Five Night Stand: A Novel (7 page)

When Agnes leaves Mount Sinai, all she can think of is a shower. As sterile as the rooms she’d just left were, all she wants to do now is wash. Instead of her hotel shower, though, she finds herself walking south along the park, allowing the rushing, swirling air from passing traffic and bodies to brush against her and scour away the past hours. At the bottom of Central Park, she descends underground for the Lexington Local to Greenwich Village. Standing on the platform, she’s amazed there are no barriers between the waiting crowd and the gully where the tracks lie. She fantasizes about stepping off, considers an end to the pain and the tremors—dreams of an end to the unknown, just as she had while leaning against the glass of her hotel window the night before. How satisfying it would be to know, to be absolutely certain of when and how her life might end. She longs to meet that train head-on. The fantasy tugs at her and she steps toward an onrush of air as a horn blasts and light appears around the tiled curve to her left. She closes her eyes, brings her hand to her face, and feels the numbed fingers tremble against her cheek.

Emerging from below, going from the gleaming glass of Midtown Manhattan to the low brick and crooked valley of the Village, is like traveling into the past. Though the handbills are only weeks old, the sense of time and place, she imagines, is half a century earlier. She listens to the voices around her, the languages of the city and of cities throughout the world. She has the sudden urge to travel and see all of those cities before it is too late. The realization of time escaping leaves her breathless for a moment and she stops to lean against a lamppost. The picture windows nearby offer food, furniture from decades before, and clothing and eyeglasses at the height of fashion. A tobacco store shows off boxes of highly polished wood and gleaming lacquer, and through the windows of a barbershop she watches a black man having a pattern shaved into the hair over his ear. A café spills its mismatched tables and chairs out onto the sidewalk, where several patrons huddle together against the cold and blow steam from oversized mugs. She closes her eyes for just a moment as she had in the subway and listens. The electricity in the air is thrumming and she can feel it against her and all around her. The city is alive and will be this way long after she is gone.

The bookshop, tucked in between a Laundromat and a store devoted to chess sets, is deep and narrow with a high ceiling and shelves that strain to reach it. Before she even realizes she’s stepped in out of the brisk air, she is standing in fiction and inhaling the musty scent of old leather and yellowing pages. She thinks the bookstore might be a more beneficial environment than the hospitals she’s spent so much time in.

She walks around the store beneath towering shelves and peruses titles. She isn’t looking for anything, but likes the familiarity she finds in any bookshop anywhere.

The man behind this counter in New York is old and white haired and reminds Agnes of the piano tuner her father used to hire to tend to the family’s antique upright. The bookseller had greeted her when she entered with little more than a nod and a look in his eyes—over his small, rimless glasses—that said, “Let me know if I can help you with anything.” Other customers come in, the bell over the door announcing each arrival, and the old man calls many by name. Some pick up prepackaged parcels at the counter while others browse as Agnes is doing. Agnes has always heard terrible stories about brusque and rude northerners, but she is finding just the opposite to be true.

She wanders through a section on architecture and picks her way among oversized coffee-table books with beautiful photos of buildings found around the world. Her hand lands on a small volume with a brown paper jacket and line drawing of the Manhattan Bridge. It’s a book of architectural drawings, elevations, and blueprints of well-known structures in New York. Agnes thinks of her mother, an artist, though not in any professional sense—she simply loves to create. From as early as Agnes can recall, she has kept a series of sketchbooks close at hand, filling them with landscapes and people, capturing a moment on paper the way some might with a camera. When she fills one, she puts it on a shelf with the others, a small library of her memories as seen through her eyes and rendered in her own hand. She always has a pencil or two with her, stuck in the crease of a novel, in a Moleskine notebook, or in the knot of hair rolled onto the back of her head.

When Agnes was a little girl, she loved to watch her mother lose herself in her drawings. Back then, they just seemed to capture minor details of her life, mundane subjects such as the family cat lounging on the arm of a couch, the eaves of their house covered in snow, or Agnes sitting and watching television. The simplicity and narrow focus of the individual drawings, though, take on a grander scope when she thinks of entire books filled with those views, and whole shelves filled with books. Drawings of family reunions or her father’s back as he sat at his piano were the stuff of family albums, everyday moments of life, though without the glare of a lens or the harshness of a camera’s flash. Each sketch became a foundation of a book, of a year, of a decade.

Agnes looks again through the architectural drawings, marveling at the simplicity of buildings and bridges and at how easy it must be to maintain and repair them with such detailed instructions. She wishes there were such a simple book of blueprints for neurons and synapses, for thousands of miles of nerves and concentrations of spinal fluid that might point out just where a defect might appear. An image as plain as an air shaft or stair so that Dr. Mundra could unfasten bolts and tweeze out the inferior parts to be replaced by something an instruction tells him will fit.

She decides to buy the book for her mother, who doesn’t know Agnes is in New York. Agnes hasn’t told her because she’s gotten her mother’s hopes up too many times already and she can’t bear to hear that catch in her mother’s voice if these tests tell her nothing. Besides, she doesn’t know quite how to explain Landon’s generosity. She’ll give the book to her with good news, or with no news at all. “It was just a visit,” Agnes will say, “to hear some jazz, eat some good food.” Her mother will love the book and appreciate the beauty in the straight, vertical lines; she’ll lose herself in the geometry and soul of the artist.

The man at the counter grins at her, the skin around his blue eyes disappearing in fields of wrinkles and time, and asks if she has found everything she needs.

“Yes sir. I’m getting this for my mama.”

He opens the book carefully and scans several pages as though for the first time. “Elegant . . . Wonderful . . . Beautiful,” he says, almost to himself as he takes in page after page. “Is your mother an architect?”

“No, she’s an artist.” It is the first time Agnes has ever referred to her in that way; she’s a receptionist at a psychiatrist’s office by trade.

“She’ll love this, then. Most people miss the artwork in a building.”

“She’ll see it.”

“Here,” he says, turning the book to face Agnes and holding a page. He’d been looking for something specific all along. “The Capasso Hotel, one of my favorite buildings in all of Manhattan.”

How could he have known she was there only last night? Agnes suddenly has an odd feeling, dizzying, and she steadies herself on the counter while he rings up her purchase. His eyes are so kind. A coincidence, she tells herself.

“Yeah, I’m familiar with it.”

3.

Just before opening, Ben sits at the bar looking over some last-minute items on a checklist. A half glass of wine rests next to a smoldering Nat Sherman Blue in its crystal ashtray, both being ignored. He’s waiting on a newspaper reporter from Memphis who is late, and Ben feels behind schedule. He is set in his ways and takes comfort in his medley of opening routines.

Andrew Sexton comes in carrying an apron and leans over the bar to talk to the bartender, a beautiful Nigerian woman with oversized hoop earrings hanging from somewhere within an oversized afro. “Coffee? Please?”

“Late night last night?” Ben says, not looking up from his task.

“Not as late as it should have been.”

“Which one was it? The youngish woman with the ancient millionaire? The tranny with the unsuspecting Japanese businessman?” He glances over his half-moon reading glasses at the front door. “Marcie? Again?”

“None of the above, Benjamin. I just stopped by Tommy’s for a few drinks. Well, more than a few.”

“A strikeout?” Ben removes his glasses and puts his papers down. He picks up his cigarette, which by now has extinguished itself, then takes another from the pack and lights it with a gold Dunhill lighter. “Drowning your lonely sorrows with Tommy at his shitty swill bar? Who was she, Sexton? Do tell.”

“A tourist.”

“We’re all tourists.”

“The girl sitting at number . . . hell, her table didn’t even have a number. Marcie sat her just offstage.”

“Oh, right. I saw her. Very pretty. And very into Oliver’s music. I don’t think she took her eyes off the band all night. Maybe that’s the problem; maybe you should learn an instrument in the next hour or so.”

“She saw me. We talked out by coats.”

“You spoke to her—face-to-face—and still nothing?”

“Yeah.”

“Shit, Sexton, that’s not even a strikeout. You weren’t on the roster.”

“Felt like I took a pitch to the side of the head.”

“Oh my. You aren’t in love, are you? Not Andrew Sexton of the Park Avenue Sextons. Not with a simple beer drinker.”

“It was scotch, single malt, and would you shut the fuck up with all that Park Avenue talk?”

“Well, I think it’s nice. And if it was meant to be, then you’ll see her again, you’ll get your second chance.”

“Yeah, well, first thing I’ll do is make sure she doesn’t get sat in the damn toilet again.”

“Chivalry is not dead,” Ben says, holding up his glass and swallowing the rest of his wine.

The club is as full as it had been the night before, the crowd humming before the band even takes the stage. Agnes arrives early enough to be given a proper table, though the hostess, Marcie, still manages to look down her long, aquiline nose at her. She’s told to follow and Agnes wonders how a woman walks in heels so high, if it’s the heels that make her hips move like that; not even Agnes can take her eyes off the hostess’s ass as she follows it across the room. They stop at a table off to one side, though more central than the previous night’s location.

As she sits, she watches people mingling about her, shaking hands and kissing the air near each other’s faces. She can smell their perfumes and liquor. She watches the waitresses carrying plates of steaming food and glasses clinking with ice. Her senses seem heightened here in this club and she’s sure she can sense the start of the music even before it begins.

“Scotch?” It’s Andrew, the same waiter from the night before, and Agnes suspects being sat in his section is more than a coincidence.

“And water.”

“Of course. How has your visit to New York been?”

“Too early to tell, but stick around.” She doesn’t remember him being so handsome and is at a loss to explain that oversight—she is an admirer of beauty. She thinks perhaps she’s beginning to feel at home in this city, or in this club.

“I think Manhattan has to grow on a person, like an appreciation for good scotch, or jazz.”

She watches him walk away, watches the way the women at tables he passes look away from their dates to admire him.

A voice comes from her other side. “The artist’s daughter.” It’s the old shopkeeper from the bookstore.

“Oh, hey . . .” She’s caught off guard, that same unease that one can feel in a strange city. Her feeling of comfort suddenly and jarringly disappears, and her mind goes blank.

He picks up on this pause and quickly takes the slack. “I’m sorry to surprise you. Your purchase made me think of this fine hotel and I came around after I closed for the day to have a look at her. I only live around the corner. I saw that Oliver Pleasant was playing and thought I might come back to catch the show. I hurried home to change and barely made it—it looks as though he’s commanded quite a crowd. The snooty hostess told me there were no seats and I believe she wanted to tackle me when I told her I only wanted to say hello to a friend, to you.”

He is much shorter than Agnes thought earlier and she thinks he must have been standing on something behind his counter. He’s wearing a green-tinted tweed coat and vest, and with his neatly trimmed white beard he looks as though he may have been a resident of the Capasso since the 1920s. She is sure if she were to reach into his pocket she’d find a watch at the end of a chain with a slight patina, possibly engraved with something heartfelt dictated by a long-departed love.

“She’s a bitch.” Agnes offers her own thoughts on the hostess. “Sit down.”

“Oh, no, no, no. I’m afraid I couldn’t impose on your evening. Your date is coming?”

“I’m alone,” she says. “Sit and maybe we can twist that hostess’s panties into a bigger wad.”

He laughs at her coarseness.

“I’m only kidding,” Agnes continues, leaning in now to talk. “She hasn’t got any on. But sit down so people will stop staring at the loneliest girl in all of New York City.”

He takes a seat and says, “These people will only look on now in wonder as to why such a pretty girl is out with her grandfather.”

“Handsomest man in the room.”

He blushes red through his beard. “Did your mother like the book?”

“Haven’t given it to her yet; she’s back home in Memphis.”

“Ah, so you are a tourist. You carry yourself like a New Yorker, yet the lilt off your tongue made me think of the South.”

Though the show hasn’t started, and people are still milling about close by, their voices raised in conversation, Agnes feels the shopkeeper’s attention focused solely on her. She feels her cheeks flush just as his had. “Daddy taught me not to take shit from anybody, and not to try and talk like anybody else, either.”

“Smart man. Memphis, you say? Huh.”

“Been there?”

“No, it’s just that you’re the second Memphian I’ve come across today.” He fiddles with the buttons on his jacket cuff—a habit of his, fiddling.

“Is that unusual?”

“Must be my lucky day. Are you here for business or pleasure?”

She considers her choices. “Something in between.”

The bass player steps up onstage in a pale green suit and takes up his instrument, lifting the massive bass to his equally massive frame as though it were merely a violin, and sets it right. He puts his arm around its body, cradling it like a woman with whom he plans to tango. His fingers, thick like hot dogs, land on the neck lightly, only the tips, while the other hand finds that woman’s backbone to tap out a beat. The sound is soft yet commanding, like pillows on a tom-tom, and the chatter in the room falls away but does not disappear. It’s the sound to set a tone, to make sure the people, the lights, the air are ready for what comes next.

“Oh, hello.” Andrew sets Agnes’s drink down and is surprised to find a guest with her.

“Andrew Sexton, this is . . . Sorry, I didn’t get your name.”

“Martin Lucchesi.”

“I’m Agnes Cassady.”

“From Memphis, Tennessee?”

“The very one.”

Andrew doesn’t know what this exchange, this game, is and feels as though he’s come in late and uninvited.

“What can I get you to drink, Mr. Lucchesi?” He has to speak up now over the bass and bends over for Lucchesi’s soft-spoken reply, then nods and leaves.

“You a fan of Oliver Pleasant’s?”

“Oh my, yes, from way back. I used to go hear him in Harlem with Parker, Cannonball, Max Roach, everyone. I sold books to his wife, Francesca, for years. She was a voracious reader, so lovely.” He has a faraway look in his eyes as though he can see the music in the air.

The drummer takes the stage then—no suit jacket, but a brown suit vest over a crisp white shirt. He falls in with the bassist, a third and fourth on the dance floor now to cut in on their tango, and they build a beat together. The bass player looks back and grins at his partner, whose eyes are closed. He is deep in meditation.

Agnes watches Lucchesi and how he nods along with the music, his fingers, thin and papery, keeping time on the white cloth and nearly blending in with it. She is taken with him, and jealous of his past, his association with this music while it was in its infancy as well as his personal connection to Pleasant.

Once the rhythm is set, the trumpeter arrives, gray fedora cocked to the side, and he blows a sad and steady tune. It’s a melody that misses at all the right places, a heartbeat of whispered salutation filling in the spaces.

Andrew returns and places a small glass in front of Lucchesi, asking if they would like anything else. They wouldn’t.

“What’s that?” Agnes asks Lucchesi over the horn’s wailing. In his small glass is a bright green liquid.

“Pernod. Yet another detail from a time long past.”

Agnes is envious of this, too. Green with envy and melancholy over being born in a time too late.

The saxophonist comes on board and doesn’t waste any time, launching into a dizzying solo that shoots up out of the ground like the Capasso Hotel itself, leaving the sidewalk and streets in a crater of rubble and the crowd looking on in wonder. He is all brash and polish with his collar opened and gold rings and cuff links catching whatever spotlight his horn doesn’t take for itself.

As fiery as the saxophone sounds, Agnes looks around for a star even brighter and catches sight of Oliver just past the entrance to the room. He is helped out of his overcoat by the coat-check girl, but waves her away and pats her shoulder as she offers to take his hat. He rolls into the room, unnoticed by the hostess squinting at herself in a nearby mirror, and speaks to two men at the booth where he’d sat after the show the night before. The three men chat and shake hands, and then Oliver begins his slow, limping stroll to the stage. Passing by tables, he accepts their greetings and offers his own. He is like a ship—an old, four-masted sailing ship—passing newer though less seaworthy vessels in the harbor on his way to the dock. He passes behind Agnes, absently placing his hand against her shoulder, to let her know he is there and to steady himself, and she feels her skin ripple with his touch. At the stand, he stops to watch the band, or catch his breath, and the saxophonist nods to him and backs away, both musically and physically, falling in with the rest of the band as Oliver takes the stage and his bench.

And then they stop altogether.

Silence.

Oliver picks out some notes with his right hand, seems to be tinkering with something, almost as though he wonders what those specific keys might sound like when pressed beneath his fingers, when the felt hammer hits the string and vibrates itself to life. It grows organically into a melody, and his left hand joins in and it all builds up until Oliver is flying across the keyboard with the energy and passion of a man sixty years younger. Even the band looks on, their instruments silent, and they grin and shake their heads, remembering why it was they got into this business anyway, why it was they took up an instrument in the first place, and exactly why it is that Oliver Pleasant’s name is on the marquee out front.

The crowd sits silent, knowing, each of them, that what they are seeing and hearing is nothing they could ever even come close to doing themselves—like flying an airplane or hitting a ninety-five-mile-an-hour fastball. Oliver takes them along on the flight, but the technique keeps them at a distance. He winds it back down, quiets himself, and the bass falls in with him. He stops altogether and takes a white cloth from his pocket to mop his brow beneath his hatband, and the crowd erupts with applause. Wiping sweat is something even they could do. The drummer has taken up again with the bass and, as Oliver puts that cloth away, the whole band becomes one and lays out a Duke Ellington tune for the people.