The Seventh Weddins #2
Just past noon, J puts on his suit and walks to the church.
It is only as he nears it that he fully appreciates that he’s about to play at a site where Bach and Mozart once played.
Of course, if you count the choir, tens of thousands of other people have also sung there over the centuries.
But how many have played their own songs?
The church itself more than lives up to its history.
On the outside, it looks like an alpine lighthouse has fallen into a more traditional cathedral from time immemorial.
The sanctuary inside is striking in its simplicity—a white skeleton of pillars ribbed in red at the top as the ceiling soars.
Toccata and Fugue in D Minor is playing as he walks up, as if to remind everyone of all that the walls have absorbed over the years.
A crowd has already gathered, speaking both British-inflected English and German.
J feels a little silly flagging down an usher and asking to be directed to the priest.
..but that’s what he’s been instructed to do.
The usher just shakes his head, and at first J thinks it’s a refusal, but then the usher points to another usher who explains after J introduces himself that the first usher doesn’t speak English.
J is then ushered into the back corridors of the church, ultimately landing in the sacristy.
In the rooms around him, J can hear the choir gathering, tuning themselves. A string quartet bows in the distance.
About twenty minutes before the service begins, a man who has to be the priest comes into the sacristy and nods at J.
J nods back, and wonders if the priest, too, only speaks German (as well as Latin, presumably).
He is an older man, very serious looking, with sharp features and small round glasses.
“You must be the singer,” the priest finally says, almost dismissively.
“I am, yes,” J confirms.
The priest calls out a name, and another man pops into the doorway.
“This is the organ player,” the priest says.
“Hello,” J greets.
The organ player nods back, then looks to his boss.
With as few words as possible, the priest says that he will signal J when it is his time to sing. There will be no mic, no amplification. J’s song will see the wedded couple out of the church at the end of the service; J must keep singing until the last person has filed out.
The priest doesn’t ask J if he has any questions. Instead, he dismisses the organ player, then turns away from J and puts on his vestments.
“So why did you become a priest?” J asks. In a sacristy, he imagines this amounts to small talk.
“For the love of God,” the priest answers. He almost sounds sarcastic, but because the priest is German, J can’t tell if he’s being mocked, if the concept of religion is being mocked, or if this is just a very straightforward answer.
The answer is so fiercely punctuated that J figures this will be the end of their exchange. But then the priest, with his back still to J, asks, “Why do you sing at weddings?”
J has a usual answer to this, but he tries to make it more elaborate for the priest.
“Singing at weddings make me feel like a kind of midwife,” J replies. “It’s like I’m delivering these people, like babies, into the next phase of their lives.”
He has to imagine neither Bach nor Wagner gave this particular answer. But, in fairness, he’s not sure they ever played weddings.
At first, J doesn’t think the priest has heard, since his answer gets such a lack of response. But then, fully vestmented, the priest turns and says, “Yes...and like a midwife you stand at the middle of life, but still on the side. You observe and study but you don’t really participate.”
When J finds himself at a loss for a response, the priest humor-lessly nods once and leaves the room. About two minutes before the start of the service, an altar boy comes over and leads J to the spot where he’ll wait. Not in the middle of the service, but on the side.
Carl and the rest of the wedding party are waiting at the front, by the altar. Then a pipe organ begins to play Mendelssohn’s Wedding March .
J has never heard this piece played at a wedding before, and if it weren’t for the setting, he might think it’s a joke.
It sounds like a Transylvanian circus processional, delivered with perfect solemnity.
V would absolutely love it, for its garish audacity.
But V is not around to appreciate it, and when J looks around to see if there’s anyone else he can share a smile with, he sees only the choir members, who have clearly been trained to match their expressions to that of the priest.
The ceremony continues along these somber tones, with Imogen walked down the aisle by her father and conveyed to the space next to Carl.
Bach is evoked far more often than love.
The priest speaks of Imogen and Carl’s holy union, but he seems more interested in the holy part than the union.
It feels to J as if they’ve all been sucked into a much earlier century, and that the marriage has been arranged to shore up a lineage or acquire a dowry.
There’s no mention of how Imogen and Carl met, or indeed why they’ve chosen to be married.
It’s all very by-the-book, and there’s no question which book it is.
J figured he’d be the grand finale, but now he realizes he’s meant to be the afterthought, the outro, not even the first song after the movie ends, but the second one, playing as the names of the prop handlers and finance executives are listed.
For a moment, after Imogen and Carl exchange their vows and are pronounced man and wife, J thinks the priest has forgotten him entirely.
When Imogen and Carl kiss, a cheer rings out from a few people and is quickly swallowed by the silence of the rest. It’s only as they turn to leave the church that the priest shoots his steely glance J’s way.
There will be no introduction here. J is meant to simply step out of the shadows. Which is exactly what he does.
In a cave in Lascaux
Before Lascaux was called Lascaux
Scribbled on the cold cave wall
“We were in love”
Shades of hematite
Manganese oxide
Memories lost forever
Captured in a drop of amber
We were here at the same time
And what a time to be alive
We were here at the same time
It was a time to be alive
It is such a peculiar feeling, to sing in a cathedral. As he sings, it is as if he’s also following his words as they travel into the air, as if he can feel the heights they reach and the emptiness they move through.
In a men’s room stall
Scribbled on the bathroom wall
For a good time call
Imogen and Carl
Longtime listener, first-time call
A trucker with a southern drawl
Breathing hard over the line
Said I can’t believe that we are
On Earth at the same time
And what a time to be alive
We are here at the same time
What a time to be alive
J closes his eyes and keeps singing. He can sense everyone else moving away from him, the space they leave behind. His voice echoes back to him, reverberates through the eaves.
Carved into an old oak tree
A rugged heart. I + C
You find an old guitar
and you play Bach’s Suite no. 1 in G
We leave it in the canopy
and over time the guitar’s body
is swallowed up by the tree
performing the slowest melody
as each string snaps successively
Stretched out over a century
An automated music piece
no music sheet, the title simply reads:
We were here at the same time
It was a time to be alive
We were here at the same time
It was a time to be alive
When he opens his eyes, he is alone.
Does he have the church to himself, or does the church have him to itself?
Is it possible for the answer to be both at once, and for his aloneness to be in such equal balance as well?
Having omniscience over the moment, and the feeling of power that comes from that.
And also having the moment completely unshared, completely solitary, and the feeling of isolation that comes from that.
Both feelings sublimely coexisting—as they always do, but not usually in such stark relief against the rest of life.
J keeps singing. Not for anyone else. Not for the pillars or all the centuries they represent. He takes the moment and sings for himself, to hear his voice as he’s never heard it before.
We were there at the same time
It was a time to be alive
We are here at the same time
It is a time to be alive
His voice lifts on the final note, and then he watches to see where it goes. Like Bach’s, like Wagner’s, like Mendelssohn’s, his work is invisible, and yet it has a chance to endure.
You don’t have to believe in any particular deity to feel gratitude. J lingers in the silence for a moment and bows his head, grateful for this unexpected gift of time and place. Then he returns to the sacristy before anyone else can step into the scene and make it any less his.
There is an afternoon’s pause between the ceremony and the reception.
J calls V to tell her about what happened, but the call goes to voicemail, and he doesn’t want to say anything about it there.
In his room, he starts to think about the ceremony in terms of a song, and he begins to free-write in his notebook.
Then he fiddles around with his DJ set some more and checks his email.
One address catches his eye—it’s not a name that he knows, but the email address is from The New Yorker .
Normally, he would figure it was just a solicitation from the subscription office, but the subject line reads: Friend of Skye’s, curious about doing a piece .