A Map of Tulsa (24 page)

“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 but 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.

“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?”