Edith gave it. But she spent the rest of the conversation trying to get me to go to Retro Night on Wednesday. “Last week you had a blast.”
I called Adrienne from the same pay phone. My voice mail went like this: “Hey Adrienne, this is Jim. I don’t think I ever said happy birthday to you, so I wanted to say that. I forgot to get your number but Edith gave it to me. Let’s hang out sometime.”
The next morning, at home, I tried again. I did my second voice mail in a different voice. To prepare I sat still for ten or fifteen minutes until finally I took the cordless like a chalice to my lips, dialed with my thumbs, and spoke: “Hey Adrienne, this is Jim Praley.” I paused. “I want to wander around in the night some.” I was speaking gravely, trembling, trying to be ironic. “Edith said you don’t talk on the phone much but I don’t really want to talk on the phone either. However. I’m calling to say: write me a letter.” And I actually gave her my parents’ street address and zip code. A pause. “Let’s talk face-to-face, I mean.”
I came from a family of teachers, women and men who had stayed inside the loops of their own educations and flourished, women and men who could expect to rule their own classrooms and to supervise their own lives. Whereas I was trying to force myself on Adrienne Booker of the Booker family. I went to Office Depot and purchased manila envelopes, and assembled a file marked FOLLOW-UP MATERIALS, mostly xeroxed from library books about Stonehenge and photos of gardens—eighteenth-century Romantic gardens with ruins and broken-down walls—along with one or two maps of Tulsa. I sat at a reading carrel and cut up the xeroxes with the maps so the different gardens appeared to be located in Tulsa. And, in an attempt to be erotic, I looked up pictures of human and animal sacrifice. Thinking of course about the stone table or cromlech on which we had sat. But I decided not to put the illustrations of human sacrifice in, after all. I sat down on the rim of a potted fern, pleased with my efficiency. This was the grandest day I had ever had at the library—it was the payoff of the last two weeks I had spent here, studying, that I was able to zip around so expertly in the stacks. I wanted only one more element in my file, something to make it seem fun. It would be in good taste to insert something that was also a non sequitur. I grabbed a book on Corvettes, and paid to xerox them in color.
This, I thought as I assembled the packet, was something I was good at.
In front of Chase’s house, at six o’clock on a summer afternoon, there was heat coming off the walk, and the knocker was soft to the touch. Nothing was as I remembered it. As I waited I pictured Chase coming from deep in the house, his curious, sleepy-looking head peeking out from behind the door. But it was a lady who swept open the door—it was Chase’s mom. She was a lot younger than mine. Her hair was pulled back super-tight. She was blinking, almost satirical when she inspected the packet. Or like she was touched. “Adrienne doesn’t live here, you know.”
“Will you please see that this gets to her?”
I waited three days. Adrienne called me on Friday. “What are you doing tonight?”
She wanted me to pick her up at the Booker in two hours.
I had to ask my mom which building it was.
I needn’t have asked—the Booker was as I had hoped the cool one, the skyscraper with the terra-cotta façade, an eye-swim, with carvings running up like tendrils of lightning bolts tumbling upward. The doorman looked at me doubtfully. I had come in my prized threadbare T-shirt. I sat down on a bench and threw my shoulders back. The elevator was mum, but I waited for Adrienne’s emergence: to show this doorman how little he knew of the world, that there were kids who dressed just like me who lived in this building—the elevator doors slid apart and Adrienne emerged wearing a cerulean dress. She put out her bare arm: I was embarrassed, and she raised me up. The doorman glanced at me as if to say, Do you have a clue?
There was something promlike about it—being downtown with a girl in a dress. “We’re going to Stars,” she said. “We’ll have to drive. Do you know it?”
Stars was a gay bar, she told me. “Don’t worry, they’ll love you.”
The rattling, windswept highway offered no help—the city lights had gone silent, and looked awesomely strewn. I couldn’t say much. Next time, I thought, bring booze. Adrienne smushed her fingertip into the lock of my glove compartment and twisted, as if her finger were a key. I never once, all that summer, believed Adrienne cared about money, my not having any. But I cared. My car felt too flimsy for her.
“Tulsa’s like a ghost town,” I said.
“Have you been to Elgin?”
“The street?”
“No, it’s a real ghost town. It’s in Kansas. You should go. There’s like an abandoned soda fountain and houses without doors and you can walk in.” Adrienne had met the caretaker, a retiree from the area who spent his summers mowing the lots and the sidewalk strips of Elgin.
“You know the source of the word Elgin?” I asked. “The Elgin Marbles. They’re actually stripped off the walls of the Acropolis. Which is like the ultimate ghost town. I guess as a direct thing the street is named after the place in Kansas. Either way. Downtown’s so dead.”
Past experience had conditioned me to gripe about Tulsa: we all do it. But Adrienne was bored by my reference to downtown being dead. “I live there, you know.” Maybe she was just putting on umbrage for fun. But for the next five minutes I was reduced to glancing at her reflection in the windshield: maybe she thought she was making a big mistake.
I hadn’t ever been to a gay bar anywhere. In Boston or New York I would have been ready, that would have been my cosmopolitan duty. But to go to one here was none of my business. I assumed the gay bars of Tulsa were fake, extra-faggy places, not gay really but pretending to be gay. With pink walls and Irish lace and super-self-conscious patrons. It was a slap in the face for a “date.”
I drove out to the airport, and she directed me to a strip mall across the road from the FedEx loading dock. Three neon stars glowed like mock sheriff badges above stucco walls. We went in: it smelled like fake smoke. Adrienne alighted on a table and asked for two of the specials. We were right on the floor, a tiled platform where a line dance was forming. Everything was pretty random—big-bulb Christmas lights on the bar, fake palm trees at each corner of the dance floor, and a DJ booth set up under a fake plastic grape arbor. The mood on the dance floor was festive: the men yipped and waved their arms like lassos. “This is fairly hokey,” I said.
“No. It’s great.” She was up, and started to do all the kick-scoot moves; she didn’t have belt loops to put her thumbs through, so she was pressing down the bell of her dress, and it puffed out behind. She clapped. It killed me that she was so adaptable. The whole rank rolled its shoulders at once, pivoted, and clapped. Some of the cowboys looked gentle and downcast, concentrating on their moves. Some were on parade. A lesser girl might have beamed, starstruck, at the men, but Adrienne was so clearly aristocratic—she simply knew how to behave. When I downed my drink (it was blue) and finally strode onto the floor she made room for me, but that was it. She was busy with heel work. I tried to glide, tap, and twirl. I thought about Chase: Was she cheating on him? Were we here because she was hiding from him? Was this being discreet? Or was it flagrant? Or was it maybe from me that she was hiding? We were the only straight couple here.
Such self-discipline was new to me: Keeping my elbows in, clapping, watching where I stepped. Whirling in a circumscribed place. I took a lesson from the men I watched. For them, the exercise in self-control meant something. They looked careworn, mild, like men who had had a bad week. It was nothing now to behave.
Among them Adrienne was formidable. She was a woman. She had an imperturbable face. The down on her arms flashed in the light. After the line dance broke up she bought off the regulars snapping her fingers, winking at them (or laughing), doing all these flourishes, and I tried to match, I would keep my wrist behind my back or something, like a matador, and set my face. And then I would go crazy. One man wagged his finger at me and shouted, I’
m sure I misheard: “Tongue out.”
Afterwards, we went to a gas station for coffee. I can still see Adrienne in heels, bearing our coffees back under the gas station lights—the cube of light made by the Texaco canopy. I had parked with our back to the highway’s sound barrier, and Adrienne’s heels echoed like in an empty auditorium. I smiled from behind my windshield, and Adrienne smiled back. She had a coffee in each hand.
We sat parked in the car, facing the station. On the highway behind us we heard the rigs whining, each one like it was about to slam into us, coming at a high pitch, and then muttering off into the night. That went on the whole time we sat there. “He’s waiting for us to make out,” Adrienne said. The station attendant, trapped in his control booth with the lottery telemetry, was staring at us. He wondered if we were Bonnie and Clyde, come to kill him.
I cleared my throat. “Aren’t we going to make out?”
Adrienne looked at me. Then she said, “You get points for that.” She lunged for her purse. “Can I smoke in here?”
She had depressed my car’s cigarette lighter, and now it popped.
“Wait, can I see that?” I had to wait for her to get her cigarette burning, and then she handed it over. The lighter’s coils were glowing orange. “I never knew how these worked before.”
“Do you want a cigarette?”
“No.”
She lit one for me.
I tried to give it back.
“It’s already lit. You have to smoke it.”
I held the cigarette out the window, but stopped short of throwing it away. There were those warnings, I knew, posted by gas pumps.
“I thought they weighed more than this,” I said. I waved my cigarette around in the air, light as a butterfly.
“Hrmf. You’re too good for me Jim.”
She sucked on her cigarette, apparently thinking. I leveraged over on the emergency brake and kissed her. She had moved her cigarette out of the way—but she made it a short kiss, and I had to sit back down on my side of the car.
“You could find a better girl than me Jim.”
I peered back. “You don’t even know me.”
“I know myself. I’m old.” She sniggered and drew her cigarette to her mouth.
“We’re the same age.”
“Yes, but—” And here she made a self-upwelling gesture.
I was sitting with my armpit clamped over the steering wheel, regarding her. “You know—part of what I like about you is the possibility that you actually are this arrogant.”
“Oh,” she said, “yeah.” She shivered. “I wish I was.”
“You are.”
“Jim—you know I don’t go to school?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like I’m not going. Some people never go to college. Are you shocked? You’re shocked.”
“No, no—I’m not. Did you not get in?”
“Oh, wow. You get points for that too.”
“With your art and with this—the way you have—you could write an amazing essay—”
Adrienne had never even finished high school. “When I turned sixteen I went to the guidance counselor and said, ‘I want to drop out now.’ And the counselor looked at me and said, ‘Are you asking me to talk you out of it?’ And I was like, ‘No, I just want to do it right.’ And the counselor was like, ‘You just stop coming.’ So I did. The only person who even tried to stop me was Chase. Whom you know?”
“Yeah—yes. But you just said whom. I don’t know, in a weird way I think all that would impress colleges—your just doing that, as if you’ve had this plan all along. Outside the box. It’s ruthless. And that you’ve actually done something with your time.”
She was annoyed.
“You do things,” I said.
“You haven’t seen those things.”
“Yes but I can tell that you are for real.”
“Jim,” she said after a minute. “Tell me a story.”
“What kind of story?”
“A story that’s sacred to you.”
It had never occurred to me to have a story that was “sacred” to me. It was like college application essays—mine at least, which I had almost had to make up. We were asked about an experience that changed our lives. An important experience. I wrote about an epiphany I’d had while standing atop a large rock. I had stood there, and I picked up some kind of vibration about my destiny. Basically, that I realized I wanted to be a statue when I died, a great man.
“In the second grade,” I began now, “we were assigned to write stories about an imaginary place. And my teacher, who still used the paddle, right, and was this very august African-American lady, sat us down in a circle. I volunteered mine for her to read, and she took it up. I was the teacher’s pet. But she gave me this look. Like her jaw dropped.
“My story was about backwards-land. So naturally I titled it after my backwards-named city. Aslut. Which is Tulsa backwards.”
I paused.
“But the crucial detail here is that I wasn’t able to figure out what the matter with the title had been, until years later.”
“Oh,” said Adrienne. She gloated a little with me.
“Yeah.”
Adrienne was going to tell me one. First, five seconds to collect herself: she had obviously told this story before, but maybe not often. She related it in hushed tones, and paused often—as if it really was sacred. It was like she regarded her younger self as a more important, more trustworthy person than her present self.
“There was a fifth-grader named Derek Walkin. He was bringing a Zippo to school, and that was a big deal. They would set trash on fire behind the dumpster. And they let me watch. I was little. I was a second-grader. Every day at lunch I would go up to their group and stand there. I thought they would kick me out. But I didn’t even look at them—their faces. I just stared at the fire.
“But. I wanted the lighter. I searched Derek’s locker. But he always kept it in his pocket.” Adrienne was staring straight ahead, as if she could still see the little Zippo working on the playground. “I went up to him and asked him for it. I wanted to borrow it. Which was madness.” Adrienne’s voice turned excitable. “I don’t know if you know what it takes, for a second-grade girl to convince a fifth-grade boy to give her his lighter? I caught him alone after school and at first just asked him to show me how it worked. It always looked like he was doing something weird with his wrist, shaking it or something—you’ve seen Zippos. You have to do like that—” She motioned. “I thought I had to get it right the first time or he would never let me borrow it. But my hands were so little.”
“What happened?”
“It took me like eight tries.”
“What did he say?”
Adrienne squinted. “He just let me borrow it.”
“Wow. Why?”
“I don’t know. He just did. He wasn’t a very well-liked boy.”
I could imagine a boy like that. A semi passed behind us, rattling. Adrienne was so acute, so practical in her dealings. It was quiet at the gas station, there wasn’t even canned music. Adrienne resumed. “He gave me his lighter because I told him what I was going to do with it. In fact the main reason he almost didn’t give it to me was that he got scared. I made him prove he wasn’t.
“I took that lighter that weekend and I set fire to my aunt’s garage. I burned it down to the ground.”
“Oh.”
Adrienne blinked. “For a while the fire was kind of nice. It spread out like at the bottom part of the wall. I stayed inside with it, to feed it, and pulled down rags and pieces of wood to keep it going. It took forever. But then it got big fast.” Adrienne widened her eyes. “What I hadn’t expected was how loud it would be. I had gone to stand by my favorite tree, to watch. For a long time I could hear the fire more than see it. I could see smoke, but that was all. Until the flames burst out the window. They broke the glass like a fist.” She pumped her fist, but slowly. “I had a cordless phone too, in my hand, to call 911 if the f
ire spread. And I wanted to call, you know. I wanted them to stop it. But I had to stick to my plan. I had to watch that garage burn down to the ground. It was mine; I was only seven years old but I knew, I knew then, that nothing was ever going to feel that big again.” She looked at me appraisingly. “I’ve always wanted to get that feeling back again.”
I wasn’t supposed to speak, and didn’t speak. As she waited she raised her hand, hung it in the air, and let it drop and crumple in her lap.
“That thing I made you,” I said.
She raised her eyebrows. “I liked it.”
I felt like I had taken a nap and woken up: I could sit in that car forever. “Look. That story. Write down what you just said and that’s your essay.”
Adrienne did want me to tell her about college. And she acted like I knew more about college, or had more quintessentially been to college, than the kids who went in-state. She was adroit, and at some level she was playing me. But at another level Adrienne was quite sincere. In fact no one had been so thorough, trying to form a picture of what I had learned.
Adrienne asked what did my classes have to do with my work—I had told her about a poem I was writing, called “Outskirts,” which was going to be very long and which transposed the city limits of Tulsa to a number of different locales—Tulsa as an oil emirate, Tulsa as an island in the South Pacific, Tulsa as a suburb of New York.
“But I’m not really taking each class except on hunches; it’s like choosing a book to read I guess, it’s going to be background information down the road.”
Adrienne understood me, but her own curiosity was more urgent. She wanted to know specifically about my art history course. “You should teach me,” she said.
This was something I could do. Immediately I brought in all the boring logistics: I had left my textbooks at school, in storage, but I eagerly outlined how I could pull relevant books at the library and bring them to her, and we could go over them.
A Map of Tulsa Page 4