“I don’t even think we slept together!”
“You can’t remember?”
“I’m sure of it,” J says. (He’s not.)
“What I’d suggest is that you turn it into a wedding song. Change the last verse or something. Take yourself out of it. Make it about them.”
“That’s not what she asked me to do.”
“Trust me. It will be better for her if Hugh doesn’t think you’re serenading her with your lost romance on their wedding day.”
“It wasn’t a lost romance!”
“To you. You have no idea what it was to her. People rarely connect in identical ways. You cannot determine how much a moment matters for the other person.”
J wonders how this applies to whole relationships, if what V is saying is also about the two of them. But she doesn’t extend the statement in their own direction, and instead changes the subject and asks about some friends back home. They spend the rest of the meal like that, in the safer harbors of other people’s shores. At the end of lunch, he asks if they can meet up again, and he decides to take it as a good sign that she doesn’t say no or that she isn’t sure, and instead says they can figure out a date once she sees how the work week is going to play out. She assumes J will be free whenever, and he doesn’t challenge this assumption, because they both know it’s true.
“Look,” V says as they’re leaving, “about that song for the wedding. I still don’t think you get it, but I think I can help. You see, at first, even for me, when you wrote a song and I knew that it was about us, or inspired by us, I made the mistake of thinking that it was only about us, that it was basically a message from you to me. It took time for me to realize that it wasn’t only about us, that even if I was an element and you were an element to it, the song wouldn’t work unless it tapped into larger elements. If anything, by trying to figure out you and me, you were also trying to figure out bigger things, more often than not love. It was still interesting for me to hear the songs and to try to figure them out myself. But I knew that even if I was inside the song, it was never really mine. Now, I’m not saying you had the same kind of relationship with this woman; I know you didn’t. But odds are, she’s never been a partof any other person’s song. So she will want to think it’s more hers than it really is. And you don’t need to correct her, if it means something to her. You just need to shift it a little to be less about her and more about her and her husband, for their wedding. You see what I’m saying?”
J wants to ask her more, wants to ask what she hears in his songs. What does she find about herself? What does she find about him?
But she’s already leaving; their conversation is already over. So he simply nods, and they say goodbye. Later that afternoon, J decides maybe he should play around with Tara’s song a little bit.
It does seem that time has proven the song right, at least in terms of payphones: They have completely disappeared from the streets of New York. J can even spy some of the alcoves they once called home; now only the metal shells remain, sometimes with a cord dangling out like a dead creature’s tail. J is struck by this aspect of time, how you never know exactly what is going to disappear, and when. Things that work can still become obsolete. The only way to avoid this fate is to be the beneficiary of a sentimental connection—there’s no other real explanation for why vinyl records remain. Our attachments carry a value. With relationships as well as curios.
It’s not too much of a stretch to think that, theoretically, in a year or two, couples won’t even need him anymore. If they want a personalized wedding song in the style of Ed Sheeran, or Taylor Swift, or the Beastie Boys, all they’ll have to do is type their request into an AI and something will spew out. But will that song really know them, the way a human can know them?
J wanders too far, too much. He realizes he needs to add some structure to his days if he’s going to stay here and not rely on V’s availability. He scrolls down the contacts in his phone and texts a few who live in New York, including the drinking buddy whomessaged him earlier. He also messages Skye again and asks if they want to get coffee or take a walk in a park.
The only way out of limbo is to make plans. So he makes plans.
He and skye meet at a Van Leeuwen and, cones in hand, find a bench in Tompkins Square Park. J feels strangely suggestive as he licks his salted caramel ice cream, futilely trying to prevent the melt from trailing down his fingers. Somehow Skye manages to keep their cone intact without flashing too much tongue.
When they first saw each other, Skye repeated what they’d said in their message about how much J’s song had meant to them, what a special evening it had been, and so on. But underneath all the happy words, J could easily spot a restlessness, a sleeplessness beneath. If anything, the exhaustion seems even more pronounced than V’s; J is starting to wonder if he is the only person in New York who gets a good night’s sleep.
Once the two of them take the last bites of their cones and sit down on the bench, J intends to ask about Detroit and where things stand after the fake wedding. But before he can, Skye asks how things are going with V, and J finds himself explaining that she’d been at the wedding, and that just when he thought she was going to shut off from him completely, she seems to have turned on a backup generator.
“The problem is, she seems to think I’m a figure from her past, not her future. I don’t know what to do about that,” J confesses.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Skye says, “but I’m starting to think that I know how she feels. Even if what she feels is wrong, in terms of you, it might be right for me, in terms of Detroit.”
“Did you have a fight?”
“Have you ever gotten to the point in a relationship where you’re not even sure what counts as a fight anymore?”
“Of course.”
“Well, I think Detroit and I have been fighting for a long time now. I’ve gotten so used to it that I don’t even notice. Then, after theparty...he was so triumphant, like a baby king basking in a parade that had been thrown in his honor—confirmation that heisthe center of the world, as he’d always assumed. I was upset, and he was justup. And it would be one thing if he was oblivious, if he was so high that he couldn’t see my low. But he saw it, alright. Saw it and made fun of me for it. Told me to lighten up, make out with some of our guests. But this voice inside me that Detroit always drowns out...well, I heard it, and it was saying,I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to do any of this right now. So for once, I didn’t.”
“That’s good. You should listen to that voice.”
“I knew you’d heard it. When you sang your song...I just had the strangest feeling, that somehow you, this person who doesn’t know me at all, managed to hear that voice inside me and treat it like it’s the best part of me. Which it might be. I don’t know.”
“It’s not as hidden as you think it is. That kindness is a very clear part of who you are.”
Skye looks away. “Stop. Please, stop.”
“Stop?”
