Fake Like Me

by Barbara Bourland

  Mr. Lin had thrown in a brand-new kit, just in case, and so I held up a finger and rooted around under the seat until I found it. While the man in the windbreaker shimmied under his van, spun the lugs, pulled the tire, and popped on a donut, I wondered if there was a body inside the van, whether the body was on ice or in a plastic bag or what. Bodies, plural, maybe. Were they in a box freezer? Were they stacked on special body-size shelves? Were they strapped to gurneys in some kind of ambulance pantomime? But I didn’t ask, and he didn’t tell; the man in the windbreaker simply thanked me, returned the kit, and drove off.

  Finally: I hit the gas and lurched forward. I must have noticed other things as I drove, but my enduring memory of leaving Manhattan will always be that coroner’s van and the bodies that I presumed were inside it.

  I remember thinking at the time that I was lucky to get out alive.

  * * *

  The rushing current of the dawning traffic pushed me up the Henry Hudson and over the tiny bridge at Spuyten Duyvil, to the Bronx, the Saw Mill, and eventually onto the Taconic State Parkway, the gently sloping four-lane country highway that stretches along the state’s borders with Connecticut and Massachusetts. I drove slowly, with the windows down, the breezes lifting my hair one way and another, under the stone bridges, switching on my hazards at the short merges, careful of my cargo.

  The first part of the drive was not unfamiliar. My first years in the Northeast were spent seventy miles north of the city, at the Academy. There I learned the basics of painting—color studies, painting from life, materiality—and the building blocks of my own taste. The faculty encouraged us to despise figuration (for its mistaken glorification of the corporeal; for its bloodstained history as a colonialist relic; and finally, most important, for its intellectual limitations) and to worship the visceral joy of abstract expression; the clean pseudo-godliness of minimalism; the intellectual detachment of the early conceptualists; and the raw passion of performance art. I was an eager student, swallowing it all whole inside a perpetually empty stomach, and got a taste for color.

  At the Academy, my earliest heroes—Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and Grace Hartigan—were put on the shelf to make room for those they influenced: Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Ellsworth Kelly, Sam Francis, and Agnes Martin, whom I came to worship with a fever. By junior year, I could recite “The Untroubled Mind,” her 1972 manifesto-slash-prose-poem, by heart, and I fantasized about making a pilgrimage to her adobe house in New Mexico. I longed to create work that lived as Martin’s did—the manifested edge of an exhale, abstract expressionism light enough to be mistaken for minimalism. I thought that cusp was where I belonged. (I wasn’t remotely like Martin, in the end, but that didn’t stop me from trying.)

  It began with Ohne Titel, my first postgraduate show. Ten untitled paintings. They were large-ish—six feet high, eight feet wide, each about the size of five doors set in a row—blank, unblemished, still pools of color, varnished with a dozen layers so that they shone with a lacquered gloss. When exhibited together, they were very clearly different shades of green. In fact they were an exact gradient shift from the green on the inside of a flower stem when you cut it, to the green of antique uranium glass, a green that is almost chartreuse, but not quite. However—alone? One by one? Nothing but large green rectangles—to any eye, the passé retreads of someone recently graduated from art school. Together, as I intended, they were something new—they were colossal—but in my youth and naïveté, I disregarded how easily and naturally they could, would, be broken, separated.

  Those paintings, and my failure to maintain them as a unit, hurt me viciously. Even now—thinking about them—there’s an ache. The two following shows had their own successes and heartbreaks, too, despite the fact that they sold, and each one brought up its own twinges of something. Yet during the past week, any time I tried to think about my Rich Ugly Old Maids, which were so beautiful, and of which I’d been so proud—I felt…nothing. It was so odd.

  I told myself as I drove that it was shock, panic, and productivity at work: Maybe, if I took a second to feel anything about this loss, I wouldn’t be able to finish their impostors. If I took the time to measure the distance of the fall, I’d never jump. I didn’t have time to think. I had to do. Maybe my brain, against all odds, was protecting itself. That wasn’t its historic strength—but maybe I’d grown smarter. Maybe I’d grown up—was that what this numbness meant?

  I hoped so.

  * * *

  Pine City was not an actual city, but rather a derelict upstate summer resort turned private retreat by the charismatic young achievers who graduated from the Academy two years before my arrival as a freshman. Pine City (the group) founded Pine City (the place) when they were twenty-eight and I was twenty-two, moving upstate shortly after I arrived in the city, naming it after themselves and defining it as the last real artist-owned retreat. Pine City was meant as their personal antidote to the corporatization of patronage that had resulted in otherwise anti-capitalist mid-career artists competing without blinking to be the Swarovski or Louis Vuitton Fellow of the year, the Costco Resident, et cetera. They kept it small, inviting only one or two other artists each season, people who were already their friends, and the myth of the place grew alongside their own.

  Though I’d never been there, I had seen dozens of photos of Pine City over the past decade—mostly of their dazzling annual parties, martini-soaked bacchanals set against a backdrop that was half Dirty Dancing, half Twin Peaks. The black lake with its armada of canoes; feather-haired young people sleeping on the beach, dried mud cracking on their skin; Tyler shooting fireworks into the sky with a grenade launcher; Jack reading Josef Albers in the lush grass of the lawns; Carey smashing a pyramid of empty Krug champagne bottles with a golf club. But those images were old. They all but dried up after Carey committed suicide. Over the last few years, the pictures of parties were replaced with portraits posed against gray curtains as the rest of Pine City marched past forty without her, their work becoming more serious, their attitudes more bourgeois, and their positions more establishment.

  My interest in them was more than prurient. (It was fueled by prurience, but with selfishness, too.) I was genuinely hopeful that moving into Pine City would inflate my sails with the creative wind I needed in order to remake seven huge paintings. I told myself it was a strategic decision: I could live free of charge for four whole months with a handful of geniuses, walk the same paths that Carey Logan did, be animated by the same winds and leaves and sunlight. I would discover the secrets to her early success, and do exactly that, and I would find out, too, what pushed her to move into performance work—and then never do that. I would finish my paintings, and this time, this time, I would turn my show profits into something responsible, maybe a farm up here, Ooh, look at that great farmhouse, maybe like that. Sure—I was living on credit cards. But I felt certain that it would all work out. And each eighteenth-century manor that I drove past, with peeling columns and chestnut-laden gravel driveways, reminded me of how gracefully my professors at the Academy lived, and tempted me to consider myself their equal.

  The perceived cheapness of upstate was, naturally, its defining feature and the ruler by which its opportunities seemed to be measured. Like everybody else in the city I’d had a million conversational daydreams about opening a bed-and-breakfast on a hobby farm (“like the Kaaterskill but closer and without sheep and less expensive but still with fireplaces”) or a yoga studio in Beacon (“people are so chill up there, you know? And you can walk to stuff. It’s like a real town”), restoring a Victorian in Hudson to its Depression-era glory (“I feel this…instinctual need for a clawfoot bathtub”), or even buying a warehouse in Albany with my friends and making a Little Detroit of our very own (“we could have a skate park in the building”). However, when the rubber met the road, as a childless, unmarried woman in her thirties, moving upstate on my own had previously appeared only to be a one-way trip to Crazytown: populat
ion, me. I’d long worried that artists who moved out of the city were ultimately destined to abandon their work in order to sell mosaic-topped garden tables to other alcoholic kooks, and I was terrified of real loneliness, of a life without the noise of the city, its bars, its parties, the comfort of its density and rancor.

  But it turned out that when I really thought about it, I wouldn’t miss the endless parade of dead-on-arrival relationships, or the hard edges that grew on me like a rash as other people got married and had babies and I stayed single, or how nobody in the city could ever commit to anything, or how easy it was to stay immature forever, or how I hadn’t made a new friend in what felt like years, or any other of the same old boring piles of garbage I’d been circling like a vulture for the last decade. The facts on the ground were that the loft had been the only thing keeping me in the city. Without it, I would’ve been driven out long ago.

  I’d missed the boat on New York real estate by at least two decades, if not more, which made this drive inevitable. Today, tomorrow, next year, five years, it didn’t matter: Eventually, in every possible version of my life (except for the one where I died alone wrapped in rags on a subway platform), I was destined to get behind the wheel of a truck like this and head up the Taconic.

  So—why fight it?

  I felt myself detach, for the first time in twelve years, from the city I was leaving behind. Maybe that drunk old tortoise from the party was right, after all.

  It was time to be a new person.

  * * *

  Susan’s directions indicated I was to exit the Taconic shortly before the tollway to Boston and head north on Route 203, cutting through the rural area southeast of Albany and northeast of Hudson, then turn right on Route 7. After a wide spot in the road whose metal sign read UNION VALE, I was to drive two miles and look out for Granger Walk, the dirt road leading to Pine City.

  The driveway was a two-mile gravel rut lined with tall, overgrown poplar trees, hemmed in by a thick, dark-green wall of forest and dotted with Granger’s original billboards—DANCING! DINNER NIGHTLY! BOATING! AIR CONDITIONING—upbeat, scripted slogans whose promises were betrayed by their faded and peeling paint. Prickles of excitement, an electric current, raised all my body hair like the hackles of a dog. I let the truck slow to a stop and took it all in—the way the air tasted, the reddish color of the road, the yellowed light dappling the ground. I hoped to remember it forever.

  I checked my teeth in the rearview mirror, brushed the crumbs from the SUNY Binghamton tennis t-shirt I’d borrowed from Cady, and flipped my hair to a fresh part.

  A few minutes later, I was there. Someone waited at the end of the driveway, in front of a wooden multistory building with a circular drive that had once been the main lodge. Metal posts stuck out from an overhang over the main doors, remnants of the letters GRANGER’S. There was no sign reading PINE CITY—no indication that this was anything more than an abandoned resort. They hadn’t glossed it up. They hadn’t made it for anyone but themselves.

  The someone turned. Tyler Savage still looked almost exactly as he had that first time on Grand Street. Divine, untouchable, an athletic, tennis-player kind of body, under an inside-out t-shirt and faded chinos dotted with flecks of paint. He was smoking a cigarette and leaning against an old diesel Mercedes-Benz station wagon, and I thought for a second that I’d never seen anyone lean so perfectly against anything, ever. It was remarkably easy, in that moment, to slide from my independent grown-up identity right back into the body of that nineteen-year-old girl crossing the street, gaping self-consciously at the most beautiful people I’d ever seen in my life.

  I pulled around, rolled down my window. A gallery girl sat in his passenger seat, tapping away on a BlackBerry behind a thick drape of hair and silver-dollar Lennon sunglasses.

  Tyler was definitely older—his brown hair, dusted with gold from the sun, was clipped short on the sides to contain the encroaching gray and white. Still: Wow, I thought. You’re more handsome than ever. Thankfully, nothing came out of my mouth.

  “You’re late,” he said to me, grinding the cigarette beneath his heel.

  “Sorry,” I said, tucking my hair behind my ear like a teenager. “I’m—”

  But before I could get my hand out the window to introduce myself, he got back into his car and drove down the paved service road, waving for me to follow. His coarseness stung, but I followed as requested, though I took my time, driving extra-slowly past the hard tennis courts, cracked and faded, their nets full of holes; grass ones choked to oblivion by tall, thin weeds; broken picnic tables and sun-battered wooden chairs; an upturned lifeboat roped to a fir tree; then the endless black lake with its huge, shabby restaurant on our right, and several slightly cleaner-looking outbuildings with metal signs that read ARTS AND CRAFTS, SPORTS, and THEATRE embedded into the hill—leftovers from the days when this resort was a kind of summer camp for rich WASPs. A few rusty single-speed bicycles were scattered here and there, and a metal rack near the beach held kayaks and canoes.

  I didn’t see people anywhere.

  This place was supposed to be full of life.

  The contrast between the photos I’d mentally hoarded over the years and this empty retreat was surreal.

  Had I dreamed it?

  We turned down yet another road, into a long cul-de-sac of small, modernist cabins lining the lakeshore. There were twenty or so, about half an acre of yard around each one. The ones on my right were beachfront. The others nestled into the forest.

  Every bungalow was impeccably restored, little sharp-angled modernist dreamscapes, a veritable Donald Judd Disneyland. Some had clean cedar siding, in varying ages and shades of gray. Others were painted exquisite shades of yellow—I spotted mustard seed, marigold, dandelion, pineapple, and ocher. All were trimmed with dark lines, blue-blacks like avocado peel and military navy. Their gutters were copper, and the fixtures on their doors and windows were brass.

  Tyler parked on the beachfront side. As I pulled in behind him, the view of my soon-to-be house obstructed by a gigantic, overgrown honeysuckle shrub hanging off a chain-link fence, I felt a surge of happiness. I was certain that the beach houses were better than the forest houses, and I was flattered. Every morning, I could wake up and swim, if I wanted. I could sit on the beach and read every night.

  Tyler hopped out and waved for me to follow him. Number nineteen, according to the enameled-metal number pinned to a stake at the edge of the lawn, was the last on the beachside row.

  “Ty,” the girl purred. “I need to take a call. We have to go.”

  He turned around and winked at her, then disappeared on the other side of the fence.

  I followed, turning past the fence and into the carport, and at first—I was confused.

  Dusty blue paint peeled off the rotted wood siding in sheets. There was a hole in the corrugated tin roof large enough to see from the road. The open windows had screens, but they were dotted with rips big enough for birds to fly through. It was a sad, rickety little thing that drooped and sighed. Nobody had taken care of it at all.

  It looked exactly how I felt.

  It did have a lovely set of bones beneath the scabs of worn-down sparkle linoleum and peeling marbled wallpaper. The front door opened into a small entryway, with hooks for coats and a built-in umbrella stand. To the left was a single-wall Pullman kitchen—the original, from the 1950s—made from a single set of metal cabinets connected to an ancient stovetop and refrigerator, the whole set stamped GENERAL ELECTRIC. The kitchen faced a large living room whose glass-fronted walls looked out upon the lake, and there was a small bedroom off to the left, with an adjacent screened-in sleeping porch.

  Still—the toilet was so old that I was afraid the elevated tank would fall off the wall at a pull of the chain. The stall shower was teeny and smelled like rotten eggs. Piles of dirty leaves cluttered the corners; water stains bloomed from the ceiling; and there was absolutely zero furniture. A striped hammock swung limply on the deck, and a cracked brown plast
ic landline phone was fastened to the wall, but the bungalow was otherwise empty.

  Tyler smacked a vintage push-button switch with the butt of his hand, and the two plain bulbs hanging from the ceiling buzzed alight. It was Depression-era depressing. I must have done something wrong, I thought to myself. A nagging voice in the back of my heart said, meanly, It’s because you’re not as successful as everyone else. They don’t think you deserve anything better, because you don’t.

  “Thanks so much for hosting me,” I said sincerely, my hands pressed against my heart. “It’s so generous of you. I’m in a bind, and—”

  “Well, Susan buys a lot of Marlin’s work, so.” He set his jaw and shrugged.

  I was bitten by that—chastened—and couldn’t imagine a reply. I leaned against the wall, suddenly dizzy, carsick from six hours behind the wheel, and closed my eyes.

  “There’s furniture in the main building, mattresses and things like that, if you need it.”

  I was stunned. Of course I needed furniture. What the hell kind of question was that?

  “You can do whatever you want with your own space,” he continued. “Obviously, you’re Marlin’s guest so you’ll need to check with her about anything major.” I had no idea what he was talking about, but I took it to understand that he was absolving himself of responsibility for me.

  “All our phone numbers are on the map. Marlin should be here in a few days.” He anchored a piece of paper, a hand-drawn map, with three spools of tape: one duct, one electrical, one masking. “You’ll probably want these for the house, anyway. Put them on my doorstep when you’re done.”

  “Which house is yours?” I asked.

  “I’m in the black one,” he said gruffly.

  “And…where’s the studio?”

  “Uhhh…you can use the old barn. It’s…picturesque. I’m sure you’ll figure out how to make it work.”

  He took the map and scratched an X on it.