Fake Like Me

by Barbara Bourland

  Carey wasn’t a painter, not exactly, though obviously it requires a very specific hand to realize glazes and paints and so on into sculpture. The most affecting parts of her sculptures were not the colors—they were necessary and very accurate and terrifying, but no—rather, it was the form, the way she took the mold of a living person’s body and, later, imaginatively inflated the cast version to match the various degrees of decay. Skin puffed up or went hard or fell away, and that was the art. The paint was—it was a necessary afterthought. It was specific and accurate but not haunting. The shape was what mattered.

  One single dagger hung on the wall of brushes. Carey’s draggy calf line from five years ago could have been made by this, I thought, though it was hard to know. Brushes, made so patiently, so lovingly, were so easy to destroy. Leave them out too long and they sour.

  Hers was in fine shape, if a little packed around the ferrule, the metal cylinder that held the squirrel-hair brushes in place, with remnants of old paint. I picked it up, gave it a solid wipeout with turp, then mixed a true neon yellow and painted the word YOKEFELLOWS over and over across the panels of Obedience, where they could hide beneath the coming layers of blacks.

  It’s such an odd word, I thought, pushing and dragging and swooping the letters as artfully as I could. I laid the word down again and again, in twins and in stacks and loops and towers.

  The only yokefellows I could think of were oxen. Who else would share a yoke? When did people write about oxen? The Bible? The Middle Ages? Shakespeare?

  I made a mental note to ask Charlie what it had meant.

  * * *

  There’s a video of Stevie Nicks getting her makeup done and singing her guts out on an early version of “Wild Heart.” Cady used to play it on her computer. “I watch this every day and so do a third of American women,” she told me. In the video, Stevie is sitting on a metal radiator in Annie Leibovitz’s studio, so young, and so blond, eyes like dinner plates. You can’t believe that she is ever going to be unhappy, or that she’s already spent a million dollars on cocaine, or that her heart has ever been broken. She is a miracle in action. And you don’t know why anyone would ever try to stop her.

  I began to walk to and from the studio instead of driving, taking the weedy path along the lake before and after those long hours with a squeegee in one hand and a knife in the other. One night, when the air was cool and light, the double doors to the Theatre—Jes’s studio—were thrown wide open. The unmistakable strains of Stevie, singing “Wild Heart” as she got her makeup done, were flowing out of the doors and into the grass.

  I could not resist.

  The music folded over itself, again and again. I tiptoed inside the foyer, where a kidney-shaped ticket counter sat altarlike atop a black-and-white-checkered floor. Behind it was a framed poster with two women’s faces arranged like puzzle pieces—Persona, the Bergman film—and a wall painted silver. The doors were wedged open. The music blasted through them so loudly that I called it an invitation.

  The aisles sloped downward, through rows of empty seats, upholstered in emerald corduroy and arranged in three wedges, semicircled around the stage. The walls and ceiling, with their peeling orangewood veneer, held parallelograms of acoustic paneling. In lieu of curtains, stacks of speakers framed the sides of the stage.

  Jes sat alone on the stage at a folding gray plastic table covered in musical equipment and connected to earth by the umbilical cords of bright orange extension cables. Swaddled in yards of gauzy black linen, her dyed fingers pummeled the keys of a laptop, and her toes, encased in rubbery basketball sneakers, tapped away on the ground. She did not look up; she looked only at the screens in front of her.

  Carey, with downy blond hair, caramel tan, feathers in her hair, sitting on the edge of a radiator in a window—exactly like Stevie—was projected on three screens around Jes, the refrain folding over and over again.

  I slipped into the nearest seat and hid in the shadows. Jes began to play the electric piano at her side, manipulating the song, chopping it into pieces. On the screen behind her, Carey’s faces merged—repeated—bubbled up, intercut by short clips of other women. I caught Nadia Comaneci winning her perfect 10 and Vanessa Williams being crowned Miss America, then Carey dressed like a gymnast, dressed like a beauty queen, dressed like a businesswoman.

  Carey’s faces went staccato, over and over again, shining back and forth. Stevie sang, and the words came out of Carey’s mouth. To my surprise, Jes joined her, voice soaring, the gold at the bottom of her mouth shining, black dust rimming the amber pools of her eyes.

  On the screen, she cut to Carey’s mouth in close-up, like Beckett’s Not I. Then little girls dressed up for beauty pageants appeared. A girl, four or five, with a mouthful of jumbled white teeth and a tacky bedazzled leotard in a dirt yard—little Carey.

  The song became a prism of harmonies while all the Careys, a metronome of skin and teeth and hair, flashed in time. Something dark passed—something that hurt—but I didn’t understand it. A feeling struck, like a church bell in the distance, and then it receded.

  Then—Jes stopped abruptly, unfurling herself like a heron, stalking into the wings. The music was still playing, the song stuck on the refrain: blame, blame, blame. When I heard the rumble of a metal stairwell—she was climbing somewhere—I crept toward the door, planting my feet carefully, like there were land mines.

  Please don’t see me, I prayed silently, sneaking through the lobby and out to the driveway. Every time I saw Jes play, I knew more of who she was, and how precisely, cuttingly observant she could be. She taught me how to speak her language, even as I became more terrified of her. Terrified, genuinely, of what she would reveal about me. When I was twenty yards away, about to turn toward the bungalows, I disappeared around the bend and let out a long, low sigh of relief.

  Then I heard her voice.

  “HEY!” she yelled angrily. “Who’s there?”

  I reasoned that she had not seen me. Faced with the prospect of explaining myself, I could not. So—like a child, I turned on my heels and fled. I ran with all my speed back to my bungalow, turning at the hedge and fumbling with the door, locking it behind me, and crouching on the floor in case she came for me.

  She never did.

  Later, as I tried to recall the feeling, the church bell, that I’d had at the end of the film, I failed. Try to remember a sound. Try to hear it again, all the way through, without hearing it.

  It’s impossible.

  * * *

  Tyler flagged me down in the driveway after work a few nights later. I stopped. It seemed that he might lean into the window, but then he didn’t—he held back and kept his distance, looking straight at me, like he always did.

  “How’s your back?” he asked.

  “Aching, but”—I shrugged—“that’s what it is.”

  He stood there with his hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched, nervous, and stared at me for a second before speaking.

  “Um,” he said. “Want to have a drink?”

  Oh God. I didn’t think I could stand to be alone with him. My eyes widened and he quickly course-corrected, raising his thumb toward the Mission. “Sundowners?”

  “Sure,” I agreed, throwing the truck into park and following him to the Adirondack chairs on the deck jutting out over the lake—and then we were sitting and talking and everything was simple.

  Two drinks later, I went to bed.

  Every night, for the next week, I found him waiting for me on the deck, in one of two chairs pointed out at the water. Mostly we drank beer, though sometimes we had tea. I would carefully take my seat and stare straight forward, and that was how we would talk. He didn’t touch me again, and I never let the moments between us slow down, and never stayed on the deck for more than an hour, and so—we settled into a space of deliberate physical distance.

  It made everything easier, that distance, pushing the tension away, over the horizon. I knew it was there but it wasn’t in my face, and that was enough.
We sat on the deck every night, looking out at the lake, talking about our work, our lives, the city, everything we had in common. Before the week was over, I caught myself thinking about him during the day—wondering what he was doing, what we would talk about that night—and looked forward to our evenings with a nervous pleasure.

  I learned about two periods of his life: what I came to think of as before Carey and after Carey, but he never said her name—not once.

  His early life was what I expected. Tyler was from Sharon, Connecticut—not far from Max’s upscale hometown. His parents were both doctors: father, a surgeon, mother, an oncologist. His father died of cancer when he was in the fifth grade. Drowning in responsibility, his mother sent him to boarding school in nearby western Massachusetts from sixth through twelfth grades. He played tennis well enough for a D1 scholarship at UCLA. After a year he dropped out and attended the Academy against his mother’s wishes.

  “She wanted me to have a real job,” he said, leaning back in his chair, wine in hand. “I don’t blame her. But I wasn’t going to be a professional tennis player or go into finance. I wanted to be a painter, believe it or not.”

  “Really?” I couldn’t imagine him as anything other than what he was.

  “Yeah. I wanted to be the next Gerhard Richter. But—I didn’t have it.”

  “It’s not entirely about talent,” I said, though that wasn’t true.

  “You don’t have to do that,” he said, reaching over to me, forgetting our boundary—before remembering it and stopping midair. The physical distance remained, but our emotional proximity had grown like moss, lush and alive and nearly too detailed to measure.

  “Gerhard Richter wanted to be Jack Whitten, anyway,” I said.

  “Yeah.” He laughed. “It didn’t matter, though. I wasn’t talented enough. I ended up being overly influenced by Experimental Studies. I didn’t realize at the time what a class-specific pyramid scheme it was—to make work that can’t sell—and we completely bought into it. We graduated believing in making work that nobody would or could ever buy. Galleries pumped us full of drugs and sent us to parties, but we didn’t make any money. They say one thing and do another. We were too young to understand the difference. We were marketing, so they could sell thirty-year-old paintings. I mean, eventually we figured it out. But the first few years out of school were hard. I had huge student loans.”

  “I remember that you were famous already,” I told him.

  “Famous at the Academy.” He laughed. “I did these big installations of taxidermied animals. It was nonsense. Marlin was doing wheatpaste murals—everybody was so hot on, you know, graffiti, trespassing, fucking whatever, but you can’t sell graffiti. Jes’s films, I mean, that was the right place in the right time, but you don’t make money on art films, only performances, and it’s barely a living. She was more prepared for that, though. Did you know, she went to Juilliard? For cello. Anyway—Jack never wanted to make objects that went on a market. He wanted to intervene differently.”

  “But Carey was so successful, right from the start,” I blurted out. “Wildly.”

  “She was built that way.” His eyes flicked to and away from the water. I felt something, then, in the air—the tender charge of his anxiety about everything Carey—and he turned to say something—I could see it on his face—but then he discarded it. Disappointment gathered in the back of my mouth. I swallowed it down.

  “Lucky that you met her.”

  “It wasn’t luck,” he responded argumentatively—and he stopped himself again, and changed the subject.

  “May I ask a question about your work?” he said instead. I nodded, and he continued: “I saw you in Tomato Tomato, I mean, really saw you in the painting, clearer than I’ve ever seen anybody in my life. And then I met you and you were so exactly that,” he said.

  “What’s the question?”

  “How do you do that?”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  The real answer was that none of it was on purpose. My work was not the result of any artistic choice or intellectual legacy; instead it was the result of my inability to make any choices at all. Painting was a compulsion that I could barely control. I was no better than, as he’d said, the people who built houses out of bottle caps or covered their yards in cement garden gnomes, and if I’m being honest, the only threads that separated me from a life among the bottle-cap people were woven into the borrowed suit jacket of class distinction. Like Carey, I was a compulsive fanatic who found success purely by chance. I was nothing like Tyler—I had no journey. I had no critical growth. I didn’t deserve to be successful.

  “I don’t exactly know,” I ventured, telling the only part of the truth I could bear to admit. “When I’m making a painting, the rest of me is defenseless. And…it is hard on me. Sometimes I feel the moods and pulses of other people’s feelings so strongly that it makes me physically sick. My skin gets so thin you could slice it open with your fingernail. It’s…I’m absorbent.” I trailed off. “I don’t know how to be different.”

  “That sounds terrible.”

  “I’m a saint,” I offered, in a self-effacing deadpan, “bleeding from my eyes.”

  “You’re a something,” he said, and then I could see he wanted to say something. Instead he paused, his eyes caught by someone behind me.

  Jes walked down the beach in a black bikini, her long hair wound atop her head and her skin gleaming with drops of lake water. As she passed the Mission, she didn’t turn to acknowledge us, though we were plainly visible. At first I assumed she hadn’t seen me, but when she crossed through a bungalow three doors down, her head turned our way—stamped with a look of unadulterated malice—and a chill ran through me. Trespasser, an imagined voice whispered. Pretender. Fraud. You don’t belong here. You don’t belong with us.

  I said my usual good night and goodbye after that, and so did he.

  And then—the next night, he was gone, a note tacked to “my” chair on the deck that said Went to Vilnius early to install, back next week, good luck.

  The note hurt much more than I wanted it to.

  Chapter Twelve

  The hours I’d been filling with Tyler’s company now, in his absence, felt like days. I’d grown used to having something to do after the workday was done, something to stave off the loneliness.

  I decided to keep myself busy. The first night, I bleached my roots; then did a conditioning mask; then toned. Still, the clock stretched out ahead of me and my eyes refused to close, listening to the sound, as always, of the opaque little ocean beside me, glittering like polished obsidian in the moonlight and beating a sullen melody across the rocks.

  One night I tried all the doors on the property. But everything was locked up tight.

  I did need to be alone in the studio, to keep at it—to work, and work, until there was no work left. Though I was productive, I started to feel deeply lonely. When I got a late-night call from Cady, Atticus, and Jonny (the boy—now man—whose room I’d once taken over at 11 Dutch), tanked on a Lithuanian honey liqueur called Virtya, huddled inside a raccoon-fur-lined Humvee they insisted was “a horrible joke” as they waited for the sun to come up outside Vilnius, I felt achingly left out. They’d also arrived early to help assemble Jonny’s sculpture for one of the competitions, and they were buzzed on the joy of it all—of sharing baroque mansions with each other before the crowd arrived, of having the kind of experience you could only earn and never buy.

  I tried to party, but sipping bourbon and reading paperbacks alone, while enjoyable, does not a party make, at least not when you’ve been doing it for days and days in a row. I worked in the studio every day until my back was screaming in pain, and whenever I was done feeling lonely, I felt anxious and scared.

  The more I thought about it, the more it seemed reasonable that Carey had stopped making sculpture because she could not bear to spend the rest of her life alone in a studio, watching everyone else get married and have children and build lives. I was working, f
or the first time, at the same pace she had, after spending years of wondering how she was so successful, how she made so many objects, how she managed it all. Her pace was hard on the body, but it was much harder, I was beginning to realize, on the mind.

  I felt a sudden longing for the 42nd Street library, where they kept the Wallach Division, the collection of everything that has ever been written on art. I used to walk up there, sit in the great big reading room, and read Art Talk by Cindy Nemser, a book of interviews with fifteen women artists, over and over. The closest thing to the library, I reasoned, would be Max’s house—that extraordinary collection I’d spied so briefly at the party. I called her cellphone as soon as I thought of it.

  “Hi!” she said brightly. “How’s everything?”

  “Aces. It’s going really, really well,” I told her. “I have a favor to ask you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Do you have that book on Anselm Kiefer that came out recently? Or anything on Jay DeFeo? That big article on The Rose?”

  “Actually, I think we do, the Kiefer at least. DeFeo, uh…we might have that last catalog. How have you not committed the Rose essay to memory?”

  “Well, I had it in hard copy and PDF’d on my computer.”

  “Fuck. Right. Well—everything’s in the library—go on in any time. The door code is my birthday. It’s in a panel to the left of the front door. Then to set it before you go, keep the door closed and type it on the inside panel.”

  “Star? Pound?” I wrapped my hair in a t-shirt, holding myself and the phone upside down.

  “Enter.”

  “Okay. I’ll drive over now, if that’s okay.”

  “It’s totally fine, but I’m not there. Fleur and I drove to the city this morning. Klaus is hosting a dinner tonight on a barge across from Hart Island.”

  “That’s disgusting.” Hart Island was a potter’s field—a mass grave of unmarked bodies.