What kind of museum would buy it? What kind of collector? Who would show it? Who would buy tickets? Carey always made me feel that I was skirting the fault lines of what I was supposed to want to look at, and this was the pinnacle: I’d never seen anything like it. It was terrifying and sad—and it was a conscious, rational choice, written out the same way as all her other artworks, methodical and planned, a decision.
That’s what struck me the hardest: how deliberate it was.
* * *
I wondered if the film truly existed. It didn’t have to, not necessarily. She could have written this page and never filmed a thing. But either way, Carey did not get what she wanted, because everyone referred to her death in the same exact way: as the suicide of a woman suffering from a long-term mental illness.
I read it again. It will be filmed from two angles. Two reels and a notebook; this was almost certainly the work that Eliot&Sprain was suing Pine City over. Oh—holy cow—this was it. To be certain, I grabbed the other two notebooks that I could not identify. They both contained many pages of notes. I was surprised to find that they were both written in the same color ink, whereas the sculpture ones were written in such a patchwork of color, but I reasoned that she did a lot less moving around on these—there was probably a single pen that never got lost, as opposed to studio work, where you’re always getting dirty and losing things.
LOVE THAT MIRACLE turned out to be a tribute to Carolee Schneemann’s Interior Scroll, the piece where Schneemann pulled a poem from her vagina and read it in front of an audience. OTHER PEOPLE’S RULES used a quote attributed to Lee Lozano’s notebooks—“artist, critic and dealer friends, I can still smell on your breath those other people’s rules you swallowed so long ago”—to justify its performance of smelling people’s breath from across a table. The notebook was filled with descriptions of the breaths. According to the date, it was her last performance. It made me feel something. It wasn’t quite as…expected…as the others. Weird, in a good way. It seemed like she was starting to get somewhere.
I pulled down the white binder of her clippings and paged through it, looking at the dozens of reviews Eliot&Sprain had collected on her behalf over the years, until I got to her obituary. A sentence toward the end caught my attention:
“Carey became incredibly depressed following the unnecessarily cruel reviews for Other People’s Rules,” Mr. Eliot told The Times this week, referring to a performance series in April of this year where she smelled the breaths of strangers. “She retreated entirely into her own world.”
I remembered the nasty review I’d seen on the back of the crossword, my first morning here, how it admonished her for her confidence. “She is certainly no longer the daring youngster who asked us to look unflinchingly upon the bodies of murdered women; instead she asks us to regard her privilege,” it said.
It was cruel, I thought, agreeing with Charlie. DROP OUT was her response: a fresh request for us to look unflinchingly upon the body of a dead woman.
* * *
Tyler found her body. If there was a film, he would have found it too, so if the film existed, then Pine City had it, and they—or perhaps Tyler alone—were holding it hostage against Carey’s explicit wishes.
There were a million reasons not to give the film to Charlie. My first thought was that it was likely grotesque and difficult to watch. My second thought was that if Charlie was right about the potential value of the work, then once it hit the marketplace, Pine City could very well find themselves in a position to do nothing but discuss, support, disseminate, and manage the work of Carey Logan for years. They could be completely eclipsed by her—spend the rest of their lives living in her shadow, even more than they already did. Everyone would be curious. Everyone would want to know the truth. Everyone would be like me, scratching at their private lives, demanding to know their thoughts and feelings.
Like me and—like Max. I thought of her secret smile the night before and the books in her office. Of course—the research was for her book. Nothing was off-limits. Not to Max—even when she had absolutely no right at all.
Telling this story would make her more than a lifestyle photographer from a rich family; more than a rich man’s daughter; more than a rich man’s wife. She didn’t even need the film. All she needed was a picture of the first and only page in the DROP OUT notebook, and if she couldn’t get permission, she could simply describe what she’d read. Maybe it was gimmicky—but nothing is a gimmick when the artist is already famous. And especially when the artist is already dead.
Then—it’s history.
Max was right. I was dying to read it. Without hesitating, I left the library, ran to her office, and wrenched open her computer.
Max foldered by project name, not year. I clicked through them impatiently. There was the project where she circled global industrial sites in a helicopter and blew up the photographs to billboards all around Los Angeles, titled There Is So Much Money in the World and None of It Is Yours. There was I’m So Authentic, the project where she’d tried on other people’s clothes, how the photos all looked awkward, like she was wearing someone else’s skin. There was Connect-I-Cut-Myself, where she took photographs of street corners in her hometown. First Kiss, one of them was called; First Time Someone Called Me a Whore. In the photos, the houses were tidy, the skies blue, the whole thing robotically sinister. I’d forgotten about that. I’d forgotten that she was a good photographer.
But I couldn’t find a folder with The Art of Losing written on it, or one called TAOL, or Book, or Memoir, or anything that looked like it. I tried opening Word and recalling recent documents, but they were about shows—edits on press releases for her gallery and drafts of emails and random notes—not book files.
One email, sent this morning, appeared when I searched TAOL.
To: Anneke Bice
Cc: Fleur Madrigal
Hi Anneke! We talked to the subject and she’s still hesitant, but ofc I have the original release so we’re clear to do what we want. Still, I would LOVE her support on this, so I’ll keep working on her and we’ll get there by pub day! Fleur is right—it’s still one of my best pictures. Talk soon—xmax
There was an attachment. I clicked it open: It was a full PDF of the mocked-up cover. On the front, Carey Logan stood on the shores of the black lake, wearing the cartoon-dipped white dress she’d worn in the “Perpetual Persephone” photo shoot. THE ART OF LOSING, it said, in beautiful gold letters below her feet. On the back cover, another photograph took up all the space—of me, standing in front of a basketball hoop, gazing into the camera with desperation in my eyes.
The back cover. Not even—like Fleur had implied—the front.
There, in the luxurious reliquary of Max’s office, sitting at her beautiful desk, smudging the keyboard of her golden computer with my oily fingers, in my shabby clothes and tangled hair, a dirty little ball of rage penned inside this concrete kennel—I figured it out.
Max didn’t love me like a sister.
She loved me like a pet.
Max didn’t have the manuscript, I realized. Fleur would probably have it. She was the writer.
* * *
I was asleep by the time Max and Fleur came home, or at least I was pretending to be, door shut, my lights out. They giggled and talked a hair too loudly and smoked a cigarette somewhere—I smelled the edges of the smoke curling under the door—and then they were calling good-nights to each other, and bathrooms and bedrooms were slamming shut, and Eliot House was quiet again.
Everything was back in its place, I was certain. Still: I lay there for another hour, waiting for either woman to burst out of her room and march over to mine and demand to know what I’d been doing in her underwear drawer.
Yes. Underwear drawers, bedside tables, mattresses, closet shelves, under sofas. For three manic hours, I pried and peeked and snooped and climbed on chairs, in every room except Charlie’s office, which was locked up tight.
In Fleur’s room there was an empty suitcase
under the bed and an assortment of minimalist silk clothing draped from the hangers. Her underwear was folded neatly and she only had two pairs of shoes. There was a phone charger, but no phone, and no gold computer; those were almost certainly in her handbag.
The other guest rooms turned up nothing. Max and Charlie’s bedroom revealed a lot of expensive clothes and accessories, which I was tempted to take, or destroy, like a bad dog, but didn’t. When I typed 1839 into the keypad on Max’s darkroom, the door sprang open.
The room was exactly as I’d last seen it. Red lights glowed in the ceiling and hundreds of negatives hung from clips around the room. The little pile of scorched ash from where she’d burned my portrait was still on the floor; it had been scattered, stepped on, maybe, but not cleaned up.
I pulled open Max’s flat files, went through all four of the huge storage units, and found nothing. I peered under tables, sweeping my hand across their undersides, and even looked in the trash, underneath the plastic bag, before I remembered about the box she’d kept my Randolph pictures in: MOST UNIQUE.
I ran to the back, opening the box to find the puffy photo album—and a huge ring of keys on a silver leather fob.
The keys were in my hand when I heard the garage door opening. It was too late to leave. I fled to the guest bedroom, locked the door, and turned out the lights as they came chattering inside.
* * *
I spent the entire night fighting with myself in a hallucinatory half sleep. I stared at the ceiling and wondered what would happen to me when I died. Would someone put my notebooks on display? If I managed the career that I wanted, then yes, almost certainly. Would I want them to put my unfinished paintings on display? Would I want to be contextualized by the Maxes, the Fleurs, the Charlies, people who could not ever begin to understand me? Would I want my life to be summarized and commodified—every detail of it interpreted without me?
No—especially when it came to Max—but I would want the chosen work, anything I’d put in a show, to be shown. I would want all of Ohne Titel reunited, all of Accounting for Taste, all of The Distance Between Our Moral Imaginations, all of my Rich Ugly Old Maids and whatever else was to come, to be together again. I loved them. I wanted them to survive. I wanted someone, someday, to see the passage of my life as it had truly been.
To see what my hands had done every good day of my life.
Chapter Twenty-One
I left Eliot House well before dawn, stripping the bed and leaving a note on top of the bare mattress. So much to do. Thank you for the hospitality. I’ll be in touch when I’m free.
The woods were quiet as I drove, for them, anyway; the breezes still ruffled the trees but this time it felt like they wanted me to be there. Climbing out of the truck, I felt the dirt and the roots gathering around me in a swirling carpet. As though I were the only person the earth loved that night and she was folding me into her path, her trees watching me go, her lake doing the same.
I walked to the edge of the water, letting my feet absorb the cold, touch the sand, touch the algae. It furred between my toes. I reached down and pulled it up, and it stretched, long and wet, its caterpillar magic evaporated by the air. When it went back into the water it was itself again.
Some things are like that—themselves only in one single context.
The studio was dark, save for the moonlight reflecting off the white-tinted panels of Purity. The black rectangles of Obedience seemed to suck all the light out of the world, and as my vision adjusted to the gloom, a crack sounded, loud and terribly close.
At first, I held still in the darkness, watching the moon inch across the sky through the ribbing of the plastic-paneled skylights, waiting for something, anything to happen—but nothing happened at all. There were no more noises from anywhere, except for the rhythmic rise and fall of my own lungs. I switched on the lights and told myself sternly to be brave. The fluorescent bars above revealed that the only things in the studio were me and my paintings. All twenty-eight panels of my seven enormous Rich Ugly Old Maids—my precious, impossible livelihood—took up nearly every square foot of space.
At last, I went hard on Obedience.
The only taste in my mouth was blackness and murk, colors that bruised every part of Tyler’s house. Lake stones and pieces of the crumbling dock outside Carey’s studio rolled across my tongue; chewed-up pieces of the neon-green lichen that grew on the end of the Eliot House dock across the water stuck to my lips. I coughed out the air of their house, tasting the cement walls, so hard they made your teeth hurt just looking at them, the vines they let run wild through it, the dirt they slept in every night like a tomb. I pulled handfuls of the beautiful Dutch-style peonies painted on the black walls of Max’s office from my throat and tried to choke back the lush, strawberry velvet of her chaise. My teeth and jawbones became the red enamel of Charlie’s stools and the matte-black tailpipe of his Ducati motorcycle, all these consummately designed objects intersecting with nature, in a futuristic, self-sufficient house that would one day sink beneath vegetation, for not even concrete and rebar can withstand the power of roots and earthquakes. I felt Carey Logan walk into the lake in her cement-filled boots, I drank the fear in her skin, and, so possessed, I worked in a trance until the sun sank again.
By two in the morning, I felt it—it was time to stop. The ocean of oily slabs gleamed, each one a tiny universe unto itself, and it became obvious to me that they were done, each of them complete, not a one in need of a single drop of anything.
They weren’t yet dry, but they were, at long last, complete. They had to be.
I was out of time.
* * *
I returned to my bungalow along the weed-choked path that Tyler first guided me down, flashlight in hand, trying to be as liminal as I had once felt. I wondered what Tyler had told the others about my sudden absence. That I was crazy, probably, that I was temperamental, that I could not control myself. Or perhaps nothing at all. Perhaps no one had anything to say about a woman they barely knew.
But they were gone. The houses were empty, the studios were locked up tight, except for Tyler’s. His station wagon was still parked in his carport.
As I crept into my bungalow, Tyler’s lights turned on. I saw him through the window, stretching, making coffee. I wanted to reach for him—and then I was washed over in heartbreak. He doesn’t love me, and he never will, I thought, suddenly, knowing that it was true, and with that one thought, the hurt turned to rot and worked its way into my muscles and tendons. He doesn’t love me, and he never will. Nobody does. A rancid fungus blossomed over the ventricles of my heart. He doesn’t love me, and he never will. Nobody does. Each repetition washed the thought into a fresh cell of my being, the thought souring one capillary at a time, until they were all ruined.
* * *
When Tyler left later that morning, there was no note tacked to my door, or “my” chair on the deck of the Mission. As I walked to his house, I reminded myself that he could very well come right back; he could be at the hardware store, or the grocery store, or at a friend’s house, but when I opened his door with one of Max’s forty keys, the trash under the sink was empty. The bed was made; the dishes washed.
He wouldn’t be back for days.
My plan was to snoop with a kind of reckless joy—toss the place—but I didn’t need to open a single drawer. Certified mail addressed to Pine City, LLC, from Cartwright, Benson and Pendergast, LLC, lay open on the counter.
Dear Messrs. Savage, Winsome, Wells and Mayfield,
In the class-action civil lawsuit of Eliot&Sprain, LLC, Eliot, Sprain, Bricklings-Young, et al., vs. Pine City, LLC, the court requested on Friday, July 22, to examine the artwork in question. Judge Elaine Rafferty has issued a subpoena for the “DROP OUT” artwork. She requests that it be delivered to her chambers by Thursday, July 28. All parties are to bring any associated material, including but not limited to notebooks, film negatives, film reels, reproductions of film negatives or reels, writings, letters, images, digital o
r electronic files or any manner of documentation that may be pursuant to the decision at hand. All documentation is to be submitted to the court in perpetuity, and as such must be made accessible to the court. The court has requested prompt compliance and Judge Rafferty has made strong assurances that a lack of compliance will result in search of the Pine City property, immediate charges of contempt of court and possible jail time.
Please advise us of your decision. Copies of this letter have been sent to all voting partners of Pine City, LLC.
Sincerely,
Jeffrey Cartwright, Esq.
Cartwright, Benson and Pendergast, LLC
I looked at the calendar on his wall. Today was Monday, July 25.
Everything was in motion.
* * *
The row of metal lockers, padlocked one after another, were easy enough to open, steel doors clanging as I flipped their latches.
Mostly they contained the paperwork of his own practice. He documented the acquisition of every organ in those same black Academy notebooks, his handwriting always tidy, if small and a bit hard to read. Everything was anonymous. Names were truncated to initials; meeting places were coded; hospitals were all simply called “hospital.”
Many of the organs seemed to come from donors who had been in accidents, people whose organs were pulled but not used for one medical reason or another. Tyler managed to inject himself along the black-market chain to intercept these lesser, second-rate body parts as they moved from unscrupulous hospital orderly to foam cooler to someone’s car trunk to hopeful line-cutter.
Met Orderly K at a Sunoco for a cup of coffee, he wrote. He makes 8/hour and doesn’t have healthcare. He’s been at the hospital for two years. F told him about outside opportunities. He wants in. I have to think about it. He seems desperate. Too—too interested.
Fake Like Me Page 27
