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  Jim wrote to me again, suggesting a conversation by phone. Without particular expectation or enthusiasm, I sent him my number. In the twenty-five years since the end of my marriage to my children’s father, though no shortage of men entered and left my life, I had never engaged in the practice of exploring a relationship with more than one man at a time. But a special circumstance existed here. Martin, the man I had been spending time with—spending the night with, on occasion—was both a very good man and also a man with whom I knew I had no extended future.

  Only recently separated from his one and only wife of twenty-six years, Martin had been called to the Bay Area in his career as a structural engineer to oversee crucial aspects involved in the rebuilding of the San Francisco Bay Bridge following its collapse in the Loma Prieta earthquake. This would be the earthquake of 1989: an event whose date contained an odd significance for me, though I had been living in my home state of New Hampshire, not in San Francisco, when it occurred. The Loma Prieta earthquake took place eleven days after the death of my mother, at age sixty-seven, to a brain tumor, and exactly one week after I had moved out of the home I’d shared for twelve years with my husband Steve, after he’d told me he’d fallen in love with someone else. Two not wholly unrelated events, as it turned out, that served to create the effect of an earthquake within my life as well.

  Though he had been put in charge of one of the key aspects of the bridge project, Martin was a modest man, and one who lived pretty simply. He made his home on a sailboat he’d bought after his marriage ended, that he kept docked in Point Richmond. That’s where I was spending two or three nights a week. Sometimes, too, Martin and I would go out in the boat and dock it overnight in a bay by Angel Island. Though never a sailor, I liked sleeping on Martin’s boat. I loved the feeling I had when I was there that I could leave my life back on shore for a while. At the time, I had a lot of reasons for wanting to do that.

  But as much as I enjoyed sleeping in the tiny below-deck bunk room with Martin and waking up to have my coffee with him on the bay, and as good a man as he might be, I also recognized that the two of us were not suited to be together in any long-term way.

  As a person who’d been single at this point for over twenty years—a woman who had supposed, early on after the divorce, that she was ready to make a new relationship, but one for whom it would take a couple of decades to get over all the bitterness and anger that had gotten in the way of that—I also believed that Martin needed to spend a lot more time on his own, and with other women, before he’d begin to know what he really wanted and needed. As enjoyable as it was spending nights on the boat with this good man, the situation could not last.

  I’d encouraged Martin to continue going on dates, and he, reluctantly, agreed. The night I got that first e-mail message from Jimbunctious, Martin was in fact out on a Match.com date—at my insistence—and though later, when he got home, he would call me up and tell me again that really, he just wanted to be with me, I knew that our days of sailing in the bay were numbered.

  So when Jim wrote to me I’d written back. Some people go right to the coffee-shop phase here—that event, well-known to online daters, where you pull into some Starbucks, scan the room for the person who resembles, however remotely, the one on the profile to which you responded, and unless he is so far from the mark as to suggest that there’s not one honest thing coming from this man, you approach the table.

  “You must be Bob,” you say. (Sam. Joe. Bill. Ray.) At which point he looks you up and down with a gaze that conveys interest, disappointment, or nothing, and you order coffee.

  I tried to avoid the coffee-shop phase. In the many years I’d spent engaging in some level or other of online dating, I had come to set far less store by the words a man posted on his profile than I did in the sound of his voice. Often I found that someone whose online profile had seemed promising would reveal himself to me within the first sixty seconds at Starbucks or Peet’s to be a person as unlikely to inspire my affection as a game show host or a tax auditor. This saved me from a lot of wasted cappuccinos. And probably saved a lot of men the same.

  Within minutes of receiving my phone number, Jim called me, and right away, I liked his voice—the timbre of it, and a way of speaking I recognized as having its origins in the Midwest, which it turned out he did, despite having spent all but the first four years of his life in California. Though I would later discover that he was not a talkative man—more inclined to listen than to speak—it was a conversation that lasted four and a half hours.

  By this point, I was all too familiar with how this type of conversation generally went. You got the basics out of the way first. How long since the divorce generally came first. It was usually a divorce, though when I met a person who had actually known the experience of a good marriage and lost his wife, I registered a humble awe. He knew something that I didn’t, and even though he had also known something else I didn’t—the loss of someone he loved more than anything—I still tended to view the widowers as the lucky ones. They had made a good relationship once. Maybe they’d even know how to make one again.

  From there, the conversation would go to children—how many, how old—and the new question (here came a measure of just how long I’d been at this stuff): how many grandchildren. Sometimes, though, the person on the other end of the phone could not get past the ex-wife part. He’d be talking about what her lawyer did, how she got the house. Looking back on my own early years after my divorce, I realized I was one of those people myself once. Endlessly reexamining old injuries, picking at the scabs, and because this was so, unable to heal them.

  Then came the subject of career and living circumstances. We might tackle politics, favored recreational activities. (“I’m a naturist,” a man told me once, before proposing that we meet up at a nudist colony.) Every one always said he worked out five times a week, and rode a mountain bike, and loved to dance. They generally expressed the view that they were equally comfortable in a tuxedo or jeans, and (when in jeans, no doubt) liked walks on the beach.

  Jim had not read the rule book concerning Internet-dating conversation. He read books that weren’t on the best-seller list. He talked about real things. He told me about things that had been difficult. Starting with his family.

  He was born in Cincinnati, he told me—an only child, though he had a beloved grandmother and cousin, and an uncle he adored—all of whom were largely lost to him when his father took a job for Hughes Aircraft when Jim was four and the family left Ohio for Southern California.

  That very first night we spoke, he told me about the train ride west, which he still remembered with stunning clarity. It was just Jim and his mother together on the train, his father having gone ahead first, and if there had been nothing else good about that train ride, the fact that his father had not been a part of that trip would have been reason enough to make those four days among the happiest of his life.

  But there was more. He remembered the sleeping car, and the porters on the train—all black, in those days—who were so kind to him and turned down the sheets of his small bed each night, and the meals in the dining car, the little soaps in the bathroom, the other passengers, the feeling of going to sleep every night with the rumbling of the wheels on the track beneath him. Most of all he was happy just having his mother there, without the scary part of his father’s ever-present and unpredictable rages, generally directed toward him.

  His mother had sewed him a train conductor’s uniform in mattress ticking fabric, with patches stitched on by hand naming all the different train lines and a cap to match. As an only child he knew how to entertain himself, and he was happy spending the days looking out the window as the landscape of America unfurled before the two of them. If that train ride had lasted a year he wouldn’t have minded. He wished it could have gone on forever.

  When he and his mother reached L.A., there was his big, scary father, bringing him home to their little ranch house near Venice, where their new life began. A new life filled
with the same old bullying and rages, but more so over time.

  He missed his family back in Ohio—most particularly his uncle Al. A small, compact man built much like the one his nephew would become, and as comfortable on horseback as he was on a Cincinnati sidewalk, Al could do a headstand and backward flip while galloping, and even into his sixties could perform a hundred one-arm pushups. He was a sharpshooter who, though too old to serve in World War II himself, had trained the troops that landed at Normandy on D-Day.

  That night on the phone, Jim spoke of his uncle more than his father. Al took him fishing at his cabin in Minnesota and drove around with him in his convertible talking about cars, a passion Al had instilled in his nephew. He listened. He did not yell.

  Later I would come to see how those early experiences had shaped the man Jim became and the way he functioned in the world. Separated by the Southern California move from the rest of his Ohio family, Jim set out to make friends in his new neighborhood in smoggy Los Angeles. When a black family moved in down the block—the first black family in the whole neighborhood—his father called them a bad word and told him to stay away; but Jim, though he was still just four at this point, had decided he wanted to say hello, so he ventured down the street by himself and knocked at their door. There was a Jewish woman living on the street, too—also a source of his father’s displeasure. It turned out she was some kind of editor who had once worked at the New Yorker and liked to talk about ideas and art and politics. Well into his teens, Jim continued to pay her visits, where the two of them would sit for hours talking about these things.

  He read a lot. This included the encyclopedia. He had a chemistry set, and he loved doing experiments, though sometimes these had to be conducted in secret. Who knew why this got on his father’s nerves? Everything did.

  There were so many ways to make his father angry, and his anger was a terrible thing. Jim wanted to play in Little League, but his father said no, that it would cut into his responsibilities around the house doing yard work. (That first night we talked, he told me about a time, when he was seven or eight, when he’d found a frog in the yard, and decided to conduct an experiment. Wanting to keep track of this particular frog, he’d wrapped a rubber band around one of its legs, not understanding that this would cut off its circulation. Days later, he found it again, with one leg gone, and wept so bitterly his father chided him for being a baby.)

  He joined the Cub Scouts. That was allowed, and he loved Scout gatherings for the friendships they permitted, and because he was happiest outdoors and hiking in nature and, above all, escaping the rages back home. But then his father decided to become his Scout leader. This was a source of deep embarrassment, though Jim stayed with the Scouts into high school.

  “Believe it or not I’m an Eagle Scout,” he told me. Quietly, without fanfare.

  Jim remembered, with a certain ambivalence, the camping trips from his youth. Every year the three of them—just Jim and his parents—would pile into the station wagon and head to a part of the Eastern Sierra known as the Owens Valley, where his father had acquired a strip of utterly barren land—eighty acres in the middle of nowhere, without electricity or running water. There they would put up their tent for the week. Their land lay in the shadow of Mt. Whitney, but they never climbed it or explored the hiking trails of that area. As was the case through much of Jim’s childhood, he was left to his own devices mostly, to read or ride his bike over the vast expanse of dusty dirt. But he and his father did engage in one activity together: They brought his rifle and shot at old cans and bottles.

  When he was twelve, Jim fell in love with the Beatles, but was forbidden by his father to turn on The Ed Sullivan Show that February night in 1964, when every other young person in America—including me—tuned in to watch. Still, he listened to their music in secret. Age thirteen: He bought a guitar with his own money and joined a band, practicing at friends’ houses so his parents wouldn’t know.

  Once his father found out, he made Jim quit the band. Jim grew his hair. His father brought him to the barbershop and ordered it cut—with plenty of skin visible around the ears. “Sidewalls,” he called this.

  That’s how it had been for him growing up. If, he told me, he could have freed himself from the powerful directives of his father—Jim might have loved to become a science teacher or a teacher of history or political science. He would have loved to make a study of music, but his father had refused to pay for any other form of education than the one he deemed right for his son.

  So Jim had gone to law school. And it turned out that he deeply believed in the law. He considered the Constitution a beautiful and meaningful document. To him, certain Supreme Court justices—Benjamin Cardozo, William O. Douglas—and U.S. Judge Learned Hand represented what the pastors who preached to him in those days did not, voices of social justice and compassion and clear-eyed wisdom, with a respect for science and history and facts. Maybe the rules of law offered Jim a structure he could accept whereas the structure of the church had come to feel impossibly constraining. There had been no room in the faith of his youth and early marriage, or in the world of the church, for Jim’s brand of questioning.

  Though his passions lay with social justice and the environment, he had been pragmatic when it came time to practice law—and made a choice that would please his father. For much of his career he had specialized in estate litigation. (“Fights about money,” he said. Fights among family members were often the worst.)

  The only thing Jim said about himself that first night we spoke that came close to evidencing pride was in the measure used to rate attorneys on their performance, he had a perfect Avvo rating of 10. He was a very good lawyer.

  Raised as a fundamentalist Christian, he had married in a branch of the faith. He was a virgin, at the age of twenty-one. In the early days of his marriage, while in law school and then practicing law in San Francisco, he had attempted to shore up his own questioning by immersion in a Bible study group and a rigid set of rules governing moral behavior. Photographs of Jim from those days—I came to study these much later—reveal not only a much younger version of the face I came to know so well, but in another way, a nearly unrecognizable one. In the photographs with his children, I can see traces of the man I knew—with his daughter in a backpack, hiking, or holding a baby. But I see a tight control there too, a man trying to be someone he is not, quietly adhering to the rules of the world he inhabited, much as he’d done in his childhood, while an interior struggle raged.

  What was I thinking, hearing this story unfold? Here was a man with a singular willingness to allow himself to be known by me. I had no idea that night what might be possible for the two of us. But one thing I recognized from the first: Here was a good man.

  He had three children, two sons and a daughter, as I did, and close in age to my own, though his daughter was still in her twenties, whereas all of mine were older now. In his profile photographs he wore suits and nerdy glasses, but I learned that his politics were extremely progressive. He loved science and philosophy. He still loved rock and roll—and not just the old stuff. On his iPod he had music from Bill Withers and Nine Inch Nails, a group called the Psychedelic Furs, the Cave Singers—also Pat Metheny and Gustav Mahler. He read science fiction and thought about black holes.

  He believed in God.

  Jim was not a big talker, he told me—though that night on the phone he was. But as much as he told me about himself he also wanted—more—to hear about me, and he listened closely.

  Over the course of those four and a half hours on the phone, it came out that my mother had been Jewish, my father the son of fundamentalist Christian missionaries, and that this had resulted in a certain questioning in my own life where God was concerned. I did not really feel Jewish, or Christian. In the world of Match.com, in the place on the questionnaire where they ask about your religion, I could easily have checked the box “Spiritual,” but in a deeper way I did not have a real grasp on what I believed in beyond the easy phrases ab
out goodness and kindness and helping one’s fellow human beings. When it came to the existence of God, and what God meant, I still wandered in the desert.

  It turned out that Jim had wrestled with questions of faith in a big way all his life. He had acquired a fierce distrust of rigid orthodoxy. At the moment we met, he attended no church, but he would call himself an Episcopalian.

  Not long after the birth of Jim’s third child, the longed-for daughter—and having been unhappy for years, he told me—he had fallen in love with another woman. Bound less by the rules of strict religion than his own moral code, he did not have an affair with her. But he told his wife he needed to leave their marriage.

  It was a choice he had to make, he told me, to save his life. Still, leaving nearly killed him. He had marked the event by climbing Mt. Whitney—fourteen thousand feet, up and down, in a single day. He knew his decision would be painful, and felt a kind of obligation to put himself through an experience of great physical challenge. Twenty-five years later, the guilt he felt at having left his marriage—and the consequences in his relationships with his three children—endured.

  Coincidentally, Jim’s marriage had officially ended, like mine, the month of the Loma Prieta earthquake; unlike me, however, he had maintained a relationship afterward for nineteen years. The woman he’d been with—the same one he’d loved since the day he told his wife he was leaving—had also become his law partner. They’d built a successful two-person practice.

  That relationship had ended just over three years before. Since then, he’d had a lot of first dates and a couple of relationships that lasted less than a year. He was clearly not a player. He was unskilled in small talk. He raised questions of substance. He possessed a strong moral code and registered all the ways he fell short of being the man he wanted to be.

  And now came the fact of his history that may have shaped the destiny of Jim’s story with his children more than anything else: Two years after Jim left, his ex-wife was diagnosed with MS.