Fake Like Me

by Barbara Bourland

  As I changed, so did Carey. She stopped making sculptures and turned to an earnest revival of ’70s performance art, using her own body as her primary medium. She slept in a cage, she ate speed until she was passing blood, she choked down hot dogs and smelled the breaths of strangers, all on public display at Eliot&Sprain. Yet, aggressive as they were, the performances completely lacked the magic and power of her sculpture. I could not figure out what she was doing, or why she was doing it, and neither could anybody else. When asked by the Times why she changed, she only said, “Because I want to express myself.” That was it. It was a meaningless explanation. I promised myself that the next time I saw her at a party, I would introduce myself. I finally had enough of an identity to hold a conversation.

  Still: The paintings for my supposed third show languished, growing thicker, and stranger, but never complete.

  Then—Carey Logan committed suicide.

  The obituary, “Carey Logan, Artist Known for Death Practice, Dies at 37,” reported that in the thirteen years since her show on Grand Street, the “dirty-blond Wednesday Addams for the Marfa set” had exhibited at the Venice Biennale as well as the Basel and Frieze fairs; she’d held solo shows at the Kiasma in Helsinki, the mumok in Vienna, and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. A slideshow of her extremely prolific career showed dozens of sculptures identical to corpses; a marble pyramid engraved as her own gravestone; the tomblike interiors of a house; and her more recent performance work.

  Her early life was summarized as briefly as always: A native of Wappingers Falls, New York, Carey Logan had no formal training. An unnamed source referred to a “long-term mental illness” leading to her suicide. Tyler was quoted: “We have been devastated,” he said, “by the loss of Carey Magnolia Logan, who was the heart and soul of Pine City.”

  My immediate thought was: So soon? Before I truly knew you? How could you go—how could you leave me behind?

  I felt, deeply and urgently, betrayed. There were only so many successful female artists who were my age, and even fewer tiny little women making big work, sincere work, in a time when everyone else was telling a long joke. Carey was supposed to stay ahead of me. To lead the way. She wasn’t supposed to quit. It was, quite honestly, the last thing I expected, even though to the rest of the world it seemed reasonable that a woman whose artistic career focused on death would commit suicide.

  Yet what I saw was that Carey had, for reasons that were not clear to me, given up on her compulsive behaviors and traded them for something that broke her in two.

  In the weekend magazine they printed more photographs, under the headline “Perpetual Persephone: Carey Logan at Home in Pine City.” Greasy-haired, with purple shadows under her eyes, she held a bottle of gin in one hand and the bow handle of a canoe with the other on the shores of a black lake. In the next photo, in a white dress, embroidered so heavily with flowers it looked almost as though she’d been dipped in a cartoon field, she smeared handfuls of ripe fruit over the tattooed skin of a bearded Tyler Savage. After that, she lay on a table, her clothing and skin coated in honey and crawling with clouds of bees, while Jes, Jack, Marlin, and Tyler stood behind her in white beekeeper suits. The last image showed her staring directly into the camera. It was painful to look at. I suppose that’s what made her special.

  We were supposed to be something to each other, I thought, looking at it. You said I was exactly like you. You were supposed to show me how to do this. You made it.

  But she was gone.

  And so—I was more alone in the world than ever.

  * * *

  Creatively, Carey’s suicide opened up the floodgates. The paintings that had smoldered in my studio for three years, now nearly half a foot deep in paint, were finished inside of six months. There were eight of them, all of them at least fourteen feet across and ten feet high. I titled the show The Distance Between Our Moral Imaginations. It sold out opening week.

  Shortly thereafter, riding high on my own momentum, I changed galleries from (reputable but not sterling) Parker Projects to the fully blue-chip Galerie Milot, a big-dick New York / London / Paris / Hong Kong / Rio ballbuster of a gallery helmed by an actual member of the French aristocracy. It wasn’t the Venice Biennale, and it wasn’t a solo show at the Palais de Tokyo, but it was the first brass ring I would need to follow the remaining four members of Pine City to the top.

  So after that—after over a decade of working and waiting and working and waiting—you’ll forgive me for feeling after The Distance Between Our Moral Imaginations as though I’d made it. I paid my student loans in full, which felt even better than I’d anticipated, and bought some extremely expensive equipment—a hydraulic lift and scaffold that allowed me to work horizontally—and got into high-end materials, imported small-batch milled pigments and exotic ingredients like shark urine and uncut rubies. For the first time in my life, I had buckets of money, and I put every cent into Rich Ugly Old Maids, the show that I was making for Milot.

  I spent the next two years on seven paintings: Humility, Obedience, Chastity, Modesty, Temperance, Purity, and Prudence. Scheduled to be shipped to the flagship gallery in Paris in three and a half months, they were beautiful and enormous and easily the best things I’d ever made. Loosely based on the seven saintly virtues, they were the paintings that graduated me from recovering Catholic no-collar girl painter into independent adult artist. They were an exorcism of the words that named them, from the guilt that had dogged me through years of wondering how I was supposed to be a person who pursued only her own interests, who was never aligned, who was never part of a family, who did not wake up every day ashamed of herself for being childless and alone. I was not pure of heart, chaste of body, obedient to authority, humble before others, prudent in my actions, temperate in my behavior, or modest in my appearance—and I no longer felt bad about it. I was free from the burden of being only a girl. I had become an old maid, a woman of my own, a master of my medium. They were my crowning glory.

  And all seven of them were in my loft on the day it burned to the ground.

  2011

  Chapter Two

  Here is exactly how it happened. It was the middle of May. I was thirty-four. I still lived on Dutch Street, in that same floor-through loft where I had once shoved seven hundred dollars into Cady’s palms, where I slept on a king-size mattress on the floor and my living room was made of thrift-store 1970s furniture, dark wood upholstered in gaudy plaids that you could only sink into. I’d never left, because it was big and it was cheap and it was in Manhattan. Though it was mostly illegal, and I thought I might die there—a fifty-fifty shot between old age and becoming the victim of a serial killer—I was fine with either outcome because I didn’t want or need any other kind of place to live. The loft was my home, my work space, my everything. It was my whole world.

  A professional studio is a beautiful thing and mine was no exception. There were custom shelves and painted pegboards, handmade hooks and clamps, razor-edged palette knives and French enamel trays looped on vegetable-dyed leather. Everything—my awls, my nail gun, my saws, my torches—had been sorted, labeled, and etched with my initials. Handmade boxes (thick cardboard and white masking tape seams) held my history, the archive of my thirty-four years on earth, a lifetime of papers and photographs and additional miscellany from each and every painting I’d ever made. Against the wall in the back were my supplies of propane, ether, turpentine, resin, liquid acrylic, vinegar, ammonia, and so forth—all those wonderful industrial blue and red and orange canisters adjacent to hanging rolls of canvas, paper, linen, stacks of hardwood and plywood, and bags of powdered fiberglass.

  I woke up to a bad smell. It was a bouquet of burning rubber, but I didn’t think anything of it because 11 Dutch Street had nine floors with nine artists and we were constantly doing things like running currents through wires to make an improvised hot knife, or melting resin in a recycled can on a Sterno burner, or etching copper with nitric acid, or whatever else dumb toxic thing we felt the urge to
do. We did wear masks much of the time, but let’s face it, fumes travel. On the top floor, I smelled all of it.

  The morning of the bad smell, I got dressed as best I could, throwing a scarf over my rat’s nest of curls and a black romper over a tattered red bikini (weeks beyond laundry day). I shoved my socked feet into a pair of wooden clogs and grabbed my canvas backpack, which contained my wallet, my paint-coated cellphone, a small Canon camera covered in oily fingerprints, and my notebook. (These details are important because they became my only possessions a few short hours later.) After locking up, I thumped hard on my prime suspect’s door: Ruby, the sculptor who lived one floor below me, was a habitual Styrofoam melter and decade-long abuser of my airspace.

  I banged four times and yelled, “RUBY, YOU’RE KILLING US BOTH,” for what felt like the thousandth time in my life. Without waiting for her to reply—it’s not like today was the day she was going to change—I skipped down the rest of the stairs and made my way north, to Pearl, where Jonah had a new delivery of R&F oil sticks. I snapped photographs of colors and textures that caught my eye as I walked: the dun-gray feathers of a dead pigeon, wedged into the waffle grid of a manhole cover. The no-longer-red sneakers on a pair of feet sticking out from beneath a pile of plastic bags and twine on Duane. The hangers left behind in an empty Baby Gap.

  At Pearl, I had first dibs on colors, picking out moss and sap green, pale scarlet—fat, cigar-tube rolls, soft, delicious, pure potential. Jonah smiled at me, gave me his discount, asked about my day; our usual routine. Then I bought a coffee, an egg sandwich, and a carton of orange juice from a bodega and headed back home.

  It was a day like any other.

  I thought that regular day would be spent finishing a painting called Prudence—pouring a bucket of glowing resin across her barbaric landscape of grease and detritus, before melting one of my new oil sticks into a puddle using a propane torch from the restaurant depot on Bowery. My mind was already there, up in my studio, as I made my way down Dutch, though I did notice that there were, for some reason, a lot of people on my block, and they slowed me down, but I was still thinking about my painting, about what was next. When I arrived at my front door, there was a big guy in a sexy costume blocking my entry. Confetti fell down around him like little paper snowflakes. Doro must be having a party, I thought.

  “Excuse me,” I said to the muscleman in the very realistic fireman’s costume blocking the door, in that absentminded city way, Please move, I am a person too.

  “You can’t go inside, miss,” he said, all rough around the edges.

  “I live here,” I said, exasperated, pointing to my name on the buzzer. “Ninth floor.”

  “Number nine?” he asked. “We’ve been looking for you.”

  It was then that I realized his “costume” was in fact very durable and covered in scuff marks—not from being ripped off in a million living rooms, but because, of course, it was real. Everything came into focus at once: the red fire trucks in the street, the rubber of the firefighters’ suits, the smell in the air, the flakes of ash dusting the shoulders of his jacket. Smoke poured out the top of my building. My fellow tenants were standing across the street, drinking coffee, shaking their heads. Ruby, red-faced and sullen, was wrapped in a blanket, talking to a blonde with a clipboard.

  “What?”

  “But.”

  “How.”

  “When?”

  These were the words that fell out of my mouth. I don’t know if the fireman replied. I wore somebody else’s skin and none of it was right. My vision narrowed into a tunnel: I could only see the door beyond him and I wanted to get through it. I dropped my bag and felt a hand on my shoulder. The hand squeezed and pulled me away.

  “Thank God,” Doro said, hugging my inert, alternate-timeline body. “I didn’t know where you were. It happened this morning. Ruby had an electrical short. She was asleep. You banged on the door and woke her up. Oh, honey, I’m so glad you’re okay.”

  “Is everybody okay?”

  “Yes. Joey looked in your place but you weren’t there. We tried, honey, but we couldn’t stop it.”

  “What?”

  “It went up, honey. Ruby’s place, and your place.”

  “What?”

  “Your apartment burned down. Or up, I guess. The fire was on eight and nine.”

  “What?”

  “I know. It’s terrible.”

  “What?”

  “What, lady?” the firefighter said, exasperated, hands gloveless and turned to the sky. Cooled shavings from the campfire of my home, delicate and ephemeral, fell from the air and dissolved into dirt in his palm. I opened my hand and caught them greedily, smearing the ashes into the crevices of my own reddened fingers.

  “What?” I blinked at Doro. She gazed up at me with her moony eyes, concern and pity spilling from every wrinkle of her owly old-lady face. I stared back, hard and unblinking, not understanding. I had five years left on the lease, I kept thinking. Five more years.

  How could my loft be gone?

  * * *

  The firemen said that the paintings themselves didn’t burn, not exactly.

  The fire started below, inside the hundred-year-old plaster walls, from an electrical surge. Ruby’s air conditioner plugged into the same ragged socket as her open-current hot knife and her soldering iron, both of which were left on overnight. When the current surged, sparks hit the ancient newspapers used as insulation between the plaster and the stone. The walls smoldered from the inside, burning their way out and up. When the fire reached my materials—all those gases and solvents placed adjacent to canvas and wood—it exploded, then seared so hot that the concrete floor cracked underneath. They think the paintings were simply blown apart. “Burning” was irrelevant, though my books, closest to the door, were sparked by a glowing box of drawing charcoal and they became the ashes that had floated into my hands like so many snowflakes.

  Pieces of my paintings were found embedded inside the apartments across the street and permanently fused to the windshields of the trucks and cars parked down our block. The rocks and gravel rooted inside Prudence actually went through my skylights and broke a pair of French doors in a condo two stories up, though two of Prudence’s four panels landed unharmed on my neighbor’s roof. Temperance was straight-up melted into the concrete cracks, a massive, blood-red pile of scorched rubies and carmine dust. Obedience, the first in the series, crated at the back of the stack, remained relatively intact—except for the part where the painting transferred itself to the crate in front and then the fiberglass substrate burned away and incinerated most of the paint, leaving the backside of a mask. The uncrated Humility, Modesty, Chastity, and Purity all went out my windows and into the street and onto cars and buildings and lampposts and sewer grates and asphalt.

  Someone gave me a debit card from the Red Cross with four hundred dollars on it and a free bottle of water. I took as many photos as I could of the building’s exterior and the scattered pieces of paintings, then hailed a cab. The cabbie asked how my day was. I told him that my apartment burned down. He turned off the meter and drove uptown without saying another word. When we got to 41st and Dyer I tried to give him a twenty, but he waved it away.

  I don’t remember getting upstairs, but somehow I did, collapsing on the tweed sofa in Cady’s studio. She held out a bottle of bourbon, and I fell into it, waiting to feel drunk. I never did, not even when it was empty. I was exposed, pulled apart, a ragged bundle of threads sailing through the air onto a condo balcony. Yet—no matter how much I drank—I never felt anything.

  The New York Times interviewed me about the explosion two days later. “Abstraction has long felt like an afterthought,” said the image caption, “but paintings like Tomato Tomato, with their feminine devotion to detail, are meticulous as a Vermeer. They make evident the time spent on their creation, but it doesn’t feel like a chore.” The reporter also described my previous work as “wry,” “spatially overwhelming,” and “viscerally incursive.” T
he Times critic, when asked for a quote, helpfully noted that they were impressed that a woman “could so successfully handle the XL format,” since it is “traditionally the domain of men.” The accompanying photograph—in which I climbed, at the photographer’s urging, a scaffold to reach Prudence’s two unharmed panels—made me look tough. Though it was meant to be flattering, I felt condescended to and boxed in. Overall it presented me as an imitation of hypermasculine abstractionists—lady Pollock, lady Rothko, lady de Kooning, my use of a bygone movement updated and validated by my gender and youth—instead of a person unto myself.

  Though I had renter’s insurance, it turned out that they didn’t have to pay if the apartment wasn’t technically legal, which it was not. The building was zoned for commercial use only, which I violated by living there.

  We weren’t allowed in for a week. During that time the firefighters went back with a chemical bath and doused the entire space to dampen any possibility of further damage, so when I did get in, it was not what I expected. In the movies a domestic fire is always an ash pile, the end of a campfire, a ragged-edged photo of your wife clutching a golden retriever peeking out from the wreckage. But apartment fires don’t actually burn that way—not if someone manages to put them out.

  I walked into two soggy feet of swampy jetsam, made from the wall plaster and the more modern insulation in the ceiling, puffed up to a shredded marshmallow by the chemical tide. My scaffold and hydraulic lift were dented and bent into uselessness, their legs and posts buckled beneath them like an animal tumbling to the ground the moment after being shot. Beneath the jetsam lay everything else, including twenty or so unfinished paintings that were once stacked next to the sofa. Boiled into a seamless mass, the paintings resembled what you get when you heat crayons together on the stove. Even my laptop was melted into a silver disk.