The Best of Us

by Joyce Maynard

Without this medication, his doctor had suggested, Samuel was likely to become seriously ill within a handful of years.

  Jim related this story to me over our nightly candlelight dinner, and by the time he finished I was begging him to take the case of Samuel Nwanu.

  “You don’t understand,” Jim said. “It’s not just that the guy has no money. This is an unwinnable case. It won’t even be fought in a regular court of law. The lawyer here would have to argue his case before the med school oversight committee, and there is no way they’re going to rule against their own highest-ranking people. Not to mention, this isn’t even my field of expertise.”

  “If you don’t help this young man, who will?” I asked. But I knew the answer.

  “I can’t afford to take this on,” Jim told me. “I haven’t got a single paying client right now. Everything’s contingency. And not much on the table, at best.”

  “I’ll help you,” I said. “I’ll work as your assistant on this one.”

  Two days later, I drove into San Francisco, headed to Jim’s office. In the elevator heading up with me was a very handsome black man, dressed in a beautiful white shirt, perfectly pressed. This was Samuel Nwanu. Every time I met with him, he was wearing that same one shirt. He must have washed it every night and hung it out to dry for morning.

  In the weeks that followed, Jim and I spent dozens of hours on the case. I served as the investigator, sitting with Samuel in coffee shops, taking notes on his story. Jim worked on the legal part and followed up on potential witnesses willing to testify on Samuel’s behalf and researched precedents.

  Over the course of this period, I set my work aside for our case. For Jim’s part, with few other clients, he had all too much time for Samuel, but even so, he was getting up at four in the morning now—three, sometimes—to prepare.

  As costly as it was to me—not to mention to Jim—part of me loved this. Sitting with Samuel over those long hours, taking down the details of his long struggle, I felt an old familiar but too-long-dormant fire that came from doing something I believed might truly matter for an individual in dire need. Most of all, I loved being part of a team with Jim, who—despite my complete lack of legal education—listened to every one of my ideas with interest and respect.

  My hours in the company of Samuel Nwanu persuaded me that a grave injustice had been done. From a distance of years, many of the particulars now escape me, but I remember passages from the letters and e-mails Jim procured from Samuel’s medical school records making reference to Samuel’s allegedly inferior intelligence, and calling into question whether a person with his unsophisticated background belonged at a school of this caliber in the first place. In one letter his acknowledged tenacity and work ethic were cited as an example of what a person like Samuel must have trained himself to do, as compensation for a lack of intellectual skills—the virtue of his work ethic transformed into proof of a liability.

  The morning Samuel’s case was to be heard by the medical school board, Jim and I were out of bed even earlier than usual to pack up his files and drive into the city together. I had picked out for myself a rare example of a conservative suit. Jim already owned plenty of those.

  “Don’t have any illusions about this, sweetheart,” he told me grimly, as we crossed the street to the building where Jim would be arguing Samuel’s case. “This is a kamikaze mission. We’re going down. The best we can do here is give Samuel a chance to be heard.” Jim deeply believed in that right.

  However, once in that windowless room where the group hearing the case would assemble, everything changed in Jim’s demeanor. He became the attorney he must have been in all those cases with Patrice in which millions of dollars of estate proceeds were at stake. He opened his briefcase, set out his yellow pad and pens and the file he’d assembled that was by now over a foot thick. He had introduced me, in as low key a manner as possible, as his legal assistant, in attendance to offer materials and notes as needed. He had told me already that if I had anything to contribute, I should write it on my pad and pass it to him.

  Samuel was late. The presiding administrator checked her watch again.

  “My client will be here any minute,” Jim said, his voice level, but I knew he was worried.

  “We’ll give him three more minutes,” the administrator said. “After that, this case will be dismissed.”

  Jim sent me out into the hall to make a call to Samuel. Two minutes later he showed up—in the beautiful white shirt as always, and looking as cool as he might if he were attending a lecture on suture techniques or performing a tracheotomy.

  The presentations began. The issue: Samuel’s dismissal—without honor, or the opportunity to receive credit for his schooling. Jim’s motion: to reinstate him, but with the fallback position that while the school might be unwilling to rescind its dismissal, it would not get in the way of his applying to other medical programs.

  Looking back now on Jim’s presentation of Samuel Nwanu’s case—a period that lasted less than three hours, start to finish, though weeks of preparation had gone into this—it is a source of some amazement to me that this was the one time, ever, that I got to actually hear Jim argue a case. The fact that it should have happened there, at a table of stone-faced medical administrators who gave all indication of having made up their minds about Samuel’s future long before they entered the room, is a source of both regret but also pride in Jim.

  He had prepared for this case no differently from how he might have prepared—and in times past, how he had prepared—for more seemingly important clients, with large amounts of money at stake. His arguments and presentation of the evidence, when he began to speak, were delivered with all the same gravitas and sober, finely articulated grace and knowledge of the law. To me that day, he was like those soldiers at the Battle of the Somme, crouched in his trench, awaiting a barrage of gunfire and certain death, but holding his ground.

  At every point in the morning, however, it seemed to me that the medical school administrators displayed an attitude of boredom, condescension, and dismissiveness. None more so than the presiding officer—a woman whose reports on the subject of Samuel’s shortcomings as a medical student had formed the cornerstone of the case against him. As she launched into her speech about his total unpreparedness for the medical profession—having made the suggestion earlier that he consider massage therapy, or chiropractic—an odd smile came over her face.

  When it was Jim’s turn to respond, I handed him a series of one-line suggestions based on my familiarity with Samuel’s file—testimony that contradicted the administrator’s, or called certain aspects of it into question anyway, and contradictory testimony from other physicians with a higher opinion of Samuel.

  The presiding medical officer brushed these aside, looking at her watch. “We’re going to need to wrap this up,” she said.

  “You know what this is?” I wrote on the note I handed next to Jim. “A mind fuck.”

  In all my years, I had never employed that phrase. The fact that I did now spoke to my utter frustration and a sense of wild injustice, as well as futility. Beside me in his Brooks Brothers suit, Jim’s eyes scanned my note.

  “You know what this is?” he said to the assembled group. “A mind fuck.”

  Everyone in the room froze. So did Jim. In his thirty-five years of practicing law, he had never spoken that word in any legal proceeding, or anywhere else for that matter. He might as well have pulled down his pants and mooned the assembled gathering. The effect would have been no more shocking. To nobody more than himself.

  The hearing ended soon after this. No need for time to deliberate. The vote on the future of Samuel Nwanu took all of one minute, and with the exception of a single low-level administrator, it was unanimous. Samuel would not be receiving credit for his three and a half years of grueling study at medical school. The recommendation that no other medical school should accept him would remain a part of his file.

  After it was over, the three of us sat in a coffee shop and
talked of Samuel’s plans for the future. He would go to Guatemala, he said (not far from my house there, as it turned out), to study Spanish, with the hope of attending medical school in Cuba once he had the new language down. Or possibly he’d go to Mexico. First, though, he would need to deliver the news to his family, and all the other villagers back in Nigeria awaiting the news of his imminent graduation from medical school, that he would not be returning home, triumphant, with his medical degree.

  Before we parted, Samuel thanked us both for all we had done for him and paid for our coffee. We hugged each other and set out on our way.

  A few weeks later, Jim received a formal letter from some board of legal oversight or other with the news that he had been formally reported for inappropriate language at a medical school proceeding where he had been acting as counsel. Mention was made of some form of censure, but none occurred.

  But this came later. That night when we were back home at the end of the day, and we’d taken off our suits and gotten back into our blue jeans, and we were sitting at the table again sharing our pasta and salad—the candles lit, the music playing, the wine poured—I asked Jim what had got into him, that he had actually uttered the words I’d scrawled on my legal pad.

  “I guess I have such a high regard for you,” he said, “that I just picked up the paper and read the words out loud. If you wrote it, that was enough for me.

  “We were going to lose anyway,” he said. “At least we went down in flames.”

  14.

  We traveled to France again, for another book tour. Times we were home, Jim kept working on setting up his new solo law practice, but he made time for another trip to New Hampshire with me. He brought me to the ballet. I brought him to see the Alvin Ailey company. We made meals together for friends and rode our bikes. Sometimes Jim brought his bass to the house of his friend Jerry in Sausalito to play music with his friends there. We drank wine and ate oysters and sometimes, on rainy afternoons, with a fire in the fireplace and a big bowl of popcorn between us, we watched three episodes in a row of Breaking Bad.

  I looked at pictures of rescue dogs online. Jim researched environmental law positions. We climbed Mt. Tamalpais and hiked in Point Reyes and came upon the herd of tule elk that wandered there. Wherever we went, he took pictures. “How lucky can two people get?” we said to each other.

  15.

  That spring I got some very good news. The long-delayed film adaptation of my novel, Labor Day—a project whose future had been uncertain for a while—was set to begin filming in June. This meant that I’d be getting a big check, and could feel a lot less anxious about my finances. Not to mention the excitement I felt at seeing the story I wrote adapted as a movie, with Josh Brolin and Kate Winslet as the stars and Jason Reitman the director.

  Nobody celebrated this news more than Jim, and as he did I reflected that in all the years, nobody—not even my parents—had celebrated my successes the way he did.

  Long ago, when I was married the first time and raising small children on our old farm, I’d been invited to fly to Portland, Oregon, to give a speech, and when I got there I’d discovered that over a thousand people had shown up to hear me. When I called home that night to tell my husband, he said to me, “Just don’t come back with a swelled head.”

  Jim, learning about the movie, had demonstrated more pride than he might have for any victory of his own in the courtroom.

  At moments like this one, he always looked out for me too—studying the contracts that I had only skimmed over, keeping careful files of them all, whereas in my old days I’d never been able to lay a hand on any paperwork.

  “You have a guard dog now,” he said. His frequent refrain.

  That May, Jim bought a motorcycle. It was a Triumph Bonneville, a classic design recently brought back into production.

  He signed up for motorcycle school, and it turned out, not surprisingly, given his affinity for driving cars, that he was a very good student.

  “What if we rode across country on the Triumph?” he said one morning. He had earned his motorcycle license just weeks before.

  We bought a set of saddlebags and begin plotting a route, but in the end common sense overtook us, and we both concluded that trip would be too much for a new rider—even Jim—and too much for a new passenger. Left to his own devices he might well have pursued the trip, but he would not have put me at any risk. So we came up with a different plan.

  In nearly forty years he had seldom if ever taken more than a week off for a vacation. But we decided to ship the motorcycle to the East Coast and ride it there. I could introduce him to the part of the country I came from and the part I still loved best, New England, and to my friends there. We would swim in lakes, ponds, and the Atlantic; we would climb Mt. Monadnock. I would bring him to the waterfall down the road from the farm where my children were born.

  Before we left home on this trip, I had called a New York Times editor for whom I sometimes wrote with the suggestion of a story for the magazine. Suppose I wrote about our summer-long New England road trip, I told him. My boyfriend—boyfriend, an odd term for Jim—could take the pictures.

  My editor seemed interested but cautious. Plenty of people said their partner took great pictures, but that didn’t necessarily mean their work would be publishable in the New York Times.

  I sent him examples of Jim’s work. (As he always did, when dealing with an issue involving his photography, Jim took extraordinary, sometimes maddening care with his images before he could share them. The day I asked him to put together a few of his photographs to show the magazine, he’d ended up spending the whole weekend choosing them and then another few hours of editing to make them better.)

  We got the assignment. I’d write the story of our adventure. Jim would take the pictures. I doubt any legal case Jim ever took on gave him more joy than that assignment did.

  Amazingly, too, Jim was up for taking off not just a few weeks or a month, but the whole summer to do this. Once he made that commitment, I expanded our plan. We would visit my daughter, Audrey, of course, and the movie set in Shelburne, Massachusetts, where Labor Day was being filmed. I had heard about a photography school in mid-coast Maine and showed Jim the online catalogue of their courses. He spent hours studying it before choosing two: environmental photography and (with the thought that one day he might actually manage to shoot the photographs for stories I’d write) travel photography. Altogether, he’d take two full weeks of classes in the little town of Rockport, Maine.

  I rented a house there for the duration of photography school that July, and for August, a cabin on the shores of a place I knew well and loved in New Hampshire, Silver Lake—a place with wood-paneled walls and blueberry bushes and a screen porch and a dock where we could sit together and read or talk or play cards. No Internet, and no need for it. If we had to get a message out we’d head down the road to the general store in town.

  As much as I loved riding on the back of Jim’s motorcycle, we decided we also needed a car that summer. On the Maine Craigslist I found a listing for a 1992 Chrysler LeBaron convertible—cherry red—for $1,800. Sight unseen, we bought it. The LeBaron was a far cry from the sleek Boxster, but we didn’t mind. We were always happy heading out on a road together, preferably a two-lane.

  Over the course of that summer Jim took hundreds of photographs for our New York Times assignment. Many times a day we’d pull over by the side of the road to capture an image—a giant, weathered road sign featuring a Maine lobsterman, under which I posed myself. A lighthouse, a stretch of rocky shore, the boathouse at the wonderful Silver Lake cabin and the dock there, where he’d sit with his cigar and we’d listen to the loons.

  It was on that dock one night that summer—having dinner with my daughter and her boyfriend, the sun just setting over the trees, a perfect night—that the topic of our old farm had come up. The one that used to be mine, that belonged to my ex-husband now.

  “You should have a place in New Hampshire again, Mom,” Audrey s
aid. “You love it here so much. Maybe this is where you really belong.”

  Sometimes I felt the same. I mentioned a place I’d looked at. A little cabin on a half-acre of land. In her opinion, Audrey said, the neighbors there were a little close for comfort. Not to mention the place was a dump.

  An old bitterness flared to the surface then. “Maybe I can’t afford a farmhouse with a pond and fifty acres on my own road like what some people have”—I was speaking of her father—“where they get to name the road after themselves and start their own yoga studio,” I said to her.

  I could feel it happening: my old downward spiral of anger over my divorce. Here came the bitterness that had eaten me up for a couple of decades, that I had hoped I was done with by now. It overtook me like a sudden, virulent fever.

  I could feel Jim’s hand on mine then, his other arm circling my shoulders. Careful. Careful. Easy now.

  In the past, when this kind of moment occurred—and they had—I might have gone the other direction: might have wept, or delivered some big speech, poured myself a glass of wine or poured it over my head, maybe. This time I stopped myself.

  This was new for me. Though I was not completely safe yet. I could still feel my heart beating too fast. Then slowing down. My breath returning to normal.

  I stood up. Though I was wearing nothing underneath it, I pulled my dress over my head. “Namaste,” I said. And dove into the lake.

  Jim stood on the dock with the others, watching me swim around the point. Until I returned, I knew, he’d have his eyes on the water.

  Sometimes I was actually impatient with how cautious he was, how protective—the way he made sure I buckled my seat belt, examined the tread on my tires. I had never had a man at my side as I did now. I never knew a man so fierce in his constancy, or steadfast in his love.

  16.

  More miles. A lot of them. We drove to Cape Cod and took a ferry to Martha’s Vineyard, where we rented a Jeep and drove to the far end of the island to watch the sunset and share a basket of clams. We drove to the White Mountains, and to Rhode Island, and to Vermont, where we attended a drive-in, seated in the LeBaron with the top down, the stars offering a better show than what was up on the screen.