He’d spoken to her on the phone the night before, when he’d returned to his hotel from the club. Drinks with Oliver had gone late, later than he’d expected, but he wanted to check in with her, to get points for the call whether she answered or not. If she hadn’t, he thought, the subsequent points would be worth more when he pouts about missing her. But she had answered and they’d talked of mundane daily events—he told her about his flight and she of the hormones making her feel cramped, as though she were having her period. He didn’t tell her specifically what he and Oliver had talked about, only that he’d spent time with him after the show and he’d talked of the past.
As Oscar talks now, Frank makes mental notes of highlights to feed to Karen.
Mr. Fairbanks was as light skinned as his wife, and though the two didn’t have any children of their own, Oliver was sure that if they had, their offspring would have been as white as the passengers on the River Star Cruise Lines. It was this paleness of skin, Oliver would learn, that allowed Fairbanks his exalted position on the line, the home in the District, and the couple their place among New Orleans high society.
“The Fairbankses, they had a neighbor, a widow several times over, name of Madame Margeurite Sherman Ragghianti Fontaine, and she had a girl named Lucille worked for her. Lucille used to hand me corn bread over the fence from porch to porch. That corn bread was better than my own mama’s, though I’d never say so in public and you better not put that in any newspaper, neither. Anyway, Fairbanks, he’d take me into neighborhoods I never even dreamed of, whole blocks full of colored folks doin as they please—shootin dice, drinkin, howlin at each other. And in one of them neighborhoods there was a club—hell, there was a club on every goddamn corner, some barely more than a Chinatown bodega in size—but only one of ’em had Marcus Longstreet on piano. Marcus was the husband of Lucille with the corn bread.”
“Marcus Longstreet?” Frank repeats, making sure to spell the name correctly on his notepad. “I’ve never heard of him.”
The waitress comes around to refill coffees and Oliver winks at her, taking a moment to smile and see that she notices him.
“That’s because you learned what you know from books and the television,” he continues once the waitress has laughed and touched him on the shoulder. “Now, I don’t mean no disrespect because that’s all Marcus Longstreet ever got. Ain’t nobody heard of Pops Longstreet, but he was the best New Orleans had. Shit, he’d a been the best New York had, better than Basie, better than Tyner, me, Gil. . . .”
“Better than Duke?”
“Watch your mouth, boy. Don’t you blaspheme in here.” Oliver takes a long pull from his still-steaming coffee. Frank wonders how it doesn’t burn the skin off his tongue, it’s so hot. “Marcus was like nothin I’d ever heard or seen at that point, a real showman talkin and laughin with everybody in the room. Not like the man at Sheffield’s I first saw; he played the piano. Marcus, though, he played the room. He sat stick-straight, sippin on liquor and maybe havin a better time than anybody else. There was a real joy in him and it came out in his music. And there I was, all of sixteen and sittin in a cramped little saloon with Mr. Fairbanks, who, I think, had to get out from under Madame’s hand and knew I probably did, too. And I did. Lord, I did, and I thank him for that escape to this day. Didn’t know how much I needed it until we walked into that club, neither, and that music hit me in the face like a slap. We was in New Orleans for a couple weeks while the boat resupplied, cleaned up, and signed on new passengers. That was one long stretch, though most of it, as much as I could get away with anyway, was spent at Marcus Longstreet’s piano.”
This isn’t entirely true. Oliver spent much of that time in the Fairbankses’ parlor laboring over textbooks and Madame Fairbanks’s favorite book, the Holy Bible. She’d made a promise to Oliver’s mother, she’d told Mr. Fairbanks, “and I can’t let his lessons get away from him.”
It was on those afternoons in their home, so humid and with windows open, ceiling fans barely moving the heat around, that Oliver would slip away from his books and out onto that grand and shaded porch that felt to him like a stage to the world. There, he’d take a square of corn bread wrapped in wax paper from Lucille. He’d eat that bread while Madame took her daily bath upstairs or met with her garden club in the backyard under the shade of a wisteria trellis. He would fold the paper neatly when finished and tuck it away in one of those books. He often wondered if Madame ever came across all that wax paper.
Madame disapproved of his trips to the bars with her husband, but Fairbanks insisted it was as much a part of his education as mathematics or Deuteronomy. And it was, Oliver knew. Longstreet’s piano was more instructional than any dusty book off any library’s shelf. His most important lesson of those weeks in New Orleans, though, began one afternoon when Oliver sneaked to the front porch, his mouth already watering for Lucille’s corn bread, and was handed that oily package, not by Lucille herself but by her eighteen-year-old sister, Leona.
“She was somethin, Leona. Not so much to look at, I guess, thinkin back on it. She had dark eyes that bugged out some, and rough skin with a wide nose. But when her full lips parted to smile and she showed off her teeth, just as white as piano keys and crooked as garden path stones, son, I knew I was sunk. Thick trunk, too, just like that old oak tree out front Fontaine’s house.” Oliver laughs at his own words and memory. “And then she leaned out to hand me the bread and I caught sight of some flesh hangin from her apron top—she helped her sister with the wash every Thursday—and I thought I was gettin a free glimpse of heaven. I was, too, boy. Our hands touched when she passed off the bread and it was electric. She smiled again and went back inside. She smiled like she knew exactly what she’d done to my sixteen-year-old self. Christ, all I wanted to do then was go back inside and play that piano.”
“What’d she do to your sixteen-year-old self, Licorice?”
“Shut up, boy; eat them home fries.”
Frank looks across the table at this duo—an elderly, broke, overweight living jazz legend with diabetes and the skinniest kid Frank has ever seen. Is this boy part of the story? he wonders.
The very next night was the next time Oliver saw Leona, and the first time he spoke to her. It was at the bar with her brother-in-law’s piano filling the room, mixing with cigarette and cigar smoke, and the laughter and call of men to women and back again. She was dancing, her body moving like pine trees against a wind. She held a highball of whiskey in one hand, its coppery color catching the low light, and a cigarette between her plum-colored lips. He watched her slide over to Marcus and expected him to tell her to go home, maybe stop the music altogether to tell her she’s too young for this music, for the liquor and dancing like that. But she backed up close to him, the wide hips of a young girl already a woman swaying this way and that, and Marcus leaned into her and grinned. His smile was all teeth and squinting, and made Oliver feel happy from across the room. The music didn’t stop, never did, and instead seemed to be played just for Leona. The crowd moved in around the piano, its player, and his wife’s little sister until Oliver lost sight of it all so that he had only the calls of the musicians and the heat of the room to orient himself in the darkness and smoke.
And then she was sitting beside him. “What you drinkin, sugar?” Her voice carried an age beyond her years. Her body, with its scent of sweat and smoke, smelled like experience itself.
“Root beer.”
“Root beer? Ha!” She threw her head back the way Marcus did when he played and let out a bark of a laugh. “Drink this.” She slid her highball over to him.
He looked around and didn’t see Fairbanks anywhere. Oliver picked up the glass and sniffed. The amber liquid smelled metallic, as though it had been mined from the earth just to be trapped in a bottle. He sipped and swallowed, and the pinpricks burned down his jawline and throat but were warm and comfortable in his belly. He coughed, only once, and wondered if this had the
same taste and effect as his grandma Hillbillie’s home brew.
“Where you from?”
“Winona.”
“Winona. And in what part of the world would I find Winona?”
“Up in Mississippi.”
“Mississippi? Y’all still slaves up there?”
Oliver thought of Sheffield and the hungry men standing around his mama’s back door for a piece of fatback and a broken-off hunk of bread. “Mostly.”
“Well, you in N’awlins now and free to be. Free to be . . . what they call you, sugar?”
“Oliver. Oliver Pleasant.”
“Pleasant. Well it’s right there in your name, ain’t it? I’m Leona. What you do, Oliver Pleasant, besides eat my sister’s corn bread and drink my whiskey? What you doin in my city?”
“Play piano on the River Star Cruise Lines with Mr. Fairbanks. We layin out, gettin back on board next week to see Memphis.” Oliver sat up straighter, puffed his chest out the way his grandson would almost seventy years later, and he felt for the first time like a man seeing the world and making his own way.
“Piano, huh?” Leona got a gleam in her eye then, a near smile on her face that showed off half her crooked teeth. “Drink that up, baby, and come with me.”
Oliver finished what was in the glass in one gulp, feeling the same pinpricks and burn, before he was being pulled across the dance floor and in and out of gyrating, sweating couples like Oliver knew from his late nights at his parents’ secret dances. Leona pulled and wouldn’t let go, didn’t let go of his wrist even when she stopped him beside Marcus’s bench.
“Cousin Marcus, this here is Master Oliver Pleasant from Winona, Mississippi—son of freed slaves and piano player on the River Star Cruise Lines,” Leona said over the din of the crowd when Marcus had come to the end of his tune. “Why don’t you let us see if he any good on dry land?”
Marcus stood. He was much taller than Oliver had expected. He was dressed impeccably in a steel-gray suit and bowed deeply to Oliver, taking a handkerchief from his breast pocket and making a show of dusting the bench before gesturing for Oliver to sit.
Oliver began playing with a fever after too many days of not playing at all and studying books in the shadow of the Fairbankses’ piano. It had become too much for him; the wanting was a physical pain of the sort he’d felt lately lying in bed and wondering what the touch of a woman might be like, feeling his childhood urges strain against his bedclothes to reach into manhood. For the past twenty-four hours that need had found a face: Leona Thibodeaux. He played that piano for her as though she were the only person in the room. Feeling the keys at his fingertips and pedals beneath his toes was as satisfying a feeling as anything he could imagine, and he gave himself over to it, mind, body, and spirit. Oliver jumped when the horns came in to accompany him, the close report of the trumpet blast bringing him off the bench and eliciting laughs from Leona, Marcus, and Fairbanks, whom Oliver noticed just to the side of the bandstand, a whiskey in one hand and a woman in the other.
The crowd was moving again, all sway and black, jumping and hollering like the crowd he knew from Winona rather than the staid white faces of the riverboat. The cruise guests had cocktails on the upper deck every night before supper, and Oliver would play a lively number while watching the riverbanks roll by, catch glimpses of small towns in the fading light and boys out fishing for catfish. Dinner was less laid back, the diners retiring indoors to white tablecloths and black men serving with white towels draped over their forearms. Oliver’s music then became background, fading into guests’ semiconsciousness like the cocktails into their blood and passing fishing skiffs into the paddle wheel’s long, purple wake.
This crowd, though, was alive and Oliver fed off it until he thought he’d sucked that teat dry. He finished in a flourish, his confidence from the shoutbacks and those sips of whiskey growing into its own sort of manhood right there in his belly. He wanted to impress Marcus and Fairbanks, of course, but mostly he wanted to impress Leona. Oliver had found the reason that man takes up an instrument, a paintbrush, a pen, or a hammer and nail to create something out of nothing: sex.
He stood, sweating and breathing hard as though he’d just run a marathon, to the cheers of all around him. Even Marcus wore a knowing grin. Feeding off the crowd, Oliver felt invincible, unstoppable, his own music ringing in his ears. And then Marcus sat back down and launched into the very same tune—one of Jelly Roll’s—that Oliver had just finished. Marcus played it as though Jelly himself were on that bench, and when his horns came in there was no flinch, just a racing ahead, a sound so full that it lifted the entire room up over Oliver’s head and spun it around. In fact, he found himself looking up at the rafters and blue smoke hanging around there; he was dizzy from the experience. He heard the laughter, he the butt of the joke. And then he laughed along with them at a lesson learned. There would be many, he knew, and they would be carried out publicly as this one had been. Lesson number one from Marcus Longstreet: You ain’t shit, boy. Oliver laughed despite himself.
Oliver looked through the dancing, swinging masses and found Fairbanks’s eyes, saw the twinkle in them as his boss raised his whiskey glass in commiseration.
Then he felt Leona’s hand on his lower back, felt it slip around and into his pocket as she pressed in behind him. He felt the closeness of the crowd, her whiskey breath on his neck. He felt her hand in his pants pocket, groping, searching, and promising a lesson he’d been hurting for. It was a lesson he’d carry with him from New Orleans and into adulthood.
For the next few nights, Oliver and Leona managed to meet up—sometimes upstairs from the club where Marcus played in rooms meant for storage, poker, and whores, sometimes in the dark recesses of public places that make up a labyrinthine city like New Orleans. Once, right alongside St. Patrick’s Church. It was a passion that grew from that first night when Leona pulled him outside, just as she’d pulled him across the dance floor to the piano. Right out into the back alley they went, where the paving stones glistened with a recent rain and the light shot silver streaks from building to building. She pushed him back against the damp wall and fell to her knees. Oliver stood stock-still, trembling, so much more nervous than he’d been to play the piano in front of a crowd. His nostrils filled with the aroma of New Orleans after hours, its refuse and spice. He looked up and could make out the few stars in a hint of sky just past the yellow back-door light and wires strung overhead. He felt her crooked teeth on him, and what he felt then, and what he would recall for days after climbing back on to that big boat to paddle upriver, was music itself. It was a feeling he swore to himself he’d never let go.
During the days, Leona went to work with Lucille, and while Madame Fontaine was at her bridge club or her garden club, Leona would ask Madame Fairbanks if that strapping boy who was staying with her might come next door to help retrieve a pot and pan from way up high. They would fall into a bed unused for decades while Lucille, unknowing, was across the house scrubbing or hanging laundry to dry out back. With the afternoon light pushing through gauzy window coverings, they were fast and passionate, and when it was over, Leona helped him tuck everything back in place, arranging his shirt and tie as though he’d done little more than reach down a pot and pan.
“That girl taught me music,” Oliver says, “but it wasn’t so much her touch and taste, though that’s a damn big part of it. I learned what it’s all about when I left that city the first time, because she was still there. She was on that dock, not makin herself known, but just a face in a sea of faces. It brought out a whole new emotion in me, one of loss, and all good music, true music, has some loss in it. Love, to be sure, and sex, whole lot a sex give it tempo and drive, but everybody knows loss and so that’s what they connect with. It was somethin in my chest I didn’t feel even when I left my people in Winona. It was new, like Marcus’s music sounded new, like the taste of whiskey was new. And you know somethin? It was just as excit
in to me as all that other shit.”
“Ever see her again?” Frank says.
“Naw. Looked, but them boats was slow goin and we went way up north with all the stops along the way. Made it up to Chicago then, my first time. By the time we made it back that far south, I was a year older and then some. And I’d had plenty more of some on that trip.” Oliver laughs and looks over at Winky, who’s working to cut his link sausage with a butter knife. “Boy, what I tell you? Pick it up.
“Anyway, that next trip to New Orleans I didn’t stay in the Fairbanks House, but with a trombone player name of Hamlet Giraud. . . .”
“He was in your quintet on the Verve recordings.”
“That’s right, young man, that’s right. We played all over together, too—New Orleans, Cali, Chicago, Europe, right here. I met him on that boat, headed down to New Orleans ’cause he had a place in Tremé, and I crashed there. Looked around for Miss Leona but didn’t see her. Marcus Longstreet still there soundin good as hell, though. He said she went over to Tallahassee see about a boy over there and he ain’t seen her since. I missed that old girl, but I found plenty new.”
Frank scratches in his notebook. He’s becoming an even bigger fan of jazz and had been up all night reading what he could find on the subject, and on Oliver in particular. He plans to go back to the bookstore in Greenwich Village this afternoon to browse the music section for more names and facts. More than anything, though, he loves a good story and an interesting character, and his experience and novelist heart tell him when he finds them.
“You can’t use none a this, can you?” Oliver says, finishing his coffee.
“May have to leave out the bit about the back alley, Oliver.”
“Hmm. Damn shame.”
He wishes he could use the story, that it was appropriate for a newspaper. He feels he could fill a dozen more notebooks with the history of Oliver Pleasant. He wants to know about Oliver’s arrival in New York, his other female and musical conquests, whether the mysterious story behind what happened to Hamlet Giraud is true, and who the hell this kid sitting with Oliver is.
Five Night Stand: A Novel Page 12
