Byron's Lane Page 9

  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:

  your slightest look easily will unclose me

  though i have closed myself as fingers,

  you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens

  (touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose

  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.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  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 t
hey 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.