Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

by Andrea Lawlor

  “I guess they weren’t non-monogamous,” said Jane, admiring the chips in her dark red nail polish. Jane always passed the femme test without even trying; she never curled her fingers inward, always stretched them out.

  “Is that Vamp?” said Paul, grabbing Jane’s hand for closer inspection.

  “My cousin works at Chanel now,” she said. “I’ll get you a bottle.”

  Paul stood next to a short lemon tree, toying with his ball-bearing necklace and lazily scanning the crowd.

  “So tell me everything!” he said. “Has so much happened?”

  “I thought you’d never ask,” Jane said. “I’m burning with my latest hate-crush. I can’t stop thinking about her.”

  “Everything!” said Paul, interjecting encouraging mumbles and small affirming noises as Jane related the story of one Bitsy Bennett, new lesbian grad student in the English department who had commenced to make Jane’s life entirely miserable by existing, and with that haircut! And of course she was sniffing around Jane’s dissertation director.

  “I don’t want to say ‘uplift the race,’ but uplift the race, Bitsy, my god,” Jane said. “I’m literally exhausted by her sweatpants, which she wears in public. I cannot believe I am made to be associated with her by shared accident of homosexual birth. Maybe I expected too much when I saw her name? It’s so The Group. You know I can’t resist that. And now she’s sneaking around Martha’s office hours with cupcakes—”

  “Oh my god!” said Paul. “You slept with her. Don’t deny.”

  Jane blushed mightily and looked, for a moment, Midwestern.

  “I have poor impulse control,” she agreed, lighting a cigarette. “I think this might be a shame crush, which I didn’t even know was possible.”

  “Possible?” said Paul. “Story of my life, my unspeakable high-school years. Remember that med student who showed up at my house that time with the ironing board? I still can’t stop thinking about him. His name was actually Randy Plummer. Like, from birth.”

  Jane passed Paul the cigarette. He could taste her lipstick on the filter.

  “Is this Chanel, too?” Paul said. “So creamy.”

  Jane nodded happily and Paul understood for a moment that she was lonely. He French-inhaled and continued to look attentive.

  “And then there’s Christopher, who has come unhinged without you, I fear. He never leaves the house except to jog self-righteously or go to class or the library or the health-food store,” Jane continued. “We might want to stage an intervention. Hey, what’s going on with your zine?”

  Every time someone walked out of the house and into the garden, Paul’s head jerked. He could not stop himself, though he was beginning to feel like a neurotic dog. He knew Jane didn’t mind; she did the same. Over the years most of their conversations had taken place side by side.

  “My zine,” he said, tapping his head. “It’s all right up here.”

  “Frog’s here,” Jane noted.

  “Here? Like here? Or here, like in San Francisco?”

  “Here here.”

  “Ah,” said Paul.

  “I am going to get me some of that.”

  Shit, he thought. He should have known he’d run into those Michigan dykes. Duh. What had he been thinking? He was about to be clocked, big time.

  “Hello, Jane,” said Frog, striding up to them in chaps, five feet two inches of pure phallic energy. “You look like you’ve been doing something very naughty.”

  Not again, thought Paul. Get better dialogue! This was one of Paul’s biggest complaints about the SM lifestyle. Plus he didn’t like pain. Fetish, yes; outfits, yes! Pain, no. But back to Frog and his current quandary. He tried to think fast but he had too much whiskey in him.

  “Hey,” said Frog, squinting at Paul with the casual boredom of an alpha dog meeting an omega. “Oh, hey, Polly. You ladies need drinks?”

  Paul relaxed. Frog was drunk! It was dark!

  “You should move here,” he said with a feeling of relief at Jane’s presence.

  “I know,” said Jane. “I’m completely ruined for Iowa now. I can’t believe how many cute girls are at this party alone.”

  Frog returned, handing Jane a beer. Uh oh, thought Paul. Jane’s going to be hurting tomorrow. He took the beer from her hand and drank most of it, to be helpful.

  In short order Jane announced she was leaving with Frog. They were taking a taxi to Oakland, and Paul found himself trudging up Market, where they’d nicely dropped him off, wishing he’d worn a jacket, wondering where the youth spent the evening. He remembered his first Pride in New York. Smoking a jay on the ramshackle Christopher Street pier with that tiny drag queen—Crystal? Esmeralda?—and that goth girl Jill carrying a boom box blasting Dead Can Dance through a freak rainshower. Tony Pinto grabbing his hand as they ran across the West Side Highway. Marching with the Pink Panthers. His drunkard sunburn that lasted a week. If it wasn’t hot, it wasn’t summer. This was fake summer, summer in name only, he thought.

  In the morning, Paul wound through the pre-Pride streets on his way to the bookstore, childishly delighted to see so many gays in one place even if it was so commercial now. Legions of homosexuals were already camped out on the sidewalks, setting up impromptu chorus lines, vending morning beers from illegal coolers, selling homemade tee shirts with clever slogans and rainbow rings (still fashionable among the amateurs), fondling each other’s new piercings, writing sex words on chests in eyeliner. Paul stopped at a corner store to buy some cheap rolls and a medicinal Coke for breakfast; even the corner store guy seemed gay today and excited for the parade. Closer to the Castro Paul heard the familiar strains of “MacArthur Park” from an upstairs window and imagined a party of middle-aged fags primping over mimosas. He consorted briefly on the sidewalk with a passel of drag queens in nuns’ habits and high heels, and accepted a handful of condoms and dental dams. Everywhere he looked he saw red ribbons and leather thongs, sometimes red ribbons pinned to leather thongs.

  At the bookstore Paul had to wait outside until the owner showed up to unlock the door, but he didn’t mind because so many new boys were walking by, wearing so little and looking at him with such impersonal hunger, as if to say, If I see you later, then maybe…The owner had a brunch and left Paul alone to open; the phone rang and rang, coworkers calling to apologize for waking up in the Sunset or having a flat bike tire, while customers began knocking belligerently on the windows. It was a tee shirt emergency! He let them in and settled into work mode. Eventually Silver appeared.

  Paul could feel the pounding from Uncle Bert’s down the street, the ever-present bassline turned up for this day which was different from all other days. Paul could hear the parade passing by and wanted to run down the block to watch the Dykes on Bikes at least but was waylaid by having to clean up a pile of vomit at the front door while Silver took the culprit under her wing and brought him to the hair salon upstairs to sleep it off. They put out a tip jar, which was quickly filled with singles courtesy of an army of vacationing bank managers from Toledo. Paul sneaked across the street with the tips to buy forties, which they drank on the fire escape during their breaks.

  Jane picked him up after work and they roamed the city streets. All the good parties had been the night before because the business gays had to work on Monday. They ended up eating burritos and discussing the three-way to which Jane had been invited that very night; the college roommate’s girlfriend had had a change of heart as a result of all that processing. Paul agreed such an invitation was worth pursuing, especially since Frog was busy. He dropped Jane off at BART and walked home in the opposite direction listening to a handmade Colourbox compilation he’d taken from Ruffles’s giveaway box, not exactly disappointed by the weekend—he was too old for that; it wasn’t as if he expected to find his true love at Pride—but somehow melancholy. Not once had he spo
tted the youth.

  * * *

  ×

  Jane left and then it was July, as cold and damp as Cole Porter had promised. But all was not bleak. Paul finally spotted the youth, while in the company of Ruffles at the 16th Street BART station. A scrappy crew of dykes with a video camera was filming a person in a bubble-wrap spacesuit. The station security guard stomped up to the improvised set and when the astronaut removed a papier-mâché helmet, Paul turned to Ruffles:

  “There!” he said. “Who is that?”

  “Oh, that’s Robin Suarez,” Ruffles said, laughing at some private joke.

  “Robin,” said Paul. “That’s who I was talking about before.”

  “I don’t think you’re Robin’s type.” Ruffles refused to comment further, just twinkled merrily.

  Over the next fortnight, Paul asked around. No one—not even omniscient Ruffles—knew any hard facts about Robin, but everyone knew Robin. “Oh, yeah, Robin Suarez,” said everyone, knowingly.

  Paul stalked his mark subtly through the alleys and nightclubs and parks. He sifted through clues, including Ruffles’s offhand remarks. A report of a Robin-sighting at the Zeitgeist, the insinuation that Robin consorted with bike messengers, Robin’s picture on an old Junk flyer on someone’s refrigerator. He collected innuendo: Robin was an escort, Robin bartended at the Top of the Mark, the SF MOMA was interested in Robin, Robin was a secret Kennedy heir.

  Hunters must wait, and so Paul waited.

  * * *

  ×

  When it finally happened, Paul was caught off guard. He was deep in Reckless Records on a Wednesday morning right after they opened—the best time for record stores. He didn’t have to be at the bookstore until four, so he came in to flip through CD bins systematically, starting at the As. Paul liked Adam and the Ants, in no small part because through them he’d learned the word adamant and he couldn’t help admiring a man who made such a clever and obscure pun so publicly. Apparently Adam and the Ants had been an actual punk band at one time before they charted. Maybe he’d read this somewhere, probably Rolling Stone, before he knew he should read Interview or Paper or at the very least Spin. When he was in high school his mom and Kostas had given him a subscription to Rolling Stone, which Paul had studied for clues about New Wave. What was the difference? How could you trust your own taste? Even Justin Rosenblum had known his own taste, no matter how the other boys mocked him for it. Paul never listened to the Smiths or the Cure in high school. That would have made him seem more gay than he already seemed, so he decided to think they were no good. Justin made him tapes with music Paul had never heard of, like Billy Bragg, Michelle Shocked, Laurie Anderson—all music with some quality of gayness, music Paul rejected. All that wasted time! Paul in record stores tried to rewrite his high-school years, casting himself as cooler—which now meant gayer—than he had been.

  “Oh, I have this on vinyl, but I don’t want to wear it out,” he’d explained as he bought his first Velvet Underground and Nico CD in front of Ruffles weeks before. He hated not-knowing. How do you know if you like something because the corporate radio brainwashers want you to like it or because it’s actually good and you have an internal sense of what’s good, which is a sign of your essential worth as a person? Paul’s strategy was to figure out who was cool and to copy what they did. He skipped the Bs so he wouldn’t have to see Bikini Kill and Bratmobile and the Breeders—Diane lived in the Bs. The Cs were also dangerous: he could get caught up in Cher and Carole King and forget all about Camper Van Beethoven or the Circle Jerks. He was making a mixtape for Jane, as an enticement for her to move to San Francisco. She could write her dissertation from anywhere, he was pretty sure, and he needed a wingman. His plan was to reel her in with a sampler of all the music they could go see every night: Pansy Division, Team Dresch, Tribe 8. Oh, look at that: he had drifted to the Ts and had entirely skipped D to S. That wouldn’t do. He strolled back. He’d forgotten he wanted to see if they had anything by this singer Ruffles kept talking about, Darby Crash, who supposedly influenced every punk band ever and then died.

  He was thinking about influence and the genealogy of punk when someone tapped him on the shoulder.

  “There you are,” said Robin Suarez.

  “Here I am?” said Paul.

  “You’ve been following me,” Robin said.

  Paul didn’t know what to say. Behind his back, he stealthily returned the Germs CD to its bin. He didn’t want Robin to know he’d just discovered them.

  “Didn’t you once chase me through the streets of Chicago?” said Robin, smiling.

  “I wouldn’t say chase, exactly,” said Paul. He couldn’t believe he was talking to the youth. He looked at Robin’s boots (fawn suede with leather tassels), Robin’s ears (somewhat pointed), and the packages (wrapped in butcher paper and blue painter’s tape) Robin was holding under one arm.

  “Yes, you did,” said Robin. “And wasn’t that you, staring at me on New Year’s at the A-House, with your girlfriend right there?”

  “Um,” said Paul. “We broke up.”

  “That’s too bad,” said Robin. “But now you’re going to come have hot chocolate with me, and tell me all about yourself.”

  They walked up the hill without speaking, Robin pushing a green Raleigh ten-speed.

  In a courtyard garden behind a yellow stucco building, Paul sat cross-legged on neatly trimmed grass. High walls surrounded a little garden of carefully tended flowers, an orange tree, a green bench, and various statues of animals. Although the house was surrounded by other houses, none looked over into the garden. You’d have to be in an airplane to see in, thought Paul. He felt private, which he imagined was how Robin intended him to feel. Paul felt the same relief he felt after the first significant returned look from a potential trick: he wasn’t crazy; this was happening, whatever it was going to be. This was Paul’s favorite part.

  It was a bright chilly July morning and Robin poured hot chocolate into glass teacups. Paul sipped his drink, which had spices in it. He tried not to stare at Robin’s delicate hands, so like his own.

  “You like San Francisco,” said Robin, with royal generosity.

  “I do,” said Paul, stifling the urge to thank Robin for allowing him to live here. He had the sense of being interviewed. Robin in private was much less animated than Robin in the world, and Paul modulated his own high spirits to match.

  “But you’re also hiding here,” Robin said, and sipped the chocolate.

  “Not really hiding,” Paul said.

  Robin smelled a sprig of honeysuckle and handed it to Paul.

  Paul sniffed the white petals. The seasons in California were mystifying. Was this spring or summer? Why were there flowers in hot chocolate weather? How could fruit grow on trees all year long?

  “Have you lived in this place a long time?” Paul asked.

  “Oh, I don’t live here,” said Robin, gathering up the teacups. “My friend is out of town. He asked me to take care of his place.”

  “Cool,” said Paul. He was back to knowing nothing about Robin. Why not say “my friend Lance” or “my boyfriend” or “a guy I know,” any of which would make completely clear the nature of the relationship, but no: “my friend.” Paul didn’t think this was some ’70s-style “is your friend coming to Thanksgiving?” Robin hadn’t seemed like a closet case, on Jack Manjoyne’s leash in Provincetown. So there must be a reason. But what? My friend. My friend. The reason tugged at Paul; he left the line in the water and turned away, back to Robin.

  “You want the tour?” said Robin.

  An adult lived here; Paul could tell immediately by the unframed but deliberate paintings in the bathroom, the chocolate-colored walls of the living room, the brass bed, the pristine cow skull lit up in a presentation nook, the guest room. Paul followed Robin through the flat, thinking at each doorway that Ro
bin would pause to give Paul his opportunity. But Robin walked through the halls like a realtor, extolling architectural virtues and remarking on niceties.

  Standing across from Robin at the butcher block, Paul felt the first doorway in the air, that telltale closing-in, always the same, the softening, the familiar force field. Paul swayed forward without stepping, a half-inch closer, if that. Robin said nothing, but leaned visibly back on the ball of one foot, and looked up at Paul through a fringe of black hair. Paul moved very carefully now. He braced his arms against the edge of the butcher block, ready to pounce, and the phone rang, knifed open the tent of the moment.

  “Excuse me,” Robin said. So polite! So correct!

  Robin spoke softly into the receiver, and Paul—interrupted mid-hunt—anxiously scanned the room. He saw by the clock on the stove that if he didn’t leave now he would be late for work. The force field was disturbed and now he was out of time. Paul gestured at his nonexistent watch. Robin shrugged in elegant helplessness and reached toward Paul, who kissed the offered cheek in farewell and rejoined the honking bright flow of the street.