My Oxford Year

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.