The Best of Us

by Joyce Maynard

  We drove out to Chimney Rock to see the elephant seals, and stood together on the cliffs, looking down at the crashing surf, listening to them playing in the water and calling out to each other with their strange, deep, guttural cries. A cormorant swooped overhead. How much richer it was, I reflected, to experience the world with a partner than, as I so often had, on my own.

  Jim had brought his camera along that day. I learned that Jim always brought his camera, or a couple of them. Ever since boyhood—film cameras only in those days, of course, no digital—he had loved photography, and made a study of it. He knew light and lenses and composition, and because he was a lover of the outdoors and hiking, his passion found an easy expression there. But I think Jim’s feeling about photography was about something more too. For Jim, an introvert, the camera provided a way to be in the world of people without necessarily having to say too much. When he sat at a table with friends, he listened closely, and he would always have interesting observations to contribute, though he was generally quieter than most. But he might also take out the camera, as I would see him do hundreds of times over the years. Once he did, he entered the world through that lens. After he’d captured his images he could disappear again at his laptop, deep into the editing.

  That day, the fog made it a lousy day for shooting, but neither of us cared. We made our way to the town of Point Reyes Station and got oysters and wine. Two dozen, not the half dozen I might more economically have opted for.

  That night I was scheduled to be part of a literary event at a little theater in Mill Valley. I hadn’t planned on this, but on the way home I asked Jim if he’d like to come with me, so we went back to my house where I could change—he, unnecessarily concerned that he might not be well-dressed enough for the event—and headed to the theater together.

  In the marriage of my youth, it seemed, I took up too much space, a phenomenon I’d been aware of all my life. I talked too much—and what I said was a little too direct for some tastes. I cooked messily, I laughed too boisterously, and when I danced, I occupied more room on the dance floor than some. I never intended to do this—in fact, I tried consciously to do otherwise—but it always happened, and when it did it was probably an irritation to some.

  That night at the theater could have been one of those times, but it wasn’t. I had worn a gold dress and heels that made me taller than Jim, a fact I registered briefly as I put them on, and then dismissed. If this man couldn’t take it that I might look a little taller than he was, better to learn that now.

  But he had reveled in the evening. He loved seeing me up on the stage, he told me. Driving us home from the theater and up the road to the mountain, he looked over at me in the seat next to him. “I was so proud to be with you,” he said.

  It was late, and he lived almost an hour’s drive away in Oakland. (An hour if I were driving. Thirty-five minutes for Jim.)

  Still, he came in and we sat on the couch together, close. We had spent more than fourteen hours in each other’s company by this point and neither one of us had been bored.

  “I need to tell you something,” I said. “I’ve been seeing another man. I’ve been sleeping on his boat with him.”

  Everything stopped. Jim’s arm, which had been around my shoulders, pulled back. For a surprising amount of time he said nothing.

  “I’d better go home now,” he said.

  I told him I wanted to know him better, and that I had no intention, in telling him what I had, of saying good-bye. I just liked him way too much to deceive or mislead him.

  “You are not the kind of person I’d have a fling with,” I said. “With you, it would be serious. I don’t know if I can do that anymore. I would never want to hurt you.”

  I had done that in the past with people I’d loved.

  Jim still sat there, head in his hands in a way that made it impossible to see his face. “I don’t know what to say,” he told me. A minute later, he was out the door and gone. I could hear the sound of the Boxster heading down the mountain.

  The next morning there was an e-mail waiting for me again when I woke up, despite how early I got up. It was from Jim.

  He couldn’t see me again. He had begun to fall in love with me, he said. Had probably done that already. He could not risk having his heart broken. How he’d felt, driving home, had been bad enough.

  He left the door open, but just barely. If I was ever truly free, he wrote, I should let him know. Maybe he would be free at that point too. (Though I knew this: He was a man who would find someone. Possibly not the right person, possibly not a person who would love him for the same reasons I might come to love him and did, but he would not be alone long.)

  “You’re a wonderful woman,” he wrote. And then, “Good- bye.”

  I had no doubt then what to do. I picked up the phone.

  “You’re not making a good choice,” I said. “And you’re being unfair too.”

  I was fifty-seven years old, I reminded him. Almost fifty-eight. I’d known a lot of big losses. Was it such a surprising and unforgivable thing that after three dates—granted, long ones, very good ones—I should not yet feel ready to dive into the kind of relationship he wanted to have with me? And if I had done so—if I had been so quick to sign on—what might that have indicated about my capacity for constancy?

  I could be with Martin, I told him, because being with Martin represented a far less complicated choice than being with Jim.

  I did not say, in this conversation, that I was now ready to make the kind of commitment Jim wanted from me. I did not even say that I would cease spending time with Martin. What I said was that I believed he needed to give us more of a chance. I also told him that even if he did feel the need to end our relationship at this point, he should tell me face to face, not in the text of an e-mail.

  We made a plan to get together the following Sunday. He would bring me to the de Young Museum, where he had a membership.

  When we got there we heard music. It turned out there was a weekly swing dance gathering on Sundays just outside the museum.

  Most of the dancers were clearly regulars. Many even wore special swing dance outfits and dancing shoes. When I suggested to Jim that we give it a try—we who knew none of the moves—he looked uneasy.

  But that only lasted a second. He set down his backpack. We danced. Not well, but gamely, and with joyful abandon. And as with so much of what followed, I can see now in the story of those early days the evidence of who Jim was, and who he would be to me. Also who I would be to him: Jim, my cautious, steady partner, seldom the initiator of the big bold move, but invariably ready to come along when I suggested one, as I always did.

  He spun me, and we even dipped. We danced only a couple of dances, but told each other we’d come back here another Sunday and learn to do this well. We had potential in the dancing department.

  We did not end up going to the museum that afternoon. We took a walk through the park instead.

  “I was supposed to have dinner with Martin on the boat tonight,” I told Jim. (Martin, who had heard about Jim, same as Jim had heard about Martin. Martin, who had not seemed as troubled by Jim’s presence in my life as Jim had appeared to be by Martin’s.)

  “I’m going to cancel the plan.” I said. “I just want to spend my time with you now.”

  Nobody had a better smile than Jim, when he was deeply, purely happy. I saw it now.

  “I want to tell you something else,” I said to him. “I will not be having sex with you for thirty days.”

  The smile disappeared.

  “What I’m suggesting is actually good news,” I told him. “It means I’m taking this seriously.”

  What I hoped I might have with Jim would bear no resemblance to what had gone on with Doug—an unpleasant man—or with Martin—a good man. Or any of the others, some good and loving men, some not, with whom I’d spent my time over the more-than-twenty years I’d been on my own.

  “I don’t know what might be possible,” I told him. “But
I want to do this right for once.”

  We got in the Boxster then and headed for North Beach. Driving along the streets of San Francisco, Jim looked at me in the passenger seat again, with the worried expression his face bore too often.

  “I’d better tell you,” he said. “I’m not one of those rich San Francisco lawyers.”

  The Porsche was old. The watch, a gift from his former lover, Patrice. The Brooks Brothers suits, a necessity of his profession. Maybe he’d been that person once, for a time anyway—the kind of man he referred to as a swinging-dick attorney. But who he was, really, was a quiet man who played Led Zeppelin loud and liked to sleep under the stars of the Eastern Sierra. He could spend a whole day on a trail with his camera, or at his desk, editing photographs. He had ridden on the Bacchus float in New Orleans in a blood-spattered George W. Bush “Mission Accomplished” costume. He read every book Richard Feynman ever wrote, and if he could, he’d quit estate litigation and work for some nonprofit doing environmental law. His days of big-money cases were behind him.

  “Well, that’s a relief,” I told him. “That means you’ll have more time for me.”

  9.

  We spent most of those first thirty nights sleeping on an air mattress—arms wrapped around each other, but no more than that—outside on the deck of my house in Mill Valley, under the stars, with the fog over the mountain when we woke. After the thirty nights were over we moved inside to my bedroom. We slept naked. I liked to rest my palm on his stomach. My head on his shoulder.

  Now and then Jim went back to Oakland, mostly to get clothes or legal papers, but almost every night from then on he was there on my doorstep by six thirty, setting down his briefcase to put his arms around me, always looking, as he stepped in, as though there were no place on earth he’d rather be. Sometimes he brought flowers; other times olives or cheese, and always wine. It always felt like a big event when I heard the sound of his Boxster coming up the hill.

  For forty years I’d worked at home, in blue jeans mostly, or yoga pants. Now Jim was spending every night at my house on Mt. Tamalpais, and every afternoon before he was due to show up from work, I liked dressing up as if a great event were taking place, which for me it was. I put on velvet some nights, silk on others, and Jim never failed to notice when I did this. I loved making good dinners for the two of us, and we lit the candles and put music on and held each other’s hand before we began the meal—a prayer with no words.

  After, we’d clean up together and sometimes dance in the kitchen. We went to bed early, but first he had a ritual.

  A beam spanned the length of the ceiling over my bed. Wearing nothing but his underwear, and sometimes nothing at all, Jim would stand on the bed and reach to grab hold of the beam to do pull-ups. Ten in the beginning. Later many more. I lay back on the pillows counting, sometimes in English, sometimes Spanish or French. Then he’d drop down onto the mattress. My man, I said. An unfamiliar concept.

  We were sitting on my deck one late afternoon that fall. This was early still in our time together. I was growing deeply attached to Jim, but I was cautious too. This was not the burly lover I had imagined for myself, a fact I had explained to him. “You might be too short for me,” I’d told him.

  It was Fleet Week in San Francisco. This meant the Blue Angels flyers were in town, the amazing team of Navy fighter pilots who for three days leading up to the big event could be seen and heard flying at top speed in precision formation throughout the Bay Area. At this particular moment, the Blue Angels were roaring in a perfect V directly over Mt. Tamalpais.

  “There’s something so sexy about them,” I told Jim.

  For a moment Jim said nothing. Then he set down his cigar.

  “Did you know one of the first qualifications for becoming a Blue Angel?” he said, looking at me with particular intensity.

  I did not.

  “They have to be five foot eight or under. They’re tough as nails but they’re little guys.”

  My five-foot-eight-inch-tall lover did not say more or need to.

  10.

  An event I loved took place every October in San Francisco—always the first weekend of that month. An exceedingly rich and generous man by the name of Warren Hellman—a billionaire financier who also happened to be a banjo player and a lover of folk and roots music—had started a free three-day music festival in Golden Gate Park called Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. In fact, the festival featured much more than bluegrass music; I’d heard Elvis Costello perform there, and Patti Smith. Emmylou Harris, always.

  Jim and I had just passed the one-month anniversary of our meeting when the festival weekend took place. Though he was more of a rock-and-roll man than a folk type, there was no question we were going to this together.

  I never missed that festival. Over the years, as the crowds grew and the number of acts increased, I had developed an elaborate strategy for taking in those three days in a way that allowed me to hear as much music as possible. I’d pack a picnic basket for the day and arrive a few hours before the music got under way. I left picnic blankets at three or four different stages, with a folding chair positioned in at least a couple of the spots, to hold my place. By early afternoon the crowds were huge, but I was one to push through firmly, no matter how tight the space. After—when I’d gotten to my spot, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone—I’d take out the wine and cheese. Sometimes I’d get up and dance on the grass. Then, as the music ended, I’d grab my backpack and hightail it to the next stage, pushing through the crowd once again. I moved fast through the crowd, with no one slowing me down.

  That first October I went to Hardly Strictly Bluegrass with Jim, who knew nothing of the festival before. A distance runner, always sturdy and agile, Jim was never the type to push through a crowd as I did, and I worried he might not be able to keep up with me. As I wove through the wall of bodies—leading the way, less by virtue of muscle than resolve—I looked back now and then for the sign of his hat. He was always there, a few steps behind. He never lost sight of me.

  I think it was seeing how gamely Jim made his way through the crowds to keep up with me that weekend, how ready he always was to come along with me on whatever adventure I cooked up—that made me realize I loved him. In all my years, I’d never known the experience of looking back over my shoulder to see a man there, bringing up the rear. Or in the seat next to me driving us safely home. I never fully understood the phrase “he has my back” until I met Jim.

  “I’m your guard dog,” he told me. I’d never had one of those before, either.

  That fall was the honeymoon time for us. Every day we woke up in each other’s arms and told each other how lucky we were. We’d waited a long time to find each other.

  Months before meeting Jim, my French publisher had purchased the rights to bring out a translation of my memoir, At Home in the World. (Et Devant Moi, Le Monde, the title in French.) It turned out that my books had become surprisingly popular in France. Now I was invited to spend a full week at a hotel in Paris to promote the book.

  The trip was scheduled for mid-October. Though my last attempt at inviting a man to accompany me to Europe had been a disaster, I invited Jim to come with me.

  It had been twenty years since I’d been to France—with my daughter Audrey, when she was a teenage exchange student. This would be a different kind of trip. Interviews were lined up almost round the clock, though there would be time in the evening for Jim and me to go out for dinner and walk through the streets.

  It was a setup for big romance, of course. We stayed at a lovely little hotel in St. Germain featuring a sunroom where we started every morning with a basket of croissants and fresh-squeezed orange juice and very good coffee.

  In my old days I would have been out the door to explore the city by eight A.M. if not earlier. It was a new experience for me to linger over our coffee as we did. Jim was an early riser like me, and like me possessed no shortage of energy. But he had a capacity to relax that I had never acquired. With Jim, I coul
d slow down at last.

  Still, we got around the city that week. Jim had his camera, as he always did, and though he loved Paris too, he made me his chief subject. He took a few hundred pictures—at the Café Deux Magots, in front of the giant clock at the Musée D’Orsay, the garden of the Rodin Museum, the walkways along the Seine and in the subway, mugging in front of a poster of three monkeys (see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil). My favorite of these photographs Jim took of me was made in the Tuileries, just after we’d emerged from a show of photographs by Diane Arbus, which had inspired me to affect the dark and troubled look of an Arbus subject, or possibly Diane Arbus herself. Long past the age when I would have served as anybody else’s fashion model, I was that for Jim, sucking in my cheeks, slouching moodily for the camera, tousling my hair—the same thing I liked to do with his. In the most romantic city in the world, perhaps, we were a pair of late middle-aged lovers giving ourselves permission to behave as if we were very young. But the wisdom acquired through age allowed us to recognize, as the young might not, how precious it all was. We had gotten our order in just as the bartender announced the last call.

  After Paris, we rented a car and drove to Provence. We drank a bottle of wine every night, and sometimes a glass at lunch. We bought runny cheese in the market and figs and good pastries that we shared in the car, driving from one gorgeous village to the next, with the top down on our rented convertible. We were Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn in Two for the Road. The sun shone every day.

  Two weeks after Paris, we celebrated my fifty-eighth birthday. Jim took me out for dinner in San Francisco. Driving across the Golden Gate Bridge in his silver Porsche past the palace of the Legion of Honor, the gold dome of City Hall, the Opera, I saw our life before us like the glittering waters of San Francisco Bay, dotted with sailboats. Here was the life I had dreamed I might know one day—the picture I’d constructed over my many years alone of what a perfect relationship would look like. Music and dancing, good meals and a drive home with the top down, to climb into bed. We were tourists in the country of love.