My Oxford Year: A Novel

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.

Impotency. The big, scary, demon-conjuring word whispered in the group sessions. The wives slinking up to me. “And how long have you two been together?” My prevarication: officially together or sleeping together? At either answer, their eyes goggle, these women who have long since measured their relationships in years, in decades even, not months. “What, that’s all? Poor lamb.” Their advice: Don’t talk about it. Don’t bruise his ego. Take a romance novel into the bath, they said. So I did. Only I varied it slightly: when I took a romance novel into the bath, I had Jamie read it to me.

By hook or by crook. Or, in this case, by book, we’ve found ways to make it work. But honestly? It’s still not enough. I feel fundamentally empty. I can only imagine how he feels.

Trust me, I understand the irony, considering how this relationship started.

But, Jamie had his final treatment yesterday. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel. A big, red, Amsterdam-style light. Open for business.

Jamie is silent and I realize he might have nodded off. He does that. Some days he sleeps around the clock (literally, from ten one night to ten the next). We’ve long since moved the sickbed from the drawing room to his actual bed. So much for negative associations. While he sleeps, I’ll sit in his bed and do work, either on my thesis or the campaign. Or I put my earbuds in and watch The West Wing for the thousandth time. On the bad days, I don’t like leaving him while he’s sleeping.

But on the good days, I’m out and about, at the Bod or the English faculty library, meeting with my adviser, going to classes and lectures, grabbing a pint with Maggie, Charlie, and Tom. I stay at Magdalen about half the time, and when I’m there I catch up with Hugh while I sort through my pidge, and chat with Eugenia in the early mornings. My Three Musketeers love that Jamie and I are together, but, at Jamie’s behest, they still know nothing of his illness. He’s immensely private and he should be. Because of Oliver, telling people Jamie has myeloma doesn’t elicit looks of sympathy; it elicits looks of ghoulish horror, as if they’re standing in the presence of a ghost.

Charlie’s Blenheim Ball plan backfired. Now Tom just seems confused around Maggie. He barely speaks to her, is aloof and distant, which leads Maggie to believe that he’s infatuated with someone else. Best-laid plans and all that. Having dinner with my friends, hearing college gossip, talking about their theses, watching Charlie try to make Ridley jealous by parading other guys in front of him . . . it gives me a chance to feel uncomplicated again. I’m just a girl studying abroad, unwittingly adopting an insufferable mid-Atlantic accent (especially after a few drinks), living in a rented attic room with the bare essentials. I have no roots in these moments. But I leave it all behind in a heartbeat to get back to Jamie and the old Victorian in North Oxford.

Some days he seems fine. Nearly normal. We laugh. We touch. We share a glass of wine. We get out of the house. We walk around the park, up to Port Meadow. We go see Lizzie, Bernard, and Ricky, have a finger of Jamie’s whiskey and popcorn. We go to the Happy Cod, share an order of chips. When it’s raining (so much of the time), we go to the Ashmolean or the Natural History Museum and stare at Anglo-Saxon treasure, illuminated manuscripts, dinosaur bones.

Watching Jamie go through this has been a lesson in fortitude. He doesn’t ask the big questions. Why me? Why my brother? What’s the point of it all? What’s next? I’ve never heard him ponder, doubt, rail. I can only assume he got all of that out of his system the first time around, with Oliver. That first great loss, like a first love, I suppose, that prompts the questioning. Maybe, once you come to realize that there are no answers, you learn to live with the questions.

I get lunch with Cecelia at least once a week. I honestly don’t know what I’d do without her knowledge and advice. (It doesn’t hurt that she also happens to know everything about women’s property rights in nineteenth-century Britain, because of her work on Elizabeth Gaskell, so she’s helped me break through the more esoteric aspects of my research.)

Frankly, I’m kind of in love with her.

Frankly, I’m kind of in love with this life.

This unexpected life.

You would think I’d be running in the opposite direction, that I’d be checking my watch, waiting for that bus to take me back to Heathrow on June 11. But it’s the opposite. I don’t know why; I can’t explain it.

Especially when I still love my job. I get a call from Gavin and the excitement kicks in, energizing me like a drug. Against all odds, Janet’s survived the early primaries (even winning, to the pundits’ shock, the Iowa caucuses) and all the candidates other than Vice President Hillerson have dropped out. But we haven’t seen the numbers move one way or the other in about seven weeks; the two candidates just keep trading primary victories back and forth. The final debate is tonight, and a week from Tuesday there are primaries in five states, which should be the deciding factor.

Everything, it seems, is coming to a head. The final debate, Jamie’s final treatment, my final term here . . . and I have no idea how any of it is going to end.

Life.

Jamie’s eyes open and he continues talking as if he never paused. “At the Oxfordshire History Centre there’s an old map of what Oxford used to look like at the very beginning of the university. A population of about five thousand, which isn’t insignificant considering London was hovering around twenty thousand at the time. The river gave it strategic importance and the Normans built a castle here, on a mound that had already been used by the Danes when they routed the city in the—” Jamie stops himself, as he often does when he realizes he’s lecturing. He thinks I mind. I don’t. I think it’s cute. “Point being, there had to be something here already, something unique to the place. The Saxons used Oxford as a center of trade and transport. Specifically, as a place to cross the Thames with livestock, such as oxen. Oxen fording the Thames. Which, obviously, is how Oxford was derived.”

I nod, my attention still on rubbing his feet. “Oxenford.”

“Right,” he mutters as if coming out of a dream. “It’s just that. That concept of a ford in the river. The place, the exact place where it’s easiest to cross. How desirable it was. Is.” He places a gentle hand on my thigh. It feels so good I practically purr. But he doesn’t continue speaking and I glance up.

He’s looking at me with what I can only describe as weary resignation. It’s everything I never wanted to see in his eyes. It terrifies me. My heart beats once, loudly, like an animal surprised in the bush.

“Oliver was forced away from that place,” Jamie murmurs, and I clench my fist to keep from reaching out and covering his mouth. “Dragged kicking and screaming. Forced to continue a fight he’d already lost. He didn’t have the strength to override my father’s insistence. Dominance. Lies. ‘You’re strong yet, Ollie, you’re young, lad, you owe it to us, to those who love you. C’mon, one more fight, my boy.’ He gave in. And he suffered. My rugger brother became a skeleton. He shat blood. He hallucinated hellfire. He tried to kill himself and they revived him. He was dragged further and further upstream. Past his Oxenford.” Jamie’s eyes refuse to leave mine, his jaw working, his teeth grinding. Angry, yes, but also righteous. “That will not happen again.”

I can’t reply. He’s been so even-keeled these past few months, more stoic than I could ever imagine being in his situation. I know he’s tired of being sick; I know he’s been beaten down by this. Intellectually, I know all of this. But I haven’t felt it, really understood it, until now.

“It’s said we live longer now. Fallacy. We’re simply kept alive longer. Death with dignity. Every culture had it. The Greeks drank hemlock. The Romans fell on their swords. Samurai and seppuku. Medieval knights, so armored there was no conceivable way to suicide on the battlefields, gave that honor to one another, a misericord slipped between the plates and straight into the heart. But us? No misericord for us. We cure people to death.” He pauses. “This is where the ones who truly love you ought to step in, champion you. They ought to.” Jamie swallows. “In those awful final days, the one who might have been able to give Ollie some comfort, the one he loved most, Ce, he kept away. He couldn’t bear having her see what he’d been reduced to. By my father.”

In the ensuing silence I can hear Jamie’s breathing begin to thicken, grow more audible, more rasped, choking down the long-repressed emotion and losing. Finally, he says thinly, “He would have had him plugged into those bloody machines forever. So Oliver made me his Lasting. His Power of Attorney.” Jamie swallows. “Truth? I had hoped that Oliver would die before it became my decision. Cowardly? Yes. But we might have come through the whole palaver without William ever knowing we’d switched the paperwork. We could have preserved the illusion that he was still in charge. When he found out . . . things were said.” He stops. That’s it. That’s all I’m going to get.

Jamie can be obtuse, especially where feelings are concerned. He speaks in fragments, pieces that he leaves for me to put together.

To his credit, William has held up his end of their bargain. For the last three months it’s been as if he doesn’t exist. While Antonia visits often, and though I know William’s been in London a lot for business, he’s exiled himself from his son’s life just to ensure Jamie does what, he believes, Jamie needs to do to keep his life. My translation? William loves Jamie. And William loved Oliver. That’s evident now.

Tears seep from the corners of Jamie’s eyes. I want to say something to help, to make it all better, but what would that be? Nothing helps the loss of a brother, the betrayal of a father. So I rub his feet while his hand kneads my thigh.

Jamie looks up, watery blue eyes finding mine. “Don’t worry. I’m not giving up. That’s not what I’m implying by any of this . . . natter.” He chuckles once, softly, self-deprecating. “You’re not rid of me yet. I’m only saying, when the time comes, let it be my Oxenford.” He looks back down at his feet. “‘Sunset and evening star, and one clear call for me! And may there be no moaning of the bar, when I put out to sea.’” Jamie closes his eyes.

Tennyson. Always Tennyson.

Everyone has his metaphor. For Tennyson it was a sandbar, for Jamie it’s a ford in the river. For me?

I don’t know yet.

I can’t think about it.

I’m not ready to think about leaving this world. Right now I’m just struggling with the thought of leaving Jamie in June, and there is no metaphor for that.

Jamie’s invited me to move in with him, but I haven’t brought more than a toothbrush and pajamas over here.

Because when I pack up in June, I don’t want to do it in this house. It has to be at Magdalen. The place I originally came here for and the place I will leave behind. I’m shallowly planted there; here, the roots have taken and will be harder to remove when the time comes.

“Relinquish,” Jamie says, more calmly, more composed. “Knowing when to let go. Release oneself. There’s nothing worse than being caught, trapped in indecisiveness.” These random thoughts that come and go as he slips in and out are little cherry bombs that he sets off in me.

When my father was dying, did he relinquish? It happened so fast. He probably spent his last moments cursing himself for taking an icy corner too quickly. But he knew his daughter and wife loved him, I’m certain of that. In that moment, was that enough?

I can’t imagine the terror William must live in, that he could get a call in the middle of the night and it’s me—me, whom he loathes—telling him Jamie’s gone. Antonia’s words come back to me. Sometimes one must ask oneself why the bull is in the china shop in the first place.

There’s no right or wrong. No judgment to be passed. Life just gets complicated when people love each other. To take sides is an exercise in futility. How do we get rid of the sides?

How do I, in good conscience, leave Jamie at the mercy of his father if nothing’s been resolved?

I will fix this. I will figure out a plan. It’s my gift, after all, and it will be my parting gift to Jamie and his family. And, in truth, to myself as well. The gift of a plan duly executed. The gift of a clear conscience.

In the deathly quiet, my phone rings. My head drops to my chest. “I’m so sorry,” I murmur.

Jamie squeezes my thigh, letting me know he doesn’t mind. “The final debate. Just the two of them, Wilkes and Hillerson. It’s tonight?”

“Yeah,” I say, standing. “It’s crunch time.” I pull the phone out of my pocket, step out of the bathroom into the bedroom, and answer softly. “Gavin.”

“So. Janet’s pregnant.”

What. “What?”

“She’s pregnant.” I’ve never heard his voice sound like this, detached, just reporting the facts. It’s so unlike him. Which is why it takes me this long to realize he’s not joking.

“It’s not mine,” he states.

Jesus, maybe he is joking. “Gavin, please, if this is your idea of a—”

“It’s the boyfriend’s. Peter’s.”

I don’t even know where to start. “H-how far along is she?”

“Four months.”

“Four months!” I yelp, turning farther away from the bathroom.

“Apparently, she’s not very—how am I having this conversation?—‘regular,’ some premenopausal thing, so it took her a few months to figure it out. The goddamn doctor’s office leaked it, just in time for the debate tonight. Not that she could’ve hid it forever.” He sighs. A measure of Gavin comes back into his voice when he says, “It’s done, kid. We’ve overcome a lot, but . . .” He sighs again. “This is just a bridge too far.” I’m silent. “I gotta make calls.”

“O-okay,” I finally answer, but he’s already hung up. I bring the phone down from my ear and just look at the blank screen.

It’s over.

I should be surprised, and I am.

I should be shocked, and I am.

I should be angry. I am.

I should be afraid of what comes next; that too.

But with all that churning inside me, my only thought as I stare at the blank screen is: now I can stay in Oxford.

It trumps everything.

And that scares the hell out of me.

I turn back toward the bathroom and see Jamie. He’s nodded off, back against the wall, chin to chest. The way a toddler can fall asleep. I stare at him for a moment. A long moment.

Then I step back out into the bedroom and call Gavin back.

“Yeah?” he answers.

“Why?” I ask.

“Why, what?”

“Why is it over? Why is she dropping out?” It’s so quiet I think we’ve been disconnected. “Hello?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Ella, just spit-balling here, but maybe because we can’t have an unmarried, single mother for president?”

He’s shouting by the end. I don’t shout back. “Why, Gavin? Why can’t we have an unmarried, single mother for president?”

He sighs, not listening. “Hillerson will eviscerate her tonight if she doesn’t drop out, I won’t put her in that position—”

“You’ll excuse me but that’s not for you to decide. Or Hillerson. Or the party. Or anyone else other than the American people. Give them the chance to decide. We’ll never know what they want if we don’t give them the choice.”

There’s a beat. “Ella, forgive me, but you’re out of your—”

“Is she there?” I swallow. “Gavin, please, I know this is outside my wheelhouse, I know you didn’t ask for my opinion, but I have one.”

After an eternity, he exhales. “Hold on.”

There’s shuffling in the background and then I hear, on speakerphone, Janet’s resigned voice. “Ella?”

“Don’t drop out.”

“Honey,” she breathes, “I want this baby, with Peter. I thought it wasn’t possible at my age. This is a once-in-a-lifetime—”

“Have your baby. And don’t drop out.” Though unsure how to read her silence, I forge on. “Do the debate.”

“I appreciate your enthusiasm, but I don’t see us overcoming this.”

Anger bolts through me. “No, see, there’s nothing to overcome! There’s only something to become!” I pace. “Become the woman who stands up to this bullshit. Become the woman who challenges the patriarchal playbook.”

“Ella—”

“We have to stop pretending that there are rules, that anyone knows anything. No one knows shit!”

There’s a faint chuckle when she says, “I agree, trust me, but—”

“If nothing else,” I huff, “if this ends next Tuesday, if we find out this is just too much for people to accept, then at least we elevated the discourse when we had the chance. That you were the candidate who didn’t just have the answers, but dared to ask the questions. Do the debate. And. Ask. Why. Make Hillerson say it, make him say ‘you’re unfit,’ not only to your face, but to the face of every woman in the country. All his arguments are specious: ‘We can’t have a pregnant candidate, we can’t have a baby-mama POTUS.’ Why? Because we’ve never had one before? And then ask him if he’d have a problem with a new father taking office? And then, once his own misogyny has painted him into a corner, ask him if he’s suggesting that you’d only be fit to be president if you’d had an abortion? Socratic method his ass.”

After a long moment, I hear the smile in her voice when she says, “Socratic method. Oxford’s rubbing off on you.” She sighs. “I’ll think about it.”

This stops me in my tracks. Really?

Oh God, what did I just do? I’m pretty sure I just asked a wonderful woman to go up onstage and lash herself to the feminist mast on national television.

I swallow. “It’s a plan.”

We hang up.

I stand there, my legs suddenly shaky. When I step back into the bathroom, I’m surprised to find Jamie looking at me through hooded lids, smiling slightly. “Are we watching the debate tonight?” he asks.

“If there is one,” I hedge.

He nods at my phone. “I’m dying to know what that was about.”

I drop back down at his feet, resuming our previous position. “I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

He cocks an eyebrow at me. “Why do you think I asked?”

I snort. It’s sad, it’s funny, and I’m suddenly exhausted. I drop my head. Then I feel Jamie’s fingers in my hair, his palm cupping my cheek. I lean into it, let it strengthen me for a moment. “So,” Jamie purrs. “Your birthday.”

I look up at the abrupt change of topic. His eyes twinkle like they used to. He’s feeling a bit better.

I smile, trying to rally. “Now we’re talking.”

“It’s next week.”

“Yes, it is.”

“I want to take you somewhere. Shall we go somewhere?”

Is he kidding?

Despite the promise we both made to postpone our December trip to the Easter vac, it became clear about two weeks ago that Jamie could not travel. His oncologist flat-out prohibited it. Jamie is still having a hard time accepting it. Obviously.

After my birthday next week, I have a couple of weeks off before Trinity Term starts and Charlie, Maggie, and Tom have invited me to join them when they go to Morocco at the end of the break. I could, I guess, but I feel like I’m on countdown. I want to spend every last minute with Jamie. I want to watch him get better. We’ve earned it.

I shake my head at Jamie’s suggestion. “We’re having a staycation, remember? Recovery, get your strength back, have sex, write, have sex, follow-up blood work, have more sex.”

He grins. “We’ll be sensible, I promise. Just a few days. I’ll get checked out before we go. We’ll keep close. We could go to the Lakes or Cornwall. Or Bath! How about Bath? Or I could show you around Cambridge? Choose something, anything.” I’m silent. “Anywhere you want. Anywhere you want that doesn’t involve a boat or a plane. It’s your birthday.”

An idea forms. “Anywhere?”

He nods once, decisively, happily. Sure he’s won.

I hold out my hand to shake. This is how we do deals in this relationship and I want him bound by this. “Anywhere?” I confirm.

Jamie shakes my hand and smiles. “You can’t frighten me,” he boasts. “Anywhere.”

Before I can tell him, my phone dings. I look down at it. A two-word text from Gavin:

It’s on.