On a particular block downtown, we had passed the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law, where Jim told me an old friend now taught. Maybe he should call his friend, he said to me. See if he was free for coffee.
“It doesn’t work like that in New York,” I said to him—irritation in my voice, no doubt, or something even worse, condescension.
“New Yorkers plan their lunch dates weeks in advance. Nobody just calls up and says ‘I’m outside your building now.’ ”
And there was more. In our early days we had so happily prepared meals together. Less than two months after we met, we’d spent hours in my Mill Valley kitchen preparing a traditional mole sauce from scratch for a Day of the Dead party. At the time, I had noted with affection the slow, deliberate way he worked alongside my own hurricane-style of food preparation, and the tender manner in which he’d reach over and clean food from wherever it landed on me, as it so often did.
But now when I cooked, I sometimes pushed Jim aside or invented some task that would take him out of my path and leave me free to work at my own accelerated pace in the kitchen.
“Here’s some garlic to chop,” I’d tell him—suggesting that he perform the task off in a corner, out of the way, though even then he chopped with maddening precision that left me impatient.
“I can’t leave pie dough sitting for so long once I’ve rolled it out,” I said to him when he was too slow chopping the apples. He was a man who measured the cinnamon, whereas I simply flung it.
What did it matter, in the end, if the pie crust was a little stiffer, or the fruit cut into pieces smaller than I would have chosen? At the time, these things seemed so important. Later, not at all.
I believe I felt, at those moments, like a ballerina who had suddenly found herself hauling a chain around her foot. I had grown accustomed to a certain way of living that had not required me to slow down or adapt to anybody else’s needs. I’d done that when my children were young, but those years were far behind me at this point. Since my children left home—with the exception of those fourteen months I’d lived with my adopted daughters—I set my own pace and kept to it.
It was an odd irony that though I had a partner at last, it seemed that I couldn’t dance the way I used to. I could not see that there might be a whole new set of steps to learn, as intricate and beautiful as an Argentine tango. He goes forward, you go back. He leans in, you lean out. His hand on your back, yours on his shoulder. You are no longer two people out there on the floor, but a couple, moving as one. For all my talk of dance lessons, I knew nothing about those kinds of steps.
And there were other worries. After our glorious New England road trip, Jim had returned home to the harsh reality that at least for the first few years, being in a solo practice was a much harder way for an attorney to earn a living than being in a law firm as he had been for so long. He, who had always been free with money, became anxious about how much was going out and how much less came in. I could hear him on the phone sometimes with a prospective client—patient and professional, but the sound of frustration apparent if only to me. These prospective clients never seemed to have any money to actually pay a retainer. Everyone wanted him to work on contingency, and the cases that sounded winnable were few and far between. When he got off the phone, he’d shake his head.
“We’ll be OK,” I told him. I had always been able to earn my living, and if we were careful that would be enough. But, of course, the idea that I would once again be the breadwinner had not been his vision for our marriage, or mine. He wanted to be my fighter pilot, my protector. I wanted him to be those things too, actually. My burly man. My guard dog.
23.
The year before, Jim had joined a men’s social club called The Family, a group of successful professional men who met for dinners in the city on Tuesday nights, and sometimes during the good weather at an encampment south of the city in Woodside, where they drank whiskey and put on skits and played music and ate chili and smoked cigars. With rare exceptions, women were not allowed at the club.
When Jim had first been invited to join and described it to me, I had been quick to make fun of all this, starting with the very name of the group. The Family. What did that mean anyway? I knew what constituted a family. This was not it.
There was a tradition at The Family that all the members—no matter what their age, and some were over eighty—were called “the children.” The leader was the Father. In their e-mails, when they signed off, they used the letters “K.Y.” for “Keep Young.” This all sounded pretty silly to me. One of the few tense moments of our summer together in New England had occurred, in fact, when I had questioned Jim why he would even want to be in such a group.
“You are actually going to pay money to go off and put on plays in the woods and sleep in a cabin full of snoring men?” I said.
Evidently the all-important skit for Jim’s group of new recruits—“The Babies,” they were called—was to be performed during a week when we were to be in New Hampshire, and he was weighing the possibility of flying back to San Francisco for a couple of nights to be part of the show. He would actually fly across the country—leaving our wonderful cabin on Silver Lake, and me—to be in this skit.
“Are you kidding?” I said.
In the face of my merciless derision, Jim decided he would withdraw from the club. If he joined The Family, he concluded, he was only going to let his fellow members down by being absent, or else disappoint me, which for Jim was the worst.
“I can’t afford it anyway,” he said quietly. “I should never have said yes in the first place.”
He sat at his laptop for a good hour and a half then, composing and then deleting his letter of resignation from the group, then starting again. Now came the saving grace, an ability I’d acquired in my sixth decade of life, that I had been unable to pull off before: the capacity for understanding, and the realization that when you love someone, it may be more important to support him than to get your way.
It took me a while, but I figured this out. Witnessing Jim’s struggle over withdrawing from the club, I recognized my own severe failure of understanding.
“You’re having a hard time pulling out of the club because you don’t really want to do that,” I said. “And I’m sorry I ever made fun of it. I had no business doing that.”
Here was the good thing about the bad parts of our relationship: We still failed regularly, but we were learning to admit to our failures and we were more ready to repair the damage than we would have been when we were younger. Humility about my mistakes was new for me. So was being open-minded to the idea that there might be other valid choices besides my own.
24.
With my encouragement, Jim remained in The Family. He didn’t attend every single Tuesday night dinner, but over the months that followed, he drove into the city as many Tuesdays as he could for a rock-and-roll jam session of musicians in the group known as Storkzilla. For my part, I managed to keep my opinion to myself that this was a stupid name for a rock group. Stupid name, worthwhile activity.
More than worthwhile, in fact. That band represented, for Jim, the resolution of a fifty-year-old sorrow.
From the first time he ever heard it, Jim had loved rock and roll, the Beatles in particular. He got his first bass with his own money at age fourteen. But because it was forbidden at his house, he had to listen to his music in secret—not only the Beatles but also Led Zeppelin and Cream, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks.
Jim taught himself to play, and was good enough to be sought out by a couple of bands at his school that had included some seriously good players. Other than Jim, they had been the bad boys mostly, or at least they weren’t Boy Scouts.
He kept his bass at his friends’ houses, where he practiced. He played at dances, and the fact that he was good no doubt raised his stock with girls. There were several he liked a lot, but he didn’t feel confident enough to ask them out.
On one of our long car drives Jim told me a story. With his own money, earned
from working weekends at a department store, Jim bought a shirt with a wide collar and a mod print. When his father saw the shirt, he told him to return it to the store.
“Something got into me,” Jim told me. “I stood in front of my father with that shirt in my hands and I ripped it down the middle.” For a while after that, Jim had kept playing the forbidden music. And then his father found out about the band and made him quit. His friends found another bass player. He missed the band, but said nothing.
There was a nationally known group of young people performing at the time—clean cut, patriotic in the tradition of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, and religious in the style of Billy Graham—called Up With People. They sometimes performed on television in the sixties and early seventies as a kind of antidote for conservative types made uneasy by rock music who wanted some alternative for their children, a concept that only confirmed their cluelessness concerning rock and roll.
In the household where I grew up, three thousand miles away from Los Angeles, with parents who had not felt truly enthusiastic about a presidential candidate since Adlai Stevenson ran for office, Up With People was a family joke. After we had seen them on television once—The Ed Sullivan Show, the same place I’d discovered the Beatles—they had become a source of ruthless satire at our house. “Up, up, up with people,” my mother sang, laughing raucously as she quoted the lyrics of one of their trademark songs. “You meet ’em wherever you go.”
But in the family where Jim was raised, Up With People represented the only acceptable alternative for a young man who wanted to play bass. If Jim wanted so badly to be part of a band, his father told him, he could join Up With People.
And he did.
Of all the stories he told me, this one might have been the hardest for him to reveal, the most painful. After he told it to me, I had sent away for an Up With People album I found on eBay. I thought he’d find this funny, but one look at his face when he opened the package told me otherwise. He had no desire to ever hear those songs again, or be reminded of the time in his life they represented. Or the man.
In the winter of 2012, fifty years after he’d been forced to quit the rock band of his youth, Jim started playing with Storkzilla. The band met up on Tuesday nights at The Family clubhouse in the city and sometimes at the Family camp in the country on weekends to play all the old songs. One of the first songs Jim played with them was “Sympathy for the Devil.”
And because I loved Jim, I no longer scoffed when he would go off to an encampment—packing his bass and his amps in the trunk of the Boxster, with a handful of the Cuban cigars I brought home for him from Guatemala to share with his friends.
He loved the friendships he made and the conversations he got to have on those weekends at the farm—with a physics professor at Berkeley, or a former Navy fighter pilot, or a classical violinist. He’d stay up until three in the morning playing rock and roll. But come sunrise, he’d be heading home, even before breakfast was served. He missed me too much, he said.
25.
Unless I’d made a mess in his car, Jim just about never criticized me, but I criticized him plenty in those days. Often the topic concerned how wasteful he could be with money: the gym membership he’d stopped using when we met, for which he continued to pay a hundred dollars a month for close to a year; the drawers full of expensive sunglasses; identical hats, shoes, cufflinks; cigar trimmers and leather cases to hold the cigars. For his part, Jim never once questioned my odd choices—the time I came home with a windmill, for example, or the time I bought a gypsy caravan in New Hampshire and hired a trucker to drive it across the Rocky Mountains to California for me.
It was my money. My dreams. He never got in the way of those.
My other refrain had to do with Jim’s failure to take initiative. Every trip we took, I pointed out, and every concert we attended, every dinner party we hosted, was the result of a plan that came from me.
One time I read that Bob Dylan would be performing in Oakland, and I mentioned to Jim that I wanted to go. He said he’d buy tickets.
A few days later, I asked if he’d bought the tickets. “I’ll get them today,” he said. But he forgot, as he often did.
Finally I went online myself, but by this time the concert was sold out. I held onto that grievance a long time—holding on to old injuries being a bad habit of mine, left over from my first marriage. All Jim wanted was to please me, and there I was reminding him of all the times he fell short.
“Why am I always the one implementing all the plans?”
“I’m just not as good at coming up with ideas as you are, baby,” he told me. “Unless they have to do with estate law.”
I was never short on ideas. His quiet gift—easier to miss, or fail to appreciate—was for being my tireless supporter and sidekick for whatever adventure I proposed. “A tiger by the tail” was an apt phrase for the dynamic between us. I mentioned a plan. He got on board and held on for dear life.
Sometimes I complained about this to my friend Becky. “But let’s be honest,” she said. “How well would you have handled it if Jim had been more inclined to take the lead?
“Consider the story of your wedding ring,” she pointed out. “His decision to buy that diamond might have been one of the only times Jim ever did something involving the two of you entirely on his own. And then you complained about his choice.
“The thing about Jim,” she said, “is how he’s always up for going on whatever wild ride you suggest.”
And, he did the driving.
26.
After all those years on my own, and despite the times when it cramped my style, I also reveled in being part of a couple. For so long, I had been the odd person at every dinner party I attended (though single people were invited less to dinner parties, as I came to realize when I ceased to be one).
For years I had been the one who drove home alone. Now I loved those times when Jim and I went to dinner with another couple, and afterward, in the car, when we got to talk everything over—Jim at the wheel, me in the passenger seat with my feet on the dash. As mundane as that experience might have been to people who’d been married for most of their adult lives, it was not the kind of thing I’d experienced much before. Ordinary life, I called it, but for me it never ceased to feel exotic and wonderful.
Sometimes friends came over to the house we shared, or one of my children might be in town, and I’d make a good meal and a pie, though (here I’d go again) it remained a source of frustration to me that on those occasions Jim would feel compelled to spend the afternoon cleaning the house. Vacuuming, in particular. Some old demons from his childhood days, I think, had left him with the idea that our house had to be perfect before guests came over, while for me what mattered was to make them feel welcome, and that the pie taste good.
“People don’t care about a little dust,” I said. “They’d rather come to a home where the hosts feel relaxed, not worn out from housework.”
We spent Christmas at my house in Guatemala, and all three of my children came with their partners, along with Jim’s younger son and his girlfriend. We played cards and swam and went for hikes and had long meals together out on the patio. We made pizza in the pizza oven, and before sunrise one morning, climbed to a spot overlooking the lake called Indian’s Nose, where we could see five volcanoes and the Pacific Ocean at once. If it wasn’t the blended family of my dreams, it was good enough.
Best was this: We ended every night wrapped around each other in the bed, my hand on Jim’s belly, his around my waist, my face pressed into his hair that I loved to reach out and stroke in the night. Many evenings still, we danced in the kitchen—to John Prine singing “Glory of True Love,” always reminding each other that we were going to take lessons one of these days and get some real moves.
I loved how he loved me—that he was unshakeable, and unfailingly ardent, and I loved his protectiveness of me. (The way he read every line and footnote of every contract I ever signed, where for years I had scrawled
my signature, reading none of the small print or the large. The outrage he felt, if he read a mean-spirited review of something I’d written, or observed anyone treating me poorly.) Once, when one particularly hostile person began posting comments on my Facebook page, he created a whole new Facebook persona—“Epicurious George”—whose sole function was to offer devastating rebuttals of every mean comment from her that came my way.
I could not walk down a street with Jim or head down a trail without holding his hand, and in the car, I’d reach across the seat to put my arm on his leg or around his shoulders. Touching Jim was as automatic as breathing.
Here it was at long last, what love looked like: We disagreed about plenty, and sometimes my old habit of judging a man harshly crept in. But I was better now at recognizing the pointlessness of so much that irritated me. What I valued most was that when we hit trouble, as we did, we knew enough to talk it out.
Not one day ever passed in which I doubted Jim’s wild appreciation, loyalty, pride, devotion, and—maybe this is the rarest of all—the utter acceptance he gave me, which included an acceptance of my least lovable and most difficult qualities. Every time I walked in the door after being away, whether for a week or an hour, I would know: He was happy to see me. Possibly overjoyed.
“Remember that scene in King Kong,” Becky said one time. “Where King Kong is wandering through the streets of New York, desperately searching for Jessica Lange? And from a distance he spots a blonde woman inside an elevated subway car?”
I knew that part of the movie. King Kong lumbers over to the train. He reaches one enormous fist up to grab it and brings the car with the blonde woman inside up to his face. He sniffs the train car. That’s when he realizes the woman inside isn’t Jessica Lange after all, and he tosses the train car on the ground. Without her, he has no further interest.
“That’s how Jim is about you,” Becky told me. “You’re the only woman in the train car.”
The Best of Us Page 12
