He took Paul to strange art galleries in the Strip District, where there were wild nonsensical interpretive dances or fleshy sculptures whose formless sensuality made Paul squirm and look away. Whenever Paul and Julian stood together in front of an artwork—a canvas blank but for a single fleck of blue, a collage of magazine models with their eyes blacked out—Julian would take rapid measure of it and then elbow Paul’s arm. “What do you think?” he would ask, with no hint of what he wanted to hear, and Paul could never think fast enough to say anything at all.
It was impossible to keep up with him. Paul’s tongue was too clumsy for wit. His thoughts were meticulous and slow, and he could never find words for them until he had milled an idea down to the grist.
There was something mesmerizing about the way Julian moved—carelessly graceful, as if he weren’t excruciatingly conscious of every atom he displaced. Paul had tried all his life to erase the anxious delicacy in his own gestures, especially the hesitant motions of his hands. For a while he thought he could teach his body to follow Julian’s somehow, if only he practiced long enough. He spent hours in front of his bedroom mirror, trying to relax into that loose-limbed elegance. But Paul was fettered and careful, and even his weak imitation of Julian’s posture looked wrong.
When they walked together across campus, Paul could all but see the two of them from the outside—a dark-haired Apollo painted in flowing Botticelli lines, and the ungainly stork of a boy beside him, trying to keep in step. He could tell other people were thinking it too, especially the friends of Julian’s who thought themselves more deserving of Paul’s place. They never hid the disbelief in their smiles as they glanced between the two of them, clearly wondering why.
Because Julian did have other friends, though Paul rarely saw them. Julian had thought of studying drama in his first semester, and occasionally the two of them were accosted on the snowy path by one of Julian’s buoyant, overwrought theater friends. Other times, the interlopers were colleagues from the arts pages of the student paper—these friends spoke in an identical arrogant drawl and made insipid comments about Max Stirner, and they never seemed to realize that Julian’s replies were making fun of them. After the initial introductions Paul always hung back at Julian’s side with his arms folded, staring at his shoes. If the friends acknowledged him at all, it was in the third person—your friend here, never his name.
But no matter how mediocre or shallow the other friends were, even they could tell Julian was destined for something. They might not understand it, but they knew. When Julian addressed them, Paul watched the way their faces opened. They smiled as if they were already thinking of what they would say years later. That they knew him when he wasn’t anyone yet; that they were there before it all began.
There was no avoiding them if they approached first, but whenever Julian caught sight of his friends at a distance he would take Paul’s arm and steer them out of sight. “I attract pretentious people,” he explained, and there was nothing in his voice that betrayed any fondness for them. “I think that’s why I like you so much, Pablo. You’re so goddamn sincere.”
Paul never asked where the nickname came from, because it didn’t matter—what mattered was that Julian had given it to him unbidden. His real name was common, ordinary, something Julian might say and then forget saying. But Pablo rang like a harp string. Julian said it warmly, but it was an imperious kind of affection. It was as if this were the name he’d given a favorite belonging.
Julian moved through every part of Paul’s life the same way—not entitled, nothing so crass and insecure, but taking for granted that Paul would allow him anywhere. His was an arrogant intimacy, the kind that followed Paul home without asking and spent the afternoon examining the bookcases and pantry shelves.
Neither Paul’s mother nor his sisters were home that first day—he had the house to himself on Friday afternoons, or else he might have refused to let Julian inside. The fact that Paul allowed him into the house at all wasn’t the acquiescence Julian probably thought it was. He’d done it for the same reason that he embraced Julian’s nickname for him—the same reason he didn’t flinch away from the occasional brush of Julian’s hand on his shoulder. Paul was taking something for his own, and he wasn’t sure it was something Julian even knew he was giving.
“So which door is yours?” Julian asked, one foot already on the bottom stair. It didn’t seem to have occurred to Julian that Paul might refuse him. Even Paul didn’t know why he did. But it pleased him to hold something back, if only for now. He liked the look that came over Julian’s face, the bewilderment that someone might tell him no and mean it.
“My mother’s going to be home soon,” Paul said, and he caught himself smiling in the brief, exhilarating moment that Julian’s face faltered.
That denial only lasted another week.
He let Julian be the one to open his bedroom door, and from the foot of the bed Paul watched him help himself to the details. Julian carefully opened Paul’s drawers of butterfly and moth specimens, then paused at the desk to examine a watercolor—a rib cage emptied of heart and lungs, a trio of bright tropical songbirds trapped inside. There was a copy of The Man in the High Castle on the dresser next to Paul’s bed, and for a moment he panicked at having forgotten to hide it in favor of something more rarefied. But Julian picked it up and paged through it without apparent judgment.
“God, and I’ve got you reading even more things about Nazis,” he said, and Paul only realized belatedly that he was supposed to laugh.
Julian hopped onto Paul’s mattress and lay back against the pillows, legs outstretched, his head resting on the Leonard Baskin reproduction on the wall behind him. The sudden nearness of him was a shock—the warmth of his ankle gnawed alongside Paul’s hip, so close that Paul could have closed the distance between them and made it seem accidental. He watched how easily Julian settled into the same place Paul’s own body lay when he slept. Paul imagined the traces of him that would remain—a stray dark hair, fine scarlet fibers from his merino pullover.
“It’s so funny the way you paint,” said Julian idly. “It’s like you checked out of the twentieth century sometime around Frida Kahlo, you still paint pictures of things . . . It’s all very Paul Fleischer, isn’t it? You don’t care what other people think you should be doing. It’s so blood-and-guts moral, so rigid. It’s exactly like you.”
Paul was sure Julian wasn’t making fun of him—he knew by now exactly what that looked like, because he’d memorized the movement of Julian’s eyebrow and the dismissive angle of his mouth. He knew that Julian took him seriously, even when Paul himself felt foolish and overreaching. But that didn’t mean he could tell whether the remark was a compliment or a criticism.
“That’s the way a person should be.” Paul’s certainty didn’t waver, but the longer he spoke, the more his confidence did. “Nothing imposed from the outside. You figure out on your own what’s good and what isn’t, and maybe that idea ends up being rigid, but that’s better than not having anything at all. I don’t care if anyone doesn’t like it, even if it’s you.”
If Julian had asked where this thought came from, Paul would have had to lie a little to claim it for his own. It was similar to something his father had told him when he was young—that there was a difference between the law and what was just, and that being a good man meant building a framework for deciding which was which. For Paul justice could encompass infinite space, far past questions of crime and punishment. But Paul wondered in his cruelest moments if the idea had extended any further than the inside of his father’s own head.