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,YESscribbled 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 HERscribbled 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 CONTENTscribbled 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.
Chapter ThirteenSadie
Jonah was picking fights with me on purpose.
He thought he was being very subtle. ‘I can’t believe you’re drinking caffeinated tea before bed,’ he said, folding back the covers on his side. ‘You’ll never get any sleep, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we have a shit-ton of work to do tomorrow.’
‘Not all of us are weaklings who can only tolerate that horrible ginger shit you drink after ten am,’ I shot back, and the fight commenced, like we both didn’t already know perfectly well how many litres of tea I was capable of drinking, and we both didn’t already know exactly what the other one was going to say next.
He’d been doing it all day, finding the pettiest points to quibble over, but it was the things he didn’t push on that gave his game away. ‘Night, Shaw,’ was all he said to me, when I built a wall of pillows between us in bed.
‘Night, Fisher,’ I replied, turning the light off and lying down on the other side of the barricade that separated me from the most cardigan-y version of Jonah that had ever cardigan’d.
Tweed Jonah was not afraid to sink his teeth into my weaknesses. He relished it, in fact. He’d done it the night before, completely demolishing my argument that I had ruined things with Chess forever.
Today, though, he’d been picking fights as a way of showing me that everything was normal. That the rings we were wearing didn’t have to change anything, and, oh, the fact that I’d snuggled up to him in the middle of the night and pressed myself so close against him it must have felt like I was trying to crawl inside his skin? I’ve already forgotten about it, Shaw, and it’s ridiculous that you’d find something so minor and meaningless embarrassing.
He could try as much as he wanted, but I was smarter than that. Cardigan Jonah in Tweed Jonah’s blazer was still Cardigan Jonah.
