“There,” he said, pointing to the X and lighting another cigarette. “That’s the barn. Fill out the form if you need anything else and put it in the box. We only have one rule here: We never go in each other’s studios. We don’t interfere in each other’s work. We won’t go into your space, and you don’t go into ours. Cool?”
“Cool,” I said, too agreeably, shifting my weight back and forth from foot to foot, an active lie, because all I had fantasized for the past decade was hanging out in Tyler’s studio while he lit things on fire.
“Um, is there wifi?”
Tyler frowned. “Never,” he said. “There’s no cellphone service, there’s no internet and no TV. There’s a VHS connected to a projector in the Mission, if you want to watch something, and a lot of books. Read whatever you want. Put it back when you’re done, and don’t dog-ear.”
“Great,” I said, trying to seem cool, like it wasn’t a problem, like I wasn’t disappointed by how gruff and rude he was, how empty this place was, how unwelcome I felt. I walked back out to my truck, pulled out the studio boombox and a huge paper bag of cassette tapes I picked up at the Goodwill, and brought them inside. A Neil Young tape fell to the floor by accident, and he picked it up and handed it back to me with a smile—not a lot, no teeth or anything, but it was enough.
“The landlines all work. The number is on the phone. There’s packaged food in the restaurant. You’re welcome to it if you haven’t gone to the grocery store,” he said as he reached for his car door. A fat beetle flew past his head, buzzing loudly. He didn’t flinch. “Fix your meals there anytime. I have to get going.”
I tried to keep the desperate panic from my voice. “You’re not staying here tonight?” (I did not succeed.)
“No—” he said, squinting at me with suspicion. “It’s the Biennale?”
“Oh, right,” I said, embarrassed. Venice. “I’m not paying attention to anything right now,” I tried to explain.
“Whatever,” he said, one corner of his mouth pulling back, fingers waving dismissively. He thought I was an amateur. “Good luck.”
With that, he drove off, gravel spitting out from behind the station wagon as he careened up the service road and around the bend. A cloud of dust swirled up as his bumper disappeared from view—and I was left all alone in the broken-down utopia that I’d spent so many years dreaming about.
Chapter Four
The first thing I did was open a seltzer. The second thing was to pick up the cracked brown plastic phone and call Cady.
“You made it!” she squealed. “WHAT IS IT LIKE?”
“It’s completely empty and it’s super shitty.”
“Huh. Somehow I thought it would be, like, a resort, still. You get a welcome drink and your bed is already made.”
“I know. It’s the opposite. There’s not even a bed. I’m sleeping in a hammock tonight.”
“Who’s there?”
“Nobody. Tyler showed me in, and then he left again.”
“Is he still, like, the most gorgeous man?”
“He’s a jerk.”
“Do you think he’s the reason?”
“Reason for what?”
“That Carey killed herself. That’s what everybody says. That he broke up with her when she stopped making sculptures, and then did nothing while she slid into some massive depression.”
“Oh God.” I turned and looked through the windows at the black lake. Clean white crests rose again, and again, over the glittering onyx of the basin. “That’s mean, Cady.” I remembered how he treated Carey that night on Grand Street, with so much joyful tenderness. I stretched the phone cord over my finger, wrapping it around and around.
“You never know,” Cady continued. “They had a crazy relationship. My old assistant Bennie said they were super manipulative, both of them, when she helped install that last sculpture show.”
“Everybody’s manipulative,” I countered. “Bennie is twenty-six. She has the emotional range of a mynah bird.”
Cady laughed. “People get depressed, you know. I’m depressed.”
“No you’re not,” Atticus shouted. “You’re hungover.”
“I think—I think it has something to do with her switch to performance. I do,” I said. “Susan Bricklings-Young said she thought something happened to her when she switched. Something bad.”
“Susan Bricklings-Young,” Cady said piously, “thinks that any artist who doesn’t want to make a salable object is clinically insane. She has told me that exact thing on multiple occasions. Susan was probably just complaining.”
“Ugh, I know. I thought that too, when Susan said it,” I admitted, unwrapping the cord from my finger. “But—still. There was no reason for Carey to stop making sculpture.”
“Maybe she got sick of it.” Cady sighed. “It looked like hard work.”
“Who gets sick of the only thing they’re good at?”
“Everybody but you, apparently. What’s the studio like?”
“I have no idea,” I said, peering at the map. “Apparently, an old barn.”
“Go look!” she said. A horn honked, and Jonny called her name. Her show—it was installing today. “Eeek. I have to go. Call me later. Tell me everything. I need constant updates. Love you,” she said.
“Love you bye,” I replied automatically. Paper map in hand, I climbed into the limp brown hammock on the porch, hoping that it wouldn’t break under my weight. Thankfully, it was dry and sturdy. I wished I’d stopped to get a blanket and pillows.
The map was a loose illustration of the colony, nowhere close to scale. All the bungalows were marked by artist (Tyler, Marlin, Jes, and Jack; Carey’s name was notably absent) and the lake labeled as THE DARDANELLE. I traced the route from my bungalow—one of Marlin’s—to my supposed studio with my finger.
There was no time to waste. If I could unload everything, and get the house in order, then tomorrow could be a productive day. That was all that mattered.
I packed up my hurt feelings, climbed back into the truck, and drove west, in the direction of a service road that stretched back into the woods. Summer air filled the cab, and as I entered the forest and paused to navigate around a particularly big pothole, the sounds came in, too, loudly enough to overpower the idling engine.
It was almost a shrieking—I heard it all so quickly. Wind battered the trees; birds screamed at each other. Cicadas rattled their exoskeletal cages like a jailed Christmas choir, and somewhere behind me, the vast, empty lake beat against its rocky shore. The outside world shrank and fell off the edges, like a twig going over a waterfall, and I had the sudden sensation of total solitude. These were the deafening sounds of human absence.
Next—the heat flew in, thick and choking with humidity. Sweat dripped down my sides in tiny tributaries, pooling against the sticky smack of my thighs on the old leather seats. Flies landed on my arms, crawling over my wrists while I turned the wheel this way and that as I drove for over a mile along that old dirt road.
It narrowed into a natural hallway. The ground was covered in foot-high weeds and gnarled tree roots, its sides walled closely with peeling birches and thickly needled conifers blanketed with cobwebs. The rare patches of meadow seen through the trees were tamped down flat, their clots of slender grasses depressed by the bodies of slumbering deer.
The farther I drove, the denser the forest grew. Soon I was in an older part of the resort, at least a hundred years neglected, a private, broken-down world that felt beyond time. I wondered if anyone burned witches here. When I passed a cluster of worn limestone gravestones that butted up against the road, I threw the truck in park and went to look.
The names were mostly dissolved from years of acid rain. On one, 1742 was visible, sunk deep into the dirt and nestled in a pile of leaves, and letters poked out beneath. I reached down to brush the leaves away.
When my hand touched the pile, it was warm and soft—and then before I realized what it was, it moved beneath my palm. A big brown bat darted out, flapping and shrieking in
confusion. Its tiny needle teeth flashed white as it emptied a high-pitched guttural noise directly into my face.
I screamed right back at it. Taut wings beat around my head as it circled once, then twice—and then, miraculously, it abandoned me.
The truck was still running. I scrambled in and pulled the door shut beside me, frantically rolling up the windows, shaking with adrenaline. My palm burned in the place where I’d contacted the soft fur.
“It was just a bat,” I told myself, cradling my head over the steering wheel. “It was just a bat. It was just a bat. Just a bat.” I looked around. No bat. See? I told myself. No bat.
I put the truck in gear and drove another mile, distracted and shaking. The only thing I passed was a damp, swollen barn whose boards zigged and zagged in opposing directions. The building strained and sagged, giving the impression that the slightest breeze could collapse it into a pile of soggy matchsticks.
I kept driving and driving but there was nothing. When the road stopped suddenly in a dead end, a wall of birches rising up in front of me like palace guards, I had to drive in reverse until the road widened enough for me to turn around.
The damp, swollen barn—it was the X. It was the only thing that could have been the X.
I should have driven back—I should have left—but instead I parked in front of the barn. A cardboard-looking door, with frayed edges, hung from a doorframe. At my touch, the handle came off in my hand, and the door itself fell and smashed onto the ground, breaking into pieces. I toed one of the soft, broken slabs, and it was so decayed that its fibers clung to the mesh of my sneakers.
Inside, it smelled like air after a storm—like a damp rag—and when my eyes adjusted it became clear that the floors beneath my feet were simply dirt, a brown expanse pierced by jagged shafts of light and pitted with muddy potholes. Toward the back, over the hayloft, the roof was partially caved in. To refer to this as a “barn” was more than inaccurate. It was a moldering, oversize lean-to—a total nightmare.
I touched the nearest wall. The wood came away easily, balling up under my fingernail like a wet paper towel. Feeling bold, I climbed the ancient ladder toward the loft, trying to reach a joist, to see if anything in this building was solid. The first step was fine, the second too, but halfway up, a rung fell away beneath me, exposing a cluster of nailheads that ripped a hunk of skin from my calf as I tumbled to the ground.
Blood rushed from my leg and dripped wetly into the hollows of my ankle. Stunned, I watched it run into my sock, over the edge of my sneakers, mixing with the dirt of the floor in a tiny, glossy puddle. My forearm was scraped raw too, blood seeping through the dirt.
I took off my t-shirt, ripped off one sleeve, tied it around the hole in my leg, and looked around the room one last time before I admitted to myself that the whole building would need to be rebuilt. It would take at least six months and a team of workers.
I was doomed.
It was rational to fear loneliness for all those years, I thought as I limped back to my truck: This place, an abandoned hotel turned abandoned retreat, had become in a single afternoon the physical manifestation of my isolation. Yet there was nowhere else for me to go. I had three thousand dollars in checking and forty-six thousand available in credit, money that would barely cover my expenses to remake my paintings, much less pay for shelter or studio space.
There was no plan C.
I sat behind the wheel of my truck for a long time. I thought about renting a storage space and living in it. I thought about squatting in Trenton. I thought about joining Atticus in his shipping container in Corona Park, and about going back to Cady’s sofa. I thought about driving straight through the night and day and night again to Gainesville, the north Florida sinkhole of my birth, to sleep on my mother’s sagging pullout couch, something that I had never considered before—not once, not ever. I thought about quitting.
But when I counted the days—roughly ninety—that I had to remake my paintings, I couldn’t let go. They had to be finished; it was imperative; nothing had ever been more true. There was no plan C because giving up on my paintings was not an available future. Letting go of them felt equivalent to sticking a gun in my mouth and pulling the trigger.
Eventually I drove back to the bungalow and climbed out of the truck. Then I did what anyone in my position would have done: I picked up the cracked plastic brown landline and tattled to the money.
“Isn’t it glorious?” Susan asked right away, after two short rings.
“No. Tyler left. Nobody’s here. I can’t use the barn they gave me. It’s falling apart.”
“It probably does need work. But that’s how they do things, you know.”
“Susan. We talked about this. It’s an emergency. I agreed to seven paintings for my show. This is number seven. I don’t turn in number seven, I don’t get paid for numbers one through six. This could set me back financially for actual years. You said you understood. I need a usable space—a big one. How do I get into the other buildings?”
“All right.” She sighed into the phone, sounding annoyed. “I suppose…my girl Friday, Julian, can bring you a key to another studio tomorrow. Meet him up front at…say, eight thirty. Don’t be late.”
She hung up before I could beg her to send him tonight.
* * *
Alone in the bungalow, I ripped into a bag of gas-station popcorn and unpacked. I had two bags of groceries, six pounds of coffee beans, a bottle of bourbon, a sixer of cheap beer, and three cases of seltzer. The metal cabinets in the kitchen thankfully revealed plates, cutlery, a coffeepot, and a smattering of pots and pans.
My clothes, destroyed in the fire, weren’t great to begin with. They’d been easily replaced in one gin-soaked afternoon with Atticus. Given free rein in the Forest Hills Salvation Army a mile walk from his shipping container, he selected variations on one theme: Dennis the Menace. Out of the duffel Atticus packed came cutoff jean shorts, oversize secondhand t-shirts, overalls, and multipacks of underwear and socks from the drugstore. His idea of a joke. Fine. After I dumped out a bag of brand-new toiletries from Ricky’s into the bathroom—soap, toothpaste, hair bleach, toner, and a purple lipstick it seemed I’d never have the occasion to wear—stacked four paperbacks from Goodwill into a pile, and duct-taped the hole in my leg, my hands were empty.
Unpacking my entire life had taken forty-five minutes.
I stood on my tiptoes to get the duffel onto the closet shelf. As I reached, pushing it to the back, I noticed one set of initials carved in the wood: MFC. I ran my fingers over the letters and wondered how long ago this house had welcomed a guest. I tried to imagine it before the leaves and cobwebs took over.
I stubbed my toe on a half-pulled nail. When I wiggled it out, a long nylon thread of avocado shag carpeting came with it, and I recalled the avocado carpet of my own childhood; pressing my face into it as the air conditioner wheezed out cold, wet puffs of barely filtered swamp air; the pernicious creep of fear that always came when the front door swung open, the screen door slammed shut, keys jangling unsteadily; and then I blinked, and the bungalow came back as it was. Peeling linoleum, walls half papered in a marble swirl, a broken ceiling fan, dirty windows, broken screens, carpet long ripped away. I was not in Florida. This was not my childhood home. It was a new place—to me, at least.
I strolled onto the beach, where thick, pebbled sand dried out against the retreating waves, to watch the ruby sunset melt below the tree line. Tyler’s black house was six houses down—number seven—and yet it wasn’t a single black, not exactly. Rather, it was five shades of black. Lamp black on the roof; Mars black on the windows; a viridian-tinted-black on the door and porch trims; the siding almost navy, probably a blackened Prussian blue; the shutters in Payne’s gray, a hard, matte black like charcoal. The screen door was locked. I tried the windows, and though they were bolted tight, I could see inside to where the walls and floor were black. The furniture was black. The lamps were black. The art on the walls was black.
In the photo shoot that was published after Carey’s obituary, “Perpetual Persephone,” the one where she wore a white dress dipped in flowers and smeared broken plums across Tyler’s skin, they’d been in a house that was all white: the doors, the floors, the furniture, the lamps, the plates, the art that hung on the wall. The single black was a number painted on the side: 7.
This house.
This house—Tyler’s house—their house—now painted black—every shade of grief. I shuddered and turned to watch the sun go down across the water.
The only black missing from Tyler’s house was the glossy black of the lake.
* * *
Another hour passed as I carefully covered up the holes in all the screens, set buckets under the darkest spots in the ceiling, and chased down mosquitoes with a sneaker, all beneath the buzzing glare of the single electric bulb in the living room.
I tried switching it off—it was ugly and unpleasant—but under the slide-change of darkness, I was unsettled by every noise, every moving leaf. Immediately I wondered if there was a prison nearby. I imagined men with biceps the size of bread loaves in orange polyester jumpsuits holding a knife to my throat, leering into me, expelling their rancid breath into my mouth. Like the subway but with fewer bystanders.
I flipped the light back on.
I thought about walking to the Mission, but I was afraid to go outside by myself. There were waves lapping, and branches breaking, and winds whistling restlessly through the trees. The moon insisted on staying hidden behind a cloud, and so the night loomed above me, the air thin as outer space and equally directionless. It felt like if I stepped outside, I’d float away into the night and nobody would ever find me again.
So: I drank, curled up in the hammock, with the light on. What else was there to do? I unscrewed the bourbon, made a t-shirt pillow and a t-shirt blanket, let the boombox play the A-side of a Carole King tape over and over, and thought about Carey. I wondered where her studio was—it wasn’t on the map. I wondered if she’d been unhappy here, or lonely, or scared, like I was right now. I realized that if I ever wanted to find out what happened to Carey Logan, I would have to actually see, and speak, to the remaining members of Pine City. But it felt like none of them were ever coming back. I’m going to be alone all summer, I thought miserably.
Fake Like Me Page 6
