She feels like crying again and curses herself. People passing by are turning to look at her and she realizes she’s talking out loud as she argues both sides. Mundra is offering her progress, a possible way out, and she’s writing it off like it’s a hoax or a promise in a fortune cookie. She takes more stock in her own death dream and in the voodoo fortune-teller who’d confirmed the notion for her. She can’t think of Mundra’s proposal now. She’ll need to sit down with it later in the quiet when she can focus on what she might be gaining: control, painless days and nights, the hope of a life. Versus what she might be losing: She could die on the table. She could be paralyzed for good, never to play, not one note, ever again. She could lose a sense or two, her sight or, worse, hearing. With one nick of a scalpel, she could lose forever her ability to tap a key on the keyboard or to ever hear Oliver play again.
It’s a heavy weight to pile on a person’s shoulders, so she puts it out of her mind as best she can and stops to watch some children in the park sledding down a hill and throwing snowballs and a father and daughter building a snowman. She looks up to the sky, at the flakes rushing down to meet her, breathes in the crisp, cold air, and crosses the street to the diner.
2.
The diner is as bright and warm as it had been on Agnes’s first morning in New York. Around the stained and chipped tabletop of the third booth from the back wall sits a disparate group of diners, a group of castaways adrift in their vinyl and Formica lifeboat. Trapped on this island of Manhattan is an old black man in a porkpie hat sitting beside a thin and dark-complected boy going to great pains to cut a sausage link with a butter knife. Across the table is a middle-aged man fingering his phone as he waits on a call, and next to him, a thin and pale young woman with her head resting in her open palm as she sips from a cup of coffee without taking it from her face. It is as though the steam is warming her as much as the diner’s radiator heat and kitchen fires. They are four people as similar as they are unique—one at the end of his career, one lost in the middle, one who dreams of beginning, and the fourth, a child, not knowing what is ahead of him. None of them know for sure what awaits them; they’re all discontent, all frightened for the future whether it be tomorrow, next year, or a decade away.
“Ain’t this the hell of it,” Oliver says, scraping food around his plate into one big mess of breakfast. “The morning after ain’t never as glamorous, never as pretty, never sounds as good as the night before. That’s the truth of whatever you find yourself in, music, novel writin, whatever; it ain’t never as good after as when you’re in it. Pass me that syrup.”
The night before, Frank and Agnes had walked together from the bridge with her arm in his and found themselves in Little Italy beneath bare bulbs strung across a street flanked by colorful Cinzano umbrellas even in the cold of night. Frank flagged a cab for her to get back to her hotel.
“You sure you won’t have a drink?” she’d asked when he’d put his hand on the door handle. She hadn’t let go of him but instead pulled him closer so he could see her moist eyes in the city light and smell the whiskey on her breath.
He considered it again, however briefly, and seemed to pack a whole night’s worth of pleasure into that moment before opening the car’s door. He brushed his lips to her temple. “See you for breakfast, Agnes Cassady.”
He walked back to his hotel. Something had passed between them on that bridge. Flirting? There may be no setting more romantic than a New York bridge in snowfall. And what man and woman don’t flirt in some capacity, whether lifelong friends or sitting down for a dinner party as strangers? This, though, was a mere passing on the street, suspended over rushing water, and he knows nothing about her other than she’s from his hometown and also has an interest not just in jazz but specifically in Oliver Pleasant. What are the odds of meeting that person on a bridge over the East River? She was even destined for the Brooklyn Bridge, where they might not have come across each other at all. Did that mean something? For her to be in the wrong place? Was this the fate of which Lucchesi spoke?
“Why are you here?” Agnes had asked Frank the night before on the bridge.
“I’m lost,” he’d said. “And I prefer the Manhattan Bridge; it doesn’t have that big-time Hollywood status. It’s the underdog bridge. Besides, I can stand on this one and look at the Brooklyn Bridge.”
He’d thought of Agnes as he’d walked, the sadness in her eyes, the urging in her voice as she’d invited him somewhere, anywhere. He felt as though he’d talked her off that bridge. He wasn’t certain how serious she was about jumping, but if her intentions were true, he’s glad she didn’t go through with it. Impulsively, he called Karen. It was close to 3:00 a.m. by then and he knew she’d be angry, but he just wanted to hear her voice and to know he made the right decision not to get into that cab. He wanted to know that the decision not to find out where that ride would have ended had been his own and that it mattered. There are things Frank is missing—his wife’s touch, her compassion and empathy, her welcoming smile when he arrives home at night from work. He isn’t sure, though, if he only started missing them when he landed in New York, or if it’s what’s been missing from his life for a time. He isn’t sure how long this hunger has been with him.
She didn’t answer. He left a voice mail, though this morning he isn’t completely sure of what he’d said, but he knows he asked her to call him. He hopes there was no anger in his voice and, if so, that it will be overlooked, understood. He’d thought of redialing but instead powered his phone off and shuffled along streets quiet with the buffer of snowfall, trying not to feel sorry for himself and thinking maybe it was time to make a change. The streetlights wore halos of light, snow clung wet to his neck and shoulders, and he thought again of Agnes, wondered again where Karen might be—and if with someone else, was she thinking of him?
At first light that morning, Frank had grabbed his phone, powered it on, and waited helplessly for the voice-mail icon. There wasn’t one and so he began his day with that sick, kicked-in-the-stomach feeling of loss. He’d dressed and left the hotel, walking the entire way to the diner on sidewalks intermittently shoveled of snow. Near the park he caught sight of Agnes leaving Mount Sinai Hospital and raised his arm, thinking to call out, but changed his mind as a cab pulled to the curb. “No, sorry, I was waving to my friend.” The driver swore at him in an exotic language and pulled away. Frank stayed a block behind her for the length of the park, stopping when she did to watch children playing in the snow. He was enchanted by her warm smile, a sharp contrast to the drunk, lonely, suicidal woman he’d met on the bridge the previous night. He wondered why she had been at the hospital. Visiting a sick friend?
Entering the diner (Frank had waited outside, stamping his feet a few more minutes so they didn’t enter together), she was tired all over again, her glow in the cold melting into the moist diner heat. It possibly faded from the walk, Frank thought, or maybe from whatever it was that took her to a hospital on such a fresh winter morning.
“How old are you, Winky?” Agnes asks the boy sitting across from her. She’s fixated on his face, so open with wonder, since she sat down and Frank introduced them. She wasn’t sure how Frank, who came in only just after her, knew the boy.
“Ten.” And then, more to himself and his plate of food, “Name ain’t Winky.”
“It isn’t?” She looks to Frank, who just shrugs, and they both look to the boy for an answer.
“This here Pablo,” Oliver answers for him.
“Nice to meet you, Pablo,” Agnes says. “Ten years old, so . . . fourth grade?”
“Fifth!” He sits up straighter then, jabs a fork at his plate.
“Boy, pick that meat up with your fingers,” Oliver says.
“Oliver’s your friend?” Agnes asks. “Where’d you two meet?”
Pablo looks up at Oliver as though he’s surprised to find him there, then blinks at Agnes, who isn’t sure whether it’s the loc
ation and circumstance of their meeting that’s causing confusion or the fact that he has a friend. “We met on the stoop.”
“He lives upstairs from me, with his mama and daddy.”
“Ain’t my daddy.”
“That’s right, ain’t your daddy. Wants me to teach him how to play the piano. Ain’t that right, Pablo? You gonna be a concert pianist when you grown?”
“Teaching? Cool. I had a teacher when I was a girl. Her name was Ms. Gaerig. Would’ve much rather had Ollie as a teacher.”
“Ollie!” Pablo’s head tips back and he laughs, sausage bits stuck to his teeth, his lips glistening with grease.
“What do you call him?” Agnes says.
“Licoricehead.”
“Pablo a racist,” Oliver adds.
“I don’t even know what that is,” says Pablo, before adding, “Ollie.”
“Why don’t you teach him?” Frank says, putting his phone back in his shirt pocket. “Could be good for both of you.”
“Too damn old. Too tired. I taught many a youngster when I was a younger man, but them lessons happened late at night, jam sessions after a gig when we’d all sit around and drink and smoke. That’s when the young bucks’d show up, ‘Pops, show me that lick’ . . . ‘Pops, play that tune for us slow so we can figure it.’ Why he want to learn piano? Why you want to learn, Pablo?”
“Sounds good to me. Sounded real good last night—pretty, like I was in a dream.”
“Last night?” Oliver says.
“Yeah, coming up through my floor. It was slow and so quiet I had to get out of bed and put my ear to the floor.”
Agnes blushes and wants to remind Oliver that she played for him, maybe even remind him that she took him home, but sees it all come back to him and flash in his face with a smile. He looks over and winks at her.
“You like that, boy?” Oliver says. “It was pretty, wasn’t it? It was real pretty.”
This should be a happy occasion, this meeting over fried pork and eggs, a joyous meeting of like-minded souls adrift on their raft and feeling real salvation close at hand. They all have a spirit hovering above them; they’ve all been touched by the muse at one time in their lives or another and can sense her still there, but each has hardened in some way, whether through loss, distance, or lying too close to the real world where the muse gets skittish. The wrecks and disasters that have thrown them into this boat together have caused a cataract to form over their eyes until they can’t see clearly that the muse is still there within their very souls.
They’re a miserable lot, these three. All except Pablo, who’s only glad to be away from home and with adults who aren’t screaming at each other or at him, who aren’t either lashing out or neglecting. If this is a lifeboat, he might be thinking, let it drift away from here, let the current take me where it will; I’m ready for whatever else there is.
In contrast to the welcoming environment of the diner, the facility Oliver enters now has the same glaring white light and industrial grade and color of paint as Agnes’s hospitals, yet it shares none of the antiseptic smell or healing properties. There is a pungent mixture of orange-scented cleanser and feces in the air, and people stooped over, shaped like human question marks, shuffle by in worn slippers and open robes. The linoleum is green where it isn’t scuffed gray, and the clocks—heavy metal IBMs protruding from the walls—are mostly stuck at different times. No matter, these people have no place to go, time having stopped for them months or years before.
It had stopped for Stanton Harris about six years earlier after a series of strokes left him temporarily incoherent and disoriented, though his motors skills were left wholly, blessedly intact. Oliver now sits across the table from Stanton, a mere shell of the man who used to play bass with him in the clubs of Harlem and on the road from coast to coast. No one would recognize the man who could at one time stand onstage and hoist by its neck, one-handed, an instrument the size of a lifeboat. No one would recognize the man who once took a knife to the thigh during a fight with two sailors on leave while Oliver and he were playing with some other cats on the south side of Chicago.
It’s a memory now that Stanton Harris might not even hold. It’s that weight of memory that could finally crush him in his weakened state with his brittle bones. Oliver watches his old friend as Stanton studies the checkerboard, trying to figure out his next move. Oliver wonders if he’s forgotten about the game, but he knows the man’s mind is still sharp despite what the doctors say—as sharp as a tool can stay in such dull surroundings.
This is where Oliver doesn’t want to end up. This is what scares Oliver almost more than death itself. It’s what prompted him to call Charlene and ask for a place to live, for help. It’s why he’s agreed to move a thousand miles away to a city he last remembers for its Jim Crow laws and the murder of a civil rights leader. Oliver doesn’t want to die so slowly, surrounded by people paid a minimum wage to barely give a damn whether someone in their charge has eaten or been cleaned.
“You gonna move or sit there all day, young man?” Oliver is only two years older than Stanton and never lets him forget he’s his elder.
“I’m thinking, goddammit, I’m thinking.”
“Thought you’d fallen asleep on me.”
“I’d as soon stay awake than fall asleep on your ugly ass. There. Your move, old-timer.”
Oliver has been making this trip up to Morris Heights—next to the Bronx Zoo and Botanical Garden, where he and Francesca used to take the kids when he’d roll back into town—once a month or so for the past two years, ever since he learned Stanton had been sent to the retirement home by his only son, who lives in a duplex with five kids on Long Island. Oliver is pretty sure he’s the only one who visits Stanton. So far he’s put off telling him that he’s moving away.
“You go by Minton’s on the way up?” Stanton knows that Oliver’s bus passes through the heart of Harlem on his way to the nursing home, and he always asks about clubs where they played together. He asks if Oliver had seen a mutual friend of theirs, long dead, as he passed through. Oliver explains each time, with the impatience of an old man, that everything—every goddamn thing—is changed.
“Boy, Minton’s been closed for fifty years.”
“Minton’s closed? I’ll be goddamned. That’s a shame. Now, look at this old girl here; she sweet on me.” A pear-shaped nurse, light-skinned with a map of freckles and raised moles across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose, walks by pushing a cart with one hand. She wears bright purple scrubs and is thumb-typing on her phone with her free hand. “Hey, sweetheart, you gonna stick me now?”
“I’ll be back, Stanton. You on my list. Don’t you go nowhere!”
“I ain’t leavin you.” Then, to Oliver, “She give me my diabetes medicine. I think she likes it.”
“Lucky, I guess. I got to stick myself.”
“So what you doin up here, Ollie? You just here two weeks ago. I know it ain’t the ambiance. They ain’t spruced the place up in never. Not even any music in these halls. You believe that? There should be music all up and down these hallways to cheer a motherfucker up.”
“You got it in your room?”
“Yeah, old son of a bitch I share it with grumbles, but I don’t give a good goddamn. He can grumble himself into the grave, I got to hear my boys play.”
“Who you listenin to these days?”
“All of ’em. Mingus this morning.”
“Ol’ Cholly.”
“Mingus!” Stanton shouts out at the checkerboard so the pair playing at the next table over jumps at the sound. Oliver laughs with Stanton.
The two old men sit in silence for a time, watching the board like it might get up and walk out on its own two checkered feet, each in his own thought. They rarely, at this age, think of the future. It might not be that afternoon, it might not be the next day, it might not even be in a week, but their time
on this earth is limited. If they think in seasons, this might be their last. If they think in holidays, they might not live to see another wreath on the door. So they don’t think about it, or they try not to.
“Respect!” Stanton shouts after a time, and the pair at the next table jumps again.
Oliver doesn’t. He’s come to expect these outbursts during their time together. It’s something old black musicians feel they have a right to shout, something they’re sure is now a common denominator just as the music, women, and drugs once were. The invective this afternoon is fired with a good amount of vitriol, and not a little spit clings now to Stanton’s bottom lip and glistens on his side of the checkerboard like droplets of anger.
Oliver hands him a handkerchief. “Wipe your lip, Stanton. Respect for what?” Though he knows it’s coming, and he knows how long it will last, Oliver humors his friend. It’s a right his old sideman has earned.
“For us. For the colored man and musician. They took our music from us, Ollie; they took it and sold it out over radio and picture shows and television. Ofay bought our clubs and paid us shit. Shit, Ollie, that’s what we worked all them years for. We made that music, that jazz.” This last word is filled with as much rancor and spittle as “respect” had been. Stanton falls into the line of disenfranchised who don’t care for the name, a description given to the services sold in old-world New Orleans cathouses. The music started there, music played for men laying their seed and for a few coins to drown out the sound and keep the girls happy. But the white men needed to name it if they were going to sell it, and “jazz”—or, “jass”—just seemed to roll off the tongue.
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