A Map of Tulsa by Benjamin Lytal Page A

cracked up. “Oh!” She moaned with relish. “You’re so weird!”
    “I’m absolutely normal! And normative!”
    “You want me to stop seeing Chase.”
    “And send me little cards with Valentine’s Day hearts you draw on them, yes. And sleep with me.”
    “Don’t you ever want to sleep with more than one girl?”
    I rolled my eyes. “Yes but that’s not the point.”
    “You don’t know me very well.”
    “That’s what I’m trying to say.”
    “Oh no you’re just making fun of me.”
    “And yet I love you.”
    Adrienne was still sitting up very straight, but suddenly inhaled like she was diving underwater. And then, in the middle of the restaurant, she began to warble in my face: “GOAOD BLESS AMERRRICA, LAHND THAT I LUVV.”
    Her voice was preposterous, like a voluptuous brass horn curling and melting and reblowing itself before my eyes. I had to slouch back in my chair and take it. Adrienne wanted to stand up you could tell, her singing was classical, and she made those gestures you’ve seen, like a mime smoothing down his napkin after a meal, raising and lowering her hand at the level of her diaphragm.
    She sang just that phrase, but people turned to look. There was a scattering of applause—surprised, but perfectly cheerful applause, pleased at this bel canto in our midst; people clapped. Adrienne, to my surprise, turned around and acknowledged it. Maybe that was when I knew I was going to get what I wanted.
    “Was that supposed to be commentary?”
    “I think it was.”
    “You’re pretty witty for somebody who never went to college.”
    “Well, you inspire me Jim.”
    “I love you.”
    “That however is not true.”
    “It’s neither untrue or true. It’s an assertion I make. Same as ‘fuck you.’ I love you.”
    “Well fuck you, then.”
    “Should we ask for the check?”
    “Yes. And then I’ll take you home, and you can stay all night. How’s that?”
    We were very happy.

5
    Adrienne allowed that Chase worked harder than I did, in bed—but she liked me too. “You’re more excitable,” she said.
    There was a ceiling in the Booker penthouse above Adrienne’s bed inlaid with zigzagged cherrywood. It was like the corners of two hundred picture frames broken apart and glued there by a man on a ladder who, in the 1920s, probably pictured a couple of fat cats for this bed. Adrienne and I were more like two sylphs, pale white fish. I got lost in that bed. I hung off the mattress, just to believe it—to look upside down out to the lip of the terrace, and there, the sky. I was surprised that houseflies came up this high—I was foremost impressed with the grandeur of the penthouse, modern with a built-in oak refrigerator and panorama windows, though on my first visits I didn’t get to inspect it much, just glimpsed aerial Tulsa out the windows before Adrienne dragged me down onto the floor. The walls were forest green. When the elevator first opened you had to look at an oilpainting, a horse naked except for its tail wrap. On the entry table beneath it Adrienne had put a bottle of hand lotion. And out of a double-wide beaux arts battle-ax of a wardrobe spilled garbage bags of thrift store treasure, pointy green collars and ruched whorehouse silks and gold lamé belts and slippery polyester pants.
    We went up to the penthouse primarily for sex. Adrienne recommended the external-release method, which was strange, because at Bartlesville she had not cared. I complied, of course. It was tricky: I don’t think Adrienne worried much about the rugs, for example, but I did, and I always reached quickly for my own underpants or for a towel—I would avoid the bed totally. I saw her bare bottom on the excellent whitework bedspread and anxiously coaxed her off of it. “I do live here, you know,” she reminded me.
    But Adrienne had taken my request for monogamy seriously. Sometimes she just lay back and looked at me, to see what I would do. Maybe it was misleading, when I scooped her off the