Rachel Glaser - Paulina & Fran

When Renaldo got back from work, he found Paulina on the couch reading a magazine, as she’d been every day that week. “How’s the new girl?” she asked.

“Fine. Good.” He took off his work shirt and put on a T-shirt.

“I had a particular flair for the job though, wouldn’t you say?”

“I’ve said as much myself,” he said.

“If only you’d have let Philip go instead,” she began softly. Renaldo laughed. “He’s a tragic figure,” Paulina said.

“That’s what you say about your roommate,” Renaldo said.

“Everyone is tragic.” He stared at her ill-fitting dress. “It’s too hot to fuck,” she said. “If that’s what you’re thinking.”

He shook his head. He’d known at first sight that he wanted Paulina for Renaldo’s, but she’d been trouble from the beginning. She talked too much. Her attitude took up space. She had the condescending gaze of a palm reader.

“Am I tragic?” he asked her, pouring two glasses of whiskey from the bottle he kept on the counter.

“Hell yes,” she laughed. “You are middle-aged , tragic in itself. You wanted a life of adventure, but you’re stuck in Queens. You gamble half your money away and spend the rest on me, an overeducated drifter.”

“But the restaurant,” he said, smiling. He handed Paulina a glass and sat back in his worn leather recliner.

“The restaurant is great,” she agreed.

“You don’t know real tragedy. You’re twenty-two. How could you?”

“I have always known tragedy,” Paulina insisted and told him the life story she used as her own, the one that had horrified her years ago in the bus stop downtown. Renaldo listened, gently rattling the ice in his glass. It was a riveting, sickening story.

“None of that happened to you,” he said afterward. “Where did you read that, in a book?” He reached over and finished her whiskey for her. Paulina pouted.

“Most of it happened.”

He laughed. “Where are your parents really?”

“Dead, like I said.” This part she’d almost convinced herself was true.

“Both in a plane crash?” he asked dubiously.

“One in the plane crash, the other in the boating accident,” she said with stony eyes.

“Which one was in which?” he asked, amused.

“Does it matter?!” She looked off. She imagined flames. Flames and waves. She imagined herself standing over two serious graves.

Renaldo glanced back toward the payroll books on his rolltop desk. “By the way, it’s official. I put Andy on accounting.” He watched her face adjust. “It’s nothing personal. You know I like having you around.”

She looked at him with disdain. “It’s too hot to fuck,” she said. He shook his head. Andy was right. It was a real task to rid himself of her. With difficulty, she took off her dress and strutted over to where he sat hunched in his chair. She sat on his lap. Sexually, he found her exhausting. It was baffling that she wanted him. Girls her age usually avoided his eyes completely. She drew her face close to his.

For weeks, he’d been dreaming of a way to end things without hurting her pride, and now it came to him simply. “I’m getting too attached to you,” he said into her neck. He ached under her weight. “I don’t want you to see anyone else.”

Paulina glowed from this victory. All month she’d camped out by his heart with little love of her own, but a stubborn need to star in someone’s life.

She eyed his small apartment. By the front door was a cheap elephant statue where Renaldo kept his keys. There was a brown spot where the bulb had burned a hole in his lampshade. All of it could be hers: The king-sized bed. The mirrored drawers. The Southern accent he used for jokes. The pile of cop novels in his closet. The drooping Mets tattoo on his bicep. He winced under her weight, and she did not shift. “I think I. .” His voice ventured out as if on a tightrope. Familiar dread enveloped Paulina, slowing her hearing. The fan sounded rickety. Everything felt flawed.

“I’m unable to love you back in a permanent way,” she said. “I have a plan, actually many plans for myself, and none of them take place here.” He nodded at her. Paulina felt a kind of momentum she had lacked for months. She transcended Renaldo’s and Renaldo and the whole lazy affair she had orchestrated. She felt dangerously attractive to men and bloated with potential.

But, Paulina had no other place to go besides her buggy apartment. She despised the other young people in the city. She had no money. She didn’t want to leave his lap. She pictured Philip’s gray eyes. “Let’s end this right,” she said, throwing herself into a long, aggressive kiss. Renaldo kissed her back. He loves me , Paulina thought, and it made him seem weak to her. She fantasized his death, being the last woman he loved.

Fuck Philip, she thought, pulling off Renaldo’s shirt. Fran would have wanted Philip. Might have gotten Philip. Fuck Fran. Paulina tugged at Renaldo’s pants, then lay waiting on the couch. Renaldo stood and sighed, taking off his pants and underwear. I’m fucking you, Philip , she thought, and the thought echoed in the chamber of her body. I’m fucking you, Fran , she thought again and again and again until the words had no meaning. Afterward, she felt immense love for Renaldo. He is unlucky to lose me, she thought, and left him minutes later while he was in the bathroom.

The sublet ended when Danielle had the baby. The baby looked awful and red, but Danielle insisted that’s how they were supposed to look. Without her scholarship’s stipend, Paulina couldn’t afford another apartment. She sold her clothes to the overpriced vintage stores she abhorred. She thought of her parents as the two serious graves. She imagined her hometown bombed out and boarded. She imagined a sad scrapbook of her parents’ obituaries. She pictured herself pulling out this scrapbook and showing people. Renaldo coming across the scrapbook in his apartment. Renaldo being moved by the scrapbook. Renaldo laughing at the fake scrapbook.

Paulina pocketed muffins at bodegas. She found no glamour in the poverty she’d dreamed of as a child. She slept in the playgrounds of parks. She washed herself in the bathroom at Port Authority. Through it all, her hair looked impeccable.

“Hair is the outgrowth of the soul,” she told a man at the bar. He laughed. She examined his glasses, his tie, his shoes. He started to tell a story involving a scandal in the finance world — a good sign. For the last week, she’d been sleeping in the art lofts in Bushwick. One boy would take her home; the next day she’d befriend his neighbor in the hall. The boys were less distracted than the warehouse guys from the art school, but their lofts were decorated the same way: stolen street signs, Christmas lights, Dr. Bronner’s nonsense on the soap in the shower, bikes on the wall, unfinished projects taking up whole tables or rooms.

But tonight she wanted a nice apartment, someone who had to be up early for a job. Sometimes she sat in the corner of a bar, shyly looking at her hands like she’d been stood up by a date. She knew how to play pool so badly that men couldn’t resist instructing her. Each man held a little promise for her — food, time, space.

In the middle of the night, she woke up in a high-rise apartment in Brooklyn Heights, then stayed awake, pretending she lived there. She made a messy omelet and devoured it. She looked for women’s clothing in the spare closet. She showered and deep conditioned her hair. An I Love Lucy marathon comforted her. Through it all, Paulina wrote on the back of an issue of GQ, I still think I will find—

“What the fuck are you doing?” the finance guy asked, squinting in the doorway.