Five Night Stand: A Novel

by Richard J. Alley

  It’s an odd juxtaposition, she’d thought, as she took a moment to look at the massive lion guardians of the public library, to consider the peace and beauty of playing piano alone for Oliver Pleasant in his home and the very real possibility of falling to her death only an hour later. One should almost preclude the other. Almost. There was that nasty spill at the end of her playing, though. All control abandoning her and her body reacting to whatever the broken nerves had commanded. And that’s the crux of it all, that’s the push she might need while leaning over the rail of the wrong bridge.

  Frank, meanwhile, had stood outside Charlene’s home to watch the kids there running and shouting with a wild abandon that throws all concern for decorum and, in some cases, safety out of the window. Playing in the snow is a happiness lost with adulthood for most people, and Frank misses it. He misses Karen, too, and had optimistically imagined her playing in the snow with their child. There was a bench nearby and he sat with his notebook to fill in the notes he’d taken at the kitchen table. It was cold, but he ignored it, focusing instead on what Charlene had said, wondering where it had all gone wrong within that family and wondering as well why she was too stubborn to put it all aside. Oliver has kept a table for his children these nights and wants desperately for them to show.

  Midafternoon sun fell on his bench and it was pleasant sitting in Park Slope with kids playing nearby and nowhere to be until later that night. He took his phone out in hopes that he’d missed a call from Karen. He hadn’t, so he called her.

  “How are you feeling?” It was the first thing he asked after the greetings.

  “Better. I guess my body is getting used to it all.”

  “Maybe that’s a good sign.” He couldn’t explain this burst of optimism, whether it had awakened after visiting the depths of despair on a bridge at midnight or hearing the secrets of an estranged family. Or perhaps it was the sun on a frigid winter day in Brooklyn. Frank looked around, hoping that maybe Paul Auster would walk past.

  “Where are you?”

  “Park Slope, Brooklyn. I came by to talk to Charlene Wilson, Oliver’s daughter.”

  “How was it?” There was sincerity in Karen’s voice.

  “Interesting. It’s a sad situation—the family is torn apart, though she lives so close by. It’s nothing new, though; the rift was born a long time ago when Charlene was a little girl.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  “It really is. I wish they’d reconnect, family should be closer. It’s too important.”

  Karen told him she’d taken a sick day and was still in bed; it had turned colder in Memphis and she couldn’t face another gray day beyond their house. She was comfortable, she said, alternately reading and watching television. She was glad he called and he was, too. She wished he were there—again, sincerely—and he did, too. Desperately.

  He thinks of the phone call now and imagines Karen at home in bed as Oliver plays “All of Me.” He’d wanted to leave Brooklyn as soon as the phone call had ended and catch a cab to the airport to get him home, but he knew that was impractical. Another two days and he’d be there with Karen to face whatever may come next in regards to career, his writing, and their lives together.

  “Where she at? I know she’s out there, been here every night so far. There she is. Come on up here, Miss Cassady.” Oliver scans the crowd and finally points to his own table. The crowd turns to see who he’s talking about, to learn who this “Cassady” might be. They collectively don’t recognize her.

  Frank is confused as he’s drawn from his daydream and glances at Agnes, who is just as confused. When Oliver’s words finally register, she shakes her head and tries to wave him off. But now everyone is staring at her; squinting eyes and wrinkled faces turn, smiling and toasting with cocktails, urging her onto the bandstand. She turns to Frank.

  “Jump,” he says, and winks.

  And she does.

  Gazing down from the stage onto the room and people there is vastly different from anything she’s used to. Talent shows in Tipton County certainly didn’t carry the drama of Ben’s club. The bars in New Orleans are raucous and tourists, within an arm’s length of the bandstand, pay only cursory attention to what happens up there. There were nights when Agnes cussed them from the microphone and suggested the dive’s owner simply put in a goddamned jukebox for all the attention the band was being paid. At Landon’s parties, of course, she was meant to be backdrop, the liquor and young bodies circulating at the forefront. But here, with Oliver leaning back on a bar stool provided by Andrew Sexton and beside the piano with a microphone in hand, and looking around at this crowd that has come for only one person, she is truly terrified.

  Placing her hand on his shoulder, she whispers to him, “Ollie, please, I can’t. My hand, I’ll fuck this up.”

  “Baby, you just play it like you did last night, ain’t no difference. Look at me and play it for me. Just to me. ‘Night and Day,’” he calls to the band, and they take Agnes’s lead.

  At first she looks only at Oliver, draws upon his strength and musicianship, and the notes come easy. It’s as though she’s in Landon’s parlor again and she half expects the audience to begin changing clothes. But there’s also comfort and nostalgia, and she feels as though she might be in her parents’ house and her father is, if not on the bench beside her, then in the room, whether in person or as memory.

  She closes her eyes and feels the warmth of the spotlight on her, lets it sink in that she’s playing piano in a New York nightclub with a band backing her and an audience of jazz lovers watching. It’s all she’s ever wanted and it pushes everything else to the side and out of sight. Gone are the thoughts of Mundra and his pink turban, a bridge of cold steel, the passing beds of men, and along with it all goes the pain, the trembling, the fear.

  Just let me stay here, right here, she thinks. Forever.

  When she hears Oliver, she opens her eyes. He’s singing, low and with the distinct phrasing of Billie Holiday. She doesn’t think she’s ever heard him sing on any recordings and the timbre of it—low and grumbling with years of French tobacco—is lovely. She looks again to the people and they are happy with it all.

  She’s so grateful to Oliver for this that she could cry, but she doesn’t have time. The song ends and Oliver calls out Monk’s “Blue Sphere.” It is technically more difficult, and she’s never played it with a band, but she manages. The music holds her up and even seems to suspend her left arm and hand, to keep it on track and in control. There are no lyrics, but Oliver stands at one point and spins, teetering from side to side. “Monk’s dance!” he laughs, and the crowd laughs with him at his impression of the eccentric pianist. It’s obvious that Oliver is having fun and the mood is light, and this helps to put Agnes at ease. She plays the long fills, from one end of the keyboard to the other, and Oliver jumps back as though impressed, looks back at the band, and shouts, “You cats diggin this?” The band hollers back, “Jump, Miss Agnes! Swing!” All she’s ever wanted.

  When that song winds down, Oliver calls another Monk tune and the band takes its cue and backs down. It’s solo Agnes now and she feels Oliver is saying something to her by choosing the song “Everything Happens to Me.” It’s how they all feel—she, Oliver, and Frank. It’s how we all feel, every one of us, she thinks as she takes a trip down through the keys. All the world’s shit is dumped only on each of us and it’s up to us to figure out how to crawl through it. Oliver wipes his brow and watches her hands as she plays and the place goes to a hush.

  She doesn’t want it to end, but neither does she wish to push her luck and lose control. Oliver leads the ovation and introduces her again to the audience: “Miss Agnes Cassady from Memphis, Tennessee, by way of New Orleans—my hometowns! Now, you step down off my stage, this is my show. Can’t have you cuttin me like that on my retirements.” The crowd is polite and the applause lasts through her embracing Oliver and her walk back to the
table, where Frank is standing and clapping. She drops into the booth, exhausted, as Ben hands her a fresh drink.

  “Well played, Miss Cassady,” he says.

  Andrew comes from across the room to stoop and kiss her on the cheek. “I had no idea,” he says, and it’s clear how little idea he has about many things. The puppyish love that she’d seen in his eyes has turned into adoration and he watches her the rest of the night from wherever he is in the club.

  The last of Oliver’s set is a blur with people, strangers, stopping by to congratulate her and fawn over her performance. Davis McComber comes by and Frank spells her name for him as he writes in his notebook. She’s in the spotlight again and has forgotten, for the time being, her troubles and discomforts. This is all happening to her.

  “We going to hear your grandson’s band tonight, Ollie?” Agnes says, bouncing from adrenaline and ready to share it with the city.

  “Grandson?” Frank asks.

  “My grandson came by other night, came here to tell me he a bandleader. Wants me to come by and hear him and his boys tonight,” Oliver explains. The band has quit and he’s taken his first Campari and second cigarette. He’s tired but has been effusive with his praise for Agnes and she’s soaked it in the way he’s inhaled his Gitanes. She is equally effusive with her appreciation and shock at having been called to the piano, and having done as well as she did.

  “Jazz?” Frank says.

  “Hip-hop. Call themselves Storyville. You believe that shit? Hip-hop. Storyville. What he know about Storyville? Tell me, ‘Come on, Pops, you gotta hear us; it’s your music, Pops, it’s good!’ What he know about my music?”

  “You should go hear him. We all should.”

  “Come on,” Agnes says. “Let’s go, Ollie, it’ll be fun.” Some of her youthfulness shows through and she vibrates from her own performance, doesn’t want the energy to stop coursing through her veins. She thinks that perhaps it’s offsetting the pain and tremors, or at least burying them for a time. Either way, she welcomes the relief.

  Oliver rolls his eyes at his two new friends and taps the rim of his empty glass with a fat index finger. Frank refills it.

  “Where’s he playing? A club?”

  “I don’t know, said it’s over on Third. Storyville. The hell kind of name for a band is that?”

  “Davis!” Frank calls out to Davis McComber, who’s nearby trying to chat up Marcie—who in turn is making eye contact with an elderly, silver-haired man as he slips his date’s wrap over her shoulders. “McComber! You know a hip-hop group called Storyville? Where they playing?”

  “Storyville? Yeah, I know them. Why?”

  “That’s Oliver’s grandson.”

  “Get the hell out. Your grandson is in Storyville?”

  Oliver looks more and more embarrassed by the whole subject and leaves the discussion up to the younger people.

  “We’re taking Ollie over there,” Agnes says.

  “Oh shit, I gotta see this. Come on, follow me.” Before the others can finish their drinks and have their coats brought to them, Davis is upstairs. When they join him, he hurries them with frenzied shouting over the noise of traffic. “Let’s go,” he says. “We’ll walk, it’s not far.” Davis leads the group like a husky pulling a sled. They struggle to keep up, moving at Oliver’s pace. Davis, impatient as always, has a half-block lead at any given time.

  Davis turns the corner on Third Avenue and they lose sight of him for a minute, until they catch up to see him standing beneath a marquee, the light shining down on his wide-brimmed fedora, peacoat, skinny black jeans, and calf-length leather boots. The creamy light reflects off the snow and creates an aura around Davis as though he’s an apparition, as though he’s standing on hallowed ground.

  And he is.

  “The Blue Note?” Oliver says, looking up at the building, one of his own cathedrals. “Cedric playing the Blue Note?”

  “Yep,” Davis answers.

  “I’ll be,” the old man says to himself. “The Note.”

  Inside, the lights are dim and a heavy bass thumps from unseen speakers all around them. Frank and Agnes look at each other behind Oliver’s back, wondering what they’ve brought him to. Davis is already across the room, saying hello to one group before moving on to the next; he has somehow procured a beer in the brief time they’ve been inside.

  Oliver’s eyes are wide. Looking into the crowd of this holy room is like looking into the past. There are faces and bodies moving, drinking, laughter everywhere. Oliver understands it, this energy. Davis does, too, his mind able to envelop all music as a single being that doesn’t discriminate based on age. He sees music as one big five-gallon bucket of notes and melodies. He can tell you how American popular music has progressed from Negro spirituals to blues to rag to swing to bop to the rock and roll of Elvis Presley to the Velvet Underground to Elvis Costello to REM to Pearl Jam and Lady Gaga. But he won’t. He doesn’t see one form of music ever going out of style to make way for another; there’s room for everyone and it all lives in Davis’s head. His assumption, the precious naïveté of a music devotee, is that everyone feels the same way. He writes about music the same way that Pollock splattered and coated a canvas in paint. One paragraph on Nina Simone will flow seamlessly into another on Madonna. His world has no shadows; it’s the simple world of constant, shining light.

  But there is no denying that the electricity in this room is different than in the Capasso before Oliver’s show. It’s static and it raises the hair on Agnes’s arms. Oliver pulls the handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his brow and cheeks as his eyes scan the room as though looking for old friends. Sonny Rollins, the white-haired colossus, had stopped in to pay his respects to Oliver earlier that night, but it isn’t such a face he looks for now. There will be no old-timers, save for Oliver. He’s looking for Charlene, hoping that, while she may not come to see her old, broken-down father play, maybe she’ll make the trip from Brooklyn to Manhattan to see her son.

  Frank brings them all drinks and they take their seats as the lights are dimmed and the music along with them. A drummer comes from behind the blue curtain and claims his seat, starting in with a four-four rhythm that further hushes the crowd. Agnes is distracted by Oliver, wondering what he thinks and whether he’ll stay for the show or leave during the first number. A horn section—saxophone, trumpet, and trombone—comes onstage and blows in unison. They aren’t the well-dressed musicians of Ollie’s group; instead they’re wearing sagging blue jeans and T-shirts or hoodies (one has his hood up so the trombone appears to grow from the dark cave of his face) and sneakers. The group fills the stage the way Ollie’s had, one by one, the instruments blending in together like a family, slowly building up in time to something that might be great. A percussionist comes aboard followed by the DJ, who steps up on a riser and dons his headphones, tilting them on his head and over an ear the way Sinatra might have worn his porkpie. The DJ is focused and at work, and it’s the only instrument, if instrument is the right word, that Oliver doesn’t recognize. The jockey picks up a vinyl record, looks at both sides, gently blows unseen dust from one side, and places it on a turntable. When he gives it a push, a piano fills the air. It’s immediately recognized by Oliver and Agnes. Davis, too, knows the tune. It’s one of Oliver’s: it’s “A Night Under Diamonds” from 1952, and the grin on Oliver’s face lets Agnes know it’s the original, not a cover. The piano line has been extracted and plays in a loop. Mingus and Roach had played on that session, and on this stage, and the stand-up bassist is bearded like Mingus—heavy, too. The drummer keeps good time, and Oliver nods his approval.

  By the time Cedric hits the stage, the group at the table is laughing and nodding together, with Frank and Agnes taking as much delight in Oliver’s mood as Oliver is in hearing his piano played back to him in this setting. But it’s the sight of Cedric that fills Oliver with pride. He’s wearing a smart suit with a light gr
een porkpie worn low over his eyes and sunglasses. Even with such a costume shielding his face, Frank can see hints of his mother and Oliver in his features, and he wonders if his eyes are the same shade of green as Charlene’s. Cedric holds a microphone, the cord looped over his hand, and struts around the stage rapping something Oliver can’t understand. The old man knows poetry, appreciates the meter, yet isn’t quite sure what Cedric is getting at. But the showmanship he appreciates, and though the musicianship of his backup players is questionable, the passion and the energy are there. Cedric carries himself like a man yet acts like a boy, jumping from side to side onstage, into and out of the red light that floods the players and bathes the music. Rings on his fingers catch the white spotlight, and all that Oliver sees and hears glitters.

  The crowd loves it, too. Eats it up the way Oliver remembers crowds in the 1950s and ’60s calling for his own music. That never changes. The music might, despite what Davis McComber thinks in his hi-fi mind, but the people’s enjoyment and fervor for it never will, whether it be jazz, rock and roll, or hip-hop. This new thing, though, this fusion of the past and the now, is like looking down into the eyes of a newborn child, one whose nose and mouth favor your own but whose understanding of the world around him and the possibilities that lie there are light-years ahead of what you’ve grown to know.