Rachel Glaser - Paulina & Fran

The man reached over the table to give Paulina his card. “Regardless of what the board decides, I invest in beauty products and think we have common interests.” The card burned in her hand. Harvey Benizio.

“But how did your interview go?” Allison asked Sadie, scanning the gallery. She was young to have a solo show, especially at such a big gallery, but she wore her usual clothes and was not nervous. She spotted Gretchen and Fran across the room and looked away.

“Bad. I was totally weirded out. I couldn’t stop thinking about Paulina. What was she doing there? Why did they let her go before me?” Sadie noticed Gretchen and Fran too. “I hear Gretchen is making lots of money. And look, Fran is still wearing that—” Sadie hesitated. They laughed. “Wait, don’t look at them. I never know what to say to her,” Sadie said.

“It’s too late,” Allison said as Gretchen walked toward them.

Fran and Gretchen hugged Allison and Sadie. Fran listened to their polite catch-up, answering “Hudson” and “house painting” and “still looking” when they inquired. She felt they could tell she’d spent the last month on Craigslist applying to decorate cakes, shear sheep, paint faces, and deliver flowers. They could sense that she’d considered posing for photographs and then researched pepper spray. Then looked into police sketch training and tattoo artist training. She applied to so many postings that she couldn’t remember them the next morning, and not a single one replied.

Fran swayed in place looking for Paulina. Important art world people talked across the room and cool-looking kids their age drank and laughed, but no one seemed exciting. The kids looked so like her old classmates that at first Fran assumed it was them, but this group was cleaner and more stylish. They were Cooper Union graduates who’d spent their saved tuition money on designer sneakers and mopeds. Whereas Fran’s classmates had a battered, psychedelic vibe, these ex-students had appropriated a trailer-trash, hillbilly look — the boys at least. The girls were dressed like new wave French philosophers. They already had jobs and studios. Each had his or her own look, and was slowly exposing the art world to it, stamping themselves in.

Fran was jealous of them, but it was a yearning jealousy. If the jealousy had a voice it might have sung, Fuck you, posers! Seduce me and give me a job. Let us work side by side in the big studio building on Twenty-Seventh, or is it Twenty-Fifth? Do you know Dana Schutz? The painter Dana Schutz — do you know her e-mail address? Never mind, just take me home and dress me. Confess to me. Take me to your roof-deck or the roof-deck of your friend.

Her desire to know them was overpowered by doubt and pride. What could they show her? They had never loved and sweated on the Color Club floor. They were part of the gallery, the gallery’s moving parts, an ambiance of youth staring at the bright drips and smears on the big square canvases. I love your paintings, Fran was about to tell Allison, when a tall willowy woman came over to Allison and said, “I love your paintings, dear.”

Allison turned to talk to her, leaving Sadie, Gretchen, and Fran to themselves.

“That’s Adria Bennet,” Sadie whispered. Gretchen gasped.

“Who?” Fran asked.

“This totally awesome artist from London.” The boredom set in again. When Fran used to take breaks with the house painters, no one needed to say anything, but here in the gallery she was afraid of being boring, she was afraid Sadie was boring, but she had entirely nothing to say.

“Remember that figure model Apollo?” Fran ventured. The girls laughed and Fran felt a nervous release.

“He’s doing really well as a musician right now,” Gretchen said. “He opened for Gorgeous Cyclops at Webster Hall. My friend is doing the art for his album.” Fran’s hair felt dry. She self-consciously braided it out of sight.

Sadie saw people she knew and went to greet them. Fran read Allison’s artist statement on the wall.

My work affects my relationships with people. A painting will change my relationship to my parents, even though the painting is completely abstract.

Fran panicked. “Remember Marvin?” Fran asked Gretchen. “What happened to him? Where did he go?” Gretchen was so tired of Fran that even a small inquiry like this physically annoyed her.

“Is that Paulina?” Gretchen asked, squinting.

“Where?” Fran turned. Gretchen motioned to the window.

“I thought I saw her, but it was someone else.”

“What do you think will happen to her?” Fran asked.

“I think she’ll just go man to man, hitchhiking the world. That’s what Dean said.”

“Maybe she’ll end up with a woman,” Fran said, blushing.

“She’s going to be one of those old ladies who draws in fake cheekbones. She’ll probably keep birds.”

“Wait, when did you see Dean?” Fran asked in disbelief. Then a startling thing happened. A boy walked over and started to talk to Gretchen, first about her glasses. (Were they Selima Salaun?) (Fran was shocked to hear they were) and then they talked about Gretchen’s job, and then the boy’s job, and his Yaddo residency, and Gretchen’s Ping-Pong skills, and then they drifted off toward the wine, leaving Fran in the center of the gallery with nothing to look at except Allison’s paintings, while around her strangers laughed, and drank, and got on with their lives. The paintings were good in an infuriating way, a way Fran wasn’t able to articulate to Sadie’s husband. “You know they’re good,” he said. “I know they’re good. Why do we have to know why?”

“But that was the whole point of our school,” Sadie explained, and she and her husband laughed.

Fran went out to the sidewalk to look for Paulina. A group of adults crowded around a bulldog and a poodle, making baby talk. Two men stood smoking. “Did you guys see a girl my age out here? She’s got dark curly hair. . almost reddish.”

“Sort of weirdly dressed and carrying on about something or other?” one of the men asked. Fran nodded excitedly. “Yeah, we saw her.” Fran’s heart leapt. “And fuckin’ twenty more just like her.” They laughed.

Most of the pay phones in the city were broken. The receiver had been ripped out or the whole console removed, exposing a mass of wires. Symbols were scraped into the glass enclosures, any remaining phone books shredded to bits. Paulina dialed Harvey’s number from the last working pay phone in the East Village, her heart trembling with each ring. When his secretary (a terse, androgynous voice) said Harvey was unavailable, she said she’d call back.

Carrying her bag of essentials, Paulina hopped a turnstile into the subway and endured steel drum music all the way to Queens. Her red boots punished her every step toward Renaldo’s. There, she loitered in the lot behind the kitchen until someone — the old cook this time — went out for a smoke. Shivering for effect, she asked him to dump some of the leftover food in a box for her, and promised this act would make him shine brightly in God’s eyes (wherever He may be) and ensure that George ascended to heaven when his time came, that instead of cooking for others he would get to run his own restaurant up there. George refused, threatening to call Renaldo.

Distressed by the idea of Renaldo seeing her unwashed dress, Paulina ran off, her bag weighing her down like an anchor. After an hour of fruitless wandering, she shoplifted a premade sandwich from a bodega and devoured it in the weeds behind a nearby gas station, listening to the wind roll a crushed beer can over the pavement and teenagers bicker over a lost bet. On the subway back, she lay across three seats in low spirits. She ran through the rain to the Starbucks bathroom, where she sat on the toilet long after she was finished, ignoring the knocks and voices, then brushed her teeth with the tattered toothbrush she kept in her bag.