Joplin's Ghost

  Carlos sat at the opposite end of a large black leather sofa, crossing his legs. His style was a blend of tropical and urban, his trademark; a peach Caribbean-style shirt, fashionably baggy jeans and unmarred white sneakers. His cologne filled the room, a scent that made Phoenix think of palm trees, seawater, Calle Ocho, and his apartment overlooking Biscayne Bay. She had once bought a bottle of Kenzo to smell in the privacy of her bedroom.

  “So…” He began, folding his hands as he gazed at her. “This is awkward, no?”

  Carlos didn’t have any accent beyond a well-spoken brother, but she remembered how he’d sometimes spoken with a Spanish syntax, the mark of his early childhood in Puerto Rico. She’d loved how he could lapse into Spanish, remaking himself with everything from his rapidity of speech to his gestures, his accent lovely as rainfall. His Spanish was light-years better than her Hebrew. Maybe she’d been so drawn to him because, like her, he danced between two cultures. Carlos’s mother was from San Juan, and his father was a black American photographer who’d lived there for years. She remembered that, too. She remembered details about Carlos as if they’d known each other for years.

  First love sank deep. Phoenix was as tongue-tied now as she’d been at sixteen.

  “I won’t stay if you don’t want me to,” Carlos said.

  “You can stay.”

  He looked visibly relieved, his clasped hands loosening. He nodded. “Good. I’d like to stay, Phoenix. Not just for the interview. I wanted to catch up.”

  Catch up. Phoenix was surprised to feel angry, suddenly. She thought she’d left the anger to Sarge. “I’m a legal adult now, one thing.”

  His eyes darted away from hers. “I see that.” He was silent so long after that, she was almost sorry she’d said it. His eyes came back to hers only reluctantly. He combed his fingers through his hair, a habit she remembered. “I guess we need to talk about that first.”

  “Or you can just get started with the interview. Either way is cool with me.” Her voice sounded more distant than she’d intended.

  “I haven’t contacted you before now because…I was embarrassed.” He still looked embarrassed, but her anger wasn’t yet sated, so she waited for him to go on. “I was an asshole. What I did was selfish and thoughtless. I was in a position to be a mentor, and instead…I tried to go somewhere else. That was wrong.”

  “I just thought you had a thing for high school girls,” Phoenix said.

  He blinked hard, a wince. “That was the first and last time, Phee. I’m not proud of it.”

  “You still didn’t have to leave me hanging like that. I was all heartbroken and shit.”

  At sixteen, being heartbroken was a wing of Hell: Obsessively checking her e-mail a dozen times a day, calling Carlos’s cell phone every other day like a religious ritual, struggling not to sound as angry, hurt and desperate as she felt. So, how you doin’? I’ve just been thinking about you, and I was wondering if you had time to give me a call, if you’re not too busy. Each time a call had gone unreturned, she felt incinerated. Still, she’d saved every review and story he wrote in the newspaper just because the words were his. She’d made a list of everything she knew about him—his height (five-ten), his favorite music (Latin jazz), where he’d gone to college (Stanford)—just to feel like she was a part of his life. She replayed every moment of their interactions in her mind each night while she touched herself, trying to escape back into time. Billie Holiday’s Lady in Satin sounded exactly like she felt, dressing her wound just right.

  “Maybe I didn’t trust myself, kiddo,” Carlos said. “Besides, your father made it real clear he would kill me if I tried to contact you.”

  That was indisputable. When Carlos had pulled up in front of her hotel with Phoenix in the passenger seat of his silver Acura at 5:00 A.M., Sarge had been waiting for them at the curb. Sarge hadn’t had the patience for Mr. Smalls, I can explain and all that jazz. Sarge had pulled Carlos out of the car by his hair and punched him so hard his mouth had spilled with blood, a back tooth knocked loose. Watching, Phoenix had screamed. Suddenly, it was Romeo and Juliet, the version she’d seen in her tenth-grade English class with Olivia Hussey and the stirring, unforgettable theme by Nina Rota. A timeless, doomed love.

  And all in front of a Saturday-night crowd on Ocean Drive.

  “So you punked out,” Phoenix said.

  Carlos smiled sadly. “Yeah. I punked out. Your dad is a convincing man. I saw him outside when I got here, and I made damn sure to stay out of his sight.”

  “He definitely would not be happy to see you.”

  “What about you?” Carlos said. His eyes hung on hers, waiting. “Apology accepted?”

  “It’s a little late. That girl’s long gone.”

  “What if we start over?” He held out his hand to her. “Hello, Miss Smalls, my name is Carlos Harris. I’m a reporter for Basslines magazine, and we’re writing a story about you.”

  The girl wasn’t long gone, apparently. The girl thrilled to hear him say his name.

  Except for its horrific ending and flawed core, Phoenix’s romance with Carlos Harris could have been from a movie, complete with its own soundtrack. Scene: South Beach.

  She and Gloria had convinced Sarge to let them have their own hotel room for the annual urban music conference on South Beach, an achievement without par. She was pulling a 3.8 GPA, and she and the band had been practicing almost nightly in the garage (one of the songs they wrote during that period had been good enough to end up on Trial by Fire a few years later), so her parents thought she was mature enough. Sarge had a room at a different hotel, but it was only two buildings away—so he decided to trust her. Cue laugh-track.

  The conference was Disney World. It was the nation’s premier urban music networking session (“Oh, shit! That’s Russell Simmons across the street!”), and Phoenix and Gloria were so psyched to be there that they vowed to be good. Back then, Gloria wanted to be Phoenix’s manager, so she took the business side seriously for half a minute. Instead of using the fake ID’s Gloria had scored during a family vacation in New Orleans earlier that year, they limited their activities to the daytime programming on making it in the music world, with their minds on their money and their money on their minds. The first day, instead of trying to sneak out to the clubs for one of the nighttime shows, they came back to their room early and were satisfied to sift through the bags of demos they’d grabbed from artists clawing their way up, guessing who would make it and who wouldn’t. Gloria didn’t even bring any weed with her, which was miraculous for Gloria when she was sixteen. They were going to be angels. When Sarge called at nine to check on them, they were in their room. When he knocked on their door for a surprise visit at midnight, he woke them up. Angels.

  Enter Carlos Harris.

  Phoenix first noticed him at a morning panel on marketing and promotion; or, rather, she noticed him checking her. He was easily the finest man in the room—which, granted, wasn’t saying much, since she and Gloria had decided that rappers weren’t going to win any beauty contests unless the judges were blind. (The term they coined was thugly). But Carlos was fine. And Carlos was older, which made his attention flattering. She guessed he was about thirty, and she was right. She liked his roguish smile, the way he kept looking away when she caught him staring. Usually any guys checking them out were really after Gloria, but Carlos’s eyes were on her. He was wearing a mustard-colored pullover and slacks, a press pass dangling around his neck. Later, when he surprised her and Gloria with an offer to buy them Cuban sandwiches for lunch, she learned that he was a music writer for the Miami Sun-News.

  “I’m going to the Lauryn Hill concert later,” he said. “You coming?”

  They hadn’t even heard there was going to be a Lauryn Hill concert. It was on the down-low, in an intimate setting on Fifth Street. In a bar. Phoenix felt her angel’s wings wilt.

  In that instant, Gloria did something so wonderful that it almost brought tears to Phoenix’s eyes: “I’m gonna crash in the ro
om,” Gloria said. “You go on, Phee. Have fun.” And she reached into her purse and handed Phoenix a fake ID.

  Gloria was going to cover for her. It opened up a universe of possibilities. First, Gloria would answer the phone in the room if Sarge called. Second, Gloria could do a damn convincing imitation of her voice that had fooled her friends more than once—and if Gloria had to, she could try it on Sarge. He might not spring another midnight surprise visit to their room, since he knew they were expecting one. It was the most daring plot they had ever hatched.

  “Get laid,” Gloria whispered with her good-bye hug.

  No one checked Phoenix’s ID while she was with Carlos over the next three days, stealing time with him when she dared. His press pass was a veil of invisibility, diplomatic immunity. All the bouncers knew Carlos. All the club owners knew Carlos. Phoenix felt like she was in Goodfellas, whisked in through the back doors to all the best tables. Lauryn Hill did a single set at the Stephen Talkhouse Bar at eight o’clock, alone on the stage with an acoustic guitar. She sang like an prophet. Midway through her set, the singer saw Carlos and nodded out at him, a silent, sisterly whassup, Carlos. Phoenix’s jaw dropped. This brother was hooked up. That was when Carlos first held Phoenix’s hand, and fever scorched her slippery palm. When he scooted his chair closer so that their shoulders were touching, she felt her body tremble. Get laid. Gloria’s advice flurried in her head.

  Carlos took her to a restaurant on Ocean Drive owned by Gloria Estefan, Lario’s on the Beach, the best Cuban food she’d ever tasted. He let her sip from his tart mojito (“This was supposedly Ernest Hemingway’s favorite drink,” he said), all the while ordering her nothing but refills for her Coke. The restaurant manager spoke to him in a hurricane of Spanish, and he answered with his own hurricane, and Carlos’s throaty laugh sounded like it was from a man who had seen the world. His rolled R’s made her squirm in her seat. She stared at the strands of black hair growing above his halfway-buttoned shirt, wondering how he would taste.

  His first kiss in his car was divine. She’d been kissed one or two times before—and she thought she’d been kissed well by Craig Roman in the back row of the movie theater at The Falls shopping mall—but Carlos’s grown-man kiss was a revelation. He cupped the back of her head between his palms and kissed her gently at first, then he pulled her tongue into his mouth and sucked it with such practiced vigor that she couldn’t imagine how lovemaking could feel any better. He sank his fingers into her hair, savoring its kinks, his fingertips rubbing small circles in her scalp. Each sensation was new, blotting her busy mind as her body took its place at her helm. When his hand brushed her breast outside of her blouse, Phoenix yelped.

  Those precious days, she was his and he was hers. Whenever they ran into Sarge at the conference, Carlos disappeared into the background and she did not look at him. The secret made it all the more exciting. Phoenix, of course, was in love with Carlos right away.

  Carlos must have kept a hundred CDs in his car, organized alphabetically in cases under his seat. He never started his car until a CD was loaded and ready to blast with the first turn of the key, as if music powered his engine. To help her learn, he dragged her away from South Beach to hear Tony Bennett at the ornate Gusman Theater in downtown Miami despite her protests that his music was too old (“Don’t talk crazy. Good music is never old. Notice how he doesn’t just sing it—he SELLS it.”), and Phoenix finally understood why her mother had left her heart in San Francisco. Afterward, Carlos drove her to a restaurant called Centro Vasco in Little Havana, where Tony Bennett’s black drummer, Clayton Cameron, took off his black jacket and slipped into a private jam session with older Cuban musicians in white guayaberas, shedding his perfect regimentation for something freer and completely perfect in its own way. He was one drummer in two worlds, at home in both.

  Music was Carlos’s aphrodisiac, and Phoenix was under its spell.

  The last night of the conference, after treating her to dinner at a Haitian restaurant called Tap-Tap painted with bright murals that made her heart sing, Carlos took her to his apartment. It was neat and spare, a music shrine. The walls were ornamented with framed concert posters—Bob Marley, B. B. King, Mario Bauzá, Tito Puente—and two of his living room’s walls were stacked to the ceiling with CDs, a collection of thousands. It was a tour through a wonderland.

  Carlos played her a CD by an Egyptian orchestra leader named Hossam Ramzy, then he let her hear the same orchestra backing up Robert Plant and Jimmy Page on a mind-blowing version of “Friends.” He played her African salsa she hadn’t known existed by Pape Fall and Africando. He whispered the English translation to Rubén Blades’s “Patria” in her ear, making her ache to love her homeland as much as Blades. He played Miles Davis’s version of “My Funny Valentine,” then Coltrane’s “Someday My Prince Will Come,” and by then she was light-headed with desire.

  Phoenix wanted to marry Carlos Harris, move into his apartment, and dust his CDs all day to keep them clean. But Carlos was slow, so slow. Carlos seemed to forget she was in the room with him. He’d closed his eyes, enraptured by the music. Al Jarreau’s “Teach Me Tonight” made Phoenix bold, so she kissed him, and he opened his eyes. She felt aware of her puny body, the curse of adolescence. She hoped he saw the woman ripe inside her.

  “How old are you?” Carlos asked.

  The question hurt, a violation of their silence. “You know how old I am.”

  “I know you’re a student at New World. That’s not the same thing.”

  She didn’t answer, kissing him again. Kissing seemed like a good way to avert an argument. She wanted to shut him up so he would pull off her clothes. She couldn’t imagine how she would find her dignity again if he pulled away from her.

  But he didn’t kiss back, this time. “Phee?” Carlos said, quiet. His index finger traced her hipbone when he slid his hand there, warm fingers tickling the fringes of her hair hidden just inside her jeans. Her stomach fluttered against his wrist. “For real, no playing. How old are you?”

  She blinked, surprised at how close she was to tears. “Sixteen.”

  Carlos answered with a long, slow sigh. His breath swallowed her. But his hand didn’t move. He was still deciding. “Have you…been intimate with anyone before?”

  Damn. She’d been afraid he was going to ask that.

  “How intimate?” she said. Craig Roman had squeezed her right breast once.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?” She tried to sound annoyed, but she only sounded miserable. Like a child. His point exactly.

  “A lot, linda. A lot.”

  Linda was the most beautiful word she had ever heard. Leeeeeenda.

  “Is it so bad if my first time’s with you?” she said.

  He massaged her scalp the way he had inside his car. Fingers had never felt so good on her scalp, even her mother’s. “If I were a god at the top of Mount Olympus, no one could make me an offering more precious than that one,” he said. He kissed her hair, then her forehead, then her lips, but only lightly. “But I haven’t earned it. I’m not the one, Phee. Find someone to learn with you. I can wait.”

  Their beginning had been a splendid one. But when he drove her back to her hotel that night, the ending was waiting.

  Dancers peeked into the lounge and tiptoed to the vending machines, keeping their eyes away, trying not to disturb them. Carlos’s tape recorder was running, but after a half hour of reminiscing, the official interview had yet to begin.

  Finally, Phoenix couldn’t avoid the question. “Have you heard Rising?”

  He nodded. She couldn’t read his expression.

  “Well?” she said.

  Carlos cocked his head left, then right, weighing the matter. “Where’s the band?”

  “All over the place. La’Keitha was touring with Lenny Kravitz, last I heard. Jabari’s doing jazz in New York, I think. Andres went to Berklee. You didn’t answer my question.”

  This time, Carlos did
smile. “I like a good steak, and I like a good cheeseburger. Rising is a good cheeseburger. Your last CD, Trial by Fire, was a steak.”

  Phoenix wanted to both slap him and hug him, just like old times.

  “I like ‘Party Patrol,’” he went on “Great violin intro, solid beat. And you did a nice cover of ‘Love the One You’re With,’ very soulful, great gospel vibe. Are you still composing music? We’re on the record now.” He nudged his cassette player closer to her thigh on the sofa.

  “I’m learning and growing with D’Real,” she said. “He’s great to work with.”

  “Will you go back to your emphasis on musicianship in the future?”

  Phoenix felt irritated. Was he toying with her? “I’m grooving with the Three Strikes family right now. We know Rising’s gonna blow up, then we’ll see what the future holds.”

  “Tell me about your rough childhood, Phoenix.”

  Now, Phoenix was sure of it: He was toying with her. “You have my bio,” she said.

  He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a folded press release with the TSR logo. “Yeah, I sure do…” he said, reading. “Grew up in the Miami projects…Father in prison until you were eighteen…And you’re only twenty-one years old? God help me if that’s not another lie. I’m afraid to do the math.”

  Phoenix felt her face coloring. She clicked off his recorder. “What’s your game, Carlos?”

  “I don’t know, Phee,” he said, winking. “What’s yours?”

  Phoenix sat closer to Carlos, lowering her voice as a bare-chested male dancer with his dance bag over his shoulder crept into the room and headed for the vending machines. “Just remember, this is show business,” she said.

  “Yes, but even in show business you can’t forget where the lies end and the truth begins.”

  “Did you come out here to fuck with me? If so, I have a busy schedule.”

  His face softened. “No. I came to tell you I’m happy for you, and to make sure you’re OK. That’s the truth. No harm intended. I see you’re defensive, so I’ll stop.”