The Best of Us

by Joyce Maynard

  I have no doubt that had this diagnosis occurred while he and his first wife were still together, he would have remained in the marriage, like Ethan Frome, in a bond of commitment that would have been a source of misery for them both. As it was, he had been cast in the role of the man who abandoned the mother of his children; and, for a quarter century, he had inhabited that place. What I observed in Jim that first night we spoke, and all of those that followed, was that at some deep level, whatever his more rational perspective offered up that might have justified his choice, part of him had never stopped believing this himself. He had been a good, though imperfect, father—but a father consumed by guilt and haunted by a sense of failure to his family. He had been thoroughly punished by nobody more than himself.

  Typically, a man expresses self-confidence and assurance in an early conversation with a prospective online match. Most women I know are attracted to this quality, and I had fallen for that brand of Alpha male myself plenty of times over the years. So when Jim told me that first night, “I have a lot of self-doubt,” and said, “I worry that I’m not a good enough man,” I might have turned and run; in fact I felt an impulse to do so. I suppose others would have too, though I am not sure that Jim had shared that level of self-disclosure with many. He could play the game of successful San Francisco attorney, and he looked the part. He just never played it with me.

  From the first day we spoke, he told me the truth about himself. I did the same.

  3.

  The night I met Jim, I had my own failures haunting me. Some of them very recent.

  It was June of 2011, two months before I’d met Martin, the bridge engineer. I had taken a trip to Italy as a last-minute replacement to teach writing at a workshop on the Amalfi coast. Ten days before I left for Italy—having just resumed online dating after a hiatus of a few years—I’d found myself on a Match.com date with a man named Doug: divorced, about my age, recently relocated to San Francisco from the East Coast, and working “in finance,” which is how a lot of men described a pretty wide range of activities that might have meant anything from hedge fund operator to bank teller.

  Looking back now on this episode—one whose only significance is to illuminate how far off course I found myself at this point—I recognize that I was never attracted to Doug. Nothing about him suggested any real possibility for kinship or connection beyond liking the San Francisco Giants (a passion for him, mild interest for me) and Italian food. His most appealing quality on our first date, and the only reason why I agreed to a second (though it was an insufficient justification for that), lay in the degree of his apparent enthusiasm for me.

  “Don’t ever cut your hair,” he told me, as if he expected to be around to caress it, which I felt sure he would not be. Still, there was something compelling in his self-assurance (something singularly lacking in the man I would meet eight weeks later, and come to love). He also paid for dinner. It is not a source of pride, but a sorry truth, that I noted and liked this behavior. It was surprisingly rare.

  On our follow-up date, which I had been sure would be our last, I mentioned to Doug that I was heading to Italy the following week.

  “Take me along,” he said.

  I said OK.

  Later I tried to reconstruct how I could have agreed to this, though every single reason serves as a sad commentary on what can happen to a woman when she’s fifty-seven years old and she’s been single nearly twenty-five years and she’s had a lot of disheartening experiences in the dating world—disheartening, or much worse.

  In my case, I think I had been left with vastly lowered expectations for my life. My romantic life, anyway. At that particular moment it had seemed to me that perhaps having the company of a reasonably intelligent, reasonably fit, financially solvent man under the age of eighty with no apparent substance abuse issues, and the financial wherewithal to take me out to dinner and buy his own plane ticket to Naples, might be the best I could expect. What I did not yet recognize, though you might have thought the previous twenty-two years would have supplied abundant evidence on this score, was that if that’s the best you can get in a companion, you are better off alone.

  But I had this picture in my head, of Italy. Italy with a man. As my trip to the workshop approached, I had registered the old familiar sadness: Here came another trip that I’d be sharing with nobody.

  A big part of my compensation for my teaching at the workshop involved airfare and a hotel room overlooking the Mediterranean in a little coastal town called Vietri sul Mare, said to be particularly lovely and atmospheric. Once I’d gotten that far, I figured I’d make the most of it.

  So I had made the plan that after my teaching responsibilities were over I would take a boat to Positano and from there make my way to a nearby town called Praiano, where two very old friends, a gay couple named Eddie and Tony, made their home. I’d stay with them for a few nights and then travel on to Venice, a city I had never visited before and one that for me seemed to conjure the most romantic picture of an Italian adventure. I saw myself sitting in little outdoor cafés, having meals of fresh pasta with fresh marinara sauce and red wine, wandering the streets, stopping into old buildings and shops, riding a gondola while the gondolier sang something that surely included the word “amore.” One thing alone was missing: the man to share it with.

  I did not suppose, when Doug suggested that he accompany me to Italy, that we’d be embarking on some extraordinary lifelong love affair. I was foolish and unrealistic, but not quite that unrealistic.

  What I thought was that I could have a pleasant interlude with this man, with lots of shared meals and wine, a good companion for exploring Italy, a warm and affectionate person to curl up and have sex with at the end of the day, and that the next morning we might sit on the balcony of our beautiful, expense-paid hotel room overlooking the Mediterranean Sea and have our coffee together. If I didn’t expect too much more than that, I should be able to achieve it.

  The plan was made. Because Doug had some commitments keeping him in San Francisco, I would fly to Naples a day and a half ahead of him. He would join me at the hotel shortly, and then would come the marinara, the wine, moonlight over the ocean. A scooter ride in Capri, maybe.

  I e-mailed my friends in Praiano, letting them know I’d be bringing a man along. “How wonderful,” they wrote back. “Can’t wait to meet him.”

  I told Doug I’d book us an Airbnb room in Venice; he’d pitch in for his half. The room I found was a tiny fourth-floor walkup, but the great part was its location, just two blocks from San Marco Square.

  Under other circumstances, I would have kept my packing light. But now that I was going to Italy with a man—picturing myself having dinner in wonderful restaurants, dancing maybe—I packed three suitcases filled with dresses, accessories, and shoes. No doubt I went overboard: There had been a couple of decades’ worth of solo trips in my past. I had waited a long time for one like this.

  The town of Vietri sul Mare is an hour’s drive from Naples. When I landed, I looked for a car service. Another woman was there, with the same destination in mind.

  She was older than me—in her late seventies, I figured, though spry-looking and lively.

  “I’m going to a workshop,” I said.

  Her name was Charlotte. She was headed there too.

  On the ride we filled each other in on our stories. Charlotte had been widowed five years before this, though in many ways she’d lost her husband, Jack, years long before that, to Lou Gehrig’s disease.

  They had met when they were young parents but married to other people. For years they’d had a secret affair, but Jack had broken it off when his wife, the mother of his children, had become seriously ill with cancer. She survived, but Jack and Charlotte had gone their separate ways, though all through her forties and fifties, Charlotte still thought about him every day.

  Jack’s marriage, though unhappy, had endured. Charlotte’s had not. She lived alone for many years, and made a full life for herself, filled w
ith many good things. But she never stopped loving Jack.

  Then one day, when she was sixty or so, he called her. His wife had died. He wanted to see her.

  After that they were joyfully together. “It was the best thing ever,” she told me in the taxi. One look at her face as she said it and you knew this was so.

  They had almost ten good years before illness caught up with Jack, and when it did Charlotte remained at his side. She took care of him right up to the end, when he could no longer speak or get up from the bed or even move.

  The day we rode that taxi together to the Amalfi coast turned out to be the five-year anniversary of Jack’s death. On the way, Charlotte took out a photograph of him to show me. She’d pasted it on the front of the notebook she was bringing to the workshop.

  Of course she wanted to hear my story, and I told her about my marriage, my divorce, the many years raising my three children as a single parent and the ones that came after, still on my own. I told her that a man I had recently met would be meeting me the next day and traveling with me in Italy after the workshop.

  “How wonderful,” she said. “He must be really special for you to have invited him here. I can’t wait to meet him.”

  Doug showed up late the next afternoon, irritated by the long trip from Naples and the fact that his driver had not spoken English. In the days since I had last seen him, I had realized that I couldn’t remember clearly what he looked like, and now that I saw him, I was unnerved. He was red-faced and sweaty, in worse shape than I had remembered, with a loud, crude voice and beefy fingers that now plucked at my breast.

  Evidently the Giants had played earlier that day. He wanted to check the score. Also, to check the stock market. And to have sex. In that order.

  The workshop where I’d been hired to teach was in fact an event whose primary focus was not writing but classical music, and it was for the musical performances that the participants, including my new friend Charlotte, had chosen to attend. Every day there were lectures about aspects of classical music, and at night performances of selections from operas by world-class young musicians. My own role as a teacher of memoir had been offered as an add-on for those who might want to give writing a try.

  The morning after Doug’s arrival I met Charlotte at breakfast. Doug was sleeping in.

  “Your lover arrived,” she said happily. “How romantic.”

  I shook my head. This man was definitely not my lover. I had known that much within sixty seconds of his presence in the room. Now I had two weeks scheduled to spend in the company of a man with whom I recognized I had nothing in common. Worse than that. I didn’t even like him.

  That night, I put on one of the many dresses I’d packed for my romantic Italian escapade. High heels. Earrings. Lipstick.

  “I think I’ll pass on the singing fat women,” Doug told me, heading to the bar. “I’m not a big opera fan.”

  That night the music was to be performed in an ancient church high in the hills above the village. I sat next to Charlotte on the bus. All the way there, encouraged by my questions on this topic, she told me stories about her life with Jack. If there were to be romance that week, my best and only shot at finding it would come from the music on the stage and the stories on the bus.

  Next day it was the same thing, but worse. While I taught my class, Doug hung out in the bar. After, he accompanied me on a field trip to Pompeii, where his contribution to a tour of the ruins came when we got to what was left of the ancient house of prostitution that had thrived during the years before the volcano buried the town.

  Over the lintel of each room in the establishment, our guide pointed out, were carvings of sexual positions. Doug, seeing this, had announced loudly to the group. “Get a load of this, Joyce. Take notes.”

  That night, before I headed out again for the musical performance Doug had no interest in attending—wearing another of my many dresses—I had mentioned that I’d gotten a note from my friends in Praiano.

  This inspired Doug to produce his best imitation of a limp-wristed and lisping gay man. This inspired me to produce my best imitation of a stone.

  On Day Three, I discussed the situation with Charlotte. “You have to tell him,” she said. “You will never find a truly good man so long as you keep settling for ones like him.”

  That afternoon I made Doug an offer. Instead of eating in the hotel dining room with the group as we had been doing, I wanted to go into town for dinner at one of the little cafés there. Knowing that Doug had shown reluctance to eat in other places besides our hotel—where everything was free, he pointed out—I told him the meal would be on me.

  Over dinner at an outdoor café that would have been lovely with a different partner, I told him the news. I softened my reasons for the sake of his feelings.

  “I know you’re a great guy,” I said, though in fact I did not. “But I can see it’s not going to work for the two of us. We need to go our separate ways.”

  He looked stunned. “What about the hotel? Venice? I spent a lot of money on my plane ticket.”

  I said I was sorry. I should have known better. Luckily, Italy was a wonderful place to explore. With or without me.

  He made a final pitch for staying together through the end of the week—pointing out that I had this great free hotel room anyway—but I stood my ground.

  “It’s not going to work,” I said. “You need to leave.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  The next day, when I got back from teaching my class, Doug had cleared his things out of the room. It was not until the end of the week that I discovered he’d left me with his bar bill and the charges for his meals.

  I set out alone for my visit with my friends Tony and Eddie. When the boat dropped me off in Positano with my three bags full of shoes and dresses, I looked around for someone to help me get them to the spot, high above the beach, where I’d catch my bus. After a few unsuccessful minutes, I started making my way up the hill by myself. With no way to carry all three bags at once, I developed a system: carry two bags a few hundred feet. Leave those sitting and go back for the third. Repeat as many times as necessary. Many times were necessary.

  It was hot that day, and I could feel the weight of every pair of earrings, every shoe. At some point, an old man called out to me. I don’t speak Italian, but I understood what he was saying.

  “Dove tuo marito?” Where is your husband?

  It was a question I had asked myself plenty of times.

  After my visit with my friends—in which I reflected how much nicer it was to spend three days with two wonderful men who were gay than three days with one awful man who happened to be straight—I headed out, again with those three suitcases, this time for Venice.

  The cobbled streets of that city and the lack of taxis were a challenge, and even more so the four flights of stairs leading to the walkup I’d rented, with the plan of sharing the bill with Doug. Money was tight now, and I no longer envisioned wonderful meals in outdoor cafés—because those would not be so much fun alone and I didn’t have the money anyway. But I made myself the promise to have an extraordinary time in Venice with or without a companion to share it. Better no man, I said, hearing Charlotte’s voice in my ear, than the wrong one.

  I spent the week walking the streets alone, looking at art, having an occasional glass of wine at some little café, with a simple meal of bread and olives, a piece of cheese. I studied the couples in love, and there were many, or at least, there appeared to be.

  On the last night I donned one of the many dresses I’d hauled across Italy with the intention of having a fine time, regardless of my solo status. With stunning ease, I managed to sneak into an outdoor concert in San Marco Square—expensive, and sold out—where Sting was performing with the Venice orchestra. Not in possession of a ticket, I leaned against a pole off to one side.

  A woman approached. Someone official, evidently.

  “You need to sit down now,” she said in Italian, though once
again I understood.

  Something possessed me to answer her in French. “Je cherche mon mari.” I am looking for my husband.

  How odd, I thought, that I’d be saying this. Not just because I didn’t have a husband; more so because the word had come to have an almost alarming connotation: For me, marriage had signified pain, and then trouble. As much as I had wanted a partner over my many years alone, I had never talked about wanting a husband. Mon mari. Maybe the prospect seemed less problematic in French than it did in English.

  Not unpleasantly, but firm, the woman told me I had to sit down. The show was about to start.

  This was when I saw it: a single vacant seat in the sea of those that were occupied. Some person—solo like me—had paid the four hundred dollars for a ticket but failed to show up. Now I had a spot in the third row.

  Sting came out to a roar from the crowd, and began to play. “Every Breath You Take.” “An Englishman in New York.” Behind him, the orchestra. Above me, the moon.

  At first I stayed on alert for the true owner of my seat, but after half a dozen songs, I settled in for the extraordinary experience I’d planned on to conclude my week in Venice. I kept my seat all the way through the encore, and then, like Cinderella after the ball, made my way back to my fourth-floor garret to take off my dress, wash the makeup from my face, and go to sleep.

  Next morning, I wrangled my three heavy bags down the four flights of stairs, through the streets, to the train that brought me to the airport. Fourteen hours later I was back on American soil.

  Though I had succeeded, in the end, in pulling off an Italian adventure—had seen my friends, had taken in the museums of Venice, not to mention the concert—I returned home with a deep sense of sadness, not simply for my continued status as an unattached woman, but for the humbling recognition of how misguided I had been to have thought the company of a man like Doug would have been an improvement over my own.