Fake Like Me

by Barbara Bourland

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “I was seventeen, I think? It was right after I got accepted to the Academy. I mean, she didn’t want to take care of him. They wouldn’t let me have him in the dorm, anyway.”

  “Jesus…You know, I have always wanted to say this. On that visit your mother hit you because I wiped my feet on the mat. And I never told her it was my fault. Or you. I didn’t say anything. I was a coward. I’m sorry,” Max admitted suddenly, a tear falling down her cheek.

  “I’m sorry you had to see that,” I said, feeling an embarrassment so acute it knocked the wind from my chest.

  “No. I’m sorry,” she insisted. “I’ve felt bad about that our entire lives. I’m so sorry that I got you in trouble like that. I didn’t know.”

  “Oh, Max,” I said to her, my voice breaking. “There’s nothing to be sorry for. If it hadn’t been the mat, it would’ve been dyeing my hair, or the way I folded the sheets, or anything else.”

  “I can’t believe that,” she said softly.

  “It’s true,” I snapped, surprised. “I’m not lying.”

  “No, I mean, I can’t believe you’ve never told me that,” she said.

  “I don’t tell anybody that,” I said. “My mom had a hard life. She was damaged, and she damaged me. I have a better life. I try not to think about it.”

  I set the photo down, but Max picked it back up.

  “Does this picture make you feel like shit?” she asked sincerely.

  I hesitated—I didn’t know if she was making fun of me or not—and then, overwhelmed by trust, nodded. Max ripped the photo in half, then quarters, then eighths, and kept ripping until there was a pile of shredded confetti in front of her on the floor. Next, she scanned a wall, pulled out a binder, paged through its plastic sheets until she found the negative, pulled a lighter from her pocket, and lit it on fire. The celluloid collapsed into her fingers and she dropped it on the floor into the pile of confetti, letting it burn down to ashes.

  “There,” she said, as the house rang three loud notes out of the nearest speaker. “Let’s eat dinner and get drunk and forget about it.”

  * * *

  Two hours later, I was on Max’s phone, calling Tyler.

  “Hey.” He was casual, warm.

  “Heyyyyyyy yourself,” I said, full of beans.

  “You’re alive,” he said, and I could hear him smiling. “Where you been?”

  “I’m at Max’s house. She kidnapped me. My truck is still at the studio. Can you come and get me? I don’t want to walk in the dark.”

  “Uh—sure. I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said. I ran to the front door, pulled it open, and left it ajar for him.

  “Is Tyler coming?” Max screeched from the bottom of the courtyard, where she was swaying to the music, wine glass in hand, a baby-rose ball gown zipped up over her t-shirt and jeans.

  “Yes!” I called out, lifting the enormous blue tulle skirt that she’d buttoned over my romper and descending the steps one by one.

  “Yay!” she squealed. “I told you, he’s crazy about you. They never come over.” Then Max brushed out my curls. “This color still looks so fresh,” she said approvingly. “You’ve mastered the formula. It’s like…the inner peel of a peach.”

  “I halved the quantities,” I told her. “The shades are the same—royal blond, rose gold, nectarine.”

  She turned up the music as I poured more wine and we jumped around.

  “‘Motownphilly’ is the greatest pop song of all time,” she announced.

  “It’s so good. But it can’t be the queen. You can’t choose the queen and not make a list.”

  “Hit me then.”

  “‘Faith,’ George Michael.”

  “Ooh, that’s maybe a burn. But it’s so dramatic.”

  “‘You Make My Dreams Come True,’ Hall and Oates.”

  “Too yachty.”

  “‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody,’ Whitney Houston.”

  “I’ll give you that. That’s a jam,” she agreed. “But is it the one true jam.”

  “Prince, ‘Kiss.’ Beyoncé, ‘Single Ladies.’ Jackson Five, ‘Want You Back.’”

  “These are all very good songs, but I don’t hear anything to compete with ‘Motownphilly’ coming out of your mouth,” she yelled, and with that, the house played the song for us and we went berserk.

  By the time Tyler walked in, I was dancing on top of the grand piano, pouring a bottle of Ruinart directly into my mouth. Max was hopping up and down next to the window and hitting all the high notes. We’d opened the lower-level glass garage wall out into the yard, and fireflies were streaming in, electric yellows and greens.

  That’s when it became a blur.

  Here is exactly what I remember.

  Laughing, Tyler grabs me off the piano and holds me in his arms, and I dump champagne into his mouth, and he kisses me with a mouth full of foam, and it drips down onto Max’s beautiful skirt. He slides one hand inside my top and we keep making out, momentarily oblivious to Max’s presence.

  “Hey!” she yells, popping open another bottle of champagne. “Get a room!”

  “Don’t tempt me,” Tyler says.

  “You are just the same,” I say to him, running my fingers down his ageless face. “Are you a vampire?”

  “The same as what?” he asks.

  “The first time I saw you,” I tell him, and he looks confused. Then I let go of him, grab the new bottle of champagne, and run outside. Max follows me and we race down the grass, chasing an invisible finish line, until I trip and fall face-first into the soft green carpet, and I wipe my face and a chunk of dirt comes away but my skin isn’t hurt, so we laugh and laugh, and the world spins around us, and Tyler is watching us from the house, and then I am suddenly very, very sad. Max takes a pack of cigarettes from her dress and lights one and hands it to me.

  “Do you think he’s still in love with her?” The words come out but I don’t remember why I thought it was okay to ask them.

  “You’re so much better than her.” Max sighs, collapsing into a bubblegum pouf in the grass. “I’m so glad she’s gone,” she says, her eyes big and wide. “It was terrible when she was here. She was the unhappiest person I have ever met. Nobody got anything they wanted when she was around.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s better now. She was crazy,” Max says insistently, not answering my question. “Everybody is happier now.”

  “Everybody loved her,” I tell Max, confused.

  “Everybody hated her,” Max whispers, and then Tyler is grabbing me by the hand, and he is whisking us both back inside, giving us water and playing more music, and we dance some more and I don’t get another chance to ask Max what she’s talking about, and the rest of the night is dark, gone from my memories.

  Modesty

  &

  Temperance

  Chapter Eighteen

  I blinked awake on a king-size bed covered in gauzy linens, surrounded by the paper fingers of a hundred ferns. Sunbeams shone through the windows and landed on my skin. Plants crept up the walls, so dense and green that I could practically feel them growing: Waxy, heart-shaped leaves brushed my shoulders, and porcelain fingers protruded from the walls, holding up ropes of vines like a surrealist gift. The sounds of a tropical hothouse—misters, birdsong, a gentle waterfall—played through invisible speakers recessed somewhere in the concrete room. I didn’t remember going to sleep, and at first, I wasn’t sure where we were.

  Tyler lay next to me with a pillow over his head. I still wore the romper. The blue tulle skirt made a soft mountain on the floor. My head thrummed unhappily, pushing up against the dry hollows of my skull.

  Max’s house. Champagne. Ugh.

  I stumbled toward what I hoped was a bathroom, brushing through ferns like a dinosaur with every thundering step, hoping Tyler wouldn’t open his eyes before I could clean myself up. I eased the door open, pushing the hand—this one made an oka
y sign—to find an elaborate en suite on the other side.

  More strings of ivy wrapped their way into a walk-in shower so huge that it didn’t need a door. I let myself luxuriate in there, soap foaming over my skin, water hot and blissful, the shampoo that same expensive bottle that Max had once left behind—except this time I wasn’t in a molding tile bath in Florida, wishing I were anywhere else. This time I was a guest. Max herself burned the evidence. She took me into her home, showed me her life, made me part of the club. She finally gave me permission to move on from that girl from the wrong side of town.

  Tyler was still sleeping, so, wrapped in a bath towel the size of a blanket, I hunted for coffee. I didn’t have to look far; a tray waited on a console table outside our room, set with two porcelain mugs, a camp thermos, and a gold-edged notepad. Max’s familiar scribble was on the top page:

  getting fleur from train in Hudson, maybe catch you, maybe not. call me later!! let’s all hang out!! & please set the alarm when you go—you know the code—xmax

  Once again—I was alone in Max’s house. Almost—and that was close enough.

  * * *

  Wet hair slicked back, wrapped in an oversize towel that stretched to my ankles, my feet left damp blotches on the concrete as I scurried up the stairs. Three steps from the top, I could see that the box of Carey’s plans for the house was already gone.

  I was about to swivel and make a beeline for the library when I heard Tyler’s voice.

  “Whatcha doin’, gorgeous?” He was across the courtyard, pouring himself a cup of coffee outside our room and watching me run for the top floor.

  “You’re awake!” I squeaked.

  “Barely.” He frowned and blew on the coffee. “What’s on three?”

  “I was going to check my email on Max’s computer,” I lied, panicking. “She went to pick that writer up from the train.”

  “How’s the shower?”

  “Extraordinary.”

  “I’ll try it out. Go take advantage,” he said.

  “Wh—what?” I stuttered.

  “Of the internet?”

  “Right.” I nodded, clutching at my towel. “The internet.”

  “I’ll be out in five minutes. Want me to bring your clothes up?”

  “That’s okay. I’ll come back for them,” I said, taking one long look at the library door and dragging myself into Max’s office instead. Dammit.

  I didn’t give two shits about my email. It could have been deleted for all I cared. I exhaled and looked around.

  Inside the floral cabinet of her work space, Max’s bleached-cedar desk held an enormous laptop and a glossy electric-blue folder from the Young Museum, but not much else. The ashtrays were empty, the coffee table bare. The bookshelf, however, still held the volumes I’d noticed at the party, and I laid them across the pink velvet and ran my fingers through their glossy pages.

  All of them were artists who had somehow disappeared.

  Dutch conceptualist Bas Jan Ader vanished in 1975 while attempting to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a one-man yacht, the Ocean Wave. The act of crossing was an art piece he titled In Search of the Miraculous, after a series of photographs. He managed to keep radio contact for three short weeks. His boat was found empty ten months later.

  Hannah Wilke documented the changes in her body during the months preceding her death from lymphoma in a series of devastating photographs titled Intra-Venus, revealing the rampant destruction wrought by her chemotherapy and radiation treatments.

  Charlotte Posenenske, a German minimalist, resigned from artistic practice in 1968 with a formal manifesto, the last lines of which read “I find it difficult to come to terms with the fact that art can contribute nothing to the solution of pressing social problems.”

  By the time I opened the slim black volume, titled Lee Lozano: Dropout Piece, my heart was working overtime. Lozano, who made the paintings I loved, the Wave series—disappeared soon after they were done. Someone had told me once she did it on purpose, the leaving. The book asserted that Lozano had indeed left the art world in 1971 with a performance titled Dropout Piece that ended with her burial in an unmarked grave outside Dallas in 1999. “I will give up my search for identity as a deadend investigation…I want to believe that I have power & complete my own fate,” she wrote in her notebooks.

  The title echoed across the empty canyon of my struggling brain: Dropout. Dropout. DROP OUT. That was one of Carey’s three notebooks in the library that I could not identify.

  * * *

  I made it six steps before he said my name. Tyler was in the doorway to our room, pulling on his inside-out t-shirt in the doorway.

  “Want to get breakfast?” he asked.

  My eyes flicked to the library. “Sure.” I sighed.

  As I descended the rest of the steps, Tyler ran his hands over the railing to where it angled into an elbow on the banister. He was lost in a dream. It was the same look as the first night we had dinner in his cabin, when he looked so devastated that I could barely stand it.

  “Can we stop at Pine City first?” I asked. “I’d love to brush my teeth and change. And I need to go to the studio right after. I can’t lose today.”

  “Tell you what.” He inclined his head to the side. “I’ll make breakfast at home.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “You’re right. We should both get the day started. We’ll get day drunk in town some other time.”

  I changed back into my clothes, and we climbed the stairs to leave. As I reached for the front door, he held out an arm and stopped me.

  “Alarm,” he reminded me.

  “Oh—right.” I typed Max’s birthday into the keypad, realizing that she hadn’t written it on the note. She didn’t want Tyler to know it. I supposed that made sense, given his conflict with Charlie, but it was nonetheless surprising, given that she had keys to all of Pine City.

  Tyler held open the passenger-side door of the station wagon for me, and closed it when I was buckled in. He lit a cigarette, rolling down the window with one hand and driving with the other. He was a good driver, sticking to the middle on those narrow country roads, and as we made our way back to Pine City, my mind wandered back and forth and over the lines in the book on Lozano. Lozano, Lozano. Carey named a project after her. Max was researching her and other artists who had disappeared.

  Then—it was as though an avalanche had been triggered in my mind. Facts tumbled down the slopes in a rush:

  Marlin’s, Jack’s, Jes’s, and Tyler’s studios were littered with pieces of Carey—the hexagons, the eyeballs, the film, the wax positives. Yet it seemed they could barely tolerate the mention of her name.

  “There’s one work,” Charlie had said, “that could upgrade the market for her previous works quite significantly. They simply won’t give it up.”

  “Everybody hated her,” Max whispered.

  “It’s never been fun,” Marlin cried in her studio. “Why start now?”

  “Other people didn’t matter to her,” Jack was saying, book in hand, that day on the lake. “She was kind of a dangerous person…anything could happen when she was around.”

  I thought about Tyler’s face whenever her name came up, and Jes—possessive, angry Jes, needy with Tyler and nobody else. Her film that showed Carey as a sad, empty copy, and the way she snapped at me every time we spoke. Jes didn’t want me around. I wondered if she hadn’t wanted Carey around, either.

  My next thoughts were like boulders, smashing against the floor of my chest. What if—what if Jes had something to do with Carey’s suicide? And what—what if all of this was about protecting her? Or what—what if Carey was still alive?

  Then the car was pulling to a stop. Tyler’s arm reached over me, the hard meat of his biceps and forearm pressing against my chest—

  Whatever happened, Tyler knew exactly what it was. I imagined he’d guessed my thoughts, and my face opened up in wide-eyed panic—

  Until—

  His hand hit the plastic handle. He
unlocked the door and pushed it open.

  “Home sweet home,” he said—and then he kissed my cheek.

  * * *

  I had one hand on my clavicle, like I always did when panic took over for reality, and then—as soon as I realized it—my lens changed. I ticked off a mental list: I was hungover, hungry, tired. I was obsessive; I was jealous; I was stressed. I was acting, as my ex-boyfriend George used to say, like a paranoid, insane person. I took a step back and tried to think it through a second time.

  Jes was gruff, but people like us didn’t kill other people. Tyler was sad. Marlin was sensitive. Jack was preoccupied. None of them wanted to keep thinking or talking about Carey, and that was their right. The more I rationalized their behavior, the more my own thoughts seemed silly and irrational—as foolish and superficial and crassly speculative as the people at Max’s party.

  Five minutes later I was at Tyler’s. Water boiling for coffee, eggs and bacon frying in a pan. I sat at his burnished black dining table, folding his black linen napkins into tiny swans.

  “Where’d you learn how to do that?”

  I hesitated before replying. “I was a maid in a motel, the summer between high school and college.”

  “In Florida?”

  “Yeah. Horseshoe Beach, Florida. It’s on the Gulf. It’s very Gulf,” I said. “Everybody had tribal tattoos. That was the summer I worked with my mother.”

  She was fired six weeks in for drinking on the job. After that I drove to work in her car every day alone, and returned to find the house empty. She would be out somewhere, with someone. The day I left for the Academy, I worked my shift and came back with my last paycheck. She wasn’t home. I signed the reverse, tucked it under a lamp, shouldered my duffel bag, and took the bus to the airport.

  But I didn’t tell Tyler that.

  He finished making our breakfast. I sat there, roiling in confusion, unsure of what to say. I was dying to ask about everything, to find out whether I was rational or irrational. I wanted to know about the lawsuit, the notebook, the film, the connection to Lee Lozano, but it had been made very clear that pressing him on Carey would only cause a rift between us, like when Marlin had accidentally printed her name. Every ounce of my curiosity about Carey was tempered by my dependence on him.