“I have a solo project also,” he said lamely, “and that’s more, uh, fusion. Jazz-rock fusion.”
“Jazz-rock fusion,” Lillian repeated. “Interesting. None of this is ringing any bells for me.” She paused, then confessed, “Idon’t reallylikemusic,” as if she were saying something naughty like ‘I’m not wearing panties.’
Scott drank more wine. “Don’t like music. No music? Not any?”
“No, not really.”
“Just, I’ve had people say that to me before, but they just meant they only like pop music and Christmas music and stuff. I get that, I’m not a snob. I love Nickelback.”
“Christmas music,” Lillian repeated, her gaze drifting toward the ceiling. “I can’t say I’ve ever given that any thought. What’s a Christmas song?”
Scott felt adrift, like he was talking to a sphinx. “Uh… Silent Night?”
Lillian thought about it more, then shrugged.
“Okay,” he said.
“Does it hurt your feelings that I don’t like music?”
“No, no, everybody’s different. I just don’t meet too many people who say that.”
Lillian nodded. “It must be exhausting to be an artist,” she said, “and be asking everyone to love you all the time.”
Scott grew a little flustered, fiddling with the rolled-up sleeves of his flannel shirt. “I’m just meeting a need, like anybody else,” he said. “A lot of people feel like they need music in their life, same way they need a plumber or a roofer.”
“Okay, a man of the people,” Lillian said. “But you don’t find it difficult when you work really hard on something, and put it out, and people don’t care like you wanted them to?”
“Uh… no, that’s tough. I don’t love that.”
Lillian sipped her white wine. “But I guess it’s like when a deal falls apart for me after I spent months on it. Like, so fucking frustrating, because why do other people have free will if they’re just going to use it to subvert yours. Is that it?”
“I do want people to have free will,” he said carefully, “because, you know, I want them to genuinely like my music, and decide to buy it.”
“Right, but you can’t control yourlabel.And I bet they fuck you all the time.”
“Sometimes, sure.”
Lillian’s eyes flashed with interest. “And doesn’t that just drive you crazy?”
“I think of it as one of the tradeoffs of capitalism, I guess.”
“But your industry is anticompetitive sometimes, right? Like, isn’t it an oligopoly? And what about the payola issue?”
Great, even this raging capitalist wouldn’t accept capitalism as a brush-off answer. “You’re gonna have to define oligopoly for me,” he said.
Lillian turned to Carver. “Carver, do I like any music?”
Carver cleared his throat and roused from his torpor, leaning forward. Scott was still surprised, every time he looked at Carver’s face, by the ways in which this was the same face he’d left behind in Westchester eighteen years ago and the ways in which it was a new face. He’d always been lean, but there was baby fat in his cheeks then, and now they were hollow. Carver was fit and handsome — Scott didn’t bother denying how attractive he found him — yet something like anemia gnawed at him. He was impeccably groomed and had a suspiciously Botoxian lack of lines around his mouth, eyes and forehead, plus a $500 haircut, but none of this disguised the dark circles under his eyes or the weary look in them.
“Music,” he repeated. “Uh… I wouldn’t say so, no. You like going to the opera.”
“But the opera is funny,” Lillian said. “All the melodrama.”
Carver rubbed his eye with a forefinger. “Then, no?”
“That’s what I thought, but I wanted to check.”
To Scott, Carver said, “An oligopoly is a monopoly with a few dominant firms instead of one, and they collude, like, anticompetitively.”
