The Best of Us

by Joyce Maynard

  The guys came to the end of the song—the woo woo woo part. Then Jim set down his bass.

  “I think something’s happening here, baby,” he said to me quietly. “Fever.”

  I took the thermometer out of my bag.

  Five minutes later we were out the door and in the car on the way back to Hunsaker Canyon, the bass and amp packed in the back with the help of our friends. Home again, Jim lay down on the couch. I lay down next to him.

  “This might be it,” he said. I set the ice beside him and went for the Tylenol. We stayed there like that for most of the evening.

  His temperature climbed to 100 that night. But then, miraculously, it went down again. Eventually, when he seemed out of danger—meaning out of danger that night, or that hour anyway—we went to bed.

  Lying there with him in the dark, we spoke of the music he’d played that afternoon. Six songs. “I hated letting them down,” he said, of the other players.

  “They were just happy we made it at all,” I told him. “We were having so much fun. We can do it another day.”

  “I don’t think so,” he told me. “I’ve let go of all that.”

  I wanted to wrap myself around him, but I could no longer do that, there were so many places on his body that hurt now. I slept pressed alongside him, listening to the sound of his breathing, my hand in his hair. I would keep my diamond ring, but sometime in the night I slipped my own wedding band on his finger.

  112.

  There was a question I asked myself many times. I talked this over with the other pancreatic cancer wives too, on occasion.

  If, tomorrow, one of us received the diagnosis our husbands had, would we choose to pursue the Whipple procedure?

  Deborah said never. For Pam, the jury was out. “We had to try,” she told me. “But I never dreamed it would be so hard.”

  Robert, the Miami lawyer who experienced complications that required a second operation, followed by a recurrence of cancer four months later, had approached his choice to undergo the Whipple with the sober realism of an attorney.

  “If I knew how my story came out,” he said, referring to his recurrence, “I certainly would not have undergone the Whipple. But I had a decision to make, and I don’t regret it at all. There was only one way to beat the cancer, and it was to undergo the operation. I may have had only a twenty-five percent prospect of success, but that was my one chance.”

  Then there was Roger, the husband of a Facebook friend, who’d undergone the surgery months after Jim. Though we had never met, I followed his progress on the Caring Bridge website, and so far he was feeling strong and good. He had even gone skiing that winter. His story—however rare it might be—represented everything I’d longed for, for Jim.

  As for me: I thought back often to that day at Fenway Park—the day before Jim checked himself into the hospital to undergo the Whipple procedure—when we’d eaten all those oysters, and Jim had felt so good. Like his old self, almost. We might have had a whole summer like that. More maybe, who knew? There would have been this too: a sword over Jim’s head. The knowledge that all the while, the tumor was growing, and that one day it would do him in.

  Meanwhile, though, we might have had our life for longer. Knowing what I knew now, I’d probably choose to leave my insides intact and let the cancer have its way with me.

  Not Jim. He had been ready to try anything. He would fight to stay alive if it killed him.

  113.

  The newly expanded San Francisco Museum of Modern Art had opened—an event Jim had talked about since we met. On a Tuesday—when I hoped the crowds would be thinner—we drove into the city to take it all in. I was the one at the wheel.

  We walked like a couple in their nineties through the museum—the kind of couple we would never be—and stopped often to sit. There was one painting Jim particularly loved—a Brice Marden that looked like tangled-up rope. We sat a long time in front of that one, because he loved the painting. And because he was tired.

  In the British sculpture room, one work caught Jim’s attention over all the others. It was the highly abstracted rendering, in metal, of a man, the image of him created not by solid forms but by floating metal rods. Depending on what angle you were viewing it from, the sculpture might look like nothing but a random assemblage of metal. When you walked around it, suddenly the man took shape. Five more steps to one side or the other and he was gone.

  Slow as a minute hand, Jim made his way around the sculpture, front to back and back again. As he walked around the sculpture, I snapped his picture—first one, then a second, then a third, all the way around.

  Later, when I looked at the pictures I’d taken of Jim that day, it seemed to me they were not pictures of a man at all. The images of the figure hidden in the sculpture remained clear, but Jim—standing a little ways off behind it, in the black fleece and black pants that were his uniform now, and the baseball cap—looked like an apparition.

  “He reminds me of myself,” Jim had said, of the stick figure man in the sculpture. “Disappearing.”

  114.

  In early May Jim’s children came to see him, and in June, one by one, mine came to say good-bye—first Audrey, flying in all the way from New Hampshire, then Charlie, then Willy. They had only known Jim four and a half years but they had loved him.

  When Willy came, he had just recently returned from shooting a movie in Romania. We’d been taking care of his dog, Tuck, for several months and I knew he missed Tuck badly, but I asked if we could keep him with us a little longer. Tuck slept in the bed with us every night, and during the days, when Jim lay mostly on the couch now, Tuck stayed at his side.

  Now came Willy, not to take Tuck home, but only to see Jim—Willy, the one whose wedding toast to the two of us had begun, “My mom has had a lot of boyfriends …”

  “My mom’s not the best driver around,” he said. “So we all appreciate having Jim take over there.”

  What he really appreciated about Jim, more than anything else, I knew, was how Jim had made his mother happy.

  There were no elaborate good-byes with the children. Jim had given his best guitar—the Martin—to his son Kenny, and also the twelve-string. But before each of my sons left on the weekend of their separate visits, he gave them each one of his bass guitars, and for my daughter, one of his old film cameras, because—an old-fashioned person—Audrey liked those more than digital, and because, she said, it would remind her of Jim. He gave her his simplest digital camera too—the simplest one, because Audrey avoided fancy things. After she got it home, she had found the SIM card inside, with photographs he’d taken years before, back when the two of us were first together. She called me up to tell me she would send me the images.

  “You two must have just met,” she said. “I never saw you look that happy.”

  115.

  He was fading away—every day a little less of him, like an old negative exposed to too much light, so thin you could almost look through him.

  I didn’t want this to happen, but it started to now: Sometimes during our day together a picture would flash into my brain—an image of my life without Jim. My life after.

  I looked at the Boxster out in the driveway, with its fabric cover over the top, so much time having passed now since the last time we’d gone anywhere in it together. Though I could operate a stick shift, I had never once driven that car, and never wanted to. For me the thrill lay in being the passenger. Sometimes when we were driving together and I was at the wheel, Jim had pointed out things that would improve my driving: the correct positioning of my hands at ten o’clock and two, the way to set my elbow on the arm rest, the concept of looking not at the road directly ahead, but beyond. I was the one driving the BMW now—I, a woman whose own car was a 1995 Honda Civic—but in all this time I had never taken the wheel of the Boxster.

  “I should get him to teach me how to drive that car,” I thought now. Then just as quickly. How could I ever?

  116.

  The long-delayed
closing date came for the cottage on the lake in New Hampshire. Months had passed since that New Year’s Eve day my offer had been accepted, but after those first few weeks Jim and I had ceased to talk about going there in summer, sitting on the porch with our wine and his cigar, our feet on the railings. I had still not laid eyes on the property, except in pictures online, but I’d sent the deposit check and now I signed the papers. When the day came that the property was put in my name, I didn’t mention it to Jim.

  Some time before, in the early days of our battle with the rat, Jim had laid out rat poison. When Tuck came to live with us, Jim made his way slowly around our property again, getting down on the ground in a way that could not have been easy for him in that post-Whipple life, to make sure not a crumb of the deadly stuff remained within reach.

  Then one day in late May something surprising happened. We came home from a trip to town—the drugstore, our daily stop—and there was a dead rat on the patio. I liked to think this was not simply a rat, but the rat.

  He was certainly enormous, for a rat. He was large as a cat, with a long thick tail and very long whiskers like the kind Jim had found on the glue trap that day when he’d almost caught the rat, only to be outwitted again.

  The rat was dead. He lay there on the flagstone, eyes open, facing the pergola whose beams he would no longer tread. “I guess this is the end of an era,” Jim said.

  We picked him up with a shovel and threw his body in the woods, and that night there were no footsteps on the roof, or anyplace else. No sound but the owls somewhere out in the woods behind the house, and in our bed, the slow steady sigh of our own breath.

  117.

  Back in the winter, Jim had started ordering a lot of things online. Pants in particular, because none of his fit, and anyway, what he needed at this point were the loose-fitting drawstring kind, in the smallest size they had.

  Now I’d catch myself thinking when he took another pair of pants out of the package, “I could wear those.”

  He ordered many books, though I don’t think he read any of them. Reading was difficult now. He ordered remastered copies of the albums he’d loved: the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, Led Zeppelin, Cream, back to the Beatles. It was as if he was tracing back through his musical life. Pushing rewind all the way to the beginning.

  A BMW mug arrived. A San Francisco Giants shirt. A PC computer, though he was a Mac guy, because sometimes when doing legal work a PC was needed. He ordered a robotic vacuum cleaner, and a hat, and a bar of French soap of the kind we’d encountered on our trips to Paris, at the wonderful little hotel we always stayed at in St. Germain. He ordered his special brand of razor blades. Many of them.

  Every day the UPS man showed up with a package from Amazon, sometimes as many as three. Often they contained shoes, though no longer the soft leather shoes that filled Jim’s closet from his lawyer days. Now he ordered sneakers, and more sneakers, and a pair of zippered black boots, and a pair of white bucks of the sort a person might wear, with a seersucker suit, to a garden party or a summer wedding. (Like the one we had, for instance, not even three years earlier.) First one pair of white bucks arrived, then a second identical pair. I even tried on some of the sneakers—because they were very good ones, and not cheap, and mine were old. But though my feet are large for a woman, and his small for a man, they were still a size too big.

  Out by the trash cans the cardboard piled up but I made no comment. I had my own purchases arriving, though mine were generally medical supplements, elixirs someone told me about on Facebook, super protein powders, frozen breast milk, a kind of honey said to possess nearly magical immune boosting properties.

  One day I found a stack of unopened bills in a corner of Jim’s office. The insurance policy on the BMW was about to be canceled. So was his phone service. Months of payments were due on the conference room he’d rented in the city, that he hadn’t used in six months.

  Two of the men in the pancreatic cancer breakfast group died in a single week—leaving the membership to three. I wrote to their wives, but did not discuss the news with Jim.

  I still lit the candles for our dinners together, still put on the streaming radio program we favored, Folk Alley. One night, as we sat there, a John Prine song came on and I got up from my chair. I reached out my arms.

  Very slowly then, he stood up and we held each other. I knew as we danced—just a few steps in place next to the table—this was the last time.

  118.

  A note came from my friend Deborah, with a link to Bob’s obituary.

  “I never thought this day would come,” she wrote. “But come it has. I sit up half the night, dreading to go to sleep, because when I wake up in the morning there is a wee tiny almost unmeasurable moment when I open my eyes and all is as it should be. And then SHAZZAM!!! I remember Bob is not here and I don’t really know where he is. I just know he won’t be back. And it’s like living the heart-wrench over and over and over. Friggin’ Ground Hogs Day.

  “My heart has broken in a thousand pieces,” she wrote.

  119.

  I was up late one night on Facebook—the place where I had found a surprising measure of comfort over the months of Jim’s illness, from a large and growing community of readers who had never met me, never met Jim, but seemed to care about what happened to him. It was not uncommon now, when I posted some update about what we were going through, for a few hundred messages to scroll onto the screen in the space of an hour, and they would keep coming in all day and into the night.

  This time, though, I heard the ping of a private message, and I went to my Facebook mail.

  It was from Layla, the older of my Ethiopian daughters.

  More than five years had passed since I’d seen her or heard anything from her or her family—though I had Googled her name a few times, which was how I learned about the medal she’d won for her running, and that she was on the honor roll at her school.

  The last time I’d seen her, when I reached to stroke her head she’d turned her face away. Now she was writing to say hello.

  It was not a long message. But her English was almost perfect.

  “Many people think you were a bad person to let us go,” she wrote. “But Adenach and I don’t. You did the best thing for us. You got us to this country and you found us our parents. I wanted you to know we’re doing great.”

  I reread Layla’s note several times before writing back. There were a thousand things I would have liked to say to her, but I didn’t want my words to overwhelm her, so I wrote only a few.

  “I am so happy to hear from you,” I said. I told her what was true, that I thought about her and her sister every day. “I want you to know that if the day ever comes when you’d like to talk to me,” I wrote to her, “I will always be here for that. I have always hoped and believed that we’d get to see each other again.”

  I told her that Willy still kept her picture on his refrigerator—hers, and her sister’s. I told her I was ready to hear whatever she would like to tell me.

  I sat there watching the dot, dot, dot in the conversation box—the indication that the person you have written to is still there on the other end, writing her response.

  “That sounds good,” she wrote. “Adenach and I will come see you when we are all grown up.”

  I wrote back to say I’d love that. A small good thing in my world of sorrow.

  120.

  The first week in June, Jim brought me into the room where he kept his camera gear. He had laid everything out on the rug. One by one, he explained every camera and lens, and the person to whom it should go. The Nikon D7000 for Kenny. A good lens for Audrey’s boyfriend, Tod. His Nikon D800E, the best camera, was for me. “You might not know how to use this yet,” he said. “But you can learn.”

  It was important for him to locate his merit badge sash; we spent a couple of hours searching for it, and we did—also his neckerchief and his cap and his Venice High track letter.

  He made lists now, like the ones I used to pre
pare for some babysitter when my children were young and I went out of town on a trip—the kind of information a person needs to know about how to take care of things when the one who’s generally in charge goes away. Jim wrote down his computer passwords for me, and his other passwords. He showed me which files of legal papers needed to be saved in case some former client needed them and which ones could be thrown out. He told me which of his possessions should go to his children, which painting to Patrice.

  He was letting go of everything—not just camera gear, guitars, his best leather jacket, his Rolex watch.

  No more oysters. No more martinis. No more checking up on Donald Trump’s poll numbers.

  No more driving. No more motorcycle. No more dancing. No more rock and roll.

  One piece at a time, Jim was saying good-bye to the world. The words that came to me harkened back to a time long ago, with one of my babies on my lap, and the well-loved book in my hands.

  Goodnight moon. Goodnight cow jumping over the moon.

  He wanted his friend Jay to have a particular hat and his fly fishing rod and reel. For his children: money to help with a down payment on a home.

  Goodnight stars. Goodnight air.

  He was going away, and at certain moments I almost wished I could be dying too. Except for the pain part, that might have felt less harsh than this: the knowledge that he was leaving, and, for the moment, I was not.

  121.

  I have known of people—people in couples—who, when they are dying, and they know this with certainty, say to the partner who will survive them, “I want you to find someone else. You need to marry again.”