A Map of Tulsa

by Benjamin Lytal

  At Adrienne’s invitation I had started going to the studio again, that week after Bartlesville. But still my bid for romantic partnership went unrecognized. She did not want to do anything at night, she did not touch me, did not invite me up to the penthouse. And I made no reference to what had happened.

  I had literally thought about getting Adrienne flowers. The gun was the superior idea. What thrilled me was the presumption: after all, you can’t make someone own a gun. But I believed I had to presume. God stands up for the presumptuous. For me to have decided to present her with a firearm—I cannot adequately advertise how excessive this felt.

  It was supposed to be obvious. At Wal-Mart, I had pushed up on tiptoe at the display counter, looking around for the clerk, worried maybe that I would flub the names and gauges I had memorized—but at least I had a show going, a blond genius with long legs and a paintbrush, and I was going to buy her a little gun for her birthday.

  It was cold to the touch that next morning. This was $300; the scrollwork was cheap; the butt was long and fancy. Looking out at the empty, sunny street, the shuttered bar, the neat public trash can, I felt rebuked. I opened my car door and sat with my feet on the asphalt, trying to get the courage to go up. What had I accomplished so far that summer? I had a loaded gun in my lap, anybody walking by would have seen. But the street was dead. I think it was a Sunday—I remember the stairway up pierced with light.

  Characteristically, Adrienne kept her back to me when I came in. Her smock was tied askew and I could see into her overalls where her ribs were bare. I just stood there. She inhaled and raised the paintbrush. “I have something for you,” I said.

  At the last second I had wrapped the gun up in a pair of jeans I found in my backseat. She pulled up at one of the pant cuffs, and the gun tumbled out.

  “Did you know you can just go to the store and buy one of these things?”

  She had stepped back slightly, as if from a snake.

  “My god.”

  I had thought she would ring with laughter. But no. “It’s for you,” I said, swallowing my words.

  She looked worried. She used her smock to pick up the gun, wielding it away from her as if she wanted to avoid fingerprints. She bent her elbow and aimed the gun at me.

  “It’s loaded,” I told her.

  She squinted, as if lining up the sight. She aimed straight at my belly.

  But her voice was strained. “Why is it loaded?” she asked.

  Her studio, on two sides, had windows made of glass brick. I said I wanted to shoot at the bricks, to see how they’d explode. “I didn’t mean for this to seem as aggressive as it maybe does.”

  Not only did Adrienne inspire me, she inspired me too much: such a crazy, serious gift idea, because it was for Adrienne. Yet she proved that she deserved it. She took off the safety, lifted, turned, and aimed.

  “It’s going to be loud—” she said, spreading her feet apart and raising the gun. The glass bricks were full of sun.

  At the instant of bullet ejection my eyes closed, like during a sneeze, but I thought I saw strands of blond hair fly back and then float down. At the back of the sound (a wide bolus of white noise), I heard a satisfying splat, and the tinkle of glass.

  She fired again, almost flip.

  “You?”

  My ears were ringing but I took the gun. I had fired a.357 in Scouts, and had been mentally rehearsing the grip and the proper firing stance.

  And I fired.

  The crack was upsetting this time; it came and went not with the civilized sound of a “report” but hacked quickly at my wrists. There was a larger puff of gray—less solid than the first. I didn’t know what to do next. Adrienne had taken a turn, I had taken a turn. We had deafened ourselves.

  Maybe I should have shot holes through her canvases if I had brought this gun to her studio. Because she was bored already. She was edging back towards her easel. I softly laid the gun on the table, so as not to distract her.

  The rest of the story is too private to make sense: Nothing happened. Adrienne got back to work. I lay down. Soon the only thing out of the ordinary was the wind that trickled in through the chinks that we’d made. Neither of us remarked on it. Neither of us felt that we should break the silence. As I was drifting off—I was abashed enough to feel a kind of pressure on my eyes, like sleepiness—I formed the improbable concern that this air from the window was going to affect her paint, dry it or sort of blow it sideways on the canvas.

  It had become my habit, at the studio, to lie still for a while after naps, with the unaired taste of my own saliva still in my mouth. I did some of my longest thinking that way. It was how I had dreamed up the gun thing. I had had second thoughts, but ultimately had decided not to go back on something that had been so gleamingly intuitive.

  Only now (back on the couch, after the smoke had cleared) did the intuition shine forth again, dumb and blue. I saw it for what it was: not love, but jealousy. Over that short courtship I had grown envious of this person, Adrienne, and, impatient to be like her, I had attempted this stunt. An impulse regrettably punctuated with Colt precision. Never in my mind or in any other part of my body did it occur to me to scare her, but I did want that shot, near her wrist, to put that crack in her space. I would wake from a nap and see her about to draw a line of the blackest force, her bare arm tingling above the raw canvas, studying, studying, and then taking only a simple cursive stroke, while my own arm lay buried in the couch.

  I was so ardent now it felt like we were breaking up. Adrienne could see I needed to talk, and after her silent painting session ended, and with the gunshot still ringing in our ears, we decided on a five o’clock supper. I suggested the Black-Eyed Pea, a busy family-style restaurant from my childhood. As we followed the hostess to our table, I couldn’t hear the hubbub so much as see it: the waiters back and forth to do refills at the soda fountain, a polished plow nailed up high on the wall.

  Adrienne’s luminous pointed face watched me.

  “I think the gun was really an attempt to make some sort of statement,” I said, while trying casually to pluck a roll from the almost-empty basket. We had left the gun in the studio; it was registered in my name, but would belong to her now. “I needed to impress you. Of course that was obvious.”

  “Why did you have to impress me?”

  I had to lean over to be heard. “Well, I mean I was trying to speak your language.” I kept glancing over behind Adrienne’s shoulder, casting back to the waiting area where I used to stand when I was a twelve-year-old, in my big T-shirts, with my sandals turned out on the flagstones, waiting with my parents to be seated.

  I felt desperately vague. I looked at the plow, the soda fountain, the patriotic bunting up near the ceiling. “You should be my girlfriend, Adrienne. Like boyfriend-girlfriend.”

  “Jim, the thing with the pistol was amazing.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Thank you.”

  “But there’s something more I want to talk to you about.”

  Her palm lay upright on the table, next to her plate; her fingers were curled up at rest, like the chicken bones. I was done apologizing that monogamy was a middle-class notion propagated by timid people—or that my people were timid, for that matter. I told her what I wanted.

  “I don’t have to choose like that,” she said, her back up now.

  “No, you’re wrong,” I said. She looked at me different. I had made her blink.

  I licked my lips. “I think you’re wrong,” I continued. “You should take a boyfriend.

  “I want you to date me and only me,” I went on.

  I sounded like the Old Testament God. And I had something very like an analogy between monotheism and monogamy in mind.

  “I want to love you,” I said, crossing my legs, “but, I don’t know, maybe that’s unwise.”

  Adrienne’s nose broke slightly; it made her look intelligent when she glanced away.

  She cracked up. “Oh!” She moaned with relish. “You’re
so weird!”

  “I’m absolutely normal! And normative!”

  “You want me to stop seeing Chase.”

  “And send me little cards with Valentine’s Day hearts you draw on them, yes. And sleep with me.”

  “Don’t you ever want to sleep with more than one girl?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Yes but that’s not the point.”

  “You don’t know me very well.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to say.”

  “Oh no you’re just making fun of me.”

  “And yet I love you.”

  Adrienne was still sitting up very straight, but suddenly inhaled like she was diving underwater. And then, in the middle of the restaurant, she began to warble in my face: “GOAOD BLESS AMERRRICA, LAHND THAT I LUVV.”

  Her voice was preposterous, like a voluptuous brass horn curling and melting and reblowing itself before my eyes. I had to slouch back in my chair and take it. Adrienne wanted to stand up you could tell, her singing was classical, and she made those gestures you’ve seen, like a mime smoothing down his napkin after a meal, raising and lowering her hand at the level of her diaphragm.

  She sang just that phrase, but people turned to look. There was a scattering of applause—surprised, but perfectly cheerful applause, pleased at this bel canto in our midst; people clapped. Adrienne, to my surprise, turned around and acknowledged it. Maybe that was when I knew I was going to get what I wanted.

  “Was that supposed to be commentary?”

  “I think it was.”

  “You’re pretty witty for somebody who never went to college.”

  “Well, you inspire me Jim.”

  “I love you.”

  “That however is not true.”

  “It’s neither untrue or true. It’s an assertion I make. Same as ‘fuck you.’ I love you.”

  “Well fuck you, then.”

  “Should we ask for the check?”

  “Yes. And then I’ll take you home, and you can stay all night. How’s that?”

  We were very happy.

  5

  Adrienne allowed that Chase worked harder than I did, in bed—but she liked me too. “You’re more excitable,” she said.

  There was a ceiling in the Booker penthouse above Adrienne’s bed inlaid with zigzagged cherrywood. It was like the corners of two hundred picture frames broken apart and glued there by a man on a ladder who, in the 1920s, probably pictured a couple of fat cats for this bed. Adrienne and I were more like two sylphs, pale white fish. I got lost in that bed. I hung off the mattress, just to believe it—to look upside down out to the lip of the terrace, and there, the sky. I was surprised that houseflies came up this high—I was foremost impressed with the grandeur of the penthouse, modern with a built-in oak refrigerator and panorama windows, though on my first visits I didn’t get to inspect it much, just glimpsed aerial Tulsa out the windows before Adrienne dragged me down onto the floor. The walls were forest green. When the elevator first opened you had to look at an oil painting, a horse naked except for its tail wrap. On the entry table beneath it Adrienne had put a bottle of hand lotion. And out of a double-wide beaux arts battle-ax of a wardrobe spilled garbage bags of thrift store treasure, pointy green collars and ruched whorehouse silks and gold lamé belts and slippery polyester pants.

  We went up to the penthouse primarily for sex. Adrienne recommended the external-release method, which was strange, because at Bartlesville she had not cared. I complied, of course. It was tricky: I don’t think Adrienne worried much about the rugs, for example, but I did, and I always reached quickly for my own underpants or for a towel—I would avoid the bed totally. I saw her bare bottom on the excellent whitework bedspread and anxiously coaxed her off of it. “I do live here, you know,” she reminded me.

  But Adrienne had taken my request for monogamy seriously. Sometimes she just lay back and looked at me, to see what I would do. Maybe it was misleading, when I scooped her off the bed again (where she had sat again)—as if I were going to do a show and lift and move her all over the place.

  “Hold it,” she said at one point, sliding off from me. She came back with a camera. “I’m going to take a photo,” she said. And she didn’t simply snap the photo. She lined up the shot, down on her elbows, the camera tilting with interest, nosing toward me like a big black snout. I looked right back—sometimes I remembered all of my life in Tulsa, and I wanted to be alone, to go down onto the warm streets, to go to a bookstore. Anyway, I managed to hold it.

  “We have to go buy condoms,” she said, after the third time.

  Of all the hundred errands we ran that summer maybe this was the primal one. In the end I made a big deal and told Adrienne I didn’t want to go buying condoms at any of the drugstores my family frequented. It was a kind of made-up scruple—but I wanted to give her some idea of the embarrassment that was endemic to my heart. We drove west, across the river, and when the time came, we went through the line together. The cashier was an ashen-fleshed white woman. She didn’t look twice.

  “Now we’re married,” said Adrienne.

  I overheard my mother using Adrienne’s name on the phone.

  “Adrienne Booker.”

  It caught me up. I stopped to listen.

  “Booker. Mmhm. I think they are.”

  “I think so. I think he is.”

  “They’re so young.”

  I had begun to live with Adrienne, almost. My parents didn’t protest now when I spent the night out. I had wanted to call them, the first time I stayed overnight at the penthouse, but I fell asleep before I realized. Later I offered that my sleep-aways might worry them. My mom worked her jaw and said no, you need to be careful though.

  But my behavior that summer had startled them, and they were being very watchful now, and were waiting. I knew this, and when I was out with Adrienne I often caught myself wishing that my parents could peer down like gods to glimpse this or that redeeming aspect of our lives. Adrienne’s hyper-professional concentration in front of her easel, for one thing. Her rigor, the way she pinned me down in conversation and forced me to say what I meant. Our conversations over art books. The value of all this, and the adult seriousness. I even wished for them to know about things, all kinds of things, that did not make sense as parent-data: the way we knocked ourselves down dancing at a show; the world-weariness with which Adrienne held a cigarette when she was tired. Her tired voice, the grain of it. The balance of the long nights out, the sense of wayfaring endurance, as we journeyed from one destination to the next, and our delicate luck. Above all the profound sense of citizenship that, over and above personal pleasure, seemed to be the point of going to so many parties, every single weekend night.

  Adrienne hadn’t partied so much the summer before, she told me. The arc of her teenage life had already crested—painting was going to be a kind of second life: life after rock bands. But for me the life was only beginning.

  I was nervous whenever we walked into a party. I thought she might veer completely away, to go talk to people I didn’t know. I had to watch her to see what mode she was in. She drank either very little or else a great deal. In fact drinking provided an example of all I wished I could distill to turn into moral evidence for my parents. Formerly drinking had seemed to me like a sluice you could open and everything would flow. Adrienne was smarter than that. She marshaled her troops like a general. Often we were the most sober people in the room.

  I looked up Adrienne’s family at the library: I told the librarian I was doing a research project on Booker Petroleum. I found out that Adrienne’s great-grandfather, Odis Booker, first struck oil at a place called Cushing. This was in 1904, just three years prior to statehood. He eased out of wildcatting, built a large hospitality business, invested in local banks, and made a pile during the boom; he built refineries on the Arkansas and completed the Booker Tower in 1926. The penthouse was intended to impress and flatter clients from out of state. I even found a priceless newspaper clipping, from a 1926 edition of something c
alled the Chicago Herald-Examiner, that included a photograph of our very bed, in black-and-white.

  The building still housed Booker Petroleum. Today Adrienne’s aunt Lydie, the same one who had gone to my college and whose garage Adrienne had burned down, worked downstairs, occupying the president’s office. But we never saw her; we lived upstairs in a kind of elysium, or afterlife. In a cloud.

  “Let’s go down,” I once said to Adrienne.

  “What?”

  “Just wander the halls,” I said.

  “Oh no,” she said. Adrienne wanted nothing to do with Booker Petroleum. To the point that she revered it. It was a polished edifice, a memorial to the past. Gracefully acknowledged, and never to be desecrated—a reason to keep up appearances, at most. I don’t think Adrienne really imagined her aunt did much, down there. There was no itch: Booker Petroleum tempted Adrienne neither as a lever of power, nor a source of resentment, nor even as a possible fate.

  To a kid growing up in Tulsa in the 1980s, oil did seem very abstract. Every September, entering the fairgrounds, I passed between the legs of the Golden Driller, a statue who stood four stories tall, his concrete hand resting on a decommissioned oil derrick, his cartoonish boot the size of a small Japanese car. And I remembered that every Christmas my Galveston grandmother would sit me down so we could look at the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog together. She had no sense of envy; she wanted to instill in me a sense of awe—I remember best the children’s pages at the back of the book: an actual floating pirate ship for children, or preassembled Legos made into a life-sized knight and a dragon. But this was nothing compared to the stories my grandmother told about the boom times. Apparently in the sixties Neiman Marcus had his-and-her pontoon planes you could order, baby blue and pink, as if you were going to barrel into the sky like lovebirds the day you struck oil.