Byron's Lane
Page 17
Christina walked us to the end of her driveway. She hugged me and kissed me on the cheek. She whispered how much she enjoyed our talk. Then she turned to Adams and extended her arms, inviting an embrace. They held each other for a long moment. Her hands moved up his back, then along his arms, and finally to the sides of his neck. She gently pulled his face close to hers. Her lips found his mouth. Their kiss lasted long enough to make me feel like a voyeur—an experience Julie Cook’s mother had never allowed us the opportunity to enjoy on Byron’s Lane.
Christina turned from us and walked up the driveway, toward her lighted house, back to Richard Hunter and her new friends. She never looked back.
I had witnessed a mixed signal that I struggled to interpret. Adams’s bewildered look, as he stood frozen at the foot of Christina’s driveway, watching the back of her until she disappeared into her house, told me he was struggling, too.
*
Back in Adams’s house, the kitchen clock showed half past twelve. Before we went to bed, we drank a Scotch nightcap on Adams’s deck. At his insistence we discussed the details of my publishing company’s pending sale to Disney. Adams speculated that taking a tendered position as a senior associate at either the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation or the Brookings Institute, think tanks focused on the national health care crisis and the role of government in a democracy, might be a good way to keep him engaged in public affairs and constructively fill his time after he quit elected politics. Adams looked toward Christina’s house. Its bright lights showed through thinning trees.
We didn’t talk about Christina. But Maggie and Kathy found a way into our discussion.
Adams rocked back in his chair. He held his drink close to his chest. “I think about Kathy sometimes. But it’s getting difficult lately to pull up her face when I close my eyes and think of her. I haven’t seen Kathy in twenty years. I’m deeply, deeply bothered that she’s fading from my memory.”
While he was talking, I shut my eyes. Maggie’s face and form were not as sharp in my mind as they used to be, either. I nervously reached in my wallet for her picture. I pulled it out and stared at the photograph in the faint porch light.
Maggie and Kathy had become good friends over the years. My indivisible friendship with Adams, and Kathy’s growing closeness to Maggie, afforded Adams opportunities to have contact with his wife after their divorce. Maggie and I were determined that their separation would not affect our association with either of them. I still get Christmas and birthday cards from Kathy, but when Adams asked me how long it had been since I talked to her, I couldn’t precisely remember.
“The last time I saw Kathy was at Maggie’s funeral,” Adams reminded me. “We met the day after, at Maggie’s favorite sidewalk café in Greenwich. Kathy told me that she was still in love with me. She said that seeing me, even infrequently, was becoming too difficult for her. She told me that she had met someone back in Oregon and that they planned to get married that Christmas.” Adams stirred his drink with his finger and stared into the top of his glass.
“I remember Kathy saying that the guy she would marry ‘was no Jonathan Adams.’” He laughed. “She tried to explain to me how that was a curse and a blessing. Then she got up from the table, kissed me on the forehead, insisted on leaving five dollars for her coffee, and walked away.” He put his glass to his mouth and took a drink. “I’ve never seen or heard from her since.”
After pausing, Adams continued. “I had two affairs when we were married. They were back-to-back. One was with an undergraduate student; the other was with my thesis advisor. I killed what was left of Kathy and me,” he confessed. “I had no desire to get involved with either of those two women. They both pursued me. But I made it easy for them. Maplewood cursed me with an oversized need to be loved and admired. Both women pushed those buttons. For a few weeks I was someone special in an unprecedented way in someone’s life. The price I paid to feel that was god-awfully high. I crave that feeling. It’s addictive. I’m not sure I wouldn’t do it again—even knowing what it cost me.”
For a long time, we sat in silence on the deck. When Adams could no longer see lights at Christina’s house shining through the trees, he stopped drinking and went to bed.
*
Showered and shaved by eight in the morning, I was tugged downstairs to the kitchen by the smell of bacon and cinnamon buns. On my way by the bedroom mirror I checked to be sure the buttons on the collar of my denim shirt were fastened. There was surely company downstairs—someone who had happened by after I went to bed or early that morning—making Adams breakfast. He’d cooked oatmeal for me once, and sprinkled it with brown sugar and raisins. But every other breakfast I’d shared with him at his house was either dry cereal or served by one of his women.
I stood in the entry from the hallway to the kitchen, enjoying a sight as rare as the aurora borealis and almost as impressive.
The Sunday newspaper was spread over the tile-topped work counter. Four barstools were arranged around two sides of it. Adams was in an unfamiliar pose, bent over the stovetop, spatula in hand, dabbing at scrambled eggs cooking in a black iron skillet. As soon as he saw me, he picked up an empty plate. Before he handed it to me, he used it to point at a small mound of bacon strips and a pastry-filled cookie sheet, just out of the oven. It was my signal to fill half the plate and bring it back to him to fill the rest of it with his scrambled eggs peppered with fresh mushrooms.
“There’s milk and orange juice in the refrigerator. If you want coffee, you’ll have to make it yourself. Glasses and coffee mugs are in the cupboard next to the sink. While you’re up, would you get me some juice?”
In a few minutes we were sitting on barstools, opposite each other, busily devouring the newspaper and the food on our plates. Breakfast and a Sunday morning newspaper stifle conversation, especially among men. It always happens that way, even when good friends are only a few hours away from taking leave of each other. After a long silence, without looking up from the paper, Adams voiced a grunt of disgust.
He was reading a guest editorial written by a first-term Republican senator from Florida who was asserting that any president of the United States not fully supporting the junior senator’s version of what U.S. foreign policy should be was spineless and wrongheaded. Adams read parts of the editorial out loud to me. He wearily shook his head. “We’re six percent of the world’s population and arrogant enough to truly believe that our hopes and fears ought to be everybody in the world’s hopes and fears. Most people don’t think like we do. And damn few share our priorities.”
A grin came across my face. Adams had just translated the gibberish of our dysfunctional global society into a short, coherent observation. This from a man who didn’t know how to analyze, diagram, or explain the meaning of the simple sentence: “This is who I am.”
“Priorities imply choices, Tom,” he continued.
“And most people in the world don’t have the luxury of being able to make choices. They don’t have alternatives. That’s not just because their leaders prohibit them; their standard of living doesn’t make choices available. Our freedom of choice is what makes people want to live and work in the United States.”
I enjoyed listening to Adams talk passionately about things he believed in. I’d missed that for most of the past four days. Maybe that edge of him was starting to come back. I put down my part of the newspaper and gave him all of my attention.
“We Americans don’t realize that planning ahead and making choices has never been a regular part of most people’s day,” he continued. “Most of our politicians don’t have a clue that the rest of the world is wired to think differently than us.”
I looked at Adams, his eyes intently focused on the opinions section of the newspaper. He picked it up off the counter, bringing it closer to his face.
I tried to temper his remarks and provide some perspective. “Maybe it is better said that we Americans are programmed differently than t
he rest of the world.”
I made my comment in a purposely off-handed way, making the point that his words betrayed traces of arrogance lingering in his American soul, too.
“There are almost twenty-five of those differently wired people for every one of us,” I reminded him.
Adams pulled his face up from the newspaper and smiled at me. Then he buried his head in the newspaper again.
“Choices.” He said the word in a hard way, and paused for a second. “God, we’ve always had more than enough choices, haven’t we? I hate having to make them. They make me too deliberate. I need to project energy.”
“I beg to differ,” I replied. “It’s an honest matter of opinion about which does more damage to the human spirit—a lack of vitamins, or the complete surrender of choice.”
Adams laid the newspaper down on the kitchen counter and stared at me. “Is that an original thought?” he asked.
“What do you think? Is it black-book worthy?”
“It certainly is,” he said.
“Then I had better footnote it. I read it in a manuscript I edited last month. The book’s about Harry Hopkins, the New Dealer who ran welfare programs for Roosevelt during the Depression and was his confidante during World War Two. Hopkins said it, but I’ve often thought it.”
Adams laughed as he opened a drawer beneath the countertop and pulled out a pen. He wrote my quote on a paper napkin.
*
Two hours later, Adams drove me to the airport. When we passed Christina’s driveway, Hunter was at the end of it, collecting her newspaper from a green tube next to her mailbox. He waved. We courteously smiled back at him. The likelihood that within the next five minutes Christina would be lounging on her sofa, her feet in his lap, sharing the Sunday Star Tribune while sipping coffee he had made for them, destroyed any prospect of Adams’s involvement in a meaningful conversation for the next half hour. I spent the entire trip to the airport filibustering.
“Figure out if you’re in love with Christina. If you are, or if you’re trending that way, make a point to get together with her soon and tell her.”
I managed to phrase my message three different ways before we reached the airport.
I didn’t think it was my place to share details of the conversation I had had with Christina the night before. If she wanted Adams to hear what she’d said to me, her thoughts were best expressed by her, directly to him. All
I said to Adams was: “I think her door is still open a crack. You need to get your foot in—quickly, before it’s closed.”
Adams offered no response.
“I wrote down a couple of phone numbers on the back of one of my business cards where you can reach me in California this week if you need some bucking up. I left the card on your kitchen counter. You really ought to have a heart-to-heart with Christina sometime this week.”
The trip to the airport was the first time Adams had driven me anywhere while not exceeding the speed limit. When he dropped me curbside, in front of the door that opened to my airline’s ticket counter, he finally spoke.
“What you said has some merit. Maybe it’s time for me to learn how to do things a different way. I’ve got to shake this Iraq thing and get focused on something again.”
The possibility of his careful consideration of my argument, given his dismissal of it just days before, gave me reason to hope that he was about to make a serious attempt to deal with his corrosive, debilitating fear of rejection.
“It looks like I’ll have no plans for Thanksgiving this year. Let’s get together in New York,” Adams said as I pulled my bag from the backseat of his car. I told him that that sounded like a fine idea. But I wished hard for a call from Adams in mid-November asking to be excused from the commitment because he had made other plans—with Christina.
“I’ll let you know if Breech calls about that Florida golf vacation,” he added.
We shook hands in his front seat and said good-bye.
As I stepped to the curb and looked behind me, I noticed that Adams had left his car. When he got to where I was standing, he put his arms around me in a splendidly awkward and meaningful way. No words were spoken. He turned and walked back to his car.
As I took my first steps toward the ticket counters, Adams rolled down his passenger-side window and called my name. I turned around. He was stretched out over the Porsche’s front seat, his head almost outside the window.
“Hey, Tom—I’m awfully glad you came. ”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
We had just finished a Thursday morning meeting at Disney when one of the office assistants tapped me on the shoulder and told me I had a telephone call from Minnesota. I looked at my watch; it was one-thirty there. As I walked toward the nearest conference room with a telephone, I was grinning. Two people who passed me in the hallway returned my smile. Adams caused it, not them. But I was happy they misinterpreted it. I wanted to keep its source all for myself.
I was impressed that my friend had pursued my suggestion so soon after I had made it. I was happy things went well; I was sure they had. What I had advised Adams to do smashed against more than forty years of carefully honed tendencies. But what Christina had told me on Saturday night persuaded me that there would be hope in Adams’s voice that Thursday. I made a mental note to ask Adams about his Monday meeting with the FBI and the state police. I’d been tied up in non-stop negotiations about the publishing house’s sale since Monday morning. I intended to call Adams as soon as they were finished, if he hadn’t called me first.
I should have been surprised that he didn’t call me on my cell phone or at the hotel. But I gave it no thought as I picked up the telephone receiver.
I pressed the red blinking hold light and started the conversation: “Afternoon, Adams. What’s up?” But the voice on the other end wasn’t him. As I listened to the person who had called, my left hand holding the receiver began to shake. It shook so much that I felt it bouncing against my ear. My mouth went dry. The muscles in my face collapsed.
Jonathan Adams was dead.
A man who said his name was Sheriff John Michaels asked if it was possible for me to return to Minneapolis within the next day or two. He said he was in the beginning stages of a murder investigation. Because I had been with Adams much of the time between the Monday night shooting and his murder ten days later, he thought I might be able to help them determine what happened and identify suspects and a motive for the killing.
His voice was cold and dispassionate; it offered no sensitivity or compassion. I instantly disliked Sheriff Michaels.
“Murder investigation?” I asked. Emotion had drained from me, flushed out by shock. The strength in my legs deserted me. I fell into a chair next to the desk on which the telephone sat.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Walker. I’ve gotten ahead of myself. As you can probably understand, it’s a little hectic here today. The FBI is all over the place and I’m trying to clear up all the confusion they’re causing.”
There was a twinge of excitement in the way he talked. My dislike of Sheriff Michaels grew.
He explained that early that morning, the woman who came to Adams’s house every other Thursday to clean it had found his front door slightly opened. She thought it odd. When she pushed the door open further, it bumped against his body lying face up in the hallway. Michaels said that Adams’s next-door neighbor, Christina Peterson, to whose house the cleaning lady had run for help, had told him that I should be the first to know about what had happened. My business card with my California phone numbers written on the back of it was found on the kitchen countertop by one of Michaels’s deputies.
“I’ll be on the next plane,” I told him without hesitation. “I’ll try to be at your office early this evening.”
I got Christina’s telephone number from directory assistance. I called her, and the phone rang for a long time. No one picked up and her answering machine didn’t engage.
I accepted a generous offer from Disney to fly me back on one of their corporate jets.
*
Disney’s plane returned me to Minnesota in the same amount of time as the drive from Pine Lake Lodge to Adams’s house five days before. I used part of my time in flight to make a list of what had to be done when someone dies unexpectedly: call Adams’s sisters, find his will, secure his house and his personal things. I numbly fell back on what I had learned when Maggie had her accident. I called the sheriff’s department from a phone on the plane and made arrangements with the sheriff to be picked up at the airport by a uniformed officer. I spent the rest of the flight thinking about Maggie and Adams and Christina Peterson. I watched barren Nevada and Utah, the snow-capped Rocky Mountains, and the browning Great Plains disappear beneath the sloped wings of my jet. I thought about the violent ends that had come to everyone who had ever lived on Adams’s property. I cursed his house.
I was slipping from rationality into a dark, churning whirlpool of senselessness. There was nothing around me that I could grab onto to stop my slide. I worried about how Christina was handling the news. I wished I hadn’t told the sheriff that I would head directly to his office when I landed in Minneapolis. I needed to grieve. I knew I could only do that effectively in Christina’s company.
Minneapolis was still an hour away. I was having a very hard time comprehending that my best friend, Jonathan Adams, was dead. I struggled mightily, trying to figure out what had happened. My grief turned to anger. I directed all of it on Islam, Muslim fundamentalists, and Iraq. Surely if Adams had never gone to Iraq he wouldn’t have been killed.