Byron's Lane

by Wallace Rogers

  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 calend
ar 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.”

  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 a
nd 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.”