Five Night Stand: A Novel (9 page)

It would turn out to be the foundation of a passion and a career. The writing continued throughout college, becoming honed and focused—favorite authors, a style developed, a voice, and career aspirations. He made new friends at college, sitting for hours on the brown and green grass of the lawn stretching out before the University Center of Memphis State University, or spending late nights in an off-campus bar that backed up to the railroad tracks. In these familiar places he would talk about writing. It was there in the wood-paneled bar, the sound of billiard balls clicking drowned out by the occasional train whistle, that he came the closest to giving his life over to passion, to creativity. It was on those nights in the bar that his blood boiled, the beer flowed, and Frank and his friends, packed into narrow booths, rubbed shoulders and thighs up against the confidence to live life on their own terms.

It’s a frightening thing to say the words “I want to be a _____.” You can fill in that blank with “writer,” “musician,” “poet,” “artist” and none of it may come true. It’s akin to telling a woman you love her, with all its implications, promises, and inevitable doomed failure. In the believing it, and in the announcement of it, one is opening his chest up and allowing anyone, everyone, to crawl in and see what’s there. It’s inviting the public to see what it is that makes a person tick and come alive, to see the cogs and all their eternally moving parts glistening in blood and oil and the seminal fluids of art. Frank found that the words and sentences and paragraphs led him along a path to the door of journalism school. In journalism he found a home and a way to make a living at what he loved doing.

Frank stares now at the black-and-white cardboard cover of a composition book the kid sitting across from him is holding in the lounge of the Capasso Hotel. He wrote in one just like it all through college, filling book after book with stories and verse, and placing them on a shelf, never even looking back. The young man facing him in the club, Frank believes, lives life on his own terms just as he and his college friends had planned. Dressed in a black peacoat over a red T-shirt with a houndstooth porkpie and smoking a slim panatela cigar, the kid is about twenty-five, Frank would say. He figures the appearance to be an affectation, a costume kept filed under “Jazz Club” in a plastic wardrobe shoved into one corner of a too-small Brooklyn apartment. There must be similar outfits labeled “Salsa Club,” “Grunge Show,” “Microbrewery,” and “Sushi Bar.” Perhaps a kimono for the last one. The kid (an unkind habit Frank has developed since turning forty is to refer to anyone under thirty as “kid”) is writing. He’s a writer. Frank feels self-conscious enough with his own notebook and pencil, but with someone else at the table taking notes as well, he feels as though he’s on a school field trip, a continuing-education seminar on the postwar jazz scene in Manhattan.

The only thing Frank feels he can do is to introduce himself to the kid. “Frank Severs,” he says over the music, holding his hand out over the table.

“Davis McComber.”

Lost in his writing, he barely looks up from his book, his hand like a cold fish, limp and scaly. Frank instantly recognizes the name. Davis McComber is the byline on many of the contemporary articles on jazz in general, and Oliver Pleasant in particular, that Frank had Googled and printed to read on the plane. Frank had lost himself, not only in the stories of Pleasant and his colleagues, on the state of modern-day jazz and the future of the medium, but in the writing itself. Davis keeps a blog, as well as freelancing for music magazines, that is read by a staggering number of people—davismccomber.com has become the go-to site for what is and what was jazz.

McComber is the antithesis to Frank’s dying industry, the very poison, some would say, that is being fed to today’s readers. Yet Frank couldn’t help being fascinated by what he’d read. The prose read like jazz, scatting and bebopping with flourishes and, when necessary, blank space. It was like poetry; it had a voice and a rhythm and maybe a little bit of trombone in it. There is no way the rigid style of the newspaper would allow such writing; newspapers refuse to bend, which is why they’re breaking. The kid is good and Frank feels himself, older by nearly two decades (a bio tagged onto one recent article in
DownBeat
magazine noted McComber’s age as twenty-three), shrinking from talent.

On the first page of his own notebook is written “Jordan,” and Frank says to himself, “Details.” He conjures a history for this character across from him, one with musician parents and late-night adventures while still in high school into Greenwich Village to hear live music; family vacations to Paris to commiserate with musicians and writers; encouragement, at a young age, from family friends such as John Updike and Salman Rushdie before the inevitable acceptance of a short story by the
New Yorker
at the prodigious age of seventeen. Offers of assignments would hound this young man through his undergraduate studies at NYU, where he would decline offers of dates to fraternity parties and homecoming formals to, instead, fly to LA to interview the next big personality for
Esquire
or
GQ
or
Playboy
. Frank’s mind is fertile with images of Davis McComber in Iowa among Cheever, Smiley, and Roth.

He’s finally caught staring at the composition book and looks into McComber’s smiling, eager face. Once the kid’s laser-like attention has been turned from his notes, Frank sees that it’s a boyish face full of life and the possibilities ahead of him. To Frank, it is as though the elegantly appointed table spans seventeen years, and he’s looking at his own twenty-three-year-old self.

“I said, where are you from?”

“Hmm? Oh, Memphis. Tennessee.”

“Sun. Stax. Hi. Ardent.”

“Rendezvous. Neely’s. Corky’s. Tops.”

“Pardon?”

“Barbecue joints.”

“Ah. I’m vegan.”

“Of course.”

Frank sips his gin and tonic and laments, briefly, even coming to New York, the most expensive city in the country, to ostensibly work for free. The drinks in this place are more than he’d like to pay. More than Karen would like him to pay as well, and he wishes he’d taken more cash from the ATM instead of using his debit card here with its traceable records of spending to be placed in the ledger of bad decisions that Karen keeps. But maybe these drinks are free, he thinks, since Ben sat him here with Davis McComber, who is freelancing for
DownBeat
tonight and said, “Be my guest.” His guest? Is everything complimentary?

“Come here often?” Frank says.

“With what Greenberg charges for a drink? Christ. I only make it when I’m working, or when there’s somebody I really, really want to see.”

“Jazz fan?” Frank can play it cool when he needs to.

McComber nods, taking a sip of his beer. “Comes with the job. Actually, the job came with the habit.”

“Habit?”

“Buying up old albums became a habit, became a borderline obsession. So did writing letters to
DownBeat
and then the occasional review until they asked me to cover a show or two, profile musicians, that kind of thing. Weaseled that into music writing for some local papers and AP stuff.”

“Backed yourself into journalism, huh?”

“Yeah. What about you?”

“J-school. Shortest distance between A and B. I’m a traditionalist.”

“I heard that’s one way to do it.”

They sit and listen to Pleasant and his quintet, both nodding and sketching out notes from time to time. McComber finishes his beer and waves to the waitress for another and one for Frank. Frank holds his glass up in acknowledgment and in a silent toast to a fellow writer, to one who keeps the fire of inspiration—whatever that is—burning.

The second set is as tight and spot-on as the first and gives way for McComber to sit later at an all-night diner six blocks away, drinking shitty coffee, smoking, and beginning his review in longhand with a pencil in his composition book this way:

Oliver Pleasant hasn’t been seen or heard from much in the past twenty years, ever since the passing of his wife, Francesca. It is unfortunate because, in a time when a musician’s sense of history doesn’t seem to go back much farther than the birth of MTV, Pleasant’s goes back to the birth of cool and beyond. He is one of our last living icons from an age when the blues was heard through brass and bass, and that story of the blues had heaped upon it the sadness of slavery and emancipation, segregation, integration, and a couple of world wars. Jazz, simply, is the sound track to our modern-day history, and tonight one of our favorite and remaining historians took the stage at the Capasso Hotel in Midtown Manhattan for his final performances before retiring for good. It was night two of a five-night stand. . . .

Agnes doesn’t have the talent of language to say or write just what it is she feels while watching Oliver play. His music is something that takes her back to her childhood, to before she was sick, to a time so long ago that she can’t have known what it might be like to have been healthy. The music tells her what is inside of her better than Dr. Mundra’s scanners ever could. She likes to know that others love it as well and watches Lucchesi as he listens, the same wrinkles spreading around his eyes as he’d had while looking through the book of drawings that afternoon. Even Andrew stopped to listen to Oliver Pleasant off and on, his New York jadedness fading away with each note.

“Well?” Andrew says once the music stops and Oliver has rolled his weight through the crowd, again brushing past Agnes, to his booth in the front of the club.

“Good shit, again,” Agnes says. “Every note, from beginning to end, was perfect. Lucchesi?”

“Delightful,” he says. “Yet I must take my leave. If you’ll permit me, Miss Cassady.” He takes a bill from his wallet and hands it to Andrew.

“Oh, I couldn’t . . . ,” she begins.

“Tut-tut. I wouldn’t have even known Pleasant was playing if it weren’t for you, my dear. And then you shared your table in an otherwise packed room. It’s the least I can do. You take care and enjoy your time in New York.”

“Thank you.” She watches him go. He stops by Oliver’s booth and shakes the man’s hand, speaks a few words, and a smile spreads across Oliver’s face. They nod a few more times and appear to exchange more pleasantries. Before Lucchesi leaves, he takes a pen and small notebook from his inside jacket pocket and makes a note of something Oliver tells him. Agnes had noticed it back home between farmers and merchants, or on Sundays when she and her parents would have supper at the Cracker Barrel down the road, the way older people, people who might not have anything more in common with each other than their number of years on this earth, could strike up a conversation and, within only minutes, connect and construe all that a generation of living has taught them.

Just before Lucchesi left, he’d cocked his head backward a touch and Oliver had glanced her way. She felt her face flush hot.

“Well?” Andrew repeats, growing impatient as he stands before Agnes.

“You said that already.”

“How about us? Will you let me show you Manhattan tonight? At least, the parts I can afford.”

She laughs at this despite herself, and because Andrew Sexton looks as though somewhere on the helix of his DNA there sits a chromosome in the distinct shape of a dollar sign. Something is coming over her and she is hard-pressed to give it a name. She tries to lay blame on the alcohol that warms her stomach and spreads through her body, or on the brief touch and glance from Oliver Pleasant as he’d made his way through the room earlier. She’s just spent her first full day in New York City, the place of film and fame, and picked her way along its streets with a southerner’s sense of grace, keeping her awe to herself, though now it is gushing out in a geyser of music and familiarity, and she finds she wants every sensation of that city for herself.

Oliver pokes around his apartment. He remembers when this was the time of night he’d come alive, when he and his boys would be anxious to finish a gig and go on to the next thing, the next tear that might take them across town or across the country. Now he’s sluggish and tired, fuzzy-headed from work and drink. He caught himself nodding off earlier while talking to that reporter from Memphis. Oliver had rambled, the words coming to him through smoke and guesswork. He can’t be sure, as he slumps on the piano bench in his living room with a cup of hot tea, whether or not he conveyed the importance of that man’s city to his past and his future.