Fake Like Me

by Barbara Bourland

  For a split second, everyone looked at me with these funny little smiles, and I thought it was all ruined. I thought about Maria Clarke’s terrible drawings and wondered if I was the latest version—if I’d be leaving here humiliated and alone. But then Tom slapped Lena on the back and said, “In Italian I think she said vaffanculo,” and then the others were throwing their napkins at me, and Lena was laughing, with her hands up in defeat, and Jes turned away to light a cigarette, and Tyler wrapped his pinkie around mine under the table, and Max pointed at my wine and said, “I’ll have a glass of that,” and it felt like I’d held, if only for a moment, my own.

  * * *

  After dinner everyone took cocktails to go for a studio walk. Someone asked if we could go to mine, but before I could answer, Tyler spoke.

  “She’s running the dehumidifier. Everything’s sealed for another few days,” Tyler lied, so smoothly, and as he said it I realized that I probably should do that. He winked at me and I smiled gratefully.

  We walked up to Marlin’s first, where she gave everyone a small framed print: three stripes of iron-dust ink that looked like the fur of a metal caterpillar. There was even one for me.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Of course,” she said, but before I could say any more, someone was opening a flat file and demanding her attention. For ten minutes, her friends rifled through everything in her studio, oohing and aahing over recent works and reminiscing over older ones.

  “I love this one,” Jeanne said. It was an old wheatpaste, brick dust still clinging to the back, peppered with holes and fragile as a ghost. A drawing of Carey.

  Marlin looked at it sadly. “Me too,” she said, patting Jeanne’s hand. They hugged briefly, and a tear rolled down Jeanne’s cheek. Jack, meanwhile, had his arm around Tyler’s waist and was pivoting him toward Tom, who was telling an elaborate anecdote about falling down a well. Jes was nowhere to be seen.

  Our next stop was Jack’s studio. The former Arts and Crafts pavilion was a soaring, peaked cabin filled to the brim with rolls of fabric, three vintage looms, and a scaffold. A large net was in progress, made from different colors of monofilament—fishing line—and swaths of parachute silk riddled with fabric flowers, woven leaves, yarn-wrapped ceramic objects, and glazed porcelain feathers. It was breathtaking—nearly religious in its delicacy and scope.

  Jack swept in, shoving things from side to side, but the rest of us stepped lightly and carefully. When we were on the far side of the net, a waterfall of silk and plastic separating us from the rest of the group, Max clutched my arm and pointed to a little glass globe suspended from a golden coin, suspended so seamlessly within his aesthetic that I hadn’t even noticed it. “That’s exactly like the light Carey made for my house,” she said. I couldn’t tell if she was being derisive or not.

  “I think they’re all doing that,” I whispered back. “I think she’s in all of their work.”

  “You better watch out,” she said playfully.

  Then Tyler’s arm brushed my waist, and my focus shifted so ardently that I have no idea what Max said after that.

  Before our next stop, we fixed a fresh batch of drinks. Tyler caught my eye while I was mid-conversation with David Bird.

  “You have to follow the work,” David was saying. “The work is the only thing that tells you who to be.”

  “Absolutely.” I tried to keep a straight face. In principle I agreed, but over his shoulder, Tyler was biting his lip and smiling at me in a way that made it impossible for me to pay attention to anything. A plum blush lit my neck and worked its way to my cheeks.

  “Let’s…get you a drink,” David said genially, glancing at Tyler.

  “Danger Beach,” Tyler said. “Don’t tell her anything about me. I want her to think I’m a good person.”

  David laughed. “It’s too late for that.”

  From there we headed to the Theatre and piled into the green corduroy seats. I tried to sit next to Tyler, but got stuck between Kerry and Anele instead, who were gossiping over me about the extramarital affair of a famous downtown artist.

  “This grad student was crying about it to one of her friends at the bar in Philmont,” Kerry whispered. “I was sitting right there. I almost leaned over and said, Honey where do you think you are, the Port Authority? Everyone in here has an asymmetrical haircut. We all know exactly who you’re talking about. Anyway—I texted him to stop being so indiscreet.”

  “What an idiot,” Anele agreed. “His wife is on the Biennale committee.”

  The gray plastic table swarming with mixing boards and orange extension cords was still there, as were the screens and the stacks of speakers, but Jes didn’t touch any of it. Instead, she dragged a folding chair into the middle of the stage, then disappeared into the wings, returning with her cello.

  She set it between her legs and held the bow aloft.

  “I’ve been trying to remember who I was before Pine City,” she said. “Not that I don’t love you.” The group laughed. “But I want to get back to basics. So—I’m a little rusty, but here we go. This is from the Philip Glass score for Dracula.”

  She played for twenty minutes, the bow rising and falling as the notes climbed over each other, her dyed fingers plucking the strings, kohl-smeared eyes squeezed closed between occasional glances at a grid of sheet music on the floor. She did not use a looping pedal or an amplifier; that night she used only the sound of rosined horsehair on catgut strings and their deep echoes in a belly of bent maple. Her foot smacked against the floor between the occasional releases of held-in breath.

  The piece, with its tenuous creeps, its plaintive, deathly romance, surrounded us; we were dizzy with it. Every now and then the bow would go all the way across the strings, from one end to another, and the full sound would be drawn out in a throaty scratch. Jes visibly strained to hold the notes. What had once been automatic, the result of hours of daily practice, was no longer. Yet there was a depth to the struggle that shaded her sound into a dreamy intensity, and I could not have imagined it any other way.

  At the end, she let the bow fall to her side and her head drop.

  I was the first to clap, overcompensating for the tension between us, and was soon drowned out by the others. After a moment she raised her head to reveal a face that was blood red and drenched in sweat. She looked to Tyler for approval. For the first time I saw Jes herself as vulnerable and fragile.

  Superb, he mouthed to her across the crowd—and then he went to her and took her hand, helping her down from the stage. They walked together out into the night, her head upon his shoulder, his arm around her waist.

  In Tyler’s studio, the last stop, everyone got rowdy and decided to light the forge. He was the center of attention, the orbit around which each conversation anchored itself. Jes hung at his elbow like a girlfriend, and everyone treated her that way. They were intimately connected to each other. As they leaned against the workbench where he and I had shared our first kiss, I had the awful realization that we would never share anything the way he shared Pine City, and all his memories of Carey, with Marlin, Jes, and Jack. Even if he did want to tell me, someday, it would never be the same as having lived it in the first place.

  As I stood near the door, marinating in jealousy, Max gripped my wrist and pulled me, quickly, into the walk-in refrigerator. When the door slammed shut in the chilly darkness, I yelped. Max ignored me.

  I waited for an annoyed Jack, Jes, Tyler, or Marlin to pull us out of there, but nothing happened. Concerned, as always, that I might alienate them, I reached for the handle, intending to leave, but Max swatted my hand away. I yelped again. She switched on her phone, waving it at the waxy red hands lining the top shelves.

  “Look. The hands from my house.”

  Her hair was flat, but her eyes were enormous. Max was drunk. Not the drunkest I’d ever seen her…but compounded with the fact that she was not currently the center of attention, I suspected I was in for one of Max’s patented baby tantrums.


  “It’s a refrigerator, Max. They’d melt anywhere else,” I said reasonably, then relaxed into the cool air, delicious after the heat of the forge, and waited for her to spin it all out.

  “These hands shouldn’t be here,” she said indignantly. “They should be archived in a museum. A curator should have these.” Huh. So—Max thought it should all be shown, too. Of course she did. She was married to Charlie. I wondered if he’d told her about the film.

  “Probably,” I replied, baiting her.

  “Don’t you get it?” she said, her tongue a little thick. “The coin? Dracula? The hands?”

  “No.” I leaned in.

  “They’re not making work about Carey,” she said. “They’re stealing from her. They’re vampires.” Her eyes were wild, the fake lashes hanging heavy, and she gripped my wrist again, the edges of her diamonds threatening my thin skin, and for a moment—our breaths clouding the air between us—for a moment I believed her. “My house is supposed to be special. What if they make another one? They’re not supposed to do that,” she said sullenly.

  Someone leaned against the door, and I saw the rubber gaskets smoosh in. We had to get out of here. “Nobody is going to replicate your house, Max,” I said sternly, putting my ear to the door. I couldn’t tell who it was, but they were laughing, the bass of it vibrating through the metal. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes,” I said, hard, like the strike of a gavel. “It is.” I pried her from my wrist.

  “All I want is to be special,” she said, her tone very serious.

  I laughed. “You’re plenty special, Max.” She curtsied, then blinked up at me, expecting another compliment. The weight came off the door, and the rubber gaskets narrowed again.

  “Listen,” I told her sternly. “We can’t be caught in here. This is totally—” I searched for a word that Max would understand. “—RUDE.”

  She nodded. “For sure.” She clicked off her phone.

  I tested the door handle, pushing it inch by inch, quiet as a mouse, then peeked into the studio. Everyone was gathered around the forge, burning something, facing away from us.

  “Let’s go.” I pulled her out in one quick motion and leaned against the door as it shut, covering its movement with my body, like we’d been standing here the entire time.

  “Jes IS a vampire, though,” she said, and I looked over to see Jes resting her head on Tyler’s shoulder. “SHE DRINKS BLOOOOOOOD.”

  Seeing them together made me feel like I was running a race I’d already lost. My whole body went slack, a loser, giving up. Max saw, and poked me, hard, with the edge of her orange fingernail.

  “He is NOT in love with her,” she whispered. “You’re so worried. It’s silly. He never liked Jes. Carey liked Jes. But Tyler is only Jes’s friend.” She laughed and repeated herself, changing the order. “Tyler is Jes’s only friend.”

  I watched Tyler and Jes, at the way they looked at each other, and wondered what Carey would have done in this moment. Probably walked over there—taken his drink—or her drink—anchored herself in front of him—then turned on her light, so that he couldn’t look anywhere else. She would have blinded them.

  I leaned against the refrigerator, with the petulant jades of jealousy and the insistent reds of frustration coating my insides—and did nothing at all.

  Chastity

  Chapter Seventeen

  Falling in love is a fever, a disease, euphoric and despairing, a rush through the body that warms everything. Suddenly you have twice as much blood as you did before—you are bursting with it. You make enough blood to dissolve the hardened internal plaque of your loneliness. With each new cell you grow ever more swollen and tender and fragile, your skin stretches thinner and thinner, enough for other people to see your heartbeat from the outside. When it is thin enough for someone to take in all of you—your bones, your nervous system, your deepest internal self—then you’re a goner, with someone else’s breath inscribed so deeply on your heart that nothing could erase it.

  The next morning when the sun came up, I went directly to the studio, refusing to look in Tyler’s windows as I drove past his house, wanting to keep him from my mind. I spent a heroic amount of energy trying to drain my body and quiet my heart, but it was too late—I was already sick with him, feeling the illness of him settle in my stomach, heating the back of my rib cage, shadowing my every thought.

  The moment the clock hit eight, I was out the door, speeding to the Mission, where—sure enough—Tyler waited for me, sitting in “his” chair, and I flew into his arms for more of those endless kisses, this time not so endless.

  We went into the Mission, pulled the curtains shut, locked the door. I climbed onto the bar top and soon my clothes were the only thing between us, and then those were gone, then I was pulling him inside me, holding him against me and looking into his eyes.

  Is this what it is to fall in love in the modern era? To find yourself having sex without a condom, to give in to what that means, to look the other person in the eye at the exact moment you are doing it, to let go, without thinking about it in advance? To let them come inside your body—to say, Do it, I want to feel it—and for them to look at you with shock and delight, just before both of you push into each other until there is no looking back?

  That night, we cooked dinner naked and fucked on the floor of his screen porch. In the morning he brought me coffee. We wove our bodies together. I watched the dust motes swirling over his skin in the sunlight coming through the window, like every lover in the history of time. He drove me to the studio. He picked me up at sunset when the day was done but pulled over two minutes later and fucked me in the back of the station wagon halfway through the driveway because we couldn’t wait another second. That night we played gin rummy naked and I told him about my adolescence. The next morning we kissed for an hour, my chin turning raw and red by the time I forced myself to go.

  After work on the fifth day, we took a long shower and touched each other with so much enthusiastic tenderness you would have thought we were teenagers doing it for the first time. Later we cooked dinner and split a bottle of wine, and slept wrapped around each other. We spent an entire week this way, not apart for more than a few minutes once the workday ended. I went to the studio every day with skin like tissue paper, overflowed into buckets of paint, and then at night I went to his house and filled back up again.

  I became more infatuated with him after every single reckless encounter, and I was open to him in every way that it seems possible to be open to someone. But he was not open to me.

  On the eighth evening in a row that I slept at Tyler’s house, he told me about his father’s illness while we were lying in bed, the sounds of the lake and the wind in the trees drifting through his open windows. It was an awful story and he told it with clean concision, the sort that comes from having thought, if not told, the same story over and over in your mind for twenty-five years. I wondered if he would follow it with more stories about death—about Carey—but it was as though she’d never existed at all.

  I simmered with unease as we fell asleep that night. I wanted desperately to interrogate him about her, but I worried that confessing the depths of my interest would jeopardize whatever was growing between us. I had spent too many years alone, or with the wrong people, trying to love them even when I knew that I didn’t, and that half-living-half-loving made me unprepared for the real thing.

  And so I kept all my questions about Carey to myself.

  * * *

  I was perched on a ladder, tapping loose pigment from above onto a panel of Chastity coated in white paint and grease, when the rolling sound of tires on gravel came through the nearest open window. I glanced toward the locks; I’d flipped them.

  “Hold on,” I yelled out. “Out in a minute.” Whoever it was, I’d squeeze through the door and talk to them outside.

  But it didn’t matter what I wanted. Max skipped right on into the studio, unlocking the door with her very own
key, from a bundle ringed on a silver leather fob. Though she wore baggy jeans and a plain white shirt, hair piled messily atop her head, she still managed to sparkle, bright like an opal, eclipsing me even in my own space.

  “Nice key,” I said angrily, frozen to the ladder.

  “I have keys to everything,” she said, laughing. “I know we’re not supposed to crash people’s studios, but I barely talked to you at the dinner. Uh—” She paused and gazed out at the room, seeing the twenty-eight panels and their 896 square feet. “Holy shit—what are you doing? What do you have, like, a hundred paintings going on?”

  “Max—you are not supposed to come in here.”

  “Oh my God,” she said, in a drawl that was half awe, half disbelief. “You’re remaking them,” she said, looking out at the paintings. “They did burn. Holy shit.” I wanted to grab her, shake her, throw her out. She was an endless poison, Max. “They’re beautiful,” she said in wonderment, walking the aisles of my work.

  “You cannot tell anyone,” I insisted, paralyzed atop my ladder, gripping the metal so hard my knuckles were white, then colorless. “This—this is bad, Max. You cannot tell anyone at all.”

  “Lockbox,” she said, crossing her heart with an X. She looked back at me to gauge my response. I didn’t bother to hide my anger, but kept working, tapping away with my jar of pigment. Ocher dust rained down into a spotted pattern that quickly dissolved, leaving a dense stain.

  She lit one of her unfiltered Lucky Strikes. “This is gooooood, though,” she said after a drag, nodding and looking around. “These are good, honey. I mean, I didn’t see the first ones up close. But maybe it was meant to be.”

  “I—I don’t know. I hope so. Thank you.”