Fake Like Me

by Barbara Bourland

“No. Between here and there. Want to walk? There’s a walking route and a driving route. This way you can see both. Then we can come back and grab your stuff.”

  “Sure. I’m still starry from yesterday, anyway.”

  We crossed the resort, past the other bungalows, the Mission, and the lobby, and then we walked along the eastern edge of the forest and turned down a pathway so strangled by ivy and plant life that I wouldn’t have dared set foot upon it without someone else leading the way. What had once been a proper road was now reduced to barely a footpath. Tyler marched down it confidently, scrambling easily over the fallen trees and hungry, grasping shrubs, and I did my best to keep up.

  As we hiked, the lake making the occasional shush sound through the thickets of trees on our left, he launched into a history of the property like he’d done it a thousand times before, which, naturally, he had. Granger’s Summer Resort, built in 1930, promised secluded lakeside hospitality equidistant between the Adirondack and Berkshire Mountains. As Susan had mentioned, it was once openly restricted, serving only white, married, heterosexual Christian couples. The Granger family allowed divorced couples and people of color after anti-discrimination laws were passed in 1961, but until they closed in 1975, they’d never, they proudly told their bank in a loan document, hosted a single homosexual.

  “I think they probably hosted thousands of queer couples. In those days, you partnered up, got two adjoining rooms. It’s fitting that we took it over,” Tyler mused, holding a branch up so I could pass under. “Constance, the last surviving Granger, an eighty-five-year-old pain-in-the-ass, sent me a clipping that described the big bed we used to sleep in and begged me to burn the property down instead. Jes wrote back and told her we were renaming it Queers, like Cheers.”

  “No wonder they went out of business.”

  “No kidding.”

  I stumbled over a rock. He held his hand out like I might fall. I shook my head. “I’m okay,” I said. “Keep talking.”

  Granger’s closed in 1975, and the property sat empty until Pine City purchased it at auction over twenty years later. Waving his hands enthusiastically, beaming with the thrill of the memory, Tyler said they’d taken it on because of the youthful conviction that your own space gave you self-sufficiency and ownership but were initially unprepared for the volume of work required to make the place habitable. It took years for them to fix up the cabins and their studio spaces. But you didn’t quit, I pointed out. No. We were stupid, and naive, and incredibly stubborn. Influxes of money, he said matter-of-factly, disappeared instantaneously, dissolving tens of thousands at a time into the workaday banalities of roof shingles and updated sewage pipes and the money pit of studio equipment and materials.

  I inquired about the studios. He told me that Jack’s, the former Arts and Crafts pavilion, was half textile factory, half woodshop. Jes filled the Theatre with computers, projectors, slides, film stills, and a darkroom, though she rarely used a studio anymore. Marlin’s was the print shop, and he, in Sports, the former gymnasium, had installed a bronze foundry and a forge.

  “Can I have a tour?” I asked.

  “That we don’t do,” Tyler said, shaking his head, one hand running through the gray of his hair. “We rarely go in each other’s spaces. We’re together so much that we try to delineate our actual selves.” His other hand fluttered with nerves, his index finger pushing back the cuticle of his thumb.

  But they loved having guests, he said, or they used to, and most of the bungalows were set up as live/work spaces—the living rooms had the ceilings pulled out to reveal the rafters, so there was a fifteen-foot-high space in each one. Many of the bungalows had been renovated with the help of friends and guests, and in general, anyone who’d done the bulk of the work on a bungalow laid claim to the space in a long-term way. Tyler thought it was important for everyone who came through to see the creation of their work as something that was only in tandem with the reconstruction and resurrection of this aging, creaking, overgrown bygone paradise. He thought that it produced work that could only be specific to this place.

  I asked if they were cataloging everything that came out of here, if all of this was a long-term real estate game—buy the property where x, y, and z were made! He shook his head. It’s not a game, he told me. This is our life. We built our own universe. I asked if they’d ever worked on anything collectively, even though I knew the answer—they were, after all, the only collective in the world that had never once created a work of art together, only worked side by side—and he said, after a minute, no. Pine City was a way to stay together, to feel like they had a family. That they were a family.

  * * *

  We popped out of the woods and came to a hill above the black lake. A narrow dock, sturdy and new, jutted from across the other side of the water, but I was certain it didn’t come from Pine City; no, this was an aspect of the enormous lake I hadn’t yet seen, a finger-shaped outlet that must have peeled away from the larger palm.

  The hill sloped down to a grassy beach, where a rickety cedar dock stretched a dozen yards toward the newer dock on the other side. We bounded down a set of dirt stairs, risers made from chunks of four-by-four, and stepped carefully onto the planks. I was afraid that it would collapse under our weight. Tyler shook his head at my reticence.

  “It’s okay,” he said. I nodded, but stayed behind him anyway. When we were halfway out, looking across the silent black lake, a cluster of storm clouds rolled in, bloated purple and gray specters, pregnant with rain.

  The sky changed in an instant—from a bright, daffy blue to a sinister yellow-green, that sickly sweet color, like the edge of a bruise, that comes before a summer storm.

  “I’m not looking to work en plein air,” I said as a chilled gust of wind bit my bare skin.

  “There’s a barn through the woods. I’m showing you the rest of the lake. Pine City is over there,” he said, pointing west. “That’s Max’s dock. Through that path is her yard, where the fire was last night.”

  “What’s a Dardanelle?” I asked him, remembering the map.

  “It’s a Turkish strait,” he said. “Marlin drew the map. It’s some mythical thing.” Then he was turning around, leaving the dock, squeezing past me without touching me. We returned to the woods, down another bedraggled path, thorns and weeds bending beneath our steps. Cobwebs dripped from the trees above us, their soft nets catching against my skin.

  As promised, a barn appeared.

  It was 60 feet across, 120 feet deep, and sturdy—the opposite of the moldering shack he’d given me on the first day—with a double-height loft and reinforced steel doors. I could barely believe it. It was more than a barn—it was a warehouse; it was a gift.

  A paved road led away from it to the east.

  “That driveway hits the main road just past Granger Walk, the Pine City driveway,” Tyler explained. “We took the scenic route, so you could get your bearings,” he continued, pulling a key off his ring and fussing with the padlock as the first raindrops fell. I helped him wrench the doors open. Lightning struck behind us as Tyler disappeared inside the barn, into the darkness. I was left alone as the rain came down, hard, the drops ricocheting off the ground and bouncing back up over my ankles. Moments later, the fluorescent beams hanging from the rafters lit up in rows, illuminating the interior all the way to the back, where an extra-wide staircase led to the hayloft.

  It was a beautiful, completely professional studio. The concrete floors were level; the windows brand-new; the sinks stainless steel. A gorgeous cast-iron woodstove was installed in the center of the room. There were kilns, too—three electric, and one gas, the size of a walk-in closet. Huge sections of the roof were tiled in sheets of clear corrugated plastic to let in the light, and the side walls were bisected by a high stripe of windows. A small kitchen was partitioned in the back.

  The rain started pelting the roof, the drops hitting hard. Tyler waited for my reaction. I couldn’t help but stare back at him—at the golden skin running under the ho
les of his thin black shirt, at the curve of his collarbone and the long lines of his neck, at the raised burn marks on his forearms that I wanted to reach out and touch one by one. He waved at the studio and raised his eyebrows expectantly. I was supposed to speak.

  “Why is this here?” I asked, incredulous. “This is—this is a dream.” I wandered around the room, dragging my fingers over the empty shelves and racks that lined the walls, around the filigreed surface of the woodstove and the circle of its shiny steel chimney. Lightning flashed above the clear plastic roof, exposing the space like a photograph.

  “Do you like it?” he called.

  “I love it,” I said quietly, and it was easy to see exactly how to be here—to see myself working, to see my future. There was even a pegboard of paintbrushes—though, mostly narrow and ultra-fine, they were, to me, more decorative than useful.

  “This was Carey’s studio,” he said slowly. “But it didn’t get a lot of use, not after…” He trailed off, his face changing, going slack, then certain. “We want you to use it, for as long as you want.”

  “Why did she stop using this space?” I couldn’t believe it. She’d made it so far that she, as Tyler said, built her own universe.

  If I ever reached this level of success, I’d never stop—never.

  His spine rose up, feet planted squarely on the ground, eyes boring into mine. “Does it matter? There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s a great space. It’s pristine.” Tyler didn’t want me to ask about Carey; he simply wanted me to accept.

  “Thank you.” I continued walking around the room, feeling the space, looking at everything from the drains in the floor to the size of the sinks. The paintbrushes, which had sable tips, were shaped for the fine detail work required of her practice. CML was scratched into the thumb pads of their flattened wood handles.

  As I wandered, Tyler stood against the wall, looking at the floor. He didn’t notice me watching him. I saw him look at the cracks in the concrete and trace one with his foot, like it was his, like he owned it; I saw him touch the wall with his hand, run his fingers over the light switches, like he was trying to memorize them. His eyes trailed around the room, memory after memory clouding his face, and I wondered how often he’d been in here since she died. I couldn’t imagine giving up my partner’s studio—erasing them from the world so completely—but I tried to remember that it was already mostly empty, and Carey herself had emptied it. Carey wasn’t on the map anymore. There were no photos of her anywhere. All of her things were gone. Pine City had already taken her away, for their own reasons, on their own timeline.

  “Are you…” I ventured, and he snapped back to me, to our existence. “Are you, um, okay with it?”

  “Sure.” He sighed, nodding. “It’s time.” For a fleeting moment he looked so sad that I could hardly bear it, and then it passed, and he was his handsome, sunny self again.

  “Why me?” I asked—a simple enough question.

  “I told you. Tomato Tomato meant something to me,” he said.

  I looked at him with suspicion and he laughed. “Honestly,” he said. “Fill this”—he spread out his arms—“full of that.”

  The piece that he kept mentioning, Tomato Tomato, was from my last show, The Distance Between Our Moral Imaginations. Each painting in that series was named with a word that conjured the differences between Americans and our long-lost colonial overlords, half named from the song “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off”: Potato Potato, Either Either, Neither Neither, Produce Produce, Privacy Privacy, Leisure Leisure, Patriot Patriot. Tomato Tomato truly is a painting that everybody falls in love with. There is some quality of love that reaches out of it—love that is so big, and so real, you cannot remember what life was like before you felt it.

  “And—because I know you’ll appreciate it,” he said.

  He was right.

  * * *

  I was so engrossed that I didn’t hear them pulling in through the rainstorm. Marlin in paint-spattered white jeans and a t-shirt; Jes in navy coveralls. Each carried a cardboard box.

  “Whaddya think?” Marlin called out. They walked straight to a metal bookcase, halfway back, covered in tools and ephemera.

  “It’s an airplane hangar,” I called back. “It’s a miracle.”

  “Get your shit out of my studio, then!” she yelled.

  “Right now?”

  “No time like the present,” Jes said, picking things off the bookshelf, boxing them up. “We came to move the rest of the Carey stuff.”

  “Oh my God, you don’t need to move that,” I said. “It’s totally fine—please don’t.”

  “We’re not moving it for you,” Tyler said, but nicely.

  Marlin tossed him her keys.

  “Let’s go!”

  He drove us back to Pine City in her brand-new Ford F-250, a black behemoth with a gleaming topper over the bed. I stole glances at him from the passenger seat.

  When we got to the print studio, he had me open both doors so that he could back in and out of the rain, and by the time we got ourselves inside we were both soaking wet and depositing huge, muddy tracks across Marlin’s studio floor.

  “Whoops,” I said, looking down.

  “She won’t care. She wants her studio back,” he assured me, putting his hand on my arm. Startled by his touch, I tried not to blush. He let go, grabbed a box, and slid it down the truck bed. “We’ll mop up later.”

  He started unlocking doors, revealing a staircase to the upper floors of the building. We draped Prudence in plastic and carefully moved her panels to the lobby, where she could lie flat for another month, undisturbed, then packed my boxes and materials into the truck’s covered bed. We tracked more mud, this time all over the interior floor mats (“now we’re really in trouble,” he said, and laughed), and roared down the driveway again, zipping south to Granger Walk and then back up Carey’s studio drive, a route now familiar on the second going, this time driving the truck directly into the barn itself, leaving huge tire tracks over the once-perfectly-spotless cement floor.

  When we pulled in, Marlin and Jes were both leaning against the wall, seltzers in hand, and they helped unload without blinking. The three of them moved in concert, with a routine automation.

  Minutes later, everything was unloaded and stacked against the wall.

  “Where’s the rest of your stuff, dude?” Marlin asked, running her hands through her waist-length hair.

  “It burned down.”

  “Of course,” she said, shaking her head, wrapping her hair into a knot. “Right. Sorry about that.”

  “It’s okay?” I asked.

  The three of them looked at each other.

  “It’s been empty since—for years,” Marlin said. “We’ve been—well—miserly about it. It’s dumb.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously,” she said. “Welcome to Pine City.”

  Marlin tossed me a seltzer, and we touched the cans together.

  “Where’s Jack?” I asked.

  “Home,” the three of them said at once.

  “He’ll be back next week. Jack has kids,” Tyler explained. “He doesn’t sleep over anymore. It’s only an hour back to his place.”

  “He has kids?” I was shocked. My long-standing impression of Jack Wells had been—well—Peter Pan, or maybe Robinson Crusoe: He lived on a boat. He spearfished the Hudson River. He carved wood and wove fabrics on looms and only did an exhibition once every five years or so. He was the absolute last person in Pine City whom I expected to be an adult.

  “Oh yeah. Jack figured life out. He’ll tell you about it, if you ask,” Marlin said. She lifted a box, seltzer still in one hand, and then wrinkled her nose at her own armpit. “Ugh. I smell like a dumpster.”

  “Take a bath, Fish,” Tyler said. He leaned over, tilting slowly, and then—before she could stop him—batted Marlin’s seltzer to the ground in one swift movement. The can hit the concrete and bubbled over with foam.

  She laughed right away.


  “You’re both idiots,” Jes said flatly. I watched the seltzer travel in a rivulet across the floor, toward the drain.

  “Let’s swim,” Tyler said suddenly, grabbing the boxes from their hands and putting them on the ground. “Come on. I’ll race you.”

  He pulled off his sneakers and jogged into the rain. Marlin rolled her eyes but chased him anyway.

  Jes turned her head slowly and looked right at me. Even in “regular” clothes—today she wore a runner’s crop top and neon leggings with mesh panels on the sides—the ink on her fingers and the gold in her teeth made her look like a traveler from another dimension. Her eyes were cold and her nostrils flared with distaste. I stiffened beneath her gaze and dropped my eyes to the ground.

  “He doesn’t usually let his girls have studios,” she said. “What’s so special about you?”

  “I’m not his—his…girl,” I stuttered. “We only just met.” I was still avoiding her eye.

  “What are you even going to do with this much space?”

  “My painting is big,” I said lamely.

  “Hey,” she said, snapping her fingers.

  I looked up right away. She’d moved closer to me, and I could smell cedarwood and sweat, could see the malice glinting in her pupils.

  Then: “Boo,” she cracked, inclining her chin toward me.

  I flinched.

  She rolled her eyes and jogged outside.

  * * *

  After a few minutes of pretending to use the studio bathroom, I followed. The drops came down, soaking my clothes, cold beads on hot skin, under the olive sky of the afternoon storm.

  Tyler had jumped in, and Marlin and Jes followed, diving fearlessly into the lake. I walked out to the end of the dock and paused, tasting red water in my throat, panic on my tongue.

  “Come on!” Tyler yelled as Marlin shoved him underwater. Their bodies disappeared completely under the opaque tint of the surface.

  You’re not alone, I reminded myself. Nothing bad is going to happen.

  I didn’t jump, though. I couldn’t bear it. Instead I scooted on my butt to the edge of the dock and dropped in gingerly, letting the water—it wasn’t nearly as cold over here—rise up and over my shorts as I gripped the metal frame of the dock. I was pleased to discover it was shallow, only four, maybe five feet deep. I pushed my feet into the sand and stood still, holding my bearings. Don’t be afraid of the lake, I told myself. You have to look at it every day.