Paulina & Fran

10

A week later, they all graduated in faux silk, then, like trash in the water, floated off to lousy jobs in obscure towns and heartless cities. Terrible things happened in the news. People killed one another in inventive ways, and Fran read about it guiltily, as if her interest promoted it.

Fran hadn’t expected to move to Upstate New York, but it was satisfying to paint houses. It felt human to trust ladders. It was the only job that responded. She’d gotten the call the same day she applied, and had accepted the offer before finding Hudson on a map. She’d be in nature! Or near nature.

She slept in the extra room of an old woman’s house. The room had two windows, a small closet, and a sooty fireplace where spiders traveled long distances to die. Fran used the fireplace as an altar for her one love letter from Julian and a student evaluation from Sampson. She looked to these little papers in the dark, evidence that she could impress people.

When Ruthie had showed her the house, Fran was so charmed by her quick wit and wise eyes that she hadn’t looked at the other apartments on her list. Fran imagined the old woman telling her life story over glasses of wine. Fran saw herself spiritually reviving the old woman, perhaps somehow encouraging a love affair between Ruthie and an old (but handsome) mailman or neighbor, and this successful union would be so emotionally satisfying that Fran wouldn’t mind being single herself, having done this good deed. These fantasies vanished once Fran moved in. It seemed Ruthie had saved all her energy and good spirits for that first meeting and now she returned to her normal state of reading the newspaper and forgetting she had water boiling. Nights, Ruthie slept in front of the television surrounded by a haunted civilization of dolls, figurines, and fake flowers.

As Fran tiptoed around Ruthie, she thought of her fellow graduates trying new drugs, seeing old bands, taking the road trip people took from one part of California to another. Weekends she took herself to the local bar, Gruff’s, dressed like she was still at school, waiting to be discovered. If Paulina were here she thought, we’d make friends with the old men playing Hearts, we’d flood the jukebox with Bowie and buy each other weird drinks — but Paulina had left her in the bathroom.

At the Lanfers’ house, which they were painting a very dark blue, she threw the tarp off the ladder and sat waiting for the others. The company was run by an angry old man. The other painters were men in their thirties and forties. They smoked and had tanned, worn skin. On break they all ate sandwiches in the shade. It felt very American to Fran.

She spoiled good days calling Julian’s old number and hearing the robot woman’s voice—the number you are trying to reach is no longer in service, please try again. Only I could be jealous of a computer’s voice, she thought. She had no one to talk to. She was friends with Allen and Pete at work, but they didn’t hang out. No one went to the farmer’s market with her. She walked there herself.

At school she’d seen herself as special, but in the weeks since graduation the world had slowed and now it was clear that everyone was as insignificant as the scrappy backyards one passes on trains. Forget style or talent; now it seemed the best thing a person could have was a house. One bought a house and then chose a color. The first house Fran helped paint was purplish gray, a ghostly, nuanced color. A woman on Franklin Avenue picked a fiery orange. One chose a color and a lover. One found a lover and trapped them with love.

“Are you coming?” Gretchen asked, her familiar voice breaking through the cocoon of Fran’s new life — the faint crackling of a record at the end of its side, a foreboding smell that filled the kitchen whenever Fran or Ruthie opened the fridge.

“That’s why I’m calling,” Fran said. “I can’t. I paint too slow. I have to work today.”

“But it’s a holiday!”

“I know. I can hear firecrackers down the street. But I gotta go to the Lanfers’.” Fran wondered if Gretchen was mad. A box fan blew from her window. “The guys I paint with call me Snail,” she said. “Isn’t that cute?” Talking to Gretchen, new Brooklyn Gretchen, Fran had to root hard for herself, convince herself that she was the interesting one, she was the artist. Julian had loved her, might still love her. She could hear people where Gretchen was, people laughing. “Where are you?”

“I’m at the party. I’m on some guy’s roof. Some guy James knows. It’s really fun. People are comparing tattoos. A bunch of kids from school are going to come by later.”

Fran looked out her bedroom window where Ruthie was watering the plants with a big rusted can. “What do you even do out there?” Fran asked, knowing.

“Branding. Web design.” There was a long pause in which Fran could hear a female voice calling plaintively for ice. “Are you making paintings?” Gretchen asked.

“Tons,” Fran said, looking at her blank wall. Nights she lay on her futon, daring herself to paint, afraid the painting would be bad. “There’s an old barn where they let me paint.” This sounded plausible but wasn’t true. Fran could hear Gretchen talking to someone. “Who is that?” she asked. “Someone from school?”

“It’s hard to hear you. It’s really crazy here. Everyone’s been drinking all day. Just move here. You can stay with me until you get a job. We’ll hang out. We’ll have fun.” Fran heard music and more talking on Gretchen’s end. It sounded like Gretchen had grown prettier to the world. Fran pressed Ruthie’s landline receiver to her face. It smelled like saliva from the eighties.

“Well, thanks. I might do that sometime. But I don’t like crowds. Plus Paulina,” Fran said. “I don’t want to see her.”

“I haven’t run into her once,” Gretchen said, losing patience. “New York isn’t the size of a room.”

“Remember when you hated Paulina?”

“I overreacted,” Gretchen said. “I didn’t like being mad at Andrew, so I took it out on her.”

Gretchen itched to get off the phone. Freshman year, Fran had been the loveliest, most interesting person Gretchen had ever met. They used to lie on the grass and Fran would captivate her with stories and non sequiturs. Now she sounded more like a runaway teen than a promising artist.

“You talked about her endlessly!” Fran exclaimed.

“Yeah, but I got over it.”

There was so long a pause that Fran wondered if Gretchen had forgotten about her.

“Did you ever remember your e-mail password?” Gretchen asked suddenly.

“Yes, and I wrote it down. But I still don’t own a computer.”

The Internet isn’t just a fad, you know, Gretchen had once told her in the Computer Lab. Now she just said, “Okay, well, gotta go, talk soon, bye.”

Fran daydreamed about the party (audacious colors, music dug up from a time capsule). She imagined moving to New York, walking with Gretchen, some man running into her and her slides falling on the ground, the man holding them up to the light. .

Fran’s paintings show a wonderful mastery of color, light, and form. This semester’s work benefited from her decision to stop painting from photographs, and instead draw from the vivid pictures in her mind. The result is a brilliant skewing. In these pieces, life is slanted and disproportionate. Humans look demonic and unreal. Without details to copy, Fran’s lines and washes render emotions through texture. The color palette is completely unexpected. Should she continue in this path, she will find herself far beyond her original skills.

She could recite it. She stood in the shower washing the paint from her skin, thinking, The result is a brilliant skewing. At her desk, Fran sketched the faces of the house painters she spent her days with, but the drawings looked cartoonish. She scribbled over them with her expensive art pencil. She smoked the wimpy clump of weed she’d bought off Allen and lay down on the floor.

The world was relaxing and rejoicing. She rolled over and did two pushups. The world was having sex and getting drunk. She lay naked on her bed, but was too bored to masturbate. She imagined this written on a T-shirt: TOO BORED TO MASTURBATE. Or maybe: 2 BORED 2 MASTURBATE. She imagined selling the shirt to Spencer’s and Hot Topic, getting rich. She knelt by the fireplace.

Dear Fran,

You are in class right now. I am sitting in your bed. Your room is filthy! There are mountains of clothing. .

She folded the letter back up. Tonight is the night I dance at the bar, she told herself. No matter what music is playing. And everyone will get up and dance with me. I will meet the kids who squat in the warehouse. She searched her closet for something to represent her.

At the bar, she danced to classic rock songs with a crew of drunken girls who wore gold hoop earrings and bras that thrust whatever breasts they had high into the night. “I would kill for your hair!” one of the girls told her. Another yelled, “I’m Annie!” in her ear. There was a good ten minutes of cathartic dancing. The girls applauded Fran’s flamboyant moves, accepting her into their group. Fran felt a rush from this, but soon discovered that the girls were only performing for the men at Gruff’s. These men, unshaven and cloaked in flannel, clutched their beers and made no motions toward dancing. Their eyes were locked on the TV.

Lying in bed, waiting for sleep, a circus of thoughts flashed within Fran. She would make new paintings and get her paintings in the town library, and then in a coffee shop, and then in a. . She didn’t like the galleries in town. She would start a gallery in a shack and then move it. . She would become a realtor. She would travel to Haiti — no, to Egypt — and a man would approach her and be Julian.

Fran could hear the voices of the visiting artists from her painting classes telling her to move to New York City. One couldn’t be a real artist out here, they insisted. One might flourish upstate, but only after making it in the city. She had to go to galleries, she knew. She had to suffer, and do her suffering in the right place.

Sadie and Allison had ignored Paulina’s calls after graduation, forcing her to get an apartment in New York with a pregnant stranger. No one Paulina wanted to see would see her. Instead she got drunk with bores. Her style was wasted on those around her. Hustling down Midtown streets with a crowd of strangers, she would crack and start telling the others how to live. There was a better New York she’d read about, and she saw it in short moments that excluded her. A crazy man dressed all in white, with tight pants, shiny white shoes, and gold jewelry winked at her, and she felt he was magic or special, that he had something to say. But when she crossed the street toward him, he screamed at her.

She’d heard that Fran was in New York too, and for the first few weeks she stepped onto every train with grace, thinking Fran would be watching. They’d graduated a few names away from each other, but hadn’t spoken since the bathroom orgasm. Paulina moped among the racks in overpriced vintage stores. She got a job at a discount shoe store, then discovered Renaldo’s, where she worked for months before the incident.

Renaldo’s was an old, updated saloon with the best Italian food in Queens. A long bar lined one side and the ceiling was gold tin. It was the first place in the city that moved Paulina — that resembled the secret New York she’d dreamed of. “In a past life I frequented here,” she’d told the bartender her first night. Later, when a fight broke out in the party room, Paulina excitedly clutched at the flocked wallpaper. She returned the next day with her résumé and met Renaldo himself.

Eventually Renaldo was forced to fire her, but she didn’t blame him. She blamed Philip. His teasingly lean physique. His hands in suds. His apron ties falling untied. She’d had little effect on him. At first he answered her questions and listened to her, and Paulina felt an electric attraction between them. She dressed more and more provocatively and bought him drinks after their shift. She tried to respect his shy manner, but started to suspect it was just another sex game.

She played the game. She bought him a record — he said he liked records — and waited for him to take her up on her offer, but eventually he ceased all communication, even when she snuck away from her stand to keep him company in the kitchen. By then, she could wait no longer, and boldly showed him what he was missing.

Paulina much preferred Renaldo’s Queens apartment to her own. It was decorated with sports memorabilia. She liked the smoky smell. The cracks between the floor slats were filled with crumbs and bits of paper. “You look like someone who does scratch-off tickets,” she’d told him after she got the hostess job.

“Desperate?” he’d asked, surprised.

“Local,” she’d said.

Renaldo didn’t condone her actions. What she had done to Philip was wrong. If a man had done that to a woman, Renaldo would have turned the man in. But she entertained him. After he fired her, she’d pleaded with him for work, and for a short while she worked the books for him, until it was discovered she’d been shortchanging Philip. Renaldo was still sore about it, but by then he was sleeping with her. She’d made herself a key one day while he was in the shower, and hung around his house like the last guest at a party.

“If you even kiss that girl, she’ll never leave you alone,” his friend Andy warned him one night as they smoked outside the restaurant.

Renaldo agreed. There was something unstable about Paulina, like a top, or a wrecking ball.

“You’ve already fucked her, haven’t you?” Andy laughed. Renaldo looked off toward the Queensboro Bridge in the distance. “Stop me when I get ahead of myself. Has she already moved in?”

Renaldo stayed quiet. Andy scoffed at him. It was Andy who had pulled Paulina off Philip, while the cooks laughed and hit their pans.

Fran sat on Gretchen’s couch, tired from the bus, still picking the fiery orange paint off her leg. The week before, she’d spilled a paint bucket on the porch of the Franklin Avenue house. She’d stood stunned as it pooled and dripped onto the white trim Allen had just finished, then fell onto the flowers below, spotting them, coating them, then flattening them. “Oh, hell!” Pete had shouted. “Pick up the bucket!”

She’d spent a disastrous week chipping away the orange, sanding down the boards, and then repainting, knowing the whole time she’d be fired when she finished. Her boss took the damage costs out of her last paycheck. She hadn’t cried, though, she reminded herself, surveying the boxes in Gretchen’s living room. Gretchen was true to her promise and said Fran could crash at her place until she got a job. Fran opened a new Photoshop file on Gretchen’s computer and wrote Thank You! in a silly font, but then erased the words, remembering how Gretchen criticized her when she’d said she didn’t want to see Allison’s show.

Fran struggled with her résumé in Word. She knew that Gretchen would be opposed to her use of borders, but Gretchen would never know. She had no phone herself, so she put down Gretchen’s number. She applied for an artist assistant job in Chelsea and felt so certain she would get it that it seemed a waste to try for others, but she applied for two more. One was an art-handling job in Long Island City. That would be good, Fran thought. She’d get strong. Hopefully not too strong, she thought. The other job was a graphic design job. She’d just ask Gretchen what she didn’t know.

Fran allowed herself to go through Gretchen’s closet and try on her new clothes. While she was digging around, she saw a fancy wood box that probably hid a dildo or a scroll of confessions, but she wouldn’t let herself open it. She found a drawing she’d given Gretchen at school — and Gretchen had folded it. Fran fumed. Graphic designers weren’t real artists, she thought. They just made signs. They just made money. Fran opened the wood box and it was filled with jewelry. She slammed it shut.

When Renaldo got back from work, he found Paulina on the couch reading a magazine, as she’d been every day that week. “How’s the new girl?” she asked.

“Fine. Good.” He took off his work shirt and put on a T-shirt.

“I had a particular flair for the job though, wouldn’t you say?”

“I’ve said as much myself,” he said.

“If only you’d have let Philip go instead,” she began softly. Renaldo laughed. “He’s a tragic figure,” Paulina said.

“That’s what you say about your roommate,” Renaldo said.

“Everyone is tragic.” He stared at her ill-fitting dress. “It’s too hot to fuck,” she said. “If that’s what you’re thinking.”

He shook his head. He’d known at first sight that he wanted Paulina for Renaldo’s, but she’d been trouble from the beginning. She talked too much. Her attitude took up space. She had the condescending gaze of a palm reader.

“Am I tragic?” he asked her, pouring two glasses of whiskey from the bottle he kept on the counter.

“Hell yes,” she laughed. “You are middle-aged, tragic in itself. You wanted a life of adventure, but you’re stuck in Queens. You gamble half your money away and spend the rest on me, an overeducated drifter.”

“But the restaurant,” he said, smiling. He handed Paulina a glass and sat back in his worn leather recliner.

“The restaurant is great,” she agreed.

“You don’t know real tragedy. You’re twenty-two. How could you?”

“I have always known tragedy,” Paulina insisted and told him the life story she used as her own, the one that had horrified her years ago in the bus stop downtown. Renaldo listened, gently rattling the ice in his glass. It was a riveting, sickening story.

“None of that happened to you,” he said afterward. “Where did you read that, in a book?” He reached over and finished her whiskey for her. Paulina pouted.

“Most of it happened.”

He laughed. “Where are your parents really?”

“Dead, like I said.” This part she’d almost convinced herself was true.

“Both in a plane crash?” he asked dubiously.

“One in the plane crash, the other in the boating accident,” she said with stony eyes.

“Which one was in which?” he asked, amused.

“Does it matter?!” She looked off. She imagined flames. Flames and waves. She imagined herself standing over two serious graves.

Renaldo glanced back toward the payroll books on his rolltop desk. “By the way, it’s official. I put Andy on accounting.” He watched her face adjust. “It’s nothing personal. You know I like having you around.”

She looked at him with disdain. “It’s too hot to fuck,” she said. He shook his head. Andy was right. It was a real task to rid himself of her. With difficulty, she took off her dress and strutted over to where he sat hunched in his chair. She sat on his lap. Sexually, he found her exhausting. It was baffling that she wanted him. Girls her age usually avoided his eyes completely. She drew her face close to his.

For weeks, he’d been dreaming of a way to end things without hurting her pride, and now it came to him simply. “I’m getting too attached to you,” he said into her neck. He ached under her weight. “I don’t want you to see anyone else.”

Paulina glowed from this victory. All month she’d camped out by his heart with little love of her own, but a stubborn need to star in someone’s life.

She eyed his small apartment. By the front door was a cheap elephant statue where Renaldo kept his keys. There was a brown spot where the bulb had burned a hole in his lampshade. All of it could be hers: The king-sized bed. The mirrored drawers. The Southern accent he used for jokes. The pile of cop novels in his closet. The drooping Mets tattoo on his bicep. He winced under her weight, and she did not shift. “I think I. .” His voice ventured out as if on a tightrope. Familiar dread enveloped Paulina, slowing her hearing. The fan sounded rickety. Everything felt flawed.

“I’m unable to love you back in a permanent way,” she said. “I have a plan, actually many plans for myself, and none of them take place here.” He nodded at her. Paulina felt a kind of momentum she had lacked for months. She transcended Renaldo’s and Renaldo and the whole lazy affair she had orchestrated. She felt dangerously attractive to men and bloated with potential.

But, Paulina had no other place to go besides her buggy apartment. She despised the other young people in the city. She had no money. She didn’t want to leave his lap. She pictured Philip’s gray eyes. “Let’s end this right,” she said, throwing herself into a long, aggressive kiss. Renaldo kissed her back. He loves me, Paulina thought, and it made him seem weak to her. She fantasized his death, being the last woman he loved.

Fuck Philip, she thought, pulling off Renaldo’s shirt. Fran would have wanted Philip. Might have gotten Philip. Fuck Fran. Paulina tugged at Renaldo’s pants, then lay waiting on the couch. Renaldo stood and sighed, taking off his pants and underwear. I’m fucking you, Philip, she thought, and the thought echoed in the chamber of her body. I’m fucking you, Fran, she thought again and again and again until the words had no meaning. Afterward, she felt immense love for Renaldo. He is unlucky to lose me, she thought, and left him minutes later while he was in the bathroom.

The sublet ended when Danielle had the baby. The baby looked awful and red, but Danielle insisted that’s how they were supposed to look. Without her scholarship’s stipend, Paulina couldn’t afford another apartment. She sold her clothes to the overpriced vintage stores she abhorred. She thought of her parents as the two serious graves. She imagined her hometown bombed out and boarded. She imagined a sad scrapbook of her parents’ obituaries. She pictured herself pulling out this scrapbook and showing people. Renaldo coming across the scrapbook in his apartment. Renaldo being moved by the scrapbook. Renaldo laughing at the fake scrapbook.

Paulina pocketed muffins at bodegas. She found no glamour in the poverty she’d dreamed of as a child. She slept in the playgrounds of parks. She washed herself in the bathroom at Port Authority. Through it all, her hair looked impeccable.

“Hair is the outgrowth of the soul,” she told a man at the bar. He laughed. She examined his glasses, his tie, his shoes. He started to tell a story involving a scandal in the finance world — a good sign. For the last week, she’d been sleeping in the art lofts in Bushwick. One boy would take her home; the next day she’d befriend his neighbor in the hall. The boys were less distracted than the warehouse guys from the art school, but their lofts were decorated the same way: stolen street signs, Christmas lights, Dr. Bronner’s nonsense on the soap in the shower, bikes on the wall, unfinished projects taking up whole tables or rooms.

But tonight she wanted a nice apartment, someone who had to be up early for a job. Sometimes she sat in the corner of a bar, shyly looking at her hands like she’d been stood up by a date. She knew how to play pool so badly that men couldn’t resist instructing her. Each man held a little promise for her — food, time, space.

In the middle of the night, she woke up in a high-rise apartment in Brooklyn Heights, then stayed awake, pretending she lived there. She made a messy omelet and devoured it. She looked for women’s clothing in the spare closet. She showered and deep conditioned her hair. An I Love Lucy marathon comforted her. Through it all, Paulina wrote on the back of an issue of GQ, I still think I will find—

“What the fuck are you doing?” the finance guy asked, squinting in the doorway.