Byron's Lane (15 page)

I turned to the first page of the index and found “Adams, Jonathan.” It was hard to miss. He had a paragraph of page numbers wrapped around his name: varsity club, class salutatorian, Most Likely to Succeed, National Honor Society, baseball and basketball teams, senior class vice president, student council vice president. I smiled as my finger ran down the list.

Adams had been the vice president of almost every high school organization he’d joined. At the end of our junior year, a week after he had won two separate elections for vice president—next year’s student council, next year’s senior class—Adams shared with me his theory about vice presidencies. He said he was high-profile and well-liked enough that he could probably run for vice president of anything without much chance of losing the election. His opponents for vice president, when he had any, were usually people of potential, testing the waters. Most kids with a résumé like Adams’s would probably have run for president. But the vice presidency, he explained to me, guaranteed him a seat at the table when important decisions had to be made. He could win the seat at little risk, avoiding the trauma of having to deal with losing an election. Inevitably, two months into his vice-presidential term of whatever club or class he was a member, the executive board would be looking to him instead of the president for direction on whatever was pressing and important on the agenda. That infuriated Bob Gundy, Adams’s archrival at Maplewood High School, who often held the position of president.

The first blank page in the back of Adams’s yearbook was crowded full of quotations, well wishes, and familiar signatures. My eyes were drawn to a quotation printed on the bottom of the inside cover page, falsely signed as Lord Byron, and written in Adams’s distinctive handwriting:

“Where did you find that?”

I’d been so absorbed in the yearbook that I neither saw nor heard Adams enter the living room. He suddenly hovered over me, like an eagle about to descend on an unsuspecting lake trout. I quickly turned the page. I looked at my watch. More than an hour had flown by.

“Lisa must have pulled it out of some box when she arranged those bookcases for me a million years ago.”

I scooted across the carpet and took a seat on the floor, my back up against the sectional sofa, our high school yearbook in hand. Adams sat on the other side of the room, facing his book case wall, in front of the toppled stack of books I had discovered on the bookcase’s bottom shelf. He restacked them one by one.

When he was finished cleaning up my mess, he walked over to the couch and sat next to me. “It’s been forever since I last looked at that yearbook,” he said. “Whenever it was, I remember I was bothered that there was no reference anywhere in it to what was going on in the country at the time. Civil rights protests that used to be non-violent freedom marches were full-scale urban riots. Two of the worst ones were in Cleveland and up the turnpike in Detroit. Vietnam War protests were happening everywhere. Four students were killed by the Ohio National Guard just down the road at Kent State. The women’s liberation movement was in full swing. And there’s not a hint about any of that anywhere in our yearbook.”

I looked up from the book and smiled at him. “Don’t be so righteous, my friend. I don’t remember anyone in our lily-white, college-bound clique, including you, involving us in thoughtful conversations about civil rights or Vietnam. But I do recall a whole lot of discussion about girls, baseball and football, cars, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Besides, some of that stuff you mentioned was old news by the time our yearbooks were published.” I laughed. “Our attention spans had atrophied. It’s an evolutionary outcome we’ve passed on to the generations that have followed us.”

“You’re right, Tom,” he finally said. After another moment’s worth of thought, he shook his head. “Maplewood did a good job insulating us from all that stuff, didn’t it? We were as far away from the east side of Cleveland and the campus at Kent State as we were from Vietnam. We were so insulated that my greatest crisis of conscience was about not giving CPR to an eighty-year-old chain-smoking farmer.”

We spent the next hour passing his yearbook back and forth as we shared stories about the people on whose faces our fingers randomly fell. For dinner we reheated leftover pizza in the microwave, ate peanuts, and drank beer. Adams decided that we should be fashionably late to Christina’s party.

Adams started looking for something to wear to the party at half past seven. He finally found the right combination of jeans, blue cotton shirt, and tan suede jacket eighty minutes later. I waited for him in the living room for almost an hour. As I thumbed through the
Vanity Fair
magazine that I’d found Thursday night, I realized I had been in this situation many times before. We were sixteen years old the first time he did this to me. It was more fallout from the Pamela Drake experience. He needed to have all the stars as perfectly aligned as possible before he was ready to present himself to a woman. I’ve spent the equivalent of at least three full days of my life waiting for Jonathan Adams.

Christina’s front yard was a sea of cars, pickup trucks, and SUVs. Every light in her house was on. The sound of people talking loudly in her backyard and the smell of cigarette smoke wafted over the house and met us as we approached the front door. Adams muttered something about Hunter having invited busloads of his friends to the party. “Very few of mine smoke,” he said.

Hunter greeted us at the door.

“Hello, Jonathan. It’s nice to see you. Come in. I want to talk to you about tax abatements sometime tonight. Remind me, okay?” Hunter pulled Adams through the doorway by the hand he was shaking. He finally let it go and reached for mine.

“You must be Tom. Christina mentioned you were visiting. Welcome to our party. You’re from Massachusetts, right? How about those Red Sox?”

I frowned. I lived in Connecticut and was a Cleveland Indians fan. I hated the Red Sox.

Hunter had answered the door wearing tailored gray slacks and a black silk shirt. “He’s overdressed for a neighborhood party,” Adams whispered. Hunter was as tall as us, but his hair was shorter. It was unnaturally dark brown for a person his age; he had no hint of gray. His hair was perfectly combed, like a television newscaster’s. I heard Adams’s teeth grinding as Hunter welcomed me to “our party.”

Hunter took the bottle of wine we’d brought over, announcing he’d take it to the kitchen and open it right away “so it could breathe.”

“Red wine should always have a chance to breathe,” he said in an instructional tone. As we followed Hunter through the foyer, Adams whispered that Hunter’s comment was supercilious. Even people who grew up on Byron’s Lane knew that you open a bottle of good red wine and let it sit for a few minutes before you drink it.

“I don’t know half these people,” Adams said too loudly as we split from Hunter and entered Christina’s crowded living room. It was easy to see the half to which he was referring. There were two herds of people in the room. The one on our left was dressed like us. Six hands from the conclave were enthusiastically waving us into their corner. The people on the right side grew quieter when we entered the room. I felt like a yearling at a horse auction.

A living room full of people has always seemed a strange, unsettling sight to me. Taking a seat, as seats begin to be scarce, is like plucking the last piece of chocolate from a box of candy. We learned as children that taking the last piece of anything is impolite. So a place to sit in a crowded living room is always available, in spite of the size of the crowd.

We spotted Christina maneuvering between the two groups. Watching her move back and forth between them reminded me of lacing up a brand-new running shoe. She was exquisitely beautiful that night. Her blond hair was pushed up and pinned into an enticing soft bundle on the top of her head. She was wearing half heels, a dark-green leotard, and an off-white cashmere sweater that spilled over her breasts and hips in a tasteful, seductive way. I added Christina’s sense of fashion to the growing list of things I liked about her.

Christina saw us, waved, and came over to greet us. She gave Adams an almost imperceptible shrug of her shoulders and a playful it’s-not-my-fault look as she walked up to him. She put her hands on his waist and kissed him on the cheek. “Richard invited a few of his friends.”

Her words were carefully delivered. Her tone put miles of distance between the act and her involvement in it. I hoped Adams was sensing all this.

She effortlessly launched us into an enjoyable conversation, and I watched Adams cling tenaciously to Christina’s lighthearted banter, often offered at his expense. He seemed to like being teased by her.

We had Christina to ourselves for all of five minutes. We took no notice that Hunter had returned from his lair in the kitchen. He was quickly on us, like a lion pounces on an unsuspecting impala.

“May I borrow her?” Hunter’s question was really a statement. “Christina, there are some people over here who want to meet you.” Maneuvering behind her, Hunter put his hands on her hips and gently pushed her toward his friends on the other side of the room.

“I’ll be right back,” she told us, in soft defiance, as she looked at us over her shoulder. It didn’t happen.

Adams was gobbled up by his gaggle of friends. I spent my time engaged in short bursts of chat with a constant stream of people who cheerily introduced themselves to me. I met no one from Hunter’s group; for the most part, they stayed camped in their corner of the living room. But I met all of Adams’s neighbors: professional people, a retired couple, and, my favorite, a farmer-turned-writer. He knew better than to try to monopolize my time after he discovered I ran a book publishing business. For his restraint and pleasantry, I gave the man one of my business cards and suggested he send me something he’d written.

I also took the time to wander around Christina’s house and stealthily observing her from the edge of her hallway. Both Adams and Christina had become hopelessly stuck in the noisy, crowded living room, as far apart from each other as Hunter could keep them.

There was little evidence of Hunter’s presence in Christina’s house; from the hallway I could see a pair of his tennis shoes on her bedroom rug, and one of his sweaters on top of a dresser next to her bedroom’s open door. No pictures of him or them were anywhere in easy view; no reference hung from magnets on her refrigerator.

Unlike Adams’s house, Christina’s walls were filled with framed photographs that competed for space with displays of art. Especially interesting was a gallery that filled a wall in her hallway. The photo arrangement consisted of seven pictures. They were all of Christina at various stages in her life: three of her as a child; one that I guessed was her high school graduation picture; she and her daughter; a posed portrait of Christina standing in an English garden; an eight-by-ten picture of her leaning against the rail of a ferryboat, the distinctive skyline of San Francisco in the background. As I looked closely at the pictures, from over my shoulder came a familiar voice. “I took that one,” Adams whispered. By the time I turned around, he was halfway to the living room.

I stopped at the makeshift bar in the kitchen and poured myself a glass of Adams’s Shiraz. When I reached the end of the hallway, Adams’s friends had already pushed him into their corner of the living room. Engaged in an animated conversation with two of his neighbors, he picked up and put down a bottle of beer on Christina’s fireplace mantle. From my strategic position in the living room’s wide, arched entryway, my eyes sought Christina Peterson. I found her sitting on the carpeted floor, cater-cornered from the place where Adams was standing. Her back leaned up against a couch. Her left hand held a half-empty glass of wine. Her free arm rested on Hunter’s knee. He was sitting on the couch behind her. One of his hands was on her shoulders as he spoke in his coffee-shop earnest way to a man sitting next to him.

Christina gazed across her crowded living room. She found Adams. His eyes caught the look that Christina threw his way. It was longer than a glance, shorter than a stare, and it was quickly acknowledged by his smile. She took her arm from Hunter’s knee and secretly shook her finger at Adams. Her gesture caused both of his hands to cover his mouth, a mock acknowledgment that he had been caught doing something wrong. He lifted his bottle of beer from its place on the mantle. In an exaggerated way, he wiped off a moisture ring the bottle had never created on its painted surface. His response caused both their smiles to bloom into full-face grins. Conversations in which they each were supposed to be involved swept over the moment. It was gone forever.

The time was right to kidnap Christina. I made my way over to the place where she sat. I offered my hand to her and tossed at Richard Hunter the same request he had made to Adams and me an hour before: “May I borrow her?” Hunter hardly noticed. He was busy making an important point to the man sitting next to him on the couch.

Barely touching her offered hand, I pulled her up from the floor. Standing, smiling, she led me outside, across her patio and a grassy patch of backyard, to the two empty chairs on her studio’s tiny porch. The small cottage straddled the edge of her lawn. The place was enchanting—a personification of all I hoped she would be. Built into one of its short walls was a jammed trophy case that testified to her abilities as a golfer. I smiled. Christina displayed her trophies in a private place, hidden from the view of her visitors. A drawing table stood in its far corner. A turntable and speaker box shared space with a stack of old record albums on a deep shelf built into the far wall. Behind and beside the studio was a pond flanked by woods. The place was as far removed from the party as Christina could take me.

As soon as we were seated on the porch’s white wicker chairs, she spoke. Her voice was so velvet and soft that it caused me to bend closer so I could better absorb its melody.

“Thanks for rescuing me, Tom. How’s Jonathan doing? Is he okay?”

Her question caught me off-guard. It told me that she had sensed the struggle inside Adams that he had tried so hard to hide from her.

“So you know he’s having a hard time adjusting to your situation?” I asked. I caught myself stammering. She ignored my question and surprised me with another.

“Tom, one of the neighbors told me someone tried to shoot Jonathan Monday night. What’s going on?”

I stammered some more as I offered her Adams’s explanation of the incident. Though Adams had requested that I not mention anything about what had happened, I couldn’t deny that it had occurred. I had heard no reference to the shooting in any of the conversations I had flitted into at the party. That surprised me; I doubted that police cars in Adams’s driveway and men with flashlights scouring his field in the evening darkness had gone unnoticed. Large houses spread over the hills and fields in that area like a mild infestation of dandelions on a suburban lawn. Most of them afforded easy views of his property.

“That’s kind of what Jonathan told me,” she said after I had finished. “I only had a minute to talk with him about it in the kitchen. Do you really believe that’s what happened, Tom? What’s being done about it?”

I told Christina about his meeting at the sheriff’s office scheduled for the following Monday. I didn’t mention the FBI’s involvement. I described Adams’s apparent indifference to the matter to dull her worry. I told her that the police were keeping a close eye on his house until they figured out what happened. Christina wasn’t satisfied with my assurances, but moved on, having convinced herself, like I had, that everything that could be done to protect Adams was in various stages of progress.

Darkness covered the studio’s porch and hid us from the rest of the party. From our vantage point, we had a clear view into Christina’s house through its huge picture window. The whole lighted living room and all that was happening in it spread out in front of us like a movie on a big screen at a drive-in theater. Adams was pried into a near corner of the room, everybody within hearing distance looking at him. It was a scene with which I was familiar. People were interested in what he was doing, what he was saying, where he had been, and where he was planning to go next. There always seemed to be a discernible hum in the air around Jonathan Adams. Rumors swirled in his wake. I wondered why my friend could never seem to sense his charisma. All he needed was a whiff of it to blow away persistent self-doubt and constant fear of rejection. If only he could see what we all saw.

“I miss Jonathan,” Christina sighed. Her eyes never left him as she spoke. “He’s been a good friend—a very good friend. But a woman involved with another man can’t have best friends—even good friends—who are men. I find that to be grossly unfair, but everyone tells me that that’s the way it has to be. What’s the reason? Is it cultural, physiological, or psychological? Why can’t I still keep Jonathan close by as my best friend?”

I didn’t respond to Christina’s question right away. I was busy observing her. Unlike Adams’s other women, Christina’s attributes didn’t rise from her potential, or her hidden assets. Her qualities were apparent and easily on display: the way she dressed, how she spoke, her accomplishments. Christina Peterson had cast a spell over me.

I finally answered. “I suppose the reason they say you can’t is a bit of all three.”

Her eyes were still on Adams. How I had planned this conversation to unfold was fast becoming irrelevant. The subject of Jonathan Adams had started well beyond the point I’d expected we’d finish.

“So I’ll have to get used to missing him, won’t I?” she said. “I’m upset with him, Tom. I wish he had given me some of the hints that are so apparent now—that I could have been his companion, his lover, the object of his affection. These past four years, I’ve watched him get involved with carloads of other women. Jonathan seemed so quick to start relationships with them and he moved so slowly to start one with me. What was I supposed to think?”

The cliché about ships passing in the night came to my mind as I listened to Christina talk.

“I’m involved with Richard now. Very involved, I’m afraid. I’m not sure how that happened. But it’s all moving too fast for me to jump off without getting hurt and without hurting and deeply disappointing Richard and everybody else we’ve involved.”

I was struck by how similar Christina’s reasons were to Lisa Chandler’s. Their rationale was excruciatingly adult and responsible. Otherwise, when Adams mentioned anything about Lisa and Christina, he described two vastly different women. My mind lapsed back to a childhood spent watching too much television. A variation of Spock’s Vulcan creed on
Star Trek
pulsed through my brain: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” The principle ran counterclockwise to thoughts and deeds emblematic of our generation, and of the two that had followed ours. I wondered where this rare perspective came from and how it had embedded itself inside Adams’s two most extraordinary women.