A Map of Tulsa (2 page)

“Do you guys want to go across?” I asked.

“We were actually thinking we should go dancing.”

So we were too old for the Center of the Universe—I assimilated this information painlessly.

Edith—who was trying to entice Cam as much as me—explained that it was Retro Night at the Cain’s Ballroom. “It’s from Prohibition,” she told Cam. “Like the oldest club in Tulsa.”

I lifted up one finger. “Can we make a pit stop at the Blumont first?”

“Well, we can get drinks at the Cain’s,” Edith said. I saw her smile to herself.

I had learned to dance at debate camp, where the pervasive self-consciousness of the smart-kid atmosphere encouraged a freak-out manic dancing, pursued between males, shouting the lyrics in each other’s faces. But we never had booze. At college—in college I had briefly taken ballroom. That was it. And at the Cain’s I did this crazy foot-stomping dance that I think took my new friends by surprise.

Edith raised her eyebrows. The floor was planks, underpinned with old steel springs—advertised as “the largest spring-loaded dance floor west of the Mississippi.” Whenever I stood still I could feel it beneath me, bouncing like a gargantuan mattress.

The Cain’s Ballroom was low, square. Its high-wattage sign stuck up iconically beside the overpass, but I had never been inside before. Portraits of Bob Wills and each of his Texas Playboys hung on the wall. Yet in this honky-tonk we had what in the late nineties was called retro music: music from the eighties. Male vocalists partook in the self-regard of staggering, dying villains. They moaned. The female response was tart. Pop. In high school I had relished this music, privately. On earphones. I thought of it as big sister music—I didn’t have any siblings, myself.

On the walk over Edith had continued to praise my poems. She had apparently decided she was going to encourage me. I wasn’t sure how to take that. In college the point had been to criticize each other’s poems. But Edith was way ahead of me, in life. She suddenly stopped dancing and went to grab the belt loop of a tall clean-cut
man wearing overalls. “Terry works at the jail,” she said, introducing him.

“I love this,” said Terry, who kept splaying his hand on his chest and smiling as if he had to catch his breath. “I love this night. I let it all go.” Edith whispered something in his ear, and glanced at me.

Her own dance was perfunctory. Head down, the knob of her spine working like a camel. Doing glad-hands, matter-of-fact, meek. Cam pranced up, grabbed Edith’s hands, and kissed her. Edith looked sheepish: Cam was already bored with Tulsa, but Edith was trying to entertain her.

The Cain’s filled; people came over. Midsong I was introduced to characters who went to Jenks, Union, Broken Arrow. No one from Franklin. I was glad. I liked being the new person. I danced near to Cam—I hoped she appreciated that I too was an alien here. I took recourse to the bar and was back and forth to the bar while our circle kept expanding.

I swallowed each drink and then hurried back for ever more expressive dancing. I panicked when our circle stopped to take a breath, squeezing as a group through a side door into the triangle lot the Cain’s owned under the highway. We could hear cars swishing their tails overhead and grumbling on the overpass but with our ears ringing it didn’t matter. We shouted in normal voices, though I myself was silent: Edith had so many acquaintances, most of whom didn’t even know Cam yet—so introducing Cam was the order of business. Alone, I snuck back in to the sweat and squeak of the club, and I started casually to work. I think I danced like someone who has
elapsed his workout and is free in blue space, swimming on the elliptical, an exhausted runner with no particular desire to get off the treadmill. I enjoyed the people around me, and this was a gift. My enthusiasm pinged off the things I admired that I glimpsed in the whirl, the girls, their hair, their boots. There was one cropped-haired boy in heavy leather skirts, spinning. Probably from Catoosa or somewhere. His legs were skinny and he looked like Rimbaud. He probably started putting his makeup on at six and got here early and was the only person from his school who ever even came to Retro Night.

My first plan had been to stay at college that summer. I had applied to work on the summer staff of the college newspaper. However, I did not get on. And no other plan or internship materialized. Anyway, as I laboriously explained to my parents, who were public school teachers, I had meant to spend the lion’s share of my days that summer reading, so. I wanted to lay this out for them and wanted them to know that, while I normally would have gotten a summer job, it was better for me to conduct my own independent studies right now, to be at loose ends, to prepare for sophomore year and the choosing of a major. That I didn’t get the job on the newspaper disturbed me, but was maybe for the best, I told myself. That there was more to it—that I had drifted, as spring semester waned, failing more and more each day to make any sort of backup plan while this secretly desired homecoming, the default plan, became a reality—I couldn’t admit that this was what I had wanted until perhaps at the Cain’s Ballroom.

After Edith and her crew came back in, I had to keep to myself, to keep thinking. But the more I kept to myself, turning by half pivots in my dance steps, keeping in time to glance maybe at some girl’s eyes, but basically reeling, the more I also wanted to get back outside again, to have another look at Tulsa.

Edith came up to me. “Hey, we might go soon.”

On the walk back to our cars a pleasant worn-out quiet obtained. Cam hummed. I hoped for Edith’s sake that Cam had perhaps enjoyed herself. We were breezing along. Under the old streetlights the sidewalk was orange, paced with clusters of broken glass and colorless weeds.

I broke the silence: “I love this.”

“You looked like you were having a good time in there,” said Edith.

I was mute.

Edith continued: “Adrienne Booker’s having a birthday party this weekend. Do you want to come to that?”

I remembered an Adrienne, a pale intense girl with a broken nose—I always saw her eating lunch at the picnic table out by the prefabs. Usually alone. She had seemed poor, and yet not—she was always sitting up straight, leonine. I had never followed up or figured out who she was. Something must have happened to her, I thought. I didn’t remember her graduating. “She went to Franklin?”

“Yeah. There’ll be people you know. Actually the party’s at Chase Fitzpatrick’s house.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. I didn’t like people who I “knew.” Chase Fitzpatrick was a great preppie, insofar as I used that term. I wondered why Edith would
be hanging out with him. Or this Adrienne. “Wasn’t Adrienne kind of a loner?”

“You know Booker Petroleum?” Edith asked.

“Yeah?”

“Adrienne Booker. She lives on top of the Booker.”

“Like the skyscraper?”

“She’s kind of disinherited, but still…”

I looked ahead of us at Cam, who was so diminutive, and who was zigzagging on down the sidewalk, bored again. She probably thought Tulsa was a trap.

“I think Adrienne would almost like you,” Edith said.

I came back to Tulsa that summer for different reasons. To prove that it was empty. And in hopes that it was not. After parting with Edith, I crossed the tracks. All this last week I had been driving, irritably, all over town. But now I had reason to feel I was getting somewhere. As I trudged up the sort of ramp street that led to the Center of the Universe, I heard someone talking. But it turned out to be just two boys, and they didn’t hassle me. They sat huddled in the lee of their wall, hoodies up, like old-fashioned wanderers, with the flame for their pipe in their faces. I sat in the wind. I had no accoutrement or explanatory bottle, but I was not embarrassed.

The sound of the boys’ lighter scorched up the sides of the buildings. I loved them—these skyscrapers. I had been to grand cities, ones with bigger more crenellated skylines—cities like battleships, bristling with darkness. But it was the simplicity of Tulsa’s skyline that had always stumped me.

I remembered on our way back into town as a little
kid I always knew the place to suddenly strain on my seat belt, to catch the skyline swerving into view. This was how I always told myself we were home: like a fanfare of towers, downtown. It was supposed to be our castle.

Oh, we headed downtown for church, or for something like
Disney on Ice,
but the streets were pale, the sidewalks clean; you looked out from the car in vain for anything in the blank street-level walls to tell you Tulsa actually instantiated itself here, centrally. It was dead. It was only way out in the sprawl, in one-story multiplexes, that I ever formed a truly urban ideal, a Chicago or a Boston on-screen with its interlocking traffic and its smooth revolving doors, a downtown that could still swell with pedestrians, jammed and honking—sounds shut off perhaps when upstairs an actress closed the window in an elegant glass-walled penthouse, and the plot began.

That was how I always reserved the idea of such a life (the big city): that it was a lost art. If it existed in Tulsa it was floors above us. Or I saw traces here and there, as with the midtown Cherry Street bars we passed—people outside laughing, guffawing necklaced women—after picking my mom up from night school.

In high school I used to get up from the family supper table: I took my dad’s camera as a prop and I went downtown, riding the highway in, to the inner dispersal loop. You exit, retarding yourself down to twenty-five miles per hour on an empty four-lane boulevard; you stop at the useless stoplight, and your idling motor growls—like the monster who’s apparently eaten all nearby people, the street is so dead. Perhaps you get out and photograph some graffiti, or a broken window, but mostly the city’s
not even vandalized, it’s just dead. I did once run into another photographer; she was female, wearing a puffy vest. We had both come down to the graveled shore of the reservoir, north of Haskell, when I heard her camera, shuttering, about forty feet upwind of me. She immediately turned away, and I followed her at a distance for several blocks until she got into a car and drove off. And then I flew away, to college. And now I was here again.

I showed up to Chase’s party on what I thought was the late side. Cars were parked up and down the street so I drove two intersections further to find a space, and then had those two blocks to dally, meandering over people’s yards. I poked my head into the shadows of the porches of the big houses, and wondered what it would be like to own one.

I should have arranged to come with Edith, to arrive together—but hadn’t wanted to assume. I dreaded the scene. I had thought names like Chase Fitzpatrick’s were gone from my brain forever. A popular blond guy, an actor and a prince. A prankster and a rich kid. One heard that Chase was a pornographer—I couldn’t even evaluate statements like that. He did do movies, and once got permission to video the empty main hallway over the course of a weekend—which admittedly was kind of inscrutable and cool. But for me Chase was always going to be a guy who drove a new jeep, who stood in a circle
with boys from the same families, and spat, ball caps carefully creased, on the high school parking lot. That’s what I thought I was walking into.

But the party, as it appeared from two driveways away, suggested something different. The kids looked rakish in the porch light; they didn’t have the puff and laundered abundance of Chase’s friends; they were slim and jagged, I could smell their hair spray, and cloves. They wouldn’t know me. I heard a girl laughing in the dark—fake, cackling, luxuriant. I didn’t mind. In my sports coat I was absurdly the authority figure who forgives the teenagers the earnestness of their pink hair and their dog collars: the policeman who has a daughter like that. The policeman calmly makes his way through the crowd.

Inside, however, was full of grown-ups. I was excited. The chandeliers were turned up bright, and amid a crosscurrent of kids men and women in their forties and fifties were talking at a medium volume, standing in groups and pairs indicative of broad interpenetrating acquaintanceship and soft manners. I heard loud dance music coming from another room, but no one seemed to mind. I walked among these grown-ups, contemptuous of their age but envious of their friendship, wondering if any of them wanted to stop me and ask me about something—about college, maybe. Stepping sideways out behind a particularly large man I saw the dessert table: Edith had a piece of cake in her mouth but motioned to me. “Come on,” she said, “I have to introduce you to Adrienne.”