“And so had you?”
He nodded and puckered his mouth in further thought. “We had a common interest in literature and we both believed in the magic of good writing to take one away. My wife had passed only a few months before Francesca began coming in, and conversation was easy; we were both lonely. We talked about books, of course, and our favorite authors. The talk led to a weekly coffee at a little shop that used to be next door, and that soon became twice weekly. It was more than a year before I invited her to my apartment just around the corner. Even there we were slow, still talking about books and her children or my late wife, even Oliver and music. It was another month before we both summoned up the courage to go to bed. It’s a short distance, it turned out, from the magic of literature to the magic of love.”
Frank’s scalp was tingling with the story and the pain in Lucchesi’s voice. He was touched and thought then of Karen and the distance between them. “You loved her?”
Lucchesi nodded and removed his glasses, wiping his eyes. “And she loved Oliver. And her children, her family. But he spent a lot of time away, months at a time, and, as I said, she was lonely. Oh, I don’t mean to say I was used only for physical intimacy. There were feelings there, very real feelings, but she never would have left her husband. Even when that woman came from France and threatened everything that Francesca held dear, she didn’t leave him. And I knew that, I understood. She filled a void for me, just as I did for her. We became such close friends and were in love on some level. I miss her now.”
“Did he ever find out?”
Lucchesi shook his head and put his glasses back on. “I don’t claim to understand what happened between Oliver and Francesca. Sure, there were stories of him on the road, of musicians a long way from home—everyone’s heard them. Francesca heard them and dealt with them in her own way. It wasn’t my place to interject or let him know how his wife spent her time. The man is a great musician and, I believe, a good man. He was lost for a time, but who isn’t?
“And all this, by the way, is off the record. Both for your story and for general knowledge. I hope you’ll respect the wish of an old man, and a long-deceased woman?”
“Of course. But, I’m curious, the French woman who you said ‘threatened everything that Francesca held dear’? Who was that?”
Lucchesi smiled again. “The intrepid reporter. That, I’m afraid, is not a tale for me to tell. But I wish you luck with your story, young man.”
Later that day, Frank lies across his bed on top of the spread and thumbs through an encyclopedia of jazz published in 1967. Like cutting through an old-growth tree, he believes he’s found a ring closest to the fire with this tome written while so many of the players were still playing, still so alive. He turns to the Ps and there he is: Pleasant, Oliver (1921– ); b. Wynona [sic], MS; performed with . . . and they’re all there. Dizzy, Teagarden, Armstrong, Billie, Coltrane, Miles, Cannonball, Hawkins . . . the list goes on.
He flips through a biography of Thelonious Monk, a newer book thick with the thrill of genius and chronology. Oliver and Monk wouldn’t have played together on the same stage, of course, but Frank has always been fascinated by the latter’s eccentricities. Solo Monk was one of the first jazz albums Frank ever bought. The first, thank God, was Kind of Blue. Without Miles Davis’s record, Frank may never have stuck with jazz. He was raised on his parents’ Beatles and Motown. His father had a thing for Chuck Berry and that led Frank to the Stones. Hendrix came a bit later, followed by Led Zeppelin and Van Morrison. He moved through punk fairly rapidly and took from it the Clash and the Velvet Underground. New wave was a lean trend for him, but Elvis Costello saw him through it until he landed on the other side with REM, U2, and the Cure.
Jazz, though, took a concerted effort. It was sought out. He’d heard it, as people do these days, in the background, at weddings or in department stores. It was the sound track of film and passed by somewhere on the lower end of the radio dial. But along with college and his want of creativity and his newfound passion for writing came a curiosity and craving for knowledge. So he snuck away from his friends and their Nirvana and Pearl Jam to a used record store down the Highland Strip and picked out names he’d heard . . . where? Someplace over the years. Everywhere, it seemed, once he saw those names on album sleeves: Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, John Coltrane, and Thelonious Monk.
He closes the book and lies back on the bed. He hefts it up to feel the weight of it, opens it and sniffs (he’d done this in the store as well, before he’d even paid for it), and then places it on his chest. He can feel his heartbeat against it. He looks over to his laptop, still open, and at the letters there on the open document, that crisp white “page.” Times New Roman, 12 pt. The type crawls across the page like insects. He reaches back over his head to find his phone among the pillows and presses Karen’s icon. It rings and he waits and he knows it isn’t her he’s thinking of, but the novel sitting on an unused desk in an unused room of the unused second floor of his house. He thinks of what Lucchesi had said about “the magic of good writing to take one away” and the power some people, Frank included, place in books.
“We had a habit, Francesca and I,” Lucchesi had said, not wanting to end his reverie, just as one might want a favorite novel to go on and on, for those characters to live long after the book is shut. “In the books I gave her, not those she purchased of her own accord, but the ones that I personally chose from my shelves or sought out at other bookstores and from scouts and dealers, I would inscribe with a small ‘ML’ in a top corner of the inside cover. And she would, upon finishing the book, put her ‘FP’ on the final page. Whatever was in between, I suppose, whatever world had been created and populated by those characters, belonged to us. It was silly, really, but I like to think of those books, of our initials and our stories, living on today, long after she’s gone.”
It isn’t silly, Frank told him. Reading and literature had brought the shopkeeper and Francesca Pleasant together, two people who were lost and lonely in the world. They had brought Frank and Karen together as well. Fiction, the landscape of make-believe and romance and fantasy, is a force to reckon with and still makes Frank’s heart beat quickly when he considers what it might all mean for him.
He first met Karen in the bar near the university. It was the early nineties and she’d worn a flannel shirt tied around her waist and a Nirvana T-shirt—the uniform of the day. She’s tall and her height was what he’d first noticed, followed by her hair, strawberry blond hanging down her back and over one eye. He and his friends sat at a small table crowded with empty beer bottles and spent cigarettes, talking of the future and past as if those bottles and cigarettes held the answers. He noticed her when she’d pass by, combat boots heavy on the tile floor, on her way to the restroom. She went a lot.
“I wanted you to notice me,” she told him later. “I’d go in there and stand around, check my makeup, and read graffiti—the other girls probably thought I was some kind of pervert—and then I’d hold my breath as I walked past you again, just hoping you’d look my way.”
“I figured it for a urinary-tract infection,” he’d said, and they both laughed. “Either way, I guess it worked.”
That semester was filled with laughter. Frank and Karen would walk the train tracks from the bar, past the university, to the sloping lawn behind the water-pumping station. Karen told him she liked the old building with its soaring windows and WPA-era art deco ornaments. She told him she was majoring in accounting because it’s what her father did—“Figures and sums are the family business.” But she had a streak of color in her, a coppery stream that cut through the unmoving stone of mathematics and statistics. That stream floated art and music and literature. She had a nascent interest in abstract paintings and alternative music, and a great love for Jane Austen and nineteenth-century prose. Frank helped to guide her, channeled that stream just as his high school love had for him—through easy conversation both in and
out of bed.
His high school girlfriend had left him for a greater love—education, and Sarah Lawrence College. A long-distance relationship wouldn’t work, she’d said, and he’d taken her on her word just as he’d trusted her in all else. Even as he moved on with his life, he ached for her. She left him, but left him with a greater understanding of who he was.
It was Karen who showed him who he wanted to be. They would lie back in the grass, the motors from the pumping station vibrating the ground beneath them, and look down at their school, and they would talk of writing and literature and very little of accounting. They would kiss and touch and he would find the courage to say, “I want to be a writer.”
Karen, with a warmth spreading through her chest, would encourage him, wallow in this dream with him as though they were skinny-dipping in the water that flowed behind and below them. “But you should be a reporter, finish journalism school,” she said, her bloodline of net pay and bottom lines still coursing through her newly engorged heart. Neither could have predicted the slow crumbling of the fourth estate in their new springtime of love.
In the bar, on the lawn, in her dorm and his apartment, they grew closer, made love, dreamed, and planned. They became inseparable and married only weeks after graduation. He began a novel that same summer, it coming to him in bits and pieces on their drive to the Gulf Coast for a honeymoon. He stayed up late nights typing on an electric typewriter in their small apartment in Midtown Memphis. She went to work for her father’s firm and Frank was hired as a copy clerk for The Commercial Appeal. When he was eventually hired as a reporter, he saw it as a stepping-stone that would lead him to a larger market or a career as a novelist. He never expected to be there seventeen years later, still as a reporter. He never expected to earn less than Karen, who worked the corporate world as though she were fly-fishing, tugging a line here, dropping bait there, until she’d hooked some of the grander species in the small pond of Memphis. Neither had he expected to be unemployed in his forties.
He had expected to finish that novel, and she’d expected to have a baby.
When the first miscarriage occurred, Karen had been devastated. It had taken so long just to get pregnant that she believed she was owed that baby. The early days of pregnancy were spent planning and dreaming and took them both back to those warm spring days on the hill of the pumping station behind the university. They even went there one afternoon with cheese and bread to lie on a blanket and take turns pressing their eager palms to Karen’s newly inhabited belly. They volleyed names back and forth—literary names from their favorite novels, musical names from a decade, five decades before. They were run off by a security guard like a couple of college kids, laughing and stumbling down the hill.
When she lost it, when the hummingbird heartbeat had stopped, so did the dreams, the plans. Frank would try to engage Karen, suggesting she read a newly released book or one of her old Jane Austen friends, but she waved him off, saying she had work to do. She seemed annoyed by his constant need for music in every room of the house or the way he could disappear into thought and take notes on scraps of paper or napkins about what he found there in his mind.
They would try again. And again. There were two more pregnancies lost, each met with lower and lower expectations. Those lowered expectations seemed to extend to each other, and one another’s needs, over time. Frank still loved Karen with all he had, and she him, but it was a love emptied of passion and spontaneity. As empty as the second floor of their house, as empty as the unfinished nursery and the sheet of paper still scrolled into Frank’s college typewriter.
“Hello?”
He’s calling from habit and out of a sense of obligation, and he’d hoped to let the phone ring until just before Karen’s voice mail picked up, knowing she’d see he called. He puts the phone back to his ear. “Hey! I was about to hang up. What’re you doing?”
“Working. Where are you?”
“Hotel. Typing up notes from an interview this morning.”
“Oscar?”
“Oliver. Yeah, interesting guy. Where’re you?”
“On my way to a client’s.”
“Which?”
“Spillman.”
“Hey, little lady.” He says it as caricature in a growly, musky voice.
“That’s the one. I’m late, can I call you back?”
“Yeah. I’ll be going to his show again, but it won’t be until later.”
“I’ll be going to bed early anyway.”
“Feeling bad?”
“A little nauseous. Hormones don’t agree with me so much.”
Hormones. She’s started a round of shots again. Dammit, he thinks. I forgot. “Two shots so far, huh? Since yesterday?”
“Yep. I’m all hopped-up, crazy and pukey as ever. So come on home so you can get some of this.” It’s Karen’s way of making light of the situation, but it always leaves Frank in an awkward place. He never knows what to say when she detours down that road, whether to console or play along. But he always tries, and usually to disastrous effect.
“I’ll want some by the time I get back.”
“It’ll take you that long?” Karen is always quicker and always more vicious.
“I’m ready now,” he says, trying to salvage this, trying to climb his way up. “I’ll be ready tonight if you want to get a little dirty online.” He says this yet finds his mind is wandering, not to their bedroom but just down the hall, up the stairs of their house, and into the office he hasn’t entered in months. He’s sitting at the desk and there it is: a clean white sheet of typing paper.
“Too sick, like I said. Sorry.”
He is relieved. Relief is not the feeling he wants to have, but it is the one that emerges and he breathes easier.
“Here I am,” she says. “I’m late so I really do need to go.”
“Okay. I’ll talk to you soon. Love you.”
“Bye.”
6.
Guests are filing in and Ben signals to Marcie to get off of her phone. She turns her back to him and continues her low-volume argument. Ben shows a couple to their table. He should fire Marcie, he knows, for a myriad of reasons, but it is an asset, he also knows, to have guests greeted at the door by those breasts and then escorted to a table by that ass. Marcie is as much a decoration and fixture as the deco wall sconces and ornate millwork on the bar.
“What is it you’re waiting on?” Ben asks Andrew as he crosses back to the hostess stand. Andrew is leaning against the bar and staring at the door with a steaming cup of coffee at his elbow.
“What? Nothing, just watching the customers.”
“She’s coming back tonight?”
“Yeah.”
“Does she know your auspicious beginnings yet?”
“Shut it, Ben.”
Though Andrew Sexton knows who to ask for when he enters the hushed womb of Brooks Brothers, he never goes there anymore. He knows where and how to order off-menu from Midtown to Chelsea to SoHo. His favorite restaurant, though, serves Vietnamese off the books from a converted apartment over a donut shop in Alphabet City. If he ever needs to get someplace, a car service could be at his door in minutes, yet he’s memorized the subway and crosstown bus schedules.
Andrew Sexton was raised among privilege, attending the best schools and running with the most starched of Upper West Side boys and girls. His grooming was looked after and impeccable, and he was raised to take over the investment banking of his father and his father before him. It is a pedigree that boasts founding fathers of banks, foundations, a city, and a country. Andrew wants none of it. “What is it you want, Andrew?” a girl once asked him, a lily-white girl of seventeen in her pink bedroom with fresh linens and a view of Central Park. She was astride young Andrew in name-brand bra and panties, but she wasn’t talking about sex. She knew Andrew wanted her—they all did. She wanted to know what he wanted from life,
what he might provide her from those steel and glass buildings at the southern tip of her island. She ran the manicured nail of a long finger down his hairless teenage chest and asked again: “What is it you want?”
“I’m going to be an artist.”
It was the answer she wasn’t expecting; it was the first time he’d said it out loud and surprised even himself when it came from his lips. It would be the last thing anyone expected to hear from a Sexton. And what sort of artist? They would ask. Fine arts? Studies in Rome and Paris? Days spent copying the masters in the Louvre and Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, champagne-filled nights in the arms of a baroness? That was all acceptable, though barely—a distraction and hobby for his early years. Abstract expressionism? A bit more difficult to swallow, to convince Mother and Father’s friends that it is worthwhile. A rogue figure in the family, yet manageable with a loft in SoHo that is both residence and studio, and a white-walled gallery in Chelsea selling his work for the cost of one of those Brooks Brothers suits. Perhaps a profile in the Times’ Arts and Leisure section, certainly a mainstay on page six.
“What sort of artist, Andrew?” that young, nubile kept-woman-in-waiting asked.
“A tattoo artist.”
All hope is lost. The suits, the restaurants, the cars, the business, the legacy. He has brothers—the legacy of name isn’t an issue—but where did it all go wrong? The schools were the best money could buy, as were the friends. The blood, certainly, is top tier. A tattoo artist? “Why, I’ve never heard of such a thing,” his mother said. “No son of mine . . . ,” his father blustered. And Andrew, to his credit, didn’t ask for suits or food or cars. He didn’t ask for help. He didn’t even ask for their understanding. Andrew Sexton, of the Upper West Side Sextons, instead held a series of restaurant jobs, paying for his own art lessons, equipment, rent, and board. While a large sum of money sat in trust until he “came to his senses,” Andrew was sucked into a whirlpool of drugs and hustling, living for a time off what he could steal or scrounge, and still he didn’t go back to his family. Two years were spent in the gutter, making his way from tattoo parlor to tattoo parlor, offering to sweep up or wash windows for an apprenticeship. He’d keep one job for a while before losing it when he showed up to work high, or not at all. Despite the snowstorm of cocaine and, later, heroin, he learned a thing or two. He practiced and got better before losing a week or more to the streets, having to work—or steal—twice as hard to buy his tattoo rig back from hock.
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