Rachel Glaser - Paulina & Fran

The world was relaxing and rejoicing. She rolled over and did two pushups. The world was having sex and getting drunk. She lay naked on her bed, but was too bored to masturbate. She imagined this written on a T-shirt: TOO BORED TO MASTURBATE. Or maybe: 2 BORED 2 MASTURBATE. She imagined selling the shirt to Spencer’s and Hot Topic, getting rich. She knelt by the fireplace.

Dear Fran,

You are in class right now. I am sitting in your bed. Your room is filthy! There are mountains of clothing. .

She folded the letter back up. Tonight is the night I dance at the bar, she told herself. No matter what music is playing. And everyone will get up and dance with me. I will meet the kids who squat in the warehouse. She searched her closet for something to represent her.

At the bar, she danced to classic rock songs with a crew of drunken girls who wore gold hoop earrings and bras that thrust whatever breasts they had high into the night. “I would kill for your hair!” one of the girls told her. Another yelled, “I’m Annie!” in her ear. There was a good ten minutes of cathartic dancing. The girls applauded Fran’s flamboyant moves, accepting her into their group. Fran felt a rush from this, but soon discovered that the girls were only performing for the men at Gruff’s. These men, unshaven and cloaked in flannel, clutched their beers and made no motions toward dancing. Their eyes were locked on the TV.

Lying in bed, waiting for sleep, a circus of thoughts flashed within Fran. She would make new paintings and get her paintings in the town library, and then in a coffee shop, and then in a. . She didn’t like the galleries in town. She would start a gallery in a shack and then move it. . She would become a realtor. She would travel to Haiti — no, to Egypt — and a man would approach her and be Julian.

Fran could hear the voices of the visiting artists from her painting classes telling her to move to New York City. One couldn’t be a real artist out here, they insisted. One might flourish upstate, but only after making it in the city. She had to go to galleries, she knew. She had to suffer, and do her suffering in the right place.

Sadie and Allison had ignored Paulina’s calls after graduation, forcing her to get an apartment in New York with a pregnant stranger. No one Paulina wanted to see would see her. Instead she got drunk with bores. Her style was wasted on those around her. Hustling down Midtown streets with a crowd of strangers, she would crack and start telling the others how to live. There was a better New York she’d read about, and she saw it in short moments that excluded her. A crazy man dressed all in white, with tight pants, shiny white shoes, and gold jewelry winked at her, and she felt he was magic or special, that he had something to say. But when she crossed the street toward him, he screamed at her.

She’d heard that Fran was in New York too, and for the first few weeks she stepped onto every train with grace, thinking Fran would be watching. They’d graduated a few names away from each other, but hadn’t spoken since the bathroom orgasm. Paulina moped among the racks in overpriced vintage stores. She got a job at a discount shoe store, then discovered Renaldo’s, where she worked for months before the incident.

Renaldo’s was an old, updated saloon with the best Italian food in Queens. A long bar lined one side and the ceiling was gold tin. It was the first place in the city that moved Paulina — that resembled the secret New York she’d dreamed of. “In a past life I frequented here,” she’d told the bartender her first night. Later, when a fight broke out in the party room, Paulina excitedly clutched at the flocked wallpaper. She returned the next day with her résumé and met Renaldo himself.

Eventually Renaldo was forced to fire her, but she didn’t blame him. She blamed Philip. His teasingly lean physique. His hands in suds. His apron ties falling untied. She’d had little effect on him. At first he answered her questions and listened to her, and Paulina felt an electric attraction between them. She dressed more and more provocatively and bought him drinks after their shift. She tried to respect his shy manner, but started to suspect it was just another sex game.

She played the game. She bought him a record — he said he liked records — and waited for him to take her up on her offer, but eventually he ceased all communication, even when she snuck away from her stand to keep him company in the kitchen. By then, she could wait no longer, and boldly showed him what he was missing.

Paulina much preferred Renaldo’s Queens apartment to her own. It was decorated with sports memorabilia. She liked the smoky smell. The cracks between the floor slats were filled with crumbs and bits of paper. “You look like someone who does scratch-off tickets,” she’d told him after she got the hostess job.

“Desperate?” he’d asked, surprised.

“Local,” she’d said.

Renaldo didn’t condone her actions. What she had done to Philip was wrong. If a man had done that to a woman, Renaldo would have turned the man in. But she entertained him. After he fired her, she’d pleaded with him for work, and for a short while she worked the books for him, until it was discovered she’d been shortchanging Philip. Renaldo was still sore about it, but by then he was sleeping with her. She’d made herself a key one day while he was in the shower, and hung around his house like the last guest at a party.

“If you even kiss that girl, she’ll never leave you alone,” his friend Andy warned him one night as they smoked outside the restaurant.

Renaldo agreed. There was something unstable about Paulina, like a top, or a wrecking ball.

“You’ve already fucked her, haven’t you?” Andy laughed. Renaldo looked off toward the Queensboro Bridge in the distance. “Stop me when I get ahead of myself. Has she already moved in?”

Renaldo stayed quiet. Andy scoffed at him. It was Andy who had pulled Paulina off Philip, while the cooks laughed and hit their pans.

Fran sat on Gretchen’s couch, tired from the bus, still picking the fiery orange paint off her leg. The week before, she’d spilled a paint bucket on the porch of the Franklin Avenue house. She’d stood stunned as it pooled and dripped onto the white trim Allen had just finished, then fell onto the flowers below, spotting them, coating them, then flattening them. “Oh, hell!” Pete had shouted. “Pick up the bucket!”

She’d spent a disastrous week chipping away the orange, sanding down the boards, and then repainting, knowing the whole time she’d be fired when she finished. Her boss took the damage costs out of her last paycheck. She hadn’t cried, though, she reminded herself, surveying the boxes in Gretchen’s living room. Gretchen was true to her promise and said Fran could crash at her place until she got a job. Fran opened a new Photoshop file on Gretchen’s computer and wrote Thank You! in a silly font, but then erased the words, remembering how Gretchen criticized her when she’d said she didn’t want to see Allison’s show.

Fran struggled with her résumé in Word. She knew that Gretchen would be opposed to her use of borders, but Gretchen would never know. She had no phone herself, so she put down Gretchen’s number. She applied for an artist assistant job in Chelsea and felt so certain she would get it that it seemed a waste to try for others, but she applied for two more. One was an art-handling job in Long Island City. That would be good, Fran thought. She’d get strong. Hopefully not too strong, she thought. The other job was a graphic design job. She’d just ask Gretchen what she didn’t know.

Fran allowed herself to go through Gretchen’s closet and try on her new clothes. While she was digging around, she saw a fancy wood box that probably hid a dildo or a scroll of confessions, but she wouldn’t let herself open it. She found a drawing she’d given Gretchen at school — and Gretchen had folded it. Fran fumed. Graphic designers weren’t real artists, she thought. They just made signs. They just made money. Fran opened the wood box and it was filled with jewelry. She slammed it shut.