Joplin's Ghost Read online

  “It’s a record,” Marcus said, a realization.

  “No it’s not. It’s that piano.”

  Leah was right, he realized. He’d paid a tuner, but he’d told them tuning would be impossible without new parts, so the old piano’s notes dangled at the edge of tonality, never quite right. The effect gave the music an added plaintiveness, and Marcus remembered how it had felt to see Leah gasping for life in his dream. And thinking Phoenix was dead. The world seemed an awful and unforgiving place, the way it had been at Raiford. Marcus Smalls shivered in his bed.

  “It’s that piano, Marcus. I want it out of the house.”

  “It’s not out there playing by itself.”

  “Go see if Phoenix is in her room.” Leah drew the covers up to her chin, like a young girl. “I bet you ten dollars she’s sleeping. I told you we shouldn’t bring it here. Livvy used to say that a piano at the club was haunted, and maybe she was right. Maybe this is that piano.”

  “Woman, you’re talking crazy,” Marcus said, but he couldn’t ignore his heart’s gathering drumbeat. That wasn’t Phoenix on that piano. It was somebody grown, and somebody good. Better than him, and even better than Leah. Someone who’d been playing a lifetime.

  “I tell you, it’s the piano, Marcus. It’s the piano.”

  Marcus had just about talked himself into believing her foolishness when he cracked Phoenix’s door open and saw that she wasn’t in her bed, her rumpled covers left behind. Closer to the living room, as the song’s opening melody repeated, the playing was louder and sharper to his ear, too vibrant and immediate to be a recording.

  Phoenix.

  His daughter sat at the piano in her Snoopy nightshirt, playing with her eyes closed, without sheet music. Marcus’s eyes smarted with tears as he heard the music flow from his daughter’s hands. It was a beautiful piece, an old piece, and she played like an angel. The music was heartache she hadn’t lived long enough to meet up close, and he hoped she never would.

  “Peanut?” Marcus whispered.

  Phoenix didn’t hear him. Her head swayed slowly as the bittersweet melody coursed through her. Her playing only stopped when the song reached its conclusion: hopeful for a sustained note, followed by a pause, then its sad finish, as inevitable as death. Phoenix sat perfectly still, her hands frozen on the keys. Gently, Marcus rested his hands on his daughter’s birdlike shoulders. She did not move to acknowledge him.

  “When did you learn that?” Marcus said.

  Instead of answering, Phoenix began to play again. This time, Marcus recognized the piece right away: It was a rag piece by Scott Joplin. “Weeping Willow.” His grandfather had taught him to play it when he was a teenager. Marcus hadn’t thought about that piece in years. Hearing it, for an instant, he thought he could glimpse his grandfather’s speckled beard and round spectacles. He remembered his grandfather’s cottonfield in Valdosta, a blizzard of white, and how cotton used to gather like snowdrifts along the roadside when it blew from its stalks.

  Marcus sat at the piano against the wall, the one Leah’s parents had bought Phoenix, a child-sized spinet. His large hands felt monstrous on the piano’s small keys, the reason he almost never played it. When Phoenix repeated the song’s melody, Marcus joined in, matching his daughter’s pace, if not her accuracy. When he stumbled, he tried to catch up. By the next refrain, he had twinned her playing, and their sounds mingled, inseparable.

  That was how Leah found them when she followed the music to the living room, armed with her husband’s golf club: Phoenix sat at one piano and Marcus at the other, their hands flinging with abandon as they communed within the joyous music. The sight of her husband and child at the pianos cast a spell that made Leah feel her life slip back into normalcy, like a fuzzy television picture rapped to clarity. Everything would be fine, she decided.

  The next morning, Phoenix said she didn’t remember waking up during the night.

  Although she remained diligent about her practicing, the flaring brilliance she had shown that night was gone. Phoenix also lost her fascination with the old piano. More than that, she was afraid of it. The story her mother and father kept spinning about the late-night concert scared her, especially when her father bought her a Joplin songbook; one glance told her that “Weeping Willow” was years beyond her abilities. The waltz she’d played—called “Bethena,” it turned out—was no picnic either. On top of that, the accident had been strange. The Bell boys insisted they hadn’t moved the piano to the top of the stairs, and what if they were telling the truth?

  Phoenix and her parents agreed that it was time for the old piano to go.

  A collector advertising for antique pianos in the Miami Sun-News came to their house to inspect it. Although the man didn’t seem impressed by the piano’s model or condition, he paid them fifty dollars and carted it away. Before he left, Phoenix saw the collector slide a pencil inside his loafer, eraser first, to scratch his foot.

  The piano was gone, and none of them missed it, not even Phoenix.

  But for the rest of Phoenix’s childhood, she had a recurring dream of sharing a stage with her father at the Silver Slipper, dressed in formal concert finery. They sat at two ivory-colored grand pianos arranged back to back, their delicate notes filling the room like a songbird’s call as they played a slow, sad waltz in perfect synchronicity.

  In the dream, the Silver Slipper’s seats were jammed, and the overflow crowd stood watching from as far as the Gallery of Greats. Everyone in the audience was rapt, their teary eyes trained on the father and daughter playing as one, giving language to joys and travails no words could express. While Phoenix and her father played in the dream, an orchestra conductor always stood before them, waving his baton with manic fervor, his face hidden beyond the harsh stage lights.

  Phoenix always awoke from this dream with her eyelashes caked together, her cheeks raw from crying through the night.

  Part One

  Muthafucka, I’m a baller—

  I’ll smoke you for my dolla.

  Pop you ’round the corner

  ’Fore you get a chance to holla.

  G-RONN

  “Don’t Fuck with What’s Mine”

  The hall was illuminated by electric lights;

  It was certainly a sight to see.

  So many colored folks without a razor fight,

  ’Twas a great surprise to me.

  SCOTT JOPLIN

  “The Rag-Time Dance”

  CHAPTER ONE

  Someone rapped on the hotel room door.

  Gloria squealed, laughing. “He’s still there, Phee.”

  “Shhhhh. It’s not funny.” Phoenix wasn’t in the mood for fan bullshit. If this was the same boy, he’d been outside their hotel suite two solid hours, knocking softly every half hour to let them know he hadn’t gone anywhere. What had been amusing at ten wasn’t at midnight.

  Phoenix pulled a velvet throw pillow from her cousin’s bed across her eyes. Before the last knock, Gloria had been flipping through The Source, fantasizing about which men she’d like to hook up with when they had the chance to shop backstage at the Grammys or the MTV Music Awards—It’s a tough choice between Tyrese and 50 Cent, huh?

  Phoenix’s only fantasy right then was to have the strength to walk to her master bedroom across the hall, brush her teeth and go to bed. The OutKast CD sounded tinny and awful from the cheap CD player that doubled as a clock radio, and Phoenix knew she had to be tired, if OutKast couldn’t wake her up. She couldn’t remember being this trashed on the road before, even when she still had a band hauling instruments and amps.

  The knock on their door came again, bolder.

  “What’s your name?” Gloria called toward her open doorway, and she might as well have been calling down the street. This was the biggest room of Phoenix’s tour so far, an elegant suite with two bedrooms, a living room with a dining room table for six, phones and televisions in each bathroom, and Phoenix’s master bedroom, with a canopied bed so high off the ground that it ca
me with its own steps. Welcome to the future, Gloria had said when they arrived last night. The room was comped, or Sarge would have put them up at the Budget Inn as usual. At least at Budget Inn, she didn’t have to walk so far to go to bed. Everything has a price, she thought.

  “Don’t encourage that boy,” Phoenix said, slapping Gloria’s thigh. “I’m not kidding.”

  “I’m Kendrick,” a voice came back, full of false confidence. He sounded young, a kid.

  “How’d he find my room? I’m calling Sarge,” Phoenix said. Sarge wasn’t in for the night yet—he was surely out at one of the clubs schmoozing the radio folks and music writers—but Sarge’s cell was always strapped to his belt, fully juiced.

  “Don’t call Sarge. Damn. Just talk to the man. You haven’t been laid in a month.”

  True enough. Ronn was busy, and so was she. Ronn was in L.A. recording a CD and trying to get his film production company going, and she was in the middle of her radio tour to promote her first CD on Ronn’s label, Rising. Three Strikes Records was better known for gangsta rap than R&B, but Ronn had put a lot of labor into Rising, and not just because he sometimes shared his massive four-poster bed with his new artist. With a hit-maker like D’Real producing her tracks, Ronn had told Phoenix she’d better get used to people knowing who she was, the good and the bad.

  Was this stranger outside the door part of the good, or part of the bad?

  “I rode the bus from New York to see you, Phoenix,” said the young man’s muffled voice. “I’m prelaw at NYU, not a stalker. I’m only asking for one night, and I won’t be bragging to my boys in the morning. I want to be a gentleman and treat you like a lady.”

  “Phee, boyfriend is smooth. Ask him if he brought a partner,” Gloria whispered, and Phoenix pinched her cousins’s arm to shut her up. Gloria was crazy if she thought they were going to tag-team groupies tonight, Gloria’s favorite fantasy.

  But the man had come from New York to St. Louis on a bus just to lay this rap on her? How did he know where she’d be staying, much less where her room was? This boy better hope her father wouldn’t stop by the suite and find him standing there. After a month straight on the road, Sarge would not be in the mood for a stranger who didn’t understand boundaries.

  Phoenix stood up. She was still wearing the tattered jeans and white T-shirt from rehearsal for Friday night’s show at Le Beat, her peanut-butter-colored makeup smudging her collar and shoulders. She lifted her underarm, and her tart scent assailed her nose. Gloria was a M.A.C. girl who kept herself glam day and night—streaked hair moussed to perfection, face painted to glorify all the right angles, blouses cut low across her cleavage—and compared to her cousin, Phoenix knew she looked like one funky mess. Funky and tired.

  So why was she wasting the energy she’d saved for brushing her teeth to walk to the suite’s white double doors? Phoenix put her face close to the doors. She could smell cologne in the cool air through the crack, one she knew. Calvin, maybe. Not Kenzo, but not bad.

  “How’d you find my room?” she said to the crack and the cologne.

  “Oh, Father Jesus,” she heard him say, surprised. His smoothness had evaporated.

  “You know you’re not supposed to be standing outside my room, right?” Gentle but firm.

  His voice came closer to the crack, and she saw a blur of dark skin. “Miss Smalls, I love your music. I have your CD from back in the day, those cuts with the mad keyboard riffs, that first one you put out. You’re a straight-up genius.”

  Phoeinx’s first CD had been born and buried four years ago, so this was a hard-core fan. Phoenix and her band in Miami had poured their souls into two CDs, and their old label hadn’t sold enough copies to pay for them. That had hurt so much, she’d come within a breath of telling Sarge she was ready to quit, except that she knew how disappointed he would be. At Three Strikes, Ronn and D’Real had laid down the law: Her original music was too this, too that, not urban enough, not enough like D’Real’s vibe, and D’Real is the producer and the producer is God. Hell, D’Real’s the real star, let’s be real. Sarge had warned her things would be different at a major label, and he’d been right. As different as different could be.

  “One of my cousins works here, and she told me where you’d be,” the boy said through the door. “Please don’t try to make me say who. I promised not to get her in trouble.”

  This was rich. “Someone’s pimping me out at the front desk?”

  “It ain’t like that.” She heard the smile in his voice, saw the white of his teeth through the crack. Polished, peroxide teeth. “I told her I would slide up on you for an autograph. But I couldn’t get this close and miss my chance to scrub your back while you take a bubble bath. And take some of this massage oil to rub down your muscles. I have strong hands, Miss Smalls.”

  Damn, that does sound good, she thought. Her knees and thighs were throbbing, sore.

  “If you want to take it to the next level, of course I have protection,” he went on. “And just to keep it safe, I brought a doctor’s report you can look at. I don’t play.”

  “Oh, no he didn’t say that!” Gloria said, Miss Blue-Eyed Ghetto Fabulous in the flesh.

  “This is a joke,” Phoenix said, certain. Arturo and the dancers had nerve bothering her this late. “Who is this?”

  Phoenix opened the door, and the man who stood there was a stranger. He was tall and lanky, with tree-trunk shoulders, a boyish face the complexion of Wesley Snipes, and a shadow of fuzz on the deep cleft of his chin. It wasn’t a joke. Phoenix assessed the stranger’s loose linen pants, bone-colored knit shirt, leather sandals, and close-cropped haircut. Nice. He had a leather duffel bag slung across his shoulder, probably his Booty Kit. He would be a magnificent man one day, but he was young. Very young.

  “You’re a baby, Kendrick,” she said. “Let’s see some ID.”

  This must be how Carlos had felt with her, she realized. Phoenix didn’t think of Carlos often, but she wished it was Carlos at her door instead of a stranger. Carlos’s memory might be bad luck for this boy, since Sarge had knocked one of Carlos’s back teeth loose.

  Gloria posted herself beside Phoenix, no longer laughing, her guardian. Phoenix couldn’t pay her cousin much—a little pocket change, free travel, and free hotel rooms—but she would definitely pay Gloria more one day. That was a fact. One day soon.

  Kendrick reached for his wallet, clumsy. It took him nearly thirty seconds to pull his license from its sleeve. Kendrick Allen Hart, Brooklyn, New York. Just turned nineteen. If he’d been seventeen or eighteen, Phoenix would have sent him back to the playground. Nineteen made him more interesting. Hell, she was only twenty-four, and her promo packets claimed she was twenty-one. There was only a two-year age difference between this boy and Phoenix singular, The Phoenix, no last name necessary. Sarge said if Beyoncé and Ashanti and Imani didn’t need surnames, neither did she.

  “Phoenix, ma’am, you’re more beautiful in person,” Kendrick said, smart enough to keep his distance in the hall. She saw perspiration across his forehead, but his cologne smelled fresh. His smile struggled against a twitching bottom lip, but held on.

  “Thank you. Give me your bag,” Phoenix said.

  Quickly, Kendrick complied, ducking beneath its strap as he swallowed hard.

  Phoenix gave the lightweight duffel bag to Gloria, who unzipped it behind her, stone-faced. Most days, Gloria was hardly better than no help at all, but she liked playing bodyguard. If Kendrick forgot himself, Gloria would put him on his back.

  “You coming to the New York show?” Phoenix said, small talk during the inspection.

  Kendrick’s admiration, loosed from all restraint, leaped free. “What? I ain’ missin’ it! Front and center. I can’t hang out in St. Louis and see you Friday ’cuz of my Af-Am lit final, but I will hear you at the Osiris. Believe that. History in the making. Phoenix, you are off the hook.”

  Friday’s show was a small listening party at a club called Le Beat near the University of Missouri,
no big deal. But next week, Phoenix had a gig opening for the New York leg of the Hip-Hop R&B Summer MegaJam, joining the show at the historic Osiris Theater in Harlem. That show would be the biggest of her life, maybe seventeen hundred people. A few days later, she would begin shooting her first music video for her single on location in L.A. The sun is about to shine on you, Peanut, Sarge told her. Time to open the blinds.

  “Where’d you get the nerve to come stand outside my door?” Phoenix said to the boy.

  “I prayed on it. I won’t get another chance after you blow up like you’re gonna do.”

  “You know you’re crazy, right?”

  “Hell, yeah. Gotta be crazy in a crazy-ass world.”

  Gloria was grinning while she went through the duffel bag. “Ooh, he brought the good kind,” she said, playfully shaking a black box of condoms. Lambskin, the brand Ronn preferred.

  She was going to do this, Phoenix realized, her heart racing. She had never done this before, not with a fan on the road, but she was going to do this tonight.

  “You really brought a medical report?” Phoenix said.

  “Yes, ma’am. Got it from my doctor on Monday, before I left. It’s in there.”

  “Bring your crazy ass in here, Kendrick. Don’t make me sorry. And if you call me ma’am again, you’re gone.”

  “What should I call you?”

  “What do you think? Call me Phoenix.”

  The sound of her name lit his face afire.

  Phoenix worked hard not to think about Ronn as she climbed out of her robe and sank into the jetted marble tub Kendrick filled to the sky with bubbles. The boy’s eyes on her made her body feel clumsy—breasts too small, legs too thin, stomach pooch too big—but her uneasiness vanished in the embrace of the hot water and the blanket of bubbles. The bubbles rose up past her chin as water beat into the tub amid the whir of the jets. In Kendrick’s eyes, she was a goddess.

  Kendrick let his shirt fall from his shoulders, past his hips, revealing the banks of his dark chest’s muscles, unburdened by body fat. His erection cast a shadow across the crotch of his pants in the candlelight. He looked like a Herb Ritts photo, except his head wasn’t shaved.