“You know,” Lydie suddenly said, “Adrienne brought this upon herself.”
I pretended not to have heard her. Sometimes people, after they emerge from a particularly intense and confined situation, have to talk things out to themselves first, before attempting polite conversation.
But Lydie kept looking at me. “What do you have in your sack?” she asked.
I still had the necktie sack in my hands. I edged out the tie, to show her the fabric. “For Adrienne, actually.”
Lydie was looking not at the tie, but at the sack. She chuckled. She kept her eyes on the road. “You didn’t buy that in Tulsa.”
“No. No. I got it at JFK.”
“You’re coming from New York?”
“Yes. Chase emailed me.” Which was an untruth: Chase emailed the listserv. “Is he around?”
“Not as yet.”
“What about Edith?”
“Who?”
“Edith Altman?”
“I don’t know who that is.”
Lydie seemed thoughtful, with both hands clinging to the top of her steering wheel. “And did you come all this way just to see us?”
“Oh, well, I haven’t been home in years, so. It made sense. And at Kennedy I just grabbed this—I thought it might cheer her up, actually.”
She smiled. “You probably shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble.”
“It’s no trouble.”
“You came all this way.”
“Well, I love Tulsa. I—can visit my parents while I’m here,” I lied.
Lydie looked at me slyly and returned to her driving. And then, after a second, she again mentioned that Adrienne “had this coming.”
“I haven’t really been in touch with her,” I said.
“But you know how she acts.”
“I heard that she was riding a motorcycle at the time.”
“But you know her.”
“Yes,” I said. “I definitely do.”
“She’s been asking for this ever since she was fourteen.”
“You mean, because she got a motorcycle when she was fourteen?”
Lydie held her cigarette one inch in front of her face, as if she was about to jab it forward. “Jim, right? A lot of young people have motorcycles, Jim. But that doesn’t make them the same as Adrienne.”
“You know me?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t introduce myself.”
“That’s all right.”
“Did you recognize me just now?” We were pulling into the McDonald’s.
“Well, no one else brought her a present, Jim. I remember you. I pay more attention to Adrienne than people think. You were the only one of Adrienne’s friends who was ever going to amount to much. Which I think is why she was so taken with you. But we have to go in. I don’t do drive-thrus.”
At the cash registers, Lydie and I split up to game the two shortest lines. Small children, brought here by their mothers for the high hour of their pre-kindergarten lives, stood by at random, studying the current display of Happy Meal favors or curling up in the booths, waiting on their food. I used to be brought to this McDonald’s. The boy nearest me windmilled his arms. On the way today, I had taken an interest in the corporate signs embedded in the streetside hills, OG&E, HILTI, PENNWELL: corporate marquees that when I was a new reader had seemed tediously vague.
Lydie paid. I was handed our food, two grease-bottomed sacks to carry to the car. “Make sure they got the order right.” While I was bent over in my seat rummaging in the sacks, Lydie asked me to tell her what all I had done since dating Adrienne. She sat there, not starting the car.
I told her I had completed undergrad, making friends with all the professors, who packed me off to New York with letters of recommendation. About the magazine she wanted to hear more. I told her how much I got paid. “I’m technically freelance, which makes no sense: I’m expected to go there every day and sit at a desk. But that’s how things work nowadays.” I thought Lydie would be interested in this. “Outside of finance, almost nobody I know from college landed jobs with benefits. I actually can’t even think of one person right now, sitting here.”
“But you’re lucky. That’s a very prestigious job.”
“Which is why I can’t leave it. Right?”
She lit another cigarette and appeared to be thinking, so I decided to start in on the fries.
I tried to hold a fry in my lips, like it was a cigarette. I sucked on it for a while and then it started to taste like a potato, for once. The smoke from her cigarette was drawing out my window, a dense tendril right in front of me, and I chopped at it with a fry. The smoke fell apart; some of it floated down and got mixed with the gold dust on my fries.
“Should we go?”
In answer, she took another long, contemplative puff. The pale cake of her foundation glistened in the heat. “I was pleased when Adrienne started dating you,” she said. “I thought: Oh—I’ve underestimated her! She’s going to grow up now, she’ll go to college.”
“Well she was too smart for that. She wouldn’t have been Adrienne if she’d gone to college.”
Lydie smiled. “That’s not fair to Adrienne.”
I took a fry out of my mouth. I wanted to proceed like a plausible adult, if I could.
“College would have changed everything,” Lydie said—leveling out her hand. “Everything.”
“But you can’t pretend that the accident is because Adrienne didn’t have a college degree.”
“Yes, I’m sorry Jim. But it is actually. That’s actually how life works. You go up or you go down.” Lydie took a puff of her cigarette, and then she continued in a weary voice. “Her accident is the logical result of Adrienne’s career. You’re upset. But you have to realize, I’ve been dealing with Adrienne ever since she was a little girl. To me, you know, I’ve been watching this wreck in slow motion.”
She was powerful, this lady. With her deft gesticulations she had the steely pace of a practiced public speaker. As she talked, she pressed her mane back against her headrest; she seemed to grow larger and larger in her seat.
She started up the car.
I said, “Coming here that summer and dating Adrienne was one of the smartest things I ever did.”
“But you didn’t stay.”
“No. No, I wasn’t brave enough, actually.”
“But you wish you had?”
I looked at the brown fence of the McDonald’s. “Sometimes I do.”
She was twisted around to look behind her, backing out. “Jim,” she said, “you’re going to be happy in life. And she’s not. That’s all you can really say, and it’s all you need to know.”
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 fl
aked 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.
3
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.”
A Map of Tulsa Page 12
