I ran into Nathan Anderson, an old friend, at the Seattle Art Museum at a traveling exhibition of an artist I had never heard of, Edward Hopper, but judging from the reaction of the people walking through the rooms I guess he was pretty famous. I came on these paintings that terrified me. In one painting there was a woman—she looked like a needle freak with yellow skin, except she had too much meat on her bones—gazing out the window beyond the frame. Light from the portrait’s window fell on her haggard face. She sat on the bed looking out the window. For me, that picture portrayed every morning after.

A man stood in front of the painting like a child looking into the Christmas window display at the Frederick & Nelson department store. He was short and skinny. I could tell he had muscles under his tight black T-shirt and his faded Levi’s. He wore a huge belt buckle of a snake eating its own tail that I think was a vintage artifact from the early seventies. His face, lined and flat, had a healthy color, even though he was thin as a knife.

I remembered a man who had worn a belt buckle like the one this guy was wearing, and I realized then that this was Nathan, who I knew years ago, when I first moved to Seattle. He and I had once hit it off. I don’t know whether it was because we were drinking rum and smoking reefer or because there was a physical attraction—I was a little too gone to recall—but we lost track of whose drink was whose after I accidentally drank from his glass and left a red lipstick smear on the rim. After that, we drank from both glasses. After we were toasted he said, “Janice baby, let’s get drunk together,” which frankly meant, “Let’s get roaring obnoxious and fuck.” After a joint and another glass of rum chased with a couple of beers, we made it back to my apartment. We stumbled into my soft bed, pulled the warm sheets over our heads and, well, we weren’t in the position to say “no,” or much of anything else. We woke at sunrise and drank coffee in the indistinct gray light that came out of the midwinter Seattle sky.

As we sat on my couch with the rancid coffee I had prepared with three scoops of tinned grounds, Nathan wrapped his arm around me and held me so tight that I had difficulty raising the cup to my lips. “Quit it,” I said, happy to have someone to be grumpy with.

It had been a rough six or seven weeks the winter I dropped out of college; actually I dropped out of attempting to save money for college. Things like rent and groceries took everything I earned running around the tables of the Red Diner downtown. I stayed up late partying, and found a million men—with their deep belly buttons under black curled hair, their fatty muscles, and the deep salty smell of their armpits—attractive enough that they would find their way back to my place. In all of these cases they would wake before dawn and dress in the dark. Leaning down, they kissed me and lied to me at the same time; smacking their lips as they left, they said the mantra that would start another day for me: “I’ll call you.” And sometimes they would. But they never lay in bed with me and waited long enough for me to make some coffee and sat with me on the sofa to sort out the time of day like Nathan had done.

I suppose that I wouldn’t remember all of these things—the long winter, the succession of guys, and the few times with Nathan—if I had never missed my period. When it finally stopped, I bought a bottle of red wine and a urine test at Fred Meyer, aware as I paid the old woman behind the counter—a woman who was much older than Mom when Mom finally died—that she knew it wasn’t good news that I had to buy something like this. A man who buys a urine test is a good thing, but a woman who does it—that is just bad news. At home I took the test and drank the red wine to celebrate the positive. I didn’t even know when the last time I had a period was, so I found a friend who had a friend who knew a doctor and got it cleaned out before I started thinking about pink or blue pajamas with the special vinyl foot-pads.

Nathan stopped by an oil painting of what, from the other side of the room, looked like a watchtower overlooking a blood red battlefield. When I came close I saw that it was really just a railway station at the edge of a sunset. “Nathan?” I said. I tried for a friendly, “Hello, it’s been years” tone of voice. But who can control these things? My voice cracked, and then in an effort to cover it up, I said, “It’s been some time.” Which came out in clear, slow syllables.

He turned around and I thought, “Oh fuck, I’ve never seen this man in my life.” His face was so thin that I could see the arc of his skull in his forehead. But he smiled and said, “Janice?”

I don’t know, but recognition from someone who hasn’t seen me in almost twenty years—this was a gift. If he had suddenly reached into his pocket and wrapped a twisty wire from the grocery store around my finger and proposed, I would have married him, even though I know what all of that is about.

We went to coffee and I realized then that Nathan had not aged as well as I had thought. We talked about my job. We talked about some of the people we knew in common. We hit it off decently enough. But I could tell something was bugging him. He was so skinny and he ate so little. He ordered a hamburger with two slices of cheese, and he ordered an extra side of fries, and then he ate all of his fries and he ate the cheese off his hamburger. He drank the Coke, and he drank six cups of coffee. Bathroom city. We talked about the people we had known all those years ago. When I maneuvered the conversation to the present, talking about the fall of the Soviet Union, or the new museum downtown, or whatever, his interest would tail off. He would watch someone on the street and say something about her hair. When we talked about what we would do next, he said, “Actually, I have an appointment.”

He did ask for my number. But that was only the polite thing to do.

I, however, was getting too old to be polite, and I was attracted to him. One of the reasons I was attracted to him was all the stories I had heard from our mutual friend Paul Lane of the abuse Nathan had put himself through, drinking until the bars collapsed behind him, pushing his endurance with whatever powder or capsule or paste was available. He had lived high on the hog, like most people these days just don’t. I think, maybe, they look at the wrecks of the seventies, the multitude of vomit-drowned celebrities and the old hippies hanging out in backwoods bars, still wearing love beads even though they have no one to love, and they are afraid. They are afraid of becoming a cultural backwater, of letting things just slip along while they remain in a time and place no one remembers properly, resurrected only in momentary retro styles and spoofy parties. Finding Nathan was like finding a genuine jean jacket with vintage beadwork in a thrift store.

Beyond this, though, I just had the basic motive of wanting to get a real, warm human body into my bed, male and my age, preferably.

I still use a body pillow I bought from a flea market during the sixth year of my marriage to Art. I call this thing my sleep dummy because it helps me sleep, and with its thick, overstuffed sections it makes me believe I’m sleeping with someone. When I lived with Art, the overstuffed torso usually lay at the foot of our bed. But there were nights when I had to pull it out and place it in the hollow Art’s body usually filled. I had to have the bulk of something there, or I just couldn’t sleep. Just before I left him, I realized that I had been living with the sleep dummy. After work, I’d pull it into Art’s spot and then read through my murder mystery and magazines. Finally I would fall asleep. When I woke up in the morning, its head would be resting on my chest. I wouldn’t know where Art was, because he wasn’t in my bed.

Now I live in an apartment by myself, close to work, and I’m still sleeping with the dummy. Over the years, I’ve spilled coffee on it. I’ve dropped ashes on it. It has acquired its own character in the stains and wrinkles and worn patches. I think of my sleep dummy as the character Mr. Paterson from Tea and Nightshade Murders. He’s the short, squat, male sleuth who drinks himself into oblivion while pondering the questions of the murder over his bottle of sherry. I always say, “Good night, Mr. Paterson,” before I turn out my light.

+

I showed up at Nathan’s apartment a couple of nights later with a bottle of wine, spaghetti in a plastic Tupperware container, and fresh bread. Nathan answered the door, wearing a bathrobe draped over his thin limbs, the pale fabric worn and stretched in places his body wasn’t. He was clean-shaven and smelled like lavender bath crystals, so I assumed there must have been a woman in his apartment. I couldn’t picture him in the bathtub, floating alone among the white bubbles. I said to him, “I thought I might drop by, but if you have company…” I was looking past him at the freshly vacuumed carpet; at the geometric order in the alignment of the sofa, coffee table, TV; at any sign of a woman, like a compact left on the coffee table, or even something as conspicuous as two mugs on the table. I didn’t see anything. I didn’t even hear water running or signs of any other activity by someone other than Nathan.

“It’s nice to see you,” he said, something I was not expecting to hear after his ambivalence at the diner. He stepped back like he wanted me to come in. The carpet in his apartment was plush compared to the worn Astroturf carpet in the hallway. The warm air from the lamplit rooms of Nathan’s apartment washed over him, carrying the lavender smell of his bath and the faint odor of cough drops or Vick’s VapoRub into the bright hallway. I stepped in. “There’s enough for three,” I said, as I set the round Tupperware down in his dark kitchen.

“Three? Did you invite someone?” he said.

“Isn’t there someone here?”

“Who would visit me?” And when he said that, at first I was relieved and I almost felt a giddy twitch along my hips. Then I wondered why he felt it was necessary to say something so pathetic.

He turned on the lights in the kitchen to show plain tile counters, empty of the standard appliances, like a toaster or microwave or espresso machine. The only standard thing was a Mr. Coffee. “I need to change, but I’ll be right back. There’s coffee. Please, sit down.” I watched him walk down his hallway, turn into what I assumed was his bedroom, and close the door.

Nathan returned wearing a white sweater and slacks. They hung on him. He smiled at me and held out his arms. We hugged and I could feel the ridge of his backbone under the sweater. He groaned and pulled back from me. “You’ll have to catch me up on everything, including the sordid details of your marriage to what’s-his-name.”

“Art.”

He stopped and looked at me. “I’m sorry. I can tell that we’re getting off to a bad start. First we met like a couple of characters in a bad short story at that Edward Hopper exhibit. I already feel like a manifestation of a cliché. We can get beyond all that after we eat. It’s very kind of you to drop by.”

“A cliché? What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. I just think I’ve seen that movie too; you know, I’ve already read that story.”

“I’d never seen Hopper’s paintings before. I liked them.”

“They’re great,” Nathan said. “But you can buy his coffee table book at Costco. I think anything you can buy from a warehouse immediately enters some phase of clichéhood.”

“I made my spaghetti from scratch.”

“And your sauce?”

“Prego,” I said. “From Costco.”

“Let me get the wine,” he said. “Immediately.”

I sat in a square stuffed chair in the living room. The TV was on, but turned to a blue screen. He poured the wine. It gugged and the sharp odor filled the room. “Do we need to heat up the food?”

“It should still be warm.”

He placed the wine bottle in the center of the coffee table, and put the plate in front of me with an exact motion, like the place was marked with tape. He set down the napkin, the fork and knife. “Do you use a knife with noodles?”

“I don’t know; do you? You don’t use chopsticks,” I said. I put one of the couch pillows into my lap, propped my elbows on it, and quickly drank the bitter wine.

He set the Tupperware container next to the wine and opened the lid, releasing smells of hamburger and tomato sauce and the pasty Mission noodle odor.

He dumped a mess of noodles and meat sauce on my plate, splattering the table. He took the knife and gave me his fork. He sat and put half as much as I had on his plate. He wrapped noodles around his knife. Shoving the food into his mouth, he freed his hands to pour more wine. He filled my glass.

I drank the acidic wine. The glass was too full and I slopped some onto the table, where it mixed with the splattered spaghetti.

“Great,” he said. “This is just great.” He wiped his mouth clean, setting his knife flat on his plate. “This is really good.”

I drank my wine in huge gulps. “You don’t have to like it,” I said. “To be honest, I’m a really bad cook, and the fact that this spaghetti isn’t making you puke on impact is amazing to me.”

“No,” he said. He raised his eyebrows. “This is good.”

“You like it, then?” I asked.

“Excellent,” he said. He made the okay sign with his thumb and forefinger.

I cleaned my fork by sticking it down my mouth, up to the widest point of the handle. I made sure I had Nathan’s eye contact. Then I handed him the clean fork. He dropped it on the table. “That’s just too sexy,” he said.

I pretended for a second to be interested in wiping up the mess of spilled wine and sauce, and then I looked up quickly. I caught Nathan spitting out a little of the food. I didn’t know what to do. I said, “Are we really going to eat all this? Or are you going to make a pass at me?” I stood up to leave for the bathroom. When I stood, the two glasses of wine entered my head, and I momentarily felt my feet slip into space; then the vertical lines of the doors and windows twisted straight.

When I came back to the room, the drapes were open to a view of the apartment across the street and the downtown skyline above the roofs and the pale shapes of clouds in the sky. A few planes moved under the bellies of the clouds, like artificial stars or massive glow bugs. Nathan had cleared the table except for the wine. He sat in the square stuffed chair. He fit in half of it, and his arms were pale and skeletal. His skull stood black in the halo of his thin hair, glowing in the lamplight. The tumbleweeds of his hands clawed the armrests. I didn’t want to make a pass at him.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I’m tired, that’s all.”

“Don’t you like me?”

“Yes. It’s not that.”

“What are we not saying?” I asked him. But I had turned around and I didn’t want him to answer. I just wanted to get all of the crap, him spitting out my spaghetti and his skull-like cheekbones, not necessarily “on the table,” but at least up toward the surface where we could look at it. I examined our reflection in the window—Nathan sitting on the chair and my hips a little too wide and a little too healthy. I didn’t want to go home drunk to Mr. Paterson. “Won’t you at least let me sleep in bed with you?”

He looked out the window. His head nodded into a clenched fist. It doubled like a knot in a thick rope. “Okay. But that’s my limit.”

“I’ll accept that,” I said.

“I mean it,” he said.

We lay in his bed, small enough that my side, soft and fleshy, pressed into the hard, sharp angles of his body. But his skin was hot and still smelled like lavender. I listened to the sick rise of his breath. It rose into the cavity of his mouth and hissed in the chambers of his lungs. I pulled the smooth shape of his head against my breasts until the hiss settled and his breath smoothed. I fell asleep to the quiet rhythm, looking forward to the gray light of the morning, when I could wake, me in bed with him and him in bed with me.

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This is part ten of the eleven stories in The Remains of River Names, a novel in linked stories. The book will appear this month on Necessary Fiction. Of the collection, The New York Times Book Review wrote, “Briggs has captured the America that neither progressives nor family-value advocates want to think about, where bohemianism has degenerated into dangerous dropping out.” The book will be re-released in a new edition from The Publication Studio this fall.