“Hello?” At the sound of her voice I imagined a certain version of myself: Able, naïve. A young man from middle America.
“Hi Helen.”
To my consternation, the focus of the conversation was Adrienne’s injury. Helen seemed to have guessed pretty precisely who Adrienne was in my life—a muse. Yet Helen totally underestimated the depths. Her mind flew like a magnet toward the endpoint: Would Adrienne be able to walk, and when would we know? Even after I announced I was quitting Helen only wanted to interpret this decision as a symptom of the intensity of my reaction to Adrienne’s injury—a clumsy act of valor. Much to my frustration, she even said if I changed my mind in the next couple of weeks, I could come back. And she expected me to be in touch in the meantime with updates on Adrienne’s recovery. It was hard to get her off the phone.
I closed my cell and curled my hand in my lap. There I was at my hotel-room desk, my phone in my lap. The wallpaper was floral, white-on-white, with matte velveteen leaves and petals. It was like a grandmother’s wallpaper. I slowly reached out with my fingertips to touch it. And then with a jerk I stood up and went back to getting dressed. Earlier, I had gotten a text from Jenny: a bunch of people were meeting for lunch at a diner near St. Ursula’s. I would go to that.
I admired the hubbub of my group. We were milling inside the door while the other diners, at narrow individual tables, warily watched this flock of youth. There was no waitress to be seen—I had already greeted a few of the others, especially Jenny—when I took charge and suggested we take some empty booths that waited next to the wall. And the group did move en masse with me as I stepped toward the booths. I thought Jenny would be sitting with me. But somehow I got trapped deep inside a booth with all boys, among them Nic. Next to him was a boy I had never met before but who seemed to be paid attention to, who joked, and who kept things going by being a bit mean to everyone. “Oh, I love your creamy skin, Nic. I’m so lucky to get to sit next to Nic.” The guy on my left started tearing up sugar packets. I felt embarrassed after my leadership getting us to sit down here; my voice sounded loud to me, and when the waitress came I ordered with a strange, extremely loud voice. “Pass the jelly, pass the salt,” I called across the table, after the food came. No one asked me who I was.
“Adrienne woke up,” Nic told me.
“Was she talking?”
“Well, she’s pretty weak. She was like the pope on TV. Sticking out her hand barely and trying to nod at people. She’s got to get her strength up. The doctors say her body’s totally overwhelmed right now. It’s going to be months. But yeah, for now all she could really say was hello or thank you.”
“Did she say anything at all about her injury? Did she react?”
“I dunno, people were really trying to reassure her, mostly. She smiled some, which I guess is good.”
“Last night she was freaking out.”
“Oh. Were you talking to her aunt?”
“I was there last night. I was the one who woke Adrienne up. And she was flailing in her bed.” I looked at the others in our booth. The joker wasn’t paying attention to me, but Nic had narrowed his brows.
“Was something wrong?” he asked.
“I mean, she wasn’t in a good mood!” I shrugged for the benefit of the group. “Which I think is a testament. Most people when they’re in the hospital they try to act brave for the people around them. But not Adrienne. She was too pissed.”
“Sure.” Nic looked uncertain, though.
“She didn’t seem weak at all when I talked to her. She said she was in pain, and then that she thought she was blind. She’s dying to take off the eye mask.”
“Oh, they took it off—”
“They did?”
“Yeah, she barely opened her eyes but you could tell she could see…”
Nic asked the boys on his side of the booth to let him out and then he went to the bathroom. I tucked into my breakfast, but I was pretty distracted. The conversation moiled around me, and I stared at people as they talked to each other. Nobody noticed. I had a packet of photos, from the summer I dated Adrienne. They were squarish photographs, I don’t remember what camera I used, but I remember getting them developed. I remember picking them up and thinking with what envy the developer must have appreciated the images of Adrienne. For she was at her best in these shiny square photographs, she was caught in them. There was an image I liked best, her arm almost out of its socket, flung in front of her face, the forearm torqued, and the pinkie sticking forward. It’s a picture of ecstasy.
A plate crashed. It was a fresh plate, newly filled with food, and you could see the food bounce while the porcelain skittered. Everyone acted like it was normal but I was shocked. I was riveted in a shocked way: I guess my eyes had already been right there when it happened to crash, and I saw it hit. I wanted to leave after that. Everything made me feel super-cheap; I left a ten, without asking if that was enough. I slid out and left.
I was driving to the hospital to finally talk to Adrienne and I was thinking about one time we had taken a pill, and we decided to hike from downtown all the way out of the city limits. We set out to walk, and left the Brady District, passing north under the inner dispersal loop, and felt good, and went up the green side of UCAT, and saw the reservoir north of Haskell. It was dry. We cut across the reservoir and got lost in a subdivision of sinuous drives and cul-de-sacs, and it started to make us feel self-conscious. There were not many white people in that neighborhood and we were feeling hot; I was rubbing my thumb between her shoulder blades, more and more urgently. We finally came out by the dumpsters of a major grocery store, and went around and walked in the sliding glass doors. It was a big wholesale place, and I had to fill out a membership to get us in. We went and tried to pick out some water; the aisles were two stories high. There were huge pallets of individual bottles, or you could buy a gallon jug, or a refill for a water cooler. We crawled in behind the pallets and plucked out a bottle of water. We were able to lie down together in the darkness where no one could see us, we had inventory on all sides. We were very calm about this—our fearless and gentle action is what I remember most—we only left because Adrienne wanted to sing. “I want to sing,” she said. So we ran out of the store hand in hand but trying not to hold hands but we couldn’t resist. “Should we go over there?” I pointed to the side parking lot, where there weren’t any cars. But Adrienne wanted to sing really loud, she said. We looked up a taxi in a pay phone’s phone book and it took us home to the penthouse. I quickly ran from room to room and opened all the windows. And then she sang and sang. I bit her nipples. But when the pill wore off I found myself holding her down on the bed: to keep her from going out on the terrace. I was afraid she wanted to jump. She swore she didn’t but I didn’t believe her. She was always so deep. She was always so hard on herself when she gave way. “This has been so fucking stupid,” she said. “Why do we do this?”
“We don’t ever have to do it again,” I said. I was weeping too, of course.
“But you like it, Jim. I can tell that you always like to go through it.”
“I do love it,” I said—but my arms still braced her arms. She didn’t struggle, though, anymore. She was disgusted. It was not so much that the drug made us happy and then sad, but that it made us especially emotionally intelligent at first, and then stupid.
Finally, I noticed that the windows were still open, and we were getting cold. I coaxed her into the tub, and we took a warm bath.
“We have to do something in penance,” she said.
We decided, though it was now ten p.m. and we were as exhausted as possible, and clean, that we would put our clothes back on, and go downstairs, and make ourselves walk the same route again, all the way to the reservoir again.
“We’ll walk around the reservoir once and then come back.” Adrienne said this resolutely, and was tying her shoes. “We’ll do it perfectly, and make it up to ourselves.” I knew that on our way we would decide to go in at an all-night diner and get pancak
es instead. I didn’t say that though. I knew I would have to let it unfold.
But I was wrong. We trudged the circuit of the reservoir under the open stars, and dined on boiled eggs, at home, and carefully went to bed without doing or saying anything to spoil the image.
When I parked at St. Ursula’s it was about one in the afternoon, and cloudy. There was fear in my chest. Now I guess I could call my parents and invite them back to Tulsa. I’m going to live here now, I could tell them. You can come visit me whenever you want.
6
I stopped. The room was empty and her bed was gone. The bed had been taken out entirely—leaving apparatus, the racks and the pouches, all with their tubes hanging bent from use.
I turned slowly, not wanting to see. Lydie’s fur coat lay flung on a chair. On the desk next to Rod’s snacks, Lydie had left her clipboard, bursting with half-filled-out forms.
I looked again, knowledgeably, at the pouches and tubes disconnected. Yesterday, when they took her to prep for surgery, these things had all gone with her. The pouch with the green sticker, for example, was the one I had carried in the elevator, the day before that. They didn’t ever disconnect it. Its tube hung now, like a tusk of ivory, dripping.
I heard a nurse pass, and I froze. I wasn’t supposed to be here. They should’ve locked the door before now, they shouldn’t have let me in. I was not an experienced man. I did not have the grace behind me that I could reach for, the white sheet that you want, to throw over a thing like this. For myself I was finished, and I had no idea how to behave. I had no theory of the Bookers’ privacy. I had floated in here, so deep. It was the rolling together of all their black holes—
Out in the corridor I walked past Lydie and then stopped, having realized. She turned too, and against the flow of traffic her figure stood out, shoulder-slanted but quite composed. She crooked her finger and we stepped out of the way, into a carpeted alcove next to the drinking fountain.
Lydie’s eyes were quaking; she drew herself up and waited for a moment, before she nodded.
“She’s gone.”
Tears slicked my face when she said the words. “Yes,” I said. My tears came like sweat. “I was just—” I started. But my voice snapped like a twig.
Lydie bobbed her head, as if trying to keep time. She had been crying too. “Well, she had a blood clot. In her leg. It’s not unusual in cases like hers. But then the clot”—Lydie motioned, jerking—“can go up to the brain.”
I reached and unconsciously touched the material of her cuff. “When did—?”
“I was in the room with her—but she was quiet.”
I was not gasping. In fact, I was very still. I only had the instantaneous dispensing of hot tears incriminating me, in an X across my face. “Lydie, what if I’m at fault? What if I hurt her? I may have done it.”
“I’ve asked about that. Because I didn’t want there to be any question. But the doctors say what happened all happened instantly, at about noon today. Your conscience should be more than clear.” Lydie had regained her composure.
“But she was shaking. I held her arms down but her legs were shaking like crazy. I had to bend her arms to keep her from hitting her mask…It seems like it would have come loose then—the clot.”
“No.”
“But perhaps that’s when it was formed?”
“She was having spasms all the time. The fault lies with the hospital. It was a nurse who deactivated her pants.”
I could barely take a breath, but my tongue kept moving. “The astronaut pants, I remember. She just started talking all of a sudden. I don’t know. I should have thought—”
“Jim, I truly think you’ve been wonderful to her.”
My heart bloomed with gratitude. That Lydie registered a tremor of suspicion toward me and instantly looked into it, that was good of her, deeply, sophisticatedly responsible. Good in a boss. But I also sensed that she had given me, as quickly as possible, the sum total of what attention she could spare.
I made it to the bathroom to cry. That was crossing the hall, and turning the corner. Like I was struggling with and racing to transport a spilling barrel of water. Once in the stall I locked myself in.
When tragedy comes like this, at first it is complete. You do not have to think it over, or decide what it means. For it is far ahead of you, and the very act of acknowledging it means letting go. But then it comes around again—and it goes through you and is worse than before. I stood with my fingertips splayed on either side of the bathroom stall, eyes closed, desperate to establish in my mind who Adrienne was. I couldn’t even visualize her face. There was something frenzied about this. At least I could cry, I didn’t have to muster that—and then I remembered her eyes opening, and her nose flattened red on the pillow. And in the morning she was at the wardrobe, racking through her clothes with conventional girlish aplomb, and talking to me.
I closed the toilet lid and sat down in the airsickness posture, with my head between my knees. I only wished I could sack up all our old experiences and give the lot, rolled up, to Lydie and Rod. Like a paper sack filled with nails. They could give it a shake. And understand how good she was. I needed everyone to be appreciative now—it was like I immediately had to build a definitive idea, a kind of mental tomb for Adrienne.
I stole out from the hospital, taking the emergency stairs that Jenny had shown me, the same stairs we had taken to the roof. I took them down, and slipped out the east lobby. My car was way on the other side of the hospital. I had no intention of taking my car. I wanted to walk myself out under the sky. It was a horror. I fled in horror. I just traversed the parking lot, and then I hiked up the grassy slope that supported the highway and followed it north, keeping just to the outside of the corrugated rail. But this did not feel very private, I was still in view of the hospital, so I waited for a lull in the traffic and then I hurried across. There were six lanes. In the distance, oncoming cars began to honk, and I felt a flash of guilt when I hopped the opposite rail—for being so showy. I jogged downhill out of view, into a grassy trough that ran along an access road.
It felt right to breathe hard. The clouds above were heavy. For the whole of that walk I was sure it would rain, but it didn’t. I had time for lots of feelings. I walked the uneven grass, obviously mowed by a riding mower every month or so. I had time for that thought. I had time for lots of thoughts, and my stepping, through the tall grass, seemed to be a blundering and a rampaging through the past. To every thought of Adrienne I could now touch the fact of her death, and when I had done that to each of my thoughts I would have scotched them, to a certain extent. And that would be done.
I wished that she hadn’t seen me, when that mask slipped. In her field of vision my face had been a white glob maybe, a big finger, pressing down on her. After five years of nothing.
I made it to Forty-first Street before tedium threatened to compromise my feelings. I found a curb to sit on for five minutes, and then I started back.
In the room, Rod and Lydie were standing, facing in different directions, each on the phone. Lydie waved me back out into the corridor, and then came after me, taking my arm. She was taking a consolation call—acknowledging, lugubriously, “Yes. It’s the truth. You’re right Frieda.” But all the while her movements were frantic. She marched me right into the elevator.
Once it closed behind us, Lydie leaned her head back against its wall. She was newly old. Her expression reminded me of my departed grandmother’s: the sad, satisfied way elderly women smile—as if at a remove. It made me feel impotent, as a grandchild—as if I was merely an ornament at the end of her life. I was sad to see it on Lydie: watching her in her crisis I saw, as if surveying a family tree, the bareness of her life.
The elevator lowered itself on its rope, and other people got on. Lydie threw me a look. She was weary, but she held my eyes for just a beat too long. It was like a definite squeeze in a handshake. It seemed to me that my allegiance to Lydie was being consecrated in blood—in the metallic tincture of th
e elevator air, where speaking was basically forbidden, I was committing to discretion in matters that went out uncontainably up through floors of the hospital and down, into and throughout Tulsa. Exiting the lobby, Lydie leaned on me and gripped my arm with her unpainted nails and we proceeded, like a Boy Scout and an old lady, across the street.
“You know Lydie,” I told her, while I thought she was in my power, “Adrienne loved you.”
She didn’t answer me until we got in my car. “I always told people that Adrienne was the reason I didn’t have any children. Now. We’re going to go buy flowers.”
She gave me directions. I didn’t know why other people wouldn’t be sending flowers; the family isn’t supposed to get the flowers. But I didn’t say anything. There was to be a gathering at the Booker tonight. “It’s what people expect,” she said. “We did it this way when my uncle died.”
I was her personal assistant now, I realized.
The sun had come out, and the sand under my eyes was clogged with tears, and every time I blinked I wished it was to sleep. At each stoplight I took my hands off the wheel and rubbed at my eyes and rested until the light turned green. I was exhausted. “How is Rod?” I asked.
“When Rod had a child, it was so strange. I thought: Oh, I’m glad someone is at least going to keep the family going. But we stopped thinking of her that way years ago, Jim.”
“That she wasn’t interested in the family business.”
“You understand.”
“But Rod wasn’t either,” I said.
“He wishes he had been.” Lydie’s voice was trembling. “You know—have you noticed? He never really knew her.”
I drove upright, like a loyal chauffeur.
“You know one thing you can do for me, Jim Praley?” She regained her voice, its drawl. “Talk Rod into coming tonight.”
“I will.”
“He’s going to fly away, you know, and he’s never going to come back.”
A Map of Tulsa Page 18