“I can tell.”
“Please.”
The tenderness in his voice throws a blanket on the fire.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” V says gently.
“The truth.”
“Okay. I’m going to tell you how I see it, and then I am going to walk back to the hotel and order my own car home. We are not going to resolve this tonight. So let me just say what I’m going to say, and we’ll talk about it again tomorrow. Agreed?”
J agrees. He doesn’t think he has much of a choice.
“The way I’m thinking of it is this. You keep asking me whether the door is closed or open. Are we together or aren’t we? But what I’m trying to tell you is this: The door is open, but I don’t want you to walk through it.”
“How is that fair?” J asks. “We’re not a couple that’s just met. We’ve been together fortwo years. And while I understand what an opportunity this is for you, I don’t think you understand what a loss it’s been for me. In fact, I don’t think you see it as a loss at all for yourself. Being told to not walk through an open door—how is that different from a closed door? In your mind, it might be. But for me...it leaves me in the same place, doesn’t it?”
“I’m sorry. It does. I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Tell me you love me. Tell me you want me to be with you.”
“What if I can tell you the first and not the second?”
It hits J then. Really hits him.
This is not a fight he can win right now.
A tear falls out of V’s eye, and she quickly wipes it off. The city looms behind her.
“I’m so sorry,” she says. “I know you won’t believe me, but it’s not about you. It’s about me, my life. I wish I could imagine you here with me, but I can’t. It’s like this new life is forming around me, and it feels right. I’m not leaving you. I’m just arriving somewhere else.”
“What if I’d come with you? What if, when you’d gotten the news, I’d said, ‘Let’s move to New York together’?”
“But you didn’t, did you? You have a life there, much more of a life than I had. You have family, all these people who care aboutyou. You’ve always had the chance to leave, but you never have. This is my first chance. And I’m taking it. I think if you weren’t dating me, if I were just someone telling you my story, you’d understand it. Because one of the things I love about you is your capacity to be by yourself, to make connections where you go but not get tied down by them. That’s where I am right now.”
“I hate this.”
“I do, too.”
J shakes his head. “No, you don’t. If you hated it, it wouldn’t be happening.”
Now he starts to cry, and the two of them look at each other with a sadness they’ve never shared before.
“Is this it?” J asks.
He expects a yes. Instead he gets an “I don’t know.” And then an “I have to go.”
V hugs him goodbye and lets him hug her goodbye. Then she walks down the dock, to order her own car. She leaves him with the city, just out of reach.
He knows her “I don’t know” is genuine. He knows she believes the door is still open.
For the first time, he wonders if he should be the one to walk away from it. But even as he thinks that, there’s the hope that if he started to walk away, she’d call him back.
THE SEVENTH WEDDING
J’s next wedding is at St. Thomas Church, an eight-hundred-year-old Gothic establishment in Leipzig, Germany, with a frankly intimidating musical lineage. Bach was choir director there for almost three decades and is buried there. Wagner was baptized in its waters. Mendelssohn often dropped by. The groom, who J has never met, is a Bach scholar, and J suspects this is his dream wedding venue. The bride, who was the one to reach out to J, is a British flight attendant. The groom comes from money. The bride is glad she didn’t know the groom had money when they met. She’d assumed that a Bach scholar wouldn’t have a large nest egg. She hadn’t realized that the only reason he could be a Bach scholar was because he had a large nest egg.
The bride, Imogen, emailed J well over a year ago to ask him to sing at the wedding. It would be a paid gig and he would do a DJ set to close the reception as well as a song in the ceremony. It was good money, and J had a good feeling about Imogen from her email, so he’d agreed.
