Five Night Stand: A Novel

by Richard J. Alley

  “We’re not all like that,” the woman continues, holding up her own glass for a toast. She is elegant looking with steel-gray hair and diamond earrings that lie against her neck.

  “Who?”

  “New Yorkers. You’re not from here, are you?”

  “It shows?”

  The woman merely smiles, still holding her glass up, tipping it just a bit to hurry the toast along, and Agnes finally takes the hint, clinking her highball glass. “To Oliver Pleasant,” the woman says. “Good music to blot out a condescending bitch.”

  Agnes grins at her new friend—she’s always felt more comfortable with people older than her peers—and then turns back to Oliver, watching intently, her own hand absently mimicking his across the table. She watches his frame on the bench like an Easter Island monolith and the way his shoulders dance, his body swaying with the melody. She picks it all up at once, the sight, the sound, the beat of his heart and of those around her. Her new friend at the next table sways as well.

  “You play?” Agnes asks.

  She shakes her head, still watching Oliver. “No. Well, for about a minute when I was a child. My mother made me take lessons. I hated it. Now, of course, I wish I’d kept up with it. You?”

  “I do—my daddy taught me, and old Ms. Gaerig. My daddy always told me, ‘Agnes, if you want to do anything well, you got to practice.’ And I did, too. Practiced my ass off.”

  “I’m sure you’re very good.”

  Agnes shrugs.

  “Do you play concerts? In clubs like this?”

  “Oh, no ma’am.” Agnes laughs and gulps from her glass. “I play in small places back home in New Orleans, but nothing like this”—she looks around the room—“no, this is nice. It’s almost like a church in here.”

  She’s come to the basement bar of the Capasso Hotel in Midtown Manhattan as though it is a speakeasy and she a skid-row drunk. It’s her first time in New York and she brings along only scenes from movies with their syncopated and scattered dialogue as reference, and a fervent love and respect for the music.

  The club is well-appointed and elegant, sconces in all the right places to highlight only what needs to be lit—white tablecloths, sepia walls, mahogany bar, and the bandstand—while all the rest is thrown into darkness and shadow. The patterned carpet is soft and she’d sunk into it with each footfall as she was led to her table. Couples sit in booths of oxblood leather, intimate and alone in the crowd, and sink just as comfortably into the darkness.

  If she were to admit it, Agnes would say she had expected a bolted door in a dark and grimy alley to greet her; a password spoken through a slot would have opened that heavy door so she could descend a staircase into a world that smelled of cigar smoke and whiskey. There is a staircase in this club, but little else from her black-and-white, James Cagney imagination.

  Agnes feels as though she’s made her entrance into a film and the sound track ties the scene together. She’s come to New York for other reasons entirely, but discovered Oliver Pleasant was playing and needed to be here with him, to be near him the way the devout flock to the Vatican if only to breathe the same air as their pope. As she settles in with her drink and the music, she becomes more at ease and thinks that this is where she belongs, that all of her father’s talk of jazz and the holy land of a New York City club has led her to this night, to this room as beautiful to her as any saint’s grotto.

  If she closes her eyes and allows herself to melt into the air, the room, the very music itself, she will find it isn’t the twenty-first century any longer but the simpler, newly awakened days of the early 1900s. She’s never been drawn to celebrity, but rather to nostalgia’s sleight of hand and its ability to cast a shadow across any situation. As her life changes now from day to day, as the mechanisms within her deteriorate and short out (terms her father would be comfortable with and know how to fix), she finds her thoughts receding to childhood and those nights beside her father, or dancing with her mother across their kitchen linoleum, where the music found them. She’s unapologetic for such feelings of nostalgia and, at times, it seems to her that she’s numb to the world and that these are the only feelings of which she’s capable.

  She’s never traveled quite so much as she has today to reach the past; the time spent in airports and waiting on tarmacs has left her feeling just as numb on the outside as she does within. Her flight from New Orleans this morning had first stopped in Houston, then taken her through Detroit, where she’d wandered the airport on a three-hour layover, pulling her black bag on wheels behind her like a nylon terrier and poking around souvenir shops. She sat in a Chili’s and ate french fries while reading the New Yorker, and that’s when she saw that Oliver Pleasant would be playing at the Capasso Hotel while she’s in town.

  These are to be the final live appearances of his career. It will be a five-night stand.

  It is something he doesn’t see here too often—a young woman, alone, so obviously enjoying the jazz and drinking top-shelf, single-malt scotch. He doesn’t see much of her kind and he’s certainly never seen her here in his ten months of waiting tables at the club. But then, they do get a lot of tourists, people coming from all over the country, the world, to hear New York–style jazz, swallowing it up like it’s a slice of pizza.

  She looks pretty if not frail. He is first drawn in by her eyes, large and brown, but it’s the graceful lines of her long neck that intrigue him. She reminds him of Audrey Hepburn. He thinks maybe he’s seen her someplace else, maybe in the park where he likes to rollerblade on Sundays, though she looks as though she hasn’t been outside in a decade of summers; her skin is smooth and clear and nearly as white as the tablecloths.

  She sits, staring at the bandstand and steadily swirling her drink, marrying the scotch and splash. She doesn’t seem to notice him—he is just her waiter—yet he goes back again and again just for her eyes. But no matter how often he goes back to her table, that table that hadn’t even existed in his station until that bitch Marcie had a busboy drag it from a closet, he gets no reaction from Agnes. And he likes to be noticed. He usually is, too, with his thick brown hair and natural blond highlights that the women he dates covet, his high forehead and stony cheekbones. He takes the audience’s attention from the act onstage as he moves around the room, making drink orders, pulling out chairs for women or offering lights for their cigarettes. Most of the staff are women—girls, really—whose erupting cleavage and short skirts distract the men, leaving their bored wives and dates to watch him instead of the musicians.

  He stands at the service bar and waits on another scotch for his mystery table. He leans over to pour a shot of vodka into a coffee cup, drinking it down without taking his eyes off of Agnes. She grows on him, mainly for her refusal to allow him to grow on her. The vodka burns and makes his head swim momentarily with a new challenge.

  “Your scotch.”

  “Thanks.” She doesn’t look away from the stage, and cranes her neck as though trying to see the keys themselves.

  “From out of town?”

  She nods.

  “Where?”

  She breathes an exaggerated sigh and looks up at him full on for the first time. “Hmm?”

  He falls into those eyes. “Um, I was just wondering where you’re from?”

  “Memphis.” She considers this boy, different from any of the boys she knew growing up. The boys back home have dirt under their nails and on their sunburned necks. They wear ball caps and apologize for spitting dip in front of her. This boy is fine; he’s fine like a girl with magazine hair, nose thin like a cuttlebone and a fat, silver ring on his thumb.

  “Tennessee?” It’s all he can think to say, lost for the moment in those eyes.

  “That’s the one.”

  “Is there another?”

  “You tell me.” She is put off by the distraction, yet can’t help but wonder what a man like that might offer her, w
hat he might be like in bed. She knows the feel of the hands of a farmworker or mechanic, all rough and gritty with the faint smell of motor oil and Budweiser. She even knows how a musician moves in bed and over her body like a fret board. But what about this boy? He smells vaguely of cologne and has probably never known a day’s hard labor with hands as smooth as her ass, she imagines. Still, she considers him, conjures up images of them together. But he has a ring on his thumb and she just can’t see her way past that.

  After the final number finishes in a crash of the cymbal and Oliver takes numerous ovations, Agnes leaves the club floor with her head swimming in the music and scotch. She hasn’t spoken with Oliver Pleasant, though she wants to. She might have talked to him when he passed her on his way to the backstage door; he’d had to brush against her as the rest of the band had, sitting in the doorway the way she was. She’d steeled herself for it all night, thinking of what to say, plying her confidence with more and more alcohol. She wanted to say hello, tell him what the show had meant to her and maybe mention that she plays, too, taught by her daddy who’d shown her how to play Oliver’s songs with the love and tenderness they deserve. Or maybe she’d just reach out and touch his hand. Those massive, poetic hands, she thought, might even have some healing in them.

  But she didn’t get that chance. He’d left the stage by the front, and not the side where she sat, and was swallowed by the crowd. She considers stopping at the table where he finally ends his journey, if only to say thank you for such a fine performance. As she approaches on her way out, though, that hostess leans over the table to whisper something to him. Her cleavage spills out all over the white tablecloth and her skirt rides up enough so Agnes can see the garters of her thigh-high stockings. Agnes keeps walking.

  As she collects her coat and sole piece of luggage from the coatroom, the waiter catches up with her. He wipes his hands on a bar towel. “Hey, I didn’t see you leave. Have a good time?”

  “Yep, the music was perfect.”

  “Where are you going now?”

  “Manhattan. Is it far?”

  He looks confused for a second, cocking his head to the side. “Up the stairs and through that door. Where are you staying?”

  “The Algonquin, if they haven’t given my room away.”

  “Can I get you a cab?”

  “I’ll walk.”

  “Hey, um, do you want to get a drink? I just need to finish up, probably another half hour. You could wait in the bar or I could come by your hotel.”

  “I just had some drinks, lots of them. You should know—you charged me for every one. Besides, I don’t even know your name.”

  “Oh. Andrew. Andrew Sexton.”

  “Oh my, it’s right there in your name, isn’t it?” she says, affecting her best, and most insincere, Blanche DuBois charms. “I’m Agnes Cassady from Memphis, Tennessee, by way of New Orleans, Louisiana.” They shake hands, and she considers him again. Andrew, with the face of a statue and inflated confidence and expectations to match. It’s her first night in New York—does she want to be alone? She thinks of the music that still fills her head, and Oliver’s radiant face as he moved back and forth with his playing. She isn’t alone at all, she realizes. This night is all she wants to take to bed with her. “No, thanks. I’ve been moving all day. You take care, Sexton.” She touches his hand, right there at the silver ring on his thumb.

  She walks out into the cold New York night and the lights and sounds—more music than noise to her ears—greet her.

  Agnes stands now at the window overlooking what she thinks must be all of Manhattan. She can’t imagine there might be more of it out of her sight; that would be just too much concrete and steel for one island. She’s already undressed, tired of the feel of the clothes she’d put on so long ago in New Orleans.

  Early that morning she’d stood at the open doors of her balcony as the sun greeted the French Quarter and cast its light on the evils and beauty of the streets and sidewalks where late-night revelers still staggered about. She’s lived there for three years with her roommate, Terron, an old friend from Memphis, now a graduate student at Tulane whose father has the means to buy the entire top floor of a building for his daughter to live in and complete her studies. Agnes had gone to New Orleans for the music, the connection to Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Sidney Bechet, Buddy Bolden, and a time past. She’s been playing piano in bars and hotels throughout the Quarter, up and down Canal, and the occasional private reception in Garden District homes. Though she’d been recruited by music schools nationwide, these haunts and corners are her graduate program.

  “How long will you be there?” he’d asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, what does it say on your ticket?”

  “It doesn’t. It’s one way.”

  “So you’re going to stay in New York.”

  “For as long as it takes, yes.”

  She’s been seeing Sherman off and on for nearly a year. He’s a saxophonist who spends most mornings on café patios playing his baritone for the lovers who have only recently stumbled from bed for beignets and chicory coffee; the low tones of his instrument hit their solar plexuses and remind them of the rumbling from the night before.

  Agnes and Sherman drank thick coffee. He had taken the morning off to see her go, though hoping she wouldn’t, selfishly wishing she’d change her mind. He lay on the bed, still rumpled and warm from their goodbyes the previous evening and early that morning, and watched her in the open doors of the balcony, the sunlight making her lightweight nightgown transparent.

  She was having her moment with the city, a hello to the new day and goodbye for who knew how long, maybe forever. There was a chill in the air that rippled her skin. She held the coffee cup with the fingertips of her right hand, her arm resting against her hip. Her left hand held the door latch, that hand always grasping something in an attempt to hold it steady.

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “Don’t be silly—you have to work. No work, no pay.”

  “Just like you.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “So he’s paying for it all? Travel. Hotel. Food. It’s his doctor, so he’s paying that as well?”

  She shrugged. “I can’t let myself worry too much for that.”

  “What does he expect from you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I find that hard to swallow,” he mumbled.

  “What would you have me do?” She turned to face him and the look on her face was not how he wanted to remember her. She held her left hand up for him to see and he looked away. “What? I’m losing control, Sherman. It’s eating my arm, my spine, and what else? My brain? Heart?” She turned back to the sunlight. “It’s eating my soul,” she whispered to the city below.

  “I’ll miss you is all,” he said, and she didn’t answer. Sherman liked to think he was her only one, and she went ahead and let him think that—it was a parting gift. She wasn’t sure what would become of her in New York, whether the hospital there could work some miracle, or whether she might disappear into the night, into a river she’d never seen before.

  Instead of more conversation, he took up his saxophone from the floor beside the bed and played “Mean to Me,” her favorite Lester Young tune, for her and for what he feared would be their last moments together.

  But tonight she’s on her own in New York and stands naked in front of her hotel window, thinking she can hear a tune brought up from New Orleans. She wonders if anyone can see her here. With so many other lives in a place like this, does anyone notice just one more, whether it’s new and full of possibility, or winding down and dying? The window doesn’t open, so she imagines the glass isn’t there. If she concentrates, she can feel the cold from outside against her thighs, stomach, and chest. If she leans forward, she can picture herself falling, falling through that cold to the sidewalk below. Certainly
the fall would cause her to black out; surely it would all end as in her dream, the same dream that has followed her for years. Though it isn’t a river far below but concrete and metal and peace. She holds her hand up to the window to feel the nighttime chill, presses her fingertips against the glass to try and stop the tremor there.

  3.

  He’s pulled to the curb this evening instead of into the driveway around back for no other reason than to gain a different point of view. He sits in his car, the engine off and ticking in the cool air, and looks up at the house. The trees brushing against the upper windows are bare in the white winter sky; he’ll need to cut them back in the spring. The house looks empty. He knows there is no one inside; Karen is still at work and here he is sitting in his car. The second story is never used anyway, save for a small bedroom in the back that he keeps as an office and only rarely visits. Even if he and his wife were inside, he thinks, any passerby on the sidewalk would look up and think the same thing: empty.

  He’s returned home from an interview for a story he’s writing for a local business news daily. It’s a fluff piece, a profile on a twentysomething attorney who’s just signed on with an old-money firm in Memphis. He’d let his imagination wander several times, distracted by a riverboat’s wake far below on the Mississippi and a pigeon making a home on the granite ledge just beyond the window glass, as the kid told how he would be bringing fresh eyes—and social media—to the firm. The newspaper’s editor has a hard-on for social media stories. This one will pay next to nothing, fifty dollars, and be read by no one other than that attorney and his proud mother.

  Such is the life of a freelancer, though, a new title for Frank Severs, having only recently been laid off by the newspaper he’d worked at for nearly seventeen years. The severance will carry him through much of the year if he skimps and stretches it, but the idle time at home is driving him mad, so he’s begun taking on work with local publications and editors he’s met over the years. Be careful what you wish for, he’d laughed to Karen when the assignment had come through. Work is work, she’d said. He said this qualified as a student internship. But he went anyway, if only to break up a day.