Chapter 57: Rock Bottom

April 25, 1993, Chicago, Illinois

“I wasn’t sure you’d show up,” Bethany said when she let me into the apartment.

“I need to talk,” I said. “And Kara agreed with me.”

“I’m hoping this is one of those ‘I talk better after I make love’ talks,” Bethany smirked.

“Yes, if by ‘make love’ you mean my way - slow and sweet. No claw marks like that day in the apartment!”

Bethany smiled, clearly remembering, “No claw marks, I promise. Let me finish Nicholas’ bedtime routine, you can read to him, and then you and I can spend time together.”

Bethany helped Nicholas brush his teeth, made sure he used the toilet, and gave him a drink of water. When she took him into his bedroom, I followed, and watched as she tucked him into bed.

“What am I reading, Champ?” I asked.

“Go, Dog. Go!“ he said.

I looked at the shelf full of Doctor Seuss and other ‘Beginner Books’ and selected the volume. It wasn’t my favorite - I preferred Fox in Sox, which was also Jesse’s favorite. Matthew’s favorite was Are You My Mother?. Birgit’s was Hop on Pop. It was funny how each of the kids had selected a different favorite book.

“Dog. Big dog. Little dog,” I began as Nicholas snuggled under his blanket.

About ten minutes later, I concluded with, “I like that party hat! Goodbye! Goodbye!“

I bent down and kissed Nicholas on the forehead, returned the book the shelf, turned off the light, and closed his door. I joined Bethany, who was sitting on the couch. She handed me a glass of bourbon.

“How do you find time to do that with seven kids of your own?” she asked.

“Jesse reads to himself now. It’s a point of honor for him!” I chuckled. “And just like Jesse, Matthew has all the books memorized, so he can ‘read’ to himself, though now that his first year of school is almost done, he’s doing OK at reading his ‘picture’ books. For the others, either I read to all the girls, or like Birgit, I’ll read to her early in the morning when we cuddle.”

“You’ve done an amazing job with those kids. They’re lucky to have you for a dad. And Nicholas is lucky to have you as ‘Uncle Steve’. And I’m lucky to have you as my best friend.”

I smiled, “Just friends?”

“Friend and lover.”

“What about Tom?” I asked.

“That’s a good question. If I didn’t have Nicholas, things would be different. But now, instead of looking for a boyfriend, or lover, or husband, I’m looking for a dad for my son. It’s a very strange feeling.”

“A dad?” I asked.

“What would YOU want if you came into my life that way? Think about it.”

I nodded, “I’d want to be a dad to Nicholas. Not to replace Nick, but still be a dad.”

“Exactly. I don’t know if Tom is that guy or not. And until I’m sure, I’m not making any commitments.”

“Nicholas likes him,” I said.

“He does, but it takes time. I need to see what kind of man Tom really is. It’s not just me at this point.”

“That makes a lot of sense,” I said.

“You didn’t come here to talk about me. You came to talk about Jessica.”

“I did,” I said.

“Then, I suppose we need to get on with it,” she giggled.

“Bethany Michelle Krajick! If that’s what you think about sex with me, I think I’ll go home!”

She laughed and stood up. She pulled her sweater over her head revealing a purple lace teddy.

“Purple? Seriously?” I laughed, remembering how she’d done that so often in High School. “And that necklace? Your eighteenth birthday gift from me?”

“I have some very wonderful memories from High School! A few painful ones, but mostly wonderful ones!”

“I still like purple!” I grinned.

“Oh, I know!” Bethany said with a smile, holding out her hands.

I hadn’t noticed the purple fingernail polish. I looked down, and her toenails had the same color applied.

“Now, just dye your hair purple...” I chuckled.

“I hadn’t thought of that!” she laughed. “But I did shave for you! Just like Prom!”

“Bethany, what’s going on?”

“I have a role to play; one Kara can’t. I believe the parallel is obvious!”

“Jennifer going to Stanford? I had a different parallel in mind when I decided to come see you.”

“Shall we do that thing we’ve always been VERY good at?” Bethany smirked. “Then we can talk.”

“Like Prom?” I teased.

“No, just love me. That’s what you said you needed. Then we can talk.”

I took my favorite Milford cheerleader in my arms and kissed her softly. I scooped her up from the couch and carried her to her bed where we made love, gloriously, for an hour, before cuddling together. I remembered something Bethany had said to me at Prom.

“So, is the new ‘New Steve’ a better lover than that ‘New Steve’ at Prom?” I teased when our breathing returned to normal.

“Mr. Adams, if there are two people who are more sexually in tune with each other, I don’t know who they are!”

“Not me and Jennifer?” I asked.

“You’d need a vagina for that to be true,” Bethany said with a smile.

I laughed. That was both true and not true. But, at this point, that was ancient history and looked to stay that way for the rest of our lives.

“Kara?” I asked.

Bethany laughed, “Nobody on this PLANET is sexually in tune with Kara! And your eldest daughter seems to be cut from the same cloth!”

“She’s five, Bethany!” I protested.

“Tell me I’m wrong!”

“You aren’t,” I chuckled. “She’s going to be a holy terror.”

“That she is. Are you ready to talk about Jessica?”

“Sweetheart, I just want you to listen, please,” I said.

“Always,” Bethany said.

I took a deep breath and blew it out.

“I was thinking, yesterday and today, about the situation with Jessica and it reminded me of something I’d encountered once before. A driven, determined young woman who put her career first and everything else was a distant second, or worse. And actually, I encountered it again, recently, but with a much different outcome. The first one I was thinking about was Katt Sundström. The most recent one would be Samantha Spurgeon.

“I went back and reread my journals from Sweden, though I skipped a lot. A few things stood out, but the most important thing was something that Pia said about Katt - that Katt was a scared, lonely little girl who let her ambitions rule her life. At that point, Katt was fourteen, I guess. I’d met her when she was thirteen, and despite her determined efforts, she didn’t get me for five months.”

Bethany laughed, “Typical Steve Adams!”

“Shush, you!” I chuckled. “Anyway, I saw her struggles, pitting what she wanted against what she needed against her ambitions, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. When we were in Sweden, and I could spend most weekends with her, she was handling things fairly well. When she and Mikael came to the US to train, she was just as needy, but I wasn’t available in the way I had been.

“What finally clued me in was her request to make love to her forever, so that she never had to let me go. It was right then that I knew she was so needy that nothing I could do would fill that need. She’d had no real friends, and no real relationships. She had nothing but her ambition.

“In the end, I helped her by showing her a solution which she’d rejected because of her ambitions. She thought the best way to keep Mikael under control was by denying him a relationship. The problem was, she was also denying herself a relationship. One that worked perfectly, given the insane demands on ice skaters. That helped her see past her ambition, and form a lasting relationship.

“I had a lengthy discussion with myself in my journal about Katt, wondering if I could see myself with someone like her. One thing I wrote really hit me - that I probably couldn’t because while her drive and determination were admirable, she needed a bit of balance. And even more, she couldn’t provide me the emotional support I would need. It would have been a one-way street.

“Now, granted, once she and Mikael got together, I saw something very different. But the fact remained; I wasn’t part of her world and couldn’t be a part of her world in a meaningful way. Oh sure, I could have tried to be the ‘kept’ man, following her around the circuit, having fantastic sex, seducing every female skater I could with her blessing, but in the end, Katt wasn’t a partner in the way I needed one.

“I told her that, right before I sent her to Mikael. She’d told me she wanted a relationship with me, but I knew her internal conflict - being a top ice dancer and winning competitions versus falling in love with me and having a long-term relationship. And I told her that she was the only person who could fix it. I couldn’t fix it for her. And that’s when, after quite a bit of internal debate, she decided I was right about her and Mikael.”

“And that worked out,” Bethany said. “They even have a baby to show for it!”

“Yes, they do!” I grinned. “But do you see the parallels? One thing I didn’t say to Katt, and I am very glad that I didn’t, was that her first true love was herself and that until she put someone else first in her heart, she’d never have a successful relationship. Well, she could have all the sex she could handle, and have a friend, but never have a soulmate.

“I remember telling Karin about Katt as well, saying Katt was so driven and determined to achieve her goal of being an international ice dance champion that she had wrecked the rest of her life, at least as I saw it. On the outside, she was a confident, driven young woman. On the inside she was a scared little girl who craved a relationship which she believed her goal simply didn’t allow.

“That made me think about my own needs. In that context, at the time, when I was with Karin in Stockholm, I realized that many of MY relationships had been one-way, and that’s why they didn’t really work. For example, with Joyce and Pia, I was taking, with Katt and Becky I was giving. With you, I was giving. Remember, this was before Senior year. Jennifer and I had a stormy relationship, alternating between giving and taking. That wasn’t finally fixed until we had Jesse. And we stopped making love.

“You once told me that Jennifer was my whole life, the anchor to my person. And there’s some truth to that. You said we’d grow old together, and we will, but not in the way you meant it when we were back at Milford High. It’s funny, but the most stable relationship I’ve had since I graduated from college has been with Jennifer, and we aren’t lovers. The connection is still there; it always has been. The only time we don’t feel it is when one of us feels the need to turn it off.

“I’ll also point out that our shared visions established you as the person to take care of me for the rest of our lives, and if we believe yours, we’ll die together in very old age. And I can see that, Sweetheart. I can see you and me taking care of each other for another sixty or seventy years, always there for each other.”

Bethany smiled, “She said we’d both come, but she never answered my question of whether we’d be together.”

“And yet, here we are. Anyway, going back to Katt, there are serious parallels to her with Samantha. She’s another driven, determined young woman who put her ambition first. She started a relationship with me because of that ambition, but quickly discovered what she’d been missing all along. Her struggle was somewhat different - did she want me as a dad or as a lover? It was a close thing, but in the end, she went for me as a lover.

“And it was the relationship with me that drew her out of that state of pure ambition. One of the reasons I insisted that she live like us, at least more or less, was to show her a different, simpler life. I think she’s learned from that, and like Abbie, has discovered love. And that discovery has changed everything for her, much as it did for Abbie. Samantha is not the same person who decided to seduce me and make me her lover any more than Abbie is the same person who seduced me in Albany.”

“It’s not difficult!” Bethany giggled. “You’re putty in the hands of those little girls!”

“Shush!” I said with a smile. “That’s not the issue here, though I do want to talk to you about that after we finish this discussion.”

“Discussion? Sounds like a monologue so far.”

“It is. It needs to be. What happened with Jessica has caused me to do some serious soul searching, which led me back to the situation with Katt. But it also made me think of something you said during our Senior year.”

“That I just had to eliminate all the competition, and then I could have you for myself!” she giggled.

“Not THAT thing, Sweetheart! And you and I need to talk about us, too. But one problem at a time.”

“Problem?” Bethany asked, moving up to look me in the eyes.

“Issue?” I asked.

“Better.”

“Challenge?”

“Perfect,” she smiled.

“What I was referring to was something you said about the difficulties I was having with my mom, and what I was contemplating with Stephanie. You told me that I was trying to get Stephanie’s approval as a substitute for my mom’s approval. You warned me that it wouldn’t work. You said having sex with Stephanie was at least partly about keeping her approval. And you also warned me that it wasn’t going to fix anything. And then you said something that has come to pass.”

“Jesus,” Bethany breathed. “I told you I thought if your relationship with Stephanie fell apart, it would destroy you, and at that time, I was sure it was true.”

“Yes. Do you see how all these threads tie together?”

“Yes. And you wrote about this exact thing, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” I sighed. “I worried that making love with Stephanie would change us in unpredictable ways and could make a complete mess of everything. I worried it could be the complete ruin of our relationship, driving us apart, never to be close again. That was what I feared. That was my deep-seated concern.”

“And that came to pass, though not for a long time afterwards.”

“We THOUGHT everything was OK. We were wrong. I hurt her so badly. And I’m sure you remember you and the girls warning me about messing up my relationship with Stephanie; how doing anything that broke that relationship would have disastrous consequences. Well, it sure as hell did. I wrote that I was afraid of what might happen, that I might destroy the most important relationship I had. How I felt nobody could replace my sister in my life.

“I even told Stephanie I had a deep-seated fear that making love with her would change us in ways that we couldn’t predict or control. And it did. And here we are, with my wife estranged from me, and a sister I barely see or speak to. Even after she burned that damned towel, we’re still pretty much estranged and I’m afraid to even try to put the pieces back together.

“Part of that was because of Jessica’s reaction, and part of it was because of my own fears. The thing is, since Stephanie had her meltdown, ALL of my connections have been off. Something is interfering with the signal, like static on the radio or ghosts on the television. I feel that with you, Sweetheart, but more importantly with Jennifer. And with Stephanie, it’s like somebody turned the transmitter off or turned on a jammer.

“So here I am, when everything seemed to be stable, seemed to be moving in the right direction, and there was no drama, finding rock bottom again. And I’m not sure what to do. I’m not sure what I can do. Sure, I need to be a good husband to Kara, and a good father to my kids, and a good friend and businessman, but there are major problems which need to be addressed which I have no idea how to approach.

“I want to go back to your comment about the role you’re playing. That Spring, in 1981, Kara took second chair to Jennifer, and willingly stepped aside for her. She did that for Jessica, too, though the parallels aren’t as close as Jessica and Katt. I suppose Jennifer telling me she was going to Stanford was, in effect, like Jessica leaving me, so I can see why you felt you were in that same role.”

“Yes. You did say Kara sent you to me.”

I smiled, “She did. I think she’s at her wits’ end with me, and with Jessica.”