My Oxford Year

Connor nods, brings the champagne to his lips. “Because she’ll have to be poor to be with him.”

I pause. “Well, yes, but it’s also a metaphor.” I take a big bite of turkey and continue talking anyway. “See, Dorothea never really lets herself feel anything. She’s pious and thoughtful and she’s always doing things for the betterment of humanity, but that just means that she never gets too close to anything really important. Like, personally important. The distance protects her. I mean, you can’t hurt that much if you haven’t lost that much, right?”

Connor chews on this. “Right, okay.”

“But it’s a cosmic joke! Because we’re going to lose it all anyway. There’s no protection! There’s only death! That’s the cost!”

Connor stares at the tablecloth for a moment while I breathe, trying to muzzle the crazy. He smiles sheepishly up at me. “Sorry. The last book I really understood was The Hungry, Hungry Caterpillar. I’m terrible at analyzing literature.”

I move the turkey around in my mouth. “I’m beginning to think I am, too.” I sigh. I pause for a second, then smile. “This is about India. You and India. You’ll learn what everything costs. That’s the point.” He nods pleasantly. I turn back to my plate, thinking about Dorothea, about Middlemarch, about the awful explanation I just gave. I wish I could talk to Jamie about this. He’d get it. What am I saying? There’s a reason it’s his favorite book. He already gets it. Deeply. Somatically.

“You know,” Connor says, “your conversation with your mom . . . I’ve never had a no-strings, friends-with-benefits kind of relationship. Maybe I should try it.” He’s teasing, yes, but he’s also testing the waters. Here I am thinking about love and death and cost, and Connor’s thinking about getting laid. I don’t blame him. Hell, I wish I could be thinking about it, too.

I push back from the table and ball up my napkin, wondering belatedly what, exactly, I’m doing. I dig in my purse for money as I find myself saying, “Connor, if I were going to have another no-strings, friends-with-benefits thing with anyone, it would definitely be with you. I mean, look at you. But I’m not.” Then I add, sounding weirdly surprised, “I’m going to leave.”

He looks mortified. “Ella, I didn’t mean—wait, stop, I’m so sorry—”

I throw a fifty-pound note on the table, my hand shaking slightly. “No, no, it’s not you. Trust me, it’s so not you. There’s something I need to . . . attend to.”

He relaxes slightly. We look at each other. “You mean someone?” he asks. Reluctantly, I nod. He grins. “What’ll we tell your mother?”

We both chuckle, happy to relieve the tension. I pause. “This was lovely. You’re lovely. I’m sorry, Connor.”

“Don’t be,” he says, a little too easily. His jaw tenses as he adds charitably, “He’s a lucky guy.”

I squeeze Connor’s shoulder on the way past and head out into the new night, thinking, Jamie is the furthest thing from lucky I’ve ever known.

Chapter 19

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face . . .

William Butler Yeats, “When You Are Old,” 1891

Jamie doesn’t seem surprised to see me on his stoop. He opens the door (I knocked this time) and steps back, gesturing me in. He’s wearing flannel pajama bottoms and a ratty Christ Church College T-shirt. I’ve never seen him in clothes like this. In my experience, he’s either dressed like he’s just stepped out of a photo shoot or he’s naked. As I walk past him, I notice that his coloring is off. He somehow looks thinner than he did yesterday, hollowed out.

He silently leads me into the kitchen, crossing to the sink. I hover at the island. He pops the tab on the electric kettle, the British assumption of tea. Then he turns back around and we look at each other.

“How are you feeling?” I ask.

He shrugs, crossing his arm over his stomach, rubbing his other forearm. “I believe Happy Thanksgiving is in order. Happy? Is that how you say it?”

“Yes. It is. Thank you.”

We’re stiff together. Formal. For the first time, I feel more English than American. I watch my hand run along the island’s marble top, studying the white and gray and black veins. “So, I’m sorry.”

“As am I.”

I look up at him. He’s looking at the floor. “For how I reacted,” I say.

He looks up at me. “I’m sorry for everything.” We assess each other, these people we thought we knew. His eyes tell me that the simple apology is enough for now, and I agree. The problem is, now I want to go to him, hug him, hold him. But I stay where I am. I don’t know who we are to each other anymore.

The kettle begins to hum, heating up.

“Will you tell me the story?” I ask.

Four years ago, Oliver was diagnosed with multiple myeloma at the age of twenty-one. Two years after that, he died. Although there can be a genetic component to the disease, Jamie says it’s rare, and he had been tested when Oliver needed possible stem-cell donors and his results were clean, so he didn’t think he needed to worry. Within a year of Oliver’s death, Jamie—then in Cambridge and helping a friend with her doctoral research in biology—got a blood test. This is how he found out. Jamie’s case is just as aggressive as Oliver’s was, but was caught earlier. He explains that he immediately began treatment, doing what Oliver had done: stem-cell replacement therapy. This entailed a few rounds of chemo, the harvesting of his own cells, and an implantation procedure that required him to stay in a hospital, completely isolated, for fear of his contracting an infection, for a month. It bought him a year of remission.

The day I arrived in Oxford happened to be the day Jamie found out the myeloma had come back. He went to the Varsity Club for a drink on the rooftop, met a blond distraction, took her for fish and chips at “the best restaurant in Oxford,” and found himself literally running into a jet-lagged Ella from Ohio.

The kettle bubbles, the hissing escalates. I have to lean over the island to hear Jamie’s low voice.

He explains his decision to pull away from me a week ago. He’s doing an eight-week round of “maintenance” chemo before deciding, in December, whether he’s going to try stem-cell replacement again. He was two rounds into this treatment and losing the ability to hide the effects. He was tired all the time and he wasn’t reliably keeping his food down and his hair was beginning to thin. He worried he might become impotent. He asked me for a month break, because that’s how long he had left in treatment.

Jamie knows everything about this disease and its cycles. He lived through it with Oliver and now he’s being forced to live through it himself. He’s a pro. He’s orchestrated his treatment the way he wants to have it: in-home, on his schedule. Of course, having money helps. He can pay a nurse to come at night so that as soon as the IV comes out, he can go right to sleep. He can have her come on a Sunday, for instance, so that he can get through his class the following day before feeling the effects.

Jamie, whom I always saw as spontaneous and haphazard, is actually a planner of the highest order. He puts my abilities to shame.