Five Night Stand: A Novel Read Free Page A

father’s talk of jazz and the holy land of a New York City club has led her to this night, to this room as beautiful to her as any saint’s grotto.
    If she closes her eyes and allows herself to melt into the air, the room, the very music itself, she will find it isn’t the twenty-first century any longer but the simpler, newly awakened days of the early 1900s. She’s never been drawn to celebrity, but rather to nostalgia’s sleight of hand and its ability to cast a shadow across any situation. As her life changes now from day to day, as the mechanisms within her deteriorate and short out (terms her father would be comfortable with and know how to fix), she finds her thoughts receding to childhood and those nights beside her father, or dancing with her mother across their kitchen linoleum, where the music found them. She’s unapologetic for such feelings of nostalgia and, at times, it seems to her that she’s numb to the world and that these are the only feelings of which she’s capable.
    She’s never traveled quite so much as she has today to reach the past; the time spent in airports and waiting on tarmacs has left her feeling just as numb on the outside as she does within. Her flight from New Orleans this morning had first stopped in Houston, then taken her through Detroit, where she’d wandered the airport on a three-hour layover, pulling her black bag on wheels behind her like a nylon terrier and poking around souvenir shops. She sat in a Chili’s and ate french fries while reading the New Yorker , and that’s when she saw that Oliver Pleasant would be playing at the Capasso Hotel while she’s in town.
    These are to be the final live appearances of his career. It will be a five-night stand.

    It is something he doesn’t see here too often—a young woman, alone, so obviously enjoying the jazz and drinking top-shelf, single-malt scotch. He doesn’t see much of her kind and he’s certainly never seen her here in his ten months of waiting tables at the club. But then, they do get a lot of tourists, people coming from all over the country, the world, to hear New York–style jazz, swallowing it up like it’s a slice of pizza.
    She looks pretty if not frail. He is first drawn in by her eyes, large and brown, but it’s the graceful lines of her long neck that intrigue him. She reminds him of Audrey Hepburn. He thinks maybe he’s seen her someplace else, maybe in the park where he likes to rollerblade on Sundays, though she looks as though she hasn’t been outside in a decade of summers; her skin is smooth and clear and nearly as white as the tablecloths.
    She sits, staring at the bandstand and steadily swirling her drink, marrying the scotch and splash. She doesn’t seem to notice him—he is just her waiter—yet he goes back again and again just for her eyes. But no matter how often he goes back to her table, that table that hadn’t even existed in his station until that bitch Marcie had a busboy drag it from a closet, he gets no reaction from Agnes. And he likes to be noticed. He usually is, too, with his thick brown hair and natural blond highlights that the women he dates covet, his high forehead and stony cheekbones. He takes the audience’s attention from the act onstage as he moves around the room, making drink orders, pulling out chairs for women or offering lights for their cigarettes. Most of the staff are women—girls, really—whose erupting cleavage and short skirts distract the men, leaving their bored wives and dates to watch him instead of the musicians.
    He stands at the service bar and waits on another scotch for his mystery table. He leans over to pour a shot of vodka into a coffee cup, drinking it down without taking his eyes off of Agnes. She grows on him, mainly for her refusal to allow him to grow on her. The vodka burns and makes his head swim momentarily with a new challenge.
    “Your scotch.”
    “Thanks.” She doesn’t look away from the stage, and cranes her neck as though