Byron's Lane

by Wallace Rogers

  Adams drained his bottle of beer. “Please don’t mention anything about this at the party Saturday, okay? And I really don’t want to talk about it anymore tonight, Tom. Everybody’s making more of this than it deserves. Let’s give it a rest.”

  I leaned toward Adams, ready to protest, but he placed his index finger to his lips.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The pizza was unexpectedly tasty thanks to the several beers and a glass of Scotch we had drunk. Like a dining event at a sidewalk café on des Champs-Élysées, dinner pleasantly languished for hours, until the sun finally disappeared into the woods at the far edge of Adams’s field. We critiqued the Cleveland Indians’ baseball season, now mercifully concluding, and shared our hopes for the Browns, whose football season had just begun.

  It was a conversation boys learn how to make by carefully listening to fathers, uncles, and older brothers. Adams and I had learned to speak sports fluently by the time we graduated from elementary school; I was the prodigy between us. I was famous throughout Maplewood for my encyclopedic knowledge of where professional football players had gone to college, which teams played in every World Series since the First World War, sites of all the Summer Olympic Games since 1896, and a smorgasbord of statistics that measured the extraordinary performances of a variety of world-class athletes. My talent in memory compensated for lack of ability to hit or throw a curveball in baseball, to make a left-handed lay-up on a basketball court, or to accomplish absolutely anything in gymnastics.

  Our autumn sports symposium had been interrupted twice, not counting last year’s postponement when Adams was off in Iraq: by Maggie’s traffic accident sixteen Augusts ago, and the two years Adams spent in the Gilbert Islands working as a middle-aged Peace Corps volunteer. The cancellations in the 1990s overlapped a period when the Indians made it to the World Series twice and the Browns broke Cleveland’s heart by moving to Baltimore and becoming the Ravens.

  Both of us had lived two-thirds of our lives beyond the confines of northeastern Ohio. We fled hundreds of miles away, in opposite directions. But we never lost a shared allegiance to Cleveland’s baseball and football teams.

  We’d recently adopted the bad habit of replacing sports talk with dreary discussions about our jobs. Passion for mine had steadily drained since Maggie’s death. Adams, engaged in work prone to higher highs and lower lows, began to lose enthusiasm midway through his second term in the state senate, right after he’d earned tenure at the University of Minnesota, and at about the same time he realized he was older than the fathers of most of his students and a few of his girlfriends. It was much easier dealing with life’s challenges when we were in our twenties and our focus was: What do I want to be? How do I want this to turn out? Lately, it’d been: Who am I? It surely was that Thursday.

  “Business is what we do, not who we are,” Adams proclaimed. He suggested we end the outdoor segment of our discussion, and I nodded my agreement. Two empty Scotch glasses and the chill that follows darkness near the end of September in Minnesota were three good reasons to make the move.

  On our way to the living room, the phone rang again. Wondering aloud whether it was a telemarketer or a real telephone call, Adams hurried off to his office down the hall in a belated attempt to answer it. I found myself alone in the kitchen and used the time constructively, refilling both our glasses with ice and Johnnie Walker Black.

  Adams’s kitchen was distinctive in its obvious lack of use. Pots and pans hung too neatly from hooks fashionably positioned over a wood-sided, granite-topped island easily accessible to and from all of the kitchen’s appliances. His stove, his oven top, his built-in dishwasher, and his refrigerator looked brand new in spite of being at least five years old.

  The women who passed through Adams’s life and his kitchen must have loved the place. The obvious financial investment he’d made would give them the false impression that he was the rare kind of man who knew his way around a kitchen, creating good things to eat for a steady stream of guests that populated a phantom, vibrant social life. Its neat appearance suggested cleanliness and order--admirable, attractive qualities. His relationships were of such short duration that their favorable opinions were unlikely to be tested.

  Retreating to friendlier, more inhabited territory in the living room, I put our refreshed drinks down on a two-month-old issue of Vanity Fair that had been tossed on a glass-topped coffee table. I sprawled across a tan, three-section couch and swung my legs onto a wicker ottoman. Content and comfortable, I looked around me.

  The room managed to seem both cozy and spacious. A built-in entertainment center, flanked by two wide walnut bookcases, filled a wall that separated the living room from Adams’s master bedroom. His majestic gray fieldstone fireplace stood opposite the longest part of the sofa. The fireplace dominated the room and faced the two-story glass wall that offered easy views of the back deck and surely framed countless exceptionally beautiful sunsets.

  I reached for my drink. Two pieces of stapled, coffee-stained copy paper, print-side down, peeked halfway out from the remnants of a four-day-old newspaper. I dug the pages out and turned them over. As soon as I started reading, I knew this was something I wasn’t meant to see, but I couldn’t put it down. The pages contained a free-verse poem, unsigned and untitled:

  When I am with you I feel an answer to something I asked a long, long time ago

  It comes with your soft touch on the small of my back

  Your fingers lingering on my shoulder, combing through my hair

  Kissing my forehead, my nose, your thumb tracing my lips

  Heat rising on my neck, my face, my head

  Standing—my back to you now, you pulling me in

  Your face buried in my hair, your lips tracing the back of my neck

  Slowly pushing down the straps of my top

  Your hands on the back of my neck again, sliding down over my shoulders

  Leaning back, my shoulders touch your chest

  I feel your fingers close over my throat

  Riding down my shoulders, past my elbows

  Slipping off my fingers, over my stomach

  I feel the zipper move down as my skirt falls effortlessly over my feet

  Then you remove my bra, my back still against you, almost naked

  You, fully clothed, the material comforting against my skin

  Finally, your fingers push down my underwear

  They, too, fall slippery down my thighs

  I am naked now

  And I close my eyes as you turn me around gently and

  Your breath catches in appreciation

  My heart is pounding with something good

  Knowing I can give you pleasure merely by my body

  You turn me back around and I feel you bend slightly as you reach down

  Your hands on my calves and then my knees, my thighs, my stomach

  Brushing lightly, quickly, over my chest and up over my throat

  I feel my breath catch and move my arms back over my head and clasp them around your neck

  Back arched, you say my name

  Your hands travel back over my breasts and linger there

  So soft you touch me, I fall back leaning on you

  Softly sounds escape my lips

  You take your time with this part of me, able to discern the perfect touch

  One hand travels down my stomach, between my legs

  Softly your fingers touch me there, each without hesitation, but softly still

  I know now that this will be that moment, the one that everyone lives for

  The one that many experience over and over—that I’d be happy to feel just once

  Your hand quickens, fingers skilled, but imperceptibly so

  This time, because I trust you, I allow myself to let go

  The room darkens around me

  I feel you holding me up, supporting me as I collapse against
you

  I feel my body move in strange, exquisite ways for what seems like hours,

  But is really only seconds

  You pull me close, leading me to bed, falling in beside me

  Wrapping around me, kissing my forehead, my lips, my throat

  It is there I fall asleep as you watch me, watch over me, hands protecting

  And we are both peaceful, both you and I complete in this moment

  Full

  I reached for my glass and took a long drink. I tried, as best I could, to put Adams’s buried treasure back exactly as I had found it.

  I finished my drink and went off to the kitchen to make another. Just Scotch this time, liberally poured over melting ice.

  *

  Adams was standing in front of his fireplace when I returned from the kitchen. He had the cordless handset from his office phone with him, and had found his glass of Scotch. When he noticed me re-entering the room, he did a side-step in front of the coffee table, putting his glass down on top of the stack of newspapers piled on it. As he fell into a chair beside the fireplace, its leather cushion made a squeak then gave an audible sigh as his weight forced out a gush of air that had been hiding somewhere inside.

  Adams reached for a pair of reading glasses, somehow buried beneath the newspaper and his drink. He pulled the reading glasses from the pile without spilling anything. He saw me watching him. “What are you looking at?” I smiled back at him and didn’t answer. “Another thing I hate about getting old,” he complained, as he put the glasses on. He repeatedly pressed a button on the black telephone and a puzzled look came over his face.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  Adams stared at the telephone receiver. “Caller ID says that all those missed telephone calls came from a pay phone. The person who called never left a message, and hung up before I picked up the telephone a few minutes ago.”

  Adams dialed the number. It rang for a long time. Someone finally answered. I listened intently to Adams’s half of the conversation.

  “Could you tell me where this phone is located?” A pause followed. “The Budget Inn on Sibley Avenue? You haven’t been trying to get a hold of someone at 651—789-6204, have you?” Another pause. “Did you notice anyone using the phone a few minutes ago?”

  Adams thanked whomever he was talking to and lowered the handset from his ear. As he put his glass back down on the table a hint of a smile overtook his worried expression.

  “Do you think that’s Linda calling?” I guessed out loud.

  “Maybe.”

  “Where should I go when she shows up in half an hour?” I asked.

  Linda McArthur was striking, tall, and blond. I supposed her to be about forty years old by then. Turning forty would have been difficult for Linda. She was the type of person who measured her worth by beauty that belied her age. She had knocked on Adams’s door the first night of a visit I made five years ago. That was the only time I had ever laid eyes on her, but I remembered everything about her. She was the kind of woman not easily forgotten. Regardless of whether a man spent five minutes or five years around Linda McArthur, her look, the smell of her perfume, a lingering sense of how she moved, the foggy sound of her voice—all were details he’d more likely remember than the date of his wedding anniversary.

  Linda had seemed agitated by my being at Adams’s house that night. Only with a great deal of persuasion by Adams, and my emphatic statement that I was tired from my trip and on my way upstairs to bed did she finally come off his front porch and into his house. He told me the next day that she’d stayed until four in the morning. He mentioned little about what they did or talked about, except how nice it was to hear her voice and run his hands along the contours of her body.

  Adams took another drink of Scotch. “I’ve seen her just three times since then,” he said. “The last time was in a shop in Uptown that some woman I can’t remember pulled me into. I saw Linda before she saw me. I worried that being in the company of another woman would drive her away from me forever. My relationship with Linda—whatever it is, was, or has been—is based on her having access to me whenever she needs it. When Linda needs me, we do this dance. She initiates the contact, but I have to beg her to jump into my life.”

  Adams moved the handset from his lap to the coffee table. “When I caught her eye, she gave me an ear-to-ear smile that showed she was happy to see me. I mouthed the words ‘Call me.’ She nodded, then shifted her attention to her husband. He was too busy flirting with a salesgirl to notice me.” Adams’s smile turned to a frown. “It bothered me that she was worried he’d seen us.”

  Linda McArthur had drifted in and out of Adams’s world for as long as he’d lived in Minnesota. Three times married and twice divorced, Linda was a character from a nineteenth-century English novel: star-crossed, misunderstood, desperate to make a place for herself in a part of the world that didn’t take ambitious women seriously.

  I remembered her story. Linda McArthur married young, the day after she graduated from high school.

  Marriage was a means to escape a masochistic father and an alcoholic mother. She worked as a receptionist at a law firm, where the constant attention of men with power and money reinforced a notion growing inside her that she had assets that could prove strategic. Shedding liabilities like her truck-driver husband and ordinary wardrobe, she was promoted in twelve months’ time to trophy wife of one of the firm’s four partners.

  Adams had first met her after her second marriage had bottomed out. He was taking a junior college course in Spanish, in anticipation of landing a consulting assignment in Central America. Linda was enrolled in the same class because she wanted to be able to communicate with the help she’d inherited: a Mexican gardener, a Panamanian maid, and a handyman from Guatemala. In truth, the Spanish class was on an expanding list of outside activities she had arranged in order to escape her husband, who had tendencies much like her father’s. Linda McArthur was in the midst of a doomed effort to recreate herself. Her plan was to use her beauty, her husband’s money, and a few of his friends to open doors. Once inside, she could demonstrate skills that would propel her into a career doing either TV commercials or weather reports on the six o’clock evening news.

  The evening after their third Spanish class together, at a coffee shop in Edina, Adams listened intently as she described her hopes and dreams. That night, Linda McArthur grabbed a piece of Jonathan Adams that they both knew she could keep for as long as she liked. His genuine interest, lack of judgment, his openness, and his trusting smile drew her in. He was dangerously attracted to fragile, beautiful women who sought his advice and his attention. None of them was needier than Linda McArthur. Her random appearances in his life were balm to his reoccurring bouts of battered self-concept. He was safe port in a storm and a trusted, passionate partner who helped her temporarily escape her turmoil, the eye of her frequent hurricanes.

  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 raise
d 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.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  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.