The florist-cum-nursery Lydie directed me to was a landmark in Tulsa; it featured a two-story neon rose—the kind of landmark that gets shown after an apocalypse, smoking and twisted. Adrienne and I often drove by here—and I resented Lydie, for a second, for picking this out of all of Tulsa’s flower shops.
She opened her door, but then waited. “Jim,” she said, as I helped her up, “you’ve got to steady me.”
She was leaning quite emphatically on my arm. My biceps twitched. In the milky light of the nursery, her sad smile looked almost drugged. “What do we get?” I asked.
“Profusions,” she said.
I set her down on a folding chair that the clerk had very observantly presented.
“Profusions,” I said. I walked up and down the aisles, trying to focus. The humidity, combined with the stink of fertilizer, shrouded my thoughts, and I wandered far to the end of the greenhouse. I wanted to be alone.
In a corner, among the succulents, I found an orange flower that looked right—thumb-high, waxen. It fit Adrienne, I felt, her spirit of ungirliness, but it had nothing to do with a funeral. It was a flower for someone to keep at their bedside and tend. It would look precious if I got it now—Lydie might perhaps love for me to bring her such a flower and say it was “from me.” But the relationship I wanted with Lydie was otherwise. I scooped up three buckets of cut carnations and turned to the cash register, all business, but there Lydie was, arms out like a forklift. She took the flowers. “Get those others too,” she said. And she told the clerk about her niece as she paid.
I found the necktie sack. Someone in the waiting room had tucked it behind a couch pushed up against a window: as if it needed to be pinned there.
This stiff blue sack with floppy golden cords. It embarrassed me in precisely the way I had known it would.
Wanting to get a few of my things out of Adrienne’s room, I stopped at the nurses’ desk, timidly, to ask if Room 607 had been cleaned.
I found Rod bent over his suitcase, packing up to go. Lydie had told me he would be filling out forms all afternoon—she had sent her lawyer, Gilbert Lee, to help him. Lydie was probably going to sue the hospital, she had told me.
“Jim.” Rod put his hand on my shoulder. “You heard?” His voice was clotted.
“Yes,” I said. I tried to know what to say. It was like I was wearing seven satchels and camera bags and had to open each flap and rummage in them to try to find what I was supposed to feel.
“All the others were here,” he said, referring I assumed to Jenny and Nic and everyone else who had probably been a half hour behind me on their way from the diner.
“What was that like?” I asked.
Rod returned to his bags. “They’re going to stage a benefit concert, they said. I don’t know to benefit what.”
The room became very small, and seemed to stink. “Are you going tonight, to the penthouse?”
He shook his head.
“It would really mean a lot to Lydie if you came.”
He stood up and gave me a look. “Jim. You can work for Lydie if you want, but don’t go thinking she’s a saint.”
He turned his huge clutched face and bent back to his packing.
I had intended to spend the afternoon at the Rose Garden at Woodward Park. I thought that with my good shoes on, the paths of gravel would feel almost French—one thinks of French poetry, so conversational, yet firm and remorseless: good for thinking about death.
Instead I holed up in the intensive-care waiting area, where I had first found Rod two days ago, and where I had left my big green bag all that time. I sat with my green bag on my lap. What if Rod was still coming to us? I thought. What if he was only on his way now, now that she had died? What if he had arrived only now, and had asked me—or someone in my place—to take him around town, to show him all the venues of Adrienne’s life? Indeed, what if I wasn’t even here yet? But was on my way now, now that she had died?
It was like I needed to think. But it wasn’t even thinking. My body produced a kind of sadness, and I found it comfortable to sit in that.
Up in the Booker, we sat in conversation, the family group. When I arrived and the elevator doors parted, my green walls of memory, the horse painting, and all the penthouse furniture confronted me. Lydie herself assumed the antler-backed chair, and pointed to a stool for me. About a dozen others sat around. Carrie Fitzgerald stood in a corner, on the phone, in a black kimono. Rod was absent. Everyone, especially two or three elderly women, seemed to be there on the basis of connections established in previous generations, and our flowers, fittingly arranged here and there, did seem to be just the thing.
“We can be thankful that your uncle isn’t alive to see this,” said one of the older women.
Lydie smiled tightly and passed a bowl of hard candies.
“Margey said she’d be here by seven…,” put in one of the younger women.
There were sarcastic smiles all around, and comments. Margey was Margaret Cann, the mayor.
Lydie was going to sue the hospital. That was affirmed, and the little old ladies nodded solemnly. “What we’re all feeling…,” Lydie began. She feigned hesitation, shying her nose back from the coffee table. “Before Margey gets here,” she said. “What we’re all feeling is a sense of lost opportunity. There isn’t anyone in this room I haven’t gone to at some time for advice about Adrienne. We deplored the choices she made. But I think all of us, if we remember, always watched for her to”—Lydie paused—“come back to us. We hoped that when the crisis came, it might be the turning point. Because we always knew there would be a crisis. But we were never prepared for this.”
There was something in these words that revealed a most un-Lydie-like desperation. I believed at least some of Lydie’s erratic behavior that morning had been real—Adrienne meant more to her than she wanted to admit; as she spoke I caught glances crisscrossing the room that indicated as much. Lydie was not usually like this. Her head was drooping, actually. There was something in there, a maternal egg that was all catastrophically hatching.
I wondered what these old women really thought. For them Lydie herself was prodigal: unmarried, hectic, the flotsam of a dynasty. Her life had been a long exercise in coping. But Lydie caught me staring, mooning at her, and I excused myself. I walked out onto the terrace to think.
Nowhere in the Booker tonight, coming up the elevator or in the penthouse, had I been able to detect the presence of Adrienne. Now I walked from one end of the terrace to the other, trying to stir up memories. The tower across the way, the subject of so much drunken staring when I was young, looked like nothing but a blown-up photograph, a random chunk of skyline. It was inert and bright. I had cried too much already. I bridled at the idea that Adrienne’s life was a waste of time—“a lost opportunity.” But it was true that we had dreamed of a crisis—a way to break open the future. It felt like bad luck to be up on the terrace. The only thing I liked was the breeze—always a little pushy at that height.
Through the glass I heard a commotion, and looked back in. This must be the mayor was here. I could see her face, trapped up on Lydie’s shoulder. They were hugging; the mayor bit her lip, and then was let down, shortish, with large bobbed hair and blocky, smart-lady earrings. She knocked around the room robotically, straight-necked but quick to hug, bumping into everyone. Her smile was almost one of gratitude: hug, hug, hug.
I let myself back inside, to be introduced. Lydie did the honors: “This is Jim Praley. He’s moving back home from New York and is going to join Booker Petroleum. An old friend of Adrienne’s.”
“Did you know Adrienne well?”
“Yeah.” I rose on my tiptoes. I was surprised that Lydie had walked off and left me with the mayor.
“I never got to meet her,” the mayor was explaining. “But Lydie is such an important friend.”
“Adrienne was very popular with the youth.”
The mayor nodded slowly, unsure of what to say.
“She was a nexus for the
arts scene, networking between Albert Dooney and all the kids in the Brady District.”
The mayor still didn’t know what to do with this information. She was staring past me, at a piece of carpet near the bedroom. “I used to live with her, basically, in that bedroom,” I said.
The elevator dinged, and a young girl wearing a small black turban peeked out. She looked like she had come to the wrong party. But then Jenny followed, and then a whole carful of kids stepped out onto the carpet. They had gathered at Albert’s and come here en masse. They all wore black. Rather than bewildered by this terribly real, real-world situation, they seemed to feel in their bones that their moment had come. The first elevator load lined up to offer Lydie their condolences, like kids congratulating the enemy’s coach. Albert broke off and came over to me and shook my hand, having recognized me. But the elevator dinged again, and again, and the room grew noisy, and soon the majority of the people in the room were kids. People wanted to hug; Nic, looking at table legs, let me keep my arm draped around his shoulders while we talked. “Does the family not want us here?” Jenny asked me. Jenny had on a very adult black dress; she had just bought it this afternoon, she told me. I imagined her going to the mall: with what sense of purpose she parked her car in the Promenade Mall parking garage and strode into Dillard’s.
They were not having a benefit concert for Adrienne, but a memorial. “You write poetry, don’t you?” They wanted me to read. Of course I declined; I disentangled myself from the kids and made for the adults again. But it was a real consolation to me, that they were going to organize something.
I was at the drinks table with Carrie Fitzgerald. Her kimono sleeves threatened to drag through the canapés and I offered to pour for her. “It’s such a remarkable group of kids,” Carrie said, holding her glass. “I’m so glad that they could all be here.”
“So am I.”
“When Chase and Adrienne were little, she was so shy. She would come over to play with Chase but he wouldn’t know where she was. She would be hiding for hours and hours, somewhere in the house, and we got to where we wouldn’t look for her, we’d just wait for her to make her reappearance, you know. She was like a little demon. And now all these people love her.”
I liked Carrie for saying this. I thought I couldn’t add anything. But Carrie kept looking at me with her big, watery, fortysomething eyes. So I spoke: “This gathering didn’t really mean much, to me, until the kids arrived.”
“I felt that way too,” said Carrie. She was going to cry.
I quickly asked, “Have you talked to Chase?”
She closed her eyes and nodded. “Yes.” Her voice was croaky. “He should be on his way from the airport now. He said—” Carried blinked, and cleared her face. “Well, there’s a group of young people out there who’re all from Tulsa, who always meet for brunch, with him and Adrienne. And he said they all wanted to come, if there was a funeral.”
That was very hard for me to hear. “Chase is really so great,” I said, and left.
Back towards Lydie’s group I heard them still saying that Adrienne had been “on a path” towards this, and that one might “have expected it.” I didn’t hear Lydie say anything, and couldn’t tell whether it was all ratified by her, or whether she was getting very softly boxed in and blamed.
“Listen, Lydie,” I said, taking the liberty of sitting down. “There’s something I can tell you about.”
Lydie’s eyeliner up close looked purple, her eyes swollen. “I was worried about what you said earlier.” I got off the couch and squatted by her arm. “I don’t want you to think that she wasn’t happy. Adrienne missed a lot of opportunities, it’s true. But when she was alive—” I formed my fingers in a gesture of connoisseurship. “Adrienne really achieved something. It’s the point. You know she became the person she wanted to be.”
“Of course Jim.”
“I mean that to be a comfort to you.”
Her mouth looked strangled. “Okay Jim.”
But it was a matter of Lydie being sufficiently taken with me to take my point. And I saw that she wasn’t sufficiently taken.
It wasn’t until I looked up though, and saw Chase coming out from the elevator, that I could be sure any of us were going to get what we deserved. I finally felt a thrill of justice, of fittingness. The elevator had not dinged in some time, and then we looked, and the doors parted to reveal Chase Fitzpatrick. He had come straight from the airport. He entered the room like a grim Luke Skywalker, dressed in black, and in black boots, bending his blond mop to take his friends in hand: he came in taking everyone’s hand and murmuring, ashen-faced. He had gotten on a plane. It made a great difference to me to behold him. With him my sense of moment was almost answered.
It was in trouble that I acquired my taste for parties: people parting and classes graduating. Or parties that are illegal. In college and occasionally in New York, you find a party that is deeply defined. Usually by loss. Such is the magic of social promotion, as practiced at the nation’s universities—each year the end of an era. It was with a veteran’s sure hand that I reached out at the penthouse for Jenny, who was standing nearby. “Were you going to go out on the terrace and smoke?” I asked. She thought I wanted to avoid Chase. But it was because I knew how to arrange things that I wanted to let him greet everyone else first, while I waited out in the open air.
The terrace seemed chilly, and I gave Jenny my jacket. She put her arms through its sleeves. We lit two of her cigarettes, and after a couple of puffs stepped closer and held each other, side by side. When I coughed, she could probably feel my ribs. “I don’t usually smoke,” I said.
Word of Lydie’s lawsuit had reached the kids, and Jenny wanted to discuss. I refused. “Tell me about college,” I said.
Jenny looked up from my shoulder. To kiss Jenny would have filled me with joy. “I actually didn’t know you smoked,” she said.
I shrugged. “I’d like to pretend to smoke, sort of.” I held the smoking cigarette out over the guardrail, and worked my jaw. “There are lots of things, where it was at the beginning of my adult life when I dated Adrienne, and then I wish she could see me now, because I’m different. I have so much energy sometimes when I’m out, when everybody goes home, and I take my subway like I own it you know with my arms flung out over the seats, waiting for anybody else to get on board. The doors open at every stop. So it’s Adrienne who could get on board. Who would see me—and being beheld by her is what I’m trying to prepare for, all the time. Or that’s basically what I do in my head, when nothing else’s happening.”
“Like you’re talking to her,” Jenny murmured.
“Like I’m getting ready for a test.”
By the time Chase found us, we had accomplished an impressive silence: at least Jenny and I stared down from the same height, and had the same perspective, leaning on that rail with our shoulders hunched almost in a shrug, stories above the sedate night streets of Tulsa.
Chase had been out on the terrace for a while first—he had been detained by some guys by the door. But he got away and he made straight for us.
I turned around without his having to say anything. We hugged. It was Jenny who remarked on the moment: “I can’t believe I’m seeing this,” she said. My sense of drama had been contagious.
“Jim Praley.” Chase bit his lip and gripped my shoulder, rubbing a fist into my belly. He was crying in a dispersed, ongoing way, talking as cheerfully as possible with the general smear of tears on his face. “It restored a little of my faith in the universe when I heard that you were here.”
I tried to smile properly; I wanted to give myself away. It was not so much that we were rivals. It was that Chase was her lifelong friend, he represented the whole backside of her life, and I had failed to love him.
“Jim Praley.”
His voice faltered, and I moved to take him by the arm, and led us around to a table I remembered, still there, still bolted into place in an alcove with two chairs. “You two sit,” Jenny said. She pr
eferred to lean back in the shadows, out of the wind.
Once seated, Chase sighed. He was looking at his hands, moving them over the surface of the table as if trying to straighten a stack of papers. “Jim Praley.” He looked up. “You were even going to take off a year from college.”
“Did you know about that?”
“It was a big deal.”
Maybe Chase sat down with me because he thought I was owed that much: he recognized my unique standing with Adrienne.
“So you were here for the last couple of days?” he asked.
He wanted me to talk. I told Chase the truth: I had seen his mass email. “I don’t know why, it was just like I knew, and I got on a plane. I’ve been incredibly blessed to be here,” I said. I reached out to Chase across the table. But he kept his hands in his lap.
“So I was here for the last two nights. Rod and I sat up together the first night—it was interesting to meet him. But you know all about him—and your mom was there too, that night. Adrienne was completely unconscious. I talked to Nic a bit about the accident—you know all about that too—I was impressed by the idea though, what Nic said, that when Adrienne got on her motorcycle, the reason she crashed was that she forgot the road had been changed. That she was following the old road, on autopilot I guess, but I would put it another way. I would say she was going on old feelings.”
I glanced at Chase; his face seemed marble, his eyes averted. I leaned in more, and tented my hands at the center of the table. “And then I was there when she woke up last night. She wasn’t coherent for me. But she was present—”
“She was probably in great pain.”
“Yep.”
Jenny stepped out of the shadows; she had started crying. Chase beckoned for her, wanting her to be included. She knelt beside the table, and Chase took her hand. She reached for mine too, and held it. But Chase and I remained apart, in our opposite seats.
I looked at him. “Thank you Chase,” I said simply.
With his free hand, he made a heavy gesture, waving away the air between us. “No regrets,” he said. He said it a second time: “No regrets.”
A Map of Tulsa Page 19