I'm guessing this is way past your need for this, and it's not a "good" solution, but in case anyone happens upon this. I was able to get it to work in Chrome with your existing code only by hiding the select on hover of the link, then showing it again when the mouse leaves (I didn't try Safari).
http://jsfiddle.net/52enE/
There's another solution to create a dummy select, but it was reported as not working in the latest chrome at the time:
Close a SELECT dropdown list programatically with Javascript/jQuery
Since the browser controls the select and how form elements are viewed there's probably no good way around this...the "best" (still not good) solution would probably be to use a custom input that acts like a select but can be fully controlled with a hide() call...or find a way to change the requirements :)