The Tenth Wedding
Eleven months later
It is the night before the wedding, and the brides and the wedding singer have broken into the hall where the ceremony and party will be held.
The brides do not particularly look like brides—there is nothing white or lacy about their outfits, and there’s nothing nervous in their expressions.
The wedding singer looks like a wedding singer, but only because he is carrying a guitar.
Broken into is probably not the right phrase—one of the brides arranged for this rendezvous with the help of the site manager, a rehearsal with no one else around.
The site itself is the Appel Room at Jazz at Lincoln Center, a remarkable space hanging over Columbus Circle, one wall a complete glass lookout over the street and Central Park.
Even at midnight, there is a steady stream of headlights and taillights, punctuated by the green-yellow-red signals of traffic lights.
The singer heads to the stage. The brides choose to sit in the third row, on the aisle.
“Are you ready?” J asks.
And Nadine, one of the brides, replies, “As we’ll ever be.”
About two months ago, J was interviewing Nadine and Frances on Zoom for the song for their wedding.
Nadine’s story was an inspiring one; she’d been married to a man who was relentlessly berating and possessive, making her feel both out of luck and out of options.
But then she met Frances and realized she didn’t need to be in a loveless marriage.
Nadine left her husband, and her lawyer got her an excellent settlement.
She enjoyed being on her own, but realized she enjoyed life even more when she and Frances were together.
One thing led to another. And now, here they were, two women in their fifties, one getting married for the first time, one for the second.
“Your relationship to love changes, depending on who you’re with,” Nadine told J. “You give up on it because you feel it’s given up on you. But it hasn’t. You just weren’t with the person who could help you reach it in its fullest.”
“Do you feel like a different person, now that you’re with Frances?” J asked.
Nadine shook her head. “I feel like I was always me. But I changed my shape for him in a negative way. And I’ve felt more my real shape with Frances.
Same thing with my relationship to love.
Love is change. I tried to bend it to make it work.
But it won’t allow itself to be bent for too long, not if you’re honest with yourself. ”
“So she found the strength to fix it,” Frances said.
“Something like that,” Nadine replied, not wanting to take the credit.
After hearing their story, J asked if they had anything else they wanted to add.
“Actually, we do,” Nadine said. “We appreciate you asking about our stories. But we were wondering...instead of writing about us, could you maybe write a song that sums up what you’ve learned from singing at all these weddings over the years?
We know that’s not what you usually do, but when we talked about it, we feel like we want to be the ones sharing our story at our wedding.
What we’d love if for you to touch on something greater, something bigger than us. That’s what we’d really love.”
No one had ever asked him this before.
“I’m not sure I know any more about love than anyone else,” J confessed.
Nadine waved this off. “I don’t believe that for a second.”
“Okay, I’ll try,” J promised. He really liked these two strangers, and also liked having a new assignment for once.
The riskiest part was trying to articulate what he’d learned about love.
He’d been down in the dumps about a relationship that had looked promising but had never really shifted out of neutral—this wasn’t the woman after V, but the woman after the woman after V.
Neither of these women had left a scar, only a slight irritation that went away quickly enough. With V, the scar was there, and he felt it from time to time, but it also didn’t take up as much of his skin as he’d thought it would.
They hadn’t stayed in touch. Or, more precisely, they’d only stayed in touch the same way that everyone else stayed in touch, through social media posts and occasional comments.
He hadn’t blocked her, nor had she blocked him.
That would have been too much of a statement for either of them.
So instead there are these passive infiltrations of information—a picture of her in her new (large) apartment; a picture of her in a helicopter with Thor and Meta; a picture of her more and more with a man who, with one click, J sees is an economics professor at NYU.
It’s like reading the summary of the new season of a TV show he used to watch.
And V has no doubt seen J’s photos from the road, plugs for gigs all over Europe.
He didn’t post about this trip to New York because it’s not a public performance.
And even though he is aware that at any moment he could turn a corner and find V, perhaps accompanied by her NYU professor “friend,” J also doesn’t feel any obligation to tell her he’s in town or ask her for coffee.
She remains past tense. Possibly past-past tense, if such a tense existed.
But it still took a while for him to come back around to love.
Preparing for Nadine and Frances’s wedding, he thought about the last wedding he’d played at—Janek from Warsaw had gotten back together with his girlfriend, so J had made a delayed trip to Poland to add his musical blessing to the ceremony.
And that was what it had felt like—a blessing, both to the wedded couple and to J himself.
Because that’s what music could be, wasn’t it?
At weddings and funerals. At the most intense moments and also the most mundane.
Music could make things better. Maybe not for any longer than the song lasted, but while the song was there, it always did some of the lifting of the moment.
The singer provided that lifting. The singing made everything momentarily lighter.
J thought about all the times he’d given up. And then he thought about all the times he returned. There was a reason music was always there for him. And part of that reason was the ability and the opportunity to share it.
That was something he’d learned.
Last, as an adjective, means the end.
Last, as a verb, means to endure.
Most of the songs he writes, most of the songs he wants to share, navigate this contradiction. Because this navigation—that is the gift he can offer to the couples he sings for. That is what he’s learned, and what he’s still learning.
J took his assignment for Nadine and Frances seriously.
He even thought of it in different terms: If he were to only write one more love song, what would he want it to say?
Would it be a falling-in-love song or a you-broke-my-heart song?
Which would represent love most accurately?
He wanted to ask his friends what they thought—he was sure Skye would have some ideas—but that wasn’t what Nadine and Frances had asked for; they wanted it to come from him, and from what he’d seen.
He thought of V. Of course he thought of V. But he wasn’t writing for her, or anyone who had come before her, or anyone who would come after her. He thought of all the couples he’d written songs for, trying to find the universal theme beneath their individual stories.
For weeks it eluded him. Then one night, he listened to the recording he’d made of his conversation with Nadine and Frances, and there it was, a single sentence buried in the middle:
Love is change .
What if he had turned to V the minute she told him about going to New York and said, “Hey, let’s do this thing together”?
What if he’d been able to set up a new version of himself as she set up a new version of herself?
Would those versions have found a way to be together, in the same way that, say, George and Lisbet managed to reunite even when the stakes were higher than they’d ever been before?
Or what about Arthur and Jun surrendering parts of each of their “I” in order to become a “We”?
Even Thor and Meta, who haven’t even reached the age of knowing what it’s like to be a grownup in the grown-up world.
..how many changes do they have ahead of them, both individually and as a couple?
The uncertainty doesn’t just come from wondering how well you know the person you love.
It comes from wondering how well you know who they will become, who you will become, and what that will mean for each other.
And then going for it anyway, based on the hunch that it’s going to work it out, that whatever changes you make will end up being compatible.
There are so many times you’ll want to give up.
And so many of those so many times, it’s right to give up.
But when love works?
That’s the giving up on giving up. That’s the song coming through the noise.
What more can he wish Nadine and Frances than the capacity to adapt, and adapt, and adapt? What more can he wish them but the shape-shifting persistence of love?
Now here he is, about to play the song to an audience of two. Nobody else has heard it first.
Yes, he can see V in its DNA...but mostly he sees his own experience woven in the helix of words and music.
It will become a song he’ll sing at weddings all the time, with the two original brides’ permission.
Many listeners won’t understand at first why he’s singing it, but by the time he gets to the end, most of the people in the room who’ve experienced love will understand what he’s getting at.
He looks at Nadine and Frances holding hands in the third row and flashes through all they must have gone through to get to this point.
He doesn’t really know them, but this wedding has given him a reason to get to know them a little, to be gifted with a sample of their music, and to give back music of his own.
The microphone isn’t on. The speakers are asleep. It’s just a man on a stage, using his voice to reach the couple in the audience.
He shares with them what he’s learned.
Every lovesong is a curse
At first so sweet at its arrival
But when I’ve written down its words
It stares back at me like a stuffed animal
The very thing it was to capture
vanished in the moment after
It just slipped right out of my little hands
New York City’s never done
If it was it wouldn’t be New York City
And you can jump into the Hudson
but the second after it’s a different entity
Loving you is loving a motion
A warm current in the ocean
That’s how I wanted my songs to be
So this is the last lovesong that I’ll sing
A promise to leave the heart open
To never fall in love with what’s been
And if I ever should write a lovesong again
I would set a key and a tempo
Then let you lead on the piano
and we’d just make it up as we go
That’s the only good lovesong I know
Every lover is a ship
Over time rebuilt and changed
Every board replaced bit by bit
Until all that’s left is the lover’s name
Sometimes I let go of the rudder
I close my eyes and shudder
And I whisper softly that I love her
Oh this is the last lovesong that I’ll sing
A promise to leave the heart open
To never fall in love with what’s been
To greet the unknown with a grin
This is the last lovesong that I’ll sing
An ode to whatever fate may bring
Kisses scattered to the wind
A lovesong to all that’s changing
When he is through, they applaud. He takes a bow, then walks off the stage to meet them in the aisle. They give him a long hug, then when it’s done, Nadine says, “That isn’t the last love song you’ll ever write, is it?”
“No,” he replies. “But you know what I mean.”
The brides smile, and at the same time, both of them say, “I do.”