The Fifth Wedding #4
Once his head notices this as a refrain, he can’t shake it.
And it feels like a worst-case scenario.
V can be a bald-faced liar sometimes, a queen of bullshit.
But the twist is that the lies are sincere, the bullshit is sincere, in that they always have a force of conviction behind them.
Negative conviction, perhaps, but not the neutered neutrality of politeness.
The polite thing would be for J to go along with it. Lord knows he is guilty of retreating into politeness all the time.
But, Jesus—not with V.
“What are you doing?” he asks her.
“What do you mean, what am I doing? I’m asking you questions.” Her immediate defensiveness is, at the very least, sincere.
“You just asked me about my subway ride here. On what possible plane of existence would you care about my subway ride? How is that even remotely relevant to the conversation we should be having?”
The waiter takes this moment to deliver a mezze plate, compliments of the house.
“Please thank the house for us,” J says. The pita looks fantastic, still hot and inflated from the oven. He rips some off and sweeps up some hummus, making it clear he will not speak until V gives him some kind of response.
She holds the moment hostage with a long sip of water, then sets it free with a sigh. “What is it you want? If you want to cut to the chase, so be it. What would you like to be happening right now?”
“I want us to be the young lovers who haven’t seen each other in years!
” he says, perhaps a little too loudly. (There are looks.) “I know a lot has been happening for you, and I know I’m walking in right in the middle of it.
..but I’ve come all this way, and I thought I would get more of a greeting than being told we only have an hour.
I’m not so na?ve that I expected you to fall into my arms. But we’ve shared our lives for a while, haven’t we?
At the very least, I would have thought there’d be some recognition of that.
Even if it’s over, even if we’re truly through, isn’t what we had worth more than idle conversation? ”
“Wow,” V says. “I’m not sure I would have asked that question if I’d known that would be the answer. I didn’t come here to disappoint you. I thought we could just have lunch. We used to be very good at lunch.”
J tries another dip and can’t help himself. He says, “This tzatziki is really good. You should try it.”
V breaks off some pita but goes for the hummus.
“You told me you didn’t fly here for me,” she says. “You told me you flew out here for a wedding.”
“I did,” J says between bites. “I sent you the invitation. It’s tomorrow night.”
“Then why are you acting like someone who flew here for me?”
“I am acting like someone who still sees your toothbrush every night as he washes up, and still puts out two towels even though I don’t know when or if you’ll be back. I know you’ve been living without any trace of me, but I’ve been living with so many traces of you. I want to know what they mean.”
“I told you, Thor loves playing your music in the office. So I’m not entirely without traces of you.”
“How gratifying.”
“Just trying to support you with the fraction of a cent you get every time it streams.”
“Now look who’s paying attention.”
V shakes her head.
“What?” J asks.
“This is exactly how I was afraid it would go.”
“And how is that?”
“ Infuriating .”
J allows himself a small grin. “Nice to know I can still infuriate you.”
He thinks they are falling back into their groove, their banter.
A good sign.
Then she pushes her chair back and stands up.
“I honestly don’t think I can do this right now,” she says.
And now it’s doubly frustrating. Because the artifice is gone. The politeness has been put back in a drawer. This is her raw, trembling self. And he still doesn’t understand it.
“Please,” he says. “Sit down. Let’s talk.”
She is still holding her napkin, and looks around as if she doesn’t know what to do with it. Finally, she puts it over her plate.
“I keep telling you, and you just don’t listen,” she says.
“I’m hanging by a thread here. And you want to throw your weight on me, see if the thread will hold.
But I’m telling you, it won’t. I can’t deal with you and everything else at the same time.
I know you think this means I’m choosing here over you.
And maybe I am right now. But I’m in it so deep that nothing feels like a choice.
And I don’t think I can get you to respect that, or even comprehend it.
You know how much I hated not having a job, when there was so much uncertainty.
You know that nothing has ever been given to me, not by my parents, not by anyone.
You know that I wasn’t expecting this job to become what it’s become.
You know these things, but you can’t connect them to where I am right now, and what it means.
One of the things I’ve loved about being with you is that you never get in my way.
But I also feel I never really tested that.
I think you want to be my top priority, and right now I can’t do that.
When you said you were coming here, I should have simply said don’t .
Because, believe it or not, I didn’t want us to do this.
This is exactly what I didn’t want. I was hoping I’d see you and something else would happen, that it would be casual, low-pressure.
But I don’t think you’re going to let us do anything other than this, so I need to go.
I need to pretend you’re still over there. ”
“Look,” J replies, “let’s just have lunch. You need to have lunch anyway, right?”
V takes her wallet from her purse, opens it, and laughs. “I don’t even have cash to leave you for the bill. I’m totally stiffing you here.”
“I don’t care about the bill. Please. Stay.”
But no. Instead of sitting back down, she reaches down and squeeze his hand. Once. Then she lets go.
Infuriating.
“For the record,” J says, “I very much would like to chase after you, but I don’t want to leave without paying, and I also think you would only hate me for following you.”
“For the record,” V says, “you are absolutely making the right call.”
She kisses him on the top of his head ( infuriating !) and leaves.
J sits there for a moment, stunned.
Then the friendly waiter comes over, looking concerned.
“Is everything alright?” he asks.
“No,” J says. “How can it be?”
The waiter looks at a loss for words, and J decides to let him off the hook.
“Everything will be fine,” he says. “Just please, although I’m sure it’s very good, don’t bring out the moussaka.”
J finishes the meal. Of course he finishes the meal. When he gets the check, he sees the waiter has taken the moussaka off.
As if V had never been there.
He knows it won’t work to show up at her office with flowers.
He knows it won’t work to text her and ask if she’ll meet for a drink after she’s done for the day.
He knows it won’t work to follow her and see if she’s meeting anyone else.
He knows it won’t work to find the last boom box in Manhattan, hold it over his head, and blast the love songs he’s written for her until she comes down to the lobby and lets him take her away from it all.
He knows all the things that won’t work.
He just can’t find the one that will.
I still want to see you, he texts.
She reads it, but doesn’t reply.
He should go back to the apartment, work on the songs.
But instead he goes to the Museum of Modern Art and walks around.
He wishes he could get lost in the paintings, but they too fall out of reach.
He feels like he is an exhibit himself, for all the tourists to see.
Man with Failed Reunion, a collage of worthless words and deeds, a gift of the artist.
You know that nothing has ever been given to me, not by my parents, not by anyone .
V feels this, more than any other, is the sentence that J should be focusing on.
While his own parents were certainly concerned when he decided to try supporting himself with his music, they never removed the safety net that had been underneath him his whole life.
V’s family was far more fraught—her father perpetually drunk and perpetually underemployed, her mother a locked box of oddly shaped resentments.
When V left home at sixteen, there was no going back and no map forward.
She made mistakes and then had to live with those mistakes.
J has heard stories of these times, but none of it was visible to him.
The woman he met, the woman he fell for, was built from a girl he would barely recognize.
She is proud of this evolution, but she doesn’t think it would take much to undo it.
Like all smart people, she is petrified of making a stupid choice.
And when a golden opportunity comes along—and what she’s doing with Secret Project is that elusive golden opportunity—that fear is so large that it can influence everything else.
J has never felt this way about anything.
V knows he hasn’t. And now, when this is the sentence he should be focusing on, she’s sure he’s hearing others instead, the ones more directly involving him.
It’s human for him to react that way. But that’s why humans are such messy creatures.
She doesn’t even have the energy to hide in a bathroom stall. When Meta walks into her ramshackle office, V is staring at a calendar pinned to the wall. It shows March of last year, but V’s kept it up, because she likes the owl that illustrates it.
“Am I interrupting?” Meta asks, so flatly that V can’t tell whether she’s being sarcastic or not.
“No,” V says, sitting up in her chair, all business.
But Meta doesn’t take the hint. Or pushes it away.
“Bad lunch?” she asks.
“Difficult lunch,” V says.
“Your boyfriend’s in town, right?”