My Oxford Year

“No, stop. Just stop, Jamie. Enough. I’m sorry they ambushed you. Just to be clear, I didn’t ask them to come. But I’m not sorry I called them. They have a right to know what’s happening to their son.”

“You don’t want to get involved in this, Ella. It doesn’t concern you.”

“It does. You know why? Because I’m the one who’s here now.” I’m channeling Antonia. So when Jamie opens his mouth to protest, I continue. “You told me nothing’s changed. And I believed you in that moment because I wanted to, but, Jamie. Everything’s changed.” I watch this land in his eyes, the sad recognition of a truth denied. “It doesn’t have to stop us, this.” I gesture between us. “But we can’t ignore it either.”

I sit down on the edge of the coffee table, right in front of him, knees to knees. “You know me well enough by now to know that I like having opinions.” He snorts at this. “But luckily for you, I’m good at it. People pay me for my opinions, but I’m giving them to you for free. So keeping things from me isn’t going to keep me from having opinions. It’s just going to keep me from having informed opinions. Which is pointless.” I take his hand. I take a risk. “Do you want me here?”

He looks into my eyes and I get a flash of the Jamie from our first tutorial. “Of course.”

“Then treat me like I’m here. Don’t shut me out. Don’t act like it’s already June eleventh. Because it’ll come soon enough.”

After a moment, Jamie sighs. “So we carry on, then, together?”

I nod. “Together. We’ll go in March. The weather will be better anyway.” Everything will be better, I tell myself.

After a moment, he picks up my hand, bends it back at the wrist, and kisses the palm. He lets his lips linger there. His eyes close. He inhales. He murmurs, “‘We are here as on a darkling plane. Where ignorant armies clash by night.’” He opens his eyes, looks over my hand at me. His eyes, though tired, call to me like midnight pools. The hardest part of this is the fragility. The shroud of look-don’t-touch over these moments of connection. The are-you-all-right-how-do-you-feel filter.

He drops his head. I reach out and run my hand through his hair. He turns his head into my palm, like a cat. He leans forward, and places the top of his head on my chest, between my breasts.

“I swear,” he mutters. “If that man is day, I’m night.”

His hands find my hips.

He turns his head to the left.

As I begin rubbing my hands down his back all I can think is, Day and night are just two sides of the same planet.

Chapter 24

Be near me when the sensuous frame

Is rack’d with pangs that conquer trust;

And Time, a maniac scattering dust,

And Life, a Fury slinging flame.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam, A.H.H., canto 50, 1850

Ever thought about what it would be like to set up shop on a bathroom floor? I hadn’t either. Now I’m an expert. I could teach workshops.

The secret is cushions. Pillows don’t cut it. They’re for amateurs. You want a big, sectional, one-piece cushion off an Oxfam couch placed perpendicular to the toilet. You’ll want a blanket that’s breathable (no microfiber, even though it would be easier to clean) that he can throw off depending on his internal temperature. You’ll also want a space heater for the cold days, an oscillating fan for the adrenal fatigue days, and—this is crucial—find a cleaning product with a scent that doesn’t make him more ill than he already is. Last but not least, find a video online that teaches you (step-by-step, it’s harder than you’d think) how to convert a regular light switch into a dimmer. Why? So that, when he’s dashing into the bathroom at three A.M., he can avoid that refrigerator-light-right-in-the-face experience. You’ll learn that light can be painful.

I like to sit, as I am doing now, on the marble countertop, my back against the mirror, a book on the 1832 Reform Bill in my lap. Jamie moves slightly, restlessly. My senses attuned, I know what’s coming. He throws off the blanket and pivots toward the toilet. I sit forward, but he holds out a hand. Wait. He hovers over the bowl for a moment, testing the waters, so to speak. I give him space, but I watch him like a hawk. Sometimes Jamie gets faint when he vomits, and about a month after he started the trial he lost consciousness and cut his forehead open on the edge of the toilet-paper holder. That face I once thought was too perfect to be handsome now has a white scar right through its left eyebrow. I got my man-with-a-story face, after all. After that, I insisted (and he finally acquiesced) on joining him in here.

Turns out, we have some of our best talks in this bathroom. We talk history (the world’s and our own), George Eliot (I’m writing my thesis on the concept of education in Middlemarch), culture, science, philosophy, and, of course, literature. Occasionally we watch Abbott and Costello. I pratfall. Badly. Anything for a laugh.

Jamie sits back, propping himself against the wall. It was a false alarm. His legs sprawl in a wide V as if he’s just run a marathon. He pretty much has.

According to Jamie, the trial’s side effects have been “rather manageable.” He averages five good days for every two bad ones and he’s only been hospitalized twice (anemia again and a sepsis scare). He’s managed to not break any bones (a pretty common feature of myeloma’s bone-weakening havoc) and though he sleeps a lot, his energy levels when he’s awake are almost normal. He’s not teaching this term, but he’s been getting revisions done, and he’s even lectured a few times. I think what irritates him most is that he’s never able to count on his body’s cooperation. He’ll be feeling fine one day, but there’s crippling acid reflux the next, then a good day, then constipation. The unknown is relentless.

Somehow he still has his hair, which brands him a pariah in the group sessions. He tries to show people where it’s thinning in the back. He’s like the narrow-hipped, all-belly mom-to-be in a Lamaze class who assures the other women that she gained a little weight in her upper arms this week. Bitch. I don’t have the heart to tell him his ingratiating explanations only make it worse.

“You know the Oxfordshire History Centre?” Jamie asks, voice witching-hour quiet.

This is the way of things; long strings of silence punctuated by non sequiturs. We both do it. In the last three months we’ve acquired backstage, VIP access to each other’s brain.

“Never been,” I answer.

“We ought to go.”

I jump off the counter. “I’ll get my purse.”

He chuckles. That’s good. Then he’s puking. Not so good. I wait. He steadies himself. He continues talking. “I haven’t been in ages, but there’s this . . . thing, this . . . historical footnote I rather enjoyed. I keep thinking about it.” He leans back against the wall.

I slide down onto the floor across from him. I hand him the water bottle, he rinses his mouth, turns, spits into the toilet. Rituals. I tentatively take his feet into my lap and try rubbing them. I watch his face, looking for any sign of discomfort. One of the weirder side effects is a transient nerve pain that comes and goes. When it’s happening, Jamie can’t be touched. He can’t even touch surfaces—a chair, the couch, the bed—everything hurts. He wanders, zombielike, from room to room, betting on his stamina to outlast the neuropathy. Now he moans in pleasure, indicating that I can keep rubbing his feet. “God, I miss you,” he exhales.