The Eighth Wedding #2
“I’ll make some remarks, they’ll read their vows, and then you’ll have a minute—two, tops—to sing your song for them, and then there will be hugs and kisses and photos, and then I will firmly but gracefully tell them to move into the hall so the next couple can come in.
If you go longer than two minutes, I will have to cut you off—is that understood? ”
“Yes.”
“Alright.” Judge Pao opens a notebook and centers herself on the wedding platform. “I’ve done this for fifteen years, and I still have my speech out, just in case. Isn’t that funny? Don’t you think that’s interesting?”
“It is,” J says. Then he realizes that Judge Pao was talking to Nick, hoping this detail will make it into The New Yorker .
No fool, Nick makes a production of scribbling it down.
Message me when you get here .
J had taken this to mean, Don’t bother sending me updates every few hours. Don’t include me in your life so often. Get used to the distance. We’ll be old friends who catch up the rare times we’re in the same place .
Something deeply rooted within him wanted to resist this, to figure out how to bring her back into his world in the way she used to be in it.
But the grounding around the roots was starting to slip.
By uprooting herself, V may have uprooted him, too.
As he packed to leave for New York again, he kept noticing small items of hers throughout the apartment.
Books she’d finished at his place and hadn’t taken back to her place.
A red jacket hanging in the closet. Dried cranberries in the cabinet.
A bottle of her preferred vodka in the freezer, only about an eighth full. A charger for her phone.
Nothing that couldn’t be left behind, but in communion they still might have some power.
Maybe not an anchor, J thought as he locked up the apartment, but possibly a beacon ?
Then, as he rode to the airport, he tried to transform it from a question to a statement.
Maybe not an anchor, but possibly a beacon.
Awkwardly, the first couple of the day doesn’t want a random Swedish musician as part of their ceremony, so J and Nick step back into Judge Pao’s small office, keeping quiet as she does her job.
The second couple, however, is willing to have J serenade them.
Dylan and Mike, the two interns, have gathered a brief overview of who they are: Allie is a librarian and Claude is a contractor.
They met five years ago; Claude’s sister worked with Allie and set them up.
Both their families are with them today.
J only has a few minutes to digest this information before the families spill into the wedding room.
(He created a template beforehand for his wedding songs today, but he’ll need some details for each variation.) As the families settle in, J is reminded all over again why he wrote “If You Ever Need a Stranger (to Sing at Your Wedding)”—there is an instantaneous joy buzzing from everyone entering the room; they exude a kind of romantic adrenaline, the euphoria of the long-distance runner crossing the finish line matched with the euphoria of the crowd witnessing the victory.
Judge Pao’s smile seems genuine as she calls the couple up and begins the ceremony; J imagines that she, too, must get something out of seeing such happiness, or else her job would be a nightmare of repetition.
With just the right balance of humor and authority, she talks about the importance of the day in the eyes of the families and in the eyes of New York State.
Then she asks the couple if they’ve written vows, and when they tell her they have, she takes a step back, as if to render herself invisible as Allie and Claude hold hands, look into each other’s eyes, and speak.
Often couples write their vows separately, for a moment of surprise in what’s otherwise a fairly formulaic event.
But Allie and Claude clearly talked about it ahead of time, because they take the word vows literally.
Allie vows to be better about hogging the pillows, about reading too late into the night, about keeping her eyes closed for most of the horror movies Claude loves so much.
Claude vows to be better about keeping the garbage nights straight, about freaking out when he can’t find his keys, and trying to watch movies other than horror movies.
They each vow to love the other—“with all my heart,” Claude says, and Allie adds, “with all your brain, too,” which gets a laugh as Claude amends his vow and repeats it.
Rings are brought to the podium by one of Allie’s nieces, and Judge Pao makes it official.
J joins in the families’ cheers and applause and is riding the moment so much that he’s almost surprised when Judge Pao says, “And now, I believe we will have a brief song in honor of the newly wedded couple.”
All eyes turn to J as he sheepishly picks up his guitar and improvises a song.
A librarian and a contractor walk into a bar
The librarian’s name is Allie and the contractor’s name is Claude
They order drinks and nervously sit down next to each other and talk
The jukebox wakes up and sings for them so soft
And in the background pirates and rabbis and bears walk in after them
But Claude and Allie don’t notice cause they’re lost in conversation
If you’re waiting for a punchline, you’ll have to wait until you’re old
As five years later the story’s still being told
It’s over in less than a minute, but he gets a response like it’s the end of a long concert.
But then, unlike at the end of a long concert, he is mostly ignored, as Allie and Claude come into the crowd and start the chain of hugs and kisses and congratulations.
True to her word, after the proper documents are signed, Judge Pao deftly persuades them to move their celebration out into the hall.
The couple and many of their family members thank J as they leave, as if he is a one-man reception line as they pass into the next chapter of their lives.
“That was great,” Nick says to him as the information for the next couple is texted in from the reception area. “Now let’s do it another dozen times.”
Just over a year ago, J had made the ridiculous mistake of allowing his manager to book a small tour in France the same week that France’s team was in the World Cup.
When they’d booked the dates, they hadn’t realized it was the World Cup, and they certainly hadn’t known that France would make it as far as they did.
The results were demoralizing—empty crowds from Paris to Marseilles.
At one venue in Lyon, J was nearly drowned out from the cheering and groaning and ref-baiting at the bar.
And, worse, there weren’t many English speakers present, and J’s story-songs didn’t really carry on tunes alone.
The audience reaction ranged from quizzical annoyance to quizzical disdain.
Even though he knew the reason for the poor performance, he couldn’t stop feeling like a failure.
On his short flight back home, he nearly didn’t put up a fight when the flight attendant told him his guitar was too big for the overhead compartment.
He was ready to leave it on a bench, for a more successful singer to take.
Once he got his luggage and got through customs, he readied himself for the trudge to the taxi stand.
He saw the drivers waiting with their plaques, none with his name on it.
He saw families reuniting delightedly. And he saw a whole bunch of balloons, as if someone had come from a child’s birthday party.
It wasn’t until he heard his name called that he realized it was V holding the balloons.
V, who wasn’t supposed to pick him up, had come to drive him home.
The previous night, he’d called her and told her what had gone wrong.
And now, she was the one thing that had gone right.
They didn’t embrace tearfully; that wasn’t their style. Instead J said, gesturing to the balloons, “Did you mug a clown on your way to the airport?”
And she replied, “I figured you’d want to pop them on the ride home.”
She had brought a hairpin and left it on the passenger seat, and as they drove back to the city, he’d popped the balloons as they both screamed, not so much out of delight but from the sheer desire for catharsis.
It made him feel better.
By the time they got home, the tour was already a story, a bad but funny story.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Look, I’m not your car service,” V told him. “But I can tell when you need it. And if you need it, I’ll be there.”
Fast forward a year or so.
(Why is it that we say fast forward but never fast backward or fast rewind ? Is it that losing time is a much quicker process than the attempt to get it back?)
J arrived again in New York. Julia was home, but luckily said he could still stay at her place, on the couch.
J had looked up the Ace Hotel, and even with a discount, it was still more than he wanted to pay, and possibly more than he could afford.
He still smarted that V hadn’t offered, almost as if she’d forgotten how expensive touring could be.
And this wasn’t even touring! This was a free gig for some publicity. And an excuse to come back to New York.
At JFK, the immigration officer actually tallied up the time J had spent in America recently, to make sure he hadn’t visited longer than his allotted ninety days.
(Apparently, he only had thirty-seven left.) Harried, J rolled his suitcase through the last-chance duty-free and escaped the sliding doors into the outer ring of New York.
He knew V had no idea which flight he was taking.
He knew V was busy, and that the AirTrain awaited.
And yet...as he saw the drivers with their plaques and the families reuniting, he couldn’t help but look around, to make sure she hadn’t come to surprise him.
It was the slimmest of slim chances; he knew this.
And still, the disappointment he felt wasn’t slim at all.