Byron's Lane (8 page)

Adams took a long drink from his half-empty glass. “There’s more to Linda than meets the eye.” He must have realized the irony in what he said, breaking into laughter. “All she needs is an opportunity and the encouragement to become who she thinks she can be. My support and her sensuality might have been enough glue to hold us together for a while.” Adams smiled and finished his drink.

But as the hour passed midnight, and Thursday blended into Friday, there were no more calls. No one knocked at the door.

Our conversation lulled. We stared out Adams’s living room window at the darkness surrounding his house. I stirred what was left of my drink with my finger. Adams glanced over his shoulder at the clock that hung on the wall at the far end of the kitchen.

“Do you mind if we watch the ten o’clock news? I taped it. The senate’s budget committee had an important hearing today and I’m curious to see how it’s reported. This won’t take long. I know how to fast-forward the recording.”

I smiled. “Sure.”

Adams raised himself from his chair, walked across his living room, and opened two cabinet doors on his bookcase wall. They revealed a thin flat-screen television. He pushed the doors back and returned to his chair, carrying the remote control that had been sitting next to the TV. With an exaggerated effort, he aimed it at the screen, as if the remote were a pistol and he was trying to hit a bull’s-eye the size of a dime. “This is where the technology gets complicated,” Adams said.

There was no mention of the senate’s budget committee meeting. The story was likely bumped by extended coverage of a car chase on I-35, south of Minneapolis. A camera on a helicopter filmed four police cars attempting to run down a stolen BMW. The car chase held our attention. Neither of us spoke until the first commercial break.

Sometime during the weather report, handled by a woman not nearly as attractive as Linda McArthur, I decided to press Adams about Christina Peterson. It had been a long day, but I wasn’t tired.

Adams had forbidden me to mention anything about jihad, fatwas, or attempted assassinations. I didn’t want to talk anymore about work. We had thoroughly covered the subject of Linda McArthur. I couldn’t mention the poem I’d found on the coffee table that I wasn’t supposed to have seen or read. Christina Peterson was the only subject left floating in the air.

“Tell me about Christina.” I spoke in a voice louder than the Ford pickup commercial that concluded the taped ten o’clock news.

Adams grimaced. He stood up to turn off the television. He stared at me for a few seconds. Then he walked to his book-cased wall and stood there with his back to me, facing his TV’s black screen. He reached up to the bookcase’s top shelf and pulled out a three-hundred-dollar bottle of thirty-year-old single malt Scotch. I recognized the label from across the room. It was Maggie’s father’s brand—my annual birthday gift to him. It was the kind of present you buy a person you need to impress but don’t necessarily want to get close to.

Adams took two crystal glasses from atop a silver tray that was pushed to the back of the shelf. Holding both glasses in one hand with two fingers, and clutching the blue-labeled whiskey bottle against his chest with the other, he slowly retraced his steps across the living room. He cleared a space on the coffee table and placed the two glasses there. He poured us each a double, no ice. Adams handed me mine, and looked down at me.

“You might be getting more than you asked for.”

He returned to his chair and balanced himself on the edge of its seat. He stared at me for a second, then started.

“Tom, at least once a month I have a reoccurring dream about going on a trip—a long trip, probably someplace overseas. In my dream, I’m madly scrambling around, trying to pack at the last moment. I’ve had plenty of time to arrange things and get ready, but I’ve put it off. When it’s time to go, something happens—I can’t find my passport, or I’m at the airport and I’ve forgotten the plane ticket. I’ve got to run home and get what I need. I run out of time; I miss the plane.

“I’m sitting in a messy room, all by myself. Clothes are strewn all over, files and desk drawers ransacked in my frantic effort to find a visa, a copy of a report I’m supposed to present, a plane ticket, or my passport. I’m left behind, alone, sitting in the middle of a room I’ve just trashed. Everyone’s gone off somewhere, and I’m home alone.”

He stirred his drink with his index finger. “I’m living that nightmare. It seems like I’ve been having some version of that dream almost every night lately. It bothers me more than my Iraq flashbacks.”

Adams caught himself. He tried to grab back his last sentence by tossing a beauty contestant’s smile my way. Then his expression turned serious, confused.

“Before I left for Iraq, I hadn’t had that dream for months. I think Christina Peterson made it go away. Now it haunts me, and I think she has something to do with the fact that it’s returned.”

He wasn’t looking at me as he spoke now. He gaze was out his living room window.

“I suppose I should count my blessings. As unsettling as the dream is for me, it’s better than the other one I have once in a while—me waving at three smiling women driving off in a white Toyota.”

I sat up straight and swung my feet to the carpeted floor. I wanted to make sure my friend knew he had my undivided attention.

“I want to be in love with Christina. It’s a responsible, grown-up thing to do. She’s good for me in a hundred different ways.” Adams dropped his eyes to his glass of Scotch and began stirring it with his finger again. “Until lately, I didn’t realize how important Christina might be to settling everything down. I daydream about what it might be like to spend the rest of my life with her. Maybe that’s partly because I know I can’t have her. I’m ready to trade passion and magic for comfort and compatibility. I’ll make all the necessary adjustments when the passion fades. If I ever get another chance with Christina, she’ll never know the difference when it happens.”

He paused and invited my response: “Am I making any sense?”

As I tried to process what Adams had just said, I turned to the darkness beyond his living room window. A porch light showed everything outside. All of it was shades of black and gray and damp. Since we had left the deck, fog crept over the prairie grass, crossed the lawn, and covered the porch. For a moment I wasn’t thinking about Christina Peterson. My mind was on the poem hiding under a newspaper on the table between us. I hardly knew Christina, but the poem didn’t seem to be something she’d write.

Adams pulled me back inside. “The little bits of time I’ve been around Christina since I’ve been home feel like when you stand on the edge of a lake at dawn this time of year. Cold air blows over the warm water and right through you. You can watch it happen. It’s wonderfully invigorating.” For an instant, he seemed to soak in the feeling he described, but the contented expression on his face soon evaporated. “I didn’t realize how much I needed her around until she wasn’t there anymore.”

I moved from the couch to the floor, my back against the furniture, facing Adams like a child in kindergarten listening to his teacher read a new book. Today’s story was Christina’s.

Born and raised in western Wisconsin, along the brown, churning water of the upper Mississippi River, in the midst of rolling, grass-covered hills, on a neat, well-kept dairy farm, Christina Peterson’s childhood was as different from ours as it could possibly be. While we were attending school half days, because Maplewood couldn’t construct school buildings fast enough to catch up with our exploding population, Christina was spending grades one through six with the same sixty classmates in an eighty-year-old brick building twice the size it needed to be. While Adams and I were running away from our past, Christina was immersed in hers, living in a house built at the turn of the last century by her father’s grandfather, in a community whose population seemed forever stuck at 2200.

The end of her freshman year at the University of Wisconsin, nineteen-year-old Christina Andersen finally said yes to a proposal of marriage—made monthly since the previous Christmas by a twenty-year-old neighbor who had been her boyfriend since the sixth grade. His case was helped by her unplanned pregnancy. Engaged in June, they married that August. The couple moved to Madison. She dropped out of college. Their daughter was born at the end of December. When Heidi started school, Christina returned to the university part time. The same year Heidi graduated from high school, Christina received her law degree.

Her marriage officially lasted until the beginning of her second year in law school. Jim Peterson never developed a serious interest in fatherhood. But he maintained a strong Midwestern commitment to handling all of its moral, economic, and legal obligations—until he and Christina divorced.

After graduating from law school and passing the bar, Christina worked as an assistant district attorney in Ramsey County, which encompassed metropolitan Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Law bored her. She saved enough money to buy a women’s dress shop in Wayzata, and developed two generations of loyal clientele, thanks in part to a wave of prosperity that produced an ever-expanding pool of wealthy and upper-middle-class households in Minneapolis’s southwest suburbs. Her business became so successful that it afforded her the time and the means to become one of the best women’s amateur golfers in the Upper Midwest. In the meantime, Heidi graduated from Brown University, married her psychology professor, and moved to London.

“Christina’s been a part of my life since the day she moved in next door. I’ve always been attracted to her. But I was afraid that I’d jeopardize our friendship if I tried to take us beyond that. She seemed so comfortable with our friendship. She gave me no indication that I’d have a better-than-even chance at drawing her into something deeper.”

Adams put his finger in his glass, swirled his whiskey around, and put his finger to his lips. “I think I fell in love with Christina the week before I left for Iraq. Heidi was back for a visit and they invited me to go across the river to Wisconsin for her parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary.”

Adams paused. “While her mother was telling me about Christina’s first day of school, Christina gave me a ‘What’s next?’ expression that invited me into every corner of her life. It was a road I’ve never taken—one that begins with years of friendship rather than a wild night of passion. I was supposed to be off to Iraq in a few days. I’d be gone for at least six months. Good timing, huh?” Adams shook his head and flashed his disarming smile.

Politics had made Jonathan Adams a master at talking in sound bites. He’d developed an extraordinary ability to express complex thoughts and ideas in twenty words or less. His talent often flowed from his political discourse to his casual conversation. But as he talked about Christina Peterson that night, succinctness was nowhere in earshot to be found.

“As soon as I got to Iraq, I knew I wanted to be home with Christina. I missed her a lot at first. I’d look at the calendar and get lonely and depressed, then I’d write her an e-mail or Skype her. But, gradually, with all the craziness going on, and with me at the front end of a long-term commitment that required so much of my attention, I figured it would do neither of us much good to get involved in a full-blown long-distance romance. I couldn’t afford the distraction and she didn’t need to be burdened by a load of worry because of where I was.”

Adams cleared his throat. “A week in Iraq is like a month in Minnesota. Everything is speeded up. The longer I was there, the more difficult it was for me to think about things the same way I’d likely think about them if I were back here. I began to question the depth of my feelings for Christina. I wondered if they might be exaggerated by loneliness and my being stuck in a war zone thousands of miles from home.”

Adams was struggling to explain himself. “In lots of ways, I reverted to how I used to be in high school.”

I decided I had better join our conversation, regardless of whether I had anything profound to say. Adams needed time to catch his breath and organize his thoughts.

“Does this have anything to do with your compulsion to be absolutely sure a girl would say yes before you asked her for a date? You know—the fallout from your Pamela Drake experience?” I laughed out loud in a staged way, hoping to temporarily pull the conversation away from its gravitas and push it toward something more familiar. “A girl had to have more tolerance than Nelson Mandela while she waited for you to move from first smile to first kiss, let alone anything that might happen beyond that. How many times did one of them ask you out before you got around to asking them?”

Adams laughed. “Some of them gave up and moved on, I suspect.”

“I was an important instrument in the first stage of your ritual,” I reminded him. “How many cafeteria tables and hallway lockers did you dispatch me to?”

It had been my job to leak news to a girl or her friends that Adams was interested. I was trained to assess reactions and report comments when his name was mentioned or after a staged walk-by. I’d marveled at the amount of information Adams had to assemble and carefully analyze before he moved from thought to action—a process that almost always led his object of interest to eventually approach him and introduce herself.

“You’re right. I guess that’s the way it usually happened.” Adams’s face grew serious, his voice soft but firm: “But I’m not talking about arranging a first date here. I’m talking about making a commitment.”

At the word “commitment” his expression resembled a baby tasting Gerber’s creamed asparagus for the first time.

Adams stopped for a moment and stared out the window again, carefully assembling what he was about to say next. “I’ve always done badly with women over forty. Until now, I never shared their sense of urgency to stake out a committed relationship.”

A line from Jane Austen’s
Pride and Prejudice
came into my head: “A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony, in a moment.” My photographic memory often spilled over from the backs of baseball cards to books. I was pleasantly surprised that I had retained some of that ability in my old age.

“That’s one of the reasons why I’ve preferred relationships with younger women. Nothing’s forced when you’re involved with them. It is what it is—a moment to be enjoyed. You try to string as many of those moments together as you can before she finally realizes you’re her father’s age and you’ve run out of things to talk about.”

Adams was animated, tottering precariously on the edge of his chair’s leather cushion. I was making a substantial effort to follow his tortuous train of thought.

I didn’t interrupt him to ask questions. He eventually got back on subject.

“The rush-to-matrimony phenomenon didn’t seem to affect Christina. All that dating-women-over-forty stuff was absent from what we were talking about and what we were doing before I left for Iraq. We were as spontaneous as twenty-year-olds. She’d pass the newspaper to me on Sunday morning and say, ‘Let’s go there Wednesday night.’ She’d call me on a cold December day and say, ‘Drive me to the Como Park Conservatory. I’ve got to see green, tropical plants.’ We did a dozen things like that. I enjoyed all of them. And I marked each one of them by pushing myself closer to her and letting her into places that had been off-limits for a long, long time.”

Adams paused for a few seconds and stared at the carpet. “During my flight from Istanbul to Amman, the first leg of my trip home, I decided to go all-in with Christina. I had two days to debrief and decompress in Amman.”

Adams dropped down from his chair and onto the carpet, sitting cross-legged now, at my eye level, on the other side of the coffee table. “The day before I headed home, I took a taxi to the old marketplace in Amman. There are two streets in the bazaar filled with jewelry shops. I found a beautiful green amber stone, a silver antique ring setting, and a jeweler who mounted the stone in the ring—all in one afternoon. I called Christina from the hotel to tell her when I was scheduled to arrive in Minneapolis the next day. I left a message on her answering machine and on her cell phone, inviting her to meet me at the airport and spend the weekend with me at the Saint Paul Hotel.”