The Best of Us

by Joyce Maynard

  Sometimes that summer, we drove the LeBaron. Sometimes the Triumph. I loved the bike for how it felt whipping down some road or other with my arms wrapped tight around Jim’s chest. He may have been a new rider but I always felt safe with him there.

  But I loved the LeBaron for the long conversations we got to have as we covered the miles together. Somewhere in southwestern New Hampshire one day, I had started talking with him in the voice of a woman named Wanda, discussing with her husband—this would be Jim—her desire to acquire a pet ferret. Unprompted by me, Jim took on the persona of Buddy, her long-suffering spouse. Crossing over into Vermont that night, we were still Wanda and Buddy, and at odd moments over the weeks the two characters continued to drop in, or their voices did. Or we were British rockers, or Dumpster-diving hobos, or New York social-register types, debating which variety of oyster we favored. Jim never thought up the games, but he knew how to play them.

  In Vermont we swam in a quarry and stopped for diner pie and shopped for souvenirs at a prison craft store and made our way through a corn maze, where I briefly got lost until Jim rescued me. We went to a contra dance in Nelson, New Hampshire, and ate lobster rolls in Kittery, Maine, and more lobster in Damariscotta, and Brunswick, and Portland. Wherever we went, Jim took out his Nikon. Every night before bed, he did his pushups while I counted them out.

  Jim had one of his best times ever at the photography school, so much so that it was hard for me to get him away from the computer sometimes, because he was consumed with editing his images. But we made day trips on the weekends too—to the town in Maine that had inspired my favorite picture book (after Goodnight Moon), Blueberries for Sal, and to the White Mountains, and to a place near Mt. Katahdin called Gulf Hagas known as the Grand Canyon of Maine. Wherever we went we met up with friends, and when we did, they always said the same thing:

  What a wonderful man you found. How lucky you are.

  After the photography school ended we rode to Acadia National Park. On our third day, walking along the northern Atlantic coastline, Jim fell on the slick rocks. He knew from the pain that he’d broken a rib—a couple of them, probably—but he was the only one of us who could ride the Triumph, so he drove the hundred miles to my old friend Becky’s cottage on Mousam Lake, with me following behind in the LeBaron.

  Becky gave Jim whiskey for the pain—one shot, then three more. Then we sat on the screen porch with her son and daughter and her son-in-law, eating fresh-picked corn and, after, strawberry shortcake with strawberries she’d picked that afternoon, and biscuits baked in her old cast-iron stove. Jim was a little drunk from the whiskey, and still in pain, but it didn’t stop him from taking pictures of the sun setting over the lake that night, and the six of us playing Taboo around the table and laughing. When darkness fell, I jumped into the lake—no suit required. Jim followed after me, never mind the broken ribs.

  It was one of those nights where you could see every star. From where we lay on our backs in the water, Jim pointed out lesser-known constellations, and the faint red glow that was Jupiter. “Can you believe it? I’m in the lake with my boyfriend,” I called out to Becky. Always before, when I swam at night, I swam alone.

  My visit to Mousam Lake was a tradition I’d held for years but never shared with anyone. Jim—though he had never been to Maine before, or swum naked in a lake, or slept on a screen porch—was game for everything.

  “Finally, you’ve found the right man,” Becky said as we were washing the dishes. “It’s about time.”

  Next morning we took off again, though we left the motorcycle at that point to ship it home. I took the wheel of the LeBaron for a change because Jim had three more shots of whiskey in him for the pain. Since meeting Jim, I had not taken the driver’s seat.

  Near the end of the summer, we headed to Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, for the last day of filming of the Labor Day movie. This was my second visit to the movie set. I’d come there at the start of filming to instruct one of the stars, Josh Brolin, how to make pie as his character would do in the film. But this time Jim was with me. “Josh Brolin had better not have any ideas about you,” he said. In Jim’s eyes, every man—of whatever age, and never mind if he might be a movie star—was bound to find me irresistible.

  For the visit to the film location, we brought Audrey along, and her brother Taj, age eleven, my ex-husband’s son from his current partner.

  Taj was a bass player like Jim, and the two of them discussed bass players they loved. Listening to the quiet, respectful way Jim spoke with Taj, I imagined Jim as a grandfather someday, and how good it would be when the two of us could share that, as we had not been able to share being parents. Family. I had this now.

  17.

  We spent our last night of our road trip in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Mostly we’d stayed with friends on this trip, or places we’d rented on Airbnb, but for that one time, we’d checked into a Hilton.

  By now we’d shipped the Triumph back west, but we had not yet figured out what to do about the LeBaron. We’d put four thousand miles on that car over the course of the summer, and by this point it was burning so much oil we kept a few quarts in the trunk at all times. But when the valet parking attendant pulled up in front of the hotel in our red convertible as we were leaving, he gave Jim a look of complete respect and awe as he handed him the keys.

  “That is the coolest car I ever drove,” he told Jim. (The attendant had evidently never driven a Porsche. He was also very young.)

  “Would you like to have it?” I asked the parking attendant. His name was Billy.

  “Are you kidding?” he said. “I could never afford a car like this.”

  “It’s yours,” I told him. No need to consult Jim on this. I knew he’d be up for the gift.

  We made the plan to leave the LeBaron at Becky’s house nearby for Billy to pick up later, after we’d left for the airport. Registration and keys in the glovebox.

  “It’s burning oil,” I told him, as Becky pulled up to take us to the airport bus. “But if you know something about cars, maybe you can work on it.”

  “I can’t believe this,” Billy told us.

  Taking off on the bus that afternoon, headed for the airport, I reached for Jim’s hand, or maybe he took mine first. There was no need to say anything. It had been the best summer of our lives.

  18.

  From the first time they met him, my children liked Jim. Their initial reason was simple: They saw how happy he made me.

  Later they loved him not just for who he was to me but for who he was.

  We were way past the stage by now where any man with whom I got together was going to be much of a father figure for my daughter and my sons. They had a father they loved, and anyway, they were off leading their own lives by now and had been for a while. But they could no doubt see from that first visit with Jim that his interest in them was real—real but not overbearing or intrusive, and that he made no attempt to impress them or ingratiate himself. They cared about many of the same things—music for one, and the state of the world, the environment, struggles going on in other parts of the globe as well as at home. They recognized his wit and his kindness, but most of all, how much he loved me.

  They called him Jimbeau. My beau Jim. And the fact that I had chosen him—after all my years of questionable or terrible romantic choices—probably improved my own stock with my daughter and sons.

  For Jim’s three children our becoming a couple appeared more problematic.

  When we had first gotten together, Jim and I made my home in Mill Valley our base. But later that year we had made the decision that I’d rent out the Mill Valley house and move to his house in Oakland. Up until this point, Jim’s younger son, Kenny, had been living in the downstairs of that house, but now he had moved out to live with his girlfriend. He was an easy-going and accepting person most of the time, and seemed to recognize his father’s need to have the house back for the two of us. Though weeks might go by in which we didn’t see him, there was no dou
bt he loved his father.

  Jim’s older son, Jonathan, a computer programmer, had made a life for himself in Germany and kept his distance, as had been true for many years. Mostly the method the two of them seemed to have arrived at for connecting took the form of sending each other eBooks from Amazon, usually science fiction. I had sent a note to Jonathan once—something about a vacation visit—but afterward Jim told me that Jonathan had written to say that he did not appreciate receiving e-mails from me, so I didn’t try again.

  In many ways, the hardest story was Jim’s with his daughter, Jane, who lived in Brooklyn and worked as a teacher to disadvantaged students. He was deeply proud of her, and loved it that when he paid her a visit in New York, the two of them had ridden bikes across the Brooklyn Bridge together. He came home from that trip as happy as I’d ever seen him.

  But she had often been critical of him too, and it seemed to me, in my limited time observing the two of them together, that Jane could be painfully harsh. If at first she displayed no interest in meeting me or coming for dinner to the house we now shared, Jim said, this was not about me. Just more of a story he had grieved for years before he and I met, a chasm that had formed long ago.

  Eventually, Jane came to visit. By this time I had rented out my Mill Valley house and moved in with Jim at his house in Oakland, the place where he’d lived with his children over the last few years they’d been home.

  I could tell how badly he wanted things to go well with his daughter. All day he’d prepared for this—buying organic groceries she’d like, vacuuming—but after he’d picked her up at the airport and she walked in the door, she had scanned the room with a look of displeasure. “What happened to the family pictures?” she said.

  Next morning, he set them out again—photographs of her and her brothers when they were little, back when Jim was married to their mother—but it was too late. I had never seen Jim as sad as he was when he returned from taking his daughter to the airport for her flight home.

  “Sometimes I think she actually hates me,” he said. “And there’s nothing I can do to change it.”

  I should have, but I could not seal myself off from Jim’s sorrow over his relationship with his children. I wanted him to be that fighter pilot hero swooping through the sky—my Blue Angel—and when it was just the two of us, he could be that person. But when he reported that Jane had criticized him, all the strength seemed to abandon him. He went silent, or retreated—turned on his laptop and found an online Scrabble game—and when we went to bed that night, it was on opposite sides, and my hand, which usually rested on his amazingly flat, firm belly, stayed at my side.

  It would get better, I said. Once his children got used to me. Our children were all grown now, and making their own lives, finding their own partners. Fair enough then that we had found ours.

  19.

  Some years back—2001—I had traveled on my own to Lake Atitlan, in Guatemala. I’d first visited there in 1973, when I was twenty, and I had not returned in twenty-eight years, but when I did I fell in love with the place all over again.

  It was the first year of my adult life in which I had no children at home—my son Charlie having gone to college in New York City, while Audrey was taking a year off from college to do social work in the Dominican Republic. Willy, though only seventeen, had set off on his own for Africa with his savings from waiting tables in Mill Valley.

  At this point I was forty-two years old and I had never felt more alone. That winter, for three hundred dollars a month, I rented a house in a small village called San Marcos La Laguna, a place where traditional Mayan indigenous culture overlapped peacefully with a small community of expatriate Americans and Europeans, South Americans and Israelis. I stayed in that village for over six months, and discovered over that time that I had never been happier.

  In the end, I bought a little house in that village on the shores of Lake Atitlan, and over the course of the years that followed I built gardens and a guest house there, and another guest house, and a sauna, and a pizza oven, and planted fruit trees and flowers of all kinds, made a waterfall, and then another one. I started a writing workshop there, bringing sixteen or so American writers to the lake every winter to work with me on the craft of memoir. I made friends. I hired local men to build stone walls and a dock and to care for my garden. I made a good life in that village, though as usual, a solitary one. I might have been surrounded with friends there, and often I was, but when the day drew to a close, I swam alone in that lake.

  I wanted to bring Jim to Guatemala. For all the traveling he’d undertaken in his years with Patrice, he’d never been someplace like this, but I knew him well enough that I wasn’t worried about his ability to adapt to life in an underdeveloped country. Over and over in the months since we’d met, Jim had demonstrated his openness to experiences beyond what he’d known before. He was far better at adapting than I was at that point. For me, that only came later.

  He brought his camera, of course, and he took hundreds of pictures, not only of the scenery but—with a form of respect and restraint often absent in Americans photographing the Mayan community—of the people. He climbed the volcano and took Spanish lessons, filling notebooks with verb conjugations. He walked into town with me every day, carrying the basket we’d fill with vegetables from the market for that night’s dinner. We ate every meal on the patio overlooking the lake and, after, he watched while I stripped off my clothes and dove in for one last swim before bed.

  One day, we set out on an adventure. There was a spot I’d visited once before, in the northern jungle region of Guatemala, called Semuc Champey, that I’d remembered as possibly the most beautiful place I’d ever seen. Semuc Champey consisted of a series of natural turquoise pools, one flowing into the other, surrounded by a pristine Eden of plant and bird life and waterfalls, bordered by a vast underground river a person could swim through, if she were brave enough, filled with stalactites and stalagmites. We’d tackle it, naturally.

  Getting to Semuc Champey was challenging, and most people chose to make the trip in a tourist bus, but Jim was up for driving, and we rented a Jeep. To add to the adventure, I suggested a different route from the one favored by the tourist vans.

  Ten hours into our journey—with the sun long gone and Semuc Champey still sixty kilometers beyond us—we found ourselves on a road so filled with potholes we had to slow our vehicle to walking speed. Suddenly, off to one side, we saw a wildfire, with flames approaching. Then, like something in a scene from Indiana Jones, a giant bolder tumbled down onto the road, landing directly in front of our vehicle. At the wheel, Jim held steady. “You sure know how to show a man a good time, baby,” he told me, and kept on driving.

  We arrived safely, early the next morning. And had an unforgettable time. Later, back at the lake, we imagined how life might be if we just stayed here.

  “You know, we could always chuck it all and come live here on the lake,” I told Jim. “Forget about money worries and all the rest of it. You could take pictures and I’d grow vegetables and write. When life got boring, we’d head back to Semuc Champey, or someplace else.”

  The truth was, as much as Jim loved our days at the lake, he loved being a lawyer. He loved the law part, and he loved putting on a good suit and driving into San Francisco in his Boxster, going out for lunch with his old friends from the Guardsmen club at the Tadich Grill or Sam’s. Life on the shores of Lake Atitlan held little of the stress of home, but neither one of us was ready for retirement.

  Still, that first winter we went to Lake Atitlan together felt like a stretch in Eden. We were both sad when the boat came to take us away—to the car that would bring us to the airport in Guatemala City and from there, back home. But I knew we’d be coming back the next winter, and every winter. Summers on the motorcycle in New Hampshire, winter trips to the lake, and in between, I thought, an endless succession of good meals and good music, long drives, small pleasures, and the immeasurable comfort of each other’s company. The future s
eemed to stretch out before us farther than the eye could see.

  It was past midnight when we got back to Jim’s house in Oakland. We knew the minute we reached the door that something had happened. The door was bashed in. When we opened it: chaos.

  So often, people who had never traveled to Guatemala, hearing I went there regularly, expressed the view that it sounded like a very dangerous place. But here we were, just home from that allegedly dangerous place, and the great violation had occurred right in Jim’s Bay Area home.

  The living room looked reasonably intact, though some stereo equipment was gone. The television had also been stolen. Amazingly, none of Jim’s guitars and cameras—some of them valuable, like his Fender Jazz Bass—had been touched. But every drawer had been pulled out, the contents strewn on the floor. A couple of expensive watches were gone. Also, money.

  It was two in the morning before we got into bed, but neither one of us had an easy time getting to sleep. At three A.M., Jim thought he heard sounds upstairs, and the realization came to him: There was no longer any lock on the door. Maybe the thieves had come back for more.

  Naked, he jumped out of bed. He reached for a baseball bat he kept leaned against the wall and raced up the stairs, ready to confront whoever might be up there.

  It was only raccoons, rooting around for garbage. Jim returned to bed, and we fell asleep then in each other’s arms as we always did. The next day we put a new lock on the door. Nothing could get us now.

  20.

  Though we took many trips together, it was being at home with Jim that I loved best. I never got over that moment at the end of the day when he would walk in the door, home from work in the city, like some character out of the situation comedies of my childhood—the hardworking husband setting down his briefcase to plant a kiss on the mouth of the woman he loved.