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that summer, believed Adrienne cared about money, my not having any. But I cared. My car felt too flimsy for her.
    “Tulsa’s like a ghost town,” I said.
    “Have you been to Elgin?”
    “The street?”
    “No, it’s a real ghost town. It’s in Kansas. You should go. There’s like an abandoned soda fountain and houses without doors and you can walk in.” Adrienne had met the caretaker, a retiree from the area who spent his summers mowing the lots and the sidewalk strips of Elgin.
    “You know the source of the word
Elgin
?” I asked. “The Elgin Marbles. They’re actually stripped off the walls of the Acropolis. Which is like the ultimate ghost town. I guess as a direct thing the street is named after the place in Kansas. Either way. Downtown’s so dead.”
    Past experience had conditioned me to gripe about Tulsa: we all do it. But Adrienne was bored by my reference to downtown being dead. “I live there, you know.” Maybe she was just putting on umbrage for fun. But for the next five minutes I was reduced to glancing at her reflection in the windshield: maybe she thought she was making a big mistake.
    I hadn’t ever been to a gay bar anywhere. In Boston or New York I would have been ready, that would have been my cosmopolitan duty. But to go to one here was none ofmy business. I assumed the gay bars of Tulsa were fake, extra-faggy places, not gay really but pretending to be gay. With pink walls and Irish lace and super-self-conscious patrons. It was a slap in the face for a “date.”
    I drove out to the airport, and she directed me to a strip mall across the road from the FedEx loading dock. Three neon stars glowed like mock sheriff badges above stucco walls. We went in: it smelled like fake smoke. Adrienne alighted on a table and asked for two of the specials. We were right on the floor, a tiled platform where a line dance was forming. Everything was pretty random—big-bulb Christmas lights on the bar, fake palm trees at each corner of the dance floor, and a DJ booth set up under a fake plastic grape arbor. The mood on the dance floor was festive: the men yipped and waved their arms like lassos. “This is fairly hokey,” I said.
    “No. It’s great.” She was up, and started to do all the kick-scoot moves; she didn’t have belt loops to put her thumbs through, so she was pressing down the bell of her dress, and it puffed out behind. She clapped. It killed me that she was so adaptable. The whole rank rolled its shoulders at once, pivoted, and clapped. Some of the cowboys looked gentle and downcast, concentrating on their moves. Some were on parade. A lesser girl might have beamed, starstruck, at the men, but Adrienne was so clearly aristocratic—she simply knew how to behave. When I downed my drink (it was blue) and finally strode onto the floor she made room for me, but that was it. She was busy with heel work. I tried to glide, tap, and twirl. I thought about Chase: Was shecheating on him? Were we here because she was hiding from him? Was this being discreet? Or was it flagrant? Or was it maybe from me that she was hiding? We were the only straight couple here.
    Such self-discipline was new to me: Keeping my elbows in, clapping, watching where I stepped. Whirling in a circumscribed place. I took a lesson from the men I watched. For them, the exercise in self-control meant something. They looked careworn, mild, like men who had had a bad week. It was nothing now to behave.
    Among them Adrienne was formidable. She was a woman. She had an imperturbable face. The down on her arms flashed in the light. After the line dance broke up she bought off the regulars snapping her fingers, winking at them (or laughing), doing all these flourishes, and I tried to match, I would keep my wrist behind my back or something, like a matador, and set my face. And then I would go crazy. One man wagged his finger at me and shouted, I’m sure I misheard: “Tongue
out
.”

    Afterwards, we went to a gas station for coffee.