When V returns to the table, J asks her how the call went.
“I have to keep reminding myself that when I was nineteen, I could barely remember how to figure out a tip, not to mention budget my spending. And Thor’s trying to run a company. It’s not his fault he’s not an adult yet.”
“So you get to be the adult?”
“Isn’t that strange?” V says. “My nineteen-year-old self would be disgusted.”
“And what would she say to me asking you to dance again?”
“Honestly? She’d have no concept of being here. She’d be in her dorm furtively masturbating to one of the Backstreet Boys whilepretending to be masturbating to Rilke. So to hell with her. Let’s dance.”
Lisbet doesn’t breathe a word to J about his song, positive or negative. She just says to him in parting what she’s saying to all the other guests—that it was lovely to have him there.
But George—George goes out of his way to pull J aside at the end of the night.
“If you get lucky,” George says, “every once in a while, you find someone who loves you so much that you’re not troubled by the meaninglessness of it all. By that measure, right now, I am a lucky man. A very, very lucky man.”
They hug each other goodbye. It lasts longer than it usually would.
“Good luck,” J finds himself saying.
And George has the grace to reply, “You too.”
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 jetplane. 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.
