A Map of Tulsa (9 page)

We slept. A bit later, the sun already high, our bedroom—somebody’s bedroom, Albert’s guest bedroom—was warm. I plowed my hands into the empty regions of the sheets to feel their coolness. Adrienne turned over. We probably stank, we had already stunk of sleep when we started. We would be craving showers. I laid my nostrils on Adrienne’s arm, in the crook of her elbow. She smelled like a Band-Aid. The skin pressed the rims of my nostrils. I didn’t quite have rights to her body yet: she stirred, and I drew back. She opened her lazy eyes onto me, and didn’t move or avert them: it was the most intimate thing. I wanted to have some cynical remark, about layabouts,
about exhaustion, but affection overwhelmed me. Her gaze persisted, staring, I shambled onto her, dazed, locked in this time, sweating.

At noon, again, on purpose. With empty bellies, with an inexplicable hoarse feeling in our throats. In full color. Like an apology to the people downstairs. The cords of her throat straining red, like it wasn’t fun. But I did not let her get out into the clean air. I held her in the burning sheets. We fell asleep with all our skin touching, just to make the heat worse, to sweat more.

Much later, Chase poked his head in. “Um, people are leaving.”

Adrienne ripped off a sheet, flipped it in her arms once, and then drew it over her head, hunching like a crone. She was going to go home with Chase, of course. “I must cover zee head,” she said, “for modestee.”

As I was loading Edith and Cam’s stuff back into my car, Chase came up and punched me in the gut. He was friendly, grinding his fist in my belly. “Okay,” he said, looking appraising, ironic: he approved. He waved goodbye as Edith and Cam and I drove off.

“You should be nice to Chase,” said Edith. Our windows were still down; we had not yet left the property. The soft tinkle of tires on gravel was all our tired ears wanted to hear.

“Why?”

“You’re not in competition with him.”

“How do you know?”

“They’ve never been like boyfriend and girlfriend. They’re like siblings.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” I said.

We got onto the main road and we rolled up our windows. Edith rode in silence for a while. “You know Jim, Adrienne grew up really unsupervised. Eventually she started dating guys in bands. It got pretty intense. They heard her sing and…have you heard her sing? She was fourteen. There were all these guys. Without Chase she never would ever have survived.”

“You mean literally survived?” I asked.

“Yeah. Maybe not, Jim.”

The late-afternoon sun glared in my windshield. It was dirty. I wondered if it would seem passive-aggressive if I stopped at a gas station to wash it. I felt irritated: I should have had that drive home to myself.

Edith had said: “Adrienne and Chase were little kids together, their families were friends. I don’t know how gradual it was, but he just started being there for her. And no matter who she was seeing she always had Chase. He gave her a lot of stability.”

“You mean she slept with him and other men too?”

“I guess!”

“And so I can be a new version of those other men.”

My parents complained about the cigarette smell in my car. They had not driven it since I came home. I arrived back from Bartlesville however and fell asleep, and that was when my dad took it upon himself to get my oil changed.

“I guess because people don’t roll their windows down,” I said.

This took place not at the dinner table, which would have been too theatrical for my parents’ tastes, but cleaning up afterwards. I was carrying plates, while my
dad washed the dishes. My mom took up position in the doorway and lobbed questions at me.

So who were these friends, that I let them smoke in my car?

It didn’t seem necessary that I should name them. “People,” I said. “I don’t know. Are you worried about secondhand smoke?” But that obviously wasn’t the point, any more than olfactory contamination was the point. My mom persisted. “Look,” I said. I took up the chopping knife and the cutting board. “My friends smoke. So I let them smoke in my car.”

“But how do you know they’re your friends?”

I looked at her. She had gone too far. And she knew it. “By looking at their art,” I said. “I know them by their works.”

I was trying to pretend to be exasperated. But my Bible quote was gratuitous. “I know it seems all bohemian,” I said, “and therefore stupid—or stupid and unconvincing to be bohemian, maybe, in this day and age.” I still tried to shrug. “I don’t know, I learn more from them than I do from my professors. I guess that seems naïve.”

This was the biggest fight I had had with my parents in memory. They were very quiet. My dad stood by afterwards, sort of waiting as I dried the dishes. I told him about a Kissinger book I was reading, transcripts of Kissinger’s telephone conversations with Golda Meir and others from 1973. I knew it would interest him. He took up the plates to shelve them.

“I guess what I should say to Mom is something like—I won’t lose track of who I am.”

My father had an equilateral nose with long, wolfish
nostrils, and thin, neat lips, and it seemed to cost him nothing to process what I had said, to find a kernel of goodwill and good sense in it. I immediately regretted having said anything at all, and at the same time was helped, beyond reckoning, by my father’s grace.

The day I brought Adrienne her gun—I’m still so proud of how crazy that was. I parked outside Adrienne’s studio one bright July morning with a small blue pistol in my glove compartment. Which I retrieved and hefted—the way you heft any present for which you have paid too much and which, held in your own hand before you give it, trembles less with the recipient’s desires than with your own.

At Adrienne’s invitation I had started going to the studio again, that week after Bartlesville. But still my bid for romantic partnership went unrecognized. She did not want to do anything at night, she did not touch me, did not invite me up to the penthouse. And I made no reference to what had happened.

I had literally thought about getting Adrienne flowers. The gun was the superior idea. What thrilled me was the presumption: after all, you can’t make someone own a gun. But I believed I had to presume. God stands up for the presumptuous. For me to have decided to present her with a firearm—I cannot adequately advertise how excessive this felt.

It was supposed to be obvious. At Wal-Mart, I had pushed up on tiptoe at the display counter, looking around for the clerk, worried maybe that I would flub the names and gauges I had memorized—but at least I had a show
going, a blond genius with long legs and a paintbrush, and I was going to buy her a little gun for her birthday.

It was cold to the touch that next morning. This was $300; the scrollwork was cheap; the butt was long and fancy. Looking out at the empty, sunny street, the shuttered bar, the neat public trash can, I felt rebuked. I opened my car door and sat with my feet on the asphalt, trying to get the courage to go up. What had I accomplished so far that summer? I had a loaded gun in my lap, anybody walking by would have seen. But the street was dead. I think it was a Sunday—I remember the stairway up pierced with light.

Characteristically, Adrienne kept her back to me when I came in. Her smock was tied askew and I could see into her overalls where her ribs were bare. I just stood there. She inhaled and raised the paintbrush. “I have something for you,” I said.

At the last second I had wrapped the gun up in a pair of jeans I found in my backseat. She pulled up at one of the pant cuffs, and the gun tumbled out.

“Did you know you can just go to the store and buy one of these things?”

She had stepped back slightly, as if from a snake.

“My god.”

I had thought she would ring with laughter. But no. “It’s for you,” I said, swallowing my words.

She looked worried. She used her smock to pick up the gun, wielding it away from her as if she wanted to avoid fingerprints. She bent her elbow and aimed the gun at me.

“It’s loaded,” I told her.

She squinted, as if lining up the sight. She aimed straight at my belly.

But her voice was strained. “Why is it loaded?” she asked.

Her studio, on two sides, had windows made of glass brick. I said I wanted to shoot at the bricks, to see how they’d explode. “I didn’t mean for this to seem as aggressive as it maybe does.”

Not only did Adrienne inspire me, she inspired me too much: such a crazy, serious gift idea, because it was for Adrienne. Yet she proved that she deserved it. She took off the safety, lifted, turned, and aimed.

“It’s going to be loud—” she said, spreading her feet apart and raising the gun. The glass bricks were full of sun.

At the instant of bullet ejection my eyes closed, like during a sneeze, but I thought I saw strands of blond hair fly back and then float down. At the back of the sound (a wide bolus of white noise), I heard a satisfying splat, and the tinkle of glass.

She fired again, almost flip.

“You?”

My ears were ringing but I took the gun. I had fired a.357 in Scouts, and had been mentally rehearsing the grip and the proper firing stance.

And I fired.

The crack was upsetting this time; it came and went not with the civilized sound of a “report” but hacked quickly at my wrists. There was a larger puff of gray—less solid than the first. I didn’t know what to do next. Adrienne had taken a turn, I had taken a turn. We had deafened ourselves.

Maybe I should have shot holes through her canvases if I had brought this gun to her studio. Because she was bored already. She was edging back towards her easel. I softly laid the gun on the table, so as not to distract her.

The rest of the story is too private to make sense: Nothing happened. Adrienne got back to work. I lay down. Soon the only thing out of the ordinary was the wind that trickled in through the chinks that we’d made. Neither of us remarked on it. Neither of us felt that we should break the silence. As I was drifting off—I was abashed enough to feel a kind of pressure on my eyes, like sleepiness—I formed the improbable concern that this air from the window was going to affect her paint, dry it or sort of blow it sideways on the canvas.

It had become my habit, at the studio, to lie still for a while after naps, with the unaired taste of my own saliva still in my mouth. I did some of my longest thinking that way. It was how I had dreamed up the gun thing. I had had second thoughts, but ultimately had decided not to go back on something that had been so gleamingly intuitive.

Only now (back on the couch, after the smoke had cleared) did the intuition shine forth again, dumb and blue. I saw it for what it was: not love, but jealousy. Over that short courtship I had grown envious of this person, Adrienne, and, impatient to be like her, I had attempted this stunt. An impulse regrettably punctuated with Colt precision. Never in my mind or in any other part of my body did it occur to me to scare her, but I did want that shot, near her wrist, to put that crack in her space. I would
wake from a nap and see her about to draw a line of the blackest force, her bare arm tingling above the raw canvas, studying, studying, and then taking only a simple cursive stroke, while my own arm lay buried in the couch.

I was so ardent now it felt like we were breaking up. Adrienne could see I needed to talk, and after her silent painting session ended, and with the gunshot still ringing in our ears, we decided on a five o’clock supper. I suggested the Black-Eyed Pea, a busy family-style restaurant from my childhood. As we followed the hostess to our table, I couldn’t hear the hubbub so much as see it: the waiters back and forth to do refills at the soda fountain, a polished plow nailed up high on the wall.

Adrienne’s luminous pointed face watched me.

“I think the gun was really an attempt to make some sort of statement,” I said, while trying casually to pluck a roll from the almost-empty basket. We had left the gun in the studio; it was registered in my name, but would belong to her now. “I needed to impress you. Of course that was obvious.”

“Why did you have to impress me?”

I had to lean over to be heard. “Well, I mean I was trying to speak your language.” I kept glancing over behind Adrienne’s shoulder, casting back to the waiting area where I used to stand when I was a twelve-year-old, in my big T-shirts, with my sandals turned out on the flagstones, waiting with my parents to be seated.