The flight attendant comes by and asks V if everything is okay.
“How could it not be?” she replies.
The flight attendant smiles. But, really, how could she understand?
For V, this is the great adventure. She’s not doing it for survival. She’s not doing it because there’s anything she needs to escape. Thisis the big journey she always secretly (even to herself) had her bags packed for.
She wants to be open to whatever comes next. She wants to see where her anchor now lies.
Nearly two months later, V is living in New York and J is trying very hard not to be heartbroken. They are still together, he reminds himself. But he finds himself needing the reminders more and more.
She has been gone for seven weeks and five days, with no return date on the horizon. Things are going well for Secret Project. People are buzzing that “a new way to do socially constructive, invitation-exclusive media” (V’s phrase) could lure people to their computers and phones for extended amounts of time and ego. Thor has been heralded (mostly by V, but increasingly in the press) as an oracle of things to come. Interviewers don’t mention that he can still take up to half an hour to decide where to have dinner.
J and V talk every day. Well, most days. V’s days seem to pass more quickly than J’s, and there is also the six-hour time difference, which cruelly ensures that their conversations are more informational than carnal. When J is feeling sexy, V is inevitably caught in an afternoon meeting or navigating the aforementioned dinner plans. When V is feeling sexy, on the rare night where she feels sexy after a fifteen-hour workday, J is sound asleep. He tried waking up at six in the morning to chat with her, but some parts of him were more amenable to an early wake-up than others.
When V had left (“I promise, it’ll probably be two weeks at the most”), she’d sold it as the perfect opportunity for him to finish writing the songs for his next album—as if her presence impeded his creativity rather than inspiring it. This theory of hers has proven to be a spectacular failure. Not only is it hard for J to write new songs that aren’t mopey-in-a-bad-way, but her absence is now tainting the older songs that were fueled by his thoughts of her. Even ananodyne phrase like “I wake up to the sun poking through a hole in the shades” becomes a summoning of morning acts that can’t be repeated when your lover is an ocean away.
The only songs J can write are the wedding songs, because those allow the illusion of belonging to another couple’s lives. Two weeks after Lisbet and George’s wedding, he played for a more customary fee at a stranger’s wedding. Anton was a punkish guitarist, and he’d fallen madly for a cellist who was not from the same scene. Instead of playing clubs, Sara played with the National Orchestra of Sweden. She also had a superbly perverse sense of humor, so she didn’t mind at all that J’s wedding song contained the punch line:
I’m not known to be
a Classical fellow
But even Beethoven
could hear
You had me at cello.
What nobody had told J was that Sara was also minor Swedish royalty, and as a result, a prominent columnist from a prominent newspaper was present. The columnist absolutelyadoredJ’s song, and once Sara told her the backstory, she decided to write about what J was doing. This article, in the higher-selling Sunday edition of the paper, brought him a surge of wedding invitations—some of them quite enticing, financially. At first, J let them sit in his inbox, reading aloud the funnier requests (“a wedding entirely on horseback!”) to V. It was only after she had decamped (“I’m sure I’ll be back before you even notice”) and his desire to write his own songs had dissipated that he looked at the invitations in earnest.
J is old enough to know you should never do somethingjustfor the money. But he figures (correctly, for the most part) that if you have nothing else to do with your time except wonder how an extreme bout of long distance will affect your relationship, youmight as well go for the distraction that will make you some serious bank.
J relies on his wedding gigs to supply a significant share of his income; what started out as a lark spun off from a song became something a little more reliable than a lark. This is the reality of the music industry right now; if he wants to actually live off of music, he has to be a part of the gig economy. As streaming transformed how people listened to songs, music became like tap water, something people took for granted, that they expected to be there for a monthly subscription fee. And in this process, music itself was transformed into something that could only be profitable if it was sold via another commodity. There is no stability in being paid $0.003 every time your song is played. The choice for J was between having an energy drink logo tattooed on his forehead or finding a way to make his music exclusive somehow. Transform it from tap water into...well. Maybe not a bottle of Acqua di Cristallo, but at least a bottle of Evian.
So when times have been tight, J has found himself playing for some entrepreneur who talked to him endlessly about the music they’d heard at Burning Man. He’s played for a very sweet couple who had at least one arms dealer in the audience. He’s played for a “struggling artist” whose father was listed inForbesas the eighty-first richest person in the world. At that wedding, every guest got their own Tiffany bracelet to commemorate the day. As an afterthought, J was given the bracelet of a man who hadn’t shown up. He didn’t feel bad selling it for a nice profit.
When J scrolls through the post-column invitations, he finds one invitation in particular that dangles a sum equal to about half a year’s salary as a barista. He almost spills his coffee over his laptop when he sees this.
J emails this couple first.
As he waits for a response, he does a little googling and discovers that the groom-to-be works “in finance” (which is to say, he doessomething involving lots of theoretical money that J will never even try to understand). The bride-to-be owns a boutique named after herself. Its logo is her name in cursive leopard-print. She has far more Instagram followers than a boutique owner would ever ordinarily have, especially in Sweden. It’s from this that J deduces she is of that strange breed known asinfluencer—people known for being known who leverage their known-ness exquisitely.
These should be warning signs, but the dollars signs block them out.
J hears back from the bride-to-be’s assistant within an hour, even though the particular hour is midnight. He wonders if the assistant is in another time zone or if she is always on standby.
A video interview is set up for the following Tuesday, at precisely 6:15 p.m.
J has no idea whether he is going to be the interviewer or the interviewee.
Since he is up after midnight, J calls V.
“Oh, hello,” she answers.
“You sound surprised it’s me,” J observes. “Didn’t you see my name before you answered?”
“I just figured it was late there. I’m surprised you’re awake.”
