Joplin's Ghost

  They might be only dreams, but to Phoenix love had never felt so real.

  Phoenix expected to see Scott’s face in her airplane window when she opened her eyes, but she only saw her own blurred features as the plane climbed through the spongy mountain of clouds. Scott could be in the clouds. Scott could be in the reading light above her. Scott could be in the shard of sunlight breaking its way through the cloud bank, a radiant blade.

  Scott could be anywhere. Everywhere.

  She would get this New York show behind her. Then, she would be free for him.

  Carlos was with her in first class because he’d used all his frequent-flyer miles to upgrade, but Gloria, Serena, Arturo, two other dancers and the two backup singers were in coach. As Phoenix’s manager, Sarge would have argued for his own first-class ticket, but Gloria didn’t have Sarge’s influence with Three Strikes, even if she was doing Sarge’s job now. By sending three dancers and two singers, the label was giving Phoenix extra support—unprecedented support, Katrice had pointed out—so she couldn’t complain about Gloria’s coach ticket. Before her singers and dancers boarded the flight, they had looked at her as if they dared her to fuck up again. Even Arturo had given her a stern look, and she knew he wanted this, too, and badly.

  I have an entourage, Phoenix reminded herself with disbelief, testing the word in her imagination. This isn’t just about me.

  Phoenix had been sure Sarge’s anger would thaw after a week, but he still wasn’t speaking to her. With Gloria’s prodding, Phoenix had been doing interviews, meeting with her video director and rehearsing her dance steps despite the distraction of Scott, but Sarge was stubborn once he’d made up his mind, just like both of his daughters. Sarge had promised Gloria he would get to New York in his own time and way. She had lost Trey, too, since Serena stuck by her plan to send him home for the start of a Bible camp one of her girlfriends ran in Georgia.

  She hoped Sarge would come. If he came, she wouldn’t disappoint him again.

  And one day soon, she would be Scott’s.

  Van Milton was already planning her next tour, trying to find backers for a full-scale production of A Guest of Honor at next year’s Sedalia Ragtime Festival at least—or, better, on a New York stage. Phoenix would have a third incarnation as a performer, this time as a ragtime high priestess. And Scott would be back on the stage where he belonged.

  “You OK, linda?” Carlos said. Carlos rarely maintained eye contact long, one of his traits she was still trying to get used to. His stare now was conspicuous.

  “Yeah, why?”

  “You looked tired all of a sudden.”

  “Nah, I’m good,” she said. “Especially with you here.” Carlos could use a few kind words. They hadn’t talked about it since the first night Scott’s ghost made love to her, but Carlos knew where she was in her dreams, whom she was with, and she was asking a lot of him. If Carlos had offered her the same arrangement, would she have accepted?

  Carlos looked wistful, keeping his eyes away. “Can we make a deal?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Let’s not talk shop on this flight. Nothing about Joplin.”

  Phoenix smiled, resting her head on his shoulder. Gloria was worried about how obsessive she had become, resenting the way Carlos supported what Gloria saw as a dangerous delusion. “Great idea. What should we talk about?”

  “Anything else. I dated a coworker at the Sun-News, and we brought work with us everywhere. We need to have more than one thing, or we won’t last.”

  Or we won’t last. Since the night Carlos accepted her rules, neither of them had talked about their relationship like a living, growing thing; it just was. Carlos was the first man who had told her he wanted to last with her. The honest simplicity of it made her heart billow.

  “OK, so let’s tell our favorite things,” she said.

  “Favorite book?” Carlos said.

  Phoenix didn’t have to think about that. “Beloved, by Toni Morrison.”

  He nodded. “I’d say Ellison’s Invisible Man, but I like Beloved, too. Favorite song?”

  Phoenix shook her head. “Are you joking? Maybe I could give you a top ten list.”

  Carlos grinned, nodding. “For me, maybe a top twenty or thirty.”

  “And even then, what about the different styles?” Phoenix said, matching his grin. It was hard to find people who loved the breadth of music the way she did. “Jazz. Blues. Soul. Rock. Classical. R&B. And what about reggae? What about salsa?”

  “And music from which countries?” Carlos said, finishing her thought. “Brazil? South Africa? Mexico? Zaire? Madagascar? You’re right. Silly question. You pick the next one.”

  The humming Phoenix felt was not from the plane’s constant roar; this was the warm, electric hum she’d experienced lying beside Carlos on the carpet in his Miami Beach apartment, meeting a man who felt like the missing piece of her. Phoenix played with the curly hairs on Carlos’s bare arm. Instead of a question, she chose a disclosure. “I’ve had sex with four other people.”

  Carlos laughed, startled. “Seriously?”

  Phoenix wondered if he thought the number was too low or too high. She’d been a virgin until she was eighteen, and she felt too inexperienced around most people. But she felt like a tramp compared to her mother, who’d had only three lovers in all. “What about you?”

  “I knew that was coming…” Carlos reclined his seat as far as it would go, which on this plane was nearly out of sight. Carlos’s chair became a leather bed. “More than four, kiddo. Believe it or not, I’m not keeping count. I’ll get a blood test, if you want to put your mind at ease about all the ghosts in my bed.”

  “Good. A friend of mine died from AIDS in high school.” Phoenix had never had the nerve to ask Ronn to take a blood test, which should have been her first warning sign, she thought. How could she be in a relationship with someone she couldn’t speak her mind with?

  “I admit I haven’t always used the best discretion,” Carlos said.

  “Don Juan Jones out in the clubs?”

  “No, that’s not my style. But I’ve lost a lot of friends.”

  “Serial heartbreaker.”

  Carlos looked reflective, staring up toward his light panel. “There are things I would change because people felt hurt, but didn’t I have to be that person to become who I am now? That’s how I look at it, anyway.”

  “What about me?” Phoenix said, and her heart sped. The Phoenix Smalls she’d been at sixteen had never had the chance to ask Carlos any questions. Even now, she’d hesitated to bring it up in case her anger was only in hiding.

  Carlos’s eyes came back to hers, tender. “That was different. That was something else.”

  “How was it different?”

  Carlos didn’t answer for a long time, then raised his seat to speak close to her ear so she would hear him over the airplane’s engine. “I saw an ambitious young sister with some talent, so I thought I could be a big brother. I didn’t understand how I could feel anything else. Kids have never been a turn-on for me. Even in high school, I liked older women. I argued myself to sleep every night, but I couldn’t keep away. I vowed I wouldn’t touch you, then I did. Nothing like that had ever happened to me. It scared the shit out of me.”

  Phoenix realized she was holding her breath. Had he felt something special, too?

  Carlos squeezed her hand. “I was giving you these expectations, doing somersaults trying to impress you, but where could it go? To this day, I wish I’d never kissed you then. I felt like such a jerk, I didn’t tell any of my friends about it. When that letter from your parents came to my paper, Dios mio. I couldn’t believe it. My publisher was asking if I’d taken a minor to bars, if we’d spent the night in my apartment. And so was my managing editor, my section editor, the people I’d worked hard to win respect from. The more I tried to tell the truth, the more everyone thought I was lying. There I was, the paper’s first black music writer, the first Latino, too, and some shit like that came down th
e grapevine. My father’s a freelance photographer in Miami, and even he asked me about it. I discovered I’m old-fashioned about name and reputation, because I’d never felt so embarrassed. No—dishonored.” Carlos’s voice shook.

  “After that, thinking about you was hard. I tried to talk myself out of coming to see you when I heard you were in L.A. The memory alone was a problem for me. But now that I’m with you again, the whole thing seems simple to me now: For whatever reason, I loved you from the beginning, Phee, almost on sight, and I never stopped. So, there it is. Punto.” Carlos made a gentle gesture, his fingers like tissue fluttering in a breeze.

  He loved me the way Scott loved Freddie, Phoenix thought, stunned. All this time, she’d thought she agonized over Carlos alone. Carlos had recited his confession as if loving her was a condition he’d learned to tolerate, with no expectations. She wasn’t ready to say I love you, too, but nothing else seemed right, so she didn’t say anything.

  Carlos’s eyes left hers again. “What happened in Miami was still bullshit, Phee. Do you accept my apology?” The raw regret in Carlos’s voice was another surprise.

  Phoenix rubbed his knee. “Carlos, I wouldn’t be with you if I was still carrying that. And remember: I wanted to have sex with you.” Carlos had been her masturbation fantasy throughout her adolescence, the reason she’d discovered how to create magic from hand lotion when she was sixteen. She hadn’t known her body’s longings were so strong, waiting for somewhere to go.

  “You were a kid, and I should have known better,” Carlos said. “If I loved you, so what? People fall in love every day. A patient falls in love with her doctor, a teacher with her student, a married mother with a great guy at work. Sometimes you’re free to pursue it, sometimes you aren’t. Love needs your permission, and that’s what no one will admit. I gave myself permission. Now you’re stuck with the consequences.”

  “What consequences?” Phoenix said.

  “Your father might have come with you on this flight if I hadn’t been here. Part of the reason he avoids you is me. That’s my fault, and I hate that.”

  Phoenix hadn’t thought about it that way. Sarge might have come without Carlos, but probably not. Probably. “That’s not on you. That’s Sarge. He had no right to harass you at TSR like that, either.” The idea of her father cornering Carlos in the hall gave her an angry pang. Carlos had been sheepish about bringing it up, but Phoenix was glad he’d told her. Once she and Sarge were talking again, that would be one of the first things they would talk about.

  “Life’s hard enough without complications, Phee,” Carlos said. “You’ll see.”

  It was then, only seconds after Carlos declared his love, that the plane shook suddenly, or Phoenix thought it had. Phoenix’s body felt so jarred that her head flipped forward and she clung to both armrests, looking for balance. The lights grew brighter, as if the plane had taken a sudden turn into the sun. But Phoenix’s skin felt taut and cold, frostbitten.

  “Phee?” Carlos said.

  Music exploded in Phoenix’s head, a cacophony of overlapping glissandos. She gasped.

  He was here, like he’d come to her at the TV taping. As always, Scott was going to talk to her in his own way. Phoenix remembered relinquishing her body at the television studio, trying not to fight. She didn’t want to fight.

  Yes, Scott. I hear you. I hear you, Scott. I’m ready.

  “I need paper,” she said.

  A notebook appeared in front of Phoenix, graph paper. Carlos had pulled her tray table down for her, and he slipped a pen in her hand. “A message from him?” he said.

  Phoenix barely heard Carlos, because her hand was no longer hers. Her fingers were growing numb, as if she were dipping her fingertips into a cold gel, one joint at a time. Phoenix watched her hand grasp the pen tightly and carve out five horizontal lines nearly perfectly spaced an eighth of an inch apart on the page. Startled, she tried to make herself stop. When she curled her fingers, the numbness flushed away, replaced by warm blood. Her pen stilled in midstroke.

  NO. You’ve been waiting for this. Don’t be afraid of him. Don’t be afraid.

  When Phoenix relaxed her hand, her pen flew again. This time, she drew a skillful treble clef with its rounded belly, and dots, dashes and numbers—6/8 time, it read. Then, Phoenix watched herself draw the first string of lively quarter-note chords, like clusters of grapes. As she drew, the music played itself in her head, much faster than her hand could capture it, but her hand was racing to try. Phoenix was skydiving, a cold wind rushing against her face.

  “I didn’t know you could write music by hand,” Carlos said, across an impossible gulf.

  “I can’t,” Phoenix said, and made herself forget Carlos, everything except her hand.

  I’m doing it. I’m really doing it.

  Phoenix Smalls and Scott Joplin flew together.

  New York was always a homecoming for Carlos Harris.

  He’d lived in the city his junior year at Stanford when he interned at the New York Times, and even with his fortieth birthday looming in six hundred days, Carlos was convinced he might still move to New York one day. It was never too late. He’d almost fled here after the nightmare in Miami, when his bosses practically branded him a child molester. (Some reporters at the Sun-News still believed the lie that he’d gotten a sixteen-year-old girl pregnant). Los Angeles had won him because his business partner was there, but New York was Carlos’s first choice, always.

  Carlos had enough work and family to bring him back at least four times a year, and that was enough for now. He had relatives in New York on both sides, and he’d helped his parents make their calls after the planes hit on September 11—Tia and Tio had still been asleep in the Bronx; his cousin Pilar had been riding on the N/R line to meet a friend for breakfast in SoHo; Aunt Josephine had been on her way to work at Hue-Man Bookstore uptown in Harlem; and his cousin Darnell had been late to his early meeting at One World Trade Center because of a parent-teacher conference at his daughter’s school. Darnell had collapsed in tears when he heard Carlos’s voice. Over the next few days, two dozen of Carlos’s friends had shared their chorus of wonderment and grief. New York lived in Carlos, and he lived in New York. Just not yet.

  This time, it felt strange to be back, surreal. Carlos felt like he was walking through an absurd dream crammed with fascinating elements: Life. Death. Music. Love. All the essentials. Phoenix was at the center of Carlos’s dream, creating miracles at will, shattering and rebuilding him in alternating breaths. He hadn’t had time to regain his balance since the first night he heard her voice on the phone, when she called to tell him she had just run into a ghost.

  Me, too, he’d wanted to say. And now he was sharing her hotel room, her bed—and something bigger than anything he knew how to manage. But he didn’t have to wonder, because for once, he knew: He loved Phoenix, and she was only the second woman to hear those words from him since he was nineteen.

  Today, Carlos barely recognized the woman he loved.

  Phoenix’s modernist suite at the Bon Maison Hotel on Forty-Seventh and Broadway was being transformed into a miniature television studio. A technician from the cable show New York View switched on two bright floodlights, erasing the color from Phoenix’s face except for her makeup, which Carlos thought looked like a clownish veil over the beautiful woman underneath. Phoenix sat waiting on the love seat with her eyes half-lidded, her lips moving to silent music in her head. She looks like a drug fiend, Carlos thought. Carlos had seen enough young performers implode under the weight of sudden celebrity to make him wish fame came with an antidote. Too much work, privilege and bullshit were a predictable combination.

  No wonder Phoenix’s label had sent both its publicity director and a bodyguard to practically camp in Phoenix’s room. Manny—who was a boriqua from a family of musicians in San Juan, it turned out—and the huge man named Kai sat across from Phoenix, sharing Krispy Kreme doughnuts and coffee, just out of the camera’s range. The room was so crowded that Glor
ia and Phoenix’s sister had retreated to the bedroom, but Carlos wanted to keep Phoenix in his sight. He was worried about her, too, but in a different way. Different, and deeper.

  Carlos wasn’t sure Phoenix had slept. Their flight had arrived at JFK late, he had helped her find a pad of blank white paper and a ruler (no easy feat at midnight, but God bless CVS), then she’d sat up drawing staffs and writing scores until Gloria’s 6:00 A.M. wake-up call. He’d fallen asleep without her, and he was sure Phoenix had never joined him in the bed.

  Whatever had happened to Phoenix on the television stage had reappeared with more power and clarity, creating a waking channel between Phoenix and Joplin for hours on end.

  This was what they had hoped for, of course. Phoenix’s union with this ghost reaffirmed Carlos’s faith in God every day. Sometimes when he was alone, he found he was crossing himself like his mother, thanking the Virgin and saints for choosing him to witness it. Last night, Phoenix had channeled at least twenty full-length Scott Joplin scores. He’d counted the pieces while she was in the shower, and he’d felt his joints shudder while he marveled at the heavy, purposeful writing that was not Phoenix’s, that had plowed its way through time and death to come to his hands. God’s work. God’s hand. Precious Lord, Take My Hand. El mano de Dios.

  But hoping for it and watching it unfold, as it turned out, were very different. Watching it frightened Carlos more all the time. This morning, Phoenix had made an effort at sleepy conversation as she dressed and Serena labored over her makeup and hair, but Carlos hadn’t seen Phoenix eat anything since they’d left L.A. It was all there in her eyes: She was an ecstatic still in the throes of her rapture. Carlos didn’t mind Phoenix going away with Joplin, as long as Joplin let her come back.