Paulina & Fran (3 page)

“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.

J
ulian and Paulina walked to the thin canal that cut through town. Swans made it seem special. A huge mall rose in the distance, but they walked toward an abandoned area of grass. Julian hummed a few notes from an Ennio Morricone score, quietly so Paulina wouldn’t hear. Then louder, so she would. It excited him to be around her. Her moods were so erratic. He could not control her. He looked at the deformed shadow she cast in the grass and smiled. He looked at his own shadow, expecting it to be noble, but it too was foreshortened and grotesque.

Behind the rusted shell of a school bus, they lowered themselves to the ground and pulled off each other’s clothing. The grass poked and itched them. Watching Julian kiss her pale breasts, Paulina felt like an empress, one who didn’t protect her people. Julian pushed his pants down and she guided him into her. She felt nailed to the universe, in the spell that made things work. They both moved at the same time. They were
impatient. There was no rhythm. The irrelevant voice of a child floated across the canal like a runaway balloon. They stopped.

“You go,” Paulina said, trying to stay graceful. Julian moved back and forth like a swimmer. Paulina felt she would never reach her orgasm, that it was continents away and unknown to her. A train hooted in the distance. She got on her hands and knees. “Like this, so you can . . .” They did it that way for a while and Paulina sensed the orgasm and strove to meet it. She grabbed her breast and imagined it was someone’s. Her orgasm was drowned out by his.

Julian lay back on the grass, caught his breath, and kissed Paulina. She scrunched away from him. He kissed her again.

“I don’t want to date you anymore,” Paulina told him.

“You love me,” he said.

“Nah, not really. Not lately.”

“What am I, your discarded plaything?”

Paulina felt his semen pool in her underwear. She had wanted one last time. As she’d told Sadie more than once, “Brains can fuck.”

The breakup sex reminded her of her semester at Smith. That had all started with Sally in the yoga shack by the lake. But Paulina couldn’t avoid her feelings for Audrey, who gazed at Paulina unabashedly in the dining hall, forcing Paulina to eat in a rugged, macho way to impress her. Then, in a steamy
room at the Smith botanical gardens, she felt up Susan Bradley, a girl preoccupied with sustainable living. Later, in her dorm room, a knock.

The girls at Smith had been naturally drawn to Paulina, whose critical gaze held weight. She followed each loaded stare to its giggling, passionate realization. But, by midterms, the girls revolted, led by Audrey. Sally looked on, stunned out of her heartbreak, as one of them punched Paulina in the face. The girl’s fake sapphire ring left a scar. After, Paulina tried to punish the girls by seducing the male teachers they all lauded. Only one was weak to this, and he was the worst looking of all. The scandal led to Paulina’s transfer.

“Did you stray from me on your trip?” Julian asked. His choice of words, his measured speech, his expression of defeat annoyed Paulina. He took everything too seriously. He silently buttoned, zipped, and belted his pants. “Was it James?” he asked glumly.

“God, no!”

“Nils?” he asked incredulously.

Paulina was ashamed that she hadn’t slept with anyone on the trip. It was unlike her. Fran had kept her occupied. She scratched hard at a trapped hair on her leg, while her lips quivered into a smile.

“I didn’t want to tell you,” said Paulina, “but me and Fran,” she paused thoughtfully, “I mean Fran and I met . . .”
She laughed. “You are never going to believe this, but we met this huge Viking named Blood Axe.”

“Shut up,” Julian said with disgust.

“No, really. I mean, it’s possible it’s not his real name, but we met this huge hulking guy and were swept away. Fran lost her virginity to him, to Blood Axe,” she said. “On his zebra-skin rug.” Julian stared at the water, looking hurt. “Don’t tell her I told you,” Paulina said. “Really, I wasn’t going to say anything, because I knew you wouldn’t believe me. And you know me, I wanted to be good, but it promised to be such a unique experience.”

“Bullshit,” Julian said.

“It’s how I got this,” she said, showing him the black-and-blue mark on her arm. “He’s unaware of his own strength,” she said, as if defending him. Paulina’s face was stoic, while inside she felt glee.

Julian cringed. “You weren’t going to tell me?” He examined her coldly.

“We’ve been drifting apart for some time,” Paulina said. “Blood Axe just sealed the deal.”

“Which one is Fran?” Julian asked. “Curly hair?”

“Yeah,” said Paulina. “Nice girl.”

“She’s a virgin?”

“Not anymore.”

Julian sighed. “Leave it to you to find some—”

“Viking,” she interrupted.

“Viking poser.”

“Like I said, a Viking. From long ago. He was divine. I don’t expect you to understand.”

“Fuck off,” Julian said and left Paulina in the grass.

She felt a stab of longing as he grew smaller and smaller in her sight and wished he’d turn around and walk her home. Even if he just wanted to fight about it some, Paulina would have fought some. She tried to salvage the glee, but now there were only a few glittery bits that dissipated once she noticed them.

The Junior Painting Studio was a large room divided by white drywall partitions. Students worked late nights in their studios and idolized the artists of the past, especially the lesser-known ones—Dubuffet, Guston, even Morandi and his underwhelming little vases and bowls. The painters glued pennies and trash and family heirlooms on to their paintings. They painted their friends making out with old television stars. They painted their friends nude in the streetlight. Nude at the Pyramids. They thought of a concept and created a series exhausting the concept.

Some of the studios were clean, like a gallery showing work. Others, like Fran’s, were stuffed like a locker with clothes, books, broken mirrors, pill bottles, doll heads, candy
wrappers, stiff brushes, old glue, and stray stretcher bars. Her paintings were thought to be strong—she’d been compared to Elizabeth Peyton and Bonnard—but she didn’t work as hard as the others. She was slow and took breaks. Spring semester, her studio was across from Marvin’s.
Other love has felt normal, but my love for Marvin feels like a wilderness,
Fran wrote in the margin of her art history handout.
I don’t just love him. I like everything he does. Everything he touches seems lucky. It is painful to watch him.

She drifted toward him naturally, like a dog. He seemed to like her, but had never asked her to do anything, even go to the cafeteria. People were perturbed by Marvin, who had no definite social allegiance and would cruise into a party, then leave wordlessly. He didn’t need anything from anyone. Once, in the computer lab, Fran clicked on a file saved to the desktop and read an artist statement:
My work affects my relationships with people. Sometimes a painting will change my relationship to my parents, even though the painting is completely abstract and mostly one color with some texture.
There was no name on the document, but Fran felt drawn to whoever wrote it, and was sure it was Marvin.

It was Fran’s first time in studio since break. She watched Marvin while she stretched a canvas. He sat on the floor dipping acorns in paint.

“Why acorns?” James asked.

“I thought the mice would eat them,” he said, “but they didn’t.” Mice had moved in over the winter and lived in the mess the painters made, eating crumbs and construction paper.

“Why that color?” James asked as he walked by.

“I have a lot of it,” Marvin said. His curly hair was in a mess over his eyes. “How was Norway, Fran?” he asked. Their eyes met for the third time that day.

“Pretty,” she said, and her body warmed like she was talking to God.

“You could never date a boy like that, who lives without needing to know himself,” Gretchen told Fran, but Gretchen knew nothing. The girls walked out of the studios without looking at each other. Both wore patchwork backpacks they’d bought at the hippie store freshman year.

Fran and Gretchen had become friends in Foundation Drawing one day after Gretchen’s hair elastic flew through the air, narrowly missing the model. Gretchen was understated. No hairdo announced her. She was a graphic design major, which Fran found uninspiring. Gretchen wasn’t free like the others. She danced, drank, and drew, but never gave herself over to it. She never felt the light of everyone’s eyes upon her; nor did she crave this kind of light.

“He talks in a baby voice,” Gretchen said.

“No, he doesn’t. He just isn’t listening to how he sounds.”

“You know you didn’t call me back,” Gretchen said.

“I know. I’m sorry. I had so much to catch up on.”

“How was the trip anyway? Did you socialize with the enemy?”

“Who?” said Fran. “Oh, I mean, in passing.”

At the lecture, Fran and Gretchen watched a successful New York artist strip to her underwear and gnaw on a man-sized piece of chocolate. During the Q&A, students asked embarrassing questions and name-dropped other artists. The questions were met with a collective groan, as if the student body were one body, one that couldn’t accept itself. After, the artist put a curse on them, insisting: “Only one person in this room will make it in the art world.”

It took a lifetime to walk to
SUPERTHRIFT
, and much of it was highway. Normally Sadie drove, but she had lent Eileen her car. Skipping ahead of Sadie and Allison, Paulina exclaimed, “I am free! I can fuck anyone I want! I can do as I please!”

“But you were doing that before,” Sadie said.

“But this time with the clearest of minds! An available bed, and a purely selfish heart. The things I will accomplish,” she whispered loudly.

“What are you going to accomplish?” Allison asked dubiously.

Paulina stopped walking. “Hey! Lay off,” she said.

After a step, Sadie and Allison stopped too. Paulina eyed them suspiciously. “What happened here while I was gone, anyway? Did the gap close further without me?”

“What gap?” Sadie asked, though she knew. They resumed walking.

“Those precious inches between your ass and hers. What did I miss around here anyway? Anything revolutionary?”

“There was a flood at the Feminist Warehouse,” Sadie said.

“That guy Fluff sold Eileen cocaine that was laced with something.”

“Oh, and my boyfriend visited and Allison met him,” said Sadie.

“He’s great,” Allison said. They smiled.

“What? What boyfriend?” Paulina asked. Cars sped by like bullets.

“Eric,” Sadie said emphatically. “Remember? I told you about him before you left and I wrote those e-mails.”

“Oh, yeah,” Paulina said. She didn’t want Sadie to have a boyfriend because she didn’t want to have to listen to her talk about him. But at least he didn’t live there; at least Paulina didn’t have to see him. “I’m sure he’s great,” Paulina said. The shoulder narrowed and they walked on in single file: Sadie, then Allison, then Paulina. Paulina’s head filled with images of lame boyfriends, ones who wore puka-shell necklaces, Adidas running pants, and shirts with words.

At
SUPERTHRIFT
, remnants from hundreds of dull lives hung before them on plastic hangers. Even when the girls found something remarkable, it always seemed like the original owner had misunderstood and squandered it. Every nightgown came with a few bad dreams. This depressive air empowered the girls. Their lives were incredible! When the clothes fit, they felt they’d looted the lame, the poor, and the dead. When they didn’t, the girls dismissed used clothing as gross.

Besides the clothes, they searched earnestly in the cassette pile, the furniture, the shoe racks. Everything seemed like something they could improve, that no one yet had known how to improve. Allison bought the paintings—amateur still lifes and common landscapes, tacky beach scenes with sponged-on clouds, clown paintings, sadly confident bubble-lettered names—to gesso over in her studio.

Paulina began a methodical search in Blouses, though she never had luck there. She listened to Sadie and Allison in Skirts, one aisle over. Their voices rose and fell. They were either trashing Eileen’s work or praising it. Paulina lingered a while, wondering, before marching off into Evening Dresses. At first nothing appealed to her. She closed herself off to every option without really considering them. Most of the dresses she’d seen before. Some had sweat or deodorant marks. Many had no inner life.

The song changed, reminding Paulina that she was free of Julian, and she loosened up. A few items intrigued her and she took some chances, ignoring any indication of size—it’ll stretch, she thought, or I’ll cut it. Once her arm was weighed down with clothes, she walked triumphantly to the dressing rooms.

“Goin’ in, girls!” she yelled to Sadie and Allison, but heard no reply. She waited, then smiled, knowing they would scamper over. When Paulina found something that flattered her, Allison and Sadie always hovered around to admire her while she pranced in the aisle in front of her dressing room. Sadie had long given up debating—anything Paulina found “fabulous,” Sadie praised as well. But Paulina didn’t just want their approval; she wanted them to be jealous.

Paulina hung her fur coat on a hook, wincing when the bottom grazed the disgusting dressing room floor. She took off her shirt and pants and piled them on top of her shoes in the corner. It would be nasty to have sex in a
SUPERTHRIFT
dressing room, but she’d have liked to be able to say she’d done it.

The first dress was huge and Paulina flung it on the floor. She’d found a nice pair of pants, but before she got too excited she spotted a bloodstain on the butt and extracted herself from the situation. “Sadie!” she called. “Allison!” She wanted to tell them about the bloodstain and show them the
jumper she was about to try on: a blue-gray cotton thing that narrowed into shorts. It was the kind of outfit one wore spontaneously, she felt. When she put it on, her breasts swelled out the top. Wearing it, she felt like a provocative babysitter. With the jumper came the promise of warm weather and new love.