Byron's Lane (16 page)

“We are what we know,” Christina said. “There have been three men in my life, besides Richard and Jonathan: my ex-husband, a Mayo Clinic doctor, and a Minneapolis writer. My husband was my opposite. The doctor was too much like me. The writer brought a truckload of issues along with him and into our relationship—issues that could only be solved by years of therapy. And therapy would probably have killed his talent as a writer.” She laughed.

I wondered how Adams would have fit into her pantheon. The more she talked, the more I understood how Hunter had snared her. He was romantic and attentive, while somehow oblivious to anything soft.

“Richard is a fixer,” Christina explained. “He makes life easy. I’m hardly responsible for anything. It’s like being on vacation. Things have changed so much these past two months,” she continued. “It’s strange. When I try to figure out what happened, I find myself falling back to Maslow’s theory, his hierarchy of needs: food, water, and shelter; safety; belongingness and love; self-actualization. You know it, don’t you, Tom?”

I nodded.

“Richard provides me with almost all of those needs. He’s as good as anyone has ever been to me. I needed to feel love when Jonathan was in Iraq. I hadn’t received a single e-mail from Jonathan for weeks, much less a letter or a phone call. I didn’t realize how much I needed to be loved until the first time Richard touched me—the same time he told me he wanted me to be the center of his life. Maybe I should have been concerned. It probably happened too soon after we met—too fast. But what he said and the things he did were so disarming. I was tired of having to fill my emotional needs all by myself. I was drained. It took an inordinate amount of energy to ignore and deny them. I missed the feeling a woman has when a man desires her so much that he can’t keep his hands off her; the look in his eyes when he’s consumed with passion.”

Christina stopped for a second, surprised by her candor. She blushed.

“Jonathan kept me an arm’s length away from him. He’d run us right up to the edge, and then he’d stop. When we were intimate it was wonderful. But I often had the feeling he was holding back. I couldn’t figure out why. The times I enjoyed most with him were the times when he let down his guard after he drank a little too much.” Christina smiled. The look on her face was the same one she had in the picture on her wall of the ferry boat ride on San Francisco Bay.

The smile that curved her upturned lips straightened. Her tan-and-green eyes opened wider. I was flattered that she quickly felt comfortable in my presence—that she was so at ease that she had already shared intimate thoughts with me.

“I was beginning to think I was past my ability to make a man want to take me to bed with him—that I had lost my attraction that way. Richard put that to rest. I hope you don’t think I’m superficial, but that’s important to women.”

The experience she described had surely been a pleasant one for Christina, but her face was drawn and she frowned as she tiptoed around its edges.

“But let’s go back to Maslow and Jonathan Adams,” she said. “Jonathan has the unique ability to fill my need for self-esteem. He respects me; he listens. He values my opinion. He’s even helped me see flashes of self-actualization. He gives that part of himself so easily, so readily; most importantly, so sincerely and so transparently. I expect he shares that quality with all of us who love him. That’s the reason we fall in love with him. Richard can’t do that. No man I’ve ever been with can do it like Jonathan does. But I needed to feel security and belongingness, too. Like every human being, according to Maslow, I need those things first.”

Falling in love was an elaborate Kabuki dance for Adams. Only he understood and appreciated the intricate moves he had developed and painstakingly refined. His dance was intended to have shown three women that he was in love with them. Like Kabuki, Adams’s way of communicating this was a dying art form. The presentation took too long. The moves were so subtle that they went unnoticed.

I decided that evening at Christina’s house, at Richard Hunter’s party, that love allowed to flourish in full bloom was more dependent on good timing than it was on great chemistry.

I encouraged Christina to talk more. She told me the same life-story that Adams had shared with me on Thursday night. I pretended like I hadn’t heard it before. As I listened, I decided that Christina was a prisoner of her outstanding qualities: honesty, loyalty, maturity, and steadfastness. Her Scandinavian roots—compassionately nurtured, tempered by fairness—produced a compelling need to set and respect boundaries—something as iron inside Christina as it was cheesecloth inside Adams. Richard Hunter’s headlong dash into her life had taken her by storm and overwhelmed those boundaries. Hunter had made himself so much a part of her space that getting him out of it would cause monumental upheaval.

But Christina’s thoughts as she expressed them that night, her words, their tone, her gestures, suggested the door was still open for Jonathan Adams. But it wouldn’t be open long.

“I love Jonathan, Tom. But I can’t do anything about it now.”

I seized upon the word “now.” I bagged it for evidence so it could be dissected and analyzed later. I memorized and replayed the velveteen softness of Christina’s voice when she said it.

I had had Christina to myself for a long time. A few guests were starting to leave and a stern look from

Hunter, suddenly standing on the lawn a few feet in front of us, was meant to remind Christina that she had an obligation as cohost to thank them for coming. Our remarkable discussion was abruptly ended.

Christina was gone. Adams was made inaccessible to me by a phalanx of friends and neighbors, so I sought out my new friend, the writer-turned-farmer. We cut ourselves loose from the group. I enjoyed his bag full of stories about his adventures in dairy farming, and his homilies about country life, until his wife came and pulled him away from me with a gentle reminder that he had twenty-five cows that expected to be milked at dawn the next morning.

As Hunter increasingly became the party’s center of attention, the closer he drew Christina to him. It was painful for Adams to have to watch. His dwindling flock of friends could distract him from the spectacle no more.

“I think it’s time for us to go home, Tom. How about it?” he asked.

I would have left sooner.

After we made our perfunctory good-byes to Hunter and his crowd, I preceded Adams out the door by a full minute. We figured that might afford him a pretense to leave what was left of the party as quickly as possible: “Tom must be outside waiting for me. Better go.”

Christina walked us to the end of her driveway. She hugged me and kissed me on the cheek. She whispered how much she enjoyed our talk. Then she turned to Adams and extended her arms, inviting an embrace. They held each other for a long moment. Her hands moved up his back, then along his arms, and finally to the sides of his neck. She gently pulled his face close to hers. Her lips found his mouth. Their kiss lasted long enough to make me feel like a voyeur—an experience Julie Cook’s mother had never allowed us the opportunity to enjoy on Byron’s Lane.

Christina turned from us and walked up the driveway, toward her lighted house, back to Richard Hunter and her new friends. She never looked back.

I had witnessed a mixed signal that I struggled to interpret. Adams’s bewildered look, as he stood frozen at the foot of Christina’s driveway, watching the back of her until she disappeared into her house, told me he was struggling, too.

Back in Adams’s house, the kitchen clock showed half past twelve. Before we went to bed, we drank a Scotch nightcap on Adams’s deck. At his insistence we discussed the details of my publishing company’s pending sale to Disney. Adams speculated that taking a tendered position as a senior associate at either the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation or the Brookings Institute, think tanks focused on the national health care crisis and the role of government in a democracy, might be a good way to keep him engaged in public affairs and constructively fill his time after he quit elected politics. Adams looked toward Christina’s house. Its bright lights showed through thinning trees.

We didn’t talk about Christina. But Maggie and Kathy found a way into our discussion.

Adams rocked back in his chair. He held his drink close to his chest. “I think about Kathy sometimes. But it’s getting difficult lately to pull up her face when I close my eyes and think of her. I haven’t seen Kathy in twenty years. I’m deeply, deeply bothered that she’s fading from my memory.”

While he was talking, I shut my eyes. Maggie’s face and form were not as sharp in my mind as they used to be, either. I nervously reached in my wallet for her picture. I pulled it out and stared at the photograph in the faint porch light.

Maggie and Kathy had become good friends over the years. My indivisible friendship with Adams, and Kathy’s growing closeness to Maggie, afforded Adams opportunities to have contact with his wife after their divorce. Maggie and I were determined that their separation would not affect our association with either of them. I still get Christmas and birthday cards from Kathy, but when Adams asked me how long it had been since I talked to her, I couldn’t precisely remember.

“The last time I saw Kathy was at Maggie’s funeral,” Adams reminded me. “We met the day after, at Maggie’s favorite sidewalk café in Greenwich. Kathy told me that she was still in love with me. She said that seeing me, even infrequently, was becoming too difficult for her. She told me that she had met someone back in Oregon and that they planned to get married that Christmas.” Adams stirred his drink with his finger and stared into the top of his glass.

“I remember Kathy saying that the guy she would marry ‘was no Jonathan Adams.’” He laughed. “She tried to explain to me how that was a curse and a blessing. Then she got up from the table, kissed me on the forehead, insisted on leaving five dollars for her coffee, and walked away.” He put his glass to his mouth and took a drink. “I’ve never seen or heard from her since.”

After pausing, Adams continued. “I had two affairs when we were married. They were back-to-back. One was with an undergraduate student; the other was with my thesis advisor. I killed what was left of Kathy and me,” he confessed. “I had no desire to get involved with either of those two women. They both pursued me. But I made it easy for them. Maplewood cursed me with an oversized need to be loved and admired. Both women pushed those buttons. For a few weeks I was someone special in an unprecedented way in someone’s life. The price I paid to feel that was god-awfully high. I crave that feeling. It’s addictive. I’m not sure I wouldn’t do it again—even knowing what it cost me.”

For a long time, we sat in silence on the deck. When Adams could no longer see lights at Christina’s house shining through the trees, he stopped drinking and went to bed.

Showered and shaved by eight in the morning, I was tugged downstairs to the kitchen by the smell of bacon and cinnamon buns. On my way by the bedroom mirror I checked to be sure the buttons on the collar of my denim shirt were fastened. There was surely company downstairs—someone who had happened by after I went to bed or early that morning—making Adams breakfast. He’d cooked oatmeal for me once, and sprinkled it with brown sugar and raisins. But every other breakfast I’d shared with him at his house was either dry cereal or served by one of his women.

I stood in the entry from the hallway to the kitchen, enjoying a sight as rare as the aurora borealis and almost as impressive.

The Sunday newspaper was spread over the tile-topped work counter. Four barstools were arranged around two sides of it. Adams was in an unfamiliar pose, bent over the stovetop, spatula in hand, dabbing at scrambled eggs cooking in a black iron skillet. As soon as he saw me, he picked up an empty plate. Before he handed it to me, he used it to point at a small mound of bacon strips and a pastry-filled cookie sheet, just out of the oven. It was my signal to fill half the plate and bring it back to him to fill the rest of it with his scrambled eggs peppered with fresh mushrooms.

“There’s milk and orange juice in the refrigerator. If you want coffee, you’ll have to make it yourself. Glasses and coffee mugs are in the cupboard next to the sink. While you’re up, would you get me some juice?”

In a few minutes we were sitting on barstools, opposite each other, busily devouring the newspaper and the food on our plates. Breakfast and a Sunday morning newspaper stifle conversation, especially among men. It always happens that way, even when good friends are only a few hours away from taking leave of each other. After a long silence, without looking up from the paper, Adams voiced a grunt of disgust.

He was reading a guest editorial written by a first-term Republican senator from Florida who was asserting that any president of the United States not fully supporting the junior senator’s version of what U.S. foreign policy should be was spineless and wrongheaded. Adams read parts of the editorial out loud to me. He wearily shook his head. “We’re six percent of the world’s population and arrogant enough to truly believe that our hopes and fears ought to be everybody in the world’s hopes and fears. Most people don’t think like we do. And damn few share our priorities.”

A grin came across my face. Adams had just translated the gibberish of our dysfunctional global society into a short, coherent observation. This from a man who didn’t know how to analyze, diagram, or explain the meaning of the simple sentence: “This is who I am.”

“Priorities imply choices, Tom,” he continued.

“And most people in the world don’t have the luxury of being able to make choices. They don’t have alternatives. That’s not just because their leaders prohibit them; their standard of living doesn’t make choices available. Our freedom of choice is what makes people want to live and work in the United States.”

I enjoyed listening to Adams talk passionately about things he believed in. I’d missed that for most of the past four days. Maybe that edge of him was starting to come back. I put down my part of the newspaper and gave him all of my attention.