A Map of Tulsa by Benjamin Lytal

and down the two hundred and twelve feet of sidewalk. I remember stopping once at sunset and watching for minutes as the sun went down, resolving into a visible red disk. I began to look directly at it—at the sun and then away. The setting sun was overwhelming the streetlight pole that stood between me and it, skinning the streetlight down into a little burnt stick. How hilarious, I thought, that I was trying to be a match for Adrienne Booker. She didn’t know what this was, this florid fire. She was working in strict,massive shapes, in black-and-white gestures. My eyes were smarting: I loved the largeness of Tulsa, its big, summery fragrance, the asphalt, the puff of chemical air-conditioning that came when the Target doors slid open. And from the livestock barns, a lift of animal freshness.

    Adrienne excused herself one night; a group of people had congregated at the Blumont, but she wanted to go home early. “I want to rest my voice,” is what she said—meaning she wanted to be alone? I was going to stay and drink. I ordered a scotch I could barely afford and turned around in my barstool to survey the group. I wanted to know what it was like to hang out sans Adrienne.
    Albert moved in on me almost immediately. In fact he sat down like I owed him something. He asked where I went to college. “So she’s your adventure,” he said. He nodded to himself. “You’ll go back up there and tell the other guys about this crazy girl you hooked up with.”
    I wanted Albert to like me. It was intriguing to see a thickset fortysomething in his cups, rehearsing the kids’ general grievances—that Tulsa sucked, that it had no confidence in itself, that it was an impossible place to produce real art. We often left him to the youngest kids (Jenny, in fact), and he was usually happy with that audience. I for one had never had a sit-down with him. I thought he must be curious, though: about me, Adrienne’s new consort. He must wonder what sort of relationship we really had, how I did it, how I dated this undatable person.
    But Albert was way ahead of me. “And then,” hecontinued, “after a while it won’t be other men you tell about Adrienne, it will be women. At a certain point in every relationship, you’ll roll out this thing about Tulsa and the ‘one girl who almost made you stay.’ Women will love you for it. It’ll be part of your repertoire. Your ‘Tulsa stories.’” He crooked his fingers to make scare quotes.
    I got up to go, but Albert reached for me and held my arm in his fat fist. “You do know she’s crazy, right?”
    I shook him off.
    I arrived home that night not heeding the protocols I had recently devised, doing nothing to muffle my drunken homecoming. I started loudly drawing a glass of water in the kitchen, and then sprawled down in my adopted armchair in the front room. Earlier that day Adrienne had finally turned to me, while she was standing at her easel, and invited direct criticism of her work. I didn’t hesitate for a second. I put my arm in, showing, almost touching her lines. I wasn’t the nurturer Edith had been, encouraging me with my poems—nor was I merely playing at the language of criticism, as we did at school. I had been watching Adrienne closely, after all. And I thought she had been preparing me for this, a no-holds-barred criticism of physical response, intimacy, and confident trust. But she didn’t thrill to the criticism. She didn’t even really take it in. She seemed to have turned to me because she was genuinely worried about her paintings. She sat down after my crit and was quiet.
    It may be that Adrienne’s pictures were bad Franz Kline, that moreover her status at parties was a function of the naïveté of her milieu—Albert commonly referred to Adrienne as “the pope of the Brady District.” And itmay be that Adrienne’s work ethic was only an exercise in girlish self-discipline. Sometimes I felt at once so robbed (as with Albert) and yet doubly possessed of my