Paulina & Fran (8 page)

J
ulian answered his door wrapped in his quilt. “She’s making out with Marvin,” Paulina said, her eyes flashing with life. His face fell. “At the warehouse party.” She waited impatiently for his sadness to turn to lust.

Julian’s chest was tight. His legs felt hollow. He wanted to close the door on her. Gossip was distasteful to him, and in the middle of the night it seemed petty and hysterical. “Who’s Marvin?”

“You don’t know?” Paulina scoffed.

Fran kissing another boy made no sense to Julian, but what could be expected from either girl? Both snuck off to house parties while he slept.

Paulina pushed past him. She surveyed the room and stood glaring at a new painting—one of Fran’s half-assed attempts. From the beginning, Paulina had been unimpressed with Fran’s paintings. Paulina could see them in the future, hanging crooked in lame coffee shops. She saw them ending up in
trash bins outside Chinese restaurants. Garbage men would hold them up to each other and laugh.

Paulina couldn’t decide if she should seduce Julian then and there or save it for when he looked less pathetic. Fran’s presence permeated the room.

“Why are you here?” he asked, leaning against the doorframe.

“I fuck myself in honor of you,” Paulina said.

He shifted his weight. He did not smile. She was wearing those stupid boots again. There was a big tear in her pantyhose, one he bet she’d made on purpose. He could see the shape of her breasts underneath the asymmetrical dress. Still, he could just go back to sleep. He let his quilt drag on the floor. He looked past her defiant sneer to the curls that surrounded it.

“Your hair,” he said. “Your hair looks . . .” She knelt before him and felt a rush.

Skipping home after the party, Fran felt an insane feminine power. She imagined herself trying on outfits, and her body making the outfits better. In her own narrow bed, she daydreamed her kiss without Julian’s snoring. Even during the kiss, she’d been daydreaming the kiss. The night had felt like a cool, dark holiday—as if by kissing Marvin she was saying yes to the night. But this would sound weak to Julian, sounded weak to her right now.

In the morning, Fran walked to Julian’s. She crawled over to where he sat slumped on his couch. “Your place was too far from the party,” she said.

He said nothing. It was obvious to him that she’d slept over at that guy’s house. When she kissed him, his mouth closed. When she took her shirt off, he looked away. “Marvin,” he said, pulling himself off the couch. Fran’s heart beat unevenly.

“I know,” she said. “I shouldn’t have, but we were dancing.” She drew this last word out, making her sound even more foolish to him. Girls at the school felt dancing was important and spiritual. He found it a pretentious flirtation.

Suddenly she seemed irrelevant in the greater course of his life. A blathering party girl. He wanted someone important. Someone who could see the world beyond. Someone who could name five countries in South America, or at least four. Someone capable of survival in any situation. Someone with endurance. He saw Fran floating through the rest of her life on a combination of luck and good genes. If she were a boy, if he weren’t sleeping with her, would he even want her around? She was bland compared with Paulina. Sure, she was sweet, but that would wear off—had already worn off. He loved her, but maybe that said more about him than her. He was probably just good at loving. He felt intense fondness for her. Maybe it wasn’t even love.

Fran held a certain unnamable trait, and it had inspired a whole love affair, and no, he couldn’t exactly name it now, not
precisely, but he knew the roots of it, the aspects that combined to make her attractive and intriguing, and this mixture wasn’t made out of the big, extraordinary things, it just dabbled in those. It was her lisp, paired with the weird shit she said going to sleep, a smell he hadn’t smelled on anyone before, but would probably smell on countless other girls, once he left the cramped college town.

“Kiss me,” Fran pleaded.

“I no longer desire you,” he said. She looked at him hopelessly. He squeezed her arm for a second, then dropped it. It fell to her side. She cried and he did nothing. He’d spent the morning crying and it no longer represented anything to him.

“I’m sorry!” she said. “I’m stupid!”

“I’m late,” he said, waiting for her to leave.

“I love you,” she said. He groaned and left for class, closing her in his apartment.

She waited for him to come back. When he didn’t, she stuffed her face in his pillow, sobbing. When she grew bored of this, she sat in his desk chair twirling, examining his room, which felt entirely different from the night before. All his objects had turned against her—his sunken-eyed Buddha, his plastic laundry bin. The room barely tolerated her.

Fran saw something on the rug and her whole body felt hot. Without getting very close, she could see it was Paulina’s student card. Fran picked it up. Paulina looked distracted in
the picture. Her pale skin looked masklike. Red-eye gave her an eerie look. Paulina’s lips were pursed as if about to speak. Fran felt an unbearable ache, as if the dead were pulling her heart. She slid the card in her wallet, beneath her own student card. They had been
dancing,
she thought again, but Julian did not understand dancing.

Paulina rejoiced when she saw Fran enter the town library crying. It was an old, decrepit library, too, where homeless people pretended to read and perverts sniffed books. Paulina walked to Julian’s with a light heart. Big gray clouds crawled across the sky. She was supposed to work on her thesis paper, “Hairstyles through Art History.” She wore the crazy drum major jacket.

Her confidence sagged when no one answered Julian’s door. Paulina leaned against the scratchy siding of the house. She smoothed her eyebrows. She crouched as if to sit, but didn’t want to dirty her Guatemalan war dress. She told herself she could work on her paper in her mind. She forgot the dirt and sat down, absently adjusting her bra, thinking about the hair history paper, how it was progressing. That Rousseau painting
War
had some funny hair, the one with the girl riding a horse.

She’d slept with Julian only a few times since he left Fran, but each felt like a victory. It was different with him now. It was always at his place and she didn’t sleep over. She left in the
night feeling like a witch who had created night. The kissing had changed too. They didn’t kiss hello or good-bye. There were only the long wild kisses during sex, the experimental kisses that initiated sex, and the brain-dead kissing after sex. Paulina peered into Julian’s first-floor neighbors’ apartment. These neighbors were adults with actual careers. They’d put time and money into arranging a stylish living room, which sat in the dark like an abandoned hotel lobby.

The leaves on the trees rustled in that scared-horse, about-to-rain way. Julian was probably working on his senior film, Paulina thought, remembering him talking about it while she’d lain beside him, bored out of her mind. During this part of the semester, the film kids obediently held microphones and lights for each other, straining under the weight, convinced they were witnessing the authentic film magic they’d been chasing, and would chase into various disappointing careers. Meanwhile the director yelled and sighed and tried to manipulate his classmates into convincing performances, but it was like squeezing water from a stone, or so Julian said.

Paulina was standing up to leave when she saw Fran approaching. Her clothes looked slept in. Fran glared at Paulina’s garish coat.

“Did you lose your troop?” Fran asked.

“When was the last time you showered? Your baptism?” Paulina asked.

Fran looked wearily into Paulina’s bright eyes. She missed Julian’s love. She craved the zen-ness of being rammed. The one time she’d seen Marvin, he’d waved noncommittally, like a classmate. In her studio, she’d started a painting of Paulina and turned her into a demon.

“Do you ever even fall in love?” Fran asked Paulina. “Or do you just live to conquer people’s bodies?”

“The latter,” Paulina said and laughed.

“You never even loved him, though! I love him,” Fran said.

“What do you know of love? You are remote. Wind chimes drive you deep in reverie.”

“Julian was my sexual awakening,” Fran said.

“No shit!” Paulina said. “Who do you think taught him all that? Before he met me, he couldn’t get a snowball wet.” Paulina snickered. Fran blushed. She tasted blood in her mouth.

“He said the weight of you nearly crushed his ribs,” Fran said. “He said you were always overacting.”

A rush of embarrassment stunned Paulina. “I was only friends with you as a novelty!” she yelled. “How a child picks an ant from a pile of ants and makes it their pet for the afternoon.”

“To be your friend is to be owned by you,” Fran said, shaking.

“You’re so pathetic. You will never be an artist. Success
will elude you! Everyone will forget you,” Paulina said, putting a curse on her. “You will live nowhere! You will do nothing!” Fran cried into her arm and Paulina laughed like the demon in the painting.

Fran’s face was red with tears, but she grew prettier through the crying. Beauty is given to the idiots, thought Paulina, and recalled watching Marvin pick acorns. Beauty is the idiot’s consolation prize, she thought, yearning to switch faces and bodies with Fran. At least I have good hair, Paulina thought. If one focused on her hair, her features were charming, but when her hair was matted from the shower, her face looked belabored, like one of Milo’s bad clay sculptures.

Paulina was so absorbed in Fran’s crying that she didn’t realize it was raining. Raindrops stuck in the girls’ hair, puffing out their curls. Hairs that previously belonged to a curl, now stuck out mindlessly on their own. Fran sat in the wet grass, hunched like an old person.

“Is this part of your fantasy?” Paulina chided. “That he’ll come back and pity you and carry you into his house like an abandoned kitten and take off baby’s wet clothes and . . .” Fran pressed her ears closed as Paulina continued.

When the crying waned, Fran told herself that she was ugly, she was useless, and the crying came back. The crying felt like her final friend. The only thing she could do. Like she was good at it. She felt a terrible untethering from the world.
She didn’t expect Julian, was no longer waiting for him, but couldn’t motivate herself to rise. Fran felt the tiny hope that Paulina could help her. That however bad Fran felt, Paulina could reverse it if she wanted to.
You’re so stupid
, Fran told herself,
that’s so stupid
, and a new batch of tears came through, warming her cheeks, dripping from her nose.

Fran’s crying soothed Paulina. Julian was nowhere. He must be working on his film, Paulina thought again. She’d never seen his work before. She hated student films. Student films disgusted her. But she would sit through it. Whatever thing it was. She would find him in the Film Building. She would claw through the recently weaned
anime
kids. Maybe it had to do with her, even, the movie. Maybe it was clearly about her, and everyone else was too stupid to realize it. Maybe it was good.

She felt drawn to Fran and repelled by Fran. She felt superior to all women and started walking quickly away from Fran. Houses of nonlovers blurred together as she passed. Lives that wouldn’t touch hers. Lives she could touch, but didn’t feel like it. She felt her old power collecting around her. She would watch this film. She would take Julian back to her place and let Fran drown in tears. Crying Fran was like the girls from her junior high who wore fairy wings—theater rejects in the grass.

Yet Fran hung out in her head like
Spirit of the Forest
or
whatever. What was
Spirit of the Forest
? Where had she heard that? A beetle flew around her and landed in her hair. Beetles never know where they’re going, Paulina thought, annoyed, swatting at it. Beetles know not what they do.

As she approached campus, she passed huddled groups of her classmates and paid them no mind. What the fuck were they whispering about?
Her?
Art students are so dramatic, she thought, weaving around them. She wasn’t like them. She was a scholar. God, no, scholar sounded so stuffy and tweed and blah. She was one of the great thinkers of her time.

“Paulina!” Sadie was running toward her. Paulina kept walking. It was so like Sadie to cut short Paulina’s glory with her kid-sister insistence. Julian was probably alone in the editing room, and the editing rooms locked.

Sadie’s eyes were full of tears. “Wait, I have to talk to you,” Sadie said, her face soggy. “Eileen died.”

“Died?” Paulina asked.

“Yes. It’s so awful. The whole thing is mysterious. I lent her my car last night and she was found . . .”

Paulina stopped and let her mind run. Eileen bought drugs from Fluff, a maniac who could not be trusted. A number of times Paulina had come close to trying heroin with Fluff at Mystic’s warehouse, but always some force kept her back. She pictured Fran in the jumper at Mystic’s and Julian taking it off her.

“At first she was in a coma, but by the time I heard about
it—” Sadie started crying again. “If only I hadn’t lent her the car, or if I had gone with her, or, I don’t know. I invited her to hang out with me and Allison, but I could have been more . . . I don’t know . . .” She trailed off and Paulina watched her sink into the frivolous hoards of her mind.

“Oh, it’s not your fault. That much is clear,” Paulina said and gave Sadie a hug.

“I know, that’s what everyone says, but it’s not getting through to me,” Sadie said, trembling. Paulina sat on the Foundation Building steps with Sadie, and listened to her tearfully cycle through the same thoughts. The longer Paulina lingered with Sadie, the more likely it was that Julian had finished his work and was walking to his apartment, discovering the crying mess on his lawn.

An hour later, the same phrases kept coming out of Sadie’s mouth—
too young, my fault, no God, senior year
. Paulina could hear snippets of the other conversations around them, whispers of
drug party
and
death wish
. The next few weeks would be this same conversation over and over, she knew. She would sometimes have to manufacture the emotions. It would overshadow all the year-end parties.