I put the mask to my face and began walking around like that. Now, this was right: two peepholes to look out from, and the rest furred, as Muppet-foolish as it was scary. I advanced toward a set of indoor stairs, to go up, determined to make a hit.
But someone was coming. At the top, a door knocked open, and suddenly there were lots of voices tumbling down into the basement. I froze. I didn’t like getting caught down here. I didn’t want to take the mask off. “Hallarghhh,” I called, in a jesting, gargling voice.
A troop of five or six people, including both Adrienne and Edith, clumped at the foot of the stairs. Adrienne cocked her head. “What’s that?” I decided to remove the mask. Adrienne remembered my name: “Jim.”
She looked to Edith, since I was Edith’s charge. But Edith appeared doubtful. Adrienne was rippling with curiosity. “What’s that mask?”
I turned it around and held it up to Adrienne’s face.
She stood there, a slender bear. “You’re too tall for it,” I said.
People wondered what was happening. Adrienne realized they were waiting. “We’re going to take some pills,” she told me. “Do you want to share one?”
Chase was not among them, and neither was Cam. I had never taken drugs. “Sure,” I said.
Although we were alone in the basement, we all shuffled into an empty side room for added privacy. Edith, who had intuited so much, drew beside me, and would have counseled me on the drug we were taking. But I jerked away from her. They had the pills out on the table. “We’ll need a good knife,” said Edith, “in order to split Adrienne’s pill.” I was half ashamed to be obliging Adrienne to share, but didn’t want to beg off. “There’s a lot of silver down here,” I said, and rushed off to get something out of the chests I had discovered. What I happened on though was not a knife but a wicked pair of filigreed scissors, scoop-handled to be used by a fancy lady wearing lots of rings but then stubby in the blades—like a fat-lipped pelican.
“The poultry shears will do it,” one boy said, randomly exultant when I brandished the scissors back in the room. People sort of applauded.
But the pills were the powdery kind—like aspirin—and Edith said we should get something more like a box cutter or a straight razor. “Whatever,” Adrienne said. She held the pill we were going to share between her fingertips, clamped the scissors over it, and squeezed, holding the whole operation away from her body disdainfully. People inspected the results. Two good crumbs waited, though a significant fraction had been pulverized, and powder was exploded on the floor.
“I’m sure that’s enough for me,” I put in.
“You should snort it,” they said, in reference to the wasted powder. “Put it on your gums.”
Adrienne chucked me on the elbow: she wanted to make eye contact while we swallowed our crumbs.
Then everyone, with a ceremony that surprised me, took their pills and went quiet. We moved the table out of the way and sat down on the dirty concrete floor, and waited.
It was like a séance. We could hear bumps and, much more immediate, some footsteps creaking above us, and occasionally a muffled yelp of some kind.
I realized that the party was going to keep going for a long, long time.
I wondered if, in about five minutes, we were all going to start crawling across the floor and kissing each other.
Then: “I’m feeling it,” said one of the boys.
“We should talk about something,” said Edith, in her normal impassive voice. But her face was broken out in a rictus of ecstasy.
Soon the room was ballistic with chatter. There was a piano, somewhere down here. Somebody was going to play. We were going to be able to enjoy the experience “without anyone else interrupting.”
I assumed that my pill was having its effect as well but that I was so inhibited, and so inexperienced, that I did not realize it—I would have to figure out how to pick out some subtle inkling and jockey it up into my cerebrum:
Adrienne had squatted down next to me. She was nimble. “We may not have gotten enough to feel it,” she said. She was anxious, as if I was the customer.
“It’s fine,” I wanted to assure her, “even a half feeling—I’m just glad for the experience.”
“Sometimes you need the full thing…” She gestured, inarticulate.
“Like to trigger it?”
She opened her palms, in a gesture of revelation.
“Maybe it would be better if it didn’t work,” I said. “I wanted to talk to you.”
“Yes?”
I had no idea what I was going to say next. “I found some stuff in the backyard,” I managed. “We could go look at it.”
She thought, nodded slowly, and rose.
The others would have made a fuss had they found out our pill didn’t work. Who knows what they did think. Adrienne stood me up by the hand and pulled me out of the room.
We climbed up the stairs and out the door, onto the grass. “It’s somewhere,” I said, and we jogged into the woods. We had to slow, and start walking; it was dark. I spotted the stone table. “It was in the moonlight earlier.” I took out the tiny LED flashlight my mother had given me, the kind that links to your key chain—“To get to your car at night,” my mother had said.
I waved the light at the table’s reflective inlay. “It’s a zodiac, but not our typical Greek one.” I shone the light on a round of figures, a peacock, a crab, a priapic chef—
“What’s that thing?” She nicked away my key chain, as simple as a thief.
The device was triangular, like a guitar pick. When you pressed on it, an LED ignited beneath the translucent blue plastic and a beam of light flew out.
“I should paint this,” she said.
“What?”
She closed her eyes, smashing the blue light in front of one eyelid, and then the other.
I tried to think what painterly techniques would come into play. “It would be incredibly hard to get the effect right,” I said.
Adrienne wasn’t paying attention.
“It’s an alien eyeball,” I said.
She fondled the key chain. “It is an eye.”
“So you paint?”
She looked toward the house. “I want to be a painter,” she said.
We lay down on the table and were staring up at the leaves and stars. Of course Adrienne had seen all this before, this table, she was a regular in this house. “Do you need to go back to the party?” I asked.
“No.” It was like five minutes passed. “Also I want to be a priest,” she said. Her voice was like sand. “I took a personality test and it said I had the three attributes. Faith, dignity, and zeal.”
I looked to see if she was kidding. But she was dignified. Even lolling her head, abstracted.
“This thing we’re on is like a cromlech,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“An ancient druidic, like, sacrificial table.”
“Edith said you were a poet.”
“I want to be.”
Adrienne sat up. “Tell me why.”
She was prepared to take me seriously, if I wanted. I tried to think. “I want to be a poet so that I can actually write good poetry,” I said. “I want to be very good.”
She nodded. “Because you think you already are, right?”
“Yeah.”
A long moment passed. We both lay in the dark. When the wind blew, we could hear the leaves whispering all around us, but we couldn’t see them.
Adrienne turned to me. “When you think about your work…are you frightened?”
“No. But I know what you mean. I will be someday.”
“Yeah.” Casually darting, Adrienne got up and walked away from the table. “Come on,” she said.
We walked deeper into the trees, until we stood at Chase’s back fence. The next house behind slowly became visible. It was taking on shape, an imposing outline against the just-blueing sky.
“Do you want to go over?” she asked.
“You know them?”
“No.”
I had to haul myself over—to be so athletic was a strange breakthrough, on top of everything else.
She walked ahead of me on the neighbor’s lawn. It looked like in a silent movie when they film night scenes in the day. An elegant woman at a garden party—until she looked back at me and acknowledged the thrill of it. I ran to catch up. “Do you want to swim?”
I considered: if she wanted to swim, what that would mean. But she seemed up for something else as well.
“I want to keep going over fences,” I said.
We traveled laterally, crossing over into another backyard, and another. Each one was like its own aquarium, planted with its owner’s choice of plant, ornamented with its own plastic castle, or gazebo, or jungle gym, sunk in its own blue. I thought of the home owners I knew, people’s parents. There was something pitiful about backyards, people having them. The notion that they were private. “We’re running through people’s dreams,” I called to Adrienne. “Like cycling through them while they’re asleep.”
We were literally running, alert to each yard’s obstacles, deerlike, but sufficiently full-tilt to make ordinary conversation impossible; some people talk while they jog—it was all we could do to lash out with second-by-second commentary, streaming flayed ribbons of conversation behind us.
A light came on and we instinctively dove into the grass. I remember it was a set of big bay windows, we saw a woman in silhouette, as if in a lightning strike, her hand attached to the pull-chain. I remember trumpet vine, and a wooden lattice with a hooped garden hose. We looked at each other, and immediately got up running. I ran on; I made no silent apology to the home owner.
I was helping her up a poured concrete wall, molded with pillars. “We should break into one of them,” she said. “Don’t you think?”
“We probably should.” I pictured an unlocked back door, a narrow hall, with faintly visible photographs on the walls, like a museum. And then opening a refrigerator to steal orange juice and being afraid of the light that spilled out.
But we kept running. It was obvious, I think from the way the air smelled, that morning would be coming soon. In the next yard we stopped, as if in celebration of something. Adrienne’s eyes were big, her shoulders thrown back, breathing.
I spoke: “I wonder if we can get to Philbrook through these yards.”
“What?”
“I think it’s on this block.”
“I don’t know Jim—I’m lost.” She came out with this very nonchalantly and grabbed my shirt and pulled me onwards. My jacket, I realized. My jacket was streaked with grass. My parents had bought it for me to go to college.
“Come on,” she was already saying—we squatted down in some mulch and hunched our way underneath the branches of a low-hanging cherry tree, waddling into a kind of bower someone had anciently built, with hedges planted on two sides for privacy. There was memorably a birdbath. She rocked back and forth where she was squatting and then stuck out both arms and pushed me over into the dirt-grass.
On top of me, Adrienne was neither lascivious nor chaste; she was simply very straightforward. She unbuttoned my fly like untying a shoe. She was quick. I was so in awe of her that I forgot to kiss back. She moved her lips from place to place with methodical deliberateness. She was a type of partner new to me. And half the sucking that I did was just buying time. Anyway she got bored and yanked my pants off. It was light now, not very, but enough for me to see our nakedness in true color. She was whiter than me. She maintained herself on top of me, and had the stage presence to let me totally imprint on her as being the image of the memory we were making, limp back, chin raised, neck red.
It reached into my fundamental idea of “morning” and messed it up; we rolled over. I was on top. “You have to come on the grass,” she said. But I was not going to come. I was too excited.
The sounds Adrienne was making seemed connected up to a story I hadn’t followed. I couldn’t tell if she was faking it or not. She probably just loved to make noise.
We finally stopped. She looked into my eyes, greedily aware of what she had done. Dogs were barking somewhere.
“I think the dogs are coming this way,” I said. I had to recover some sense of my voice. She didn’t reply. She grasped me so suddenly it hurt. I was intimidated, and she laughed. One thing I could do was I crawled back on top of her and so she had to let go.
“Your arms are getting dirty,” I said. I felt the breeze on my hip.
We continued for a long time, silently now. The sun was rising over the people’s back wall, and I was the one raising it. It got brighter and warmer the more I went. I always think about this of course. I have tried to measure the added amount of that second time, and how much it accounted for. I want to know whether I won Adrienne, or just lucked into her. I try to measure it when I listen to slow music, and I compare it to that music. It is like the music might stop, if I listen hard enough. When I look at cold statues I remember the sweat on Adrienne’s chest. She was not loud that second time, she was intent, and she looked into my eyes so much that we suddenly became friends. I started laughing. It seemed like a place to stop.
It was because of the birds chirruping right above us that I had started laughing. “You have to go,” she whispered.
“Can’t we hide here?” I asked, taking her hand.
She suited up and stood waiting as I tucked in my shirt. She led me out straight by the people’s back windows and around the side of their house.
“Is this okay?”
We came out on open lawn, in the sun, on a quiet street. It wasn’t even clear which house this lawn belonged to, these houses were so far apart and the lawns were continuous—and in the morning humidity I could hear the brrrum of a central AC start up. I wished that we could get inside one of the houses. I would have liked to sit on someone’s nice furniture and drink orange juice.
“Do you know where we are?” I asked.
“You go now.” She smiled.
“Won’t you walk me to my car?”
“Nope.” She was already backing away, going in the other direction.
I waved, stiffly. She drew herself up and patted the air between us, pushing me off like a boat.
For the first block not one car passed, but then on the next street there were two or three. Did they realize? The dew was burning off the yards I passed, and if I stretched my arm out over the grass, I could feel the waves of heat. It smelled sour. I found Philbrook; I was going to hop the wall and invade the grounds except I had to pee. And I didn’t want to desecrate anything. My parents would be on their way to church by now, I calculated. I would drive home, but I would have to wait an hour or two before they came back and I could confront them. So I drove slowly. I stopped at a QuikTrip, to use the bathroom. It was over-air-conditioned and smelled like tile cleaner. Wherever I had left the bear mask, I mused, I did not know—I thought of that house I had been in as an intricate novel, one I had read too fast but could unwind, later, and rethink, in my notebooks. I dried my hands and rushed out into the main part of the convenience store, and fixed myself an amaretto cappuccino, and with the clerk I counted out my bills audibly, like my father sometimes did.
3
I did not assume it was a repeatable experience. Running through the backyards, pretending I was high—bounding after her like I did—maybe I was high. I was grateful that it had finally happened to me—a sense of moment that bore me in my car like a heavy, Wagnerian music. Full of foreboding of course. When my parents got home from church my mom wouldn’t look me in the eye. She put down her purse. With no prologue she told me that “you have to be safe”—and that was going to be all. But stupidly, stupidly, I brought up Chase’s address. Mom might think I had been rolling insensate on the floor of the Cain’s Ballroom. But Maple Ridge, I told her. I thought the intimation of wealth might be explanatory—rich people’s parties are different, they go on longer—they’re unashamed of themselves—
“You don’t know th
ose people, Jim.”
She almost never snapped at me like that. I slept through the afternoon, grinding my teeth, and got out of dinner by going off to the movies. At the concession I just purchased a Coke and a piece of pizza in a triangular box and sat through the movie tripping out on my own headache. It was dark when I walked back out into the sticky parking lot. I spent the night sitting up Indian-style in my bed, with my window cracked against the air-conditioning, reading. I filled up a small notepad with notes.
I went to the downtown library the next day—ever since I got home from school I had been making almost daily trips to the library, to try to follow the reading course I had set for myself. It was wholesome. My particular books smelled good. Classics that had been reprinted, they had tight, bright pages, and didn’t seem to have been consulted much. For probably two hours that afternoon I took the most meticulous notes—but then got the idea to call Edith. I could simply ask for Adrienne’s phone number. Why not? I went down to the circulation desk, where they had a pay phone.
Edith was cautious.
“You guys had a good time on Saturday?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Just don’t be surprised if she doesn’t call you back.”
“Why—did she say something?”
“No. But Adrienne’s hard.” I heard diplomacy in Edith’s voice. “I hope I didn’t give you the wrong idea, Jim. Adrienne doesn’t really date people, you know.”
What Edith maybe didn’t understand was the intuitive validity of my interest: that simply I ought to get what I want. Wanting was a form of virtue, especially when you wanted challenging things. That’s how my world worked. It was how I had gotten into college. What more comprehensive validation was there of a teenager’s intuitive sense of his future than the positive return he gets on a list of his accomplishments mailed off to authorities on the East Coast? I said to Edith, “I think you are meant to give me her number.”
A Map of Tulsa Page 3