A Map of Tulsa (12 page)

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 stand 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.

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.

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.”