The Seventh Weddins #3
It ends up that Nick Andrews, the reporter, is indeed a friend of Skye’s, but wasn’t at the wedding because of his “conscientious objector status.” In other words, he wasn’t there because he’s never liked the way Detroit treated Skye, and that means he’s one of the people Skye has turned to now.
Meanwhile, they told Nick about J’s wedding-singer gigs, and about how helpful J has been, and Nick, a staff writer at The New Yorker, got the idea of pitching a story about J to Talk of the Town.
You have the right profile—obscure enough, but not too obscure, Nick writes.
And the weddings are a great hook. Will you be back in town in the next couple of weeks?
And would you be up for doing something if my pitch lands ?
J has appeared in The New Yorker before, but always as a listing, never a subject. He writes the reporter back and says he’ll be back in New York in a few days. Then he writes Skye to thank them (and also to make sure Nick’s email isn’t a prank).
He is eager to tell someone else the news—but there’s no one in Leipzig, or in the entirety of Germany, really, for him to tell.
So he calls V again.
And again it goes to voicemail.
This time he leaves a message. “I know how much you love The New Yorker . Well, guess who they want to talk to. I’ll give you a hint: You’ve slept with him repeatedly, and I sleep with him every night. Call me back.”
It’s a weekend, and even if she’s working, she should be able to check her voicemail and call him back.
J is left to wait in a hotel room, which is second only to a hospital in terms of worst places to wait for someone to call back.
V does not call back.
J can think of a hundred things she could be doing instead of checking her phone.
Driving! (Except she doesn’t have a US license.) Hiking!
(He checks the weather in New York, and it’s not great for hiking.) Napping alone!
(Possible.) “Napping” with someone else!
(J doesn’t want to think about this option.) Perhaps she’s stuck underground in a subway car, delayed by a jumper on the tracks.
Just call me, J thinks. I want you to call me .
But this appeal backfires, because it makes him even lonelier when it doesn’t work.
It doesn’t take long for J to fall into the pit—the one that’s even worse because he feels he dug it himself, then forgot it was there.
It’s not a big pit—it is, in fact, the perfect shape of his own body.
He wonders, is this all his life will ever be—moving from hotel room to hotel room, singing about love without ever making it work for himself?
The priest’s unfair words about midwives come back to him—what if he is nothing but a romantic bystander, a charlatan who convinces couples he knows more than he really does?
What if it’s this, more than anything else, that V has recognized?
What if she was his best shot, and he missed?
He thinks all these thoughts, and the pit doesn’t give them any room to dissipate. They are incessant. And behind them, a dog is barking, barking, barking.
J loses hours this way. The thing that could free him from the pit is a call from V, even a text.
But his phone remains silent.
Any power he felt in the church is gone now. The balance of the aloneness has tipped, and he feels separate from the rest of the world, separate from the place he should be.
J’s DJ set will be after the meal at the reception, so he receives a table card just like any other guest. Before he goes to Table 23, he stops off the spot by the dance floor where his laptop will be set up. Everything seems in order.
Table 23 is near the dance floor, but not particularly near the bride and groom’s table—this is the Pluto of wedding tables, at such an orbit that guests may debate whether they’re part of the wedding at all.
It is a table for ten, and four people are seated when J arrives.
One is a very, very old man who stares off into the distance like he’s waiting for a steamship; when he breathes, which is infrequently, his lungs sound like a broken whistle.
Next to him are two women in their fifties or early sixties who are clearly sisters, if not twins.
And then there is a slightly older man, who is walrus-like in both his shape and demeanor, seated at a one-chair remove from the closest woman.
“Welcome to the Losers’ Table,” the man says when J has taken a seat.
“Don’t listen to him,” one of the sisters says.
“It’s true. I checked every single place card. We are the only adults here who don’t have dates.”
“Pam is my date,” the second sister says.
“Will you listen to yourself?” Walrus Man spits out. “Did you take your sister to your dances in high school, too?”
J introduces himself, aiming the introduction more at the sisters than at the man. The sisters, Pam and Sam, introduce themselves back. The elderly man nods, then returns to seeking his steamship. The more garrulous man focuses on buttering a roll.
“Elgar here is Carl’s great rival,” Sam explains, gesturing to the butterer.
“Regarding scholarship and Bach,” Elgar huffs. “I was not his rival for Imogen. He can have her.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Sam says. “Most people don’t.”
“I thought your song this morning was lovely,” Pam adds. “I mean, we had to leave halfway through. But I wanted to hear the rest of it!”
A server comes bearing salads.
“Do you know if there will be others joining you?” the server asks.
“Those seats are extra,” Elgar replies. “Just in case anyone becomes single during the reception. There’s got to be a place for them to be banished.”
“Is he always like this?” Pam asks Sam.
“Believe me,” Sam says, “it’s worse when he’s flirty.” Then she gestures to the seat next to Pam and tells J, “Join us.”
At first it feels awkward to J to ignore Elgar throughout the meal, as he, Sam, and Pam turn to talk to each other and, occasionally, the older man, who appears to be an old friend of either Imogen or Carl’s now-deceased grandparents.
This conversational avoidance doesn’t stop Elgar from ridiculing the proceedings, from the bride and groom’s entrance (“I guess she finally wore him down”) to her father’s toast (“I hear he’s been married four times, so he’d know how to do this”) to the choice of music the string quartet is playing during the meal (“Ask not for whom the Pachelbel tolls, because it might just toll for you”).
J has encountered men like this for years, usually in all-male spaces—men for whom a lack of love has turned malignant, with side effects of blame and hostility.
Pam and Sam are better at tuning Elgar out.
They ask J about his singing, and after a digression about his career that gives him the opportunity to mention the New Yorker email (“Their crossword is a joke”—Elgar), the discussion turns to love stories, and how everyone has a favorite story about love.
It doesn’t take much prodding for Pam to volunteer her own.
“This was in the nineties, when I was a young doctor working for Médecins Sans Frontières. We were in Bosnia, and it was relentless work. Most rewarding work I’ve ever done, but relentless.
There was such a shortage of doctors that we worked in shifts, and since I had always been a night owl, I always took the night shift.
We all shared quarters, so while I was at the hospital, someone else would sleep in my bed.
And then when that person went off to the day shift, I’d go and crash.
“I always went to the same bed, and when it was time to leave, I’d take my sheets and fold them into a box underneath. An hour or so later, the second person would come, take out their own sheets, and go to sleep. We never saw each other.”
“Of course you didn’t,” Elgar grumbles.
“Shush. I know this sounds like something I’m making up, but I swear it happened.
From offhand comments by other people, I knew the man I shared the bed with was Belgian, and from the way the bed smelled when I returned, I knew he smoked.
It wasn’t a fancy mattress, and sometimes I’d come back and his shape would still be there.
It was like I was sleeping in his shadow. Naturally, I was intrigued.
“One day, probably three weeks in, I came back and his sheets were still on the bed. While I was folding them, the scent was enticing—I wasn’t much of a smoker, but the times I’d smoked had been memorable, and at that moment, I felt an actual craving.
Lo and behold, when I went to put the sheets in his box, I found a pack of cigarettes there.
At first, I felt he owed me a cigarette, because of the sheets.
So I nicked one and had the best time smoking it.
It was only after, when I was trying to fall asleep, that I felt a little guilty, like I had broken some kind of pact by going into his things.
I wrote him this note, saying ‘I couldn’t resist taking one—I hope that was okay.
’ When I got back from my shift there was a cigarette waiting for me, with a note that said, ‘Figuring you might need this.’ The next morning I left an apple on our pillow as a thank you and a note saying I hoped he’d had a good night, all things considered.
He left me chocolate the next time, and more cigarettes.
“It went back and forth like this for about two weeks. It would have been so easy for us to find each other—all we’d have to do was slip out on break and go back to the house—but neither of us did that.
We just left each other presents and notes, until one morning I came back and there was a whole pack of cigarettes, and a note that said goodbye.
It’s probably the sweetest, most passionate relationship I’ve ever had. ”
“God, I love that story,” Sam says with a sigh.
Elgar just laughs.
J figures they’ll ignore him, but Pam says, “What? Say what you want to say, Elgar.”