A Map of Tulsa (5 page)

I did not assume it was a repeatable experience. Running through the backyards, pretending I was high—bounding after her like I did—maybe I was high. I was grateful that it had finally happened to me—a sense of moment that bore me in my car like a heavy, Wagnerian music. Full of foreboding of course. When my parents got home from church my mom wouldn’t look me in the eye. She put down her purse. With no prologue she told me that “you have to be safe”—and that was going to be all. But stupidly, stupidly, I brought up Chase’s address. Mom might think I had been rolling insensate on the floor of the Cain’s Ballroom. But Maple Ridge, I told her. I thought the intimation of wealth might be explanatory—rich people’s parties are different, they go on longer—they’re unashamed of themselves—

“You don’t know those people, Jim.”

She almost never snapped at me like that. I slept through the afternoon, grinding my teeth, and got out of dinner by going off to the movies. At the concession I just
purchased a Coke and a piece of pizza in a triangular box and sat through the movie tripping out on my own headache. It was dark when I walked back out into the sticky parking lot. I spent the night sitting up Indian-style in my bed, with my window cracked against the air-conditioning, reading. I filled up a small notepad with notes.

I went to the downtown library the next day—ever since I got home from school I had been making almost daily trips to the library, to try to follow the reading course I had set for myself. It was wholesome. My particular books smelled good. Classics that had been reprinted, they had tight, bright pages, and didn’t seem to have been consulted much. For probably two hours that afternoon I took the most meticulous notes—but then got the idea to call Edith. I could simply ask for Adrienne’s phone number. Why not? I went down to the circulation desk, where they had a pay phone.

Edith was cautious.

“You guys had a good time on Saturday?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Just don’t be surprised if she doesn’t call you back.”

“Why—did she say something?”

“No. But Adrienne’s hard.” I heard diplomacy in Edith’s voice. “I hope I didn’t give you the wrong idea, Jim. Adrienne doesn’t really date people, you know.”

What Edith maybe didn’t understand was the intuitive validity of my interest: that simply I ought to get what I want. Wanting was a form of virtue, especially when you wanted challenging things. That’s how my
world worked. It was how I had gotten into college. What more comprehensive validation was there of a teenager’s intuitive sense of his future than the positive return he gets on a list of his accomplishments mailed off to authorities on the East Coast? I said to Edith, “I think you are meant to give me her number.”

Edith gave it. But she spent the rest of the conversation trying to get me to go to Retro Night on Wednesday. “Last week you had a blast.”

I called Adrienne from the same pay phone. My voice mail went like this: “Hey Adrienne, this is Jim. I don’t think I ever said happy birthday to you, so I wanted to say that. I forgot to get your number but Edith gave it to me. Let’s hang out sometime.”

The next morning, at home, I tried again. I did my second voice mail in a different voice. To prepare I sat still for ten or fifteen minutes until finally I took the cordless like a chalice to my lips, dialed with my thumbs, and spoke: “Hey Adrienne, this is Jim Praley.” I paused. “I want to wander around in the night some.” I was speaking gravely, trembling, trying to be ironic. “Edith said you don’t talk on the phone much but I don’t really want to talk on the phone either. However. I’m calling to say: write me a letter.” And I actually gave her my parents’ street address and zip code. A pause. “Let’s talk face-to-face, I mean.”

I came from a family of teachers, women and men who had stayed inside the loops of their own educations and flourished, women and men who could expect to rule their own classrooms and to supervise their own lives. Whereas I was trying to force myself on Adrienne
Booker of the Booker family. I went to Office Depot and purchased manila envelopes, and assembled a file marked
FOLLOW-UP MATERIALS
, mostly xeroxed from library books about Stonehenge and photos of gardens—eighteenth-century Romantic gardens with ruins and broken-down walls—along with one or two maps of Tulsa. I sat at a reading carrel and cut up the xeroxes with the maps so the different gardens appeared to be located in Tulsa. And, in an attempt to be erotic, I looked up pictures of human and animal sacrifice. Thinking of course about the stone table or cromlech on which we had sat. But I decided not to put the illustrations of human sacrifice in, after all. I sat down on the rim of a potted fern, pleased with my efficiency. This was the grandest day I had ever had at the library—it was the payoff of the last two weeks I had spent here, studying, that I was able to zip around so expertly in the stacks. I wanted only one more element in my file, something to make it seem fun. It would be in good taste to insert something that was also a non sequitur. I grabbed a book on Corvettes, and paid to xerox them in color.

This, I thought as I assembled the packet, was something I was good at.

In front of Chase’s house, at six o’clock on a summer afternoon, there was heat coming off the walk, and the knocker was soft to the touch. Nothing was as I remembered it. As I waited I pictured Chase coming from deep in the house, his curious, sleepy-looking head peeking out from behind the door. But it was a lady who swept open the door—it was Chase’s mom. She was a lot younger than mine. Her hair was pulled back super-tight.
She was blinking, almost satirical when she inspected the packet. Or like she was touched. “Adrienne doesn’t live here, you know.”

“Will you please see that this gets to her?”

I waited three days. Adrienne called me on Friday. “What are you doing tonight?”

She wanted me to pick her up at the Booker in two hours.

I had to ask my mom which building it was.

I needn’t have asked—the Booker was as I had hoped the cool one, the skyscraper with the terra-cotta façade, an eye-swim, with carvings running up like tendrils of lightning bolts tumbling upward. The doorman looked at me doubtfully. I had come in my prized threadbare T-shirt. I sat down on a bench and threw my shoulders back. The elevator was mum, but I waited for Adrienne’s emergence: to show this doorman how little he knew of the world, that there were kids who dressed just like me who lived in this building—the elevator doors slid apart and Adrienne emerged wearing a cerulean dress. She put out her bare arm: I was embarrassed, and she raised me up. The doorman glanced at me as if to say, Do you have a clue?

There was something promlike about it—being downtown with a girl in a dress. “We’re going to Stars,” she said. “We’ll have to drive. Do you know it?”

Stars was a gay bar, she told me. “Don’t worry, they’ll love you.”

The rattling, windswept highway offered no help—the city lights had gone silent, and looked awesomely strewn.
I couldn’t say much. Next time, I thought, bring booze. Adrienne smushed her fingertip into the lock of my glove compartment and twisted, as if her finger were a key. I never once, all that summer, believed Adrienne cared about money, my not having any. But I cared. My car felt too flimsy for her.

“Tulsa’s like a ghost town,” I said.

“Have you been to Elgin?”

“The street?”

“No, it’s a real ghost town. It’s in Kansas. You should go. There’s like an abandoned soda fountain and houses without doors and you can walk in.” Adrienne had met the caretaker, a retiree from the area who spent his summers mowing the lots and the sidewalk strips of Elgin.

“You know the source of the word
Elgin
?” I asked. “The Elgin Marbles. They’re actually stripped off the walls of the Acropolis. Which is like the ultimate ghost town. I guess as a direct thing the street is named after the place in Kansas. Either way. Downtown’s so dead.”

Past experience had conditioned me to gripe about Tulsa: we all do it. But Adrienne was bored by my reference to downtown being dead. “I live there, you know.” Maybe she was just putting on umbrage for fun. But for the next five minutes I was reduced to glancing at her reflection in the windshield: maybe she thought she was making a big mistake.

I hadn’t ever been to a gay bar anywhere. In Boston or New York I would have been ready, that would have been my cosmopolitan duty. But to go to one here was none of
my business. I assumed the gay bars of Tulsa were fake, extra-faggy places, not gay really but pretending to be gay. With pink walls and Irish lace and super-self-conscious patrons. It was a slap in the face for a “date.”

I drove out to the airport, and she directed me to a strip mall across the road from the FedEx loading dock. Three neon stars glowed like mock sheriff badges above stucco walls. We went in: it smelled like fake smoke. Adrienne alighted on a table and asked for two of the specials. We were right on the floor, a tiled platform where a line dance was forming. Everything was pretty random—big-bulb Christmas lights on the bar, fake palm trees at each corner of the dance floor, and a DJ booth set up under a fake plastic grape arbor. The mood on the dance floor was festive: the men yipped and waved their arms like lassos. “This is fairly hokey,” I said.

“No. It’s great.” She was up, and started to do all the kick-scoot moves; she didn’t have belt loops to put her thumbs through, so she was pressing down the bell of her dress, and it puffed out behind. She clapped. It killed me that she was so adaptable. The whole rank rolled its shoulders at once, pivoted, and clapped. Some of the cowboys looked gentle and downcast, concentrating on their moves. Some were on parade. A lesser girl might have beamed, starstruck, at the men, but Adrienne was so clearly aristocratic—she simply knew how to behave. When I downed my drink (it was blue) and finally strode onto the floor she made room for me, but that was it. She was busy with heel work. I tried to glide, tap, and twirl. I thought about Chase: Was she
cheating on him? Were we here because she was hiding from him? Was this being discreet? Or was it flagrant? Or was it maybe from me that she was hiding? We were the only straight couple here.

Such self-discipline was new to me: Keeping my elbows in, clapping, watching where I stepped. Whirling in a circumscribed place. I took a lesson from the men I watched. For them, the exercise in self-control meant something. They looked careworn, mild, like men who had had a bad week. It was nothing now to behave.

Among them Adrienne was formidable. She was a woman. She had an imperturbable face. The down on her arms flashed in the light. After the line dance broke up she bought off the regulars snapping her fingers, winking at them (or laughing), doing all these flourishes, and I tried to match, I would keep my wrist behind my back or something, like a matador, and set my face. And then I would go crazy. One man wagged his finger at me and shouted, I’m sure I misheard: “Tongue
out
.”

Afterwards, we went to a gas station for coffee. I can still see Adrienne in heels, bearing our coffees back under the gas station lights—the cube of light made by the Texaco canopy. I had parked with our back to the highway’s sound barrier, and Adrienne’s heels echoed like in an empty auditorium. I smiled from behind my windshield, and Adrienne smiled back. She had a coffee in each hand.

We sat parked in the car, facing the station. On the highway behind us we heard the rigs whining, each one
like it was about to slam into us, coming at a high pitch, and then muttering off into the night. That went on the whole time we sat there. “He’s waiting for us to make out,” Adrienne said. The station attendant, trapped in his control booth with the lottery telemetry, was staring at us. He wondered if we were Bonnie and Clyde, come to kill him.

I cleared my throat. “
Aren’t
we going to make out?”

Adrienne looked at me. Then she said, “You get points for that.” She lunged for her purse. “Can I smoke in here?”

She had depressed my car’s cigarette lighter, and now it popped.

“Wait, can I see that?” I had to wait for her to get her cigarette burning, and then she handed it over. The lighter’s coils were glowing orange. “I never knew how these worked before.”