Rachel Glaser - Paulina & Fran

Julian’s voice was epic in Fran’s phone, as if it were coming in from the afterlife. “How did you even find this number?” she asked, amazed. “It’s an unlisted landline!”

“It wasn’t easy. But once I found out you were working for Levrett-Mercer, I knew I could figure it out. The tutoring company I work for is owned by them.”

Fran asked how he was and he told her he’d gone on a terrible vacation to a random place he’d pointed to on a map, and how the locals had sensed this. She asked about his films and he told her he’d sent them to a few dozen festivals but heard nothing back. He’d spent some hours working on a stop-motion animation, but after his hard drive broke he couldn’t bear to start over.

“What do you do out there?” Julian asked.

“Boring, boring things,” Fran said and he laughed.

“What are you doing tonight?” he asked.

“I was going to go meet up with Jane from work, but now I don’t know.”

Fran laughed. “Yeah. I wanna hear all about. . about wherever you live.”

“Now you’re just going to stay in and talk to me all night?”

“Pittsburgh.”

Fran stretched out in her bed and closed her eyes. It was the most relaxed she’d felt in weeks. Julian remembered her. He missed her. He hadn’t run out and married someone. He was floundering as badly as she was. “Yeah, tell me all about Pittsburgh.” And she actually wanted to know about it. Fran pictured Pittsburgh as windy, with big rusted bridges. For some reason she pictured the people there wearing pilgrim hats, though she knew that was stupid. The name Pittsburgh seemed dignified to her, a place of hanging wooden signs and barbershops, like in old Westerns. A place with no chain stores. Did people trade goods in Pittsburgh? Did they know how to fix cars?

Julian cleared his throat and her heart beat happily in anticipation. She felt like he was offering her a way out, but she didn’t have to leave her room.

“What are you wearing?” he asked.

“A purple fleece. .” she answered.

Paulina sat reading a romance novel on the train to Pittsburgh. The language bored her, yet turned her like a screw in her seat. She ate a floppy, disappointing personal pizza. She thought back to her time in the cold college town, chasing the Color Club boys with Sadie and Allison. She remembered how she and Fran had been new friends once, talking about religion and their bodies, expecting to reach something the other would disagree with, but finding no end. Befriending Fran had been like finding a jewel — a girl whose powerful naiveté was wholly her own.

Julian met her at the Pittsburgh train station. Paulina still found him attractive, though slight wrinkles had formed around his eyes and mouth. He slouched in his wool coat as if resigned to whatever fate was chosen for him. February’s hateful winds greeted them outside the station, sweeping Julian’s longish hair across his forehead. He looks like a morose Beatle, Paulina thought, pressing her body to his.

Julian’s apartment was charmless. Paulina lay in his bed, marveling at the lack. “I would paint this gray wall beige, maybe add a chair rail to the wall, wallpaper the top half in a subtle floral pattern or light geometric. Crown molding up top, and a decent baseboard. The floor could be sanded down to a more spectacular level of grain, and then restained.” The room was lit by an overhead fixture that belonged in a dorm room or cell.

Then they were having sex and Paulina found it difficult to kiss him. She tried to at first — he was so eager for everything — but ultimately she turned her head away and kissed his arm instead. After, they lay in the dark. Julian’s hands brushed again and again against her breasts in a way that would usually have annoyed her, but tonight soothed her. Paulina thought of Fran, her legs and her laugh, the way she twirled her hair while distracted.

“Remember Thai Dream?” Julian said. Paulina’s heart sank.

“No,” she said, and he laughed.

Paulina remembered one night when she and Fran took the wrong Metro in Norway. Instead of the downtown, they saw rows and rows of houses with red-tiled roofs. For a moment it all felt hopeless — they were exhausted and had a long day of museums and lectures the next day — but then Fran ran a few steps and clicked her heels like they were in a paradise. A boisterous group of Norwegian teens passed, wearing bell-bottoms and puffy winter jackets, and Paulina started walking with them to make Fran laugh. Paulina kept pace with the group and Fran followed too, for blocks and blocks, until they arrived at a nearby house party.

At the party, Paulina and Fran had talked only to each other. They danced with the teens in someone’s bedroom, at one point chasing each other through the kitchen and the living room, where an old man was watching television and breathing through a ventilator.

The Metro was no longer running when they returned late that night, but Paulina was able to find a cab, and even convinced the driver that she was an American pop star. Paulina remembered Fran smiling with her eyes closed, her head on Paulina’s lap, while Paulina played with her hair. Paulina had insisted on paying for the cab, though it was nearly the last of her kroner. Later, she’d had to steal some from Marissa to get by, but it had been worth it to walk arm in arm into the hotel, where, if she remembered right, a sleepy concierge had winked at them and offered them macaroons.

The memory left Paulina with such a strong sense of Fran that she imagined it was Fran who was now getting out of bed and walking off toward the bathroom. That night in Norway, she remembered Fran pulling her nightgown down over her breasts. What had Paulina said then? Hadn’t she said something funny? Or had she just stared?

Paulina rose from the bed and followed the phantom into the bathroom. Stray pubic hairs were visible on the checkerboard floor. An insistent drip had worn away the porcelain sink, leaving a rust stain. Julian’s body in the act of peeing disgusted her. Paulina found herself examining his gray toothbrush, the worn bristles sticking in all directions. Her legs were now completely absent of magic. The toothbrush displeased her. A crusty accumulation of paste sat low in its bristles. She threw it in the garbage can.

“What’s the meaning?” said Julian, his penis soft, his balls slack.

“I’m giving you mine,” Paulina said, pointing to the new one she had brought. Julian snickered at her, then brushed his teeth in an exaggerated manner.

At school, Julian had resented how much time and energy Paulina and Fran stole from him. They sought him out in the editing room. They kept him from his work. And when they stayed away, he compulsively summoned them back — mentally replaying their latest dramas, desiring one, then suddenly the other. During crits, he’d said little to help the flawed films of his classmates and had made no lasting friendships.

After school, he’d moved into his dead uncle’s apartment and spent his summer days walking the streets of Pittsburgh. Past the dim-colored houses, the garages built into hills, he smiled at the McBubbles Car Wash sign, the Heinz sign. He peered into abandoned Blockbusters, was heckled by a homeless man who called him Slim. He glared at the Carnegie Mellon kids in Warhol T-shirts, jealous of the anticipation on their bright faces.

He met Internet dates at crumb-covered coffee shops — dental hygienists who didn’t take his ambitions seriously, starry-eyed college students who talked over him, sequins flashing that they’d rather be dancing . Drunken dates used him as a sounding board, recounting their bad childhoods and newfound allergies. Perhaps most frustrating were the bookish girls who messaged back and forth with him about novels and movies, never responding to his invitation to meet, satisfied to write letters until their deaths.