Paulina & Fran

13

Every workday, Fran went to the bathroom about three or four more times than necessary, and hid in the stall listening to the other women, learning how to reload the toilet paper dispenser based on the directions drawn out on the side. Fran no longer felt inspired creating questions. She ruined her eyes looking at tiny JPEGs of masterpieces. She got lightheaded reading about improper ventilation. These things were familiar to her, and yet she was on the other side now, with the nonartists. When she was assigned to work in Denise’s old cubicle or Roy’s, their departure no longer seemed bleak. They had escaped! They were free! It was she who was trapped.

Every now and then, she’d turn a corner in the hallway, suddenly face-to-face with a youngish guy. Their dull faces pulled into quick smiles, and he seemed to feel as Fran did, a look in the eyes. But then it was over and they walked past each other — Fran to the copier like a zombie, the boy to a wing Fran had never seen. Sex seemed the antidote to Levrett-Mercer, or joy and nature and soul music.

Soon there were SUPERCURL salons in LA, San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, Austin, San Antonio, Chicago, Baltimore, Boston, and Philadelphia. SUPERCURL products were sold in the hippest boutiques. SUPERCURL produced a revitalization treatment, and a CURLS FOR KIDS shampoo. The marketing team created promotions, photo contests, a Curl Club with rules and rewards. The production team designed an Advanced SUPERCURL Hairbrush and Detangler Comb.

Each development was momentous, but Paulina grew used to it. She was still looking for good people to sleep with. For a month she was obsessed with an ego-crazy plastic surgeon she met at a party, but by the end of their short time together she hated him with all her heart. When she walked down the street, the curls of strangers seemed to shine brighter in the sunlight, and she felt a mix of pride and jealousy.

“I definitely notice a difference,” Luca told her. Paulina lay facedown on the massage table in her beauty room. Luca was a large, presumptuous Romanian man who dressed in black and called himself the Curly King. He worked exclusively on Paulina’s hair, and he also served as her masseuse, her dealer, and sometimes her lover. Luca slept with women and men and lived in a massive basement he called the Dungeon. He often seduced people, then, like picking a lock, drew out their darkest secret before sending them on their way.

Luca stayed inside much of the summer, never wearing shorts, cursing the heat. He hadn’t taken a subway since he was a teenager, finding the lighting untenable. He was constantly rewriting his will, deciding who deserved what trifle, ashtray, or mirror. Most of all, he understood hair. He could predict it, and ultimately, control it. One day, he and Paulina planned to merge their curl philosophies and start their own school, The Curl Institute, where hairdressers would study to become SUPERCURL-certified.

“Five, ten years ago, those same girls had bird nests. Frizz balls. You’ve really cleaned things up,” Luca said while he massaged her neck. Paulina knew this to be true, but most days it did not awe her.

“I was once like a peacock, decked out in all magnificence,” Paulina told Luca, her face buried in a pillow. “I imagined myself the center of a movement. A political movement, or an art movement, something that combined the two.” Paulina still had pizzazz, but the pizzazz had withered. It lay dormant inside her, slipping out in quick, cutting remarks. Luca kept kneading her flesh until the massage became esoteric and neither understood it.

Paulina summoned Fran in her mind. Fran was in a dim place, struggling under a heap of books. “Libraries!” Paulina cried to Luca. “What a trap for youth!” People didn’t think realistically in libraries. People filled their heads with moldy ideas and left their sexuality in a coil near the stacks, where it turned to nothing and joined the dust on the floor, swept by losers.

“Huh?” The massage paused while Luca lit a cigarette, and then reluctantly continued.

“I was just remembering someone.”

“Who?” Luca asked.

Paulina considered telling him the whole thing — the art school, the hotel rooms, the party — but quickly rid herself of this desire.

“Just this weird farm girl who’s probably breeding dogs somewhere and feeling sorry for herself.” Paulina stared into the wallpaper. “She was cute, like a muffin. Paper skirt and all. One time she took up with a discarded lover of mine and I couldn’t sleep well until I had him back, to remind myself why I’d gotten rid of him in the first place. I can’t even remember his name,” Paulina said, but it rang in her head like a bell. She rose from the table and wrapped a sheet around herself.

“Where are you going?” Luca asked.

“Checking the weather,” she said and opened her laptop and typed Julian’s name.

That week, Fran was assigned to a highly decorated cube. A glass jar filled with candy bars sat on a doily. An archaic, sun-damaged “Got milk?” ad was pinned to the soft cubicle wall. But most distracting was an ultrasound taped above the monitor. Fran stared emotionlessly at the ambiguous shape.

Jane poked her head over the divider. “I think that’s the arm,” Jane said, pointing.

“No, that’s a shadow,” Fran said.

“What’s the light source?” Jane asked, raising her eyebrows.

“Congratulations nonetheless!” one of the history guys teased.

Jane giggled. “Imagine you with a baby!”

Fran laughed. “Wait, why not?”

“You can’t even handle a day’s work. Imagine raising a living being? A project you can’t leave for me and Meryl to finish,” Jane said, nudging her.

Fran and Jane were perpetually on the edge of becoming friends. Every workday they’d share a few jokes, or bond over some obscure nonevent in their office: was Meryl eating an Amy’s frozen burrito again? Jane would spot the man they’d nicknamed Old Drawers, looking lost in the lobby. Together they’d uncover hilarious outsider art deep in the image bank.

But when Jane invited Fran out on the weekends, Fran never made it. Often she declined immediately with a lie — she had friends coming in that weekend, or she was dogsitting in Columbus. Other times she’d say, “Yeah, sounds good! I wanna meet your friends for sure.” As the appointed time grew closer, though, Fran was inevitably seized with doubt. What if Jane’s friends were boring? What if it was awkward? Instead she’d take a nap, then wake up at midnight and walk to a bar covered in flags of the world and talk to guys who gave her their business cards.

Jane nudged her again. “Hey, I wanna check out your studio sometime. You could visit mine too.”

“Definitely,” Fran said, blushing.

“Mine is near the Institute downtown,” Jane said.

“Cool,” Fran said. “Mine is a ways out, but I’ll draw you a map sometime.” She needed to find a studio. Why had it taken her this long? That was the whole point of taking a job in Ohio — finding a nice warehouse space where all the artists hung out dancing, where some hot guy was always welding and NYC gallery owners wandered in off the street. Fran still felt a connection to that world. The other day she’d bought an Artforum, hoping to find Paulina’s byline on a few reviews. Paulina had once mentioned wanting to write for them.

“Oh, wait, is it in the Art House Studio?” Jane asked.

“No,” Fran said, “though I looked at one there.”

“The Seventy-Eighth Street Studios?”

“No.” Fran nervously twirled a frizzy curl trying to guide it back into shape.

“Where is it? In Shaker Heights?”

“Yeah,” Fran said finally. “Close to there.” Why did Jane even care?! “I need to make some copies,” Fran said, grabbing a handful of papers and walking confidently down the hall.

Suddenly, the young guy was walking toward her. Fran smiled at him. He nodded at her. When he was just about to pass, Fran blurted out, “I have this feeling, like, that we’re in 1984, and we have to escape.”

“The year?” he asked.

Fran laughed into her hand. “No, the book. I mean, the civilization in the book. The weird, controlling, conformist society.”

“That’s weird,” he said. They looked each other over. He adjusted and readjusted his watch, then shoved his hands in his pockets. He wasn’t any cuter than the guys Fran met at the bars, but she sensed an intelligence within him. She tried to imagine herself passionately kissing his neck, grasping at his chest and arms. Figuring out what he liked sexually. What his silences meant. Where his mind took him when it took him away from her. He shifted uncomfortably. “Haven’t read that one in a while. Don’t really remember it. Sorry,” he said, walking past her, but he didn’t sound sorry at all.

Julian’s voice was epic in Fran’s phone, as if it were coming in from the afterlife. “How did you even find this number?” she asked, amazed. “It’s an unlisted landline!”

“It wasn’t easy. But once I found out you were working for Levrett-Mercer, I knew I could figure it out. The tutoring company I work for is owned by them.”

Fran asked how he was and he told her he’d gone on a terrible vacation to a random place he’d pointed to on a map, and how the locals had sensed this. She asked about his films and he told her he’d sent them to a few dozen festivals but heard nothing back. He’d spent some hours working on a stop-motion animation, but after his hard drive broke he couldn’t bear to start over.

“What do you do out there?” Julian asked.

“Boring, boring things,” Fran said and he laughed.

“What are you doing tonight?” he asked.

“I was going to go meet up with Jane from work, but now I don’t know.”

Fran laughed. “Yeah. I wanna hear all about. . about wherever you live.”

“Now you’re just going to stay in and talk to me all night?”

“Pittsburgh.”

Fran stretched out in her bed and closed her eyes. It was the most relaxed she’d felt in weeks. Julian remembered her. He missed her. He hadn’t run out and married someone. He was floundering as badly as she was. “Yeah, tell me all about Pittsburgh.” And she actually wanted to know about it. Fran pictured Pittsburgh as windy, with big rusted bridges. For some reason she pictured the people there wearing pilgrim hats, though she knew that was stupid. The name Pittsburgh seemed dignified to her, a place of hanging wooden signs and barbershops, like in old Westerns. A place with no chain stores. Did people trade goods in Pittsburgh? Did they know how to fix cars?

Julian cleared his throat and her heart beat happily in anticipation. She felt like he was offering her a way out, but she didn’t have to leave her room.

“What are you wearing?” he asked.

“A purple fleece. .” she answered.

Paulina sat reading a romance novel on the train to Pittsburgh. The language bored her, yet turned her like a screw in her seat. She ate a floppy, disappointing personal pizza. She thought back to her time in the cold college town, chasing the Color Club boys with Sadie and Allison. She remembered how she and Fran had been new friends once, talking about religion and their bodies, expecting to reach something the other would disagree with, but finding no end. Befriending Fran had been like finding a jewel — a girl whose powerful naiveté was wholly her own.

Julian met her at the Pittsburgh train station. Paulina still found him attractive, though slight wrinkles had formed around his eyes and mouth. He slouched in his wool coat as if resigned to whatever fate was chosen for him. February’s hateful winds greeted them outside the station, sweeping Julian’s longish hair across his forehead. He looks like a morose Beatle, Paulina thought, pressing her body to his.

Julian’s apartment was charmless. Paulina lay in his bed, marveling at the lack. “I would paint this gray wall beige, maybe add a chair rail to the wall, wallpaper the top half in a subtle floral pattern or light geometric. Crown molding up top, and a decent baseboard. The floor could be sanded down to a more spectacular level of grain, and then restained.” The room was lit by an overhead fixture that belonged in a dorm room or cell.

Then they were having sex and Paulina found it difficult to kiss him. She tried to at first — he was so eager for everything — but ultimately she turned her head away and kissed his arm instead. After, they lay in the dark. Julian’s hands brushed again and again against her breasts in a way that would usually have annoyed her, but tonight soothed her. Paulina thought of Fran, her legs and her laugh, the way she twirled her hair while distracted.

“Remember Thai Dream?” Julian said. Paulina’s heart sank.

“No,” she said, and he laughed.

Paulina remembered one night when she and Fran took the wrong Metro in Norway. Instead of the downtown, they saw rows and rows of houses with red-tiled roofs. For a moment it all felt hopeless — they were exhausted and had a long day of museums and lectures the next day — but then Fran ran a few steps and clicked her heels like they were in a paradise. A boisterous group of Norwegian teens passed, wearing bell-bottoms and puffy winter jackets, and Paulina started walking with them to make Fran laugh. Paulina kept pace with the group and Fran followed too, for blocks and blocks, until they arrived at a nearby house party.

At the party, Paulina and Fran had talked only to each other. They danced with the teens in someone’s bedroom, at one point chasing each other through the kitchen and the living room, where an old man was watching television and breathing through a ventilator.

The Metro was no longer running when they returned late that night, but Paulina was able to find a cab, and even convinced the driver that she was an American pop star. Paulina remembered Fran smiling with her eyes closed, her head on Paulina’s lap, while Paulina played with her hair. Paulina had insisted on paying for the cab, though it was nearly the last of her kroner. Later, she’d had to steal some from Marissa to get by, but it had been worth it to walk arm in arm into the hotel, where, if she remembered right, a sleepy concierge had winked at them and offered them macaroons.

The memory left Paulina with such a strong sense of Fran that she imagined it was Fran who was now getting out of bed and walking off toward the bathroom. That night in Norway, she remembered Fran pulling her nightgown down over her breasts. What had Paulina said then? Hadn’t she said something funny? Or had she just stared?

Paulina rose from the bed and followed the phantom into the bathroom. Stray pubic hairs were visible on the checkerboard floor. An insistent drip had worn away the porcelain sink, leaving a rust stain. Julian’s body in the act of peeing disgusted her. Paulina found herself examining his gray toothbrush, the worn bristles sticking in all directions. Her legs were now completely absent of magic. The toothbrush displeased her. A crusty accumulation of paste sat low in its bristles. She threw it in the garbage can.

“What’s the meaning?” said Julian, his penis soft, his balls slack.

“I’m giving you mine,” Paulina said, pointing to the new one she had brought. Julian snickered at her, then brushed his teeth in an exaggerated manner.