“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, m
aking 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.
4
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.”
Kim kept smiling. “She said you taught her art history.”
I gestured roughly. “I didn’t teach her anything.”
“We always used to get smoothies,” Kim said, “after yoga. It made us hungry—everybody else in the class was moms. It was funny for me because I always thought, Adrienne Booker, what a mystery, she dropped out. And I heard things about her, you know. But then here the two of us were, at Salad Alley. And that she dated you.”
I was tired. I had barely slept the night before, and had been riding on adrenaline this morning, all the well-wishers coming into the waiting lounge for Adrienne’s surgery and me there already, like a host. I had tried to ignore the headache brightness of the waiting lounge lights.
“She said she hadn’t heard from you in years.”
“She said that?”
Kim’s voice deliberately softened. “Why did you never come back?”
I felt lost, drifting away for a second. “I don’t know.” I crossed my legs. “I mean, there are rules, aren’t there? After a certain amount of time you can’t get back in touch anymore.”
Kim slapped the plastic couch where she was sitting with some resolve. “After this I’m on my way to see Jamie Livingstone.”
“Oh?”
“You have to come, Jim. You were friends, weren’t you?”
“Well, Jamie and I rode the same bus.” It seemed like another life to me. I knew he probably wouldn’t want me to make any kind of overture.
But Kim was always friends with everybody, in a popular-girl kind of way. My sense of reserve seemed almost sardonic in comparison. “You should get out of the hospital for a while,” she told me. I couldn’t really argue with her.
Finally, the neurosurgeon came in and confronted this reef of sleepy, half-skeptical young people, sought out Rod, and informed the patient’s father that the operation had gone smoothly. Adrienne “did a great job.” As no one would be allowed to go in to see Adrienne for hours yet, Kim and I rose to make our exit. But Kim wouldn’t take French leave, and I had to stand there like an impatient husband while she said her goodbyes.
We took separate cars. That was the way of it: always like a convoy setting out into the veldt, in Tulsa. I pulled up alongside Kim: “Instead of the highway let’s take Yale.” Yale was the avenue I used to live off of, named Yale by the dirt-road, brass-banister generation that had laid Tulsa out—trying to embolden themselves, I guess, with big names. We had a Harvard Avenue too. When they were laid out, these roads cut through open prairies, but long ago they had been subdivided, graced with inexpensive split-levels: the neighborhoods still remained spacious, and it was out here that Adrienne and I had found the Hobby Lobby and the Target and the other air-conditioned big boxes that softened our afternoons, that summer. This was home. As a kid I always used to come with my dad after dinner, to fill up the car at these gas stations. It was a quiet thing to do, our stomachs full, watching evening traffic for a minute from the cool smooth concrete. I took in the fumes like sea air. Or we would go running errands on Saturdays, different places: back and forth, out onto the blacktop, downcast in the perpendicular sunlight, then back in: fueled by Coca-Cola and succored by the AC vent. I leaned my head directly on it. In our plush backseat there was an exposed joint of lubricated metal, the back bench of our minivan being collapsible, and I often wiggled my finger down between the cushions and then drew it out, to smell the grease on my finger.
I honked and pointed out my window, to signal to Kim that we should stop at the QuikTrip ahead to buy something to drink. “I want a Big-Gulp-type thing,” I explained once we got out of our cars.
“When was the last time you were in town?”
“My parents moved away after that summer, so.”
We stood with our straws in our mouths on the curb in front of QuikTrip, bashfully listening to an unshaven man on the pay phone behind us. He was trying to borrow money from someone, an old girlfriend, it sounded like.
“Lydie says you’ve been a big help.”
I took that in. “Do you think Lydie felt abandoned when Adrienne left town?”
“Well. Lydie…” Kim looked off down the street. “She took us both out to lunch once, before Adrienne left. That’s how I know Lydie. But I think that was Adrienne’s farewell to her. And she invited me along.”
After the surgery, Lydie had left without ceremony, rushing off to a meeting—she was about to buy a geothermal energy company in Texas. All during the surgery she and one of her lawyers, Gilbert Lee, had been going over strategy in a vacant conference room in the hospital. For a while, early in the morning, Lydie had let me sit in. I had been impressed, particularly with the lawyer’s clarity of mind—and with their general air of engagement and proactive self-interest so early in the morning. In some alert corner of my mind I wondered if Oklahoma could become a leader in geothermal energies. That would be good.
After Yale, Kim and I turned left onto Twenty-first Street—the street my mother and I always took going to elementary school. I had been a transfer student, to a better district, and Kim and I were now retracing the route my mother and I had driven daily into the wealthier parts of the city. I did not think then in terms of money. These were simply the more rooted parts of Tulsa, the older parts: the parts with taller trees and hence more elaborately inflected houses—it was obvious that the two things worked by the same encouragement: age, pulling up the peaked roofs, knotting the chimneys and bulging out dormers and balconies, gnarling the ironwork—trees grew taller and the old growth spread itself out, fluxing and rising. In those days I had never even been in a two-story house before. Taken on tours snaking out from our elementary school, I was always amazed to hear that some of the houses, the very oldest ones, dated from as far back as the 1920s.
That made them more than sixty years old.
/> But even since then, in my short life span, Tulsa had grown older. Trees grew as they individualized. I observed that some of the newer trees, meant to dignify the newer strip malls, had since my school days lifted their bush into the sky, some bending over backwards, some like thrusting arms holding their orb aloft. Hedges, having different destinies, had grown wild and fat.
With my car already lagging behind Kim’s I slowed down to rubberneck at the four-story office tower my mom and I had watched go up morning after morning in the 1980s—I hadn’t known then that you could simply build a building. I thought all the buildings we were meant to have were already here, and official. The turreted house, like a castle guarding its corner, seemed for example to have a history and, I dreamed, a military purpose. My mistakes were many. The MRI clinic presented circular windows that probably must themselves be the MRIs, the torture tubes. The roof of the Sun Salon slanted down not with tinted skylights but with solar panels. And the Tudor Cottages Shopping Center, fronted with half-timber façades, dated back to the time of England, somehow.
Today I didn’t know much better. I wished I had an adult relationship to the city. I wished indeed that I was omniscient. Some buildings I had been in—from the road I could glance in a neighborhood lending library and remember how the mold smelled. Other sites triggered more situational memories—the cascading all-important Woodward Park where I and my several friends had warrens of rosebushes to run through. But I had never been rich in adventures. I grew up on the backyard system. I had been shuttled in cars.
I remembered when I went to the doctor as a little kid—my pediatrician was up on the eleventh floor of the same medical complex we were headed to now—I gazed down, standing for five minutes at a time trying to orient myself at the doctor’s big picture window. I could see the river and a few familiar office towers and a seabed of trees, but no houses: the houses were there of course, beneath the trees, but I didn’t know that. I did recognize the fancy shopping center immediately below us, with its English telephone booths like little red knobs—but then behind the shopping center there was an open field, and behind that field there was a second, and with a shock I wondered if anyone had ever gone to that field before, or if it was known to man, or was on any maps. Of course it was Cascia Hall’s soccer field, a perfectly well-known place.
A Map of Tulsa Page 14