Five Night Stand: A Novel

by Richard J. Alley

“Too damn expensive. I ain’t got as much money as you. Musicians, we ain’t in it for the money, son. No sir.”

  A surgery might take some of the pressure off those discs, his doctor had said, but a surgery costs money and that’s something that’s been fading faster than Oliver’s memory these days. A musician’s income was always hit and miss, feast and famine, so that any saving was almost unheard of. There are those he’s known to put away cash in a mattress or wall, then maybe fall asleep with a cigarette and all that good money goes up in flame. A musician doesn’t get paid unless he plays, and Oliver’s been gone a good long time. Friends have helped out here and there but they’ve been disappearing as quick as his memory, too, and quicker than his money. His wife’s schoolteacher pension (God rest her soul) barely pays for food and get-around. A surgery just to help his comfort is out of the question. So Oliver tries to forget about it, lies down a lot, and self-medicates with a little booze now and again.

  “These walks help me,” he says, though Winky has run up ahead. “Yep,” he continues to no one, “they help me just fine.”

  They don’t go deep into the park but sit on a bench just inside the entrance where they can watch people pass and listen to the city come awake.

  “Folks fightin?”

  “He ain’t my folk.”

  “Where you from, Winky? You ain’t never said.”

  “You ain’t never asked.”

  “I’m askin now.” Oliver has seen this boy almost daily, yet their conversations never go much past the playful barbs they throw at each other. Oliver has found himself grateful for the familiar face in the absence of his own children, or any family at all. Even if it’s just to say hello, he likes being able to have someone there to hear it.

  “Here,” Winky says.

  “But you’re dark. Not like me, ’course, but darker than most. Mexico?”

  “My daddy was from Chile. Mom’s from Detroit.”

  “What brought ’em here?”

  Winky just shrugs, bored already with the conversation the way boys get bored with anything that stands still for too long. He squints up at the trees and movement catches his eye. He goes to explore.

  Everything looks new to Oliver in the morning, like it’s not just the people waking up but the whole damn world—plants, buildings, taxicabs with their bleating horns. He likes it. In his younger days, this was the hour that his world would go to bed. He’d play a club all night, going way past what the club owner had wanted or expected if the music felt right. After the gig, he and his boys, maybe some of the audience, too, would sit around drinking, talking shit, and critiquing the music. They wouldn’t stop there, though, but they’d stumble out of the place, pushed by the owner who just wanted to go home to his wife, and stagger a few blocks to a friend’s flat or a shut-down club whose owner had no wife, no life of his own other than his bar and the liquor there. They’d play some more, drink some more, smoke some more. Those days were always about more, a time when Oliver felt he couldn’t get enough music, booze, sex, and friends. They’d pull chairs out in the middle of the floor, sit in the round, and blow their horns, trying to best each other. “Cutting,” they called it, while off to the side Oliver gave them the tune on the club’s piano. He’d give up his seat if Count or Tatum came by; he was always happy to listen to someone else play and to learn what he might take for himself.

  The energy in that room on those nights was something else. It was almost otherworldly, like nights as a boy watching what happened beyond the dusty windows of his parents’ lunch counter. They weren’t the same tunes played for their audiences, but something new. It was the beginnings of bebop, when new theories and voices were being expressed. It was music they weren’t sure the audiences would understand because they weren’t sure they understood it themselves, not yet. But they also weren’t sure if they cared what the public might think. Maybe this was a language just for musicians, fueled by booze and dope and a fervor to play. Maybe they’d keep it to themselves, play it only for each other and only behind closed and locked doors, the guard of the late-night hour keeping watch over them all.

  But things get around. Musicians talk same as anybody, maybe more. They want to show off—it is show business, after all. Midway through a set of standards some night, the saxophonist takes a solo and the crowd is stunned by what it hears; the frenetic wailing sounds like the night itself. It puts a sound track to the age and gives the kids and suburbanites in the audience a taste of the heroin that courses through that horn player’s veins. It’s a hint of the danger there.

  Surprisingly, the audience likes it. They love it, and they can’t get enough of it. Like a fever, it permeates the clubs, the street, the whole top half of the island. The jazz writer Jackson LeDuc hears about it and then hears it himself one late night at Minton’s, and he pounds away on his typewriter the way Oliver does on his keys. He tells other places—Chicago, Kansas City, Memphis, New Orleans—about what he hears and from there it’s an epidemic, a plague from the piano as contagious as any verve and virus.

  Those were good nights, late nights. Afterward, after the playing and cutting and clowning, Oliver and his friend Hamlet would go down to a diner in Midtown. Sometimes others would join them, but sometimes not. Most of those cats were eager by then to get home to wives or girlfriends or take one of the women who hung around those clubs home for a taste, where they could gaze at the curves and bare skin in the new light of morning coming through the windows. They imagined then that what they were seeing before them, atop them, was the very music they’d spent the past hours playing.

  “You hungry?” Oliver had disappeared into his own world and nearly forgotten the boy sitting next to him, shivering in the cold. The world is awake now. “Let’s eat.”

  The diner is bright, as though the hours of the day sped up and the colors of morning have become all white and chrome in a noon sun. Oliver likes this diner and has breakfast here most mornings after his walk to the park. It reminds him of the one he and Hamlet visited so long ago to sit and talk and drink coffee, eating mounds of bacon and putting their world to bed. He looks across the table at the skinny boy there and misses his old friend the trombonist.

  “You want to call your mama? Tell her where you at? There’s a telephone over there.”

  “Nah.”

  “Mornin, Oliver. Who’s this, your son?” The waitress—“Lucy,” as her name tag reads—is tall, all legs, with mussed brown hair tied up in a bright red scarf and a smile almost as bright. It’s the welcoming smile that makes her customers overlook her tired eyes.

  “Mornin, sugar. Naw, hell no this ain’t my son. This Winky—he my neighbor.”

  “Name’s not Winky,” the boy mutters.

  “Tell the lady hello, son.”

  “Hello.”

  “And what can I get you gentlemen this morning?”

  “I’ll have my usual. Get Winky here some flapjacks—short stack—home fries, and sausage links. Juice?”

  The boy nods.

  “And some OJ, honey. Coffee for me.”

  “Doctor said anything to you about your usual, Oliver?”

  “I ain’t asked him about it.”

  “Your call, I’m not your mama.”

  “Ain’t my doctor, neither, far as I can see. He ain’t near as pretty.”

  Lucy walks off shaking her head, the red scarf just touching the top of her shoulder.

  “You think she’s pretty?” Winky says, swiveling around in the booth to watch her go.

  “Haven’t met a lady yet that ain’t.”

  Winky watches Lucy, who has stopped to talk to a customer at the long white counter, and nods to himself.

  “Why you want to learn the piano?”

  Winky shrugs. “I like the way it sounds from your apartment. Sounds better than the other noise.”

  Oliver nods. Seems like everybody has a re
ason for what they do, whether it’s to cook a meal, write a book, fuck, or take up an instrument. He thinks back, trying to recall what it was that made him first sit down at the piano.

  He thinks of Francesca and the kids, and the living he made, of course, but it goes back deeper than that. It flows backward in time down the Mississippi all the way to New Orleans and the soul of that city, then back up the Delta to Mississippi and the man dressed in brown who played his piano so that black people could feel free. That’s it. When he thinks back to the start, to the first time his fingers touched the keys and the music touched his ears, there’s the smell of his mama’s cooking in his nose, the taste of cheap whiskey stolen by the sip on his lips. He played it first for his folks and siblings to see if they liked it any. They did. He played it best he could to make it sound like that man in the bowler hat with the two-cent cigar did. I still ain’t sure I do, he thinks. But he’s sure that this has been his aim for all these many years, to make it sound like that man’s playing and to make people feel like the people felt who listened to him: free.

  Oliver is grateful for the talent. It rescued him from a hard life of plowing fields or digging ditches in the relentless Mississippi sun and sent him on a journey up the river, over state lines, and across oceans. With that piano he began a life that has carried him to this diner, where he sits across from a wild-haired boy who eats his sausage with a fork.

  “Pick that up, boy, and eat it with your fingers.”

  “Gets me greasy.”

  “That’s for after,” Oliver says, and sucks the ends of his own thick fingers.

  Frank walks through the bookstore to kill time. He’s been to New York only once before; he and Karen had come here a few years after they were first married. They were both wide-eyed to life and to the city back then, and he wonders if it will be a different experience alone this time.

  He’s an unapologetic tourist enamored by the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building. He’ll be sure to see the Guggenheim and maybe a room or two at the Met. He’ll spend a quiet moment at Ground Zero and stroll through Central Park.

  But for now he’s just a man wandering the streets and it’s an overwhelming sense of freedom to be far from home and lost among so many people. He’s found his way from his hotel in Chelsea to Bleecker and walked aimlessly with his chin tucked into his coat against the crowds and brisk winds that cut down the narrow canyons to find his neck like a garrote. He can’t believe how much colder it is here than it was in Memphis when he’d left.

  “Cab’s here,” he’d said back in Memphis before his trip began.

  “This is just so silly, Frank, and so expensive. There’s no way the pay from selling this story can make up for the expense of New York.” Karen was continuing a days-long debate the two had been having.

  He knew that her emotions were genuine, if not her reasoning. She didn’t want him to go, that was clear, but she knew he’d been given a fair severance package and that he knew enough people in the industry to sell the story with a phone call. Her persistent arguing was, in some ways, appreciated; he would be missed—he hadn’t expected that from her.

  “Lots of stories here,” she’d said. “Closer to home. Closer to me.”

  “It isn’t about us, Karen. This is a good story, maybe a great one. It just happens to be in New York.”

  “Happens to be.”

  He had looked past her and out the window with its sagging, leaded glass. The cab was at the curb, exhaust pouring into the cold air. He wondered if his thin coat would be warm enough for where he was going. He wondered if the cab driver got the same sense of emptiness from the house as he had only days earlier.

  “Why don’t you meet me there this weekend?” The suggestion felt forced, an automatic gesture as part of their goodbye, yet as necessary as their kissing goodnight had become or the “love you” at the end of a phone call.

  She didn’t say anything, only sat hugging her mug of coffee with both hands. “Your cab is waiting.”

  After his tourist stroll through the city, he’ll go to the club and meet with Oliver Pleasant. He’s spoken to the club’s owner on the phone and asked if he could come early to speak with him as well. “I’ll be here,” Ben Greenberg had said. “I’m always here. Where else would I be?”

  For now, though, Frank walks with his hands in his pockets through this bookstore crowded to overflowing within its narrow aisles. Paperbacks and vintage magazines are piled in his way, so he has to sidestep them just as he had the people on the sidewalks outside. He’s in fiction, the section where he always finds himself—in any bookstore in any city—with his own unfinished novel back home tugging at him like a phantom umbilical cord. The ember within him that can be so covered and cold on a day like this glows red again as he peruses the names on the shelves. A copy of Jane Austen takes him back again to Memphis, back to the little kitchen where he’d been cooking spaghetti. He’d had every intention of waiting until after dinner, once their bellies were full and a glass of wine or two had been consumed, to tell her about New York. But she’d been first to bring it up.

  “Who’s this?” she’d asked, referring to the music coming from his computer.

  “Oliver Pleasant. It’s the Oliver Pleasant Trio.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of him.” She spoke distractedly while unburdening herself from work, emptying the kitschy, retro lunch box she carried that Frank thought too cute for a woman her age; stowing her briefcase beside the china hutch; going through the day’s mail—all actions that were second nature, tasks performed in the same manner and at the same time every evening. The only scenery change over the years seemed to be in the way the sun fell through the windows, the way the seasons caught them there together.

  He held out a wooden spoon of sauce for her to taste, his hand cupped underneath to catch any drips. So close to each other, he could see that she looked tired, another stressful day marked in lines around her mouth and eyes. Her hair, worn now in a bob, was still more strawberry than gray, yet was slowly giving up that fight. Even so, he found her attractive, the sort of beauty that comes from familiarity and so much of a life shared.

  “He’s from around here, a place called Winona, Mississippi.”

  “Well, I’ve heard of Winona.” She tasted and nodded her approval.

  “He’s one of the last of his generation still alive. He was young, but he played with them all—Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie.” He was calling to her now as she changed out of her work clothes in their bedroom. “Anyway, he’s retiring and moving to Memphis; I heard about it all at Rachel’s today with Hank.”

  There was no reaction from Karen, no acknowledgment that she was hearing anything he’d said. He could hear only the Pleasant Trio and feel the muffled opening and closing of drawers and a closet in the next room through vibrations in the floor.

  “So guess who’s going up to New York for his last shows and to interview him for a story?”

  He hadn’t heard her come back to the kitchen. Padding in on sock feet, she stood behind him in the doorway. “Who?”

  “Oh Jesus, you scared me. I am.”

  She looked at him without speaking. The music came to an end.

  Recalling that night and the look on Karen’s face, he pulls the Austen off the shelf. She’s Karen’s favorite and this edition of Mansfield Park is beautifully appointed and sparingly illustrated with an antique hand. He opens it and brings the crease to his face to breathe in its aroma and age. He’ll buy it for her. She already has the novel, has read it half a dozen times, but she’ll appreciate this edition. He reaches up and takes down Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy for himself. He thinks maybe he’ll have time this week to visit Brooklyn, to walk around and see if he might run into Auster. Like the Empire State Building, Statue of Liberty, and Central Park, perhaps the living icons are also out in the open, leaning agai
nst lampposts just around the corner to be happened upon and photographed.

  But this trip isn’t a vacation; it’s work. He’d explained as much to Karen as he ate spaghetti that night and watched her push her food around the plate and sip wine. He told her he’d sell it to somebody, that not every story in Memphis had to do with crime, infant mortality, and felonious politicians. There was still art and culture, and plenty of editors thought these just as important as the others. “Can’t you sell it first?” she’d asked.

  “Sure, easy, I’ll make some calls tomorrow.” But he hadn’t. Although he was confident in his abilities and skills, both to write a story and to know when a story was a good one, he didn’t want to hear no just in case. He wanted to go. He needed a brief respite from home and Memphis and Karen. Of course he couldn’t tell her that, he would never damage her feelings that way, but the truth was there and he would heed the urge.

  Money is an issue and he thinks about it as he pulls thirty dollars from his pocket to hand to the bespectacled bookseller. He and Karen have both made a decent living—his in sheer number of years spent at the newspaper and hers as a rising financial wealth manager with a long list of clients—but every spare cent seems to have been spoken for over the past two years as doctor bill after doctor bill came in from trying to discover why she wasn’t yet pregnant, and then working to get her pregnant. It has been a tense experience with hopeful phrases in the beginning, angry exchanges later, and, lately, mere silence on the subject. It is always there, though, felt in the quiet nights and the unused upstairs rooms of the house.

  “When are you leaving?” Karen had asked.

  “Early next week.”

  “I start a new round of hormone shots Monday.”

  “How long this time?” The “this time” was like a gunshot in the otherwise silent kitchen, Karen having closed the laptop and shut off the music from the Pleasant Trio. Frank wished immediately that he hadn’t said it, but she pretended not to notice.

  “Two weeks.”

  “You could fly up and meet me. We could spend the weekend in New York.” He didn’t push the idea because he knew she wouldn’t. He wasn’t even sure he really wanted her to.