And I never knew what direction my house was in. In a city of cars, when you don’t know how to drive, when you’ve been driven everywhere, seat-belted, orientation is rare. It’s a deep, slanting science, a source of anxiety, a thing that you fumble for but can’t bring yourself to grasp.
Kim and I were in the elevator going up—it was exactly like a dream, a high school reunion transposed to my childhood doctor’s office. It was no longer pediatrics, of course, the hospital had shuffled its departments—but it was the same physical space, the same layout, the same windows. Kim took a call from some guy named Randall, and I stood at what seemed like the same old window: There was the shopping center with its little red telephone booths. Looking out, I saw the Arkansas River clock through the Thirty-first, the Forty-first, and then the Sixty-first Street bridges, after which the river bent away, so that only with my cheek pressed to the window frame could I follow it all the way out to the 101st Street bridge. I stepped back and contemplated the scattered office buildings rising from the trees. I tried to remember their names, and the intersections. It pleased me to line up the landmarks on the unseen grid of streets that was spread out, like a net, beneath the blowing tops of the trees.
Kim covered her receiver with a smile. “You go on in first. He’ll be so excited to see you.”
Jamie was in a windowless room, watching TV. The TV was bolted to the ceiling, and Jamie sat up in bed looking at it, his remote poised. He glanced at me and then back to the TV, and almost changed the channel, but didn’t. He looked to see what exactly I wanted.
And he recognized me.
I should have had some line. But it was all I could do to stand there and be looked at.
Flustered to present himself, Jamie lifted his far buttock off the mattress and reached for my hand. “What’s up.” His eyes were candid, except that he kept glancing down at his lap, looking for something.
“Guess who brought me here. Kim Wheel.” That was the first thing I said. As if the smaller irony were enough to account for the larger.
We tried to catch up. I spotted his wedding ring—which Kim had told me to look for. Jamie and his wife wanted to move to New York, or maybe New Jersey: “Melissa and I are going to try to get teaching jobs there,” he told me.
I sighed. “And me”—I raised my eyebrows—“I’m thinking maybe I should move back here.”
Jamie welcomed that. He could be perfectly pro-Tulsa. He told me how downtown was about to undergo a big revitalization. There were lofts, he said, and apartments, “just like a big city.” He smiled. “You move home, and I’ll move to New York. Reverse brain drain.”
Jamie had met his wife at a comic book convention. She studied nursing at OSU Tulsa, but then went back and became a kindergarten teacher. He was still finishing his computer science degree: he would use it to teach high school. I remarked that my parents, who as Jamie knew were also teachers, had retired and moved away to sunny Galveston. “It’s as if Tulsa never happened, for them,” I said.
Jamie made a dry spitting sound.
I further bewailed my parents. “It’s, like, didn’t they make any friends here?”
“Their friends probably all moved to Phoenix.”
Jamie and I were bonding. “I got to go to a study-abroad thing in Germany,” I told him, “and in Germany they stick to even their elementary school friends—forever. You’ll be at a bar and then your friend gets an SMS and he’s like, ‘That’s Georg, from the village. Georg’s going to join us.’”
Jamie nodded his head sagely.
I went on: “But in America it’s like we’re always supposed to disappear—if we reach, you know, a certain level of success. Like Elijah. It’s like, if we’re valedictorian we have to get assassinated—because effectively we get up and give a speech and then we disappear to some faraway university. All our major social institutions growing up are about building intense friendships over a limited period of time and then severing them. High school, and then college. And summer camp. Poof. My parents, having completed their careers successfully, move.”
I was in a way bragging. But Jamie said that he too had lost touch with tons of people—and he had not gone anywhere. Occasionally he would run into someone at the store. At video rental stores, especially. One of our very smartest classmates had recently gotten a job as a reporter for the local news. “I see her on TV sometimes.”
“Of course,” I said, “we talk about losing touch with people but we didn’t even know them at the time, probably.”
“Except for her.” He gestured at Kim, who was standing in the door. “And she still knows everybody.”
We turned and watched Kim pull up a chair. It was as if we were two old gumshoes and Kim was the attractive lady who had come in to consult with us. She seated herself neatly. Kim Wheel had always been much more popular than Jamie Livingstone or Jim Praley. And having her there changed the dynamic. She was catching up with Jamie on his condition. His treatment was nearing its end, apparently. But I wasn’t really listening.
“Do you remember Adrienne Booker?” I abruptly asked Jamie.
“No.”
Kim looked up. “You remember her, Jamie. She went to Franklin.”
“She did?”
“She kept a low profile,” I said, “but she was friends with like Chase Fitzpatrick.”
He opened his mouth as if in epiphany, but it didn’t come. He closed his mouth again.
“She dropped out early, but you might remember her, she did all this art stuff,” I said. “Oil family. She used to eat lunch by herself—by the prefabs?”
“Oh!—she was in that one play.” He jammed his fingers into the mattress trying to remember the name of the play. I wished he would give me a hint. But my eyes wandered behind his bed, to where someone had pinned up a wall of photos. I wanted to get a look at Jamie’s wife. The photos appeared recent, and a preponderance featured a party of some kind, held outdoors under a bright blue tarp. A small shoal of people: I hesitated to say which one would have married my old bus-stop friend. I couldn’t tell. None of the revelers in the photographs seemed to be aware that they were in a movie about social entropy, and missed connections, and loneliness. Helga—as I dubbed the heavily bespectacled, fist-pumping one, the one who seemed to be caught in some exhortative pose in every picture, and whom I figured not for the wife but for some kind of auntie ringleader—she presented herself not as the ringleader of a marginalized or embittered minority, but of a happy, normal, self-sufficient group of friends.
Jamie snapped his fingers. “She tore apart her children! A tallish blond girl.”
“Medea? Wow.” How excellent Jamie was to recall this. “I have zero memory of that. But that’s definitely her though—like a Greek tragedy or something.”
We told Jamie what had happened to Adrienne.
“I actually flew here to see her,” I put in.
“So you guys…?”
I nodded, as if thrown into reverie. “Summer after freshman year of college.”
Jamie waited.
“I met her at a party,” I allowed. I expected the impact of my feeling to speak for itself. Saying it out loud seemed like curtailing the force of it. “We dated that summer,” was all I said. I wanted the room to swirl around us, to pop up with life-sized dioramas depicting the Blumont, the couch at the studio, the Booker terrace. Perhaps I paused for a second too long. Jamie contracted, and perceived something in my eyes: I had looked forward far too long to this. Quite specifically: to impressing him.
“Okay,” he said. “And you’ve kept in touch…”
“Actually, no.”
Jamie almost laughed. It was weird. He repressed it. He smiled, his small face blushed.
I had put myself in a weak position, and it seemed to stress him out and he blinked, tossing his hair out of his eyes.
Kim didn’t realize what had happened. She was outlining some of the difficult questions surrounding Adrienne’s rehab. Jamie was bored.
“Your frie
nd’s related to the Booker Petroleum family, right? So, I mean—no point getting mixed up in that.”
Kim seemed surprised. “With Lydie Booker, you mean?”
Jamie spoke out in the loud bored singsong that people use to intone obvious wisdom: “If Lydia Booker gives you a dime, she will start running your business.” He explained, “My sister-in-law works for the Greenwood Foundation. Lydia Booker gave them ten thousand dollars. Six months later they almost wanted to give it back. They actually had a meeting to discuss that option. And this is other nonprofits too. She has a reputation.”
“What was the problem?” I quickly asked.
“I don’t know. She had her own guy she wanted to be the speaker at this big gala thing. She had this great idea, she didn’t see what the problem was.”
“Tulsa’s evil grandmother,” I joked, my voice trembling.
“Exactly.”
I made an exaggerated gesture, drawing a pretend cigarette to my lips, and blinked my eyes in Lydie’s exhausted, imperious way.
Jamie didn’t get these physical references. But Kim smiled. “I do think Lydie can be like that.” She was nodding. “That’s part of why Adrienne isn’t that close to her—Adrienne totally doesn’t have this like controlling …”
“Power thing?”
Kim’s eyes lit up. “Yes.”
“Really?” My voice squeaked. I went on, in a quieter voice. “But the things about Lydie that strike you as domineering are the same things about Adrienne that I love. I mean, when I met her I realized—to be an artist, you can imagine—you have to understand—she has this kind of regal thing.”
“Maybe you should marry into the family,” said Jamie.
I must have blushed.
“I just mean—”
“No, no worries. It’s true. It was aspirational when I first dated her. Adrienne lived in a skyscraper. And that she didn’t go to college—to never go in the first place, you know, in our day and age. It blew my mind.”
“Because it’s stupid,” said Jamie.
“Well. You’re preparing for life as a public school teacher, Jamie. You have a certain outlook.”
“I’m just saying you have to be pretty fucking loaded to consider not going to college. Has she ever supported herself?”
I was speechless.
“You would like her, Jamie,” said Kim. Kim was so smart.
“I’m just saying not everyone can afford to just blow off college, that lifestyle.”
A long silence ensued. It was humid. A monkey chittered, coming from another room’s TV.
“Adrienne screened a video one time,” I began. My voice was tight and flat. “She’s on a sidewalk at night, right north of here. In that section between Cherry Street and 244.” I looked at him. “She was naked.”
I crossed my legs.
“The camera zooms in on her face, and then zooms out on her body, back and forth. Her face is serious, like she knows that she’s naked. You understand there is nothing erotic about this. In fact it was hard to watch—she was screening it just for me. It goes on for five minutes. At the end, the cameraman kneels down, and you get like a monumental shot from below, her standing there looking off into the distance, and that’s it.”
“You made that movie?”
“No, no, Chase did. Chase Fitzpatrick.”
“They never got caught?”
“No, of course not. We didn’t do it to get caught.”
Kim was politely holding her breath. I could tell from Jamie’s face that he thought this was all the stupidest and perhaps most obnoxious thing he had ever heard of.
“You see,” I said, “she made me do a movie like that. Once.”
Jamie frowned. “Was this like an initiation rite?”
“No. It was art. I mean. It was midnight before we were going to go, and I was like, ‘Aren’t we going to have some drinks?’ ‘No,’ Adrienne said, ‘you have to be mindful.’ She said I had a performance to give. And Chase—who was sort of the other man, you understand—was coming over with the night filter. Soon I was in the passenger seat and I was like, I guess I have to take my clothes off. They had a good spot—the street was dark, all the houses were built up on these really steep front yards, with steps down to the sidewalk. So I wasn’t walking past anyone’s picture window.
“And it was my show. To direct. So I made Chase get out and train his camera on the passenger-side door. I meant to count to a hundred but could only make it to ten, and then I stepped out, as confident as if I was in a business suit. And I tried to keep up that briskness. I think it was really comedic, for a while—which is not what I wanted. I had to go up to the corner, cross, and come back down. I had Chase shooting me, you know, and here I was.” I gestured.
“It’s one of those things, like you realize…” I stared away, the talk dead in my mouth. I took a deep breath.
They were silent. Kim looked odd, leaning way over on her elbow. She didn’t know what to say.
“Maybe too much information,” I said.
“No no.” Jamie tried to chuckle.
Street Fighter, as we called this series, did not exist on the internet. I had one copy, on an old VHS tape. Other than that, Adrienne might have a copy. I hoped she did.
At least I could say I had opened up to them.
Jamie had said little about his prognosis, but from what Kim said, it was decent. He would lead a normal life. He would just need someone who could always come take care of him, for a night or two at a time. And judging by those photos on his wall, he would have someone. It looked quite possible that Jamie Livingstone from the bus stop would in middle age be better provided-for in love and companionship than Adrienne Booker.
I was flying back to New York the next morning. It didn’t seem real. For the first time since I landed in Tulsa, the sky was overcast, and seemed to wad like a layer of protective cotton over all our little buildings and roads. Kim had driven down to the river, to the efficiency apartment where she told me she lived. I was headed downtown. But on the way I stopped at the time-honored record store, Starship Records & Tapes.
Starship had once been a house, small and peak-roofed, and retained its creaking wooden floors, its chopped-up floor plan. Most of the CDs were locked in glass cases, built in along the walls. I had to ask for help, and the clerk, not having heard of Adrienne, suggested I try the clearance bins. There it was. Patience, the album was called, by Adrienne Booker. It was loose in a cardboard box labeled LOCAL ARTISTS.
I got back into my car and slid Adrienne’s CD into the stereo. I didn’t want to play the stereo very loud. My windows were down. I didn’t want to blast anything. In fact I wasn’t positive that the music even was Adrienne’s. I checked the jewel case. Her live performances had been so brash, so off-putting, whereas what I was hearing now was normal, a tangy drum-and-guitar thing.
Live shows had always been the point. The word was paint to her, and as a vocalist she pushed and smeared and lashed it, pronouncing and repronouncing a lyric, ironizing it and jinxing it, or singing it like liturgy, solemn and black. Or she was violent—hacking out the rhythm. She never believed in expressing feelings, I knew: the thing that captured the crowd was her cold manner. If she moved a muscle it was controlled, never blurred. Even when, from her ululations, I expected her to be freaking out—I would look at the stage and see a stately figure, glancing at her audience. She always stood still while she sang, as if posing for a portrait—like Mona Lisa, or like Washington on the dollar bill.
I was passing under the inner dispersal loop when something made me turn the stereo back up. This was I believe the second song, and much softer than the previous: the voice that tacked above the drums sounded like Adrienne’s own. Not sawing as it used to do, but sailing.
For the first time since I arrived in Tulsa, I was hearing her. I pulled over to the curb and stopped—the street was so dead. “It’s too soon for morning,” Adrienne sang. Here was the ideal mythic instance of the singer-songwriter: that she is in tro
uble and has put her voice down to be found, by an ex-boyfriend perhaps, when he comes back looking for her. But it was not like Adrienne was speaking to me, not at all: She had never spoken like this. This was as if I peeked in her diary and discovered that she secretly formed her sentences with great care—speaking to us meanwhile in jottings and interjections and acting distracted. She had never had the mind of a diary-keeper. She had never talked like this: “I am trying, I am trying / To make it work / Because you love me.” Her voice was different physically too, it was shallower than it used to be, and that did more to bring me up short than anything. It was as if she had tied something inside her and fastened up the collar of her throat.
My phone rang. It was Lydie. “Jim,” she said, “can I consult with you about a couple of things?” She was saying something about Rod, I tried to understand what. My reception was horrible, so I turned the stereo off and climbed out of my car, hurrying down the sidewalk in hopes of finding a better signal. I had the skyscrapers before me. “Hello,” I kept saying, “Lydie?” Lydie was about to go into a meeting, but wanted to know if I was available to stay with Adrienne again. There was some problem with Rod—we would have to discuss it all, she said, after her meeting—this meeting with Texas—which was going to last all afternoon.
“Shall I just drop by your office later?”
She was surprised.
“I’m nearby,” I said.
“Well come by if you want. We should be done about six.”
Now that I was on my feet, I kept walking. I wished I had earphones and could listen to Adrienne while I walked our old routes. For here I was. “I am trying, I am trying / To make it work,” I sang in an undertone on the empty street. A quarter-hourly carillon of church bells bloomed out, and wafted down as it could, between the buildings.
A Map of Tulsa Page 15