Fake Like Me

by Barbara Bourland

  I dreamed about the fire. I watched my paintings burn, flames wrapping around the edges of their framing, the paint itself boiling and bubbling and melting to the ground. My books lit up. The pages caught orange and turned to ash in my hands. The soggy birth certificate was in my palm again, the empty passport, too, with its blank pages. I screamed for help, but no sounds emerged from my throat. Silently I watched two years of work disappear into a wet black smoke, one that swirled around my face until I was gasping for air, awake and briefly possessed of the odd and unwelcome conviction that the paintings were supposed to burn.

  * * *

  In the morning, the shower ran hot, but brown. I hit my elbows and knees against the walls of the narrow, unfamiliar stall. In the kitchen, I reached for the wrong drawers and the wrong cabinets, but eventually, managed an egg and a cup of coffee: nearly normal. I put on the first t-shirt from the pile, an extra-wide, one-size-fits-all crop top with WHAT WOULD JESUS DO? positioned around a triangle. “Atticus, Jesus would wear a crop top,” I agreed, rolling up the sleeves.

  At eight twenty-five, I drove to the main lodge to wait for Julian. After half an hour passed, and Julian still hadn’t appeared, I decided to look around.

  Julian: Honk when you arrive, I wrote on a napkin from the glove compartment, tucking it under my windshield wiper.

  The main entrance was locked. But the landscape banked steeply around the sides of the building, so I followed it up and around until a screen door appeared, banging in the wind, unlocked and naked.

  Inside it was the fusty brownish dusty-dark of a hallway long neglected. I pressed along the walls on both sides of the door until a push-button switch rose beneath my fingertips. The yellowed bulbs turned on, one after the other, leading down a hallway to a half set of stairs that dropped behind the reception desk in the resort’s main lobby.

  It was a vast, double-story atrium—once a welcoming, airy check-in and lounge—the walls paneled in warm wood and modish squares of orange and green melamine. I stood behind the long reception desk, in a kind of faux-Mondrian design, where a rusty bell and an old ballpoint pen, draped in a soft pool of dust, were the only remaining office supplies. The keyholes were vacant, the shelves empty.

  On the opposite wall, the main doors were padlocked with a thick bicycle chain. To my left, a wall of windows faced the restaurant and the lake; to the right, a wide staircase led to upper floors that must have once contained lower-priced, motel-style rooms for those who couldn’t afford the expense of a separate bungalow. Dark rectangles haunted the walls at eye level, where pictures had once hung.

  And in the middle, as Tyler had mentioned, there was a treasure trove of furniture. What had once been a breezy reception lounge was now a storage facility. Stacks of plastic and metal chairs rose between vinyl sofas and easy chairs, alongside metal bed frames, musty spring mattresses, ancient melamine side tables, and modernist lamps with torn, stained shades.

  “Help yourself,” I muttered, running my fingers through the quarter-inch layer of dust that coated everything. Nearly all the mattresses reeked of mildew, but one on the end had spent its recent exile in a sunbeam. The fabric was crispy to the touch and its once-floral pattern was now bleached a rancid yellow, but at least it didn’t smell.

  I dragged the mattress through the dust, wedging it behind the desk and up the narrow half stairs and out through the side door, then sorted through the bed frames until I found enough pieces to make something work. The vinyl sofas were too heavy to carry alone, but I was able to take two metal folding chairs, three side tables, a plastic-wrapped pile of linens—cheap, hospital quality—and four metal lamps too, and stack them out front.

  Still—there was no Julian.

  I went back into the lodge and crept up the wide staircase.

  I expected more mildewed furniture, maybe some shag carpeting, but the upper two floors of the lodge had twenty-four empty motel rooms scraped down to the studs. Most didn’t have flooring, only joists; the beginning of a renovation. In the room next to the stairs, I found a folded NYT crossword puzzle atop a three-gallon paint can. The date on the newspaper was three years old, shortly before Carey died. It seemed that no progress had been made since then.

  I took the puzzle (it was only half filled in) outside with me and sat on the hill, watching the woods. Nothing happened—wind shook the trees and some birds flew around, your basic forest action—and I mindlessly filled in the clues. When I was done, I paged through the remainder of the section, and found a review for a show by Carey Logan. According to the date, it was roughly six months before she’d died.

  “I left asking myself two questions. One: Is ‘Other People’s Rules’ a good work of art? Two: Is Ms. Logan a good artist? The answer to both is that Ms. Logan’s electrifying personal presence, overwhelming as it may be, does not an artwork make. She may still be beautiful, but she is certainly no longer the daring youngster who asked us to look unflinchingly upon the bodies of murdered women; instead she asks us to regard her newfound privilege. Unlike her, I did not find it interesting.”

  It was so unkind and sexist and humiliating. Carey had certainly proved that she was a good artist—that she was newsworthy was the paper’s own self-evident truth—and she did not deserve to be taken down so forcefully. I could not recall reading any review that assessed whether or not Chris Burden, who let himself be shot on-camera, or Vito Acconci, who masturbated under the floorboards of a gallery, were still attractive, or if any male artist was still attractive unless it was asserting that like Bruce Springsteen their butts were still worth grabbing. I’d never seen Richard Prince, Jeff Koons, or Chuck Close being admonished for showing us their privilege. The word newfound reminded us that she was uneducated and poor, that she was some kind of interloper into privilege, implying that she didn’t deserve it or that she was a fool to be interested in it. And the byline enraged me most of all—it was been written by a woman, no less. The same woman, I realized, who so generously expressed her apparent shock that I “could so successfully handle the XL format,” since it was “traditionally the domain of men.”

  “Judas,” I hissed at the paper.

  A brand-new Range Rover pulled up, emerging like a shiny black nightmare from the gentle scenery. When the driver’s-side window rolled down, I found myself looking at the smooth, artificially plumped face of an impeccably dressed man with dyed-platinum hair and a permanent sneer.

  “Hello?” the man whom I presumed was Julian snapped, though he made no effort to introduce himself. “Ugh,” he said, impatient with disgust. “You’re…bleeding.”

  I looked down. My tape bandage had worked itself free. “I cut my leg in the barn,” I tried to explain. “Thanks for bringing the key.”

  He rolled his eyes unsympathetically, as though I had somehow intentionally removed my own flesh in an attempt to skip the nonexistent line of invisible people for usable studio space.

  “You can use this for now,” he said, passing me an orange-capped key with PRINT STUDIO written on the label in tiny, impeccable handwriting. “It’s for those doors.” He pointed to the locked lower doors of the lodge, the ones around the side. “Get to it. You don’t have a lot of time.”

  “Until what?” I asked, but he was already driving away.

  Alone again—but now there was somewhere to go.

  Chapter Five

  I unlocked the doors and discovered a full basement-turned-printing-studio beneath the lobby. It had four huge tables, at least four feet wide by ten feet long; three slop sinks and a washout room; a full ventilation system; and long windows that looked down the sloping hill that led to the Mission and the lake. Along the walls, deep shelves were packed with bright jars of ink and yellow-skinned screens; a pegboard was hung with custom-cut squeegees of every size. The light was good.

  One wall had no shelves at all. Instead, in hand-painted letters, it was covered in a quote I knew by heart:

  The great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is this: That th
e more distinct, sharp, and wiry the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art; and the less keen and sharp, the greater is the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism, and bungling…Leave out this line and you leave out life itself; all is chaos again, and the line of the Almighty must be drawn out upon it before man or beast can exist.

  The passage, written by William Blake in a descriptive catalog to accompany one of his own exhibitions, was on the wall in the senior lounge at the Academy. Someone had typed it out in the 1940s and tacked it to the corkboard with a little metal pin, under the headline WE KNOW EACH OTHER BY OUR LINES—and nobody ever moved it. Generations of us ran our fingers over the lines and copied them down. Ask any Academy graduate how we are different from the others. We know each other by our lines is the answer. We know the bounding line.

  Though the trend during my time was to avoid figuration, we nonetheless, as was tradition, entered the Academy with a natural hand and left with sharpened claws. Some of us were more talented than others. The gifted draftsman can use dime-store acrylic paint on a palette knife like David Hockney did in the ’60s, rendering the subject flat-faced, buck-toothed, bug-eyed—and still the subject will feel as though they have been seen like never before. A line like that is the rarest of gifts. Blake had it, and Marlin Mayfield had it.

  Below the painted quote, six of her prints lay on a drying rack. I examined them cautiously, flipping the wire shelves up with care. The dense paper, pressed flat, was handmade, edges raw and uneven. Marlin used more than ink—it looked like iron dust on magnetized paint—and so the prints were fuzzy, built up from the surface in a pattern of tiny hexagons. The images were of different anatomies: a hand, a leg, a torso. The edges were executed with such a specific, meaningful line that I found it hard to look away.

  But they were not mine to look at. I was here for myself. I wheeled the rack of her prints carefully into the washout room, draped the whole thing with plastic, and looked at the studio. It would work—it would more than work. We know each other by our lines. I was, in one small way, home again.

  * * *

  I spent the morning unpacking my haul from Manhattan. There were power tools, sheets of plywood and copper, bags of powdered fiberglass, a thousand dollars’ worth of powdered pigments, gallons of turpentine, then pints of linseed, safflower, and walnut oils, along with Liquin and Galkyd (chemical drying additives, cheaters, which I rarely used, but would be desperately relying on) and a host of other toxic mediums, resins, and plastics. When I found the superglue, I ripped off my makeshift bandage and squeezed the cold gel into the wound in my leg. Not bad, I thought, smoothing masking tape across the top. There’s always med school, I joked to myself. At least then I’d have health insurance.

  I refilled the truck with the borrowed pile of furniture, tarping it into place until there was time to unload it at the house, then locked myself in the studio. For the thousandth time, I said a silent prayer on behalf of Hayley Thomas, the professor who ran the Academy’s freshman foundation course.

  “There are no rules to this life,” Hayley said, every year, “so you’d better write it all down or you’ll never be able to remember. Write down your paints, the humidity, the time of day. Record everything about a piece—beyond your materials, I mean, who you spoke to about it, or how much it cost to ship it, and when you’re having a hard day, you’ll be able to look at your notebooks and remember how much work you did. When you have a success, you’ll know how to repeat it. And when you make a mistake, you’ll have a record of that, too.”

  Because of Hayley, the notebook that lived in my backpack, the one I brought with me the morning of the fire, contained records of every painting in Rich Ugly Old Maids. I planned to start with Prudence, getting into the rhythm with her two undamaged panels, and work my way backward as best I could, using the documentary photos in my camera and the notes in my notebook. Jacqueline had seen images, but she’d never seen the work in person. I told myself that I certainly had the right to make and deliver my paintings in whatever condition I saw fit. Obedience was on the posters and in the advertisements, but that one was basically all black. I could get pretty damn close, I told myself. Pretty close. Close enough.

  I propped the two unharmed panels of First Prudence against the wall for guidance; since I couldn’t afford to match her materials and remake all of my other paintings, she would remain half a painting forever.

  The next hours were spent making new panels of Prudence. They would, when assembled, be a total of ten feet high and twelve feet wide. I cut and drilled, screwed and framed (the wood backing would be covered in fiberglass, so that they looked smooth in the back, effortless), over and over, four times, four panels. Once done, each panel took a table.

  I was more than eager to remake her; I was desperate. As I spread a ready-made gesso over the wood in thin, even layers, the work hypnotic and soothing, I felt, for the first time since the fire, a sense of calm spreading through my body, warm, opiatic. It was a relief to discover that here, even in this strange place, cradling the ghost of a painting and bereft of my pricey tools, I could work, like I had for much of the past twelve years.

  Painting had not left me.

  Prudence would live.

  I forgot about the loss of my home, about the loneliness that had swept me up the night before. I forgot about the emptiness of the resort in which I stood and I forgot about how afraid I was.

  I was working again, and so my life was full.

  Somewhere around 4 a.m., I curled up on the ink-stained sofa in the studio, pulled a moth-eaten blanket over my aching body, and forced myself to fall asleep.

  This was my chance—no matter how strange—and I was determined to make it work.

  * * *

  One of my professors once told me that she started all of her paintings with a photocopied picture of her parents and the words FUCK YOU scrawled across their faces. The final compositions—abstract seas of color—show no traces of the beginning whatsoever, yet the paintings speak to you, screaming a version of FUCK YOU felt in the back of your throat weeks, months, or years later.

  Whether we are pasting photos of our parents into the gesso or not, all artists are of course doing that same thing: We are burying our past selves within the work, pieces of which rise to the surface without our permission like bodies in a flood. I think oil painters are the worst—that we shovel the most shit onto the canvas. But—not everybody has a shovel. Watercolor painters, for example, aren’t adding or shoveling but rather removing the occlusions of what we perceive as reality to expose what lies underneath, like wiping fog off a car window. Pencils burnish, create an impression, a frottage; ink is a violent stain; charcoal, a cloudy exhale; acrylic, a plastic advertisement; photography, a viewpoint. Sculpture is architecture. They’re all different, these mediums of representation. I started working with oil because it takes the longest to dry—some of my paintings are so thick they won’t be dry for a thousand years.

  This was, strictly speaking, my biggest problem. In the morning, the air was so humid that the gesso looked like it was sweating, though I knew it was dry. Panic rose beneath my ribs: There was no time for this kind of humidity. Even Liquin couldn’t stand up to this weather—not with the quantities of paint I was using. If the first layer was applied under these conditions, the rest would be affected, and the final product could be melted, unstable, even after months of drying—months I didn’t have. That exact quality I was so attracted to—that heavy, damp shit-shoveling—it was a condition I could no longer afford.

  I needed a solution. Today.

  When in doubt, I always leave the studio and go for a walk. I’m not an exercise fanatic, but this is a solid, unwavering truth: Leaving the studio makes everything better. I locked up and walked down the driveway, past Arts and Crafts, the Theatre, and Sports, and onto the shore of the black lake.

  It stretched ahead for a mile, maybe more. I stood on the only visible beach, which ran about half a mile, from the Mission to my bungalow
. The licorice lake was lined around the soft curve to my left with pointed evergreens and thickets of shrubs, and a grassy hill rose opposite me, on the far shore. The water moved heavily, with windswept waves that were never placid. To my right it wrapped around the corner to the east, where a peninsula jutted out sharply and cut off the view.

  I wondered where Carey had walked into the lake in her cement-filled boots. Was it here, close to the Mission? Was it in front of their house, number seven? Did she take one of the canoes and roll out of it?

  I took off my shoes and let my feet touch the incoming swells.

  It was cold—so cold that it made my bones ache from the inside out. I jumped back, then steeled myself and walked into the cold. I wanted to know how it felt, to be fully frozen and surrounded. My legs dragged back against the current, but I pressed on, gasping when it touched the back of my knees. I made it all the way up, past my waist, the ground silty and slippery beneath my feet, and then—I pinched my nose and dropped under.

  The cold was a wallop to the chest, but it was tolerable. I dropped to the bottom and opened my eyes. Beneath the surface, the water wasn’t black but red—pure Red Oxide, the color of iron—and it was dotted, quite beautifully, with little green caterpillars of algae whose fine fibers swung gently to and fro. I popped up, into the sun, considered swimming farther, into the deep—where there was nothing to hold on to. Yet the mere act of thinking about the open water made me step back involuntarily toward the shore.

  It was impossible for someone to drown themselves here. It was too cold. It was too scary. I thought about all those pictures of the beach covered with people, feather-haired, mud cracking on their skin. Maybe in a crowd, it could be fun—lighthearted.