“I think you’re coming along, Laura,” Mary told her.
“Right,” said Cynthia. “It’s still a little rough, that’s true, but we really made some improvement today.”
“Do you really think so?” Laura asked. By now, three quarters of the beer was in her stomach and she was starting to feel quite fine indeed.
“I do,” Cynthia said. “We could tell you were starting to feel The Struggle there.”
“I am starting to feel it,” she said. “It’s actually a fairly deep song.” She looked over at Celia, who was sitting next to Jake. “You seem to write a lot about lost love, about breaking up, about dysfunctional relationships.”
Celia nodded amicably. “We’ve all been through those, haven’t we?” she asked. “It’s an emotional subject that most people can relate to.”
“I really can’t,” she said. “That might be part of my problem getting into your tunes, feeling them.”
Jake looked at her with disbelief. “You’ve never had a bad relationship?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I’ve never really had a relationship—on a romantic level anyway—until the one I’m in now. Certainly nothing on the level of writing a song about.”
“Amazing,” Celia said. “I can’t even count the number of times I’ve had my heart broken, or had to break someone else’s, since I was fifteen years old or so. How did you manage such a feat?”
She shrugged a little. “I was kind of shy and withdrawn growing up. I never really dated at all until I met my fiancé eighteen months ago.”
“Ben mentioned you were engaged,” Celia said. “Congratulations.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“Tell us about him?”
“There’s not much to tell,” she said. “He’s a dentist, my dentist, actually. That’s how we met. He’s a little older than me, but that doesn’t matter. Love is ageless, right?”
“It can be,” Kingsley allowed.
“Have you set a date yet?” Celia asked. “I remember how frantic things were when Greg and I were getting close.”
“Well ... not yet,” she said. “There are a couple of hurdles that need to be overcome before we can start planning things on that level.”
“Hurdles?” Kingsley asked.
Another shrug. “It’s complicated, and kind of boring,” she said, giving her pat answer to enquiries of that sort. “We’re getting there.”
Kingsley nodded slowly, a cynical expression on his face, but he enquired no further. Neither did anyone else.
Pauline was sitting in her office the following Monday morning when the first phone call came in. Unsurprisingly, it was Joshua Flag, the artists and repertoire manager from Aristocrat Records—the A&R guy assigned to Veteran. Since he was in charge of a group that she managed, he had her direct line and was able to bypass the answering service she employed.
“What can I do for you, Josh?” Pauline asked him after enduring nearly five minutes of boring, unproductive preliminaries. She was sitting in her pajamas at her desk, had still not taken her shower for the day, and her coffee was getting cold.
“Well,” he said, his weasel-like, used car salesman voice firmly in gear, “I was mostly calling just to update you on how the boys are doing. They’ve been rehearsing up a storm in that warehouse and they’ll be ready to hit the road for the first scheduled date on September 30 in Boston.”
“I’m aware of that,” Pauline told him. “I do keep in touch with my band, you know. I spoke to them after their rehearsal on Friday.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” Joshua told her. “I just wanted to touch bases with you on that and let you know we’re still on track. And then there’s the whole Matt Tisdale thing.”
“You mean that he’s releasing his album at the end of the month?” she asked.
“Right,”
“You told me about that last week,” Pauline reminded him. “Is there any new information about it? Any new thoughts on how that might impact sales and airplay for Veteran?”
“Well ... no,” he said. “Our assessment of the situation remains the same. It is projected that the album is going to have minimal airplay and only sell to the hard-core Tisdale fans. He’s actually doing us a favor by putting his crap out first. It’ll bring Intemperance back into the current public consciousness. It can only help Veteran.”
“Yes,” Pauline said. “I seem to remember talking about this subject at length when it was first brought up.”
“Right,” Josh said. “Again, just touching bases here, making sure we’re all on the same page.”
“We’re all on the same page, Josh,” she said. “Is there anything else?”
“Uh ... well ... now that you mention it,” he said, as if it were an afterthought and nothing of consequence, “I’ve heard a rumor floating about that your brother and Celia Valdez are working on some sort of independent project.”
Pauline smiled. Thank you, Coop, she thought. Jake had called that one. There was no way Coop could possibly keep his mouth shut about that kind of news. Still, she had to play cool. “Wherever might you have heard something like that?” she asked Joshua.
“Nowhere in particular,” he said. “It’s just a little rumor that’s floating about. We here at Aristocrat just wanted to know if there was any truth to it.”
“I’m not really at liberty to say, one way or the other,” she told him.
“But you’re not denying it?” he asked.
“Nor am I confirming it,” she said. “What business is it of yours, anyway?”
“It’s not really our business, but ... you know ... if it’s true, maybe we could make it our business, depending on what kind of stuff Jake is working on.”
“Just Jake?” she asked. “What about Celia?”
She could almost hear the eye roll he had to be doing. “Celia doesn’t interest us much,” he said. “She’s a has-been. That contract we offered her last year was just something we were doing out of ... oh, kindness, I suppose. We weren’t really anticipating making much money from it.”
“Wow,” Pauline said. “Aristocrat Records doing something out of kindness? That kind of brings a tear to my eye, Josh.”
“We did have an expectation that a Celia Valdez solo album wouldn’t lose money for us,” he said. “That is not likely to be the case these days. Too much time has gone by since she was hot.”
“It’s only been two years since their last hit album,” Pauline said.
“An eternity in the popular music biz,” he said. “Anyway, we were talking about Jake. Has he come around and started producing some hard rock tunes in the Intemperance genre? If he has, we would certainly be interested in giving them a listen. He remains a huge, untapped resource you know. That contract offer we made him would still stand.”
“If this rumor were true and he and Celia were starting their own label, why in the world would he sign a contract with Aristocrat?”
“I would think that would be obvious,” Josh told her. “For financing and development of the project.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” she said, “as I am just a relative newcomer to the music business after all, but when one starts one’s own label, one necessarily has the financing for development of the project in place. That’s the whole idea of being independent, right?”
“Well, yes, of course,” Josh allowed, “but isn’t it always better to have someone like us footing the bill in advance?”
“Hmmm,” she said slowly. “I’m thinking the answer to that is no, when someone like you gets to keep eighty percent of the profit and retain rights to the music being produced. I can pretty much assure you that Jake and Celia are both done traveling down that road.”
“Then they are working on something?” Josh asked.
“Again, I neither confirm nor deny that information,” Pauline told him.