Phantom Limb

The summer Michael and I spent driving around our old haunts and watching kung-fu movies was the summer I met Natalie. Michael and I were at a dive bar, listening to his friend play guitar and sing. Natalie arrived halfway through the set, shaking her bony shoulders out of a raincoat she had worn despite the seventy-five degree weather and blue skies. She was small and brown-haired, and looked around at the bar, at the stage, at me, like we might suddenly decide to crush her to death. “You must be Natalie,” I said, shaking her hand. “The girlfriend.”

“And you're John. Michael talks about you.”

“Just flattering lies,” Michael said, and took her arm. “Sit down, let me get you a beer.” He could really open up the charm when he wanted to sleep with a girl.

There was nowhere to sit, so Michael bought her a beer and we watched the show from the back. Natalie stood with her arms crossed and her eyes half-closed, and when Michael put an arm around her waist she only looked at him and turned back to the stage. “You okay?” he asked between songs.

“Just tired. I drove straight from Eugene and I'm all car-wobbly. The beer is helping.”

Car-wobbly? I thought.

She smiled and her lips pulled back to reveal too much gum. Michael smiled back, and suddenly I felt like the fun-killer, the one who didn't belong. I hadn't wanted to meet her—I would have been happier spending the summer with Michael alone, watching movies, drinking, laughing at people from our high school on Facebook. We didn't talk much during the school year, when we were both away at college, but whenever I came home for the break it was just Michael and I, and our other friends became secondary. That was the way I liked it; in my mind, he belonged, like barbecue, beer, and the Beach Boys, to summer.

Some of Michael and Natalie's school friends were having a party, so after the show we grabbed burgers from Dick's and ate them in the car, alternating introductory small talk with bites of greasy fast food. Michael and Natalie had met at a party, and then it turned out they had a class together. She had seen Michael's short films and read his scripts. I told her that Michael and I had known each other since ninth grade (years longer than her, I wanted to add), that we were the two weird kids in our P.E. class who talked about movies and video games instead of football and girls, and that we were in a punk band in high school.

“Michael, you were in a punk band?” she said, turning to him and slapping his knee. She laughed, a short, sharp bark, and Michael lifted his eyebrows and cocked his head, as if to apologize. I felt myself frowning and looked out the window so they wouldn't see it. Our travesty of a punk band was a joke between Michael and I, something we ironically brought out at parties to establish our cred, and I didn't like having this strange girl have a laugh over it when I hadn't meant for her to.

We drove to the University District and parked in front of one of those sprawling, falling-down houses that spring up around universities, the kind of houses that come with threadbare sofas and basements full of mold and empty beer cans. Michael's friends, liberal arts majors in glasses and tight jeans, smoked clove cigarettes on the porch and cheered when we approached. “Michael! Nat!” I got introduced around and one of Michael's friends handed me a beer.

We drank. I nodded my head on the outsides of conversations about Truffaut, Alan Moore, the Seattle International Film Festival. In one corner of the living room I found somebody's long-forgotten vinyl collection (Engelbert Humperdinck's Sweetheart, Air Supply's Love & Other Bruises, an entire LP of whale song recorded in the deep Mid-Atlantic) on a shelf covered in dust and dead crane flies. Much of the house felt like that, like an abandoned museum to irony: plaid couches and hand-stitched doilies, cutesy mugs from Goodwill stained with red wine. I felt like I was inside a joke I didn't understand.

Around midnight, Michael realized that what we had thought was a liquor shelf was actually the top of an upright piano, and he swept the bottle caps and empties to the floor with a clatter. He upended a wastebasket for a stool and sat down, swaying, to bang out a few experimental chords. “You've got to get this shit tuned,” he growled.

He shook his wrists and straightened up on the wastebasket, shushed one of the housemates, who cheered, and gestured Natalie over to him. He plinked out the introduction to “Dear Prudence” and Natalie sang in a wavery, soulful voice.

“Dear Prudence, won't you come out to play? Dear Prudence, greet the brand new day.”

One of the housemates, very drunk, found a guitar and played another Beatles song, “I've Just Seen a Face,” and we all sang that one together. Michael picked out a bass line on the piano that didn't quite match the guitarist's tempo. While we sang, Natalie leaned over the keyboard and brushed Michael's long hair out of his eyes.

There was a comfort and a certainty in that movement, like finding the right key and sliding it into a lock, two bodies that treated each other as one. It was as if Natalie had pushed her hair out of her own eyes. They're in love, I thought. Michael saw me watching them and gave me a nod and a crooked smile—“Sorry you had to see that little private thing,” it seemed to say. “It won't happen again”—and then we all sang the chorus.

I went back to school. I worked hard in my programming classes and dated a business major named Meghan. She didn't have much of a sense of humor, and she listened to music that I knew Michael and Natalie and their friends would have scoffed at, but she liked me, so we spent a lot of time in the coffeehouses in town, and a lot of time in her bed, which smelled like strawberries and Prada perfume. A few weeks before graduation, she told me over waffles that she wasn't “feeling it” any more, and I told her that I wasn't really feeling it either, so we broke up and finished our breakfast. By the time I moved back to my parents' place in Seattle, I didn't think about her much anymore.

I had been conscientious about making connections with professors and visiting lecturers, and I had put on a coat and tie and gone to every job fair my school hosted, but I still had a hard time finding a position. I worked on applications and my resume in the morning, sitting on my parents' guest bed in boxers and a tee shirt, and almost every afternoon I drove down to the University District. Michael had left his old studio apartment and moved into a room in the house we'd got drunk in the previous summer. They called it the Shitty College House, although four of the five guys who lived there had graduated, including Michael. He worked at a coffee shop now.

It was almost like the summers we had in college. One of the roommates had a nice high-definition TV, and we hooked up my Super Nintendo through the cable so we could educate each other on all the video games we had loved as children. On the hottest days, the walls of the Shitty College House's living room beaded with sweat and the carpet outgassed the odor of whatever filth was buried deep in its fibers. We had fans, but they only helped a little. Natalie was there that summer, too. She had one more year of school, but she had earned an IT internship with an insurance company in Seattle, and she spent the summer in the house. She watched us at our video games and studied. Sometimes she left for an hour or two and never said where she went.

One morning we drove up to the mountains and hiked part of the Pacific Crest Trail. The sun was high and cool, and a couple times an hour the trees broke and we saw the Cascades rising in jags out to the horizon. I pointed in the directions of trails the three of us had hiked that summer, but Michael and Natalie weren't having it. They were quiet, and I felt like a third wheel. Natalie was always like that around me. Around Michael and their college friends, she was wide open, always on the verge of something—laughter, a song, an intricate anecdote—but when it was only Michael and the two of us, or in those rare moments when I was alone with her, she turned back into the cringing, mousy girl I'd met at the concert the previous summer.

“Remember Mount Si?” I asked, trying to break the silence, and pointed toward the little mountain we'd hiked in June. “Michael was too much of a pussy to scramble up the last hundred feet or so?” They kept walking, and I had to follow.

We stopped at the edge of a boulder field to eat string cheese and handfuls of almonds, and Michael complained about not feeling good, so we turned around. I followed them down the trail, watching Natalie's little butt in her torn khaki shorts. She had a nice butt, and her backpack's dangling straps bounced on either side of it as she walked. On the car ride home, I rapped my knuckles against the window.

Back at the house, Natalie showered first, while Michael made us sandwiches. I hung out in the kitchen and drank a beer, even though it was only the early afternoon.

“Does Natalie not like me?” I asked Michael. “It's fine if she doesn't.”

He looked up from spreading mayonnaise. “She likes you fine. She just doesn't do new people that well.”

“I'm not that new, she's known me for a year.”

“She's just getting used to you.”

“Okay,” I said, but I wasn't sure.

Natalie left the bathroom in Michael's terrycloth robe and flopped on the sofa in the main room. She dangled her legs over the side of the armchair and said, “I want to watch something fun. None of your stupid video games today.”

Michael didn't say anything, but pulled out his two black leather binders full of DVDs and dumped them on her lap. She opened the first one and flipped through it, chewing her sandwich. Michael grabbed a towel and boxers from his room and went off to shower.

“Ah,” Natalie said, and slid an old Steve Martin movie into the DVD player. “Classic.” She turned on the box fan by her side and stretched her toes in front of it.

“You guys want to hike Tiger Mountain this weekend?” I asked, and opened another beer. “It's an easy hike.”

“Sure,” Natalie said. “Tiger Mountain, rawr.” Her eyes darted around the room and she seemed to realize that we were alone. She pulled the robe tighter around herself and sunk into her armchair, angling away from me so a strand of dark, wet hair fell against the side of her face.

“Have I done something to piss you off?” I asked, and when she didn't respond, I added, “I mean, I didn't mean to. You just seem weird around me sometimes. You've been quiet all day.” The living room filled up with the movie's soundtrack. “I just wanted to clear the air,” I muttered.

“Michael and I got in a fight last night.”

“Oh.”

“It was about work. That stupid-ass coffee shop. Michael needs to get to LA. He's just—he's lazy. The short he made for his senior thesis is really good. Really really good. But I have to torture him to get him to enter it into festivals. I don't know how he expects to do anything if he just sits on his ass, you know?”

“Yeah,” I said, relieved that I wasn't the cause of her awkward silence. She was even confiding in me. “It's good that you're here to push him.”

“God knows he needs it. He needs pushing.”

She relaxed into her chair and lost that tight-wound quality I saw in her so often. For the first time I felt that her vulnerability was open to me, that she was on the verge of happiness or music or laughter with me, and it was like seeing a landscape I knew from a different, stunning viewpoint. “It's good that you push him, Natalie,” I repeated.

She looked at me. “Just Nat.”

A few years passed. Natalie graduated and we both got jobs in the IT department of the insurance company where she had done her internship. I programmed actuarial software—basically I constructed algorithms to read giant tables (which were compiled by a different department) to determine the likelihood of a particular claim. I understood the programming, but not the theory behind it, and it was boring work.

Every day I biked from my neighborhood, across the bridge to one of the gleaming new skyscrapers downtown, near the water. In the bathroom off the lobby I brushed the wrinkles out of my shirt and khakis, fixed my helmet-hair, and looped my tie—which I had carried with me in my backpack, next to my lunch—around my neck. I worked in a cubicle on the fifteenth floor. Sometimes I got to walk to Natalie's cubicle to discuss a meeting we both had to attend, or a project I was working on that used her code in some vague way. To get to Natalie's cubicle, I had to cross through the main hallway in front of the windows, which gave me a view of the waterfront, the gray stretch of the viaduct, and the Puget Sound beyond.

I got a promotion and they sent me away for a week's training in Boston. When I got back I had an email from Michael. He was housesitting for a friend of his parents in West Seattle, and he wanted to catch up. I had kind of lost track of him. Natalie and I saw each other occasionally at work, but we didn't have lunch together and she didn't join the IT department after work for happy hour at the oyster bar down the street. I wouldn't see either her or Michael for a while, then they would pop up at a party, or Michael would email me part of a script to read.

I drove south from my apartment and across the West Seattle bridge, over all the warehouses and power-lines, past boarded-up 7-11s and soccer fields bounded by chainlink fences. I rolled my window up when I passed a group of kids wearing gang colors. The house was a little one story tucked back in a labyrinth of tall fences and vine-encrusted trellises, hidden away from the rest of the half-gentrified neighborhood. Michael met me at the door in his old terrycloth robe. His beard was growing out of control, and the smell of his unwashed laundry and clove cigarettes wafted from the living room behind him.

“Nice robe,” I said. “Where's Natalie?”

“She couldn't make it out today.”

He had buried the coffee table under a stack of empty pizza boxes, cigarette packs, and Kurosawa DVD cases. “I only really leave to buy food and Pepsi and smokes,” he explained.

“Charming. Get dressed. I'll buy you an enchilada.”

We drove back through West Seattle. I talked and Michael listened. His dark sunglasses and pale skin made him look vampiric, like a monster dragged from some subterranean lair. We found a Mexican restaurant and ate on a patio scattered with cigarette ash and napkins. “You been writing?” I asked him.

“Not since that last script I showed you. Just watching movies, mainly.”

“That was like six months ago.” Laziness wasn't unusual for Michael, but even when he didn't have a job and slept in every day, he wrote, followed Hollywood insider blogs, and plowed away at a reading list of classic science fiction. “Got to get going on those scripts man.”

“I know it.” For a moment we both ate our enchiladas and listened to the cars on the road and the tinny Mexican music pinging out of the speakers by the patio door. “West Seattle, man. This place is crazy. I hear fights at night. The other day I was walking to the corner store and I saw these two kids fucking around in a construction site, and they had this dog with them. A mutt. And they wrestled this dog into a big mud puddle and just jumped around with it and tackled it and shit. Two kids wrestling a dog in a mud puddle. In a construction site.” He stared at me through his aviator sunglasses and lit a cigarette. He looked sick. “Weird place.”

“You alright, Michael?”

“I'm fine. Nat and I broke up.”

“Oh.” I felt a flutter of excitement down in my stomach, then a sturdier weight of guilt. “How? When?”

“Has she said anything?”

“No, I haven't seen her since I got back.”

“It was last weekend. She—” He waved his hand in the air, looking for the right words. “Anyway, she broke up with me. It was kind of mutual, but she initiated it.”

“Shit. What are you going to do now?”

He told me that his parents, who he'd been staying with, were relocating to Spokane for a job, so without Natalie, his choices were Spokane or Los Angeles. “Which is good,” he said. “Kind of lighting a fire under my ass, telling me to get where I need to be. I've got people I can stay with in Burbank until I get settled.”

“That's good. That's really good. When are you leaving?”

“Two weeks. I want to be on my way. Can we hit a video store on the way home? There's a movie I've been wanting to see.”

I bought the enchiladas, since I was the one with a job, and the DVD rental, too, and we returned to the house. We grilled hotdogs and watched the terrible foreign horror movie Michael had been reading about online. We laughed and drank a beer and didn't talk more about Natalie, but I gave him a hug before I drove home, to my apartment in a much nicer part of the city.

I was thinking about Natalie, about what I'd say when I saw her at work. My throat was getting tight and my stomach boiled, like it did before presentations, and I couldn't help but spool out various futures for me. Michael in LA. Me in Natalie's apartment. Natalie and I together.

But then that heavy weight of guilt settled on me again and I remembered a conversation I'd had with Michael a few months after he and Natalie and I did all those hikes that summer. I had been on the other side of the state, visiting friends who were still in school, and I was walking home from some party and thinking about Michael and Natalie, wanting to hear their voices. Her voice. Michael's phone rang for a long time, and I thought it would go to voicemail and I'd have to hang up, but finally Michael picked up with a muffled, “Hello?”

“Michael!”

“John?”

“What's up?”

“I was asleep,” he said. “I'm in Florida for a film festival. With the time difference it's like four in the morning here.”

I told him I wouldn't be long and asked what he was doing in Florida. He was there to present his thesis short film, at a student film festival. Natalie had hounded him until he entered it, and he had won an award. “Are you drunk?” he asked me.

“Very much, yes. I'm walking home from a party, wanted to say hi,” I said. “Is Natalie there?” I imagined her lying next to him, trying to sleep, maybe smiling, and I remembered that when she smiled her upper lip stretched into two curves that met just above her front teeth, curves like the wing of a seabird in flight.

“No, no Nat. She's back at home, for school.”

“Okay,” I said, and something lifted off me—expectation or dread or the reasoning behind my call, I couldn't tell. I shook my shoulders in the cold air and laughed. “You're a lucky guy, Michael. Seriously, she's cool.”

“I know.”

“Seriously, a lucky guy.” I remember feeling that I was just talking then, saying whatever drifted into my head before I could filter it, and part of my brain was yelling at me to shut up.

“You're embarrassing me, man,” he said, and his voice took on that shy, half-ironic tone he used when somebody got too personal with him, like a shield of unsaid jokes held against some onslaught. I didn't think he read anything into my praise of his girlfriend, but I wasn't sure. “Go stumble home. You're drunk. I'm going to sleep.”

Now, driving up route 99 through the city, I wondered if Michael had really had no clue, or if he just wanted to save me from embarrassment. Natalie. I drove north, and my stomach and head and hands were tingling.

The Monday after my visit with Michael I had lunch with Natalie in a sushi place near our office and asked her about it. “It sounds like Michael told you all there is to tell,” she said. “How's he doing?”

I thought about the pizza boxes and stale cigarette-and-sweat smell in the house, the sunglasses and the robe. “He's alright,” I said. “I mean, you know, considering. He's moving to LA.”

“Figures,” she said, and snorted, but didn't explain.

We met for lunch almost every day. She joked that the breakup was an excuse to get out of the office and explore the sandwich shops and sushi bars downtown. For me, lunch was an excuse to be near her. I was aligning every atom in my body toward her. My life stopped for Nat. I barely ate or slept. I started losing weight. I drank too much coffee, made playlists of songs I thought she'd like, and listened to them at three in the morning while I worked out or just sat, staring, thinking. There's a scene in The Graduate where Dustin Hoffman is sitting at his desk and the camera zooms in on a piece of paper where he's written the name of his beloved Elaine, over and over. It's kind of cheesy, but that's how I felt. Searching the internet at the end of a sleepless night, I found that the name Natalie came from the Latin natale domini, which meant “Christmas Day.” I am in love with Christmas Day, I thought, and I said out loud to my empty apartment, “Natalie. Christmas Day. Natalie. Natalie. Natalie.”

I always started getting nervous about an hour before or lunch meetings, so I brainstormed funny things to say and stuff to talk about, but our conversations never petered out. I learned a lot about her: that she was born prematurely, that she had an autistic younger brother, that she had wanted to grow up to be a writer of fantasy novels.

“I never thought I'd be here now, doing this,” she said. “Designing user interfaces is interesting and all, but it's not the kind of career a little girl dreams about. Do you like work?”

“Not really,” I said. “But I like being able to pay off my student loans.”

“Why do you do it if you don't like it? I think if you don't like your work then how much could you possibly like your life?”

I shrugged. “It's not like I hate it. I just don't define my life by it. I've got other things.”

But her comment stuck with me, and later I thought about the “other things” I had in my life: my weekends, which I spent bike riding around the city; Michael, leaving for Los Angeles in less than two weeks; the movies and music that Michael had introduced me to; the few guys at work or from Nat and Michael's school friends that I liked to drink with; my family in the suburbs. But I was in my mid-twenties; what else was there? I had those things, I had a job, and soon, I hoped, I would have Natalie.

At her request, I drove Nat to Michael's goodbye party the night before he left town. He had invited her and insisted that she come. She hadn't been happy about it, but felt obligated, and wanted me there as some sort of backup or go-between. She had put on a nice top and makeup, and she kept turning her bag over in her lap and rolling the passenger window down and back up. “Do you think I should get really drunk?” she asked me.

“Probably a bad idea. Might be good for a laugh or two, though.”

The party was at the Shitty College House, and it looked like the housemates had used Michael's leaving as an excuse to throw a rager. We heard music and voices from the street, and the entryway was stuffed with people, only a few of whom I knew. As soon as we entered, Natalie crunched up and closed herself off. “I don't want to stay long,” she said. “And I need a drink.”

Michael was in the kitchen, near the booze, talking to a girl I'd seen a few times before at parties. He glanced in our direction when we came in and raised his glass. Natalie kept her head down and went to pour herself a drink. He looked better than he had two weeks ago—in new jeans and a flannel, beard trimmed, color in his face like he'd seen the sun once or twice. He detached himself from the girl to say hello.

“Glad you made it,” he said.

“I wouldn't miss it. When do you leave tomorrow?”

“Early. Early morning for my cousin's place in Salem, then on through to California the next day. How's Natalie doing?”

“She's okay. We've been having lunch, trying to get the coworkers into some good TV.”

“Yeah?” he said, and looked over to where she was making a drink. He didn't say anything else.

“I don't think she wants to be here that much,” I said, trying to make him feel better maybe.

His forehead wrinkled and he said, “Well, I'm glad she came anyway. It would feel weird not having her here on my last night in town.” I realized I had said the wrong thing, and he patted his shirt and looked at her in a way that made me think he was just barely holding it together, that he was relieved to be driving a thousand miles away in the morning.

Nat and I only stayed for an hour. They never actually spoke to each other, and Natalie drifted through the house she had lived in for a summer, between the clusters of her college friends and past the old piano, with a dazed expression. I said goodbye to Michael and he hugged me and told me he would call.

Outside it was misty but warm, and the streetlights burned orange circles in the night. “He still had one of my shirts,” Natalie said as we walked back to the car. She swung her purse by its strap. “I stole it back.” She was tipsy.

“I'll bet he just forgot he had it.”

“Yeah, probably,” she said. The light on 45th changed, and while we stood on the curb and waited for the signal to walk, Nat leaned her head on my shoulder and said, “John. John, I'm glad you're here.”

“Me too. It's no problem,” I said, and when the cars stopped we walked into the intersection still touching.

We fell into a pattern: lunch on the weekdays and bars on Friday nights. Before one of our Friday night outings, I saw Nat's apartment for the first time. She lived in a one bedroom in one of the boxy little apartment buildings that sprouted up in Seattle during the sixties and seventies. Her building was on Capitol Hill, near the dividing line between the residential north side and the hip, loud, commercial south, where the bars were, and on Friday nights the apartment filled with the street sounds of drunk young people.

Nat had decorated her apartment with impressionistic paintings of the city she and Michael found in some coffee shop down near Pike Place. Her floor to ceiling bookshelves were full of fantasy paperbacks she had read as a kid, her mom's cookbooks, and a handful of DVDs she claimed in the breakup. She had a cat, named Toby, a grizzled old thing who sat, stiff with anger, on top of a carpet-wrapped cat tree and hissed whenever I got close.

After the first couple of trips to the bars, I started crashing on Nat's couch. She drank vodka tonics and I drank beer, and we hung out until we were good and sloshed, then we walked back to her apartment. I wanted to flirt with her, to dance, to wrap my arms around her and sink my face into her hair, but I didn't. I was so afraid I'd fuck it up, that I would make the wrong move and she would look at me funny, and then I'd only see her in her cubicle at work or when we crossed paths in the coffee room.

One morning I woke on her couch and lay there, listening to the building's heating system click in the walls. It was weird finally seeing Nat's place after having known her for so long, and now, with the silver-blue morning light glowing behind the blinds and a dull hangover in my head, it made me sad. I thought about her life with Michael, how he would have laid on this very couch with his feet up on the armrest and read his blogs, or how the two of them might curl up and watch movies together. Only my need for Natalie kept me from slinking guiltily out and getting in my car.

Instead I turned on Natalie's laptop and got online. Michael may have sent me a message. We had taken to emailing back and forth, and earlier this week he told me about a new girl he was dating, Amy. “She's great. She would fit right in with our old group of friends. We make Star Wars jokes together. She was a regular at the coffee shop I wrote in, saw me writing, said she was interested in that stuff too and we started to talk. I think it's how half the couples in Hollywood meet.” According to Michael, she had just landed a position at a cable television network.

Late last night, somebody had posted pictures of Michael and Amy on Facebook, and I got my first look at her. She was a wild-haired, busty blond, grinning and dangling on Michael's arm in every picture. They were both outfitted with sunglasses, headbands, water pistols, and Solo cups, the artifacts of an unidentifiable theme party.

“Is that Michael?” Natalie asked. She padded out into the living room in an old sweater and a pair of flannel pajama bottoms. “Let me see. Who’s that?”

I hesitated, but tilted the screen toward her.

“That didn't take long,” she said, and walked into the kitchen. “You want some coffee?”

“Sure.”

“Have you talked to him much?”

“Yeah. You?”

“Not at all. How's he doing?”

“He's a page for a TV network, and he's interning for some production company, reading scripts. He says he's writing a little bit, too.”

“And dating Tits McGee.” She laughed, but the coffee cups clattered hard and crisp in the sink, and she didn't say anything else.

A few weeks later we ended our night in the Iron Hammer, a favorite dive bar of ours, just around the corner from her apartment. It wasn't a great bar, but it did what it had to: it had darts and cheap macrobrews and the arcade game where you use a plastic shotgun to hunt virtual deer. Paper bowls of microwave popcorn sat on all the tables. We had started that night with whiskey, and were ending it, quite drunk, with pitchers of Bud Light at a table in the corner.

“I'm going to find you a new job,” Natalie said. “You've got to like your job, John. You've got to do something you like.”

“What could I do?”

“Anything you want, you're a smart guy. You could work for a tech company. Hell, don't you live like right down the road from Google? Or you could shift careers entirely, find something that you can really get into, maybe go out to LA with Michael, get some Hollywood programming job. Seduce one of those trashy Hollywood bitches.”

“Not my type,” I said. “What about you? Those fantasy novels? Whatever happened to that?”

She finished her beer and eyed me. “Who says I'm not writing in my spare time?”

“You never said you were.”

“Because I'm not.” She laughed.

The bartender brought the lights up for last call and everybody filtered out onto the sidewalk to smoke or call their friends. Natalie and I stumbled around the corner to her apartment building and fell through the front door, startling Toby, who growled and ran for his corner. “Goddamn, I'm drunk,” Natalie said, and she collapsed on the couch.

“Ditto,” I said, and joined her.

She slipped her shoes off and sighed. We were sinking drunkenly back, thigh to thigh, into the space between the two couch cushions. Maybe I should kiss her, I thought. I leaned my shoulder into hers and she rested her head on me.

“Sorry for hassling you about your job,” she said. “I just want everybody I know to be happy.”

“I know. It's okay.”

“I'm too tired to pull out sheets for you. You can just crash in my bed. I'm a bed-sharer.”

So I got into her bed and she crawled in after me. We curled up, spooning, and I could feel that she hadn't shaved her legs recently. We were half-naked together. I was glad the alcohol made my body heavy and slow, because if I were sober, I would be shaking, and she would be able to feel it against her back.

“Your bed smells like nutmeg,” I told her.

“Mmm, should I have washed the sheets?” Her voice was low and close, and the bones in her back hummed in my chest.

“No, no, not in a bad way. It's nice. I dated a girl once whose pillows smelled like strawberries. Your bed smells like nutmeg.”

“You're random.” She squirmed against me. “Do you mind moving your face back? I'm not too comfy.”

I slid away from where I had crooked my chin between her shoulder and neck, back along the pillow, feeling somewhat rejected. “Sorry.”

“It's okay.”

“You should turn around.”

“Why?”

“So I can kiss you,” I said.

She hummed. “I don't think that would be a good idea, John. Let's keep it friends?”

“People at work already talk. The whole IT department.”

“I know,” she said. I grunted and she rolled her shoulders a few inches away from me. “Have you talked to Michael recently?”

“No. Just online.”

She hesitated for a moment, then rolled back toward me, and I pushed my face into the hair that spilled over her shoulder, which was thicker than I had imagined, and smelled like sweat and shampoo and the fried food from the Iron Hammer. The streets outside were full of revelers shouting across streets and down blocks. Two men sang the chorus of “Don't Stop Believin'” and their friends laughed.

“I miss him,” Natalie said. “Being with Michael, sometimes, I miss that.” I didn't say anything, and after a minute she said, “I miss it,” again and pressed her body into mine like she wanted a response, or to imprint the importance of her comment upon me.

I didn't know what to say. I felt the tug I always felt now when I thought of Michael: a feeling of closeness not lessened by distance, somewhere between deja vu, love, and a phantom limb, shot through with black guilt.

“I'm sorry,” Nat said. “I know—it's weird.”

“No, it's okay. I miss him, too.”

Nat and I in bed, saying that we missed Michael—would he believe it if he could see it? Natalie would treat me differently after tonight. I had tried, and I had failed. What was my life—all my bike rides, pints of beer, hundreds of lines of code, cups of gourmet coffee, Google searches for her name, the morning light from her living room window—without her, or without the possibility of her? I felt a sense of abandon, a feeling that I could do anything I wanted. Everything was fluid; nothing mattered. Fuck it! I could scoot in and hold Nat, feel her breath on the hairs of my forearm and her butt tight against my thighs; or I could run outside, be a part of that night, careen down the street in my boxers. What would Michael think about that?

I wanted to keep Nat awake, with me, for as long as I could so I asked, “Do you still love him?”

“Sometimes. We had something, I think.”

I shrugged. A crowd of barhoppers walked past, leaving the buzz of south Capitol Hill for their homes in the quieter north, or for buses that would take them away to other parts of the city. They walked and chattered, and somebody knocked over a plastic garbage can, and they talk-talk-talked, and their noise made it up to Natalie's bedroom window and inside to where we lay, together but not touching. Not really.