Five Night Stand: A Novel Read Free

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.
    “We’re not all like that,” the woman continues, holding up her own glass for a toast. She is elegant looking with steel-gray hair and diamond earrings that lie against her neck.
    “Who?”
    “New Yorkers. You’re not from here, are you?”
    “It shows?”
    The woman merely smiles, still holding her glass up, tipping it just a bit to hurry the toast along, and Agnes finally takes the hint, clinking her highball glass. “To Oliver Pleasant,” the woman says. “Good music to blot out a condescending bitch.”
    Agnes grins at her new friend—she’s always felt more comfortable with people older than her peers—and then turns back to Oliver, watching intently, her own hand absently mimicking his across the table. She watches his frame on the bench like an Easter Island monolith and the way his shoulders dance, his body swaying with the melody. She picks it all up at once, the sight, the sound, the beat of his heart and of those around her. Her new friend at the next table sways as well.
    “You play?” Agnes asks.
    She shakes her head, still watching Oliver. “No. Well, for about a minute when I was a child. My mother made me take lessons. I hated it. Now, of course, I wish I’d kept up with it. You?”
    “I do—my daddy taught me, and old Ms. Gaerig. My daddy always told me, ‘Agnes, if you want to do anything well, you got to practice.’ And I did, too. Practiced my ass off.”
    “I’m sure you’re very good.”
    Agnes shrugs.
    “Do you play concerts? In clubs like this?”
    “Oh, no ma’am.” Agnes laughs and gulps from her glass. “I play in small places back home in New Orleans, but nothing like this”—she looks around the room—“no, this is nice. It’s almost like a church in here.”
    She’s come to the basement bar of the Capasso Hotel in Midtown Manhattan as though it is a speakeasy and she a skid-row drunk. It’s her first time in New York and she brings along only scenes from movies with their syncopated and scattered dialogue as reference, and a fervent love and respect for the music.
    The club is well-appointed and elegant, sconces in all the right places to highlight only what needs to be lit—white tablecloths, sepia walls, mahogany bar, and the bandstand—while all the rest is thrown into darkness and shadow. The patterned carpet is soft and she’d sunk into it with each footfall as she was led to her table. Couples sit in booths of oxblood leather, intimate and alone in the crowd, and sink just as comfortably into the darkness.
    If she were to admit it, Agnes would say she had expected a bolted door in a dark and grimy alley to greet her; a password spoken through a slot would have opened that heavy door so she could descend a staircase into a world that smelled of cigar smoke and whiskey. There is a staircase in this club, but little else from her black-and-white, James Cagney imagination.
    Agnes feels as though she’s made her entrance into a film and the sound track ties the scene together. She’s come to New York for other reasons entirely, but discovered Oliver Pleasant was playing and needed to be here with him, to be near him the way the devout flock to the Vatican if only to breathe the same air as their pope. As she settles in with her drink and the music, she becomes more at ease and thinks that this is where she belongs, that all of her