Still—it went that way after all. I read once about the noises our throats make when we are rehearsing a thought; we speak without speaking, and those around us hear us without doing so. It’s how, sometimes, you know exactly what someone is going to say—because they have already told you, with their eyes and their posture and the inaudible speech they’ve been rehearsing in their heads and passing imperceptibly through their vocal cords.
He handed me a mug of coffee. My fingers spread flat across the surface of it. He paused and peered at my fingertips.
“Have we met before?” he asked.
“Do you know who the president is?” I replied, holding my hand to his forehead.
“No, I mean, like, before this summer.” He held my hand and stared at it. “Last night you said I look the same.”
“Ohhh—I was dru-unk.” I grimaced. But—determined, against my better judgment, to pick away at Carey—I said it. “Well—I was in one of Carey’s shows.”
“What?” He turned to stone.
“My hand was, anyway.” I held out my left hand. “She cast my hand in a show at a gallery, while I was still in school, and I saw it, years later, in Paris. The show was called 72 HOURS. I was, like, hour forty-two or something. The skin was falling off, but I recognized my fingernails,” I said, rubbing my fingertips against each other to make a hard, rattled noise. “See? They have ridges. My mom has them, too.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that before?”
“Uh…because you’re in mourning?” I offered. He looked incredibly confused.
“What do you mean?”
“You—I mean, wasn’t she your partner?”
“Y—yes.”
“She died two—almost three—years ago. You painted the house black. You wear all black,” I said. “You’re visibly upset whenever her name comes up, and you’ve never talked about her, or even what your life was like when she was alive.”
“I’m not still mourning Carey,” he snapped.
“Well—then what the fuck is wrong with you?” I asked, but nicely.
He laughed. “Nothing,” he said. “Can you believe that I’d rather talk about you?”
“No. I have a ton of questions. For starters—” I was about to ask about the lawsuit, but he cut me off.
“That doesn’t mean I can talk about her.”
“Weren’t you together for a decade?”
“On and off for fifteen years. But it was not a perfect relationship by any stretch of the imagination.”
“You can’t omit fifteen years of your life.”
“I know that,” he said. “I—I cannot talk about it. I cannot discuss Carey, or my life with Carey.”
“Why?” I could not help myself. “Why on earth not?”
“I—I can’t. There’s things you don’t talk about either. You don’t talk about your mother. That’s the first time I’ve ever heard you say anything about her other than she lives in Florida and you don’t go home.”
“That’s different.”
“Is it?”
“My mother is only sad.”
“Well, for me, Carey is only sad.”
“But I’m asking you to. If I told you about my mother, would you tell me about Carey?”
“No,” he said plainly. “I can’t.”
“You mean you won’t,” I said, shoving my chair back from the table. “That’s different.”
“No—I would, but I can’t. You shouldn’t care. It doesn’t have anything to do with you.”
“Is this because of what’s happening with Charlie, and the work you’re holding hostage?” I asked, the words landing before I could take them back. He looked at me the way he’d looked at Marlin—angry, hurt, betrayed—but I didn’t stop. “Because—I’m not going to run and tell Max everything you say.”
“Apparently you are, because she’s telling you all about our business,” he snapped, and then we were two dogs fighting, circling each other.
“She didn’t tell me that,” I said, exasperated. “Max never talks about you. At all. She has her own things going on. Charlie did. He says you’re holding Carey’s work hostage and that it’s all over money.”
At that Tyler turned almost purple. “Why the fuck is Charles Eliot talking to some random painter about our business? God, that guy is such an asshole.”
That’s when my brain melted, neurons firing in every direction, heart beating through my teeth while anger flooded my bloodstream.
“Some random painter.” I screamed the only words I’d heard him say. “SOME RANDOM PAINTER? You are the asshole!” And then I was out the door, running through the narrow path in the woods, over branches and leaves that swatted and scratched at my skin, all the way to my studio—the only reason that I was here.
* * *
I don’t remember working, though I know that I did—long enough for my t-shirt to soak through with sweat; for my hair to float up into a nest, then plaster itself back to my forehead. Long enough for my bare feet to turn black with dirt and my shoulders to hunch in pain. A pile of empty beer cans rose up in the corner, evidence of a fresh inability to abstain during working hours, a failure of my own personal temperance; coffee grounds and Pop-Tart wrappers filled the trash. I worked for—what—a day? two?—but don’t remember any of it.
I only remember being devastated.
I knew it. I knew that I didn’t matter to him. I was, of course, some random painter. I didn’t have a name or a place in his consciousness. I was simply another young woman in a long line of young women who came here to make beautiful things with our beautiful bodies. We each stood in for Carey until the summer ended and he could send us away. I felt foolish—and blind—and humiliated. I would never see Tyler’s inside—not really. And though it was the closest I’d ever been to Carey Logan, I’d never know her either, and the loneliness of it all nearly killed me.
Something was happening with DROP OUT—that had to be the film—but I was torn right down the middle. The more I dug up about Carey, the more I jeopardized my own future. All Pine City had to do was ask me to leave before my paintings were finished, or call Jacqueline, or Susan, and rat me out—and then I’d be finished, too.
I had to complete my work. By my count, I was almost out of time: four more days to paint.
Sometime in the middle of the night, Tyler drove up and asked if he could come in and talk.
“I’m fine,” I told him through the door, without opening it. “I need to work.”
“I hate that I hurt you,” he said.
“I’ll be out of here soon, and you’ll have Carey’s studio back for the next one. The next random whatever.”
“That’s not how it is,” he said sharply. “That’s never been how it is.”
“I don’t care,” I told him, and then I walked away from the door and turned up the stereo as loud as it would go.
Ten minutes later I heard him drive off.
As I collapsed onto the orange sofa—Carey’s sofa—I wondered if this had all happened to her once, if she had slept here with a broken heart, surrounded by the only thing that mattered, that was always there for her: work.
* * *
The next morning, I moved with a fury I hadn’t known for years. I was a burning, licking flame that passed over each panel in a focused heat, transforming every scrap of the virtues that had so consumed me for the past two years, passing them once again from my brain to the brush as if some empowered ghost were animating my body.
I had worried that it would be impossible to remake my own work, and yet, now I think, Could it have ever been any other way? Did I believe that a single effort could rip these words out of my body for good? No; it seemed they had only grown back bigger and stronger. This time, I let the palette knife scrape the cavities of my soul right down to the bone.
SOME RANDOM FUCKING PAINTER. I finished Modesty before the day was out. Not only was Modesty identical, but she was better than before—she was lurid and crude and hypersexual. I realize it so
unds weird to say that about a pile of paint, but that’s what she was.
Four down; three to go, the final layers. I doubled the concentration of Galkyd, stuffed a towel under the door, and ran the dehumidifiers on high.
I slept on the sofa again, waking with cracked lips and dry skin. Three days left—but I wasn’t ready to call them done. The next task, building the frames, was a labor so complex I hesitated to even think about it. I tried to motivate myself with the knowledge that once I built the frames, a truck would take them away and I would never ever have to see anyone from Pine City ever again. These will sell, and I’ll be flush again, and I won’t buy a house up here, I’ll get a new passport and move to Berlin, or maybe Warsaw, they say that’s the new Berlin, right? Somewhere in the former Eastern Bloc. I would cash my checks and buy all new clothes, start a brand-new life somewhere all over again. I would finally dye my hair a different color, and then I’d be a brand-new person, for real this time.
Yet—my body wanted to stop. It didn’t matter how little time remained. I was very nearly broken.
Yuck, I thought, smelling my armpits, which had spent days sweating through my shirt, recoiling as my stomach howled with emptiness. I don’t have any clothes. I don’t have any food. I need a shower.
Back at Pine City, everyone could be there—Jack and Marlin, Jes and Tyler. Maybe even Jack’s beautiful family, maybe even their friends. I didn’t want to see them. Some random painter. I couldn’t bear the humiliation of it all.
Dizzy, I climbed in my truck and drove to the Stewart’s in Union Vale for snacks. The clerk, the same woman who had kindly told me about the paint on my nose the day I’d first run into Max, stared at me with open confusion as I walked around the store, ripping hungrily into a bag of chips as I filled my arms with a case of seltzer, assorted snacks, cheap toiletries, and a promotional t-shirt three sizes too big that read ROOT BEER FOR LIFE. I smiled at her sunnily, ambling around the aisles on my blackened bare feet, dirty fingernails and paint-covered arms shoving a credit card into the reader while she bagged up my purchases.
It failed. She turned the machine around and punched in a code.
“I have to cut this up,” she said.
I nodded agreeably and rooted through my pockets until I found another, handed it to her, and crossed my fingers behind my back.
“You okay, honey?” she asked as the machine dialed. Concern shading her face, she handed me a pair of flip-flops. “Take these. On the house.”
“I’m fudging great,” I said, popping a potato chip into my mouth and stepping into the sandals. “Everything is great.” The machine blinked APPROVED. I signed the credit slip with a flourish and skipped back to the truck. She watched me through the window, biting her lip, hand on her cheek.
At the studio I showered with the hose in the driveway and washed my clothes with a bar of soap, painting in the root beer t-shirt until they were dry.
I took a break to brush my teeth and stared at myself in the mirror. My eyes were bloodshot—raw wounds in a pallid face. My hair was limp and laid flat against the bones of my skull. The veins of my skin pulsed below the surface; the edges of me were starting to wear away, to disappear completely. I was a floating bundle of nerves. I wondered if I would survive this, if I was surviving it, if there was another me who had already died somewhere along the way, if I was only half a person, if I wasn’t supposed to be here. I wondered if Carey had stood here, in this spot, facing this mirror, and felt this same way. I reminded myself that she was fine as long as she made sculpture, and that she killed herself when she let go of it. It’s okay to work this hard, I told myself. It’s necessary. If you let go you might float away. It felt for a second like I was flashing in and out of existence, but it was only the flickering of the fluorescent lights above my head.
The declined credit card was troubling. My three credit accounts were set to automatically withdraw the minimum from my checking account every month, so it was either maxed out—a distinct possibility given the interest charges on the approximately thirty-nine thousand dollars I’d spent so far this summer—or I’d failed what would now be a hefty minimum payment. Or both.
There was only one way to pay it off. I went back to work.
By the dawn of the next morning, I was almost done with Temperance, the carmine red of her surface better than before, deeper and sadder, even without the rubies. I took a break to catch a few hours of sleep on the sofa, but before I knew it, it was late afternoon, and someone was banging on the door.
* * *
“You cannot hide in here,” Tyler was telling me through the door. “I don’t accept it.”
“Too bad,” I yelled. “I’m not hiding, I’m working. Isn’t that the point of all this? How else am I going to stop being some random painter?”
“That’s not fair,” he said.
“It is completely fair and accurate,” I told him.
“I’m coming in,” he said, and then he was unlocking the door and walking inside. He was wearing a hooded sweatshirt covered in burn holes, and clean black jeans in place of his paint-spattered black chinos, and he had three days’ worth of beard growing over that angle of a jawline. The humidity forced his hair into loose curls, and large purple swipes of exhaustion cut his cheeks. Unmoved, I glared at him from behind a sea of paintings.
“I know you’re upset with me, but I’m worried about you,” he said. “Look at you. You look like an insane person.”
I ignored him. “Does everybody have keys to this place?” I snapped. “Give it to me.”
He looked alarmed but rolled it off the ring and set it on the hook next to the door. “It’s my property, so yes, I have keys, but no, no one else has keys to this studio,” he said flatly.
“Max has keys,” I said.
“Max is not supposed to have keys,” he said, putting his head in one hand and closing his eyes. “That’s not good.”
“Max knows everything and I’m not even allowed to say Carey’s name,” I told him, saying what I shouldn’t have said, the anger in my voice so sharp that Tyler flinched.
“Max does not know everything,” he said. “I—look. I am not trying to keep secrets from you. I—we are sorting something out, delicately, and it’s not my place to discuss it.”
“It is crazy to keep such a wall between me and them. You don’t talk about any part of your Pine City life. You have these big ‘we’ statements and then, like, I don’t know, change the subject. And what’s worse is you don’t want me to know.”
“What exactly do you want to know?”
“Seriously? Everything. I want you to tell me about yourself.”
“Be specific.” He was daring me to ask something, but I couldn’t tell what it was.
“Okay, for starters, my hand was in Carey’s show, and I tell you about it, and I know you were there, I mean—you looked horrified. But most people would be interested that we, you and I, shared something like that. And I want to know the hows of it. The whys of it. It’s—it’s our shared creative life. But you close up like nothing matters between us at all.”
“I—I know,” he stammered. “I know it. You’re right.”
“And—then—the other thing—is that she’s everywhere here.” I waved my fingers in the air. “She’s in everything—the artwork, the missing photographs, every part of Max’s house. And—she mattered to me. Haven’t you figured that out? It is so…it is SO lonely to be me. You don’t understand. You make this work that…it has a brain. It’s experimental. It’s ideological. My work, like her work—it only has heart. She was an unsophisticated girl from a bad family and so am I. You will never understand what it means to be a young woman in this business. Or to be—someone who makes things all the time and they don’t even know why and they can’t stop. She did that too. And so, what I am trying to say, is that she is someone that I need. I need footsteps, Tyler. I need to know how she did it.”
“She didn’t.” He said this very firmly.
“Oh—h
er successes don’t count, because she killed herself? That’s completely unfair. We all die, Tyler. I want to know how she lived.”
“I realize that. You’ve begun to make that very, very clear.” He sounded furious.
I didn’t care. “But you won’t say anything.”
“I can’t tell you. It’s not that I won’t. It’s that I can’t. Don’t you understand the difference?”
“You’re telling me that the allegiance you have with your friends is more important than sharing her with me.”
“I wouldn’t put it like that.”
“But it’s like that.”
“What do you want from me?” He sounded so pained. “My career—my life—my friends—those things are mine. I made them.” He pointed at himself. “I won’t give them away because you don’t have any heroes.”
“You have been given so much. You had a blue-chip gallery at twenty-four. You’ve had sixteen years of a career that I’m thisclose to never starting. You have friends, property, legacy. You’re right: I don’t have any of that. I don’t have that many friends. I don’t have any money. I don’t have any family. I don’t own anything except these paintings. I don’t have anything at all.”
“You have me,” he yelled.
“No!” I yelled back. “No. I don’t.”
It was so sharp that everything deflated immediately. He took a step back.
I did the same, then looked away, at Temperance.
It became clear to me, in that exact moment, that she was complete; there was nothing else to do. In the horrible silence between us, I took a breath and motioned to Tyler to help me shift her panels closer to each other, and when they were properly assembled we walked up to the loft to stare down at her.
“Oh my God,” he said, and his voice broke a little bit, and he was folding himself around me, pulling me into his body, and then we were kissing, those endless kisses, and I tasted a tear in my mouth.
Fake Like Me Page 25
