Five Night Stand: A Novel Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2015 Richard J. Alley

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477827741

  ISBN-10: 1477827749

  Cover design by Jason Ramirez

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014952410

  For Kristy,

  There from the very first note.

  CONTENTS

  OPENING NIGHT

  1

  2

  3

  (INTERLUDE NO. 1) BEGINNINGS

  NIGHT TWO

  1

  2

  3

  (INTERLUDE NO. 2)

  NIGHT THREE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  (INTERLUDE NO. 3)

  NIGHT FOUR

  1

  2

  (INTERLUDE NO. 4) THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF HAMLET GIRAUD AND JANE DOE

  NIGHT FIVE

  1

  CODA

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  OPENING NIGHT

  1.

  Oliver Pleasant doesn’t know anybody in the seats, not well enough to say hello to anyway.

  And yet, he knows everybody, the music bridging past and present to bring eras together like a family reunion. This is the same audience, more or less, that Oliver has been playing to since 1935 when he was a fourteen-year-old boy onstage at a talent show in Winona, Mississippi. Back then he’d hammered out rags as rough as the planks that made up that schoolhouse stage. Over the years he’s taken a saw and rasp to those tunes and smoothed them at the edges, sanded them slowly over time with finer and finer grit paper, and applied a polish to them. The songs are comfortable now. People can take their shoes off to dance without fear of a spike in the foot; they can lie back on that smooth and waxed wood to take a nap in the afternoon or make love all night long. Oliver sees himself as a carpenter, a craftsman putting notes and melodies together, fitting them when they will, stepping back to rest and reconsider when they won’t.

  He lets himself get caught up in the music, the backbeat and horn solos, and thinks that he can understand all of human nature in the space of one song, in only one of those ascending flights of notes. Fancying himself a poet, he’d caught some shit for it back in the day on the band buses going from one gig to another, some of the lines on those maps little more than old wagon ruts. He felt good about the music back then and he is feeling it again here in the basement bar of the Capasso Hotel in New York City. He’s always liked this room, the size of it, the lights, the way his piano sounds when it comes back around to him. That sound of it leaves his fingertips and goes to the bar for a gin and tonic, takes a tour around the place to touch the pretty ladies on their bare backs, tingling their spines right between the shoulder blades before landing softly back on his ear. He sees men and women all up on each other, rubbing and stroking, kissing in the dark when he plays one of his slow numbers, his fingers falling on the keys so you can barely hear the melody. He likes the effect his music has on people and he’s glad to know the ability is still with him after so many years. He’s grateful this audience is here for him.

  Oliver Pleasant is having a wonderful time and so is everyone else in the room as far as he can tell, especially one young girl whom Oliver is thinking might climb right up onstage with him any minute. That girl is into it, and every time Oliver turns to talk to the audience he sees a big grin on her face, her hand swirling a tumbler of good brown booze. But when she sips from the glass, there is something else. Pulled from the music, even in the few seconds it takes to swallow a tear of liquor, he sees something in her face. Pain? Maybe. But perhaps not—the light is low, and a cumulus of blue smoke moves like an ocean between the two, and this girl is too young to know anything about pain.

  Oliver has been away from his piano too long and knew it was time to come home again, even if it was only to close the door for good. He needed that door to be closed from the inside, on his own terms. When he decided it was time to retire—that eighty-five years was a round enough number for him to fit his girth through—he called his old friend Ben Greenberg, who’d been asking Oliver to play his club again for years. “Any time you want, Ollie, any time you want, you just send word and I’ll clear out the calendar. If Dizzy himself is scheduled, I’ll tell him to pack up and come back the week after.”

  “Shit, Benji, Dizzy dead,” Oliver would always reply. “If he’s onstage I’m comin to sit my black ass at a table up close to hear him blow. I’ll even buy some of them overpriced drinks you sellin.”

  The men’s friendship goes back almost fifty years, back to when Ben Greenberg was a boy making a nuisance of himself among his father’s friends—jazz musicians from Harlem and visiting bluesmen from Chicago. Ira Greenberg, Benji’s old man, had been a friend to the musicians. An attorney and impresario, he’d booked some gigs and represented a few artists back in the 1940s and ’50s as a hobby because he enjoyed the camaraderie and music, and because jazz musicians always had the best dope. Later, it turned into something more lucrative and afforded him a business trip or two a year to the West Coast or Europe.

  Ira had met Oliver when he was a young player just beginning to make a name for himself in New York clubs and recording studios. Soon after, Oliver had gone to Amsterdam and Paris for his first solo shows—small club dates—but came back to the States broke. An unscrupulous European agent had refused to pay him for the gigs. Ira, still young and full of piss and steam, made some calls, sent some telegrams, and even caused a ruckus with an ambassador. Oliver was paid in full. With a heightened sense of justice and empathy for the underdog, and always eager to help an up-and-comer, Ira never asked for anything in return.

  Since then, Oliver and Ira had been lifelong friends and, by extension, Ben became family as well. He has offered his home to the pianist anytime he wanted, and Oliver thought of no one else—no other club—when it came time for his final shows. He made the call and Ben accepted, then hung up the phone to call his press agent. Ben loves the music, but he is every bit the businessman Ira had been.

  When he’d made the decision to retire for good and play his last shows, his final five-night stand, all he’d told Ben was that he needed four musicians who knew how to play. “Don’t put me no schoolboys up there, Benji. You make sure they can blow,” he’d said.

  “Which tunes should I tell them, Oliver?”

  “All of ’em.”

  And Oliver will be goddamned if he’s found a one that would stump these boys yet. He’s pulling out titles and shouting tunes by Monk, Peterson, Basie, his own compositions, and all the way hell and back to King Oliver. These boys can play—drums and bass, tenor saxophone, trumpet—and Oliver is having a great time. He can’t help but talk and play like he’s twenty-five again and not eighty-five.

  She’d come in late, just before the lights dimmed and the band members took the stage one by one. She sits now at a table to the side of the stage and wat
ches his hands move across the piano keys. A shitty little table, the worst in the club, barely even a seat, jammed as it is into a corner and partially blocking the doorway that leads backstage. Even so, she is grateful for it.

  “We’re full tonight,” the hostess had said without looking up from her fashion magazine.

  “Oh.” Agnes was caught off guard, having expected to just walk in and hear Oliver Pleasant play. “Could I stand somewhere? In the back? I traveled all day and just came in a taxicab from the airport to get here.”

  The hostess carefully dog-eared a corner of the page she was on, closed her magazine, and set it aside, then looked the girl over. She smiled as though to an inside joke, and made a noise in her throat that was either sympathy or mild contempt. “Leave your bag and coat at the counter, and I’ll see what I can do, sugar.” The sugar was contempt. “Name?”

  “Agnes Cassady.” And then, as an afterthought, “Thank you.” An offering of gratitude and a reflection on the good southern manners her mother had instilled in her, but that would be the last of such manners. Agnes doesn’t suffer fools gladly or for long—also a lesson from her mama—and this woman, Agnes’s first face-to-face contact in New York City, had pushed her limits already.

  “Mm-hmm.” The hostess, in her own condescending way, had taken pity on Agnes Cassady and treated her guest like a lost kitten, the table a saucer of milk.

  The music ends with a crash of the cymbal and then silence, and Oliver makes his way to a large booth near the front of the room, where he sits with his ever-present porkpie set squarely atop his head to cover the baldness. The table’s stark white cloth, spotlighted with a pendant fixture from above, holds a “Reserved” placard, a bottle of Campari, and one small glass. It is here that Oliver makes his home. This is his backstage, having given up on the cramped dressing rooms, dingy in their fluorescent lighting and filled with the dope smoke he’d long lost a taste for. Those rooms are a younger man’s lair, lonely even as they fill with musicians’ admirers in low-cut dresses and made-up faces. He prefers the solitude of his booth and the feel of the cool leather through his sweat-soaked vest and starched shirt. He likes to watch the crowd and the pretty girls who walk by and smile. They leave him alone, presuming that genius needs time to rejuvenate, and he appreciates that distance. This is also where he sits on those nights when he feels like hearing live music, seeing what the young bucks might be up to, or when one of his few remaining friends is in town for an engagement. There aren’t many of them left, most having succumbed to age or infirmity, gone to see their fathers. He’ll be there with them soon enough, he knows. Until then, though, he’s happy in his booth, sipping Campari and smoking his Gitanes, vices he’d found with those friends across a time and ocean so far away now.

  “Beautiful, my friend, just beautiful,” Ben says as he slides into the booth and asks Marcie, the hostess, for an aperitif glass. Ben bends and kisses the back of the pianist’s hand as though he were a living saint, his lips just grazing the massive onyx ring there.

  Ben looks just like his daddy, sitting across the table. He has the same salt-and-pepper hair as his father and it courses through his thick, woolly beard. But Ira Greenberg would have been in a sharp, shiny suit, while his son wears a loose silk shirt—untucked and open at the collar and then some—linen slacks, and sandals. Oliver is always giving his friend shit about those sandals worn no matter the season. And the silver ring in his earlobe. “Don’t you let your daddy see you dressed like that,” Oliver often tells his friend. “Liable to kill ol’ Ira.”

  “Ira’s gone, Oliver, and times have changed.”

  “You think he don’t see you?” Oliver would shake his head at his friend.

  Oliver nods his head now. “It’s a good room, Benji. Sounded real nice, tight, coming back up to me. Good crowd, too.”

  “Here for you. Tomorrow night, too.”

  “Oh Lord. Been a long time since I had five nights. I got to pace myself.” He pushes the Campari away just as Marcie returns with a glass for Ben, who pours himself a drink.

  “Are you not feeling well? Don’t push yourself, Ollie; you know we don’t have a contract. You beg off if you aren’t up to it and I’ll find a fill-in.”

  Oliver waves him away. “Now, now, Ben, don’t get them sandals of yours all twisted up. I’m just tired, old and tired, and that set there took a hell of a lot out of me. It’s not in a bad way, though—but like sex, if I recall right. Makes me want to just roll over and go to sleep.” He brings the bottle back to him and refills his glass, but only halfway. “Miss her, too. You know, out there in the crowd watchin me.”

  “Francesca?”

  Oliver nods. “She was my muse, Benji. All them long nights on buses and strange cities. Treated her wrong, too, them lonely nights away.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up, Ollie; it was ages ago. Things were different then.”

  “Love still love, ain’t it? Respect still respect. That changed any?”

  “That’s still the same, still what makes the world go round and what keeps the music playing. Keeps all these good people coming in to hear you, too.” Ben holds his glass up to toast the musician.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t know why these people should care so much. Most of ’em weren’t born when the tunes was written, don’t know what it is they’re about.”

  “And what are they about, Ollie?”

  “Struggles. Pushin and pullin. Sex. Loneliness. Loss.”

  “Francesca?”

  “Yeah.” Oliver lets out a long sigh and stream of smoke, the weariness carried away on curlicues of gray.

  “How about something to eat? The kitchen never closes for you.”

  “Thank you, no. I think I’d just like to go.”

  “As you wish. I’ll call your car.”

  Oliver’s apartment is on the ground floor of an old crumbling row house on West 115th just off Malcolm X Boulevard in south Harlem. The area had been full of good musicians at one time—Fletcher Henderson, Eubie Blake, even W. C. Handy.

  He stops at the bottom of the stoop and takes in the buildings on either side before he heads inside his own. The state of Oliver’s home stands out in contrast to those surrounding him as younger folk move in with their ideas of coffee shops and sushi restaurants, Asian-infused soul food—whatever that is. Oliver knows the gentrification will take his place over soon as he’s packed up his suitcase and is gone. Won’t be long before it takes the whole of the second and third floors as well. Coming along nicely, he thinks, climbing the steps. Won’t be long before this whole block looks as pretty as the first time Francesca laid eyes on it.

  Once inside, he removes his hat and hangs it on the wall with the others. He loosens his tie and drops onto the sofa, then puts his feet up on the ottoman and takes a cigarette from a box on the end table. Before striking a match, he picks up a framed picture from the same table and looks at it.

  It’s been almost twenty years since Francesca passed. He looks at the beauty in the picture, the olive skin that had seemed so pale in contrast to his midnight blackness, the thin red lips, green eyes, and jet-black hair.

  He had met her at her father’s club in Sacramento when he was a young man on tour with Bechet. Her father was an Italian immigrant who’d farmed the land, selling his produce to markets before scrounging enough money to buy his own market. From there he’d bought a nightclub at the urging of his wife, an artist and native Californian who’d become enamored with the bands and musicians passing through town from Southern California, San Francisco, and points east. The last thing her father wanted was for any daughter of his to marry one of those musicians, so Oliver hustled her back to New York and married her right onstage in a little Harlem club long since gone.

  The memory of Harlem as it was, as he and Francesca were, briefly lifts him up before the twinge of regret pinches and pops that balloon, deflating him once again. “I wa
sn’t perfect,” he says to the photo, “not even close. Not like you, Francesca. My sweet Chesca.”

  He sees their daughter’s face in his wife’s and thinks then of who else was missing from the night’s audience. He thinks of his daughter and sons, missing them and hurt by their absence, though he knows he has no right to be; he’s made his bed. He puts it all aside, not because he doesn’t want to think of his children but because he is a superstitious old fool, and conjuring up reasons for them not to come to any of his final shows might jinx the next four nights and make it so. He still has hope they’ll come. In all his life, it was the music and that honest-to-God hope that he’s counted on.

  He smiles and touches his fingertips, still raw from playing all night, to the glass. “Good night, Francesca.”

  2.

  The club is packed, and she could see each patron’s face from where she sits if she wanted to, but she’s there for him and can’t take her eyes away. In order to see him, to be able to watch his hands, she’s pulled her chair away from that shitty little table—sticky on top from whatever service it had been in before being dragged from a utility closet for her—and leans far to the right until she nearly tips over the wobbly cane-back chair.

  Agnes feels she has been put in her place, both physically and metaphorically, with this table. A moment of apprehension washes over her; she worries that the attitude of the hostess might be the rule in Manhattan. Ultimately, she won’t let herself care, but it still makes her feel better when the elderly woman at the next table leans in to say, “Don’t let her get you down.”

  “What’s that?” Agnes says, her eyes fixed on the piano.

  “Marcie. The hostess.”

  At this, Agnes turns to find where the hostess is. She can see Marcie across the room ignoring another patron who tries to get her attention.