The sound of the boys’ lighter scorched up the sides of the buildings. I loved them—these skyscrapers. I had been to grand cities, ones with bigger more crenellated skylines—cities like battleships, bristling with darkness. But it was the simplicity of Tulsa’s skyline that had always stumped me.
I remembered on our way back into town as a little kid I always knew the place to suddenly strain on my seat belt, to catch the skyline swerving into view. This was how I always told myself we were home: like a fanfare of towers, downtown. It was supposed to be our castle.
Oh, we headed downtown for church, or for something like Disney on Ice, but the streets were pale, the sidewalks clean; you looked out from the car in vain for anything in the blank street-level walls to tell you Tulsa actually instantiated itself here, centrally. It was dead. It was only way out in the sprawl, in one-story multiplexes, that I ever formed a truly urban ideal, a Chicago or a Boston on-screen with its interlocking traffic and its smooth revolving doors, a downtown that could still swell with pedestrians, jammed and honking—sounds shut off perhaps when upstairs an actress closed the window in an elegant glass-walled penthouse, and the plot began.
That was how I always reserved the idea of such a life (the big city): that it was a lost art. If it existed in Tulsa it was floors above us. Or I saw traces here and there, as with the midtown Cherry Street bars we passed—people outside laughing, guffawing necklaced women—after picking my mom up from night school.
In high school I used to get up from the family supper table: I took my dad’s camera as a prop and I went downtown, riding the highway in, to the inner dispersal loop. You exit, retarding yourself down to twenty-five miles per hour on an empty four-lane boulevard; you stop at the useless stoplight, and your idling motor growls—like the monster who’s apparently eaten all nearby people, the street is so dead. Perhaps you get out and photograph some graffiti, or a broken window, but mostly the city’s not even vandalized, it’s just dead. I did once run into another photographer; she was female, wearing a puffy vest. We had both come down to the graveled shore of the reservoir, north of Haskell, when I heard her camera, shuttering, about forty feet upwind of me. She immediately turned away, and I followed her at a distance for several blocks until she got into a car and drove off. And then I flew away, to college. And now I was here again.
2
I showed up to Chase’s party on what I thought was the late side. Cars were parked up and down the street so I drove two intersections further to find a space, and then had those two blocks to dally, meandering over people’s yards. I poked my head into the shadows of the porches of the big houses, and wondered what it would be like to own one.
I should have arranged to come with Edith, to arrive together—but hadn’t wanted to assume. I dreaded the scene. I had thought names like Chase Fitzpatrick’s were gone from my brain forever. A popular blond guy, an actor and a prince. A prankster and a rich kid. One heard that Chase was a pornographer—I couldn’t even evaluate statements like that. He did do movies, and once got permission to video the empty main hallway over the course of a weekend—which admittedly was kind of inscrutable and cool. But for me Chase was always going to be a guy who drove a new jeep, who stood in a circle with boys from the same families, and spat, ball caps carefully creased, on the high school parking lot. That’s what I thought I was walking into.
But the party, as it appeared from two driveways away, suggested something different. The kids looked rakish in the porch light; they didn’t have the puff and laundered abundance of Chase’s friends; they were slim and jagged, I could smell their hair spray, and cloves. They wouldn’t know me. I heard a girl laughing in the dark—fake, cackling, luxuriant. I didn’t mind. In my sports coat I was absurdly the authority figure who forgives the teenagers the earnestness of their pink hair and their dog collars: the policeman who has a daughter like that. The policeman calmly makes his way through the crowd.
Inside, however, was full of grown-ups. I was excited. The chandeliers were turned up bright, and amid a crosscurrent of kids men and women in their forties and fifties were talking at a medium volume, standing in groups and pairs indicative of broad interpenetrating acquaintanceship and soft manners. I heard loud dance music coming from another room, but no one seemed to mind. I walked among these grown-ups, contemptuous of their age but envious of their friendship, wondering if any of them wanted to stop me and ask me about something—about college, maybe. Stepping sideways out behind a particularly large man I saw the dessert table: Edith had a piece of cake in her mouth but motioned to me. “Come on,” she said, “I have to introduce you to Adrienne.”
“Who are all of these people?”
“It’s actually Chase’s mom has this party every year, and it always falls on Adrienne’s birthday. So kids come too.”
“Are Chase and Adrienne related?”
“Their families go way back.”
We couldn’t find Adrienne in the front part of the house, so we went on an expedition into the back. Edith led me upstairs and down, and the halls ran on forever. Chase lived in a house the size of a small space station—I could have entertained myself had Edith let me alone to look into all the rooms, ones with dormer nooks, one with a telescope, a library, ones with no furniture at all but walls of built-in closets. Alas, one of the downstairs rooms had a home theater, and it was full of kids.
And leaning against the far wall I saw the girl Adrienne. She stood like a statue in the flickering light of the screen. Her broken nose flashed in outline, like a glimpse of what I had remembered: but she looked taller, or was towering somehow; perhaps it was an effect of the light. At the projector, I saw Chase—looking bored—like the bull at the center of his labyrinth. I glanced again at Adrienne: she caught my eye looking.
On-screen: The picture was low-definition, from the seventies. A banquet. Naked young women carted in a large covered dish, stopped, removed the lid, and revealed a platter of different-colored feces. People whooped and clucked, clapping, and I tried to laugh too. I have a toothy grin where I tense up my jaw and bare my teeth, when I’m faking it. I didn’t dare look off from the screen. This was of course the kind of movie they watched. Not all of them laughed. Some cringed, some moaned: Edith pretended to throw up. But I stared straight ahead as if nothing had happened. On-screen a flaming match was held to a boy’s nipple, and the hand holding the match trembled.
We seemed to be toward the end of a long movie. Something else with shit was happening, but I scanned the audience—I glanced at Adrienne. She was scanning the audience too. She must have seen this movie before. She was surveying her friends in their bucket chairs, an impatient expression on her face. She wasn’t as pretty as the Italian girls on-screen, but she was as blond and clear-skinned as the prettiest of them, and seemed—a lot more alive. There was something in Adrienne’s face that made me root for her. Against Chase. Naturally assuming she was a captive of Chase.
When the movie flashed “FINE,” Adrienne was the first one up; she yanked at the pull-down screen, bending over in excellent jeans, leveraging her small buttocks back as if to ring a bell: she stood up with a glance at the crowd and strode to the back, her blond hair mobile, like plumage. People were applauding the movie. With the lights up, it was nice to see Adrienne in color: in her gray T-shirt, her arms pink. She high-fived Chase, and he captured her hand, holding her while she swayed.
Edith stood me up.
“This is Jim.”
“That was a serious movie,” I said.
“It was a piece of crap,” said Chase. But Adrienne was looking at me. She seemed oddly intent.
Someone burped. Other people had gotten up and were waiting to compliment Adrienne on the movie choice. They were all excited: the movie was banned in the U.S., apparently. Adrienne, whom in high school I’d taken for a social outcast, worked the crowd with a queenly efficiency. Some people got a smile, and that was it. I would have floated out of the room, but Edith made me stay. She had told Adrienn
e about me, I guessed. Briefly, there was a press. Chase elbowed by with film reels under his arm.
“Why did you pick that for your birthday?” a sleepy-looking boy asked Adrienne.
“Maybe it was kind of anti-birthday,” I suggested. But no one heard me. Everyone was eager to get out of there and away from that movie. The crush of people fizzed and was gone. A tall egg-shaped man leaned into the room. “Your aunt is leaving.” He gave Adrienne a look and disappeared.
Except for Edith and me, Adrienne was now alone. “What was your full name?” she asked me.
“Jim Praley.”
“Okay.” She took my arm. “Can I take him?”
Edith shooed me away, as if eager to get rid of me.
Adrienne steered me out into the hall. I felt mom-escorted, stiff-armed, institutionalized by these ladies.
“So Jim Praley. Are you having a good time at my party?”
“Well I love these hallways you have,” I said.
“They’re not really mine.”
“Right.”
“Why do you love them?”
“Because they seem so abstract.”
“Huh. Say more.”
“I guess because like the walls are plain, and with this carpeting—like they could be computer-generated, repeating on into forever.”
“And you love that.”
“Yeah. Like it could all have just come out of your head.”
“My head in particular?”
“Doesn’t it feel like I’m walking through a hallway in your head?”
She tried to feel. “Yeah. Maybe.”
“That’s what I love.”
She looked concerned and felt the brow of her head.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“I have to go say goodbye to my aunt. And you have to protect me from her.” She looked at me. “The thing is, you go to Lydie’s old college.”
Except for an ironic glance at my sports coat, her aunt barely noticed me. She was all eyes on Adrienne, smiling over her niece, her bushy middle-aged hair sticking out, her lips appreciative.
“So this was fun!”
“It was fun,” Adrienne said. “Most things are fun.”
“Okay.” Her aunt took this in. She was leaving. In fact her driver had already started the car. “We didn’t kill each other!”
“No.”
“Rapprochement.”
“Rapprochement.”
Lydie crossed her fingers and shook them in the air, and climbed into the backseat of her town car.
“That was good,” Adrienne said, after the car had pulled out of the driveway. “That made a big difference.”
“Were you guys fighting?”
“Well, Chase always makes us be nice. At things like this.” Adrienne looked at her feet. “Back to the party now?”
Inside, the adults were drifting away. Most had come for a dinner, hosted by Mrs. Fitzpatrick and somebody named Albert Dooney—the egg-shaped man who had summoned Adrienne a second ago and who, I would learn, was a great local impresario. He specialized in youth but was capable of entertaining adults too. Through a door to the dining room I glimpsed a disheveled table loaded with boxed catered cakes slumped over on their doilies, and wineglasses, some still full. But the rest of that night was drinking out of plastic cups.
Under the chandeliers, Adrienne proceeded to command an unceasing rotation of well-wishers. The general mill geared up around her and caught, like a chain. My sense was that she was not intimate with these people—she did not have Edith’s hungry gregariousness. Rather, Adrienne had a gift I had learned to observe in college in the very greatest undergraduate politicians: to turn every conversation into a kind of checkup, a set of top-down questions on the person interviewed. She gave nothing of herself—she ended the conversation whenever she liked, and with an air of accomplishment. This is hard to do to your peers. I guessed that maybe not all the other kids liked it. But there seemed to be wide respect for Adrienne.
I had volunteered to bartend, and over the next hour had conversations with a half dozen disconnected people, pouring them drinks—“I don’t know how to open this bottle,” I said, hilarious. The alcohol made me graceful, and I happily took up position basically manning a keg, passing sloshing cups of beer off to strangers—Adrienne had glanced to say goodbye. A boy with tattooed crosses on his wrists showed me how to prime a new keg, and I started pumping. I was drunk for a while. People came and went, and I asked them for their orders as if I was an old hand, a proprietor at his counter. “What’ll you have?!” A guy I barely remembered from freshman year of high school came to relieve me, and I welcomed him like an ancient friend—he didn’t have any idea who I was but he seemed pleased enough, accepting my vigorous handshake and obliging my sudden interest in his name and in his Franklin class.
Upstairs I found Edith manning a bay-window bench, a salon at her feet. I swung into the room having forgotten that it was Edith who had invited me or that I owed Edith anything for that. I stretched out beside her and told her all about my doing. “I don’t know if I realized this in high school,” I said, “but Adrienne Booker’s sort of impressive.” I fingered the curtain philosophically.
Edith stuck out her tongue. “Some boys would say…sort of stuck up.”
“I’m stuck up too.” I gestured out the black window. I was feeling magnificently hollow. “But she’s better at it. There’s more to it with her.”
“Did you meet Lydie?”
I raised my eyebrows and put my arm around Edith’s waist. My head was resting on her shoulder. “Yes. Next time I see her I’m going to ask her for her niece’s hand in marriage.”
Edith shooed away the vodka bottle that Cam, herself half slumped against the bay-window bench, raised up like a friendly elephant, nudging against my leg. I got up and took a cup of Hawaiian Punch instead: “You can taste the huge molecules of NutraSweet, rolling around like brambles in your mouth.”
“There are other girls downstairs,” said Edith.
“Yes but they’re not deep—Adrienne is like a new level.”
“You seem like you want more a girlfriend.”
I rolled my eyes. “What is more? Is it more girlfriendly to be less like Adrienne? I think Adrienne’s pretty nice.” I thought I had to account for my being the only male in the room so I went over and put a couch cushion over my face. “I am sorry I feel so like a minotaur I should go to another room.”
Eventually I laid my head in Cam’s lap. Her thighs were small, and slippery on account of her Chinese pants. So I had to have my head squarely in her lap. “What do you think of these Tulsa kids?” I asked.
“They’re a bunch of drunks,” Cam said.
“That’s why they’re so great.”
“Do you like being drunk?” she asked.
“I think so. Should I not?”
“Some people hate it the first time.”
“Why?” I asked.
“They miss having control of themselves.”
“When I am sober I have no control. I am forced to just watch myself doing nothing.”
The party was never going to end.
At some point, as if it had been raining, it stopped, or something, and the party flowed out back. I discovered a brick terrace beneath my feet, and beyond that was grass, and then great trees. The night air had turned to aloe.
The yards in this neighborhood were vast and irregularly shaped. It was like the trees went on in a continuous great wood, feeding into all the greatest backyards of Tulsa. Maybe they backed out onto Philbrook even. Philbrook was an oilman’s palazzo that eons ago had been converted into an art museum, the type of institution to which a field trip might be taken—its grounds, with a long reflecting pool and sloping greenswards, were, in spite of my growing up in a region supposedly rural, the most Arcadian thing I had ever had. We even went to A Midsummer Night’s Dream there, performed on a summer night. And the back stairs of Chase’s porch plashed down into the same swanlike curls as Phi
lbrook’s, having the same Italianate elegance that had so taken, apparently, the oil barons who built Tulsa.
I stepped down onto the grass and walked anonymously through shadowy congregations of kids smoking in the dark. Some people ahead of me were skinny-dipping; I wandered further into the woods, in the moonlight, until I came all alone to a huge table, a monolithic piece of patio furniture inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a zodiac design. I stared. As I picked my way back towards the house I almost thought that table had frightened me. I was glad to get back under the yellow light of the windows. Somebody had put out chicken sandwiches, and I ate one, having found a terrace rail where I could sit and sift my thoughts.
The sandwich was good. I guessed I had done well at this party. I thought of Adrienne Booker mainly. Would there be more parties like this, or were there places around town I would run into her? I somehow very much doubted she would go somewhere like Retro Night. But whatever existed out there, I now was into it. Edith would show me. Unless Adrienne occupied a whole higher level, maybe. I had come back down onto the grass and was now testing the lock of a basement door—which opened onto a sturdy flight of steps. With the last part of the sandwich in my cheek, I retreated down these steps and wandered through the basement. I was alert to the creak of floorboards above me: the party went on up there, with me down here, walking on concrete.
Every lightbulb had a little string, which I pulled, leaving them on behind me. It was endless, like an antique storehouse, with paths narrowly uncurled between banks of shrouded furniture. I found an English saddle, moldy but eloquently shaped, like a strenuous black tongue. I noted the boxes and boxes of wineglasses, and the velvet-lined strongboxes, organized with silver: From different grandparents, devolving here? I discovered a terribly realistic bear mask, made out of what felt like real fur, but with man-made underpinnings, cheeks and chin lined with paisley handkerchief material. And the snout, looking back at me, was lambskin-soft, wrinkled like a glove, tipped with tortoiseshell nostrils.
A Map of Tulsa Page 2