Some days, Harvey regretted his deal with Paulina. Her ideas were good, but she was difficult. She was sensitive. She was always firing her secretary. She told off their head of distribution. Paulina bought things impulsively—an apartment on the Lower East Side, a motorcycle she soon crashed. She bought friends and drugs. She ignored Harvey’s advice. Viv started avoiding her at events.
Paulina sat on her love seat wearing a silk kimono. Dinner was over; only the most charred parts of the brussels sprouts were left on the crystal platter, the chicken bones looked grisly piled in a bowl, and the cloth napkins were crumpled on the mirrored table she had imported from India. The straight-backed dining chairs, grandly upholstered in green velvet, were being set back in place by Paulina’s maid. Guests sprawled on the oversized leather couch in the living room, noting the excellent condition of Paulina’s exposed brick, mesmerized by the chandelier that lorded over them. Candles dripped their wax on silver plates. Music played, but Paulina could not tell who put it on or where it was coming from; everything had been installed while Paulina was on vacation.
Juliette, a young gallery owner Paulina had met at Harvey’s one night, bent to scratch the cat. “I can’t believe you haven’t named him yet!” Paulina stared down at the cat, lean and black, and its companion, fluffy and white. The cats had been a gift from Paulina’s stylist for her twenty-fifth birthday. He said if she tired of them, she could just set them loose on the street.
“That one I call Nameless,” Paulina said, “and the other is Unknown. But of course I’m open to suggestions.”
“What about Cicero?” offered Mimi, Paulina’s personal shopper.
“Too grand,” said Clive, an ex-boyfriend of Dean’s that Dean had sent in his place.
“Dust mite?” said Eli, heir to the Aerobed fortune.
“Jasmine,” said Jasmine, a SUPERCURL model Paulina had discovered in the subway. They all laughed. Clive walked over and turned a dial on the wall that appeared to control the music. Paulina watched in wonder. Just the day before, the doorman had told her about Channel 100 on her television, which showed a live feed from the lobby of the building. In black and white, she’d watched her guests arrive to dinner.
Eli and Clive danced lazily and the others threw cushions at them. “Strip!” Paulina ordered, but they refused. Jasmine passed around a carved ivory pipe packed with weed and they smoked. Paulina’s throat burned. The smoke added to the good feeling in the room—the sense that there was nowhere else to be. Jasmine told a long story about stealing the pipe from the house of her husband’s ex-lover. Paulina gazed at everyone’s faces as if they were strangers. The faces moved and Paulina watched them through their quick changes. She heard them talking, but couldn’t tell which voice was whose. She’d been pulled from one life and shoved into another. She tried to remember the name of the maid she’d hired.
“Paulina went to Norway too, didn’t you?” said Jasmine. Paulina looked up.
“Paulina is in Norway right now,” said Eli, and blew smoke in her face.
Paulina laughed. “I went with an old lover of mine. We went discothèque to discothèque.” What a wonderful word, “discothèque.” How wonderful Fran looked in the discothèque. The white cat walked in and jumped on Paulina’s lap. She stroked the creature’s soft head.
“What was his name?” Jasmine asked.
“Her name.” They all laughed and looked at her admiringly, she felt. The old confidence welled in her. “We shacked up with this Nordic god, far away from the world.” She felt how their full attention rested on her. “What a time we had there. His castle had a chamber of weapons. He had a trained hawk. We ate bread, and things he had killed, and we drank wine,” she said. “He had the most dramatic chest.” Paulina pictured Blood Axe like a giant, tall as her windows. “His cock was bigger than Rhode Island. Its arch was designed by Romans. His balls were like two factories populating the world.” Her audience smirked at her. “His hair was okay, but the girl had the finest curls I’d seen, beyond my own.”
“Where is she now?” asked Clive.
“She’s still there.” The cat jumped from her lap and brushed against Jasmine’s legs. “She chose him over me.”
“How could she?” Clive teased, but Paulina took him seriously.
“He was a tremendous lover. His hands. The textures.” She shuddered. “He was a terrible filmmaker. But he knew what to do with a woman’s body. I could have given her the same, given her better, but still she went with him. She left me.” Paulina sighed, reaching for one of the cats, but neither was near.
“What really makes a good lover, do you think?” asked Clive, and everyone answered at once, cutting Paulina’s story short. She sat silently through their foolish comments, their boring anecdotes. Their conversation cheapened sex until it seemed the idiot fun of pedestrians and nobodies. Why hadn’t Dean showed? Why had he sent his second-rate gay instead, this ex-lover who clearly wanted to join SUPERCURL’s marketing team? All during dinner he spoke of his skills, his eye, but Paulina would never hire him. She wasn’t allowed to hire people anyway, as Harvey kept reminding her.
Paulina watched Eli play with the cats in a way that would only encourage violence. She turned on Channel 100, looking for interesting people in the lobby. There were none, just the doorman reading the newspaper. She desperately wanted to escape to the balcony, but when Jasmine suggested the balcony and they all cheered, Paulina told them to go without her.
She lay on her back, staring into the chandelier, wondering where Fran was, hoping it was a dark, damp, wretched space, like a war trench or sewer. I hope she’s painting faces as a birthday clown in Nebraska, or somewhere that’s nowhere, Paulina thought. She wanted Fran to suffer. For even in Paulina’s new place, with all of her dreams in reach, the gold letters of her name pressed into her business cards, the intoxicating enthusiasm of her agent, there was still that bundle of misery that traveled along with her, that let out little mites of suffering, even while Paulina laughed, even while she gleamed.
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 P
ittsburgh.” 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.
Paulina & Fran Page 13
