I said that we had to get back, but my mother asked if I didn’t want to show Adrienne through the house. It was a mess, she did say. I took Adrienne in through the back door, into the TV den, and I could hear Mom and Dad, through the thin outer wall, talking now about the yardwork. My mom was going to make stew for supper. Meanwhile, Adrienne had stepped up into the dining room, where family photos were ranged on a bureau. I felt a jagged upwelling of privacy when Adrienne stopped to look. “Come on,” I said.
“Oh my god.” She started to coo.
“Don’t,” I said.
Adrienne straightened up, burned. She waited for me to lead her around.
The house was not large, and soon there was nowhere to go but into my bedroom, with Adrienne near my teenage bed—that was about the whole point, wasn’t it? But she went straight to my green notebook, the one that I never took out of that room.
“What’s this?”
“My diary.”
She closed her mouth. Genuinely given pause, I think. She pivoted, and spent a few seconds admiring my bookcase. “I want to look at all your books,” she said.
At the first intersection, with my car’s AC still blowing hot air, I turned to Adrienne. Now we could relax—she had really been so perfect with my mother—surely she had some remarks to make, now that it was over—yet her politesse was real. She had nothing but nice things to say about my parents. She really liked them. Especially my dad. But she turned on me: “You’re being so strange.”
“What?”
“You acted like you didn’t want us to be there. I thought you were going to be so excited.”
She was visibly upset.
“You acted like you were ashamed of me,” she said.
Adrienne thought I was a great coward, sometimes. That made the difference between us. And everything else flowed from there.
There was the time she woke me up in the middle of the night and made me come out with her onto the Booker terrace. We were twenty stories high, recessed from the funneling wind. I heard a bat flapping in the gutter above us, a not-uncommon sound after dark.
“Watch this.” She held out a pencil in her hand. The pencil was long and yellow and vertiginously shaved: she held it point-down, arm’s-length over the rail. The wind was already nibbling it out of her fingers—between her pointer finger and her thumb, with her pinkie daintily up and clear—when she released it. “Uh—” The inclination to lurch over and watch, versus the horror of the clean skyscraper drop, screwed me off my sense of balance, and I imagined I had almost lunged after the pencil. I had seldom been pissed off so instantaneously. She continued to point down, her index finger right where the pencil had been. “That will be a new drawing,” she said.
It was a fair conceptual point—
But I remember how it felt to lay my fingers on that railing and gingerly lean over and look. They teach you in science class that pennies dropped from on high can kill people. But no one was below, of course. Not in downtown Tulsa. The illuminated street, bobbing below me, was empty.
6
In August I got a piece of mail that for two nights lay unopened on my desk. On the third night I waited until my parents went to sleep and then closed my bedroom door and very silently unstuck the envelope. Inside was a pebbled piece of stationery stamped with the seal of the college registrar: “Request to Take a Leave of Absence.”
Adrienne had started singing. The first time it happened I was laid out on the couch, reading; it was like she put down her paints and suddenly she was in front me, crooning—I was embarrassed. The song was a folk song. She met my eyes, but briefly. She did not want me to applaud. When she started a new song, I turned back to my book and pretended to read. She would practice like that, for fifteen or twenty minutes a day.
That August was hot. We would go driving, without purpose. I accelerated so gently and so seldom it felt like our front-wheel drive was a breathing animal, pulling us along in its animal thoughts. We were practicing our instincts. Often I didn’t know—should I turn right, should I turn left? I was supposed to relax into the guesswork. One of the requirements of Sunday driving is that for long stretches no one speaks. It’s a wholly kinetic form of pleasure. It was invented by farmers when they first got their cars. Maybe Adrienne had acquired a sense of it from art films, from their beautiful longueurs, and their discipline of boredom. The driver’s seat is assumed by an uncle who doesn’t talk much, one for whom silence is essential to the masculine condition. And maybe that was Adrienne’s ideal.
One day we had come out to an area where we didn’t usually get. We found an old fry house, and ordered chicken plates and malts. We ate in the car. Adrienne threw her bones out the window as she cleaned them. “Is that really what you do?” I asked. Adrienne nodded. She wouldn’t speak—as if she was protecting her voice. It was getting more and more like that. I kept my bones on my plate, and then when I was finished walked all of our trash in, to the trash can inside.
Life was just a practice. I had come up the elevator that morning and crawled into her bed. We weren’t feeling anything in particular.
“Here,” I said, “I know this place.” I pulled into a hardware store, its sunken parking lot vaguely familiar to me. “It’s funny: all of these places, we’re going to run into my dad somewhere.”
But we ran into someone different. A buzz-cut guy in reflective sunglasses, explained to be a TU art student Adrienne knew. She shielded her eyes and engaged him politely. He had been gone all summer but was back now, getting ready for the semester. “Got to redo the studio space,” he said. He grinned like a Cheshire cat and raised up the house paint he had bought—matte black, it looked like.
“Photography?”
“Portraits. I’m going to seat one good portrait a week, all semester long.”
“Then you should do Jim sometime.” Adrienne turned to introduce me. I don’t know whether she realized what she was saying. Ever since July, when I had stopped writing, I had daydreamed about staying: becoming a regular, going back to Retro Night, for example—not dancing but somehow benevolently there, presiding. And around town, a man in my own clothes, gradually growing my father’s beard. I could get a job of some kind. The Tulsan question: On those halcyon days you go out to lunch, what kind of car will you drive? Something respectable, I sensed. Or perhaps a pickup truck. A lanky, sad man. Jogging up and vigorously shaking someone’s hand. At some kind of reception. At Adrienne’s gallery show this fall, in my salt-and-pepper beard. Already faded with age. That could be two months from now.
One night I went home, and took off all my clothes, and filled out that form. I left it like a loaded gun in my desk. It would be the most prodigal thing I had ever done: to take a year off from college.
Meanwhile, Adrienne sang. I was no help; I knew nothing about music. I might take note, coming up from the street, of the voice as I heard it out the window, and of how it echoed in the stairwell. The timbre of it spoke to me more than the words. Her practice songs came from Alan Lomax recordings and old things, blues and staring, admonitory chants. I could hear the physicality of her courage in the open edges of her voice. She literally opened herself up and put her insides out there. I did not imagine someone of my temperament could do this. Adrienne was other. Sometimes, like someone teaching herself to cry on demand, she would scream. Just for a few seconds.
I came up behind her one day. I reached one arm over a shoulder, the other around her armpit, and held. I could feel it in her ribs how she worked, and in her skeleton how she strained to stand tall. She turned around in my arms and began a song where surely I would know the words. O say can you see.
I was supposed to sing along.
I did not want to do it. Adrienne always took me too literally. She never realized how hard I worked just imagining our relationship.
I did not sing along to the radio. Or in the shower. I had only intoned words lost in wide lumbering choruses at church and at school assemblies.
She held my eye. I
breathed. She had gotten to “bombs bursting in air,” the last word of which isn’t really sung, but trembled out. Finally on “gave proof through the night” my voice found its center of gravity and bowled through the chute. Indeed my lungs were the best thing I had going, and as the song marched swiftly to its end, I realized I was using booming volume to cover for my lack of control. It was my lips and my tongue, my barely prehensile tongue, that I did not know how to use.
We did not say anything afterwards, but I felt better. We had not slept together in days, at that time.
Adrienne went to the small galley sink she had for her paints, and filled a glass of tap water. She drank half of it off, and when she finished she had to catch her breath.
“There’s something I want to tell you about,” I said.
And then it was too late, I had to tell her. “I have the chance to take a year off from school.”
“What would you do?”
“Well. What am I doing now?”
Adrienne went over to switch her fan back on. “Is it to work on your writing?” she asked over the noise of the box fan.
“No, I mean—I could write. I—” Frustrated, I went over and turned the fan back off. I gestured. “It’s obvious why I think of staying.”
She sat down on the couch. “Jim. You know I’ve formed a band?”
“No. I did not know you had formed a band.”
“That’s what I was going to do when I started singing, Jim. I have a show this Saturday.”
“I mean, this is fantastic. That’s amazing.”
She monitored my eyes. “You’re upset though.”
“I don’t want to be.”
“I’m doing something I can’t share with you, Jim.”
“Right.”
“You need to think about what you can do.”
That weekend I studied Adrienne onstage. I stood at the back and watched her performance with knowing eyes; I looked at her jeans, and watched for the wisp of irritation that sometimes crossed her face. She really did scream. She just stood up there and forced it, it was like she was exorcising something from her head. I knew how determined she was. There was a boy playing the harmonium, which I had just learned the name of, and a boy on drums. The music never overwhelmed itself—it wasn’t supposed to be that she was upset, or that this was an access of passion. Her words didn’t come from her heart so much as from other parts of her body, her diaphragm and her sinuses—and her perfect rib cage. This was the same corporeal apparatus that had been mine sometimes, that walked crabwise in bed, and roused me with its toe when it was hungry.
Maybe the thing Adrienne and I had really had in common was our selfishness. Within the scene, as I got it, the same audience went to every show, of every kind; some individuals thought there should be more shows, of any kind, period. The boosterism of the local arts pages, which never ran a negative review of any local band, even obtained in the bathrooms of the nightclubs, where if people talked to me while peeing I knew they wanted to be psyched, wanted me to be psyched. Most of all, they wanted Adrienne to be psyched. Those who remembered Adrienne’s previous bands said so, and made themselves prominent enthusiasts of this, her return. She made none of them jealous, she was too much an alien for that. Her more pretentious fans talked about Adrienne’s mystique. The younger kids kept their distance, but watched her like they might a passing legend, using itself up.
At bottom, perhaps, Adrienne was innocent of leadership. She had flair, and an artist’s sense of what belonged to her. She never considered it a debit on herself to ask for something: negotiating with a club’s owners to let her set an onstage table on fire, for example. (It was exciting, and then it took twenty minutes, her band stopped playing, and we all had to watch it; only Adrienne stood there, it was sublime and stupefying. It would not have worked in any larger town, but Tulsa was small enough to act like a furnace, reflecting its own light inward and reassuring itself, conserving heat.)
I had tried to love her by learning the way she lived. I liked it best when the summer blurred on me—whenever there was a good view of the skyline from someone’s backyard, and I could raise my bottle in a toast. Occasionally I pulled off a good kiss, as difficult with her as a good joke. And the one time she let me up on stage with her I danced so wild I knocked an amplifier off, and the club made her stop, while they checked to see if it was damaged.
The first week of September was hot. Adrienne’s studio had neither air conditioners nor many openable windows, and we only went there for an hour or so each day just to pretend we were working. At night her band came to practice. And day after day it stayed hot, summer didn’t break, it kicked itself up another notch. Life melted. I started going back to the library sometimes, if only to enjoy its cool recycled air.
Adrienne wore a tiny charm from Chase, a shoe on a chain, which kicked against her chin when she was on all fours. For the first time, Adrienne let me mount her in her studio. We were not supposed to so much as caress each other during work time—even when we were very excited. But we gave up. She flattened a huge piece of cardboard and laid it down for us, and we slept afterwards with our bones on the floor. I remember waking up in the sun, in the fibrous reek of the cardboard, and finding myself alone, bargaining with God for just the sound of her voice behind me, or a clatter from the bathroom.
Adrienne had decided to record an album, working with Albert. They would do a session at Bartlesville in the fall. Painting had been an interval. She had stopped painting—the canvases were at Albert’s gallery and would be shown in November, and she said almost nothing about them.
The scene thinned out. Life was slowing down. Or she might not work with Albert, she said. She might get a team of volunteers to help build a recording booth in her studio, once the weather cooled off. Chase could do it.
I spent more and more time in the wind. Up on the Booker terrace I liked how it was almost impossible to process or to think. Sometimes I contemplated putting a pin through a condom—while it was still in its wrapper so it would look safe. It was just a thought. The next skyscraper over and then down—my sight line swooped like a bird on the wing, imagining a glide, and a landing.
If I woke up first, if it was the type of morning that you might make breakfast in bed, I might instead (and she certainly didn’t have any eggs) gather her laundry. I was riding down in the businessmen’s elevator, dirty sleeves and panties forklifted against my chest. I had a real domestic emotion: Adrienne had performed the night before, she had been hoarse and very wonderful when she went to bed, teetering over her pillow and trying to ease down on her haunches, head hanging, like a pony who wants to spend the night in a human bed.
Sometimes the penthouse looked so trashed. These days were Adrienne’s apotheosis. And I developed a repertoire of things I did, cushions I always straightened, lampshades I righted. I tried to keep the Turkish rugs flat. I became the one who always made the bed. Adrienne went to the studio without me, to sing, and I spent all afternoon in the penthouse. Or I went down to the streets and crept along the walls of the buildings. She had started using her motorcycle more, and sometimes from up in the penthouse I could actually hear it on the street below, in the deadly quiet of weekend evenings.
She was humorless, was why I liked her. Those last weeks she was spending more and more time with Chase, but I wasn’t jealous, exactly. I did think she should see more of me. I thought she should paint more too.
You might suppose that I would force myself on top of her, that I would tell myself a story about reasserting our love. But when I tried my brute strength it only expressed how dumb I felt. And her cradling, crablike acceptance sometimes was equally, wonderfully dumb.
I went home to my father, once, and tried to spend an evening talking with him. I was just at that age, that summer, when you begin to appreciate that all the seemingly superficial things of the world have actual technical importance—that paint protects wood, as does dusting, that cleaning up after yourself is an essential instance of
self-respect. And sometimes I would go to the penthouse and find its heirlooms slightly dirty. The Bookers had a Teddy-Roosevelt-style chair made entirely of nailed-together antlers, antlers grooved and seamed with gummy dust; I would sit down sometimes in it, measuring its creak as I lowered myself down. This was Rod’s inherited chair, supposedly.
Once, when the apartment was getting very cluttered, I went out and put six bottles of Adrienne’s favorite whiskey on her credit card. One of the six bottles went in the double-doored wardrobe, thrust into the leg of a boot. One I planted beside the tub, among shampoo bottles. One in a trash can in the study. One in plain sight on the hearth. One on the terrace, which had a built-in liquor cabinet we never used. And one in the refrigerator door.
I started to stay up all night at the penthouse. Adrienne would turn over in her bed. I would prowl around, fixing things, straightening. Whoever designed it really was fantastic, the big fireplace up this high like for a hunting lodge in the sky. I could put a pillow on the hearth and lean back, and obliquely out the terrace windows catch the eastern sky lightening.
One night I thought I heard the elevator ding. It was nothing, but I froze where I sat. I thought Rod Booker would come in, or his dead grandfather Odis, either one of them to kick me out, or to make me finally introduce myself.
Adrienne had talked about coming to the airport with me. But I was not sure I had given her the date of my departure. And when it approached, I didn’t call her. I had not called her for several days. My heart was tired. I thought I might try to disappear, and not force her to write a speech and kill an ox.
My parents were circling tighter. There was much for them to do, buying me a new laptop, stocking me up on allergy medicine, buying socks. I was reminded how much I needed them. They had to cosign my student loans. Shopping for the laptop with my father, I was struck by how fun life could be. My father and I had a certain amount of money to spend, we weighed the different bundles and options. I told him about some of the different classes I was considering taking. It all made sense to him.
A Map of Tulsa Page 9