A Map of Tulsa (27 page)

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 preferred 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.”

Jenny was speaking through her tears. “We’re going to go dancing later, is that what you heard, Chase?”

Chase looked up. “Do you think Adrienne would approve of that, Jim?”

“I definitely do.”

“Okay then,” he said.

But none of us were going to go dancing. Chase was lost, staring into corridors inside of himself. He wouldn’t get over this, I could guess, for a long, long time.

We three rose and went in. Kim had already texted me to say that she was here, and now I looked for her in the crowd. As I approached I heard her say the words “blood clot” and “blood thinner”; she and her neighbor were conscientiously discussing the cause of death. Kim and I decided we had to look some of this medical information up on the internet, and so I showed her into the study. “There used to be a computer in here,” I said. The study was the same—windowless. “Okay,” I said. It was actually the same computer as before, an ancient 286. Awesomely grim, to be confronted with this machine. I sat down and switched it on—the CPU first, and then monitor.

“It’s old,” said Kim.

It was booting from DOS. The RAM counted itself, and then the green type flew up the monitor, scrolling fast, and halting, as if stuck. Kim laid her hand on my shoulder. I kept my eyes on the monitor. “She would have been very happy that you came back,” whispered Kim.

Windows loaded, and then I clicked on the browser. “Maybe Lydie knows the password,” I suggested. Kim left to go ask.

My legs were like the legs of crabs. The room spun, the 1980s office chair squeaked. On my second pass I stopped: I saw the pulsing light of a laptop there on the floor.

The laptop was asleep.

I watched the light pulse, like an EKG. It was a newish laptop.

I wondered whose it was.

Without opening the laptop, without touching it, I crept out of the study and cut back through the party
and into the bedroom. The bed, the furniture, everything was museum-perfect—totally as if Adrienne had never lived here. But then in the private bath, through the shower door, I thought I saw products: pastel and bright green bottles behind the rippled glass. I opened the medicine cabinet: cotton balls and dainty scissors, more products, all jumbled together not by use, but by a hurried maid. New things, unexpired things. Face cream, open. A pill bottle with a clean laser-printed label, dated this April 18. So she had been back here, maybe. On retreats from L.A. sometimes—giving herself residencies in Tulsa. Having hermitages up here. That’s how I would have been. A pedestrian again. Haunting the streets.

I washed my hands urgently. Then, lifting up the bed skirt, I peered under the bed and found a pair of red espadrilles. They were worn to the heel. I fished one out and pressed the insole. It was soft as her toe.

In defiance of any onlookers from in the main room, I went to stand before the doors of the big master wardrobe and pulled them wide. Here was the end of the rainbow: black, black, black, fuzzing into gold and silver sweaters and then breaking into turquoise white yellow red, hanging. I slid my fingers between separate hangers: a tie shirtfront dress, its halves hanging apart; a cream-colored gown with blue fleurs-de-lis; a lone magenta sash, hanging; four men’s oxford shirts, all yellow, soft with wear; a waitress’s dress I remembered, with
MILDRED
embroidered above a steaming apple pie. I had suppressed all memory of such a dress, but I knew it. She had worn it to a party once.

I knew half these dresses. Oh God. I racked through
them: another strapless gown, gray, with a tall elastic waist; a gold sequined blouse that looked like chain mail and that had a rip I remembered—and I found it with my fingers, at the armpit; a blue dress with a flounced hemline, causing me to look down. At shoes: the usual pell-mell, heels chopped up like waves at sea, every color, and busted espadrilles stacked in the corner. So she continued to walk everywhere. She came back here sometimes, and walked the old streets. Some of the shoes were very ancient, like dead bats, equally gothic as the fashion used to be, but at least one flat that I saw, mateless on the surface of the pile, had to be almost brand-new: it had a certain kind of notch, for toe cleavage, that I had seen on fashionable girls in New York that summer. A dull object caught my eye. I knelt down. It was an old beat-up boot with weeping laces. My old hiking boot from Boy Scouts.

I had stood up, and was holding the boot as I might hold a model boat: a hand at bow and a hand at stern, right up close to my face.

“Yeah, no, it’s apparently pretty normal in spinal cord cases.” Kim had gotten online. She looked a little beautiful, paused in the doorway. Standing with one foot forward and the other foot back.

“I guess I’m going to take off,” I said. Kim moved out of my way. Near the elevators I spotted Lydie. She was seeing the mayor out, and I decided to descend on her, while I still had this look of profundity on my face.

We smiled, and shook hands in silence. I spoke gently. “I’m going back to New York, Lydie.”

She kind of curtseyed. “Okay Jim.”

“Thank you though for—”

She smiled weakly. “Go,” she said. I turned; I was going to catch the mayor’s elevator car. “But Jim,” called Lydie, “where did you get that shoe?”

I was still holding the boot. I turned to put it back. But instead of returning it to the wardrobe, I slid into the kitchen, squeezing past a group of girls. Under the pretext of getting a beer, I opened the refrigerator and put the boot inside. I saw uneaten sushi, bitters, limes turned brown, and a sheaf of unshucked corn. I saw her everywhere—the magnets from SoundBiz on the refrigerator door; and her doodling on a menu, angry geometric shapes. I opened one of the drawers, loud on its casters. “Is there a bottle opener?” I asked aloud, for the benefit of the girls standing near me. But I never was going to drink this beer: I rooted through more menus, rubber bands, screwdrivers, as quietly as I could, until I found a little beaded pouch I knew, and inside it felt the familiar weight of Adrienne’s extra key. It was the spare key, one of the long-toothed keys that opened Adrienne’s studio. Right where I knew it was.

And then I wound back around the corner and pressed the arrow down.