Joplin's Ghost

  Well? How’d it go?” Sarge asked, when she met him in the TSR lobby. He could probably see bad news on her face. Phoenix had pulled herself together long enough to talk about her video and promotion with Manny and Katrice and say her good-byes, but now she wanted to curl up under a bed somewhere. Sarge was alone in the lobby beneath a giant-sized framed poster from Ronn’s first feature film, Paid in Full. In it, Ronn loomed larger than life above the movie’s title, a stone-faced monster with a 9mm resting against his jaw.

  Phoenix sat beside her father and curled herself into the crook of his arm. Instead of answering, she pulled out the tabloid article she’d folded as a sad memento. She hadn’t wanted to leave it with Ronn. She hoped he would never see it again.

  Sarge read the article with a pained grunt, as if he’d been kicked in the gut. Then, he handed it back to her. “SOBs didn’t mention the name of your damn album,” he said.

  Phoenix wanted to laugh, but was afraid it would be a sob. “That’s what Ronn said.”

  Sarge kissed the top of her head, sighing. He paused a long time. “How mad is he?”

  Not as mad as he has a right to be, Phoenix thought.

  “He said he’s not mad. He won’t be inviting me over anytime soon, though.” Realizing she had spent her last night in Ronn’s bed, Phoenix felt a cramp above her pelvis. She was barred from his inner space. She could suddenly smell his spicy deodorant and the hairs clustered below his navel. Ronn was only her boss now.

  Sarge didn’t have to say he’d told her so, but she could almost hear it screaming from his mind. She was grateful for his self-restraint. “And everything else?” Sarge said.

  “We’ll see. He promised me everything else is straight. Meanwhile, I’m the ho-of-the-week. I feel like the world’s biggest fool, Daddy. I want to hide.”

  Sarge didn’t answer, but his sigh was its own language. Been there, done that.

  “Daddy…did you cheat on Mom?” Phoenix said suddenly. Phoenix had never asked him, but she felt entitled. No matter how far Sarge’s fall from grace might have been, he had never been dumped by an international star on the word of a tabloid magazine. A fall that steep and mighty had to have a few privileges, she decided.

  Sarge’s pause, this time, was longer. His silence sounded like a yes. “It’s not that simple, Phoenix. She knew I was away a lot. As long as I kept it away from home, it was my business.”

  Gloria had told her long ago she thought Phoenix’s parents had an open marriage, but the term had sounded so salacious from her cousin’s lips that Phoenix had rejected the idea. Now, for the first time, she had confirmation. But if the marriage had been open for Sarge, had it been open for Mom, too? She didn’t think so. When Sarge was away, Mom had been home with her.

  “So what happened to you guys?” she said, not bothering to try to sound like an adult.

  Sarge stretched out his limbs beside her, slumping until he was low enough to lean his head against hers. Phoenix suddenly remembered being a little girl again, in physical therapy, with Sarge coaxing her to do one more leg lift so she could walk right again. “To me, it felt like getting lost,” Sarge said. “One day, I just couldn’t see my way back home. And I guess she stopped feeling like she was married to me. That’s all.”

  “And she still wants me to go to Juilliard. I’m sure that doesn’t help.”

  “You had nothing to do with it. Relationships are hard in this business, Phoenix. You better know that before you start.”

  “Fine. I’m gonna quit relationships while I’m behind. You can make me a chastity belt.”

  “I’ve already got one on order,” Sarge said.

  At that, miraculously, Phoenix did laugh, but it was for the last time that day.

  Sarge took her hand and squeezed it. “You sure this is what you want, Peanut?” He sounded weary suddenly. Maybe whatever was tiring her was catching.

  “What do you mean?” Phoenix said, although she knew.

  “This. Three Strikes. Tabloid stories. Pop radio.”

  “Don’t you?” Phoenix said. She had heard Sarge tell someone at a party that signing her with G-Ronn was the most exciting moment of his career. “You’ve worked hard to get me here.”

  “Honey, I’m almost sixty-five years old. I’m not living for anyone else, and nobody else better be living for me. What I want is the revolution. I want to turn back the clock to the days when our neighborhoods were sanctuaries and our people were willing to die for change. What’s that shit got to do with here and now? What difference does it make what I want?”

  Sometimes, not often, Phoenix heard the bitter quaver in her father’s voice, remnants of the militant he had slowly smothered to death in prison. She often wondered what it would have been like to know him then, but Serena reminded her that she wouldn’t have had the chance to know him hardly at all.

  “Answer my question. Are you sure you want this?”

  Phoenix couldn’t choose between yes and no.

  Sarge’s lips twitched with irritation. “This is what you’ve talked about since you were in pigtails at New World. You said you wanted to be Janet Jackson, and you asked me to help you make it happen. You said, ‘Daddy, I have a calling just like you did.’”

  “I know…” Phoenix said, covering her face with her palm, as if he’d shined a light on her.

  “And instead of ramping up to make sure you don’t waste this opportunity, I see you coasting. I see you making errors of judgment. There’s a part of you even trying to put on your brakes to slow it down, sabotage it. Well, that don’t cut it here, at this stage. That’s why you better learn the answer to that question, Phee. Because if you want it…”—his eyes shimmered as he looked at her, his Daddy stare—“Phoenix, if you want it, there is nothing and no one that can stop you from having it. It’s handled. But if you don’t want it?”

  Sarge shook his head, sighing again. “If you don’t want it, you will fail. You hear me? You will fail. There are a hundred traps already set for you. And that’s not even the bad part, the sad part. Let me lay it on you: Why in the world would you waste so much God-given time and energy on something you don’t want? There’s no sense in that. That’s just a damn shame.”

  Phoenix blinked with new tears. “I want it, Sarge.”

  “What?” Sarge said, cupping his ear. “I can’t hear you.” He used to say that when she was supposed to be practicing the piano. Even if she’d only spent thirty seconds craning her ears to hear the television in the family room, or flipping through a comic book she’d hidden inside her sheet music, Sarge’s voice would come booming through the house: I can’t hear you! That was how she’d started calling him Sarge.

  Phoenix smiled. “I want it,” she said, more loudly, drying her eyes.

  “Again.”

  “I want it.” That time, she even believed it.

  “Then you damn well better start acting like it.”

  When Kai arrived to drive them, Phoenix felt grateful to leave Ronn’s building and be shielded beyond the Lexus’s opaque windows, so no one could peek inside at her. Ain’t that the fool who cheated on G-Ronn? If I ever had a man that rich, I’d treat him like a king.

  Sarge wanted to be dropped off at a rental car company, so Phoenix asked Kai to take her to the West Hollywood one-bedroom apartment she shared with a film production assistant who was usually away, their version of a time-share. She and Nia watered the plants in the window and kept the dishes clean, but rarely saw each other as they chased dreams in different directions. It wasn’t as much a home to Phoenix as Mom’s house in Miami, with her room intact from high school, but it was the closest thing Phoenix had to a home of her own. Her pathetic white Corolla was waiting at the curb, the windshield buried under a fallen browned palm frond, like some junk car.

  This had been the worst day of her life, except when Grandma Oprah died when she was fifteen. There had been bad days after her band’s first two CDs were released—the slow, awful realization that the sales were going to be disast
rous—but that had been different. Today was worse, somehow. Her bones felt crushed to powder.

  Phoenix suddenly realized Kai had been idling at her curb a few seconds beneath the neat row of towering royal palms, and she’d forgotten to open her door and get out of the car. The big man leaned back to look at her, and she saw her drawn face reflected in his sunglasses.

  “You ever read any of the I Ching? The book of Chinese philosophy?” Kai said.

  Phoenix shook her head.

  “’Pac turned me on to it. You know Tupac was a reader, right? His crib was like a library. He’d spend hours over at the Bodhi Tree, that bookstore on Melrose?”

  Phoenix only nodded, feeling numb. Kai talking about Tupac and the Bodhi Tree felt like a new, deeper manifestation of the strange dream her day had become.

  “Whenever I see a look on anybody’s face like you got on yours, I lay my I Ching on them,” Kai went on, playing with the traces of dark fuzz that grew above his top lip. “The quote goes like this: ‘When the way comes to an end, then change—having changed, you pass through.’ Meditate on that, Phoenix. Take care of yourself, baby girl.”

  Shit, Phoenix thought. Kai knows what happened, too.

  By the time Phoenix let herself into the shade-darkened, stuffy apartment and fell across the futon, her face hurt from the effort of tears. What’s the matter with you? You told Gloria you weren’t into Ronn, and now that he’s dumped you you’re torn up like somebody died. She remembered what Sarge had said about feeling lost from Mom, and that was how she felt, too; except she was lost from herself, the worst kind of lost.

  Phoenix wanted to call Mom and Gloria, but once she lay down, she couldn’t move. Tired of feeling sad and awful, Phoenix forced herself to go to sleep, trying so hard it felt like she was shoving her consciousness into a hole in the earth.

  As soon as Phoenix’s mind started playing, letting go of the day, she heard footsteps striding across the apartment’s tiled floors, walking toward her. Nia? She’d thought Nia was on a shoot up in Vancouver. She tried to say her roommate’s name and open her eyes, but her lips wouldn’t obey, and her eyes refused to acknowledge the daylight glowing in fuchsia through the shade from the window above her.

  Cool breath played across Phoenix’s earlobe, making her skin squirm. Raising her hand, she flicked at her ear to deflect the current, which skated to the nape of her neck.

  “Freddie?” a man’s voice breathed urgently in her ear, on top of her.

  The strange man’s voice made Phoenix sit upright, flung from sleep with a gasp. She raised her hands, ready to fight somebody if she had to.

  But except for the wilting plants propped bravely in the windowsill, there was no living creature in sight.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  St. Louis

  1904

  Scott stood outside of the limestone facade of the Stark Music Company publishing house and printing facility on the corner of Fifteenth and Locust, hunching his shoulders against the gnawing February cold that was too harsh for snow. Scott stared up at the lines for electric streetcars strung like twine up and down the cobblestone street, then he closed his eyes and breathed in a mouthful of the frigid air. It had been a mistake to come back here before his trip home to Texarkana, but it was done, so he would say hello to Nell and make a quick departure.

  Scott had left his gloves behind in the room his former student Arthur Marshall and his wife had offered him for the night, and now he wished he had stayed inside. Or, better, he wished he had ignored his itch to visit St. Louis and gone straight to Texarkana from Sedalia like he had planned. St. Louis held bad memories now, and he hadn’t vanquished them as well as he’d thought. Last fall, he had been touched by the parade in his honor down Market Street, but he didn’t want his friends putting themselves to that trouble to raise his spirits again. Besides, for all its good intentions, the parade had made him feel like a fraud. So much for the much-ballyhooed tour of the Scott Joplin Ragtime Opera Company.

  As a wind gusted down the tunnel of buildings, Scott looked at Stark’s tempting doorknob. But cold or not, he couldn’t make himself go in.

  Scott noticed that Stark’s building was a marked improvement over the meager shop Stark had had in Sedalia the day Scott walked in and handed him the pages for “Maple Leaf Rag.” Back then, John Stark’s best prospects had been as a piano peddler, and a middling one. Now, his business looked prosperous. Scott noted the replicas of the cover sheets in the window for “Maple Leaf,” “The Entertainer,” “Sun-Flower Slow Drag” and “Elite Syncopations” beneath a banner proclaiming “Home of the King of Rag-Time, Scott Joplin. Only true classic rags!”

  John was nothing if not a salesman. John’s King of Ragtime invention grated on Scott’s nerves nowadays. Besides, he did not have a home here. To say so was a lie. Here I am, like those freed slaves after the war without the heart to leave their masters. The bitter thought brought an almost physical pain with it, as if wrested from another man’s mind. Many of Scott’s thoughts had become foreign to him, unsuited to his temperament. Heartbreak had remade him.

  Scott heard the jangling of bells, and John suddenly stood in the doorway as if he’d been summoned. Someone was playing a rudimentary version of “Something Doing,” inside, either a student or an employee in dire need of lessons.

  John was the rarest of white men, one who never seemed to age. He had been fifty-eight when Scott met him five years ago, and he didn’t look a day older now, his hair preserving its youthful swarthiness despite his ivory beard. Blue eyes glittered from behind John’s round-frame spectacles as he smiled. “Well, well, the prodigal son returns,” John said. “I thought that was you lurking. I didn’t hear a celebration in the streets this time. Come inside, Scott.”

  Scott didn’t return his smile. “I’m looking for Nell.”

  “So am I. I don’t expect you’re planning to wait outside.”

  “I’m fine.”

  An impatient grimace replaced John’s smile. “Come on in, Scott. Don’t be an ass.”

  “Don’t be an ass yourself.” Again, the words sounded like another man’s, spoken harshly. Scott’s voice caught the ear of a passing white man in a trench coat and derby, and the hot look he gave Scott could have melted the ice beneath his soles. The man paused his step, as if he could walk no farther after bearing witness to the spectacle of a nigger mouthing off to a white man.

  Looking quickly away from the stranger’s eyes, Scott removed his hat and walked toward the warmth and safety of John’s building. Forgetting himself that way in any of the towns he had toured in the past few months would have resulted in disaster. For all John’s faults, at least he wouldn’t have him lynched. Inside, Scott felt palpable relief settle over him.

  A white man playing the upright piano near the door glanced up at Scott for an instant, then took his eyes back to the keys, not recognizing the composer of the piece he was mauling.

  “I’ll take that,” John said, snatching Scott’s hat. “Your coat, too.”

  John’s showroom was impressive, an array of pianos that filled the room with the pleasant scent of rosewood and mahogany. Racks of sheet music lined the walls, with pianos on hand so visitors could test the piece themselves. Scott had never seen the printing facility, but he knew it must be a sizeable one, to need so much space.

  “You’re living well on my royalties,” Scott said, shrugging out of his overcoat.

  “No better than you should be,” John said. He gestured toward the rear, where he kept his office. “What happened on your opera tour?”

  Scott chuffed bitterly. John had nerve, all right, bringing up the Guest of Honor tour.

  “It’s a polite inquiry,” John said, when Scott didn’t answer. “I’ve heard it didn’t go well. If that’s true, I’m sorry.”

  “That’s charitable.” Sarcasm was another of Scott’s new gifts.

  “Hogwash. Just because I didn’t publish it doesn’t mean I wished you ill. Have a seat. You look tired.”


  Suddenly, Scott felt tired. He sat in the straight-backed wooden chair beside John’s desk and its meticulous stacks of sheet music. John had never given A Guest of Honor a chance even after the St. Louis show with thirty performers to prove with every note and step that Negroes could stage an opera using themes and music from their own traditions. Dr. Booker T. Washington and President Roosevelt would have lauded it themselves, had the opera had a chance to live. But it had been destined to die. John had only a partial hand in sealing its fate.

  The tour sat in Scott’s memory like a bleeding wound. He had resigned himself to the indignities of travel—the name-calling, malevolent stares and presumption of servility that followed Negro performers wherever they went—but he couldn’t have imagined that a member of his own company would steal their meager proceeds, leaving them without pay. Or that every copy of his masterwork would be confiscated in a trunk in Pittsburg, Kansas, because he couldn’t afford to have it released to him.

  There were a half dozen people he could beg to help him retrieve his trunk, and John was no doubt one of them. But the opera, clearly, had been cursed. Not the sort of curse Louis believed in—at the hand of a hoochie-coochie man—but a strange kind of curse all the same. A curse of foolishness. A curse of vanity. Booker T. Washington had dined at the White House, so had he believed all of the confines of his race had been shattered?

  The truth was, no one cared to see niggers singing opera, or a rag king composing one.

  “This might cheer you…” John said. “I have an associate from New Orleans, and he told me he saw a little boy on the street corner outside his store hawking watermelons to the tune of ‘The Entertainer.’ He sings it like this: ‘Water-me-lons, they’re wet, they’re cold!’ And he always rouses a big crowd, that boy.” John chuckled

  Scott’s throat was suddenly so dry that it hurt. “Maybe I’ll collect a penny royalty for every watermelon he sells. That’ll be high living. I’ve had the wrong intentions all along.”