The Best of Us

by Joyce Maynard

  I vacuumed. Before, this had been Jim’s job, so it took me a minute to figure out how to turn the machine on. I had never cleaned a house before the way I cleaned ours that day. That night, and every night after, I slept on my side of the bed only.

  Back in our early days, when Jim had first started sleeping over—sleeping over, but not making love; those thirty days when we’d slept on the air mattress under the stars on my Mill Valley deck—he had slowly begun moving a few possessions over to my house: his cameras, of course. His bass. A few CDs, and some books that would never have found their place on my shelves if he hadn’t brought them (science fiction, philosophy, law, The Bible).

  And clothes. Such fine clothes, with labels from Brooks Brothers and Calvin Klein, ties from Hermès, shoes of the softest leather and a jacket that looked like something Steve McQueen would have worn.

  There had been a time when the amount of space I’d reserved for Jim in my bedroom—for his clothes, anyway; the man himself took up more—had been confined to a single box. After we’d moved to Hunsaker Canyon, there was more room for him, of course. More room in every way. We bought an armoire for his suits, and a chest of drawers, and he even annexed part, though hardly half, of the space next to my vast collection of dresses and skirts. But slowly, in a deeper way, my husband moved into a space that had remained unoccupied a very long time, at the core of my heart.

  Then he died, and there was no need for his beautiful clothes to remain in our closet anymore, and the armoire could be mine, even, as well as the drawers. All those shoes he owned—some of them ordered online only a month or two earlier—sat on the shelf in their boxes.

  I did not want to see his clothes hanging there—empty jackets, shirts without Jim in them. Then there were the T-shirts—the one with the vintage insignia of a motorcycle company from the fifties; the one I’d bought him on our road-trip summer in our Chrysler LeBaron convertible that said PROPERTY OF THE MAINE STATE PRISON (and he had posed for a picture in it, looking the part); another from a show of Ai Weiwei we attended in Toronto on our film-festival trip, with the words EVERYTHING IS ART, EVERYTHING IS POLITICS.

  Some of these clothes I boxed up for Jim’s younger son, who was his size. A few I gave to friends. I placed a call to Jim’s old law school to ask if there might be some scholarship student about to graduate and enter into practice, in need of good suits for court appearances. Someone very trim. Around the size of a Blue Angel fighter pilot.

  Some clothes I kept for myself—his blue-and-white-checked flannel shirt, his black jeans, the belt he’d worn to look sharp at the Bob Dylan concert, and the black Patagonia jacket he hardly ever took off by the end, because he was always cold.

  I was Jim’s size, more or less, though in the last months I’d outweighed him. Time was, I had believed the height and girth of a man might serve as some kind of indication of strength, and look what happened. I had ended up in bed with a ninety-pound man in possession of more fortitude than anyone I ever met.

  I did not want to become the keeper of the Museum of Jim, so I cleaned out his office too—the model of the plane his father had worked on back at Hughes Aircraft in the fifties, the biographies of Learned Hand and Benjamin Cardozo, the pictures of Jim with his children when they were small and he was attending Bible study and trying to figure out how God might help him stay in his marriage, the suit his mother sewed for their train trip from Ohio to Los Angeles in 1956, the plaque from 1967 commemorating his having attained the level of Eagle Scout. All these went into the boxes.

  But what was I supposed to do with his shotgun, and his other shotgun, and his rifle? (And I found something I hadn’t anticipated in the gun closet. There had been a small silver box with a lock on it whose combination remained unknown to me. Finally a neighbor drilled it open. Inside: a Walther PPK, identical to the little handgun Sean Connery carried in the early James Bond movies. Small enough to fit in a pocket, and if there is ever such a thing as a beautiful gun, this was it.)

  We had talked through the disposition of Nikon camera lenses and camera bodies, but what was I to do with the negatives and slides from fifty years of documenting the California landscape? And guitar amps, and children’s drawings, and Father’s Day cards and cigar cases, and eight pairs of glasses in which one of the lenses was only moderately corrective and the other a prescription so extreme it resembled a magnifying glass. What about the cigar cutters, and hand-tied fishing flies and scout badges? What about papers from law school and love letters from Patrice, and his carefully worded eulogy for the father who had beat him up all through his childhood—Jim loved him regardless—and a journal expressing his despair at what leaving his wife might do to his children, and a couple of very angry letters from his older son confirming the worst of his fears?

  I kept voice messages I had on my phone—just two, and very short, my only record of Jim’s voice. (“Sweetheart, I’m passing through town. Any groceries to pick up?”) I opened his laptop—unsure of the rules here concerning the privacy of a man no longer alive. Suppose he had written something he wouldn’t want me to see? There were all those e-mails between him and Patrice. Not my business.

  But I clicked on his music library. There were his beloved Mahler symphonies. There was Stevie Ray Vaughan and the New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars. There was every song the Beatles ever recorded.

  I thought I was just about finished cleaning out his office when—tucked into the back of a drawer—I came upon a wooden cross. When I found that it occurred to me that as much ground as we’d covered in our not-quite five years together, as many topics as we’d explored over our few thousand miles out on the road (Jim at the wheel; me in the passenger seat with my bare feet on the dash), I had perhaps never known where he had ended up in his lifelong quest for God.

  I’d sell the motorcycle. I’d fill a truck with things for Jim’s children. I’d bring a suitcase full of size nine-and-a-half shoes to Guatemala, where a pair of good sneakers cost more than a few days’ wages. I’d keep the Nikon D800E and get Tod to teach me how to use it. I’d drive to the place where Jim was cremated, and kiss his cold cheek one more time before they placed his body in the fire. But I would leave his ashes for his children to scatter, at Point Reyes, perhaps.

  The Boxster had been in the garage, but one morning a few days later I went out and turned the key in the ignition. Very slowly, because this was the first time I’d sat at the wheel of this car, I backed it out and set off down our driveway. Shifting a manual transmission after all these years proved less difficult than I’d imagined. What threw me was something else: the sound the engine made. It was the sound that had always signaled that Jim was coming home.

  A few days after Jim died, Willy drove up from Los Angeles to pick up his dog, and made the crazily extravagant decision to buy us tickets to the final game of the NBA championship, the Warriors against the Cleveland Cavaliers. Though Jim had loved Steph Curry, even he would have agreed that LeBron James deserved the victory that night, and got it. Out in the parking lot after the game, I studied the faces of the devastated Warriors fans, for whom losing the championship appeared to be the worst thing that ever happened. Evidently none of them had loved a person with pancreatic cancer.

  A few days after that, just as the sun was coming up, my son brought me to the Oakland airport, where I got on a plane headed for Manchester, New Hampshire. It was July now, my wedding anniversary, and like that day three years earlier, the sky was cloudless. From my seat on the airplane, the sun had come through the window at just the right angle to catch my wedding ring, reflecting little flecks of light that sparkled on the wall of the plane and the armrest and the back of the seat in front of me like stars. When I moved my hand the sparkles moved with me as if something magic were happening here. Wherever my hand went, for that brief moment when the sun hit my ring finger, sparkles encircled me.

  Maybe this was why men gave diamonds to women they loved. So there was no chance, ever, that you’d forget them. So they’d come
to you at odd moments like this one—well, the giver of this ring came to me all the time and would have regardless—and when they did, you’d be enveloped in stars.

  My friend Danny picked me up at the airport that afternoon. It was close to sunset, but he knew where I wanted to go first—to the cottage I’d bought sight unseen that winter. (“Guess what, sweetheart?” I’d told Jim over dinner that night. “I bought a house on a lake ten miles down the road from where Audrey lives.” Never one to question my wilder choices or to suggest that I was capable of anything less than all I aspired to, he’d said, “That’s great, baby.”)

  Later that summer, many things would happen. I would pick blueberries with my daughter and make it to the top of Mt. Monadnock, the one I had climbed four times with Jim. I would paint the front door of the lake cottage yellow and tear down a wall to let the sun into the kitchen, and drive to Maine one weekend to see Becky at the place where Jim and I had made our annual pilgrimage for corn on the cob and pie, out on the screen porch, watching the sun disappear over the water and listening to her son recite “The Legend of Sam McGee” while we polished off a bottle of zinfandel. (There would be little wine that summer. With illness gone from my life, I found I needed wine less, though sometimes when a friend came by I’d open a bottle.)

  I’d attach a picture to the refrigerator from the summer of our wedding three years back, of Jim at the Madison Hut in the White Mountains of New Hampshire at the end of that long hard day we’d tackled Mt. Adams, his green bandana not quite covering that great head of hair, with a smile that suggested there was not one thing in the world he wanted more of life than what was in his grasp at this one perfect moment.

  All that summer, I’d sleep in the boathouse, in the bed I’d brought down from the main house. A single bed, but if Jim were here we could have shared it. All that summer—with the exception of that one weekend I’d driven to Maine—I would get up at five thirty every morning. After my swim and my coffee I’d spend my day at the little desk I’d set up in the boathouse, retracing our story. I recognized as I did this that I was reluctant to get to the end—as if, so long as I hadn’t reached the last chapter, it might still turn out differently.

  Home again in California at the end of the summer, I would start up the Boxster and take the car out on the highway, where, sometime around ten o’clock on a September night, almost five years to the day from when Jim took me for our first drive together—top down, the voice of John Lennon coming to us through those very fine speakers he’d installed—smoke would suddenly surround me in a cloud so thick I could barely see the road in front of me.

  I’d pull over then to see flames coming from the exhaust pipe. Firemen would arrive. Then a tow truck.

  We had left the Porsche undriven for too long, the mechanic told me later, when he delivered the news that the seals had been broken, the engine destroyed. A replacement would cost more than the car was worth.

  “A Boxster is actually just a poor man’s Porsche,” he told me, but what did he know?

  So that fall I’d end up back behind the wheel of my twenty-year-old Honda Civic. Back where I started, I might have said, but I was nowhere close.

  Later, I’d sell the motorcycle, and (Jim would have hated this) a repo man would come to take the BMW away. I would turn Jim’s office into an art studio and start painting again, as I had not since I was very young. I would host a memorial service at our house—my house now—for which I would bake ten apple pies and print one hundred copies of a book of Jim’s photographs—including the one of the bored-looking couple on their cell phones in Valparaíso, and a bristlecone pine tree in the Owens Valley—and a hundred people would come to tell stories about him, and our friend Melissa would sing “The Book of Love” and all the men with whom Jim played music in Storkzilla—fifteen of them, including two horn players, a drummer, a harmonica player, an accordion, and many guitars—would gather on the patio where Jim used to smoke his cigar and they would play till almost midnight. I might be partnerless, but I would dance.

  I would travel to France on a book tour—also to Budapest, alone this time. I would track down my friend Deborah—the one with whom I once plotted a dinner on one coast or another that we imagined sharing with our two husbands, miraculously cured of pancreatic cancer—all of us raising our glasses for a toast to having beaten the odds. There would be a dinner one day, with fewer places set, and a toast to the two husbands missing from the table.

  Three nights after my sixty-third birthday I would gather with a group of writing students on an island in Florida to watch the election. As the returns came in, and we took in the stunning news, and the younger ones began to cry, I’d find myself putting my arms around those younger women, who were twenty-six and thirty-two and thirty-seven. “You wouldn’t believe the things a person can survive,” I told them—one of the things a person knows when she’s sixty-three, that she might not have at thirty.

  And one more thing: I’d learn that I was going to be a grandmother.

  But all of this—the drifting out to sea on my personal iceberg—came later. That July day two and a half weeks after Jim left the planet, when Danny first brought me to the little cottage that I’d bought during the last months of my husband’s life, I lifted my suitcase out of the car and set it down on the grass, pausing for a minute to take in the lake before heading inside. I looked out across the water as the last sliver of sun disappeared behind the trees on the other side. Somewhere a child was calling out to her mother. A couple paddled a kayak to no particular destination.

  I had been such a person once, a woman in the front of the boat with the man I loved behind me steering our craft. We cut smoothly through the water, matching the strokes of each other’s paddles.

  I climbed the steps to the porch. The previous owners had taken the rocking chairs but I’d buy another one.

  I put the key in the lock. Stepped in the door. Breathed in the smell of an old summer cottage. Through the windows, late afternoon sun streamed in. I could see the water dappling in the places where the trout came up to feed.

  “How Jim would have loved this,” I said. If he were here with me, he’d light a cigar on the porch and rest his feet on the railing. He’d watch as I walked down to the water, and he would keep his eyes on me until I reached the shore again. My guard dog.

  And after, over a good meal, we’d have many things to tell each other. What happens to those things, I asked myself, when there is no longer anyone to tell?

  It was just me now—a woman with her laptop, wearing a blue-and-white-checked flannel shirt to keep her warm on chilly nights, looking up at the constellations whose names she tries to remember and sometimes does, though from this hemisphere the Magellanic Cloud was not in evidence.

  One solitary woman and one solitary loon. Every night that summer, from where I slept in the boathouse down by the water, I heard her long, mournful cry. Somewhere out there at the other side of the shore maybe, her mate would call out to her. Every morning, just as the sun came up, I’d stand at the water’s edge for a moment. Then swim.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  So many friends, and strangers who became friends, supported my husband, Jim, and me during the nineteen months of our struggle, as—after—they supported me, alone.

  It’s not possible to name them all, but I want to single out a few. Rebecca Tuttle Schultze, Bridget Sumser, Karen and Tom Mulvaney, Rona Maynard, Lori Moran, Jenna Termondt, Jim and Bonnie Bell, Jay Holan, Bill Walmsley, Norm and Diana Paulsen, Katharine Schultze and Charles Grant, Kelly Hood, Barbara Floria Orcutt, Daniel Thibeault, Stephen and Garen Tolkin, Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine, Jenny Rein, Pat Shareck, Helen and Tom Hurley, Kevin Sessums, Diana Hamlet-Cox, Phil Matthews, Susan and Al Guillot, John and Florie Stickney, David Geissinger, Victor and Marie-Helene Yalom, Leonard Nielson, Margaret Tumas, Tom and Kelly Bradley, Leslie and Hrach Krikorian, Beverly Anderson and Woodward Payne, Melissa Warren Vincel, Landon Vincel, Karen Kraut and Jason Adkins, David Schiff, Robert
Glazier, Peter Schneider and Jennifer Brehl, Laurie Lehman, Pam Loftus and the nurses of Rock Medicine, and the men of Camp Three.

  I need to single out a woman whom I have yet to meet. I have quoted extensively here from Deborah Kanter’s brave, fierce, terrifyingly honest letters over the course of her own battle to save her husband, three thousand miles to the east of where ours was waged. Gratitude goes in equal measure to Pam Noble, another friend and sister I would never have met if not for our shared experience of loss.

  Nobody provided more joyful hours over the course of the past two years than the musician/lawyers (and one chemistry professor) who made up the band known as Storkzilla, and made it possible for my husband to play rock and roll almost to the end of his life: Allan Schuman, Tony David, Jerry Spolter, Garry Spolter, Tucker Spolter, Rich Saykally, Mike Papanek. Deep gratitude as well goes to Dave Motto for his musical guidance and friendship.

  I was humbled by the courage and kindness of the Pancreatic Cancer Men’s Breakfast Club—John Snyder, Sean Cooley, Steve Belzer, Jeff Filter, Dave Maclellan, and the one who stands alone now, keeping the fire burning: Dan Baker.

  Among physicians, my thanks to the oncology and infectious disease teams at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Dr. James Moser, UCSF Medical Center, Diablo Valley Oncology, Michael Broffman at Pine Street Clinic, Dr. Brian Wolpin at Dana-Farber, Dr. Ronald Weiss and Asha Gala at Ethos Health. Most particularly, I want to single out Dr. Katie Kelley and Dr. Sarah Doernberg at UCSF, Dr. Joseph Mancias of Beth Israel and Dana-Farber, Dr. Neil Stollman, and the nurses, aides, and counselors at Hospice East Bay. My humble gratitude goes to all the unsung heroes of every hospital where my husband was a patient, and all the other places where he was not a patient too: the men and women of the nursing profession, who make everything else possible.

  To my agent, Nicole Tourtelot—who read this manuscript as many times as I did, I think, and offered invaluable counsel—my deepest thanks.