A Map of Tulsa

by Benjamin Lytal

  “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.

  I explained that I had gotten the news by email, and had simply decided to come.

  Kim gazed at me. “You flew here? Wow.”

  “I’m a romantic fool.” I bit my lip and drummed my fingers on the chair’s plastic armrests.

  “You’re sweet,” said Kim.

  Jenny crossed her legs, and then Kim crossed her legs as well, the two girls crossing them in the same direction.

  I turned to Nic.

  “You seem to know everybody,” he said.

  “Jim was Adrienne’s boyfriend,” said Jenny.

  I glanced at Kim. But Kim apparently knew all about Adrienne and me. I thought I might be blushing, but I wasn’t.

  Nic asked when it was that I had dated Adrienne. “During the Clinton administration,” I said. I looked up. “I’m—it’s such a privilege to come back,” I said.

  Our conversation patrolled the city, and the women told me about new developments, the artificial islands built in the Arkansas River, and the roller coaster that got torn down last year—but I couldn’t figure out whether Kim and Jenny knew each other well, or if these shared points of reference were the only stuff we could talk about. “I have to admit I’m aching a little bit to go downtown or something,” I said. “In New York I’m always, like, take me back to the Blumont.”

  “That place blows,” said Jenny. “They fired all the old bartenders.”

  I reached out. “How is Chase, though—I guess he’s not here?”

  “He’s a film editor.” Jenny looked to Nic for confirmation.

  “He’s only an assistant,” said Nic. “They do a lot of big shitty action movies.”

  “So he’s not around much?”

  Jenny raised her eyebrows. “Well, I think he keeps track of Adrienne.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You knew she moved to L.A.?”

  “Oh.”

  Jenny shied her knee into the air, as if startled.

  Kim leaned in and touched Jenny’s thigh. “Adrienne was only in town visiting, is that right?”

  Jenny: “Yeah. I hadn’t seen her since Christmas.”

  “Strange she didn’t visit more often,” I interjected, trying to keep my voice level. “It must have been different, in a new city.”

  “It’s actually really healthy for her, I think,” said Jenny.

  “And Edith Altman has helped her a lot, hasn’t she?” asked Kim.

  “That’s where Edith is?”

  “She’s a casting agent,” said Jenny.

  “Adrienne was doing movies?”

  “No.”

  Kim grabbed my knee. “Have you heard the album?”

  “The one from back then?”

  Everyone looked at me in confusion.

  “She was going to make an album with Albert Dooney?”

  Kim looked to Jenny for backup. “This was her first album. Just last winter. It’s been really well received.”

  Nic concurred, vaguely.

  My dominant feeling was one of losing control. There ought to be something I could say, a story I could tell, to make them understand how close she had been to me. But she had moved. In my agitation, I couldn’t even raise my eyes to look at the others, and the center of the conversation was now, without anyone having said anything, on my distress. “I’m just thinking…” I tried. They waited. “What you said, Nic, about her not wearing a helmet.” I reached my fingers out, from where I sat crumpled in my seat, and traced a zigzag through the air. “She’s still asleep?”

  Tulsa belongs to the East. It belongs to the forest of broadleaf trees that unrolls off the backside of the Appalachians and carpets the South. Farther than Tulsa the trees thin, and then you get the Oklahoma of famous photographs, the flats of silver gelatin spreading out, in the Dust Bowl. The Okies go to California. Tulsa is some degree back off that, up from the plains. It’s the endpoint of a different migration: of civilized tribes forced to leave farms in Georgia and in Florida. Who walked all the way here. And who then had this area to themselves, for a time.

  I watched Adrienne in her bed, her chest rising and falling, and I saw her old dresses, puffing in the wind. I remembered Tulsa. We preferred the streets at noon, at their emptiest. Not like California. I disliked the idea of California. I pictured Adrienne in L.A. standing at the rail of that famous observatory, posing. It was unpleasant to think of Adrienne as anything other than in control, in her own mind. To move to a city—as I well knew—you have to be ready to almost degrade yourself with eagerness. You have to be ready to show up at thousands of events and parties and not even know really whether you’re invited. I didn’t think Adrienne would be very good at that. The Adrienne I knew stood at her easel, her bottom in her pants. She could stand still for an hour at a time.

  Lydie didn’t understand why I was so upset. “She was young and single, Jim, and she moved to California.”

  I had assumed I would somehow know if Adrienne ever moved—I really did feel I would have contacted her, had I known she had left Tulsa. She should have come East though, if she was going to
relocate. But she shouldn’t have moved at all. Adrienne never traveled. Which was part of what made her so attractive. That she was sufficient unto herself. Maybe Lydie was half right: something had gone wrong. Maybe the accident was somehow a testament to how far off course Adrienne had got. And Adrienne had been depressed—but Adrienne wasn’t allowed to get depressed.

  Jenny found me in a corner, staring into space. She asked me if I wanted to go up to the roof.

  I didn’t know you could go up there. I followed Jenny up the emergency stairwell and out a big push-bar door into the night air.

  She walked quickly across the gravel. “This is nice, right?!”

  It was a relief. The door’s security light illuminated the near roof, but the rest was blackness, tabling out over the city lights. Jenny was wearing short shorts, and the backs of her legs flashed like bowling pins as she hurried out of the light. She walked straight toward the best view: the faraway skyscrapers stood out in three dimensions, while the intervening neighborhoods lay flat, like a bed of glittering soil. I thought how the Tulsa skyscrapers were more timid and beautifully protuberant than New York’s. “The city looks great,” I said. But Jenny wasn’t listening. She was scraping around for something behind the ledge’s cornice. “Shit.” The security lights had gone out. But Jenny stood up and flourished a bottle. “For dark times,” she said. Her voice was husky. I think she felt self-conscious, surprising me with a bottle of whiskey.

  At our backs an exhaust vent suddenly let go a plume of steam, and we had to move. I handed the bottle back to Jenny, and she led the way, trailing along the lip of the roof. She was short in front of me. Her brown hair, the back of her head, and her long-sleeved jacket were all lost to the night, and I followed the glint of the bottle dangling down next to her bare legs. “It’s wonderful about the whiskey,” I said.

  “We planted it last night,” she explained. “We’re here for the long haul.”

  By “we” I didn’t know who she meant, the kids downstairs in collective—or did she mean to imply that a more select posse was lately manifest: Jenny and one or two other kids, who were now running things? I had drifted through the late afternoon and evening among these groups, in the waiting lounge. I had been steeled for rejection—I thought of myself as a prodigal son, unlooked-for, probably resented. I made sure to greet Adrienne’s new friends with a mild, statesmanlike smile. I tried a handshake when I could. But none of them cared who I was. The world wasn’t as coherent as I had remembered. They didn’t even know each other, lots of them. Maybe it all fell apart, after Adrienne went to L.A. I had half imagined giving a speech to explain myself. But there was no occasion. Lydie was the only person who recognized how weird it was of me, to have come.

  “Lydie asked me to sit up with Rod tonight,” I said, “in Adrienne’s room. So I’ll have to be back downstairs in an hour.”

  “That’s cool,” Jenny said. On the way up here she had snatched a hospital blanket off a cart, and now she spread it out before us so we could sit on the gravel at the edge of the roof.

  Jenny and I were so funny that time we hooked up and snuck into the woods at Bartlesville. We crossed the cabin’s yard with huge blankets heaped on our heads, like disguises—even though it was already broad morning. It was some gesture at secrecy—to pretend what we were doing was illicit. Yet my thought at the time had been not that I was betraying Adrienne, but that I was doing something to impress her. It was the sort of thing that Adrienne taught me. I wasn’t sure the kids here at the hospital got it. Be tough. Have some fun. Do the math. There is a moral obligation to do what you want. Don’t spare yourself out of a sentimental sense of etiquette.

  I took a drink of whiskey and handed it back to Jenny. I could make out the contour of Jenny’s throat as she swallowed. She wiped her mouth. “So how’s New York?” she asked. “That’s what we should be talking about.”

  “I mean. It’s a great city. But you have to have a lot of money.”

  “Adrienne’s like that about L.A. too, like all blasé: L.A. sucks.”

  I didn’t like this topic. “Would you ever move, like that?”

  “I’m going to go to New York actually, after college.”

  I could see Jenny in New York. Sometimes my friends and I arrived at parties where I had little idea how we had been invited, but we entered and asserted our rights, and took beer out of the refrigerator. And at these parties where we knew absolutely no one, where the girls had dressed up, and the apartment was hung with posters we had all seen around, we heard their boys grumbling—as if it was not just their apartment they could kick us out of, but New York itself. It was painfully obvious how many parallel worlds us kids in New York were renting. We went into these parties and tried to steal the girls. And when that worked it was simple. But when a nice girl hesitated, if you started to feel sorry for her, that was when you could see: where she had come from, and where she was trying to go.

  She had found this vintage dress, and her bookcase was full of books. And her boys were probably very good boys. To some extent she was living the dream. And it was to just that extent that I wished her absolutely the best, and went home feeling sorry for her and for myself and for every kid in the city.

  “You should go to New York,” I told Jenny.

  Jenny had lit a cigarette. “So New York and not L.A.?”

  “Do you remember the time Adrienne cut off her ponytail?” Once, toward the end of that summer, Adrienne had cut off her ponytail onstage, while singing. She whipped it away so it came apart like a pack of spaghetti over our heads. She had hair-sprayed it before, so it was stiff.

  Jenny was in no mood to reminisce. People like Adrienne and me would go on trying to be artists, until it was too late, and kids like Jenny would long since have accepted the reality of their lives. Chase would be a real artist. Edith was Edith. But Jenny would grow up and be able to sit in judgment of us all, that I knew. And the gravel on the roof was still quite warm, heated through all day, and its wild tinny smell came up to me now in the dark. I had to take advantage of this moment with Jenny. I should tell her a secret or something. But what are you supposed to do in life? Are you supposed to sleep with everyone you meet?

  “I wish she hadn’t moved,” I said.

  Jenny was sitting with her legs tucked under her, like a shepherdess.

  “You and I are alike,” I told her. “We do things like going to college, going to big cities. We need that sort of stuff.”

  “Most people,” Jenny said, “leave.”

  “But Adrienne stayed here for what, how many years after she dropped out of high school, before she left? I know I’m sentimental about Tulsa. But Adrienne wasn’t even thinking about it. She just looped in her own loops.” I did my finger in a circle, and went on: “She painted when she wanted to paint. I was glad somebody in the world was living like that.” I glanced at Jenny. “Of course it was only possible because of her family.”

  “Did you always know them?”

  “I met Lydie once that summer. But that’s it.” I was still waiting to hear what Jenny thought about what I had said.

  “Adrienne never really talked about her family much.”

  “Right. The fantasy we all have of Adrienne is that she’s quintessentially parentless.”

  “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 wake
s 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.