Joplin's Ghost

by Tananarive Due

  Phoenix heard Carlos breathing slowly behind her turned back. Carlos was here, asleep, and that simple knowledge was Phoenix’s anchor to sanity. There was nothing to panic about. All she would do, she decided, was roll very slowly onto her back, reach over to shake Carlos, and ask him if he could see the piano, too. Maybe the piano wasn’t really here. Or, maybe she was dreaming. Carlos could tell her one way or the other. She would have launched her plan if she hadn’t noticed the foot of the bed and forgotten her plan altogether.

  There, a black man was sitting at the edge of the mattress, not three inches from where her feet were entwined. He sat with his legs wide apart, hands clasped between his knees, staring at the carpeted floor. If she twitched, she would kick him.

  So this IS a dream, Phoenix thought, her heart slamming her chest. But in truth, her heart was sending out an alarm because she did not feel like she was dreaming. Last night’s dream had seemed real at the time, but Phoenix understood the difference now. Last night, she hadn’t felt the stabbing awareness that she was awake, the constant onslaught of reminders. The satin bedsheets against her skin, the lumpy mound in the center of her pillow, or her skin itching all over, starting at her feet. The smell of Carlos’s aftershave, the thin cobweb billowing beneath the air-conditioning vent, and the words Calle del Cristo painted on the artwork shaped like a miniature country storefront hanging on Carlos’s wall.

  Irrefutable clues that she was wide-awake were everywhere.

  Phoenix dug her nails into her palm so hard that she carved raw crescents into her skin. She would rather hurt herself than risk a movement that might make the man sitting on the bed look toward her, or chase him away.

  That is not a real person. That is Scott Joplin’s ghost, and he’s not going to hurt you, Phoenix thought, trying to soothe herself, but she couldn’t forget she was lying: She didn’t know he wasn’t going to hurt her, she only hoped he wasn’t. She was pinning her hopes on a psychic’s conjecture and movies about sad, yearning ghosts. The hard truth was, she didn’t know anything about this realm that kept brushing against her shoulder. She had not known this man in life, and she knew him less in death. Please, please go away. Shit shit shit, please leave me alone.

  Phoenix’s feet trembled. Her efforts to lie still turned her muscles against her, shooting conflicting impulses across her rigid, restless body. Her eyes kept trying to look away from the man who wasn’t there, as if she hoped he would vanish if she blinked, but Phoenix forced herself to stare. The veins in her neck bulged from the effort, but she was going to look at him the way she would stare directly at an eclipse, even if there were consequences.

  The man’s profile didn’t look like the stoic photograph she had studied these past days; his jowl seemed looser, and his lips were almost Ronn’s, with that plump velvet cushion on the bottom. He was darker than Ronn, maybe half Ronn’s size. His skin was onyx against his downy white dress shirt. His hair was wiry, tiny black coils. Agony had hollowed out the exposed side of his face. He might be praying or crying, or both. He was the portrait of misery. On her bed. And he was dead.

  Phoenix’s mouth shook as words tried to bring themselves out for air: What do you want from me? What can I do to help you? But the words never came. Phoenix borrowed more oxygen from her lungs, trying to speak, but her voice had shut itself down, useless. She had never been more sorry to be afraid. But if he looked at her, she might faint. And if he touched her…

  On her nightstand, Phoenix’s cell phone rang, and her fear set itself free as a scream. Her eyes went to the phone for a half second as she remembered where the ringing had come from. A second at most. But when she looked back, the man at the edge of the bed was gone. The piano, too. Phoenix felt like she was a part of a slideshow clicked to the next image, this one not quite identical to the last.

  “C-Carlos,” she said. Her arm flailed for him.

  Carlos’s eyes were already open, slits nearly hidden in the shadows across his face. He lay stock-still as a corpse, his eyes trained on the spot where the ghost had been. “I saw,” he whispered, not moving, as if he still expected the visage to come back. “He was there…ten, fifteen minutes.” Carlos didn’t sound blasé anymore. He was a man who had seen a ghost.

  “Why didn’t you wake me up?” Phoenix felt a flash of irritation.

  “I couldn’t. Anytime I moved, he seemed to fade. I pretended to be asleep.”

  “Did you see a piano, too?”

  “No. I saw a man sitting on the bed.”

  “In a white shirt?”

  “Yes. And he was posed like Rodin’s The Thinker, but his hands were folded. Every few minutes, I heard him sigh. Most of the time, he was looking right at you.”

  By the time Phoenix noticed her phone again, it was on its fourth ring. The 314 area code told her who it was, and she thanked God for his timing. Her hands were so unsteady, she dropped the phone and had to slide from his bed to retrieve it from the floor.

  “Mr. Milton?” she said, afraid she’d missed him.

  “Yes, it’s me,” Van Milton said, sounding as relieved as she felt. “I—”

  “The ghost was just here. In my bedroom. He was sitting at the edge of my bed, I swear. He was right here. Can you please tell me what’s going on?”

  A blast of static on the line made Milton’s voice hard to hear. Puffs of her hair fell across Phoenix’s earlobe, and she brushed them aside while she strained to listen. “I was hoping you’d tell me,” Van Milton said. “I need to see you, Miss Smalls. Right away. How can I find you?”

  “I’m in L.A.,” she said.

  “So am I. I just landed, so I’m using my cell phone. After I saw the faxes you sent me, I took the first flight I could find.”

  Van Milton looked like he might be in his bedclothes when he met Phoenix and Carlos in the TSR lobby at eight-thirty in battered gray sweats and a faded T-shirt from a Sedalia ragtime festival. His eyes were overanxious and rest-broken, so he probably hadn’t slept on the overnight flight. By the way he lurched to his feet, he might have dozed off waiting for her.

  Phoenix hadn’t wanted to meet the curator in such a public place, but there was no way around it. He’d refused to discuss more on the telephone, and she had an appointment in Ronn’s office at nine with Katrice, Manny and Jamal Lewis, the director of her music video. Sarge had been surprised when she said she didn’t need a ride to the studio—So you’re still with him, he said, the him being Carlos—but he’d kept his criticisms to himself. She’d see her father at the meeting. Felicha told Phoenix that The Mothership was free, so she and Carlos met privately with the curator in Ronn’s most prized studio, which Phoenix thought befitted the occasion.

  Phoenix told Van Milton about the ghost they’d seen on her bed. While he listened—or half listened, she thought—the curator spread the pages of sheet music she’d faxed him across the control boards until paper blanketed the machinery, a makeshift exhibition.

  When she was finished, Milton tapped the silent keyboard of the gray Yamaha MOTIF ES. “How do I get this to work?”

  Since that was one of the few questions about Ronn’s studio Phoenix could answer—and despite the violation of The Mothership’s number one rule, Nobody better fuck with the equipment—she was happy to turn on the synthesizer and test a key. Her touch set off a blast from a techno-happy brass section, which made them all jump. “Let’s try a piano,” she said.

  Milton nodded. “Please.”

  That done, the curator’s practiced fingers launched into a ragtime melody on the MOTIF’s convincing imitation of a piano. Despite its cheer, the music filled Phoenix with dread even before Milton spoke. She didn’t know this song, yet she did. “This is ‘The Chrysanthemum.’ When I pulled your fax out of our machine, it jumped out at me in the first measure. Joplin dedicated it to Freddie Alexander, who was soon to be his wife,” he said.

  Freddie again. It might be a melody Phoenix had heard in her sleep, but she couldn’t be sure. Phoenix wrapped her arms around herself
, rubbing her skin for warmth. The Mothership always got cold overnight, so it was frigid, ghost or no ghost.

  “Joplin’s publisher claimed it was inspired by a dream about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It’s good work, from 1904, available in any full collection of Joplin’s rags. So when ‘The Chrysanthemum’ was at the top of your stack of so-called ghost music, I asked myself, ‘Why is this girl trying to make me out like some fool?’ I almost didn’t bother with the rest. I’d had an aggravating day…” Milton’s hands tinkled out a rapid melody in a different key.

  “But this one caught my attention. I didn’t recognize it right away because I’ve never known how it begins. I called it ‘Page Two,’ the second page of an unpublished Joplin manuscript. One day in 1947, Joplin’s widow invited a photographer to the house, and he captured one of Scott Joplin’s unfinished manuscripts in a photograph. An enterprising young man in Chicago, Reginald R. Robinson—he’s a friend of mine—was researching Joplin a few years ago when he found that photograph of handwritten sheet music. Well, Reginald—now, he’s a bright young man who also happens to be a self-taught musician from the projects—had the brilliant idea that if he enlarged the photo, he could see the music clearly enough to transcribe it, which is what he did. He recorded it for the first time on his last CD, all thirty-one seconds of it. It was a rescue, because that original sheet music in the photo has been lost, like everything else Mrs. Joplin had in the 1940s. Or, we’d thought the music was lost.”

  At that, Milton gazed at Phoenix above his glasses, a significant look that made her realize he had not made up his mind about whether to trust her. “But now, thanks to you, I also have Page One. And pages three and four, which make it complete, so I was able to play the whole thing last night. If it’s what you say it is, I’m the first to play the entire piece since the man who composed it. Except for you, that is. In your sleep.” His tone was skeptical.

  “I’m just telling you the way it happened, Mr. Milton,” Phoenix said, defensive.

  “Yes, so you’ve claimed,” he said with that same undecided, blank look again. “I should tell you, Reginald said he had a similar experience at the Joplin House, in the parlor. He sat at our piano for two hours and composed something he called ‘The Ventriloquist.’ He told me he felt like he was channeling Joplin’s spirit. The piece is good, and it sounds like Joplin, but Reginald is an excellent composer. My guess is, there’s a thin line between revelation and imitation.”

  “Not with me,” Phoenix said.

  “We have it on video,” Carlos said, speaking for the first time. He stood apart from them beside one of the video games near the door. “It may not prove she was sleeping, but if you saw the tape…”

  Milton half shrugged, shuffling through his pages of scores. “If it were done cleverly enough, how would I know? Any good composer could imitate Joplin’s style.” He sighed, gathering several pages in his hand and slowly pulled off his glasses to pocket them. “I have a sense of humor, so when I came across ‘Page Two,’ you got my attention. It’s pretty obscure. But I could have called you from St. Louis about that. I didn’t need to use my sister’s discount flight pass to get here overnight.” Milton’s eyes shimmered as he gazed at her, probing as if he hoped to see past her mask. “Then I got to the next pages. These. And I had a different feeling.”

  He showed her a longer score, which began with a florid introduction over a two-step tempo. He had at least fifteen pages of it, continuous.

  “Yeah, that one’s different,” Phoenix said. “Some of it looks like ragtime, some doesn’t.”

  “It’s an opera,” Milton said quietly. The hum of the equipment almost swallowed him.

  “Didn’t Joplin’s opera go to Broadway in the seventies?” Carlos said. “Treemonisha?”

  “This isn’t Treemonisha,” Milton said. He hesitated, begging Phoenix with his eyes to confess it now if she was trying to scam him.

  “I didn’t even know he wrote operas,” Phoenix said. “All I know about Scott Joplin is what you told me on the tour. I heard about his wife named Freddie, and that’s it.”

  Milton sighed, going on reluctantly. “Volumes of Joplin’s manuscripts have been lost. Before she died, his widow said he had more songs unpublished than published, but it’s all vanished over the years, the kind of thing that drives music historians crazy. One loss is especially sad, given its significance. In fact, one time we found a trunk in the attic of the Joplin House and we got excited, thinking maybe it was the trunk. But it wasn’t.”

  “What trunk?” Phoenix said.

  “Joplin lost a trunk in 1903. Supposedly, every copy of his first opera, A Guest of Honor, was in that trunk, and it was never retrieved, so it’s lost. No one has laid eyes on it in more than a century, yet I might have a copy of the first pages in my hand.”

  “Is there a recording of it?” Phoenix said, her heart skipping.

  “No, unfortunately,” Milton said.

  “Then what makes you think this is it?” Carlos said.

  “I don’t know how I know it, but I do. It’s vintage Joplin, start to finish. If it’s not A Guest of Honor, what’s the point of all this? A Guest of Honor is the one scholars have been bedeviled by, and I assume that’s why you’ve just given it to me.” Milton waited, watching their faces. Phoenix thought her eyes must be blank, because her thoughts were a cacophony.

  Carlos came closer, staring at the music in Milton’s hand. “Dios mio,” Carlos said. “If you’re so sure it’s Joplin, why don’t you believe what we’ve told you?”

  “Why? Why would I?” Milton said with a sarcastic chuckle. “All these years, there’s been a storm of speculation about Joplin’s missing music, especially his lost opera. And here you come sending it to me over a fax machine? If it’s authentic, you got this music somehow. Maybe you’re brokers. That I understand. But why tell me it came to you in a dream? That you were sleepwalking? You must think I’m a special kind of fool.”

  “You’re the one who told me about the ghost,” Phoenix said.

  Milton’s eyes spilled a hidden pool of anger. “Yes, and I’ve worked there for ten years, and I’ve played the piano in that building night and day, and nothing like you described has ever happened to me.” He sounded as envious as Heather Larrabee, and Phoenix felt sorry for him.

  “He didn’t choose you,” Carlos said evenly. “He chose Phoenix.”

  There was a knock at the studio door. Felicha stuck her head in, apologetic, saying something about Jamal Lewis being there early, and how he wanted to know if Phoenix could go with him for coffee down the street so they could talk about the video.

  At that instant, it was excruciating to think of sitting at the cafe to discuss the finer points of the “Party Patrol” music video, or whatever else might be on her director’s mind. Phoenix didn’t look over her shoulder at Felicha, keeping her eyes on Milton. “I can’t,” she said. “Tell him I’m sorry. Tell him I’ll be out as soon as I can.”

  As soon as the door closed again, Milton spoke rapidly, knowing their time was almost finished: “Please tell me you have the originals of the pages you faxed to me?”

  Carlos held up his satchel. “As original as they can be, from a Mac. It’s 188 pages in all. Your copy is probably sitting on your desk back at the Joplin House.”

  Milton looked alarmed, reaching into his back pocket for his cell phone. “I’ll want to see those you have, of course. But I’ll call my office and tell them to guard that package like gold. I’ve already faxed my pages to a ragtime scholar in New York named Edward A. Berlin. He’s likely to have a different idea about it—he’ll assume it’s a fraud, since he’s seen others—but I want his opinion. And I didn’t want it lost again, no matter what our outcome here today.”

  “What kind of outcome?” Phoenix said.

  “You tell me,” Milton said. “What are your plans for this music?”

  “I don’t have any plans,” Phoenix said. “You can’t seem to get that straight.”


  “What did you hope to gain by faxing this music to me?”

  “I just want to know what’s happening to me!”

  Phoenix wondered who was shouting so early in the morning, shrieking like a nut in the presence of an elder. Her body trembled, and she realized she was leaning against the console for support. She had an end-of-the-day headache already. Carlos guided her to a swivel chair, and she’d never been happier to surrender her legs and feet.

  “This has been hard for Phoenix,” Carlos said. “I need you to lighten up, Mr. Milton.”

  As Van Milton looked at Phoenix trembling in her chair, still clinging to herself for warmth, the gentle lines and creases in his dark face began to reshape themselves. His head tilted forward, and his eyes dimmed, then sparked.

  “This music came to you in your sleep?” the curator said.

  As if he was hearing it for the first time.

  Sarge, what’s up with your girl?”

  “Good morning to you, too, Katrice,” Marcus Smalls said, scanning the headlines of the Final Call newspaper he still sometimes bought by his barbershop on Crenshaw, just to see what Farrakhan’s boys were talking about these days. Marcus could have used a few minutes’ reflection before he ran into Katrice Daniels, since the intense, willowy woman reminded him of his ex-wife, a similarity that wasn’t going to do their working relationship any good. TSR’s vice president for marketing and promotion was six feet tall and hard to take in large doses, but he couldn’t afford to piss her off. Katrice would be running her own label in a year. Besides, Katrice told you what she thought, a trait worth the price of the aggravation.

  “Look, Sarge, you know how much I love Phoenix’s vision, so I’m an advocate, okay? But she doesn’t have her head wrapped around this process. She’s not engaged. Between you and me, she got jacked in the studio with D’Real, and she’s walking that same road again. Jamal Lewis is here to find out what she’s thinking—which is so rare for Jamal that we should declare today a holiday—but where’s Phoenix? She’s got her own little meeting going on in The Mothership she can’t pull herself away from, Felicha says. Can you please give your client a gentle 4-1-1 that if she wants to have a voice in her career, she better start using it now?”