Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

by Andrea Lawlor

  Paul looked under B.

  “We don’t have any,” he said.

  “Yeah,” said Silver. “He was straight. You should check him out, though.”

  “Cool,” said Paul. He didn’t have time to read straight poets but he wanted to be nice.

  He read one of Myles’s poems, the one about being a Kennedy; he was fairly certain but not positive that she was not a Kennedy, and this ambiguity thrilled him in a way that reminded him of Robin.

  As Paul was thinking through the Robin situation, who should walk in and plop Close to the Knives on the counter but the bowling-pin boy, Derek.

  “You work here?” Derek said.

  “I work here,” Paul said, ringing up the purchase with great professionalism.

  Derek was wearing a vintage purple Tuffskins jacket and green jeans from which Paul could not look away. That combination should never have worked. How had Derek gotten away with it? Paul had the feeling of having learned something profound, like suddenly understanding one of Foucault’s sentences.

  He smiled at Derek. Derek smiled back. They stood smiling foolishly across the counter until an elderly gentleman collapsed in one of the aisles. The entire store, staff and customers, sprang into action: Thom administered CPR, Divya called a gay-friendly EMT she knew, community-minded johns stood by panting with civic concern. A customer gathered four or five oranges that had escaped the man’s bag in the fall.

  “I should go,” Derek said. “You’re busy.”

  “Oh, okay,” Paul said. Thom and Divya totally had the situation under control. “Yeah, I should help.”

  Derek left the store. Paul walked over to the situation. He noticed purple blotches on the man’s distended neck; the man was perhaps not elderly. As Paul moved closer, he was rebuffed by the scrum of early responders. He returned to his post at the register. Somebody had to mind the store, he thought. The ambulance came and took the man away. Divya went on break and Thom retired to the office to do paperwork. Paul spent the rest of his shift at the register, out of sorts.

  Toward the end of the day, Paul leaned on the counter, pretending to organize the pink triangle jewelry but really staring out through the glass at the dark Tuesday night quiet of the Castro. He had forty minutes left, an eternity to stand at a register alone.

  The door opened. Derek came in.

  “This might sound forward,” Derek said. “But would you want to have dinner when you get off?”

  Over burritos, Derek and Paul compared notes on New York, where they’d sort of overlapped. Derek took the Metro-North from Vassar on Monday nights to attend ACT UP meetings at Cooper Union with his friend Kenny, whom Paul thought he remembered. They traded notes on ACT UP celebrities, that Village Voice reporter and the famous photographer. Paul remembered the vehement bald lesbian who’d once scolded him for giggling. “People are dying, Paul,” she’d said, and he’d been embarrassed until he saw Tony Pinto cracking up behind her back.

  Derek told Paul how he’d been so happy to study dance in college—his childhood dream deferred by a homophobic father—but he’d been too old at eighteen and too short at 5'7" to make it as a professional ballet dancer, so he’d majored in the infinitely more practical art history. Paul, impressed by Derek’s tragedy, accepted an invitation to smoke a little weed at Derek’s apartment, mere blocks away from the bookstore. After-dinner bong hits led to frottage and an exotic sleepover that dumped Paul back on the street when Derek left for work in the morning, biking out to the De Young for his job as something called a program assistant. Paul would have to ask Malcolm or Ruffles what that meant.

  When Derek stopped by the bookstore the next evening to suggest a second date, Paul agreed but couldn’t help wondering what Derek saw in him. Derek was so fancy.

  The next morning, he came home to an answering-machine message from Robin.

  “Hi, Polly, it’s Robin. I haven’t seen you around for a while. Come over to my studio tomorrow if you want. Around noon.”

  Paul played the tape over and over, first writing down Robin’s address and then attempting to isolate the faint Spanish inflection in Robin’s voice. He pictured that green lace-up shirt, the chase through the streets of Chicago. Robin, he thought.

  * * *

  ×

  Paul perched awkwardly on a cot, watching Robin hammer small black furniture tacks into blocks of wood, to what end Paul could not determine. He surmised this craftiness was a new artistic direction for Robin, whose extant sculptures, though handmade, appeared to have been assembled by robots.

  Robin’s studio looked severe in the thunderstorm darkness, fluorescent overheads casting a sinister supermarket light. Paul appreciated the avant-garde realness of Robin’s décor choices: dirty white walls; butcher-paper plans held up by bright blue painter’s tape; a worktable made from filing cabinets and a door; a cot that doubled as couch, covered by a neon-pink-and-green granny-square blanket. Robin would never carefully tape up pictures of supermodels to the wall, unless it was to detourn them.

  Robin paid Paul no attention but moved around the studio with a sense of purpose. Paul noticed Robin’s particular slightness, accentuated by a faded army-green mechanic’s jumpsuit and large black lace-up boots. How effortless Robin looked, how sui generis.

  “There’s beer in the fridge,” Robin offered.

  Paul pushed himself off the cot and dutifully opened two beers from the minifridge. He offered one to Robin, who refused. Paul shrugged and lined the two bottles up on the sawdusty floor. He picked one up and drank most of it in one gulp.

  Paul had not thus far been able to bring himself to ask Robin any of his burning questions—why are we like this? are there others? can we get sick? Being with Robin should be answer enough; to ask more would be gauche.

  “I’m going back to Iowa,” Paul said, experimentally. Until the words came out of his mouth he hadn’t even considered this retreat.

  “Really,” Robin said, precisely tipping over a coffee can of tacks and standing back to study the pattern they made on the butcher paper. “Seems like a good place to go.”

  “I might go to State instead,” Paul said. He knew he was grasping now, far off the script.

  “SF?” Robin said, carefully extracting one last tack from its lip holster.

  “Yeah,” said Paul.

  He looked at his shoes.

  “Robin?” Paul said. “Can I ask you a question?”

  Paul was immediately disgusted with himself. He sounded insecure, asking if he could ask—just the sort of dumb question he himself had so often railed against. But Robin just nodded, seemingly unperturbed.

  “What are we?” Robin supplied.

  Robin turned the hammer around and began removing tacks from wood.

  “I mean…” said Paul.

  “You want to know what I really think?” Robin said.

  “Yes,” Paul said.

  “We’re like everybody else, only more so.”

  “No, seriously,” Paul said.

  “We’re just what we are. You’re asking the wrong questions, Polly.”

  Robin disappeared into the hand-built closet in the corner and reemerged with a small box.

  “Do you like candy?”

  Paul nodded.

  “My grandmother sends me a box of turróns every year to my father’s house, and my father just crosses out his address and writes in mine. No note.”

  Robin offered the box to Paul.

  “The orange ones are the best,” Robin said, pointing out a choice piece wrapped in wax paper and tied up with a piece of orange string.

  Paul unwrapped the sticky white candy, which tasted like nougat and seemed like something Tony Pinto would have eaten.

  “I never met my father,” said Paul, between bites.

 
“I can’t decide if we should be lovers or best friends,” said Robin, as if Paul hadn’t spoken.

  I already have a best friend, who I owe a phone call, Paul thought. Friends were too much work.

  “Lovers!” Paul said. He had a sugar rush from the turrón, and reached for another.

  Robin laughed, with a shrug, that laugh of recognition without amusement.

  “Of course that’s what you’d say.”

  * * *

  ×

  “What happened with Robin?” Ruffles asked Paul one morning a few weeks later, after Derek had gone home to change for work and Paul sat about aimlessly drinking coffee and flipping through an old issue of Deneuve. He might not be a lesbian right at this very moment, he thought, scratching at a patch of dried semen on his boxer briefs, but he liked to stay current.

  “We’re friends,” Paul said.

  “Uh huh,” said Ruffles, helping himself to the rest of Paul’s French press.

  “Did you know Meshell Ndegeocello is gay?” Paul said. “I love her!”

  “Jade’s experiencing a grand passion, by the by,” said Ruffles. “She’s staying in Berlin indefinitely. I thought you might like to know.”

  “Meaning?” Paul said, raising one eyebrow. He knew Ruffles preferred him as a roommate to Jade, who sounded with every anecdote more and more like a domestic tyrant.

  “Yes, my pet,” Ruffles said. “You may stay on indefinitely.”

  “My favorite word!” said Paul. They toasted with their coffee cups.

  The universe was conspiring to keep him here, Paul thought.

  * * *

  ×

  Later that same week, Paul cooked dinner at Derek’s for the first time. So far Derek had cooked every time they ate together, as Paul’s specialties ran from scrambling eggs to ordering well, and Derek preferred, unfathomably, not to spend money on restaurants.

  Paul did like to cook an elaborate meal occasionally, and he decided to impress Derek with a capon out of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1. He banished Derek to the living room to pick out music and open the wine, and consulted the recipe he’d hidden in his pocket. Derek periodically ducked into the kitchen with little questions about Paul’s early life, about his parents and schooling and extended family. Paul deflected most of these, offering a noncommittal tidbit and then, “But what about you? Were you out in high school? Who was your first boyfriend? Are your parents cool?”

  Was Derek actually curious about Paul’s past? He seemed to be running down a list of “dating questions,” almost like an interview. He seemed pressingly interested in Paul’s future, which Paul suspected was born of Derek’s not-very-well-hidden embarrassment that Paul hadn’t finished college and worked in retail. Although a bookstore wasn’t retail, not really. It wasn’t like he was a shop girl.

  Derek was apparently close to his mother (shocking) and scared of his surgeon father (again, who would have imagined such a thing, for a young gay aristocrat?). He had a sixteen-year-old sister to whom he spoke by telephone nearly every day.

  Paul thought of his own brother, who’d turn seventeen in a month. When was the last time they’d actually had a conversation? Not last Christmas, certainly. Probably before Ari hit puberty. Paul had sent him a funny postcard of the crookedest street in the world a few months ago. Ari was probably better off without him, Paul thought, but silently vowed to make him a birthday mixtape this year. He tuned back in to Derek’s story about his Latin tutor in Grosse Pointe, whom Derek had always suspected might be gay.

  Paul stared at Derek from the doorway, all that earned muscle under his clothes, his bare feet stony from years of hardwood floors.

  “You should really finish your application to State,” Derek said, carving the capon because Paul didn’t know how. “And why not apply to UC Berkeley while you’re at it? You’d have in-state tuition either place, so you might as well go to the better school.”

  “Good idea,” said Paul, thinking Yeah, right, and They call it Cal. Derek was the sort of person who could have gotten into Cal without even knowing its name.

  * * *

  ×

  For weeks, then months, Paul and Derek went on dates to see the buffalo in the park, to film festivals, to modern dance shows choreographed by Derek’s friends, to lackluster demonstrations in front of government buildings or pharmaceutical company headquarters after which they got coffee. They attended and hosted dinner parties made up of other handsome young college-educated gay couples of all nations. They had a gentle and cuddling sex life, mostly what Paul called side-by-side love. He used to mean it snidely but was learning to appreciate its pleasures. Sometimes they gave each other minty-safe plastic blowjobs, smoking pot first for extra focus. Early on, Derek articulated his objection to anal sex on both safety and cleanliness grounds. But despite his heightened attentiveness to personal hygiene Derek was possessed of a supremely filthy imagination. Always up for a role play, he’d happily indulged Paul’s Edward II and Gaveston fantasy, seeing Paul and raising him one—Kid and Tak, Clinton and Lewinsky, Catherine the Great and her steed. Derek stopped by the bookstore most nights Paul worked, bringing him sandwiches and staying to chat. He was impressed by how many books Paul had read, and Paul tried to find poems or passages Derek might like, to read out loud in bed.

  * * *

  ×

  When Derek’s friend Kenny got a positive test result, Derek cried for two days straight, canceling rehearsals and watching marathons of daytime TV.

  “I just at some fundamental level don’t understand,” he said to Paul, who’d stopped by before his shift. “He works for needle exchange, for Christ’s sake. He’s always safe.”

  Paul kept his own counsel, having seen Kenny enter more than one backroom on the heels of one or another old white guy. Paul remembered something Diane had said, some hoary lesbian chestnut—“Don’t pathologize your desires.” That had been good advice, even if she hadn’t taken it herself. Paul wondered why Kenny liked those older guys, why they had to be white. Kenny’s boyfriend wasn’t white or old.

  “He’s still alive,” Paul said. He felt a righteous monologue about the entitlement of rich boys from Grosse Pointe coming on and squelched it, resulting in a sentence that sounded, even to his own ears, wise and compassionate.

  Derek pressed his thumb against the square of flesh between his eyebrows.

  “Yeah,” he said, and Paul could see the ghost of Derek’s boyhood. He swallowed his rage.

  “It’s okay,” Paul said, picking up and softly petting Derek’s free hand. “Everything’s okay.”

  They sat like that for a few minutes and then Derek curled up on the couch. Paul muted the television.

  “I wish I didn’t have to go but I do,” he said, covering Derek with a blanket. He needed to get back on the street.

  “Paul,” said Derek, as Paul fiddled with the deadbolt.

  “Yeah?” Paul said. He turned around.

  “I love you,” Derek said. He looked at Paul with tender eyes and a raw red nose.

  They’d never said this before, and Paul felt sick and a little violent at the thought of what he was about to do, what Derek was making him do.

  “I love you too,” he said, and went to work.

  * * *

  ×

  At the store, Paul found himself shadowing Silver, mesmerized by her always slightly pursed lips, the dimplish folds which appeared at the side of her mouth when she spoke in her whisper-soft voice. He wondered if she pursed her lips intentionally, to make them fuller, more girlish. Silver was talking a lot today, maybe because it was just the two of them in the store. She’d found one of the regular street kids nodded out on the back patio when she’d opened; she’d made sure he was alive and sent him on his way but now she needed to talk to her AA sponsor, who, Paul came to understand, was not
returning her phone calls.

  “What do sponsors do?” Paul said. “Maybe I can be your substitute sponsor.”

  He’d never known anyone else who’d stopped drinking before, though of course he remembered the rock star in Iowa City and all the hubbub about sober space at Michigan. And he’d seen those Sober Dances advertised. Poor Silver. Now she’d have to go to Sober Dances.

  “Well,” said Silver. “First off, you’d tell me to have an attitude of gratitude.”

  “Okay!” Paul said. “Ready? ‘Have an attitude of gratitude.’ ”

  “Thanks,” Silver said. “Now tell me to make a gratitude list.”

  “You better make a gratitude list,” Paul said sternly.

  Silver nodded and started writing on the back of a flyer.

  Paul thought of the bumper stickers bought by so many lesbians and really old gay guys in drawstring pants.

  “Hey, Silver,” he said. “Hey. Ready? I have more. ‘Take It Easy!’ ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid!’ ”

  “Basta!” Silver said. “You’re on my list already.”

  “Look who’s a salty dog,” said Paul, and applied himself to the unpacking and shelving of the weekly delivery of porn mags. He knew that street kid, the one who spent hours at a stretch reading Portrait of a Lady, slipped into copies of Honcho to preserve his appeal for the johns. He decided to make a gratitude list himself. He’d have to thank Derek—“My lover Derek,” he’d say. He pictured the camera panning across the audience, as if it were his Oscar acceptance speech—Susan Sarandon’s supportive face; Tom Cruise, intrigued. But what would he thank Derek for? Derek had, it was true, turned him on to John Cage and Merce Cunningham and Yoko Ono. Derek got him into museums for free. Derek encouraged the tender shoots of Paul’s academic ambitions. Derek had given him a first edition of Dancer from the Dance, with the original dust jacket. But Paul couldn’t help wondering if Derek secretly thought of him as the earnest and wifely Italian truck driver. Derek had introduced Paul to his whole circle of college chums, the exact sort of nice boys Paul could never be friends with on his own. And Derek made efforts—accompanied Paul to Klubstitute and valiantly tried to hide his fear of the brash dykes therein, bought him trinkets, laughed at his witty asides, told him he was pretty. Derek was a good boyfriend, and with every passing week, Paul felt himself also to be a good boyfriend and to have numerical proof, in days and weeks and months. No need to reveal Paul’s thoughts when he’d spotted Robin at the Box—where he’d only gone to drop off flyers for Derek’s show, of course—leaning over to flirt with a pretty bartender.