The Ninth Wedding #3
But another part says, You need the money . This is the least Thor can do, after wrecking J’s relationship.
He writes back to Thor, congratulating him and Meta on their engagement even though he knows they’re already married.
He doesn’t mention the money, his roundabout way of accepting it.
J is no fool. he knows V will be at the wedding. They will have to see each other.
A month is not nearly enough time to plan a wedding, unless you don’t have enough money to afford options or you have so much money that options are limitless.
J wonders if V has somehow been roped into planning the whole thing.
Meta didn’t strike him as the wedding-plan type, especially when the wedding will be in a Swedish city she’s presumably never been to before.
Most likely, V is in charge of hiring the right planners and keeping Thor’s attention on the company and its tasks.
J can almost imagine how frustrated she must be.
He ventures a text: As I’m sure you know, I’m playing Thor and Meta’s wedding. So if you would like to put in any song requests, I have some influence. Though I suspect you have your own influence over the day ?
To which she replies: I have been trying to avoid all mention of it . And then she adds: That has nothing to do with your songs .
J smiles, but he also knows he’s hit a dead end.
Back when they were together, this would have been the start of a long conversation.
But while he’s slept, his instincts have shifted, at least in relation to her.
He knows he is lucky to have gotten a reply, and even luckier to have gotten a clarification.
So he draws short of another line of banter, and also draws short of a simple I hope you’re well .
He does hope she’s well...but he recognizes it’s no longer important for her to know that.
He tells his friends he’s okay, he’s moving on, and there are definitely times when he is so lost in his own head—talking with these friends, working on music, watching TV—that he doesn’t think of her.
But then he will go for a walk and recollection will tug him toward the restaurant where they celebrated birthdays, or the cinema where they argued for a good fifteen minutes about whether Wes Anderson was a genius or simply a creator of beautiful, empty vessels.
He has to completely avoid the block where V used to work, because he’ll imagine himself a year ago, waiting on the sidewalk to see her after, ready to take her to the bar down the street so she could vent her way through the day’s tension to arrive at the evening’s calm.
The block with her apartment is also a bane; instead of recalling the times they shared there, he instead imagines it a completely frozen space, a personal Pompeii.
From New York, Skye tries to tinker with J’s spirits, lift him from afar.
I understand how hard it is, they write.
It’s grief. It’s mourning. But it isn’t a death.
You helped me understand that, even though you didn’t know me at all.
You are a very good observer of strangers, and I think it would be a mistake to think you’re supposed to turn that observation onto yourself.
Every now and then, sure. But none of us can observe ourselves all the time.
Or the people we love. Our guesses just get more educated, the older we get.
And sometimes we still get them wrong..
.but that only makes us better guessers the next time .
J doesn’t want to think about a next time. He still knows there are women he could call up for dates, for sex, for momentary forgetting. But that feels like taking cough syrup to cure a broken leg.
He also knows he could drink. And he does drink, but only with friends, only as a part of conversations that he hopes won’t turn into laments.
On his own, he resorts to his guitar and his piano, just to see what songs come out.
One night he goes down a Paul Simon wormhole, and he can deny what he’s doing with “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” or “Still Crazy After All These Years,” but when he’s compelled to play “She Moves On” he has to admit to himself what he’s doing.
Stripped down to a guitar, the song doesn’t sound at all like it does on The Rhythm of the Saints .
It sounds like one of J’s songs. He doesn’t tear up as he sings it; he isn’t particularly moved.
But he plays the song five times in a row, as if it holds an essential piece of the puzzle, or at the very least a kinship with what he’s feeling now.
Two weeks before Thor and Meta’s wedding, she texts him.
All our business partners are flying in for the wedding. So please, I beg you, no Pamplona. Are we agreed ?
(The Pamplona wedding served far, far too much wine, and J had flubbed a lyric so that “here comes my baby” became “here comes the baby.” Many gasped, the bride’s mother jumped up from her seat, and the bride’s father, after the misunderstanding was cleared, still threatened violence.)
He texts back, You have my word. No Pamplona .
It’s going to be weird to be home .
Taken aback, J replies, I imagine it will be .
We should get coffee. Maybe the day before the wedding? It would be too weird to see each other for the first time at the wedding itself .
So this means she’s been thinking about it.
Of course, he writes back, trying to keep as neutral as possible. That makes sense .
He names a place and time. She accepts and says she’ll see him before they know it.
J emails Thor to set up a time to talk to him and Meta about their song.
You don’t need to talk to us, Thor replies. You’re already our friend!
J thinks it would be rude to dispute this, and he imagines they’re very busy, so he starts writing, based on what he knows.
Perhaps because Thor has called them friends, J feels he should give them a wedding gift beyond his song.
He decides to stop by the local indie bookstore.
Before he walks in, he checks to make sure that Glenda, one of V’s closest friends, isn’t behind the register.
Coast clear, he heads to the fiction section.
..only to hear Glenda greet him from another aisle, where she’s been reshelving.
“Are you here for the new Jonathan Franzen?” she asks—a judgment-laden question if ever there was one.
“No, just looking for wedding gifts.”
“Oh, yes... the wedding .”
J and Glenda are not friends, but they are not not friends. They’ve coexisted in V’s orbit, but more as planets than moons. From the way she says the wedding so knowingly, he understands that she and V are still talking all the time. Glenda has escaped Pompeii.
“It’s going to be quite an event,” J says, as if he knows more than he really does.
“That’s one way of putting it.” Glenda stops then and looks J over. In a gentler voice, she asks, “How are you doing?”
“Oh, you know. Keeping busy.”
“I kept meaning to reach out, but I wasn’t sure if you’d want me to.”
“No, no—that makes sense.”
“She doesn’t want there to be sides. She made it very clear to all of us that you didn’t do anything wrong, that it wasn’t one of those situations. It’s just her coming into her own, you know?”
“I am very aware of that—painfully aware of that,” J replies, perhaps with a little too much bite. “She is doing what’s best for her, which was ultimately not what was best for us. That sums it up, doesn’t it?” Then he feels compelled to add, “We’re meeting for coffee before the wedding.”
“I know. And I hope you know that it isn’t going to change anything.”
J laughs. “Well, it could make it worse. But I appreciate you warning me not to expect her to bring me roses.”
Glenda shakes her head. “You’re a good guy, J—and I imagine that makes it harder to make sense of what’s happened.
She’s never had thousands of people applauding her at the same time.
She’s never heard something she wrote playing on the radio, or in a movie.
She doesn’t have strangers from all over the world writing to her to ask to play at their weddings.
I’m not saying she’s been jealous—she hasn’t been jealous.
But she’s also been waiting for her turn, her chance to stop jumping from job to job, to create something herself. ”
“And you’re saying she couldn’t have done that with me?”
“I’m just saying that’s not the way it played out. And when the time came...no, never mind.”
“Please. Go on. This is helpful,” J says, not specifying whether it’s helpful for his recovery or simply his masochism.
“I’m just saying...based on my own observation, not on what she’s said to me, per se.
..even before New York came along, the two of you were stuck.
There wasn’t any talk of taking it to the next level.
You were happy where you were. But relationships like to progress.
And when the opportunity arose to take a next-level chance. ..neither of you went for it.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that when V got the call to go to New York, it didn’t occur to her to ask you along.
And it didn’t occur to you to join her on the adventure.
I’m not saying it would have worked out even if you’d gone.
But it would have been an expression of commitment that neither of you had ever really expressed to each other.
Again, I’m not saying you didn’t love each other.
You absolutely did. But when the moment came for you to love each other more, life took you on different paths.
And the path she’s landed on...it’s the right one for her. ”
It hurts to hear this, particularly because J knows Glenda isn’t saying it to be mean. She genuinely thinks it is helpful. And maybe it will be, eventually. But right now, it stings.
“I’m sorry,” Glenda says. “Truly, I am.”