Paulina & Fran

11

While nagging a hot dog vendor for a pretzel, Paulina smelled familiar perfume. The smell recalled the old, easy life of frolicking and looking at amateur drawings. Paulina turned and saw long black hair trailing away. “Sadie!” she exclaimed.

Sadie recoiled at the voice and walked faster. Midtown was crowded with businesspeople and mascots. A children’s field trip filled the space between Paulina and Sadie. Construction workers were building the new MoMA. Sadie cut a corner. It was the worst time to be spotted. My whole career depends on this interview, she thought. She knocked an old woman off her feet as she passed, then gasped and knelt to help her up. Paulina watched. “Hey,” Sadie said, flustered.

“At last! I’ve been trying to get in touch with you.” Seeing Sadie revived Paulina’s sunken spirits. Sadie was like a misplaced doll, triumphantly found.

“Really? I’m actually late for a job thing,” said Sadie. She would not let herself say, But I’ll call you this week or But let’s meet up for coffee. She turned to go.

“Let’s have a drink tonight,” said Paulina.

“Tonight’s not good,” Sadie said. She slowly walked away and Paulina followed behind. Sadie glanced back. Paulina’s curls were still so healthy and shiny! But other parts of her looked desperate and rundown. Her skin was dry in patches, her eyebrows unruly. Sadie was already mentally relaying the scene to her therapist.

“Is this about the boots? I’ll give them back,” Paulina said. Sadie kept walking. “Is it about Eileen still?” Paulina crossed herself. “I could have been more sensitive. Everyone does their own thing with death.”

They wove around strangers on the sidewalk. Huge buildings shut them off from the sky. “What job thing?” Paulina asked. “How’s that boy you’re seeing?”

“Eric’s good. We have a place together.” Sadie had married Eric just the week before. She had designed her dress — long, blue, with peacock feathers. Only the best people Sadie and Eric knew were invited. Sadie saw no reason to curate the rest of her life any differently. She held her portfolio case with both hands. “This is where I have my appointment,” she told Paulina in front of a black, mirrored tower.

“What kind of job?” Paulina asked. “I’m still looking too, if you can believe it. I’ve been hosting for a restaurant,” she said self-consciously. “But I want something more regular.”

“It’s a fashion thing,” Sadie said dismissively and walked into the lobby. Paulina followed her.

“I like fashion,” Paulina said, adjusting her dress. Her voice echoed into the vaulted ceiling. Sadie checked in at the reception desk and was agitated when Paulina did the same.

They rode up the elevator together. “You need an appointment,” Sadie said. “Plus you don’t have a portfolio.”

Paulina laughed. “I don’t need a portfolio.”

They sat on opposite ends of the waiting room. “What kind of company is this?” Paulina asked the boy next to her.

“Teenage girl stuff. Like Forever 21. There’s this team of new investors in there looking to reinvent the company. A lot of money is sitting at that table!”

Paulina smiled at him and then Sadie, but Sadie wouldn’t return her gaze. A few minutes with Paulina had completely dismantled Sadie’s well-being. Don’t waste yourself on the past, her therapist had stressed after a series of Paulina dreams. Paulina cutting Sadie’s houseplants with scissors. Paulina sitting silently in Sadie’s closet.

The therapist was one of the new things, along with the expensive black portfolio and referring to Eric as her husband. Sadie began a text to Allison that read: Queen Pauline in Midtown, could not shake her, send help, but she needed to focus on the interview; she watched the cursor delete her words. She looked to her phone for a picture of her and Eric that might repair her. The one from the rehearsal dinner. He looked handsome in that picture. There was a good future in his jawline. She had noticed this on the train, years before. The receptionist looked over her marble desk. To Sadie’s dismay, Paulina’s name was called.

Paulina gazed empty-handed at the formal, well-groomed people seated around the conference table. They looked at her expectantly. This was the kind of moment she had been preparing for. Her spontaneous ideas were better than most people’s labored thinking, she told herself. She remembered the way the Venus Flytrap had sauntered over to Eileen’s fish tank and grabbed Eileen’s favorite fish.

Paulina ran her hand over her curls and was flooded with confidence. “Your clientele are easily convinced that wrapping a vintage tablecloth around them will win them true love. The operative word is vintage. Today’s America is grimy and organized. There is none of the romantic languor of gourmet European farm towns. Teens want to look lazy and mysterious. Their clothes shouldn’t tell you if they are rich or poor — it is tedious to be either. The clothes should hint at an adventure just taken place or about to unravel.”

Paulina couldn’t read the executives’ faces. She continued.

“Give them vintage clothes without the stink of someone else’s troubles. This is their golden time. Their boys are virgins. Their surroundings don’t match their exuberance. They need the clothes and music to transform their habitat. They are trying out their personalities, some of them for the first time.”

Paulina looked at a dry erase board where someone’s careful drawing of a sports bra glowed from the projector. The executives stared at her. “What about for the men’s line?” a man asked. His bald head and bushy eyebrows made him look distinguished. He wore a suit like the others and a flashy red shirt. “We might want to go in that direction,” the man said. The others at the table shot him a look. Paulina paused to think. Her mind was as empty as an oven. Stray thoughts passed like birds.

“Is that a Halston?” the man asked. Paulina just stared at him. “Your dress,” he said. “Who is it?”

Paulina clutched the ruffled SUPERTHRIFT dress, which she’d sold to Beacon’s Closet and then stolen back.

“Oh, yes. Halston.” The word sounded good in her mouth. She’d heard of that, of him, from The Andy Warhol Diaries. All her dresses were suddenly Halstons. The man smiled at her, while the others scrutinized her dress.

“If that’s a Halston. .” a woman started to say.

Paulina stepped forward. “Similar for the men,” she said. “Relaxed and brawny. Like they’re coming back from the duck hunt to meet your parents at a restaurant. Like they’re on a solo graffiti mission while everyone else is taking their SATs. Graphic silkscreens, distressed denim, but add some lining, trim, piping. Let the girls and boys continually one-up each other.” The projector moved of its own accord, the sports bra was replaced by a fitted tank top.

“What is your design experience?” a woman asked.

“It’s limited. I don’t see myself designing as much as curating. I have a fantastic sense of predicting and creating trends.”

“May I ask what products you use on your hair?” asked the man in the red shirt.

“It’s something I’ve invented. I’d tell you the ingredients, but my business manager wants me to resist until I get a patent.” Business manager! Paulina reveled at her quick thinking.

“I think we’re done here, Harvey,” one of them said. Someone sighed. The group’s focus broke, and all at once they turned to one another, talking and checking their phones, drinking from the bottles of water that lined the table, opening and closing their laptops. If Paulina had surprised them, now they surpassed her. They had already forgotten her, though she still stood there, unable to leave.

The man reached over the table to give Paulina his card. “Regardless of what the board decides, I invest in beauty products and think we have common interests.” The card burned in her hand. Harvey Benizio.

“But how did your interview go?” Allison asked Sadie, scanning the gallery. She was young to have a solo show, especially at such a big gallery, but she wore her usual clothes and was not nervous. She spotted Gretchen and Fran across the room and looked away.

“Bad. I was totally weirded out. I couldn’t stop thinking about Paulina. What was she doing there? Why did they let her go before me?” Sadie noticed Gretchen and Fran too. “I hear Gretchen is making lots of money. And look, Fran is still wearing that—” Sadie hesitated. They laughed. “Wait, don’t look at them. I never know what to say to her,” Sadie said.

“It’s too late,” Allison said as Gretchen walked toward them.

Fran and Gretchen hugged Allison and Sadie. Fran listened to their polite catch-up, answering “Hudson” and “house painting” and “still looking” when they inquired. She felt they could tell she’d spent the last month on Craigslist applying to decorate cakes, shear sheep, paint faces, and deliver flowers. They could sense that she’d considered posing for photographs and then researched pepper spray. Then looked into police sketch training and tattoo artist training. She applied to so many postings that she couldn’t remember them the next morning, and not a single one replied.

Fran swayed in place looking for Paulina. Important art world people talked across the room and cool-looking kids their age drank and laughed, but no one seemed exciting. The kids looked so like her old classmates that at first Fran assumed it was them, but this group was cleaner and more stylish. They were Cooper Union graduates who’d spent their saved tuition money on designer sneakers and mopeds. Whereas Fran’s classmates had a battered, psychedelic vibe, these ex-students had appropriated a trailer-trash, hillbilly look — the boys at least. The girls were dressed like new wave French philosophers. They already had jobs and studios. Each had his or her own look, and was slowly exposing the art world to it, stamping themselves in.

Fran was jealous of them, but it was a yearning jealousy. If the jealousy had a voice it might have sung, Fuck you, posers! Seduce me and give me a job. Let us work side by side in the big studio building on Twenty-Seventh, or is it Twenty-Fifth? Do you know Dana Schutz? The painter Dana Schutz — do you know her e-mail address? Never mind, just take me home and dress me. Confess to me. Take me to your roof-deck or the roof-deck of your friend.

Her desire to know them was overpowered by doubt and pride. What could they show her? They had never loved and sweated on the Color Club floor. They were part of the gallery, the gallery’s moving parts, an ambiance of youth staring at the bright drips and smears on the big square canvases. I love your paintings, Fran was about to tell Allison, when a tall willowy woman came over to Allison and said, “I love your paintings, dear.”

Allison turned to talk to her, leaving Sadie, Gretchen, and Fran to themselves.

“That’s Adria Bennet,” Sadie whispered. Gretchen gasped.

“Who?” Fran asked.

“This totally awesome artist from London.” The boredom set in again. When Fran used to take breaks with the house painters, no one needed to say anything, but here in the gallery she was afraid of being boring, she was afraid Sadie was boring, but she had entirely nothing to say.

“Remember that figure model Apollo?” Fran ventured. The girls laughed and Fran felt a nervous release.

“He’s doing really well as a musician right now,” Gretchen said. “He opened for Gorgeous Cyclops at Webster Hall. My friend is doing the art for his album.” Fran’s hair felt dry. She self-consciously braided it out of sight.

Sadie saw people she knew and went to greet them. Fran read Allison’s artist statement on the wall.

My work affects my relationships with people. A painting will change my relationship to my parents, even though the painting is completely abstract.

Fran panicked. “Remember Marvin?” Fran asked Gretchen. “What happened to him? Where did he go?” Gretchen was so tired of Fran that even a small inquiry like this physically annoyed her.

“Is that Paulina?” Gretchen asked, squinting.

“Where?” Fran turned. Gretchen motioned to the window.

“I thought I saw her, but it was someone else.”

“What do you think will happen to her?” Fran asked.

“I think she’ll just go man to man, hitchhiking the world. That’s what Dean said.”

“Maybe she’ll end up with a woman,” Fran said, blushing.

“She’s going to be one of those old ladies who draws in fake cheekbones. She’ll probably keep birds.”

“Wait, when did you see Dean?” Fran asked in disbelief. Then a startling thing happened. A boy walked over and started to talk to Gretchen, first about her glasses. (Were they Selima Salaun?) (Fran was shocked to hear they were) and then they talked about Gretchen’s job, and then the boy’s job, and his Yaddo residency, and Gretchen’s Ping-Pong skills, and then they drifted off toward the wine, leaving Fran in the center of the gallery with nothing to look at except Allison’s paintings, while around her strangers laughed, and drank, and got on with their lives. The paintings were good in an infuriating way, a way Fran wasn’t able to articulate to Sadie’s husband. “You know they’re good,” he said. “I know they’re good. Why do we have to know why?”

“But that was the whole point of our school,” Sadie explained, and she and her husband laughed.

Fran went out to the sidewalk to look for Paulina. A group of adults crowded around a bulldog and a poodle, making baby talk. Two men stood smoking. “Did you guys see a girl my age out here? She’s got dark curly hair. . almost reddish.”

“Sort of weirdly dressed and carrying on about something or other?” one of the men asked. Fran nodded excitedly. “Yeah, we saw her.” Fran’s heart leapt. “And fuckin’ twenty more just like her.” They laughed.

Most of the pay phones in the city were broken. The receiver had been ripped out or the whole console removed, exposing a mass of wires. Symbols were scraped into the glass enclosures, any remaining phone books shredded to bits. Paulina dialed Harvey’s number from the last working pay phone in the East Village, her heart trembling with each ring. When his secretary (a terse, androgynous voice) said Harvey was unavailable, she said she’d call back.

Carrying her bag of essentials, Paulina hopped a turnstile into the subway and endured steel drum music all the way to Queens. Her red boots punished her every step toward Renaldo’s. There, she loitered in the lot behind the kitchen until someone — the old cook this time — went out for a smoke. Shivering for effect, she asked him to dump some of the leftover food in a box for her, and promised this act would make him shine brightly in God’s eyes (wherever He may be) and ensure that George ascended to heaven when his time came, that instead of cooking for others he would get to run his own restaurant up there. George refused, threatening to call Renaldo.

Distressed by the idea of Renaldo seeing her unwashed dress, Paulina ran off, her bag weighing her down like an anchor. After an hour of fruitless wandering, she shoplifted a premade sandwich from a bodega and devoured it in the weeds behind a nearby gas station, listening to the wind roll a crushed beer can over the pavement and teenagers bicker over a lost bet. On the subway back, she lay across three seats in low spirits. She ran through the rain to the Starbucks bathroom, where she sat on the toilet long after she was finished, ignoring the knocks and voices, then brushed her teeth with the tattered toothbrush she kept in her bag.

I had so much potential, Paulina thought as she looked for a spot to sleep in the park. But I am renowned for nothing! She moaned loudly, stirring the dealers from their benches. Two scuttled toward her in the darkness, trying to sell her drugs.

The next morning, when Harvey was again unavailable, Paulina read off the number of the pay phone to the secretary. This time she added that it was Urgent! and that she’d be leaving the country very soon.

All day she sat in the phone booth, eating old croissants from the bakery across the street. Finally the phone rang. Paulina took a deep breath, smoothed her eyebrows, and answered it as professionally as she knew how, but it was a woman asking for Percy. Though men of all shapes and sizes walked by with briefcases and dogs, holding phones to their faces, smoking their cigarettes, Paulina insisted there was no soul in sight. When the woman kept chattering on, Paulina hung up.

She left the booth only to pee and get water. She watched birds peck at a pizza crust until it was just a few burnt crumbs. Every time the phone rang, it was the same woman. “I can see no man living or dead,” Paulina said, tired of life.

“But Percy gave me this exact number!” the woman cried.

“What does he look like,” Paulina asked. “In case he shows later.”

“He’s short and pale and has eyes like the devil, and he’ll be drunk because Aggie doesn’t care right for him—”

“Just give me your number,” Paulina said. “I’ll write it down.”

The woman repeated her number twice, and Paulina said uh-huh after each digit, but did not write it down, did not care what became of Percy or anyone else. She slumped against the cold glass. She felt like a useless body of itches, pains, and wants.

She spent the night in the phone booth, awakened twice by crazy people who wanted the phone, and once by a cop with something to prove. Harvey didn’t call. After a second day by the phone, she was dreaming of the old college town. Could she live in some unused studio, getting swipes off freshmen’s meal cards? A hunched woman poked Paulina’s bag with a stick. Paulina shooed her away.