He coughed and sat up. “Right,” he said. “Right. Is this about your essay?”
I nodded, pushing the heel of my hand under my wet eyes. “It’s not that I want special treatment,” I said, though I did. “It’s just, I think there should be a bit of grace, you know, given the extenuating circumstances.”
At “extenuating circumstances,” I started to cry harder, because I was thinking about not just these circumstances, but all of them. I was in love for the first time properly, and he didn’t want me, and it was eating my organs.
“If,” Fred Byrne began, “there’s been a death in the family, or something, you know what I mean, we can say there was a death. I can waive the—”
“I just want you to acknowledge what’s happened,” I continued, and I was talking not so much to him but to Carey. James and I spoke so much about these two men, compared their traits and so on, that one was kind of a facsimile for the other. “Everything’s different now. I’m different now.”
Fred Byrne looked over the armchair to James, who was coming back from the kitchen with the mugs of tea.
“You’ve not been very nice to Rachel, Fred,” James said, like he was mediating a divorce. “I don’t know if you’ve behaved sensitively.”
Here is something that I love about James: he lets people have their own connections. He will never try to convince you to feel differently about someone. He will not be the delivery boy for baggage from one person’s relationship to another. However, when it comes down to fights between friends and lovers, he will put the friend first.
“Right,” Dr. Byrne said again. “No, you’re quite right, James. I thought I had compartmentalised something that I don’t think can be compartmentalised. I’m sorry, Rachel.”
His voice was soft and masculine, and James’s eyes filled with affection at the humility he was showing. Him, a man of almost forty, apologising to a twenty-one-year-old girl. He squeezed Dr. Byrne’s leg, and Dr. Byrne patted his hand.
A new flood broke over me, seeing the two of them so clearly in love. They had everything in the way of their relationship: orientation, marriage, age. But they were making it work. They had found a space for it to thrive in. I, meanwhile, couldn’t make love work with someone single and straight, purely because he could not be bothered with me.
James sat at the armchair, rubbing my back. “I’m sorry, Rache.”
“Is she okay?”
“Boyfriend,” James said.
“He’s not my—”
“He was here three nights a week. He met all your friends. I call that a boyfriend.”
“What happened to him?” Dr. Byrne sounded genuinely interested.
“Invisible Man,” James answered.
Dr. Byrne tutted with his tongue. “Rough,” he said.
He leaned forward and put his big hand on my knee. “Right, Rachel, let’s sort this out, will we?”
He said he would fix things. He would put the word out in the faculty that I was very ill and had shown him a doctor’s note. Something serious but not deadly or visible. (“Heart murmur?” James suggested.) That would get me off the hook for my essays for a while, without any penalties being applied. It would give me a clearer runway to focus on my exams, which started next week.
He said all this gently, not like he was patronising me, but like he cared.
“You don’t have to do all that,” I sniffed. “I shouldn’t have shouted at you. It was my own stupid fault for not doing the essays.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“It’s like nepotism, though, kind of.”
“It’s favourable treatment, but far less hard-working students get it all the time, so we won’t worry.”
“Are you sure?”
“Rachel, come here,” he said gravely. I moved from the armchair to the couch. He put his big arm around me, somewhere between a dad and a friend. “We’ve all had our hearts broken, and we’ve all had someone cut us some slack because of it.”
He opened his messenger bag and took out his laptop. I remember being surprised he was connected to the wifi already. Had Dr. Byrne been working here? James and I sat on either side while he tapped out an email to the department head. We decided that I wasn’t sick, but grieving, because it was true. He said that I was afraid of approaching the whole department because I was conscious of my lack of blood connection to the dead. He stipulated that, given Rachel Murray’s previous dedication to her studies, she should be given an extension until the end of May.
“Now,” he said, opening another tab on his browser, “pizza.”
Dr. Byrne ordered and went to the bathroom. I snuggled next to James, my head on his shoulder. “He is nice, though,” I said, exhausted from all the crying, “is the thing.”
And now I’m crying again, because he was a nice man, a really nice man. Is a nice man? So hard to know, when all you know about a person is that they are in a coma.
* * *
I had thought Dr. Byrne would stick around for the pizza he had paid for at least, but he made his exit as soon as it arrived.
“No, no, you two do your thing,” he said, which I liked. I appreciated when any adult acknowledged the validity of me and James’s “thing.”
“Rachel, my dear,” he said, sliding his laptop back into his messenger bag. “I just wanted to say…sorry again. I’m so fond of you, you know. I didn’t want to embarrass you. In class, I mean.”
“It’s okay.” I shrugged. “It’s over now.”
This didn’t sit right with him. He knew that he had not done enough. “Is there anything else I can do? With the department, I mean. Name it.”
This was my only chance, so I went for it. “I want a job.”
“You have a job,” James said, aghast.
“I can’t…” Dr. Byrne began, equally tortured. He couldn’t excuse my essays and give me a job. It was too suspect. He was already a man who had married his student.
“No, no,” I said. “I want to work in books. In publishing.”
He was a little alarmed. “With Deenie?”
“An internship or something. I want to work with books, and they say it’s all about who you know. And, well, she’s the only person I know.”
“Fair enough,” he said. “I’ll put it to her.”
The word “blackmail” never crossed my mind. Although it may have crossed his.
“I would never say to her…” I said, groping at the unsayable.