The Sixth Wedding #3
“No. Not now. I have to see it through...and then, who knows? I used to wonder about those people who left Facebook or Google early in the ride. How ridiculous! I thought. Cashing in before the real cash came to town . But I’m starting to get it.
You have to get to a point where you’re compensated for all you’ve done.
..and then you can step away before it takes over more of your life.
I don’t know yet if I’m looking to get to that point or not.
It’s a day-by-day thing. And in the meantime, I perform. ”
“Do you enjoy it at all?”
“Sure. It feels great when we’re winning. But I get the whole shark tank thing now.”
“Shark tank?” J asks.
“I’m in with the sharks, and they all see me as a fellow shark. But my secret is that I know I’m not a shark at all, and I have to keep up the shark pose so they’ll let me keep swimming with them. Otherwise, best-case scenario, I’m left behind. Worst-case, they eat me alive.”
“And where do I fit into this shark tank?” J can’t help but ask.
“That’s exactly it,” V says. “You’re on the other side of the glass. I know you’re there. I know you can see I’m not a shark. But there’s nothing you can do to help me. If I think too much about you out there watching me, I will lose my place.”
“Is that what this is about? Is it work that’s separating us?”
V takes a sip of coffee before replying.
“I don’t know how to explain this without hurting you.
In a way, yes, it’s the work. I have no doubt that if I’d never met Thor, if the company hadn’t gotten the attention it’s gotten, I’d still be back home with you.
That has separated us. But when I think about the end of my time in New York, when I think about what my next step should be.
..going back to you feels like going backward.
It feels like trying to squeeze myself into clothes I’ve outgrown.
I know you want to know why, and I can’t tell you why.
Last night...it would have been so easy to invite you over.
And enjoyable. But I am super conscious of not misleading you. Or myself.”
J feels there is something he should be able to say here, some bridge he can create for her to use to cross back to him.
But he can’t find his way to those words.
He understands she is in the shark tank without him.
He knows he can’t break the glass between them, that there isn’t any safety for either of them in doing that.
This isn’t intimidation, really. It’s more like the perils of self-awareness, the inability to wrestle the situation into a form that can be pinned down.
“I am here for you,” he tells her. “I can stay here for you as long as you might need me. If you want me to come over, I’ll come over. If that doesn’t feel right, I understand.”
Something has shifted, because she doesn’t push this offer away.
“I appreciate that. But I don’t want you sitting around waiting for me. Here or anywhere else.”
“It’s okay for me to stay longer,” J assures her. “I have another wedding to play next weekend.”
As they eat their sandwiches, he tells her about Tara; somehow, V has never heard the story behind the payphone song. She doesn’t even seem familiar with the song itself. (J is not offended; it’s a very deep cut.)
When he’s done telling her the story, V says, “Her husband-to-be can’t possibly want you to play that song at their wedding.”
“Why do you say that?” J asks. He explains about the payphone Hugh bought for her.
“He was trying to neutralize your influence, take some of your territory. Why would anyone want to hear another man’s song about his wife at their wedding?”
“It’s not about her, really.”
“That’s not how he sees it, I’m sure. At the very least, he thinks you slept together, and that it’s your night of passion, as much of the song, that Tara remembers.”
“I don’t even think we slept together!”
“You can’t remember?”
“I’m sure of it,” J says. (He’s not.)
“What I’d suggest is that you turn it into a wedding song. Change the last verse or something. Take yourself out of it. Make it about them.”
“That’s not what she asked me to do.”
“Trust me. It will be better for her if Hugh doesn’t think you’re serenading her with your lost romance on their wedding day.”
“It wasn’t a lost romance!”
“To you. You have no idea what it was to her. People rarely connect in identical ways. You cannot determine how much a moment matters for the other person.”
J wonders how this applies to whole relationships, if what V is saying is also about the two of them.
But she doesn’t extend the statement in their own direction, and instead changes the subject and asks about some friends back home.
They spend the rest of the meal like that, in the safer harbors of other people’s shores.
At the end of lunch, he asks if they can meet up again, and he decides to take it as a good sign that she doesn’t say no or that she isn’t sure, and instead says they can figure out a date once she sees how the work week is going to play out.
She assumes J will be free whenever, and he doesn’t challenge this assumption, because they both know it’s true.
“Look,” V says as they’re leaving, “about that song for the wedding. I still don’t think you get it, but I think I can help.
You see, at first, even for me, when you wrote a song and I knew that it was about us, or inspired by us, I made the mistake of thinking that it was only about us, that it was basically a message from you to me.
It took time for me to realize that it wasn’t only about us, that even if I was an element and you were an element to it, the song wouldn’t work unless it tapped into larger elements.
If anything, by trying to figure out you and me, you were also trying to figure out bigger things, more often than not love.
It was still interesting for me to hear the songs and to try to figure them out myself.
But I knew that even if I was inside the song, it was never really mine.
Now, I’m not saying you had the same kind of relationship with this woman; I know you didn’t.
But odds are, she’s never been a part of any other person’s song.
So she will want to think it’s more hers than it really is.
And you don’t need to correct her, if it means something to her.
You just need to shift it a little to be less about her and more about her and her husband, for their wedding. You see what I’m saying?”
J wants to ask her more, wants to ask what she hears in his songs. What does she find about herself? What does she find about him?
But she’s already leaving; their conversation is already over. So he simply nods, and they say goodbye. Later that afternoon, J decides maybe he should play around with Tara’s song a little bit.
It does seem that time has proven the song right, at least in terms of payphones: They have completely disappeared from the streets of New York.
J can even spy some of the alcoves they once called home; now only the metal shells remain, sometimes with a cord dangling out like a dead creature’s tail.
J is struck by this aspect of time, how you never know exactly what is going to disappear, and when.
Things that work can still become obsolete.
The only way to avoid this fate is to be the beneficiary of a sentimental connection—there’s no other real explanation for why vinyl records remain.
Our attachments carry a value. With relationships as well as curios.
It’s not too much of a stretch to think that, theoretically, in a year or two, couples won’t even need him anymore.
If they want a personalized wedding song in the style of Ed Sheeran, or Taylor Swift, or the Beastie Boys, all they’ll have to do is type their request into an AI and something will spew out.
But will that song really know them, the way a human can know them?
J wanders too far, too much. He realizes he needs to add some structure to his days if he’s going to stay here and not rely on V’s availability.
He scrolls down the contacts in his phone and texts a few who live in New York, including the drinking buddy who messaged him earlier.
He also messages Skye again and asks if they want to get coffee or take a walk in a park.
The only way out of limbo is to make plans. So he makes plans.
He and skye meet at a Van Leeuwen and, cones in hand, find a bench in Tompkins Square Park.
J feels strangely suggestive as he licks his salted caramel ice cream, futilely trying to prevent the melt from trailing down his fingers.
Somehow Skye manages to keep their cone intact without flashing too much tongue.
When they first saw each other, Skye repeated what they’d said in their message about how much J’s song had meant to them, what a special evening it had been, and so on.
But underneath all the happy words, J could easily spot a restlessness, a sleeplessness beneath.
If anything, the exhaustion seems even more pronounced than V’s; J is starting to wonder if he is the only person in New York who gets a good night’s sleep.
Once the two of them take the last bites of their cones and sit down on the bench, J intends to ask about Detroit and where things stand after the fake wedding.
But before he can, Skye asks how things are going with V, and J finds himself explaining that she’d been at the wedding, and that just when he thought she was going to shut off from him completely, she seems to have turned on a backup generator.
“The problem is, she seems to think I’m a figure from her past, not her future. I don’t know what to do about that,” J confesses.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Skye says, “but I’m starting to think that I know how she feels. Even if what she feels is wrong, in terms of you, it might be right for me, in terms of Detroit.”