I felt better after telling Melissa my deepest secret. When she came home from work, I practically jumped on her, pushing her back against the door. She dropped her keys and her medical bag and put her arms around me. Shrugging off her coat, she led me upstairs.
Melissa lay on the bed and kicked off her shoes, revealing bright green-and-pink argyle socks. She caressed my face, the cuffs of her shirt undone and brushing against my cheeks. I took off my leopard punk bracelet and threw it on the floor, not wanting to impale her on the spikes. We kissed for hours then went downstairs and had our tea. Afterward, I cuddled up next to her on the couch, leaning my head against the soft black, pink, and yellow flannel of her shirt. We were watching Maurice, the film that had been made out of the E.M. Forster novel. He was my favorite novelist, and Howard’s End was my favorite novel. I’d taken a tutorial on him at Exeter and kept all his books on the shelf of my residence-hall room. With limited space and in an uncharitable mood, however, I’d tossed Dickens’ Little Dorrit out my window, and it lay all winter up against the base of the apple tree.
I was still only partially moved out of my bedsit when I got a severe flu, which I tried my best to ignore. Melissa told me to stay in bed, but after she went to work, I took the tube to Hackney. I wanted to surprise her by collecting the rest of my belongings. Slowly I rolled the pint glasses and ashtrays I’d thrown out of Exeter pub windows and collected later—having brought them all the way back from the States—into T-shirts and put them in my rucksack.
I started taking down the pictures I’d tacked to the walls of guitars I someday wanted to own—mostly printed out from eBay on Melissa’s computer—but got so woozy I thought I was going to pass out. I ended up exhausted and nauseous on the unmade single bed, surrounded by photos of pink-paisley Stratocasters, blue-floral Telecasters, vintage Lake Placid and Daphne blue Strats, Jaguars and Jazzmasters with some Gibsons, Epiphones, Rickenbackers, and a few Mosrites thrown in. I rang up Melissa on her mobile and asked about the possibility of a home visit.
Melissa came to get me when the office closed. “How bad do you feel?” She put her hand on my forehead. “You’ve got fever.” She looked around at the scattered photographs. “Is there anything else here you need right now except for your centerfolds?” She peered into the bathroom. “Don’t tell me. I never noticed it before, but you don’t own a hairbrush.”
“Well.” I shrugged.
“I asked you not to tell me,” Melissa laughed. “What do you do if you get a tangle?”
“I’m not going to tell you,” I said as firmly as possible given my indisposition.
“Oh, please tell me,” Melissa begged. “I’m sure it’s charming.”
“I use a fork,” I said.
Melissa collapsed across my bed in hysterics and said to the ceiling, “Bless ’er.”
“Or I use yours,” I said crankily. “You know I do.”
“I just wanted to make sure that you flew across the ocean to start a new life without a hairbrush.”
“It’s not like I couldn’t get one here. You do have hairbrushes in England, you know. I only took what I needed.”
“And a hairbrush takes up the space of what, two, maybe three CDs or an effects pedal? I think you’re lovely.”
“Are we going or not? Or are you gonna stay here laughing all day?”
We drove out of Hackney with the Kinks playing “I’m Not Like Everybody Else.” Melissa shifted gears and put her hand on mine. When the song ended, she asked me to slip Between the Buttons, my favorite Rolling Stones CD, into the car stereo. “I prefer old Rolling Stones when Brian Jones was in the band,” she said.
“Me, too.” I leaned back against the worn, comfortable seat. When the song “Miss Amanda Jones” came on, I murmured, “Amanda Jones. That’ll be my name when we get married.”
Melissa laughed, parking in an assigned space near her flat. She installed me upstairs in what she insisted on calling “our” bedroom, asking if she could do anything for me.
“I could murder a cup of tea.”
Melissa came back upstairs, handing me a cuppa. “I put honey in it.” She pressed her lips to my forehead to see if I’d got any hotter. “Poor thing. You are sick.”
“I feel very sorry for myself,” I warned her, “and very pathetic.”
She went into the bathroom and came back with a white wafer of flu medication dissolving in a glass of water. “Take this. It’s Co-codamol.”
The wafer bubbled, spitting water out of the glass. It had an off-putting smell. I made a face. “What is it?”
“In your day it was called Paracodol.” Melissa took the tea. “Drink it.” I drank it as dramatically as possible and leaned against the pillows, gagging. She sat next to me. “Just relax. It’ll make you drowsy.” She massaged my head with her fingers.
I closed my eyes. “I’m cold,” I murmured, leaning against her.
Melissa climbed over me and got under the covers, holding me against her stripey brown-and-blue shirt.
“Sometimes I get weird when I’m sick,” I said.
“How will I notice?”
“Cheers, very funny. My defenses go down, and my OCD runs rampant. The intrusive thoughts and prayers for protection become so incessant they drown me.”
“You have to tell me about that in more detail,” Melissa said, becoming medical.
I ignored her. “And I have a jukebox going in my head twenty-four hours a day. With all the music I listen to, you’d think it would play something nice. But when I’m not paying attention, it turns demented and plays the most horribly annoying songs.”
“Such as?”
“Oh, childhood songs, patriotic songs, Christmas songs. Anything that’ll irritate me the most.”
“What’s your mental jukebox playing now?”
I paused. “‘Close to You’ by the Carpenters.”
Melissa laughed and said, “Sorry. I know that’s awful.”
“Now it’s singing ‘America the Beautiful.’ You have to move fast to keep up with it.” I started singing the United States Marines song, “‘From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, / we will fight our country’s battles on the land and from the sea.’”
“Ouch.”
“Plus, half the time it gets the lyrics wrong. One of its favorites is from the film The Wizard of Oz, which traumatized me as a child. ‘We’re off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz.’ Except my mind says gizzard, ‘We’re off to see the gizzard, the wonderful gizzard of Oz.’ It’s maddening. ‘Joy to the world, the Lord is come. / Let earth receive her King!’”
“But you’re Jewish.”
“Of course I am. That only makes the Christmas songs more disturbing. If I opened my mouth and sang everything that popped into my head, you’d go spare.”
“And this is going on all the time?”
“You’re not going to run off to get your notepad and start writing this down, are you?”
“It’s a bit important,” Melissa teased me, “but I shall memorize it. And on top of this are the intrusive thoughts?”
“On top, around and underneath. And prayers for protection.”
“Who are you protecting?”
“Everyone. Especially you.”
“Ta.” Melissa smiled. “What if I told you, as a medical doctor, that these thoughts have nothing to do with anyone’s physical reality? Would you believe me?”
“Sure,” I said, “but I’d keep having them anyway. We only use a tiny percentage of our brains. How can you know my brain isn’t connected to everything in the universe?”
Melissa said, “I need to think about this more. But for now, you’ve done everything you need to do, and you can rest.”
“Thank you,” I said. “My OCD and I thank you. My OCD is a delicious combination of low self-esteem and megalomania.”
“What does it feel like?” Melissa asked.
“Very I’m-trapped-in-my-head-and-I-can’t-get-out-ish,” I said.
“It sounds frustrating and painful.”
“It could be worse,” I mumbled, dozing off. “It was worse. This is like heaven.”
“I’m glad. I’m sorry you still have symptoms that bother you. I wish I could do more.”
“But you do. You make the mechanisms in my brain slow down. When I’m with you, I’m not tormented.”
“What a lovely thing to say,” Melissa said, tucking the covers in around me. “I’m all goosepimply.”