11.
It wasn’t perfect, of course. But even our difficulties, or what I thought of then as difficulties, were the kind you have to be lucky to experience. I wanted Jim to talk more and spend less time on his laptop. I wanted him to take more time off from work, and to go to the beach with me instead of sitting at his desk studying legal briefs.
Sometimes we argued, and when we did, I discovered what a low tolerance he had for anything that felt to him like criticism or—as he perceived it—an attack. What in my mind constituted lively, constructive discussion felt to Jim—the son of a man who had cut him down relentlessly throughout his childhood—like a threat.
One night, in the middle of one such exchange (a discussion, in my eyes; in his, a fight) he had gotten up from the table, picked up his briefcase and moved toward the door. “I’m going home now,” he said.
Home being the house that had been sitting mostly empty in the Oakland hills. It was eleven o’clock at night.
But he didn’t leave. He stayed to talk things out. Years of failure for each of us in our past relationships—times we’d let anger or pride or stubbornness obscure what mattered most—had taught us plenty, and as much as I sometimes found myself wishing I’d met Jim when I was thirty-five, or forty-five, or fifty, even, I doubt that my younger self would have possessed the wisdom or humility to get past all the ways our flesh-and-blood relationship fell short of my dreams and do the work of making it stronger. The concepts of compromise, adaptation, and acceptance were new to me. But Jim was a peacemaker—a man who sought to locate the common ground, or the meeting place, anyway, that would keep his clients out of court. Now at home, he practiced this skill. Slowly, I got better at it.
I had lived on my own for many years and worked alone writing my books, in a house where—once my children left—nobody was around to get in the way. Some years back, on a visit west from a very good and loving man, David, with whom I had tried to make a long-distance relationship, I had exploded at him once for his request that before I head to my desk to work in the early morning hours, I tell him “Good morning.”
“I might not want to say ‘Good morning,’ ” I snapped. “It might break my concentration.”
In the end I said the words he’d wanted to hear from me, then sat at my laptop, irritated, fuming, for a full half hour—accomplishing nothing—reflecting on how demanding David had been, and how impossible the relationship was.
Now there was a man living with me, not merely paying occasional visits. I wanted him there, but on my terms. As a woman whose only designer-label clothing made its way to my wardrobe through the auspices of some thrift shop, I had come up short on closet space even before Jim entered my life. Once he had, I’d given him a box to store his pants and shirts—his shoes, even—and a couple of hooks for his ties. One or two suits made it onto the rack. No more than that.
Every morning when he got dressed for work, and not without a certain wry amusement (amusement, not complaint), Jim had examined the contents of his box and taken from it, uncomplaining, whatever he needed to wear into San Francisco that day.
At the time, this was my idea of how to have a man in my life. I’d wrap my legs around him all night long, but all the stuff of his life (shoes, shirts, underwear, socks) would remain in the corner, so as not to disturb the life I’d made for myself.
I got the closet. He got the box.
It was because of this, I think, that he sometimes made the round trip to Oakland and back, all on a Saturday morning, just to pick up a particular fleece or a suit. And then I gave him a hard time about wasting so much time driving. You could have called me insufferable, but he never did.
He liked the drive. He probably needed that time alone in the Boxster, playing Social Distortion at top volume. I loved him, but I never let up on him. My demands were many. My expectations high. He hardly ever complained.
I also know I was blaming Jim at this point for a problem that had nothing to do with him. For a long time I’d been having difficulty writing, having been unable to work much for nearly the entire time the girls lived with me. Now that Jim was in my life—happily so, mostly, but distractingly too—I was dangerously behind in my work.
In mid-November I placed a call to an artists’ retreat center in Virginia I’d gone to in the past, to ask if they might fit me in. They called me back to say there was an unexpected three-week opening, starting the following Saturday.
Ten minutes later I’d bought my plane ticket.
That night I told Jim I’d be going away to write. He didn’t question my choice or the fact that I had not consulted him. He even told me he was happy for me that I’d gotten this opportunity. It’s only now that I can look back and realize the disappointment he must have felt at my leaving. Not at my desire to work, or my making work a priority. It must have made him sad, that I still saw my life as divided in this way. There was my time with him, and my time with my work, and I could not yet envision a truly integrated life, where the work might have been accomplished without my having to go someplace else to do it.
Between November of 2011 and the following May, I left many times. I went to Virginia and to New York and Guatemala and New Hampshire, and Virginia again. I rented a cabin in Guerneville once—the kind of place a couple might go for a romantic getaway. I went alone.
I loved Jim. But I had never had a man in my life before who was so totally committed to being with me, and I didn’t know what to do with it. I loved it that he was part of my life now. I loved it that when my plane landed in Oakland, or San Francisco, he was always there in the Boxster, or if I had a lot of luggage, the Prius, waiting in the cell phone parking lot for my call. Then he’d speed over to whatever airline door I’d be standing at on the sidewalk, and leap out to pick up my bag. Never without wrapping his arms around me first.
If he’d gotten a haircut in my absence, I gave him a hard time about that. I always wanted him to grow his hair longer, and to let it be a little less tidily groomed. I’d reach across the seat and tousle it up, then kiss him again.
But there was this other part of me that felt a need to run away, be alone, with nobody’s needs but my own to consider. I’d love him like crazy when I was around. I’d take off on some plane or other when it suited me, happy in the knowledge that when I returned, Jim would be there waiting for me.
12.
At the point when I met Jim, in the fall of 2011, he was practicing estate and trust litigation—his field of specialty for most of the thirty-five years of his career up to that point—at a firm in San Francisco. He was good at that, but he was restless too.
Although from a young age he’d been passionate about politics and social justice, he’d made the choice early on in his career to go into a field that would ensure a good living for his family, and he did that—first in corporate law and later in a series of smaller firms. It was in the course of his practice that he met Patrice.
At the point Jim and Patrice met, he and his wife had been married for sixteen years; they had three young children. He had been raised to believe that a man stayed with the woman he married, no matter what; but he was deeply unhappy and lonely in that marriage, and alienated, too, from the church that had brought him and his wife together—a church whose rigid and punitive structures he had tried to embrace but no longer could.
Jim had told me the story. Like him, Patrice was an attorney, about Jim’s age. She was beautiful, and very smart, and crazy about Jim. The two of them never ran out of things to talk about—ideas, politics, the law. Jim’s sharp, wry humor was an important aspect of who he was, but in the years of his marriage, he had come to keep that part under wraps.
“That was one of the things I loved about her,” Jim said, of Patrice. “She got my jokes. I could always make her laugh.”
They were just friends, he told himself. But he fell in love with her.
They did not have an affair. Not that he didn’t think about this. He just couldn’t allow himself to act on it.
He was a man who still attended Bible study every Tuesday evening, raised to believe that divorce was a total failure of character.
He told his wife he had to leave, gave her the house, and moved into a little apartment, where his children came on weekends.
He and Patrice got together. The two of them started a law firm, and it turned out they were perfectly matched as law partners. They earned a reputation for winning, and they made a lot of money. They had some great times spending it, traveling to glamorous, romantic places all over the world together, then flying home to take on the next case.
Back when Jim had left his marriage, his older son—age eight at the time—had told Jim that if he ever saw his father with another woman besides his mother he’d never speak to him again, and Jim honored this edict, he told me, over the entire nineteen years that constituted his romantic relationship with Patrice. Sometimes they talked about getting married, but they maintained separate homes, and never lived together. In the end, Jim explained to me, it was Patrice’s difficulties with his children, and theirs with her, that had ended the relationship.
Even before the breakup of their personal relationship, however, their law partnership had ended. (Imploded was the word Jim used.) He had joined a more conventional firm specializing in estate law, and though he did well enough and made a reasonable income, he never again experienced anything like the success of those days with Patrice.
Once, walking near Jackson Square in San Francisco, Jim had pointed to a bronze medallion set into the sidewalk. On closer examination I saw the names cast into the bronze: Jim’s and that of Patrice, memorialized on the streets of San Francisco. Whatever it cost to buy that medallion was probably nothing for the two of them in those days.
The firm where Jim worked after he and Patrice dissolved their relationship—though not free from stress—was no doubt a calmer work environment than Jim’s two-person firm. He had colleagues there he liked and respected. But it held little of the old excitement. The great days of six-figure settlements were behind him.
It was during this time that Jim embarked on a project about which he told almost nobody. He went back to law school, nights, at Golden Gate University. Over the course of a few years of night classes, he earned a degree in environmental law. He had a dream of one day leaving the world of estate law and its bitter fights over money and applying his skills instead toward protecting land, water, air.
There wasn’t much money in this—at least, not for an attorney wanting to work on the public interest side. And the jobs for a newly minted sixty-year-old environmental attorney were few.
The spring after we met, Jim made the decision to pull out of the estate law firm in the city and set up a solo practice in San Francisco. He rented an office space and printed cards. And waited for the clients to call.
Jim was never a schmoozer or a marketer. Though he had many friends in the legal community of San Francisco, the task of setting up a firm, solo—without benefit of a legal assistant or secretary or a team of colleagues—proved more daunting than he had anticipated. Though I would have said there was no subject we didn’t talk about, he told me very little about this. I just saw it on his face. Worried about money and clients, he did his own filing now, but the papers piled up on his desk. He set up a website and made sure his ranking as a Super Lawyer was up to date, and he let old friends know he was out on his own now. But Jim wasn’t a rainmaker. The glory days and big money he’d known in his practice with Patrice appeared to be over.
13.
One day the phone rang. Jim told me the story over dinner that night.
A young medical student by the name of Samuel Nwanu had contacted him—referred by another attorney who’d turned down his case, as several already had. By the time he got Jim’s name, he was running out of options.
Samuel Nwanu had recently been kicked out of medical school one semester shy of graduating with his medical degree. He believed he had grounds for a lawsuit. Short of this, he wanted to fight for reinstatement.
Samuel had grown up in Nigeria—not in the capital of Lagos, but in the bush, where he lived without electricity or running water and attended a school that had no books or paper. Raised chiefly by his grandmother, he’d been schooled since he was very small in the properties of the many medicinal herbs that grew around his small village. The memories of walking through the bush with her as she pointed these out remained a powerful influence.
An ambitious student, Samuel managed to get to Lagos, where he gained entrance to a good school. His country was filled with young people who had struggled to get an education, only to find they had no way to put their schooling to use once they received their diploma.
“Why do you think you get all those scam letters from Nigeria?” he had told Jim. “Those people don’t have anything better to do.”
But Samuel set his sights on the United States. When he was eighteen a friend entered his name in a lottery whose prize was a U.S. visa, and he won. To help Samuel come up with the ticket, every farmer and shepherd in his village contributed whatever meager sum they could. His father rode the bus from their village to the capital carrying this money in his lap—a giant sack of coins that he set on the counter at a travel agency to purchase Samuel’s one-way ticket to San Francisco, where the family knew of a young Nigerian man who was attending college in nearby San Jose.
Samuel arrived speaking no English, though he taught himself fast. He got a job, and as soon as his English was good enough, gained entrance to San Jose State. Over the next four years he earned an engineering degree and got a good job in Silicon Valley. He was well paid. He sent money home regularly.
But on a flight to New York City, he found himself sitting next to a young pediatrician. He talked with her the whole five hours, and by the time he landed he was convinced—despite having just spent four years earning his engineering degree—that he should go to medical school.
Back he went to San Jose State for more science classes in preparation for the medical boards. When his scores on those proved low, he took another year of classes and tried again.
Now came the surprising part of the story. Out of all the medical schools to which Samuel had applied—including several that accepted him—one had displayed sufficient enthusiasm to offer him a big scholarship and actively encourage him to attend. This was one of the top medical schools in the country.
Samuel did not feel confident that he was equipped to attend such a competitive school, particularly after meeting a young Harvard graduate who’d been turned down there with scores vastly surpassing his own.
The admissions team assured him they’d help him with the first year of his studies, which were bound to be unusually rough for a person of his background.
As he expected, he did poorly that first term, but his advisors told him not to worry. They’d help him get through this.
Samuel may have been operating at a significant disadvantage compared to his fellow students, but no one could have been more determined. Only then another challenge presented itself: a series of alarming symptoms that compromised his eyesight and his ability to walk. Diagnosed initially with severe stress, he took a leave of absence. It was months later that Samuel finally received the correct diagnosis for his problem: a rare form of MS.
He was put on medications—astronomically expensive, though paid for as a result of his student status. This got his medical condition largely under control. He was a third-year student now. Struggling, but getting by, he told us, though there was one administrator at the school who made it clear she wanted to get rid of him.
It was the fourth year—the last—that did him in. This was the stage in a student’s medical training when he was placed on actual hospital rotations and given the responsibility to work with patients, though always overseen by interns and residents and med school faculty.
Here, Samuel’s record was hard to understand. A few of his superiors spoke glowingly of his compassion and gentleness with patients, and on a c
ouple of occasions it appeared he had actually identified a significant factor in a case that others had overlooked.
But other reports of Samuel’s performance on rotation—particularly those of a couple of prominent faculty members who had been critical of Samuel since his early days at med school—now spoke of him as an individual who should never hold a medical degree. One superior spoke of Samuel’s curious inability to make eye contact with patients. (A behavior, Samuel later explained to me, that had to do with customs in Nigeria, where to look a person in the eye would be considered disrespectful.)
Another evaluation in Samuel’s file referred to an attending physician’s difficulty in understanding what he was saying due to Samuel’s strong accent. Mention was made too of Samuel’s having referred in his medical practice to highly nontraditional methods of treatment employed in Nigeria—like herbal medicine. Most damning of all was an account, by one superior, of an interaction in which Samuel spoke with the family of a terminal patient in a manner suggesting that death was a natural part of the life cycle, a view easily accepted in the culture in which Samuel was raised but frowned upon on the wards of the hospital where he’d been on rotation.
The result of all this was crushing. Not only would Samuel be denied the dream of receiving his med school diploma that June (an event for which his entire family and village stood ready to celebrate back in Nigeria, unaware of any difficulty), but worse yet, the institution would place in his file the irrevocable opinion that he was not suitable for admission in any other medical program in the country. From his many years’ pursuit of his dream to become a doctor, he would emerge with nothing but a gigantic medical school debt. That, and a diagnosis of MS, the medication for which he could no longer afford now that he was no longer enrolled at the medical school.
The Best of Us Page 8
