Byron's Lane (10 page)

Agreement arose among those who offered opinions that Congress was hopelessly dysfunctional and incapable of playing a useful role in the process. His class decided that the president and his advisors should make war policy and all of the decisions associated with it. Matters like going to war had to be considered and acted upon quickly.

Anna was overwhelmed. Adams jumped into the debate to try to save her.

“How do we hold the president responsible if he makes a bad decision? How do we change course before we’re forced to deal with the disaster he’s created?”

A young man sitting next to the senate president responded: “If the president screws up, we won’t reelect him. If we don’t want to wait until the next election, or if he’s in his second term and can’t run for president again, we impeach him.”

A few grunts of support rumbled through the room. Buoyed by the favorable response, the student elaborated: “Given the Monica Lewinsky thing back in the nineties, impeaching a president doesn’t seem that difficult to do.” A third of the class nodded in agreement.

A young man sitting close to me spoke for the first and only time. “If the president’s action produced a bad outcome or caused a bad unintended consequence, people probably wouldn’t be able to figure that out, because the problem is probably too complex to be explained in simple terms. Besides, the president controls the microphone. Anyway, most people will have forgotten about the issue in a month or two.”

The student senate president jumped back into the discussion. “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there, does it make a noise?”

Half the class laughed. I could almost hear Adams suck air into his lungs through his suddenly wide-open mouth, as if the class had collectively punched him in the stomach.

Anna, Adams’s comely education major, spoke next. “I wrote my class paper about Ronald Reagan’s presidency. His foreign and economic policies are the source of a lot of our problems today. Hardly anybody realizes the mess he made of things because it can’t be explained in two minutes, or in one- and two-syllable words. And even if somebody could, nobody wants to listen. It’s old news. My dad thinks Ronald Reagan’s face should be carved on Mount Rushmore. And every year that passes, he believes that more and more. So I guess you guys are right.”

The color drained from Adams’s face. His apprentice had deserted him. Worse, she’d used what he had taught her as her rationale for capitulating.

Adams once confided in me that his passion for teaching was too much driven by his eagerness to work with an audience of malleable minds. He told me he had to work hard at checking his impulse to lead a discussion rather than facilitate one. His body language shouted that he was struggling to suppress his instincts. Lucky for him, he was saved by the bell.

The debate was abruptly ended by the sound chairs make on wooden floors when they’re pushed back from a table. Time was up. Class was over.

Most of Adams’s students had escaped the requirement of answering a direct question or offering an opinion during the free-range discussion that had consumed the class period. The silent ones gratefully marched out the door and into the hallway, knowing there were only nine more Fridays left in the semester.

Adams and I were the only people left in the room. It was suddenly as silent as an empty warehouse.

“What just happened here?” he asked me across bare tables and scattered chairs.

“All I can think of is my favorite Daniel Moynihan quote,” I answered. “‘Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.’”

I shook my head, shrugged my shoulders, and we smiled at each other. Adams had just bumped up hard against further evidence that he was becoming an anachronism. He laughed out loud as he packed a dog-eared copy of the Constitution and his notes and a textbook into his black canvas daypack. He was a step away from being completely out the door before I could grab my jacket. I hurriedly followed him out of the building and chased him across the quadrangle.

The colloquium at which Adams was scheduled to make a presentation was a good walk across the campus and had already begun.

Sorenson Hall was the largest building on the university’s west bank. It housed the College of Business Administration and all its graduate studies programs. It was an imposing six-floor gray-green glass box, wedged onto the edge of a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. The loud echoes our first steps made on the polished gray tile floor as we crossed its sprawling lobby announced our late entrance.

The colloquium had started at ten o’clock. It was quarter past ten when Adams opened one of the lecture hall’s double doors and rushed down the right-side aisle of the amphitheater to take his chair at the table in its pit. I picked up a one-page program from an empty desk pushed just inside the room and slipped into an aisle seat in the back.

The title of the event was “A Symposium on American Foreign Policy Since the 9/11 Terrorist Attacks”—so read the canary-colored sheet of paper that I held in my hands. Adams had campaigned hard to be a presenter, and had even written a paper on the subject. But he wasn’t officially invited to be a speaker until after a shorter, reader-friendly version of his research paper was published as an op-ed piece in the
Washington Post
. Adams’s graduate degrees were in public administration, not international studies, history, or political science. The academicians who organized the symposium claimed he wasn’t qualified to talk about American foreign policy. An editorial in the university’s student newspaper and a robust national response to his
Washington Post
article forced the university’s political science and history faculties—the event’s sponsors—to add another chair at the front table.

Thanks to the dust-up surrounding Adams’s inclusion on the panel, attendance at the colloquium was twice as large as expected. Three of the faculty members at the head table shifted uncomfortably in their seats and scowled as they watched Adams try to sneak down the terraced aisle to the front of the room without drawing attention away from the session’s first speaker.

Adams could only stay long enough for his twenty-minute presentation and the designated question-and-answer period that followed it. He would have preferred to be able to participate in every aspect of the program, but his calendar was full that Friday. He was due back at his campus office by noon to keep appointments he had made weeks before with two of his graduate students.

Adams’s presentation was a critical analysis of the tortuous political justification for preemptive military incursions in foreign countries charged with harming the United States or threatening its interests. It was a critique of America’s tendency to support despots and dictators because they provide stability, security, and sustainable partnerships. His argument was mostly a moral one, buttressed by historical case studies of good intentions gone badly. In the end, he asked the panel and the audience to consider one question: “If the long look of history has judged our efforts to affect regime change in Latin America and Africa arrogant misadventures and political fiascos, why will history, fifty years from now, look differently at our attempts to do the same thing in the Middle East?”

Adams’s
Washington Post
piece had ended with the same question. I leaned forward in my seat, folding my arms on the back of the empty theater chair in front of me, expecting the same kind of thoughtful response his guest editorial had generated.

I was disappointed; so was Adams, judging from a frown on his face that he held for the next fifteen minutes, the entirety of his presentation’s scheduled discussion period.

Student and faculty radicals enthusiastically embraced what Adams had said. They painted his presentation as an indictment of America’s “endemic imperialistic tendencies—consistently evident in U.S. history since the run-up to the Spanish-American War.” All four of the people who offered that opinion used the same phraseology in statements they masqueraded as questions. Adams was afforded no time to respond.

“Let’s see if we can get back to the presentation,” the session’s moderator directed, after the last “questioner” concluded his remarks.

An equal number of conservatives in the audience made opposing assertions. The endorsements from the Left had made Adams’s conclusions easy to mislabel and criticize—never mind that the conservatives, like the liberals, had to twist his premise to prove their point.

An old man in the audience wearing a bowtie stood up and raised his hand. Adams pointed to him.

“Your observations are laden with moral relativism and a typical 1960s ‘Blame America first’ analysis of current events,” the man announced. Scattered applause splashed through the audience. The man sat down.

A faculty member from the economics department spoke next.

“Dr. Adams, need I remind you that the world is vastly different now than it was before September 11? Historical lessons don’t apply anymore. The United States is in the middle of what’s likely to be a never-ending war on terror. That needs to be acknowledged.”

One of the tenured doctors of philosophy in attendance questioned whether Adams’s academic credentials and job experience qualified him to be taken seriously. She made no reference to his presentation.

No one asked Adams to expand upon his points. I counted seven statements made and no questions asked. After the chairman of the history department ended the morning’s discussion and declared the meeting adjourned for an early lunch, Adams wearily climbed the amphitheater’s steps.

Outside in the warm sunshine, a hot-dog vendor had his cart set up on the edge of a parking lot, just beyond the extending shadow of Sorenson Hall. Sitting under an old maple tree, my back up against its wide trunk, we ate a quick lunch: two hot dogs, a shared bag of Fritos, and two Diet Pepsis. Cross-legged on the grass, facing me, Adams admitted that he was disappointed that no one asked him to elaborate on the points he’d tried to make in his presentation. Still, he was confident that the theme of his presentation had not been lost in the rarified air of the lecture hall. “I’m fairly sure my remarks will inspire some thoughtful analysis during the colloquium’s afternoon session,” he said, cautiously adding, “I wish I could be there—just to make sure my point of view isn’t misrepresented.”

I quietly consumed my food without sharing my opinion. I suspected that his forty-page paper had been scrutinized by his detractors and his supporters like it was scripture from the Bible’s Book of Revelation. His words and ideas were just as likely to be used to support wildly divergent points of view as they were to provoke a thoughtful discussion. It was best that Adams not have to witness the free-for-all.

After twenty minutes, we struggled to our feet, placed our garbage carefully on top of an overflowing waste can, and headed off in the general direction of Adams’s campus office. Between smiles and hellos to and from students and faculty members, we lamented the morning’s happenings.

“There was something important missing from your class discussion today,” I said, “and a Grand Canyon full of misinterpretation of your remarks at the symposium. When people make decisions today, do they understand that they need to be accountable for the consequences? Do you think those kinds of considerations play a role in the decision-making process anymore?”

Adams’s answer came fast. “Do we really have to be accountable anymore, Tom? Like my class said, we focus on fixing the problem—and fixing it fast. Consequences and accountability only matter when the fix doesn’t work.”

He paused before continuing. “We’ve been doing things that way since our Byron’s Lane days. Baby Boomers expect to be defined and measured by their job and the social standing it provides them. Both depend on how effective we are as decision makers. It’s tangled up in how we’re wired. But I agree with you, Tom,” he concluded. “There were a lot of essentials missing in both those debates.”

I barely heard Adams laugh. He was getting ahead of me. I had to walk faster.

When we were side by side again, he continued: “I’ll bet we’ll be able to say these same kinds of things about the conversations you’ll be privy to this weekend at the resort up north. By the end of the day, you and I won’t have been exposed to anything we haven’t seen reported or heard discussed on TV news and radio talk shows. And that’s too bad.”

Adams looked straight ahead as he walked. It was as if he were talking to the buildings that surrounded us rather than me. He speeded up his walk again, bounding up the steps of the impressive century-old ivy-covered building that housed his office. Barely getting inside before the door he had swung open had closed on me, I ran up a flight of stairs behind him, gasping for air by the time I got to the place where the stairs emptied into the middle of a dark hallway.

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.

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 herself 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.