Joplin's Ghost

by Tananarive Due

  “Hope so,” Phoenix said, but that wasn’t true. She knew Scott wasn’t sweating about who was paying attention to him and who wasn’t anymore, a lesson she hoped she had learned from him. Scott had left those worries far behind.

  La’Keitha sounded her Fender again, challenging her with the intro to “Gotta Fly.”

  “Hey, Phee, is this a sound check or a press conference?” La’Keitha called.

  Phoenix shot her a look and turned back to the scholars. “Sorry for my friend’s manners.”

  “What manners?” T. said, and the group snickered behind her.

  “No, no, don’t let us keep you,” said Milton. “Go, Phoenix. Be a star.”

  The stage was too crowded. The Rosebud was intended for ragtime concerts with a single piano, not a full band. But this was a special event, a limited-seating fund-raiser for the Joplin House, so nobody would mind the way they looked as long as the music was good. Besides, they had more room here than they’d had in her parents’ garage in Cutler Ridge.

  As Phoenix strapped on her Liberation, she noticed that the audience of early arrivals had grown. By now, the more determined had claimed the tables in the front, and the growing crowd reminded Phoenix of the arena audiences that followed her from city to city: New Age ghost-lovers, young music fans and ragtime die-hards. Their dress ranged from tie-dye and sandals to suits and ties to hip-hop chic, but they had her music in common.

  Phoenix was intrigued by a black couple sitting near the stage, especially the young man. Early- to mid-twenties, close-cropped hair. Tree-trunk shoulders. The name popped to her like a childhood memory: Kendrick Allen Hart. She had met him in another life.

  Andres was already counting off with his drumsticks, so Phoenix didn’t have time to walk over and say hello. But she found his eyes and smiled with a Whassup, Kendrick nod. Kendrick’s grin filled the room. People liked being remembered. Kendrick’s date looked at him with new eyes, shocked and impressed. Phoenix knew that feeling well.

  “…Three…four… ”

  The sound of Phoenix & Fire brought the Rosebud Bar back to life.

  Hey, have you seen Carlos?” Phoenix asked, pulling Gloria away from her plate.

  In the hour left before the show, the band had escaped to a meeting room upstairs to eat a catered meal of St.-Louis-style barbecue, Milton’s thank-you. Downstairs, the audience was a throng already.

  “Haven’t seen Carlos in a while,” Gloria said. She licked barbecue sauce from her pinky in a delicate way only she could master. “Not since he said he was taking a tour of the house.”

  Gloria said it casually, but there was nothing casual about that, and she knew it. That was a surprise, from Carlos. He almost hadn’t come with her for this concert, since he had fallen out of the habit of trailing after her on tour. He had his life, too.

  But this was different. This was Scott’s house. She had thought it should matter.

  Phoenix knew she had only convinced Carlos to come because it was a one-day gig, and she had promised him Sunday in St. Louis to themselves, a vacation. Her project was due in her electronic music class at USC’s Thornton School of Music on Tuesday anyway, so her real life was still back in Los Angeles. She had to stay in the habit of spending time with him, or they were in trouble. They almost hadn’t survived the two years she’d dedicated to Joplin’s Ghost, and she understood why. Carlos had loved Joplin’s music long before he met her, but their experiences had flavored Joplin with something he didn’t like the taste of. Too much history, in every way.

  “Where are you going?” Gloria said, when Phoenix turned to walk away.

  “To find my man,” Phoenix said. She nodded toward Jabari, who was laughing across the room with T. over a plastic cup of beer from the keg. “You should take the hint.”

  Gloria feigned disgust, shaking her head. “No way. Too effing immature. He’s not ready.” She’s in love, and she knows it, Phoenix thought. And Jabari wasn’t ready. It was hard to grow up while you were getting famous, and love was scary. Love might be the scariest thing.

  “Then trust yourself, Glo,” Phoenix said. “I’ll be back.”

  “Like hell. You’re not walking over there by yourself.”

  “Excuse me? I’m not an invalid.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re Phoenix, which is worse. I’m walking you over.”

  Phoenix tried not to hear the steady hum of two hundred excited voices as she and Gloria got out of the elevator and slipped out of the Rosebud’s side door. Milton was going to have crowd management problems, she thought. This wasn’t the chaos at Staples Center, but small audiences jostled her stomach, too, at least until the set started. She had been surprised by the classical music Grammy nomination for Joplin’s Ghost—she hadn’t won, and hadn’t expected to, given the controversy—but she hadn’t performed that night. No pressure. This time, Gloria said the Grammy people had already scheduled them. That would be interesting.

  You got me here, Daddy. I know you’re still watching us.

  Phoenix and Gloria crossed the wooden walkway from the Rosebud to the Joplin House, where a uniformed female employee was guarding the locked door. “Yeah, he’s still up there,” the woman said, standing aside. “I would remember seeing that fine-ass man come back down.”

  Phoenix blocked Gloria in the doorway. “I’m not playing, Glo. I’m fine. Nobody’s gonna come snatch me with locked doors and a guard.”

  In Gloria’s eyes, Phoenix saw the Osiris again, always at the edges. Time didn’t erase it, and neither did the truce between Ronn and DJ Train. And, there was more than the Osiris at stake, Phoenix remembered: Her life had changed the last time she walked into the place where Scott Joplin lived. She couldn’t expect it to be nothing.

  “Cuidado, cuz,” Gloria said, and hugged Phoenix at the door. “Love you.”

  “Love you, too, cuz.”

  Crossing through the museum lobby to the doorway to the adjoining town house, the one painted 2658-A MORGAN on the door, Phoenix’s stomach bloated. It was the usual stage fright, and something new: She was nervous about being here. Funny how she’d hidden that from herself. How had she thought this would be easy?

  The hall leading to Scott’s home was brighter. Maybe it was only because the paint was a different color, a vibrant yellow, but the day’s last light shone across Scott’s floor in a way it didn’t shine two steps before his threshold. When she touched the pipe banister to climb the stairs, the same thought came that had come the first time: He touched this.

  It was the closest she would come to touching Scott again. In one way, the banister’s solidity was soothing; in another, the distance felt cruel, unnecessary. Touching the banister was like remembering how Sarge’s face looked at the Osiris after her set. Bittersweet. She wished she could have lived here with Scott, in the days before his promise became a burden.

  It was a long climb up Scott Joplin’s stairs.

  Phoenix knew to go to the parlor first, because she was sure that was where he would be. She saw the room in her mind before reality came on her imagination’s heels, everything in place: He was standing at the parlor window, staring outside, beside a chair and a small Victorian table with a globe-shaped lamp. This room was a portal, like before.

  “Hey,” she said, whispering.

  Carlos turned around slowly. He smiled, but didn’t answer. The light through the window was so brilliant, she couldn’t make out all the features of his face.

  “Well?” she said. “How is it?”

  Carlos sighed, gazing at the ceiling, toward the fireplace, and, lastly, at the nondescript black upright piano against the wall, a random antique standing in for whichever one had been here for Scott, before the bitterness came. Carlos stared at the piano a long time.

  “It’s quiet,” he said. “He’s not here. Just like you said. Whatever you did, he’s gone.”

  “He needed to be quiet,” she said. “He deserved it.”

  Phoenix was glad Scott had escaped this room, and her
gladness overcame the part of her that hated his absence. It wasn’t as bad as missing Sarge, but the loss was magnified here. She was a hundred years too late, or Scott might have come around the corner with a smile and “Weeping Willow” in his hands, the ink not yet dry on the pages.

  Carlos slid his arm around Phoenix’s waist as she joined him at the window. Outside, there were cars parked everywhere, like the bustling city street it had been in Scott’s time. But these cars were here for her.

  “I thought you had a concert,” Carlos said.

  “Soon, but I always have time for you,” she said. “Are you glad you came here?”

  “I think so,” Carlos said. “But…I wanted to feel something. Recognition. A glow.”

  Phoenix’s heart jumped. “You have the glow, Carlos,” she said.

  Carlos sighed. Then, he grabbed her hand and walked her away from the window, across the parlor and through the entryway to the adjoining bedroom, which was darker, suddenly personal. The shaving mirror gleamed as if Scott’s face could be hidden inside of it.

  Carlos steered her toward the bed. “Let’s lie down a second, Phoenix.”

  She resisted, laughing. “This is a museum. Van Milton would kill me.”

  “This is more than a museum to us,” Carlos said, finding the spot behind her knees that made them collapse, so she slid on top of him, his hands bracing her buttocks. He had a gift for making her body do what he wanted, as if he’d mapped her. “Besides, Van Milton would love it. He’d post a sign over the bed: Phoenix’s ass was here. And charge extra admission.”

  “You are a bad and evil man,” Phoenix said. “That’s not even a little bit nice.” Milton was a true believer, mistaking her for something more than she was. Phoenix tolerated Milton’s worship better than Carlos did. She couldn’t have done Joplin’s Ghost justice without Milton’s help finding its audience.

  But the thought of Milton’s indignation couldn’t keep Phoenix from enjoying her slow recline on top of Carlos as he lay down flat on the thin mattress. She couldn’t resist the invitation of the brass bedposts. She welcomed the scent of the quilt, which was clean, but smelled its age.

  The bed was tiny, and the room was too narrow for one much bigger. Maybe that had been the fashion then; she couldn’t remember. Scott and his wife must have slept very close. You couldn’t get lost through the night the way she and Carlos did in her king-sized bed.

  “I’m about to disappoint you, Phee,” Carlos said. “So, I’m sorry.”

  Phoenix prepared herself to grieve again. He was going to tell her that although he loved Phoenix Smalls, he couldn’t share a life with Phoenix. “What do you mean?”

  Carlos’s face shimmered, sad. “What you believe about me isn’t true.”

  “What do I believe about you?”

  He waited a long time. “You think Scott Joplin is hiding inside me somewhere.”

  Put that way, it sounded silly. That was why she didn’t say it often, because spoken words were so awkward. But after she and Carlos burned the piano in the alley outside The Harbor, after Sarge’s burial day, she had tried to put it in words for him:

  Think about it, Carlos. We loved each other as soon as we met, like Scott and Freddie. You’re older than I am, just like Scott was older than Freddie. You don’t play the piano, but music is in your soul. When I dreamed he was touching me, you were the one touching me instead. You helped me free him, and you helped me get free of him. I know I was Freddie once, because while I was gone, I felt what she felt. When I was gone, I knew Scott was you.

  “I never said he’s hiding in you, exactly,” Phoenix said. “But, OK.”

  Carlos spoke very quietly, as if he were whipping her and wanted to apply his lashes as gently as possible. “I want to believe it, for your sake, because you went through this awful ordeal, a loss no one but you can understand, and I want to be there for you…”

  “You were there for me,” she reminded him, and wiped a quick tear from her eye. What he had done at The Harbor still touched her, given that they had been strangers then. Sort of.

  “I want to believe what you believe about timeless love, two souls who find each other after a tragedy and get to live the life that was interrupted. But I feel like a fraud, Phee. I’ve been here in this house more than an hour, no interruptions, and it’s just not there. Even at the piano—nothing. I don’t feel him in me. I only feel me in here.” His gaze didn’t blink.

  “We don’t live their lives, Carlos. We live new lives.”

  An angry car horn sounded from outside, a new arrival anxious to hear her. Phoenix felt her nerves again, internal pressure squirming. High expectations were waiting on that stage.

  “If we’re going to do this,” he said, bumping her nose, “Carlos Harris has to be enough.”

  “What?”

  “You have to want me, not a fantasy. I’m a magazine writer who’s won a couple of awards. I know a few things about music, and I’m good at what I do. I pay taxes and honor my parents. But I’m not Scott Joplin, Phoenix. I never was, and I never will be.”

  He never stopped searching for reasons she might get tired of him, she thought.

  “Carlos, I never asked you to be Scott. I’m not Freddie either, not anymore. I just was. Of course it’s enough if you’re Carlos. You’re the one I want.”

  “But you won’t stop believing we’ve met before,” Carlos said, not convinced.

  She smiled. “No, I won’t. I know it.”

  “Why do you think that?” he said, his face suddenly earnest. “How do you know?”

  And there it was, of course: The question with no answer.

  “I just do,” she said. “I know where I was. I know you were there, too.”

  With the sound of the car’s horn gone, the room sang in its silence. Carlos raised his head, no longer looking at her even as she stayed perched across his chest, riding his slow breathing. Neither of them spoke for a long time, enjoying the hush. This room was theirs now. This bed belonged only to them.

  “Maybe I hear it,” Carlos said. “I think so.”

  “What?” She was hoping he could put a name to it.

  Carlos smiled, his eyes unfocused. “Music,” he said.

  Of course. That was the thing about Scott Joplin’s house.

  Music lived in the very walls.

  Author’s Note

  In 1995, while I was on my first book tour promoting my first novel, The Between, a bespectacled man waited to talk to me when the modest crowd thinned at a now-defunct bookstore in St. Louis. This erudite, rational-seeming man told me he was the curator of the Scott Joplin House, then he fascinated me with tales about what he believed were encounters with the ghost of Scott Joplin. A lampshade suddenly askew after being straightened the moment before. A man standing in the room, gone an instant later. The curator’s name was Jan Hamilton Douglas. (I recreated his claims within this book’s text, when Phoenix visits the Joplin House and Van Milton tells her about the ghost.)

  I was intrigued by his stories, but my schedule didn’t permit a visit to the Joplin House. Instead, I scribbled some notes about the meeting in my journal, kept his business card, and wondered if a future story might bloom from our meeting.

  I should say this: I do not write about the supernatural because of my own experiences. I often joke that I don’t have a psychic bone in my body, so a ghost could be sitting on my lap and I would never know. My stories about the supernatural are shaped by conjecture and conversations with readers and sources who are insistent about the things that have happened to them. So, my interest in Joplin’s ghost was purely in terms of what kind of story it might become. How might those encounters impact a character’s life? What might a ghost encounter really be like, as opposed to what we see in movies? Something about those stories Jan Hamilton Douglas told me felt real, even if they were only his imagination.

  I didn’t think of the first real pieces of Joplin’s Ghost until late in 2002, more than five years later—a story about a tur
n-of-the-century artist whose genius went largely unrecognized in an era of intense racism and a contemporary character suppressing her creative voice for fear of failure.

  While I was planning the novel, I did a silly thing: Rather than calling Jan Hamilton Douglas right away to tell him I had a story idea for his ghost, I got it in my head to surprise him when I could make a research trip to St. Louis. When I finally made it to the Scott Joplin House in the spring of 2003, I learned that Jan Hamilton Douglas had passed away suddenly six months before. What a loss! Not only had I lost my primary souce, but everything I have learned about Jan Hamilton Douglas since tells me that he would have been an extraordinary person to know.

  Still, the staff of the Joplin House was very welcoming. I visited the parlor Mr. Douglas had mentioned, and of course I experienced none of what he had described. No Scott Joplin. But there were two odd developments: In the Rosebud Cafe annex of the museum (a project Mr. Douglas oversaw and, ironically, the site where he died), the employees are displayed in a row of photographs. For two weeks after Mr. Douglas’s passing, I was told, his photo fell to the floor and had to be hung again several times. Also, while I sat at a table in the Rosebud to begin my interviews, the door leading outside, which was beside me, swung open on its own.

  Bad hinges? A strong wind? I can’t say.

  Research for this book also took me to ghost-hunter Lawana Holland-Moore and renowned psychic Jeffrey A. Wands, both of whom I interviewed by telephone. Jeffrey happens to share my publisher, and I’d heard stories of his visits to my publisher’s office, where he amazed the employees with his readings. My main concern was to depict the psychics in my novel as accurately as possible, not to get a reading of any kind—but in the midst of the interview, Jeffrey told me a few noteworthy things about Freddie Alexander (Joplin’s wife), as well as my own late grandmother.

  He also made a suggestion for the story involving a music stand. When I didn’t respond to the idea right away, Jeffrey said, “That wasn’t from me. That was from Joplin.”