Chapter Twelve Jonah
Chapter Twelve Jonah
I woke the next morning to the soft trill of my alarm.
Light was streaming through the gaps in the curtains, a sunbeam hitting me directly in the eye, and my wife was sprawled across my back, dead to the world.
I had not moved in the night.
I didn’t like sleeping on my front, but the terror that I’d wake up beside Sadie with a visible erection had apparently paralysed me even in slumber.
She, though, had moved.
Our fingers had been the only part of us touching when we’d fallen asleep.
At some point, however, she had decided that my bony back was a superior cushion to the many hotel pillows, and draped herself over me like a quilt.
Her head was resting just above one of my shoulder blades.
I could feel all ten of her fingerprints where they rested against my skin, one hand on the nape of my neck, the other on my waist.
Her body was angled at a diagonal to mine, her breasts squashed directly into the middle of my back.
And if I thought too hard about that fact, then Project Control Your Inner Teenager, Jonah, Absolutely No Boners would be a complete disaster.
‘Shaw,’ I whispered, twitching my shoulders to rouse her and reaching over with one arm to turn the alarm off.
‘Mmm?’
There were a few more glorious, sleepy seconds of her warm weight pressing me down into the bed before she leapt off me like I was made of knives.
‘Oh, fuck, Jonah, I’m sorry!
’
I sat up slowly, reaching for my glasses on the bedside table, wishing her eyesight were more like mine, because surely, surely it was written all over me how little I had wanted her to move.
‘It’s fine.
Don’t worry about it.
’
Thankfully, she told me to take the first shower (‘I need to pick the right first-day outfit’).
I managed to escape to the bathroom before she noticed that Project Control was in catastrophic failure.
I could only hope she didn’t hear the strangled sound I only managed to swallow half of when it failed completely in the shower – or if she did, she’d just assume I’d stubbed my toe on something.
We were going to have to find a place of our own soon , I decided, flicking through rental listings on my phone when it was Sadie’s turn in the bathroom, earmarking a few with Friday evening inspections that we could take a look at before dinner at Fi’s tomorrow.
How was I ever going to be able to concentrate at work when I knew that I would be going to bed with my wife that night?
Sadie had clearly had the same impulse as me when it came to picking her outfit: armour.
I’d put on my lucky tweed blazer, the one I’d worn to all my job interviews.
33 She was wearing a black jumpsuit, cinched at the waist, which I’d seen her wear at milestone events before: our PhD completion seminar, a TV interview she’d done on romance fiction for Valentine’s Day two years ago, a union meeting where we’d voted on whether to strike, dinner with my parents.
‘You look nice,’ I offered, instinctively standing up when she came out of the bathroom like we were in a nineteenth-century novel and then immediately feeling awkward about it.
She cast a critical eye over me.
‘You look like you’re going to be hot.
It’s supposed to be a million degrees today.
’
I chuckled self-consciously.
‘And here I thought my wardrobe was going to be perfect for the Tasmanian climate.’
I was prepared for her to take aim at my arsenal of tweed and knitwear and pull the trigger, but she didn’t.
Instead, she bit her bottom lip, brow furrowed slightly.
No, no, no, no.
If she started thinking, she’d immediately sink into the pit of angst that had consumed her yesterday – and if she did that, the pit of guilt I’d been sinking into would consume me too.
‘Let’s go down to breakfast.
You’re clearly hungry, if you’re eating your lipstick.
’
Her hand flew to cover her mouth.
‘Good idea.’
‘You know,’ I said, opening the door for her, ‘I don’t think you’ve ever said those words to me before.
’
‘If you had more good ideas, then maybe I would.’
It was a half-hearted bit of repartee, but I let myself ascend a rung on the ladder out of the pit of guilt anyway.
It didn’t last, though.
The minute we sat down at a table together, having made ourselves plates at the buffet, Sadie sank back into herself, and I slid straight back down.
I had thought a lot about marriage.
You couldn’t study early modern theatre and not think about it.
Whether it was the joyous fifth-act weddings and fêtes of comedies like Much Ado About Nothing or A Chaste Maid in Cheapside or the messy couple drama of tragedies like Macbeth or The Duchess of Malfi, marriage was a constant preoccupation.
Given I’d written my thesis and then my monograph on the depiction of relationships on the Jacobean stage, I’d probably spent years of my life musing on marriage.
What I hadn’t really thought about was my own.
Love – now that means something to me, Sadie had said, that fateful night when she’d proposed to me.
Marriage, not so much .
One of the reasons I’d said yes to this absurd scheme was that I felt – well, no, perhaps not exactly the same way.
There were nuances.
Similarly, though.
Marriage to my father had turned my mother into a shadow of herself.
I, like the rest of my family, had been convinced that Fiona was throwing her future away by getting married – and shitty as I felt about it now, I ultimately hadn’t been wrong.
By all logic, the ring on my finger should be nothing but a costume for me.
So why was it that all I’d been able to think about since the day I’d kissed my bride was making her happy?
‘Why are you staring at me, Jonah?’ Sadie asked abruptly, fork halfway to her mouth.
‘Do I have something on my face?’
‘Oh! I, um…’ I had a PhD in words – why was I so frequently lost for them?
‘Sorry. You’re just in my line of sight.
’
She raised an eyebrow.
It was obvious disapproval, but it was also pure, unadulterated Sadie Shaw: original flavour, not its recent miserable shadow.
It buoyed me enough to try the move again that had not worked in the security line yesterday.
‘There’s some rental places we could look at tomorrow evening, if you want,’ I said, taking out my phone and quickly starring a couple I knew she’d hate before I handed it to her.
‘I’m sure you’re not interested in using me as a pillow long-term.
’
‘Oh, ha ha,’ she said dryly, starting to scroll.
‘You’re a real comedian.
’
I leant back in my chair, grinning at her over my coffee.
‘I try.’
‘Not well.’
There was that acerbic note in her voice.
There she was, there was the woman that had said “I can’t stand you” to teenage Jonah and ground his pride and his heart into a bloody pulp.
‘Please tell me this is a joke.’ She turned the phone around, displaying one of the places I’d just starred.
I put my foot on the next rung of the ladder out of the pit of guilt and hoisted myself up.
‘What’s wrong with it?
’
‘What’s wrong with it?
!
’ A flush was creeping up her chest.
‘What’s wrong with it?
’
That argument carried us all the way through breakfast, and all the way back upstairs so she could fix her lipstick.
‘What part of “green space” was ambiguous to you, Fisher?’ she demanded, sticking her head out of the bathroom, lip-liner in one hand.
‘How am I supposed to grow the vegetables for your gourmet cuisine in three square centimetres of concrete?’
‘One, at no point did I insist on you doing that. We’re living in Australia’s fucking larder now, you don’t need to farm the land and provide for us.
Two, if anyone could get whatever the gardening term is for blood from a stone, surely it would be you, Shaw.
’
She made a familiar noise of frustration, but her eyes were alight.
She was enjoying herself.
One of the lesser-known genres of Jacobean drama was the domestic tragedy.
34 The most famous example was Thomas Heywood’s 1603 play A Woman Killed With Kindness , which I’d written about extensively because it told the story of a marriage.
There were not a lot of lessons to take from it.
If you boiled it down to the bare bones of the plot, it was about a man who was allegedly too kind to his wife because he sent her away instead of revenge-murdering her when he caught her cheating on him (leading to her longer, more agonising death by guilty starvation).
Perhaps, though, there was a lesson for me in the title.
In the airport, Chess had grabbed me by the collar and made what she expected of me very, very clear.
I’m not going to tell you not to lay a finger on her , she’d snarled.
Sadie’s an adult.
She can do what she wants.
Fuck who she wants.
Marry who she wants.
Then she’d yanked me in closer.
But you have ridden her coattails into a job you do not deserve , she’d said, kicking me face-first into the pit of guilt with steel-capped boots.
And if you do one single thing to drag her down – if you hold her back, even a little – I will ruin you.
I had tried kindness.
It had worked a little, but not a lot.
Too much, perhaps, would smother Sadie, at a time when she could not afford to be smothered.
What she might actually need was not a pillow but a punching bag, somewhere to put all those pent-up feelings.
And much as I did not want to fight anymore – I had to give my wife what she needed.
I owed her that much.
Unlike being married, I had imagined having a permanent academic position.
Many times.
One of my favourite things to do, if I was neck deep in marking or needed to head off an anxiety spiral about my ongoing insecure employment, was to decorate my dream office, the one I would have one day when I reached the promised land.
My dream office, like my dad’s real one at ESU, would be lined with bookshelves, so full they looked a bit dangerous.
Unlike his, though, my office would also be comfortable, welcoming, inviting.
Instead of the confrontational lone chair he had in front of his desk to interrogate people, I’d have a couple of comfortable, cosy chairs in a corner, perfect for conversation.
Maybe even a couch, with a blanket, in case I or someone else needed to take a nap.
A bottle of some kind of dark liquor in my desk drawer – that was my dad again – but two glasses instead of one, drinks shared collegially or compassionately where necessary.
‘Well,’ Sadie said faintly, as we stared into the sixth-floor cupboard we were apparently going to be sharing.
‘Well,’ I echoed.
I traced a finger over the nameplate.
All the other nameplates in the corridor were engraved metal, but ours was paper: Dr Sadie Shaw typed in a sans serif font, Dr Jonah Fisher scribbled underneath in blue pen.
All the other doors in the Literary Studies corridor were locked.
We’d followed the directions in the first-day email we’d both received and had encountered a lot of people in our first couple of hours of gainful employment at Lyons University – the people in faculty services who had taken our photos for our new staff cards, the IT people who’d given us the work laptops we both had under our arms, the security people who’d handed us the envelope with our office keys inside – but we had not encountered a single one of our new academic colleagues.
The lights in the corridor were on motion sensors.
They’d winked on as we exited the lift.
As we stood there, staring into the tiny space we were supposed to share, they winked off again.
‘This is worse than the bed,’ I said, at the same time as Sadie said, ‘This is going to be really awkward when we get divorced.’
We glanced at each other.
‘First day and you’re already fucking up, Shaw,’ I said.
She arched an eyebrow.
‘ I’m fucking up?
’
‘The only d-word you should be uttering at work,’ I said, nudging her lightly with my elbow, ‘is darling .’
She rolled her eyes.
We entered our office, something which should have felt like a huge metaphorical leap taking barely a single step.
There was hardly enough room for us to stand side by side.
Most academic offices had the desk facing the door, so the occupant could look up from their work and see who was there.
To orient a desk that way in this office, though, would require the occupant to vault over it to get to their chair, because there would be no room to walk around it.
Instead, our desks were against the perpendicular walls – although ‘desk’ and ‘against’ were imprecise ways of putting it.
They were more white laminate planks than desks, long and narrow, attached to the walls by metal frames.
Sadie put her laptop and her handbag down on the left plank, which was only just wide enough to hold them, and experimented with the winder on the metal frame.
‘At least they go up and down, I guess,’ she said, glancing over at me.
‘That’s something.
’
I held her gaze for one beat.
Two.
Then we both started laughing.
‘I never thought I’d ever be nostalgic for hot-desking,’ I said, setting my laptop and satchel down on the right plank and trying to wedge myself into my desk chair, ‘but at least that involved actual desks.’
She chuckled again, but then her expression got more serious as she tried to sit down and our chair wheels immediately got tangled.
‘How are we going to get any work done when we’re practically sitting in each other’s laps?
’
‘Not a fucking clue,’ I said, forcing teenage Jonah – summoned by the phrase sitting in each other’s laps – back down, lest Project Control enter a new level of disastrous failure.
‘What if one of us needs to have a confidential consultation with a student? What are they supposed to do, stand awkwardly in the doorway while the other one of us puts headphones on and pretends they can’t hear?
’
Sadie exhaled.
‘We’re going to have to scope out the campus cafés before semester starts.
We’ll have to hold all our office hours there, so we might as well do it at whichever one has the best coffee.
’
‘Do you want to start now?’ I asked, half-rising from my chair.
‘It’s not like there’s anyone else here to notice if we go on a coffee—’
‘Oh, there you both are!’
Half-sitting, half-standing, all-the-way-jumping in surprise, my foot got caught in the wheels of my chair and I tripped.
My glasses fell off my face, landing on the carpet – and, as if I were a character in some farce by Molière, I fell straight into Sadie’s lap.
‘Well, this is quite a re-introduction, Dr Fisher!’ the woman standing in our doorway said cheerfully.
Then she wagged her finger playfully at us.
‘I know you two are married, but no hanky-panky in the office.’
She was clearly joking, but my face must have been beetroot red as I righted myself.
‘Professor Vargas,’ Sadie said, her own blush starting to creep up her chest as she handed back my thankfully-unbroken glasses.
‘Lovely to see you.’
‘Sorry about that,’ I said.
‘You startled us. We didn’t think anyone else was here.
’
Professor Sofia Vargas was a tiny woman, less than five feet tall, but she had a massive voice that far outsized her.
You know those stories about Tolkien teaching at Oxford and basing Treebeard on C.
S.
Lewis after hearing his voice echoing down the halls?
Sadie had said to me after the HR call about my partner hire, Vargas has the same vibe.
‘Oh, it’s only me here today,’ Professor Vargas said.
‘We do a lot of working from home at Lyons these days. The corridor does have a bit of a zombie apocalypse feel, doesn’t it?
’
We both laughed nervously.
At least this would solve our office space problem.
We’d still be on top of each other, working from home, but not quite this on top of each other.
‘Although not now you two are here!’ Professor Vargas said, immediately shattering my delusions.
‘We’re taking full advantage of the fact we’ve finally got some continuing staff whose teaching hasn’t been completely bought out by research grants.
You’ll be in front of a lot of classes this semester!
’
Then she paused, regarding our tiny office as if for the first time.
‘Lucky you’re a married couple.
You’d really want to like someone you were crammed into this box with, wouldn’t you?
’
We both laughed nervously again.
‘Lucky,’ I echoed, unconvincingly.
‘Come down the hall to my office. Let’s talk through your workloads somewhere with more space, shall we?
’
Vargas’s office looked much more like the office of my dreams.
Fewer overstuffed bookcases, perhaps, but the windows had stained-glass detailing around the edges, and the little coffee table with a couch and armchairs she had in the corner was more comfort than even my ambitious internal interior designer had dared to dream of.
‘This must look horribly unfair, after the closet we’ve stuck you in,’ she said apologetically as she gestured at us both to sit, ‘but being the Head of the School of Humanities does come with its privileges.’ She grinned broadly at us.
‘Hopefully someone will retire soon and we can get you a bit more square footage, hey?’
There was no other response we could make but to laugh nervously once more.
‘All right.’ Vargas logged into her laptop then turned it around to face us.
‘I know we hired you both on 40-40-20 contracts, and it was my intention to try and honour the spirit of that as well as the letter.’
When you were in the precariat, a 40-40-20 contract seemed both as magical and out of reach as a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.
It meant you were getting paid to work on your research 40% of the time, teaching another 40%, and doing service – committees and admin and various other stuff – 20%.
‘But like I said,’ Vargas went on, ‘the Lit Studies department is in a bit of a staffing pickle at the moment. Your new Head of Department – that’s Lachlan Petrovski, you’ll meet him tomorrow – and I have had to be a bit creative in planning out your workload.
’
Sadie glanced at me.
I recognised the unease in her eyes.
She clearly hadn’t forgotten the name of my dad’s ‘old chum’ either.
But then I registered what the spreadsheet on Vargas’s screen actually said, and all thoughts of Petrovski disappeared completely from my mind.
A 40-40-20 contract meant that, theoretically, you were working a lot more than a casual academic – it was full-time, after all, not hourly.
Practically, though, it had always seemed like it would be a lot less work, because you were actually getting paid for your research instead of doing it for free on the side in the vague hope it would one day earn you one of these mythical contracts.
That was technically probably still true – but my fucking God , the amount of teaching they had loaded us up with for the semester was eye-watering.
All of it was lecturing.
And all of it was together.
What they’d done, Vargas explained to us, was manipulate our respective 40% teaching allocations to get us in front of as many students as possible.
Sadie and I would be chairing two units each – her, a first-year unit on contemporary literature and a second-year unit on Romanticism; me, a first-year unit on classic literature and a second-year unit on medievalism – but all of the small-group seminar teaching and marking would be done by casual academics.
We would be doing the large-group teaching, co-lecturing all four units together (‘we know you’ve been very successful as a teaching team in the past, so we thought – let’s lean on that!
’).
Semesters at Lyons were thirteen weeks long.
Lectures went for an hour and took place weekly.
That meant that, between us, Sadie and I were going to have to write fifty-two lectures.
The word-count sweet spot for an hour-long lecture for me was between five and six thousand words.
I tried to do the maths on the total word count we were expected to produce – apparently, according to the workload calculator, with just one lone hour of prep time per lecture – and my brain started making static noises like an old television.
35
‘I know it’s a lot,’ Vargas said, smiling apologetically at us, ‘but it’s a great long-term investment.
Once the lectures are written, you’ll be able to use them for years.
’
‘Oh,’ was all my bolshy wife – who had never backed down from an argument in her entire fucking life, and who I knew, from being at dozens of the same union meetings as her, had very strong views on staff exploitation – said.
‘I don’t suppose the staff previously teaching the unit have notes we could use as a scaffold…
?
’ I asked cautiously.
‘No, unfortunately. We’ve had casual scholars giving these lectures in the past, and we’ve implemented a policy about reuse of their work.
’
That was actually a very good, very sensible policy.
Universities had a nasty habit of paying casual academics to do work once, then either recording their classes or taking their teaching materials and reusing them in many subsequent semesters without paying them again.
Sadie and I had both advocated for the implementation of a similar reuse policy when we were in the precariat.
That didn’t particularly help us in the present moment, though.
I had to resist taking Sadie’s hand and holding on for dear life.
‘Don’t worry, though!
There’s also some fun stuff hidden in here!
’
There was more ?
Vargas scrolled down the spreadsheet on her screen.
‘We had to do some creative accounting and spin some of this as service, but we’ve managed to get you both some unit development hours, so you can do some of that work we actually hired you for.
We want to put together some new units for the semester after this one: one on popular fiction, one on Shakespeare.
And guess who we want to write them?
’
She beamed.
Sadie looked nauseous.
I could only assume I did too.
‘You two being an item really was a bit of a blessing, if you ask me.’ Vargas leant back in her chair in satisfaction.
‘We managed to palm off our new modernism unit on one of our existing staff, but God only knows who we would have got to write the Shakespeare unit if you hadn’t been a package deal.
’ 36
She gestured from me to Sadie.
We both forced another nervous laugh.
We were silent as we walked back down the corridor to our cupboard, Professor Vargas having swept past us to the lift on her way out (‘Off to work from home this afternoon!’) and a promise to see us at the pre-semester School of Humanities meeting the next day (‘Invite should be in your email!’).
I opened our office door.
Sadie and I both stood in the doorway again, regarding the tiny space, the cell we’d have to spend so much time in, far more intimate and far more permanent than the bed we were temporarily sharing.
‘How about we go and get lunch?’ Sadie said.
I was fairly sure that if I tried to eat anything, I would throw up, but I agreed anyway.
We found a table in a corner of a café in the next building over.
Because semester hadn’t started yet, it was quiet, and we sat there in abject, shell-shocked silence for several long minutes, extremely mediocre chicken wraps held limply between our fingers.
‘Fuck,’ Sadie said at last.
‘Fuck,’ I agreed heavily.
‘What the fuck. How the fuck. Just – fuck.’
She put her wrap down on top of its cardboard container and pressed two fingers into the space between her eyebrows.
‘Just when I thought this week couldn’t get any worse.
’
‘Hey!’ I said, initially repressing but then leaning into the flash of hurt, because even if I was as panicked as she was, I had punching-bag duties to perform.
‘You obtained a precious jewel this week, Shaw. How dare you?’
I flipped her the marital bird, the way she had in the airport.
She made a sound that was halfway between a scoff and a snort, and I was congratulating myself on some top-notch spousing when she sighed.
‘Here are some words I thought would never come out of my mouth,’ she said.
‘Jonah, you are by far the best thing that has happened to me this week.’
Oh.
Wow.
Her week has been unbelievably shit , I told myself, trying to beat back the rising heat in my cheeks.
It’s not like you have any competition.
Sadie picked up her wrap again and took a bite.
‘Imagine how much work they would have tried to heap on me if we hadn’t pushed for partner hire,’ she said, somehow still the most beautiful woman in the world with a mouth full of chicken and avocado.
‘I would have drowned.’
‘Now that would have been an achievement,’ I managed.
‘First person in the world to have drowned in a cupboard.’
The sound she made this time was more distinctly a snort of amusement, but it was followed by another sigh.
‘We still might. Fuck, Jonah.’
‘Fuck,’ I agreed again.
‘And the fact they want us to do it all together , too!’ She took another bite of her wrap, a few crumbs flying out of her mouth.
‘What the fuck is that about? I know we’re—’ she flipped the marital bird back at me, ‘but come on. Everyone knows collaboration is more work than just doing it yourself.’
‘Maybe it’s a strategy.
’ I took a bite of my own wrap.
‘They’re hoping we’ll drive each other up the wall and split up, so they can fire me.
’
She looked thoughtful for a moment.
‘That would explain the cupboard.’
It was my turn to snort with amusement.
When we were finished with lunch, we ordered coffees and took them back to our office so we could start making a plan of attack.
I swivelled my chair around to face Sadie’s desk-plank so we could work side-by-side, me scribing as we both worked off my laptop on a document in the new shared drive we’d just set up, but after the fifth time our chair wheels got tangled, we decided to call it and – like the rest of our colleagues – work from home.
Back in our serviced apartment, we started off sitting at the tiny kitchenette table, tried the uncomfortable armchairs, and eventually ended up spending the afternoon working side by side on the bed.
‘So much for not fighting anymore,’ Sadie said heavily, loose strands of hair sticking to my shirtsleeve as she looked at the plan on my laptop screen.
‘All we’re going to do is fight.
’
The only way we knew how to teach together was to performatively disagree.
Our planning document was a table of weeks and texts and potential arguments we could have over them – arguments which, over the course of the afternoon, had provoked several more arguments 37 – trading off lectures the same way we had for the past few years at Bass.
‘Just for work, though,’ the part of me that had got stuck on the phrase Jonah, you are by far the best thing that has happened to me this week said.
‘At home, we can be a team.’
‘Thanks, Fisher.’
She glanced at me.
I glanced at her.
For a moment, I felt exactly like I had at our PhD graduation, when I’d seen that the tassel of her bonnet was tangled in her hair.
What would happen if I reached out – gently, gently, ever so gently – and stroked those loose strands behind her ear?
Then her stomach growled, the bubble burst, and we both laughed.
‘Dinner?’ I asked her.
Sadie nodded, reaching for her phone and opening up one of the delivery apps.
‘Let’s see what’s open around here at – shit, seven-thirty.
I didn’t realise it was that late.
’
‘Two and a half hours overtime and it’s only day one.
What an auspicious beginning.
’
It happened slowly, her foot slipping on the ladder above her pit of angst, like it was a slo-mo sequence in one of the action movies my Screen Studies ex-girlfriend had forced me to watch.
‘I wish I could talk to Chess about this,’ the greyed-out shadow Sadie whispered.
‘She’d know how to push back.
’
I took a risk.
‘Why don’t you call her?
’
She looked at me like I’d grown a second head.
‘I’m serious.
I know you’re fighting, but one of you is going to have to call the other eventually, right?
’
Sadie bit her lip, biting off the last vestiges of her lipstick.
‘Okay.’
She did it.
Calling: CHESSIE came up on her phone screen.
Chess didn’t answer.
And Sadie looked completely, utterly crushed.
I was suddenly filled with an overwhelming wave of anger.
How dare Chess make Sadie feel like this?
Wasn’t her whole deal that she would do anything for her?
Wasn’t this the relationship I’d been so jealous of, the one I’d measured mine with Fiona and Elias against?
I’d been so confident last night when I’d told Sadie that of course she could mend things with Chess, no problems.
Sure, Chess hadn’t come to our wedding, but she’d turned up at the airport to scream threats at me.
You didn’t do that if you didn’t care.
She might sulk for a bit, but she’d get over it.
She loved Sadie too much not to.
But in reality, I didn’t actually know this woman – and maybe her bond with Sadie wasn’t as strong and as perfect as it had always looked to me, someone who had spent so many years being an objectively bad sibling.
And maybe some part of Sadie had already known that, deep down: after all, something had made her so scared to tell Chess we were getting married that she’d waited until we were practically at the altar.
Just how unconditional is your love?
I should have snarled back in Chess’s face, when she’d had her fingers twisted in my collar at the airport.
Maybe then she would have been the one who stumbled back.
Maybe she would have been the one begging Sadie for forgiveness instead of the other way around.
Maybe I wouldn’t have to spend all my time picking petty fights just to give Sadie something else to think about, because suddenly I’d become a devout adherent to a happy wife, happy life -esque philosophy: wife not actively crying, Jonah doesn’t feel like he’s dying.
Maybe then I could reach out and trace the long line of that red hair.
And maybe then I could draw Sadie to me, cradle her head in the crook of my neck, and I could say – I could say—
I stopped.
I took out my own phone and opened up a delivery app.
‘What about pasta?’ I said, taking Sadie’s phone out of her nerveless fingers and handing her mine instead.
‘Pasta is the absolute worst food to get delivered, Fisher.’ A hint of that familiar acid came back into her voice.
‘You know that.’
I did know that.
And I knew, looking at her as she scrolled (‘If you insist on noodles, Jonah, then let’s get Thai’), that I could no longer relegate the way I felt about her – the way I had felt about her ever since our very first seminar debate, fifteen years ago – to a footnote in my mind, something to be skimmed at best and skipped over most of the time.
No matter how I tried to rationalise it, this wasn’t some teenage crush I’d never managed to entirely shake.
It was no mere physical attraction, nothing that could be summed up by it’s your dick, Jonah, don’t romanticise it; no simple intellectual fascination that could be explained away by the fact that Sadie was the best sparring partner I’d ever had.
Now that I was married to her, I couldn’t gloss over it anymore, or argue myself out of what I had always known perfectly well was the truth.
I was in love with my wife.
I loved Sadie Shaw more than words could wield the matter, dearer than eyesight, space and liberty.
38
33 Given I was zero for four on job interviews, ‘lucky’ might be something of an overstatement, but emotional attachments are not always rational.
34 Lesser known because Shakespeare didn’t write in it.
It had been a point Sadie made to me when she’d tried to convince me that nineteenth-century bardolatry (where a bunch of critics decided Shakespeare was a million times better than all his contemporaries) could be considered a loose analogue to contemporary BookTok discourse, because it elevated a particular author above all others for reasons that, from an outside perspective, could be very difficult to see.
I didn’t think she was right, but I’d been surprised to learn that she’d absorbed so much about Renaissance literary cultures.
I hadn’t thought she paid that much attention to my research.
35 I did it later.
If we split the difference and said 5500 words, multiplied by 52, that was 286,000 words – the equivalent of about three novels.
36 The sole piece of satisfaction I took from this conversation, which, due to overwhelm, I did not realise until considerably later, was her strong implication that Rory Worland would not have been in contention.
37 Picked at a ratio of about 3:1 Fisher:Shaw.
38 ‘Where both deliberate, the love is slight:
Who ever lov’d, that lov’d not at first sight?
’
– Christopher Marlowe, Hero and Leander (1598), lines highlighted by Jonah Fisher one week after meeting Sadie Shaw in first year undergrad, YES scribbled beside them.
‘The more I strive, I love; the more I love,
The less I hope: I see my ruin, certain.’
– John Ford, ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore (1633), lines highlighted by Jonah Fisher shortly after moving into the share house, THIS, SHE’LL RUIN YOU IF YOU LET HER scribbled beside them.
‘I know she hates me,
Yet cannot chuse but love her:
No matter, if but to vex her, I’le haunt her still.
’
– Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, The Changeling (1622), lines highlighted by Jonah Fisher the day after PhD graduation, RELATABLE CONTENT scribbled beside them.
I might have relegated my adoration of Sadie to my mental marginalia in an attempt to pretend it away, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t always been completely obvious to anyone who looked for it.