And again it goes to voicemail.
This time he leaves a message. “I know how much you loveThe New Yorker. Well, guess who they want to talk to. I’ll give you a hint: You’ve slept with him repeatedly, and I sleep with him every night. Call me back.”
It’s a weekend, and even if she’s working, she should be able to check her voicemail and call him back.
J is left to wait in a hotel room, which is second only to a hospital in terms of worst places to wait for someone to call back.
V does not call back.
J can think of a hundred things she could be doing instead of checking her phone. Driving! (Except she doesn’t have a USlicense.) Hiking! (He checks the weather in New York, and it’s not great for hiking.) Napping alone! (Possible.) “Napping” with someone else! (J doesn’t want to think about this option.) Perhaps she’s stuck underground in a subway car, delayed by a jumper on the tracks.
Just call me,J thinks.I want you to call me.
But this appeal backfires, because it makes him even lonelier when it doesn’t work.
It doesn’t take long for J to fall into the pit—the one that’s even worse because he feels he dug it himself, then forgot it was there. It’s not a big pit—it is, in fact, the perfect shape of his own body. He wonders, is this all his life will ever be—moving from hotel room to hotel room, singing about love without ever making it work for himself? The priest’s unfair words about midwives come back to him—what if he is nothing but a romantic bystander, a charlatan who convinces couples he knows more than he really does? What if it’s this, more than anything else, that V has recognized? What if she was his best shot, and he missed?
He thinks all these thoughts, and the pit doesn’t give them any room to dissipate. They are incessant. And behind them, a dog is barking, barking, barking.
J loses hours this way. The thing that could free him from the pit is a call from V, even a text.
But his phone remains silent.
Any power he felt in the church is gone now. The balance of the aloneness has tipped, and he feels separate from the rest of the world, separate from the place he should be.
J’s DJ set will be after the meal at the reception, so he receives a table card just like any other guest. Before he goes to Table 23, he stops off the spot by the dance floor where his laptop will be set up. Everything seems in order.
Table 23 is near the dance floor, but not particularly near the bride and groom’s table—this is the Pluto of wedding tables, at such an orbit that guests may debate whether they’re part of the wedding at all. It is a table for ten, and four people are seated when J arrives. One is a very, very old man who stares off into the distance like he’s waiting for a steamship; when he breathes, which is infrequently, his lungs sound like a broken whistle. Next to him are two women in their fifties or early sixties who are clearly sisters, if not twins. And then there is a slightly older man, who is walrus-like in both his shape and demeanor, seated at a one-chair remove from the closest woman.
“Welcome to the Losers’ Table,” the man says when J has taken a seat.
“Don’t listen to him,” one of the sisters says.
“It’s true. I checked every single place card. We are the only adults here who don’t have dates.”
“Pam is my date,” the second sister says.
“Will you listen to yourself?” Walrus Man spits out. “Did you take your sister to your dances in high school, too?”
J introduces himself, aiming the introduction more at the sisters than at the man. The sisters, Pam and Sam, introduce themselves back. The elderly man nods, then returns to seeking his steamship. The more garrulous man focuses on buttering a roll.
“Elgar here is Carl’s great rival,” Sam explains, gesturing to the butterer.
“Regarding scholarship and Bach,” Elgar huffs. “I was not his rival for Imogen. He can have her.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Sam says. “Most people don’t.”
“I thought your song this morning was lovely,” Pam adds. “I mean, we had to leave halfway through. But I wanted to hear the rest of it!”
A server comes bearing salads.
“Do you know if there will be others joining you?” the server asks.
“Those seats are extra,” Elgar replies. “Just in case anyone becomes single during the reception. There’s got to be a place for them to be banished.”
“Is he always like this?” Pam asks Sam.
“Believe me,” Sam says, “it’s worse when he’s flirty.” Then she gestures to the seat next to Pam and tells J, “Join us.”
