A Map of Tulsa Read Online Free

out beside her and told her all about my doing. “I don’t know if I realized this in high school,” I said, “but Adrienne Booker’s sort of
impressive
.” I fingered the curtain philosophically.
    Edith stuck out her tongue. “Some boys would say…sort of stuck up.”
    “I’m stuck up too.” I gestured out the black window. I was feeling magnificently hollow. “But she’s better at it. There’s more to it with her.”
    “Did you meet Lydie?”
    I raised my eyebrows and put my arm around Edith’s waist. My head was resting on her shoulder. “Yes. Next time I see her I’m going to ask her for her niece’s hand in marriage.”
    Edith shooed away the vodka bottle that Cam, herself half slumped against the bay-window bench, raised up like a friendly elephant, nudging against my leg. I got up and took a cup of Hawaiian Punch instead: “You can taste the huge molecules of NutraSweet, rolling around like brambles in your mouth.”
    “There are other girls downstairs,” said Edith.
    “Yes but they’re not deep—Adrienne is like a new level.”
    “You seem like you want more a girlfriend.”
    I rolled my eyes. “What is more? Is it more girlfriendly to be less like Adrienne? I think Adrienne’s pretty nice.” I thought I had to account for my being the only male in the room so I went over and put a couch cushion over my face. “I am sorry I feel so like a minotaur I should go to another room.”
    Eventually I laid my head in Cam’s lap. Her thighs were small, and slippery on account of her Chinese pants. So I had to have my head squarely in her lap. “What do you think of these Tulsa kids?” I asked.
    “They’re a bunch of drunks,” Cam said.
    “That’s why they’re so great.”
    “Do you like being drunk?” she asked.
    “I think so. Should I not?”
    “Some people hate it the first time.”
    “Why?” I asked.
    “They miss having control of themselves.”
    “When I am sober I have no control. I am forced to just watch myself doing nothing.”

    The party was never going to end.
    At some point, as if it had been raining, it stopped, or something, and the party flowed out back. I discovered a brick terrace beneath my feet, and beyond that was grass, and then great trees. The night air had turned to aloe.
    The yards in this neighborhood were vast and irregularly shaped. It was like the trees went on in a continuous great wood, feeding into all the greatest backyards of Tulsa. Maybe they backed out onto Philbrook even. Philbrook was an oilman’s palazzo that eons ago had been converted into an art museum, the type of institution to which a field trip might be taken—its grounds, with a long reflecting pool and sloping greenswards, were, in spite of my growing up in a region supposedly rural, the most Arcadian thing I had ever had. We even went to
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
there, performed on a summer night. And the back stairs of Chase’s porch plashed down into the same swanlike curls as Philbrook’s, having the same Italianate elegance that had so taken, apparently, the oil barons who built Tulsa.
    I stepped down onto the grass and walked anonymously through shadowy congregations of kids smoking in the dark. Some people ahead of me were skinny-dipping; I wandered further into the woods, in the moonlight, until I came all alone to a huge table, a monolithic piece of patio furniture inlaid with mother-of-pearl, azodiac design. I stared. As I picked my way back towards the house I almost thought that table had frightened me. I was glad to get back under the yellow light of the windows. Somebody had put out chicken sandwiches, and I ate one, having found a terrace rail where I could sit and sift my thoughts.
    The sandwich was good. I guessed I had done well at this party. I thought of Adrienne Booker mainly. Would there be more parties like this, or were there places around town I would run into her? I somehow very much doubted she would go somewhere like Retro Night. But whatever existed