Fake Like Me

by Barbara Bourland

  But not alone.

  Alone, it was big as the ocean.

  I returned to my bungalow to change into clean clothes and slam coffee—the beginnings of a routine. Rusty water streamed from my clothes the whole walk, turning my hair into wet ropes. Outside my porch, I paused, twisted the ends together, and squeezed out most of the water—and as it drained through my fists and into the sand, I had an idea.

  Oil paint likes structure. Jay DeFeo, whose oil paintings weighed hundreds of pounds, was famous for using rope—rope like the wet ropes of my hair—to support the massive piles of paint. I didn’t have time to learn how different ropes would behave, but I knew how raw wood acted. Raw wood drank oil.

  In the studio I took two fresh pieces of plywood and carved holes, making organic, honeycomb-patterned lattices that roughly followed the contours of how Prudence had once looked, then secured the lattices flat atop the new backings. Prudence would be at least an inch thick above the substrate when she was complete, and this raw wood latticework interior would soak up much of the oil, hastening the drying time by months. I hoped that when covered the lattice would look and weigh much the same as actual oil paint would have. It wasn’t a textbook solution, but it was something, and buoyed by the optimism of my own fresh ingenuity, I unscrewed fresh jars of powdered color and took out a clean palette knife.

  The key to mixing paint is to let the pigments separate, to float them in the medium just so, so that the colors band in this distinct-but-merged way—like how you can see pink and orange and green winking all at once in an oil puddle at the gas station, or in the nacre lining the edge of an oyster shell. But to get this kind of separation, you have to know when to stop, to thin out, to pull back. Painting is about overestimating the time it takes to pull the trigger.

  I tried to match the color of the red lake water that drained from my pink hair, reaching for something that wasn’t totally pink or red, but held pieces of tangerine and sunlight too, with a smear or two of the softest, darkest algae, or the reflective blue of a fish scale somewhere in there. When I was satisfied, I made a lot of it.

  I spackled the mix onto panel two and pushed it into the holes of the lattice that I’d attached. I did this over and over, making pocket after pocket of this nacreous blood red. And I was so involved with my painting, headphones plugged in, my world reduced to Prudence’s four panels, that I didn’t hear the studio door opening—or someone walking up behind me.

  * * *

  “What are you doing?” a voice demanded angrily and directly into my ear, cutting through the music. I jumped, almost tripping into the painting. Marlin Mayfield stepped back. I watched her mouth move as she gestured around the room and toward my paintings and me. I yanked out my headphones.

  “This is my studio,” she was saying, hands on her hips, in white overalls spattered with dark ink, narrow feet shoved into white Birkenstocks, brown hair pulled into a knotted bun. “Hello? Are you fucking listening?”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said quickly, sincerely, fingers splaying across my chest, trying to diffuse the tension. “Ju-Julian gave me the key,” I said, the words coming out jumbled, too close together.

  “We’re already giving you a place to sleep,” she said. “Now you’re taking my studio?”

  “I completely understand,” I said, raising my eyebrows, letting my jaw fall open, my hands in the air, don’t shoot. “Honestly, I’m in a real bind here. I need the space. My studio burned down.”

  She squinted, stepped back, crossed her arms over her body, and said nothing as she walked around the studio, looking at each panel of Prudence carefully before she glanced back to my face.

  “Huh,” she said. “Well. I’m Marlin Mayfield.”

  “I—I know,” I stammered, “I was at the Academy after you.”

  “I know,” she threw back. “I read that article.”

  “That reporter wanted to fuck me,” I said sheepishly. “It doesn’t count.”

  She laughed—an inroad.

  “Listen, I’m truly sorry about trespassing in your studio,” I said with what I hoped sounded like remorse. “I didn’t know what to do. Tyler gave me the barn, but it’s not usable. I respect that I’m a guest here. But I am completely at your mercy. I’m desperate.”

  “You know what…don’t worry about it. These are good,” she said, turning back to another panel, letting her palm hover over the wet, wavy surface of the oil. “How long again?”

  “Three months.”

  “We’ll find you another space. I need to be back in here”—she glanced at a calendar on the wall—“before June fifteenth.” She turned and looked out the window, crossing her arms over her white overalls. “Rats,” she continued. “That barn needs to be torn down. Tyler should have never given it to you. He can be combative. Don’t take it personally.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I can’t move these yet, though. I need another week or two. Is that okay?”

  She nodded and scribbled her cellphone number on a piece of paper.

  “Call me when you’re ready. I’ll let you get back to it,” she said, turning on her heel and heading for the door. “We usually do sundowners at the Mission.”

  We. I wondered if Tyler was back. Not exactly an invitation, but close enough.

  “Cool. See you,” I replied, plugging in my headphones. Briefly, I let myself wear the slender thrill of inclusion before turning back to Prudence, and then I zeroed in and the day disappeared behind me. At some point the sun completed its arc across the lake and began to sink into the horizon. I stepped back, wrapped my palette knives in plastic, scrubbed my hands with a turpentine rag, and marched toward the restaurant.

  * * *

  I’d seen so many images of the Mission, of its scarred wooden floors and bedraggled red velvet curtains, of its massive round tables and the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the lake, of its deck covered in a long line of wooden Adirondack chairs, that walking toward the real thing felt both jarringly surreal and slightly disappointing.

  Images flashed through my mind of a wedding here, when the whole place was lit up by bottle-green votives and they’d sent brown-paper-bag luminarias off the end of the dock. According to the newspaper, the bride and groom, friends of Pine City, had climbed into an aluminum canoe bedecked with tiny silver bells and paddled off into the night while Yusuf Islam himself had played “If You Want to Sing Out.” I thought about the video of Tyler throwing Jack off the deck, of the prints I’d seen at Johnson Reuchtig of naked male models lined up in the Adirondack chairs, of that hilarious photo of Karl Rove doing a keg stand, over there, near the hedge. Jes standing on a floating dock—which wasn’t out there anymore—playing a theremin. Marlin and Carey laying thousands of rotten flowers along the beach.

  Somehow it doesn’t matter how old you grow, or how sophisticated you become. The people who impress themselves upon your consciousness at nineteen will never shrink or fade from memory. They will always be just a few steps ahead, and you’ll both hate and worship them for it, because you cannot help but compare yourself.

  The Mission had a big white metal sign done in enamel with a cartoon Jesus over the entryway. When I heaved open the wooden slab of a door, I don’t know what I expected—I think probably for there to be a party inside—but what I got was a dark and empty room.

  Marlin wasn’t there, Tyler wasn’t there, nobody was there. It was deserted. The only sound came from the refrigerator’s compressor somewhere in the back of the kitchen.

  The round tables were there, as were the bedraggled red velvet curtains. The walls were covered in hundreds of framed photographs arranged salon-style—but there were dozens of holes. I flipped on the light to see the pictures. They seemed to show every famous living artist in America, hanging out on the shores of the black lake, painting cabins in gym shorts and baking cakes in the kitchen and strapping sculptures to dollies, with the help of Tyler, Jes, Jack, and Marlin. Over and over, it was the four of them—Jes always standing clo
sest to Tyler, Marlin and Jack their own pair—and there wasn’t a single photograph that included Carey. That was, I realized, what the holes were. Someone came through and took every photo of Carey from the wall. As though they couldn’t bear to be reminded. I put my palms in the empty squares, touching each star in the constellation left from bygone picture nails, and wondered what was supposed to replace her. Nothing, I thought, remembering the way she held the gallery at Grand Street in the palm of her hand. Nothing could replace her.

  I imagined her in this room, leaning against the bottles, behind the bar. She would have smiled and welcomed me; she would have unlocked a different house; she would have given me a real place to work, right off the bat. Carey saw herself in me, I knew she did—and she would have treated me like a protégée instead of an interloper.

  I sighed, walked around the bar to where she did not stand, where nobody stood, mixed two scoops of instant coffee with half a cup of cold water, choked it back, and returned to the printer’s studio, where I worked until four before falling asleep on the sofa again.

  In the morning, back at my bungalow for a shower and slice of toast, I found a note slipped under the door from Marlin:

  jes n me went to hudson for the night, didn’t want 2 disturb u, catch u soon, good luck

  I experienced a cheek-warming flash of humiliation. In a moment of pity, Marlin tried to make me feel comfortable, then later regretted it. No matter whether or not I told myself that I had come here as their equal, the fact remained that I was clearly a very unwanted gatecrasher.

  But I didn’t have a choice. This was where I was. The work had to get made, and I was the only one who could do it. I pushed myself to repress my embarrassment—to keep going, to make breakfast, drink coffee, shower, get dressed, and return to the printmaking studio. After an hour of work my skin burned with the fever of my painting and I was myself again.

  I don’t need friends, I told myself. Only work.

  The next nine days passed without interruption from Marlin, Jes, Tyler, or anybody at all. Each day was exactly the same: wake, shower, eat, paint, nap, paint, swim, sleep, repeat.

  There’s no other way to be. This is how the work happens—when there is nothing else to distract you. The bursts come for hours every day, and then between them, you sleep, because working takes everything out of you—opens a drain at the bottom of your stomach that lets the dishwater out. Then, later, some invisible hand refills you, and the cycle begins anew. It is the condition of my purpose. I am nothing else but this.

  I ignored every part of myself that cried out for human companionship so that Prudence, my once-final, now first old maid, could grow shining and luminous.

  And it worked.

  * * *

  On day ten, I went for twelve hours, nonstop, scraping a slab of oxidized copper with a razor blade dipped in vinegar. The scrapings went directly into a food processor borrowed from the Mission, where they were pulverized into nothingness. Eventually my labors generated nearly a pound of dust. I mixed a scoop of the green dust with some safflower oil, a daub of lead tin yellow, and a pinch of powdered gold leaf on a palette, using a long, flat knife. More yellow, more dust; more oil, more gold. When I was satisfied with the ratio, I mixed the remainder.

  I was essentially making verdigris, a highly toxic and unstable pigment the same color as the Statue of Liberty. Seventeenth-century Renaissance painters, whose verdigris glazes and tints were initially a brilliant, minty-grassy green, lacked the chemical materials to prevent verdigris from degrading over time. No matter what kind of oil medium they used, as the varnish degraded and the oils dried out, the topmost layer of copper was inevitably exposed to oxygen and would turn a brackish brown. Essentially what they lacked was a material that could be mixed at room temperature and dry to a chemically impenetrable solid: They lacked plastic, that base petroleum by-product whose applications now intersect with almost every aspect of our economy. I like verdigris because it reminds us that everything is destructive. The Renaissance painters’ lack of plastic destroyed their own work; my access to it is destroying the delicate ecosystems of our planet and so on. Everything that gets created destroys something else.

  For Prudence, I needed a version of verdigris that was not only stable, but more yellow than blue and literally glowing. It was delicate, a chancy process the first time around, and I was nervous to repeat it. The color had been a light green, somewhere on the yellow-jade spectrum between pear and honeydew, a color that turns the lights on in the basement of your mind. Like before, I poured twelve ounces of casting resin into a bucket, folded in the verdigris with a paddle, and then added an ounce of hydrogen peroxide gel (dental bleach, essentially) to reach that glassy, milky quality, to make something that shone. After testing the color against a prep board in the corner and adding another half ounce of the peroxide, something clicked, and it was time.

  I walked to a panel and began to pour.

  Watching the glossy, virescent plastic flow out of my bucket and down onto the backing, seeing it expand across the painting’s hole-ridden landscape, I felt it—the feeling that governed the last twenty years of my life—a rightness about the work, the material, the world. The green flowed for nearly a minute, a long, thin stream stretching out in front of me like a wire, before I stopped and tilted the bucket back up.

  This wouldn’t fully set for at least forty-eight hours. I took a breath, looked around, and felt myself close up, my skin thicken and expand. It was possible that it ruined the painting, this step a misstep, but I didn’t think so. The click in my brain, the voice of the painting, my god, my north star, told me it would work.

  Still—anything can be destroyed.

  Chapter Six

  T he next morning, I found myself wanting to press something into the slowly curing surface, something organic. Something foreign and delicate. This hadn’t been in original Prudence but it didn’t matter. I was moving on, to something better.

  I wanted tulips, orange ones, maybe. And—I was almost out of food. Time to find town.

  The promises lining Granger’s driveway were painted on the reverse with local attractions. Driving away from the retreat, I was presented first with a cluster of music notes dotting a cloudy painting of Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra; then a jockey perched astride a sprinting thoroughbred at the Saratoga Race Course; next, hikers adjusted their packs atop Jiminy Peak; then apple-cheeked families picking matching fruit from nearby orchards; and finally, renderings of the Colonial buildings at RPI and the Gothic ones at Emma Willard School were accompanied by “Parent’s Weekend—Commencement—Book Early!”

  I drove to Union Vale, the nearest town, where the only market was a Stewart’s gas station. I bought boxes of cereal, a gallon of milk, and some frozen hamburgers, and as the cashier rang me up I asked for directions to the nearest farmers market. Speaking to another person after so many days of complete and total solitude sounded weird and I almost laughed at my own voice, so scratchy and halting.

  “Uh…” She paused. “It’s Sunday, so…it’s the good one. New Lebanon, hon,” she said. “North on 22. And—you got paint on your face.”

  “Oh,” I said, raising my fingers to my cheek.

  “No.” She pointed, looking at me with unvarnished pity. “Your nose.”

  “Thanks,” I told her, peeling off a strip of something whitish. She put out her hand like it was a piece of gum, threw it in the trash, and we both smiled. It was nice; she made me feel like a person.

  I followed the two-lane road north, until a hand-painted sign announcing the market came into view. I parked in a dirt lot and wandered the dozen or so stalls, buying bread and cheese until I found someone selling wet bunches of tulips and freesias.

  And as I was rummaging through the buckets of imported flowers, someone called my name.

  “HIIIII!” the voice yelled, laughing. “OHMYGOD!”

  A leggy woman in a silk minidress with dirt on her knees, a basket full of pro
duce, and a filterless Lucky Strike clasped between her teeth was barking at me from across the parking lot. Huge sunglasses obscured her face, a faded Chicago Bulls baseball cap pinned her brown hair back, and gardening gloves covered her hand tattoos, but I’d have known Max de Lacy from behind a brick wall.

  “You crazy fucking bitch,” Max screamed. “I heard you came up here. But nobody, I mean nobody has seen you. I mean, you’re a ghost. I cannot believe about your loft. That’s so awful.” She hugged me and I responded limply.

  “I’m at Pine City,” I said casually, as though I came up here all the time. “I’ve only been here a week or two.”

  “You’re going to love it,” she said. “It’s magical.”

  “It’s great so far,” I agreed. A lie.

  “Well, I’m glad we ran into each other. I’ve been calling. You don’t answer emails anymore. You’re never online.”

  “I’ve never been online,” I told her.

  “I keep thinking you’re going to change your mind.”

  “Definitely not.”

  “Well. You can’t hide. Not now that I’ve found you.” Max was victorious.

  “I guess so.” I almost smiled. “Where are you staying?” I asked.

  Max’s eyes went wide. “We’re right across the lake?” she said, a question, a reminder, but graciously, which is when I turned beet red.

  “Oh, right,” I said lamely. “I knew that.”

  Everyone knew where Eliot House was—at least, everybody who was anybody. Despite the gaffe, I did know quite a few things about the rust-and-concrete modernist behemoth cut into the hill seven years ago by Max’s new husband, Charles Eliot, and his business partner and former spouse, Helen Sprain. Originally designed to showcase artwork from the vast holdings of their gallery, Eliot&Sprain, in a controlled environment, the “smart house” had been completely integrated with the first fully functional home-assist computer—and the interiors were designed by Carey Logan.