A Map of Tulsa (19 page)

“I wish she was.”

“But she’s like Lydie. Definitely more than she would admit.”

“I heard that Lydie is going to like give Adrienne to some doctors in Virginia for some medical experiment?”

“Uh, the UVA trial is one of lots of options Lydie is exploring. She has to do something. And the experiments are a really expedient way of getting Adrienne admitted to a selective rehab program.” I was pulling rank on this. Though I liked the idea that the kids were making up paranoid conspiracy theories.

“But like Rod,” Jenny persisted. “Don’t you think it’s strange that, after staying away for
so long,
he comes now? Like Nic said: you know Rod’s worried about what’ll she say to him when she wakes up.”

I stared at Jenny and grinned. “Rod and I both,” I said, “are supposed to sit up with Adrienne tonight. And maybe she’ll wake up.” I took another long drink from the bottle. Jenny was quiet.

“Do you think Adrienne’ll be all right?” I asked.

“If the doctors say so, I guess.” Jenny said this weakly.

“Lydie told me that the bowel function might be permanently damaged.”

Jenny said nothing.

“But what is that about?” I asked.

Jenny didn’t want to discuss it.

I looked at Jenny, or tried to look at her, in the dark. “I hate to think about it,” I said.

Jenny might reach out, Jenny might say something like, You love her very much, don’t you?

But Jenny wouldn’t say anything of the kind. “I’m getting drunk,” she said. “I should go home soon.”

It had been kind, very kind of her, to take me up here. We got up, and folded the hospital blanket. The air was still warm—hot, even, like there might be lightning. “I did really used to love her,” I said. I was making this confession as if to compensate Jenny somehow, as if she needed to have some takeaway from this tête-à-tête.

So I came to Rod with liquor on my breath. “Am I late?” I asked. I checked Adrienne’s face. There was a bruise that I monitored, and since that afternoon it had already turned from black to yellow.

Rod was looking at me strangely.

“Lydie told me to be here at eleven,” I said.

“Did she?”

“She did.”

“That’s funny.” Rod leaned forward like a fat man, with his hands on his knees. “I told her I would be here.”

“Well she said that I should help you.”

He seemed puzzled for a second, and then he squeezed up his eyes. “Jesus.”

I hadn’t really thought this through: Lydie was using me like a pawn. I was here as her agent. But I asked Rod to let me stay anyway; I had all my baggage here already, I told him.

“Make yourself at home.”

While I was getting seated he briefed me on the medical situation. He explained the latest issue: that when they bolted a rod to Adrienne’s spine it would give her a very slight stoop, five degrees or so. This would be permanent, a part of tomorrow morning’s stabilization surgery.

“Five degrees seems like a lot,” I said. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings—but he was already on to all the technical aspects anyway, how the metal would react with the tissue. He very much laid it out for me—as if he was the doctor, and
I
was the patient’s father.

“I thought they were just going to staple it.”

He shook his head fiercely.

With Rod in front of me, with his snow-white beard and his raw blushing neck, I could begin to reconstruct why Adrienne, age twelve, had deigned not to follow him East. I didn’t exactly blame him for not being a father to her; indeed he did not seem to
be
a father. He was innocent of that. I felt bad about his not knowing what to say, and his resultant sentimentality—like when he said, “That’s really a tribute,” about my coming here. If he was a little repetitive about Adrienne’s spinal cord and the science, that was understandable. Perhaps he would open up as the night wore on.

I got us some of the nurses’ coffee. And then, as will happen late at night, we made a plan to get some food. I told Rod that there was a barbeque place with twenty-four-hour delivery. I knew it from “the old days,” I alluded, hoping to intrigue him. I had practically lived in
this man’s rooms, in the penthouse. “Are you staying at the Booker?” I asked.

No, he said, the Booker gave him the creeps. Rod seemed to think that his family’s business, Booker Petroleum, was evil. I tried again: Did he ever consider moving back to Tulsa at all? I thought Rod and I could have in common a certain flavor of regret. In a very softball way, we were both self-exiled. But Rod misunderstood. He started to supply me with all the different reasons why I was
right
to have left our shared hometown. “But then sometimes you want fish,” he said. He granted that local barbeque was pretty good: “Good, but not the best. And if you want sushi? God help you.” I didn’t have the heart to tell Rod that decent-enough sushi was widely available in Tulsa. “Did you ever try to vote for anyone in this town?” Rod asked. “It’s like beating your head against the wall. You might as well vote Communist as vote Democrat for President.”

When the barbeque came, we ate silently, side by side.

Rod was basically like Albert. Both were oil babies, who abdicated their place in the adult world and tried in vain to justify themselves. They belittled the city—they were especially harsh about its lack of culture. Even growing up, I knew people like this, men and women—though from the middle class—whose chief consolation in life was cynicism—we all did it. Because the city of Tulsa was easy to put down. In New York, I reflected, this was less common. There are lots of ways to be cynical about New York, but it’s rather uncommon to
act too good for it. But in Tulsa—we were the worst. Us kids.

It was not until I interviewed for college, and visited local alumni from various out-of-state universities in their homes, that I realized Tulsa actually had leaders—people like Lydie, people who believed in it and who got business done. For my interviews I went in succession to a gray house, a red house, a blue house. Inside I found a small-time CEO, a local dean, a lawyer. At the gray house, the CEO took me into his three-car garage and showed me his Corvette collection: He was the first person in years who told me to my face that being smart wasn’t good enough. I should play sports too. The man in the red house had the best chair for me, set in an alcove with books on either side as if to buttress me; he sat in a hard chair out in the open and let me volley at him. The man in the blue house, by contrast, was frankly impatient. If I hadn’t read as much as him, then too bad. Nonetheless, I left his house that night as I had left the others, starstruck, preoccupied of course with my chances to go East, but also gazing into the night sky, wondering just what powers constellated themselves undreamt-of in Tulsa. Growing up in Tulsa, watching the nightly news, you never would have guessed that power was conducted by these calm, well-installed individuals, that Tulsa was studded with them. It flattered me just to know they existed.

Surely these men who had interviewed me in the nineties had also gone to the same Tulsa galas where Rod would have shown up, in his sunglasses probably, a goofball in the sixties. Surely Rod knew them, knew their
names, knew them from years-ago parties, had gone to the same one or two local private schools with them, and remembered them as you do, haunted by an adolescent memory, a dirty joke that was whispered in your ear when you were too young. There must have been parties, weddings, before I was born, when all these people were young men. And I could well imagine Rod avoiding the guys who were really smart—the guys who were to impress me so much, decades later. Rod just went back to the drinks table. Rod moved to Rhode Island, and judged the world from there. From the beach. Because Rod hadn’t played the power games that were his class prerogative, his politics were bullshit. That was what I thought.

We were asleep already in our chairs—or I thought we were—when another person came into the room. I assumed it was a nurse. “Everyone else is gone,” she said, as if to explain herself, and sat down. It was Chase Fitzpatrick’s mother. Her name was Carrie: I had seen her in the lounge earlier that evening, and we had been quickly introduced. I had remembered her from the time I rang the Fitzpatricks’ doorbell and Carrie answered, and I gave her the collage-book I had made for Adrienne. I was astonished that Carrie was still here, that she came in now. And she sat down just as if she was going to stay all night. She adjusted her skirt in the chair. “Adrienne’s such a special girl,” she said. She was gazing at the patient.

Carrie had good bones, and bangs cut across her forehead, but vicious crow’s-feet that she obviously tried to cover up but could not. She was probably about forty-five. Her manner was all politeness, and yet she did not
seem to take into account that we had been sitting here, with our take-out containers as yet undiscarded and smelling, that for untold minutes now we had been sitting in an easy, ursine silence.

“Chase is trying to get her a job, you know, Rod. But she’s too busy singing. All our children are so busy! But she could do anything, Rod. Even in a wheelchair. You know her. Adrienne could do absolutely anything.”

Carrie couldn’t quite figure out how I fit in. “Chase wanted me to say hello to everybody,” she said to me, tentatively. “He wishes he could be here. But they’re wrapping their movie.”

She talked so much I couldn’t concentrate on what she was saying; I grew actively afraid she would wake Adrienne—I resented Carrie coming in here. I felt Rod and I each had a claim to Adrienne’s bedside—in different ways our two voices belonged in Adrienne’s psychic space. But Carrie spoiled it; she was as silly as us, but somehow more generic, or realistic. Trying to be a mom like she was.

“If you two want to go lie down on the couches and get some sleep, I can wait in here,” she told us. But as soon as she said that her phone rang. I didn’t know who it was—some other thin middle-aged woman, awake on antidepressants in the middle of the night. Carrie was telling this woman all about Adrienne’s condition: the surgery tomorrow morning, how it was just going to be preliminary, to stabilize Adrienne, and how Adrienne would have to fight, and how there would be physical therapy. And then she got into Adrienne’s whole backstory. “No. Huh-uh. No college. She never finished high
school. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. But she’s a good girl. She’s neat. Yeah. Ever since they were little. Preschool. But she’s had lots of problems…”

I rose and laid my hand on Carrie’s shoulder. She didn’t flinch, she accepted my touch naturally, like it was a comfort. She didn’t stop her conversation. The silk of her blouse turned warm under my touch and finally I crouched down, I tried to be kind: “Rod and I want to stay with the patient tonight, I think. I think we’ll try to sleep.”

Carrie put her hand over the receiver. “Okay.”

Maybe I imagined it, maybe I was dizzy with fatigue, but it was like I had to stare her down then, squatting by her side, getting through to her the idea that she had to leave.

“Okay,” she said. “You need my phone number though.”

She had her phone back on her ear as she dictated me the number, making the poor other woman sit through it while she gave me instructions. Finally she left, and we could hear her resume her conversation, fading down the hall: “Hey there. Yeah, they’re okay, I think they’re going to be okay.”

Rod was smiling—at my valor, or at my foolish territorial pride.

“She’s a tough case,” he said.

I spent much of that night listening to Rod snore. I had never been a snorer, so far as I knew—I compared Rod, a week ago, him snoring alone in Rhode Island, with me, probably silent as a fish, in Brooklyn.

Adrienne’s stabilizing surgery was successful. Her neck was secured, and her thoracic vertebra was stapled. I sat it out all morning with everyone else.

I was talking to Kim Wheel.

“There was once this NHS thing, planting trees. You won’t remember, but we were all carpooling. I was in your car. And there was a beer bottle rolling around on the floor mats.” I looked at Kim.

She looked at me. She didn’t get it.

I raised my hands, to signal my innocence. “There was a beer bottle touching my leg!”

Kim laughed.

“I was there in your backseat with my legs in this crazy position the whole time, to keep from touching it.” I had hiked my feet up in the air and was about to fall out of the waiting lounge chair. People were looking.

Kim was telling me how she and Adrienne became friends. They had taken the same yoga class, as it happened, prior to Adrienne’s move West.

“It must have been me who mentioned your name. We would talk about Franklin. But when I mentioned you it was a big deal. Adrienne got all serious.”

Kim bugged her eyes out. She was trying to do Adrienne’s stone-cold, divine stare.

I nodded, to encourage Kim. “I imagine Adrienne’s good at yoga,” I offered. Kim seemed tempted to take this wickedly and I interjected, “She has had such great powers of concentration.”

“Tell me stories,” said Kim.

I stared.

Kim’s eyes twinkled.

“Well, you know—I don’t know what kind of time you spent with her, but she could stand all day in front of her work, meditating.”