Fake Like Me

by Barbara Bourland

  “Finished!” I called out.

  “Dinner’s on the second-floor balcony,” he said, and I nodded before returning the books to their correct positions on the shelf and cleaning up the table I’d been using. My feet practically floated up the steps to find that Charlie—sweet, good Charlie—had set a beautiful table for two on the balcony outside his office, with a decanted bottle of wine, roast duck, heaps of steaming vegetables, even a fresh bunch of tulips in a pale green ceramic vase. On the edge of the deck, a red plastic sugar feeder hanging from a thick brown sailor’s rope was crowded with hummingbirds, buzzing in the air like oversize wasps.

  I sat down and pulled the heavy canvas napkin over my lap, feeling very briefly ashamed of myself as he filled my glass with a 1990 Bordeaux, a wine I knew from my days at the restaurant. It was too good for me under any circumstance, especially this one. He was clean-shaven as always, hair jet black, shirt white and untucked, dark-gray trousers slim and pressed. But tonight there were bags under his eyes, and a slight hunch to his shoulders. I glanced into the area of his studio visible beyond his narrow figure and realized it contained a whirlwind of drawings, practically hundreds, stacked on every surface, plans for shows from a decade ago, along with new ideas. I loved the thin paper he used, all that white and blue, and how it seemed so delicate and specific and intentional, how everything was a plan. Helen, his ex-wife, was the booming, enthusiastic personality of Eliot&Sprain who made all the deals and did all the publicity. Charlie stayed in the background, more or less, to deal with the artists and the visions for the work.

  “Long day?” I asked, pointing to his studio.

  “You’ve no idea,” he said, raising his glass. “Cheers.” He downed a swallow immediately. “The Beijing project I was telling you about at the party?” I nodded. “…is turning bad. They now want to put a high-speed monorail on the bottom, which means the air around it will be filled with fumes and the artist would need thirty times the weight capacity. They’re asking her to become, or hire, I suppose, an architect. It’s a disaster.”

  “Why don’t you delegate all this stuff?” I asked him. “I mean, you don’t need to be dealing with these details. Isn’t that the artist’s job?”

  “That’s the difference between us and the others,” he said. “We only have about forty artists. Hen and I handle everything on our own. This way everything always gets done right the first time. We’ve never lost an artist, you know. Nobody has left Eliot&Sprain. Not ever.” His eyelid, pale and greasy, twitched. His hand flew up to hold it still.

  “Sorry.” He chuckled. “I’m falling apart.”

  “That sounds very stressful.”

  “It’s mostly boring,” he said, tilting his head. “I’m the only one paid to be bored; it won’t do to pass the burden. Let’s talk about something else. Or my eye will jump off my face.”

  “It’s not boring. It sounds hard,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever done anything that hard in my life.”

  “You spontaneously create monumental objects of desire,” he offered. “No big deal.”

  “Yeah—then it’s over. Everything for me is about giving birth, I think,” I said. “Somehow I get pregnant, and then eventually a painting comes out, but I don’t have to maintain it or nurture it beyond the moment it is ‘finished.’” I made exaggerated air quotes with my hands.

  “What about if your paintings fall apart? Don’t you preserve them?”

  “For a hundred years of hanging on the wall, maybe, but I don’t use varnish anymore sooooo…uh. No. And they fall apart anyway—Leisure Leisure lost its pound of real gold last year. Fifteen thousand dollars fell on the floor because I hadn’t properly attached it. I told the curator to put it back on with a blowtorch and she told me to call her back when I was sober.”

  “Did you?”

  “I was sober! I even sent her a telegram saying the same thing but she’s ignoring me. So now it has a big patchy hole in it and they left the gold exactly where it fell, and there’s a guard standing watch all the time. They framed the telegram and put it next to the painting. So. Win some, lose some.”

  He laughed, an easy sound. Sipping the wine, I was once again astonished at how too good for me it was: The taste was broad, like a field, and loamy with dirt, sharp with minerals.

  “Wow,” I exclaimed—like a little girl. I sound like such a clod.

  “A case of this was a gift when I got divorced. Well, when Hen left me. I’m drinking it down.”

  “Nice gift.”

  “It was,” he said. “It should have been. It was from Hen.”

  “That’s…exquisite.” I shook my head in disbelief. “I’ve never left a relationship on a high note. Only low ones.”

  “Hen’s the most socially adept person on earth,” he said, looking out across the yard, over the Goldsworthy wall and toward the lake. “She has no enemies.”

  “Whose idea was it to have Carey do the house?” I asked, lightly—casually—as though it were an afterthought, like I was merely curious in the way that normal people were curious.

  “Both of us. We thought she’d do a wonderful job. And she went bonkers for the idea—she literally accepted on the spot, which was very un-Carey. She usually deliberated over everything for weeks—then took years longer than she was supposed to.”

  “Were you here when she died?” I heard myself asking the rudest question in the world.

  “Yes. It was terrible. Tyler found her, you know.”

  My arms, folded in front of me, went rigid. I glanced down—yet they hadn’t moved. They were the same old arms—the same old legs—crossed in the most unpremeditated kind of way. I felt rooted to my chair, the sensation of it suddenly overwhelming.

  “I’ve heard that. He hasn’t mentioned it.”

  “He wouldn’t,” Charlie said. “I don’t imagine it’s a thing one discusses.”

  “How can you still live here?” I heard myself asking the second-rudest question in the world. “She’s—she’s everywhere.”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “It’s been—well, I don’t mean to put you in the middle of anything, but Carey assigned us the management of the estate. She shipped us most of her work before she died, with very deliberate instructions, which was awful but also, you know, it was what she wanted.”

  Instructions. He means the notebooks. I turned my face toward the long grass, watching it bend in the breeze, so that Charlie couldn’t see the ravenous interest shooting from my eyes.

  “And we appreciated that,” he continued. “We have a responsibility to raise the profile of the estate. She left the profits of the estate to Pine City, which makes it all very complicated. Hen and I—we’ve been trying to do what Carey wanted. But they won’t sell a single thing, even though it’s all worth five times what it was when she was alive. And Carey would have known that. She had no problem selling any of her work. But there’s one particular work that could upgrade the market for her previous works quite significantly—and they won’t give it up, so…it’s been several years of limbo. It’s a delicate course. I genuinely don’t understand why they won’t let us put it on the market.”

  “What is it?”

  “Well—that’s not entirely clear. We haven’t actually seen it,” he said.

  “What would they get out of it?” I dared to ask.

  He rubbed his fingers together and then opened them to the air in a way that suggested it was an extremely appealing amount of money, enough to, say, buy the planet. “I think, what I would call real money. We can’t seem to come to an agreement. I’ve been trying to encourage them, but I’m getting a bit frustrated. I’ve always found them very hard to deal with, frankly. They close ranks like the military.”

  His eyes flicked up at me, and I sensed he wanted me to give him something in return. But I had barely any information.

  “I’m working in her studio,” I offered. “It was empty when I moved in.” I realized once it was out of my mouth that this was not strictly true
, but I didn’t think he’d be interested in a box of terrible drawings that belonged to someone else—they were genuinely, not merely comparatively, worthless. “Do you—do you know why she stopped using it?”

  “No idea,” he said, widening his eyes and shaking his head. “She came over one day, said she was done, and that all future work would be performance. That was that. I was nervous for her. Everybody was. Tyler especially. We thought it might damage her career. But in the end—it was too brief to make a difference. They were livid, though.”

  “Pine City?”

  “Yes. They cared about money while she was alive, they were always inserting themselves in everything, pushing on her behalf, but now that she’s dead they seem to want the whole thing to go away. It’s—”

  My face had lost all pretense of innocence. I was rapt, nearly drooling. I was too much. The second Charlie noticed, he backtracked.

  “I—I shouldn’t be talking about it,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I don’t want to sour your relationships over there. They’re good artists. They mean well. It was all very tragic, and I think if we could resolve everything in a way that was satisfactory to everyone, then yes, Max and I would like to do something new.”

  “Time for a new house, maybe,” I said, after a beat.

  “Perhaps,” he agreed. “I’ve been thinking of doing something big. A museum.”

  “For the write-off?” Savvy collectors who turned their collections into legal nonprofit entities needed only to “show” the works a few times per year in order to save hundreds of thousands (millions?) of dollars in taxes.

  “No, an actual museum.” He laughed. “Open every day, cheap to access, nice bathrooms.” It was my turn to laugh. “The work, and us above. Like the old English country houses, you know, bygone, genteel aristocrats living upstairs with their dogs in one heated room while the public clomps around for 2p downstairs.”

  “Won’t that cost like a billion dollars?” I laughed at myself. “I’m sorry again. I cannot stop asking you the rudest questions. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  “It’s okay. Yes. We opened a gallery in Dubai. Literally ten times what we make anywhere else. It only sells prints. No—it’s that, we have so much artwork, more than we can display, far more than I know what to do with. I like to see people looking at it. It gives me joy. And Max needs…not to be alone so much,” he said lovingly, shaking his head. “I worry about her. Do you worry?”

  “About Max?” I was incredulous. “Never,” I told him, with certainty. “Max, out of anyone I’ve ever met, knows what she needs and how to get it.” I’d never thought of Max as being fragile or confused or in danger of anything at all, but then again—I realized that we barely knew each other anymore. Max could be one big performance, and I would never know the difference. “Why do you ask? I mean…besides the fact that she’s physically isolated and you’re always out of town. She seems happy to be working on that book.”

  “I guess I don’t have a reason. A feeling…I don’t mean to be paranoid.” He trailed off. “It’s probably down to the house. I love this house. But it’s not hers.”

  We sat in silence as I poured us both fresh glasses of wine.

  “I think the impulse to make a home that belongs to you both is probably a good one,” I said, as sincerely as I could. He nodded and began eating, scooping up huge forkfuls of duck and potatoes while I stared out at the yard. Orange rays sliced across the green grass from the west, shadows pooling under the trees. We drank a second glass, then a third. The wine flowed through me, hot like blood, and the whole world transformed from a drab gray outline into full-scale Kodachrome color. I felt everything: the dusk in the air, Charlie’s smile across the table, the glass between my fingers, the wine on my tongue, the clean smell of the evening dew, so faint that were dew a color it would be the water in the jar where you rinse your watercolor brush.

  After that we returned to small talk, enjoying the night air, trading war stories about expensive professional mistakes we’d made. I got the sense that he didn’t know many people with whom he could discuss the real details of his life; and whether I had earned it or not, my history with Max placed me in a family-like proximity that genuinely meant something to him. It made me feel terrible, how easily he trusted me, because I didn’t deserve it. At last—when we were halfway through a second bottle, glasses four and five—I confessed something I’d been holding on to for years, the fingers of my brain too drunk and guilty to hold their secrets any longer. Courage grew from the base of my spine and bubbled out my mouth.

  “Do you remember when we met?” I asked.

  “At that party, downtown. The one with the elderly, nudist acrobats. Who could forget.”

  “That’s not where we met,” I said, grimacing. “I’ve been meaning to ask for so long if you remembered. I would have said at the party but Max was being…”

  “…so very Max,” he said, laughing. “Yes. I understand. So where was it? How could I possibly forget?”

  “It was a while ago. Six, seven years. It was October. I was coming out of Canal Plastics with huge sheets of neon acrylic, and I couldn’t get a cab, and I was trying to get them home, and I kept slipping, and I actually hit you with one and knocked your briefcase in the street. And instead of being mad, you took an end and walked with me—”

  “All the way to some alley in the Financial District! Up nine flights of stairs!” His face opened up, and Charlie stared at me with an expression of total disbelief. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe I didn’t remember you, with your hair and everything.”

  “I had a scarf over it,” I said faintly, wondering what he would recall.

  “Yes,” he remembered immediately. “A floral thing. And sunglasses, even though it was sunset. And a janitor’s uniform, with some kind of turtleneck underneath. And socks with sandals.” He laughed. “Now I get it. You didn’t have heat.”

  “Eleven Dutch Street had many fine qualities. Heat was not one of them.”

  “Oh, I’m such an arsehole.” He groaned, reaching for my hand across the table with his left and putting his forehead in his right. “You know…I looked for you at Carey’s funeral. A year later. I don’t know why. I thought you might know her. Out of all the events we attend, that was where I thought of you. It’s funny, now, to remember that.”

  “We didn’t trade names.”

  “No. Because you berated me the whole way back. I thought you were going to kill me.”

  “You dropped six hundred dollars of magenta acrylic on the sidewalk!”

  “Because you were walking too fast,” he said, still laughing, still holding my hand in his long fingers, the knuckles on his left hand stained from the ink of the extra-fine-tip markers he used. I felt self-conscious and drew my hand back, leaned away in my chair. Charlie didn’t let me make any space, though; he immediately put my hand to his face, a gesture that shocked and delighted me, and I wondered if he remembered doing that same thing six years ago, before kissing me in the stairwell of my building—that sweet kiss we shared before he walked down the stairs and into the night without another word.

  “I did know you,” he said. “I’m sorry. I should have known you this whole time. Oh…please don’t stop being my friend. Please don’t be angry.”

  “It’s New York. Nobody remembers anything,” I said lightly, blushing. I felt a magnet hold my hand to his jaw—a magnet so strong I broke the connection in shock—and he returned to his own space, leaning back again, telling me what he’d been doing that day, who he’d been that year, reminiscing in a rush, the words and memories coming as fast as the beating wings of the hummingbirds who still gathered around their sugar feeder.

  I listened, and that was where my confession ended, that I had known him, after all.

  I did not confess that I dreamed of running into him for years after that day, pictured him at all sorts of moments, mostly lonely ones. On some days, every tall, dark-haired, clean-shaven man wearing an expensive suit h
ad been a potential Charlie to me, and I would see them in the subway or on the street and wait for them to turn—

  —and then it would always be someone else.

  Until that party downtown.

  There he was, at long last, and married to my friend.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The next day was horrible, backward. The notebooks interrupted time and time again. I kept looking at the digital camera’s tiny picture display of the spines, spinning the wheel to zoom in. CAREY 2, FORGIVE/FORGET, THE BURIAL PROJECT, 72 HOURS, TOMBSTONE PIZZA, YOKEFELLOWS, ELIOT&SPRAIN HOUSE: Those were all sculptures. HOLD ME, CHOKE ON IT, SLEEP DISORDER, OTHER PEOPLE’S RULES, DROP OUT, LOVE THAT MIRACLE, SIDE EFFECTS (MODAFINIL): Those were the performances. Two rolls of film, the letter said. Pine City had possession of two rolls of film. A work that, in Charlie’s words, “could upgrade the market for her previous works quite significantly.” Something that would make everybody money. Money that Pine City didn’t want. What could it be? A film, but of what? Which one was the film? SIDE EFFECTS (MODAFINIL) was the one where she stayed awake for days. SLEEP DISORDER was when she slept in a box, with the aid of constant supplements of sedatives. CHOKE ON IT was the hot dog–eating competition. OTHER PEOPLE’S RULES was the one with the awful review. But LOVE THAT MIRACLE and DROP OUT—I had no idea what those were. One of them had to be the film.