Rachel Glaser - Paulina & Fran

With Harvey’s connections, the company grew quickly. They scouted models, held photo shoots, and signed advertising contracts. High sales in England gave Harvey’s investor friends confidence. Some people dismissed Paulina, as if she were the SUPERCURL mascot or even Harvey’s daughter, but others seemed to respect her as their colleague. Now she dressed very chic in silk and suede. What she didn’t understand, she had her secretary research.

A year later, they worked with an architectural firm to open their flagship salon in SoHo. Paulina knew all the construction workers and tracked their progress daily. She was on the hiring committee and interrogated the stylists and managers. After the salon’s grand opening, Paulina was interviewed in Vogue in a story titled “Curly World” and photographed with her hair spread out on a pillow. She was quoted saying, “I wish to revitalize the curls of the world.” She said the art school had exposed her to “hair in need.”

Some days, Harvey regretted his deal with Paulina. Her ideas were good, but she was difficult. She was sensitive. She was always firing her secretary. She told off their head of distribution. Paulina bought things impulsively — an apartment on the Lower East Side, a motorcycle she soon crashed. She bought friends and drugs. She ignored Harvey’s advice. Viv started avoiding her at events.

Paulina sat on her love seat wearing a silk kimono. Dinner was over; only the most charred parts of the brussels sprouts were left on the crystal platter, the chicken bones looked grisly piled in a bowl, and the cloth napkins were crumpled on the mirrored table she had imported from India. The straight-backed dining chairs, grandly upholstered in green velvet, were being set back in place by Paulina’s maid. Guests sprawled on the oversized leather couch in the living room, noting the excellent condition of Paulina’s exposed brick, mesmerized by the chandelier that lorded over them. Candles dripped their wax on silver plates. Music played, but Paulina could not tell who put it on or where it was coming from; everything had been installed while Paulina was on vacation.

Juliette, a young gallery owner Paulina had met at Harvey’s one night, bent to scratch the cat. “I can’t believe you haven’t named him yet!” Paulina stared down at the cat, lean and black, and its companion, fluffy and white. The cats had been a gift from Paulina’s stylist for her twenty-fifth birthday. He said if she tired of them, she could just set them loose on the street.

“That one I call Nameless,” Paulina said, “and the other is Unknown. But of course I’m open to suggestions.”

“What about Cicero?” offered Mimi, Paulina’s personal shopper.

“Too grand,” said Clive, an ex-boyfriend of Dean’s that Dean had sent in his place.

“Dust mite?” said Eli, heir to the Aerobed fortune.

“Jasmine,” said Jasmine, a SUPERCURL model Paulina had discovered in the subway. They all laughed. Clive walked over and turned a dial on the wall that appeared to control the music. Paulina watched in wonder. Just the day before, the doorman had told her about Channel 100 on her television, which showed a live feed from the lobby of the building. In black and white, she’d watched her guests arrive to dinner.

Eli and Clive danced lazily and the others threw cushions at them. “Strip!” Paulina ordered, but they refused. Jasmine passed around a carved ivory pipe packed with weed and they smoked. Paulina’s throat burned. The smoke added to the good feeling in the room — the sense that there was nowhere else to be. Jasmine told a long story about stealing the pipe from the house of her husband’s ex-lover. Paulina gazed at everyone’s faces as if they were strangers. The faces moved and Paulina watched them through their quick changes. She heard them talking, but couldn’t tell which voice was whose. She’d been pulled from one life and shoved into another. She tried to remember the name of the maid she’d hired.

“Paulina went to Norway too, didn’t you?” said Jasmine. Paulina looked up.

“Paulina is in Norway right now,” said Eli, and blew smoke in her face.

Paulina laughed. “I went with an old lover of mine. We went discothèque to discothèque.” What a wonderful word, “discothèque.” How wonderful Fran looked in the discothèque. The white cat walked in and jumped on Paulina’s lap. She stroked the creature’s soft head.

“What was his name?” Jasmine asked.

“ Her name.” They all laughed and looked at her admiringly, she felt. The old confidence welled in her. “We shacked up with this Nordic god, far away from the world.” She felt how their full attention rested on her. “What a time we had there. His castle had a chamber of weapons. He had a trained hawk. We ate bread, and things he had killed, and we drank wine,” she said. “He had the most dramatic chest.” Paulina pictured Blood Axe like a giant, tall as her windows. “His cock was bigger than Rhode Island. Its arch was designed by Romans. His balls were like two factories populating the world.” Her audience smirked at her. “His hair was okay, but the girl had the finest curls I’d seen, beyond my own.”

“Where is she now?” asked Clive.

“She’s still there.” The cat jumped from her lap and brushed against Jasmine’s legs. “She chose him over me.”

“How could she?” Clive teased, but Paulina took him seriously.

“He was a tremendous lover. His hands. The textures.” She shuddered. “He was a terrible filmmaker. But he knew what to do with a woman’s body. I could have given her the same, given her better, but still she went with him. She left me.” Paulina sighed, reaching for one of the cats, but neither was near.

“What really makes a good lover, do you think?” asked Clive, and everyone answered at once, cutting Paulina’s story short. She sat silently through their foolish comments, their boring anecdotes. Their conversation cheapened sex until it seemed the idiot fun of pedestrians and nobodies. Why hadn’t Dean showed? Why had he sent his second-rate gay instead, this ex-lover who clearly wanted to join SUPERCURL’s marketing team? All during dinner he spoke of his skills, his eye, but Paulina would never hire him. She wasn’t allowed to hire people anyway, as Harvey kept reminding her.

Paulina watched Eli play with the cats in a way that would only encourage violence. She turned on Channel 100, looking for interesting people in the lobby. There were none, just the doorman reading the newspaper. She desperately wanted to escape to the balcony, but when Jasmine suggested the balcony and they all cheered, Paulina told them to go without her.

She lay on her back, staring into the chandelier, wondering where Fran was, hoping it was a dark, damp, wretched space, like a war trench or sewer. I hope she’s painting faces as a birthday clown in Nebraska, or somewhere that’s nowhere, Paulina thought. She wanted Fran to suffer. For even in Paulina’s new place, with all of her dreams in reach, the gold letters of her name pressed into her business cards, the intoxicating enthusiasm of her agent, there was still that bundle of misery that traveled along with her, that let out little mites of suffering, even while Paulina laughed, even while she gleamed.

Every workday, Fran went to the bathroom about three or four more times than necessary, and hid in the stall listening to the other women, learning how to reload the toilet paper dispenser based on the directions drawn out on the side. Fran no longer felt inspired creating questions. She ruined her eyes looking at tiny JPEGs of masterpieces. She got lightheaded reading about improper ventilation. These things were familiar to her, and yet she was on the other side now, with the nonartists. When she was assigned to work in Denise’s old cubicle or Roy’s, their departure no longer seemed bleak. They had escaped! They were free! It was she who was trapped.