Five Night Stand: A Novel

by Richard J. Alley

  Frank walks blindly down crowded sidewalks, brushing against people without turning to offer a southerner’s apology. He loses his scarf somewhere around Sixty-Fifth but doesn’t even notice, he’s still so hot with rage. He turns into the park on a whim. Without a grid pattern and iconic buildings to orient himself, he loses his way. The scenery of trees dusted with white powder and joggers whizzing by slowly begins to relax him and the anger leaves, the void now filled with regret.

  By the time he’s traversed most of the park, he’s already ashamed of himself. He’d never meant to lash out at Oliver that way. He’s taken out his anger with his own situation on this old man who already feels alone, spewing his bottled-up rage at an unsuspecting friend instead of at the newspaper’s publisher or Karen when he’d felt it. He’ll make it up to Oliver somehow, he knows he will.

  How the hell do I get out of here? He sees light glinting off a flurry of cars and heads for a break in the trees, an exit that dumps him out at Columbus Circle. He turns left, unsure of where to go, but thinking he might just find his hotel and lie down until it’s time for Oliver to play one last time.

  Agnes sits and watches New York glide past her as though it’s slipping through her fingers. She’ll miss it. The cab she’s in will stop at Mount Sinai and wait while she runs in to leave a note written on hotel stationery for Dr. Mundra. She’d written it with the same finality of a suicide note. Possibly with the same outcome, but this isn’t the first suicide note she’s written. While writing it, she sat at the small desk in her room, her left hand laid out before her and trembling, fingers twitching out of control, and she didn’t work to stop it or hide it as she might have normally. Instead, she let it lead her way.

  Doctor, thank you for all you’ve done. I’ve decided to return to New Orleans and live out what time I have left the best that I can, if I can. Take care of your wife and little boy. Treasure them. —A. Cassady

  In the backseat of the cab, she wears a man’s porkpie pulled down over her ears and touches her wrist at the spot where Mundra had only a day before massaged it. She wishes that she could have the pressure of such soothing fingers on her daily. The spot is raised now and tender, not only from the usual nerve pain but also from the markings left by Andrew. She’d woken him before first light, when she’d risen up from the dream of a wrinkled, brown face with mirrored eyes telling her she was going to die. Finding herself in Andrew’s arms, she’d felt unexpectedly safe.

  “Andrew, wake up,” she’d said, shaking him. “Come on, get up.”

  “What? What is it?”

  “I want you to tattoo me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Come on, get up. It has to be now.”

  Sitting in the small wooden chair where she’d thrown her coat and Oliver’s hat only hours before, she showed Andrew the spot on her wrist and explained what she wanted there. “Hash marks. Two and five, right here.” She hadn’t explained why, and he hadn’t asked. He took his tools from an old cigar box at her feet and prepared the black ink and motorized needle. He took her hand in his to hold it still, and as he worked, she told him she was leaving. She told him she needed to be back in New Orleans, to play regularly somewhere, anywhere—that she had felt so at home at the piano onstage with Oliver, but she knew it wasn’t the New York crowd that made her feel that way. She knew it was the piano itself.

  “I can go with you,” he said, intent on his work and not looking up into her eyes because he knew he would lose all focus if he did.

  “Don’t be silly, Andrew, your home is here.”

  At that, he looked around his apartment and laughed. “Not much of a home. I can wait tables and ink anyplace.”

  “Might as well do it here.”

  “I can make a home for us. Take care of you.”

  “With what? We going to make a tent out of your Star Wars shower curtain?”

  He looked into her eyes then and flipped the switch on his rig. The sudden silence was deafening. “I’m not exactly what you see.”

  “No? Are you a superhero? Do you twist that thumb ring of yours and turn into somebody else?”

  “I turned into somebody else to become this. My parents don’t like who I am.”

  Andrew’s ambiguity was beginning to piss her off; she wasn’t in the mood for games. “Who the hell are you?”

  “I’m rich. Richer than you’ll ever be. Or, I could be. My folks are wealthy, my whole family is.”

  “Why aren’t you?” She looked around the room. “I mean, why live like this?”

  “Because they don’t want me to be who I am. They want me to be who they are. I want to be an artist.” He looked again into her eyes. “I am an artist.”

  “It’s that important to you? Living in squalor to follow your dream?”

  He shrugged. “It’s the only thing, isn’t it? Isn’t being a pianist the most important thing to you? Isn’t it why you’re talking about rushing back to New Orleans now?”

  It was her turn to shrug and she hugged her bare shoulder, feeling more naked than ever now as she looked again out the window.

  “Take me with you, Agnes Cassady.”

  She put her good hand on the top of his head and ran long, delicate fingers through his thick hair. “I have to go,” she whispered.

  In the cab today, the black marks look striking against her white skin and the blue veins of her wrist. The scars are raised and red, but that will fade. Everything, she thinks, fades. She looks up from her reverie of the night before and her silent goodbye to the city of New York in time to see Frank rushing along the sidewalk and turning into the park, his scarf flying off unnoticed and into traffic. She considers having the driver stop so she can catch him, wrap his scarf around him against the cold, and tell him goodbye. Maybe she’ll even ask him to escort her to the airport or all the way to New Orleans. But she doesn’t want company. For the first time in a long time, Agnes only wants to be alone.

  Oliver is impressed with the movers’ progress. He’d planned to stick around when they came to the door after Pablo had disappeared at the top of the stairs, but he quickly grew restless watching these strangers pack his life into cardboard boxes. Most of those boxes would be sealed up in a warehouse on Staten Island. Why? He didn’t have any idea—it was a service the moving company offered. He knows he’ll probably never see most of it again. They have Benji’s name and number, and, acting under power of attorney, he can deal with it all “once I’m in the ground,” Oliver has said. Some of it will be sent to Memphis, but he doesn’t want to impose too much on his niece, and besides, he’d insisted, “I don’t need a whole hell of a lot anyway.” Some foundation or other for jazz over at Lincoln Center is interested in much of the memorabilia, but Oliver has left that up to Benji as well, the ugliness of business being his forte.

  He’s tired, too tired to care much anymore, and that row with Frank has taken the wind out of him. All Oliver wants is a nap before his show. He finds the foreman, a withered ogre who may be older than Oliver himself but with the wiry muscles and stooped shoulders of a life’s work spent on trucks and beneath furniture. Oliver left it all in this man’s hands because he is a fan—he knew who Oliver was before they introduced themselves and even rattled off a discography in case Oliver wasn’t sure himself who he was. “I’m tired as shit, man, I got to get some rest. You handle this?”

  “You go on and lie down, Pops. We’ll wait to get the bedroom. My boys’ll pack that up while you gone later—you playin tonight, right?”

  “Yeah. Hey, you want to go? I’ll put you on the list, probably ain’t nobody else showin up anyways.”

  “Yes sir, that’d be fine. That’d be just fine. Hey, where you want that piano to go? Only thing in here ain’t got a note on it.”

  Oliver walks to the piano and places his palms on the closed lid, rubs his hands over it as though smoothing a sheet over a lover. H
e finds a pen and, on a yellow sheet of paper the movers use to keep track of what goes where, he writes: “Upstairs, Apt. 2D.” He bends at the waist, his palms still in place, and touches his lips to the cold wood. “Goodbye, old friend,” he whispers.

  As he enters the lobby of his hotel, Frank is greeted by a warmth that cheers him and then a sight that brings his heart up into his throat. There in the sitting lounge, beside the blue-white vapors of a fake fireplace, sits Karen. He hesitates, scared that it’s a mirage, that the cold of the park has pervaded his brain and left him confused. But it is her and she beckons to him. They hold each other for what feels like years. All those years where there might have been distance, or coolness, are warmed and brought back to life in this embrace.

  “What are you doing here?”

  She shrugs. “I missed you.”

  “I missed you.”

  Upstairs in his room, they don’t speak. The shock and elation of having her near has left Frank silent, and the only sound is the hushed whisper of fabric as it falls to the floor. First her coat, then his, then her blouse and his shirt, and so on until they stand naked in front of each other with the light of the city falling on their skin. He looks at her as though for the first time and she drinks it in, recalling the passion they first felt for each other. Without speaking, they each reminisce about a little bar along the railroad tracks, a grassy hill in springtime when the whole university, the whole world, and their life together, was spread out before them. They remember walking through that first tiny apartment together, laughing over the secondhand furniture and the way the metal-frame bed rattled and squeaked beneath them. A two-story, century-old house appears before them and they look up at its possibilities staring back, daring them to make what they will of it and to fill it with laughter and soul.

  Now, there in a hotel room in New York City, Frank and Karen take that dare again, together. They kiss and taste and love and laugh again until the bright white of memory gives way to the star-filled sky of hopes and dreams. There in a hotel room in New York City, this couple makes love and learns to love all over again.

  Later, she asks about Oliver’s show, mentions the time, and suggests he get ready so he doesn’t miss it.

  “I’m not going,” he says.

  “Why not?”

  He doesn’t tell her about the argument at Junior’s. He’ll explain it all later once he understands it better himself, and he doesn’t want to ruin what they have just then. “Everything I need is right here. I’ve missed you so much, Karen, not just this week but for too long.”

  “Frank. I’m right here; I love you.”

  They order room service, sparing no expense for steaks and desserts. The money will work itself out, she says, this accountant whose adherence to the bottom line has never wavered. She has faith in him and knows he’ll find work, that something will come along.

  He watches her move around the room, happy to have her there. She goes to the restroom to wash up and then the window to take in the view. “What’s this?” There are scraps of paper with illegible handwriting, as though hastily written, scattered on the table.

  “Notes for a novel.”

  “What’s it about?” she says, going to the door for the room service.

  “A bookstore clerk who falls in love with the wife of a jazz musician.”

  “Sounds romantic.”

  They eat and drink and make love again.

  At midnight, he rises and stands in the window, surprised at the moonlight and how it can compete with the false lights of the city. Karen sleeps the way she always does, the way she has for the seventeen years he has slept beside her, on her back with one arm thrown over her head. He watches her for a minute, drinks in her body. He knows this isn’t the end, that their life isn’t a novel to be neatly wrapped up in a cozy, romantic hotel room. There will be things to work on, issues to deal with in a very real, probably painful way. But this is a start and that’s all he’s hoped for—a first sentence on a blank page. Karen seems willing to work with him, and that, alone, means more than anything.

  He looks back to the city. He wonders how Oliver’s show was, wishes the best for the old man, and thinks that maybe, hopefully, their paths will cross again one day. Perhaps in New York, or maybe at home in Memphis.

  From the piano he can see that his new friends are not there. His eyes scan the crowd, see the same type of expectant faces he’s seen every night, every year for his seventy years at the piano bench, but he doesn’t see Frank Severs or Agnes Cassady anywhere. His reserved booth is empty, the bottle of Campari standing vigil over that desert of white.

  What he eventually sees, though, through smoke and the rheumy eyes of age, fills him with such happiness and emotion that he has trouble finishing the song he’s been playing. He can feel his face flush and, at the same time, his hands falter for a split second, half a note, and Oliver, for the first time all week, misses a chord change. No one in the audience notices. The rest of the band does, but they forgive him this misstep without even a glance. He wouldn’t have noticed their looks anyway; he is lost in a stare at the center table, the one he’s asked Benji to hold all week. Being shown to that table by Marcie are his two sons, his grandson, Cedric, and Charlene with her husband. He thinks maybe he’s imagining things, that maybe his tired eyes are failing him. He thinks perhaps he died back in his apartment in his sleep while the movers packed up his life. Maybe they packed his old, dead body into that piano and shipped it off to go stale in a warehouse on Staten Island. Maybe heaven is a club in the basement of a New York City hotel where he can play piano night and day for his family.

  He tips his head—gleaming under the lights for the first time in as long as he can remember without his trademark porkpie—and his sons clap, Cedric lets out the whoop of a seventeen-year-old boy, and Charlene smiles. That smile, Oliver thinks, is the smile of Francesca. Tears blur his eyes and he turns them back on his hands to guide the fills and melodies that impress everyone in the room.

  “Baby girl,” he says as he comes to his daughter from the stage, holding his arms wide and enfolding her as though she were six years old again and not a grown woman standing beside a husband and teenage son.

  “Daddy.”

  He takes the time to go around the table and hug his sons, his son-in-law, and Cedric. He whispers in his grandson’s ear, “Hell of a show last night, son. You got it in you. You got it, baby.”

  And then it’s back to Charlene because the mere sight of her has let him know that everything will be okay and that, whether he ends up in Brooklyn, Manhattan, or Memphis, he has his family, still and always.

  “You sound good up there, Daddy. How are you feeling?”

  “Oh, Charlene, I can’t complain. Feels good when I’m at the piano, don’t even notice the arthritis or diabetes or nothin. Just music.”

  “Music always had that way with you, didn’t it?”

  “It did. Yes ma’am, and it still does.”

  Oliver has champagne sent over for the table and Ben stops by to greet this further extension of his family, one whose patriarch, in some ways, was his own father, Ira. Oliver and his children talk, catch up, comment on the crowd and on his retirement. Charlene keeps a distance, but it’s melting into softness. She doesn’t mention Frank Severs’s visit, or how she’d spent the rest of the day in her music parlor alternately crying for her family and angry at the intrusion. She doesn’t tell Oliver that she almost came to the show the night before, that she’s put on a dress and shoes every night this week with the intention of taking a cab across the Manhattan Bridge to hear him, but that it took a stranger from the South to jog her priorities, and her brothers to promise to come into town so they could present this united front of Pleasants. She’s been thinking so much about her father these past weeks leading up to his final shows as he’d called her and left messages asking her to come. She’d sat listening to his album
s and had, once or twice, pulled one of those old books of her mother’s from the shelf just to hold it while she did so. She wanted to feel the weight of it, the weight of memory on her soul.

  Charlene has known about her mother and Lucchesi since she was barely a teenager, since one morning when she’d suddenly become ill and had to stay home from school. Her mother had errands to run and was unable, or unwilling, to suspend them for a sick child. So Charlene was bundled up and they took a bus to Greenwich Village, where her mother poked in and out of shops before turning into a bookstore where Charlene had never been. Francesca browsed, taking books from their places to flip through them. She put most back but kept a few. As Charlene pretended to read a Nancy Drew mystery, she watched her mother at the counter asking the clerk, a bearded man with a sparkling smile, some questions. He answered and she laughed, tipping her head back lightly and touching him on his sleeve. He winked and smiled even wider.

  There was something between the two that Charlene, even at a young age, could sense. It would be years before she put a name to it, before she herself would know the touch of a man, the feeling of love in laughter. She also noticed that the clerk rang her mother up for her purchase but put another book on the stack before placing them all in a bag. Later that evening, Charlene took that book from the shelf where Francesca had placed it and opened it to find “ML” written in the corner. She thought nothing of it until a few weeks later when she was looking through her mother’s books and saw the same letters in the same spot on another book. She kept looking to find more of the same, and her curiosity led her to the “FP” in her mother’s handwriting in the back of those books.