She had been a better editor than college—Adrienne stood up and intimidated me more than college ever dared to. She wanted to be the opposite of a meritocracy: born wealthy, mostly unfriendly, but agog with unearned talents. After I met her I tried to go ahead and be like her, running ahead of myself like a dog, barking, looking back at its dull human master and wondering why he couldn’t keep up. I could write a new college application essay:
When my ex-girlfriend broke her back in a motorcycle accident, I learned many things about myself. I learned how to relax. I learned that my girlfriend had probably completely forgotten about me. And I remembered how honorable she was, and true. I realized I had never taken it upon myself to sit and watch her sleep. I had never stood still. I had never let myself doubt her; I had never stood still and stared at her before. I should have.
I wondered how many more days Adrienne might sleep. I wanted very badly to talk to her. And yet I could leave tomorrow and she might never know I had been here. Lydie might think less of me if I disappeared, but that wouldn’t matter.
A nurse was in Adrienne’s room. She jumped when I entered.
“Hey,” I said. This nurse was checking and replugging some of Adrienne’s wires—like a switchboard operator would, in a hurry. She left the blanket folded back, as it had been before I ever got here.
The room smelled like Windex now. With the night nurse gone the room fell deathly quiet, except I could hear some heat pipes. Or rather it was something in this room, perhaps some new medical equipment, clicking and knocking—I looked—or I thought it might be Adrienne’s pants, the astronaut pants that kept her blood flowing, pockets filling and refilling with air—but the astronaut pants were not going, actually. They had been turned off.
I got up and walked around to the other side of the bed. Adrienne’s left forearm—the one wrapped in its cast, braced up to the fingertips in a steel splint—wobbled from the elbow. Her arm was having a kind of slow spasm or something; it was knocking against the aluminum part of the bedrail at slow, clip-cloppy intervals.
“That’s very spooky of you,” I murmured, grasping her bedrail. I wondered if I envied her, lying there. “Soon you’ll be transformed,” I told her. “It won’t take long. The old Adrienne will cease to exist. You’ll grow new skin, new bones. So and so. They may even fit you with retractable claws.”
“What about my hands?”
It was her. It was a pencil flung off the penthouse rail and I had to fly—
“—Your hands are beautiful.”
She rang the casted hand so violently against its rail that I jumped backwards.
“Not this,” she said, flailing it against the rail.
“Your cast,” I hissed, seizing it, trying to keep her from breaking it, “it’s in a cast.”
“I can’t see,” she explained, almost conversationally. Time raced outside, and I stared at her open mouth, alive now with its characteristic contours, grimacing. Hoarse, heaving: She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know who I was.
“Should I get a nurse?”
Her blindfolded face managed to wither, as if impatient.
“It hurts,” she said.
“I know.” I was still gripping her left hand.
She drew up her lip. Her gums were marvelous, like the reddest part of a watermelon. “You’re in the way,” she panted, “you’re all in my way.” She was beginning now to try to scoot up on her other elbow, as if to rise, and then she gave that up, and began instead to gesture with her free right hand pointing upward and left, and then coming down clumsy, finlike, on her mask; I groped vaguely to catch it and seized that hand too, pulling it away.
“Adrienne.”
She strained to shake her hand out of my grip, but I wouldn’t let go. I could feel all the separate flexors roiling beneath my fingers like a piano, a silent appassionato. This was finally Adrienne. Her lips were twisting, twisting and relenting. “Go get a nurse,” she finally gasped. I obeyed; I let go of her arms and was almost out the door when I stopped and turned back—she thought I was gone. Craftily, she crooked her bare arm out from the sheets and suddenly tore at the mask. The blue mask snapped askew, quite crooked on its strap. She struck it again, agile now with her thumb about to hook beneath it—I was back at the bed and yanked that hand backwards, her cast arm rose, and I had to wrestle my elbow down for leverage, holding both her arms now, my torso beached halfway on top of hers, restraining her completely. My face hovered above her face: her bruised cheekbone stood out where the mask had been, the skin there looked raw, I would have to replace the eye mask exactly in its old outline—and coming out under the edge of the eye mask was her eye—what should have been the white of her eye but was red, a lake of red, and the blinking lid was black.
“It’s for medical purposes,” I breathed, trying to sound authoritative. “Don’t hurt your—fuck!” She stabbed her free thumb into my arm and gouged upward, at the blood vessels below my wrist. I let go for a second and then I shook her unhurt arm so hard I feared I would break it.
“Adrienne!”
The eye mask’s elastic band had slipped over the widest point of her head and was now beginning to contract, slowly inching itself off. While I lay there, the section of eye that I could see increased, and within the red came a razor-thin wisp of blue, the gassy corona about a dead black star, the dilated pupil, a hole in space. Falling, my face had to fix itself. I did and didn’t want her to recognize me. For all I knew her vision was deranged. Quick as I could I released the hand that was in the cast and reached to replace her mask. The eye, blinking weakly, snapped itself together. The iris contracted, and took on a look of intelligence. In the instant that I replaced the mask, I wondered if she had seen me.
Her free cast flew back and came down on the side of my head, and her legs began to shake as if uncontrollably. I should have called a nurse but it hurt too much, even to laugh at the blow, and so I plunged my head into the pillow beside her ear. “Adrienne. Is this the first time you’ve been awake?” She was silent. Her ear was silent. My head was smarting. “Listen,” I said, in a voice that seemed flooded to me with my own identity. I had stopped whispering. “Do you know what’s happened?”
Her lips stiffened.
“You know you are in the hospital?”
“Yes.” Her breath was like a foul warm wind. “I thought I was blind.”
“You broke your back.”
She spasmed again, a mechanical insistence of life, and then raised her casted hand high to strike the bedrail, making a mighty knell that filled the ward. I let it fall and then I closed in on her, my chest across her chest, my arms across her arms, my head beside her head, until, like a propeller winding down, her body shuddered and her spasm stopped. My head was almost kissing her. I pulled back slightly, and saw her lips puckered, as if on the point of an idea.
Then a strong orange arm pulled me away, and the nurse tabbed the spigot that controlled Adrienne’s morphine, letting two slugs drain into Adrienne’s blood. “You should have called me,” the nurse said, as Adrienne’s eyes, underneath the mask, probably closed.
“She was awake.”
The nurse surveyed Adrienne. “Well. You calmed her down.”
“Did I hurt her?”
The nurse stiffened. She was an older woman, she was strong, her tanned skin creased at her elbow and wrists.
“She was trying to take her mask off, so I had to restrain her.”
“You’ve been drinking.”
“Is it on my breath? It stays on your breath.”
The nurse stood there, considering.
“Did she hit you? You’re bleeding.” She examined my head. I winced. The nurse came back with gauze and rubbing alcohol. “I called her mother,” she said.
“Her aunt? Lydie said she was going to try to sleep—”
“Well, she’s on her way.”
“I wish you had asked. I mean, is this an emergency?”
“She asked to be called in the event that the
patient woke up.”
I scraped my fingernails down my tongue, trying to get rid of the taste of whiskey. I sat down to wait. From the ding of the elevator, from her boots on the waiting room carpet, I could hear Lydie coming. She stood, draped in an unseasonable fur, filling the doorway, her face haggard and un-made-up.
“Hey Lydie.”
“Is she awake?”
I explained about the morphine. Preemptively, I sketched out the scene with the eye mask and the spasm. I didn’t mention that I had been drinking. Lydie shed her fur and laid it, like a blanket, across Adrienne’s midsection. She listened respectfully, nodding but not giving anything away. Then she carried herself out of the room, presumably to see the nurses.
When she came back, Lydie stood for a while at the foot of Adrienne’s bed. I expected her to take a chair, but she stayed intent, her arms braced on the bedrails. I wouldn’t have thought Lydie needed such moments.
“What do the nurses say?” I asked.
“She’ll be out for a few hours.” Lydie sat down opposite me, businesslike. I saw what it was that her face was missing: the eyeliner. “Jim,” she said, “we have some spare time here.”
“I know you were looking forward to a good sleep,” I said.
She made a very small smile and shook her head, casting her eyes back toward Adrienne. Then back to me. “So, Jim. Are you going to make your flight in the morning?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, I think it would be disingenuous to pretend that we couldn’t make room for you. I still haven’t talked to HR. But at the very least I could hire you out of my personal budget.”
“That would be an honor.”
She shifted, puissant.
“However, Jim, I want us to be candid. I don’t want you to put yourself in a position where you would be frustrated. As it happens, you don’t have much relevant experience or training. Nor do we have any really exciting openings at the moment.”
“An exciting opening probably wouldn’t be appropriate…”
She frowned. “Well, you could be my personal assistant.”
“I would jump at that.”
“It’s not a glamorous job, Jim.”
She waited for me to ask questions.
“What would I be doing?”
“I have different assistants and they do different things. On a task basis. So it varies. I would never ask you to organize my medicine cabinet or anything like that—I’m not talking about that sort of thing. But you might have to organize a reception, caterers and flowers. I might give you a research project and you would spend a week down in our library.”
It was this easy. Lydie gave me a sense of the numbers, reminding me that the cost of living in Tulsa was much lower than that of New York. She obviously didn’t know how little I had been making.
“Lydie, I have your offer.”
“Well, you should think it over.”
“I may have to move very fast. I probably will make up my mind tonight, and let New York know.”
Lydie ordered me to get a hotel, get some sleep.
I had only $147 left in my checking account, but didn’t mention this. I would use my credit card. I rose and walked out, with nothing but my wallet and rental keys in my pockets. It didn’t even occur to me to go find my luggage.
The highway was empty under the stars. I drove slowly, to keep my rpm’s low. My car was a fly in the great empty barn of the sky. It’s a flying pig, I said. Trapped and harnessed.
Adrienne would be astonished. Nothing I could have told her—about New York, or my editing job, or my poems—would have impressed her. That had all been just a matter of showing up—indeed it was no more than what you expected, if you went to college and talked the talk. But that I asked Lydie for a job—that was a wild action, and it would run on into the future, and Adrienne would recognize in it that wild, sad thing in my nature for which she had loved me, or had been supposed to love me, that thing I had tried to convince her of. I could take satisfaction in having brought at least this part of my self up short, to rapid maturity. I realized I had made this statement. Adrienne would have to believe it.
It was good to sneak off from the hospital, to celebrate in private. I looked out off 169. That was how I selected my hotel. The Embassy Suites commanded an apron of grass between 244 and the Broken Arrow, a kind of no-man’s-land unseen from surface roads. I simply drifted down the proper exit ramp and parked.
The hotel’s reception desk was empty, so I strolled out under the big atrium. It yawned all the way to the top, up to a high glass skylight, an atrium banded with terraces, each floor’s recessed exit sign bleary and green. It was like the inside of a space station: I remembered it, I realized. I had been here before when I was little.
Had I apparently been everywhere before—did I overdo it? Beside me there was a pool, and a tropical waterfall built on brown Oklahoma rocks. I undressed in the lobby bathroom and slipped into the water wearing just my boxers. My wallet would be handy poolside. I could wave my credit card at the receptionist whenever he or she appeared.
Underwater I could feel my hair lift up off my scalp and wave. I bounced, at the bottom of the pool, and made my way to where I could just barely stand, with my toes curled at the cliff of the deep end. I let the water lap my chin. It smelled like carpet. I was waiting to see if anyone would come out on the terraces, on the floors above. There’d be a signal, a muffled door sound, and the rattle of an ice bucket. Even though it was Adrienne I wanted to wait for. The water in the pool seemed to be tight, or actually tense. I needed her. I had touched her. If only I would let go and float, something that was out in the night would come padding in on these carpets and hit me. All the water was like a fat suit, a gelatinous square that constrained and controlled me and I wished, if that were the case, that Adrienne would come in and hit me again, splashing, beaning me with her heavy plaster cast again, and again. In case she never gets through to me again. That was what the emptiness built above me seemed to betoken. This is powerlessness, I thought, these still waters.
When I woke up it was like the ceiling had been freshly painted. As if in the blink of an eye it had turned to yogurt, and in that instant I had woken up. I was blinking. There was a rising humor. Maybe it was the unexpected luxury of the hotel bed, but I was delighted with this new job. I guessed I had done well on this trip home. I would go to work. Adrienne would recover. Maybe she would even be around some—the future spread out stunningly blank, but it was mine and I had spread it out by myself, and I felt happy about that. Wearing only a towel and my shirt from the day before, I ventured out into the lobby to try to get shaving cream and some other things. I well knew how rare it was to wake up so happy. I looked kindly at the children who were playing in the pool this morning, who were screaming and splashing in the hollowness of the hotel.
My flight to New York left at ten. If I walked straight out the lobby’s sliding glass doors, wearing my towel, and hired a cab, I could make it. I cracked a private smile. I felt that way: ruinous, marooned. It was a relief, like deserting a war. The front desk attendant gave me some shaving cream and a razor. Last night I had talked to the night manager. He found me swimming, and we had a nice chat. I’m actually from here, I told him. I’m looking to come back, I’m interviewing with Lydie Booker. He was impressed. He asked me what I was looking at for housing. His sister was a real estate agent. What I’d really like, I told him, was to live in a house I’d never seen before, on a street I’d never visited.
In front of the mirror, scraping the cream from my chin, I made a serious face. I could have been a business traveler. But where is the beginning of something embarrassing? In my room there was a second bed, a bevy of towels, a piece of soap the size of a poker chip, wrapped in peach-colored foil. I surveyed my situation. Under the shower, being a good dog, I had considered a return to New York: I could always find another ticket. I thought of Adrienne. Perhaps she was up by now, sitting up in her hospital bed. I couldn’t help b
ut think about her with her skin remade, unbruised, uncut, sitting up bright and comfortable in her hospital bed. I might not know what to do with my sudden reappearance on the scene, but she would know. She would be able to receive me with the poise of a sitting queen. Coming out in a towel, I laid my phone next to a clean pad of hotel stationery. I would have to call New York now and quit.
I should probably call Marcus, as well.
He would need a new roommate, for one thing—in fact, if I got somebody in time, I could probably get out of October rent. I could send out an email—and include everybody I knew, anybody who might be arriving in New York—announcing, in fact, that I was leaving. But I did dread telling Marcus the specifics. He had listened to me talk about Adrienne enough, and could prelabel the situation: There goes Jim. Running away from life. Smart Jim, leaping to the aid of those who do not need him. Turning his back on New York. Too good for New York. Pretending that he has some kind of ancestral homeland in the city blocks and front yards of Tulsa. Jim the Boy Scout, foisting himself on a tragically lamed ex. Basing his identity on people who do not know him. Good Jim, trying to do CPR on a dummy. I guess that’s Jim’s comfort zone. He makes up an imaginary girlfriend, and abandons his friends in New York. He quits his magazine because he’s afraid of writing. He wants to get a “real job.”
I should wait until I had spoken with Adrienne, and then call him. As long as I could report something human she had said, Marcus would respect that. As long as there was a girl involved, I thought, you were supposed to be able to be crazy.
But to work: I needed to make that part official. Dialing my boss Helen Mack I imagined her high sunny office, a normal day at work. The midtown skyscrapers out the window.
A Map of Tulsa Page 17