A Map of Tulsa

by Benjamin Lytal

  Jenny was speaking through her tears. “We’re going to go dancing later, is that what you heard, Chase?”

  Chase looked up. “Do you think Adrienne would approve of that, Jim?”

  “I definitely do.”

  “Okay then,” he said.

  But none of us were going to go dancing. Chase was lost, staring into corridors inside of himself. He wouldn’t get over this, I could guess, for a long, long time.

  We three rose and went in. Kim had already texted me to say that she was here, and now I looked for her in the crowd. As I approached I heard her say the words “blood clot” and “blood thinner”; she and her neighbor were conscientiously discussing the cause of death. Kim and I decided we had to look some of this medical information up on the internet, and so I showed her into the study. “There used to be a computer in here,” I said. The study was the same—windowless. “Okay,” I said. It was actually the same computer as before, an ancient 286. Awesomely grim, to be confronted with this machine. I sat down and switched it on—the CPU first, and then monitor.

  “It’s old,” said Kim.

  It was booting from DOS. The RAM counted itself, and then the green type flew up the monitor, scrolling fast, and halting, as if stuck. Kim laid her hand on my shoulder. I kept my eyes on the monitor. “She would have been very happy that you came back,” whispered Kim.

  Windows loaded, and then I clicked on the browser. “Maybe Lydie knows the password,” I suggested. Kim left to go ask.

  My legs were like the legs of crabs. The room spun, the 1980s office chair squeaked. On my second pass I stopped: I saw the pulsing light of a laptop there on the floor.

  The laptop was asleep.

  I watched the light pulse, like an EKG. It was a newish laptop.

  I wondered whose it was.

  Without opening the laptop, without touching it, I crept out of the study and cut back through the party and into the bedroom. The bed, the furniture, everything was museum-perfect—totally as if Adrienne had never lived here. But then in the private bath, through the shower door, I thought I saw products: pastel and bright green bottles behind the rippled glass. I opened the medicine cabinet: cotton balls and dainty scissors, more products, all jumbled together not by use, but by a hurried maid. New things, unexpired things. Face cream, open. A pill bottle with a clean laser-printed label, dated this April 18. So she had been back here, maybe. On retreats from L.A. sometimes—giving herself residencies in Tulsa. Having hermitages up here. That’s how I would have been. A pedestrian again. Haunting the streets.

  I washed my hands urgently. Then, lifting up the bed skirt, I peered under the bed and found a pair of red espadrilles. They were worn to the heel. I fished one out and pressed the insole. It was soft as her toe.

  In defiance of any onlookers from in the main room, I went to stand before the doors of the big master wardrobe and pulled them wide. Here was the end of the rainbow: black, black, black, fuzzing into gold and silver sweaters and then breaking into turquoise white yellow red, hanging. I slid my fingers between separate hangers: a tie shirtfront dress, its halves hanging apart; a cream-colored gown with blue fleurs-de-lis; a lone magenta sash, hanging; four men’s oxford shirts, all yellow, soft with wear; a waitress’s dress I remembered, with MILDRED embroidered above a steaming apple pie. I had suppressed all memory of such a dress, but I knew it. She had worn it to a party once.

  I knew half these dresses. Oh God. I racked through them: another strapless gown, gray, with a tall elastic waist; a gold sequined blouse that looked like chain mail and that had a rip I remembered—and I found it with my fingers, at the armpit; a blue dress with a flounced hemline, causing me to look down. At shoes: the usual pell-mell, heels chopped up like waves at sea, every color, and busted espadrilles stacked in the corner. So she continued to walk everywhere. She came back here sometimes, and walked the old streets. Some of the shoes were very ancient, like dead bats, equally gothic as the fashion used to be, but at least one flat that I saw, mateless on the surface of the pile, had to be almost brand-new: it had a certain kind of notch, for toe cleavage, that I had seen on fashionable girls in New York that summer. A dull object caught my eye. I knelt down. It was an old beat-up boot with weeping laces. My old hiking boot from Boy Scouts.

  I had stood up, and was holding the boot as I might hold a model boat: a hand at bow and a hand at stern, right up close to my face.

  “Yeah, no, it’s apparently pretty normal in spinal cord cases.” Kim had gotten online. She looked a little beautiful, paused in the doorway. Standing with one foot forward and the other foot back.

  “I guess I’m going to take off,” I said. Kim moved out of my way. Near the elevators I spotted Lydie. She was seeing the mayor out, and I decided to descend on her, while I still had this look of profundity on my face.

  We smiled, and shook hands in silence. I spoke gently. “I’m going back to New York, Lydie.”

  She kind of curtseyed. “Okay Jim.”

  “Thank you though for—”

  She smiled weakly. “Go,” she said. I turned; I was going to catch the mayor’s elevator car. “But Jim,” called Lydie, “where did you get that shoe?”

  I was still holding the boot. I turned to put it back. But instead of returning it to the wardrobe, I slid into the kitchen, squeezing past a group of girls. Under the pretext of getting a beer, I opened the refrigerator and put the boot inside. I saw uneaten sushi, bitters, limes turned brown, and a sheaf of unshucked corn. I saw her everywhere—the magnets from SoundBiz on the refrigerator door; and her doodling on a menu, angry geometric shapes. I opened one of the drawers, loud on its casters. “Is there a bottle opener?” I asked aloud, for the benefit of the girls standing near me. But I never was going to drink this beer: I rooted through more menus, rubber bands, screwdrivers, as quietly as I could, until I found a little beaded pouch I knew, and inside it felt the familiar weight of Adrienne’s extra key. It was the spare key, one of the long-toothed keys that opened Adrienne’s studio. Right where I knew it was.

  And then I wound back around the corner and pressed the arrow down.

  I wanted to walk our old walk. I came down from the penthouse and plunged out the lobby doors into the night that, back in the nineties, had used to be day, when we set out on our mornings. Indeed the door of the lobby felt a little light under my arm, and I was afraid I might break it. And when I got out into the middle of the street and looked up, I expected the skyscrapers to not be there. I was trying to deprive myself of Tulsa all at once. But the black towers stood there, and the street was bland beneath my feet. It was real, and beyond it the boring neighborhoods were realer.

  The wind tore through the cross streets like a gale from the deserts—streaming out to western Oklahoma and Texas and Mexico beyond. I remembered how the skyscrapers used to look from my parents’ car: the lungs of my hometown, combusting and bright. The engine of the known world.

  So I had needed Adrienne as a memory. When people heard I was from Tulsa, they expected stories, and I too, as I walked around on the East Coast, saw how cool it could be to be from here. Even when I was a little boy I knew what an origin story was. But Tulsa was mute. When I met Adrienne I knew what I needed. And as soon as I had it from her I instantly turned back to my own life, and built up a young man who merely carried Adrienne in his heart, as an image. Now I wanted to give Adrienne back to herself.

  But she was dead, and so I was going to get to keep her forever.

  I walked over the tracks, didn’t glance at the Center of the Universe, but hid myself among the warehouses of the Brady District. On my peregrinations the afternoon before I’d never made it over onto these streets. So here they were, still packed up in darkness, just as I had left them five years ago. I could hear the bar crowds down the street, a rebuke to me, and I hurried by; on the sidewalk in front of Adrienne’s studio I stopped with my back to the door and looked both ways. The long-toothed key still grabbed in the lock—I jogged up the steps—and the flashli
ght still hung on its string.

  And its batteries worked. I shined the flashlight around, and in my heart I panicked. I felt like I was inspecting the scene of a crime. I didn’t see any easels, only old music gear. A microphone left out, getting dusty. Finally, a lamp. I switched it on and saw the clothing rack, stocked with some things, khaki high-waisted shorts clipped up on a hanger, and at least three or four hanging bags of dry cleaning. I went up and checked the stapled receipts: transactions from only one week ago. And I saw a bed. I wondered at what point did she decide it was all right to sleep here. We never slept here. This was a defeat in her life, a slippage. The top sheet ran twisted, hanging off the side like a rope, the pillows were on the floor. Reaching down before I could stop myself, I touched one of those pillows, I picked it up like a professional basketball player picks up a basketball: one-handed.

  I made that bed. It was a ritual in grief. And also a daily ritual, one that Adrienne never took notice of when she was alive. Perfect. I patted up the pillows but didn’t know where to put them, so I put them back on the floor, then I pulled the mattress pad tight and drew the sheet up to its edge. I pulled it very straight. Then I replaced the pillows and threw the blanket over all of it, coming around to each corner to correct it and to check the sheet. Perfect. Perfect.

  Somebody would come in here soon, looking after Adrienne’s things—and when they noticed the neat, tight bed, if they knew Adrienne at all, they would know that she hadn’t made it. That I had been here, maybe—and then I noticed the Advil on the bedside table, and again an old medicine bottle, this one quite old, stuffed with weed, her name printed in dot matrix: “Booker, Adrienne.” So she never became famous.

  Idly, I opened the bedside drawer, and saw one revolver pointing back at me.

  I picked it up. Had the safety been off this whole time? I inspected the chamber. Three bullets. I bent over and cried. That’s exactly how many should have been left, after we shot out the window.

  I stuck it out and aimed: A salute, as if. An apology. I was apparently too old for grand gestures. Pretending to aim, I waved the gun at the window, waved it at the image of the refracted streetlight. I crooked the gun in my lap and turned out all the bullets.

  I dream sometimes that Adrienne is singing, and that I try to sing too. Sometimes she’s in jail, and we have five minutes together in a bleak reception room, beneath a high window. Sometimes we’re onstage. And we try to sing a duet, with the spotlight in our faces and with all of the Tulsa people there in the heave of the audience. I dream how brave I would have to be to stick my vocal cords out there and let them wave and vibrate, next to Adrienne’s. Merle Haggard said recently in an interview that to sing with your wife, “actually singing together, actually harmonizing together, that requires some dual fault that might not exist in other marriages.” I think he meant that he and his wife had each done something wrong, and had each confessed it. And therefore weren’t afraid to open up, to sing in each other’s faces.

  So the burden of my nightmare could be this: that I never really opened up to Adrienne. I never confessed. I worshipped her but I sacrificed nothing. I dated her the whole time like a little kid who doesn’t want anybody to see what he’s reading. Adrienne got so eager every time I started telling about my parents, or about my writing. I remember her sitting Indian-style on that whitework bedspread gripping her socked feet out of sheer attentiveness while I told her, for example, about the time my mother found my poetry. The admixture of shame I felt, having written what I had written, and not being willing to explain it to my mother. To Adrienne, that aroused her faithful pity, I think. But I never really let Adrienne counsel me on such matters. I never realized how clearly she perceived my embarrassment. I shoved my embarrassment back into my bag, and turned around, and then expected Adrienne to educate me.

  You know I used to belabor the real memories: the bitter way Adrienne smoked when she was tired; the offhand, superior way she ate with her fingers, discarding chicken bones off from her plate; the way she walked into a crowded party acting as if nobody were there. She had a tiny belt she used to wear that, when she was sitting, talking, she would idly whip off and thread around her wrists in a figure eight, like to handcuff herself. There was once in my car when we were making out we thrashed around so showily that we got our feet up by the headrest and our heads on the floor mat, kissing fast so as not to have to remark on our predicament, I think we both liked the idea of that floor mat that had shoe dirt spread into it and smelled like plastic with our own wine smell. Sometimes when we stood up in the mornings in the penthouse it was as if we had borne that bad party smell up there just to go out on the terrace and let the wind rip it off. And most of the time we weren’t at parties: I was watching Adrienne paint, and she stood there like a practiced girl, used to being watched, about to dive off the high board for hours, with the raw canvas in front of her and her Tulsa-purchased studio warming up, all the time.

  But what I tend to think about more, now (and I don’t see any reason why this will change), is the years away. When I might have been wiser. Had I come to find her. When I was in New York. And she was on her way to L.A.

  Which is simply to say that those years when we were apart, but both alive, were the sweetest. Because they had the most potential. And I think in my dream it’s those years that we force open and would sing, if we could.

  But sometimes when I’m at work and I get tired, I think—and I really do believe: only the famous people, the people you listen to all your life, really have it, can really sing. Adrienne tried. For all our studies we had no idea.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks first to my agent, Edward Orloff, for seeing this book clear. To my editor, Allison Lorentzen, for her commitment and her strength. To early readers Karan Mahajan and Ida Hattemer-Higgins, for their confidence. To other readers: Maureen Chun, Ceridwen Dovey, Sam Munson, Amelia Lester, Roy Scranton, and Willing Davidson. To Taylor Sperry and others at Penguin. A tip of my hat to Priscilla Becker, Ellery Washington, Thad Ziolkowski, Julia Holmes, Timothy Farrington, Claire Aaronson, Adam Berlin, and John Berlin, each of whom made some unconscious contribution to this book in a conversation I still remember. Thanks to my aunt Linda for her interest, to my aunt Nell for her precedent. To Arlen and Clara Gill for their love. I also want to thank Rachel Cohen here, for her early mentorship.

  Thanks to Dinaw Mengestu, for letting me sit at his table.

  Thanks to my mother and father, whose love and grace allow me to be who I am. And to my brother Sam, for his grace.

  This book is dedicated to my wife, Annie Bourneuf. She keeps a roof over my head; she wakes me up in the morning. She knows what I know.