“Flat like, uninteresting. Predictable.”
“I don’t think you’re around good people, then,” Scott said. “And I don’t mean that in a preachy way, I just mean like… I don’t know. I find it comforting how similar people are everywhere I go, ‘cause even though a lot of people suck shit, most people are alright. And they’re good in the same ways. So I know wherever in the world I go, no matter how different things are there, I can find some fellowship. But rich people…” He sucked his teeth. “I think they’re a little removed from that. I think if you can pay for help, or pay for fellowship, you’re not gonna extend it as freely.”
Carver ashed his cigarette in the grass. “Then maybe everyone is fundamentally transactional, and rich people just pay with money while everyone else pays with effort.”
“Sounds like something a finance guy would say.”
“Uh-huh, guilty. Guilty of cliche.”
Scott grinned at him. Carver could see his teeth shining in the darkness, then more of his face as he lifted his cigarette back to his mouth. “I know I’m one to talk. I’m a huge cliche, I always have been.”
“At least it’s a cool cliche.”
“It’s less cool the older I get,” Scott said. “A fact I’m painfully aware of. But this shit becomes your whole life, your whole socialcircle, especially if you make it your career. And especially if you start young like I did.”
“I never really got why you leaned into it so hard,” Carver said. “You could have pulled off being more publicly multifaceted. You didn’t have to keep it a secret that you wrote poems and shit.”
Scott shut his eyes and winced. “Don’t remind me,” he said, laughing.
“But they were actuallygood,” Carver insisted, feeling unusually loose-lipped. “You think I’d say that if I didn’t mean it?”
“Look, I, uh… you’re probably right, honestly. I was insecure, and I was… I never had much in the way of family. Most of the appeal of leaning into a cliche is probably that it comes with people, and camaraderie.” Scott shrugged.
Carver was thinking about himself now, and suspected that he was being a hypocrite. He had stepped into his cliche for similar reasons, though he wasn’t looking for people or camaraderie so much as a way forward — a diagram for his life. He had gone to Duke with an eye toward snagging a high-paying job, fallen into the finance funnel, and eighteen years later here he was. He had only ever worked in finance, all his friends were in finance or finance-adjacent, he lived in Tribeca, his wife was a fellow MD. He’d allowed his career to determine his wardrobe and the food he ate and the haircut he had and the vacations he went on and the type of closet case that he was.
Except it did not determine Scott. Scott, who predated his career, did not fit into his life at all. Sure, maybe a good amount of the guys he worked with had a friend like Scott, but was his semen currently drying on their leg? Closeted finance guys fucked other closeted finance guys, or purchased escorts and sugar babies. Scott was aberrational. He saw Carver in a way thatno one else did, and in doing so he punched a big hole in the side of his brain and stepped on through.
This wouldn’t be as much of a problem if Carver didn’t, on some level, deeply enjoy the way Scott saw him. Fucking him again had made this hard to ignore. As terrifying as it was for Scott to write songs about him, he liked the idea of being his muse. He liked that Scott’s desire for his body hadn’t waned since they last spoke. He’d forgotten the way Scott looked at him, spoke to him, touched him. It was nice to experience all this again. It was nice to see him again.
“It’s like being in a gang,” Carver said. “They promise you people, but then there’s everything that comes with it.”
“Right.” Scott laughed. “It’s tough as an artist, too, trying not to let people pigeonhole you, ‘cause once that happens it’s over. You can become a victim of your own success, even. But you can’t be too outside of it all, either.”
Carver glanced away from him, back at the sinister shadowed figures of the trampoline and the trees behind it. “Whatdidyou write about me?”
“Huh?”
“The shit you said you wrote about me. I didn’t — honestly, all I’ve heard from you since high school was that one radio hit. I’ve only heard the stuff you wrote for me when we were, uh — I don’t know, together.”
“You seriously haven’t listened to any of my stuff?”
“No.”
“Can I ask why?”
“Because I knew you either wrote about me or you didn’t. And both were bad, so I just didn’t want to know.”
“Gotcha,” Scott said, and it sounded like he was smiling.
“What did you write about me?” Carver said, losing patience.
“Uh…” Scott shifted in the grass, then lit another cigarette. “I don’t know. Nothing that made it onto an album was solelyabout you. California…” He cleared his throat. “California did let me down in a lot of ways, so songs about us were also about that — like, the unfulfilled promise. I had a line about running to the edge of the world and just finding more world. Then a couple years in, I got my heart broken by this woman, and the two rejections kind of rhymed with each other. So I wrote a few songs that mixed you with her.”
Carver’s hackles rose instantly, but he said in what he hoped was a casual tone, “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Scott said. “She was older, like thirty-eight… Jesus, she was only a little older than we are now. I thought she was so mature. But she was married, and I kind of hoped she might leave him and run away with me, and she brushed me off. She was nice about it, but… y’know.”
“You ever date anyone attainable or emotionally available?”
