Five Night Stand: A Novel

by Richard J. Alley

  That old piano had made a soothing, comfortable music that made Agnes think of home, and her father, no matter how far away she traveled.

  She woke up just outside of Winona, Mississippi, about two hours from Memphis. There had been a delay, a freight train slow to switch tracks as they’d left Louisiana, and the light outside was waning. Landon was still there, stick-straight in the chair and reading a Victorian-era novel. It was as though he hadn’t stirred in all those hours. She had idle time to lie there and watch him, something she’d never really done before with his skittering through crowds and her own focus on the piano. With the reading light illuminating the side of his face, he reminded her of an old picture she’d seen of William S. Burroughs. His face was long and lean, the pallid skin sagging and mottled with age. She may have seen that photo framed in Landon’s house, she recalled.

  The train ticket was a gift that she’d been too drained to reject; she was too tired for any fights just then. She was grateful for the ticket and comforted by his presence. The trip to New York and visit to his doctor would be something else. It was a last resort, perhaps her very last hope. She maintained her dignity and wasn’t a kept woman; she was damaged, and she only wanted to be whole.

  As the train car swayed gently like a boat, she thought he looked calm, more human than when he played the host or favored guest. She wasn’t sure which was the real Landon Throckmorton, but something told her that he was relieved to be sitting in a train, quietly reading in half-light instead of on society’s stage. She wanted him to go on reading, to envelope himself in the silence and solitude and rhythmic movement, but he’d looked up from his book and caught her eye. He dropped the book to his lap and smiled and she was sure then that this was the real Landon.

  There was a car waiting for them (of course there was) at Central Station in Memphis. It dropped Landon at the Peabody Hotel, where all doors were opened for him by tall, lanky black men in top hats and tails. The driver continued down Highway 51, past the hospital where Agnes’s daddy had taken her only three years before and poured his heart out to a woman he didn’t know, something that must have been hard for such a proud man to have done. But it was for his daughter, and she knew he would have taken that hospital apart brick by brick and put it back together again if they could have helped her. The bright lights of the hospital and low streetlights of uptown gave way to a scab of a city with boarded-up factories and shops, rusted cars, and men and women wandering from corner to corner as though help, or an answer, could be found the next block over. When they crossed the I-40 turnoff into Frayser, then Millington, and passed fields of soybean and cotton, Agnes breathed easier. She was home, the smell of fresh mowing and wood fires heralded her arrival and she felt her heart speed up. The anticipation, the excitement of homecoming, though, was emptied from her when the driver pulled into the long, rutted drive and up to the gravel, parking in front of her childhood home. She sat in the backseat and looked up at the house through the car window. It was massively white and wooden and looked, for all the lights on inside and the shine of a full moon across its eaves, lonely.

  2.

  Agnes awakes in the apartment of Andrew Sexton. It is amazing for its closeness; she’s never seen anything like it. The room is only slightly wider than the queen mattress she lies on, yet the ceiling is so far from where she rests that it makes her head spin. Though perhaps that’s the scotch. She pulls her hand from under the covers to remind herself of its slight tremor. With her other hand—her good hand, as she’s come to think of it—she reaches for a pack of Nat Sherman Reds on the cinder block next to the bed and lights one with a brass Zippo lying nearby. Sitting back against the wall, cold against her bare shoulder blades, she blows a stream of smoke the same color as the sheets she’s tangled in. She belches and feels better.

  There is no clock as she looks around the room and blinks the night back into focus. There was a shitty little bar after the sophistication of the jazz club and an exuberant Irishman named Tommy serving shot after shot of whiskey, whether asked for or not. She was introduced to people, so many she could never hope to remember their names. And then there was dancing. Christ, that music was awful, the throb of it coming back to her temples and making the room swim even more—such awful music. They had walked for what felt like miles through the night, a cold night along city streets still alive with clatter even at what must have been a late hour. The light from cafés and all-night bodegas spotlighted individuals and groups of people as though she were meant to take notice of them, though she knew she’d never be able to recall their faces. Like the ornately framed and spotlighted paintings, centuries old and thick with oil, that she’d stared at on the walls of the Brooks Museum of Art in Overton Park as a child in Memphis while on school field trips. Her classmates ran around her, ignoring the treasures in front of them. She is unable to recall a single detail of those paintings now—not a face, not a body, not a gesture, artist, or title.

  There had been music everywhere last night, not just the mindless, tribal bass of the clubs, but music in the streets and coming from hidden doorways, from passing cars and apartment windows near enough to the sidewalk to be scratched by the naked branches of trees that fought to survive in the unlikeliest terrain. It had reminded her of New Orleans. Her ears ring with it all now and she closes her eyes to make one melody come through clear, but all she can summon is Oliver Pleasant playing “Crepuscule with Nellie.” Thelonious Monk, you beautiful, crazy son of a bitch! she hears her father shout the way he would some nights.

  A few feet away a toilet flushes and her waiter comes through the door wearing only blue briefs with a trickle of his business on the front; he pulls his hair back into a ponytail, exposing the two hoop earrings he wears. She grimaces as her stomach turns over again. He is tall, seems even taller from her perspective, lying as she is practically on the floor, and his rippled skin has become a broad expanse now released from the constraints of clothing. He is tattooed. The left arm, from shoulder to just below the elbow, is a series of designs in crisp reds and blues with highlights of white and yellow. An octopus, all black and gray, covers his wealth of muscled back, its curious tentacles reaching up and over his shoulders to his chest, the tip of one tentacle—becoming blacker where it narrows down to its pointed end—teases the silver barbell speared through his right nipple. “Turn around,” she says, and he does, because it’s more demand than request. “Let me see what all you got there.” The tentacles wind down and around his hips and disappear into the blue briefs. Agnes is certain she knows just where those tentacles end, yet she can’t, for the life of her, remember where or how. She shifts her weight below the sheets, and the soreness she feels lets her know those tentacles grasp an impressive treasure.

  “Good morning,” he says. “Everything look okay?” He falls back into bed beside her and picks the cigarette from her fingers, taking a long, dramatic drag from it. She takes another from the pack and lights it.

  She shrugs and says “Hello,” and thinks what a stupid, simple thing it is to say, as close as they’ve obviously been. Outside, a garbage truck’s hydraulics squeal as it fills itself with an entire building’s worth of refuse. “I’m cold,” she adds.

  “Do you want some coffee? I mean, I don’t have any, but I could run out for some. Starbucks is just on the corner.”

  She looks to the window, the building across the narrow street almost close enough to touch, and up to the gray sky beyond. “My apartment in New Orleans is about sixteen times this size. The doors open right up to a balcony that overlooks Royal.”

  “Sounds nice. I’ve never been.”

  She thinks of Sherman, up by now and shuffling through the Quarter with his saxophone over his shoulder, heading to one of his regular gigs where tourists will drop money at his feet as they wait on beignets and alligator hash. He’ll be distraught that he hasn’t heard from her; he’s like a little boy. But then, Agnes has never noticed much difference b
etween her boys and her men. “You should go. Sometime.”

  “What are you in New York for? You never did say.”

  She shrugs again.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a girl drink as much as you did. Jesus, downtown is going to have to re-up on booze before tonight. And you talked, too, a lot about music—‘the music of the city,’ you called it.”

  She blushes at the thought and tries to recall the night again, purge it into the present, but only comes up with the taste of bacon. “Bacon.”

  “You’re hungry?”

  “Did we already eat breakfast?”

  “Yeah, well, about 3:00 a.m. we stopped at Junior’s. Not sure I’ve ever seen a girl eat like that, either. You put away an entire number four and then ate half of mine. Caitlynn and Eric loved that.”

  “Who?”

  “We met up with them last night. My friends?” He stares into her blank face. “You don’t remember much of anything at all, do you? Maybe you shouldn’t have mixed the rotgut I bought you with Ben’s high-end scotch.”

  “Maybe you should mind your own fucking business.” She looks back toward the gray sky, smokes some more.

  The first time he’d seen her in the club, Andrew had thought Agnes to be frail. That was a mistake, the pale skin and thin frame equating to weakness in his mind. Now he knows her as someone comfortable in the night. She’d moved along New York’s streets at ease, to the point that he sometimes had to rush to keep up with her. Outbursts like this one, telling him to mind his business, appear to be the norm for her; she takes nothing off anyone. He’s not sure he’s ever known a woman with the inner strength and conviction of Agnes, certainly not any women in his family. It’s that strength, he thinks, this inability she seems to have to give a shit what anyone might think about her, that is sexier than any physical attribute.

  He falls back on the bed to stare up at the ceiling. “You want to eat?”

  The thought of food makes her queasy and she rises to go to the bathroom, naked in the dim light of his apartment, which she realizes consists of only the one room and a bathroom. He watches her walk away from him.

  “I want coffee,” she says. “Why don’t you be a dear and reach across the street there and see if your neighbor’s got any.”

  In the bathroom, little more than a closet holding a toilet and stand-up shower with a Star Wars curtain, she looks at herself in the mirror beneath a bare bulb. She looks at the circles under her eyes, her thin lips cracked from the cold night, and her hair knotted from wind and fucking. This isn’t the image of her New York self that she’d pictured back home. In the hospital, yes, maybe, but once outside those hallways, she’d expected only glitter and glamour. She straightens up and notices the angry purple and red of a hickey next to her left nipple. “Great,” she says to her reflection. She lowers the seat and pees, self-conscious of the sound with Andrew on the other side of the door. All she wants is a shower, but she’s scared to even look behind the curtain at what hygienic atrocities R2-D2 and Princess Leia might be hiding there. She thinks of her spotless hotel room with its clean sheets and toilet sanitized for her protection and lets out a sigh that tastes of bacon, cigarettes, and scotch. No toilet paper. “Great,” she says again.

  “I thought you said you’re from Memphis,” he says when she returns and begins searching through the sheets.

  “I am. Where are my panties?”

  He pulls them from under a pillow and holds them out to her. When she reaches for them, he grabs her wrist and pulls her down on top of him. “What about New Orleans? You said, ‘my apartment in New Orleans.’ . . .”

  He has his hands on her ass and she feels the cold metal of his thumb ring against her skin. “I’ve been there the past couple of years.”

  “Doing what?” He kisses her neck.

  “Andrew, come on, I need to go.” She tries to push her way up but is no match for him.

  “What do you do in New Orleans?”

  “I play piano.”

  He stops his aggressive affections and looks at her. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” She’s giving in to his kisses and touch and feels him stiffen beneath her, the smell of sex from the night before everywhere.

  “You any good?” He pulls her legs apart and strains against her.

  “Good enough.” She traces one of the octopus’s tentacles with her finger. She doesn’t have a tattoo of her own and has always found it odd that people are so willing and quick to alter their bodies permanently when her own body is being altered beyond her control.

  “Why did you come to New York?” he says.

  She licks the sterling-silver jewelry piercing his chest. “Shh . . .” And she begins the quest to remember where those tentacles might lead.

  3.

  The riverboat didn’t immediately point north. It traveled south to New Orleans as though siphoning blood through a vessel back to the heart, enriching it before pumping it out once again. The trip farther south made Oliver feel as though the captain had taken his musical career into consideration on the trip’s itinerary. Oliver didn’t know about jazz other than what he’d heard the man playing in his parents’ restaurant and what the train porters spoke of at their stops. He’d never even been outside of Winona.

  “When that paddleboat pulled up to the port of New Orleans,” he tells Frank, who is sitting across from him at Junior’s Diner, “it was like my spinal cord had finally connected to my brain so that all my senses came alive. There was music playing from the very minute we tied up. Music coming from the docks and the saloons and whorehouses, almost from the murky water itself—it filled the air and gave me a place. It felt like home, I guess is what I’m sayin. It put me in a mind I never had except those nights in my folks’ restaurant when the joint was shakin and everything just seemed to hum and stomp with the music. But it wasn’t only in the cover of dark like when we had to sneak around back home; no, it was during the blue early morning hours, the bright white of day, and suppertime, too. Music—always, baby, and forever.”

  Mr. Fairbanks, the musical director of the River Star Cruise Lines, and his wife had a house in New Orleans, in the Garden District, and it was there that they took young Oliver when they disembarked. The trolley—it was Oliver’s first time on a streetcar; New Orleans would become a treasure chest of firsts for the boy—carried them down a street called Canal, though there was no water.

  “It was a grown-up street with buildings and men in suits and hats,” Oliver recalls, “but there was still music, even on this workday. In the middle of the day!”

  The music was accentuated and brought to life by the swaying and rocking of the trolley car.

  Madame Fairbanks ushered him off the trolley and to a low, ornate iron fence and gate. Oliver didn’t enter right away; he could only stand, staring up at the towering lady in front of him. “Lady” was the only term he could think of for that austere house, so strong yet so fragile with its pale blue coloring and white gingerbread details. A porch the width of the house held rocking chairs and was shaded from the midday sun by an overhang. The rest of the small front yard was protected from the summertime sun by a massive oak tree in the neighbor’s yard, its Spanish moss hanging from branches and trying in vain to reach the coolness of that porch.

  “Come along, Oliver,” Madame Fairbanks called from the porch. She was a light-skinned mulatto with a hint of the islands around her eyes and nose. Oliver was unsure of her age—Madame Fairbanks seemed ageless in her high-collared dress and smooth skin—but she was beautiful at any age. Beautiful, yet stern. Once Oliver entered the house with its formal rooms and towering ceiling, he was welcomed by a wide and low piano. It was the only grand piano he’d ever seen and he stood for a moment and stared into its mouth and the rows of teeth and muscle there, just as he’d stood and stared up at the riverboat when he’d first arrived at the docks, at the skyscrapers from the tr
olley, and at the roofline of the Fairbanks House. New Orleans would hold him in awe the rest of his life, upon every return and with every memory no matter where he laid his head at night. When he couldn’t stand it any longer, when his fingers itched until he feared they might fall from his hands, he slid onto the bench to pound a rag, one of Mr. Fairbanks’s own compositions. He was stopped midway through the first bar by Madame Fairbanks pulling the cover over the keys, nearly severing Oliver’s fingers. “Not here, not a note of that devil music in this home.”

  “It was made known to me right off that, while Fairbanks was lord over the boat and the music and his musicianers while on the water, it was the madame who ruled in her house. And she wasn’t havin none of my shit in her parlor. Always thought it odd since it was the music that paid for the house in the first place,” Oliver says. “But that was her castle and she was the moat between me and any pleasure while under her roof.”

  Frank laughs, as he has several times already, feeding Oliver’s need to tell a story just as Oliver feeds his face with a plate of his usual bacon. Frank has hung on every word, ignoring his own plate while his coffee has gone cold, and is practically falling on the table as he leans in, scribbling to keep up with Oliver’s voice. Oliver seems to have a renewed vigor in the morning, not the tired, slightly slurred speech of his postshow reverie. This story is everything Frank had hoped for, everything he’d told Karen it would be, meeting the inflated expectations he’d given her in their kitchen that night over spaghetti.