Read A Map of Tulsa for Free Online

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 AdrienneBooker 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