Because you’re weary of the Idaho winter and country boys in their barn jackets and think that what you must need is a real city fix, you trade shifts at Lewiston’s only disco, where you work as a cocktail waitress, pack your curling iron and makeup in your purse (you don’t own a suitcase), pawn your deer rifle (you are the daughter of a logger, raised on venison), and buy a round-trip bus ticket to Spokane. No money left for food, but you still have two Dexatrim and half a pack of Virginia Slims menthol, which will quiet the hunger until you can reach a bar and fill a napkin with celery sticks, sweet slices of orange—enough to get you through the first hour of the night.

You know just where you’re headed: The Ridpath–a real hotel with room service, which you understand works like this: you pick up the phone, utter a prayer for food, and it arrives like a miracle at your door. The two-hour ride north provides time to plan: you’ll claim not to have a driver’s license; you’ll register under your Oklahoma grandmother’s maiden name; you’ll provide a cousin’s old address. You believe that the desk clerk won’t ask for more because you’ve curled your hair just like Farrah Fawcett. Purple eye shadow, a blouse that dips nearly to your navel—you’re prepared. In fact, you’re more than prepared because you’re wearing a fur coat—real fur—which you were given in payment for some modeling you did for a clothing shop in town that couldn’t pay but was willing to trade. The store once housed The Lewiston Fur Shop—all that 1940s inventory gone out of style. “Take your pick,” the owner said, and let you loose to pet the racks of fox stoles, mink jackets. The coat you chose tufts up around your ears, brushes your knees. Its sleeves are weighty and largely cuffed. You feel like you might be able to pull yourself inside of it, hibernate for a while.

The Ridpath is a grand old dame, says the man at the door. Inside smells fusty, like hair oil, the back of your grandmother’s couch. The lobby is dark and somehow heavy, like your coat, which you now let fall open. The middle-age clerk calls you by your grandmother’s name, hands you the key, slides his fingers across palm. You wince a smile, take the elevator to your room, which is bigger than some of the shacks you’ve lived in. You sit on the bed, stare at the phone. The dance club you’ve heard so much about—best bands, best booze, best boys–is too far to walk in your four-inch heels. You’ll need to call a cab. No. You’ll need to call the front desk. The front desk will do such things for you.

The coat waits with you in the lobby, bundles you into the back seat for the first taxi ride of your life. You watch the lights flick across your window, count the intersections, just in case. The disco’s parking lot is full but the driver pulls right up to the door. You rummage your purse, your coat pockets, while he watches in the rearview. You see by his eyes that he is smiling. You smile back. You can hear the music, feel the bass beating the air. He gets out, comes around, opens your door. “Next time,” he says, and you think, yeah, next time.

But this time is real, and it goes like this: you order a double vodka tonic, start a tab that you will not pay. You find a table near the front, let the coat drape the chair. When you’re asked, you dance. When the waitress says someone wants to buy you a drink, you say sure, ask for olives on the side. You smoke all of your Virginia Slims menthol. You consider. The man you choose is darkly handsome and looks like a French sailor boy—or what you think a French sailor boy might look like, since you have never been to Paris or even seen the sea. He wears a striped knit shirt, bell bottom pants, and has a way of staring at you that suggests arrogance. He helps you on with your coat, runs his hands down your shoulders. The fur lifts, settles. He pays his tab. He pays yours. He says, “Let’s go get something to eat.” You say, “I know where.”

Spokane is a room at the Ridpath, a jacketed waiter who delivers your food on a rolling table covered in white linen. Spokane is lobster that you crack from its shell and pluck out with your fingers, steak that you take in large bites, bones that you suck and gnaw. Spokane is a silver bucket of ice, a bottle of champagne, and a boy whose skin is so smooth, you can only think of parachute silk. Spokane is a miniature envelope of fine cocaine—and, of course, you’re hungry for that too. When he asks if it’s your first time in the city, you say yes, because he may not be ready for the realities of your last time in this city, with a high school chum, now majoring in business at Gonzaga, who wanted to show you Spokane and took you for burgers at Dick’s and then to a dank theater, where the double feature was violent porn and the floor was tacky and the men on both sides wore dark, ugly slickers and smelled like Valvoline. How you went back to your chum’s apartment, back to his waterbed with its headboard full of mirrors and tricky little compartments full of illicit things. How he had another chum, already there, waiting for you, and that chum had a camera, and they didn’t think they could take no for an answer. If there is one thing you’ve learned about this city, it’s that no is never the right answer.

But that was before, and this is now, and some part of you wants to feel more lighthearted than you are and make this boy with his smooth skin laugh. You think you might ask him, Do you know how hard it is to snort cocaine on a waterbed? Instead, you take the tiny straw he offers, keep your mouth shut, because this time, this time, this is your room, your rules, your reality. You’re making it up as you go along, seizing this moment, because Spokane is never tomorrow, when you’ll wake to find the boy has already set sail, when you’ll curl your hair, pull on your elegant coat, take the elevator down, tell the clerk you plan to shop the day away, and walk out the door of The Ridpath into a world you have no idea how to live in.