A Map of Tulsa (14 page)

I went back to college and I made a lot of friends. I was older now—I wore my newfound bohemianism like an old coat, partaking of joints with a companionable ease. Clinking my glass. I hardly forgot Adrienne. For a while I sent her emails, but I never got a correspondence going. Either Adrienne didn’t reply or she typed off something careless. “You are the philosfer,” was the sum total of one of her answers, after one of my best, most excited emails. It was like she bent over her keyboard without even sitting down, typed something, and was off. Whereas I sat up all night building my paragraphs. When I pressed send I slipped out of the dorm and went brooding over the email I had just written, down sidewalks and river trails. And when it rose, the morning sun smelled like acorns and dirty jeans. I went home and slept. I was not unhappy. In fact, the last emails I sent were written in full knowledge that Adrienne wasn’t even reading them. Like skywriting: the words fade, and the little biplane stutters off over the horizon. I stopped emailing at the first freeze. Stopping
seemed to me an essential gesture. And then after that I tried not to think about her too much. Not because it hurt. But because I needed to hide from Adrienne, in my mind.

What would she say, if she ever ran into me again? After I graduated, and moved to New York, I became obsessed with this possibility. That maybe Adrienne would see a sobered man, with his face set against her. Or someone who three years on still had something to say to her. I had moved to New York, as most kids do, with a dire sense of fate and culmination, and I was prepared to meet Adrienne around any street corner. I would spy her down the block, at the point just before a face gets legible. Not that I really planned to see her. But she ghosted the ins and outs of all my yearning: my poems, my job, even other girls. Sometimes I hardly registered her among my thoughts, but she was there—even in college I had used Adrienne, like a kind of high C, to put my head into tune.

In New York I got paid exactly $207 a week to work at a big literary magazine—part-time, to be sure, though it took up most of my days. Some people said it was criminal for them to be paying me so little, with no benefits. But the name recognition was big. As everybody acknowledged. And I was happy to work with so many famous writers—meaning I typed them correspondence about their payments. I got up early every morning and put on nice pants and tucked in my shirt. I thought of Adrienne: her early mornings, with her skirts. I wished she could see me when I climbed up from the subway at Times Square. Now here was a wide-awake city. Here was a downtown.

I wasn’t writing. I partied a lot. Literary New York was a round of parties. But you couldn’t quite feel that they were leading anywhere, the way parties in college did. Or in Tulsa. In Tulsa we drove all night across town to get to a party, feeling as if it was going to be of historical significance when we got there. That was what made weekends fun. We had kidded ourselves—but properly. Now I was merely a dupe. Living on $828 a month.

I had discovered, on my computer at work, that if you center an online map on North America and dial down to the local level, zooming in without reference to region or state, it’s Coffeyville, Kansas, that loads. I had been to Coffeyville. I hadn’t known though that it was our nation’s bull’s-eye, the center of America. On-screen it’s basically an intersection of highway above a pale green fill—but then at the bottom of the screen I saw that there was a tempting white border, and that clicking south on the compass I could cross down into Oklahoma. I clicked and let the screen redraw, following the most eye-catching line, bright yellow Route 169—down through blankets of farmland, through the pale emptiness around Nowata, and down further till, trending westward, past Talala, past Oolagah, 169 made a confident westward leap over Owasso, and the computer seemed to have to stop and think, to gather itself, before Tulsa displayed.

Meanwhile, my parents’ lives went on like ancient chronicles. In Galveston a young uncle flew his pickup off the road, and I went to Texas to be in the waiting room when he died. My grandmother died too. My twenties were stitched to life by these funerals. And I
would forgo a party in New York for a funeral in Texas any day of the week. Texas and that part of the country, Oklahoma, that was where reality obtained. Two different cousins got divorces. One of them turned out to be badly in debt, and before we knew anything my grandfather gave her $40,000 out of his life savings. Shortly after that we got power of attorney over him, and put him in a home.

I missed Tulsa, but was getting used to Christmas in Texas, the Christmas lights strung above the sand—I tried calling a girl I was seeing to tell her about it. I walked away from the family bonfire with my phone on my ear. A little boy came skittering out of the blackness. He was my second cousin. I was talking to my “girlfriend.” I was trying to tell her how good it was to get away from New York, into the largeness of the night.

I didn’t stick with any girl—I wasn’t writing. I seldom got up sufficient momentum to feel that it was even me, Jim Praley, who kept coming back to his desk. Sometimes on a slow night I tried to tell someone about Adrienne: I knew it was a good story. But I never emailed Adrienne, or tried to make contact. For long periods of time I probably didn’t even think about her: we all have these recurrent dreams in our lives, which we manage mostly to repress. There was once, early on, when Edith came through town and I took her out to some bars. I made a point of not even mentioning Adrienne’s name, not once. “That girl Edith was worried about you,” my roommate later reported.

“Why?”

“She said you used to be a lot nicer.”

I was trying to get a full-time job somewhere, I was trying to figure out what to do in my life. Still, sometimes, coming home of a winter’s afternoon, when my mind ought to have been full of all kinds of things, and I was trudging through the snow, I looked up to see if Adrienne might be waiting there on my stoop. As if Adrienne of all people would struggle up through five years of absence to come and sit in the snow.

Once, on the train home, I thought I saw her, a very prim girl seated in the next section. I flattened my back to the door, my heart pounding, and as the train reentered the tunnel I fought to catch her reflection in a window. She got out at the first stop in Brooklyn, and I raced out too, I ran up the steps and followed her above ground, keeping a certain distance between us—her blond hair done in a complicated chignon and her step, amazing, brisker than ever—until I saw that I was going to lose her and began to trot, and actually sort of let her get away, crossing to the opposite side of the street as she, whoever she was, disappeared behind a sliding glass door.

When I got news of Adrienne’s accident I had just turned twenty-four. It was a cool day in September; I was getting ready for work, but I had stopped what I was doing to yank out my window unit. It was just the one window, in that room, and I had not been able to open it all summer.

Even though I was running late now, I stood by the newly opened window enjoying it. I decided to read my email. Something had come in during the middle of the night, and there were already four or five responses on
top of it. It was the high school listserv, of all things. Somebody had been hurt—I scrolled down.

I read that email before I knew what it was. Launched into confusion, I feared that I had written the email myself, somehow. I reread it quickly twice just to make sure she wasn’t dead. I tried to get clear what had happened. I didn’t understand. That her life had been going on all this time, but now she’d fucked up. And therefore we all found out about it, online.

I wasn’t even crying. I swayed there, with my elbows on my desk. A broken back was not good. I rubbed my eyes. And then I sat down. In fact, I started reading the
New York Times
. For years I’d had the restraint never to google Adrienne. There had been a line. I did not search for her.

I read an article about Congress, clicking even to the second page. And then I stood. I leaned my forehead on the raised window sash. I was going to miss my train. I would force myself to picture her injury. The bones very visibly snap, and the nerves go dark. Fine. It was a cartoon, a diagram. I visualized her real arm. It was sticking out in mental space, the fist hard and the wrist straining, the little arm hairs translucently raised, and the muscles of the forearm compact like a fish. As if only her arm had been broken in the crash.

I realized I was crying. For years I had been visualizing her face only. But finally I had figured out what belonged to me: I struck my forehead hard against the glass. Sometimes you want the world handed back to you. And on the penthouse terrace, reaching her arm away out with that pencil between her fingers. As if she had taught herself to throw the world away.

I didn’t go in to work that day. This was going to be Adrienne’s gift to me. I called in, and told my boss what I was going to do: that there was an open flight leaving in ninety minutes, and that if I made it I could be in Tulsa by lunchtime.

In the taxi on the way to JFK, with my common sense in tatters, I was blinking, passive, calm. I fingered the
buttons on my cell phone. I was gone—I sat stunned, watching the New York streets run by. I couldn’t hear the radio. And I hadn’t been to Tulsa in five years.

With delays at the airport, I might have taken time to sit and rethink, but I docked my laptop and plunged into email again. The list had blown up: old classmates felt obligated to quickly type something, to demonstrate their dismay, to wish Adrienne well. Now that I had time to study the thread, I discerned that my onetime friend Jamie Livingstone had, less sensationally, entered another hospital that same day—he for an obscure bone treatment. Together with Adrienne’s wreck this set everyone going. People undertook chronologies of all respectable alumni suffering, of early deaths, of parents’ deaths, of injuries, of house fires, of layoffs, piling onto each other’s lists in what was condoned as a grief ritual. But really it was a kind of victory lap—we had lived, and we could prove it. The real world had made its visitations. It hadn’t complicated us—on the contrary. All the codes of speech, the terror of the popularity system, the guarded egos, all that stuff had slipped away. We were very nice to one another now.

I was still reading after I boarded the plane. The stewardess asked us to shut our laptops and slide down our window shades—so that thereafter the shades glowed, heavy with the morning sun. I sat with my head bent, already tired, waiting. Once we reached cruising altitude, I pulled my laptop out again. There had been a total of fifty-three downloaded messages since early this morning. And yet none of them came from anyone I remembered as
Adrienne’s friend. Nowhere on the listserv did anyone address my questions: What had been the cause of the wreck? What did the doctor say her life would be like, if she really couldn’t walk? And what exactly was meant by “Adrienne’s family”? “I can’t believe this is all happening,” one Kim Wheel had written. Kim Wheel, the girl who did the morning announcements senior year. What did Kim Wheel know of Adrienne? “Was at St. U’s last night. It is so amazing how people come together at times like these. We’re so glad that you are going to be all right, Adrienne, and we are all going to send you our energy.” As if Adrienne was ever going to check this list.