Lester looks over to the chatting couple. “Cute girl,” he says to himself. Not going to win any pageants, but handsome in a quirky way, bright eyes and wavy hair and an interesting profile. Big nose, that’s another way to say it. She reminds him of the bohemian chicks he went with in the Village, way back when. Birds chirping about women’s liberation, too busy to shave their pits (but not their legs, thank goodness). He did well for himself, for a while there. He could talk just about any woman, fourteen to forty, into his bed. Emily cracks up across the room, her laugh like a trill.

Young love. A lot of good songs about it, too. “There Will Never Be Another You.” “You’re My Everything.” “All of Me.” Those kinds of feelings seem a long way off now, but at least he knows what they’re singing about.

Lester takes a long draw off his whiskey sour and starts into “Emily,” nice and easy. The stretch of the piece is in the right-hand melody, low then high, and Lester has no problem with that. E-B-G, E-B-G, E-B-G. Wow, he loves this song. His left hand spreads into a G7, pain-free. E-A-A, E-A-A, E-A-A. It was written for some bad movie, but Lester first heard it performed by Bill Evans, back when Scott was playing with him in the Village. After that, Lester couldn’t put on an Evans record without hearing another version: he plays it on Conversations with Myself, on Live in Paris. He recorded it in San Francisco, too, just a few days before he died.

When Lester finishes, a few light flourishes in the right hand over the low rumble of C-sus, he looks up. The girl is gone, and Jason Goodyear is sitting in her place.

Emillionaire was a bust—their conversation went well enough, but she seemed more interested in the free wine than getting to know “Frank,” and when he invited her up for a nightcap in his room, she let a quiet laugh slip out before saying no, she had to be heading home. So William is left alone to watch the muted Late Late Show monologue—Craig Ferguson gesticulating like a marionette—and listen to that weird old piano man. It is while he is sitting at the bar, feeling supremely sorry for himself, that Jason Goodyear sidles into the seat next to him. “This one free?”

Eric is so startled at the player’s appearance that he forgets a tap, the beer foam spreading over the lip of a pint glass and down his arm before he snaps to attention. Jason waits patiently for him to wipe up the mess, then orders a beer of his own. “You need anything?” he asks William, then nods at his near-empty glass. “He’ll have another of whatever that is.”

“So, how’s the spring going?” Jason asks once both men have their drinks.