Paulina & Fran

12

Though Gretchen had outgrown Fran professionally and emotionally and now had more than a dozen friends she much preferred, she still spent an occasional hour or two with Fran if she showed up outside Gretchen’s office after work. She still found relief looking at Fran’s face — it truly was like a face from a painting, the eyes staring into thoughts, the mouth open slightly in the moment before or after speaking.

It had been more than a year since Fran moved out of Gretchen’s apartment. While they inhabited the same space, Fran’s life seemed to crawl by one minute at a time, as Gretchen waited for her to get an interview, and then an outfit, and then an apartment. You could at least do the dishes, Gretchen had thought every day she came home to find Fran lying stoned on the carpet with a T. Rex song on repeat. After Fran moved out, her life seemed to move at an accelerated pace. Every time they talked there was some boy or roommate or coworker taking up her thoughts, as it had been before with Julian and Paulina.

At a bar, Gretchen half listened to Fran’s issues with her latest boyfriend, a psychology major who insisted on biking to Fran’s Bushwick sublet and always arrived late, exhausted, and ranting about animal rights. Once Fran had taken him to a party at Gretchen’s and he’d sat in a closet, reading the New York Times on his laptop. Before him she had been seeing a waifish sound recorder Gretchen had never met, but whose penis Fran had twice drawn for her on a napkin.

Since Fran made little money painting ceilings and walking dogs, while Gretchen landed client after client, Gretchen regularly paid for their meals and drinks, while Fran mumbled things about “getting a real job” and “taking whatever I can get.” This time, when Gretchen was about to lay down her card, Fran stopped her and put down cash instead.

“Okay, so here’s the real news,” Fran said, nearly skipping toward the subway. “That career counselor got me an interview for a job writing test questions. I had it yesterday. I got it!”

“Congrats!” Gretchen said, truly startled at the news.

“I bet it will give me a lot of painting ideas.”

“Really?” Gretchen asked, no longer hiding the doubt she so often hid by forcing her eyebrows straight and her voice even.

“Well, it’s visual art test questions, so it’s creative.”

“Where is it?”

“Ohio.”

“You’d leave all this for Ohio?” she asked, pronouncing the word like it was an ancient place no longer on the map.

“There are still people in Ohio. There are bars. I think there’s even art in Ohio!” Fran was showing some of the old, senseless passion that Gretchen had forgotten. “Jim Dine is from Ohio. Jim Drain is from Ohio. .”

“I know someone who fucked Jim Drain,” Gretchen ventured.

They silently crossed the street.

“Yeah?” Fran waited for Gretchen to ask her more about the job, but Gretchen was covertly checking her phone. More and more often Gretchen chose the tiny world in her phone over Fran. She scrolled through the little pictures of the little people in the phone, her face lighting up with a ghost-white glow.

“I thought you’d be excited for me,” Fran said, staring at a homeless woman sleeping under cardboard.

“You should be painting, not selling your soul,” Gretchen said without looking up.

“Since when do you care about my paintings?” Fran asked, watching Gretchen drop the phone into her leather purse. “You know, I saw that drawing I gave you. You folded it.”

“What? The one you were going to throw out anyway? The one I rescued? Does it have a sort of dog person licking an angel?”

“It was Marvin as a deity, I think,” Fran said haltingly. It wasn’t such an achievement, Fran admitted to herself, but folding a drawing was inhumane. This kind of moment was occurring more often between them. It was like the bending of a stick — a moment where one could push harder and finally snap the bond. Fran would feel Gretchen’s view of love was callous, or Gretchen would challenge Fran’s nostalgia for school, but always they let the disagreements die in silence, protecting the tradition of the friendship, though sometimes that was all it was. They saw each other because they saw each other. They saw each other because they’d seen each other.

But Fran was thinking of her new job now; she no longer cared about the drawing. Burn the past to light the future, she thought, though the words came from an unknown source. “Anyway, I’ve been packing and stuff. I’m excited.” She pictured herself at a desk, in her own cubicle. She imagined a digital display of all her earnings — big red numbers climbing quickly, like the ones near Union Square.

Gretchen suddenly remembered the coat she’d once lent Fran, a Rebecca Taylor coat that was surely the most expensive item in Fran’s closet.

“I don’t know how my roommates will take it,” Fran said thoughtfully. “I haven’t told them yet because I wanted to wait until I really—”

“Can I have my coat back?” Gretchen asked. “I mean before you pack it up.”

“What?” Fran searched her pockets for her MetroCard as they took the steps down to the L train. “Oh yeah, of course.”

The donate/destroy pile took up half of her room. Boxes of plaid stockings, gold leggings, fringe-covered boots, a zip-up one-piece with racing stripes, a tinfoil crown, ribbons, garish SUPERTHRIFT purses, high school friendship rings, mix tapes from boys, depressing underground comic books, old art history handouts, and a globe that Marvin had painted black. “I won’t need this stuff in Ohio,” she told Gretchen, who pawed through the clothes without finding a single thing worth adopting.

“Yeah, all you’ll need is a fleece and, like, a deli sandwich,” Gretchen said, reunited with her coat.

“What’s wrong with fleece?” Fran asked self-consciously.

“Nothing. It’s just the opposite of fashion. It’s a gateway drug to an unglamorous life of sitcoms and deli sandwiches and watching sports. .”

“But it’s cold in Ohio,” Fran said. “And I like deli sandwiches.” Gretchen laughed. With the potential end of their friendship finally so near, both girls felt a giddiness, and then a clinginess, but they could stay in touch, they reassured each other, if they wanted to, they thought.

Paulina sat in the desk chair in Harvey’s office, looking over the figures. “This is how much you’ll give me just for the ingredients?” The number made her tingle. She acted bored by it. The week before, she had demonstrated her products on Harvey’s sister-in-law in her Upper West Side apartment. Then, a few days ago, Paulina and Harvey had met with a hair scientist who confirmed its effect.

Recently, Paulina had been sleeping in the cramped apartment of a chubby drum teacher named Devon. She cooked dinner and cleaned for him while he gave lessons. At first this arrangement worked fine, but after Paulina failed to attend a band practice of Devon’s, he acted coldly toward her. His roommate started latching the deadbolt. Sometimes Devon wouldn’t answer his phone, and then Paulina either slept by his door or went out and found some other lonely soul. Sometimes it took hours.

“For the ingredients and the right to own and manufacture the products,” Harvey said. “That is, only if it’s approved by the FDA.” Over the last week, Paulina had gotten used to Harvey. She liked his suits and his mannerisms. His eyes were always flickering, doing the quick work of his mind. He repeatedly ran his hand over his bald head. Paulina liked his wife, Viv, and their Chelsea apartment, and the world of deals and design, private cars and business meetings.

“But what about me? You need me!” Paulina told him. She was wearing her best clothes. She wagged her finger at him.

“I like you, but I don’t need you. You know nothing about business. What are you, twenty-three? With a what degree? An arts degree?”

Paulina gritted her teeth. His original figure was more than enough. It would set her up for a few years. She could finally rent her own place. She so badly wanted a bathroom of her own. She wanted a refrigerator filled with food. A bed she didn’t have to share. But why should Harvey have all the fun? What if the labels were tacky?

“Who’s going to be the spokesman for this thing?” Paulina asked. “Some middle-aged man? No offense, Harvey, but only I can represent this company! Don’t you know anything about PR? Wouldn’t it be great press if a twenty-four-year-old genius started her own company? A woman-owned company for a women’s hair product?”

Harvey watched Paulina fiddle with the sculptures that decorated his desk. He pictured her face on the website, her signature on the bottle. “What would you call it?” he asked her.

“SUPERCURL,” she said with no hesitation.

That sounded okay to Harvey. Nothing mind-bending, but it sounded sharp. She was making all the right points. Still, he could do it without her. He could use his sister-in-law, Rebecca, as the spokeswoman. She had the same kind of hair. “This number is more than fair,” he said. “But I can throw on a few more thousand if you’ll feel better about it.”

Paulina scowled at him. “Listen. I’ve done my research. I’ve been to salons. I’ve seen the horror work they do to curly hair. You can’t comprehend the physical pain and mental suffering! SUPERCURL will be the world’s best product line for curly hair!”

She was smart, this one — he had to admit it. She’d kept him laughing all week, telling him and Viv all sorts of crazy stories at dinner. And her poor mother had gotten into a horrible boating accident. Harvey could see Paulina’s vision and see beyond it. They could make curly hair seem like a cult. Hell, it was a cult. Even Rebecca and Paulina, who had little in common, had quickly bonded over their curls.

“SUPERCURL,” he said to himself. The phone rang.

“That’s right,” Paulina said, spinning side to side in her desk chair.

Harvey turned and took the call.

Paulina listened to him talk to someone about something. When he laughed, she worried that it might be at her. She stood as if to leave, to get his eyes back on her, to show him he needed her, but he motioned for her to stay and she sat back down.

Marveling at the cows in the fields, the roadkill on the highway, the schizophrenic voice of the radio, Fran drove her rental car to a small town outside of Cleveland where she had already paid first, last, and security for her new apartment. She flirted with the high school boys who worked the supermarket registers. She befriended stray cats. She took long breaths that meant: My new life, I am ready, begin!

It isn’t half bad, she wrote in a letter Gretchen took weeks to answer. There’s a record shop and a crêpe place and a park where local bands play in a gazebo. Fran moved into a basement apartment in an all-studio building. There was always a tenant smoking dejectedly under the awning, even when it was raining, especially when it was raining.

On Fran’s first day, Meryl, the woman who interviewed her, led Fran through the Levrett-Mercer office, introducing her. Meryl’s tanned skin was loose on her bones. She wore long skirts that failed to conceal her white tennis shoes. Her plainness, her frumpishness, seemed to certify that she was good at math and work.

Meryl pointed to a girl with short red hair. “This is Jane. She’s been here for two years. An artist like you.” Jane smiled. She had sunken eyes and thin lips. Besides this, she wasn’t bad looking. She was even pretty, Fran thought. But Fran found herself focusing on the sunken eyes and thin lips, as if it were a competition to be the prettiest girl in the expansive corporate building.

“I went to MICA,” Jane said. Her gray dress pants fit well on her long legs, and Fran saw the outline of small breasts through her white button-down shirt.

“I went to art school too,” Fran said, feeling satisfaction from having gone to a better school. Jane smiled, then turned back to her work. Meryl nodded.

“You’ll be a floater, like Jane. So every day just come to me when you get here, and we’ll find you a spot.”

Floaters rotated around the abandoned cubicles. Sometimes one would be referred to as Fred’s old cubicle, or Roy’s, and Fran would wonder, What happened to Fred? And she would imagine a tragic end. The cubicles were nearly identical. Each had a faux wood desk, a boxy black monitor, an adjustable desk chair, a file cabinet, and a company calendar that shrunk the whole year to a few inches.

Fran slouched in an ergonomic chair. She was to write multiple-choice questions for a test to certify high school art teachers. Some of the questions referred to specific pieces of art. Fran could write, “In this painting by Paul Klee, the composition creates which of the following effects?” Then she would write the correct answer, along with three equally plausible answers. The answers had to be similar in sentence construction and length. The format had strict guidelines. Some words could never be used. Only certain artists were eligible. The rules didn’t bother Fran — they freed her. She felt glee whenever Meryl approved a new question she’d written. Everyone else used a computer, but Fran wrote on a yellow legal pad. She started wearing panty hose and heels. Her days filled with small problems and small solutions.

The trademark SUPERCURL was registered, and the company founded, in a single week. Paulina was named founder/spokeswoman and Harvey signed her to a generous contract based on projected profits. SUPERCURL filed for patents on Paulina’s homemade concoctions for conditioner, styling gel, and frizz guard. There were designers to hire and chemists to consult. After preliminary testing and approval by the FDA, SUPERCURL started outsourcing production. The SUPERCURL conditioner wasn’t as strong as Paulina’s original recipe. Dyes made it white instead of its usual brown. Fragrances disguised the potent smell.

With Harvey’s connections, the company grew quickly. They scouted models, held photo shoots, and signed advertising contracts. High sales in England gave Harvey’s investor friends confidence. Some people dismissed Paulina, as if she were the SUPERCURL mascot or even Harvey’s daughter, but others seemed to respect her as their colleague. Now she dressed very chic in silk and suede. What she didn’t understand, she had her secretary research.

A year later, they worked with an architectural firm to open their flagship salon in SoHo. Paulina knew all the construction workers and tracked their progress daily. She was on the hiring committee and interrogated the stylists and managers. After the salon’s grand opening, Paulina was interviewed in Vogue in a story titled “Curly World” and photographed with her hair spread out on a pillow. She was quoted saying, “I wish to revitalize the curls of the world.” She said the art school had exposed her to “hair in need.”

Some days, Harvey regretted his deal with Paulina. Her ideas were good, but she was difficult. She was sensitive. She was always firing her secretary. She told off their head of distribution. Paulina bought things impulsively — an apartment on the Lower East Side, a motorcycle she soon crashed. She bought friends and drugs. She ignored Harvey’s advice. Viv started avoiding her at events.

Paulina sat on her love seat wearing a silk kimono. Dinner was over; only the most charred parts of the brussels sprouts were left on the crystal platter, the chicken bones looked grisly piled in a bowl, and the cloth napkins were crumpled on the mirrored table she had imported from India. The straight-backed dining chairs, grandly upholstered in green velvet, were being set back in place by Paulina’s maid. Guests sprawled on the oversized leather couch in the living room, noting the excellent condition of Paulina’s exposed brick, mesmerized by the chandelier that lorded over them. Candles dripped their wax on silver plates. Music played, but Paulina could not tell who put it on or where it was coming from; everything had been installed while Paulina was on vacation.

Juliette, a young gallery owner Paulina had met at Harvey’s one night, bent to scratch the cat. “I can’t believe you haven’t named him yet!” Paulina stared down at the cat, lean and black, and its companion, fluffy and white. The cats had been a gift from Paulina’s stylist for her twenty-fifth birthday. He said if she tired of them, she could just set them loose on the street.

“That one I call Nameless,” Paulina said, “and the other is Unknown. But of course I’m open to suggestions.”

“What about Cicero?” offered Mimi, Paulina’s personal shopper.

“Too grand,” said Clive, an ex-boyfriend of Dean’s that Dean had sent in his place.

“Dust mite?” said Eli, heir to the Aerobed fortune.

“Jasmine,” said Jasmine, a SUPERCURL model Paulina had discovered in the subway. They all laughed. Clive walked over and turned a dial on the wall that appeared to control the music. Paulina watched in wonder. Just the day before, the doorman had told her about Channel 100 on her television, which showed a live feed from the lobby of the building. In black and white, she’d watched her guests arrive to dinner.

Eli and Clive danced lazily and the others threw cushions at them. “Strip!” Paulina ordered, but they refused. Jasmine passed around a carved ivory pipe packed with weed and they smoked. Paulina’s throat burned. The smoke added to the good feeling in the room — the sense that there was nowhere else to be. Jasmine told a long story about stealing the pipe from the house of her husband’s ex-lover. Paulina gazed at everyone’s faces as if they were strangers. The faces moved and Paulina watched them through their quick changes. She heard them talking, but couldn’t tell which voice was whose. She’d been pulled from one life and shoved into another. She tried to remember the name of the maid she’d hired.

“Paulina went to Norway too, didn’t you?” said Jasmine. Paulina looked up.

“Paulina is in Norway right now,” said Eli, and blew smoke in her face.

Paulina laughed. “I went with an old lover of mine. We went discothèque to discothèque.” What a wonderful word, “discothèque.” How wonderful Fran looked in the discothèque. The white cat walked in and jumped on Paulina’s lap. She stroked the creature’s soft head.

“What was his name?” Jasmine asked.

“Her name.” They all laughed and looked at her admiringly, she felt. The old confidence welled in her. “We shacked up with this Nordic god, far away from the world.” She felt how their full attention rested on her. “What a time we had there. His castle had a chamber of weapons. He had a trained hawk. We ate bread, and things he had killed, and we drank wine,” she said. “He had the most dramatic chest.” Paulina pictured Blood Axe like a giant, tall as her windows. “His cock was bigger than Rhode Island. Its arch was designed by Romans. His balls were like two factories populating the world.” Her audience smirked at her. “His hair was okay, but the girl had the finest curls I’d seen, beyond my own.”

“Where is she now?” asked Clive.

“She’s still there.” The cat jumped from her lap and brushed against Jasmine’s legs. “She chose him over me.”

“How could she?” Clive teased, but Paulina took him seriously.

“He was a tremendous lover. His hands. The textures.” She shuddered. “He was a terrible filmmaker. But he knew what to do with a woman’s body. I could have given her the same, given her better, but still she went with him. She left me.” Paulina sighed, reaching for one of the cats, but neither was near.

“What really makes a good lover, do you think?” asked Clive, and everyone answered at once, cutting Paulina’s story short. She sat silently through their foolish comments, their boring anecdotes. Their conversation cheapened sex until it seemed the idiot fun of pedestrians and nobodies. Why hadn’t Dean showed? Why had he sent his second-rate gay instead, this ex-lover who clearly wanted to join SUPERCURL’s marketing team? All during dinner he spoke of his skills, his eye, but Paulina would never hire him. She wasn’t allowed to hire people anyway, as Harvey kept reminding her.

Paulina watched Eli play with the cats in a way that would only encourage violence. She turned on Channel 100, looking for interesting people in the lobby. There were none, just the doorman reading the newspaper. She desperately wanted to escape to the balcony, but when Jasmine suggested the balcony and they all cheered, Paulina told them to go without her.

She lay on her back, staring into the chandelier, wondering where Fran was, hoping it was a dark, damp, wretched space, like a war trench or sewer. I hope she’s painting faces as a birthday clown in Nebraska, or somewhere that’s nowhere, Paulina thought. She wanted Fran to suffer. For even in Paulina’s new place, with all of her dreams in reach, the gold letters of her name pressed into her business cards, the intoxicating enthusiasm of her agent, there was still that bundle of misery that traveled along with her, that let out little mites of suffering, even while Paulina laughed, even while she gleamed.