Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

by Andrea Lawlor

  They walked home in the moonlight, block after chilly block of not talking or touching. Paul felt the pull of Diane’s shoulder, her hip. When they got back to their room, Diane lay down on top of the unzipped green sleeping bag they used for a blanket.

  “Come here,” she said. They didn’t wait to get their clothes off. But when they were done he knew they were done.

  V.

  Paul slumped against the plastic window of the California-bound Amtrak, the Zephyr. He alternated between weeping and wishing he’d worn tighter pants. He’d changed when he’d left P-town to take the return flight from Albany to Chicago and was now stuck, a ghost with gangly limbs, a potbelly, his own round chin, too much or maybe too little body hair—all his old inadequacies. He couldn’t muster the energy or focus to become a more attractive version of himself. No one on the train was cute anyway. Maybe no one would ever be cute again.

  In movies you always met someone on the train, which is why Paul had spent an obscene sum of money on a train ticket instead of just taking the Greyhound like a normal person. The train was a place of possibility, of romance, a portal to a new world, or at the very least an opportunity for a ground score. In Strangers on a Train, Robert Walker chatting up Farley Granger in the dining car, Granger smiling, “You don’t know what you want.” Paul knew. Of course, that had not ended well. But what about Some Like It Hot? Didn’t Tony Curtis meet Marilyn Monroe on a train? For a moment he felt a little better. He’d meet someone who’d take his mind off this endless looping of Diane to Diane to Diane. He was not enough for Diane, was not right and could never be right by virtue of his very malleability, was not right because he could make himself right? But then, she had said at one point in the last few days that he was “too much” for her, so what to do with that? Paul tried to put his thoughts in order.

  The train ride from Chicago to San Francisco—actually, the stop was called Emeryville—took fifty-two hours; Paul had been on the train for twenty-nine hours already and his ass ached from the bristly velour. In twenty-three hours he’d be in San Francisco with nowhere to go, no one expecting him. He possessed a folded-up sheet of loose-leaf with the scrawled names of a youth hostel and three cafés likely to offer bulletin boards, notes from his call to Christopher from a payphone at O’Hare. Christopher had told him just to come back, that he could stay in the living room until the subletter moved out. Paul didn’t call Jane. Jane was mad at him, he was pretty sure. She’d never liked Diane, couldn’t understand but mostly was just pissed that Paul disappeared when Diane came into the picture. Anyway, he couldn’t go back to Iowa City in the middle of a semester, in such obvious disrepair. He needed a place to stash himself for a while. He wished he were a replicant, wished he could unplug himself for a few months. When he did sleep he dreamed of Diane, the worst dream—the dream where she still loved him—and when he woke he was alone again.

  Paul was too old to run away but not grown. He’d already spent five dollars on a crappy boxed ham sandwich and needed to ration his money. He had $519 left to his name, $181 of it in cash. He bought a coffee every few hours, just to have an activity, paying in coins so as not to break into his paper money. If he ate something else maybe he could change, could look how he felt, about fifteen. He could work up enough energy if he had a hot dog probably, stomach-turning as the thought might be, but hot dogs were five dollars too. Couldn’t some kind train mother open her picnic basket full of cold bottles of milk and fried chicken and apples and offer Paul food? But the train mothers sat with their sleeping children in their laps, flipping through Marie Claires, drinking individual white wines. If the train mothers were to consider Paul at all, they’d consider him balefully. Paul walked back to the terrible bathroom, held his breath, and applied eyeliner and a heavy coat of Fire & Ice as a last-ditch effort to improve his mood.

  Minutes after a roadside sign for Roseville, Morrissey’s voice began to drizzle in Paul’s ears, his offer to die by the side of his beloved unfulfilled. Paul hit eject to investigate and discovered the glossy brown ribbon snagged, unraveled, useless—mutilated by the act of looking at it.

  He managed a few minutes’ sleep here and there, crying into his sweatshirt to exhaust himself. Individual train lights pierced the darkness because people had to read. What could they read at a time like this? During one moment of waking Paul pulled down the beige plastic table and wrote a few sentences to Diane on notebook paper, but he had nothing to say so he stopped. He couldn’t read. He was unconsoled by the Vogue he’d stolen from the train station newsstand. When night returned, Paul brushed his teeth in the terrible bathroom, gathered his belongings, and repaired to the bar car, where, he thought, dashing Cheeverish older men might like to buy him drinks.

  He found instead two off-duty train conductors, a red-nosed salesman discussing the frustrations of the office-supply business, and the persistent smell of discount cigarettes and fried onions. Paul fled back to his velour cage, where he tucked his legs primly against the seat and attempted to hold one position indefinitely. Maybe in San Francisco he’d become a monk. Anything was possible there. He’d never been to San Francisco, but it was a place you could go, a lit-up bulb on the map, the last okay destination.

  Paul considered his resources. He’d spent a good chunk of his Provincetown cash on the Peter Pan back to Albany and the train ticket. His belongings were at Jane’s. His mom thought he’d gone back to Iowa City months ago. So did Kostas. Everybody in Iowa City was probably mad at him, except maybe Christopher. He had no friends in California or, now, in Provincetown. Did he have any friends anywhere?

  * * *

  ×

  Theresa liked to tell Paul she’d missed the ’60s, she hadn’t been cool enough, she was washing diapers for professors and going to bed early, but that wasn’t exactly true.

  She’d dropped out of Russell Sage after one year, fulfilling her mother’s predictions. It was 1969. She liked the classes but couldn’t stand the sheepy other girls, so proper and snobby. So parochial. Theresa considered herself a citizen of the world, and she wanted to see the whole of her territory.

  That June she spent her accumulated life savings on a one-way plane ticket to Paris, where she hoped and expected to meet a combustible but tender painter who’d bring her around to his favorite cafés, where she’d banter with poets in fluent bed-learned French. Instead, she took the first invitation she received and boarded a train for Sienna with an Italian girl she met on the plane. The Italian girl, Rosalie, was from Queens and was very free, Theresa thought. Not like the girls in her neighborhood, or those stuck-up Russell Sage girls. Theresa wanted badly to be free. On the ferry from Napoli to Palermo, Rosalie met a weedy English playboy who persuaded them both to stay with him at his uncle’s place in the Paphos District, on Cyprus. They couldn’t refuse, Rosalie had maintained, as she and Theresa conferred in the ferry’s rainy stern. How could they live knowing they’d missed the festival of Dionysus? Who else in this life would ever invite them to Cyprus? And so to Cyprus—where they drank the absent uncle’s wine, where they climbed the rocky coast to picnic on olives and exotic crumbling cheese, where the English playboy, Reggie, rotated his affections to Theresa, who found herself—woke up to herself—bidding Rosalie farewell at the ferry terminal in the little city. When, two wine-soaked weeks later, Reggie returned to his fancy English life and his fiancée, Theresa stayed on. She extracted from Reggie a guilty offer of a caretaking position, and was allowed to remain at the house until his uncle returned the next spring. She needed time to accommodate this new version of herself, as someone who’d throw over a girlfriend for a boy she didn’t like, who’d walk out on a full scholarship to a private college, who’d leave two inept parents alone and drinking themselves to death in the cold upstate winter. She’d left Troy in flames, she thought, making her way through a translation of the Aeneid borrowed from the uncle’s library.

  Was she Dido or Lavinia? When Reggie’
s uncle returned with his valet (his valet!), Theresa packed the Virgil into her small bag and again accepted the first offer that came: babysitting for a German couple, archaeologists too busy digging up the Paphos police station to toilet-train their only child. I’m Lavinia, she thought with scornful self-awareness, but was relieved.

  She tried to hide her goodness from herself, pretending she wasn’t saving for her ticket home to the States but instead for more adventure. She flew on goodness-autopilot. She told herself the money she’d asked Frau Vogel to hold for her would buy a month in Paris. Meanwhile, Stefan was as charming as any small child, and the archaeologists were kind in their Teutonic way. They drew her walking maps to special ruins on the island, taught her to cook a passable schnitzel, and introduced her to the only other young people they knew: their graduate students and their colleagues’ au pairs. Theresa didn’t speak French and was intimidated by the graduate students but she established a camaraderie with an Australian au pair called Daisy and they occasionally made day trips to Rhodes. She sent cheery postcards to her parents and picked up their infrequent letters at the post office, thinking all the while, a few more months, a few more months. She waited out the rainy season, diapering and reading and planning her trajectory around the Continent.

  One Thursday, the eternal help’s-night-off, Theresa met Daisy down at the new bar for tourists, right on the beach in Paphos, to dance by the sea now that the rains had slowed. She’d drunk quite a bit—it was some festival or another—and had danced with no restraint, had felt like Isadora Duncan. She had, she thought later, perhaps made a spectacle of herself, and then an even more spectacular dancer took the floor. For the rest of the night she danced exclusively with this dark stranger, sweat pasting his thin unbuttoned shirt to his chest. Later on the beach Theresa licked the salted sweat from his neck—bold Dido!—and he made love to her right there in the sand. When she reported her adventure to Daisy, who was somewhat less free than Rosalie, she used the words made love.

  Theresa never saw the stranger again. She didn’t know his last name, or where he was from. She knew that he spoke English with an accent she wasn’t sophisticated enough to identify, maybe Greek or Turkish. That he had curly black hair and olive skin, maybe darker. That he had no home, was a traveler, like her a citizen of the world. And that, on his thigh—for she remembered not his face but his bare thigh—a scar like a pink worm dripped down to his knee, shiny keloid reflecting the moonlight. Theresa felt herself subtly changed. She began to consider Paris more seriously. She listened to the Vogels’ box set of La bohème as if she might divine her destiny in Maria Callas’s voice.

  This is my life now, she thought on Thursday mornings, sipping thick sweet coffee in the café and reading week-old copies of the International Herald Tribune left by British tourists. Occasionally a group of long-haired American or French boys would pass through town and Theresa would invite them to spend a Thursday afternoon exploring ruins. Daisy had begun to look up to Theresa as the wild one, the free one. Eventually, Theresa had to admit to herself her two missed periods. When she began to show, she confided tearfully in Frau Vogel, who advised her with an expensive Continental sangfroid that was shocking but also comforting. It was too late to “do something about it,” Frau Vogel said, which Theresa knew. They agreed she would stay until the baby was born. Then, of course, she would be on her own.

  When the baby came, Theresa sent her parents a postcard of a church, St. Kyriaki’s, and wrote a few impressive lines about the dig. She didn’t mention the Vogels’ fear that the violence in the north would drift down. She didn’t mention the baby or her new job at the café or the morning mass she’d begun to wake up for every day.

  When the Turks came for real, five years later, Theresa bundled up her baby—still her baby!—bade farewell to the island and retreated, with the rest of the Americans, to the safe lie of home.

  VI.

  Emeryville, as it turned out, was not San Francisco.

  Paul had to pack himself onto a shuttle bus from the Emeryville station to the Oakland station, which was also not San Francisco. By the time he was back on dry land, it was one in the morning.

  The newish green streetlights, a municipal marriage of hunter green and teal, washed the bleak Oakland cement and blacked-out storefront glass. The street had that stage-set emptiness that brought to mind thoughts of Stephen Sondheim. For blocks Paul saw no humans. He hit the end of all streets, saw water. He rubbed any remaining makeup onto his shirtsleeve. He couldn’t get much bigger physically—he still hadn’t eaten properly and couldn’t just imagine himself bigger—so he put up his hood and tried to walk “like a man.” The few other people who’d disembarked from the shuttle with him were long gone, on to meet their families or hail their taxis. Paul couldn’t find anyone to ask for directions to the hostel, something he hadn’t anticipated. He was used to New York, imagined arriving at the equivalent of Grand Central. He couldn’t sleep in the train station; the benches were divided by bars every two feet—so homeless people wouldn’t stretch out and nap, Paul realized bitterly. Even if one could sleep sitting up, which after fifty-two hours on a train Paul could not, fluorescent lights and rent-a-cops would make sleep impossible.

  Paul’s two small bags gained weight with each step. He passed the same boarded-up Chinese takeout place twice, then helplessly paced the block three more times before dropping to his haunches in the doorway of a metal-shuttered tobacco shop. A cab whooshed down the street and Paul jumped into the gutter, wild-handed until the cab pulled over half a block up. Paul ran.

  “Can you tell me how to get to”—he consulted his sheet of paper—“Kearny Street and Broadway?”

  The cabdriver sighed, checked his fake Rolex, and unlocked the back door.

  “Fifty bucks,” he growled.

  “I’m broke,” said Paul. “Can’t you just tell me how to get there?”

  “Gotta drive ’cross the bay. Can’t walk it,” said the driver. “Or wait. BART starts at 6.”

  Paul swore in his mind. That would bring him to $131 cash. He could not wait five fluorescent hours in that station. He opened the back door and slid across the vinyl. He tried not to think about the percentage of his total money he was now spending on this cab, couldn’t do that math anyway. He tried not to think about how stuck he was in this sad tired old body. Out the streaked windshield the bay was strung with tiny Christmas lights or fairy litter, which didn’t make up for anything.

  * * *

  ×

  Paul spent that whole first night at the hostel scratching his thighs and ears, bedbug-hunting, and then they kicked him out at eight without time for a shower or even a French bath. He stuffed both his bags in a common-room quarter locker and left with only his Walkman and his remaining $120.

  His crappy free tourist map didn’t show bus routes or even individual streets, just locations from which one might watch seals or eat “bread bowls.” Where was San Francisco? Paul didn’t want to ask the straight, probably homophobic, hostel people how to get to the Castro, so he decided to walk until he saw another gay person. He walked and walked. Maybe San Francisco wasn’t gay anymore, he thought after twenty fruitless minutes.

  He found Market Street, apparently the hub of low-rent commercial activity: cigar stores, hamburger chains, Paylesses. There wouldn’t be any gays on Market Street, he thought, but then he saw a peep show. It didn’t open until nine, so Paul sat across the street at a diner and made a dollar coffee last. He’d wait until lunch to spend money on food, even though he was spacey with hunger.

  When the box-office grate opened, Paul paid his check and left the diner. The haggard queen in the booth drew Paul a walking map to the “heart of Gay SF.” He was halfway down the block before he noticed the unsolicited phone number on the paper. Paul was awash in judgment—did he seem so desperate he’d go for a toothless old fag?—before he decided to feel flattered.

 
He stopped at a Rite Aid and stole double As for his Walkman to listen to a mix Tony Pinto had made him years ago. Maybe he could start over, from then. Rewind, scotch-tape the tabs, tape over his life. He walked and walked. By the time Paul found a critical mass of pink neon triangles and blacked-out windows with silver-fonted signs, his stomach stung from hunger. He liked that internal buzzing, which burned out stray thoughts of Diane. But he needed to bulk up, or curve up.

  He chose the first diner with a good name: Sparky’s. A hopeful name. Maybe he could be sparky again, as someone else. He sat at the counter and ate a cheeseburger, and then another cheeseburger, and then a plate of fries with gravy, Iowa-style. His rawboned skinny punk-rock waiter arched an eyebrow after the second burger but didn’t say anything.

  When Paul looked up, he saw it was raining. He’d definitely ordered expensive-enough food to hang out until the rain let up, but he didn’t have anything good to read. He wished he’d sat in a booth, where he could hide from the waiters. His waiter hovered in a tight black tee shirt that said The Stud. Paul didn’t have the wherewithal to make conversation, even with such an easy opening. He guessed the skinny waiter was cute, even with all the acne scars and patchy sandpaper beard. Or maybe because of the scars. That was a type some people were into, he thought with a detached regard: guys with pockmarks. He wondered vaguely if there was a corresponding hanky color. He missed Diane.

  “Coffee?” said the skinny waiter.

  “Okay,” said Paul, removing his headphones. Liz Phair was playing. He wondered if the skinny waiter picked the music.

  “Good album,” said Paul. The world was his breakup tape.

  “Yeah,” said the waiter, busying himself with side work. Paul sneaked a look at the quarter-sized cork plugs in the waiter’s earlobes.