Paulina & Fran (11 page)

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.

W
hile 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 vir
gins. 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.