The Performing Arts sign was still exploding: La Bohème was here again, boom boom boom. A friend of mine who had lived all over once defined the true city as a place where you can sing on the street and not seem crazy. But there wasn’t even anyone on the Tulsa street, to hear you sing. Simply to be on foot was enough to look like a crazy person. I heard a car turn the corner behind me. I remembered when I had been to no city but this one. At that age—you wouldn’t mind to seem crazy.
Which is what Adrienne had done so resolutely, in effect, with so much courage and poise. From her friends at the hospital I got no impression of her edge, of the instant sharpness of her spontaneity. She cut my hair once, while I was napping. She demonstrated—what? Presence, ultimately, leaps of faith landing with her silent sense of moment. The way she used to walk down the street. I wondered if I saw her now—if I was one of the Texans up there meeting with Lydie, and I came down to the street for a smoke break and saw Adrienne walking by, a young woman of arch deportment, the perfectly sedate expression on her face, the bags under her eyes, the heels and skirt.
A businessman might feel flirted with. Adrienne’s image might stick in his mind. But later probably, in remembering—a businessman might think he saw through Adrienne, with her flamboyant skirts and her stiff neck.
I remember once in the studio when Adrienne was painting she turned to me. “Do you really think I’m good?”
She had her paintbrush in her hand and wet paint on it when she asked me.
Maybe she had been wasting her life. I stepped onto Main, and a long-held breath began to flow: all the lights turned green, and the cars ahead of me as well as other clumps down the line came loose and began to roll. And then were gone. The road itself, being one-way, was free of yellow lines, and stretched across calmly, curb to curb, with the dignified tautness of a preacher’s back.
I marched on.
This street used to be dirt, the ground for roughnecks who on payday tottered down the road spilling their buckets of beer, shying up to storefronts, peering into the new-built porticos of banks and two-story office buildings. There used to be a trolley line. It all got cleaned up, though. The last spontaneous thing that happened here was a race riot. Before our parents were born. Now it’s so clean that even our town boosters have decided it’s boring, and will talk about that, and vote ballot initiatives back and forth to tear up pavement and plant a pedestrian mall or to repave it and put traffic lights back in a decade later.
I wish there could be more to it. I can eke some poetry out, but when the world ends people are going to remember this part of Tulsa as a dry run. I had used downtown as the backdrop to a love story—but most people aren’t so willful. At their roots, the skyscrapers are dumb. What a relief it had once been to slide my arms beneath Adrienne’s back, to spread apart her shoulder blades.
I neared the Center of the Universe and began to climb uphill toward the skater’s plaza. Rod used to send Adrienne to Massachusetts for ballet camp, she told me. But when Rod himself moved house to New England, she stopped. That was her pride. She was so graceful, compared to Rod: she might have gone to ballet camp forever. I imagined she had the body for it. After Rod left, she took to roaming the streets at night. She could have become something horrible. But she didn’t. That was her pride. There were special limitations in her character, internal walls that she respected. On those walks that governed Adrienne’s mornings, we sometimes stopped at the Center of the Universe to watch the skaters. They would already be at work—they were skipping school, was why they had to get there so early; they had to make a show of leaving home and then they had to go somewhere. I had always wanted to know skaters—I soon learned to smile at their seriousness, the way they would lean over like a hawk, arms spread, or cradle the air in front of them as they balanced; I loved the earnest way they cursed, as if their dads were watching. They knew who Adrienne was from their older brothers. And anyway they had always seen Adrienne at any good party they had ever been to. They talked to her as they might talk to a friend’s very hot mother. They would coast near, and one time she even held out her hand like a queen, and let herself be kissed, just to make fun of me the way I was watching.
This afternoon the Center of the Universe was empty except for its clanking flagpole. I took a deep breath. I wanted to try, like Adrienne, to sing. I started out quietly—humming, almost. But you have to do it kind of loud for it to be “singing.” Behind me I had the skyscrapers, mute and dumb, and out before me the bricky warehouse district rippled in the heat. I started in my mouth, droning like Adrienne had taught me. I sounded like a Ouija board talking. I forced myself to form a syllable, blunting the sound into consonants. I stepped forward. It was like winding up a pitch: “New York, New York, New Yooork.” The “New-Yuhhh…” combination was easy, but then I had to lower my jaw, eyebrows raised, as the “Yuh” widened into “Yor.” My real life was waiting, in New Yoooork. Or?
I could see what Adrienne liked about singing: I had to go to the most confident thing in my stomach, the warmest and wettest thing, in order to open up my throat. An electric impulse in the brain has to ignite in the lungs, as by analogy the antennae tips on buildings flash red—as if stinging the air with red-hot ideas, as if that was what made the waves sizzle in the air.
I walked abashed, in the glare of my half-dead epiphanies, to the rail of the plaza. I leaned against it and looked back at the skyscrapers. I was not going to sing. I did not have the same insides as Adrienne—that much was clear. But if only she had ever looked up at this view and wanted it as bad as I did. When I first heard that she crashed, I thought it might have been the most ballsy kind of suicide, throwing the bike out from beneath her. But that was wrong—that was a confusion I had made between her high autonomous daredevilry and real heart, real autobiography. It was much more like her, precise even in the absence of stimuli, to try to follow her own road and flip, mistaken perhaps but poised, through the air like a mannequin.
At six p.m., the sun angled its neck, and the Booker’s art deco carvings sliced in relief like fresh lacerations—the skin of a Mayan temple.
All of this was real to me: the brass bench in the lobby, the smooth black floor. Everyone had gone home at five. The receptionist must have wondered why I crossed the floor so slowly and ceremoniously: it was the lento of self-destruction, watching in slow-motion for the shoe-box diorama to bend, the cardboard breaking beneath the weight of my sole, canceling the remembered version of this space.
“I’m here to see Ms. Booker. She’s in a meeting, but I was told I could wait.”
The upstairs secretary had never heard of me.
“Tell them it’s about her niece—Lydie’s expecting me.”
The elevator rattled upward like a self-assertive little machine. I pressed a number I had never pressed before, 18, a fat sans-serif numeral like the others, stenciled onto a yellowed translucent button that looked forever dirty, like an old bone die. I ran my hand over the whole array, up to the decorative panel above it, which was stippled with a corona of little gold indentations, dots fading up asymmetrically like the arm of an art deco Milky Way. My hand looked young, and awfully pink, on the gold. Adrienne was always automatically up for a kiss in here; she liked to wave at the security camera. But now the door opened onto an office.
All was quiet, after-hours. I could hear voices, but the hallway ahead of me was empty. Brown marble tile, white veins. Everything was ugly: radiators and other fixtures of the same vintage as those in our public schools, built during the same boom. But everything here had lasted better and was cleaner. Up ahead of me two men in suits, the voices I had heard, emerged from what must have been a men’s room, and then disappeared around a corner. I dropped back and then followed them around that corner, and saw a grand padded door close behind them. And there in front of that door was the secretary.
She showed me to a couch; I immediately got up and asked for the bathroom. After I washed my face it still looked like I had been crying. It was
the lack of sleep. I could draw some strength from the rooms just two stories above, the bedroom where I had spent so many authoritative nights—but I had decided not to think about that. Adrienne didn’t live there anymore, they said. She lived in Los Angeles. When I came back out I sat down and was quiet. The secretary was playing solitaire.
I had been sitting in silence for an hour when finally Lydie and the others came out. They were finished. There was agreeable chuckling as the door opened and Lydie strode out smiling; her smile seemed to increase when she noticed me—but she made no sign. I couldn’t tell who were her staff and who were the Texans until Lydie showed a number of them to a side door, mentioning that they would find refreshments in the refrigerator, and she referred to something that I thought was perhaps a conferencing device, and then she turned to face me as the remaining men, her staff presumably, streamed on past her.
“Sorry Lydie—I didn’t know what we needed to set up for tonight.”
She smiled and knocked her head sideways, indicating a door I hadn’t seen before. It was small, but the room beyond it was magnificent. “I have to take those men out to dinner,” Lydie was saying. These windows! I had always seen them from the outside, floor-length windows wrapping around the neck of the Booker—they constituted one of the key details in the Tulsa skyline. I remember, when Adrienne first asked me up to the penthouse, I was a little disappointed that its windows weren’t these. But to look out from them now was humbling: because we were level with the buildings at each of the intersection’s corners, the main thing you ended up looking at was other offices.
I had been trying to reconstruct in my hour on the couch wistful things people had told me about the prewar office spaces of New York, tight bookish places with ceiling fans—spaces cast off only recently in favor of newer offices with energy-saver lights and ergonomic chairs. Booker Petroleum had chairs carved from wood, muscled like animal parts; the ceiling was high and dark. Lydie, with her crinkled black shift, would have suggested something much more austere; she really could have been a gallerist, a crow in a white box. But the way I saw her sit now, the way she gripped the arm of her armchair with a buckled air of possession, her neck upright and a washed, offhand seascape hanging behind her, it was clear she had assimilated it all and emphasized a way to be herself in Tulsa, keeping the office together the way she might have a family.
“That’s by Rod.”
“Hm?”
She jacked her thumb at the seascape behind her.
“Rod’s a painter?”
“He was.” Lydie’s chair squeaked. She regarded me. I liked the idea that she was evaluating me.
“You said something about Rod on the phone.”
She twisted her chair away, as if caught off guard. Her meeting had clearly gone well, and maybe she had let herself forget about the hospital. “Rod isn’t going to be there tonight,” she told me.
“Something’s the matter?”
She looked bored. “I don’t know.” She had picked up a wand-sized microphone, which she mashed up into her chin. “Adrienne needs to wake up soon. But she’s going to be fine. She’s stable, that’s the important thing.” Then she spoke into the little microphone: “I’ll be out in five minutes.”
“Is there a problem with anesthesia?”
“No, they had her murmuring some.”
She just doesn’t want to wake up, I thought. “But Rod. Where’s Rod going to be?”
“He wants it to be my turn.”
I frowned, unimpressed with this logic.
“Jim,” she said, “the point is, Rod won’t be there tonight. And I need to sleep.”
Once again, I was to show up at eleven.
“I want to give you some money for meals,” she was saying.
“Lydie,” I began. “I wanted to ask you how the meeting went—”
“Yes, while I was sitting there I had a flashback to our discussion this morning: Gilbert was speaking, and I wondered, where’s our Jim?” She laughed.
“I should have come up, then. I was walking around downtown, getting reacquainted with the sights.”
She smirked. “The sights?”
“Yes.”
“Yes,” she said, “you should have come up. You could have learned something.” She drew herself up. “Now, I know you’re flying back in the morning, and I don’t want you to overstrain yourself.”
“I’m not sure I want to go back to New York, Lydie.”
She held my eyes.
“Lydie—I wanted to ask you, do you think I might be able to get a job at Booker Petroleum?”
She looked blank. “Yes?”
“I guess I wanted to at least ask. I don’t mean to be impertinent—I’m just excited and—I don’t know, I’m very curious to ask.”
“You want a job.” She was stirred.
“I think I would.”
“Tell me more.”
“Well.” I clawed the air in front of my face—as students do, when they feel they’re really grappling with a question. “I might make a life for myself in Tulsa.”
She stared at me. I hoped she believed me.
“Or if you know of any other opportunities in Tulsa—”
“No, no.” She waved that idea away. “But your obligations at the magazine.”
“I think my boss would understand.”
“Understand what?”
“That I belong out here.”
Lydie waited to make sure I was finished, and then she raised her eyebrows, as if skeptical, almost as if she was offended. She looked out the windows for a few seconds. “Does this have anything to do with Adrienne?”
“No. Not in any direct way.”
She smiled. “The meeting met our expectations,” she said. She had become very brittle; the warmth from the earlier part of our conversation, the afterglow from her meeting, had faded. “We’ll be dropping heat wells in the ground all over northeast Oklahoma. And I’ll lay people off to facilitate the merger.”
“Okay. I understand.”
She smiled at her lap, her gray hair tousling down. “But I think I could take on another assistant, in the process. I don’t know if it’s quite the sort of work you’re expecting.”
“I’d love to hear what you have.”
“Jim, you seem like a very ambitious person.”
“Yes.”
She was cautious, gently nodding. She spread her hands apart. “I don’t know what advice to give you. This is something you just came up with?”
“I’ve always wanted to come back.” I waved at the air. “My life in New York is completely frivolous.”
She nodded, bobbling her head sideways and at different angles, considering.
“Okay. So let’s talk in the morning.”
It was time to stand, but I didn’t know if I could face the drop behind me. I got up though, and saw that dusk was falling. The windows had turned reflective. The scene was done, we were silent now, she in her shift and me in my nice pants, reflected, each moving with the poise that actors take on in theater, the office like a set, me stepping out of her way: she comes around the desk and I follow, and I’m the one to pull the door behind us.
5
Driving back to the hospital, I was head to toe the modern applicant, my skinny arm on the gearshift, my spherical head too improbable for anything but the cartoon of contemporary life. I treated myself to more of the rooftop whiskey at St. Ursula’s, not to celebrate my success with Lydie so much as to celebrate my careering life. It always went most out of control exactly when it landed. I went down only when the whiskey had sufficiently blurred my grandiosity, such that I felt nineteen and twenty-four in the same breath.
Adrienne lay twinkling in the lights of her monitors. I stared. And then I went out onto the ward to get coffee.
“Well here you are,” I said, coming back. “Would you like some coffee?” I had brought two cups.
Adrienne had been asleep for days. And on so much medication, she would dream. In her dream she w
ould hear us, and in her sleep would misconstrue. Her head would sag, heavy with medication, encrusted and scared, smeared with confusion. She hadn’t spoken coherently since her injury, Lydie said. Nor supposedly had she been cognizant to understand anything. Yet she was fighting, according to the rhetoric. She churned. I thought she probably guessed.
She had murmured, when they fitted her with her neck brace, “No water, no water, no water”; Lydie and Rod had both mentioned this to me. It was a rumor started by the doctors, and it was supposed to be proof of her orneriness surviving.
I dragged a plastic armchair over to the bedside, pushed it completely flush with the rail, and added a pillow so I could sit level with the bed.
“You may wonder why I’ve come here,” I said. I noticed a MasterCard-sized sensor that had pulled partway loose above her breast, and I leaned forward to fix it. The irritation there was crosshatched and red. But I pressed the sensor back down.
While craned over, I wanted to pull up her blanket for her. I held my breath. There were so many bandages, and they rustled as I pulled. I dragged her blanket up to her neck, and then I plopped back into my chair.
“You wonder why I’ve come here.” I took up the second cup of coffee and held it in my steepled hands; I forced myself to drink. Then, a toast. “To Adrienne Trismegistus Thrice-Greatest. Killer of Indians. Dinosaur and friend. Old triceratops.”
I had hitched up my pants and went out to the bathroom once more. The urinal was sculpted and clean. Once upon a time, I remembered, I tried to write Adrienne the most beautiful emails. They may not have made much sense to her, but a Saturday afternoon would go, composing one. It was the joy of that semester back at college. I was never so fluent. Or so accomplished, as after staying up all night, when I wandered the campus at dawn feeling spent, as if I had just written a term paper or something. I wandered the public parks going over what I had written in my head. Out of all of it there was only one line I could still remember: “The connections between us, Adrienne, are more intricate and more awesome than I am, on my own.” She never let me write drivel like that when we were dating.
A Map of Tulsa Page 16
