A Map of Tulsa (20 page)

Kim kept smiling. “She said you taught her art history.”

I gestured roughly. “I didn’t teach her anything.”

“We always used to get smoothies,” Kim said, “after yoga. It made us hungry—everybody else in the class was moms. It was funny for me because I always thought, Adrienne Booker, what a mystery, she dropped out. And I heard things about her, you know. But then here the two of us were, at Salad Alley. And that she dated you.”

I was tired. I had barely slept the night before, and had been riding on adrenaline this morning, all the well-wishers coming into the waiting lounge for Adrienne’s surgery and me there already, like a host. I had tried to ignore the headache brightness of the waiting lounge lights.

“She said she hadn’t heard from you in years.”

“She said that?”

Kim’s voice deliberately softened. “Why did you never come back?”

I felt lost, drifting away for a second. “I don’t know.” I crossed my legs. “I mean, there are rules, aren’t there? After a certain amount of time you can’t get back in touch anymore.”

Kim slapped the plastic couch where she was sitting with some resolve. “After this I’m on my way to see Jamie Livingstone.”

“Oh?”

“You have to come, Jim. You were friends, weren’t you?”

“Well, Jamie and I rode the same bus.” It seemed like another life to me. I knew he probably wouldn’t want me to make any kind of overture.

But Kim was always friends with everybody, in a popular-girl kind of way. My sense of reserve seemed almost sardonic in comparison. “You should get out of the hospital for a while,” she told me. I couldn’t really argue with her.

Finally, the neurosurgeon came in and confronted this reef of sleepy, half-skeptical young people, sought out Rod, and informed the patient’s father that the operation had gone smoothly. Adrienne “did a great job.” As no one would be allowed to go in to see Adrienne for hours yet, Kim and I rose to make our exit. But Kim wouldn’t take French leave, and I had to stand there like an impatient husband while she said her goodbyes.

We took separate cars. That was the way of it: always like a convoy setting out into the veldt, in Tulsa.
I pulled up alongside Kim: “Instead of the highway let’s take Yale.” Yale was the avenue I used to live off of, named Yale by the dirt-road, brass-banister generation that had laid Tulsa out—trying to embolden themselves, I guess, with big names. We had a Harvard Avenue too. When they were laid out, these roads cut through open prairies, but long ago they had been subdivided, graced with inexpensive split-levels: the neighborhoods still remained spacious, and it was out here that Adrienne and I had found the Hobby Lobby and the Target and the other air-conditioned big boxes that softened our afternoons, that summer. This was home. As a kid I always used to come with my dad after dinner, to fill up the car at these gas stations. It was a quiet thing to do, our stomachs full, watching evening traffic for a minute from the cool smooth concrete. I took in the fumes like sea air. Or we would go running errands on Saturdays, different places: back and forth, out onto the blacktop, downcast in the perpendicular sunlight, then back in: fueled by Coca-Cola and succored by the AC vent. I leaned my head directly on it. In our plush backseat there was an exposed joint of lubricated metal, the back bench of our minivan being collapsible, and I often wiggled my finger down between the cushions and then drew it out, to smell the grease on my finger.

I honked and pointed out my window, to signal to Kim that we should stop at the QuikTrip ahead to buy something to drink. “I want a Big-Gulp-type thing,” I explained once we got out of our cars.

“When was the last time you were in town?”

“My parents moved away after that summer, so.”

We stood with our straws in our mouths on the curb in front of QuikTrip, bashfully listening to an unshaven man on the pay phone behind us. He was trying to borrow money from someone, an old girlfriend, it sounded like.

“Lydie says you’ve been a big help.”

I took that in. “Do you think Lydie felt abandoned when Adrienne left town?”

“Well. Lydie…” Kim looked off down the street. “She took us both out to lunch once, before Adrienne left. That’s how I know Lydie. But I think that was Adrienne’s farewell to her. And she invited me along.”

After the surgery, Lydie had left without ceremony, rushing off to a meeting—she was about to buy a geothermal energy company in Texas. All during the surgery she and one of her lawyers, Gilbert Lee, had been going over strategy in a vacant conference room in the hospital. For a while, early in the morning, Lydie had let me sit in. I had been impressed, particularly with the lawyer’s clarity of mind—and with their general air of engagement and proactive self-interest so early in the morning. In some alert corner of my mind I wondered if Oklahoma could become a leader in geothermal energies. That would be good.

After Yale, Kim and I turned left onto Twenty-first Street—the street my mother and I always took going to elementary school. I had been a transfer student, to a better district, and Kim and I were now retracing the route my mother and I had driven daily into the wealthier
parts of the city. I did not think then in terms of money. These were simply the more rooted parts of Tulsa, the older parts: the parts with taller trees and hence more elaborately inflected houses—it was obvious that the two things worked by the same encouragement: age, pulling up the peaked roofs, knotting the chimneys and bulging out dormers and balconies, gnarling the ironwork—trees grew taller and the old growth spread itself out, fluxing and rising. In those days I had never even been in a two-story house before. Taken on tours snaking out from our elementary school, I was always amazed to hear that some of the houses, the very oldest ones, dated from as far back as the 1920s.

That made them more than sixty years old.

But even since then, in my short life span, Tulsa had grown older. Trees grew as they individualized. I observed that some of the newer trees, meant to dignify the newer strip malls, had since my school days lifted their bush into the sky, some bending over backwards, some like thrusting arms holding their orb aloft. Hedges, having different destinies, had grown wild and fat.

With my car already lagging behind Kim’s I slowed down to rubberneck at the four-story office tower my mom and I had watched go up morning after morning in the 1980s—I hadn’t known then that you could simply build a building. I thought all the buildings we were meant to have were already here, and official. The turreted house, like a castle guarding its corner, seemed for example to have a history and, I dreamed, a military purpose. My mistakes were many. The MRI clinic presented circular windows that probably must themselves
be
the MRIs, the torture tubes. The roof of the Sun Salon slanted down not with tinted skylights but with solar panels. And the Tudor Cottages Shopping Center, fronted with half-timber façades, dated back to the time of England, somehow.

Today I didn’t know much better. I wished I had an adult relationship to the city. I wished indeed that I was omniscient. Some buildings I
had
been in—from the road I could glance in a neighborhood lending library and remember how the mold smelled. Other sites triggered more situational memories—the cascading all-important Woodward Park where I and my several friends had warrens of rosebushes to run through. But I had never been rich in adventures. I grew up on the backyard system. I had been shuttled in cars.

I remembered when I went to the doctor as a little kid—my pediatrician was up on the eleventh floor of the same medical complex we were headed to now—I gazed down, standing for five minutes at a time trying to orient myself at the doctor’s big picture window. I could see the river and a few familiar office towers and a seabed of trees, but no houses: the houses were there of course, beneath the trees, but I didn’t know that. I did recognize the fancy shopping center immediately below us, with its English telephone booths like little red knobs—but then behind the shopping center there was an open field, and behind that field there was a second, and with a shock I wondered if anyone had ever gone to that field before, or if it was known to man, or was on any maps. Of course it was Cascia Hall’s soccer field, a perfectly well-known place.

And I never knew what direction my house was in. In a city of cars, when you don’t know how to drive, when you’ve been driven everywhere, seat-belted, orientation is rare. It’s a deep, slanting science, a source of anxiety, a thing that you fumble for but can’t bring yourself to grasp.

Kim and I were in the elevator going up—it was exactly like a dream, a high school reunion transposed to my childhood doctor’s office. It was no longer pediatrics, of course, the hospital had shuffled its departments—but it was the same physical space, the same layout, the same windows. Kim took a call from some guy named Randall, and I stood at what seemed like the same old window: There was the shopping center with its little red telephone booths. Looking out, I saw the Arkansas River clock through the Thirty-first, the Forty-first, and then the Sixty-first Street bridges, after which the river bent away, so that only with my cheek pressed to the window frame could I follow it all the way out to the 101st Street bridge. I stepped back and contemplated the scattered office buildings rising from the trees. I tried to remember their names, and the intersections. It pleased me to line up the landmarks on the unseen grid of streets that was spread out, like a net, beneath the blowing tops of the trees.

Kim covered her receiver with a smile. “You go on in first. He’ll be so excited to see you.”

Jamie was in a windowless room, watching TV. The TV was bolted to the ceiling, and Jamie sat up in bed looking at it, his remote poised. He glanced at me and then back to the TV, and almost changed the channel, but didn’t. He looked to see what exactly I wanted.

And he recognized me.

I should have had some line. But it was all I could do to stand there and be looked at.

Flustered to present himself, Jamie lifted his far buttock off the mattress and reached for my hand. “What’s up.” His eyes were candid, except that he kept glancing down at his lap, looking for something.

“Guess who brought me here. Kim Wheel.” That was the first thing I said. As if the smaller irony were enough to account for the larger.

We tried to catch up. I spotted his wedding ring—which Kim had told me to look for. Jamie and his wife wanted to move to New York, or maybe New Jersey: “Melissa and I are going to try to get teaching jobs there,” he told me.

I sighed. “And me”—I raised my eyebrows—“I’m thinking maybe I should move back here.”

Jamie welcomed that. He could be perfectly pro-Tulsa. He told me how downtown was about to undergo a big revitalization. There were lofts, he said, and apartments, “just like a big city.” He smiled. “You move home, and I’ll move to New York. Reverse brain drain.”

Jamie had met his wife at a comic book convention. She studied nursing at OSU Tulsa, but then went back and became a kindergarten teacher. He was still finishing his computer science degree: he would use it to teach high school. I remarked that my parents, who as Jamie knew were also teachers, had retired and moved away to sunny Galveston. “It’s as if Tulsa never happened, for them,” I said.

Jamie made a dry spitting sound.

I further bewailed my parents. “It’s, like, didn’t they make any friends here?”

“Their friends probably all moved to Phoenix.”

Jamie and I were bonding. “I got to go to a study-abroad thing in Germany,” I told him, “and in Germany they stick to even their elementary school friends—forever. You’ll be at a bar and then your friend gets an SMS and he’s like, ‘That’s Georg, from the village. Georg’s going to join us.’”

Jamie nodded his head sagely.

I went on: “But in America it’s like we’re always supposed to disappear—if we reach, you know, a certain level of success. Like Elijah. It’s like, if we’re valedictorian we have to get assassinated—because effectively we get up and give a speech and then we disappear to some faraway university. All our major social institutions growing up are about building intense friendships over a limited period of time and then severing them. High school, and then college. And summer camp. Poof. My parents, having completed their careers successfully, move.”

I was in a way bragging. But Jamie said that he too had lost touch with tons of people—and he had not gone anywhere. Occasionally he would run into someone at the store. At video rental stores, especially. One of our very smartest classmates had recently gotten a job as a reporter for the local news. “I see her on TV sometimes.”

“Of course,” I said, “we talk about losing touch with people but we didn’t even know them at the time, probably.”

“Except for her.” He gestured at Kim, who was standing in the door. “And she still knows everybody.”

We turned and watched Kim pull up a chair. It was as if we were two old gumshoes and Kim was the attractive lady who had come in to consult with us. She seated herself neatly. Kim Wheel had always been much more popular than Jamie Livingstone or Jim Praley. And having her there changed the dynamic. She was catching up with Jamie on his condition. His treatment was nearing its end, apparently. But I wasn’t really listening.

“Do you remember Adrienne Booker?” I abruptly asked Jamie.

“No.”

Kim looked up. “You remember her, Jamie. She went to Franklin.”

“She did?”

“She kept a low profile,” I said, “but she was friends with like Chase Fitzpatrick.”

He opened his mouth as if in epiphany, but it didn’t come. He closed his mouth again.

“She dropped out early, but you might remember her, she did all this art stuff,” I said. “Oil family. She used to eat lunch by herself—by the prefabs?”

“Oh!—she was in that one play.” He jammed his fingers into the mattress trying to remember the name of the play. I wished he would give me a hint. But my eyes wandered behind his bed, to where someone had pinned up a wall of photos. I wanted to get a look at Jamie’s wife. The photos appeared recent, and a preponderance featured a party of some kind, held outdoors under a bright blue tarp. A small shoal of people: I hesitated to say which one would have married my old bus-stop friend. I couldn’t tell. None of the revelers in the
photographs seemed to be aware that they were in a movie about social entropy, and missed connections, and loneliness. Helga—as I dubbed the heavily bespectacled, fist-pumping one, the one who seemed to be caught in some exhortative pose in every picture, and whom I figured not for the wife but for some kind of auntie ringleader—she presented herself not as the ringleader of a marginalized or embittered minority, but of a happy, normal, self-sufficient group of friends.