A Map of Tulsa by Benjamin Lytal Page B

bed again (where she had sat again)—as if I were going to do a show and lift and move her all over the place.
    “Hold it,” she said at one point, sliding off from me. She came back with a camera. “I’m going to take a photo,” she said. And she didn’t simply snap the photo. She lined up the shot, down on her elbows, the camera tilting with interest, nosing toward me like a big black snout. I looked right back—sometimes I remembered all of my life in Tulsa, and I wanted to be alone, to go down onto the warm streets, to go to a bookstore. Anyway, I managed to hold it.
    “We have to go buy condoms,” she said, after the third time.
    Of all the hundred errands we ran that summer maybe this was the primal one. In the end I made a big deal and told Adrienne I didn’t want to go buying condoms at any of the drugstores my family frequented. It was a kind of made-up scruple—but I wanted to give her some idea of the embarrassment that was endemic to my heart. We drove west, across the river, and when the time came, we went through the line together. The cashier was an ashen-fleshed white woman. She didn’t look twice.
    “Now we’re married,” said Adrienne.

    I overheard my mother using Adrienne’s name on the phone.
    “Adrienne Booker.”
    It caught me up. I stopped to listen.
    “Booker. Mmhm. I think they are.”
    “I think so. I think he is.”
    “They’re so young.”
    I had begun to live with Adrienne, almost. My parents didn’t protest now when I spent the night out. I had wanted to call them, the first time I stayed overnight at the penthouse, but I fell asleep before I realized. Later I offered that my sleep-aways might worry them. My mom worked her jaw and said no, you need to be careful though.
    But my behavior that summer had startled them, and they were being very watchful now, and were waiting. I knew this, and when I was out with Adrienne I often caught myself wishing that my parents could peer downlike gods to glimpse this or that redeeming aspect of our lives. Adrienne’s hyper-professional concentration in front of her easel, for one thing. Her rigor, the way she pinned me down in conversation and forced me to say what I meant. Our conversations over art books. The value of all this, and the adult seriousness. I even wished for them to know about things, all kinds of things, that did not make sense as parent-data: the way we knocked ourselves down dancing at a show; the world-weariness with which Adrienne held a cigarette when she was tired. Her tired voice, the grain of it. The balance of the long nights out, the sense of wayfaring endurance, as we journeyed from one destination to the next, and our delicate luck. Above all the profound sense of citizenship that, over and above personal pleasure, seemed to be the point of going to so many parties, every single weekend night.
    Adrienne hadn’t partied so much the summer before, she told me. The arc of her teenage life had already crested—painting was going to be a kind of second life: life after rock bands. But for me the life was only beginning.
    I was nervous whenever we walked into a party. I thought she might veer completely away, to go talk to people I didn’t know. I had to watch her to see what mode she was in. She drank either very little or else a great deal. In fact drinking provided an example of all I wished I could distill to turn into moral evidence for my parents. Formerly drinking had seemed to me like a sluice you could open and everything would flow. Adrienne was smarter than that. She marshaled her troops like a general. Often we were the most sober people in the room.
    I looked up Adrienne’s family at the library: I toldthe librarian I was doing a research project on Booker Petroleum. I found out that Adrienne’s great-grandfather, Odis Booker, first struck oil at a place called Cushing. This was in 1904, just three years prior to statehood. He eased out of wildcatting, built a large hospitality business, invested