Joplin's Ghost (39 page)

Louis pulled the pages close to his face. “Nigger, what the hell is a heliotrope?”

So much for wondering if Louis would like the title of their collaboration. But Louis sounded more animated now than he had since the day they’d worked on it. Scott was glad he’d brought the music. He wished the room had a piano.

“A heliotrope’s a flower that always blooms toward the sun.”

Louis scanned the pages quickly, but the music symbols didn’t hold his interest long. Louis turned back to the title page, and Scott stood up to look at it over his friend’s shoulder:

Heliotrope Banquet. By Scott Joplin and Louis Chauvin.

Louis stared at the title page a long time. Then, he gave the stack back in silence.

Scott flipped to the third page and bent lower to point out passages, following the music with the tip of his index finger: “Yeah, see, where you end the
da-da-da-daaaa-da-da
section in the key of G, here’s where I go to C with
de-da-de-da-de-daaaa
…” Scott sang the melody line.

Slowly, Louis nodded, first in approval, then keeping rhythm.
He hears it,
Scott thought.

“…So, we start it off with that elegant, newfangled sound you’ve got, a whole new direction, then it comes full circle. I think it blends us just right.”

Finally, Louis smiled. “That’s real good, Scotty.
Yeah.
I remember it now.”

“I figure on sending it to Stark, see if he’ll pay what it’s worth for a change. If not, there’s other fish in the sea. Especially in New York.”

“Louis Chauvin and Scott Joplin…” Louis murmured, closing his eyes. “How ’bout that?”

Scott was so happy Louis liked the piece, he hated to ruin the mood with another word.

“I heard that waltz, ‘Bethena,’” Louis said, his eyes still closed. “I never got around to sayin’ so, but I thought it was the best thing you ever did. You were telling the
truth
. That’s what I like about that man picking his guitar outside the Theatorium. Plain truth, that’s all. Music ain’t all about sitting up in a theater and clapping when it’s done. Sometimes you want to dance. Sometimes you want to cry.”

Scott blinked, staring down at his shoes. For a while, he had forgotten to miss Freddie.

“Sorry about that gal you married, old man,” Louis said. “Wish I’d met her.”

Scott nodded. “Me, too.”

“Hear you’ve been keepin’ busy, though. Not just in music.”

Scott had courted indiscriminately since Freddie’s death, trying to fill the hole she’d made. Women felt like Scott’s tonic now, except their effects were temporary. None of them were like Freddie. No one was. “Leola wasn’t the match you thought she’d be,” Scott said. Leola was pleasant enough, and a very good singer, but she had wanted to marry him after only a few visits. He wasn’t ready for a new wife, he’d told her. She’d finally turned him away in search of a more likely prospect. “Can’t blame her, though,” Scott said.

“Women ain’t got no more hold on me, and I’m glad. Right here is all the lovin’ I need.”

Scott gazed around the room again, and he realized suddenly that it did not resemble a chapel at all: It felt more like a crypt, with its flickering light and still, silent bodies.

“How you doing, youngster?” Scott whispered finally, the words he’d avoided.

“You got ears, don’t you? My sweet lady’s leaving me. Looks like I can’t trust her neither, in the end.” To Louis, the piano was a living thing, an appendage, almost. Scott loved his pianos, too, but not like Louis. “But she won’t get away that easy. They say Paderewski played until his keys were bloody, show after show. She ain’t gonna buck me without a fight.”

The memory of his doctor’s face made Scott feel a boulder lodge in his stomach.
This is the time to tell him,
he thought. Until he told someone, his own ringing brain would never accept his doctor’s words. He opened his mouth, waiting for the courage to face it.

“I’ll tell you something I wouldn’t say to nobody else in this world, Scotty,” Louis said before Scott could speak. “I’m glad it was me got it instead of you. I mean it.”

Scott’s mouth closed. He didn’t know if he could open it again.

Louis went on: “I got aches and pains and ailments, sores, headaches, seeing things that ain’t there, but I wouldn’t give a shit about all that if I had my
hands
. I wouldn’t wish it on nobody. ’Specially you, ’cause you don’t just play music, you write it for keeps,” Louis said, and for the first time emotion climbed into his voice, parting the haze.

“You go on and sell our music to old man Stark, so maybe a person or two will realize there’s a professor named Louis Chauvin, and he could play the shit out of a piano. You go on to New York and be the
real
Black Paderewski. Naw, hell—Paderewski’s gonna wish he was
you
. When you’re up there facing the sun, I figger I’ll be there with you one way or another.”

Scott thought he saw tears in Louis’s eyes, but the dew was gone when Louis blinked. Scott’s chin shook. He didn’t know where his grief for Louis ended and his own began.

“We’ve had a good visit, old man, but I’m gonna have to ask you to find your own way out,” Louis said. “I don’t plan on doing much in the way of talking in a minute or so.”

“I understand,” Scott said.

Scott lingered, gazing at Louis the way a painter would: Beneath the slant of his Stetson, Louis’s curls were limp with sweat, his hollowed face scarred, and he was barely propped in the oversized chair, as if he were boneless. He was a scarecrow in a radiant white dress shirt with a theatrical ruffled collar, black tuxedo trousers, and shoes shiny enough to talk back to the candles.

Louis would always be a showman. Always.

The last time Scott Joplin saw Louis Chauvin, he was a terrible and beautiful sight.

P
hoenix closed her eyes, feeling her seat vibrate as the 747 achieved takeoff speed, racing for flight. She reached beside her for Carlos’s hand, and he clasped it tightly in his lap. In all her years on the road, she realized, she’d never had a lover travel beside her. She’d had band-mates, Gloria or Sarge, yes, but never a lover. Smelling the just-enough whisper of Carlos’s cologne, Phoenix realized she had become one of the people she used to envy on airplanes. She and Ronn had never traveled alone as a couple, never side by side.

Carlos’s hand felt so good, Phoenix forgot her fear of takeoffs. The loud shudders, groans and whines of machinery and wheels beneath her didn’t make her heart race.
Besides, I have a friend in a high place now. Scott will keep me safe.

Scott still came to her at night—not always with music, but with memories. Five times now, she’d relived the memory of Scott’s last night of lovemaking with Freddie, when she’d been sick. Phoenix didn’t feel the sensations as keenly as she had the first time, with Carlos’s human hands doing a ghost’s work, but each time she awoke, she had trouble catching her breath because Freddie’s pneumonia touched her in her sleep. Two nights ago, Phoenix had awakened with tears drying across her face, whispering
I love you, Scott
until Carlos shook her awake. Freddie’s love for Scott burned strongest when Phoenix’s dreams were fresh, inseparable from her heart.

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 the 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.