The Best of Us

by Joyce Maynard

  These were not words Jim could have spoken. Jim, who said to me once, as we lay in the dark, “You will never know how much I love you.”

  Except that I did. Jim, in whose eyes I was the most beautiful and desirable woman on the planet, and therefore desired by every other man in whatever room we entered, which had left him not jealous or controlling, but fierce in his intention to be such a good husband I’d never feel inclined to run away with one of them. Not that any of Jim’s imagined competitors for my affection had shown the slightest indication of offering a threat. It was only in his imagination that this was so.

  His imagination. He always said he had none. The idea that one day, Josh Brolin might spirit me away—or Dan Rather (another competitor, in Jim’s eyes) may have been the scenarios he envisioned, but they haunted him.

  Now, as our days together dwindled, we did not speak of what I would do with my life, After. It was not just the cottage in New Hampshire that went unmentioned, but the years ahead that I might have, and he would not—where I might spend them, and with whom.

  He was, unfailingly, a man who sought nothing so much as my happiness. He would have wanted that. He simply couldn’t bear to picture what it might one day look like, for me to find that again with someone other than him.

  But I knew he thought about it. Pressed up against his withering body in the night, it sometimes seemed to me I could actually feel the thought passing through him, and when I did I held him tighter.

  I did not say, “You are the only man for me.” I did not say, “I’ll never marry again.” (I had just discovered, at age sixty-one, how much I liked to be married.)

  What I said was, “I will love you forever.” It was a promise I would have no difficulty keeping.

  122.

  On one of these afternoons, a thought had come to me with searing clarity.

  Always before, for as long as I’d had children, my children had remained at the center of my universe. Whatever man entered the picture—and many did, very good ones in some cases—this never changed, and I never questioned any other feeling but that one. Before I was anything else, I was my children’s mother.

  I remember saying once to David, the good and loving man who had wanted to make a life with me years before, that I could only consider this if my children liked him. For Jim too, as uneasy as things had remained with one or more of his children over the years, the fact of his being their parent had remained the central and life-shaping fact of his life. When, at the age of eight, his older son had laid down the edict that he would never accept Jim’s new partner or be in the same room with her even, Jim had accepted those conditions and adapted to them. For nineteen years his relationship with Patrice endured, but he never lived with any other woman but his children’s mother until he lived with me.

  Even when we got together—and as much as I loved him—I continued to view my children’s preeminence in my life as immutable. I maintained the view that they were the most important people in my universe, long after I ceased to be the most important in theirs. And of course, it was only natural and right for them that this would happen. They were doing what children are supposed to: making their own good lives, separate from their parents. I just never believed that I might do the same.

  Even on the day I married Jim, I would have told anyone who asked that my children came first. When, with one of my sons holding each of my arms, I walked through the wildflower-filled field on that New Hampshire hillside to speak my wedding vows to Jim I did not say this, but I might have. “I love you more than anyone. Except my children.”

  Maybe Jim was doing the same thing when he made what had seemed to me at the time like a nearly unforgivable choice to walk away from the dance floor that day, just as the band started up, because his older son had chosen this moment to say he wanted to talk. What would we not do for our children?

  I would still do just about anything for mine. But a shift had occurred sometime over the not quite three years that constituted my marriage to Jim. I don’t know when it happened. I do know that the fact it did, and my willingness to say so, would cause no injury to my three very well-loved children. There is nothing I could say that would cause them to doubt how I feel about them.

  Not on our wedding day, or for some time after that, but sometime in the space between that moment and this one, Jim came to occupy, for me, that place in the dead center of my heart.

  One of those last days we spent on the patio, as we sat there in the late-afternoon sun watching the deer amble through the grass, I had set down my wineglass and reached over for Jim’s hand.

  “You are my favorite person,” I told him.

  All those years I spent envying the people with big, loving families surrounding them—people whose parents were still alive, people whose brothers and sisters lived down the road and stopped by for coffee on Sundays, people who had to put two leaves in the table at Thanksgiving because of all the relatives who came to join them that day, and most of all those who got to raise their children with their children’s other parent—I had felt, even as the mother of three, like a woman short on family. All those years I’d been on the lookout for mine.

  I’d carried around all those pictures: blessedly “intact” families I read about on Facebook; happily blended families; adoptions that worked; my old dream of that fourth baby I never had. And here it was, finally: the family I’d been looking for. My children would certainly be in this picture, as it now appeared Jim’s would not. But Jim was my family. The one I counted on to be there when everyone else was gone.

  123.

  “Suppose we get in the BMW,” he said one morning, “and just start driving. Take a road trip. No telling where we’ll end up.”

  Just keep on driving until we can’t anymore.

  124.

  One afternoon—one of the last, and I knew it—I opened the door to let Tuck out and there was Jim, standing on the flagstone, holding the handles of our wheelbarrow. The wheelbarrow was full of wood. He must have hauled it all the way from the garage to the house, and because this wood had not yet been split, and the logs were large, these were not logs for our fireplace.

  We had moved into June by this point. Warm weather now. Not the season for fires, but there was more wrong with the picture than that.

  It was very heavy, this load of firewood. I had no idea how Jim had managed to push the wheelbarrow up the hill to the spot where he now stood on our doorstep. He looked like a man who had just walked a hundred miles in the desert without food or water. He looked like a dying man, and he was, of course.

  And here comes the terrible truth: I was angry. All I could think, seeing this man I loved standing there, was that he had just about killed himself hauling this wood. All I could think: He will be unable to do anything for the rest of the day. And I would have lost out on the tiny window of minutes with him—narrowing all the time—when we might have sat together and talked on the couch, or shared our glass of wine, or maybe even walked out to look at the olive trees. He’d squandered a vast portion of what strength remained, on this one pointless mission to bring in the useless firewood.

  “What were you thinking, Jimmy?” I said to him. “These logs aren’t any good for burning.”

  If he could have looked any sadder than he had, before, now he did. Slowly, slowly, he turned around in the direction he’d come from. He bent to pick up the handles of the wheelbarrow, to return the wood to where it had been stacked behind the garage.

  “Never mind,” I told him. “I’ll do it.”

  He did not argue. He went to bed.

  125.

  So it was June. Jim’s birthday month. We were coming up on the day whose coordinates I had recited five hundred times over those last nineteen months, in one doctor’s office or another. Jim’s sixty-fourth birthday—the age Paul McCartney had written a song about, when it seemed so incredibly old. Will you still need me? Will you still feed me?

  “Only sixty-four,” I said.

  Som
e months before this, when so much still seemed possible that no longer did, I had asked Jim to get us tickets to see Bob Dylan at the Greek Theater in Berkeley. They didn’t come cheap, but remembering times past when he’d let assignments like this one slide, he bought us two great seats for his birthday weekend.

  We were well over a year into cancer treatment, and with as much hopefulness as we still possessed, we had also learned that when there’s something you really want to do, you shouldn’t put it off.

  Bob Dylan! I think I was about thirteen years old the first time I heard him (that would have been my sister’s Columbia Record Club album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan). I fell in love with him then, studying that photograph of Dylan walking down a street in Greenwich Village holding the arm of a beautiful young woman, looking like two people who would be in love forever, though of course they wouldn’t. I learned to play “Blowin’ in the Wind” on my guitar. I memorized the lyrics of every song on that album, and the ones that came after.

  Jim and I had loved a lot of music over our five decades of listening. But through all that time, one artist neither of us ever stopped following was Dylan. His music changed a lot, but he was always there in the mix, with new songs and old songs sung in totally new ways. Somewhere along the line, he turned into this old guy who even sang cabaret songs on occasion, as if he were Frank Sinatra—but more accurately, as if he were Bob Dylan paying homage to Frank Sinatra. My younger self would not have known what to make of this, but Jim and I were older too.

  Now Dylan was seventy-five. (Thirteen years older than I was. Eleven years older than Jim.) And he was coming to a wonderful outdoor amphitheater in Berkeley, twenty minutes from Hunsaker Canyon. I’d seen Dylan many times over the years. Jim never had.

  We’d actually bought tickets to see Dylan one other time a few years back, but that night Jim was called away on some legal work for a client that couldn’t wait. Those were the days when we thought we had all the time in the world, and if a job came up that interfered with our plans to be together, we sometimes allowed the job to take precedence, as we would not now.

  Five days before the Dylan concert—on hospice now, and methadone—Jim started slipping badly. Sleeping more. Remembering less. His gait, when he walked, was the slowest shuffle, the step of a man for whom lifting a foot off the floor represented an expenditure of strength no longer within his realm. He was barely eating; even the apple pie I’d made him sat untouched on the counter. His eyes had taken on a look I had not seen before. On the last occasion we’d gone out to a restaurant—lunch in Lafayette sharing a fish taco and a margarita—I recognized that the people in the restaurant had been staring at us uneasily, as if we no longer belonged in a place like this. You couldn’t look at Jim anymore and fail to recognize he was a dying man.

  As the date of the concert approached—June 9, a Thursday night—the idea of making a trip to a concert in Berkeley, the idea of making a trip anywhere, seemed impossible. I even went on Craigslist with the thought of selling our tickets, or trying to.

  But I didn’t list them for sale. Forgetful as he had become, Jim kept telling the hospice nurses and friends who came by that we were going to see Bob Dylan Thursday night.

  “I’m taking Joyce on a date,” he said, though I doubt they believed him.

  The Greek Theatre is an outdoor venue. And even in the middle of the hottest summer days, my husband got so cold now he hardly ever wanted to be outdoors. Never mind at night.

  That morning, though, we agreed we were going to this concert, and Jim rested up all day to be ready. The music wasn’t going to start until eight—with an opening act—but knowing how slowly Jim was walking, I knew we’d need lots of time getting there.

  He dressed up for this. He wore his black jeans with a belt that had a silver buckle, and a black turtleneck sweater and black boots, and a black hat a little like the one Walter White wore on Breaking Bad. He looked like some old rock star—a very old one. I wore my special leather jacket with fringe that made me feel like some rock-and-roll musician’s girlfriend. Which I was, actually.

  On the drive over, we talked about what songs we hoped Dylan would play. His choice was “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” I said “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” though we both agreed that on any given day we might have made totally different choices.

  At the parking lot, we got a handicapped parking space, but there was still a significant walk to the amphitheater. With great slowness and some pain, no doubt, he made it, though making it along that three-block stretch of sidewalk took most of an hour.

  We sat on the concrete then—but with Jim’s inflatable pillow under him, and blankets—waiting for the show to begin. Only then Jim’s eyes started to close, and he started rocking side to side in a way that had nothing to do with music, because the music hadn’t started yet. If I hadn’t held him up he would have flopped over.

  I brought him to the medical tent. Except for the part about how it breaks your heart, it’s not so difficult, holding up a ninety-pound man.

  Here was one good thing about having a medical issue at a concert in the San Francisco Bay Area. If it’s a rock concert, the people helping you out will be a team of great old hippie RNs—also a few young ones—from a group called Rock Medicine that grew out of a project the rock promoter Bill Graham started long ago, back in Janis Joplin days, back when the medical issue for people attending concerts was bad LSD trips. These nurses all work for no pay, just love of the music and a belief, as they explained to me that night in the tent, that if at all possible, a person experiencing medical difficulties at a rock concert should receive a little help so he could get back to enjoying the music.

  Regular hospital nurses, looking at Jim as he was at that moment, would have told me I’d been crazy to bring him here in the first place, and instructed me to get him home right away. But the Rock Medicine nurses were there because they loved music, and they believed in the medicinal effects of rock and roll. They had no problem with letting Jim lie on a cot for an hour or so. There were no drugs to help him at this point, but I asked if anyone had a banana and one was delivered to us. Potassium.

  By this point, the opening act was under way. It was Mavis Staples, another old-timer. From where Jim lay in the tent, and I on the floor beside him, I could hear her belting out her songs from the stage while the nurses talked about recent shows they’d seen and others that were coming up. Steve Winwood. Bonnie Raitt. Joan Baez.

  One time Jim opened his eyes and seemed to come to for a moment. “Bob Dylan?” he asked me, sounding even more baffled than the baffled state he inhabited most of the time now. Mavis Staples sounded nothing like Bob Dylan, of course, and even in his confused state Jim knew that much.

  He lay there for close to an hour while Mavis performed. At one point he took a bite of the banana. A few times I had to put my ear to his chest to make sure he was still breathing. And then he opened his eyes and said he wanted to see the show.

  “Let’s do it,” the nurses told us.

  We brought him back out into the amphitheater in a wheelchair, which meant they put us in a really great spot reserved for the handicapped, and I wrapped him in all four of our blankets. His head was mostly flopped over, so all you saw of him was his hat sticking out from all the blankets in the wheelchair.

  It was dark now, and the moon was out, a crescent. The lights on the stage came on. Then, there he was: Bob Dylan, wearing a cream-colored dinner jacket and a hat a little like Jim’s, but with a broader brim. The band started playing, and they were a very tight band, which I knew Jim would appreciate. My old Jim anyway, and maybe even Jim as he was now.

  As for Bob Dylan—well, he was Bob Dylan. Nobody else is like him, though I also reflected there was no other fan in the entire amphitheater like the one sitting next to me in that wheelchair.

  It was late, and normally we’d be in bed asleep by this hour. And the night was cool, even for me. When I asked Jim if he wanted to go home, he said “NO!” in a way
that almost sounded angry, but really he was just being firm. My husband wanted to see Bob Dylan. And he wanted to do this with me. And not just for three songs either.

  About twenty minutes into the show, Bob Dylan started playing “Tangled Up in Blue,” and Jim said “I WANT TO STAND UP.” So I helped him up and he held on to the railing. His eyes were looking wild, but also focused—that look I had been seeing occasionally at this point, as if he were beholding something totally different from the rest of us. He also looked up at the sky a lot, the moon.

  Sitting there beside him in the handicapped section with my head on his shoulder, I considered the possibility that Jim might die at this Bob Dylan concert. There would be worse ways to go.

  I kept asking if he wanted to go home but he was adamant he did not. So—careful as I always was now—I wrapped myself around him, and not with just my arms, but my whole body—and whispered in his ear from time to time. We stayed that way the whole show. The Rock Medicine nurse, Pam, checked up on us every few minutes and brought me coffee.

  I had been worried about how I’d ever get Jim back to the parking garage, but Pam said she and another one of the nurses would help us. The plan was to let me know when it was the second to last song. When Dylan started playing that one, the two nurses lifted Jim and his chair up to the exit ramp and wheeled us through the crowd. Still wrapped in blankets, with his black hat on, Jim stared straight ahead, as if this was some other planet he was visiting, but only temporarily.

  We had to go down a very steep hill, which is hard with a wheelchair. If the nurse pushing the wheelchair had lost control, Jim would have crashed right into Bob Dylan’s bus—a picture that came to me at this point, in which I imagined Bob Dylan himself in the bus, looking out at us with an air of surprise, though in fact he was still onstage—but this nurse was a very large and strong man, so I knew we were in no danger of that happening.