A Map of Tulsa by Benjamin Lytal Read Free Book Online Page A

garage burn down to the ground. It was mine; I was only seven years old but I
knew
, I knew then, that nothing was ever going to feel that big again.” She looked at me appraisingly. “I’ve always wanted to get that feeling back again.”
    I wasn’t supposed to speak, and didn’t speak. As she waited she raised her hand, hung it in the air, and let it drop and crumple in her lap.
    “That thing I made you,” I said.
    She raised her eyebrows. “I liked it.”
    I felt like I had taken a nap and woken up: I could sit in that car forever. “Look. That story. Write down what you just said and that’s your essay.”
    Adrienne did want me to tell her about college. And she acted like I knew more about college, or had more quintessentially been to college, than the kids who went in-state. She was adroit, and at some level she was playing me. But at another level Adrienne was quite sincere. In fact no one had been so thorough, trying to form a picture of what I had learned.
    Adrienne asked what did my classes have to do with my
work
—I had told her about a poem I was writing, called “Outskirts,” which was going to be very long and which transposed the city limits of Tulsa to a number of different locales—Tulsa as an oil emirate, Tulsa as an island in the South Pacific, Tulsa as a suburb of New York.
    “But I’m not really taking each class except on hunches; it’s like choosing a book to read I guess, it’s going to be background information down the road.”
    Adrienne understood me, but her own curiosity was more urgent. She wanted to know specifically about my art history course. “You should teach me,” she said.
    This was something I could do. Immediately I brought in all the boring logistics: I had left my textbooks at school, in storage, but I eagerly outlined how I could pull relevant books at the library and bring them to her, and we could go over them.
    “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