Fake Like Me

by Barbara Bourland

  Tyler watched him walk away. “How long have you known them?” he asked.

  “Her? Twenty years, give or take. We were childhood pen pals. Friends, sort of.”

  “Him?”

  “I’ve only met him a few times,” I said, “but he’s a nuclear flirt.” I wandered into the grass and looked up at the stars. One broke free from the Milky Way and barreled across the sky; I looked around to see if anyone else had seen it, but the crowd around me was busy, talking and laughing, everyone except for a golden-blond woman on the other side of the yard, sitting on the Goldsworthy wall all alone. There was something familiar about her. Like so many other people at the party, she was a stranger who gave me the sense we’d been in the same room before. She caught me staring, pointed at the sky, and waved at me, as if to say, I saw it too. I waved back—a tiny little shake of my hand—pleased to have shared the moment with somebody.

  When I turned around, Jes Winsome had draped her long arm over Tyler’s shoulder, and they whispered urgently to each other. He shifted slightly under her weight, not uncomfortably, and my stomach fell.

  “You’re the summer girl?” Jes asked once we made eye contact, her voice a razor’s edge, a violent dog whistle, signaling ownership. Her fingers rested on the lapel of Tyler’s tuxedo, the skin dyed dark blue up to her knuckles, matching the color of the fabric. Whether it was ink or a tattoo, I couldn’t tell. I suspected that was the point. Tiny charms glittered from within the long ropes of her hair, and gold sparked from the bottom of her mouth. Kohl rimmed her eyes, inky pools of ash and hazel, and she drank me in.

  This woman scared the living shit out of me.

  “I suppose,” I said quietly, automatically submissive, as she intended. When she narrowed her eyes, bored with my two-word reply, I opened my mouth but—as in my dream about the fire—nothing came out. Ketamine, I realized, feeling my heart drift through the aquarium of my body. Uh-oh.

  “This one doesn’t even speak,” she said, rolling her eyes.

  I’m too high.

  Tyler gave me an odd look. “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Excuse me,” I managed to squeak. “I have to find a restroom. I’ll be right back.” I grabbed my sandals from the lawn and started walking toward the house, my cheeks hot, sweat running down my sides, intending to flee. I didn’t think I could drive. Maybe I could catch a ride home from somebody at the door, or even walk if necessary.

  On the second floor, I passed my painting. It was lovely as ever. As my eyes ran over its contours, there were flashes of making it. Though only six, maybe seven years had passed—was that possible?—I felt much older than the twenty-seven-year-old girl who had hauled its magenta acrylic up nine stories. That girl (and she was a girl) kept pot in a little gold box and she loved a musician who left her over and over again. She used to sit on the roof of 11 Dutch and look through binoculars at the buildings rising up over her head and wonder if she was ever going to make it.

  She could never have conceived of standing here, in this dress, in front of this painting, in this house, in this context. I sighed and ran my fingers along the edge. That needed more beeswax, I thought, touching one section with the back of my index finger. Oh, that’s still so right, I remember feeling that rightness, I thought, brushing another.

  “You shouldn’t touch the painting,” someone said behind me. “It’s completely disrespectful.” They didn’t specify to whom—to the artist—or the owners.

  “I know,” I said after a moment, withdrawing my little paw. “I couldn’t help myself.”

  * * *

  The scolding stranger stormed off, revealing an open door to the left of my painting glowing with warmth. I peeked in to find a spectacular library, a double-depth room extending down and lined with shelves, brass rails, and hanging ladders. There were thousands upon thousands of books—on every artist you could think of. Oooh, said my brain. Picture books. But as I was about to step through, a claw closed around my wrist.

  “YOU,” Max yelped, pulling me away from the doorway, dragging me to the third floor. The hard bars of cement felt dangerous beneath my bare feet, but soon they gripped a fine rug, and then we ducked through a doorway done in a pale-blond wood. The transom window was made from a smooth pink slab of semi-opaque rose quartz.

  “Let’s talk,” Max cooed. “Welcome to my lair.”

  It was an extraordinary room. Under an enormous hexagonal skylight through which you could see the night sky, the walls of Max’s office were painted with seventeenth-century florals—peonies and chrysanthemums, their petals shining and lush, giving one the overall impression of having tumbled into a Dutch still-life—and an egg-shaped chandelier hung in the corner, illuminating the room with a tender flush of golden light. The furniture was custom: a ruby-grapefruit velvet daybed, a bleached-cedar desk, two huge armchairs, a brass bookcase, and a small coffee table that was 90 percent ashtray. I perched on the edge of one of the chairs. She lit two cigarettes and offered me one; I took it. I don’t smoke, but with Max, I always smoked and drank and snorted whatever she did. I couldn’t help it. Nobody could.

  “I’m so glad you live here now,” she said, lying dramatically on the sofa. “I would die of loneliness if you didn’t live here.”

  Max could have died of loneliness anywhere, though I didn’t say that.

  “What are you doing, Max?” I asked instead.

  “Oh, well, I rented out the top of the brownstone because we decided to stay here for the whole summer. I kept the garden apartment open but I haven’t been going back at all.”

  “With your time, I mean.”

  “I’m doing a book,” she said excitedly. “I’m editing all of my photos from the last twenty years, starting with high school and writing about what happened in each one. They’re calling it Just Kids meets The Year of Magical Thinking, but, you know, for our generation.”

  “That’s a good idea.” I took a drag of the unfiltered cigarette and picked tobacco out of my teeth.

  “I have a brilliant writer. She does a ton of collabs. Fleur? Madrigal? Anyway, she’s razor-sharp. She’s around here somewhere. You should talk to her.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “The Art of Losing.”

  It took me a minute to realize what she was referring to. “…isn’t hard to master,” I said, recalling the line of an Elizabeth Bishop poem we’d loved as teenage girls.

  “Exactly. Of course you would know that right away. Christ, we are so old. Look at us.” She tapped her cigarette into the ashtray. “I mean, you don’t look a day over twenty-five. But I feel old as dirt. All I do is get lasers pointed at my skin and needles injected into my arms. Thirty-five and they told me they were going to inflate my biceps ‘like a tire’ to get rid of the batwings. Can you believe that? And it worked.”

  Self-consciously I remembered the purple lipstick I’d put on earlier but never reapplied and reached up to wipe it away; I wondered if there was a purple ring around my lips, if I looked stupid and thoughtless.

  “Don’t worry, you’re good,” Max said nicely. “I bet you wiped it all off on Tyler Savage’s face.”

  I snorted. “I absolutely did not. He’s very clearly with Jes Winsome.”

  “Ah. Jes. She’s starting to look like a wizard. But she’s ‘post-studio.’ No competition.”

  We both laughed.

  “He’s up for it, though. Always some new summer girl,” Max said melodically, looking out the window. Jes had used the same phrase—summer girl—and now I understood. “He’s slept with half the women at this party.”

  “Since Carey died?”

  “Since? More like during. They were like that, though. Anyway—he’s a lover, not a fighter. Speaking of—how’s George?” she asked. “Is he still around?”

  “No,” I replied, shaking my head. “He left me, what, a year ago? I retroactively support his decision. I was the worst.”

  “You’re never the worst. You’re the best.”

  “We were th
e worst, then. All we did was drink and have sex.”

  “What else is there to do?” She laughed, but I didn’t think it was funny, because she was married to somebody who had a hell of a lot more to offer than drinking and fooling around.

  “Do you get along with Charlie’s ex?” I asked, suddenly curious. “Helen. It’s impressive they still run the gallery together.”

  “Hen? Oh sure. She doesn’t care about me—she treats me like a child, kind of, but not in a mean way. She’s twenty years older than me. It doesn’t bug me. I must seem very young to her. But…it’s probably easier because they divorced before we got together. When they finished the house. This house killed their marriage, they both say.”

  My skull felt heavy on my twig neck. Ketamine. I stared glassily at the spines of the heavy books that lined the brass shelves beyond her shining mass of hair, on artists whose work was only barely familiar to me. Their names lurked at the fringe of my mind: Bas Jan Ader, Hannah Wilke, Charlotte Posenenske.

  There was a narrow volume on Lee Lozano, a painter I knew only from her Wave paintings—ten solid colors into which she had etched uniform striations in single sessions that ranged from eight hours to three days. The paintings were showstopping in their simplicity, radiating infinite space. I’d read once that there was an eleventh painting but she physically could not finish it and so it remained as a pencil outline, a broken window. She died somewhere tragically, I remembered, but could not recall how.

  Max said something that I didn’t hear.

  “One more time?” I asked.

  “I’m sorry you lost your home,” she said sincerely, for the second time.

  “I’m sorry too,” I said, and then I missed my loft with a homesickness so acute that it seemed my bones might break from the pain of it. I missed the sounds, and the drafts, and the way that every nail revealed a dozen layers of paint, all in terrible colors, and the way you used to always have to stop on the seventh floor for a quick pause to catch your breath before the final two flights; everybody did it, that seventh-inning stretch. Nine flights is a lot, and the freight elevator that worked, it seemed, for one week a year, its cage doors held together with special brass tabs that I’d never seen anywhere else. I missed the pigeons that collected in the eaves each evening, turning the windowsills white and cooing me to sleep, and the hot plate and the minifridge and the plastic bathtub with its mystery stains. I would have given anything, in that moment, to go back in time and live the last six months all over again, to have put my paintings in climate-controlled storage like I was supposed to—to have a home of my own, to curl up anywhere the way that Max curled up in here.

  Exhausted, and possibly on the verge of tears, I stubbed out my cigarette and stood up.

  “I gotta go home, Max,” I told her. “This is wild, though.”

  “No!” she cried, the ketamine melting her face into agony. “Please don’t.”

  “I have to, Max,” I said. “I’m overwhelmed.”

  She hugged me for the second time in the past two weeks and I realized we’d exchanged more words tonight than we had in years. “Make one of the staff drive you, okay?” she said. I nodded.

  I let a freckle-faced teenager drive me home with the windows open, and told him to leave my truck at the end of Max’s driveway, unlocked and with the keys tucked in the visor, then gave him a twenty. After locking the front door behind me, I shimmied out of my dress, poured myself another drink, and curled up in my new bed. Loneliness ran through me like poison, a jet-black stream of unhappiness that threatened to rip me open, to take the bones of my rib cage and break them in half. The room spun. I felt awful. Why did I go to that party? All it did was highlight everything I didn’t and couldn’t and wouldn’t ever have.

  I pulled the covers up over my head and shut my eyes until the world went dark.

  Chapter Eight

  The bright lemon light of the following morning—and the remembered promise of a new studio—blotted out any lingering sadness. I took the long walk back to my truck, taking in the leaves, the dappling light, and every new color of green. The trees shimmied and shook in the breeze, leaves flickering to the ground in bursts and rushes.

  I kept thinking about Tyler’s question as I walked, whether or not I was one of them. The Carey Logan fans.

  I didn’t like that phrase. I wasn’t a fan. I was more like a disciple.

  This is it. This is the end: This is late-stage capitalism. My generation does not get to consider the things that other artists did. The 1950s, ’60s, ’70s—those photos I used to fetishize of Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell in the Village—they’re a cruel joke to me now. I can’t imagine meeting with the Art Workers’ Coalition, like Lucy Lippard and Faith Ringgold did, and having demands—not the meeting, that I can imagine. Rather, it is the having of demands that I cannot fathom. What would we ask for? And—from whom?

  Because—now—nothing exists outside the market. Everything I could ever afford was designed by sub-sub-contracted freelancers, manufactured by modern-day slaves, and shipped through oceans lined with trash by seasonal hourly workers whose schedule is controlled by a computer, whose commute is two hours each way, who are longing for health insurance, who will die in debt. I cannot imagine what it was like to resist before every emotion I had, including resistance, was commodified. What it was like before—before we dug our own graves? Or, maybe more accurately, before someone else dug them and we woke up inside? Imagining resistance feels like a dream I cannot quite remember.

  There’s no avoiding it. We make work and it goes in the machine. If I don’t make the profit on the first sale, then somebody else does the second time it sells, the third and fourth times, and whenever, say, the content aggregator “cultural brand” occupying the glass tower they built over the grave of 11 Dutch sees an art-related traffic spike on the horizon for whatever the upcoming art fair might be. “Eight Women Painters You Should Know,” writes a penny-a-word freelancer working remotely for an anonymous advertising firm employed by the data contractor of the publicist of my gallery. Then it is reposted forever, until the end of time, accompanied by images of my paintings that don’t belong to me because I didn’t press the shutter, racking up money trees across the landscape of capital in which I am simply another thing to look at.

  There are so many ways to exclude me from the profit margins.

  What I loved about Carey’s work was the pure, absolute, hard-edged resistance of it. Death—actual death—genuinely resists being called an artwork. The work of decay resists even being shown. It resists easy, clean, thoughtless profit by relating to our darkest fears. To re-create dead bodies and call them a work of art is to get people to ask what exactly they are paying for when they view an artwork.

  Death doesn’t resist the commodified conversation—it is perhaps the peak of such a conversation—but it nonetheless resists being replicated. A deliberately grotesque dead body is a work of visual art that (most) people will not take photographs of.

  We can’t alter the machine. We can, however, inject sites of confusion, distance, forgetting. Even then—it is futile. It is. But still—I try. I try to make paintings that reach inside people, open the refrigerator door of their chest, take out the eggs, one by one, and throw them on the floor. The shells break, the yolk oozes into the cracks of the hardwood—and they forget, if only momentarily, about the machine they live in. It is true that few people can afford to own my paintings, but there is a sweet and sour satisfaction in the twin facts that those very same people cannot afford to be perceived as selfish, and that they will lend a work to any reputable museum at the drop of a hat. Artworks might be commodities, but unlike stocks, their value is almost completely derived from social impact.

  Carey knew all that. And she did it better. She had really tried. And I wanted to know the whys and hows. I wanted to know everything about her. I’d lied about the degree because it was convenient in the moment; because I didn’t want to make Tyler uncomfortable; because I
wanted him to like me—no, because I needed him to like me. I had my reasons, I told myself. Good ones.

  I wasn’t the only one too spiral-eyed to drive myself home; dozens of cars still littered Max’s driveway. The caterers and a cleaning van passed me; they’d almost certainly be taking dirty plates directly from the arms of passed-out guests.

  My truck was unlocked, keys tucked in the visor, as requested. The road home was empty, the sun was shining, and with the wind whipping through my hair and the hard plastic of the steering wheel under my fingers, it all felt very free. After so long in the prison of Manhattan, where you were never unlocked, where you took your laptop to the café toilet with you, it was a rush to be in a place where nobody wanted the meager things you owned. Sure, it was because they already had something better, but still, it felt nice.

  I returned to find Tyler sitting on my doorstep, knees up, arms crossed, back in his casual black—sneakers, jeans, the inside-out t-shirt.

  “Heya,” he said. “Ready?”

  “I’m excited.”

  “You ran away last night.” He rose up above me.

  I stepped back a bit. “I was…tired, and overserved,” I said—not a complete lie.

  “No. You ran away from Jes,” he said with a smile, stretching, leaning against the house. He was so at home here. “You shouldn’t be afraid of her. She’s extremely interesting, and incredibly kind.”

  “I didn’t want…” I struggled to find the appropriate words. “To embarrass myself. I was saying whatever came into my head.”

  “I liked how you spoke to Charlie,” he said.

  “Well—it doesn’t matter what someone like me says,” I explained. “To him, I mean. I’m a little bug.”

  “Some bug.” He laughed. “Do you need anything from inside?”

  I shook my head. “I’m desperate to see the studio,” I said. “Which building is it?”

  “It’s next door,” he said, hopping up, walking down the driveway.

  “You mean at Max’s?”