Five Night Stand: A Novel

by Richard J. Alley

  Oliver plays a soft song, “God Bless the Child,” for Pablo, who sits and watches those massive hands move over the smoke-stained keys. It’s the first time he’s seen Oliver play. He finishes with another song, one for a little boy. “You know that one, don’t you?”

  Pablo nods. “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

  “That’s right, son. That’s right.”

  Oliver sends the boy back upstairs with an armload of jazz records, a head full of thoughts, and a portable phonograph he carries by the handle like a lunch box. At the top of the stairs, Pablo looks back and nods. “Thanks, Ollie.”

  Oliver nods back at his protégé.

  In Oliver’s apartment the previous night, Agnes had taken his shoes off and loosened his tie, having again taken the burning cigarette from his fingers, and then walked him to his bedroom down a long, narrow hallway with walls covered in picture frames. She eased him back onto his bed and then took a moment to look around and gain perspective on where and how an icon spends his sleeping hours. It looked like any senior citizen’s bedroom anywhere, an environment decorated in rumpled clothes, a small television with rabbit ears on a nearby cane-back chair pulled from the kitchen, a night table with its surface filled to capacity with pill bottles, a clock, wadded tissues, and a lamp. On a table on the opposite side of the bed, though, Agnes saw only a lamp, a silver hairbrush, a picture of three young children playing in the snow, and a Bible. It looked as though it had been left untouched since the day Francesca died. There was profound sadness in this tableau, an unoccupied side of a marital bed being the loneliest desert in the world, she thought. She had the sudden urge to crawl into that side of the bed and give her own loneliness a home, to slide in beneath the sheets and occupy it just for a few hours, just so it could know again the warmth of flesh and dreams on its pillow.

  She was pulled from her fantasy by Oliver, eyes open, watching her. “Charlene? That you?”

  “It’s me, Ollie, it’s Agnes. Agnes Cassady. Frank and I were just leaving; you get some sleep.”

  “Agnes. How you? You sounded good tonight, sweetheart, real good. I want you to have something. There, on that bureau there, by the mirror, take that hat there.”

  “The brown one? Here?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. That’s for you.”

  “Whose was this one, Ollie?”

  He closed his eyes again to sleep. “That one’s mine.”

  She bent and kissed him on the cheek, and whispered, “Thank you.”

  After she said goodbye to Frank and left Oliver’s place, Agnes had gone straight to Andrew’s. When he opened the door, she realized he wasn’t alone. There was a wariness in his eyes as though the past might be standing on the dark and smelly landing to his apartment instead of a still-glowing Agnes Cassady. She glimpsed someone behind him, rising from the mattress on the floor. It was the bartender from Ben’s, the tall and graceful black woman with the Afro and earrings. She still wore the earrings, but nothing else. Agnes was momentarily caught off guard when the woman stopped and turned full to the door as though daring Agnes to enter. It wasn’t that she’d expected Andrew to be alone; she hadn’t really thought about it. It was the grace and elegance of this nude woman—her skin shining, purple nipples pointing outward, and jaw set firmly—in the midst of Andrew’s filth and disorganization that stirred something in her. Not a jealousy over Andrew, but an envy for having such a perfect body with so much self-control.

  “Hey, Sexton,” Agnes said, “you were supposed to meet me at Tommy’s an hour ago for that tattoo. He said we could use his office. The fuck?”

  “What? Oh yeah, right, the tattoo. Shit, I forgot. . . .”

  The bartender had gone to the bathroom, the only other place she could go, and came out almost immediately fully dressed. She looked just as elegant in clothes, and she made a point to kiss Andrew heavily on the mouth before leaving.

  “I’ll call you,” Andrew said halfheartedly after her as she disappeared into the shadows of the stairwell. Then, to Agnes, “Hey, look, I’m sorry about that.”

  “Shut up, Andrew.” She entered his apartment and flung her coat onto a small wooden chair. She left an oversized, brown porkpie on her head and kissed him just as his last guest had. “Did you see me tonight?”

  “See you? You were amazing. I had no idea you could play like that. How did it feel?”

  She kissed him again. “How did it feel? There’s nothing to compare it to.”

  “Like a good meal, or love?” he said hopefully.

  “It was like a great fuck,” she whispered, slipping to her knees and taking him into her mouth, tasting the tall, graceful woman on him.

  They lay in his bed afterward, not speaking. She was tired but didn’t feel like closing her eyes. She didn’t have long left in New York and she didn’t want to spend it in darkness. Andrew breathed steadily beside her until she was sure he had fallen asleep, and then she got up to stand in his window. She put Oliver’s hat back on and stood looking across the street at the brick building where it was mostly quiet and some lights glowed warmly inside apartments, and she could see movement in still a few others. Below, on the sidewalks, there was no one. New York does sleep.

  She thought of New Orleans and of her apartment. She thought of Sherman—she’d told him she’d call yet hadn’t. The cold coming through the single-pane glass touched her skin and it occurred to her that she missed the heat and humidity of the South. She thought of Landon Throckmorton, who had sent her to New York to visit his doctor. Or was it something more? Had the old man foreseen all of this or planned it as he had the train ride to Memphis? Had he known she’d go to hear Oliver play, that she would meet him and eventually play for him in his home and onstage in front of an audience? Maybe Landon is fate, she thought. He’s in control of all of this.

  She’d told Sherman that Landon was paying for the New York trip simply out of kindness, because that was the truth. She didn’t know just what Landon thought of her, or what he might expect from her when she returned, but maybe Landon did know all; maybe he was a specter flying over her, then sitting on her shoulder to help guide the way just as the muse might. She’d let it happen and was curious if there might be more. Stranger things had come from New Orleans.

  He hadn’t touched her at all on the train ride to Memphis or back to New Orleans, perhaps out of respect, or for the circumstance of that funereal trip. It wasn’t until the following New Year’s Eve when she’d played at his party, one that would last until well into the morning and see groups breaking off to find bedrooms or soft indentations where the illusion of privacy might be had in that massive Victorian home, that he placed a hand on her. Exhausted from the long night, she’d fallen asleep in an upstairs bedroom, recalling only the last sip of scotch and moonlight that fell through the window. She’d awoken sometime just before dawn with a start and the feeling that she wasn’t alone. She wasn’t. Landon lay beside her, fully clothed in a tuxedo that contrasted against her nakedness. She’s not a modest woman, but she was startled by the company. She lay on her stomach, arms crossed beneath her head, and looked at him and he smiled back. And then she felt his thin, cold fingers at the small of her back. He ran his flattened palm up her spine and over her shoulders, back down over her ass and bare backs of her thighs. He didn’t ask her to turn over; there was no overt sexuality. He didn’t touch himself. He seemed to get whatever it was he needed from palm on skin, and she let him. It was as though he were inspecting his porcelain or the fabric on an antique settee; perhaps he was looking for any damage. She drifted back into sleep at some point, and when she woke up, she was in the same position but with a soft afghan pulled over her, and Landon was gone.

  There were other similar instances. Similar in the sense that she was only expected to lie there naked while Landon touched her. He still didn’t penetrate her or undress himself, but he did request that she go to a particular bedroom,
undress, and wait for him. And other times there was someone else there as well, different women or young men—eighteen- or nineteen-year-olds—and they, too, would lie naked beside Agnes. Landon would touch them in the same chaste, inquisitive way. He seemed to look at the bodies as though they were art, and indeed they were in their own ways, the boys hairless and smooth and the girls like Agnes herself, with a lack of curves and her angular hip bones and shoulder blades—androgynous. They must have appeared delicate side by side, like fine china or most lifelike sculptures. Several times Landon took photos with an old Polaroid camera; Agnes never asked what became of those photos.

  Agnes isn’t sure Landon Throckmorton is capable of feeling guilt, living as he does on the edges of society, within a world he’s created for himself and peopled with those who look the other way from his eccentricities. But she feels they have a connection and that this connection is why he arranged for her to go home and escorted her there. And she feels he took advantage of that by touching her body, yet she feels some culpability, as though perhaps she crossed a line by accepting what he would offer for those nights of lying still while he became familiar with her. She shrugged it off. It is whatever it is and all part of the experience of being Agnes Cassady for as long as that being exists.

  She turned from the windows and lay back down beside Andrew, closing her eyes and drifting to sleep.

  “You talk to your wife?”

  “Yeah, yesterday, that’s why I was late to your show. I wanted to talk to you, too, beforehand, but time got away from me trying to rush back.”

  Frank and Oliver are back at the diner. It’s the morning of his last show and Oliver assumed he’d be eating alone after sending Pablo upstairs to listen to records. Frank has shown up, though, and Oliver is grateful for the company.

  “Rush back? Where’d you go to call her?”

  “I was in Brooklyn. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, but your show had already started and then with the excitement of Agnes playing and Cedric’s show, I just never did get around to it.”

  “Brooklyn? What you doin there?”

  “I went to see Charlene.”

  “My Charlene?” He stops salting his food, the shaker held in midair. “What for?”

  “I wanted to ask her a few questions for the story, and to get to know someone you’re close to.”

  “Guess you found out how close we are.” He puts the shaker on the table and slides it, crashing it into a bottle of ketchup and mustard. “Talkin to me is one damn thing; I don’t know how I feel about you snoopin around, though.”

  “Oliver, I wasn’t snooping.” Frank pushes the food on his plate around with a fork. “I just went to talk to her.”

  “What she tell you?”

  Frank gets uncomfortable and is growing testy; he looks around for the waitress. “Where is she? This coffee is cold already.”

  “Answer me, boy. What Charlene have to say about her daddy? You so goddamn anxious to tell a story, tell me a story.”

  “You probably know, don’t you?”

  “Why don’t you go on and tell me anyway?” Oliver says. Then, more to himself, “Can’t believe you just run off and talk to my Charlene. Not even bother to come to me with it first.”

  Frank sighs and loses more of his patience. He’s spent the past few days in a disorienting haze away from Memphis and his home, and Karen. Hell, if he is honest with himself, he’s been in this haze since leaving work and without the comfortable, familiar grid pattern of the newsroom with its familiar voices and focus on tasks to right him. And now he’s taking it out on Oliver. He wants to stop, but he can’t help himself; the anger feels good, the vitriol is cathartic. “She talked about your time away, how lonely Francesca was, and how much your kids missed you. But that’s not news to you, is it? What would you expect, that you’d win father of the year?”

  “I don’t expect nothin but maybe just a little respect for a old man who spent so much of his time and gave so much of his life to music.”

  “Respect? From Charlene? Come on, Ollie, it was all for shits and fucking giggles. It’s only music.” He knows it’s wrong even as it leaves his spittle-covered lips—Charlene wouldn’t even agree with such a statement. Frank has a lifetime of uncertainty built up within him—with his writing and his marriage, and the family they’ve tried to start, now with unemployment—and he knows that music has given Oliver the only certainty the old man has ever known. And now Frank, petty and envious, is trying to take that from him.

  Oliver begins to drink his coffee but stops and sets the mug down on the table harder than he means, the saucer beneath it clattering. “Only music? What you say? Who told you that, ‘only music’? Charlene say that? Let me tell you about ‘only music,’ son. Let me tell you about ridin that bus from New York to Chicago down through Missouri and Tennessee and Ken-tucky in the middle of a summer tryin to get to New Orleans, the one safe place we know of in the South, but then our goddamn bus driver gettin lost in Alabama. Nineteen fifty. You know what it is for a bunch a sweaty Negroes to get lost in the backwater of Alabama in 1950?” He’s staring into Frank’s eyes now, and Frank thinks he sees a hint of an Oliver Pleasant in his twenties all full of hellfire and yearning.

  Frank feels small and tries to look away, but he can’t.

  “No, ’course you don’t. And you know what for? For to take that music to the people. The one goddamn thing them people had, the one thing they could call their own. They couldn’t get their fingers into it, no, but then again, neither could the white man. So they held on to that music, that ‘only music.’ And no, I know Charlene didn’t say nothin about ‘only music,’ neither. You know how I know? I know ’cause Charlene remembers what it’s like to be told you can’t eat here and you can’t piss there. She knows what it means to be second class and she knows that what we was doin was takin a first-class music to them people as just a taste of somethin they didn’t think they could have. Just like at my Hillbillie’s on them nights. It’s a taste of freedom. Even my children know what that taste like. You know what it means to have your children get a taste for that so late in life, Frank? Hmm? Frank, you know about children, or you just think you know about my children? My life? What you know about it all? About bein a father and havin to travel from place to place to support a family. You think that shit’s easy? You think it’s all one big party?”

  Frank finds it difficult to swallow. He finds it even more difficult to speak, but manages to choke out a sentence. “No, Oliver, I wouldn’t know anything about it. We can’t have kids.” It’s the first time he’s phrased it in such a way to Oliver. He gulps down his cold coffee and feels it churn in his gut. “But I’ll tell you this, if I did have any, I’d be with them right now.”

  “Instead of up here in New York? Your wife up here with you, Frank?”

  Frank slices into his eggs, but he only manages to move them around even more without taking a bite, his appetite having suddenly vanished. The days have been stressful away from Karen and not knowing where they stand or where she’s slept, and what his future holds.

  “She told me about Hamlet, too.” He’s not sure why he says it, but, again, he can’t help himself. “That sounded like a real party, Oliver, a fine time. Why was Marie Broussard with Hamlet that night and not you? Why was she even here and not in Paris where you kept her? Marie Broussard part of your freedom ride, Ollie?”

  The waitress comes by with coffee, but she turns before reaching their booth to avoid the storm blowing there.

  “Hamlet, huh? You ask her about that? Got all up in my business, didn’t you, boy? The hell gives you the right to go askin my family questions about me? Who the fuck you think you are comin from down south to put your nose where it don’t belong? What the hell you think you’d get?” Oliver’s appetite is undiminished and he pushes a forkful of pancakes into his mouth.

  “You know what I got from Charlene
, Ollie? What a selfish prick you could be. When I asked her why she wouldn’t help you out, why she was sending you a thousand miles away to live, she talked about hurt and grown-up anger, but she should have just said, ‘Because my daddy is a selfish prick.’ Would have made my day a lot shorter.”

  They both sit and stew in their anger and this surprise argument. Neither leaves, both too stubborn, but Frank hasn’t finished. “I can’t believe I felt sorry for you, all alone and broke and giving up your life, forced to move away.”

  “I don’t need your pity. I don’t need you to feel sorry for me. I been around a long time, son. I seen shit you only read about in history books, if you even paid attention to any of it. Livin this long is work and I sinned a lot, but maybe my greatest sin is pride, and my pride don’t need you goin around to my kin to ask for help on my account.” He stabs his index finger in the air at Frank. “You dig? My business, not yours.”

  “Got it.”

  “Good. Now go on.”

  Frank reaches for his wallet. “I’m paying for this.”

  “I don’t need you to pay for shit, just go.”

  Frank gets up to leave and takes his time to wrap a scarf around his neck but fumbles with it, looking down at Oliver. He’s angry and reluctant to leave it this way. He waits a beat, then two, but Oliver won’t even look at him, so he turns to go. At the door, though, he turns to come back and stops halfway. By now, the other customers in the diner are paying attention to the scene.

  “One more thing. I came up here to see you, just to see you. Agnes came to see you, and a club full of strangers have paid to see you and listen to you play for the past four nights. You aren’t alone; you’ve got a world of people who are willing to help if you’ll only ask. Pride? Pride isn’t your greatest sin, old man—a lack of faith in the people around you is your sin. The people still here, Oliver, not Duke, not Dizzy, not Coltrane or Monk.” He turns and hands the waitress a wad of cash, and says back to Oliver, “I got this,” before storming out the door.