“Oh, I love them,” Celeste was saying. She turned toward the other man in the circle, who had stringy hair down to his shoulders. Celeste said his name, which I couldn’t hear, and he jerked his head up from her body to her face. “Didn’t you see them in concert?” she asked him. “Last year, in New Jersey or something?”

“Yeah, man,” he said. He took a swig of his beer and then, as if he hadn’t yet achieved the requisite level of chill, ran a hand through his hair. “They were fucking incredible. Dude’s voice is sick. Just sick.”

The non-Celeste woman shook her head. “Honestly, I wish we could go back to the days before music had lyrics at all,” she said. “Just pure instrumental magic.”

“Seriously?” the stringy-haired guy said with disdain.

“Yes!” she said, then started singing a Beethoven symphony, dancing and flinging her limbs about, clearly trying to charm the circle with her whimsy. The stringy-haired guy had his eyebrows raised, and I winced. Celeste was far more beautiful than her friend, and if she’d done the same gesture, I was sure this guy would be laughing now like a giddy baboon. I wished I could see the bartender’s face—but now his head moved back and forth, a little no, cutting into the impromptu performance. She continued dancing for a moment, as if to proclaim her self-assurance, but then stopped and gave a nervous laugh.

“I can’t stand instrumental music,” the bartender said.

The rest of the circle waited for him to continue, and so did I. But he did not.

“Why?” the dancing woman asked, a little aggressively, maybe trying to punish him for his headshake, which she’d perhaps interpreted as condemnation or rejection. It was difficult to watch.

“It’s irrational,” the bartender said. “Uncontrollable.” I breathed in sharply: my father, who hated my mother’s classical music—one of their few incompatibilities—had said almost the exact same thing. Primordial. I knew the dancing woman had been singing a Beethoven symphony, I realized, because it was on one of the records my mother would play when my father wasn’t home. If he came home in the middle, he’d groan, “This again!”—he’d always try to make a joke of it, but it was clear it very much wasn’t a joke to him, that there was something painful about the music and he needed it to stop. Immediately, my mother would shut it off.

“Yeah, it makes you feel, dude,” the stringy-haired man said, running his hand through his hair again, like punctuation. “That’s what music is supposed to do.” Never mind that he had been proselytizing someone’s “sick” voice and sneering at the dancing woman only moments before. I wondered if I should insert myself into the circle to make this point in the bartender’s defense, but now Celeste had taken a little step toward the bartender and was looking at him with her eyes wide and her lips pursed into a little pout—I’m listening, I’m here for you, and also you want to fuck me. A look that stopped me cold.