I spent nine hours in there trying to piece together some semblance of who I had been, but it was ruined—all of it. Even the folder with my birth certificate, kept in an (unlocked) vintage safe by the door, had soaked in the chemical bath for so long that it was blank—the embossed STATE OF FLORIDA was intact but my name was wiped out. Same with my passport, bleached into emptiness. In the end I walked away with a bag of ghostly, rotten photographs, a strangely unharmed pink-and-green silk varsity jacket, my camera, notebook, cellphone, and the stone totem that my father’s colleagues from the pipeline sent me when he died. My whole life fit in my backpack.
But the biggest problem was one of my own making. My new gallerist, that brass ring, Jacqueline Milot, called and asked if the paintings had exploded. Because, she said, you’re, forgive the expression, so hot. I’ve had dozens of calls. Everybody is so excited about the explosion. The article! I mean, you can’t buy that press, I’ve tried many times. So, I am asking: Please tell me you had my Rich Ugly Old Maids in storage. I know we paid for some of them to be crated, the ones that already sold. That building was such a hazard…and you know, even if I want to, which I do not—I cannot sell hasty remakes. People would think that was sloppy, especially for an unproven young woman, no matter how talented you are. Female painters are the bargain of the century, I keep telling everyone, but a bargain is an Hermès scarf on sale, you know? It must not look like the price. I hope you had them in climate-controlled storage, like we discussed. (We had not discussed this.) Because this show looks like it is going to sell out. If it goes, I can sign you for life.
Yes, I repeated obediently, staring at my notebook.
Yes, I had them in storage. (In a way, I did. At the Academy they taught us to keep detailed records of each and every project, and my notebook held the recipes for every Rich Ugly Old Maid.)
Only Prudence blew up.
The other six were fine.
Could I have an extra month or two?
No no no no no, she said, we’ve already placed the ad buys. We went all out. We’ll delay delivery for varnish if we have to. Can you remake Prudence in the next few months? That will have to be okay. We’ll keep that our little secret. That’s not in any of the ads, right? No. No. And nobody has bought that one yet. That’s good. Because if I have to change the advertising you’ll be on the hook for the marketing we’ve already done. You know that, I’m sure. It’s in our agreement.
Okay, I told her.
No problem.
And that is how I found myself committing fraud.
* * *
The day after my call with Jacqueline, I contacted every semi-reputable residency in America. Full of a manic certainty that I could make seven huge paintings in three months and that everything I’d worked for, everything I’d achieved, wouldn’t be for nothing—I hadn’t submitted the wall text, no one knew what was supposed to be in the paintings, Jacqueline sold some already but only based on photographs, and it’s not like she’d paid me yet, I only got paid on delivery, I didn’t need to do anything other than copy myself, I was certainly allowed to sell whatever paintings I wanted, there was nothing wrong with it so long as I got paid in the end—I dialed number after number and pleaded my case. The pinnacle of my creative career required pulling off an enormous, complex, physically laborious hoax, but I didn’t question whether or not it was possible; I fixated only on getting it arranged. All I needed was a space, and I could make everything right.
But it didn’t work. “We’re full. Try us next summer!” they all proclaimed. Voice after voice shot me down with brightly colored arrows: No, No, No, but next year we’d love to.
“Your CV is very impressive. Just need to follow those deadlines,” the voices chirped.
I emailed almost every artist I’d ever met. They were either staying put for the summer—“DYING for the studio time”—or had already sublet their places while they traveled, and every response I got with a frowny face at the bottom made me want to throw Cady’s computer out the window.
We called our closest friends over for an emergency meeting. (Mostly they were Cady’s friends, and therefore my longtime, albeit warm, acquaintances.)
“We need a plan,” Cady yelled over the din of box wine and records. Everyone knew I had to remake one painting. Nobody—not even Cady—knew it was seven.
“Why are you asking us?” Atticus said, the boyfriend and house in the Catskills long since forgotten. “I live in a shipping container in Corona Park. I can’t solve your problems, baby.”
“You know I still live with my parents,” our friend Lola said. Everyone threw popcorn at her. “You can sleep in my sister’s room if you want. But she has sleep apnea.”
“Go back to the Academy and squat. Take a studio.” Agnes was being sincere.
“Break into a warehouse in Trenton. There’s a million.” So was Jonny.
The room broke into an argumentative din. Our friends didn’t know what to do. None of us had truly made it yet—I was the furthest along—and no one had the slightest room for variation along the tightrope of their financially precarious lives.
“We need to be talking to rich people,” Jimmy Daltry yelled. “What the fuck is going on tonight? Who has a fancy invitation we can give to our favorite girl painter?”
“Brilliant idea,” Cady said, pawing at a stack of mail. “There has to be something.”
“HOLD ON,” Agnes cried out, dumping her satchel upside down on the floor.
One hour later, wearing a blush-colored dress of Cady’s with my pink hair in a tight ponytail and my feet strapped into a pair of her blocky wooden sandals, I was ushered out the door and put in a cab to Chelsea.
“I’ll give you a hundred bucks if you cry right now,” Cady said quietly, holding open the car door. “It’s not healthy to keep all that inside. It’s going to come out sooner or later.”
“You’ll give me a hundred bucks anyway,” I said, and she smiled and rolled her eyes and handed me a roll of twenties, bound with a rubber band.
“Spend it on drugs,” she insisted. “Do them with someone who can help you.”
Fifteen minutes later, I was at a sit-down dinner for someone I’d never heard of. They were serving turtle soup, apparently some kind of social protest except there we were eating turtles, and nobody seemed to care that I was sitting at Agnes’s embossed place card, because the people sitting next to me had read about my “situation” in the paper, which they mentioned loudly and frequently, though no one seemed to understand or care that it meant I was actually broke and actually homeless. Instead they seemed excited by it, in that disaster pornography way, the way their eyes gleamed when they said, HOW ARE YOU? YOU MUST BE *SO* UPSET. And I knew in their eyes they would go home to their big bedrooms and whisper to each other, across the genteel wrinkles of their fine sheets, We are so lucky.
“What an opportunity for you, though,” some drunk old crank in a shiny teal dress told me. “A real life change. Cleansing. I felt that way about my divorce. The Buddha teaches us to leave the past behind. Lucky that your old work is gone. You can be a new person.”
“I don’t want to be a new person,” I told her.
“That’s the stress talking,” she said—and then she bought a fifty-thousand-dollar giant tortoise shell and all I could do was picture her wearing it. Before she could say anything else, a well-preserved man with perfectly round glasses and pale hair stepped into the inches between us, elbowing me out of the way until I got the hint and stepped backward.
“There’s someone I want you to meet,” he told Tortoise. “A phenomenal artist. You simply must.” Then he took her by the wrist and stepped back into me again, and I smacked into the nearest wall. When he turned again I ducked, narrowly avoiding a shoulder to the face.
The pale-haired man marched her across the room. Tortoise gave me a halfhearted, slightly embarrassed little wave goodbye.
He never even glanced in my direction.
I was used to it. Art has a way of pu
tting everyone at their most transactional. I’m invisible until someone calculates my value. I drank heavily that night, primarily to cushion the anxiety generated by everyone’s behavior, and also to force myself to stay at the party and talk to people in the hope that something would come of it.
It paid off.
At some point during drink number six, I found myself talking to Susan Bricklings-Young, wiry descendant of the Peabody sugar dynasty and one of my favorite elder exemplars in the human-being-category of “robust New England alcoholic rich person.”
“You ought to go upstate,” she drawled in her low voice—Katharine Hepburn on lithium. “What’s that place? That place that used to be called Granger’s—you know, it was one of those terrific places where you could come for the summer and dawnce—it was restricted, terrible, but true. What is it called?”
Something twitched in my brain, an errant spark trailing the metal tines of a plug from an unsafe wall outlet, but it didn’t connect. I shrugged.
“This is going to kill me. Oh, what is it called? I should know. Mother and Father simply ah-dored it up there when I was a gurl. It was the country. Mostly fahr-ms and fah-rests. And—”
While she yammered away, waxing nostalgic about the time before black people could vote, I saw young Susan in Connecticut, petting a borzoi in a room full of peeling yellow silk wallpaper. Surrounded by Radcliffe tennis trophies and lace-sleeved ball gowns, she picked up the phone and accepted an invitation to a restricted hotel as though it were nothing. I wondered how many rifles she owned. A lot, I guessed.
“And then those mahrvelous artists bought it and gave it that boring name,” she finished, effortlessly depositing her empty glass on a tray with her right hand while another ice-filled tumbler of vodka appeared in her left. “What is it called? I buy reams of Marlin’s work every yeahr and I still can’t remember. Dammit, I’m old.”
Marlin. The plug slammed back into the outlet.
“Pine City,” I told her. “They’re called Pine City.”
“That’s it,” she said, her bony fingers rising to her temples, a vein in her forehead gently deflating. “Thank you. I would have died if I’d forgotten.”
“What do you know about the application process?” I heard myself asking, liquor burning in my esophagus, adrenaline shooting through my spine, stars in my eyes.
“There’s no process, it’s completely private,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s invitation only.”
“Would you call for me? I’m dying, Susan. I need space, like, yesterday. Everywhere else is full.”
“Hmm,” she said, peering at me. “What do I get?”
“What do you want?” Anything—I would have given her anything.
“A painting,” she said. “I want a discount on a painting.” Though she’d never come to one of my shows, I wasn’t surprised. Susan could turn around and sell it again in five years for twice the price; whether she liked my work or not, I made paintings, and paintings were things that you could stock and sell short.
“I’ll ask. Hold on.”
I pulled out my phone and texted Jacqueline. Four a.m. in Paris. She was out at a restaurant, still, and wrote back right away, and five minutes later we’d agreed that Susan Bricklings-Young would be the proud new owner of Obedience, the one on the poster for Rich Ugly Old Maids, for a 20 percent discount that would come directly out of my cut. (That hurt. My appetite for money at that point was monstrous. I was in voracious desire—not to keep—to spend. I wanted to melt emeralds into a plastic that covered all the walls and all the ceilings, so we could live inside them; I wanted to paint a twenty-foot-high waterfall in facets of hard-shine aluminum so that inches away you felt terribly afraid that the painting itself would cut you open. I wanted to drink every color so I could piss rainbows. I could never, ever go back to a different kind of life.) So I told Jacqueline it was worth it and when she said, in a blithe, indifferent way, Whatever, c’est your vie, cherie, I felt like even more of a fraud.
When I finished texting, Susan handed me a fresh drink and told me she’d get me to Pine City. We clinked glasses.
“You look like her, you know,” Susan said, squinting drunkenly.
“Like who?”
Susan twitched. “You know—the one who drowned. The morbid one. There’s something about your silhouette. It’s rather uncanny.”
“Where did she drown?” I asked.
“Up there.” Her eyes darted from side to side, and then she leaned in. “She filled her boots with cement and walked into the lake.” She waited for my reaction.
“By herself?”
“That’s what they say. She was always moody. Nervous, if you know what I mean. Something behind the eyes. Anxious.”
I nearly snapped that everyone raised without a safety net was nervous behind the eyes—that we did not have the room to be anything else—that people like Susan made us naturally nervous. “Why do you think she did it?” I asked instead.
“Oh, she was always strange…,” Susan said, waving her arms dramatically. “Especially at the end. Those things she did were so…unbecoming of an ahr-tist of her stature. I’ll never understand it. I have several of the sculptures, you know, in my collection. She used to be rational. But then—” The lines on her face deepened. Her liver-spotted hands, coated in gemstones and lacquered with polish, wrapped themselves atop my shoulders. She yanked me toward her. “Something happened to that girl,” she insisted in a low voice. “Something…bad.”
“What do you mean?” I breathed. She gripped harder. One of her many rings cut into the skin of my neck, but I didn’t care.
“She wouldn’t listen to reason. She became so…difficult,” Susan whispered. “I knew it was all wrong. And eventually, so did she.” She nodded wisely.
“What was wrong?” I asked.
“The performances,” Susan said. “That poor man,” she whispered salaciously. “He was so very in love with her. It was all so upsetting.”
“Tyler?”
Her eyes flickered. I couldn’t tell if it was from alcohol or annoyance that I actually knew something or both. “Mmm,” she said. “Not that she cared. Nervous gu-hl like that. Never saw what she had.”
Before I could squeeze anything else out of the gin-dampened sponge that was Susan’s brain, the well-preserved man who had shoved me into the wall earlier reappeared, a demon whispering in her ear. “There’s someone very important I want you to meet,” he said, loudly enough for me to hear. Then he guided Susan forward, toward my body, as though it were an open space.
This time I stepped out of the way.
* * *
Thoughts of Pine City overwhelmed me on the walk home, my brain obsessively running Susan’s comments on a loop. Nervous girl. Something bad. That poor man.
I imagined myself lying on the grass, bees crawling across my skin, surrounded by Tyler, Jes, Marlin, and Jack as we discussed the truth about ourselves and our work. I would talk about how hard it was, sometimes, and how I never seemed to be able to predict what would happen next. Well, one of them would say, you know what happened to Carey, right?
No, I would say. Tell me. And then—then I would know how it was all supposed to play out. I would learn what Carey did wrong, and I would take care never to do the same.
By the time I stumbled into Cady’s studio I was too worked up to sleep. The feeling was one part the night before Christmas—because I was nineteen again, Pine City was the most exclusive party on earth, and I was about to be invited—and three parts nervous terror. As I lay on the futon, staring at the wires threading across the ceiling, I had the sudden and very particular feeling that everything was about to change. My stomach sank down to my hips, my knuckles buzzed, and time paused. Everything was going to change.
That’s when I recalled what needed to be done. I had to make seven paintings in three months in total secrecy. All it would take was one phone call—or one photograph.
Time came right back, rushing past me so quickly I co
uldn’t catch it. No—I said aloud—no. Yet—I had to do it. It’s simple, I told myself: Don’t piss anyone off. You’ll make your work, and maybe they’ll notice you’re making a lot of it, but nobody is going to bother you. It’s an abandoned hotel, for Pete’s sake. There’s room enough for everyone. If I could pull this off anywhere, Pine City was the place. It’d be fine.
The next morning, when the phone rang, my heart skipped a beat.
“You’re in,” Susan said simply. “Be there Monday. Someone will show you around. My boy will send directions.”
She hung up.
I walked to a tire place in Chinatown known for their side business in used and abused automobiles, pulled out a credit card, bought a dented red Nissan pickup truck for seven hundred bucks, and went shopping.
Prudence
Chapter Three
Thirty-four, single, homeless, the pilot light of my talent flickering under pressure, I left Manhattan for good exactly three days later.
The truck bed was piled high with materials, lovingly tarped and bungeed. I was extra-careful with it, checking my mirrors over and over, taking turns slowly, missing lights. As I was about to coast onto the West Side Highway, a man in a windbreaker flagged me down. I eased to a stop behind his white van, collapsed inside the right-hand turn lane.
“I have a flat,” he said, holding up a badge. I rolled down the window and stared at him, unsure of how I was supposed to help. I didn’t have the courage to do anything other than scowl.
“My jack split. Everybody else is a gypsy cab.” He gestured toward the glossy Lincolns cruising by. “They don’t want to help.”
It was then that I read the text on his windbreaker: CORONER. His van: NEW YORK STATE.
“You got a tire iron in there or what?”
Fake Like Me Page 4
