Five Night Stand: A Novel

by Richard J. Alley

  It was a low time for Andrew, the lowest being a four-month stint at Rikers, a fortress his parents probably didn’t even know existed. It cleaned him up for a time, but he scored soon after release. Soon after that release, while sleeping days away on a concrete ledge beneath the Manhattan Bridge, he went to work for Ben Greenberg, washing dishes and taking out trash. Ben saw more to the boy than such work, and he also recognized the stench of despair and hopelessness. He reached out and rescued Andrew; the heart of Ira Greenberg still beat within his son.

  Ben pulled Andrew up and out of the sewer, cleaned him off, and cleaned him out. He stayed after him to go to AA meetings, to get out in the fresh air of parks, and to work toward his goals. Ben knew talent, not only when he heard it onstage but also when he saw it on a canvas, whether that canvas held oils or was a scar on skin. By staying clean and staying employed, Andrew was able to make new friends, a different sort of friend than he’d ever known—true friends—and he became happy again. It was a happiness not even his father’s money could buy; he’d found it on his own. He tried to keep his pasts—both of them—from these friends because he didn’t want to know if they were or were not the kind that money could buy, or the type who would run from weakness.

  Andrew, of course, didn’t marry the girl in the pink bra and panties. A tattoo artist? She was having none of that in her perfect future, though she did that day. It was the best sex she would have for years to come, while leaving Andrew with a taste for something more exotic.

  He watches the door like a puppy waiting for his master to return home. It has been five years since that girl asked what he wanted and he’s coming close to getting it, working by day for a tattoo parlor in Times Square, inking “I ♥ NY” and “9/11—Never Forget” on tourists. He feels he was on the right track, so close, and then he met Agnes Cassady and now he has a whole new want. Day to day, he thinks to himself. That’s how things change. If he could go back in time and again find himself beneath that perfect and poised girl going moist atop him, he would say, “I want to be an artist, and I want Agnes.”

  Andrew greets her before she’s completely seated, having been shown to her table by Marcie, who gives him a bored look. “Hey,” he says, words failing him. This is new for Andrew, a young man who, though he’s shaken the ornamentation of status from his surface and had it scrubbed with asphalt streets and broken concrete, can’t rid himself of the confidence that comes with wealth. It soaked into his skin like summer sun during a childhood spent in the Hamptons and on tennis courts along the Hudson. Yet in the presence of Agnes, whose indifference he finds so alluring, worn on her collarbone like a fragrance, he has trouble with the simplest greeting. “Good day?” He’s missed her, longed for her the minute she’d left his tiny apartment, leaving him alone in his warm, damp sheets.

  He doesn’t hear her reply; she appears to shrug, to toss her hair, to rub her bare shoulders for warmth. It is all exhilarating to him. “You left pretty quick this morning,” he says.

  “I was late.”

  “Meeting?”

  She shrugs again. “Scotch? Please?” She puts Andrew Sexton back in his place.

  The room is at capacity again. A buzz fills Agnes’s ear. It’s the excitement and music of the previous nights that has managed to penetrate Manhattan’s thick concrete crust, calling to people who want to know for themselves what forces have been moving beneath the surface of their streets and their safe day-to-day lives. Her attention is drawn to the door, where Marcie is turning away a party of four. The man, the leader of his pack, is irate. He is obviously not used to being told no. Marcie, also obviously, is taking great pleasure in being the first to do so.

  Despite the standing-room-only crowd, there is the same large, empty table beside Agnes’s that has been there the past two nights. The small “Reserved” placard in the center acts as a beacon for the angry silverback at the door who gestures toward it. He is finally intercepted by the bearded man in sandals and directed back outside.

  For Agnes, it’s the music. Always the music. She hasn’t come to New York for the pageantry, to gaze upon the fashions and fashionable or to drink in the elixir of celebrity. The music, ever since she was old enough to reach the keys from a piano bench, has been her life force. In those earliest days, the sound of the piano was intertwined with the closeness of her father. Memories of his music from that bench and his smell of coffee and sawdust are all the same to her. It’s what she missed the most back at home for the funeral. She sat on the bench in the family room of the old farmhouse playing the slow numbers that were her father’s favorites. She slowed them down another half step for the day. Still dressed in cemetery black, her mother sat beside her. Agnes laid her head on her mother’s thin shoulder and they both cried silently while Agnes played, the music the embodiment of a husband and father who had left the room too soon.

  The two women had traveled to downtown Memphis, whisked away from Tipton County and the buzz of cicadas by a Town Car, to a white-tablecloth restaurant and Landon Throckmorton. He charmed her mother, rising when she arrived and gently kissing the back of her hand. He expressed remorse for the passing of her husband and asked after him, and he listened intently and genuinely as Agnes and her mother traded stories.

  Her mother described a simple man, a handyman by trade who was good with his hands. She’d meant at his work and the way he could repair anything, but she blushed all the same. She spoke proudly of her husband, unashamed of his simplicity or his work measured more in the sweat of his brow than any pay by the hour.

  Agnes told Landon that the evenings were her favorite when he’d come home from a long, hot day of patching rotted windowsills and changing locks. He was tired, his hands mottled with paint or grease, and he’d sit at the secondhand Cable-Nelson console piano and play tunes by McCoy Tyner or Bill Evans.

  “How was work, Daddy?” Agnes was always on the bench beside him as his head would sway, tilted back just a bit. Sometimes he closed his eyes.

  “Crows cawing.”

  “What about?”

  “Don’t matter, just listening to themselves. Each one trying to be louder than his neighbor. Look at me! Look at me!” He’d imitate a bird, flapping his arms out to the sides like wings and nudging Agnes, who giggled in delight. She could picture her staid and heavily rouged piano instructor perched on the music stand in her conservatory, shrieking like the big blackbirds that alighted on the barn where Agnes’s father kept his tools and the small, green tractor he used to mow the lawn.

  Her daddy played soft on those evenings, maybe to counter the volume of his day spent with ripsaws and hammers, and the incessant complaints and demands of his clients. Agnes liked it. Loud or soft, she loved listening to him play.

  Agnes was as grateful to Landon for the night out and her mother’s much-needed distraction as she was for the passage to Memphis and all else he’d arranged. But her mother questioned Agnes’s relationship with the older man later at home as the two women lay curled in Agnes’s parents’ bed watching a late-night talk show. “Friend,” Agnes said. “Sometime employer.”

  On the train back to New Orleans, she sat cross-legged on the bunk of the train compartment and watched him as he read, just as he had for the entirety of the trip to Memphis. Her book, one suggested and loaned by him, lay open in her lap while she watched this man, almost fifty years her senior, and wondered what he wanted, what the needs might be for a man who seemed to have everything. She grew restless and left the compartment to walk the length of the train, stopping periodically to sit in vacant coach seats and stare out of windows at passing towns that vanished into thin air, she imagined, as soon as they flew from sight. Landon had brought a bottle of wine and they shared that back in the compartment, watching the kudzu-covered trees and lampposts glide by. They discussed Memphis and New Orleans and all that lay between the two. Landon never touched her on the train, never asked for more than conversation and comp
any.

  To grow so close to a man without the inevitable physical play was anathema to Agnes, who collects men and wears them like a carnival mask—not to hide who she is from others but to show herself who she might be. The doctor’s wife one week, a long weekend as the judge’s girl, the mistress of a venture capitalist, and plaything to a chef. She’s had them all. She gathers them in and holds on to them until she’s finished. And by then, they want her. They want to hold to her, to lock her in a room to play piano for them, to love them like their wives or girlfriends or boyfriends can’t, or won’t. She doesn’t need them; she needs the music and the fleeting feeling of being in control. She wants to be an adult while she can, to learn what it might be like to be married to any one of them just as her mother wanted to know what it was like to shop for a prom dress with her daughter and to give her away as a bride.

  It’s a normalcy Agnes feels is due her. She’ll be dead by the time she’s twenty-five. This she knows. How? From a dream. A premonition. A high priestess in a low place along oily voodoo streets of New Orleans who reminded Agnes of the things that come to a person in and out of hospitals, lonely in those examination rooms or as a budding teen when ostracized by her peers. Holding to any one of these men for too long—for a month or a season—would mean giving them a lifetime: her life. She wants experiences, craves the myriad spices, tastes, and sensations. Dr. Mundra can’t help her, none of them can; only her own will and curiosity can make her whole.

  Now, as Agnes sits in the bar at the Capasso, Andrew aches for her. He watches her, taking in her bare calf and the way her shoe hangs from her toes. He wants those legs wrapped around him again. She flips her hair to look back at the front door and he lets slip a moan from his throat for the tendons there, bending and twisting with her backward glance. In her hand is the scotch and he sees the slight ripple of the glass, the faintest vibration he’d noticed that morning in his bed as her hand moved down his chest, his stomach, and between his legs. He can’t purge the memory of this woman’s body and touch and smell from his mind.

  And she knows it. Agnes can feel his gaze on her and it only makes her less inclined to look for him among the crowd. But she does wonder where he is, and as she scans the room back to the front door for any sign of Oliver, she lets her eyes wander to the periphery. There he is, by the bar waiting on a drink order but watching me. Sweet boy. She wonders how lonely she is, whether she’ll go back for more tonight, though this time it would have to be in her hotel room and not the dungeon of his flat. She can almost see them together once again, feel his weight on her, moving more and more quickly, when suddenly the piano catches her by surprise. It’s something slow and light played in C. Where had he been? She’s been watching intently for Oliver Pleasant but hadn’t seen him at his booth or crossing the room. She’d been distracted by her tattooed lover. She decides to forget Andrew Sexton for now, for the duration of this tune, this show. She’ll decide on him later, after the music has washed over and through her. That might, once again, be all she needs.

  When the set is over, it’s the bearded man in sandals who brings a scotch to Agnes. She sees up close that his beard is shot through with gray and he wears a small gold hoop earring. He smiles familiarly as he greets her. “My name is Ben Greenberg and this is my club. My friends call me Benji.” He offers his hand and she takes it, noticing the small tattoo of a music note on his wrist. She feels nothing at all for this man and can sense it is mutual, and she is at once relieved and at ease. “I’ve seen you here every night of Oliver’s show,” he continues. “I can’t get busboys to show up so regularly.”

  “I’m here for Mr. Pleasant, for the music.”

  “We all are. Would you like to meet him?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t. He seems tired tonight.”

  “I’m sure he is. You’re a musician, right? A pianist?”

  “How did you know that? I mean, I do play piano, but not in New York, not like Pleasant.”

  “One doesn’t spend as long in this business as I have without being able to recognize a player. Come on, let’s get you over there, Ollie always has time for a fellow musician.”

  Ben introduces her to Oliver Pleasant, who sits like a boulder, a backdrop to the still life of Campari, foreign cigarettes, and silver lighter in front of him. He beckons her to sit and thanks Ben, who makes his way to another table.

  “Where you from, Miss Cassady?” Oliver says.

  “Memphis?”

  He blows a tired stream of smoke. “Is that right?”

  “Well, Tipton County, just outside Memphis. Close enough to smell the barbecue, though.”

  “Memphis. You know that young man there? The one with the notebook? He from Memphis, too.”

  She follows the direction of his index finger across the dimly lit room. “No. No, I don’t know that man.”

  Oliver manages a smile and says it again. “Memphis. W. C. Handy . . . The Peabody Hotel.”

  “Now those I know. Yes sir.”

  “What you doin in Manhattan?”

  She shrugs, glances sideways, and sips at her scotch in the same manner as she’d noncommittally answered Andrew’s question earlier. But Oliver is more worldly and has communed with women in faraway places, and he knows when an answer isn’t.

  “Ain’t nobody’s business. You like the show?”

  “Like it? It’s been wonderful, every night of it.” She wants to tell him that she plays piano as well, that she grew up with her father playing Pleasant’s songs and that hearing them again, here, live, is like having her daddy back, if only for a night. She wants to thank him for those songs, for what he’s given the world. She feels all of these things bubbling up in her, but Oliver is someplace else, looking down at the smoke as it curls off his cigarette. “It means a lot to me to be here,” she finally manages, gulping from her glass and looking for a passing waitress, Andrew, or Benji to have it refilled—even Marcie at this point, such is her discomfort with being here while Oliver so clearly is not.

  It’s the same beat and weary look that was in his eyes when he’d taken the stage earlier. He’d sat there alone and merely played with a few keys in C here and there, pushing at them like a child with a plate of unrecognizable food, not knowing if it might taste good or even be edible. He talked in circles; he spoke low so that the crowd hushed with him, not completely mute, but respectfully quiet so they could hear what it was he was talking about. He talked about books and about California; he spoke of cold-water flats and babies and loss. The words meandered as much as the tune until the melody finally started to coalesce, as did the talk, and he spoke of his wife.

  He said he’d married so long ago, he believed that maybe he’d always been so. “I been knowin her forever,” he said. “I ain’t never not known her, but I lost her and that feels new to me, like it just happened this night. Wish she was here. Lord, I wish for that. Wish they all was.” The tune took more shape, like a balloon filling with air, and there was a palpable fear in the room that it might overfill and destroy itself. Agnes had seen the man in sandals—the man she now knows as Benji—standing close by, his eyes on his friend. The song was so slow and beautiful that Agnes had only wanted to put her head down on the table and close her eyes to it. “I brought Francesca back from Sacramento, California, and married her. That was a beautiful week for me and I wrote this here song for it, for her. Guess I ain’t played it since she left us. When was that? Benji, baby, you know? You recall? Today? Was it today or was it two decades ago? Let’s see now if I can get this song out, see how she goes.” The room had quieted more so that even the servers stopped, and it was understood by everyone that they would wait on drinks and food. The silence was such that even the kitchen seemed to have halted its industrial gears.

  When he’d finished, he’d pushed his porkpie back on his round head and mopped his brow, his chin, his eyes with that blindingly white handkerchief. No one applauded because i
t wasn’t for anyone else. This was Oliver talking to Francesca, and there only happened to be a room full of people by accident, a room full of people giving those two their moment together. The band stood just offstage and seemed to await his invitation to enter that space of the piano. The horns held their instruments in folded arms and each of them bowed in reverent silence until Oliver nodded to them, and only then did they join him.

  And when they did, Oliver led them in a wild swing as though to shake the sadness from his mind and air out the room, as though it would shake the plaster from the walls and ceiling. Those young guns on horns, drums, and bass sucked wind for the better part of an hour trying to keep up with that old man.

  Now, in his booth, a neglected cigarette burning down to ash and Campari going to water in his glass, he still looks as though he’s with Francesca someplace, maybe back in Sacramento or up in that cold-water flat. He looks to Agnes as though it’s exhausted him, all of it—the frenetic pace, the long hours, the booze, and the memories.

  “You play?” He says from nowhere, as though that’s what he’s been wondering as he sat there in silence.

  “Oh, well, a little, yeah. My daddy played and I took lessons as a kid.”

  “That’s nice. Nice. Jazz?”

  “That’s what my daddy played, yes sir. I was raised on it, all the best—Bill Evans, Brubeck, McCoy Tyner, Duke, Peterson, Basie . . . you.”