Five Night Stand: A Novel

by Richard J. Alley

  “That’s fine, real fine. You got to have that foundation and it sound like your daddy did right by you. He still with us?”

  “My daddy? No sir. He died a couple years ago while I was down in New Orleans. That’s where I live now, playing in the Quarter and places.”

  “New Orleans you say?” He seems to perk up at this and she notices his slight gesture to a passing waitress at Agnes’s empty glass. “I spent some time in New Orleans now, yes ma’am. Good times.”

  “Did you live there?”

  “Well, no, not so I had an address or nothin, but I think we all live there, part of all us musicianers. Don’t you think? Ain’t all this”—he moves his thick hand across the table as if to take in the room—“born from New Orleans? Wouldn’t be no Capasso, wouldn’t be no Benji Greenberg, wouldn’t be no Oliver Pleasant or Agnes Cassady without New Orleans. Wouldn’t be no jazz.”

  A waitress sets a fresh scotch in front of Agnes just as Oliver holds his glass up for a toast and the two clink glasses. “To New Orleans,” he says.

  “To jazz,” Agnes offers.

  The two talk of music and lightly of travel and New Orleans. She talks of the past—not hers, but the music’s. She tries to speak knowledgeably about history and make it clear that it comes from so much study, so much curiosity, and her father’s vault-like memory of names and numbers. Oliver had lived through these times and she wants him to know she respects that. Oliver nods and smiles. The girl knows her stuff, he can hear that. Once the scotch has worked itself through her tough exterior and stiff nervousness, loosened her up so her mind moves more like a wave machine than a grandfather clock, she talks almost nonstop. She takes one of his Gitanes from the pack on the table without asking and lights up, laughing and apologizing only when the thick smoke chokes her and she realizes what she’s done. He waves the apology off, always happy to sit in public with a pretty girl.

  Oliver has come to know loneliness like a growth, something he has to deal with every day, always there and up front when he looks in his filmy morning mirror. He’s relished these past few nights with other musicians and his friends who have stopped by to pay their respects—Sonny Rollins stopped in, as did Jimmy Heath, Joe Lovano, Diana Krall, even Tony Bennett and the Marsalis boys—but he misses the touch of a woman. He’s afraid he may forget that warm sensation eventually, just as he’s begun to forget his earliest compositions. Forgotten, even, what he’d had for breakfast or just how bad his morning piss had hurt.

  Sitting and talking with Agnes brings back that warmth like the first sip of whiskey taken in forever. He’s enjoyed the nights in his oversized round booth in the back of the club, plush and comfortable like nothing he knows of in his own home and the world outside Benji’s. He wears his ever-present porkpie atop his head, covering the baldness there. He’s not vain, but has always liked the hats and has a collection he’s taken from friends over the years, stolen them until they came to expect it, hope for it, even. It was like a badge of honor for Oliver Pleasant to be wearing one of your lids onstage or in an album cover photo. He has one from Count Basie, Ornette Coleman, a couple from Oscar Peterson, and even one from Frank Sinatra.

  As people wander to and from the bar, and in and out of the club, they stop to say hello to Oliver and introduce themselves as fans. He accepts their hands politely but does not acknowledge Agnes to them until his band drifts past from backstage. He calls them over one by one to introduce “a fellow player,” a phrase which flushes her face more than the liquor or the French cigarette. Each member leans in too close to her, sits right up next to her with their thighs touching, putting their arms around her to say hello, ask her where she’s from, ask her where she’s sleeping, before Oliver sends them on their way like a mother shooing her kids away from a freshly baked pie.

  When they’ve gone and the room has cleared a bit, he offers her some of his Campari. She sips from his glass, lingering and swirling the fragile aperitif glass in her hand, stopping to watch the whirlpool she’s created. She tells him then about pain, about a dusty hand-me-down piano back in Memphis so infused with the blues of the South that some nights she’d swear she heard it crying in the other room as she tried to sleep. She tells him about the disease that’s consuming her slowly, gripping her nervous system like the law stepping on a criminal’s neck, how unfair it is that it would begin its death march with her left hand and bring with it a pain in her skull, loss of feeling, and tremors. She places the glass back on the table and he covers her hand with his large paw, holds it there to feel the trembling. She, in turn, feels the warmth, not just the physical heat of his hand but the tenderness he feels toward this woman who will never know her potential, a music that will never find its natural height. A music unknown is one of the most melancholy things Oliver has ever considered.

  He doesn’t know if she can play or not, doesn’t care. Oliver hasn’t heard anyone talk about jazz and the need—the ache and hunger—to play in a long, long time. Most of the musicians he’s played with toward the end of his career were more interested in when the paycheck would arrive and for how much, when the dope would arrive and how much, and the same for the women. But this girl feels pain and, he believes, she can play through that pain.

  Not knowing just what to say and hesitant to drink from his own glass she’s filled with such sorrow, he tells her some stories of the old days and their characters. He tells her how the young cats, the idealists, the innovators used to meet at Gil Evans’s place on Fifty-Seventh not far from the Capasso where they sit now. “Everybody would be there,” he says, “Gil, Max Roach, George Russell, Lee Konitz, even Bird would stop by, usually just to impress us.

  “Gil’s flat was in this old building right behind a Chinese laundry and all the pipes from that building ran through his little place that wasn’t more than a damn closet with a sink, toilet, piano, and bed. We’d bring in crates and boxes and whatever we could find to sit on. Bottles and stories got passed around. New ideas, Russell’s ‘Lydian Concept’—that shit was far out then but most a them cats dug it . . . or said they did.”

  He gets her to laugh eventually with stories of the Chinese laundry owner’s wife, who would cook them something to eat, even at four in the morning when they’d all finished their sets and gathered to talk and blow and smoke the dope that the laundry owner supplied. “She didn’t understand a word of English, especially the shit we talked because that wasn’t exactly the Queen’s English. We’d ask her to blow, nudge each other, cacklin like a hutch full of goddamn hens until Bird or somebody offered their horn and she blew on it so it made a noise like a dyin cat. Then we’d all laugh and tell whoever’s horn it was they could learn some shit from Chen or whatever the fuck her name was.”

  Agnes eats these stories up and washes them down with her scotch, the earthy taste quickly washing the sweet Campari from her tongue. She wants another cigarette and asks this time; Oliver obliges.

  “How long ago did she pass, Ollie? Your wife?”

  “Twenty years.”

  “You said up there that you wish she was here, said you wish they all was. Who’s ‘they’?”

  Oliver takes another cigarette for himself and takes his time lighting it, blowing the smoke, and tasting.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s none of my business. I just heard you say it.”

  “Guess I was talking more to the piano than anybody.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “My kids. I got two boys—twins—and a girl. Don’t see them too much.”

  “They live far?”

  “Girl, Charlene, she in Brooklyn. Boys all over, musicianers, you know. Hell, you probably seen them in New Orleans.”

  “I would’ve gone to see a Pleasant. Don’t recall them there.”

  “Use their mama’s birth name: Zanone. Wanted to make it on their own. I respect that.”

  “Pianists?”

  “Trombon
e. Tenor sax. They good, both of ’em. Play here sometimes when they come through, thought I might see them one of these nights. Hopin to see all of them. Damndest thing, though, my grandson stopped in last night. Tells me he’s a musician and wants me to come see him and his boys play.”

  “Jazz?”

  “Please. Hip-hop. You believe that shit?”

  “I don’t.” She thinks. “But then, I don’t get out much.”

  Oliver laughs and drains his glass. “You ever been to Paris, Miss Cassady?” he asks.

  “Ain’t been nowhere but Tipton County and Orleans Parish. Except here. What county is this?”

  “Hell if I know.”

  “What’s Paris like, Ollie?” She lays her head down on her arm, un-self-consciously and unaware now of her surroundings.

  “Paris like a woman. Well, it’s like bein in love with a woman. You ever been in love, Miss Cassady?”

  She shrugs as best she can in her position. “Most days. Nights, anyway. Tell me about her, tell me about Paris.”

  “It was tamed by then, late forties, fifties and such. Men came before us, Bechet, Armstrong, and they tamed her, though it cost them all somethin. By the time we lay down with her, she was eager, swallowed us up, boy. We could play all damn night, any night, and she’d be clawin for us by lunch.”

  “You live there?”

  “Off and on. Kept a place there, anyway. Kept a woman there.”

  “Francesca?”

  “Hmm? No, no, Francesca was here. I kept a little fifth-floor flat and it’s where I stayed when I was in town. It was quiet and gave me and the other cats a solitude we needed. Musicianers seek spotlight and recognition onstage, but when it comes time to wind down, we want it quiet and out of the way. Maybe not so quiet, now that I think on it; it was a rare thing if any of us went to bed alone. This little apartment was in the center of the Latin Quarter, and the inside and out was wrought iron and plaster with good windows that caught the breeze from the Seine. It was high enough up off the street to filter out that early mornin sidewalk noise below, too. I sure miss that flat some days.

  “I had this old girl name of Marie there and she’d wait for me to come back overseas like a dog waiting on a bone. That old girl was hungry. She wanted me to move there, which I wouldn’t; I couldn’t with so much of my life, Francesca and the kids, bein here. But if I was there for two weeks, four, two months, she didn’t care, she wanted us to live like husband and wife. She got it, too.”

  Despite the family he had back in New York, Oliver looked forward to those times in Paris as well. Marie was beautiful and worldly, and when Oliver was away in America, she worked in Italy and Spain as a photographer for the fashion industry. Even in his infidelity, Oliver was monogamous—a taste of the same fruit, just from a different orchard. As much as Marie enjoyed her time with Oliver, the late nights at Paris’s jazz clubs and cafés; drinks with other musicians, artists, and writers; early morning walks along the river to their little apartment where they would make love as the pinkish light of day was just beginning to break over the horizon—as much as she enjoyed the life, Marie was a jealous woman.

  “When me and Marie weren’t around, them other cats might stay there. There was this other little girl over there, Giselle,” he says, pouring a sip more of Campari into his glass. “Giselle looked after the flat and whatever musicianer might be there at any given time, makin sure they had food and drink, and that the place stayed clean. Her daddy owned the building and ran a patisserie on the ground floor. Giselle was legendary for fightin off American boys who ended the night alone, or those that didn’t but wanted a little extra taste anyway. ‘Juste un peu plus d’amour, mademoiselle?’”

  Marie could cope with Francesca, the American wife, the public face of Oliver at home; that was the way it had to be. The other girl, however, the Parisienne, was a different matter. There was only room for one and Marie resented this intrusion. There were nights Oliver was in Paris and Marie had to be away, mostly for work or to help look after her ill mother. She fretted these nights the way Francesca must have back in the small Harlem apartment she and Oliver had at the time. Marie clung to wild fantasies of Giselle entering the apartment and of her slipping into bed with Oliver, who would still be wound up from the night’s show and all alone. The thoughts were enough to send Marie into a blind rage. To make her presence known, on mornings she was there, when Giselle would let herself in and spread food on the small table beneath the window and boil water for coffee, strong and thick like Americans take, Marie would rise and parade nude around the apartment. She would flaunt her beautiful body, her long legs and full breasts, inspecting the fruit Giselle had brought, “the pears are not so ripe”; stand full in front of the balcony doors and comment on the weather, “it will rain today”; and leave the door to the small water closet ajar as she washed the previous night away with a rough washcloth.

  “Did you love her? Marie?”

  “I did. I think I loved all those women at one time or another. They gave me somethin to play for, somethin to go on workin for. I knew I wouldn’t have them all, not for long, except Francesca. Almost lost her a time or two, but she stayed with me. She’s my muse.”

  “What happened with Marie?”

  Oliver stares again at the smoke from his cigarette, curlicues reaching for the light. He picks up the cigarette and sets it back down as though the weight of it is too much. Settles, instead, on another taste of liquor.

  “Oliver?”

  “Well, that’s another story, sugar. Another story for another time. Another time from another life.

  “Tell me what you know about love, Agnes Cassady.”

  Agnes has to think about this. She thinks about it every time it comes up, which is more than you’d suppose down there in the Quarter, though it’s usually in the form of “Are you married?” “Got a boyfriend?” “Want one?” She smokes the French cigarette, pulling it in deep without concern—it’s one of the perks of knowing life’s limit ahead of time. She blows the smoke out in a sharp stream, splitting Oliver’s tired cloud in half. “I loved every one of them,” she finally says.

  Oliver laughs, a deep growl of a laugh. “How many?”

  Agnes shrugs. “Not enough, not for a lifetime.”

  “How old are you? Talkin about a lifetime. What you know about a lifetime?”

  “Twenty-two. But I’ll be dead by the time I’m twenty-five.”

  The words strike Oliver like a slap across the face; he doesn’t speak of death if he can help it. It’s a fear he carries around with him in his breast pocket. At eighty-five, Oliver lives in the same neighborhood as death, can see it sometimes out of his window, lurking across the street, hears its feet shuffling up and down the sidewalk outside his door. It sits on his stoop and waits. That knowing, deep in the soul, that there’s something swirling about in a room or out in the city that can take you any time it wants makes a man sober. Giving voice to it, the way that Agnes just did, is just inviting it to sit down with you, begs it to reach across the table and into your breast pocket to take what it wants.

  “Dead?” he says, whispering without even realizing. He pulls his porkpie down low over his brow. “What you talkin ’bout, dead? You young, girl, the thick of your life.”

  She mashes her cigarette into the crystal ashtray. “It’s eating me up, Oliver, killing me from the inside out. Look at it!” Agnes thrusts her hand up in front of his face and they both watch it tremble, the shadows changing and dancing between her fingers and on her palm. “There are times I can’t control it at all, times I can’t feel the fingers. And the pain that comes with it, from my neck to my shoulder and down that arm, back up to my brain. It’s blinding, it’s torture. There are times I just want the lights to go out. Goddammit, I just want it to stop. And I used to be able to stop it—that’s what scares me the most, because I can’t anymore. Time was I could sit down at the piano and
play and the shaking would stop and the pain would stop and the wishing for death would stop.”

  Oliver is nodding his head, but still staring at the hand, at the thing in front of him he thinks might just reach into his breast pocket. “I know it, darlin. I know what it’s like for the music to take some pain away. I’ve lived a long time, lived through pain and hurt, and I know what it is to have it go, how good it feels to have them scales take over the empty place inside, fill up what the pain left behind.”

  “That’s right. That’s right, it fills you up so nothing else can get in there, not pain anyway. You known pain, Ollie?”

  “I know pain.”

  “You know what it feels like to want to die?”

  “I know, baby. I know. But you ain’t got to. What the doctors say? What they call it? Got to be medicine for it. Shit, there’s medicine for everything now, head medicine, arthritis medicine, dick medicine, mood medicine. . . . They got somethin for you?”

  “They don’t know. It’s why I’m here, see another doctor, another hospital. Shit, Ollie, I’ve spent years of my short life in hospital rooms, doctors looking at me, poking at me, fingers in here, fingers in there. I just want to live and love the last few years I got.”

  “Live and love, ain’t that somethin. Some people live a hundred years don’t figure out the secret to it all is just livin and lovin. How many you loved, Agnes? You gettin close to a lifetime, ain’t you?”

  Agnes laughs and sips her scotch. She looks across the room at Andrew Sexton stripping tables of their coverings, throwing spent silverware in a bus tub, and snuffing out candles. Church is over. “Every one of them. Every man I take to bed I’m in love with, love them just for being with me, helping me feel alive and making me forget the pain, the death for just an hour or two, same as music.” She chokes on the feeling in her throat and gulps her drink. “Same as music was.”

  “Ain’t no more?”

  Agnes slowly shakes her head back and forth. “Ain’t no more, Oliver Pleasant. I can’t hold it still enough to get through a song. Hurts worse than telling a man I’m not in love with him anymore, hurts more than the needle from my spine to my brain. It’s a pain I wouldn’t wish on anybody.”