The First Wedding #4
“As identically as possible,” Arthur continued.
“But that wasn’t enough, either. So then they started to surgically alter themselves to be a single nongendered being, and invented their own identity: pandrogyne .
Genesis got breasts. Lady Jaye got her eyes done to match Genesis’s.
Beauty spots were tattooed on Genesis’s chin to echo Lady Jaye’s.
And so on. They wanted to become a we, so that became their pronoun.
Even after Lady Jaye died, Genesis kept referring to themself as we. ”
“But doesn’t love require distance, separateness?” J asked.
“Of course,” Jun said. “But the way I see it, we’ve spent almost half our lives with separateness.
We wasted so much time figuring things out, partly because the world made it so hard for us to figure things out.
You don’t know what that’s like, to believe the world actively wants you to remain separate and alone.
Maybe in a few generations, queer kids won’t know what that feels like, either.
But for us—it took too much time and too much navigation to come together comfortably. ”
“I don’t think we want to share the same body,” Arthur said, “but we do want to share the same heart. We’ve lived long enough with separate hearts. Let’s be together the rest of the way. Let’s live together, and then when we die, let our ashes be mixed in the same urn and buried together.”
“Making up for lost time,” J offered.
“Yes,” Jun told him with a sad smile. “There has been so much lost time. So doesn’t it make sense that we want to spend the rest of our lives found?”
The toasts are not as awful as wedding toasts can be; neither J nor Olivia needs to pull their respective plugs.
Because Arthur’s father is the most uncomfortable with what’s going on, he gets the most tears when he gives in despite himself, calling Jun the piece that had been missing in their family, the piece that made the whole jigsaw suddenly make sense.
As the assembled crowd raises its glasses for the father’s toast, J looks over to the bar, where Straitjacket Heart is still perched, Hotline Bling beside her.
He despairs slightly that she has not freed herself of him, but at least takes some solace in the fact that every time Hotline Bling’s tried to talk to her in the past five minutes, she’s shushed him so she could listen to the speeches.
Once Arthur’s father is done, it’s J’s turn at the microphone.
Even though it is a single song, he feels much more vulnerable with this set, much more naked in the spotlight.
In a concert setting, if he messes up, the only thing he’s ruined is his own reputation.
But these performances always mean more.
He has been asked to conjure a blessing, fill the room with this couple’s shared heartbeat.
It is not at all in his nature to be confident that he can pull off such a feat.
He looks to Straitjacket Heart. From the stage, he can’t really read her expression. But he does see her nod, just once, so he can take the momentum from that nod and ride it into his opening chords.
There is no net here. No lyric sheet. Nobody wants a blessing that’s read from a piece of paper. No, it has to seem like the truth is sung straight from the soul.
The song he’s written for Jun and Arthur is called “55%.”
It goes like this:
Think of life as a battery
Ticking backwards slow
Instead of being 37
We’ve got 55% to go
Think of all the time
We’ve practiced and rehearsed
For an ending that never started
For the other to strike first
We gotta hurry up and love
We might not have much time left
Give or take—45 years
Of not being dead
I have so many questions
While we’re still alive
I’ll never know you completely
And it tears me up inside
We met in the wrestling ring
We were young and we brawled
I got to gently unmask you
And tell you what I saw
Not a savage beast
With a heart made of metal
When you waved the white flag
That’s when you won the battle
We gotta hurry up and love
We might not have much time left
Give or take—45 years
Of not being dead
I have so many questions
While we’re still alive
I’ll never know you completely
And it tears me up inside
As he sings, Jun and Arthur joyfully dance along, surrounded by so many people dressed as so many other songs.
When J is done, he sees that Jun and Arthur are teary as they beam and bow to him.
This is the first time they’ve heard the song, and it moves them to see themselves within it, to know it is yet another marvel that would not have existed if they’d never met.
The wedding guests cheer and applaud. Hotline Bling whoops. Next to him, the straitjacketed woman looks like she is holding her own reaction inside, to examine it better before she shares it.
J now wishes he had a lyric sheet, because he has nothing to give Jun and Arthur in this moment except a bow back, an acknowledgment that what they’ve created has led to the song’s creation.
After he steps to the side, the DJ announces that now there will be karaoke for anyone who wants to sing the song that inspired their costume.
“That was amazing!” Olivia cries, wrapping J in a spontaneous hug and popping another balloon in the process. “Did you see how happy Jun and Arthur looked? That was such a highlight. You’re incredible.”
A guy dressed as a juicebox has jumped onstage, swigging from a bottle of gin. The DJ cues up “Gin and Juice.”
“This is not going to be a highlight,” Olivia groans. “Here, come with me. I have a surefire coping mechanism for amateur karaoke.”
J looks over to Straitjacket Heart, but she hasn’t extricated herself from Hotline Bling. If anything, Bling seems to have dialed it up, and it doesn’t take a doctor to see how it makes J ache.
“I happen to be very into coping mechanisms,” J tells Olivia. But still, he’s surprised when she pulls him into a catering office and offers him a rough powder.
“Don’t worry—it’s just Molly,” Olivia says. “There’s a guy out there in a Cannibal Corpse t-shirt who says he’s dressed as their song ‘I Cum Blood,’ and he plans to sing it. You’re going to need this.”
J has never tried MDMA before, but he’s been around people who were on it, and they seemed to be pretty happy.
Also, Hotline Bling and Cannibal Corpse are too much for any bookish, folkish sensibility to handle at the same time, so J opens up his mouth to new possibilities.
He is startled to discover that swallowing MDMA feels like inhaling crystallized hairspray.
“Now we dance!” Olivia says, in a way that makes it sound like this is part of the official MDMA protocol.
Luckily, Gin and Juice has been replaced by Dancing on My Own, who ironically fills the dance floor as she carries the tune to heights that karaoke rarely reaches.
J starts to feel a lightness, but he isn’t sure whether it’s because of the song, the fact he no longer has to perform, or the drugs he’s just snorted.
Olivia is very handsy in her dancing, but in a friendly-more-than-flirty way.
The next person to take the stage is dressed in an aqua/periwinkle/navy/sky combo. With orchestral seriousness, he launches into “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues.”
Those who’d been rockin’ to Robyn start to slide from the dance floor.
J assumes he and Olivia will, too, but instead she wraps her arms around him, careful not to crush the lone balloon between them as she leans her head in.
Her hand starts to strum the small of his back.
He strums hers in return, because it feels like the friendly thing to do.
J gets lost for a moment and later will not be able to remember if his eyes were open or closed as he swayed with Olivia.
There was just the sensation of the music, and hands on backs, and then a poke higher on his back, not like a strum at all, and then another poke, this time popping the second-to-last luftballon, which had been dangling off his elbow.
He turns, and there’s V. Who he knows he should be thinking of as “Straitjacket Heart.” But she’s really his girlfriend V, playing a part. Because they thought it would be fun. And he’s having fun. Really, he is. But V doesn’t look like she’s having as much fun.
“I need to talk to you,” she says.
“Okay, sure,” J replies. He tilts his head forward. “This is Olivia. She’s a friend of Jun and Arthur’s. We were just—”
“It’s urgent,” V interrupts.
J doesn’t want to be rude. He wants to be friendly.
“Okay,” he says, his hands now off Olivia’s back, but still on her waist. “But Olivia and I were just—”
V reaches between them and playfully pops the last luftballon. Olivia startles. V reaches into J’s shirt, wraps her finger around one of the buttons, and pulls him in the direction of the door.
“I think it’s time to go home,” she says with a smile. “Slip out of our costumes.” Then she lets go and heads outside.
“You should follow her,” Olivia tells J. “It’s okay. I should probably make sure people know they can take home the flowers.”
“Thank you,” J says. Then he goes outside to find V standing alone in her straitjacket. He momentarily thinks it’s smart to lead with, “What happened—did Hotline Bling hang up on you?”
“Says the man who was about to deflower Every Rose Has Its Thorn!”
“Kiss from a Rose.”
“Well, wouldn’t you rather seal the deal with me?”
J likes the sound of this.
“Well,” he says, “we’re never going to survive unless we get a little crazy. Is that what you’re saying?”
V cozies up to him and whispers in his ear. “I’m not just crazy...I’m Crazy in Love.”
“Oh!” he says, voice full of childish revelation. “The straitjacket and the heart-shaped glasses. Now I get it! Are we stopping the game now? Let’s keep going! Tell me all about your four, five, or six brothers and sisters. I have to say, I love all of them!”
“I don’t want to talk about them, not after they died in that tragic canning accident.”