A Map of Tulsa by Benjamin Lytal

to work. I lay down. Soon the only thing out of the ordinary was the wind that trickled in through the chinks that we’d made. Neither of us remarked on it. Neither of us felt that we should break the silence. As I was drifting off—I was abashed enough to feel a kind of pressure on my eyes, like sleepiness—I formed the improbable concern that this air from the window was going to affect her paint, dry it or sort of blow it sideways on the canvas.
    It had become my habit, at the studio, to lie still for a while after naps, with the unaired taste of my own saliva still in my mouth. I did some of my longest thinking that way. It was how I had dreamed up the gun thing. I had had second thoughts, but ultimately had decided not to go back on something that had been so gleamingly intuitive.
    Only now (back on the couch, after the smoke had cleared) did the intuition shine forth again, dumb and blue. I saw it for what it was: not love, but jealousy. Over that short courtship I had grown envious of this person, Adrienne, and, impatient to be like her, I had attempted this stunt. An impulse regrettably punctuated with Colt precision. Never in my mind or in any other part of my body did it occur to me to scare her, but I did want that shot, near her wrist, to put that crack in her space. I wouldwake from a nap and see her about to draw a line of the blackest force, her bare arm tingling above the raw canvas, studying, studying, and then taking only a simple cursive stroke, while my own arm lay buried in the couch.
    I was so ardent now it felt like we were breaking up. Adrienne could see I needed to talk, and after her silent painting session ended, and with the gunshot still ringing in our ears, we decided on a five o’clock supper. I suggested the Black-Eyed Pea, a busy family-style restaurant from my childhood. As we followed the hostess to our table, I couldn’t hear the hubbub so much as see it: the waiters back and forth to do refills at the soda fountain, a polished plow nailed up high on the wall.
    Adrienne’s luminous pointed face watched me.
    “I think the gun was really an attempt to make some sort of statement,” I said, while trying casually to pluck a roll from the almost-empty basket. We had left the gun in the studio; it was registered in my name, but would belong to her now. “I needed to impress you. Of course that was obvious.”
    “Why did you have to impress me?”
    I had to lean over to be heard. “Well, I mean I was trying to speak your language.” I kept glancing over behind Adrienne’s shoulder, casting back to the waiting area where I used to stand when I was a twelve-year-old, in my big T-shirts, with my sandals turned out on the flagstones, waiting with my parents to be seated.
    I felt desperately vague. I looked at the plow, the soda fountain, the patriotic bunting up near the ceiling. “You should be my girlfriend, Adrienne. Like boyfriend-girlfriend.”
    “Jim, the thing with the pistol was amazing.”
    “Right,” I said.
    “Thank you.”
    “But there’s something more I want to talk to you about.”
    Her palm lay upright on the table, next to her plate; her fingers were curled up at rest, like the chicken bones. I was done apologizing that monogamy was a middle-class notion propagated by timid people—or that my people were timid, for that matter. I told her what I wanted.
    “I don’t have to choose like that,” she said, her back up now.
    “No, you’re wrong,” I said. She looked at me different. I had made her blink.
    I licked my lips. “I think you’re wrong,” I continued. “You should take a boyfriend.
    “I want you to date me and only me,” I went on.
    I sounded like the Old Testament God. And I had something very like an analogy between monotheism and monogamy in mind.
    “I want to love you,” I said, crossing my legs, “but, I don’t know, maybe that’s unwise.”
    Adrienne’s nose broke slightly; it made her look intelligent when she glanced away.
    She