Fake Like Me

by Barbara Bourland

  Moments later, in a pathetic attempt at standing upright, I lost my balance and found out.

  * * *

  I put down my legs and expected to find ground, but instead, I fell into nothingness—it was much deeper than I expected—and then the tube scooted away from me.

  I’ve never been a strong swimmer.

  I tried to get my feet on something solid, but there was nowhere to stand. The tube floated away; there was nothing to grab on to, but I kept trying, jabbing my feet downward, bobbing violently, searching with my toes for sand or rocks.

  When I found one with the edge of my big toe, I put my weight on it. My mouth kissed the surface, with breath that was ragged and damp, but there was air. Toes balanced on the rock, I tried to calm down.

  I shifted my weight.

  Then the rock moved—and I moved with it.

  My foot slipped, the algae greasy under my heel, and the rocks grabbed at my feet, catching my ankle and yanking me downward. I was jerked away from the surface.

  NO, my body screamed. NO.

  I tried to swim up.

  The rocks held me back.

  When my fingers touched air, my head stayed beneath. I reached down to my calf, to shake my leg free, but it didn’t work.

  I screamed. A mouthful of red water went down my throat.

  I kicked and flailed and felt the skin of my ankle rip open, but the rock didn’t budge. The water came quickly, in gulps, filling my throat, burning my nose. My arms pumped up and down, up and down, involuntarily, and I tried to reach the surface, but all I could inhale was more red water. Nothing worked. My head felt a rush of pressure, like it was going to explode. I tried to remember everything I’d ever learned about drowning. I tried to stop swallowing water. My legs and feet began to kick, and kick, and I couldn’t stop them.

  I was a marionette jerking on a string.

  And then, in a moment, a miraculous moment, I put my weight down on the other foot, and the rock moved. My ankle came free. I shot to the surface.

  Air.

  I gagged and gasped and vomited lake water in a stream. A coughing fit came over me; my arms were still pumping, and my legs were kicking, and a voice in the back of my mind told me to float on my back. FLOAT, it yelled. FLOAT. I managed to get my pelvis up, and then I was floating, still coughing, but floating. There was air on my skin, in my mouth, in my lungs.

  I wasn’t dead.

  I didn’t drown.

  It took five minutes before I dared to lift my head—upend my balance—to look for the tube.

  I made my way toward it, carefully, on my back. Adrenaline burned away the alcohol. Though I was trembling, cold inside, fizzy, destabilized, I had control of myself once more. I held on to the tube and kicked—and kicked—and kicked—for shore.

  * * *

  The first thing I did was throw up, heaving liters of bile-scented lake water into the vintage toilet, sunburned knees pressing tenderly into the peeling linoleum of the floor. Then I took a cold shower, staying under the needles of the spray for half an hour, until my skin stopped cooking itself. Afterward I crawled into bed and clung to the scratchy white sheets, shipwrecked until dawn.

  The night was unbearable—rife with fever dreams and nightmares—and every time I heard the sound of the lake on the shoreline, it felt like I was still drowning, like the red water was still pouring from my nose and eyes and mouth.

  I crawled out of bed at dawn, tried to put the near-drowning behind me and seize the day. Now that Prudence was done, there was plenty to do: Call Marlin and let her know that I was ready to move studios. Clean up my materials, box them, put them in the truck. Go out into the world to restock my supplies—set up for the next painting, and the next, and the next.

  Yet—my chores happened on autopilot. All I could think about was the lake. I heard it, the waves and the wind, as I made my coffee, as I got dressed, as I walked to the studio past all the empty buildings. I saw it through the windows beyond my painting every time I raised my eyes. No wonder Jack, and Jes, and Marlin, and Tyler were never here, I realized. The lake was too loud. It would never let them forget.

  Humility

  Chapter Seven

  On Friday morning, a tattooed courier stood in the carport, holding out a creamy white envelope with my name drawn in cursive across the front. I thanked her, still groggy. She nodded, climbed on a motorcycle, and sped away without another word.

  It was an invitation, letter-pressed onto a card stock too thick to bend:

  MAX DE LACY and CHARLES ELIOT

  DEMAND the honor of your presence

  at their annual SUMMER PARTY

  JUNE 10 // 7 PM

  ELIOT HOUSE // UNION VALE, NEW YORK

  dinner // drinks // dancing!!!! BLACK TIE !!!!

  The party was tonight.

  I was a late inclusion—obviously—but it didn’t matter. Max could have thrown an intimate dinner party with her mean friends from college and I still would have gone. That’s how desperate I was to see other people.

  The day was spent cleaning up after the hurricane that Prudence had left in Marlin’s studio, working mechanically with the radio on, trying to sort and clean and scrape and sanitize, until the familiar chimes of All Things Considered came on at four o’clock.

  I poured a drink and started picking the plastic and paint off my arms. My sunburned skin was sore to the touch, but the color, mercifully, had faded from tomato to peach. I did my nails, teased my curls into their fluffy champagne cloud, and put fresh masking tape over the glue bandage on my leg and injured ankle.

  But I had nothing to bring, and nothing to wear. I hopped in my truck and drove the forty-five minutes into Hudson, intending to buy a bottle of wine and a dress. I parked, threw two quarters in the meter, and let myself stroll a few blocks of the sidewalks. At some point I passed a young couple pushing something I recognized from Tribeca: a four-thousand-dollar Silver Cross baby carriage. The dad had neck and face tattoos, wore a collared black cotton sweatshirt and matching drop-crotch sweatpants, and exuded an air of complete detachment; the mom, young enough to be in high school, wore a wispy, thrift-store dress, her arms covered in tattoos and cut scars, and a three-, maybe four-carat diamond ring.

  I walked into a wine store and asked for a summer red. They came back to me with some wonderfully cold bottles in a clear, light-red color, a red Sancerre, they said, and I handed over my credit card.

  I stopped in the vintage shop three doors down and picked out an armful of dresses—things in featherweight silk, the kind of things I never wore because of how impractical they were. As I stepped into a dressing room, the shop’s bell rang, and two young women walked in. They browsed and chatted idly to each other while I stayed behind the curtain, trying on dress after dress until I fit into a long, sparkly purple gown.

  When I had it halfway over my head, one of the women said a word so familiar that I stopped and listened.

  “…Logan, but apparently she was so crazy that she would literally disassociate,” said one of them, in a nasty, gossipy tone, dripping with delight. “My boss said that once she got so drunk they had to pump her stomach. Nobody was surprised when she did it, you know? I mean, look at her work. It was all one long prelude.”

  “Kind of brilliant, if you think about it. She’s like a saint now,” the other girl said. “She owns death.” She sounded jealous, and slightly irritated, like Carey had taken control of an idea that should have rightly been up for grabs. A wave of rage swelled in me. They had no right to say those things about Carey. I wanted to jump out of the changing room and scream at them: You don’t know a thing about Carey Logan. Keep her name out of your thoughtless mouths.

  But I didn’t get the chance. I was still pulling the dress from my naked shoulders when the bell rang again, and they walked out the door.

  * * *

  I drove back toward Pine City with the dress on a hanger, intending to pull over before the party to change so that it didn’t wrinkle too much. I felt a
current of electric fever as I drove: I was an artist, upstate, going to a party at Max and Charlie’s.

  Max and Charlie. My friends Max and Charlie. What a thing to say.

  When I first met Charles Eliot—Charlie to me later—he’d looked exactly like every other insecure hetero middle-aged narcissist I’d ever met, a category of Manhattan man whose tastes are so insistent, so domineering and mediagenic, that we now have cortados in every coffee shop and hand-sharpened Blackwing pencils at every subway newsstand, lavender chewing gum and copies of The Gentlewoman side by side with herbal boner pills and magazines called King and Side Bitch to remind us that the world will sell us anything we want. Charlie was another product to me at first, a glossy paper cutout. Lean, tall, dark hair streaked here and there with gray, trendy eyeglasses, fine trousers and shoes, a black cashmere sweater. A man concerned with appearances.

  “This is my husband!” Max had shrieked at me when we ran into each other unexpectedly at a party, downtown, somewhere in Tribeca. “Can you believe it?”

  I could, because he was rich.

  “Congratulations,” I said to him.

  “We eloped.” Max beamed.

  Charlie stepped forward and held out his hand. A thin gold band circled his left ring finger.

  “Nice to meet you. I’m Charlie,” he said genially, in a genteel, upper-class British accent, and I replied, “We’ve already met.”

  He looked at me without recognition. “I’m so sorry,” he said, shaking his head sincerely. The party raged on around us. A drunk woman barged into him and he guided her back into the hallway. “Nice to see you again.”

  I’d said it on impulse, to see what he would do. Behind him in the doorway Max rolled her eyes.

  “She’s messing with you. You’ve never met because she never ever goes out ever,” Max had said decisively, exhaling and stubbing out a cigarette into the stairwell. (I did go out. All the time. But I was always steps—blocks, even—behind her.) “Don’t be mad—we didn’t have a wedding. We eloped. Nobody even knew we were dating. It’s only been six weeks.”

  “I’m not mad,” I told her. “I hope it was fun.”

  “It was so much fun.” She nodded. “Hold on. Let’s get drinks,” she demanded of him, before giving me a quick hug. “Stay right here,” she insisted.

  I nodded. “Sure thing,” I said.

  “Nice to meet you,” Charlie said. I smiled at him and watched them walk away.

  “Seriously, don’t move!” Max yelled.

  I waited until they were around the corner, and then I walked out the door and didn’t come back.

  I didn’t see Charlie again until my next show, The Distance Between Our Moral Imaginations, where he stood dutifully by Max’s side as she worked the room and I stood paralyzed in the corner.

  “We met in the Atlanta airport when we were kids, can you believe that? But I mean, it was obvious even then. She’s a total genius,” Max squealed, over and over. “She’s the last sincere artist in the whole goddamn world. Look at these things. Don’t they make you want to burst into tears?”

  At some point Charlie brought me a drink, a Campari and soda.

  “You don’t want that,” he said conspiratorially, taking away my glass of cheap white wine. “It’ll give you a headache. Drink this instead.”

  “I want to be drunk,” I confessed. “This is terrifying. All these people.”

  “They don’t see you, you know,” he said. “You’re wallpaper. Whether that makes you feel better or not, I don’t know, but it’s true.”

  It did make me feel better, actually, and we fell into an easy conversation, until Max decided it was time to go, and we all hugged goodbye, and they left. That was two years ago.

  My dented pickup truck grumbled toward their road, turning at a large brass plate engraved with ELIOT HOUSE. Then I saw the cars; there must have been a hundred of them, expensive and shiny, already spilling out of the mile-long drive, and I felt very aware of every nick and dent on the truck as I rolled to a stop on the spongy brakes. I opened the passenger-side door and hid behind it, watching for passing cars and squeezing into my dress when there were none. Then I buckled Cady’s wooden sandals onto my feet, used the side mirror to apply a swipe of purple lipstick, and got back behind the wheel.

  At first glance, Eliot House was a kind of Mies-van-der-Hobbit-Hole, a plain door set into a grassy hillside with nothing else visible. From the sides it’s barely a house—all you can see are rusted steel walls, commissioned from Richard Serra’s studio—but the back is a gaping mouth, three stories of walls that lift like garage doors to open each level to the elements. Eliot House is basically shaped like three squashed donuts, stacked and shoved halfway into a pile of dirt. I’ve also heard it called the Carey House, a tribute to Carey Logan’s interiors, though she died shortly after it was completed.

  A twenty-something girl dressed like a lab tech, in a long white coat and spatter-guard glasses, took my keys and gave me a ticket in exchange. A second offered me a glass from a huge fountain of bourbon made out of a hundred coupe glasses stacked in a pyramid, and then I was past the fourth-floor foyer, walking down to the third floor, facing the covered interior courtyard.

  What looked like a thousand people were milling around inside Eliot House, lining the courtyards that rimmed every floor, spilling in and out of doorways, openly snorting and licking fingerfuls of drugs from the little bowls of powder strategically placed at various intersections. Some of them I knew—familiar faces from the city—but most of them were strangers. It seemed, in those days, that the art world grew bigger with every passing minute.

  Three pianists were positioned on the ground floor, playing the harmonies of a classical concerto. Max stood in the center of everyone wearing a backless gown of unlined organza, the fabric pleated over itself and wrapped tightly around her waist, holding a huge, full-frame Nikon D5 in one hand and a vintage Leica in the other. Her glossy hair was brushed out into big, round curls, like Diana Ross on the cover of Mahogany; her earlobes sagged under the weight of an enormous pair of ruby earrings. She was barefoot. I felt my chest cave in at the sight of her. No matter how many new dresses I bought, Max would always make me feel small and shabby.

  I stood there on the third-floor balcony, with my wildly unnecessary bottle of wine in hand, and counted their money. There were smaller works, the coins of the realm: A Stella by Sturtevant. Francesca Woodman, her own face blurred out. An embroidery by Louise Bourgeois that read SO I THINK I LOVE YOU. Sarah Lucas’s Chicken Knickers. Ana Mendieta covered in blood. Then—huge ones, the big bills: a fecund, fermenting mass of paint from Wangechi Mutu. An architectural mass of scribbles and topography by Julie Mehretu. Resin cylinders from Eva Hesse. A running slide projection of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency by Nan Goldin. Vines, green, real ones, grew from the ground-floor courtyard, flowering clematis and morning glory and other varieties I didn’t recognize, and they trailed their way around the paintings and over railings. I was shocked to see one of my own pieces, 7,067 (Tampons and Ruined Underwear Money), on the second floor facing the courtyard. People hovered in drug-induced rapture in front of it, holding their hands up to the glowing panels of plastic and oil.

  It went on, millions of dollars’ worth of artwork. Eliot&Sprain famously only sold works made by women, though the conditions of the market—buyers rarely paid top dollar for living female artists—meant their most lucrative artists were long dead.

  A group of people wearing fragile, nineteenth-century summer whites entered and paused a few feet away. They gaped at the scene in front of them and turned excitedly to each other.

  “The Carey House,” said one of the women in a singsong voice, pulling and pushing against the balustrade.

  “I can’t believe Max lives here.”

  “She did buy new furniture. Still. There’s not much you can do. I mean, the design is the design is the design. You know—all the hooks and knobs and stuff are fingers.”

  “Isn’t this
where Carey Logan died?” My skin went hot. I held my breath and listened.

  “Yes…she…” The voice went quiet. “Tyler pulled her out.”

  “I bet he did. I bet he took her organs.” Someone laughed meanly. I thought about his black house, and felt sorry for him, suddenly, that nobody else seemed to be able to see his grief.

  “Did you know her?” the singsong woman asked.

  “No. I mean, I knew her work, obviously,” one of the men answered. “It was spooky. All those dead bodies. All that…rot.” I felt anger rise up again. Carey’s work wasn’t “spooky”—it was—it was—I wanted to turn and tell him—those are women’s bodies—we are so afraid—we are so easy to hurt and nobody ever cares—it’s not a joke—but the sound of the party rushed into my hot ears and reminded me that this was not a place I could speak freely.

  “Well,” one of the women said, “lucky for Max, anyway.”

  “Not that she needs it,” added another. I tried not to snort. That I could agree with.

  They ambled down the steps and disappeared. I looked down at my hands, one of which had gripped the railing until the knuckles had lost all color.

  Max was still mid-conversation, so, without anyone to speak to, I unclamped my hand, downed my cocktail, and stared down a large abstract painting to my right. It looked like a Rothko, but somehow…better, a door-size rectangle of blues and tans whose figures seemed to float over each other. The paint was applied so thinly that initially I thought part of it was made from layers of nylon stockings, and it wasn’t until I examined the surface from multiple directions that it was clear how the work had been accomplished: by the talents of an extraordinarily skilled hand. I squinted at the corner, looking for a signature. Private collections rarely had wall text; the display wasn’t for strangers. The point was to talk about it.

  “Arcangelo Ianelli,” a voice said. “Brazilian. He’s dead.”

  It was Tyler, in a frayed and faded navy tuxedo, leaning against the wall, golden skin shining against the concrete, hands in his pockets.