Rachel Glaser - Paulina & Fran

Eventually he’d fallen in love with Michelle, one of his married students, a musician and composer hoping one day to get a PhD. Michelle had more grace than Paulina and Fran combined. She was smarter than him, she was sensible, but her husband limited every aspect of their time together. Julian saw him in framed photographs in their house and once at the butcher’s counter at the store, buying more frozen shrimp than one person could eat.

Guilt aside, the affair revived him. He started writing movies and taking walks again. He read books with drawings of flowers on their covers, helplessly psychedelic, or tired, limp pen-and-ink drawings of Japanese fish. He cooked for Michelle and took her on weekend trips when her husband was away on business. Julian fantasized the husband’s death or mysterious disappearance, but the man kept returning unscathed.

When the affair ended and Michelle no longer responded to his texts or e-mails, Julian fell into the same lovesick dread he’d felt at school. Unshowered and brooding, he watched all the Bond movies sequentially, unable to make himself do laundry or go to the supermarket. He joined Facebook, waiting for Fran to appear, but she had never liked the Internet, had never understood how it worked. He remembered how she’d researched her art history papers in the library, instead of using Google the way he’d shown her.

Julian spent his days on the Internet, reading all the different kinds of news, tracking the weather he watched through his window. He watched graphic videos of assassinations, illegally downloaded programs he didn’t need and didn’t use. He lingered in the comments sections, where the conversation always turned irrelevant and ugly. The Internet misled him. It took him so many places he forgot to leave his desk.

Julian and Fran spent hours on the phone, having long, convoluted heart-to-hearts. One Friday, after work, Fran finally went to the train station and bought a ticket to Pittsburgh. Julian had offered to come visit her many times, but she was embarrassed by her small town and the eccentric neighbors she’d unconsciously befriended. How could she explain that she and Violet did puzzles together and drank hot chocolate? Her Ohio apartment was just normal. It wasn’t painted the bright colors of the art school. It had no funny shrines to Johnny Cash, no florescent rock installations in the bathroom.

On the train, Fran recalled young Julian seducing her. He’d been a thin dream of someone’s. She remembered the frazzled hairs pointing away from his erection, his intense stare. She started drafting a letter to Gretchen in her head. You won’t believe this, but I’m about to see Julian after so many years! And he’s single, he says. And I’m definitely single. And I brought condoms. .

When she got to Pittsburgh she walked languidly around the station, half-smiling in case he was watching from across the room. She wanted to see him before he saw her, but he was nowhere.

At the line of sinks in the bathroom, she wet a curl of hers that had separated. She listened to two girls laughing and smoking in one of the stalls. I think he stood me up, Gretchen. Isn’t this absurd? All the sinks had automatic faucets, but one was running even though no one was near it. Fran tried to fix it, waving her hands under its stream, but the faucet would not turn off. She let it run. With nothing else to do, she examined her face in the mirror, pleased with the face that looked back at her, though she tried to keep this satisfaction from the strangers walking past.

When she left the bathroom, Julian was there. He gave her a big hug. Fran pressed her face hard into his coat. “I’m sorry I’m late,” he said. “I would have texted you, but you’re the only person on earth without a cell phone.” She demurred proudly. “I borrowed my neighbor Joel’s car to pick you up.” He took her hand and they walked to the parking lot, feeling young and watched.

Julian wanted to kiss Fran when they got in the car, but she was looking wistfully into the distance and he didn’t want to rush things. “Are you into this?” he asked, starting the engine.

“What?”

“This. Me. Pittsburgh. Joel’s Volvo. The weather.”

“I’m into it,” Fran said. “I feel good.” She leaned over and kissed him.

Julian led her up the three flights to his apartment. Fran gave him the old, good feeling. He wouldn’t push her away this time. Fran could get him over Michelle, the way Michelle had gotten him over Fran, the way Fran had gotten him over Paulina. He looked at Fran’s profile approvingly. Looking at her, he could remember them splayed on his bed that one summer, stiffly going to their first fancy restaurant, filming her in the bathtub with his Bolex.

They walked into his apartment and Fran set down her bag. “Do you have a mirror?” she asked Julian, touching her hair. Already her hair felt different than it had at the station. Every day it seemed to get dryer.

“There’s a small one in the bathroom,” he said. She wandered toward it. His apartment was like hers, absent of joy. A lonely painting hung unevenly off the wall, its thrift store price tag still glued on. To look in his dusty bathroom mirror was to see oneself through a stranger’s eyes.

The sex was as good as it had been, was made better by her sexless time in Ohio. Julian gave her his love back. He treated each part of her body like a precious thing that told the story of mankind, even her elbows and earlobes. He listened intently as she reluctantly told him about the Bushwick loft, Gretchen’s success, the test questions she lay awake creating in Ohio.

Fran felt her old personality whirling around her. She teased him about the copy of Mein Kampf in his bookcase. “Is that to scare away your one-night stands? You should have a whole shelf like that. A shelf of horror.” Julian laughed.

“I do! I have some medical textbooks,” he squinted across the room.

“ A History of Cannibalism ,” she said. Every time he laughed she felt relief. She’d found a loose thread from her past and could follow it back to herself.

The next morning, sunlight danced on Fran’s face. Julian reached for her and held her. His radio started playing music. Fran looked at a spider’s web that stretched between Julian’s dresser and the wall. The spider was alive like her. Some life energy connected her to it and to everything. The future was going to be easy! Fran thought, rummaging through her bag for underwear. She didn’t need to meet a new person! She didn’t need to change!

She saw it on the floor while getting dressed. “It’s hers,” Fran said. The hair clip looked tiny on the floor, but she recognized it. Suddenly, Fran recalled Paulina’s voice, her unnerving cackle, the foreign elegance she lent a place.

Julian sat up in his bed. “She’s visited once or twice. She called me last month and it got me thinking of you again.” He tried to gauge if she was jealous. Jealousy was a good sign.

Fran stared at the hair clip, letting her eyes blur and focus on it. “Once or twice?” she asked him.

“Twice,” he said.

“Fuck,” Fran said. “I feel crazy.”

Why couldn’t he just pick one of them? Fucking flip a coin , she thought. And why did Paulina still want him? Just to torture her? Fran’s head throbbed. And now she was going to cry in front of Julian, who was never moved by tears.

“Come back to bed, babe.”

Fran bent down and picked it up.

“What are you going to do, smell it?” Julian asked.

Fran cursed him off. The hair clip was the same kind Paulina had used in college; it might even have been one she’d worn back then. Fran put the hair clip in her hair. It made a satisfying click.