Joplin's Ghost (3 page)

Phoenix could tell their personalities from their faces. Miles Davis, Billie Holiday and Scott Joplin were frowners, looking like somebody owed them money or had gotten on their last nerves. Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Count Basie were ready to get on with the show, with enough smiles to make up for the rest. Especially Louis Armstrong. Louis Armstrong could smile for days. Whenever Phoenix heard the phrase
grinning from ear to ear,
she thought of Louis Armstrong in that photograph, with his forehead, horn and teeth gleaming. It was hard to imagine what one man could have to be so happy about.

Phoenix found Mom and Sarge on the stage walking from microphone to microphone, doing a sound check with Javier. Sarge’s booming voice filled up the room:
checkcheckcheckonetwo
. A woman Phoenix didn’t know stood by watching them. The woman had bleached-blond hair and wore a pantsuit that looked tight, bulging around her body’s every lump, and Phoenix wondered how she could breathe. Her pale hair sprayed behind her as though she were standing in the middle of a private storm.

She must be tonight’s singer, Valentina somebody. Latin jazz. Phoenix had seen her poster outside the front door, but the woman in the poster was younger and thinner. The woman in the poster was also smiling, and Valentina was not.

“What are you looking at?” the woman snapped at Javier, who was bending over behind her to plug a cord into an amp. “Put your eyes back where they belong, you useless starfucker.”

She said it so loudly that Javier’s face went red.

“Bitch,” Gloria muttered under her breath, since she had a crush on Javier even though he was an old man, nearly thirty. Phoenix couldn’t help giggling. She liked the sound of
starfucker;
the front half was glittery and the back half vulgar, the way the perfect cussword should be.

Sarge’s head swiveled to look back at the singer. Beneath his mud-cloth African skullcap, his eyes burned bright. “We don’t talk to staff like that here,” Sarge said. Her father’s voice was its own growling storm.

The singer shot him a look as if she was ready to unload some more inventive words, but Sarge’s eyes, or maybe his voice, made her keep her lips pinned shut.

“Apologize to him for that language,” Sarge said.

The woman’s lips peeled back against her teeth as if she wanted to bite Sarge. To Phoenix, she looked like that vampire lady in
Def by Temptation,
the sexy horror movie she and her cousin had watched on cable at Gloria’s house after her parents went to bed. But the woman said, very softly, “
Lo siento, lo siento,
let’s just get finished already.
Dios mio.
”

Something she said must have been
I’m sorry
in Spanish, because Sarge’s eyes left her and he went back to yanking cords. Phoenix saw Mom give him a frown. Mom had told Sarge that if he ever talked to her the way he talked to the artists, she would kick him to the curb. But Sarge saved that tone for grown people who thought they were children and didn’t know how to act. He didn’t even talk to Phoenix like that, except when he told her to bring him his belt.

Phoenix climbed onstage to give her mother a shameless hug. She only hugged Mom before she was about to beg her for something. Mom’s bosom smelled like perspiration and Ombre Rose, her favorite perfume. She was wearing her loose purple batik pants and matching top with the mirrored, sparkly collar, like an Indian princess. Mom only wore clothes that draped over her body, hiding it. Mom was never through with her stories of the starvation and broken bodies from her days with a ballet company in Boston, but as long as Phoenix had known her, her mother had weighed more than two hundred pounds.

“What’s up, Buttercup?” Mom said, blowing a strand of hair out of her face. Her dark hair was limp and straight, except when it got wet, when it turned nearly as wiry and curly as Phoenix’s. Phoenix enjoyed posing in the mirror with her mother when their hair looked alike.

“I want to ask you something.”

“Can it wait?” Mom said, keeping her eye toward Sarge and the singer.

“Peanut, come here,” Sarge said, beckoning. He was winding a black cord around his thick arm, from his palm to his elbow.

The singer left the stage and stood watching them from a few yards away, her arms folded across her chest. She was so mad, her face looked bright pink. Hibiscus pink.

Sarge lowered his face to Phoenix’s. His neck was almost as thick as his face, and he had a broad nose that flared when he was mad, or when he laughed. Phoenix couldn’t see herself in her father’s face either, although everybody told her she looked just like him in the eyes. She wished she had browner skin and could shave her head like Sarge, or else she wished her hair would lie down flat like Mom’s and Gloria’s. She had a little of each of her parents, but not enough of either.

“Did you hear Queen Isabella?” Sarge said softly. “I had to give her The Ray.”

Sarge had told her Benny Goodman used to give his musicians The Ray with his eyes when he didn’t like what he heard on the bandstand. Sarge did it with his eyes
and
his voice. Don’t be fooled by that Sunday school teacher suit and glasses in the picture, Sarge had told her—you did
not
mess with Benny Goodman. Nobody messed with Sarge, either.

“She had it coming,” Phoenix said.

“Be that as it may,” Sarge said, “your mama’s giving me looks. So I want you to go on over there and do that little-girl thang. You know how you do. Give her a smile, bat your eyes, and say these words exactly like this: ‘You’re so pretty. You look better than your picture.’”

Phoenix rolled her eyes. “That’s a lie.”

Phoenix heard Javier chuckle from behind the drum set. Sarge lowered his voice. “It’s not a lie. It’s an exaggeration. Besides, beauty is subjective.”

“What does subjective mean?”

“It means she looks pretty if I tell you she looks pretty. It’s a matter of
opinion
. Go on.”

“Really, it’s shameful,” Mom said, walking past them toward the grand piano at the back of the stage. “If you teach her deception, it’ll come back to you.”

“One song getting airplay on public radio, and she struts in here acting like she’s somebody. I’ll send her ass packing right back to wherever she’s from.” Sarge barely kept his voice down when he said that. His eyes looked restless, like he might give the singer The Ray again because his memories were making him mad. “Musicians come do their job. In and out. But singers? Always the same shit.”

Phoenix reminded herself, yet again, that she would never, ever be a singer.

The singer pulled out her cell phone to call someone, glaring at Sarge from her safe distance against the wall. She was about to walk out, and that would be the end of the show. Phoenix could feel it. It had happened before.

“I’ll do it, but I’ll have my fingers crossed behind my back,” Phoenix said. “OK, Mom? That means it’s not a lie.”

“Oh, so that makes it all better. What a relief,” Mom said sarcastically. She dismissed them with a wave of her hand and disappeared behind the backstage curtain. Phoenix heard Mom promising herself she would sell the Silver Slipper, and she meant it this time, no matter what her father had said about family legacy.

Suddenly, Phoenix remembered the piano. “Can I have that old piano, Daddy?” When she wanted something, she’d learned it was better to call him
Daddy,
not
Sarge
.

“Which old piano?”

“Upstairs. In the storeroom.”

“We’ll see. I’ll take a look at it,” Sarge said, winking. From Sarge,
We’ll see
was only a short hop to
yes
. When Mom said
We’ll see,
it almost always meant
no,
another of the differences between her parents. “Now go on and work your magic, Peanut, before I get in trouble. If we lose this one, your mom’s gonna be just about through with me.”

After beckoning for Gloria to come with her (“
What,
Phee? Javier was finally noticing me!”), Phoenix sidled up beside the woman. The singer was punching the buttons on her cell phone as if she wanted to break them. She put the phone to her ear, and her flurry of Spanish began. Phoenix had heard some of the words at school:
Puta. Maricón. Comemíerda.
Angry words. Go-to-the-principal’s-office or meet-me-after-school words.

After a deep breath, Phoenix stood in front of the singer and stared up at her with admiring eyes. Following Sarge’s advice, she blinked a time or two, trying to bat her lashes, but she thought she probably looked more like she had dust in her eyes.

The singer sighed, and her breath smelled like the strong Cuban coffee Mom drank from little plastic cups the size of thimbles, like motor oil with sugar. The singer put her hand over the phone’s receiver. “What do you want?” she said to Phoenix.

“I’m sorry to bother you, but you are
so
beautiful,” Phoenix said.

The singer’s face froze, waiting.

“You’re much prettier than in your picture. And you sing great, too,” Phoenix went on. She remembered she’d forgotten to cross her fingers behind her back, so she did it after the fact.

An amazing transformation took place: The lines near the singer’s mouth vanished as her lips became a smile, her eyes were suddenly girlish, and her face glowed like a newly lighted candle. In that instant, Phoenix realized she wasn’t lying, because the woman’s face on the poster outside was posed and fake, but Valentina’s face had become lovely and soft and honest. She was older than the woman in the poster, but that did not make her less pretty; in fact, her beauty seemed more lasting, more precious, because most of it sat in her gentle brown eyes.

“Thank you,
gracias,
” the singer said. She blinked, and Phoenix could tell she was close to tears. Phoenix had never seen such a powerful reaction to her words. “You are a very sweet girl to say that. Not everyone thinks so. Some say I am a foolish old woman.”

“They’re just stupid,” Phoenix said. “I hope I can be as pretty as you one day.”

“For real. Can we have your autograph?” Gloria said, holding out a napkin. Gloria could be a royal pain when she wanted to, but Phoenix could count on her cousin to back her up every time. While Valentina signed the napkin, Phoenix glanced around to look at her father on the stage. He was grinning as wide as Louis Armstrong.

Phoenix would tell Sarge she hadn’t even lied. She was proud of that.

“You two are best friends?” the woman said, when she’d finished signing her name in a swirl of cursive, illegible but still beautiful.

“Cousins,” Phoenix said.

Valentina didn’t blink or frown. Most people couldn’t understand how brown skin and white skin, or black cornrows and blond hair, could be in the same family. That was tiresome.

“Ah, cousins! But friends, too?” the woman said.

Phoenix looked at Gloria, who smiled at her. They both nodded. Everybody at school knew they were best friends. Anybody who messed with Phoenix was messing with Gloria, and messing with Gloria was a bad idea. Gloria wasn’t afraid of anything or anybody. In that way, Gloria was more like Sarge than Phoenix was.

Valentina put one hand on top of Phoenix’s head and the other on Gloria’s. “Always stay friends, not only cousins,” she said. “
Siempre. ¿Comprende?
Always.”

Then Valentina went back to the stage, with a regal walk like a queen. She walked straight up to Javier and gave him a tight hug, her true apology. She purred at him in Spanish.

“Bitch,” Gloria muttered. “Her hand is almost touching his butt!”

“Stop looking at that old man like that. You’re so gross, Gloria.”

“I’m an early bloomer.”

“You’re a Freakazoid.”

“Takes one to know one.”

“I can’t help it if you’re my cousin.”

“I can’t help it if you’re too much of a baby to know a cute guy when you see one. I got my period already, remember? I’m a
woman
.”
Double-gross,
Phoenix thought. She wouldn’t care if she didn’t get her period until she was as old as Valentina. She had seen Gloria wash out her bloody underwear in her sink at home, and stained underwear was nothing to brag about.

After hugging Javier, Valentina went to Sarge next, although she did not hug him. Sarge was not the kind of man people tried to touch without an invitation. She kept her distance, but she was smiling. And The Ray was gone from Sarge’s eyes.

The show would go on. Sarge owed her now. She would get her piano.

Phoenix wanted to see her piano again, to make sure she hadn’t only imagined it. She beckoned to Gloria, and they made their way back past the Gallery of Greats to the bright red EXIT sign over the rear doorway that forked right for the bathrooms and the emergency exit, left for the stairs to the second floor. The sticky floor smelled like old beer.

Halfway up the stairs, Phoenix’s heart went cold in her chest.

The piano was no longer in the storage room. It was at the top of the stairs.