My Oxford Year

Chapter 20

The individual; true man;

Individuality.

A man’s but one half; some woman

The other half must be.

James Thomson, “Mr. MacCall at Cleveland Hall,” 1866

Ella?”

I’m in a dream and I hear my name in chocolate-covered-caramel tones.

“Sorry, but my leg’s quite gone to sleep.”

I crack open my eyes and see a blurred Jamie on the other side of the couch. We’ve tangled into each other in the night. “Sorry,” I mutter. I shift so he can extricate his leg.

As I wake more fully, I notice that he looks almost completely normal. As if one night of sleep has magically cured him. I realize that this is the reason I never noticed he was sick; if he avoided me on certain days, I really couldn’t have known. I open my mouth to say good morning, but Jamie’s smile fades and he murmurs, “I wasn’t trying to trap you.”

I take a second. “I know.” I have to clear the morning out of my throat before continuing. “I knew it when I said it.”

Jamie tentatively reaches out and rests his hand on my ankle. “Please understand, you are no part of this. You and I are separate from this.”

I digest this. In one sense, he’s absolutely right. What if he had continued to hide his illness? We might have fizzled out. I might have left on June 11 none the wiser. This is his illness, not ours.

“Nothing has to change,” he says. “Except that I don’t have to lie anymore.” He grins wryly. “We can continue on. If you want. Nothing has to change,” he reiterates.

I think of something he said the other night, that this—me—was his last hurrah. I realize that I feel the same way. Before I go back to my life, before I continue on my preordained path, my plan . . . I want this. Whatever this is. My first instinct was to run away from it, but now it’s the opposite. Being with him seems imperative now. Like being given the opportunity to hold time in your hand.

At my silence, Jamie swallows. “I understand, obviously, if you don’t want any part of this. If you don’t want to continue the intimacy with which . . .” He pauses. “Perhaps we might be friends?” He looks down at his hand on my ankle like he’s memorizing it. Like it might disappear before his eyes.

“I don’t want to be your friend.”

He removes his hand, nodding reflexively.

“I want to be your girlfriend.”

He looks up at me. “Truly?”

“Whaddaya say?” I stick out my hand. It’s how we do things.

He takes my hand, beaming, and gently pulls me toward him. “It’s a plan.”

AFTER SOME BREAKFAST (which, for Jamie, was just coffee and two slices of thick-slab bacon on toast) we’re lingering at the kitchen table, Jamie looking like he could fall asleep again. I’m back to thinking. Specifically, about the trip I have planned in December. I still really want to go, but am I being selfish? It would be amazing if he could come with me, but it’s over the holidays and surely he has plans. And would he even be well enough to travel?

Jamie breaks the silence. “Tuppence for your thoughts?”

I shake my head. “I was just thinking . . . about a trip I’m supposed to take over break.”

He perks up. “Where are you off to, then? Back to America for the vac?”

“No, actually. Europe.”

“All of it? Really?” I throw a bit of bacon at his head and we both smile. “Where exactly are you going?”

“Everywhere.”

“You’ve obviously put rather a significant amount of thought into this.”

“Considering I’ve never been anywhere, everywhere is a perfectly reasonable answer.”

“Hang on,” Jamie says, straightening. “What do you mean you’ve never been anywhere?”

“Ella from Ohio’s never been outside of the good ol’ U.S. of A. Until she arrived at Heathrow on September twenty-eighth, that is.”

Jamie now sits ramrod straight. “Are you taking the piss?”

“Nope.”

“But you seem so . . .”

“Worldly?” I suggest, putting on an air. “Sophisticated?”

“Opinionated.”

It feels so good to laugh with each other again. “Do you want to hear the plan?” I ask.

“Absolutely.”

I’m excited again. I tuck my leg underneath me and resituate myself. “All right, on December twentieth, I’m taking the Eurostar to Paris, where I’ll spend Christmas, and then I’m training to Brussels for three days—”

“Brussels? Why Brussels?”

I shrug. “It’s Brussels.”

Jamie’s mouth forms a confused moue. It’s the same look I’d give him if he said he was coming to America and wanted to see Ohio. I persist. “Then I’m heading to Amsterdam for New Year’s, spending four nights—”

Jamie interrupts again. “What happened to the rest of France?”

“I don’t want to rent a car. Too expensive.”

Jamie makes the same face again. I persist again. “Then from Amsterdam, I’m doing the overnight train to Venice—”

“Hold on, you’re going to be that close to Bruges and you’re not going?” I huff, growing exasperated. “Tell me you’re going to Ghent, at the very least?” I glare at him. He shrugs and says, “Sorry, but it just seems a waste. Hilary Term doesn’t begin until January eighteenth, you have almost a month, and you’re going to simply take trains back and forth between major cities, which all have the same McDonald’s and the same cheap T-shirt shops and fake gelato and Irish pubs called the Blarney Stone and everyone you meet speaks English?”

A silence hangs in the air, that anticipatory moment right before the curtain goes up at the theater. And then I say it. “Well, if you have such strong opinions about it, you should come with me.”

Without missing a beat, Jamie reaches across the table and grabs his phone, tapping the screen and studying it. “My final treatment is on December the sixteenth. I’ll most likely need three days to recover.” He looks from his calendar right at me. “Ah. What a coincidence. That’s the twentieth. Shall we leave then?”

My heart quickens. “For where?”

“Everywhere. Or was it anywhere?”

That pang of guilt comes round the bend again. “Jamie, hold on. We’re acting like you’re fine, like everything’s normal. I think, just to be safe—”

He leans in to me across the table. “Nothing. Changes. That was the deal.”

I rub my forehead, wanting so badly to believe him. But something else occurs to me. “Also, there’s no way I can afford the Jamie Davenport version of this trip.” We’ve never discussed money, and Jamie doesn’t flaunt it, but it’s clear he has it, that it comes from somewhere other than his meager JRF stipend. The classic car (which he’s said he’s had since he was eighteen), the ability to renovate the town house however he wants, the wine habit. The velvet trousers.

He waves me off. “I’ll take care of it.”

I bristle. “No. Absolutely not. Are you insane?”

“What?”

“I’m not taking your money.”

“Who said anything about taking it? I’m sharing it. ‘Can’t take it with you,’ and all that.”