Byron's Lane

by Wallace Rogers

  My friend had already made a left turn and was ten yards ahead of me, his hand fumbling in his brown blazer’s coat pockets for his keys.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Adams unlocked the door of his second-floor office and bent over to pick up several pieces of mail that had been pushed through the inch-wide space between the floor and the bottom of the door. He stood barely inside the doorway, examining what he held, providing me just enough space to pass by. His office was exactly what I expected it to be—cramped and cluttered with books.

  The room seemed barely wider than the space the door consumed. A flat-screen computer monitor peeked out from behind a mound of research papers stacked on top of his desk. Opposite the desk, hard against the room’s lime-green plaster walls, were two tall maple bookcases and a well-worn couch that had managed to wedge between them. An orphaned mahogany writing table that held a pile of professional journals and magazines filled one of the corners of the windowed wall. Two chairs—a contemporary black swivel desk chair and an upholstered straight-backed antique that looked like it had been liberated from a nineteenth-century railroad baron’s parlor—rounded out the decorating scheme, such as it was. The black desk chair was pushed tight against a big oak desk. It bumped against the processing unit of his desktop computer, half-hidden underneath the desk. The upholstered chair sat at the side of the desk, facing the room’s book-cased wall.

  Leaves on the branches of a golden oak tree covered his office’s lone window. The little bit of light that managed to find its way in filtered through the leaves and had a yellowish taint as it diffused around the room. There was never a need to close the blinds that hung precariously from the top of the tall window frame.

  Adams took a seat in the straight-backed chair next to his desk and opened his mail. Shedding my dark-blue blazer, I pushed the wheeled desk chair back from his desk and sat down.

  In front of me, half buried behind research papers and ungraded exams, was a framed picture of Lisa Chandler.

  Adams had found Lisa Chandler four years ago roaming the university library on a cold Friday night in March. She was what the business of higher learning refers to as a “non-traditional student.” Lisa was a thirty-two-year-old undergraduate psychology major.

  I met Lisa Chandler during my last visit to Adams’s house in Minnesota. She was consumed by equal parts guilt, confusion, and love for two men at the same time. She was beautiful, in a seductively understated way. She had shoulder-length chestnut hair and soft chocolate-brown eyes. She looked younger than she was, a feature I remember she complained about during a long, enjoyable conversation I had with her one evening, as Adams was making a heroic effort to cook dinner for the three of us.

  “Lisa’s unbelievably insightful about people and what motivates them,” Adams had told me while we cleaned up his kitchen after she had left the next morning. “We’ve spent hours talking about human nature—what makes us be the way we are. She’s damn close to perfect, Tom. Every time I’m around her, I want to make love to her. ”

  The Jonathan Adams/Lisa Chandler partnership might have had a nice shelf life except for the problem that she was married—to an oil rigger who was away on a work assignment somewhere off the coast of Indonesia. Lisa’s husband was due to return home three weeks after I met her.

  The picture of Lisa Chandler was hugely out of sorts in Adams’s universe. It was the first time since his divorce that I’d ever seen a photo of a woman in any of the places where Adams lived or worked. Its placement suggested he still needed to have Lisa somewhere in his life, even if all he could hold close to him was a memory of her.

  His comments the night before about his feelings for Christina Peterson took on more meaning. Somewhere in his thoughts he was trying to figure out how he might be able to create an environment where Christina could comfortably fit into his life, accompanied the consistent, constant passion he had felt for Lisa.

  The picture on his desk put an exclamation point on his Lisa Chandler relationship. Seeing the image of her face in the framed photo recalled the story he’d once told me about how and why it had abruptly ended.

  Adams came to New York the day Lisa’s husband returned to Minnesota, less than a month after the three of us had had dinner at his house. It was mid-June, and he was dragging me to Guyana to help him on a consulting project he had hastily arranged. The job was an excuse to get out of town. Adams’s intention was to come home in July with less baggage than he had taken with him to South America in June. I was there to help him bridge his sense of loss more than I was there to help Guyana develop a method for listing and assessing private property for tax purposes.

  Adams never told me what Lisa Chandler had meant to him, but it was clear from his poignant description of how they ended their time together that she was, and would always be, Polaris, the North Star, in the constellation of women who loved him.

  His relationship with Lisa Chandler had died here, in his campus office, on a Saturday morning, a week before our hastily arranged flight to Guyana. He told me what happened over gin and tonics at the Pegasus Hotel’s poolside bar our first sweaty night in Georgetown. Adams had described the event with such vividness and intensity that I could recall all of its detail that Friday in his office, years later.

  They’d sat on the couch in his campus office, opposite each other. Adams was pressed against one end, giving Lisa the space between them he knew she wanted. She was curled up in the fetal position, as far away as she could be from him, her arms crossed tightly against her chest. Her message was obvious: All the places she had allowed him to touch were closed to him now, and would be forever.

  In Lisa Chandler’s mind she had to cast Jonathan Adams as the serpent in her Garden of Eden. He accepted the role without an argument because it helped her anesthetize the guilt she felt, having invited him into every part of her. He had seduced her into tasting the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. This was the revisionist history she had to create, the picture she had to paint of their short, intense relationship. It was the version of their story that she had to force herself to believe in order to explain what had happened and why it had occurred.

  Her soft light-brown hair hung in uncombed strands that had fallen haphazardly on either side of her perfect lips and mouth, framing a face contorted by consternation, but at least as beautiful as when he saw her in the moonlight that faintly lit her bedroom the first time they made love. Adams told me that when he closed his eyes and conjured an image of Lisa—something he said he often did—he would think of her hair, its silky softness, how it would gently tumble onto the tops of her shoulders. Letting her hair down was a sure sign she was feeling comfortable. It was a reliable predictor that another glimpse into who she really was would soon be allowed him.

  The more she spoke, the wider the couch and the gulf between them seemed to get. She told him that what had seemed so wonderful during that late winter and early spring had irreparably damaged the rest of her life. She was happily married before her husband left for Asia. She didn’t know if she could ever feel that way again. She admitted that Adams helped her see what she could become. She said it was not a nice gift to give someone about to reenter a life in which that kind of awareness causes problems.

  As she talked, Lisa’s hazel eyes rarely glanced up from her folded arms to his face. Adams had a premonition. The rest of her life passed between them. He saw her continuing to develop into an exceptional person. Where she saw struggle and accommodation at the cost of happiness and fulfillment, he saw Lisa poised to do something special. She was at the cusp of the prime of her life. If she had the will to do it, she was capable of creating her own opportunities to flourish. He was as sure of it as she was sure that it could never happen.

  From across the empty space between them, Lisa finally looked at him, bewildered. He was someone she had unexpectedly fallen in love with, the person who had upset her ordered life. She had one week to put hersel
f back together. Her mind and her soul were expanded now. She didn’t know with what she could fill the space inside her that Adams’s absence would surely create. Lisa told Adams that last day they were together that the best she could hope for now was to find a way to carve out a small, undetectable part of the life they had shared and save it somewhere for her to privately savor. This would be the only way she could cope with the rest of it.

  Adams was something she had allowed herself to touch—another kind of life. She was unbound by what she used to believe were her limitations. When her husband left a year before, she promised she would be there for him in body and soul when he returned. Having made that promise before she knew a different way wasn’t enough reason to break it. The adjustment that had to be made required her immersion back into a state of ignorance—punishment for her infidelity.

  Lisa glanced at Adams across the couch. A pained look came over her face. But he saw another face—eyes wide shut, moaning lips, her effervescent chestnut hair hanging over the edge of his bed as she allowed him to touch those parts of her she now so conspicuously concealed from him: the small of her back, the bend in her legs, the nape of her neck. He’d miss their all-night talks and her insight, her trust, the hundred wonderful ways she would respond to his touch—all the things that made her infinitely desirable.

  But Adams knew that the important thing then and ever after was to take the pain away. So he listened intently and tried as hard as he could to understand and accept that everything they had enjoyed and shared had to be pulled up by the roots. Both people sitting on opposite ends of that couch knew the most important thing to do now was push Lisa back to where she used to be. Anywhere else was unacceptable. For Lisa Chandler to choose Jonathan Adams would cause too many people heartache.

  I picked up the framed picture and looked at it closely, trying to draw even more of Lisa’s presence into the room than the space she already occupied. Adams must have known that my long silence meant I was replaying the episode of their breakup.

  “I haven’t seen her since,” he said softly as he rose from his chair to take the picture from my hands. “She was ‘somewhere I have never travelled,’” he said in his quietest voice. “Every moment with Lisa was a gift. She was a wonderful surprise.”

  Suddenly I knew who had written the poem I’d found.

  I got up from the desk chair and meandered through an alley of stacked books and mismatched furniture, making my way to his office window.

  People who have been good friends for a long time develop an ability to converse as eloquently with a look as with carefully crafted sentences. When I cast this kind of a glance at Adams, he was staring at an Ansel Adams calendar tacked on the wall above his desk. The picture above the month of September was El Capitan at Yosemite. His mind seemed as far away from the University of Minnesota as he was from the place in the picture. My friend’s look betrayed a sense of concern.

  Adams realized I was looking at him, like people in cars at stoplights who sense when you glance their way. His expression seamlessly transformed into a smile as he refolded a letter he had opened and stuffed it back into its strange blue envelope. The cause of his concern could have been Lisa Chandler, Christina Peterson, or the contents of the letter. I had neither time nor opportunity to solve that mystery. The shadow of his first appointment crossed the threshold of his office.

  “You’re welcome to stick around, Tom. But I can’t imagine you’d be much interested in listening to ninety minutes of the mundane aspects of researching and writing a doctoral thesis.”

  I fetched my jacket and patted my friend on his shoulder as I passed by the place where he sat. A disheveled young man was standing in the hallway, just outside the door, awkwardly clutching the draft of a research paper and a heavily book-marked textbook. He was as anxious to get into Adams’s office as I was to get out.

  *

  Minnesota was at the back end of a summer that had pleasantly lingered in the Upper Midwest a month longer than usual. Days like these were always special to those of us in northern climates, and meant to be enjoyed to their absolute fullest. Grassy knolls, lawns, and benches on the campus grounds were full of students desperately soaking in every ounce of gifted sunshine and warm weather.

  One of the students drew an appreciative audience as he tossed a Frisbee to a black Labrador retriever that was always able to catch the disc in mid-air. A fraternity brother at Ohio State once advised me that dogs were magnets that attracted women. The scene spread out before me suggested that his theory might still have traction. The young man throwing the Frisbee and his fetching black Lab were about to make new friends. He pointed at two young women intently watching their game, and his dog ran to them and dropped the Frisbee at their feet.

  I smiled as I watched. Maggie fell in love with my dog before she fell in love with me.

  As I roamed the campus, I struggled to identify the lessons learned from Adams’s breakup with Lisa Chandler. Could he apply them to his intense disappointment over his inability to start a relationship with Christina Peterson?

  After an hour of aimless walking, I decided there were no lessons to be had. Lisa was his id; Christina was his ego.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Adams was right: the drive from the University of Minnesota’s campus north to the Mille Lacs Lake area was exceptional. The sun, its path across the sky sinking lower with every day that moved Minnesota closer to winter, cast long shadows through the thinning trees and over the road. Intermittent wind gusts caused by cars and trucks moving fast along the two-lane highway made fallen leaves scatter, reassemble, and scatter again across the black asphalt. The landscape all around us was beginning to erupt into a riot of color. The maples were turning red and dark pink; the aspens, gold; the oaks, a dozen shades of amber.

  The Porsche clung tight and low to the winding road. Adams drove at his usual pace. We would get to where we were going twenty minutes sooner than we should. We were headed for an upscale backwoods resort, where a political strategy meeting for next year’s state legislative campaign would take place.

  “You know, I wouldn’t have been invited to this meeting if word hadn’t leaked to the press last week. I’m the party’s trophy wife,” Adams said with a smile.

  “Is that right?” I answered. “I figured this was an audition for the party’s endorsement to be its candidate for governor. But I wasn’t going to bring up the subject until we ran out of things to talk about.” Adams responded with a laugh.

  Jonathan Adams was acknowledged by most people interested in state politics as the conscience of Minnesota’s Democratic Party. He enjoyed the moniker, wore it proudly, and seemed to do whatever he could to prove it true. He was often on the short side of lopsided votes in the state senate. He sponsored gun control legislation, controversial tax reform measures, and changes that made the senate more transparent and accessible—televised legislative sessions, liberal referenda laws, tighter registration requirements for lobbyists. He was a frequent guest on local talk shows that covered Minnesota state politics. Any party-sponsored event that would likely be covered by the press had to include him. His attendance gave the events legitimacy and profundity.

  Apart from these occasions, Adams and the state government’s leading Democrats had little use for each other. Their marriage was one of convenience. They never embraced his Mr. Smith Goes to Washington style; he never endorsed the way they did business. But Adams and his party’s leaders knew that the public liked to see them dance together. So they danced—and they danced well, especially when microphones sprouted in front of them and the lights on TV cameras were turned on.

  “You know, Tom, in some ways, it’s easy to be the kind of politician I’ve always been. I’m like a Republican congressman in the early 1960s. I’ve never really been in charge of or legally responsible for anything. I stand back, I watch, I compliment and criticize. My proposals have merit and might even fix things, but my priorities
and what I think is important are so politically toxic and opposed by armies of lobbyists, the majority of elected Democrats will never touch it.”

  After ten miles of silence, Adams talked more about politics, and how its hardening edge and increasing dependence on campaign contributions were sapping the fun out of it for him.

  “The state party expects me to make at least fifty calls a week to solicit money from donors. I hate the duty. I don’t need the money. I haven’t had a credible opponent in any of my reelection campaigns. The money I raise pays for somebody else’s attempt to get elected. I have no desire to run for reelection next year, just to face four more years of all this.”

  His announcement, I thought, was caused by his malaise. If he could shed even a little bit of it, he would change his mind. Maybe he’d run for governor. Politics motivated and defined who he was. Women gave quality to Adams’s life; politics gave it purpose.

  Still, Adams was torn. He didn’t know what he could substitute for politics to fill time and keep him sharp. He needed to be in the game. But he was fast approaching a point where he had done just about everything he had ever really wanted on a professional level. He had done well, and mostly on his terms. He was fluttering too close to having to ask himself: Is that all there is? It was a question a baby boomer idealist should never have to ask; we were utterly unprepared to deal with the consequences if the answer was yes.

  My life was traveling on a parallel track. My trip west this time was partly business. Minneapolis was on the way to Los Angeles, and I’d be leaving Sunday for what looked to be a week’s worth of meetings in California to finish negotiating the sale of Maggie’s family’s publishing house to a subsidiary of the Disney Corporation. What’s Next questions were on my horizon, too. As we passed along the west shore of Mille Lacs Lake we were tantalizingly close to agreement that sometime within the next two years we’d buy a medium-size yacht and sail it down the Mississippi River, across the Gulf of Mexico, to the Florida Keys.