by Zoe Lee
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Seth
Mondays were the only day Wild Harts was closed, but this particular Monday morning, Aden had made the executive decision to open it around five for a private party.
Aden stationed himself behind the bar, blending pitchers of margaritas.
A few minutes later, Dunk and Daisy came in carrying grilled steaks and potato salad, setting them on one end of the bar and then going into the kitchen to get stacks of plates and handfuls of cutlery, after they made out in the hallway where they’d had their first kiss.
When they came back, red-cheeked and smug, Chase was adding brownies, pies, and individual slices of cake from the bakery to the buffet. She winked at them and ducked behind the bar to grab some napkins, sliding her ass across Aden’s thighs.
Striding in, Leda called out, “Y’all cut out the lovey-dovey stuff before Seth gets here!”
“Yeah,” Jamie murmured with a wicked smile, “do it at home like we did.”
“Who says we didn’t?” Dunk demanded indignantly.
“You guys are as bad as rock stars,” Kayla said, her chin tipped up, Downbeat behind her, her fingers threaded with Gin’s in a rare display of nerves or possessiveness.
The two groups were sizing each other up when Tristan strolled in, stopping between them, and whistled. “Is this a standoff? I thought we worked all this out at my hangout.”
“It’s just weird,” Aden said in his gruff way.
“If we’re all here, who’s bringing Seth?” Daisy fretted.
“Seth brought himself,” Seth stated dryly as he pushed through the doors.
Thirteen pairs of eyes shot over to him, Xavier and Trentham and Gin pivoting.
Seth absorbed the blows of their pity and empathy and concern, the outrage on his behalf, the uncertainty about how to treat him or what to say.
It wasn’t just that Astrid had walked away after he’d put himself out there.
It was that Astrid had sent her draft of a story to Downbeat, and it was all about him.
I interviewed Seth Riveau twice, once in a group with the members of Downbeat, which he was a part of for two years before their breakout, and once in a coffee shop where I insulted him. I was less than a hundred feet away during Downbeat’s set at Pitchfork in June, where Seth was a featured guest and took the lead on their encore. I poured over lyrics of songs he’s written. I viewed footage of performances going as far back as his brief tenure at Juilliard, one of the most prestigious conservatories in the world. I saw him play with a local band in his hometown.
In my experience, this is more than enough research and first-hand experience to get a fairly clear picture of an artist, even if I don’t have all of the details of what makes him/her tick as a person.
But all I know for certain about Seth Riveau is that I don’t understand him at all.
The facts are easy to recite. There’s nothing there I haven’t heard before.
He was born the youngest of three in a small town in the mid-Atlantic states, where his parents were small business owners, active and loved in their community. He was a prodigy, in school, youth orchestras, and garage bands, and he was accepted at Juilliard, where he met not only future bandmate Xavier Talon, but his musical soulmate, the late German musician Hedda Becker.
Like Miles Davis before him, like athletes who are drafted during college, he and Hedda dropped out to pursue their dreams early. They had a record deal at a good studio in Nashville, but it didn’t perform the way anyone hoped. So they traveled the world playing beat-up venues. By all accounts, they made an incredible number of friends—not industry contacts, but friends who happened to also be in the industry. During this time, Seth also wrote countless songs for others around the world.
The duo split up and shortly after, Hedda passed away. Seth’s work and performances became patchy—a month-long residence at a jazz club in New Orleans, deejaying in Rio and Ibiza, selling songs here and there—for six months. Then he joined Downbeat for their first world tour, wrote all but two songs on their next two albums, then quit and moved back to his hometown two years later.
In the years since, he’s sold literally hundreds of songs for artists in many genres, been a session musician for artists who are considered the best in their genres, barring the most mainstream genres like pop and hip-hop. He’s got a day job at the family business. He joins old friends for important gigs like the Voodoo Jazz Festival in New Orleans and Pitchfork in Chicago. He plays with several local bands, which seem to perform covers or their own music, but never anything he’s written.
Undoubtedly the loss of Hedda Becker was devastating. I am certain that the mediocre success of his only studio album was devastating in an entirely different, incomparable, but still legitimate way. If it were me, having Downbeat’s popularity begin to skyrocket as soon as I left, whether I continued to write their songs or not, would have been another blow to my psyche.
Yet Seth Riveau is not bitter. He isn’t angry in a way that suggests he’s covering up oceans of disappointment. He isn’t cavalier as if he’s got personal demons driving him to the brink of hell on earth.
No, Seth Riveau is the calmest artist I’ve ever met. I honestly believe it’s genuine, not an act. He’s uninterested in speaking about himself, but tells wonderful stories about the friends he has made during his time in the music industry. He was happy to tell me what singers and songwriters and musicians he’s in awe of and loves, but masterfully sidestepped giving me anything about his process. He vehemently hates stereotypes of all sorts, as well as the concepts of genius and prodigy.
Seth Riveau has the talent, skills, presence, focus, and support network to become a star, but he is not a star. Perhaps he’s made choices that to outsiders seem incomprehensible, such as leaving Downbeat, but no one who knows him thinks of these choices as self-sabotage.
On paper, Seth is an enigma, a bunch of pieces that could never in a thousand years fit together.
In person, he makes perfect sense and isn’t missing any pieces. He’s an ordinary man with extraordinary gifts, which he puts to use exactly when, how, why, and for how long he wants. He values everyone and loves them deeply, and they in turn never ask him for anything he wouldn’t give them without thought. His empathy circumscribes every act and word, but he’s no pushover.
But I am an ordinary woman with quite ordinary gifts and the idea of Seth Riveau infuriates me.
There is no argument he could make about why he’s choosing to use his gifts the way he does that wouldn’t sound foolish to me, that wouldn’t infuriate me and make me call him names. Pig-headed. Wasteful. A shame. Insulting to those who dreamt their whole lives of being extraordinary, for those who worked their asses off for endless years and hours and just didn’t have what it takes.
Despite all of that, I’ll never be able to forget that I met him. I’ll never be able to stop looking up what he’s written periodically so I can listen to it. I’ll never stop following his career, whatever it is. I’ll always share stories about him with other folks who’ve met him over the years.
Here are twenty of the best lines Seth Riveau has ever written and ten of his best performances...
“Here,” Aden stated, shoving a truly giant glass of red wine into Seth’s hands.
“Let’s dive into this food too,” Dunk said, only a touch selfishly since he was hungry.
“I’ll get your plate, Seth, you sit,” Xavier instructed, the rafters practically shaking.
In a mad rush, they all scrambled awkwardly, all of them too cheery and too optimistic, and it was out of character for absolutely all of them except Dunk and Daisy.
Seth appreciated the effort they were taking to cheer him up, but the truth was that he didn’t know if he needed it. He was too numb to even know if he was pissed or not. So there wasn’t much point in bolstering him when he wasn’t sure he was really down in the dumps at all. It didn’t matter, though; he would stay here all night. It couldn’t hurt him.
“She’s maybe just a little too old for you, honey,” Daisy said, her face flushed, and then her sweet face twisted up and she rushed out, “Only because maybe you want babies and she wouldn’t want to start over when she’s probably forty and has a kid in college!”
“Way to dig that hole even deeper, babe,” Dunk laughed.
She whacked him on the back of the head, practically a professional sport in Maybelle.
“I wanted that cover,” Kayla whined, swaying into Gin, her dirty martini sloshing. “Like, I wanted to frame my lady on the cover with her band, looking like a rock star. But no, that pop star princess with the leaked shaky cam homemade porn snatched it from all of us!”
“That’s just not the Astrid I always knew,” even Hank put in, soft as ever.
“What a know-it-all,” Leda sniffed.
“I’m sorry, kid, I thought it was going to be good for you,” Xavier admitted with a sigh into his beer.
“Jesse says drink some whisky for her,” Aden commented, tucking his cell back into his pocket and sliding his arm behind Chase’s shoulders. “And that she sounds like a snob.”
Seth realized his hubris: This was hurting him.
Because while everyone was thoroughly supportive and taking digs at Astrid, not a single one of them was repudiating the article’s thesis. Not a single one of them denied that she was right. Not a single one of them railed that she hadn’t made her argument perfectly. Instead of indignance or feelings of disloyalty, Seth felt a scalding wave of shame.
“Do y’all think she’s right?” he suddenly demanded, voice raised enough to be heard.
The conversations stuttered into silence, not quite as poetic as a needle being snatched off vinyl, but not that far off either. Half of the people dropped their eyes while the other half turned to stare at him, eyes peeled too wide, trying not to blink or give anything away.
“Well?”
Trentham cleared his throat, his chair creaking like an out of tune organ as he shifted his weight. “You know we all love you, kid, but… you have to know that we wonder too.”
“When you were just a little kid, it was all you dreamed of,” Aden said, his arm tightening around Chase’s shoulders like he needed to bring her closer to shield himself just in case Seth’s nearly-endless calm ran out. “Mom and Dad always said they never worried about you because you found something that you loved and were good at. I heard Mom tell someone that’s the best parents can hope for, because a kid who loves something but sucks at it, or a kid who hates something they’re brilliant at, is just a disaster waiting to happen.”
“But you weren’t the same when you came home,” Leda said, meeting Seth’s eyes squarely, not needing to specify she meant when he’d moved back to Maybelle permanently.
“You never said anything,” he pointed out sharply.
Gin, sitting next to him, reached over and grasped his knee. “You were heartbroken, kid. When’s the right time to stomp all over that to ask you about your career plans?”
The fragility of his heart during that time came flooding back—the near-constant sense of being in fight or flight mode, adrenaline spiking in his bloodstream and sending his heart careening off-rhythm as if it had a death wish. There had been a persistent, awful, low-level feedback buzz in his ears whenever he was awake, insulating him from the fullness of the noises around him, but also egging on that fight or flight panic. Every time he’d tried to listen to music or tried to write, every time someone asked him when he was performing next or what he was writing, his mouth went dry and his mind went white hot.
Only time had tempered it, a steady intravenous drip of coolness and calmness reentering his systems until he’d built up a sort of immunity to the fight or flight, until he’d fought off the illness of the buzz in his ears and the white heat in his mind.
“It’s been six years, though,” he gritted out, head swinging back to Leda. “How come you never said anything? You were stupid fearless back then. You railroaded everyone.”
“I—” Leda’s chin quivered and she sucked in a breath. “I just couldn’t, okay?”
“I bet we all thought the same thing. What if I break him all the way by asking?” Trentham hypothesized. “And it was easy to talk ourselves out of maybe pushing you back to the saddest you ever were by bringing it up. And every time I saw you, you were better. After a while, you were playing some gigs and writing new songs for us and other people.”
“Aden and I saw you in New Orleans, remember?” Chase interjected. “You seemed happy, like you were just where you wanted to be, doing just what you wanted to be doing.”
Xavier clicked his tongue, even that noise twice as loud as when anyone else made it. “Kid, you’ve been in music since you were in high school, over half your life. I figured… if you wanted to do something else, you know how to do it. If you wanted back in, you’d do it.”
“I thought you’d call us,” Jorge said, the first time he’d spoken all night, his skinny throat working when people looked over at him in surprise. “When, you know, you were ready. When Trentham saw you in the airport, it seemed like destiny. To us, anyway.”
“But you walked,” Xavier said with a wink to let Seth know he was (mostly) teasing.
“Walked from what?” Chase asked, sharp as always.
Seth slid his hands into his pockets and cocked an eyebrow at Xavier, at all of them, and answered in his mildest tone, syllables spun out like honey clinging to thorns, “Downbeat.”
“Again,” Gin muttered loudly.
“What!” Leda screeched. “Seth, you fucking—” She caught the rest of her words and he was, in a detached way, proud of her restraint, until abruptly she turned ghastly, sweaty pale, whirled around, and threw up all over the floor.
“Leda!” Jamie yelled, jumping up and catching her arms, stepping right in the throw up without seeming to notice, not that he would have cared anyway. “Baby, are you okay?”
Aden jumped up and went for the mop, bringing it over while Jamie led her back to her chair, kicking it over a couple of feet so that Aden could clean up the throw up.
“That was how much you puked here the night we got back from our trip,” Dunk told Daisy with way too much relish for a grown man. When everyone groaned at him, he admitted, “Okay, that was bad timing. Leda, I didn’t even see you take a single shot. Food poisoning? Oh God, tell me it wasn’t the chile brownies, Leda! I ate like four of them.”
“It’s not food poisoning, moron,” Leda snapped, dropping her sweaty forehead onto Jamie’s strong chest and clutching his tee shirt. “It’s morning sickness.”
“At night?” Dunk asked in total confusion.
“M-morning—?” Jamie stammered, cupping her face and raising it up while a smile brighter than the summer sun lit up the whole room. “Leda. Shit. Oh, God, I love you.”
“Oh, Leda!” Daisy squealed, bouncing in her seat.
“Congratulations!” everyone chorused.
Seth, however, was glued to his chair. His fingers wrapped around the frame on the bottom of the seat and glued there too, feeling the exact opposite of that fight or flight reaction. Everything was fuzzy and far away, most especially his heart, which should be full to bursting right now because he loved his sister and Jamie and he knew they’d been trying to conceive for almost a year. He wanted to gather her up and rock her, sing to her.
Nausea hit him too, at his own selfishness in this moment, because he’d dared all of his family and friends to tell him that Astrid Sinclair was right, and then, before he had the chance to toss that back in their faces and tell every single one of them the fuck off, Leda…
Leda had thrown up, and she could blame it on morning sickness all she wanted, but Seth knew in his heart that it was because he had been upsetting her so much, and with her body already primed to throw up right now, he’d pushed it into reacting that way.
He stumbled to his feet, barely registering when everyone else stepped aside so that he could stumble the rest of the
way to Leda, whose eyes were wet with tears, her mascara in little streaky blobs under her lower lashes. His throat worked, his mouth open, but no words came out and he could only shake his head and swallow hard, fingers twitching towards her.
Then she grabbed him, pressing her cheek to the top of his head because she was taller than him in her heels, and she shook finely while he felt her cry a little into his curls.
“I was going to tell you first,” she whispered, breaking his heart all over again, in a completely new way, “but I guess the baby’s as stubborn as me and Jamie and didn’t listen.”
“Happy for you,” he managed to wheeze into her ear.
“Get in there, Aden,” Dunk said, and then Aden thunked into Seth’s side and hugged them with a grunt of annoyed affection. “See? One big happy family, look at us!”
“And it’s going to be a bigger family soon,” Leda whispered, her voice soggy.
“I love you,” Seth found his voice to finally say.
She squeezed him harder, her nails digging into him, and all of the tension left his body, so that he was drained but able to let in the happiness and joy of the moment. Surrounded by almost all of the most important people in his life, he let it all wash through him, cleansing out the bitterness of Astrid’s story, all of the emotions and reasons and moments that she didn’t know about that had shaped his heart and mind about his art.
“Photo op,” Gin announced gruffly from behind them.
“Yeah, you need to immortalize this moment, man,” Xavier boomed happily.
“But we didn’t help Seth—” Kayla protested, showing off her softer side, the one that fueled her tough woman outer shell so that she was the best publicist anyone could have.
“Yes, you did,” he murmured hoarsely, easing out from between his siblings so that they could all rearrange themselves, Jamie cradling Leda’s stomach with his big hands, Trentham lumbering behind Kayla and Gin while Hank took out his cell. Tristan clapped Xavier on the back and they scooted closer to Chase and Dunk, Daisy crouching a little in front of them since she was the shortest, Jorge slipping in at the edge.