CHAPTER 112 - Teach Your Children

“It is a wise father that knows his own child.”

— William Shakespeare,

The Merchant of Venice

Universal Music. Fifty-Sixth and Broadway.

Tuesday, 30 December 2008.

Frederick Curon, bachelor and fashionista for life, had been a cat dad for about eleven months at this point. He had picked up the cat from a vet in California, and had slowly learned, bit by bit, what it meant to be a cat-father.

In that time he had also learned that there were two kinds of meowing.

There was the kind that began with “Dad…”, which was the voice of a kitten who wanted cream, or had found the cream, or had spilt the cream, or had sold the cream to another company by accident.

Then there was the tone that said, “Oh shit, that wasn’t lactose-free cream.”

So, when Eppie had called and said, “Could you come to Universal?”

He had naturally assumed that it was the second kind because his cat sounded unsure, a little scared, and could use an adult.

When he got out of Sony’s town car, however, he started to feel suspicious. He’d had a cat for about eleven months, but he had been jousting with Justin Woodhouse for about two decades. At this point, he knew the man’s kids, he knew the man’s artists, and he knew Sir Justin’s golf memberships like the back of his hand. Sir Justin also kept tabs on him, and it was very, very well known in the industry that Eppie had done something impossible.

Become friends with the Richards estate.

To bully Eppie into writing a song for Universal?

To steal a song from under her nose like snatching a flake of shaved bonito?

Might as well kick a cat in public and upload it to YouTube for the front page.

Woodhouse was an old dog, but he was the most cunning hound Curon knew. Universal Music was the biggest dog in the pound for a reason.

He slipped through security without a glance and was guided upstairs by two dudes and a gal with a badge and a smile. The lift to the 25th floor dinged, and the door opened to muffled carpets that swallowed sound, so visitors couldn’t hear the artists crying.

He scoffed at the platinums and the golds on the walls.

Inside the conference room, there were six people, including Woodhouse. They were huddled in one corner like mice avoiding a snake. On the other side of the room, sat Eppie, pen and paper waiting. Valorie, the redhead, was dressed to protest ongoing wars while looking like a treat. Eric, Sony’s faithful Newfoundland he had sent to protect Eppie, stood between Universal and her, not letting anyone get past.

The man deserved another raise.

“Justin.” Curon tipped his chin.

“Fred.” Woodhouse returned the greeting.

Woodhouse’s eyes were a little puffy.

Oh no… Curon groaned internally. What has she done now?

“So er… what seems to be the problem?” he asked the question very carefully because he was now a parent at a parent-teacher conference with the principal and the family of the victims sitting on one side.

“There’s no problem per se.” Woodhouse gave him the strangest look, as if there were some misunderstanding.

“Dad…” Eppie raised a hand.

The whole room turned. Eyes grew as large as marbles. Mouths hung open.

“Call me Mr Curon,” he said to the room very quickly, watching Woodhouse’s lips curl ever so slightly. “We’re still discussing the adoption process.”

It took a few more seconds for the room to settle and the internal stories within the observers’ minds to find their mark.

Paranoid, Curon scanned the room.

Thankfully, there were no flower pots.

“So what has she done?” Curon decided to defuse the situation before things got worse. “Anybody hurt, mentally or physically?”

“Just their pride, Fred,” Woodhouse said in his performative British accent. “Your daughter wrote a song, and I think she’s regretting giving it.”

“I am fine with it, Mr Curon,” Valorie interjected, cutting the tension. Goodness gracious, Curon fought the marketer in his frontal lobe. The girl wasn’t even made up properly, and she was giving him flashbacks to the videos he had watched on VHS all the way back in the ’80s. It wasn’t so much that she had the figure for it. With the fringe over her cheeks and the camellias in her hair, she stunned. It was, he decided, Valorie’s face. She looked period-accurate, as they would say.

“I wouldn’t say that’s fine if you agreed to it.” Curon looked at his child. “A deal’s a deal, right? Just because you wrote a better song doesn’t mean you can rescind the contract. Right, Eppie?”

His daughter looked back at him with those ridiculous eyes of hers, wet and wide and entirely sincere.

Curon’s eyes narrowed.

Those were not eyes pleading for help.

Those were eyes pleading for fish.

He pulled out a chair between them, sat down, and folded his hands on the table. He looked at Eric, looked back at his girl, then he said, “All right, let’s hear the song.”

Eppie sang her new song.

A song of times going by in a voice of profound sadness and nostalgia, with slant rhymes and a texture like blades of swaying grass on a farm in Bethel. In his professional opinion, Eppie’s head-voice a cappella gave the lyrics a body that didn’t suit the mood as well as it could have.

She was too young, too shrill, too hopeful.

“Miss Sanders.” He turned to the flower girl beside his cat. “Can you sing those verses for me?”

Unlike his shameless cat, it took the Senator’s daughter about a minute to work herself up.

Valorie stood a little back from the table, encouraged by their blue-eyed kitty, looking at Sir Woodhouse, and sang the same verses in a voice that was lower, richer, huskier, a little sad and a little tragic.

Curon listened to the song the way he listened to all the music he produced: not to the words, but to the feeling, to the mood, to what some experts would call the synaesthesia of it, the texture. So that his mind could feel the highs and lows, the bumps and the ridges.

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The room grew contemplative.

“It does suit Valorie much better…” He delivered his verdict. “I don’t really see a problem. There’s no real chorus, yet the bridge is solid. It’s unfinished, of course.”

“So we’re good?” Woodhouse looked from one party to the next. “Shall we discuss details?”

“Well,” Curon said. “Since I’m here, I might as well say it. This is not a Hot 100 kind of song. Radio play, yes. Public spaces, perhaps? Clubs? DJ remixes, probably not.”

“It’s a beautiful song,” Woodhouse interjected. He looked at their flaming flower child. “I have plans.”

“You’re paying for it either way, but just so we’re clear, you’re happy with stalling at forty?”

“Ah, you won’t get it.” Woodhouse shrugged with such smugness that it irked Curon. “You weren’t there, my friend. It’s a vibe.”

You weren’t there.

Curon wanted to retort but had nothing to say.

In the summer of 1969, Frederick Curon had been just six years old, living on the rented floor of a building in the Bronx with a mother who worked two jobs. They had a radiator that sometimes worked, and his beginnings in music had come through bootlegs, mixtapes, and neighbourhood kids with boomboxes.

Woodstock and Glastonbury were mythologies on televisions, no more accessible to him than the fantastical worlds of morning cartoons.

“I was fourteen,” said Woodhouse, his eyes glazing over. “I snuck out of the consulate where my uncle worked, and I hitchhiked my way to Bethel. We stood three days in the rain listening to the greatest music that has ever been produced on God’s sweet earth.”

The young people, Curon included, looked at the man like he was from another age.

“I want the song. This is for Miss Sanders’s career. This is for the critics my age, and the romantics who will listen to the song and lie awake in bed at night, and think about it. Valorie will be taken very seriously. It’s a good persona. It’s a perfect persona.”

That part, Curon agreed.

A senator’s daughter with a face like that singing an elegy for a summer of love from two generations ago. Nostalgia sells more than just greenbacks. The trade magazines would go crazy. The fashion magazines, more so. The teen magazines, maybe.

“So, that’s why I want it, and I’ll sign it now,” Woodhouse said. “Will you sign it? Miss Fontaine?”

Curon looked to his daughter.

“You good?”

Eppie nodded.

“I wrote it for Val. It’s only natural.”

The flower girl crumpled, and she pulled his cat into her arms and smothered her with a crown of floral petals.

Some guy from marketing clapped.

As for Curon, he locked eyes with Eric.

The lawyer nodded.

“Well then,” he said to his rival at Universal. “Let’s hear your terms. Full writing credit. Then there’s Eppie’s marketing proposal, the creation of the persona. Don’t be cheap.”

“Of course, we are more than happy to offer Ms Fontaine a substantially better percentage than our usual terms in recognition of the circumstances,” Woodhouse answered smugly.

Shit. Curon recalled that, yes, Woodhouse did keep an eye on them—meaning he knew that Eppie absolutely did not care about money.

“Can Eppie keep my percentage?” The senator’s daughter said something so naive it was unbelievable.

Curon felt mildly annoyed. Having worked with Eppie for so long, he knew what was coming. Woodhouse would offer terms, and instead of asking for more, Eppie would say, “Send it to the charity; leave me the scraps.” She would bat her dainty little white hand and then not think about the royalties again, ever.

And Woodhouse would laugh all the way to the bank.

He had to put a stop to this.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Eppie said to the flower girl. “You keep your due.”

Curon groaned as Eppie turned to Woodhouse to do her Saint Fontaine speech.

“As for Universal,” Eppie said, chirpily. “I want double the percentage of your standard contract. Not for the marketing. Not for the costume design or the persona. The extra percentage for Hair Like Mine goes from Universal to my personal account.”

Curon felt his breath catch in his chest.

Had something happened to Eppie?

Had Woodhouse done something?

Charmed her with foul drugs or potions? Lobotomised her, perhaps?

His Eppie, wanting money?

Had she been corrupted by the music industry so quickly?

Eat into Universal’s cut? That was unheard of. It was a very, very dangerous precedent.

Justin made a small, uncomfortable noise before he waved away the protests simmering in the throats of his marketing, A&R, and artist services.

“Additional condition: finish the song. We will push marketing in full. You get the double percentage only if it reaches the top 10.”

“Done.” It didn’t take a Frederick Curon to read Eppie’s expression and see that his cat had snatched the singing, mounted fish.

Eric stood and pulled out a briefcase from thin air. Woodhouse summoned his team, also from thin air, and the legal eagles decamped to another room to hammer out the details. Despite Eppie’s personal cut, her usual contracts remained in place: the Charity Trust under her name and the trust for a child artist. Universal was flummoxed; for Sony, it was just another Tuesday.

“Now that that has been finalised.” Woodhouse turned to them. “Shall we have lunch together?”

The crowd agreed.

Sir Woodhouse shooed away his employees. “Don’t you guys have families?”

The heads of his divisions murmured, bowed and left.

“Come.” The head of Universal Music looked relieved. “I know a place. It has the best British food in New York. We’ll celebrate this the Universal way. I’ll bring a bottle from 1969.”

“Sunday roast?” his kitty cat rubbed her paws together gleefully, already licking her chops.

“What?” Sir Woodhouse gave her a dismissive look. “Don’t be ridiculous. We’re going for poppadoms and chicken tikka masala.”

The Vaughan House.

Saturday, 3 January 2009.

For Eppie, the most important event in the new year calendar was not Pilates with her father, or Vaughan’s meet and greet with finance bigwigs, or Davis giving both Curon and herself a scolding for not dragging Valorie over to Sony, or the singer she had found.

It was getting ready for a family from Reedley.

“They’ve arrived?” Lady Vaughan asked over breakfast. Her not-mentor had a new installation to open on the ephemeral nature of time from a duo of artists, a multi-media, multi-sensory installation. In a time when every other museum was cutting back on public installations, the Met had instead expanded on its grants and allowances, with special emphasis on display spaces. For Vaughan, this meant endless meetings with the museum’s many departments on the matter of curation and funding.

“Yes, today,” Eppie said. “I am going with Lim at eleven.”

“With Mr Wang? Is that wise?”

“Eric’s coming too.”

“You’ve thought this out well, then.” Her not-mentor drank.

“Thank you,” Eppie said what needn’t be said anyway.

“What’s there to thank?” Vaughan shrugged. “It was empty, anyway.”

“It’s a good neighbourhood.”

“Doña Tita is a treasure. If you don’t mind me asking, how will this Nikkei family make a living? The theatre girl’s not going to be a full employee until she’s ready? No? That’s at best six months out.”

“Father Parson said he arranged something.”

“A rural priest arranged something?” Vaughan’s smile remained, mysterious as always, and all-knowing. “In NYC?”

“Well…” Eppie did a thing with her shoulders. “They owned a nice Peruvian restaurant in Cali that was doing well before. Someone found a shawarma place near Rivington that couldn’t pay back its loans. Apparently, they contacted Father Parson. Other than that, I don’t know the details.”

“Of course you don’t.” Vaughan put down her cup. “Ignorance is bliss. I guess.”

Eppie laughed a little awkwardly. She knew, of course. But oftentimes, it was better if everyone kept up the pretence.

Vaughan stirred her tea. “George?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Could you be so kind as to go down to Rivington with Eppie? Give the new family a hand with whatever they need, if they need it.”

“Ma’am,” George replied reassuringly, both for Eppie and for his employer.

Eppie finished her tea and her juice in a single gulp.

Lim and Mio.

Mio and Lim.

And Nozomi.

Inga, Ingō, and Kahō, the fruit of causality, the causality of karma, and the fruit that ripens and falls. If such a fruit falls into the fertile soil of the Ark Theatre, would the strange seed germinate? And if so, what strange fruit would it bear?