Rachel Glaser - Paulina & Fran

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.