Byron's Lane (9 page)

I shuttered. This would have been Adams’s first attempt to contact Christina in ten weeks, and I could sense the outcome.

“I got on the Internet to see what was going on back home that weekend. I bought two tickets online to
Turandot
—her favorite opera. It was opening at the Ordway Saturday night.”

A smile filled my face. This detailed information was not absolutely essential to Adams’s story, but was just the kind of description he always felt compelled to provide. I was on vacation, but I couldn’t stop being an editor.

As Adams continued his story, my smile vanished. I knew this was headed for a tragic ending. Yet there was still a hint of excitement in his voice as he told me what he had planned for the two of them his first night home.

Adams had left a message for Christina at her dress shop before he boarded his plane in Amman, bound for Paris. No response. Her answering machine picked up again when he called her house before he left Paris for Minneapolis. Disappointed that he wouldn’t be met at the airport, unsure now of what he was walking into, his plane landed at MSP on a Saturday morning. As soon as he cleared Customs, he called Christina’s cell phone. Still no answer. He took a cab home from the airport. He called his legislative assistant, told her he’d be in the office early Monday morning, and that there were two tickets waiting for her and her husband at the Ordway that night.

Every time he drove past Christina’s house that weekend, the same strange car was parked in her driveway. Its presence prevented any further action. He never called her or stopped by. He would expose himself to disappointment and rejection no longer. Early the next week, the cleaning lady he and Christina shared told him what he feared had happened. Christina had met someone. His name was Richard Hunter: a businessman, ten years younger than Adams, recently divorced, scion of one of the richest families in Minneapolis. Besides being heir to a flour fortune, he owned the largest real estate company in Minnesota. Adams was familiar with

Richard Hunter; he frequently had business at the State Capitol, and was well-connected with Republicans who worked there.

Hunter fancied himself a swashbuckling entrepreneur, and presented himself accordingly. Adams claimed that his carefully crafted reputation was undeserved. He said Hunter frequently made bad business decisions that were papered over by large infusions of cash from the family fortune. As Adams talked, I thought of Jim Breech and his story about the high school senior who broke all of his scoring records at Maplewood High. I felt more comfortable when Adams shifted his focus back to Christina.

Hunter apparently had Christina in his sights for a long time. As Adams moved so excruciatingly slow, so delicately, to wrap his arms around Christina’s life, he failed to sense her loneliness. Hunter gave Christina all his time and all his attention. She soaked up everything he poured on her like a five-foot-five, hundred-and-ten-pound sponge. Because Adams had dropped out of Christina’s life without any kind of an explanation for more than two months—between the time Hind, Farah, and Nur were killed and when he had tried to call her from Amman—she figured he had lost interest. Work and distance had pushed Christina away from his center. The death of his friends shoved Christina and everything else in the world beyond his reach. His tenuous hold on his previous life was tethered by a single phone call—the one he made to me an hour after the catastrophe in Mosul.

“Their picture was on the society page in the Sunday
Star Tribune
last week.” Adams reached over to the coffee table and rummaged through the newspaper, pulling out the society section. I recognized it. The section he gave me had covered the poem. The two coffee-stained pages had disappeared.

“Hunter made a big contribution to the children’s museum where she does volunteer work. That’s him in the picture giving the director a check. Christina’s standing beside him.”

I put the newspaper back on the coffee table. To this day I don’t know what he did with the poem.

“The ring is in a box somewhere in my office. Christina didn’t get the messages I left for her until the Saturday I got back from Iraq—the same day she and Hunter returned from a week at his second home in Florida. I’m glad I didn’t run into them in the airport.”

Exhausted, Adams placed his glass on the table and buried his face in his hands. He straightened up. “So that’s why I’ve been acting like my porch is the top of a sand dune in the Sahara desert, it’s in the middle of the day, and I’m barefoot. I came back from Iraq a mess. I need some full-time support and guidance to fix me. Christina is the right person, in the right place, at the right time. But she’s not available anymore because my bad choices and stupid hang-ups have driven her into the arms of somebody else.”

Adams was never the self-confident rebel, the Byronic hero, he projected. He was a non-threatening non-conformist who craved acceptance. Fear of rejection—which most of us learn to rationalize away or live with—was the principal motivator in Adams’s life. It served him well and it served him badly. He had never lost an election. The possibility that he could lose one made him an outstanding campaigner and an effective politician, but that same fear caused him to avoid a woman’s total immersion into his life, or his into hers.

“Have you told Christina how you feel about her since you’ve been home?” I asked.

I didn’t have to wait long for a reply. It came like a thunderclap after lightning has struck something close by.

“Out of the question, Tom. I can’t face more rejection. There’s no upside for a move like that. In politics, when you decide to press a point, you never put the other side on the spot unless you’re sure how they’ll react. The same rule applies here.”

Adams spoke with conviction. His eyes squinted and he pushed his lips together, underlining his firm look. Then the tone of his voice and the expression on his face changed. He grew pensive.

“Seldom does a day go by without me playing this over and over in my mind. I can’t fix this. I can’t make things turn out differently.” Adams put his hands on the edge of the coffee table and looked at me sternly. “I expect any day now to see an engagement ring on Christina’s hand. When Richard Hunter sees something he wants, he moves heaven and hell to get it. That’s how he works. And he wants Christina.”

I wasn’t as convinced that Adams understood the depth of Christina’s relationship with Hunter, or that he could predict with certainty how she’d react to his telling her that he loved her. I remembered how Christina had brushed Adams’s cheek with the back of her hand before she fled down his driveway.

“How many chances to fall in love land in the laps of people our age?” Adams asked as he reached for the blue-labeled bottle and poured another drink. I attempted once more to shake him from his depression.

“How can you be sure that Christina is as important to you as you say she is? Are you sure you’re in love with her? Why isn’t it likely that you might meet someone tomorrow, next week, or next month, and fall more in love with that person than you think you have with Christina?” I asked.

Adams jumped up and disappeared down the hallway. Gone less than a minute, he returned from his office carrying a black ringed notebook. He sat back in his leather chair.

I recognized the black book. He took it with him everywhere he went. Its compartments contained a calendar on which he wrote appointments, a slot for business cards of important clients and contacts, and a small notebook in which he jotted reminders, thoughts, and ideas he’d collect during the day. An alphabetized index of street and e-mail addresses and telephone numbers filled another section. As time and space required, he replaced the calendar, reshuffled the business cards, and refilled the notes section with blank paper. Everything Adams had touched over the years had been either lost, tossed out, or replaced at least once—everything except his black organizer.

Adams pulled a tissue-thin piece of paper from its inside pocket—a page torn from a book. He carefully unfolded it and handed it to me. The thinness of the paper and its small print made its source obvious: It was from a
Norton Anthology of American Literature
textbook—the books we were issued on the first day of English class when we were juniors at Maplewood High. On the ripped-out page was a poem by E. E. Cummings: “somewhere i have never travelled.”

“I first read this poem when I was sixteen,” Adams said. Then he did a remarkable thing. He recited the poem perfectly, word for word, by heart. I followed the words he spoke on the torn page I was holding. I was moved as much by the passion with which he recited the poem as I was by what Cummings had written. Adams’s tone was confident and sure, like the voice of a devout Christian saying the Lord’s Prayer. He perfectly captured the essence of every one of Cummings’s words. When he finished, he emphasized the point he was making by repeating one of the poem’s lines:

Adams pushed himself back from the edge of his chair and settled deep into its confines. I was speechless. A thick silence hung in the room before he cut it with a matter-of-fact statement: “This is my yardstick. This is how I know what love is. It describes how loving someone makes you feel about the person you love, and how that love affects you.”

Adams extended an open hand to me. The glimpse he had allowed me into his soul was over. I passed the sacred torn page back to him. He carefully folded it and returned it to its protected place inside his indispensable black book.

He had managed to discover the definition of love. He had found a way to identify and measure its feeling and determine its depth and breadth. I wondered what other important things he had kept hidden from the world, and from me.

Hardly pausing long enough to allow me to absorb what had happened, Adams completely changed the tenor of his voice. He made a series of announcements as stark and devoid of feeling as if he were the press secretary telling reporters about the president’s next day’s schedule: “I’ve got a nine o’clock class to teach in the morning, and I want you to come to it. I have to make a presentation at a colloquium at ten-thirty. I hope you’ll come with me to that, too. I’d also like you to go with me to a political meeting I’m supposed to attend up north tomorrow night and Saturday morning. We’ll spend the night at the lodge where the meeting will be held. It’s a beautiful drive up there this time of year. You’ll enjoy it. The Porsche pulls out of the garage at eight sharp. Breakfast is on your own.”

Then Adams’s voice changed again. “I’m glad you’re here, Tom. I can see how much you want to help me through all this. I truly appreciate it. I have to live most of my life in a very public way. I have to look strong, confident, and decisive. You’re the only one around me now who’s seen my other side. Can you ever know how important it is to me that I can show it to you, trust you, and not be embarrassed by it?”

There were no hugs or handshakes. Adams reached up to the floor lamp that arched over his chair and switched it off. He stood up, walked across his living room, turned right, and headed toward his master bedroom. I propped myself up against a corner of the couch and stared at the fog and the darkness outside. After a while I put on my shoes, climbed the unlit stairway, and found my room on the second floor.

Settling into bed, I thought about Adams and everything that had happened that day. Recalling how much energy and effort I had to expend to try to make sense of Maggie’s death was the closest I could come to empathizing with Adams’s frustration, his sense of helplessness, his growing loneliness.

Nothing can ever be put back exactly the way it was. Both of us were too far down the road to say what the hell and start over. For reasons behind our control, things often don’t work out the way they ought to. This was a hard lesson for us to learn. As children, we white suburban middle-class American kids were taught that if we wanted something badly enough and we were patient, focused, and willing to pay the price, whatever we wanted could always be had.

Jim Breech learned his lesson well. He never left home—in body, or in spirit, or in mind. Why should he have ever wanted to? Maplewood nurtured Breech in ways Adams and I could only dream about. He had easily moved from super-athlete to the community’s most successful businessman. Everything Jim Breech needed to know about life, he learned in first grade: Treat people like you want to be treated, stand by your friends, work hard and play hard, and honor your promises. Maplewood’s prescription worked for him. He was the closest of the three of us to living the American Dream.

But Breech was not a happy man that afternoon. That untidy fact made me think about what Maplewood’s insulation was costing him as he struggled with the discovery that there are limits to our possibilities. Maplewood allowed him little room for the transformation he needed to make. Adams and I chose lives more complicated. But neither our path nor Breech’s had led us to where our generation was promised we could go.

I turned on the lamp on the nightstand next to my bed. After a minute spent staring at the ceiling, I surveyed the room. In addition to my bed, a bookcase, and a chest of drawers, the room was filled by a large, four-section window that looked out over Adams’s driveway and his front yard. The first evidence of dawn showed in a bank of brightening pink and gray clouds. I got out of bed and walked over to the bookcase.

On its top shelf was a copy of Adams’s opus,
Maximizing Local Revenues by Coordinating Land Use and Fiscal Policies
. Adams never talked about the book, except when someone paid him five thousand dollars to do a forty-minute PowerPoint presentation about how to apply its methodology.

I returned to my bed with the book, opened it, and started to read. I was asleep by the third page.

Adams’s Friday schedule was more evidence of his mighty struggle to put himself back together. As he moved through it, he laid bare all of his divergent parts. Everything—the qualities that drew you to him, his self-destructive tendencies—was on display that day.

His classroom was small. When tables and chairs were moved across the wooden floor, they produced enough noise to drown out conversation. The intimacy of the place afforded none of the anonymity craved by students who didn’t want to be there.

Nothing hung on the bare lime-green walls except a white projection screen in the front of the room and a clock in the back. A gray metal cart with a projector on it was pushed into a corner, next to one of four floor-to-ceiling windows separated by narrow pillars. The class was scheduled to start at nine. The clock above me read 8:55. There were only three people in the room: myself, seated on a narrow bench built over an old, non-functional steam radiator; Adams, disheveled but intent; and a young woman, appealing in appearance, persistent in her view that Adams should reconsider the grade he’d given her on the last exam.

She was fit and wholesome-looking, like a woman on a Swedish tourism bureau travel poster: tall, long blond hair, dazzling blue eyes. Her eyes were so Caribbean blue I could see their color when she would glance in my direction the length of the room away. She did so frequently, trying to figure out who I was—Adams hadn’t introduced us. But that was her fault. She hadn’t given him a chance. She’d pounced on him from the hallway as he was unloading the contents of his backpack, ten seconds after he had unlocked the classroom door.

She and Adams were sitting side by side, at a table nearest the front of the room. A graded exam she had pulled from an oversized tote bag lay between them. They were deeply involved in conversation, trying to reconcile different definitions of the word “comity.” Adams was an advocate for the textbook’s version. The appealing young woman was adamant about a more expansive notion of what the word meant. His resistance was melting. The look on his face suggested he didn’t seem to mind losing the argument. By the time the clock had struck nine and the rest of his students were rushing into the room, the two of them had split the difference. He added three more points to her exam grade.

The points were more important to her than they were to Adams. I was disappointed that Adams had capitulated. Based on what I heard across the room he was right, she was wrong.

The classroom’s small size and the quiet it contained when just three of us occupied it were the reasons I could easily eavesdrop. Its character changed dramatically as the Westminster chimes on the clock tower in the middle of the quadrangle outside rang nine bells. The noise Adams’s students made jostling chairs around, greeting familiar faces, arranging books and notepads in front of them on the long wooden tables, reminded me of the purposeful chaos an orchestra makes tuning its instruments before the conductor comes on stage.

In the same way, the room became quickly quiet when Adams stood up from his chair, held the class roster close to his temporarily bespectacled face, and silently took attendance.

Eight oak conference tables arranged in a big rectangle filled most of the room. Twenty-one people, including Adams, occupied all but three of the chairs that were haphazardly arranged around the outside of the assembled tables. Adams’s early-arriving student retained her seat next to him. Using the space around her to spread her notebook, laptop, large handbag, and two textbooks, she appeared neither out of place nor divorced from the rest of her classmates. She had a friendly smile that easily drew return smiles from everybody who looked her way.

I kept my place in the back of the room, seated beneath the wall clock. As Adams was about to begin his class, he glanced at me. His look implied a question: Do you want me to introduce you? I waved him off with a slight shake of my head and class officially began. No one had taken particular notice of me.

The Friday morning session was the discussion component of an introductory course in American political institutions. The course was intended for non-majors—juniors and seniors, mostly teachers-in-training who needed four credits in American government to satisfy a state teaching certification requirement. For four credits his students had to attend two lectures and one of Adams’s seminars each week. The lectures were assigned to other faculty members in the political science department. Adams managed three discussion sessions every week. He organized his lesson plans around the material that had been covered in that week’s lectures.

Almost everyone in the room was there because he or she had to be. Budding social studies teachers, who might someday directly apply what Adams covered in class, were greatly outnumbered by prospective elementary, algebra, and science teachers. Most of his students saw little of relevance in Adams’s syllabus.

Dr. Adams used the Socratic Method to teach his class. It tended to unnerve his students and accounted for why the few empty chairs in the room were closest to where he was standing. The popular notion seemed to be that the farther one sat from the professor, the less likely it was that he or she would be called upon. Being asked to answer specific questions directed to individual students exposed them if they hadn’t studied the week’s assignment. Adams’s first query almost always spurred spirited discussion. From the students’ perspective, a robust debate consumed time and reduced the possibility that they would be confronted directly with a question they weren’t prepared to answer. Adams had explained all this to me during our forty-minute commute from his house to campus.

The class was an eclectic bunch. But it was less diverse than it seemed to want to be. It was two-thirds female, dressed in the uniform of the day. Three styles of blue jeans covered various lengths of everybody’s legs. The loose-fitting layered look was prominent among the men. They seemed overdressed, given the unseasonably warm temperature outside. Many of the women wore tight cotton pullovers, the most intriguing of which were not quite long enough to touch the tops of their jeans or cover their faux-diamond-studded navels. Four of the men wore baseball caps: two, with brims carefully bent in semi-circular curves that framed their foreheads; the other two wore theirs backwards. All of the women had hair long enough to be pulled into a ponytail, braided, or allowed to fall unencumbered to their shoulders, except where it was clipped in random strands with tiny plastic clamps apparently only available in two shades of brown.

Almost everybody was white and tan. Two ethnic Asian women and a woman who appeared to be Native

American allowed a claim could be made that the class was multicultural. All of them were young people who had probably just passed their twentieth birthdays. Their gear and their mannerisms suggested they were classic Generation Y types. The iPads, notebook computers, and energy they brought with them into the little room befitted a confident collection of young men and women aware that they were already among their generation’s top twenty percent in terms of status, education, and earning potential. How they channeled that confidence while they were in Adams’s classroom spoke volumes about them.

True to form, when Adams tried to launch an examination of Congress’s war powers, the class quickly transformed his question into a vivacious verbal exchange about political expediency. Criticizing Congress and how it does its business was easy. Anybody tech-savvy was bound to have been exposed to a web-driven analysis of the subject recently. The discussion had the same characteristics as a conversation on a twenty-four-hour cable television news network: voices rising, frequent interruptions, no requirement to substantiate anything being said.

The more closely I tuned into what was unfolding, the more the content of the conversation cast me back to Maplewood High School. The quality of the discussion quickly reached the shallow depth of the efforts we’d managed in most of my English classes. Our insightful interpretations of literary classics like
The Tale of Two Cities
and
Julius Caesar
usually came from having read CliffsNotes versions the night before. What spewed from our mouths was the stilted language of literary criticism unsupported by inflections that suggested we knew what we were talking about.

I looked out the window, across the campus two floors below, and wondered if our teachers were ever aware of our shortcuts. We surely weren’t the first slackers to discover that Classics Illustrated had published a comic-book version of every novel or Shakespearean play we were assigned to read. Our teachers hardly ever asked us to explain, defend, or describe in detail any aspects of what we eagerly borrowed in condensed form from someplace else. It seemed more important to them that we understood plot and setting than character and theme. I smiled. Maybe Baby Boomers and Generation Y are more alike than different.

Theories, assertions, and bad debate technique spread across the joined tables. Like pooling water, they managed to find and fill the lowest places. His students’ points of view and the boisterous, disjointed way they presented them smothered thoughtful examination of the esteemed principle of separation of powers. Still, I doubt I would have listened as carefully if they had talked instead about important aspects of the week’s lectures. Like Adams’s students, I needed to be entertained if I was expected to learn something along the way.

Two spokespeople emerged from among the assembled students. One of them slipped into his remarks that he was the student senate’s president. He looked the part of a campus politician and resembled a young Trotsky: bespectacled and goateed, darting dark eyes. He had the loud confidence of someone who had never faced a problem that wasn’t solvable. He claimed his leadership position in the student senate had afforded him considerable experience making tough decisions.

“Look, here’s how we handled the plastic water bottle crisis last spring. It’s relevant to this discussion. We balanced the right of free choice while, at the same time, we addressed an important environmental issue. We stopped the sale of water in plastic bottles at the university bookstore and dining halls, and we got the university to stop using college funds to buy bottled water. But we didn’t say that students couldn’t carry it around or drink it.”

The student senate president postulated that unraveling an international crisis was a four-step process—the same process he’d applied to the plastic bottled water controversy. “First, you define the issue,” he said. “Then, you figure out a way to clearly describe it to outside observers. Next, you identify all the players with a stake in the outcome. Finally, you develop an action plan that addresses the problem and includes something in it for all of them.”

He described each step as if he were reading a recipe for oatmeal raisin cookies. I recognized his process. The four steps came from a self-help book that had held a place near the top of the
New York Times
bestseller list for two months last year. The author had offered his manuscript to us, but I’d passed on it, and his agent eventually took it to Simon & Schuster. Ever since I’d made my bad business decision, Maggie’s father had found ways to remind me about it.

The student senate president did not reference his source, and a competing point of view was articulated by Adams’s Nordic protégé.

“I’m training to be an elementary school teacher, but even I know that whenever a political decision or public policy is made, unintended consequences have to be considered. There’s no place for that kind of examination in Troy’s four-step approach. A careful, systematic look at all the alternatives, including analysis of how similar situations were handled in the past, needs to be done.” To summarize and support her argument she quoted Harry Truman: “‘The only thing new in the world is the history we don’t already know.’”

A nice touch, I thought.

Her comments inspired a question from a classmate, who referred to the girl as Anna, about historical symmetry.

“A little empathy, lots of respect, and a shared sense of justice should be considered in the policymaking and decision-making processes, too. Troy’s approach leaves no room for that,” Anna answered.

Her assertions were the same Adams would have likely made, had he joined the debate. The more she spoke, the surer I was that the discussion on how Adams had graded her test was not the first that had involved just the two of them. His influence was all over her.

But the president of the student senate carried the day. Worse, over the next thirty minutes, he managed to forge a consensus. “It’s more important to act quickly than it is to act deliberately,” he claimed. Anna’s Truman quote was matched by a quote he mistakenly attributed to “one of Shakespeare’s characters.”

“All’s well that ends well,” he maintained.

The theme of the play he referenced described Adams’s love life more than the management of political decision making. Adams’s Eliza Doolittle wilted under her student president’s barrage of interruptions.

“Define the issue. Explain it in simple, easy-to-understand terms. Identify the stakeholders. Give something to everybody. And do it fast,” he repeated.

Anna was out-gunned by someone advocating a weaker position who could talk louder than she could. Her adversary never addressed the issues she’d raised. He flung his talking points around the room until they covered the walls and the tables and hung heavy in the air. The outcome of the discussion was as frightfully fascinating as its runaway dynamics.

“Look, the United States Constitution was written in the 1780s. In order for it to provide almost any useful instruction about how something ought to be done, it needs to be applied in the context of the twenty-first century,” Troy Trotsky maintained.

I watched Adams squirm in his seat when his class decided that it was impractical to involve 535 members of Congress in a decision as important as whether or not we ought to go to war. He put his head in his hands when one of his students said the media could handle “the checks-and-balances thing.”