Joplin's Ghost

by Tananarive Due

  The boys Scott had met from the next table performed admirably, and Joe Jordan always made his competitors sweat, but the night belonged to Louis Chauvin. He would likely win Tom’s contest on Beaumont, too. Louis was still a marvel.

  While young men and women flocked to Louis’s side after the contest, hoping to breathe in some of his talent for themselves, Scott sat in the dining room jotting notes for a “Rosebud March” on a napkin for a half hour while he waited for the late supper he’d been promised. The music wasn’t much yet, just something to occupy his mind. If not for tomorrow’s train, Scott would have left long ago and planned to see Louis another time, but he didn’t want to miss him. Louis had offered to treat him to prime rib, a Rosebud specialty, and Scott was glad to be treated.

  “God in Heaven, you’ve improved,” Scott told Louis when he finally joined him. Louis’s face was flushed from the praise of admirers, his collar colorfully stained with ladies’ promises.

  “Some of us don’t got sense enough to be satisfied, do we?” Louis said, fanning out his winnings on the tabletop, fifteen dollars. Scott wondered how much of the money he had already spent and how much would be left by dawn. Usually, Louis spent most of his winnings on the girls upstairs. Scott didn’t mind relieving his friend of a couple of his dollars, since the food here was magnificent. Tom took as much pride in his kitchen as he did in his playing.

  “When are you gonna come back to St. Louis, where you belong, Scotty?”

  “I don’t know,” Scott said. “My father needs to see me, after Will. Then I might come back, or I might not. I’m afraid I’ll be an old man sitting at this same table.”

  “I got news: You’re already an old man sittin’ at this table, old man.”

  Scott smiled wanly. “I’d go plumb crazy, Louis. I’m halfway there now.”

  “Well, your soul’s here in St. Louis. See how the place lit up when Tom called your name? They were all lookin’ at you sayin’, ‘Damn, that nigger over there sold copies of a song he wrote to thousands and thousands of folks who ain’t his mama, white folks to boot, and he’s one of us.’ Tom would cut off his hands to be Scott Joplin, and you know it. Your soul is here, and that ain’t goin’ nowhere. That’s a fact.” Louis raised his wineglass, and Scott clinked his against it, toasting. He had never heard Louis speak about the soul. He noticed that his friend’s eyes seemed red and glassy from something that wasn’t liquor.

  “How…are you?” Scott said, gazing at Louis directly, so he’d know what he meant.

  Smiling, Louis reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small burlap bag wound with twine. “Don’t touch it. That’s my bag of luck. I can help you get yours.”

  Scott hushed his voice. “Please tell me you’re seeing a doctor by now.”

  “Time to time. I’ve been feeling good, though. See here?” Louis held up both palms above the table. His right hand still shook slightly, but no worse than before. “My hoodoo man’s got this licked, Scotty. Come with me to see him.”

  “There’s no need,” Scott said, but he wasn’t hungry anymore. He’d made himself forget about Louis’s suspicions about Rose, and his fleeting fear of illness three years ago had been crushed by all of the losses in its wake. Everyone got headaches and muscle aches from time to time. That didn’t mean he carried syphilis.

  “The dog sleeps, Scotty,” Louis said cryptically.

  “So you’ve said.”

  “If you ain’t got it, I’m glad for you. But hardly a nigger in here ain’t carryin’ the dog. I wouldn’t feel no shame for it. Napoleon had it, too. Probably Shakespeare and all the rest. But that don’t mean you shouldn’t see after yourself.”

  “Follow your own advice.”

  “I am seeing after mine, Scotty. Believe it,” Louis said, and put his bag of luck away.

  Scott hoped Louis wasn’t foolishly leading himself to a path of needless suffering, like poor Will’s fight with consumption. Scott noticed a man across the dining room who looked like Will, except he was a few years his late brother’s junior. The man was grinning, enjoying the company of the pretty dark-skinned woman who sat beside him, laughing at his every word. The woman had a more delicate face, but as Scott stared at her he realized that she bore a remarkable resemblance to Belle. Unless he was mad himself, seeing a pair of ghosts.

  Scott felt such an acute sadness that it blocked his throat. He didn’t miss Belle, exactly, but the thought of her and their first little apartment on Morgan filled Scott with grief. He wished he could reclaim the past three years and become that confident, energetic man again. Scott had eaten only half his plate of prime rib, and his stomach was already pinching.

  “I see where you’re looking, and you’re better off without her,” Louis said. “That woman wasn’t no good for you, not from the start, and I told you as much to your face. Believe it or not, Leola still mentions your name from time to time. She’d be happy if you called on her.”

  Leola. Yes, the singer he had dallied with, whose eyes had shimmered into his. Last he’d heard, Leola had left the bar stages and was giving voice lessons, selling Poro hair tonic for extra money. Now that Belle had left him, what was to stop him from looking her up? For what? So you can lie down with her and catch your morning train?

  “Maybe Belle was right,” Scott said. “Musicians shouldn’t marry.”

  “Marry?” Louis said, pretending to sway off-balance on his chair. “Man, what’s wrong with you? I ain’t said nothin’ about getting married. Leola ain’t the marryin’ kind.”

  “What kind is she, then?”

  Louis grinned. “The best kind, Scotty. The kind that treats you right and leaves you be.”

  The thought of a night in Leola’s arms, in any woman’s arms, seemed too great a gift for Scott to imagine. He remembered the time when he could have snapped his fingers and had any of a roomful of women who’d heard him give a private concert, when his rendition of “Sun Flower Slow Drag” had so stirred them that even John Stark had remarked upon their excitement—and those women were white. Music was a natural aphrodisiac, Louis liked to say.

  But Scott didn’t dare toy with Leola. She deserved to be courted, and he had neither the time nor inclination for courting tonight. If he had the money to spare, he might have ventured upstairs to one of the hotel rooms instead, slipping onto a canopied bed while a perfumed stranger whispered lies and made his forsaken skin tremble to her touch. Yes, he might have. My God, he was too broke for a night with a whore.

  He had to go home. Or find home, if such a place existed for him.

  Much of what Scott loved about St. Louis, he suspected, might be dying before his eyes.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Los Angeles

  It takes a village to make a video, Phoenix thought. A sea of bodies lay before her.

  The line for the dance audition wound around the building just after 9:00 A.M., when Phoenix arrived at Millennium Studios on Lankershim with Arturo and Sarge. The lithe, wiry hopefuls were male and female, mostly teenagers or in their early twenties, their skin tones reflecting every shade of God’s rainbow. Olympia had advertised for a funky, jazzy look, so there were no leotards in this audition line, only baggy streetwear on the men, bare midriffs and colorful hairstyles on the women. Some dancers leaned against the building’s wall, some sat cross-legged on the sidewalk, some were stretching; they looked like they had been lined up for hours. It was an amazing sight. Phoenix’s heart raced with an adrenaline blast. All of this was for her.

  Walking past the waiting dancers while she kept her face hidden behind her oversized Fendi Suns shades, Phoenix felt the crowd stir and glow in her wake. She heard whispered voices: That’s her. See her over there? She’s in G-Ronn’s video. That’s Phoenix. Arturo and Sarge matched her breezy pace on either side as if they were her bodyguards, and Phoenix realized they were. If she hadn’t known it before, she knew it now: This was real.

  “Damn, there’s three hundred people here, yo,” Arturo muttered as a Three Strike
s intern in a black TSR T-shirt moved aside to let them slip into the side door where the line began. Olympia loved Arturo, so he had been spared an audition even though she was sure Sarge would be happy to have him bake in the sun with everyone else.

  “Five hundred,” the intern corrected. “The first group’s already inside.”

  “How many are we hiring?” Phoenix asked Sarge.

  “Twelve,” Sarge said. “Including swing. Ten principals.”

  “All these people for ten spots?” Phoenix whispered, surveying the waiting crowd from the doorway. Word must have gotten out that G-Ronn would make a cameo in the video and help her with final casting, Phoenix thought. Ronn’s name was a lightning bolt.

  Four girls who looked sixteen stood at the front of the line watching Phoenix with eager eyes, documenting her every word and movement. They were small-breasted and thin, with spray-on gold and burgundy in their funked-up hair. Phoenix saw their dreams shining in their eyes. She wondered how far they had come, and how much they had sacrificed to get here. Phoenix hadn’t known how to answer those hungry gazes in the line, but she gave the girls a smile. “Good luck,” she said, meeting their eyes before she disappeared inside.

  She’s so pretty, so down-to-earth, she heard the girls marveling before the door fell shut.

  Inside, more dancers wound in the hall leading to the dance studio. These were too preoccupied with preparations to notice her, checking their costumes and makeup, doing more serious stretches and splits, limbering themselves with popping moves to music in their heads. The closer Phoenix got to the studio doors, the more fevered the excitement burning from the dancers. One girl sat on the carpeted floor with her eyes closed, mouth moving in silent prayer.

  “Go on in and watch, see if anybody catches your eye while you have time,” Sarge told Phoenix quietly, handing her a thin sheaf of papers she recognized as her day’s interview schedule. The first of four interviews was in an hour, with a man named Keith O’Hara from an L.A.-based magazine called Basslines. She had never heard of the man or the magazine. “It’s good color for the reporters to see you here at the audition, build excitement for the video. You can do your interviews in the lobby when it’s time. Those phoners from New York later will come to the reception desk. Anybody asks about your personal life, tell them it’s off limits. Mystery is good.”

  “I’m on it,” Phoenix said, nodding. Between the Starbucks grande iced latte she’d nearly finished and Sarge’s pep talk yesterday, the malaise that had led her to Kendrick’s arms in St. Louis had lifted. Phoenix didn’t have time to stress about a tabloid story or her love life. She had blown her romance with Ronn, but she wasn’t going to blow this chance. Maybe it’s best Gloria’s still pissed and won’t be around. I need to be about my work right now.

  The studio was large, with a shiny finish on the floors and mirrors stretching the length of the front and rear walls. Olympia already had six rows of ten dancers in place as she ran them through some of the steps Phoenix recognized from the St. Louis show, which Sarge thought had gone fine despite all the drama the night before. A video camera was set up in front, taping the auditions so Ronn and the director could see the footage later. Phoenix and Arturo tried to slip in without interrupting, walking close to the wall as they made their way to a semicircle of folding chairs set up in a back corner, but Phoenix could feel the dancers noticing her. She caught eyes gazing at her reflection in the mirror, watching. She would have to get used to people staring.

  Shit. I’m paying for this, Phoenix realized suddenly. Sarge had explained that the cost for her music video would come out of her royalties, a depressing thought. The dancers they hired would make $250 a day for the week of rehearsals, and $475 a day during the shoot, which would last at least another week. And that didn’t count sets, costumes, locations. Even though the director was giving her a break because of his friendship with Ronn, this video was going to cost a fortune, probably $50,000 or more, and that was cheap.

  “You all got it? From the top,” Olympia said.

  The chorus from “Party Patrol” suddenly blasted from the sound system. A room of sixty dancers sprang into motion, and dozens of soles mewled against the floor. The dancers couldn’t have been working long, but most of them mimicked Olympia’s motion with surprising confidence. To Phoenix’s eyes, they looked like she could hire any random dozen of the dancers in this group alone. After running through the routine twice, Olympia asked them to switch rows so the dancers near the back could move forward.

  Watching, Arturo never ran out of criticisms: “OK, now girlfriend with the bald head better take some classes, and she needs to start with ballet,” he whispered as part of his running commentary. “People always think they can come audition because they’ve seen some videos on MTV. I’ve been in classes since I was eight. Oh Lord, do you see Snoop Dogg up here hogging the line? He needs to move back and let somebody else show off. Olympia hates divas.”

  “Really?” Phoenix said, grinning. “Then why does she like you so much?”

  “Why do you think? ’Cuz I’m the best, chica.”

  Phoenix studied Olympia’s gentle, friendly manner with the dancers as she tutored them through the routine, and suddenly felt bad that she hadn’t shed her reserve around her. She would do better, she decided, even though her band’s shows had never needed a choreographer. All they’d needed was the music.

  “You think Olympia’s good?” she asked Arturo.

  “Oh, yeah. She’s smart. She’s not afraid to push the edge, but she knows her roots. She loves Bob Fosse and Alvin Ailey and Katherine Dunham, like me. We can talk, see? And she likes my ideas. That’s another reason we get along. She’s gonna work your ass off.”

  “I know that’s right. This looks like an audition for a Broadway show.”

  “That’s what it is,” Arturo said, nodding. “Remember how Roy Scheider said it in All That Jazz? ‘It’s showtime, folks.’ We’re gonna take videos to a whole new level with ‘Party Patrol.’” Arturo sounded like Ronn, a convert. Maybe after all these years of storming off the stage, Arturo was growing up. If she could keep her own shit straight, she could take a village with her to Ronn’s moon, sun and stars.

  “Ya’ll remember there’s supposed to be some singing somewhere in this video, too, right?” Phoenix said, teasing.

  Arturo feigned confusion. “What’s your name again? Did you say something, Britney?”

  “All right, now,” Phoenix said, warning.

  “Oh, I’m sorry—is it Monica? Imani? I get you all mixed up.”

  They tried to smother their laughter, like being back in their high school auditorium with Jay, and Phoenix suddenly missed their friend fiercely. It still didn’t seem right that they had grown up without him. Some of the dancers in the row nearest them glanced nervously over their shoulders, afraid they were being laughed at. Phoenix covered her mouth, but she couldn’t stop giggling. It felt good to laugh, after the past few days.

  “You need to turn back around and get your steps down,” Arturo told the gawkers, and Phoenix pinched his muscle-bound arm to shush him.

  “We’re not laughing at you,” Phoenix said.

  “Speak for yourself,” Arturo muttered, and she pinched him again.

  The door opened, and one of the interns came into the studio accompanying a man with a reporter’s notebook. Phoenix glanced at the watch Ronn had given her: It was already after ten, time for her first interview! Her days flew past. Glancing at the reporter again, Phoenix mistrusted her eyes. “You have got to be shitting me…”

  “What?” Arturo said.

  Now, she was sure of it. She recognized the reporter’s ambling walk.

  “It’s Carlos.”

  “Carlos who?”

  “The Carlos, from high school,” Phoenix whispered, and Arturo’s eyes widened. No one in her circle at New World had been spared the story.

  “Miss Smalls?” the intern said, leaning close. “The reporter is here. His name is—”

/>   “I know his name,” Phoenix said. He loomed so large in her memory, he seemed smaller now even though he’d gained weight in eight years, filling out his cheeks, giving more heft to his chest. But everything else was the same: His liquid brown eyes, baby-smooth Hershey’s Kiss skin, and two front teeth that angled ever-so-slightly toward each other, a defect that made him attractive in her eyes. He still had a thin moustache groomed to perfection, and hair sprang from his head in short, tight twists she’d always called his dreadlets. His hair had once fascinated her. Everything about him had once fascinated her. Her toes twitched at the sight of him, and especially at the familiar scent of his cologne. No one wore Kenzo like Carlos.

  It took Phoenix a long time to think of what to say.

  “You don’t look like a Keith O’Hara.”

  He shrugged, grinning, and his smile brought back her twitching toes. “I told Keith I’d take this interview. He’s still writing your CD review, though. No conflict of interest. I hope this is all right.” His clipped sentences told Phoenix he was nervous, an idea that amused her. She was the one who used to feel nervous around him, in their seventy-two-hour courtship.

  Phoenix saw Arturo giving Carlos a careful examination, and he glanced at Phoenix with an approving smile. “I think you two need to be alone,” Arturo said.

  He stole the thought from her mind.

  Phoenix and Carlos went to a small room beyond the lobby that had vending machines offering water, sports drinks and snack foods. At least they were out of Sarge’s sight. Phoenix didn’t know where her father had vanished to, but she hoped he wouldn’t be back soon. Sarge would not be in the mood to see Carlos Harris, and Phoenix was tired of melodrama.