The Third Wedding
Two weeks later, V is on a plane to New York.
Nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then everything happens—that’s how it feels to V.
How do you react when the possibility that’s been dangling in front of you is suddenly in your hands?
All she could do was say goodbye to her apartment, say goodbye to her friends, say goodbye to J, without being able to say with any certainty when she’d return.
It should feel terrifying.
It does not, in fact, feel terrifying.
Her gut is telling her they are going to ace this test; Thor and the tech team have cast a spell over the financiers, and V is going to do her best to make sure nothing wobbles.
In the meantime, she wants to enjoy this flight.
She and Thor were given business class seats—which, they discovered, could be folded down into beds.
Even though Thor is a programming savant, he still reacted with glee upon seeing the amenity fortress the airline provided.
V was right there with him, snapping photos to send her friends before she had to turn her phone off.
(This was before she understood she had free wi-fi.)
“We’re traveling in style!” Thor proclaimed from across the aisle. V couldn’t discern a single ounce of nervousness within him. This was also part of his gift.
Thor fell asleep before they’d left Swedish airspace, but V has stayed awake well past the last European land mass.
Once upon a time, she might have imagined that such a journey would make her feel the pull of home even stronger—Gothenburg was where she’d anchored her life, so it made sense for the tug to come from what was being left behind.
But instead, V has the strange sensation that she’s tethered to the future, and that her anchor has been shifted to New York before she’s even gotten there.
She has no idea what any of this means. All she knows is how it feels.
There’s an echo here: That moment, age sixteen, when she took the things that mattered to her from her room and left her parents’ house.
Their mess, their noise, had infected her, and she knew she had to get out before it turned her into the people they had become—drunk and angry, drunk and sad, drunk and bitter.
Only with distance could she understand that not everyone was so hateful, and that finding an unhateful home was worth all the hardship of making a new life from scratch.
Her best friend Glenda’s family had taken her in, and then a year later she’d had her own place.
..with three roommates. A year after that, she moved in with the first of a string of non-starter boyfriends.
It wasn’t until she was in her mid-twenties that she finally understood what it meant to live alone.
Later, when she met J, she loved that he understood the value of this.
While they’d talked about living together, they agreed that having separate spaces worked well.
When she’d left her parents’ house, she had mostly felt resentful. It was only later that she felt grateful. Now, there isn’t resentment. But there is gratitude, even though she knows it comes at a cost.
She and J had dinner last night, and she could tell he was putting on a brave face.
There was some irony in this; he traveled all the time on tour, and she had grown very used to him leaving on a jet plane.
Of course, the next line of that song is “don’t know when I’ll be back again”—something that was never the case with J, but was true now for V.
“You go to New York all the time,” V reminded J. “You have friends there. It’s not like I’m moving to Perth.”
“ She’s moving to Perth ,” J had spontaneously crooned over the dinner table. “ So far from the land of her birth. / I think she’s taking all my mirth.../ but I’m proud of her, for what it’s worth ”
“I appreciate that,” V had said. And she still appreciates it now, as she pushes back her absurdly expensive plane seat and looks out at the pulsing lights at the edge of the plane’s wing. But it’s only a minor chord in her mind’s current symphony.
She always knew she’d make this next step in leaving home.
She just never imagined she’d leave like this.
First class, with a nineteen-year-old genius as her flying companion.
There’s a part of her that wishes she’d had the bravery to leave at eighteen, to forgo the first non-starter boyfriend, put her prized possessions in a backpack, lose that backpack at a train station, and then discover there were prizes to be found all around the world.
She knows she has wired herself to be responsible—that is, after all, why she’s indispensable to Thor and Secret Project.
But any person wired for responsibility looks every now and then at the fuse box with longing.
She knows how strange it will be for J. She’s been acting like his anchor, his Penelope. Which she knows is overstating it...but, again, it’s how it feels. Or how it’s felt. Up in the air, he feels a long way away. She is not waiting for him for anything. He may have to wait for her.
The flight attendant comes by and asks V if everything is okay.
“How could it not be?” she replies.
The flight attendant smiles. But, really, how could she understand?
For V, this is the great adventure. She’s not doing it for survival. She’s not doing it because there’s anything she needs to escape. This is the big journey she always secretly (even to herself) had her bags packed for.
She wants to be open to whatever comes next. She wants to see where her anchor now lies.
Nearly two months later, V is living in New York and J is trying very hard not to be heartbroken. They are still together, he reminds himself. But he finds himself needing the reminders more and more.
She has been gone for seven weeks and five days, with no return date on the horizon.
Things are going well for Secret Project.
People are buzzing that “a new way to do socially constructive, invitation-exclusive media” (V’s phrase) could lure people to their computers and phones for extended amounts of time and ego.
Thor has been heralded (mostly by V, but increasingly in the press) as an oracle of things to come.
Interviewers don’t mention that he can still take up to half an hour to decide where to have dinner.
J and V talk every day. Well, most days.
V’s days seem to pass more quickly than J’s, and there is also the six-hour time difference, which cruelly ensures that their conversations are more informational than carnal.
When J is feeling sexy, V is inevitably caught in an afternoon meeting or navigating the aforementioned dinner plans.
When V is feeling sexy, on the rare night where she feels sexy after a fifteen-hour workday, J is sound asleep.
He tried waking up at six in the morning to chat with her, but some parts of him were more amenable to an early wake-up than others.
When V had left (“I promise, it’ll probably be two weeks at the most”), she’d sold it as the perfect opportunity for him to finish writing the songs for his next album—as if her presence impeded his creativity rather than inspiring it.
This theory of hers has proven to be a spectacular failure.
Not only is it hard for J to write new songs that aren’t mopey-in-a-bad-way, but her absence is now tainting the older songs that were fueled by his thoughts of her.
Even an anodyne phrase like “I wake up to the sun poking through a hole in the shades” becomes a summoning of morning acts that can’t be repeated when your lover is an ocean away.
The only songs J can write are the wedding songs, because those allow the illusion of belonging to another couple’s lives.
Two weeks after Lisbet and George’s wedding, he played for a more customary fee at a stranger’s wedding.
Anton was a punkish guitarist, and he’d fallen madly for a cellist who was not from the same scene.
Instead of playing clubs, Sara played with the National Orchestra of Sweden.
She also had a superbly perverse sense of humor, so she didn’t mind at all that J’s wedding song contained the punch line:
I’m not known to be
a Classical fellow
But even Beethoven
could hear
You had me at cello.
What nobody had told J was that Sara was also minor Swedish royalty, and as a result, a prominent columnist from a prominent newspaper was present.
The columnist absolutely adored J’s song, and once Sara told her the backstory, she decided to write about what J was doing.
This article, in the higher-selling Sunday edition of the paper, brought him a surge of wedding invitations—some of them quite enticing, financially.
At first, J let them sit in his inbox, reading aloud the funnier requests (“a wedding entirely on horseback!”) to V.
It was only after she had decamped (“I’m sure I’ll be back before you even notice”) and his desire to write his own songs had dissipated that he looked at the invitations in earnest.
J is old enough to know you should never do something just for the money.
But he figures (correctly, for the most part) that if you have nothing else to do with your time except wonder how an extreme bout of long distance will affect your relationship, you might as well go for the distraction that will make you some serious bank.