Fake Like Me

by Barbara Bourland

  I’d never been invited there, either. The moment hung awkwardly between us—this special world, this famous country house she lived in, the hospitality that she had extended to everyone but me.

  I looked at the limp bundle of tulips in my hand, which seemed so important earlier, and thought about the glassy corner of Prudence where I had longed to press their petals. Now it seemed suddenly pointless, almost dumb. Max had blown the urge right out the window of my mind.

  I had to get away from her.

  “I’m working. I have to get back,” I said.

  She handed me her phone, and I typed in the number from the landline in my bungalow kitchen. Max wrapped her arms around me and hugged me again.

  “I’ve missed you,” she said. “I’m so glad you’re finally here.”

  Her shiny hair smelled like the same shampoo she’d been using since we were teenagers, an expensive scent that had always made me feel self-conscious, and all I could do was look down, my face red and my ears burning. I got in my truck and drove off, trying to concentrate as I navigated the asphalt highway at seventy miles an hour. Though I rushed to Marlin’s studio, tulips clutched in my hand, when I stood over Prudence their significance was gone. Whatever had propelled me to need them had disappeared. I wanted to throw the tulips on the ground.

  Instead, I filled a jar with water, clipped the stems, and arranged the flowers on an empty table. They looked better there, I realized, and suddenly all I could see of my borrowed studio was what Max would see: the way the paint spattered on the floor, the meticulously spaced cups along the wide tables, the racks of hanging squeegees, and the poetic smears of printer’s ink lurking on each door and frame. All I could see was a photo shoot, a glossy cover of my life, only the style and none of the substance. #studiolife. It made me crazy. It stopped me from seeing or feeling any of the things I needed to see or feel in order to make the work, because even at thirty-four, being around Max made me childishly desperate to be like her. A vein popped in my forehead.

  As I looked at Prudence with new eyes—Max’s eyes—I realized that she was complete: There was nothing left to do. A swirl of disappointment passed through me. I wanted to come to this realization on my own, not with Max’s eyes in my head.

  I looked around the studio. On to the next one—or ones. I needed to find the nearest hardware store as soon as possible, get more materials, to move to the next painting, but suddenly the stress of what lay ahead—eighty days of nonstop work—and what happened—my life falling apart, Max so safe with her husband and the home he gave her—hit me, and I told myself it was time for a break, that I’d earned it, that I needed to take a breath.

  Five minutes later, clad in a tattered red bikini and sunglasses that were 60 percent duct tape, I pushed a rubber inner tube from someone else’s porch into the water, the waves crashing gently over the round, matte-black surface.

  One hand held the tube. The other, a bottle of bourbon from the Mission bar.

  * * *

  If I’d ever been up here before, I would have known why Carey Logan had been hired, over all the famous artists that Eliot&Sprain represented, to design the interior of Charles Eliot’s famous retreat: because Pine City was located across the water. She was talented—naturally—but she also knew the land. Eliot House wasn’t visible from Pine City, but I was now certain that Charles and Max owned the other half of the shoreline.

  I hoisted my butt into the middle of the tube and paddled with my free hand, spinning like a leaf, then committed to the undignified labor of emptying the bottle. I drank, lay back on the tube, and the lake shuttled me around its vast surface area as I tried to catch glimpses of what was now Max’s house.

  She’d been living up here for three years, I realized. We hadn’t seen each other since my last opening. Max was someone who made me so viciously insecure that I went out of my way to avoid her—an impulsive, competitive reflex that I’d had since we were teenagers—even though I genuinely liked her. And of course, she could have provided an introduction to Pine City at any point, but she was the last person on earth that I would ever, ever ask for help.

  Our friendship was an accident. When I was eleven years old, my parents sent me to see my grandmother on the cheapest flight available, one that had a five-hour layover in Atlanta. The airline was supposed to keep track of me. Not to worry, the travel agent told my mother. There was an entire lounge for unaccompanied minors with Super Nintendo and free gummy bears.

  I’d been sitting in that lounge by myself for an hour when a stewardess walked in with the tidiest-looking kid I’d ever seen. She wore a crisp, starchy white collared shirt tucked into blue jeans, polished penny loafers, and a dark plaid blazer. Her glossy hair was pulled into a neat ponytail, and she spoke to the airline employees with precision and poise. By contrast I had jelly stains on my childish purple t-shirt, a large scab on my knee, visible knots in my hair, and no manners whatsoever.

  “How do you do,” she said to me politely. The stewardess smiled at us both and left.

  “What’s up, motherfucker!” she yelled as soon as we were alone. I laughed in shock at the worst word I had ever heard. “I’m Maxwell,” she said. “My friends call me Max.”

  “Hi.” We shook hands like adults. “Wanna play Mario Kart?” I asked.

  “What’s that?”

  She’d never played before. I handed her a controller and explained. We spent the next four hours playing a dozen rounds of Super Mario Kart. We ate three bowls of gummy bears, sneaked out of the lounge, took the monorail to a different concourse, and stole copies of Filly and Sassy from a newsstand.

  Max was flying from her dad’s place in Los Angeles to summer camp in Maine, some ultra-preppy eight-week finishing school, with a gaggle of other rich girls to sail and play bridge. We exchanged our summer addresses and promised to write—a promise that we kept for years and years.

  It felt special to have a pen pal, especially one as exciting as Max. Nobody else in my grade had one as good. Max lived in both a real New York brownstone and a real Beverly Hills mansion, and she sent photos giving me the peace sign in cool clothes from her vacations on sailboats on turquoise oceans, from limestone ruins in Rome, from a bridge in Paris. She sent dirty pictures that she stole from I’ll never know where and soap opera gossip about her prep school that I cherished. The stuff I sent back—Polaroids of my pet snake, Randolph, “posing” in different locations in our local mall with horrified people in the background—was less glamorous, but she always said she looked forward to them most out of everything.

  “You’re the weirdest person in the whole world!” she always told me, and I believed that it was a compliment: She was so tidy and well groomed and good at tricking adults, and cosmopolitan, and I thought she knew everything there was to know about the world. She was my number one confidante and I assumed I was hers, and we made many plans for places we would live and businesses we would run and things we would do, together, when we were grown-ups. We carved out a whole world of mutual dreams.

  Yet Max’s dreams were steps from her brownstone, something I did not fully understand until we were older. Her babysitters became boldface names in the Village Voice; her mother was a fixture in Sunday Styles. Her father’s family owned a whole town in Connecticut. He lived in Los Angeles half the year, producing movies. We spoke only once, on the phone, when I was fourteen. Her mother asked me questions with such disdain that I knew I would never be invited. Max came from privilege so elaborate it seems almost like an accident, but, of course, it is not.

  High school changed everything. In tenth grade she was cast in a supporting role in a downtown movie about graffiti culture, her pubescent body on display like Brooke Shields in Pretty Baby. She won an Independent Spirit Award. Then Max and her friends started appearing in magazines, like her exquisite mother: Her clique had a whole spread in Sassy. She began traveling to places that were so exotic I had never heard of them, places like the Maldives, Moorea, Soufrière, even Rangoon, which was
a word I knew from the menu at the Chinese restaurant in the strip mall, but not a place I could find on a map. She picked up a camera. Two of her pictures ran in Filly, and all my friends could see the credit, right there, when it came in the mail: Photo credit: Max de Lacy.

  She made being an artist look so possible—so attainable, the result of mere choice, of waking up and saying I think I’ll be an artist, that seems right, though at the time I still didn’t understand the gulf between my life in Gainesville and hers in Manhattan—that I scrapped my plans to go to the state university and focused on making a portfolio. Miraculously, I got a scholarship to the Academy, while Max got into an elite university, early decision. She wanted to be “well rounded,” she said, didn’t want to pick a medium, majored in poetry, minored in French, apprenticed with photographers like Ellen von Unwerth and Annie Leibovitz during the summers, and took up with a crowd of people like her, ones with Dutch last names and very expensive opinions.

  I studied painting and only painting.

  During that time we were only a few hours apart. My freshman year, her sophomore, I took the bus down to see her for the weekend. Max had a whole gang of people under her thumb, people who resented my closeness to her, and when she wasn’t speaking directly to me, then I might as well not have existed. Everybody thought my major was stupid. “Isn’t painting dead, though?” they asked, unable to hide their pity. “I mean, who cares?”

  I wish I had replied that we don’t all get to take counter jobs at galleries for minimum wage while still being expected to have a half-million-dollar education, a pert ass, a clothing allowance, a travel stipend, and multiple passports so we don’t have to deal with pesky international labor laws. We don’t all get to be dilettante jokesters who decide that our work doesn’t need to make money, that institutions are the enemy of truth, and then wake up someday and miraculously discover that we have become the people in charge, but I didn’t know that yet. I said nothing at all.

  On my last night, Max abandoned me to hang out with people from a special club she wanted to get into, and I found myself sitting against the net on the tennis courts, smoking a joint in the dark with a group of her friends. I got stoned fast and told them that I thought time itself was a smokescreen, a construction designed solely to prevent us from discovering that the moment we were in was both the past and the future.

  The handsomest of the group said dismissively, “You think about a lot of stupid shit.” The others laughed.

  I went back to Max’s dorm, took a long hot shower, burrowed into my sleeping bag, and cried. In the morning, she came in as I was leaving, gave me a careless one-armed hug, and absentmindedly told me to stay in touch.

  I didn’t visit again. Our letters transformed into emails, which became infrequent and then simply annual obligations. After art school I moved straight to the city—first to that sublet in Brooklyn and then my loft on Dutch. Max was already living in a brownstone off the Bowery with her boyfriend, Petey Delano, the aggressively bearded, amateurly tattooed downtown artist whose Polaroids of her naked body wound up at the Guggenheim after he shot himself in the bathtub.

  She got the brownstone.

  One night, when I was twenty-three, in the days leading up to Ohne Titel, I saw one of Marlin’s wheatpasted posters. FAMILY VALUES, it said. JES WINSOME. HIGH LINE. FRIDAY AT 8.

  Cady and Atticus were out of town, so I called Max to see if she wanted to go.

  “LOVE to,” she said, with complete enthusiasm. “Absolutely. I keep hearing about Pine City. I want to see them up close.”

  We met at 34th Street, climbing over the chain-link fence and crawling through the holes in the wooden blockades all the way down the then-abandoned freight railway to the very end, where it abutted the meatpacking plant on Gansevoort Street. Over a hundred people were already there, a scrum of ripped denim and eyeliner, buzzing and crawling over the piles of trestles and pockets of wildflowers that burst through the gravel.

  Jes had hauled full Marshall stacks, a projector, a twenty-foot screen, and six VCRs up there. Her film combined clips of Phyllis Schlafly protesting the ERA; Pat Nixon, rigidly sprayed into a pantsuit atop a garden chair in Arizona to discuss her shopping habits; Nancy Reagan on 60 Minutes, wounded by “scathing” criticism of her White House redecoration; Tipper Gore in front of Congress, gravely laying the blame for 1985’s teen suicide rates at the hands of popular musicians. Their comments were stacked and clipped and looped until there was nothing left but the fragments of their voices, edited to say, “We betrayed you. We will do it again and again.”

  All the while Jes sang the lyrics to “Walking on Broken Glass,” looping it louder and louder, over herself, over and over again and again, until cops materialized in the street below us, lights flashing, torches beaming. We were forced to disperse. Max and I ran, giggling hysterically, shrieking ravenously, the entire way. On 22nd Street, we spied an unlocked roof door, held ajar with a cinder block. We jumped five feet from the side of the High Line, skinning our knees as we landed, tumbling down the stairwell and bursting past the surprised doorman. We didn’t stop running until we got to the Half King on the next block.

  I ordered us two beers at the bar while Max looked for a table where she could smoke. When I came back outside, she was leaning against the back window of someone’s glossy chauffeured Tahoe and giggling.

  “Hey, sweetie, I’m grabbing a ride uptown,” she said, running into the patio area. “Kim and Thurston are having a last-minute thing for Patti,” she whispered. “You know how famous people can be. I’ll call if it’s chill. Anyway—this was a blast.” She kissed my cheek and bolted.

  I drank both beers at the bar, then went home and watched my phone as it didn’t ring.

  After that I never asked Max to join me for anything ever again.

  For the next decade we lived less than a mile apart but didn’t hang out much: She was busy with the drama of her life, acting, photography, socializing with actors and photographers, and I was busy with both my work and the surprisingly complicated process of becoming a person who didn’t think someone like Max had all the answers. We ran into each other occasionally, at parties both downtown and uptown, and she always pretended to be happy to see me, and I pretended back. She got herself invited to Pine City and went three summers in a row—a fact that made me so insanely jealous I swore never to acknowledge it to her face. She made an entire, thriving career out of the art of being herself, a self that, though it was given to her, though it was deposited via umbilical cord, is still its own medium, its own challenge. It’s no small thing to be a lifestyle artist. It is a complex and difficult con.

  When Accounting for Taste, my show at Parker Projects, became a reality, she acted like she was thrilled for me, and brought her friends to the opening, all those other people-cum-brands, and they took photos and oohed and aahed, and I felt embarrassed for myself that I’d become another piece of content for them to curate, and I was ashamed, too, that I couldn’t get that kind of crowd on my own—they were here for her. I always felt like I was in competition with Max, even though there was no competition, none at all, because she would always win. But she made the gallery happy, and the paintings sold, so it didn’t matter how I felt. Max tried to see me more after that—once I became somebody. She wanted me to appear on her wall—to be part of the photo stream of her existence.

  But I wanted nothing more than to go back in time, to when we were young and I was nobody, and have her still want to be my friend, and there was no way to do that, so the gulf between us did not narrow. Still: She brought another crowd to The Distance Between Our Moral Imaginations, my second show at Parker, even though I didn’t ask that time, and the crowd oohed and aahed again, and the work sold, and I got to switch to Milot and to make more paintings. Two years went by. Then my loft burned down, I drove upstate, and I ran into her on the day that I finished the first painting in my second, fraudulent set of Rich Ugly Old Maids.

  * * *

  On that da
y, floating half drunk on the black lake above Pine City, I drank myself stupid, mourning the loss of my loft and my New York life, a loss thrown into relief by Max’s appearance in the farmers market parking lot. I hadn’t cried yet, but I was working my way up to it.

  I was, in fact, wallowing, which is very close to crying. I wallowed hard, in all the self-pity I could muster, on an empty lake with a soon-to-be-empty bottle.

  I wanted so badly to get in the truck and drive home, but since I didn’t have a home, I settled for riding the currents. I lurked on the shoreline that I assumed belonged to Max, but the house wasn’t visible; a sharp hill banked ahead, hiding their world from Pine City. Nothing as pedestrian as lakefront living for Max and Charlie.

  The hill was round enough to be human-made and so steep it was nearly a cliff. A group of people appeared atop it, pointing left and right and all around, cameras in their hands. They wore the wide-strap linen fascist-minimalist garb of gallery flacks. Two black-suited arms waved behind them.

  “Hey!” I slurred. “Yoo-hoo!”

  Nobody heard me. I was too far below, the angle wrong, and then the arms were pointing and leading them away, down the hill, to the east, and they disappeared. I pressed a fingerprint onto my red-hot thigh and it came up goose-white. A bad sign. I wanted to talk to them, ask why nobody seemed to ever sleep at Pine City, and I wanted to see Max’s house, and I wanted to get out of the sun.

  My tube was rapidly approaching the shoals of the hill, covered in a dense carpet of poison ivy and stinging nettles. Paddling away from the shore was a no-go, as my motor skills were functioning in inverse proportion to the amount of bourbon I’d so diligently consumed. Lying there, weak, sunburned, and drunk, I wondered idly what it would feel like to drown, if it would feel bad—if it would hurt—or if the cold would knock out all your senses.