The Ninth Wedding #4
They make small talk for a little longer—Glenda’s four-year-old son is obsessed with a song of J’s that is hardly age-appropriate—and J purchases books for Thor and Meta.
He maintains his composure until he leaves the shop, and only when he rounds the corner does it hit him again: It’s over, it’s over, it’s over .
He doesn’t understand why this keeps happening, how many times it has to hit him before it finally carves itself into the stonework of his mind.
Hope is a tenacious beast, but even beasts have limits.
The wedding planner—who, as it turns out, is not V—gets in touch, walks him through the logistics. She also takes great pains to emphasize that he is a guest as well as a performer, and that the bride and groom are looking forward to his presence for the entire event.
Over the next few days, it’s not that the words for the wedding song come pouring out, or that they’ve run dry. J has to work to get to them, and then work to put them all in the right place, to the right tune.
Be suspicious of any writer who says it’s usually otherwise.
He has no idea when V is flying in. So the day before they’re supposed to meet, he wonders if she’s close, tries to sense her presence.
Could he sense it before, or is this a fiction he’s telling himself after the fact?
When she walked into a room, definitely.
But a city? Was his affection’s radar ever that encompassing?
She’s cut her hair again.
Not radically. But it’s also not entirely familiar, so immediately his presumption of familiarity takes a hit.
“I like your hair,” he says as they sit down for coffee. He doesn’t particularly like it, but he wants her to know he’s noticed.
“Thanks,” she says, unfolding her napkin and putting it on her lap. “I’m still not sure about it.”
“It’s good to see you,” J says, even if the word good doesn’t fit right. If he were being honest, he’d say It’s inevitable to see you, or It’s almost like seeing a stranger now, to see you .
“I’m glad we’re doing this,” V replies. “Seeing each other before the big day. The wedding is going to have enough drama already.”
“Really? Is something wrong?”
“No, no—it’s just that the families haven’t met before. Everyone besides Thor and Meta think it’s happening too quickly. But since the families don’t have any financial leverage here—Thor’s paying for it all himself—there’s not much they can do.”
J understands he could say, Plus, they’re already married . He’s tempted—just to have that frisson of accomplishment, proving to V that he knows something she doesn’t.
“You must be so busy, with everything happening,” J says instead, and V tells him all about Secret Project, and the challenges ahead.
It’s all so boring, now that he doesn’t have any stake in it.
He wonders if she’s rich. That’s nearly impossible to ask.
So instead, when she’s done, he asks, “Are you going to stay in New York?”
“For now.”
“Meaning...months? Years?”
“I don’t know. That’s all I can give you.”
“Surely, you don’t have to give me anything.” J sees this as a light, morbid joke. That’s all.
But V sighs and says, “Please. Let’s not fight.”
“This isn’t fighting,” J points out.
“It’s not getting along, either. And I want us to get along.”
“I think I’ve done a very good job of respecting your wants, V,” J says. “But when you ended things between us, your wants stopped being a priority of mine. You do understand that’s how it works, don’t you?”
V sits back, backs down. “Okay. That’s fair.”
J is tempted to point out that she is no longer the sole arbiter of fairness, either, but decides to keep that to himself. Instead, in a friendly tone, he asks, “Are you seeing someone in New York? Surely it can’t be all work.”
“I’m not seeing anyone. But I might, J.”
She says it gently, even considerately. She doesn’t ask him if he’s seeing anyone else. She knows that’s not the issue.
“Okay,” J says. Then he repeats it. “Okay.”
This is the moment of true understanding, the one that is almost transcendent in its absoluteness. She has been telling him this for weeks, months. Now he feels it. It isn’t that she doesn’t want to be in a relationship. It’s that she doesn’t want to be in a relationship with him .
Even though he’s known it’s over, has been dealing with it being over, it’s still startling to J how much this wrecks him.
“What happened to us?” he asks.
“No single thing,” V answers, unsurprised by the question.
“No single moment, no single turn. It wasn’t like I was miserable.
I was never miserable, J. It was more about meaning, about definition, about living with as little dissonance as possible.
I was...how do I put this? I know: I was a lyric set to the wrong music.
The words were clear to me. But the music of everything around me wasn’t supporting those words.
At times, it was working against those words.
So I had to change the music. And part of that was separating from you, looking for a better match, or maybe no match at all.
You weren’t wrong for me, J—but you weren’t right for me, either.
Not in the kind of relationship we had, that vague space where we don’t want to use the words boyfriend and girlfriend, but we don’t want to use anything more serious, either. So where does that leave us?”
She is not asking J this question. So he lets her keep speaking, to answer it.
She says, “Perhaps selfishly, I still want us to talk. Because I love our talking, especially when it’s not about us.
Which I understand is quite a thing to say right now, but I’m going for it.
I don’t want to ghost you. I don’t want you to ghost me.
We are too smart to let ourselves be haunted.
But the only way to avoid it is to get through this hard moment of redefinition.
You will naturally think it’s harder for you, and I won’t dispute that. But please know it’s also hard for me.”
“I don’t doubt that,” J says, with no trace of bitterness.
But he also...doesn’t care. He doesn’t care how hard it is for her.
He doesn’t care how she feels about their future.
He doesn’t care about her desire to not be haunted.
If anything, he feels like a ghost right now, at this table but no longer at this table.
He is standing aside, watching this person who looks like him politely go along with what she’s saying.
Because he really doesn’t want to fight.
He doesn’t want to argue. He doesn’t want anything out of this conversation anymore.
“Thank you,” she says. “I hoped you wouldn’t.”
For the next half hour they have what could only be called a normal conversation.
It feels like those first hours after a noisy but harmless storm passes through, and the fact that it’s not rainy takes on a different meaning than it had before.
J is happy to let his ghost sit there and chat amiably.
V tells J not only about Secret Project, but also some of the people she’s met in New York, how it’s felt like the first time since university that she’s had to go out of her way to make new friends.
(J nods, sympathetic.) Because she doesn’t want her social life to be entirely about work, she’s joined a running club, and now has three friends with whom she runs on Wednesdays and Sundays and drinks with on Fridays.
Fiona, Theresa, and Janet. (J forgets their names as soon as she says them.
He does not need to know the new cast of characters in her new life.)
She asks about his songwriting, and he gives her what paltry update there is. He tells her about what happened with Skye and Detroit, and George (whose prognosis remains good) and Lisbet, and also about a strange nervousness he feels about playing Thor and Meta’s wedding.
“But you’ve played so many weddings before,” V says. “Why would this one make you nervous?”
“Honestly, it was probably you,” J tells her, unable to stay a ghost for too long, and feeling the need to put some of his blood back into the conversation. “Not just the fact that you’d be there, but also the fact that Thor is your boss, and basically the only reason I’m there ties back to you.”
“I think you’ll be fine. Thor is a genuine fan. And Meta...well, I can never get a read on her. But I’m sure that if she didn’t want you playing, you wouldn’t be playing at her wedding.”
J sighs.
“What?” V asks.
“Maybe I’m just tired of weddings.” It’s not that he hasn’t had the thought many times before, but it’s rare for him to say it out loud.
“Why?”
“I think when I have things going on in my life, I enjoy it. But when I don’t, I feel like I’m a spectator in the world, and the weddings make that more obvious. I don’t mind being an observer, but I find it hard not being able to share my observations.”
“You can still share them with me,” V offers.
J can tell: She really means it.
Still, he says, “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“You haven’t lost me,” V says.
“How can you say that? I have.”
“No. You haven’t. We have a choice here, to either devolve or evolve. I want us to evolve. And the only way to do that is to keep talking, to talk this through. So when I say you haven’t lost me, you have to take me at my word.”
“No,” J says. As simple as that, it’s exactly what he means.
“What do you mean, no?”