver says.
The boy Oliver calls Winky—a ten-year-old dark-headed boy with almond-colored skin—just points behind him with his thumb and Oliver knows he’s talking about the apartment where he lives with his mother and her boyfriend. Oliver has heard the adults arguing nightly through the floor above him. Heard things breaking on occasion, too.
“You play last night?” Winky says.
“How you know that?”
“Seen you leaving. Late.”
“Maybe I was going to see a movie, or out on a date.”
“You wasn’t seeing no movie, and you’re too ugly to date.”
“True.”
“Sound good?”
“’Course it sounded good, boy; I practiced.”
“Heard that. When you gonna teach me? Teach me how to play like you, Licorice.”
“Shit, boy, I’m tired. I ain’t got the patience to teach no kid how to tame that monster.”
“You going to eat?”
“Might. Might just walk. You know how to do that, or you need an old man to teach you?”
“Shut up, I can walk.”
“Come on, Winky.”
The two walk south in silence toward the park along streets lined with trees bare in the season. People aren’t headed out to work yet, only a few dedicated runners in skintight Lycra like colorful superhero costumes jog past them on their way to the park. None of the runners look their way; not even an old black man and waifish boy walking together can get New Yorkers to turn their heads. Oliver moves with his rolling step like a ship at sea—not a lost ship, but one with a crew so tired it doesn’t seem to care which way the wind blows it. Winky runs ahead, kicking a chunk of concrete that has come loose from the sidewalk. Once he gets too far ahead, though, he stops and waits on Oliver, toeing the rubble with the front of his worn Adidas sneaker. They stall at the light traffic before crossing streets, and Oliver comments on what shops and restaurants aren’t around anymore.
“Yeah, you’ve told me. Hurry up, Licoricehead. Why’re you so slow?”
“Cold gets into my hip, makes it hurt. Slows me down.”
“What happened to it?”
Oliver hasn’t talked about the accident as a boy in years. In fact, when he thinks back, Francesca may have been the last person he told, other than his doctor who only talks about degenerative discs and all those years on buses with no padded seats and no shock absorption, of spending so many years on hard and unforgiving piano benches, the toll it takes on muscle and bone to work the foot pedals for hours on end. Oliver just tells people it’s from too much fucking. “Makes my hips so damn tired,” he says, and cackles in the way that is an old man’s right.
Now he turns to Winky. “I was a little boy, ’bout half your age, down in Winona, Mississippi. You heard of Winona?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s there. Or was. Anyway, it was a summer day and me and my brothers and cousins was out playin in the dirt in front of my mama and daddy’s restaurant when a mule broke away from its master and
hauled ass down the road, ran up on us quick as wind, boy, and damn near took my leg with it. Rolled right up on me, broke my hip and my thick bone above the knee.”
Winky looks up in horror at the story, unable to imagine such pain, unwilling to imagine his friend hurting. “They take you to a hospital? My mom works in a hospital.”
“No, there weren’t no hospital, son. It was a full day later before a doctor from the next county showed up. My leg grew blacker and bluer; I got me a fever, and my mama was fit to be tied. I believe my daddy would’ve killed that doctor if my uncles hadn’t held him back. That fool come up explainin himself from the yard to my family lined up three deep on the porch that he’d been tendin to the birth of the mayor’s first grandchild. You believe that? Shit, lucky I can walk good as I do.”
“You don’t walk so good, Licorice.”
“Yeah, well, that old white son of a bitch almost never walked from that yard the way he took off his straw boater and wiped his brow like he was waitin to be thanked for the work he done between that white woman’s legs all the day before. If he hadn’t been the only one could fix me, my daddy sure woulda killed that man.
“Anyway, spent half a damn year growin into a plaster cast he set in about ten minutes, and it never did heal up right. Left leg’s been an inch shorter all my life since then.”
“Can they fix it now? We’ve got hospitals here.”
Five Night Stand: A Novel Page 4
