A Map of Tulsa

by Benjamin Lytal

  The oil refineries always occupied the opposite bank of the river. No one had ever explained to me how they worked—they were just a snake pit of detail that I pored over as a teenager standing with my bike on the pedestrian bridge, wondering what was important. I remembered an issue of National Geographic my dad kept, from the ’78 oil crisis. Tulsa was on the cover, an aerial photograph of the refineries, lit up like a metropolis at night. In bright spots you could see the petroleum works illuminated, leaving dark reaches, I assumed the oil drums, in reserve. But I didn’t know.

  Adrienne showed me a videotape of her one parent—Rod Booker. “He lives in Rhode Island,” she told me. In the video, Rod comes out a screen door, and stands in profile while it slaps behind him. He’s a big bearded man wearing rolled-up khaki pants and an XXL black T-shirt. You can’t tell what he’s looking at: he seems to be looking away out of shyness, and when he finally turns and confronts the camera, it’s like he’s trying to stare it down almost. And it stays on him.

  Then he turns again, and the camera pans and follows him down to the surf.

  “That was my first movie.”

  Adrienne had wheedled a video camera out of her father when he left Tulsa. She was twelve years old and promised she would “use it to come visit him.”

  “Are you going there at all this summer?” I asked.

  “I only went there that once.”

  I was a little shocked. Soon I requested the video again.

  “Why do you want to keep watching the Rod video?”

  “Boys have this thing about the girl’s father.”

  She snorted.

  Adrienne had never been anybody’s daughter: Her biological mother, a Frenchwoman who spent American grad school on New England sailboats, abandoned the baby—Rod had had to book a flight to Tulsa and mix the formula, cradling the baby himself all the way, connecting in Dallas, changing her diaper on a toilet seat there, at last depositing his infant daughter at the ancestral home in Tulsa. After that, Rod felt his parental duties were fulfilled. He flew to Paris and spent some years trying to get Marianne back: their line to the family was that she had been suffering from severe postpartum depression. But young Adrienne would never see her mother again. Great-Uncle Harold, who at that time was running Booker Petroleum, was certain of that. He hired a string of Lebanese nannies, and his wife, Great-Aunt Alexandra, managed them.

  Rod came back to live in Tulsa, but was often gone. Adrienne was closer to her great-aunt, a woman of Swedish extraction who had grown up in Nebraska and had met Harold at a ball in Denver. When she and Harold both died, Booker Petroleum passed to the younger generation. Rod sold his shares to his older sister, Lydie, and bought a house in Rhode Island in front of a rocky beach, not far from where he had first met Marianne. Rod had had so little to do with Adrienne that no one, when the time came, even suggested that she move to Rhode Island with him.

  But Lydie must have been the least maternal woman in Tulsa. It was just the two of them, in the house on Twenty-eighth Place, not far from the Fitzpatricks’: in only a year or two Adrienne grew quite tall, and started getting rides from older boys. She very wisely insisted on getting a motorcycle as soon as she was legal, which in Oklahoma is age fourteen. She started staying over at the uninhabited Booker penthouse: she would call Lydie in the middle of the night and say that she was drunk, that she should just walk over to the Booker rather than try to ride home. Lydie let it be known that Adrienne didn’t have to call and wake her up every time she was drunk: she should just go to the penthouse as necessary. And so Adrienne moved there, bought new clothes, and decided she would never have to go back to Twenty-eighth Place again. She would drop school forms off in the inter-office mail if she needed her aunt’s signature. She would order bagels and twenty-four-hour barbeque. She gave her laundry to the doorman, and her aunt paid. There was a janitor who came up to clean the bathrooms and take out the trash. Lydie was satisfied enough, and even set up a generous allowance for the sixteen-year-old, now that she was on her own. At least this is how Adrienne narrated it to me, when I kept her up one night, telling her about how much I cared for my own parents.

  I accompanied her to the studio daily: Routine was an art. At the start of the workday she would change; she hung up her bright morningtime skirts very neatly, and once a week I would haul these back to the Booker for her and hand them off to the doorman like a stack of kites. I was proud of such chores. My writing went neglected. As the summer thickened and we started to sweat, I stopped altogether.

  Adrienne and I circulated ourselves in the city. To be a painter, a mixed-media artist, and sometimes to be just a very wealthy young woman—to do all this you did a daily thinking up of needs, of paint and paintbrushes, new easels and even stools and chairs—of triple-pack men’s undershirts and drop cloths and two-by-fours. In the beginning we would overlook the midday meal, but as the summer lengthened we learned to make an expedition out of lunch: we might get the lunch counter at Steve’s Sundry to ourselves and order grilled cheese and egg salad, or we might admit that we were more in the mood for Village Inn, for raising our voices in that wide empty sea of plastic booths. Sometimes we set out for the eternally deserted eastside sushi place, where the rolls were enormous and loose. And then it was on to Hobby Lobby or Target or the lumberyard, or on odd days to the dealers west of the river, where we mingled with general contractors at specialty lock-and-doorknob shops or looked at fencing for no reason, or on one occasion purchased a hundred-pound chunk of limestone from a landscaper outlet. They refused to drop the rock into the trunk of my car but instead wedged it into the backseat because, they told me, “You wouldn’t be able to lift it out of the trunk by yourself.” The rock was deeply pocked all over, and yet smooth—like a human skull with eleven eye sockets. Adrienne helped me carry it up the brick stairs and into the corner of the studio, where it sat for the rest of that summer—and did her some good, I think.

  We lived a beautiful life. Sometimes we drove around just to get ideas—Adrienne was painting squares then and she got her ideas from buildings. I asked, “Can you really look, with me beside you?” And she would cut me off: “Turn left, turn right.” And then we would park. She was looking for lines, she said. She was trying to corner lines. The passing semis ironed out their shadows above an on-ramp under which the bike path dove, and anyone from my childhood could have driven by and glimpsed Adrienne, sitting on the hood of my car, sketching.

  Cam went back to Connecticut in mid-July, more or less as planned, but it was a blow to Edith. I took her out to dinner, thinking I might now be in a position to introduce her to someone, to bring her into my world. Cam hadn’t been very artistic anyway. “Adrienne and I stayed up all last night working on this minimalist sculpture she’s making. It’s a tabletop train landscape we bought, with foam hills and stuff, and we’ve covered it with nails. There’s a nail exactly every square inch, you know?”

  Edith didn’t believe me.

  “It’s tedious,” I admitted. “We get tetchy sometimes.”

  “You guys should just be having fun,” said Edith.

  But we were having fun. We went to the neon dealer one day. It was purchases like that that made me feel we were freer than two kids ever had been. Not just because we had Adrienne’s money but because we had such a liberated sense of what to do with it. As a kid I had always looked out for the neon dealer. I was always driven past his triangular storefront, two glass walls, each canted to face to the street so that you had lit-up samples coming and going: Coke, Miller Lite, a neon toucan, a flashing domino. Seven or eight OPEN signs. But it never occurred to me that you would actually go into that store and buy something.

  Sometimes that summer, when I looked down from the penthouse windows and saw midtown Tulsa in all of its tiny detail—the highways, the trees, the scrunched-up houses and neighborhoods—I was struck by how clear it was. I felt I understood how power worked. The complexity of a cityscape was supposed to intoxicate you, I knew, was supposed to
exhilarate you with intimations of unseen connections and conspiracies. The city map was supposed to be like a powerfully overcomplicated circuit board: illegible, but richly suggestive, and downright functional, obviously. It was. It functioned very well. With Adrienne I felt I understood that.

  Did it make me like Tulsa better, to date someone rich from it? Yes. It made me like it a lot better.

  Yet from Adrienne I kept certain parts of myself back. Over and over she expressed interest in meeting my parents, I talked about them so much. But I wanted to keep her away from them. And there were certain parts of Tulsa. Like the Target store: the Target had been our standby when I was little. After dinner, on summer nights, my parents and I would go to Target. Just to stock up on things. But it was like a taste of ice cream, to drive and take a breath of that bright air-conditioned box. “Can I go ahead?” I would always ask as soon as we got through the front doors. I would run ahead to the electronics section, and my parents would pick me up there fifteen minutes later.

  So whenever Adrienne needed Target for errands, I preferred to wait out front, pacing up and down the two hundred and twelve feet of sidewalk. I remember stopping once at sunset and watching for minutes as the sun went down, resolving into a visible red disk. I began to look directly at it—at the sun and then away. The setting sun was overwhelming the streetlight pole that stood between me and it, skinning the streetlight down into a little burnt stick. How hilarious, I thought, that I was trying to be a match for Adrienne Booker. She didn’t know what this was, this florid fire. She was working in strict, massive shapes, in black-and-white gestures. My eyes were smarting: I loved the largeness of Tulsa, its big, summery fragrance, the asphalt, the puff of chemical air-conditioning that came when the Target doors slid open. And from the livestock barns, a lift of animal freshness.

  Adrienne excused herself one night; a group of people had congregated at the Blumont, but she wanted to go home early. “I want to rest my voice,” is what she said—meaning she wanted to be alone? I was going to stay and drink. I ordered a scotch I could barely afford and turned around in my barstool to survey the group. I wanted to know what it was like to hang out sans Adrienne.

  Albert moved in on me almost immediately. In fact he sat down like I owed him something. He asked where I went to college. “So she’s your adventure,” he said. He nodded to himself. “You’ll go back up there and tell the other guys about this crazy girl you hooked up with.”

  I wanted Albert to like me. It was intriguing to see a thickset fortysomething in his cups, rehearsing the kids’ general grievances—that Tulsa sucked, that it had no confidence in itself, that it was an impossible place to produce real art. We often left him to the youngest kids (Jenny, in fact), and he was usually happy with that audience. I for one had never had a sit-down with him. I thought he must be curious, though: about me, Adrienne’s new consort. He must wonder what sort of relationship we really had, how I did it, how I dated this undatable person.

  But Albert was way ahead of me. “And then,” he continued, “after a while it won’t be other men you tell about Adrienne, it will be women. At a certain point in every relationship, you’ll roll out this thing about Tulsa and the ‘one girl who almost made you stay.’ Women will love you for it. It’ll be part of your repertoire. Your ‘Tulsa stories.’” He crooked his fingers to make scare quotes.

  I got up to go, but Albert reached for me and held my arm in his fat fist. “You do know she’s crazy, right?”

  I shook him off.

  I arrived home that night not heeding the protocols I had recently devised, doing nothing to muffle my drunken homecoming. I started loudly drawing a glass of water in the kitchen, and then sprawled down in my adopted armchair in the front room. Earlier that day Adrienne had finally turned to me, while she was standing at her easel, and invited direct criticism of her work. I didn’t hesitate for a second. I put my arm in, showing, almost touching her lines. I wasn’t the nurturer Edith had been, encouraging me with my poems—nor was I merely playing at the language of criticism, as we did at school. I had been watching Adrienne closely, after all. And I thought she had been preparing me for this, a no-holds-barred criticism of physical response, intimacy, and confident trust. But she didn’t thrill to the criticism. She didn’t even really take it in. She seemed to have turned to me because she was genuinely worried about her paintings. She sat down after my crit and was quiet.

  It may be that Adrienne’s pictures were bad Franz Kline, that moreover her status at parties was a function of the naïveté of her milieu—Albert commonly referred to Adrienne as “the pope of the Brady District.” And it may be that Adrienne’s work ethic was only an exercise in girlish self-discipline. Sometimes I felt at once so robbed (as with Albert) and yet doubly possessed of my summer-long crush. I was sobered, in a way. Earlier that week my parents had announced that they might be retiring. They would retire together—Tulsa Public Schools was offering an early retirement package, trying to shed staff. My wise old parents were going to take it. And come next summer they would move to Galveston. That had always been the idea: to go be with my mother’s people. And lately my grandmother had been very scattered and needed care, and my grandfather couldn’t manage. It was time to circle the wagons. “And with you going away to college so far,” my mother said. They might even move as early as March. And since we always had Christmas at Galveston, that meant that leaving for school in September might mean leaving Tulsa for good—I would never again have a parental excuse to come back here. I had to think about that. It was in this armchair where I was sitting that I had prepared Greuze and Chardin, and Delacroix, and Goya, for Adrienne. How long ago that seemed. It was as if all summer I had been staring out from the Booker hazily, and the stakes were only now coming into focus.

  I had told Adrienne how I would stop some nights before I got home and turn the Camry’s ashtray over into a neighbor’s grass, running my finger under the tray’s aluminum teeth to make sure all her ashes were gone. Sometimes if I had anything bigger—a wad of fast-food wrappers that we had failed to clean up, or beer cans—I knew a dumpster behind a McDonald’s. I even threw my entire backpack away once, because it had been soaked in spilled rum. “Why don’t you just tell them your girlfriend smokes?” she said. Which was, I think, the only time she ever referred to herself as my girlfriend. She repeated that she wanted to meet my parents. “They’re your life,” she said. “I should meet them.”

  We were at Target one Saturday. It was hot, the first Saturday of August. I had been waiting in the car. When Adrienne came back I told her I had an idea. My parents lived nearby and we could just go right now and visit them. She got back out of the car and went into Target. She came back with a new yellow sundress. She took off her T-shirt and shorts—feet on the dashboard, with people walking by—she put on the dress and reapplied her lipstick, and she was ready.

  I had pulled out of their driveway only that morning. Now, my father was mowing the front lawn. “That’s my dad,” I announced. He was wearing a straw hat and jean shorts. When we pulled in, he did not stop, perhaps not hearing us, and we had to wait for him to get to the other end and wheel around before he saw us and let the mower die. He waved, and seemed to enjoy his predicament, stopping ten feet away to brush his hands off on his shorts. His beard would probably have been completely white at that point. I remember being immoderately proud of him.

  With Adrienne he was very charming.

  I had never seen my father greet a strange young woman before. We were such a funny family. When I was little, it seemed that everyone we knew was old. And, as time went by, I had failed to bring in anyone new.

  Of course as a teacher, my father would have met new young men and women all the time. But this was different. He nodded just slightly as he shook her hand; he was already laughing. She said to him that he looked like me—so he got to do a double take and act a little surprised. I had forgotten that he could josh like this. Adrienne smiled, and insisted. She was careful to s
tand on the part of the grass that had already been mowed, as if to respect his work. She had a way with grown-ups.

  He told her that I ought to be the one mowing the lawn, but that I was “too big” now to do so.

  We went around back to put away the mower and my mom came out on the deck to meet us. I wished that Adrienne were more explosively beautiful. But my mom was very nice, of course, and sat us down on the patio furniture. I sat there rigidly, and I let the women talk. My mother’s manner reminded me of when we used to run into her students—at the grocery store, for example, or once, when I was vulnerably twelve, into a whole gaggle of them at the fairgrounds. With teenagers my mother had an inimitable manner of noninsulting encouragement. She asked Adrienne about her upcoming gallery show—

  “It’s only a group show,” Adrienne said. “But it’s an honor to be included.”

  “You must be excited.”

  “Did you know that Adrienne’s great-grandfather was a famous wildcatter?” I thought this might interest my mother, who sometimes taught Oklahoma history.

  “Like from statehood days…” I prompted.

  “I’d love to hear stories,” she said to Adrienne.

  “What ones I know…” Adrienne looked about, rueful.

  My mother had thrown on something rather nice before she came out. And so how had Adrienne looked, from out the window? She looked so unconcealably pink, her pink throat and chin like a tall Russian teapot. Upright. I leaned back, to see if she had ripped the tag off her dress. She had. I was too young then to know how novel my parents were in the world. But I think Adrienne had divined their basic goodness already.

  Galveston came up, and Adrienne poured out information about her childhood visits there. Booker Petroleum had big interests in Galveston. My mom and her tried to talk Galveston restaurants, though neither had heard of the others’. In fact my mother looked rather defiant, shading her eyes in the sun: she began to tell Adrienne, at length, about her brothers’ and sisters’ houses, and the neighborhood there, and the schools where some of my young cousins were enrolled.