Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

by Andrea Lawlor

  Paul lay down fully clothed on the most remote bunk he could find, turned fetally to the wall, and hugged his duffel. The French hostelers looked dangerously American to him, dubbed-over frat boys. This was San Francisco? Paul knew he could not remain in the hostel. All night he hovered just above sleep: missing flights, retaking the SATs, boarding express trains going in the wrong direction. When the first alarm bell rang, he sprang up and claimed the one single-stall shower. He dressed in the stall, stripped his bunk of its pilling sheets, returned his dirty linens to the front desk, and checked himself officially out.

  Today he’d hit the café bulletin boards, get dimes, make some calls. And if he couldn’t find an apartment to move into by night, he’d sleep in the park. Paul had gone west, as the Pet Shop Boys had advised, and he was new. He needed to be where the new people were.

  * * *

  ×

  At Café Flore, Paul spent $1.25 on a coffee plus a buck in the tip jar. He arranged a temporary office for himself by the phone. He’d taken only the little xeroxed rectangles and could no longer match number with gay-friendly roommate situation, so he ordered the slips by handwriting, artiest first. A tired or else stunningly jaded fag answered on the first ring and invited Paul over immediately; the apartment was a few blocks away.

  Paul scooped up his coffee, wishing he had a scarf to toss jauntily over his shoulder. He made his way to the apartment, which turned out to be both prohibitively expensive and rife with cats. Paul counted six but smelled more. His potential roommate—bald, disheveled, in his forties—oozed needy troll energy, another strike. Paul drew the line at living with trolls. Some people would, for instance in the situation where the troll offered free rent. Paul dared not take the chance; uncoolness was contagious and no one was immune. The troll worked as a graphic designer, apparently, which accounted for the misleadingly nice handwriting.

  Paul made his polite refusal and walked back to Flore, which is how he’d overheard a sparkly boy on the street refer to his new base of operations. The country-punk counter girl smiled at him. He left more messages on more answering machines, leaving the payphone number for callbacks. He’d used up all his numbers and all his dimes and now he’d have to guard the payphone against other customers. Paul smarted at this unfairness of apartment hunting: you needed an apartment with a phone to get an apartment with a phone, like you needed a job to get a job, or money to get money. But worse—you needed a phone to get a job, so you actually needed an apartment to get a phone to get a job, so the apartment was first, but you needed a job to get the apartment. Paul felt an incisive critique of capitalism coming on and ordered an expensive latte as a distraction. When he tried to pay for the latte, the counter girl waved his money away.

  This, thought Paul, buoyed, will be my city. He left the full price of the drink in the tip jar, $91 left in his pocket.

  He and the counter girl smiled at each other in pure true friendship. When he finished his delicious latte, Paul knew he had to leave. He could come back the next day, but he couldn’t order anything else here today and he couldn’t linger. The balance was delicate. He could say one more thing, though, to cultivate. He approached the counter, snapping his jacket closed.

  “What’s this song? Who is this?” he said, with a hand gesture of subtle rapture.

  “Oh my god, right?” the counter girl said. “It’s Echobelly.”

  “Oh, cool,” said Paul. “PJ Harvey’s drummer’s new band?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So good.”

  Paul stood tip-tapping his fingers on the counter for another minute.

  “Hey,” he said. “Do you know anybody who’s looking for a roommate?”

  “Weird,” said the counter girl, with her big-toothed Scandinavian smile. “I actually do.”

  She wrote out name and number in graffiti-style letters, and pushed the napkin toward Paul.

  “Does that say Ruffles?” Paul asked, modulating his intonations carefully: too much emphasis said hickish surprise and no emphasis said hickish gullibility. He raised one eyebrow ever so slightly.

  “Yeah,” said the counter girl, laughing. “That’s his name. He’s cool. Everybody in that house is cool.”

  “Cool,” said Paul.

  “Say Suzy gave you the number.”

  Paul made a sharp little salute of thanks, high on conquest-adrenaline and expensive coffee, and went back to the payphone. Ruffles answered and invited Paul to come over to check out the house, located in the very butch-sounding Alamo Square. Out on the street, Paul stood briefly with his tourist map, attempting to find Alamo Square, before he gave up and decided it would be more fun to just ask people.

  Alamo Square was more a lawn than a park, flanked on all sides by tumbledown gingerbread houses. Paul rang the bell of the most tumbled-down of all the houses and a scarecrow fag in very snug silver bell-bottoms, a shaved head, and two very large hoop earrings answered. Paul could hear Shirley Bassey’s mellifluous laugh in the background, then horns.

  “Paul?”

  “Ruffles?”

  “Come in, darling,” Ruffles said. He was maybe in his thirties, and so stylish Paul couldn’t breathe properly at first. The counter girl must have thought he was cool enough to live with Ruffles, and a proud calm infused Paul’s body.

  Ruffles led him on a tour of the house: two floors, a room just for bikes, something called a water closet which turned out to just be a bathroom without a shower. The kitchen had wallpaper, which Paul found exotic. The Shirley Bassey was coming from a record player. The living room, Paul was surprised to discover, was not thrift-store ironic but instead sunny and wood-floor minimal, with a view of the pretty red bridge.

  They sat on facing couches and Ruffles explained the situation: five people lived in the house, but one was going to Berlin for a couple months and needed to sublet her room, conveniently the cheapest, located in the basement. She planned to leave it furnished but would pack up most of her stuff. Would Paul mind using her furniture? Was Paul vegan? Could Paul agree to not eat meat in the house? Was Paul cool with possible SM-related noises? Was Paul very quiet in the mornings? Did Paul have any pets? Did Paul smoke? How soon could Paul move in and start paying prorated rent? Paul was cool with everything, the other roommates were cool with Ruffles deciding, Ruffles was cool with Paul. They shook hands, for fun.

  “We’re going to just eat you up,” said Ruffles, slipping the Shirley Bassey record back into its sleeve and putting on Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. Ruffles was clearly a tastemaker. Maybe Paul could sit at his feet and learn, an ephebe to Ruffles’s Socrates.

  “Would you take a check from Iowa?” Paul asked.

  “Can you get a money order?” Ruffles countered.

  Paul agreed to come back later that evening with the money order and get his key then. Ruffles said Paul could move in the next day. He hadn’t asked where Paul was staying, and Paul hadn’t volunteered. Sitting out the night at a twenty-four-hour diner beat having Ruffles think him a friendless waif. Ruffles was not the kind of gay who rescued puppies, Paul could tell.

  Paul walked shin-splintingly fast to a bank machine, then to a check-cashing place on Divisadero where he purchased a money order for $162, which he then delivered to Ruffles. After the prorated rent plus the ATM fee ($1) and the charge for the money order ($5), he had $156 in the bank and the $91 still in his pocket. He was going to make it after all.

  He met two more of the roommates: also disinterested, also older punk-rock royalty—a photographer of hardcore bands who worked at Flax and a playwright who managed a small experimental theater in the Mission. Paul privately decided to bone up on hardcore and experimental theater, two areas of study he’d never before considered. The roommates were very polite and about to leave for a trip to Joshua Tree, which Paul pretended to have already known was a real place.

  Ruffles handed Paul a key
attached to a pink two-tone rabbit’s foot, and they all agreed Paul would move his stuff in the next morning. Paul hoped it wouldn’t seem strange that this “stuff” consisted of two bags. He left the house trying to imagine how Holly Golightly would handle the situation. He should maybe get big sunglasses, he thought. He should definitely go to the movies.

  He splurged for one movie (Crooklyn) and then snuck into two more (Bandit Queen, The Crow) at a cineplex on Van Ness, and emerged bleary-eyed and melancholy at midnight. Which world was this, he wondered. He couldn’t believe how sad it was that Brandon Lee had died during the filming; anyone so gorgeous was undoubtedly gay. He felt a little tragic, with the night so long and open before him.

  He still had at least ten hours to kill until he could honorably “move in.” He walked to the Castro, where packs of happy business gays pranced through the streets complaining loudly about the sullen waitress at dinner or tsking the street kids outside the subway station.

  It was very hard to break into the avant-garde without a place to live, Paul thought. Back at Flore, Paul’s new friend wasn’t working, so he sat and nursed a succession of coffees and wrote multiple unsatisfying drafts of a letter about crows to Diane, punctuated by guilt postcards to his mother, Kostas, his little brother Ari, and most guiltily of all, Jane. And to Christopher, who had sent him a letter care of General Delivery in Provincetown, itemizing his share of the bills and listing his phone messages (including another one from Tony Pinto).

  He walked to the Safeway at 3 AM to look for a cheap meat snack, and found a novelty-size marbled composition notebook. Paul loved functional tiny things; he loved how they turned him into a temporary giant, how he could have everything he needed in the palm of his hand. He surged with pleasure and excitement—maybe it was the coffee or maybe it was being able to go to a supermarket at three in the morning. He loved the city. He wandered the aisles with the tiny composition notebook, gazing in wonder upon all the California foodstuffs. He decided to pay for the notebook, if only to have some kind of interaction with the cashier.

  Back at Flore, Paul arranged his copy of A Lover’s Discourse on the table, careful to keep all the various Polaroids and pressed lilacs inside. Someday he would actually read the book all the way through, not just skim sections until he found a pretty idea which then overwhelmed him. He drew crows in his new notebook and dabbed coffee in between the lines for a watercolor effect. By the time the sun came up, he had reached a pitch of exhausted agitation and packed up his little office.

  He had seen a miniature park with benches on the other side of the Muni tracks, so he walked there in the chilly spring air. He curled up on the bench and dozed off the coffee until the noise of upstanding citizens with their dogs forced him awake. He let his mind empty, watching the dogs smell each other. Dogs, like everything else in life, were better with Diane. He thought of how intently dogs stared at Diane, sometimes pulling their owners down streets to follow her.

  He’d gone as his scruffy girlish-boy self to Ruffles’s house, had introduced himself as Paul—a mistake, he now saw. What if Diane wanted to get back together? But at least he’d have a phone number for that bookstore application. But then if he got the job, he’d have to go to work in his boy body. Everything was impossible and his stomach hurt. The coffee crash had begun.

  * * *

  ×

  An hour or so later, back at Alamo Square, Paul rang the buzzer and knocked. When no one answered, he let himself in. Heaven, he thought—a house to himself. He clattered down to the “garden” level and found his new room, maybe a little dustier and smaller than he’d remembered. He unpacked quickly and then sneaked looks behind his new roommates’ closed doors. He canvassed the kitchen for food he could eat without anyone knowing, and made himself a little sick on a breakfast of crackers, pickles, peanut butter, spoonfuls of tomato sauce, and—the big score—two large bites of cashew chicken from a takeout container. He had many tasks to accomplish today—thrift-shopping for sheets, giving his new phone number to that bookstore, buying groceries. Where to begin? Definitely a shower.

  Paul couldn’t remember the last time he’d taken a long hot shower in a clean bathroom. He washed and conditioned his hair a few times, sampling all the different products, from Aussie Mega to Finesse and finishing up with Aveda. He exfoliated with that apricot face scrub that smelled like the beach, slapped his face with Clinique toner, and carefully worked a dab of Sebastian Molding Mud into his hair. He took the smallest amounts of the products, samples really; no one would notice.

  Finally clean and fresh, Paul reclined on the living room couch with a stack of old but high-end fashion magazines (i-D, Photo, Vogue Italia) he’d found in the “water closet.” He doubted they belonged to Ruffles, but anything was possible. Gay men were so full of contradiction, he thought, as he began systematically paging through a Bazaar for pictures of the holy trinity of supermodels: Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista. Paul understood the feminist critique of the fashion world. He too was anti-fur and pro-positive images. He agreed models were too white and too skinny, but he loved these strange beings, their lost boyishness and their ennui and their dioramic emotional rearrangements.

  Linda was his favorite. He took the most delight in finding her in some crowded mise en scène. Linda allowed her form to appear in shocking configurations; Paul imagined these as vaguely collaborative, desultory acquiescences to some high bidder. When she’d said she wouldn’t get out of bed for less than $10,000, let alone do whatever was being proposed—what was she wearing when she’d said that, he wondered. He liked her Chanel campaign well enough but what hooked him was her editorial work: the Peter Lindbergh pieces in Vogue Italia, the Steve Meisel shots of her as blonde bombshell or Catholic schoolgirl or Catholic schoolboy or Linda as a girl poised to kiss Linda as a boy. Naomi was the smart one, Paul thought, and Christy was soft, Christy you might actually want to talk to about your problems or make out with, but Linda was the cunning fox, the trickster, this generation’s Stephen Gordon in French cuffs, Linda the Artemis to Christy’s Aphrodite and Naomi’s Athena. When he lived in New York he’d steal old magazines from rich people’s tied-up recycling on his way home from the bars and hunt through the back pages for clues about Linda’s natural habitat. She might be at Nell’s or the Tunnel or some VIP room at Limelight, and he’d only have to get past a bouncer to meet her and—then what? Even in his fantasies he never got past just seeing her and basking.

  Back in high school Paul had taped George Michael’s “Freedom ’90” video off 120 Minutes, and for years he watched it over and over, absorbing the drug of Linda, new every time. If anything, the high improved upon repetition, potency rebuilding during the rewind. First, drums and a tambourine. Next, flashes of Linda, short hair, in pants, sitting alone in a hallway. Romantic! Then Linda mouthing words, intercut with Naomi dancing in underwear, confusingly sexy—then back to Linda, and I mean, come on, thought Paul. She is totally singing to Naomi! On film Linda seemed almost vulnerable, softer but not soft, one of Fassbinder’s sailors, soft with malice, singing, “Heaven knows I was just a young boy, didn’t know what I wanted to be…” Singing with her eyes closed, singing about someone else. Even in the fantasy, you couldn’t have her. Anyone could see her vulnerability but it wasn’t for you. To watch her was to watch the girl you loved fantasize about someone else. “I was every little hungry school girl’s pride and joy, and I guess it was enough for me…” she mouthed, over and over, then intercutting with Naomi and a jolt! they both opened their eyes. Then the chorus, and Christy comes sweeping through the loft, naked under a sheet like a wedding dress, Christy seemed sad, what was it about her sadness that made Paul want her? But he wanted to be Linda. Now a motorcycle jacket was on fire! Christy knew what George Michael was singing about, Christy was the nice girl who felt bad that George Michael had to be such a closet case, who felt bad that Linda Evangelista had to be secretly in love with her,
who felt bad that Naomi Campbell was secretly a genius not being taken seriously. Christy was full of love, Paul thought. But Paul loved Linda, who was tortured and mean and hard and the kind of gorgeous that hurt, all angles and rage, she walked the catwalk in pain she was too proud to show. Never feminine, if feminine meant at all soft. Never pretty.

  In Iowa City he’d tried to play down his love of supermodels, had diluted his Linda wall shrine with drag-night club flyers and museum postcards. At Diane’s, he’d been restrained, hadn’t put anything on the walls in his effort to conform to her admittedly superior minimalist aesthetic. She’d tack one fading flea-market snapshot to the wall and be done with it. Now all that was the past. Who would he be here, in this high-ceilinged city? He split the binding of the Bazaar and carefully removed a Versace ad featuring Linda with a pompadour. He’d hang it up in his new closet, for old time’s sake.

  * * *

  ×

  A bookstore was really no different from a bar, Paul thought when he arrived, ten minutes before anyone else scheduled for the night shift. More public, better lit, but the same seaside question of what might wash up today.

  Now that he’d been at the bookstore for a few weeks, Paul had amassed preferences, was settling in. For one, he preferred opening, being alone with his light sweet coffee and dominion over the tape player. He disliked arriving late, but no one else minded. The store, the owners, the workers, the customers—everyone was on Gay Time. Paul liked the late shift well enough; nights often meant readings, and readings were efficient: anyone attractive was almost guaranteed to be smart and interesting, and anyone old enough to be unattractive might be famous.