Laughing, Andreas and Kerstin join hands and run down the hill like schoolchildren at the end of the school day. The taxi waits just out of view.
“Do you need a ride?” Elin asks J.
“No, I’m good.”
“Well, it’s been nice to meet you.”
“Where are they going?”
Elin shrugs. “I have no idea.”
With that, she heads to her car, at a safe distance behind the married couple.
J packs up his guitar, pulls a water bottle from his rucksack, and takes in the view as he drinks.
The wedding is over so quickly, it would be easy to wonder if it actually happened.
But J senses Andreas is right—this is indeed something they will all remember.
Now that it’s done, now that he doesn’t have a song to retreat into, all J’s other cares seem to rise from the city and reenter his thoughts.
He can hear his own heart, but V can’t.
He needs to find a way to talk to her.
And he needs, right away, to start planning a fake wedding in Brooklyn.
THE FIFTH WEDDING
It is surprisingly easy to plan a fake wedding in Brooklyn.
J texts Julia, a guitarist in New York who plays in his band when he tours America. He knows she is a creature of Brooklyn, and also trusts her to keep the secret from V, who she’s only met in passing.
On it,she replies.
Five hours later, there’s a plan.
J’s desperation is so loud that it drowns out any possible alarms. So when Julia explains that the couple, Skye and Detroit, are polyam-orous performance artists who are willing to donate the night they’ve reserved at a Brooklyn performance space in order to “perform” a wedding, the only response J has is “That’s great!” There isn’t anything inherently alarming about polyamorous performance artists in Brooklyn performance spaces—it’s just that in this case, had J bothered to check their joint Instagram, he would have noticed that the worddisruptorscomes up a lot in their self-description, and the only recent review they’ve quoted (not from an actual reviewer, but from someone else’s Instagram) calls them “a mess so hot it’ssteaming!”
Skye is J’s point of contact, and when they refer to the event as a “wedding-slash-wedding deconstruction,” J doesn’t stop to ask whatthey mean by that. Instead, he focuses on the fact that Skye and Detroit have asked for two songs rather than one—one for each of them, “because otherwise we’ll feel overly defined as a couple.” J replies that he’ll do anything they’d like, as long as it looks like a wedding to anyone who isn’t in on the joke.
Julia will be away for J’s sudden visit and is happy to offer her apartment for his lodgings. This is a huge relief to J—New York City is many adjectives, but more than any other, it’sexpensive. He also likes that if he ends up staying with V for at least part of the time, he won’t feel like he’s paying for somewhere he isn’t sleeping.
He texts V to share his flight information and the details of the wedding. He sends this information at the start of her day, before work hours, in the hopes this will enable the quickest response. But it’s still two hours and three minutes before he receives a noncommittalthank u for letting me know.
J tells himself to play it cool, but he’s far too hot to do this effectively. In less than a minute, he’s replied,will I get to see you?
This time her response is instant.
I hope so. We’ll see when you get here. My days are not my own.
It’s that last sentence that J feels opens the door. The implication is clear, isn’t it? If her dayswereher own, she would be making plans to see him.
That’s what he wants to believe, and since there’s no reason to do otherwise, he believes it.
When V sends her text, she is standing in a bathroom stall in her office, because it’s the best chance she has for uninterrupted privacy. She doesn’t exactly know why she feels she needs to make such a retreat from her coworkers; it’s not about them, and more that this is the way she’s always been, looking for corners when the world gets a little too personal. As a girl, talking to her friends on thephone at night, it wasn’t enough for her to be behind her closed bedroom door. No, she needed to crawl under her bed, to hide there and talk.
It is not quite right to say that all these weeks, J has felt more theoretical to her than real. His presencehasbeen real—just at a remove. And in that remove, she’s felt she’s been slowly building, for the first time ever, a life of her own making. It reminds her of when she was a teenager and discovered how swimming would make her feel. Suddenly, she had a new kind of body, and that body had power. Now she has a new kind of life, and she’s still waiting to see if the result will be power or simply exhaustion.
