The Best of Us

by Joyce Maynard

  It was a life I’d never lived before. More often than not, one of us would have brought home some interesting food to share—a piece of good cheese or the makings of bruschetta—and we’d take that outside with a glass of wine and tell each other about our day. During the months we’d lived together at my house in Mill Valley we had done this out on my deck overlooking Mt. Tamalpais, but now that we lived in Oakland, we took in a different though equally spectacular view. From outside Jim’s living room we could see three bridges and the Oakland skyline, and on a clear day, the San Francisco skyline beyond it, along with the planes landing at the Oakland airport. We were so high up that even the hawks circled below us.

  One night in late March, Jim came home earlier than usual, carrying roses and two dozen shucked oysters that he arranged on a platter and carried out onto the deck with a couple of martinis for us. He had put on an album of Chet Baker. He seemed preoccupied and uncharacteristically nervous.

  “I think you should try that one first,” he said, pointing to a lone oyster that stuck up higher than the others from its shell.

  I knew then what was coming. If I hadn’t guessed already, the intense and slightly anxious look on Jim’s face would have given him away. Under that oyster, of course: a ring.

  The setting was simple, the diamond huge.

  I wasn’t a diamond person. I wasn’t even much of a ring person. For my one and only marriage, in 1977, I’d bought my own gold band for twelve dollars at a pawnshop in New York City. Somewhere along the line I must have taken it off and gotten confused about where it belonged, because on the cover of a book I published in 1984, featuring stories about my young marriage, I am pictured with my three children and that wedding ring clearly visible, but on the wrong hand.

  That ring had disappeared long before this, and though there had been no shortage of suitors of various levels of seriousness in the years since my divorce, nobody had ever asked me to marry him this way, certainly not with the kind of seriousness and intention Jim displayed now.

  “It’s such a big diamond,” I said. “It must have cost so much money.”

  A look came over him then—that anxious look he got when he was worried he’d done something wrong, particularly something that might displease me. It was a look that probably had its origins in that Southern California ranch house where Jim grew up, where the prospect of displeasing his father was a daily certainty, with large and frightening consequences.

  “It’s beautiful,” I told him. “I’m just not used to something like this.”

  “So what do you think?” he asked me.

  We were married on Fourth of July weekend in New Hampshire, at a place called Cobb Hill in the little town of Harrisville, a few miles down the road from the cabin at Silver Lake that we’d rented and loved the summer before. Because the wedding would take place so far away, we didn’t expect friends from California to attend, but a surprising number did. My friend Charlotte—the woman I’d met two summers back, in the taxi on the way to the workshop on the Amalfi coast where I conducted my brief, disastrous Italian affair—had made the trip from Washington, D.C.

  And there were old friends too: Becky, from Maine; Laurie, from down the road in New Hampshire; and some of Jim’s old San Francisco friends from his days in the Guardsmen, a service organization in which for years he had put on an elf suit every December, selling Christmas trees to raise money to send underprivileged children to summer camp.

  There was also a stringer for the New York Times in attendance, and a photographer, come to take pictures for the “Vows” column, for which we were to be the featured couple the following week. Knowing the column would find an audience with many people our age—long divorced, like us—it made me happy to think that our story might serve as a source of hope for others who might have supposed it was too late to find a partner.

  “I feel like I’m really there for this relationship,” Jim told the New York Times reporter. “I’m not putting a priority on my golf game. I don’t have one, actually.”

  “It has been the quest of my life to create a happy family,” I told her. It had taken a lot longer than I’d hoped, but that day it seemed clear I had it at last.

  All three of my children were there with their partners, and though there had initially been some uncertainty about this, all three of Jim’s. He’d bought a ticket for his son Kenny and his girlfriend to come from Oakland, and his son Jonathan and his girlfriend from Germany. This was the first time I’d met Jonathan, and besides saying the word “hello” he did not speak to me, but Jim told me it was often that way. No need to take it personally. His daughter, Jane, rode up with a friend from Brooklyn.

  The wedding took place on a hilltop, with fields and woods all around. My two sons, Charlie and Will, in seersucker suits, walked with me through tall grass filled with wildflowers to the spot where Jim stood waiting for me—each of them looking so much like their father, the man I had once loved and with whom I had fought so bitterly for so long. Jim’s daughter and mine stood side by side, holding flowers. I had not worried that Audrey would register joy over our marriage, but to see Jane smiling made me happy—above all else, for Jim, who never stopped hoping for the approval of his older son and daughter.

  We had chosen to write our own vows, but the morning of the wedding, Jim had still not gotten anything on paper, while my own vows had been ready for days. Two hours before the ceremony was due to begin, still in his boxer shorts, he had disappeared into the cabin where we were staying. He emerged forty-five minutes later in his tuxedo and red silk bow tie holding a yellow legal pad.

  “I love how you love me,” he said. “You know me better than anyone ever has.”

  For my vows, I wanted to name every single thing I loved about Jim, so the vows went on for quite a few minutes. Among other reasons for this, I knew from my own long experience as a single parent that when your fellow parent is not there to say good things about you, or is disinclined to do so, your children are unlikely to have heard them articulated, and I wanted Jim’s children to take in, from a woman who deeply loved their father, all the reasons why.

  The minister who officiated—an old friend from California—read a Wendell Berry poem called “The Country of Marriage,” and my longtime assistant, Melissa, and a folksinger friend from Maine, Travis, performed a duet of a song called “We Come Up Shining,” about a couple who sometimes encounter difficulties but, when they do, work them out. Jim got down on his knees and removed the high-heeled shoes I’d been wearing up until then, replacing them with my favorite pair of cowboy boots with roses on them.

  That day, something seemed to change in Jane’s attitude toward my getting together with her father. At the dinner after the ceremony, she toasted the two of us. Kenny sang a funny song he’d made up. My son Willy stood up to speak.

  “My mom has had a lot of boyfriends …” he began. “I mean, really a lot.” For a moment I was afraid he might actually go over the list. “And I’m here to say, Jim is the best.

  “My chief emotion today …” he said, “is relief. Let’s face it. These two are not spring chickens. Not to mention what good news it is, to those of us who’ve been her passengers on the road, that my mom won’t be doing that much driving from now on.”

  There was a band led by a friend who’d driven all the way from Virginia, and my three children, singing a cappella a Townes Van Zandt song I loved, “If I Needed You.” Jim and I stepped up to the microphone too, for a duet of the John Prine song “In Spite of Ourselves,” with lyrics we had adapted for the occasion.

  First it was my turn:

  “He plays online Scrabble and he loves his Boxster,

  Give him a bass and he’s a rock star.

  His suits are out of fashion and his shorts are pretty old

  Studies those contracts like a centerfold.

  But he’s my sweetheart,

  That’s his great art

  Never gonna let him go.”

  Then came Jim:

>   “She don’t know her east from west.

  How’d she ever pass her driving test?

  Her writing though is among the best

  Gets us invited to some big film fests.

  Keeps on typin’

  Thinks like lightning

  Never gonna let her go.”

  21.

  One event at our wedding cast a shadow. That weekend represented Jim’s first visit with his older son, Jonathan, in over a year, and there was a palpable lack of ease between them. When Jonathan arrived, he’d disappeared into the bedroom we’d set up for him in the house we’d rented for our families, and the next morning he went out to breakfast with his girlfriend. He had barely spoken with Jim since his arrival, and to me not at all.

  Then came the wedding ceremony and the reception after. Just as the band had started playing, Jonathan approached Jim to say that he’d like to talk with him.

  I’d been looking forward to this moment—the dancing part—ever since we’d started planning the wedding. Jim and I had actually taken dance lessons to get a few moves down for this. But now—recognizing the rarity of Jonathan’s making an overture toward him—Jim had stepped away from the tent and disappeared with his son.

  They were gone for close to an hour.

  So I danced with my sons and daughter and my friends. I had a good time visiting with friends. But I kept looking for Jim, hoping he’d come back before the band finished their set. As one song after another finished without Jim’s return, a knot formed in my stomach. I’d picked out every one of those songs with him in mind.

  The band we’d hired specialized in covers of George Jones songs. I had requested that they learn one in particular—“He Stopped Loving Her Today.”

  There was a particular reason why I had asked for this song. It told the story of a man so devoted to the woman he loves—long after she’s left him—that he remains faithful to her for what would appear to be decades. It’s about a kind of crazy, over-the-top love and loyalty, and though I had no intention of abandoning Jim as the woman in the song had done to the man in the song, the particular brand of true blue devotion George Jones sang about always made me think of Jim. Only in the final verse of the song do we discover why it is that the man in the song has stopped loving the woman, at last: He died.

  That would be Jim, I told the band, only partly joking.

  Now though, as the musicians launched into the song, my husband was nowhere around to hear it and dance with me.

  Something took hold of me then, and I got up anyway. I started dancing by myself, reenacting the story told in the song—of a man so crazed with love he keeps reading his old love letters, and waiting for the woman he loves to come back to the moment he takes his last breath. It was a kind of dancing I typically reserved for the privacy of our kitchen or bedroom—my wild interpretive dances, performed with abandon for an audience of one, as Jim cleaned up the last of our dinner dishes or sat back in his chair to take in the spectacle. Only now I was performing it for all of our assembled guests.

  We were down to the final lines of the song—the part about placing the wreath on the man’s door, the reason the man in the song had stopped loving the woman after all these years. I was so wrapped up in my dance that I’d gotten down on the floor by this point, enacting with considerable melodrama the picture of the dead man being carried out, when, from my spot on the ground, a pair of black shoes came into my range of sight.

  Jim was back. Just in time to pick me up off the ground and wrap his arms around me. We finished the song together and stayed that way the rest of the night. And later, as we were all dancing with my son Charlie as DJ, fireworks started going off, first from one town below us on the hill, then a different one. It was the Fourth of July weekend, of course. But it felt as if they were for us.

  “What did he want to talk about?” I asked Jim later. We were back in our little cabin on the hillside now, with all but the youngest and most energetic of our guests retreated to their hotel rooms. Here I was in the arms of the man who was now my husband, though it still felt strange to me, saying the word.

  “Jonathan, I mean. When he wanted to go off with you. ”

  “It was nothing much,” Jim said. “Science fiction novels. Computer stuff.”

  In the years that followed, the story of Jim’s disappearance from the dance floor that night was one I brought up way too often. I knew the reason why he’d allowed this to happen—his longing to connect with his son. But I had a hard time letting go of my disappointment.

  Still it was a wonderful wedding. The best ever, many of our guests told us later. The New York Times story about that day, the editor told me, had been one of the most shared online of any “Vows” column the paper had ever run.

  One friend who’d been there told me later how he’d expressed a certain good-natured concern to Jim over the possibility that living with me might prove a little taxing. Jim had shaken his head. “I know I’ve got a tiger by the tail,” he said. “But I’m up for it.”

  “We could have thirty more years together if we’re lucky,” Jim said to me that night, as we headed to bed.

  22.

  We marked the start of our marriage with a four-day hike along the Presidential Range in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, lapsing into our Wanda and Buddy routine on occasion, and totally silent when we needed to be—touching down in a different Appalachian Mountain Club hut every night for a good dinner and a good night’s sleep, rising at five in the bitter cold to head out on the trail to the next summit. Every night they gave us two bunk beds but all we ever used was one.

  It was a rugged hike—particularly the last day on Mt. Adams, when we watched hikers thirty years younger than we were turn around and go back down.

  “What we lack in strength we will make up for with tenacity,” I said, as we marked our arrival at the summit. Reaching those peaks—reaching any peak—had always felt symbolic to us. If we could do this, we could do anything.

  The Labor Day movie came out, and I was invited to attend the Telluride Film Festival that September for its first public showing. Jim and I made the trip together, watching two or three movies a day and having drinks in the bar at the New Sheridan Hotel on Main Street. I got to wear my cowboy boots. He wore his hat.

  After that, there was a flurry of publicity around the movie. We went to Denver for another premiere, and to Austin for a book festival, posing in front of the wall on Congress Avenue beside graffiti that said “I Love You So Much,” with both of us adopting the demeanor of a couple in the midst of a standoff. We flew to Toronto and walked the red carpet there—I, with a borrowed necklace of Swarovski crystals, Jim in his tux, waving while cameras snapped our pictures and the people lining the walkway tried to figure out who we were. I allowed myself to fantasize that maybe the next spring we’d attend the Oscars together.

  The summer before, at a vintage shop in Portland, Maine, I’d found a great dress—a very simple 1960s sheath with a label from Paris, encrusted in bright blue sequins. The dress fit me almost perfectly—almost, because as good as it looked once I’d gotten it on, zipping up the back always required five minutes of Jim’s wrangling effort with the zipper first.

  Now, at the age of sixty, I was experiencing this unlikely little dose of glamour, Midwestern style: movie screenings in Chicago and St. Louis and Minneapolis and Kansas City, for which the studio always provided a makeup artist and stylist and a very good hotel room. Every night, with assistance from the makeup artist in whatever city I’d touched down in that day, I’d put on my blue dress and my four-inch blue silk heels and step out onto the stage to introduce the movie.

  Jim had to stay home for that trip; he was still trying to get his new law practice off the ground. But I ended every night with a call to him, and when I finally got back home he was there at the cell phone lot ready to swoop me up in the Boxster.

  The movie flopped, but after I got home, I hung the blue dress in our bedroom as a reminder of my little mom
ent of glory, and settled into my new life. Or tried to. That concept—that two people might know a single, joined life, did not come easy.

  I had been very good at throwing a wedding—I, a former high school prom chairman, the host of a hundred parties and fundraisers. But building a marriage required more than the skills of an event planner.

  At the point Jim and I got together, I had been single for twenty-four years. Just putting that ring on my finger had felt odd—almost embarrassing, as later it would be difficult to say “my husband” or to refer to myself as Jim’s wife. To me, marriage had meant trouble, failure, pain. Why would a person in her right mind sign up for more of that, once the fun part—the celebration and the music, the dancing and the friends—was over?

  For more than two decades I had lived as the most independent of women. Once Jim and I were married, I still operated as if I were one. I made my own decisions about where I’d go, and when, and if Jim had a different idea from mine, I might go along with it, but with the recognition that I was compromising in ways that felt almost like a betrayal of my true self.

  Sometime not long after the wedding, we had gone to New York, a city I loved and knew surprisingly well, considering that I’d lived there only briefly, thirty-five years earlier. In the past, I’d traveled to that city on my own, mostly. I moved quickly, and stopped only where I wanted to. I made accommodations to nobody but fellow passengers pressed up against me on the subway.

  Jim did not know the city well, and he took it in slowly. He liked to stop and take pictures or sit on park benches taking in the skyline. He wanted to read about each exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History. He thought it would be nice to sit down and get a sandwich, whereas I would have marched on and grabbed a handful of nuts to keep me going.