A Map of Tulsa (17 page)

I liked Lydie, enough to fight with her. Obviously she didn’t get her niece. It was adolescent to say so. But if Lydie was going to judge what happened to Adrienne so permanently tragic I could at least establish how worthwhile in the first place Adrienne was. Adrienne was great. Great not as a raw estimate of worth but as a specific virtue: greatness. Lydie, a woman of means and connections, might have appreciated what I meant: something about Adrienne’s self-possession, her boldness. Adrienne taught us how to
use time
. But then again Lydie may not have realized how much time someone like me, with my special little record of achievement, had wasted.

The beginning of time say is middle school. A huge blasted cratered wasteland of an area. For me literally a wide windswept derelict parking lot, where for three years I waited every morning for the bus. I found myself
at the bus stop each morning as if newly created, solitary, blinking in the darkness. The material of the backpack was cold and plastic, my jeans were cold, my socks felt cottony and coarsely knit. The other kids waited under an awning at one end of a long, stadium-sized parking lot: every morning I was dropped off at the opposite end, and started across. I didn’t romanticize it, but trudged across, with neither presence of mind nor interest. The winter wind built up across the lot and opened up the sky. I kept my head down: I studied the tar, the differently flaked patches. Cars would well up at the light behind me, and then I would hear them drain away.

It was the most muted time in my life, and everything that I then expected—sex, music, some kind of heroism—seemed to jostle behind it like a curtain. I found nothing to say to my schoolmates. Nor they to me. Our awning belonged to an abandoned movie theater; we stood spaced out one person to each pole. Eventually I made friends with Jamie Livingstone, and we two started to stand at the same pole. We weren’t very
good
friends: Jamie bobbed his head in his headphones. I guess he tried to stay upbeat, but we didn’t talk much, and I never knew what was going on in his life, though we were friends for years. I remember that his T-shirts were all made of cheap heavyweight material and hung stiffly from his shoulders. For a while he wore a string necklace with a yin-yang symbol on it, but I never asked him about it.

Each day, when the school bus appeared at the far intersection, we all filed out from under the awning and lined up on the curbside grass. We squinted to confirm the bus number, 286, stenciled above the bus’s front
window; and in the event that a strange bus stopped we stood there to parley with it, like members of a little village. We didn’t get on without checking. It was our experience that substitute bus drivers often went sailing off course and dragged our schedules to pieces. Then we arrived at school late and had to go into the office and demand clemency. We would excoriate the bus driver in front of the assistant principal. Jamie was not a natural leader, but in these situations, and at the bus stop, he often was our spokesman. He seemed to know what his rights were. He was good at talking to bus drivers.

He took a worried interest in me, quizzing me about bands, and you could see in this and in other things the influence of his parents, and what they took seriously. Jamie could be almost grim: Have you heard of such-and-such band? And do you like them? I had not heard of, in most cases. My parents did not teach me such things. To know already, as Jamie did, would have been to enter life somehow tutored. Jamie would hand over the CDs he lent me as soon as I stepped under the awning, taking the jewel case quickly from his bag, expecting me to slip it into mine. I always wanted to take some time to study the cover. Jamie would toss his hair out of his eyes impatiently. Only when I got my own private seat on the bus could I take the CD out and read the lyrics. Once we got to school Jamie and I seldom talked together. I think he had a hard time. Was I ever disloyal to him? Of course.

Way up in the penthouse, though, with Adrienne Booker, I sometimes thought of Jamie. I wondered what
that guy was doing. There had never been much to say, or to remember: being the so-called fag patrol. What Jamie and I had experienced in middle school was at best a kind of numbness. But it was different than the storied humiliation of boys’ schools—oh, we might have loved that. We read books about stuff like that—or about dragons and sorcery—and held them up over our eyes so we wouldn’t have to look at our pretty classmates.

When Adrienne Booker waggled out of her skirt, she seemed so straight, like an arrow lodged forever in her own layer of reality. She paced across the room so I would have to watch: up on tiptoe she leaned towards me and smiled and let her khaki skirt fall. She was just having fun. She didn’t know, like I did, how unlikely she was. Perhaps this was why our relationship failed: that I never told her how much I relished the irony. That there was an angle on our love I could share only with someone like Jamie Livingstone. When Adrienne sat Indian-style across from me and said first we had to stare at each other for five minutes as a prerequisite to touching, I knew then that the fog of boyhood would never again touch my brain. She was the most palpable person I had ever met. Her body was so much heavier than it looked, there was always so much of it lengthwise. I sometimes thought I might get her sitting partway up on a pillow so that she extended in three dimensions like a jack. She would simply undo my pants, or would stand up in the bed and tear my shirt off over my head. I remember she always tried to undress me first. Except in the mornings, when we were blessed with a kind of neoclassical
convenience, being already naked: We often woke up talking. A clarity I’ve never had with anyone else. Adrienne always made me speak precisely, and even reviewed me: Was that the lintel over there, or the doorjamb? I was expected to put a word to my feelings, to explain and explain. I had told her I was a poet, after all. It had been her way of encouraging me; she tried to get out of my way so I could verbalize. I preferred to touch her. In bed it was limb limb, the pleasure of the awkwardness of her two long legs, trying to steer them down and upside down was more rapid and communicative than anything she would ever want me to repeat afterwards. I squeezed, to emphasize: my happiness was much more than I could say.

What about someone like Jamie? He could drive down 169 to the movies, or buy a CD at Best Buy. He could complain about what they played on the radio. He never heard about local bands, and he seldom had cause to go downtown. He could find some friends, presumably, but without resources—without venues—all they could do was compare notes and talk about foreign movies. Like spies who had heard rumors of the world.

Jamie was left out. And I almost had been too. Adrienne lived in a certain world, and if its borders did not exactly correspond to downtown, they nonetheless existed, and I wanted to stomp my foot on that border and declare, This division exists. I have crossed it.

So when Lydie compelled me to defend Adrienne, saying that Adrienne should have gone to college and that that would have been saving herself, and I was tempted to say in response how much Adrienne’s glamour meant to
me, how brinkmanlike it was and fierce, I desisted only because I despaired of explaining. You cannot seriously say that you love someone because they are cool or argue about “being cool” as if it was a value—one that trumps education. It isn’t done.

Lydie assumed that people like me merely walked up a ramp into her proximity, happy to rise. But I did it for the girls. Nothing Lydie assumed—about college, about New York, about New York magazines—accounted for the romanticism that brought it all up so sharp to my senses. I had whetted my own appetite. Lydie could never fathom that period of years when I wasn’t even hungry yet and was just trudging through, learning band trivia from Jamie—who now apparently had a bone disease. And was in a hospital himself, elsewhere in this city. Another irony just for me. The real world was bestowing its rewards, at least on those who had stayed in Tulsa. But Adrienne remained a thing in my head to grip, a staff and a standard. Someone to swim for, a hero.

Rod met us in the lobby. “Her friends are with her,” he explained. I made an effort to finish my hamburger. Dashing upstairs I almost tripped, but once I reached the sixth floor I veered past Adrienne’s door (I heard their voices) and walked a loop through the ward.

I had been thinking about calling my parents. I would proudly tell them I was back in Tulsa. Though I wouldn’t be able to tell them why: they would think it crazy that I had come back after five years to tend to this particular girlfriend. There was a window bay down the corridor, and I could picture myself standing there calling them, looking out over South Tulsa in the direction of Texas. But what would it even mean to my parents, to hear that I was back in Tulsa? It would seem like a bitter act. As if I resented them leaving here. Was that the case? I wondered.

Neurology had its own good-sized lounge, with a TV and an array of couches, and I decided to wait there. Among the ill-slept families sitting through the painful
afternoon I observed a young man talking on the phone, sitting with his ankles crossed, in cargo pants. It sounded like he was on the phone with his wife: “…nope, nope. Tell them. Mmhm. For supper.”

And then I heard him mention Adrienne.

“Are you friends with that girl in there?” I asked, sitting down next to him as soon as he hung up.

“I’m sorry?”

“Her—I guess paralysis?” I said. “It’s terrible.”

“Oh, she’s going to be okay.
They’re goin’ to do a surgery in the mornin’
.” He said it in a croaky, singsong voice—as if it was
a hangin’ in the mornin’
.

I pulled my pants fabric straight on my lap. “Yeah, that’s what I heard.”

His name was Nic. He was a natural gossip. He told me that Adrienne had been up at Bartlesville on the night of the accident. That explained why she ended up out here by the highway, rather than at one of the midtown hospitals.

Nic worked in a reference to Albert’s barn as “our friend’s personal recording studio.”

“Right. So she was recording?”

No. She was drinking. And afterwards, when she came out to get on her motorcycle, young Nic was there on the patio. He told her not to drive. He was high—but he could see she wasn’t fit to drive. He had been sitting out there reading the stars, that night. Mars was out. “I thought that would get through to her.”

As Nic talked, a fit young woman exiting the elevator walked past in the direction of Adrienne’s room.
I thought it was Kim Wheel—a grown-up Kim Wheel. From that point on, half my attention was down the hall.

“So you know Adrienne pretty well?” I casually asked.

Nic shrugged.

“She’s hard to know,” I offered.

“Wait—you know her?”

“Well yeah.”

“I was under the impression that you didn’t know her.”

He was almost offended. I enjoyed the moment. But I asked him to go on, to tell me what had happened.

He obliged: Adrienne wrecked on Albert’s own private drive.

“Was it paved? I don’t remember.”

He cut his eyes at me. “Uh, Albert had it redone. That’s the thing. He shortened it, and got the turnoff from the highway changed. So she went straight when she should have turned.”

“She drove straight off the road?”

“Yes sir.”

“Oh, God.” It pained me that Adrienne had made such a definite mistake. I had been assigning the fault to another car, some moron behind a long hood.

“On a motorcycle,” Nic said, “when you know you’re going too fast into a turn, you have to make a decision. You either commit, and lean into the turn that much harder, or you straighten up. The key with motorcycles is you’ve got to look into a turn, you’ve got to see a line through the turn. If you straighten up though you do
have maximum braking potential, and that’s what Adrienne may have been thinking. But if she’d really laid the bike down…”

She would not have gone flying through the air. He went on about technical details, but what moved me was the fact she’d been following the old road. Adrienne had been on a kind of autopilot in her head.

“So the crash was technically off-road,” Nic concluded. “She hit an old tree stump and flipped her vehicle.” I bent my wrist forward as it was explained to me, flattening the back of my hand on the table in front of us so that my elbow popped forward: Adrienne flew into the air.

Nic had actually been down there before work this morning, to look for skid marks. I was impressed.

“There weren’t any marks?”

“No. Anyway, if she had braked, I would have heard it.”

“You were close enough?”

“I was the one who called the ambulance. She was only fifty yards down the drive. I heard a crash, and started running. Once I saw the vehicle I had my phone out.”

I wished I had been with him, running in the dark. I stared. “Thank you,” I said.

He looked at me.

“Was she wearing a helmet?” I asked.

“Adrienne? That’s not really her style.”

“No. I guess not.” I was stung.

Those from Adrienne’s room were now flushed out. I looked for Edith. The whole group was mostly strangers—but Jenny Mayhew walked at their head—and never let a
Sunday school teacher tell you otherwise, it is often a great thing to have slept with a person. I found the courage to rise from my chair and greet her. And here was Kim Wheel, the announcements reader. She stopped in her tracks. “Jim Praley.”

Six or seven years out of high school, Kim and I no longer knew how to rate each other. I guess we were friends, slightly. She was shaking my hand quite sympathetically; she was skinnier than she used to be. She had been getting sun, I observed. The skin on her collarbones was spotted.

She and Jenny both sat down.

In chaos, a few polite questions were asked: Kim was applying to medical school next year, and for now was getting a premed certificate at the OU extension campus. And Jenny was getting her bachelor’s—Jenny hadn’t aged at all. Her red mouth smacked, her eyes forever evaluated and stared, amazed. She flicked her hair off her shoulders every time she was about to speak. But her level speech, which had sounded seriously childish when she was fifteen, fit her now, and seemed earned.