Five Night Stand: A Novel (6 page)

“He’s one of the last of his generation still alive. He was young, but he played with them all—Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie.” He was calling to her now as she changed out of her work clothes in their bedroom. “Anyway, he’s retiring and moving to Memphis; I heard about it all at Rachel’s today with Hank.”

There was no reaction from Karen, no acknowledgment that she was hearing anything he’d said. He could hear only the Pleasant Trio and feel the muffled opening and closing of drawers and a closet in the next room through vibrations in the floor.

“So guess who’s going up to New York for his last shows and to interview him for a story?”

He hadn’t heard her come back to the kitchen. Padding in on sock feet, she stood behind him in the doorway. “Who?”

“Oh Jesus, you scared me. I am.”

She looked at him without speaking. The music came to an end.

Recalling that night and the look on Karen’s face, he pulls the Austen off the shelf. She’s Karen’s favorite and this edition of
Mansfield Park
is beautifully appointed and sparingly illustrated with an antique hand. He opens it and brings the crease to his face to breathe in its aroma and age. He’ll buy it for her. She already has the novel, has read it half a dozen times, but she’ll appreciate this edition. He reaches up and takes down Paul Auster’s
The New York Trilogy
for himself. He thinks maybe he’ll have time this week to visit Brooklyn, to walk around and see if he might run into Auster. Like the Empire State Building, Statue of Liberty, and Central Park, perhaps the living icons are also out in the open, leaning against lampposts just around the corner to be happened upon and photographed.

But this trip isn’t a vacation; it’s work. He’d explained as much to Karen as he ate spaghetti that night and watched her push her food around the plate and sip wine. He told her he’d sell it to somebody, that not every story in Memphis had to do with crime, infant mortality, and felonious politicians. There was still art and culture, and plenty of editors thought these just as important as the others. “Can’t you sell it first?” she’d asked.

“Sure, easy, I’ll make some calls tomorrow.” But he hadn’t. Although he was confident in his abilities and skills, both to write a story and to know when a story was a good one, he didn’t want to hear no just in case. He wanted to go. He needed a brief respite from home and Memphis and Karen. Of course he couldn’t tell her that, he would never damage her feelings that way, but the truth was there and he would heed the urge.

Money is an issue and he thinks about it as he pulls thirty dollars from his pocket to hand to the bespectacled bookseller. He and Karen have both made a decent living—his in sheer number of years spent at the newspaper and hers as a rising financial wealth manager with a long list of clients—but every spare cent seems to have been spoken for over the past two years as doctor bill after doctor bill came in from trying to discover why she wasn’t yet pregnant, and then working to get her pregnant. It has been a tense experience with hopeful phrases in the beginning, angry exchanges later, and, lately, mere silence on the subject. It is always there, though, felt in the quiet nights and the unused upstairs rooms of the house.

“When are you leaving?” Karen had asked.

“Early next week.”

“I start a new round of hormone shots Monday.”

“How long this time?” The “this time” was like a gunshot in the otherwise silent kitchen, Karen having closed the laptop and shut off the music from the Pleasant Trio. Frank wished immediately that he hadn’t said it, but she pretended not to notice.

“Two weeks.”

“You could fly up and meet me. We could spend the weekend in New York.” He didn’t push the idea because he knew she wouldn’t. He wasn’t even sure he really wanted her to.

“Maybe I’ll call Helen, see if she wants to come up and stay awhile.”

“That’s a good idea.”

The expense of the trip will make the situation even more tense if Frank doesn’t manage to find work soon. He has little hope left that she will become pregnant, though he’d never suggest she stop trying. Just as he spared her from his needing time away, he could never visit the finality of failure upon her.

“Vacation?” the shop owner now asks as he makes change for the books.

Frank is startled from his thoughts. “Hmm?”

“You have the furrowed brow of the tourist. I’ve always found it funny that the creases tend to follow the patterns of the subway system.”

“Aha. No, here for work.”

“Where’re you from?”

“Memphis.”

“He comes in here, you know.”

“Sorry?”

“Auster. He stops in from time to time.”

“What’s he like?”

“Tall. He’s very tall.”

2.

Agnes has been in and out of hospitals since her late teens. They all look the same to her; the first one had had the same color scheme and sterile smell as the one she sits in now. The touch of a stethoscope and the darkness of an MRI were to her rites of passage as common as a driver’s license or the first taste of beer to other teenagers. She’d had her first taste of beer around then, too, in a parked car on the banks of the Hatchie River. When the tremor started, in fact, she thought it might be due to the one beer she’d had, and she confided as much to the nurse at Methodist North, who told her to forget all that thinking. A no-nonsense woman in her fifties with close-cropped bleached hair, the nurse told her that she’d be drinking a whole lot more beer in her lifetime and her mama and daddy were worried enough already without thinking their daughter might turn to alcohol.

After that trip to Methodist, and the inconclusive scans and blood work, her daddy took her to the West Tennessee Children’s Hospital. He marched her right in the front door and up to reception, where Agnes stood nervously watching a little bald-headed boy—he was off to one side in the lobby, tethered to a tank of oxygen as he played with Legos. They didn’t have an appointment but that hadn’t stopped her daddy, dressed in his coveralls for work, stripes of grease and paint across the belly and a slight yellowing under the arms. He just wanted one of them doctors to look at his little girl, he explained, just to know what it was, and then maybe they could fix it from there—her daddy, always the handyman, everything fixable with the right tools and know-how.

The receptionist made a call and had a nice woman in a smart suit with identification badges around her neck come and take Agnes and her father into a small meeting room. The woman, Jean was her name, gave him some coffee and Agnes some juice, both in WTCH coffee mugs, and explained to him that his little girl just wasn’t little enough, that the West Tennessee Children’s Hospital was just that, a place for children. Jean had a soothing voice and even patted his arm as she told them there were capable neurologists everywhere for adults, especially in Memphis, and said that she’d give him a list of recommendations.

He thanked her when it was over, and told her he understood. Looking at his boots, caked with mud that flaked in specks of brown on the white tiled floor as he shuffled them back and forth, he explained he “needed to try, at least, because he’d heard this hospital was the best there was and, you know, free.” She understood that, too, she said, and let Agnes and her daddy keep those coffee mugs.

Back out at reception Jean said something to the receptionist, who went back to her computer and started typing. The little boy was still there, playing with the Legos and not distracted in the least by his bald head or the mask covering his nose and mouth, or by his mother, who sat a few feet away with a magazine open in her lap, though keeping her eyes on her son. The woman looked tired.

Agnes wonders now what is in store for her and whether she will ever become as comfortable with whatever is happening inside her body as that boy was with his own sick little self, and she wonders at the fact that Jean had called her an adult that day. It was the first time that Agnes, all of sixteen at the time, had ever thought of herself as such. It was how she would think of herself from then on.

The receptionist had taken a sheet of paper from her printer and handed it to Agnes’s daddy, who shook Jean’s hand and thanked her. Jean squeezed Agnes’s arm, told her to take care, and gave her a look that an adult might give a sick child.

Now at Mount Sinai, when the doctor comes in, Agnes is wearing a hospital gown and only her underwear. “You can strip down to your bra and underwear and put this gown on, please,” the nurse had told her.

“I don’t wear a bra,” Agnes had said. “My titties are too small.”

The nurse left the room laughing.

The doctor is a large man with a dark complexion and heavy black beard, wearing a white turban that matches his doctor’s coat. In all of Landon’s talk about his doctor in New York City, he never mentioned a turban. It doesn’t bother Agnes; she just thinks a turban is the sort of thing a person ought to have mentioned. Dr. Mundra rolls a steel stool from the corner until he’s sitting at Agnes’s knees, having to look up at her to speak. He puts his clipboard and Agnes’s file—that file is as thick as the Tipton County phone book—down on the sink counter and takes her trembling left hand in his right.

“Agnes, please tell me what is wrong,” he says in a thick Indian accent. The man’s eyes, as he looks up at Agnes, are full of kindness.

And then, for reasons Agnes doesn’t understand, she starts crying. It is something she hasn’t done, hasn’t allowed herself, since that day she and her daddy visited the children’s hospital back home. After they’d left and were sitting in the cab of the pickup truck driving down North Parkway, she’d thought of that boy who didn’t care about anything but his Lego tower; Agnes thought about his mother sitting so close by and not caring about anything in the world but her little boy. She knew her daddy, in the seat beside her, didn’t care about anything right then but her, and she realized how scared he must be. More scared, even, than she was. And as she cried that day, her daddy, staring straight ahead at the road they were on, took her left hand in his right, just as this doctor does now.

Dr. Mundra waits and watches her.

“It’s all in that file there,” she manages between sobs.

“I know, but I want you to tell me. When you’re ready, Agnes; we have time.”

Time is something Oliver thinks a lot about these days as another year winds down. Winter has always been a contemplative time for him and is even more so this year as he brings his career and his life in New York to a formal end.

The apartment he’s lived in for more than forty years is a time capsule; the walls long ago ceased caring about whatever year it might be outside. Outside started changing years ago, too, with the petty crime and poverty creeping into his neighborhood like mold, like the kudzu he knew as a child. Francesca had been so proud of this place she’d chosen to raise her family, of the neighbors and the Pleasants’ station in life. He could hear it in her voice when she gave their address to someone over the telephone, the way she would hold for a beat right at the end before saying, “Harlem.” It had been like punctuation at the end of a sentence.

Coming back around these days, though. Make Francesca proud to see young couples walking around, pushing baby strollers, sitting outside at cafés. This is the neighborhood she’d known once again, and Oliver is sorry to have to miss it all.

Oliver pads around, looking at the same photos, the same knickknacks, and sitting on the same furniture his wife picked out so long before. It’s cluttered and could use a good cleaning. After his morning walks, though, once he’s stopped to pick up the papers or some magazines from a stand at the West 116th Street subway stop, he’s too tired to straighten up. He reads, naps, and saves the piles of paper, full ashtrays, and dirty teacups for another time. But the sitting room is a comfortable place and he moves around it with the same ease he moves around in his clothes or inside his own mind. He should be packing up all of these lamps and candy dishes and ashtrays, he thinks, or throwing much of it out. He should have begun that weeks ago. He’s meant to, just as he means to now, but instead he ends up looking in awe at the shelves full of books that Francesca amassed over the years. It’s daunting to look up at so many stories unread by him. He always said he would read them to know what Francesca saw in them, to know the same characters like friends, as she had. But he hasn’t. One more thing he hasn’t done in a long life of familial regrets whitewashed with professional success and acclaim.

With its random gaps, the bookcase looks like a child’s mouth grinning for the camera; volumes are missing, loosened teeth in the canon of Francesca’s literature. Charlene took crates of books out of the house when her mother died, the very day she died, if Oliver remembers correctly. “She wants something of her mother close to her,” he’d told himself as he tried to sleep on the sofa that first night. He’d tossed and turned, the missing books enforcing his sense of loss. Charlene must have known they’d go unread, he’d told himself. He wouldn’t have minded her taking them all in due time, and he’d suggested it to her, happy to know that they’d have a home and be enjoyed as much as Francesca had enjoyed them. But she’d been selective and now he has to contend with those left behind. He’ll have to ask her if she wants them now, or he’ll have them boxed up and carted off. Maybe the school where Francesca taught for so many years will want them, or Oliver can find the old bookstore she used to shop in and see if they’ll take them off his hands.

A giveaway calendar from the American Federation of Musicians hangs on a nail beside the bookcase among plaques and framed photos. The calendar is still turned to July 31, 1952, the day his oldest daughter was due. She would arrive two days later.

Where have the years gone?
Oliver wonders for not the first time today.

It is the time away from Francesca that he wishes he could get back. Maybe he’d do things differently, he thinks. Maybe not—he really can’t know. He was trying to make a career then, support himself and Francesca and, eventually, three children. But it wasn’t all about sending money back home. It was also about the road and the records and the audiences as much as it was any family responsibility. It was about playing a little bit better than he did the night before and a whole lot better than anybody else out there trying to make a dollar doing the same thing. There was the fear of the future and the unknown—the kid in his mama’s pantry right then, or onstage at a school talent show down south who, though he didn’t even know it yet, was after Oliver’s job. These were the reasons Oliver took to the road, sometimes ten or eleven months out of the year: fear, a fear for his very life. These are the reasons he couldn’t explain in letters home, written on quiet nights in a train car moving through California or from a dingy hotel room in Berlin.

He sent money so Francesca could buy this apartment she’d chosen without him and a wall of books to read during nights alone on this furniture she chose. He sent gifts to his family, too, and took more pleasure from that—the latest Paris fashions, hand-carved dolls from Italy for his daughter, pocket trumpets found in a pawnshop in New Orleans for his boys. He was the doting father from a thousand miles away. And once home, he lavished souvenirs on Francesca and the kids, and woke early to cook eggs and flapjacks, flipping them high in the air to squeals of delight from the children.

His first day back was always a holiday for the family. No matter what they had going on at school or work, they took the day off and Oliver would take them to the park; to the Met, where he’d search out paintings of places he’d just visited; and out for ice-cream sundaes for lunch. They called those Ollie’s Days, and the kids, worn numb by an afternoon of activity and movement, would fall fast asleep in the evenings, leaving time for Oliver and Francesca to reunite, to explore each other the way Oliver had just explored half the world and Francesca book after book.

He believed then that those hours made up for the weeks and months away. Yet it was only a matter of days until Oliver was back to work, only instead of hopping a steamer for Europe, he was on the Lexington Local to the Village. There, he’d spend nights playing clubs, at late-night recording sessions, or in strange women’s beds.

“New York is where it is, baby; I got to keep my chops in my own city,” he’d say.

“I thought Los Angeles is where it’s at, or Kansas City, or Madrid,” Francesca would counter. “Where’s it going to be next week, Ollie? Near or far, or does it even matter?”

And then he’d leave, first kissing the tops of the kids’ heads while they still sat eating their supper.

These days, he walks around his quiet apartment that Francesca always kept so tidy, looking at family pictures and Francesca’s great wall of books. He realizes that even if he had that time back in his pocket, he doesn’t know what he’d change, even with the advantage of hindsight. The music and emotions of being onstage had coursed through his veins, and it was a force that was not easily tamed. We all make our beds, he’d often said, and then we’re told to lie down on them.

Oliver goes back to the bedroom he’d shared with Francesca, though not for many years now, and lies down on his side of it for a nap before his second night of shows.