A Map of Tulsa (6 page)

“Do you want a cigarette?”

“No.”

She lit one for me.

I tried to give it back.

“It’s already lit. You have to smoke it.”

I held the cigarette out the window, but stopped short of throwing it away. There were those warnings, I knew, posted by gas pumps.

“I thought they weighed more than this,” I said. I waved my cigarette around in the air, light as a butterfly.

“Hrmf. You’re too good for me Jim.”

She sucked on her cigarette, apparently thinking. I leveraged over on the emergency brake and kissed her. She had moved her cigarette out of the way—but she made it a short kiss, and I had to sit back down on my side of the car.

“You could find a better girl than me Jim.”

I peered back. “You don’t even know me.”

“I know myself. I’m
old
.” She sniggered and drew her cigarette to her mouth.

“We’re the same age.”

“Yes, but—” And here she made a self-upwelling gesture.

I was sitting with my armpit clamped over the steering wheel, regarding her. “You know—part of what I like about you is the possibility that you actually are this arrogant.”

“Oh,” she said, “yeah.” She shivered. “I wish I was.”

“You are.”

“Jim—you know I don’t go to school?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like I’m not going. Some people never go to college. Are you shocked? You’re shocked.”

“No, no—I’m not. Did you not get in?”

“Oh, wow. You get points for that too.”

“With your art and with this—the way you have—you could write an
amazing
essay—”

Adrienne had never even finished high school. “When I turned sixteen I went to the guidance counselor and said, ‘I want to drop out now.’ And the counselor looked at me and said, ‘Are you asking me to talk you out of it?’ And I was like, ‘No, I just want to do it right.’ And the counselor was like, ‘You just stop coming.’ So I did. The
only person who even tried to stop me was Chase. Whom you know?”

“Yeah—yes. But you just said
whom
. I don’t know, in a weird way I think all that would impress colleges—your just doing that, as if you’ve had this plan all along. Outside the box. It’s ruthless. And that you’ve actually done something with your time.”

She was annoyed.

“You do things,” I said.

“You haven’t seen those things.”

“Yes but I can tell that you are for real.”

“Jim,” she said after a minute. “Tell me a story.”

“What kind of story?”

“A story that’s sacred to you.”

It had never occurred to me to have a story that was “sacred” to me. It was like college application essays—mine at least, which I had almost had to make up. We were asked about an experience that changed our lives. An important experience. I wrote about an epiphany I’d had while standing atop a large rock. I had stood there, and I picked up some kind of vibration about my destiny. Basically, that I realized I wanted to be a statue when I died, a great man.

“In the second grade,” I began now, “we were assigned to write stories about an imaginary place. And my teacher, who still used the paddle, right, and was this very august African-American lady, sat us down in a circle. I volunteered mine for her to read, and she took it up. I was the teacher’s pet. But she gave me this look. Like her jaw dropped.

“My story was about backwards-land. So naturally I titled it after my backwards-named city. Aslut. Which is Tulsa backwards.”

I paused.

“But the crucial detail here is that I wasn’t able to figure out what the matter with the title had been, until years later.”

“Oh,” said Adrienne. She gloated a little with me.

“Yeah.”

Adrienne was going to tell me one. First, five seconds to collect herself: she had obviously told this story before, but maybe not often. She related it in hushed tones, and paused often—as if it really was sacred. It was like she regarded her younger self as a more important, more trustworthy person than her present self.

“There was a fifth-grader named Derek Walkin. He was bringing a Zippo to school, and that was a big deal. They would set trash on fire behind the dumpster. And they let me watch. I was little. I was a second-grader. Every day at lunch I would go up to their group and stand there. I thought they would kick me out. But I didn’t even look at them—their faces. I just stared at the fire.

“But. I wanted the lighter. I searched Derek’s locker. But he always kept it in his pocket.” Adrienne was staring straight ahead, as if she could still see the little Zippo working on the playground. “I went up to him and asked him for it. I wanted to borrow it. Which was madness.” Adrienne’s voice turned excitable. “I don’t know if you know what it takes, for a second-grade girl to convince a fifth-grade boy to give her
his lighter
? I caught him alone after school and at first just asked him to show me how it
worked. It always looked like he was doing something weird with his wrist, shaking it or something—you’ve seen Zippos. You have to do like that—” She motioned. “I thought I had to get it right the first time or he would never let me borrow it. But my hands were so little.”

“What happened?”

“It took me like eight tries.”

“What did he say?”

Adrienne squinted. “He just let me borrow it.”

“Wow. Why?”

“I don’t know. He just did. He wasn’t a very well-liked boy.”

I could imagine a boy like that. A semi passed behind us, rattling. Adrienne was so acute, so practical in her dealings. It was quiet at the gas station, there wasn’t even canned music. Adrienne resumed. “He gave me his lighter because I told him what I was going to do with it. In fact the main reason he almost didn’t give it to me was that he got scared. I made him prove he wasn’t.

“I took that lighter that weekend and I set fire to my aunt’s garage. I burned it down to the ground.”

“Oh.”

Adrienne blinked. “For a while the fire was kind of nice. It spread out like at the bottom part of the wall. I stayed inside with it, to feed it, and pulled down rags and pieces of wood to keep it going. It took forever. But then it got big fast.” Adrienne widened her eyes. “What I hadn’t expected was how loud it would be. I had gone to stand by my favorite tree, to watch. For a long time I could hear the fire more than see it. I could see smoke, but that was all. Until the flames burst out the window.
They broke the glass like a fist.” She pumped her fist, but slowly. “I had a cordless phone too, in my hand, to call 911 if the fire spread. And I wanted to call, you know. I wanted them to stop it. But I had to stick to my plan. I had to watch that garage burn down to the ground. It was mine; I was only seven years old but I
knew
, I knew then, that nothing was ever going to feel that big again.” She looked at me appraisingly. “I’ve always wanted to get that feeling back again.”

I wasn’t supposed to speak, and didn’t speak. As she waited she raised her hand, hung it in the air, and let it drop and crumple in her lap.

“That thing I made you,” I said.

She raised her eyebrows. “I liked it.”

I felt like I had taken a nap and woken up: I could sit in that car forever. “Look. That story. Write down what you just said and that’s your essay.”

Adrienne did want me to tell her about college. And she acted like I knew more about college, or had more quintessentially been to college, than the kids who went in-state. She was adroit, and at some level she was playing me. But at another level Adrienne was quite sincere. In fact no one had been so thorough, trying to form a picture of what I had learned.

Adrienne asked what did my classes have to do with my
work
—I had told her about a poem I was writing, called “Outskirts,” which was going to be very long and which transposed the city limits of Tulsa to a number of different locales—Tulsa as an oil emirate, Tulsa as an island in the South Pacific, Tulsa as a suburb of New York.

“But I’m not really taking each class except on hunches; it’s like choosing a book to read I guess, it’s going to be background information down the road.”

Adrienne understood me, but her own curiosity was more urgent. She wanted to know specifically about my art history course. “You should teach me,” she said.

This was something I could do. Immediately I brought in all the boring logistics: I had left my textbooks at school, in storage, but I eagerly outlined how I could pull relevant books at the library and bring them to her, and we could go over them.

“Let’s do it tomorrow,” she said. And she put on her seat belt.

“I thought you were trying to get rid of me.”

“No you didn’t. You’re a better listener than that Jim.”

Every morning at eight I would nose my car down into the Booker’s garage. I pretended I had gotten a job there, that I worked for Booker Petroleum. Men not much older than me waited in shirts and ties for the elevator, while I took the brass bench in the lobby and sat with my art books on my lap—those books were too big to hide, so I decided to be rather brazen. I had Old Master nudes and just sat there with my elbows on my knees, looking at the pictures. I sucked on my iced coffee until Adrienne came down.

She was calling me at six, six-thirty to wake me up. “Routine is an art,” she informed me.

This went on for about two weeks.

On exceptional mornings, calling at six, she told me not to come. “I’m seeing something; I’m going to go on over and get started.”

“Okay.” I would make some excuse to my parents and go back to bed.

But most mornings, Adrienne put on one of her bright skirts and her heels and came down to meet me—she took these rush-hour walks like a morning constitutional. We traveled every morning through the streets of downtown, across the tracks, to the old brick loft where she worked. It was a little over a half mile’s distance—all within the bounds of the inner dispersal loop. It was good to be a pedestrian. Adrienne had a small Japanese motorcycle in the Booker garage, but she seldom used it. “I don’t have a car,” she said. “I don’t want a car.”

That first day when we got to the studio I tromped upstairs, iced coffee in hand, ready to emote and discuss. But I didn’t yet realize what my role was. When we got to the top of the stairs Adrienne put her finger to her lips and led me into a darkness. At the far end of the space, with a giant iron screeching, she yanked back the big industrial shutters—and in the flood of milky light I saw her already opening her paints, no longer making eye contact with me, and I was uncertain, and I sat down.

Instead of showing me her paintings, Adrienne simply started to work. I didn’t know what I had thought was going to happen, but I was shocked that she could think while I sat there watching. She lifted her brush and made a stroke. It paralyzed me. I could see several of her canvases from my couch—they looked like the real
thing. They were big abstract shapes, and the canvases were huge.

Only when she wanted a break did she turn to me, and then not to chat or heaven forbid touch or kiss, but to go through the art books. I prepped each night, giving her my art history course as I remembered it and going artist by artist. I was half diffident at first, irritated at the paused status of my love suit, I didn’t expect Adrienne to like artists like Greuze or Chardin. Both made plain, watered-down pictures, people dying, people in wigs bending over to pick a spoon off the floor, or a mother sitting at a wooden kitchen table with her children. Chardin she might like, if at all, because this young wife resembled her, painted with the white neck and the tapering, pinkened fingers. In fact every night, in the air-conditioned parental house when my parents had gone to bed and I sat with a heavy art book in my lap, I thought of Adrienne most bodily, much more so than when I was in her studio. I fantasized about us actually being at college together: we strayed into my dorm room together, after the art lecture.

Adrienne was an even better student than I had intuited. Her exposure as a child to her aunt’s milieu—not just an arsonist at seven, but equally the child at the table at dinner and at parties—served Adrienne better than she knew. And she had a work ethic. She had taught herself to be extremely patient. “I used to be in rock bands,” she told me, “except I wanted to rehearse so much nobody would work with me.” While looking at the art books she always wanted to stop and spend five minutes with her nose in a picture, in silence. And this
would be longer than I had spent on it. “You’re wrong about Chardin,” she said one day. “He’s so mellow. His color is perfect.”

“That chair is the same color as that piece of meat,” I put in.

It could be Adrienne was putting up a front, to show that going to college had nothing to do with painterly knowledge. She knew that her lack of education could hurt her—if she failed in life, people would say so. Her aunt would certainly say so. Perhaps I, with my alma mater, represented her aunt, and Adrienne wanted to school me. But Adrienne’s eyes when she looked at the pictures were honest. And she did seem to take a personal interest in me. Otherwise I wouldn’t have kept coming. Though Adrienne did not once that week directly ask me how I liked her paintings. What compliments I offered weren’t listened to. And there was no touching, no kissing.