A Map of Tulsa (10 page)

I felt desperately vague. I looked at the plow, the soda fountain, the patriotic bunting up near the ceiling. “You should be my girlfriend, Adrienne. Like boyfriend-girlfriend.”

“Jim, the thing with the pistol was amazing.”

“Right,” I said.

“Thank you.”

“But there’s something more I want to talk to you about.”

Her palm lay upright on the table, next to her plate; her fingers were curled up at rest, like the chicken bones. I was done apologizing that monogamy was a middle-class notion propagated by timid people—or that my people were timid, for that matter. I told her what I wanted.

“I don’t have to choose like that,” she said, her back up now.

“No, you’re wrong,” I said. She looked at me different. I had made her blink.

I licked my lips. “I think you’re wrong,” I continued. “You should take a boyfriend.

“I want you to date me and only me,” I went on.

I sounded like the Old Testament God. And I had something very like an analogy between monotheism and monogamy in mind.

“I want to love you,” I said, crossing my legs, “but, I don’t know, maybe that’s unwise.”

Adrienne’s nose broke slightly; it made her look intelligent when she glanced away.

She cracked up. “Oh!” She moaned with relish. “You’re so weird!”

“I’m absolutely normal! And normative!”

“You want me to stop seeing Chase.”

“And send me little cards with Valentine’s Day hearts you draw on them, yes. And sleep with me.”

“Don’t you ever want to sleep with more than one girl?”

I rolled my eyes. “Yes but that’s not the point.”

“You don’t know me very well.”

“That’s what I’m trying to say.”

“Oh no you’re just making fun of me.”

“And yet I love you.”

Adrienne was still sitting up very straight, but suddenly inhaled like she was diving underwater. And then, in the middle of the restaurant, she began to warble in my face: “GOAOD BLESS AMERRRICA, LAHND THAT I LUVV.”

Her voice was preposterous, like a voluptuous brass horn curling and melting and reblowing itself before my eyes. I had to slouch back in my chair and take it. Adrienne wanted to stand up you could tell, her singing was classical, and she made those gestures you’ve seen, like a mime smoothing down his napkin after a meal, raising and lowering her hand at the level of her diaphragm.

She sang just that phrase, but people turned to look. There was a scattering of applause—surprised, but perfectly cheerful applause, pleased at this bel canto in our midst; people clapped. Adrienne, to my surprise, turned around and acknowledged it. Maybe that was when I knew I was going to get what I wanted.

“Was that supposed to be commentary?”

“I think it was.”

“You’re pretty witty for somebody who never went to college.”

“Well, you inspire me Jim.”

“I love you.”

“That however is not true.”

“It’s neither untrue or true. It’s an assertion I make. Same as ‘fuck you.’ I love you.”

“Well fuck you, then.”

“Should we ask for the check?”

“Yes. And then I’ll take you home, and you can stay all night. How’s that?”

We were very happy.

Adrienne allowed that Chase worked harder than I did, in bed—but she liked me too. “You’re more excitable,” she said.

There was a ceiling in the Booker penthouse above Adrienne’s bed inlaid with zigzagged cherrywood. It was like the corners of two hundred picture frames broken apart and glued there by a man on a ladder who, in the 1920s, probably pictured a couple of fat cats for this bed. Adrienne and I were more like two sylphs, pale white fish. I got lost in that bed. I hung off the mattress, just to believe it—to look upside down out to the lip of the terrace, and there, the sky. I was surprised that houseflies came up this high—I was foremost impressed with the grandeur of the penthouse, modern with a built-in oak refrigerator and panorama windows, though on my first visits I didn’t get to inspect it much, just glimpsed aerial Tulsa out the windows before Adrienne dragged me down onto the floor. The walls were forest green. When the elevator first opened you had to look at an oil
painting, a horse naked except for its tail wrap. On the entry table beneath it Adrienne had put a bottle of hand lotion. And out of a double-wide beaux arts battle-ax of a wardrobe spilled garbage bags of thrift store treasure, pointy green collars and ruched whorehouse silks and gold lamé belts and slippery polyester pants.

We went up to the penthouse primarily for sex. Adrienne recommended the external-release method, which was strange, because at Bartlesville she had not cared. I complied, of course. It was tricky: I don’t think Adrienne worried much about the rugs, for example, but I did, and I always reached quickly for my own underpants or for a towel—I would avoid the bed totally. I saw her bare bottom on the excellent whitework bedspread and anxiously coaxed her off of it. “I do live here, you know,” she reminded me.

But Adrienne had taken my request for monogamy seriously. Sometimes she just lay back and looked at me, to see what I would do. Maybe it was misleading, when I scooped her off the bed again (where she had sat again)—as if I were going to do a show and lift and move her all over the place.

“Hold it,” she said at one point, sliding off from me. She came back with a camera. “I’m going to take a photo,” she said. And she didn’t simply snap the photo. She lined up the shot, down on her elbows, the camera tilting with interest, nosing toward me like a big black snout. I looked right back—sometimes I remembered all of my life in Tulsa, and I wanted to be alone, to go down onto the warm streets, to go to a bookstore. Anyway, I managed to hold it.

“We have to go buy condoms,” she said, after the third time.

Of all the hundred errands we ran that summer maybe this was the primal one. In the end I made a big deal and told Adrienne I didn’t want to go buying condoms at any of the drugstores my family frequented. It was a kind of made-up scruple—but I wanted to give her some idea of the embarrassment that was endemic to my heart. We drove west, across the river, and when the time came, we went through the line together. The cashier was an ashen-fleshed white woman. She didn’t look twice.

“Now we’re married,” said Adrienne.

I overheard my mother using Adrienne’s name on the phone.

“Adrienne Booker.”

It caught me up. I stopped to listen.

“Booker. Mmhm. I think they are.”

“I think so. I think he is.”

“They’re so young.”

I had begun to live with Adrienne, almost. My parents didn’t protest now when I spent the night out. I had wanted to call them, the first time I stayed overnight at the penthouse, but I fell asleep before I realized. Later I offered that my sleep-aways might worry them. My mom worked her jaw and said no, you need to be careful though.

But my behavior that summer had startled them, and they were being very watchful now, and were waiting. I knew this, and when I was out with Adrienne I often caught myself wishing that my parents could peer down
like gods to glimpse this or that redeeming aspect of our lives. Adrienne’s hyper-professional concentration in front of her easel, for one thing. Her rigor, the way she pinned me down in conversation and forced me to say what I meant. Our conversations over art books. The value of all this, and the adult seriousness. I even wished for them to know about things, all kinds of things, that did not make sense as parent-data: the way we knocked ourselves down dancing at a show; the world-weariness with which Adrienne held a cigarette when she was tired. Her tired voice, the grain of it. The balance of the long nights out, the sense of wayfaring endurance, as we journeyed from one destination to the next, and our delicate luck. Above all the profound sense of citizenship that, over and above personal pleasure, seemed to be the point of going to so many parties, every single weekend night.

Adrienne hadn’t partied so much the summer before, she told me. The arc of her teenage life had already crested—painting was going to be a kind of second life: life after rock bands. But for me the life was only beginning.

I was nervous whenever we walked into a party. I thought she might veer completely away, to go talk to people I didn’t know. I had to watch her to see what mode she was in. She drank either very little or else a great deal. In fact drinking provided an example of all I wished I could distill to turn into moral evidence for my parents. Formerly drinking had seemed to me like a sluice you could open and everything would flow. Adrienne was smarter than that. She marshaled her troops like a general. Often we were the most sober people in the room.

I looked up Adrienne’s family at the library: I told
the librarian I was doing a research project on Booker Petroleum. I found out that Adrienne’s great-grandfather, Odis Booker, first struck oil at a place called Cushing. This was in 1904, just three years prior to statehood. He eased out of wildcatting, built a large hospitality business, invested in local banks, and made a pile during the boom; he built refineries on the Arkansas and completed the Booker Tower in 1926. The penthouse was intended to impress and flatter clients from out of state. I even found a priceless newspaper clipping, from a 1926 edition of something called the
Chicago Herald-Examiner
, that included a photograph of our very bed, in black-and-white.

The building still housed Booker Petroleum. Today Adrienne’s aunt Lydie, the same one who had gone to my college and whose garage Adrienne had burned down, worked downstairs, occupying the president’s office. But we never saw her; we lived upstairs in a kind of elysium, or afterlife. In a cloud.

“Let’s go down,” I once said to Adrienne.

“What?”

“Just wander the halls,” I said.

“Oh no,” she said. Adrienne wanted nothing to do with Booker Petroleum. To the point that she revered it. It was a polished edifice, a memorial to the past. Gracefully acknowledged, and never to be desecrated—a reason to keep up appearances, at most. I don’t think Adrienne really imagined her aunt did much, down there. There was no itch: Booker Petroleum tempted Adrienne neither as a lever of power, nor a source of resentment, nor even as a possible fate.

To a kid growing up in Tulsa in the 1980s, oil did seem very abstract. Every September, entering the fairgrounds, I passed between the legs of the Golden Driller, a statue who stood four stories tall, his concrete hand resting on a decommissioned oil derrick, his cartoonish boot the size of a small Japanese car. And I remembered that every Christmas my Galveston grandmother would sit me down so we could look at the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog together. She had no sense of envy; she wanted to instill in me a sense of awe—I remember best the children’s pages at the back of the book: an actual floating pirate ship for children, or preassembled Legos made into a life-sized knight and a dragon. But this was nothing compared to the stories my grandmother told about the boom times. Apparently in the sixties Neiman Marcus had his-and-her pontoon planes you could order, baby blue and pink, as if you were going to barrel into the sky like lovebirds the day you struck oil.

The oil refineries always occupied the opposite bank of the river. No one had ever explained to me how they worked—they were just a snake pit of detail that I pored over as a teenager standing with my bike on the pedestrian bridge, wondering what was important. I remembered an issue of
National Geographic
my dad kept, from the ’78 oil crisis. Tulsa was on the cover, an aerial photograph of the refineries, lit up like a metropolis at night. In bright spots you could see the petroleum works illuminated, leaving dark reaches, I assumed the oil drums, in reserve. But I didn’t know.

Adrienne showed me a videotape of her one parent—Rod Booker. “He lives in Rhode Island,” she told me. In the video, Rod comes out a screen door, and stands in profile while it slaps behind him. He’s a big bearded man wearing rolled-up khaki pants and an XXL black T-shirt. You can’t tell what he’s looking at: he seems to be looking away out of shyness, and when he finally turns and confronts the camera, it’s like he’s trying to stare it down almost. And it stays on him.

Then he turns again, and the camera pans and follows him down to the surf.

“That was my first movie.”

Adrienne had wheedled a video camera out of her father when he left Tulsa. She was twelve years old and promised she would “use it to come visit him.”

“Are you going there at all this summer?” I asked.

“I only went there that once.”

I was a little shocked. Soon I requested the video again.

“Why do you want to keep watching the Rod video?”

“Boys have this thing about the girl’s father.”

She snorted.

Adrienne had never been anybody’s daughter: Her biological mother, a Frenchwoman who spent American grad school on New England sailboats, abandoned the baby—Rod had had to book a flight to Tulsa and mix the formula, cradling the baby himself all the way, connecting in Dallas, changing her diaper on a toilet seat there, at last depositing his infant daughter at the ancestral home in Tulsa. After that, Rod felt his parental duties were
fulfilled. He flew to Paris and spent some years trying to get Marianne back: their line to the family was that she had been suffering from severe postpartum depression. But young Adrienne would never see her mother again. Great-Uncle Harold, who at that time was running Booker Petroleum, was certain of that. He hired a string of Lebanese nannies, and his wife, Great-Aunt Alexandra, managed them.