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

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 realthing. 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 thiswould 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