‘I’m not surprised. He might be a fully-grown man now, but he’s still aboy. He has his pride.’
…and I’d completely refused to listen when he’d tried to tell me how hard it was to have people only ever perceive him through the lens of his father.
Ever since our wedding, Jonah had been trying to look after me. Some of his tactics had been profoundly irritating, but he’d been doing his best – and then the second he’d needed a bit of looking after in return, all he’d gotten were my teeth. I was as bad as his fucking dad.
‘Then,’ Fiona went on, oblivious to the crisis I was having, ‘I will never forget this either, because it was adorable – he put his chin in his hand and said, “If this is what university is going to be like, I think I’ve fallen in love with it.”?’
Oh.
Goodness.
I didn’t know what to do with this information. If my mind was a glass full of water, then this week, people had continually been dropping rocks into it, driving the level up and up and up. The fight with Chess was a rock. Getting married was a rock. Moving was a rock. Starting work was a rock. All the lectures that had been dumped on us – fifty-two rocks, right there. Fiona had just thrown in another handful, and now my mind was overflowing. How many crises could one person have simultaneously?
‘Jonah and I haven’t been close for a long time,’ Fiona said, sipping her wine, eyes crinkling at the corners as she smiled at me, ‘but I’ve always paid attention when he mentioned your name, because I had a sneaking suspicion he might marry you one day.’
Well, at least we didn’t have to worry about selling her on our story. Fiona had already gone and written it for us.
I could have left it there. I should have left it there. It would have been so easy. I should have picked up my glass, knocked back my wine, and said something like,well, speaking of Jonah, I suppose we should get back to him, I know how desperate he is to spend time with youand then that would be that.
But somehow, without me ever actually deciding to say it, the words, ‘Jonah’s also kind of the reason I fell in love with university,’ were coming out of my mouth.
‘Whaaaaaat?’ Fiona leant back in her chair, grinning. ‘Now this I have to hear.’
I rubbed a hand over my brow. Tsundoku was perfectly temperature-controlled, but I both had goosebumps and felt like I was sweating.
I’d never told this story to anyone. Not even Chess, who’d already formed a very strong negative opinion about Jonah by the time this had happened, due in large part to The Incident at our first graduation ceremony.
‘I didn’t follow the same academic path as Jonah,’ I said. ‘I took some time out between Honours and PhD. I grew up poor and I wanted a financial safety net before I fully committed to being broke again, so I took an office job and I told myself I was going to stay there for five years before I went back to uni.’
I started twisting my rings around my finger. ‘But I was bored out of my brain. The office was near campus and I used to go there sometimes on my lunch breaks. Visit my old haunts. Remind myself what I was working towards, why I was suffering through all this boredom. Sometimes I’d go to the library and just walk through the stacks and smell that old book smell.’
‘Oh my God, you and Jonahareperfect for each other.’
I was pretty sure old book smell had a universal appeal, but I wasn’t about to gainsay her. ‘One day, I was running late to get backto work, and I took this shortcut through the Lit Studies building. I was really legging it – I normally wouldn’t risk cutting through that building, because I didn’t want to run into your dad – but then suddenly, I came to a screeching halt, because I heard Jonah’s voice.’
Fiona put her hand on her heart.
‘He was teaching a seminar.’ God, I hoped the low lighting in here meant she couldn’t see how red I was turning. ‘He was standing in front of a whiteboard, and he was leading this discussion aboutNorth and South, and he was wearing – the same tweed blazer he’s wearing today, actually. He’s had it for years. I hope he’s been getting it dry-cleaned.’
Fiona laughed.
‘He was wearing that blazer,’ I said. ‘His hair and his beard were all scruffy, and his glasses were falling down his nose, and he looked like the most stereotypical academic in the world – and I had this profound moment of clarity. All I wanted was to be in that classroom. All I wanted was to be in his shoes. All I wanted was what he had. I wanted tobehim.’
It had been such a small thing, but it had felt eucatastrophic, that moment: like a deus ex machina in my own life, stars which had been crossed suddenly aligning, a wild Jonah appearing like a WRONG WAY, GO BACK sign on the highway to put me on the right path.
‘And I didn’t want to wait anymore, not for another second,’ I said. ‘So I texted my boss that I’d gone home sick, and I went and knocked on my Honours supervisor’s office door to discuss enrolling in a PhD.’
Then I’d gone home and told Chess what I’d decided, omitting all the parts about Jonah, and she’d hugged me so hard I thought my ribs were going to break.All I want, she’d whispered in my ear,is for you to get what you want, sweetie.
‘Anyway, now he’s stuck with me,’ I finished, forcing out what I hoped was an airy laugh. ‘If I hadn’t seen him teaching that seminar, I would have been years behind him, academically speaking. He’d have got the Lyons job outright instead of having to marry me for it.’
‘Somehow,’ Fiona said, ‘I don’t think he minds.’
She was profoundly wrong about that, but I wasn’t about to tell her so.
Thankfully, Satoshi chose that moment to come by with a stack of queer middle-grade books for Lex. As he and Fiona chatted about what wine would go best with what she was planning for dinner, I escaped under the pretext of looking at the bookshelves, so I could take a few deep breaths and calm down.
I simultaneously thought about that story all the time and hadn’t thought about it in years. Every time Jonah put on that tweed blazer, I was reminded of it – of that feeling of wanting so desperately to have what he had – but I hadn’t considered it in its broader context in a very long time. Certainly not since I’d married the owner of the blazer.
