“We should just call them toasters,” J suggests.
Olivia laughs—a loud, joyous burst of laughter. “Exactly. I guess I’m hoping the toasters aren’t too toasted. We’ve set up two mics—how ’bout you stay at one plug and I’ll stay at the other, and if they start to ramble on or tell stupid jokes about stupid things Jun and Arthur did that have nothing to do with them being a couple, we pull.”
“Sounds good,” J says. But what he’s really thinking is,I guess I have to go back inside.
“You’re the best,” Olivia replies. Then she takes a look at him and says, “Your poor balloons. Did you bring any extra? We have about two minutes, and I could help you put them on.”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Drat. Well, then...no rest for the wicked. Let’s go make some magic.”
J takes a deep breath and exhales. There’s no saying no to women like Olivia.
The wedding is drawing him back in.
“Do you have any role models for your relationship?” J had asked Jun and Arthur as part of their interview.
“Well, my parents,” Jun said. “They bicker all the time and love each other like bodies love oxygen.”
“I wonder if that makes my parents carbon monoxide,” Arthur said.
“They’re not that bad!”
“They’refine,” Arthur told J. “But their roles are a little too rigid for them to be role models.”
“What about outside of your family? Who else?”
Arthur looked instantly giddy upon landing on his answer. “Do you know the story about Genesis P-Orridge and Lady Jaye?”
J shook his head. (He did, in fact, know the story, but he wanted to hear how Jun and Arthur would tell it.)
“Genesis was in Throbbing Gristle,” Jun went on. “Which doesnotmean we want you to play any Throbbing Gristle songs at the wedding.”
“In fact, please don’t,” Arthur agreed.
“Anyway,” Jun said, “Genesis and Lady Jaye were married but they weren’t satisfied with that. They’d shared a kiss once that made them leave their bodies and become one and they wanted to feel like that again. So they started dressing alike—”
“As identically as possible,” Arthur continued. “But that wasn’t enough, either. So then they started to surgically alter themselves to be a single nongendered being, and invented their own identity:pandrogyne. Genesis got breasts. Lady Jaye got her eyes done to match Genesis’s. Beauty spots were tattooed on Genesis’s chin to echo Lady Jaye’s. And so on. They wanted to become awe,so that became their pronoun. Even after Lady Jaye died, Genesis kept referring to themself as we.”
“But doesn’t love require distance, separateness?” J asked.
“Of course,” Jun said. “But the way I see it, we’ve spent almost half our lives with separateness. We wasted so much time figuring things out, partly because the world made it so hard for us to figure things out. You don’t know what that’s like, to believe the world actively wants you to remain separate and alone. Maybe in a few generations, queer kids won’t know what that feels like, either. But for us—it took too much time and too much navigation to come together comfortably.”
“I don’t think we want to share the same body,” Arthur said, “but we do want to share the same heart. We’ve lived long enough with separate hearts. Let’s be together the rest of the way. Let’s live together, and then when we die, let our ashes be mixed in the same urn and buried together.”
“Making up for lost time,” J offered.
“Yes,” Jun told him with a sad smile. “There has been so much lost time. So doesn’t it make sense that we want to spend the rest of our lives found?”
The toasts are not as awful as wedding toasts can be; neither J nor Olivia needs to pull their respective plugs. Because Arthur’s father is the most uncomfortable with what’s going on, he gets the most tears when he gives in despite himself, calling Jun the piece that had been missing in their family, the piece that made the whole jigsaw suddenly make sense.
As the assembled crowd raises its glasses for the father’s toast, J looks over to the bar, where Straitjacket Heart is still perched, Hotline Bling beside her. He despairs slightly that she has not freed herself of him, but at least takes some solace in the fact that every time Hotline Bling’s tried to talk to her in the past five minutes, she’s shushed him so she could listen to the speeches.
Once Arthur’s father is done, it’s J’s turn at the microphone. Even though it is a single song, he feels much more vulnerable with this set, much more naked in the spotlight. In a concert setting, if he messes up, the only thing he’s ruined is his own reputation. But these performances always mean more. He has been asked to conjure a blessing, fill the room with this couple’s shared heartbeat. It is not at all in his nature to be confident that he can pull off such a feat.
He looks to Straitjacket Heart. From the stage, he can’t really read her expression. But he does see her nod, just once, so he can take the momentum from that nod and ride it into his opening chords.
There is no net here. No lyric sheet. Nobody wants a blessing that’s read from a piece of paper. No, it has to seem like the truth is sung straight from the soul.
