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.”