A Map of Tulsa (28 page)

I wanted to walk our old walk. I came down from the penthouse and plunged out the lobby doors into the night that, back in the nineties, had used to be day, when we set out on our mornings. Indeed the door of the lobby felt a little light under my arm, and I was afraid I might break it. And when I got out into the middle of the street and looked up, I expected the skyscrapers to not be there. I was trying to deprive myself of Tulsa all at once. But the
black towers stood there, and the street was bland beneath my feet. It was real, and beyond it the boring neighborhoods were realer.

The wind tore through the cross streets like a gale from the deserts—streaming out to western Oklahoma and Texas and Mexico beyond. I remembered how the skyscrapers used to look from my parents’ car: the lungs of my hometown, combusting and bright. The engine of the known world.

So I had needed Adrienne as a memory. When people heard I was from Tulsa, they expected stories, and I too, as I walked around on the East Coast, saw how cool it could be to be from here. Even when I was a little boy I knew what an origin story was. But Tulsa was mute. When I met Adrienne I knew what I needed. And as soon as I had it from her I instantly turned back to my own life, and built up a young man who merely carried Adrienne in his heart, as an image. Now I wanted to give Adrienne back to herself.

But she was dead, and so I was going to get to keep her forever.

I walked over the tracks, didn’t glance at the Center of the Universe, but hid myself among the warehouses of the Brady District. On my peregrinations the afternoon before I’d never made it over onto these streets. So here they were, still packed up in darkness, just as I had left them five years ago. I could hear the bar crowds down the street, a rebuke to me, and I hurried by; on the sidewalk in front of Adrienne’s studio I stopped with my back to the door and looked both ways. The long-toothed
key still grabbed in the lock—I jogged up the steps—and the flashlight still hung on its string.

And its batteries worked. I shined the flashlight around, and in my heart I panicked. I felt like I was inspecting the scene of a crime. I didn’t see any easels, only old music gear. A microphone left out, getting dusty. Finally, a lamp. I switched it on and saw the clothing rack, stocked with some things, khaki high-waisted shorts clipped up on a hanger, and at least three or four hanging bags of dry cleaning. I went up and checked the stapled receipts: transactions from only one week ago. And I saw a bed. I wondered at what point did she decide it was all right to sleep here. We never slept here. This was a defeat in her life, a slippage. The top sheet ran twisted, hanging off the side like a rope, the pillows were on the floor. Reaching down before I could stop myself, I touched one of those pillows, I picked it up like a professional basketball player picks up a basketball: one-handed.

I made that bed. It was a ritual in grief. And also a daily ritual, one that Adrienne never took notice of when she was alive. Perfect. I patted up the pillows but didn’t know where to put them, so I put them back on the floor, then I pulled the mattress pad tight and drew the sheet up to its edge. I pulled it very straight. Then I replaced the pillows and threw the blanket over all of it, coming around to each corner to correct it and to check the sheet. Perfect. Perfect.

Somebody would come in here soon, looking after Adrienne’s things—and when they noticed the neat, tight bed, if they knew Adrienne at all, they would know that
she hadn’t made it. That I had been here, maybe—and then I noticed the Advil on the bedside table, and again an old medicine bottle, this one quite old, stuffed with weed, her name printed in dot matrix: “Booker, Adrienne.” So she never became famous.

Idly, I opened the bedside drawer, and saw one revolver pointing back at me.

I picked it up. Had the safety been off this whole time? I inspected the chamber. Three bullets. I bent over and cried. That’s exactly how many should have been left, after we shot out the window.

I stuck it out and aimed: A salute, as if. An apology. I was apparently too old for grand gestures. Pretending to aim, I waved the gun at the window, waved it at the image of the refracted streetlight. I crooked the gun in my lap and turned out all the bullets.

I dream sometimes that Adrienne is singing, and that I try to sing too. Sometimes she’s in jail, and we have five minutes together in a bleak reception room, beneath a high window. Sometimes we’re onstage. And we try to sing a duet, with the spotlight in our faces and with all of the Tulsa people there in the heave of the audience. I dream how brave I would have to be to stick my vocal cords out there and let them wave and vibrate, next to Adrienne’s. Merle Haggard said recently in an interview that to sing with your wife, “actually singing together, actually harmonizing together, that requires some dual fault that might not exist in other marriages.” I think he meant that he and his wife had each done something
wrong, and had each confessed it. And therefore weren’t afraid to open up, to sing in each other’s faces.

So the burden of my nightmare could be this: that I never really opened up to Adrienne. I never confessed. I worshipped her but I sacrificed nothing. I dated her the whole time like a little kid who doesn’t want anybody to see what he’s reading. Adrienne got so eager every time I started telling about my parents, or about my writing. I remember her sitting Indian-style on that whitework bedspread gripping her socked feet out of sheer attentiveness while I told her, for example, about the time my mother found my poetry. The admixture of shame I felt, having written what I had written, and not being willing to explain it to my mother. To Adrienne, that aroused her faithful pity, I think. But I never really let Adrienne counsel me on such matters. I never realized how clearly she perceived my embarrassment. I shoved my embarrassment back into my bag, and turned around, and then expected Adrienne to educate me.

You know I used to belabor the real memories: the bitter way Adrienne smoked when she was tired; the offhand, superior way she ate with her fingers, discarding chicken bones off from her plate; the way she walked into a crowded party acting as if nobody were there. She had a tiny belt she used to wear that, when she was sitting, talking, she would idly whip off and thread around her wrists in a figure eight, like to handcuff herself. There was once in my car when we were making out we thrashed around so showily that we got our feet up by the headrest and our heads on the floor mat, kissing fast so as not to
have to remark on our predicament, I think we both liked the idea of that floor mat that had shoe dirt spread into it and smelled like plastic with our own wine smell. Sometimes when we stood up in the mornings in the penthouse it was as if we had borne that bad party smell up there just to go out on the terrace and let the wind rip it off. And most of the time we weren’t at parties: I was watching Adrienne paint, and she stood there like a practiced girl, used to being watched, about to dive off the high board for hours, with the raw canvas in front of her and her Tulsa-purchased studio warming up, all the time.

But what I tend to think about more, now (and I don’t see any reason why this will change), is the years away. When I might have been wiser. Had I come to find her. When I was in New York. And she was on her way to L.A.

Which is simply to say that those years when we were apart, but both alive, were the sweetest. Because they had the most potential. And I think in my dream it’s those years that we force open and would sing, if we could.

But sometimes when I’m at work and I get tired, I think—and I really do believe: only the famous people, the people you listen to all your life, really have it, can really sing. Adrienne tried. For all our studies we had no idea.

Thanks first to my agent, Edward Orloff, for seeing this book clear. To my editor, Allison Lorentzen, for her commitment and her strength. To early readers Karan Mahajan and Ida Hattemer-Higgins, for their confidence. To other readers: Maureen Chun, Ceridwen Dovey, Sam Munson, Amelia Lester, Roy Scranton, and Willing Davidson. To Taylor Sperry and others at Penguin. A tip of my hat to Priscilla Becker, Ellery Washington, Thad Ziolkowski, Julia Holmes, Timothy Farrington, Claire Aaronson, Adam Berlin, and John Berlin, each of whom made some unconscious contribution to this book in a conversation I still remember. Thanks to my aunt Linda for her interest, to my aunt Nell for her precedent. To Arlen and Clara Gill for their love. I also want to thank Rachel Cohen here, for her early mentorship.

Thanks to Dinaw Mengestu, for letting me sit at his table.

Thanks to my mother and father, whose love and grace allow me to be who I am. And to my brother Sam, for his grace.

This book is dedicated to my wife, Annie Bourneuf. She keeps a roof over my head; she wakes me up in the morning. She knows what I know.