Fake Like Me

by Barbara Bourland

  “How can you be the person that you are?” he asked me. “How do you walk around full of that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, pushing my face into his shirt, realizing the tear was mine, it had leaked out of me somehow, and then I made myself let go of him, and held open the door to the studio and forced him to walk through it.

  “Goodbye, Tyler,” I said, shutting the door in his face. I reached for my eyes, expecting to feel another tear, but nothing came out.

  Purity

  &

  Obedience

  Chapter Nineteen

  Max answered the door with an unlit cigarette in one hand and a glass of wine in the other, mid-laugh. It took less than a second for her smile to fall and her long arms to wrap me in a hug.

  “Oh honey,” she said. “Come in.” She didn’t flinch at my baked-in body odor.

  “I don’t want to go back there,” I mumbled, my face pressed into her shoulder.

  “That’s okay. You don’t have to. You can stay here as long as you want.” She squeezed me again and led me inside, holding my hand tightly, like a sister would, and for the first time since we were children I was certain that she loved me.

  “What do you need?” she asked.

  “I don’t know…a shower, clean clothes. A good night’s sleep.” I looked down at my feet; they were caked in dirt. My legs were covered in flecks of paint, my shirt was stained with linseed oil, and my hair was held up with an oversize rubber band.

  “I can do that,” she said, taking me to the second floor and depositing me in the guest room where the bed hung from the ceiling on chains. “There’s an attached bath in there. Hop in, and I’ll bring you some stuff to try on. Sorry—I’m taller than you.” She mumbled to herself, “Whatever, you know that. I’ll figure something out.” She slipped a hair tie off her wrist and snapped it around mine. “There’s a toothbrush under the sink and all that stuff.”

  “Max?” I asked. “One more thing.”

  “Anything.”

  “If Tyler calls, tell him I’m okay, but please don’t let him come over. Is that all right?”

  “Sure, honey,” she said, nodding and closing the door to my room. “Anything you need.”

  * * *

  Fleur turned out to be the sweet, familiar-looking blonde who had perched alone on the Goldsworthy wall at the party, the one who waved at me. She sat below me, on one of the sofas, and from my perch on the balcony I could see the small fingers of her manicured hands, the top of her bony skull, the part in her hair, and the collar of her printed dress as she typed away on a gold laptop. In one of Max’s old shirts and a rolled-up pair of Charlie’s jeans, I walked down the stairs, twisting my hair up as I called out to her.

  “Hi,” I said, wrapping Max’s hair tie around my bun and wiping my hands on my jeans. I held one straight out. “You must be Fleur.”

  Fleur set the laptop to the side and grinned, then bounded up and shook my hand strongly, with a confident grip.

  “Shooting star,” she said right away, and I smiled.

  “Yes. Hi. Nice to see you,” I said.

  “I don’t think we’ve ever officially met,” she said, head tilting to the side. “But I’m delighted to know you. I hope you’ll let me interview you. I’m a big fan. I’ve seen a lot of your work.”

  “I’m—thank you. Uh…today is not a good day. I’ll have some downtime soon,” I assured her politely. “In a few weeks.”

  “Max said you’re hanging with us for a while,” she said. Max popped out of the kitchen, squeezed me from behind, and placed a wine glass in my hand. I nodded.

  “Drink up, honey,” Max said, grabbing another bottle and walking toward the glass doors of the garden. “I think we should build a fire.”

  Twenty minutes later we had a roaring flame going in the fire pit, and the three of us stood around it, watching the orange glow and shifting against the plumes of smoke in a little circular dance.

  “Where’s Charlie?” I remembered to ask.

  “The city,” they said in unison. Fleur’s face was blank while Max rolled her eyes.

  “Whatever,” Max said, blowing out a sigh. “He’ll be home this weekend. Until then: ladies, ladies, ladies.”

  “I do have to go back to the studio,” I said. “I’m not done.”

  “Want to talk about it?”

  “I mean…yes, but no? I don’t know. I’m in love with him,” I said, telling Max the truth for the first time in years. “I’m in love with him and he’s not in love with me. And he is so successful and it’s so easy for him. And he doesn’t—he doesn’t understand what it is for me to be, I don’t know, myself. He doesn’t understand how lonely it is.”

  I wanted to say, Carey is between us. But I didn’t.

  “I hate men,” Fleur said, nodding with understanding. “Like, I really hate men.” I appreciated her brevity.

  “Yes.” I laughed. “I hate men too.”

  “To hating men,” Max said, and we raised our glasses.

  “What can you tell me about the book?” I asked. “I want to know everything.”

  “Oh my God, it’s sooooo good,” Max said.

  Fleur smiled bashfully. “Max has a lot to say about a specific time, so it’s easy to write,” she said. “I’m the coauthor. It’s her voice. It’s her everything.”

  “But you make my voice sound not insane,” Max said. “Without you I’m basically some bananas magpie with a pile of photographs and a billion intersecting stories that read like the drunkest cocktail party of all time.”

  “What’s your favorite part so far?” I asked.

  “Uh—” They looked at each other in cahoots, with one of those secret friendship faces, and then back at me.

  “We can’t say yet,” Max said excitedly. “But I’m dying for you to read it. DYING.”

  “What’s your second favorite part?”

  “It’s the part about you, actually,” Fleur said. “I realize that’s probably terrifying.”

  “I hadn’t realized that I merited inclusion.” I was genuinely surprised.

  “There is nothing better than that photograph of you,” Fleur said. “You’re the teenage dreamer. It’s a classic American photograph. I think it’s the cover.”

  “But—I mean, Max, you—Max burned it.”

  “I did,” Max assured me, blue eyes wide as teacups, hand pressed to her heart. “I’ll never reprint it as a fine art photograph. Never. That’s my promise. I won’t break it. But the best chapter is about you, that photograph, and my friendship with you.”

  “That’s not what I thought you meant.”

  “We don’t have to use it, if it bothers you,” Max said, her voice now softer than a cat’s paw—and twice as quick. “It’s the publisher…they think that it’s the one. I’m open…to anything.”

  “I mean, what’s so bad about having your face on next year’s bestselling memoir?” Fleur asked, flattering me now. “You’re the Mapplethorpe. It’s so honest.”

  I turned pink and stared into my wine. “What is there to say?”

  “It’s about what it meant to capture someone’s vulnerabilities and profit from them. And what it means, now, to be friends with an actual magician.”

  I was shocked by that answer.

  “Don’t act confused,” Max said, drinking her wine. “I know who we are to each other. I’m not afraid of it.”

  “I am,” I said, not kidding, and they both laughed.

  “Don’t be,” Fleur said. “It’s such an extraordinary book.”

  “Are you asking?” This ambush was making me nervous.

  “I’m asking,” said Fleur, sitting down next to me, cross-legged, her whole being tuned into mine. Max was suddenly at the fire, moving the logs around, on the other side of the column. “Max loves you. Max wants to protect you. I like you, but I love this book, and I want to protect it. That picture—it is everything.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said, overwhelmed by frustration. “I’m so
rry but—no. I don’t want that. I don’t.”

  “I know,” said Max, pressing her hands to the ground like she was trying to calm a screaming child. I looked around; nobody was screaming. “I know, and I won’t do anything that you’re not comfortable with.”

  “I mean, think about it, right?” Fleur asked.

  “No,” I said, and it snapped off my tongue so cleanly that we looked over each other’s shoulders without speaking for the next thirty seconds, all of us stunned.

  Ultimately, Max broke it. “I totally get it. I’m so sorry for asking,” she said, pulling one of my curls affectionately. “Let’s fucking get drunk and forget this whole thing. Fleur, you have to tell her about your apartment. It’s crazy. Fleur bought the world’s cutest apartment. It’s like half skylight. It’s so charming.”

  “It’s half skylight because it’s seven hundred square feet but yes, thank you, Max, it is charming. I’m fully redoing it except for the skylight. Actually—would you mind looking at photos and tell me what you think? I want to paint every wall gold but Max says it’s crazy.”

  “It’s not crazy, it’s genius,” I said, faking girlish camaraderie while my insides boiled over with hurt. Fleur winked, then scampered inside to get her laptop.

  “Isn’t she the best?” Max said, watching her go with a dreamy look on her face—one I hadn’t seen in years. Max was always at her best when she felt seen. I smiled benevolently at her.

  “Yes, Max, she’s very lovely,” I lied. “It seems like she understands you.” That one was true.

  The rest of the evening passed quickly as we drank wine and went through pictures of Fleur’s new apartment until suddenly they were aware of being tipsy, and tired, and they tottered back inside to make tea. Then we were hugging good night, dispersing to our bedrooms, and I was all alone with my wounded heart.

  * * *

  Even Max’s patented brand of calculated manipulation wasn’t enough to keep Tyler from my thoughts. I thought about him all night. About the shape of his face and the smell of his armpit, and the feeling of him, that destabilizing unfolding that took place whenever we reached for each other. I tried to tell myself that I would never feel those things again, so I might as well get over it tonight. The sooner the better. But then the other half of my brain would wish for him to open the door and tell me that he was sorry. That’s the real cruelty of a broken heart. The only person you want to discuss it with is the person who did the breaking.

  I ricocheted like that, between regret and desire, for hours and hours. Each time I began to fall asleep, I would think something—a want of him or the burn of rejection—and jolt awake again. It felt like waking up in the bathtub at the exact moment the water has entered your mouth: It’s not clear which way is up. In that state I relived every single one of our conversations, seeing them from a new perspective—the one where I was a dumb girl from a small town, buzzing around his chest because he was the center of the universe and I was a fly. All us flies look the same.

  “I’m a saint, bleeding from my eyes,” I remembered telling him, something I meant at the time even though I made it sound like a joke. Now I hated it. “My skin gets so thin you could break it with a fingernail.” Absurd. I wished that I could take it all back and do none of it over again. This time I would not reach for him in his studio. I would not look him in the eyes. I would not let myself want.

  It is so awful to want. I have let myself want so few things, because—the tension of it—I can barely stand it. I let myself want my paintings, when I am making them, and then I force myself to push them away, and that’s—I can barely handle that.

  If God is real, then Don’t Let Yourself Want should be the first commandment. Don’t let yourself want anything. Be happy with the life you’ve got. It’s all she’s going to give you.

  * * *

  Purity—and then Obedience—and then frames—and then crates. The closer I got to the end, the more work seemed to appear. As the paintings cured, I would build their frames: custom semi-opaque fiberglass encasements, rather like giant cellphone cases, ones that I liked to ring in bands of brightly colored, rubberized silicone because I preferred the texture of how rubber sits against a wall over the hard gnash of almost any other material.

  I couldn’t move any of the paintings myself. The panels, yes—they were only 100 to 150 pounds each—but the whole assembly weighed somewhere between 600 and 700 pounds. Because of their heft, I would need to build a lightweight dummy painting, carve a foam inverse of the frame shape that I wanted, and create a mold from that. Then I’d need to cast seven frames, or more likely eight since I always managed to break one. (This is why you have assistants.) Each of these actions—building the dummy, carving the foam, creating the mold, casting one frame—would take a day or longer. I’d need to rent a hydraulic lift to fit them onto their corresponding paintings. Then—I’d have to build their crates for shipping.

  That work, the work I needed to do once I was done painting, should have taken all summer. The realization of this hit me the moment that I woke up at Max’s house—and then I was filled with the desire to lie in bed all day. I didn’t want to go to work. I wanted to do anything but work. But I can’t, I reminded myself. I need to finish, as soon as possible, or there will be no more money to send my mother, no more money for shelter, or food, or for more paintings. It’s not negotiable. There’s no time to take off—no boss to call—nobody to cover my shift. I told myself that this was the last time they would be mine. As I held the knob of the door in my hand, I heard Carey’s words echoing inside my head: The work comes first. Always.

  I drove the long way back to the studio, clockwise, so that I didn’t pass the entrance to Pine City, and then I worked. I was now an entire week behind schedule.

  But when I saw my paintings—those long, winking stripes of color, innocent and helpless—I was their mother again and nobody else mattered. They needed me. I had so much work to do, and so little time to do it in.

  I spent the day with Purity, using a V-shaped tool to carve a little series of trenches. Then I took a propane torch and fired a smelting bucket full of tiny lead ingots until it turned red. When the molten metal splashed down—first, burning the paint, then that black-silver pewter color pouring down the trenches in mercurial runnels—it was so delicious that I nearly touched it.

  It would have cleaved the skin right from my fingers.

  At sunset, I sat on the rickety dock and watched the sun go down over the far side of the black lake. Tyler would be doing the same, somewhere around the bend, with his real friends.

  The ones he would do absolutely anything for.

  * * *

  In those moments, so close to the end, I wanted to quit. Perhaps I could have.

  Back at Max’s, there was a note on the kitchen counter. At opening tonite in Hudson!! If you want to come it’s the Bright Gallery 7–9 and the dinner after is at Wazo. If not back later xmax

  I had the house all to myself for the third time.

  That profanely beautiful house.

  I wonder if it happened like it did because of Max’s house. In some ways, all I ever wanted was to know what the rules were. I wanted to be like Max, who could look at her mother and grandmother to learn how to be beautiful and poised and decorative in a way that gave her hard economic security. I wanted to be like Charlie, who could look at every man who had ever lived to learn how to be the man who got to decide which women were the most important.

  Even though I knew there were no rules to this life, I wanted to know what they were. I wanted there to be someone like me who could tell me that yes, work was hard and sometimes your heart gets broken, and here is how you finish something. I wanted to know what the signpost was between keep going and give up. I needed to know the difference between move on and drop out.

  I went straight to the library.

  Chapter Twenty

  A pit formed in the bottom of my stomach as I examined its coffee-stained first page. The handwritin
g was ragged, but it was unmistakably Carey’s.

  DROP OUT PIECE:

  I will remove myself forcibly from the world in an intentionally posthumous work. I will fill a pair of large rain boots with quick-dry cement (volume over my feet is 1.6 gallons per foot, approximately 30 pounds per foot) and walk into the lake. DROP OUT will be filmed from two angles. The footage should be edited into a continuous, linear narrative and displayed as a film. It must not be referred to as a suicide: rather, it is my final work. I am of sound mind. I know this life is over. I choose to document the end.

  The rest of the notebook was empty, but this single page, covered in fingerprints, had clearly been read over and over and over. I stared at it, reading the words, amazed by what I saw, sick to my stomach at first but then angry that it had been a secret for so long, that it had never been validated, or framed, or hung on a wall, or even talked about, because I felt, suddenly, and so strongly, that it deserved to be. If Bas Jan Ader could sail into the Atlantic on a one-way trip and call it a romantic artwork; if Hannah Wilke could photograph her own fatal disease; if Lee Lozano could call quitting itself a performance piece; then Carey Logan deserved to have these explicit final words made public.

  Regardless of medium, I believe absolutely that any work of art needs to make you feel something. It needs to draw you in, to create and manage desires that you weren’t aware of. It needs to kick you in the stomach like a donkey. We look at death all the time—films and paintings and Christ—obituaries and biographies—memorials and televised funerals of celebrities. How many dramatizations of that last breath have I seen? Hundreds. Thousands? We desire representations of death, but we do not televise murders, or footage of school shootings, or the bodies falling from the towers. We do not want to look at actual death. It is sacred. But what is the difference? What is the difference when we are being explicitly asked to observe?