“Let’s do it tomorrow,” she said. And she put on her seat belt.
“I thought you were trying to get rid of me.”
“No you didn’t. You’re a better listener than that Jim.”
Every morning at eight I would nose my car down into the Booker’s garage. I pretended I had gotten a job there, that I worked for Booker Petroleum. Men not much older than me waited in shirts and ties for the elevator, while I took the brass bench in the lobby and sat with my art books on my lap—those books were too big to hide, so I decided to be rather brazen. I had Old Master nudes and just sat there with my elbows on my knees, looking at the pictures. I sucked on my iced coffee until Adrienne came down.
She was calling me at six, six-thirty to wake me up. “Routine is an art,” she informed me.
This went on for about two weeks.
On exceptional mornings, calling at six, she told me not to come. “I’m seeing something; I’m going to go on over and get started.”
“Okay.” I would make some excuse to my parents and go back to bed.
But most mornings, Adrienne put on one of her bright skirts and her heels and came down to meet me—she took these rush-hour walks like a morning constitutional. We traveled every morning through the streets of downtown, across the tracks, to the old brick loft where she worked. It was a little over a half mile’s distance—all within the bounds of the inner dispersal loop. It was good to be a pedestrian. Adrienne had a small Japanese motorcycle in the Booker garage, but she seldom used it. “I don’t have a car,” she said. “I don’t want a car.”
That first day when we got to the studio I tromped upstairs, iced coffee in hand, ready to emote and discuss. But I didn’t yet realize what my role was. When we got to the top of the stairs Adrienne put her finger to her lips and led me into a darkness. At the far end of the space, with a giant iron screeching, she yanked back the big industrial shutters—and in the flood of milky light I saw her already opening her paints, no longer making eye contact with me, and I was uncertain, and I sat down.
Instead of showing me her paintings, Adrienne simply started to work. I didn’t know what I had thought was going to happen, but I was shocked that she could think while I sat there watching. She lifted her brush and made a stroke. It paralyzed me. I could see several of her canvases from my couch—they looked like the real thing. They were big abstract shapes, and the canvases were huge.
Only when she wanted a break did she turn to me, and then not to chat or heaven forbid touch or kiss, but to go through the art books. I prepped each night, giving her my art history course as I remembered it and going artist by artist. I was half diffident at first, irritated at the paused status of my love suit, I didn’t expect Adrienne to like artists like Greuze or Chardin. Both made plain, watered-down pictures, people dying, people in wigs bending over to pick a spoon off the floor, or a mother sitting at a wooden kitchen table with her children. Chardin she might like, if at all, because this young wife resembled her, painted with the white neck and the tapering, pinkened fingers. In fact every night, in the air-conditioned parental house when my parents had gone to bed and I sat with a heavy art book in my lap, I thought of Adrienne most bodily, much more so than when I was in her studio. I fantasized about us actually being at college together: we strayed into my dorm room together, after the art lecture.
Adrienne was an even better student than I had intuited. Her exposure as a child to her aunt’s milieu—not just an arsonist at seven, but equally the child at the table at dinner and at parties—served Adrienne better than she knew. And she had a work ethic. She had taught herself to be extremely patient. “I used to be in rock bands,” she told me, “except I wanted to rehearse so much nobody would work with me.” While looking at the art books she always wanted to stop and spend five minutes with her nose in a picture, in silence. And this would be longer than I had spent on it. “You’re wrong about Chardin,” she said one day. “He’s so mellow. His color is perfect.”
“That chair is the same color as that piece of meat,” I put in.
It could be Adrienne was putting up a front, to show that going to college had nothing to do with painterly knowledge. She knew that her lack of education could hurt her—if she failed in life, people would say so. Her aunt would certainly say so. Perhaps I, with my alma mater, represented her aunt, and Adrienne wanted to school me. But Adrienne’s eyes when she looked at the pictures were honest. And she did seem to take a personal interest in me. Otherwise I wouldn’t have kept coming. Though Adrienne did not once that week directly ask me how I liked her paintings. What compliments I offered weren’t listened to. And there was no touching, no kissing.
“What does Chase have that I don’t?” I once asked her.
“You’re happy, Jim.”
“What?”
“You’re the only person I’ve ever liked who’s so happy.”
I always took a nap as soon as we got to the studio: I wasn’t used to early mornings. I lowered myself down by my stomach muscles, very gradually; I always tried to angle my head in such a way that Adrienne might want to come over and inspect me, my head and my neck, my ear, or my arm. I respected her strictures and her sense that the studio was a sacred place, but I assumed she would break her rules, when the climax came. It didn’t.
She addressed her easel and I addressed my notebook. When I couldn’t think of the next line to write, I could look over and watch her paint. She wore overalls to paint, usually. She could stand in front of the easel for five minutes without doing anything, and I watched. When she felt like it Adrienne might say something offhand—but it had to be poised, our talk, talk that could stop on a dime. She raised her brush again, and I shut up.
My parents didn’t know why I was waking up so early. I was quick at breakfast, silent, going over what I would say about that day’s artist. Overall I loved it. After years of staring at downtown, my perspective revolved in. Adrienne pulled the city inside out for me: she chose the most built-up streets for our morning walks—for a block or two we existed in an urban canyon; had we gone the opposite way, the horizon would have emptied out, the skyscrapers would have given out on limp downtempo parking lots and strip malls. But for a block, I at least could imagine that we had been born in a bigger city. I loved to talk about that, alternate destinies and fate. I liked to pretend it was very strange to have been born in a place like Tulsa.
I tried to be open; I tried to tell Adrienne about the things I liked. That on First Street in the mornings the concrete turns to gray putty. That in a state of grace you could imagine the concrete lines going on straight forever. But of course the skyscrapers crest, Tulsa buckles, the cross streets slope up; they have to span over the tracks.
Adrienne introduced me to the eight a.m. rush hour that fleetingly brings downtown to life: she wore heels mainly out of respect for her family—to look decent in the Booker Petroleum elevator but also out of respect for the brief daily flowering of downtown Tulsa. That there were people in suits, people who parked and got out of their cars and massed at the crosswalks as people in a big-city movie might. It lasted all of ten minutes, commencing at eightish and then again at five. But seeing it did more for my sense of downtown than twenty years of downtown church had.
Of course, Adrienne wasn’t preoccupied by such things. We passed by the Episcopal church, and she merely said, “It’s nice.” We passed by the Performing Arts Center, and she said, “It’s an eyesore.” The ingrained culture war, the knee-jerk resentment that most kids have for the conservative town, didn’t seem to worry her. She never had any problem going to Wal-Mart, she simply loved that she could buy things, and ran circles around her cronies. “That flag,” I said, pointing to one in the sporting goods section that had slipped partway off the wall, “they’re supposed to burn it. That’s what you’re technically supposed to do, when they touch the ground. Burning flags is actually extremely patriotic.” Adrienne didn’t care.
And she never swore. “Downtown is so fuckin
g lively,” I said, and immediately noticed how crass it sounded—I got frustrated sometimes. Sometimes I wanted to throw my old life against Adrienne. There was a man with a jeep who was always parallel-parking between Second and Third, I recognized him through his windshield two days in a row. “I think that guy was my Sunday school teacher,” I told Adrienne.
I kept mentioning Sunday school and church. Adrienne had been in choir at First Presbyterian and had liked it. “But you didn’t have to go,” I said, “every seventh morning of adolescence—they asked us to sign a pledge card once, pledging never to have premarital sex. They told us that people regret premarital sex for the rest of their lives.”
“Maybe it’s true.”
“They actually said, ‘When you get married you will stand at the altar with your bride and, in, like, a nightmare, see all the other women you’ve ever slept with, all lined up, holding hands with your bride, grinning at you.’ It was obscene.”
“Don’t act outraged,” she said. “You’re not convincing as an outraged person.”
“What do you think he thinks of us though? In the jeep. Surely he doesn’t look at us and say, There go two young coworkers, on their way to the office.”
“Do you care? I thought you hated Sunday school.”
“No,” I stressed. “Him—I crave his respect.”
One morning, when the man from the jeep was about to pass, I stopped him. “Mr. Bangs?”
He was heavier than I remembered, his face flecked with salmon, blurred. I introduced myself. “Jim Praley. I was in your Sunday school class. You were the small group leader, and we used to go into the little room.”
He was solicitous—he thought he had to reprise his mentoring role. I told him I was a college sophomore in the fall, we always walked this way to my friend Adrienne’s studio, to paint.
“This is my friend Adrienne Booker,” I said.
“Okay, I believe I work for your aunt, Ms. Booker.”
Adrienne smiled and nodded very graciously.
He leaned over a bit as he shook our hands goodbye, his tie hanging plumb.
We ranged over the sidewalk going on. Adrienne was silent, and I was obscurely apprehensive. I dashed ahead of her and balanced atop a fire hydrant. At the corner of First and Main the Performing Arts Center’s big digital sign, with its scramble of lightbulbs bringing off a firework, exploded, showed the temperature Fahrenheit, and then admitted that La Bohème was in town, boom boom boom, as if anybody cared.
“Was that rude? Of me to introduce you like that?”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. That we’re just betaking ourselves off to our artistic pursuits? And—mentioning your last name.”
“Is that something you think is important?”
I trailed her the rest of the way, down First, across the tracks, and then down among the warehouses of the Brady District.
Later that day, I realized she wasn’t working. I woke from my nap and lay, as was my habit, in the depression my body had made. Usually this was the most private part of my day—when our mutual silence was as constructive for me as it was for her. But today I couldn’t think, an aggravated silence ballooned in my head the instant I realized I was awake. I endured it for a short while, and then got up and rinsed my mouth. Adrienne was standing in front of her easel, hands behind her back, staring at me. I said I would go out and get our lunches. When I got back I was glad to see her bent over a tall table—one she rarely used—apparently drawing. I set her lunch down at her elbow, and then went and took up my writing pad. We ate our lunches in nutritious silence.
I wrote on. My pen-scratching was the only sound in the room, but I didn’t care if it annoyed her. When I heard footsteps coming around behind me, I didn’t turn. I saw her raising up her leg like an equestrienne. She straddled my belt and undid my shirt. “Lie back,” she whispered, “I’m going to draw on you.” Her marker was large and black. The ink felt refreshing at first, wet. But I was not proud of my chest: the way she sat on me, studying me, for minutes at a time between marks. Mainly I was having a transport of obedience. “This is so nerve-wracking,” she said, bearing down on me. She would close one eye, spread my skin with two fingers, and mark. Just an inch or two, or once (the process had grown excruciating) an endless black wing, like cold water, flowing across my nipple. It went like that, her leaning back and me supine: me an artwork, with my chest hairs.
After she was done, she stood me up in front of the mirror: I had an embellished arabesque glyph on my chest, large and highly visible, the kind of thing that as graffiti would make you stop and look. She really was talented.
“To do that on someone,” she said, “I think you have to really like them.”
She meant the tension in the act of drawing: that she could bring it off while concentrating atop me. It proved that she liked me?
Later that day, she broke down. We were looking at another one of my library books: The Passion of Delacroix.
“This has nothing to do with anything,” she said. Her eyes were wet.
“It’s just Delacroix.”
“No it’s, what did you say—”
“Trivial?”
“It’s trivial.”
“But what we’re doing—it’s not.” I said.
“Why do you not think so?”
“Do you feel trivial right now?”
“No.”
“Well.”
She blinked. “But I’m not working. I’ve been spending too much time with these books.”
“I won’t bring them tomorrow.”
“Jim. I should go back to painting alone.”
“Okay.”
“I’m afraid I’ve been missing something,” she said.
And then I started sleeping in again. I went to the Blumont that weekend and got drunk alone. I went walking, and ended up underneath the clinking flagpole at the Center of the Universe, where I found encampments of all types of white kids smoking pot, telling legends under the June night about Hitler, and Wu-Tang, and the CIA. Nobody offered me anything, to partake or to buy. I thought I recognized a few faces, maybe just types. Anyway, I was too nervous, and walked back to my car with my hands in my pockets.
I had lost control of the summer. I had interrupted my self-imposed study program to pursue Adrienne, and now all my dreams and random thoughts went feeling towards her. I sprawled on my parents’ carpet and thought about the cool poured concrete of the studio.
“I’m painting,” she said.
“I can call back later.” My heart raced, just to have her on the line.
“I painted something I will want to show you.”
“I can come over now—”
“No—I have to figure some things out, Jim.”
“I was going to ask you to go to Stars again.” I cast my eyes down. I had asked.
“I’ve got to wait a minute. I’ll call you later this week.”
“Should I—”
“No.”
I sank to my knees. The blood had gone out of my head, and I needed to lay my face in the carpet to rest.
4
I heard through Edith: Adrienne had invited me to come on a weekend to Bartlesville. What Adrienne imagined this would be like is, in retrospect, unclear. Edith called up out of the blue, chiding me for neglect, for spending all my time with Adrienne only—when I hadn’t seen Adrienne in a week. “She said maybe you could give me and Cam a ride to Bartlesville.” I pretended I knew what Bartlesville meant: beyond that it was a small city thirty minutes to the north, the home of Phillips Petroleum. I packed a shirt and tie, my sleeping bag, and even a swimsuit.
Bartlesville meant Albert Dooney’s cabin. His family, like so many of Oklahoma’s smaller oil families in the 1920s, had built vacation homes in the long-backed hills of Osage County. We were actually ten minutes west of Bartlesville itself, by the shores of a tiny lake. Albert had added a small recording studio to the fishing getaway his grandfather had built, and he regularly invited Chase’s fr
iends to come out for a weekend, to record. Albert was the type of man who in middle age finds comfort in the young and is happy to live with their bluster and their self-pity, the kind of man who feels fulfilled reaching his finger out, from time to time, to correct them.
Driving up, with Edith explaining some of this to me and Cam smoking and the radio on, we decided to take surface roads—I was in no hurry to arrive. The landscape reminded me of my Boy Scout excursions, a blanched summer forest up close, overgrown over miles and miles of tumbledown wire fencing. We stopped at a gas station that I even thought I remembered: the parakeets the owner kept out by the pumps. One bought beer now, instead of candy, and I traveled not with a vanload of adolescent boys but with two girls. Even better that they were lesbians.
And then we had to arrive. I always hate it when the engine switches off and you have to find yourself where you actually are, bereft of the enveloping hum of an automobile. We had been playing a complicated form of twenty questions. The designated letter was L: “Are you Michael Jackson’s alleged long-distance girlfriend?” Cam asked. I had to think. “No, I am not Lisa Marie Presley.” “Did you play Romeo opposite Claire Danes?” But I refused to continue, now that we had stepped out of the car.
Albert’s lake house was drab, made out of brown shingles, a big saltbox with squat four-pane windows on the second floor. We walked past an ashy grill and entered through the kitchen. Our host was just sitting there, like a circus bear at a tea party. Girls were sitting at his table sorting beans, one of them on the cordless to people who hadn’t left Tulsa yet, demanding that they bring this and that. Albert looked unconcerned. His eyes filled up his glasses, and he blinked thoughtfully; his limp fringe of hair lay on his collar as he turned about. “Here’s the girl from Hartford,” he said. I carried the beer we had brought, in cases with the cardboard finger slits turning my knuckles white—I didn’t know where to set them down. Having stood with a sweet grin on my face at first, but hating the thought of being the center of attention—being introduced in a round—I plunged forward with my beers. Conscious that although Adrienne had invited me, she wasn’t here yet. These others didn’t know me. I rummaged around in the refrigerator, trying to make room for my beer among all the ground beef. But at the sink a boy with sandy hair and Lennon spectacles stood scouring the removable grill part of the grill, and he leaned over to see what I was doing. He told me beers went in the pantry. Where indeed I found an icebox filled with brightly colored, stackable cases of beer.
A Map of Tulsa Page 5
