A Map of Tulsa (13 page)

“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.

But right before we sat down to dinner that night, the phone rang. “Weren’t you going to call me?” Adrienne asked.

“So, Adrienne’s going to take me to the airport tomorrow,” I told my parents. They understood—skeptical as they were of Adrienne, they imagined the love we had was as big and round and pink as any teenagers’. They would give any scene at the airport a wide berth.

I budgeted thirty minutes to say goodbye. Picking up Adrienne at two, I would have us to the airport with time to kill. She would take a taxi back, and my parents would get my car out of short-term parking that same day. The inconvenience for my parents mortified me.

In the event, Adrienne was late coming down. The Booker’s shadow was chilly, and I got goose bumps waiting in the car.

She dressed casually that day. Her T-shirt, tucked
into her beltless jeans, puffed out, so that it was like a small cloud floated in and occupied my passenger seat.

“We’re late,” is all I said.

When the tongue of the highway lapped us up and locked us in and drew us on the highways that ran like aqueducts out of the ancient city of Tulsa, I gathered myself up and thought: This could be the last time. Downtown, and then the green neighborhood of my elementary school, had already fallen away behind us, and the cityscape to come was a haze. Homes, billboards, fast food, furniture emporia, I had not memorized it any better this summer than I ever had before. Tulsa would always be indifferent. The only thing that distinguished me today was in my passenger seat: Adrienne Booker, the famous girl. After my parents moved I would have no excuse to come back here unless Adrienne bade me, and she wasn’t going to do that.

Adrienne wanted to help me with taking my luggage out of my trunk, but I yanked it all out myself and started walking. She hurried to keep up; she tried to catch my eye. But this was how I wanted her to remember me. I decided to check every single piece of my luggage. That way I walked beside Adrienne empty-handed—better, I thought, to go with no reading material into the future.

“Jim,” she said. We were stopped beside the newspaper dispensers, in sight of my departure gate. “I can go sit with you. Or I can turn around here. I don’t know how you like to say goodbye.”

I had to reel and take stock of the people around me. They were not my friends. Not that I disliked, for example, the man passing by in the ocher plaid shirt, but
he had made a deal with his homeliness that I would never be offered—no more than he would ever appreciate why I had invested so much in my own vanity, or how deeply in the red I now was. How dare Adrienne ask me what I wanted? I wanted her to be here, and to act on her own needs. She acted like she was here only politely, to service me. “I am going back to college,” is what I said.

She was puzzled. Did she not realize what a fool I had felt like, all summer long?

I pecked her on the nose. “Good luck with your recording,” I croaked.

So I sat at my gate alone. This was my last look at Tulsa, and I could not even see it: out the window it was only tarmac and sky, like the whole city had slid off the table. I prayed for the power of memory to preserve it. More important than saying goodbye to Adrienne, I told myself, saying goodbye to the town. Because of course what I told myself was that I was graduating—that, one year out from high school, this was the real commencement.