J does not stay to see them give Adam and Eve their happy ending.
THE FOURTH WEDDING
J decides that maybe it’s time to take a break from weddings.
He’s not in the mood for love. He and V have been in contact, but their conversations haven’t been those between lovers. J is not expecting reconciliation, but even negotiation or argument would be comforting at this point. Instead, it feels like they are trading Wikipedia entries summarizing their past few days, a bloodless rendition of a world gone right (for her) and wrong (for him).
J is too embarrassed to tell his friends what’s happened, in no small part because it isn’t entirely clear whathashappened. V has not said, “It’s over.” Even though she ignored the song he sent and his darkest-hour questions, she now answers his texts with something approaching promptness, as long as he doesn’t type anything that could be construed as emotional. He suspects that if he asks herAre you still my girlfriend? she will respondWhy are you asking me that? OrThe fact that you’re asking the question should give you an answer. OrIs that what you called it? Anything besides a yes or a no.
He tries to tell himself that there’s nothing to worry about, that this is the way they are. After all, he would often leave for weeks or even months of touring, and there wouldn’t be pressure to be inconstant touch. Or even significant touch. They had always been chill about such things.
He’s starting to wonder, though: What if that was, in fact, a problem? What if being so comfortable with being at a remove meant there’d been something missing all along?
They liked reaching out for each other when they were close by. But why hadn’t they ever done it when they were far apart? No long phone calls. No postcards or letters. Just a passionate going-away kiss and then a passionate welcome-back kiss, with everything blank in between.
He goes back to blaming the distance. Of course he blames the distance. V’s only response to Celestia’s wedding was to say,Maybe in the future, you need to insist they build you a bigger cake. If they were in bed next to each other, he knows the conversation would continue from there—What do you feel my ideal cake size is? And maybe thenIt depends on whether you’re wearing heels, doesn’t it?
But that’s not how their texting works. They might as well be using a transatlantic telegraph.
Meanwhile videos of him being yanked through the tiers have gone viral, and at first he wondered if his career was over, punch-lined to the curb. Not just his wedding career, but his entire career.
Instead it’s made him more popular. It hasn’t increased streams of his music, but his inbox is now flooded with wedding requests. Most of them involve him popping out of things.
It is very easy to say no to these, and to think he’s taken the wedding gigs too far.
What had his original wedding song said?
True love can be measured
Through these simple pleasures
They are waiting there for you to be discovered
Well, that was then and this is now.
These couples want a canary, not a Cassandra. J worries that if he attends one more wedding, he will become the person who raises an objection. Not to the specific couple (maybe), but to the principle. And maybe not even the principle of being married. No, to the con job that goes back to Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark—one by one, people giving themselves up to two by two.
What hurts is that he’s pretty sure by now he didn’t do anything wrong with V. He just didn’t do anything right enough.
J knows the sense of power he feels deleting all the requests that come in is pathetic. This, and only this, is something he can control.
No, he will not pop out of a giant éclair.
No, he does not do toddler birthday parties.
No, he does not want to tell a Swedish gossip blogger the “real” story behind the “wedding of the century.” (He suspects this is really Mikhail trying to see if he’ll abide by his NDA.)
No, he does not want to sing a wedding cake shop’s jingle for a radio ad. He didn’t even know that radio ads were still a thing.
He is done with weddings. Done done done.
That is, until Andreas calls.
Andreas is a relatively young guy who loves relatively old things. He and J met when J was looking for a vintage car to use in a music video. “Oh,” everyone told him, “you need to talk to Andreas. He’s the nicest guy in the world.”
Even though Andreas did not himself own a Rolls-Royce, he knew someone who did, and because Andreas indeed turned out to be quite possibly the nicest guy in the world, the owner was willing to let J drive his precious heirloom along the seaside while playing an acoustic guitar and singing about love gone wrong. Since then, J has returned to Andreas a few times for very obscure items, mostly as props and sometimes as gifts. In every exchange, Andreas has beenthe embodiment of kindness and graciousness—the sort of man who would not just give you the shirt off his back, but would then take out a needle and thread to make sure it fit perfectly. Even when they didn’t have any business to attend, J would get a call from Andreas every few months, asking him to drop by his store. There, Andreas would have an object that he thought would delight J—an old flashbulb from a 1940s camera, or a rare 45 of Al Bowlly and Ray Noble and His Orchestra singing “Hang Out the Stars in Indiana.” The fact that Andreas would never, ever accept payment for these items both endeared him to J and left J a little mystified. Surely no one could be this chipper, this generous all the time. They aren’t friends, really. But they’re not business associates, either. They’re just two guys who every now and then have their orbits connect.
When J sees Andreas is calling, he assumes it’s because another item has fallen into his possession that he feels compelled to pass J’s way.
