The Sixth Wedding #2
The next morning, J wakes to find a response from Tara that has the appropriate number of exclamation marks for the situation, plus a few heart emojis thrown in for emphasis.
She provides him the time and place for the wedding and tells him he shouldn’t go to any trouble to dress up, get a band, etc.
His appearance is already guaranteed to be a highlight of the wedding.
(J appreciates that he will be a highlight but not the highlight.)
Ten minutes after her first message, there is a second one.
Oh! The man I’m marrying is named Hugh. After years of online dating, I ended up meeting someone by joining a runners’ club!
I figured if anyone could find me charming after running 10K, I’d be a fool to let him go!
It’s his second marriage. It’s my first (which I think you know ?).
We’ve been together for two years now, which might seem a little soon—it does to my mom!
—but we’re both more than ready for the step.
On one of our first dates I told him about the song you wrote for me, and one of the first things he did after we moved in together—I still can’t believe he did this!
—was he somehow found an old payphone that still works (?!
?!?) and he had it installed in our kitchen.
His daughter (a handful!) thought it was super weird, but it’s one of my favorite things about our apartment.
And I guess I have you to thank for that!
Anyway, let me know if you have any questions.
And (oh, the awkward part!) if there’s a fee or anything else we can do (charity?) to thank you for doing this, please let me know.
I am sure you have hundreds of other ways to spend a Saturday night.
(And of course if you want to bring a guest and stay for the reception, please feel free.
..but don’t feel any obligation. As I said, I know you probably have plenty of other places to be!)
There is also an earlier message from Skye, from four in the morning (the tail end of their long, emotionally twisted day):
I couldn’t go to sleep without thanking you again for your song.
A lot of my friends have sent me videos of you singing it, and so far I haven’t been able to watch it without crying.
There’s something about it that makes me very happy and also something about it that makes me very sad, because I don’t know how someone I don’t know can see these things while people much closer to me can’t.
But my point is that it’s very special to me, and I would love to get your address so I can sew you a little something as a thank you .
No messages from V, but J isn’t particularly expecting any. It is still very early for a Sunday; J’s body is still clinging to Swedish time, but V hasn’t been living that way for a while now.
J goes for a walk, gets breakfast. He messages Tara to thank her for the details and to tell her that Hugh sounds great.
He messages Skye with his address, but also adds that he’ll be in New York for at least another week.
Finally, once the clock ticks past ten, he messages V a simple Good morning .
He figures it will apply whenever she’s awake. (Assuming it’s before noon.)
When this is done, he sits back down on his bed and stares at his hands without realizing he’s staring at his hands.
His thoughts have borrowed the energy from the rest of his senses, molding them into a profound indecisiveness.
Being in New York, in someone else’s apartment, feels like limbo.
He’s not on vacation—not really. He’s not on tour.
But he’s also not home. He knows he could launch himself into his emails; nobody he’s answering needs to know where he is, especially at a moment when the wakefulness of the time zones overlaps.
Except the placeless place of cyberspace also feels like limbo, perhaps more so than anywhere else.
An hour and ten minutes after he sent his morning greetings, V replies and forces his mind to moor itself again.
Thor and Meta have taken a helicopter ride upstate—I don’t even know what that means, except that I’m free for a few hours. Have you eaten ?
Since it’s eleven thirty, J isn’t entirely sure which meal he is or isn’t supposed to have eaten. Either way, the answer is: I’d love to meet up .
I promise to stay for the full meal this time, V replies. Then she sends him a link to a café in Brooklyn.
J wonders what it means, that she’s coming to his borough.
He remembers how nervous he was, the first few times they dated.
(Dated? Mated? Which was the primary instinct?) Partly he was nervous because of the way they’d met, with her as Tom’s date.
But mostly it was the twofold intimidation that comes from wanting to be with someone you find to be spectacular.
Their spectacular nature is itself intimidating, and you wonder how you could possibly measure up, because you feel they are inherently (pick any that apply) smarter/more beautiful/more comfortable in their skin/ more popular/happier/saner/sexier than you.
And then there is the intimidation of the wanting itself—it is so much easier to date or mate when you don’t particularly care about the results.
The more you care, the more you worry you will fuck it up.
And the more you worry you will fuck it up, the more intimidating it gets.
At the start of the relationship, J was certain that he was a better musician than V, and he soon discovered he was also much better at keeping his apartment clean.
But other than that...he was willing to concede that V might be his better in all other regards.
It was only when he got to know her more than it got more complicated, and the more complicated it got, the less intimidating it was.
It wasn’t that she became any less smart or sexy; it was just that these qualities were wedded to her more vulnerable qualities, her own bouts of doubt.
Comparison became situational, not empirical, and their relationship became a relationship, not a contest or a puzzle.
He liked that part.
It hasn’t gone back to the start now, but a new kind of intimidation has crept in. He handed her such power over his happiness, over his plans, without even realizing he had done so. Now, he has no idea how she will use this power...or if she will choose to relinquish it entirely.
He doesn’t want it back. He still wants her to have it. He also wonders if he’s a fool to feel that way.
Maybe V chose this place so they wouldn’t have the intermediary of a waiter.
They order at the counter, get their premade sandwiches handed over on white plates alongside their coffee.
As they walk to a table, they make small talk about the wedding.
V is wearing a casual purple dress that J remembers well; he takes some comfort that there’s a kind of continuity with her Swedish self, even if this New York City self seems like a more tired version.
“I wish I’d seen you there yesterday,” J tells V when they sit down. “I would have very happily escaped with you after the vows were done.”
“Yes, those vows.” V shakes her head. “The whole thing made me sad. I’m not even sure why.”
“The imbalance between them?” J asks, thinking of poor Skye.
“Maybe that. But honestly, they didn’t seem to mind the imbalance too much.
At least not in the beginning. I think that can be navigated, if both sides know what they’re doing.
It was just so...performative. And, look, I know all weddings are performative, and that you’re a wedding performer.
But now everybody is performing all the time, aren’t they?
I think it would be hard to be an actual performer during the mass performance our culture is becoming.
There are so many times when I’m sitting in meetings about Secret Project, thinking about how people are going to use it, and I have to tell you—it exhausts me.
All of it exhausts me. How performative we’ve all become.
But it’s not like I’m going to bring that up with Thor or the investors.
It’s the whole reason we’re there. To monetize people’s desire to control how they’re seen, to get gratification from how their words and images are received.
To give them the platform to exploit themselves.
..at least until the next platform comes along and makes ours a relic, a floating vessel of dead profiles lost in a sea no one sails anymore. ”
“Those certainly sound like the words of an exhausted individual,” J ventures. “You seem tired.”
V grunts at the obviousness of this observation, then says, “You think?”
“You need your sleep.”
This isn’t just an adage on J’s part. It’s something he and V have talked about.
While he has the ability to be both a night owl and an early bird, she grows shakier the less sleep she has.
Many nights he would come home very late from a gig and he’d crash on the couch, knowing that even the slightest noise in the bedroom might cause a ripple effect through her day.
V seems to understand that J’s words aren’t empty, that they are being offered by someone who knows her. She doesn’t have a sarcastic response. Just more tiredness.
“I’ve been trying to sleep,” she says. “Honestly, I have. And Thor is good about that—the workdays are long, but when they’re over, they’re over. The problem is more with the days themselves, and what they take out of me. That’s what it feels like at this point; the taking is outpacing the giving.”
“Can’t you get a few days off to recharge?”