The Best of Us Read online

  More Praise for The Best of Us

  “A meditation on the power of partnership to transform and sustain us. Like the marriage in its pages, it is romantic, brave, tender, and searingly honest—a book about loving, losing, being alive.”

  —Dr. Lucy Kalanithi

  “There isn’t a happy ending, but their journey is a beautiful one nonetheless.”

  —Bustle

  “Brutally honest and deeply loving.”

  —Woman’s Day

  “Maynard as caretaker is a revelation, both beautiful and heart-wrenching—a role she undertakes (as everything grows harder) with grit, grace and growth.”

  —The Buffalo News

  “Even at its darkest, [The Best of Us] strives to find meaning in calamity, heartbreak, and loss. A moving tribute to the evergreen lessons of the heart.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Maynard’s heartfelt story will resonate with those who have lost loved ones.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “This haunting story, penned by a master wordsmith, is a reminder to savor every loved one and every day.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “A love letter to a love story.”

  —Library Journal

  “Maynard shows us her flaws, her exuberance, her willingness to take risks, to fall in love, and happily, finally, to discover what a mature marriage and loving relationship look like—flaws, cancer and all. Her readers will do more than connect; they will laugh, cry and rekindle hope that the best of us just might be possible.”

  —The Charleston Post and Courier

  “Joyce Maynard has been through so many ups and downs in her life and she communicates her love, pain and everything in between through her life affirming experiences, written with great emotion and clarity in this beautiful memoir. I highly recommend it.”

  —BookTrib

  “The Best of Us is both heartbreaking and uplifting, a chronicle of unlikely, unexpected romance and personal tragedy, as well as a meditation on the nature of love.”

  —Omnivoracious

  “The Best of Us feels like a life come full circle, addressing a much more adult kind of love.”

  —Signature

  “[Maynard’s] is a story of genuine heartbreak and loss, paradoxically made bearable by the great love that made the loss so immense.”

  —The Hippo

  “Maynard’s fiction fans will be especially moved by their story, which, despite the sad ending, shows the promise of late-life love affairs. He, a lawyer, is the ‘catastrophiser’; she the ‘voice of wild optimism.’ He made her a kinder, better version of herself. This memoir remembers how.”

  —Post Magazine

  “[Maynard] brings to readers the beautiful but equally heartbreaking story of her second marriage to a wonderful man who she lost to an aggressive form of cancer after only three years of being together … The Best of Us could have been solely a testimony of hurt and despair, but Maynard injects her unique humor into it with a combination of Match.com disaster stories … to the joy of finding love with her second husband Jim at the age of fifty-nine.”

  —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  “Filled with passion and humor and beauty and aching sadness, The Best of Us gets at the heart of what love is: a willingness to open your heart completely to another person despite the risk of heartbreak.”

  —Christina Baker Kline

  “Joyce has captured her all-too-brief time with Jim in The Best of Us with her characteristic honesty and with so much love that my heart broke and soared on every page. Everyone needs to read this book.”

  —Ann Hood

  “Maynard’s lyrical, moving, break-your-heart memoir will make you love a little harder, appreciate each second a little more, and shake your world in the best of ways.”

  —Caroline Leavitt

  “This fiercely honest book is as much about life as it is about death. We understand the magnitude of Maynard’s loss because she has shown us the magnitude of her gain: the transformative joy of finding love in her late fifties. I could not stop turning the pages.”

  —Anne Fadiman

  “Joyce Maynard’s memoir of life, death, and love is written with honesty, intimacy, and a generosity of spirit that left me weeping, and in awe. I loved it.”

  —Abigail Thomas

  “The Best of Us is shattering in the best possible sense. With exquisite honesty, bravery, and large-heartedness, Joyce Maynard gives us a love story that we read breathlessly, even though we know how it will end. This is a beautiful story about the complexity of ever daring to adore another human being. I was moved and transfixed.”

  —Dani Shapiro

  “Oh! This book! Tender, insightful, ruminative, soaring. To find such love and then to lose it, and to capture so much of its beauty on the meager page—Joyce Maynard alchemizes life-numbing pain into dazzling prose.”

  —Hope Edelman

  For Jim

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  FICTION

  Baby Love

  To Die For

  Where Love Goes

  The Usual Rules

  The Cloud Chamber

  Labor Day

  After Her

  The Good Daughters

  Under the Influence

  NONFICTION

  Looking Back

  Domestic Affairs

  At Home in the World

  Internal Combustion

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part One: Before

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Part Two: After

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty
-Eight

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  Chapter Seventy-Eight

  Chapter Seventy-Nine

  Chapter Eighty

  Chapter Eighty-One

  Chapter Eighty-Two

  Chapter Eighty-Three

  Chapter Eighty-Four

  Chapter Eighty-Five

  Chapter Eighty-Six

  Chapter Eighty-Seven

  Chapter Eighty-Eight

  Chapter Eighty-Nine

  Chapter Ninety

  Chapter Ninety-One

  Chapter Ninety-Two

  Chapter Ninety-Three

  Chapter Ninety-Four

  Chapter Ninety-Five

  Chapter Ninety-Six

  Chapter Ninety-Seven

  Chapter Ninety-Eight

  Chapter Ninety-Nine

  Chapter One Hundred

  Chapter One Hundred and One

  Chapter One Hundred and Two

  Chapter One Hundred and Three

  Chapter One Hundred and Four

  Chapter One Hundred and Five

  Chapter One Hundred and Six

  Chapter One Hundred and Seven

  Chapter One Hundred and Eight

  Chapter One Hundred and Nine

  Chapter One Hundred and Ten

  Chapter One Hundred and Eleven

  Chapter One Hundred and Twelve

  Chapter One Hundred and Thirteen

  Chapter One Hundred and Fourteen

  Chapter One Hundred and Fifteen

  Chapter One Hundred and Sixteen

  Chapter One Hundred and Seventeen

  Chapter One Hundred and Eighteen

  Chapter One Hundred and Nineteen

  Chapter One Hundred and Twenty

  Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-One

  Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Two

  Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Three

  Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Four

  Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Five

  Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Six

  Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Seven

  Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Eight

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Reading Group Guide

  A Note on the Author

  What I am learning to give you is my death

  to set you free of me, and me from myself

  into the dark and the new light. Like the water

  of a deep stream, love is always too much. We

  did not make it. Though we drink till we burst

  we cannot have it all, or want it all.

  In its abundance it survives our thirst.

  —Wendell Berry, “The Country of Marriage”

  And did you get what

  you wanted from this life, even so?

  I did.

  And what did you want?

  To call myself beloved, to feel myself

  beloved on the earth.

  —Raymond Carver, “Late Fragment,” his last poem

  Prologue

  On the Fourth of July weekend three years ago, at the age of fifty-nine, I married the first true partner I had ever known.

  We spoke our vows on a New Hampshire hillside with friends and children gathered, as fireworks exploded over us and a band backed us up for a duet on a John Prine song. That night we talked about the trips we’d take, the olive trees we would plant, the grandchildren we might share. We would know, in our sixties, the love we had yearned for in our youth. Each of us had been divorced almost twenty-five years. How lucky, everyone said, that we had found each other when we did.

  Not long after our one-year anniversary, my husband was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Nineteen months later, having shared a struggle that consumed both our lives in equal though different measure, I lay beside him in our bed when he took his last breath.

  I had once supposed I was done with marriage. A few decades of disappointments and failures had left me reluctant to try again. Then I got married that second time—to Jim—but with the belief still that nothing, and no man—not even one I dearly loved—could alter my course of fierce and resolute independence. I came and went, always happy to see him when he picked me up off a plane, but happy to hop on the next one that would take me away again. I had my life, he had his. Sometimes we’d share them. That was my idea, though never my husband’s.

  Not until we learned of his illness, and we walked the path of that terrible struggle together, did I understand what it meant to be a couple—to be a true partner and to have one. I learned the full meaning of marriage only as mine was drawing to a close. I discovered what love was as mine departed the world.

  This is our story.

  PART ONE

  Before

  1.

  Ever since the end of my marriage to my children’s father I had wanted to fall in love. But if you had asked me—or if I ever asked myself—what it meant to fall in love, I doubt I could have told you. “Falling in love” was an idea I had picked up from a lot of rock-and-roll songs and movies and the fairy tales that came before them.

  My own experience of love had not contained the happy ending, though passion was part of it, as was romance, and certainly drama. (Drama: an addiction of mine, maybe. To look at my history, at least, you would have had to consider that possibility.)

  Age had changed me in many ways, but not in this one. Into my fifties, and closing in on the next decade—my children grown and gone, along with so much else I had held on to once and now let go—I still looked for that feeling of my pulse quickening, of holding my breath when a person walked in the door—my person. But when I tried to imagine what this falling-in-love thing would look like with the passage of time, my imagination—though it seldom failed me—provided no picture. Mostly what I had known of falling in love was that heartbreak followed soon after.

  I had been, at the point our story began, a writer of fiction, and in the writing of fiction, it is well understood that for a story to hold the reader’s interest, conflict must exist. I might have told myself otherwise, but for years I think I carried that belief into my life off the page. Where was the drama in happiness? If there was no trouble present, what kept the story alive?

  What did I know of love? What had I witnessed? My parents had started out with a big love affair, filled with extravagant emotion and conflict. The fact that when my mother met him, my father had been twenty years older than she was—and divorced—had not even been their biggest obstacle. He just wasn’t Jewish.

  He had courted her for ten years—writing her poems, sending her drawings, swearing his devotion, taking a job under a made-up name as a radio host on the prairies of Canada so he could recite romantic poetry to her over the airwaves without her parents knowing it. He was handsome and funny, brilliant and difficult. But romantic—and in the end, irresistible.

  Within days of the wedding, our mother told my sister and me later, their love affair was finished, though my parents remained together for twenty-five years—slinging barbs at each other across the dinner table and sleeping in separate bedrooms. This was what I saw of marriage, growing up, balanced only by a decade of situation comedies on television, in which romance between the parents never went beyond that moment when Donna Reed’s husband comes back after heading out the door to work, to plant a kiss on her cheek.

  At twenty-three I married a man who was as unwise a match for me as I was for him. But he was handsome and talented and interesting, and his silences seemed to suggest mysteries I was ready to spend my life exploring. When I’d tell him a story from my day, he would say, “Cut to the chase.”

  I was thirty-five when we divorced, and single for the two decades that followed. The phrase I employed to describe myself: “a
solo operator.” There had been a time when what I wanted most in life was to make a home with a partner and to raise our children together there, but after losing the home of my marriage, and the dream of what is referred to as “an intact family,” I had made good homes on my own, and watched my children move back and forth—brown paper bags in hand, containing their possessions—between the worlds of two parents deeply at odds with each other. I grew accustomed to doing things alone and doing them my way, and I discovered, as I did this, the pleasure of my autonomy.

  As the years passed, less and less did the idea of marriage play a role in my picture of my future. Divorce, and all the sorrow surrounding it, had left me reluctant to go down that particular road again, and anyway, what I yearned for—big love, big romance—seemed to contradict what I’d known of marriage.

  By the time I reached my fifties, I had lived alone—or alone with my children—for longer than I’d lived with a man. It was living with someone that got me into trouble, so why try that again?

  Still I kept searching, without knowing what I was looking for. No surprise I did not find it. And then—though it took a while to recognize this—I did.

  2.

  I met Jim on Match.com. I liked his photograph—a rakish hat over a head of good hair, a smile that seemed to contain genuine delight in whatever it was that had been going on as the camera captured the moment. I liked the things he said about himself in that short profile, but I had learned long before that how a person described himself in a dating profile often bore little resemblance to the real person who had posted it.

  I had studied Jim’s profile only briefly, anticipating (after years of this stuff) the inevitable red flag. I closed my laptop.

  But the man in the photograph had taken note of the fact that I’d looked at his profile, and looked up mine. He wrote to me. “Maybe another time,” I wrote back. I looked at his photograph again, and the others he’d posted—one in which he was wearing a tuxedo.

  “Probably a Republican,” I concluded.

  There was another reason why I had been reluctant to find out more about the man whose online moniker (this alone would later indicate how little relationship exists between the man and his profile) was “Jimbunctious.” At the time he sent me that first message (sent to me at “Likesred shoes”) expressing an interest in meeting me, I had recently started spending time with a different man I’d met online just a few weeks before. And I was having a good time with him.