Joplin's Ghost

by Tananarive Due

  “And you’re a fool. They’re illegible!” Scott said. He and Lottie argued all the time now.

  Lottie raised her arms with pages fanned in each hand, a performance that embarrassed him. “See what he’s doin’? I told you, I can’t let my eyes off him a minute. This man is burning his music and sending it out with the trash every chance he gets. I’ll feed him and wash him—I’ll carry him from one end of this flat to the other—but I will be goddamned if I’m gonna watch him burn up what’s left of Scott Joplin. You better talk to him, Sam.”

  “It’s all right, Lottie,” Sam murmured, patting her shoulder. He steered her gently from the room, speaking in her ear. “I’ll talk to him. It’s all right.”

  At least I don’t have to wonder if my wife will be deprived of male company after I’m gone, Scott thought, watching his friend’s tenderness toward his wife. Lottie might be running with any of his friends, or all of them. Was he still Lottie’s husband, or only one of her boarders?

  He wouldn’t let Sam see his music either, he decided. Sam might steal it for Lottie.

  Joe Lamb was the first to put on his hat and reach out his hand for a parting handshake. The first mourner to reach the casket before he goes on his way, Scott thought.

  “Hiya, Scott.”

  Scott grunted. It had taken training to get Lamb to stop calling him Mr. Joplin. Lamb was a good rag composer and had been since the day Scott met him, but he treated Scott as if he’d been his teacher. “I’m working on a new rag for Stark,” Lamb said. “When I’m finished, maybe I’ll come by and play a few bars so you can tell me what you think. Like old times.”

  Scott grunted again, nodding this time. “How’s John?” he said.

  Lamb leaned closer, cupping his ear with a svelte hand. “Once again?”

  “Stark,” Scott said, trying to force a single clear word past his tongue.

  “Back in St. Louis. He’s not the same since his wife died. Nell’s fine, though.”

  Scott nodded. He was glad to hear good news about John’s daughter, anyway.

  “You take care of yourself, Scott.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Scott said.

  Watching Joe Lamb tip his hat to the others and leave the parlor, always a gentleman, Scott felt a gentle intuition about the man: Lamb, like Sam, was going to live a long life. Music had strengthened his spirit instead of poisoning it. Scott felt so much envy for a white man walking into his future on his own two legs that he had to look away.

  “I better bookity-book on out of here, too,” young Walter Powell said, reaching for Scott’s hand. “There’s hell to pay with Europe if you’re late.”

  “You still playin’ for Jim Reese Europe?” Herbert Wright said with another swift slice from his apple. “Everybody I talk to says I gotta see Jim Europe. Put in a good word for me with that bossy SOB. I need some weekend work.”

  “You want to meet Jim, you better come on now, then. You might get lucky, but watch your mouth. Try not to sling sassy for half a minute. You’re crazy, man.”

  Wright shook his head, standing. He reached behind him for his bass drum, which he carried in a case wherever he went. “Never did like bossy folks,” he muttered. “But let’s go.”

  “I thought you wanted a taste, baby,” Sadie protested, sidling beside Wright. Sadie was the perfect actress, her face sagging from undue injury as she rubbed a slow, sensuous ring on Wright’s back, beneath his shoulder blades. Despite himself, Scott wished she were touching him instead. He had almost forgotten touching.

  “I gotta get somethin’ in my pocket first, angel,” Wright said. “Save me a lil’ bit.”

  Sadie’s smile was fit for a wedding chapel, although her eyes never smiled, day or night. “I’ll save you more than that, sugar.”

  The faces changed, but the conversations were no different than the ones Scott had heard at the piano in Sedalia cathouses, with transactions competing to keep pace with the music. It was impossible to escape one’s beginnings. Scott wished someone had told him from the start.

  When Herbert Wright shook Scott’s hand in parting, Wright’s eyes darted around the room like a cat’s, and those eyes gave Scott a shudder. He felt a sting of premonition strong enough to make him queasy. Herbert Wright didn’t like rules, and he was the type to kill a bandleader like James Reese Europe one day. Herbert Wright, like Scott, was pure bad luck.

  “You look better today, Joplin,” Wright said with a wink, which made him a liar, too.

  One by one, everyone escaped to their own lives, for good or for ill. Sadie gave Scott a long look—almost as if she hoped to invade his thoughts—and walked back to her room, humming the “St. Louis Blues.” Or was it the second movement from his symphony he heard fluttering lazily from her nostrils? Why wasn’t it obvious to Lottie that this girl was spying on him?

  Sam came back to the parlor alone, without Lottie. He had been gone a long time. “Lottie’s gonna keep herself company for a while. You need some help somewhere before I go?”

  “My room,” Scott said, little more than a sigh.

  Sam pulled Scott’s arm over his shoulder and hoisted him to his feet, so high that Scott’s soles barely touched the floor. “She thinks you’ve gone crazy, Scotty,” Sam said, carrying Scott to the hall. Without Lottie watching, Scott barely made the effort of moving his legs.

  “Madness is the least of what ails me.” Scott closed his eyes as they approached the long mirror on the buffet, refusing to look at himself as an invalid in Sam’s arms.

  Since Lottie had caught Scott burning his music, she had moved his things to the spare room down the hall. Instead of Lottie’s decorative heirlooms and draperies, Scott had only his bed, a lamp, a night table, a wardrobe, and the silent, neglected Rosenkranz, where no one could touch his piano but him. This room is a prison, Freddie used to say. He had his own cell now.

  “If you’d give me that music, it would make Lottie real happy,” Sam said, turning so they could both fit through the narrow doorway. “That woman loves you, Scotty. But she’s tired, see? Love don’t fix everything.”

  “You’re wrong,” Scott said, as Sam lowered him to his bed. A chuckle came, a bad taste in his mouth. “Love doesn’t fix anything, youngster.”

  He felt corrupt speaking those words to a man with a cherub’s face and a long life ahead, but talking had become hard work. Scott had decided that if he was going to make the effort to speak anymore, he might as well tell the truth.

  This time, when he tried to go to sleep, Scott didn’t hear singing. He heard crying instead.

  A lost girl, he thought, waking. The crying had made him dream about Alice and her adventures in Wonderland. He had seen a girl running past giant toadstools with a Cheshire cat grinning at her from the treetops, like the illustrations in Freddie’s book. All along, Scott had thought the crying was part of his dream. But Scott’s eyes were wide-open now, and the sound of a crying girl was more distinct, from somewhere in the dark.

  “Who’s there?” Scott said into the darkness. No light from the streetlamps could find this room, with his window shades pulled low. “Lottie?”

  Another sob came, and it didn’t sound like Lottie. This girl’s voice was higher pitched, years younger than Lottie. Scott opened the drawer to his night table, fumbling for a match, until he remembered that the lamp on his night table was electric, not kerosene. Besides, Lottie had taken his matches away.

  Scott almost expected the crying to stop when he switched on the lamp, but it didn’t.

  In the light, he saw the girl crouched on the floor beside the Rosenkranz in bare feet and a thin white gown that didn’t reach her knees, much less hide her pale nakedness. Her face was buried in her arms as her thin shoulders shook with sobs. If he was only imagining the girl sitting beside the piano, he was more mad than anyone thought.

  But her arms…her hair…

  “F-Freddie?” Scott said, afraid to say her name for fear of being wrong.

  The girl only cried on, a sound so p
itiable that Scott’s eyes melted. All these years, when he’d dreamed about Freddie, she’d always been smiling. He had never imagined her in tears.

  The girl suddenly looked up, her eyes wide and expectant, as if she had just heard him call her. As if his words had traveled a great distance to reach her ears, riding the wind.

  “My God…” Scott whispered, his heart lurching into a dance. The rush of blood through him made Scott’s skin hot. “It is you. I knew you were there. I’ve felt you with me, even when I was only dreaming. Freddie! Oh, my dear girl!”

  Freddie stood up, steadying herself against the piano. Wherever Freddie had come from, her trip had tired her, he thought. The Rosenkranz brought her here, repaying its debt, he thought, elated. Scott couldn’t recall the details of his agreement with this piano, but Scott knew they had an agreement just the same.

  Scott searched his wife’s face, hoping to see her smile, and instead he saw the absence of a face beneath her dark hair. The closer he tried to look, the less he saw. There were impressions of faces from one instant to the next in the place where her face should be, but none were hers—and yet, all of them were Freddie. It was Freddie who was now taking quick steps toward him, and Freddie who curled beside him in his bed, weightless and angelic.

  “Oh, my dear heart. My dear, sweet girl. What’s wrong?”

  Again, Freddie seemed not to hear him at first. Then, she only cried with more anguish, sobs that tore his skin. Was she sad only to see him so reduced?

  “I can’t bear to hear you like this,” Scott said, stroking Freddie’s hair, which was springier than he remembered and smelled of sweet fruit. He whispered to her, searching for her pale earlobe in her nest of hair. “You don’t have to bring any pain with you here. I won’t let any hurt touch you while I’m near. I promise you, dear heart. I promise.”

  Freddie clung to his neck, exactly like a child grasping for her father. Scott held her, and in his arms she was not weightless, only as light as a feather pillow, with flesh that seemed to meld to his rather than touching him. When he hugged her, Scott sank inside of her, and she into him. Scott’s mouth opened as a shock of sensation traveled through him.

  In his better days, Scott’s toes had curled from pleasure at women’s hands, but what Freddie gave him in that instant made the memory of fleshly union trivial. Scott felt the current of his love for her course through them both, and her love for him dazzled him in return. He had never needed to hold someone so much, and she had never needed so much to be held.

  She had come back to him. She had found him.

  “Stay with me, Freddie. Please. Stay with me,” Scott Joplin said to his ghost.

  Part Five

  When I have fears that I may cease to be

  Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,

  Before high-piled books, in charactery,

  Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain;

  When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,

  Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,

  And think that I may never live to trace

  Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;

  And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!

  That I shall never look upon thee more,

  Never have relish in the faery power

  Of unreflecting love!—then on the shore

  Of the wide world I stand alone, and think

  Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

  —JOHN KEATS, “When I Have Fears”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  On the third floor, the two bodyguards were the only people visible in the carpeted hall.

  The bodyguard beside the elevator on Phoenix’s floor tracked Carlos with his eyes for a moment, then ignored him. The firm-jawed brother’s name was Terrell, but that was all Carlos had learned about him in seventy-two hours. The guard at the other end of the hall—who was friendlier and had the unforgettable name of John W. Gacy—hitched Carlos a nod.

  The guards were dressed in business suits and ties like Wall Street executives, hired courtesy of Three Strikes Records—bling without the sparkle. The brothers had perfect posture, stood with their impeccably shined shoes in a V at the heels and called the medical staff “ma’am” and “sir”—so these guys were ex-military. If Ronn Jenkins could afford to hire an army for Phoenix, Carlos figured she deserved that and more. Ronn Jenkins had a lot to answer for.

  Ronn’s ongoing feud had inspired a twenty-one-year-old kid to camp out in the theater overnight to elude metal detectors and shoot two people dead, firing into a crowd of bystanders, including minors. The man in custody, Cecil Taylor, was a cousin of DJ Train’s. He had admitted to police that he wanted to kill Kai and G-Ronn to avenge three killings in Los Angeles and Brooklyn; one a decade old, one a month old, and one a week old, on the street outside of Three Strikes Records. G-Ronn had once dined at the White House under President Clinton, so he had scaled great heights; but even if he had never killed anyone himself, Ronn Jenkins had blood on his hands.

  Ronn didn’t visit Phoenix, but he insisted on giving Phoenix a private, comfortable place to heal. The Harbor Recovery Center on the Upper West Side was only a slight downgrade from her hotel suite at Le Bon Maison midtown—and the private mental hospital was much pricier at $2,000 a day, Gloria said. Even Ronn Jenkins doesn’t have enough money to pay Phoenix what he owes her, Carlos thought. Ronn hadn’t gotten so much as a nick during the melee he had wrought, and Phoenix had lost her father.

  The tremors Carlos felt in his psyche showed no sign of abating. Thinking about the Osiris made Carlos’s cheek quiver involuntarily, so he thought about the shooting as little as possible. Carlos couldn’t imagine anyone heartless enough to try to hurt Phoenix now—she was hurting enough—but the guards kept the reporters away. Phoenix Smalls was famous, at last, but not in the way any sane person would want.

  Phoenix’s official diagnosis was a mental collapse after witnessing her father’s murder, and that might be part of it. But Carlos knew it was more than that, even if that was plenty.

  Just as he reached Phoenix’s door, Gloria slipped out of the suite. Synchronicity.

  “Thank God you’re back. I need nicotine,” Gloria said. “The real loony bin is in that room, Carlos. I can’t handle it.”

  “I know.”

  Carlos noticed the floral scent of her perfume even though he wasn’t trying. Gloria was cute, and blondes were an old weakness. If once upon a time wasn’t far behind, Carlos thought, he might be another bad thing about to happen to Phoenix. It would kill him to let that happen.

  “Mom and Dad are trashed, so they’re back at the hotel. Can you stay with Aunt Leah?”

  “Of course. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Thanks, dude.” Gloria leaned into him for a hug.

  “Take it easy, rubia. Cuidado. New York doesn’t run out of bars,” Carlos said. This morning, Gloria’s breath had reeked of beer when she showed up for duty at her cousin’s side. Gloria nodded. “That’s what Phoenix would say, but I need to go somewhere, get shit-faced, and dance my ass off.” Gloria noticed they were still hugging the instant he did, and pulled away quickly. We could help each other forget for a while. Carlos was disappointed when the thought appeared, but relieved he was able to push it away.

  “Carlos, I have to say it again—I was so wrong about you. You’re good people. If you weren’t seeing my cousin…”

  The unfinished sentence made Carlos’s head swim with images of Gloria’s sturdy legs, seeing them bared the night he almost gave up on Phoenix. “Same here,” Carlos said.

  The taboo dangled, a hot wire between them, and he knew they were two of a kind. Taboo was a tiresome, persistent fetish.

  “I would never do anything to hurt Phee,” he said, once it was time to stamp it out. He meant it, even if this conversation felt better than anything that had happened all day, or yesterday, or the day before. And probably tomorrow. Now, Carlos knew why Heather’s grief had ignited her
sexually when her aunt died a year ago, while they were still sleeping together: You wanted to feel something else. Anything else. Everything else.

  “Good thing, or I’d kick your ass,” Gloria said.

  Carlos kissed Gloria’s forehead, a brother. “No need. I love her, too.”

  Gloria nodded. Either she had applied her makeup wrong, or Gloria’s eyes had sunken during the day. She slipped her pearl-colored lighter into her back pocket. “My Newports are calling. ’Night, Carlos. She’ll be back.”

  She’ll be back. That was the promise that kept them all going.

  Room 315 was L-shaped and regal, with a caramel-and-brown pattern on the walls and a showpiece black sofa patterned after old Egypt, each armrest guarded by two golden pharaohs in head cloths. Lush potted trees in African-patterned clay pots were scattered in the corners. The room was nearly as big as Phoenix’s apartment; a living room, dining area and separate bedroom. It would have been cozy, if not for the rest.

  This time, Phoenix’s room was hot.

  As soon as Carlos opened the door, he unbuttoned his top three buttons. The heat wouldn’t get better soon; the temperature changes lasted for hours. It had taken a day and a half of maintenance men to make them realize that Phoenix’s room made its own decisions, no matter where she moved. Phoenix’s room had its own mind.

  The Venetian blinds, which were pulled to the side and clumped together at both ends of the picture window, swung slowly back and forth as if they were on a rocking ship. The swinging had started suddenly this morning.

  The room’s large picture window was fogged with runny condensation. The interaction between whatever was in Phoenix’s room and the air conditioner was making steam, he realized. He thought he saw writing on the window between the lines of slowly running water, craggy paths on the pane. CARLOS, it said in cursive, a greeting that vanished when he blinked.

  Carlos reached into his pocket, fumbling for the cross he kept in his wallet, the one he wore only time to time but carried everywhere because he’d promised Nana when he was ten. Phoenix’s room made Carlos want to remember how firmly his mother and grandparents believed in a just, protective God and to forget that he had ever doubted. Carlos was relieved to find his cross was where he had left it. He rubbed it, walking farther into the room.