Five Night Stand: A Novel

by Richard J. Alley

  “Him? He my neighbor, Winky.”

  “Name ain’t Winky.”

  Oliver laughs at what he considers their banter. It’s not what he’d had with Hamlet, but he’ll take any consistent call-and-response like he used to have on the bandstand.

  “Can I call on you again, Oliver? Maybe we could get together and talk some more?”

  “You call me anytime, young man. Come on out and see me tonight, too. Tell ’em you there for me, you on the list.”

  Oliver loves telling stories, loves having his mind travel back down dusty roads and debris-littered waterways to moments he’d thought were forgotten. Leona Thibodeaux. My God, that was so many lifetimes ago, he thought he’d never remember it, despite his promise to his teenage self that those weeks in New Orleans would stay with him forever. How much has happened since then? Travel, Francesca, kids, recording, fame, music, music, music . . . and yet here Leona had been this morning, right here at breakfast in New York City.

  “Some things, they never gonna leave you, Winky,” Oliver says to his guest after Frank takes his leave. “Good food, good drink, good woman, the right song. Never. Stick with you like them flapjacks on your ribs.”

  “I don’t even know what you’re talking about, Licorice.”

  “You will, son. You will.”

  4.

  Darkness. Closeness. Noise: loud clanging like the trolley on St. Charles or her friend Ché on his cowbell—such awful rhythm for a percussionist. A beating, in and out, in and out, in and out. Steady. Agnes retreats inside herself; it’s all she can do once slid into the MRI tube as she’s been over and over again the past few years. “You think I’d be used to it,” she’d said to the tech, but you never get comfortable with being buried alive. “Is it like being swallowed?” Sherman had asked her once when she’d returned after a trip to Tulane. Yeah. Yeah, it is. She swallows hard, knowing she has almost half an hour to go on the inside. She tastes scotch and cigarette tar on the back of her tongue, the grittiness of a fingertip full of Colgate in her teeth. I can’t believe I lay around that shitty apartment fucking and drinking shitty Starbucks coffee all morning instead of going back to my hotel, she thinks. Smells like a bayou cathouse in this tube. I can’t believe he needs another scan. Agnes had had all her records sent to Dr. Mundra, but, as he explained in that soothing, paternal voice of his, his preference is to have as up-to-date an image as possible.

  The first time Agnes was slid into an MRI—swallowed, buried—she was sixteen years old. She’d been told that the machine was a giant magnet and asked if she had any metal inside of her. She thought then of her body as a machine with gear wheels and pistons, and the plugs and clamps she’d seen laid out on an oil-stained sheet her daddy spread on the driveway when he was taking his old truck engine apart. She thought of herself as bionic and with the invincibility of a teenager and, for the first time in a while, considered that the test might be routine, that the film might show that she was as healthy as any teen anywhere. “No,” she’d answered, “no metal.” Did she have any jewelry, any piercings that weren’t immediately visible? “No,” she said, smirking and glancing over at her mother, whose raised eyebrows showed mock horror.

  She had been taken out of school midday that Friday, something almost unheard of and frowned upon so late in the school year as all focus turned to final exams—as if such benign tests were at all important. Her father had wanted to be there, but he couldn’t miss work with the cost of that scan, possibly the first of many and as expensive as a small used car, he’d said. While she waited in a thin cotton gown with a pattern of ducks in flight all over it, she watched her mother behind a levee of paperwork and the tiny vertical wrinkle between her eyebrows that would grow and become permanent over the next few years while the tests showed, just as that first one would, that what was happening in her young body was anything but typical.

  That first time in the machine had been the scariest. It was the unknown, except for the familiarity of nightmares, and a nascent fear of enclosed spaces and the wonder of suffocation. The tech, a thin Hispanic woman not much older than Agnes, had told her to keep her eyes closed and breathe steadily and calmly. The first thing Agnes did after the mechanical whirring and movement stopped was to open her eyes. And then she pressed the panic button and the whirring began again, pulling her from the tube. When her head finally emerged, she was looking up at Rosario. “Fuck. That,” Agnes said, rising to go.

  A smile spread over Rosario’s face and she pushed her back gently. She spoke in a near whisper, although they were the only two in the room. “Scary as shit, huh?”

  “Scarier.”

  “I know, baby. What you gotta do, you gotta find some happy place and go there. Close your eyes and sink down there into your mind and into whatever gives you comfort. I went into that tube a year ago”—she shrugged—“worked for me. You got one of those places? Something to calm you?” Rosario was still whispering.

  Agnes nodded and Rosario patted her shoulder and reached for the button to slide her back in. Agnes held to Rosario’s wrist. “What was your happy place?”

  Rosario glanced back through the window and into the control room before leaning down closer to Agnes’s face. “Oral sex. My boyfriend’s good at it so I just went back to that in my mind.”

  Agnes was sent laughing into the machine and kept her eyes closed that time. She didn’t know much about cunnilingus then—her boyfriends still had an adolescent focus on their own parts—so she thought of sitting on the bench next to her father as he played piano. For the next twenty-seven minutes she went through a list of songs note by note, seeing her father’s hands and moving her own in her mind. Even as the clanging and pinging of the MRI’s engine filled her senses and worked to push her fear to the forefront of her thinking, the music of Garland, Pleasant, Monk, Evans, and Ellington filled her head and pulled her out of harm’s way. Before she knew it, her concert was over and she was being spit out again.

  “Find it?” Rosario had asked, her face a blur in the white light of the open room.

  Agnes nodded. “What did they find? From your MRI?”

  “Migraines, no perceptible cause. I take Tylenol, try to get my boyfriend to work on me.” She winked. “Hope that’s all it is for you, too, baby.”

  Agnes stands on the perimeter of the Great Lawn and looks in awe at the expanse of meadow, the trees, and the grand city beyond Central Park. It is the stuff of movies and the stuff of song, and never did a melody mean so much as when she hummed it under a winter-blue sky and with a view such as this. Anytime she’s left a hospital (how many have there been?), Agnes has felt the need to be outside, but never as much as after an MRI. To counteract the claustrophobia, she’s walked to the park as fast as she could to lie down on her back in the grass and look up at the sky. After the cold metal, the grass under the palms of her hands and against her neck feels like life itself; the sky is a dome of cerulean and the last leaves of color tumble over her as the wind picks up. The day before, she’d needed the grittiness of the Village and a walk through Manhattan’s streets to strip away the false sterility of the hospital and its odor of chemicals and industrial astringents. Today she just wants to breathe.

  After her first MRI, her mother had wanted to do something special and took Agnes shopping. Her mother suggested they look for a prom dress; she was grasping then for a normal moment, for a classic, cliché mother-daughter moment because she was scared. Agnes’s mother didn’t know how many more of these moments she might be allowed. She didn’t know if she’d have the chance to see her daughter in a college gown or to plan a wedding. Because she didn’t know if she’d hold a first grandchild born to her only daughter, she wanted an afternoon of lunch and girl talk and shopping.

  The idea was as out of character and out of context for the two of them as a sixteen-year-old with an incurable neurological disorder. Agnes and her tomboy ways, preferring to climb a ladder to a
rooftop with her daddy or play a seventy-year-old torch song, her mother more comfortable with a clean white sheet of paper and stick of charcoal, and the mess such an afternoon of creativity might make.

  But each went through with it for the other, each willing to suspend routine for an afternoon to make the other happy, until it all fell apart. She and her mama had picked out an armload of dresses at Goldsmith’s department store, laughing like sisters at the different styles and wondering how Agnes’s thin frame might fill one out, before carrying them back to the fitting room. In that small cube with its floor-to-ceiling door and overhead fluorescent light, the walls closed in around Agnes. She heard the clanging and whirring of the MRI tube she’d left only an hour before and believed the air had left that little room.

  “What is it, Agnes? Sweetie? You look pale—are you okay?” her mother said, dropping the dress she’d been holding into a heap on the floor. “Oh, baby, you’re shaking like a leaf. Agnes?”

  Agnes leaned back to feel the cool mirror on her bare back. She slid down until she was crouching and hugged her arms, skin raised with gooseflesh even as sweat beaded on her forehead and across her upper lip. Her mother opened the neck hole of her T-shirt and slid it back over her daughter’s head. “Agnes? Talk to me, Agnes!”

  Her mind raced with possible causes for this erratic behavior. Was it an adverse reaction to the MRI, a side effect of the radiation or whatever was in there? Or was this it? The end? And she said over and over in her mind, Please don’t let this be it, please don’t let this be it.

  “Mama?” Agnes said, as evenly and coolly as she could, her eyes closed and her right hand trembling as much as her left.

  “Yes, baby? You okay?”

  “Mama, open the door.”

  “But your shirt. Here, let me slip it over your arms.”

  “The door, Mama.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  When her mother opened the dressing room door, Agnes shot out like a bullet, running into the prom dress department, past shoes and accessories, through menswear, and out the door into the parking lot. Her T-shirt flapped behind her like a cape around her neck, her bare torso attracting stares from people uncertain of her gender. By the time her mother found her, Agnes was sitting on the hood of their car chewing at a hangnail. Her mother leaned back against the car and they both stared off at the department store doors in the distance.

  “I didn’t like those dresses,” Agnes said, and they both fell into laughter.

  They told Agnes’s father the story at dinner and he laughed with them until tears came to his eyes, both at the comedy of his daughter streaking through Goldsmith’s and the tragedy of his daughter inside a medical machine—and, too, for the fear of the unknown. He didn’t laugh at all when his wife told him later that the boy who had asked Agnes to prom had backed out. Teenagers could be cruel, and when word got around that Agnes was having tests done in a hospital, and classmates noticed that her left hand never stopped quivering, rumors of cancer and AIDS and sickness and contagion and everything else children don’t know a damn thing about scared that boy off. He came up with an excuse not to go, though Agnes heard he was at the dance with a girl from Dyer County, a girl who may not have heard that he might already be infected.

  Her father did finally laugh to himself, however, one day that summer when he came across that boy’s prized, restored Mustang at the Hatchie bottoms where kids went to ride four-wheelers and drink, and he slipped it into neutral and eased the front end of that car into the river.

  Agnes thinks of all of this now, here, on her back in Central Park. She wishes her daddy were with her, wishes he could have heard Oliver Pleasant play last night. She thinks of how much she’s looking forward to hearing him play again tonight. Andrew said he’d reserve a table for her, though he looked hurt by her eagerness, knowing it wasn’t for him but for Oliver. Such a soft boy. So many feelings worn right there on his sleeve, tattooed across his thin wrists. She should feel guilty for accepting such kindness even though there are no feelings for Andrew, but she’s behaved worse, she supposes.

  She suddenly realizes that Landon will probably be calling soon. She still smells Andrew on her and needs to shower, too. She should go. “Just a few more minutes,” she says, and stares up at one lonely cloud making its way across the sky, then closes her eyes to it all.

  5.

  Frank sits on the bed in his hotel room and types the notes from his morning interview with Oliver. He laughs to himself remembering stories of Leona and Madame Fairbanks and wishes he had someone here to share them with. Oliver and the boy were an odd pair; he makes a note of the way Oliver treated him like a doting, though distant, grandfather might. He made the kid eat his eggs and sausage, handing him a napkin and ordering him to wipe his mouth, but then would seem to forget the kid was there beside him for some time while telling lurid stories.

  After breakfast, with Oliver’s gravelly voice and laughter still in his head, Frank had walked back to the bookstore to see what was on the shelves regarding jazz. “Do you believe in fate?” the old man said from behind the counter when Frank walked in. He was sitting at a wooden desk piled high with paper invoices, catalogues, reference books, and a tall stack of novels at his elbow that he went through one by one, taking notes on them in a yellow legal pad.

  “Fate?” Frank said once he’d found the source of the voice among the clutter. “Yeah, sure. I guess.”

  “I saw you at Pleasant’s gig last night.”

  “You were there? I didn’t see you.”

  “You were busy talking with Davis McComber; I didn’t want to interrupt.”

  “You know Davis?”

  “Sure, sure. He’s a customer. Good writer, too.”

  “He is, and young. Did you enjoy the show?”

  “Oh, sure, I’ve never been disappointed. And I sat, as it happens, with the other Memphian—a gracious young lady.”

  “Is that right? Weird. I’ll do you one better: I just left Oliver. I was interviewing him for a story.”

  “Newspaperman? As endangered a species as jazz artist. As rare in the wild as a seller of books.”

  “You don’t have to tell me; I was laid off last month. This is freelance work.”

  “No shame there, young man. Talent is talent regardless of the medium.”

  Frank has Wikipedia, of course, and can summon up any artist with full bio and audio clips with the click of a mouse, but he still enjoys flipping through books and the thrill of not knowing what he might find on the next page. As he walks through the bookstore slowly, pulling out books and taking his time finding the section labeled “Music,” he appreciates the heft and density of the objects on the shelves. He values the effort that someone put into researching and committing a biography to paper; it is something that can’t be changed at the whim of someone else, somewhere else, with their own click of an anonymous mouse. A book is as permanent as our past, as lasting as ink.

  As it happened, the music section was large, more than Frank had hoped for, and situated against the far wall from the front counter and door. Frank stood in front of it, staring up at vertical and horizontal spines, some books as large as coffee tables and others mere pamphlets. Bare, World War II–era brick was visible through gaps in blues, opera, and rock and roll. His eyes drifted to the street through the large plate-glass window speckled with flyers advertising readings, poetry slams, and music revues to passersby. The wind had picked up and he watched a small cyclone whip down Bleecker and lift leaves and trash, tossing them into the air before laying them all down again on the hood of a cab. The driver looked irritated, more at the fact that there was no one to blame than for the mess itself. Something was blowing in out there.

  “Looks like snow,” Lucchesi called from across the store.

  Frank had asked about the other Memphian. A young woman, Lucchesi had told him. “Young and pretty, though pale, as
if she might benefit from an afternoon outdoors.”

  “What does she do?” A reporter’s questions are like a chef’s knives or a cop’s pistol, always there by his side and at the ready; always sharp, always loaded.

  “Didn’t say, though she loves the music. Perhaps she’s a musician herself?”

  “Here alone?”

  “Appeared to be, at least she was last night, though the waiter seemed taken with her. I don’t believe I’m so old as to have overlooked that.”

  “Are you a longtime fan of Pleasant’s?”

  “Oh my, yes. His wife as well, I guess you could say. I used to sell her books. Francesca Pleasant was a voracious reader.”

  “She died, didn’t she?”

  “Yes, twenty-two years ago.”

  Lucchesi had slipped away from him then, through the transom of the door, taken away on the brisk air blowing through the streets like a wind tunnel. He’d gone back in time someplace where Frank wasn’t invited, left the bookshop with only a shell where his body had been. It didn’t take an investigative reporter to see that there was something more than books and music between this man and the Pleasants.

  “You were close?” Frank said, bringing the old man back to the shop, but slowly, allowing him to lower himself to the floor at his own speed.

  Lucchesi smiled and his blue eyes twinkled a bit behind his glasses. “It shows?”

  “Most people would have simply said ‘about twenty years.’ I’m sorry to pry; it’s none of my business.”

  The old man looked to the windows as if Francesca might be there. “She was lonely, Oliver was gone a lot. She seemed to take refuge in her books, as though the characters were more than just paper and print. They’d become her friends, I believe.”