Paulina & Fran

2

There were twelve students on the ten-day trip, along with an expert on Nordic history; Sampson Harris, the head of the Painting Department; and Nils, the painting grad who hung by Sampson’s side. Tim’s name on the signup list had been Paulina’s incentive to sign her own, so she was wounded when she couldn’t find him in the airport van. Paulina glumly surveyed those around her: Illustration majors and others whose majors were meaningless to guess. She spoke only once on the ride to the airport, loudly interrupting a discussion about a blind illustration teacher. “There is another van, correct?”

“Yessir,” said Sampson Harris (late forties, portly, and beaming). Paulina disliked him. When Sampson gave a crit, his forehead wrinkled in thought, his eyes twinkled with self-love. His bravado and pride were typical of male painters. Male painters weren’t self-deprecating like male illustrators. God, did she hate anything self-deprecating. Male painters weren’t neat like male architects — but then neatness also annoyed her. And male sculptors thought themselves sensual (if clay) or brave (if metal).

Her opinion of Tim had worsened the night of the party, but in the days since then it had buoyed back up. All semester she’d clung to the idea of him. The laundry room was the only time they’d ever had sex, but this event had been christened and bedazzled in her memory until it bore little resemblance to what had taken place. Tim is in the other van, she told herself and sat back, letting the talk fade around her while she imagined herself and Tim, naked in a hotel suite, stoned, glamorous, inseparable.

But the airport was Tim-less. “His girlfriend made him cancel,” an illustration major told her with unconcealed enjoyment. Paulina examined the others at the airport, people who didn’t go to the art school. Stubby little families huddled near the TV monitors. Brain-dead teens wandered in toxic groups of two. Forgotten children sat like sentinels on top of mounds of luggage.

Paulina stood in despair, scrutinizing the pattern on the carpet, which stretched for miles. An unstable mind had created the pattern; Paulina assumed the designer had or would soon end his or her life. Paulina ran her boarding pass over her lips. She eyed a swarm of graphic designers and illustration majors, fearing they would try and befriend her. One of them, Marissa, was either the clueless graphic designer Paulina had met the week before or a girl so similarly flawed that the two might as well have teamed up and become one. Paulina noticed a gay freak from the Textiles Department whom she’d never felt akin to. Nervously, she took the little gray piece of cloth she carried in her bra and rubbed it against her lips. Her breasts were sweating in a tight shirt from eBay that didn’t fit her.

When Paulina awoke that morning, she’d felt her life was an invitation to an even better life — she saw her name in wondrous script — but now she found herself in a social nightmare of unending duration. She decided to take a taxi back to school and surprise Sadie and Allison at Thai Dream or wherever they were spending break. She gathered her things. She would just tell Sampson and leave.

The college town seemed suddenly like the most boring, lacking place she’d ever been. She turned and saw Fran. A hive broke out on Paulina’s neck. She clutched the scrap of blanket. She could entertain herself with Fran, even if she didn’t befriend her, even though Paulina knew Fran was friends with a distraught design major who regularly shunned Paulina before Paulina had a chance to shun her first. She could hang out near Fran, and the others would assume they were friends and stay away from her.

Paulina found herself walking toward Fran, who was sitting on a bulky piece of luggage, her nail-bitten fingers skating over the stickers on her old Discman. She took off her headphones when Paulina approached her. Tiny voices sang from the headphones. A mindless beat beat on unhindered. After an unnecessary introduction, Paulina was entertained to hear Fran had a slight lisp. Paulina waited for Fran to draw her out in conversation, but Fran just smiled. Paulina stood paralyzed, snapping and unsnapping her hair clip. She looked for Nils, whose age gave him a slight edge over the others, but he was with Sampson.

Boarding the plane, Paulina stayed by Fran, conscious to seem apart. But the stale smell and muted colors inside the plane induced another anxiety in Paulina — a fear of boredom. She had barely spoken all day long, but now she found herself bargaining with the man and woman assigned to sit next to Fran, burying her aggression under a manipulative veneer of weakness and manners. Eventually the man in the window seat agreed and took Paulina’s seat instead. Though she’d gotten her wish, Paulina sighed when she sat down and was careful not to look at Fran.

During takeoff, the girls stared silently out the window. The woman next to Fran slept. The white noise of the plane was disconcerting, then distracting, then comforting. After a few stray remarks, Paulina and Fran gradually found their common ground — the others on the trip, scattered in different seats on the plane. “I see James’s work, clothes, and attitude as a protective measure against the flamboyance prevalent at our school,” Paulina declared.

Fran found Paulina compelling and strange. After speaking her first words to Paulina at the gate, Fran felt sized up and then accepted. Fran had known they’d sit next to each other, and envisioned them, as if in a crystal ball, paired up to the exclusion of the other girls on the trip.

“My favorite,” Fran said, motioning to Milo. Milo was the only male textiles major. He was skinny and friends with girl nerds. His art was draping fabrics. He had never kissed a boy (or girl) and lived in his gayness like a prison. “You will find someone, Milo, soon!” insisted his girlfriends, some of whom had never experienced such delight before — the delight of calling this stooped, eccentric creature their friend. “Milo is the watered-down version of some queers I knew in high school,” Paulina said, but Fran sensed this wasn’t true.

Very quickly, the girls formed a familiarity. Gretchen hated Paulina, Fran knew, but Gretchen felt far away. Paulina leaned her seat back and Fran could hear the muffled protest of the person behind her.

“What do you think those suckers are doing back home?” Paulina asked.

“Being with their families.”

“What would you regret if we died right now in a crash?” Paulina asked.

Fran looked far into the fabric of the seat in front of her. “I guess I don’t have enough good paintings for a solid ‘in memoriam’ show,” she said. “But it doesn’t really matter.”

“It doesn’t,” Paulina said and laughed. “Do you have a boyfriend?” she asked.

Fran thought instantly of Marvin, but Marvin was not her boyfriend in any sense. “Do you?” she asked.

Paulina stared into the dark window of the plane. “Yeah, but I’m ending it.”

“Who?” Fran asked, with increasing curiosity.

Paulina leaned over and took out a sleep mask from her big leather purse. She pulled the mask on top of her forehead, matting down her curls. “I believe his name is Julian,” Paulina said flatly.

“Is he printmaking?” asked Fran.

“Film, but I’ve never seen anything he’s made.”

“I think I had a class with him once, an art history lecture. Does he have long, scraggly hair?”

“I cut it,” Paulina said in the same emotionless way. She slid her sleep mask over her eyes and said nothing for several hours.

In any foreign country, Paulina wanted to belong. She lagged a block behind the group. They trudged along, stopping at every museum in sight. They ate lunches on picnic tables, the boys all speaking their bad Norwegian. With disdain, Paulina watched as their accents spawned stupid personas. James was the worst offender. His persona had its own name, Gulltopp, the name of the poor man he’d sat next to on the plane. James’s Gulltopp did a funny dance before and after meals and spoke only about fjords.

In a tragic use of alphabetical order, Paulina was sentenced to room with Marissa, who spoke her thoughts freely and often, injuring Paulina with her exaggerated wonder. The first night, Marissa gushed about Norway, and Europe, the artists of the past, while Paulina listened to her earplugs expand. Paulina believed that only Fran deserved to be her friend. Fran, who sat hunched against the wall during art history lectures, who stared too long at birds and bugs and faraway noises, who played with her hair so incessantly that Paulina knew she would never pass a job interview.

In a room of tapestries at the National Museum of Art, Paulina told Fran, “I need to sleep with someone exciting.”

“Ooh, like Nils?”

Paulina made a face. “No, like a fucking Viking from the past.”

Fran laughed, avoiding the glance of the other person in the room, an old man clutching a cane. The tapestries were all Viking scenes — tall ships slanting on the water, a sword fight inside a treasure cave. The details hurt Fran’s head if she examined them too closely. Neat narrow lines indicated light and shadow. The texture of the waves stood in stark contrast to the clouds, to the sails, the glint of the swords, the hair curling out of helmets. “We could find someone like that,” she said.

“Someone who holds a whole chicken in one hand and eats from it,” said Paulina.

“And he’s got long, blond hair.”

“Yeah he does. His dick is enormous—”

“Not enormous, but a good size, and of good texture,” said Fran.

“Snakeskin?” said Paulina.

“Velvet,” said Fran. The old man left, and they were alone for the first time. “How is his house decorated?”

“With a single zebra-skin rug,” Paulina said, staring with unfocused eyes. “What is his name?”

“Blood Axe,” said Fran, reading the card on the wall.

Paulina laughed. “Perfect.”

“And he’s followed by a pack of animals,” said Fran.

“He can take five puppies in his hand and squeeze them into a full-sized dog.”

“His native tongue can’t pronounce our names.”

“Or his own name!” Paulina said.

“He’s killed men, but never a woman,” Fran added.

“His torso has a lot of drama.”

“What kind of drama?” asked Fran.

“Like scars and hair and muscles and things.”

“Does he carry a bloody ax?” Fran asked.

“Not these days. But once he did,” Paulina said wistfully. They laughed.

They strolled out of the museum and into the chilly air. They huddled for warmth. They lost the group. They posed with statues. They found their way.

Norway was magnificent. Train rides along the fjords gave them clear views of vast, overphotographed glaciers. Though Paulina refused to mix, the others formed experimental social groups, sparked by an ambiguity as to who was cool. The students wandered around Oslo, clueless and buzzed. They had solemn moments in Norwegian history museums, face-to-face with an ancient gown or worn-down coin.

Freed from Sadie and Allison, Paulina spent the long bus rides breaking down their personality flaws for Fran’s entertainment. Sadie was always bragging about her healthy and natural lifestyle choices — drinking only on weekends, never eating fried foods — but went to the tanning booths weekly, saying she had an “appointment downtown,” and was always drenched in perfume. Sadie loved pictures of cats and dogs but not the creatures themselves. She was always scolding Paulina for not recycling, as if she understood the earth’s innermost perils. Paulina declared her incapable of intellectual thought.

As for Allison, she had the bored look of a stranger on a bus, even when she was listening attentively. She took herself so seriously as an artist that Paulina felt embarrassed for her. She often had pimples and took no time to disguise them. The biggest problem was Allison’s hair, which had neither the articulation of curls nor the sleekness of straight hair and was thick, like unprocessed wool.

Paulina described the tedium of Julian, how he slumped around her apartment, oblivious to her other lovers. She criticized all the dull lovers of their school, and the pretention rampant among the art history majors.

“There’s an art history major?” Fran asked.

Paulina nodded. “It’s new.” After finding art making meaningless, Paulina had begged the registrar to count her art history credits toward a major, eventually seducing him. During each of their nights together, she had discussed the benefits of an art history major so casually that even after her successful academic petition he believed that they’d thought of the idea together.

After the first night of the trip, Paulina had convinced Fran’s roommate, Angel, to trade rooms with her so that Paulina and Fran could room together. Fran noticed Paulina rubbing the little gray rag on her lips at night, but she didn’t ask about it. Fran understood that being this close with Paulina had its restrictions. She couldn’t visibly socialize with the others on the trip, though everyone was very nice and always inviting her to hang out. Being with Paulina was like being under Soviet rule, she thought during a few outrageous moments, but it was worth it.

At a dance club in Bergen, Paulina and Fran experienced the same fathomless fun they felt at the Color Club. Each moment they amazed themselves. In dancing they spread themselves and saw themselves in the reaction of those around them. We must be very beautiful to feel this beautiful, Fran thought. The pleasant shock of a new country made them feel they deserved it, that the earth swiveled to show them things. They drank and flirted with skinny Norwegian boys. They spent so much time together without getting sick of each other, it was inspiring.

Paulina no longer needed Sadie or Allison. She envisioned herself and Fran socially dominating their small school. In good colors, far in the future, she imagined them growing even more sophisticated and successful. In lives abundant with luck and love. In LA or Paris. In short leather jackets.

While Paulina deep conditioned her hair, Fran drank beers with James, Angel, and Marissa at a bar close to their hotel in Stavanger.

“Why do you hang out with that crazy bitch?” asked James. “You should hang out with us.” The others nodded in agreement.

“She is dangerous and unpredictable,” Marissa hissed.

“Ask her about her semester at Smith sometime,” Angel said.

“Smith?” James asked.

“Paulina was a big lesbo at Smith,” Angel said. “She seduced every girl there, then got kicked out.” Just when it seemed like Paulina could not be more interesting to Fran, something like this would emerge.

“Every girl?” James asked.

“Practically. I’m serious. At least half of them. She told me about it when she transferred here.”

“You roomed with her?” Marissa asked.

“One semester. I have never met anyone with a higher opinion of herself. I had to convince her that she didn’t deserve to use both closets. That I needed a closet too, even if my clothes weren’t as special as hers.”

Fran was used to hearing Paulina criticized. Freshman year, Paulina had seduced Gretchen’s high school boyfriend visiting from Northwestern. He’d gone to a party while Gretchen hot glued cardboard for her foundation class. The boyfriend fell for Paulina, but Paulina refused to talk to him afterward. The boyfriend broke up with Gretchen, who was devastated and then obsessed. Vital parts of Gretchen had been destroyed, and she knew it, but couldn’t repair herself.

“Oh my god,” Angel said, “look.” A few feet away, Nils was flirting with the bartender, a woman with blond hair and horse teeth.

“Do you think he’s cute? I think he’s so cute,” Angel said. Nils took out a pencil and started to draw the waitress in his sketchbook.

Fran shrugged. Generally speaking, Paulina and Fran felt grad students to be egomaniacs who had charmed themselves into a stupor. At school, the grad students all had small cells where they played artist, sitting in a chair from SUPERTHRIFT mulling over their lives, experimenting uselessly with video (all of them!), reading online artist interviews. Their résumés hovered in their thoughts.

“They try too hard,” Fran said. “Grad students, I mean.”

Every grad student TA’d a class — sitting smugly in the back of the room, smoking theatrically outside the woodshop, talking too much about too many artists. Always the grad students were breaking up their long-distance relationships and partnering up with one another, fighting boredom with infatuation. Every year, there was one grad who rose above this — a girl who didn’t just understand the undergrads, but could rule over them. An artist would show up and inject dye into a fish tank filled with hair gel, depicting the scene of Helen Keller and the water pump, or make a video that wasn’t lo-fi and self-reflective, but instead brilliant.

Nils was tattooed. He was okay. In the hotel elevator he’d told Fran he liked her pheromones. The conversation veered from him to a grad Fran couldn’t picture. She missed Paulina’s cruel gaze. She tried to imagine the insults Paulina would whisper to her. Paulina might say Angel was a “daft beast with a big crease.” She’d once called James a dildo with eyes.

A week into the trip, Angel had grown tired of Marissa and, by the time they got to Kristiansand, wanted to room with Fran again, like she’d been assigned. Angel made it clear that she couldn’t stand Paulina, but Paulina refused to leave, and instead shared a bed with Fran in a “Nordic sleepover.”

“I actually fantasize about Blood Axe,” Paulina told Fran.

“You do not!”

“I do,” said Paulina.

“So do I,” Fran said.

“Who the hell is Blood Axe?” Angel asked from her bed.

“Just this guy we fucked,” Paulina said.

The next day, back in Oslo with the afternoon free, Paulina wanted to get lost in Frogner Park and search for hallucinogenic mushrooms, but Fran wanted to go to an amusement park with Angel and Milo. “Just go,” Paulina said dismissively. “It’s not like we’re connected by a cord or anything.” At an Internet café, Paulina read an e-mail from Sadie, again about the boy she’d met on vacation, but more in-depth — his hobbies, his family history. Paulina skimmed it quickly, then composed her own reply.

Though she is the only bearable company in the country, I can’t help but notice that Fran’s inconsistent, adolescent wardrobe is a nostalgic circle jerk for the past. At 20 years old, she still remains challenged by simple tasks such as clear speaking.

“I got high last night and had revelations,” Fran told Paulina the next morning.

Paulina snorted. She had spent the evening wandering around the city feeling lonely and boring. She’d refused to sleep in Fran’s room or her own, and had ended up in Nils’s room, rubbing against him while he talked about his girlfriend. It distressed her that he wouldn’t sleep with her. She had missed Julian.

“Anything you do with those losers has nothing to do with me,” Paulina said. It was their last day in Norway. The Viking Ship Museum was amazing, but it was wasted on them. They were sick of museums. They spent a good half hour deciding which boat could best support their weight, and then crawled inside it to hide, nibbling a chocolate Fran had bought on the street.

“What do you think Julian is doing right now?” asked Fran.

“Filming a bug and then squashing it,” Paulina said.

“Do you love him?”

“Not really. For a while I liked having him around.” Across the room, a female museum guard approached a male museum guard. “I spent a lot of time with him last semester. Showed him the ways of a woman, wasted time philosophizing. Tried to outfit him in better clothing, but he resisted.” Paulina watched as the two guards conferred, then walked toward them.

“It’s easy to dismiss things when they aren’t nearby,” Fran said, smoothing the worn wood of the ship.

“What?” Paulina said, feigning distraction. The guards approached Paulina and Fran. The man told them sternly in Norwegian to get off the ship, and then the female guard told them the same in overenunciated English. Fran blushed wildly as she disembarked, in a way Paulina found beautiful and idiotic.

The girls meandered around the museum, avoiding their classmates. Their classmates ruined the dream. “It’s like traveling to the moon, only to see the junk you left on your bedroom floor,” Paulina whispered.

They saw Nils doing an involved sketch of a ship and felt bad for him. “Do you think he’s sexy?” Paulina asked Fran.

“He’s okay,” Fran said.

“Who do you really like?” Paulina said.

Fran wouldn’t say.

“James? Tim? Dean? Troy? Zane?”

Fran smiled. “Dean, Troy, and Zane for sure.”

“No, really though. Who do you want to sleep with? Whose little cock do you draw in the margins of your art history handouts?”

Fran hesitated. She liked keeping things to herself. She hadn’t told Paulina that she’d kissed Nils after the play they’d seen in Bergen, or gotten a matching tattoo with Milo at the amusement park — a little pink ice-cream cone behind her ear.

“Stop being so precious!” Paulina scolded. The female guard glared at them. “She’s been following us!” Paulina exclaimed.

“Marvin,” Fran said impulsively.

Paulina laughed. “Everyone likes Marvin! He doesn’t count.”

“Not the way I do,” Fran said. She’d deluded herself in believing she’d discovered him.

“He’s beyond us anyway. He’s like a gorgeous dog who paints,” Paulina said. “He’s untouchable.”

“I’m going to touch him. No one has really tried,” said Fran.

“You’re unreal. Do you know how many times I’ve tried to seduce him?”

Fran looked at her with dismay. “You can’t,” she said.

“Are you kidding? You can’t claim him. What makes your Marvin infatuation more important than mine?”

Fran’s teeth locked. Marissa approached with something unwieldy she’d bought at the gift shop, but Paulina snapped at her and she retreated.

For the rest of the day, Paulina and Fran avoided each other. Fran walked the rolling fields of Vigeland Park with Milo and James. Paulina got drunk with Nils but he refused to let her sleep in his room. “You’re a twenty-seven-year-old on a school trip!” Paulina told him. “I mostly just feel bad for you,” she muttered as he closed the door. Then she walked sadly back to her assigned room with Marissa, fumbling with her card key, loudly undressing and humming to herself. Marissa struggled to maintain her composure while also pretending to sleep.

In the morning, everyone was packing for the airport when Paulina burst into a fury. “What did you do with them?” she yelled at Marissa.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, freak! Stop screaming at me!” Marissa screamed.

Fran heard their voices from across the hall. “What is it?” she asked, walking into the room.

“She’s hidden my hair potions!” Paulina said. “How low and immature!”

Fran started searching under Paulina’s bed.

“What do they look like?” James asked, peeking in from the hallway. Angel joined him in the doorway, but neither helped to look.

“They’re these glass jars. Sort of baby-food sized,” Fran said.

Paulina had refused to tell Fran her ingredients, but the stuff worked. Paulina had put some in Fran’s hair a few nights before, and for twenty-four hours Fran was invincible to humidity and frizz. Now, however, Paulina could only hold up the empty bag where she’d kept the bottles and rub her blanket to her lips.

“Wait, is that the thing you were telling me about?” James asked Marissa.

Paulina fumed.

Marissa nodded. “Her blanket!”

“It’s a tattered rag,” James said, “I’d hardly call it a blanket!”

Paulina glared at him, her whole body tense. “Shut up, losers! Marissa, what did you do with them?”

“Why would I move your hair goop?”

“As a passive-aggressive hate crime against me,” Paulina insisted. Marissa laughed in disbelief.

“God, you’ve been such a bitch on this trip,” James said. “You barely made eye contact with anyone.”

“You deserve every bad thing that will happen to you!” Marissa yelled.

Paulina kicked over Marissa’s suitcase and emptied her toiletry bag while Marissa berated her with an incoherent emotional speech.

In a low drawer beneath the sink, Fran found the bottles and thrust them at Paulina.

“What’s that, lube?” James said, but Paulina was too busy putting the bottles in her bag to respond. She carefully put the bag in her suitcase. Her eyes glazed over as she held the blanket to her mouth.

“That girl’s got a serious oral fixation,” Angel said and James snickered.

“Joan of Arc had a blanket,” Paulina said, but Fran knew this couldn’t be true. Angel cracked up. Paulina glared at her, waiting for her to stop, but Angel laughed loudly while Paulina boiled beside her. Just when Fran thought the whole thing might subside and Angel was catching her breath and letting out little laughs of relief, Paulina leapt at Angel, and in one stunning movement, Angel grabbed Paulina’s arm and flung her to the ground.

“Oh! I hate her so much it’s murdering me,” Paulina said, throwing herself on Fran’s bed.

“Angel or Marissa?”

“I hate her hair, and her fucking day camp wardrobe. I hate when people do that — form a club of losers to torture you,” Paulina said. “Marissa,” she said. “Both,” she said. She cast her angry eyes at Fran, who sat by the hotel room window watching the doorman smoke. “What do you hate?” she asked Fran. Fran said nothing. Paulina waited impatiently, eyeing the welt on her arm in the mirror. Her hair was unruly and she liked herself less because of it. She looked like a doll whose factory-made hair was not meant to be brushed but had been brushed violently.

“I hate when people call alcohol a ‘social lubricant,’” Fran said.

On the flight back, Fran and Nils watched an action movie on the TV above their heads. Paulina sulked next to a stranger. In the van back to school, when everyone sang along to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Paulina just stiffened.

Back on the ordinary streets of their little college town, Fran felt that childhood feeling, that the world was shrinking down to normal after stretching out before her. She and Paulina passed the pizza place where the employees were brats, where she and Gretchen used to eat dinner after 3-D Design. On Ridge Street, she turned toward Wilson Street, but Paulina grabbed her sleeve. “I’m down this way,” Paulina said, pointing down Ridge.

“Oh, this is where we say good-bye and are never friends again,” Fran said.

They laughed and embraced, Paulina’s breasts pushing against Fran’s.