Fake Like Me

by Barbara Bourland

  The film cut through a composite of Maria’s early days as Carey. Her first show, BODYWORK, was followed by CAREY 2. There was footage of Pine City making the work, filmed by Jes on a Handycam. Maria comes in the door and coos. She’s wearing a frilly, frothy dress—very un-Carey.

  “It looks so good,” she said. “What should I wear tonight?”

  Marlin throws her a plain t-shirt and jeans. Maria sticks out her tongue. “Carey Logan is boring,” she yells, right before shutting the bathroom door.

  Jack: “She moved into the loft in Long Island City. We were all in love with each other.” He exhales and looks offscreen.

  Tyler: “I wrote a whole manifesto on it, early on. Richard Prince and Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons don’t make a single thing. They have assistants. This was exactly like that. It’s the exact same thing. Except that in those cases the labor is executed by someone interchangeable but the idea-machine remains the same, and what we were doing was the opposite of that.”

  Marlin: “What was the labor? Was the labor the work itself, or was it the identity, the standing in the gallery, being small and blond, working-class and nonthreatening? Was the labor being the object of other people’s fantasies? Was it the emotional labor? Or was it the sculpture?”

  Jack: “Carey got famous pretty fast. We were special by association. The galleries opened doors for us—residencies, institutions. We didn’t have to figure out how to sell work until after she died. I spent fourteen years making exactly what I wanted.”

  Marlin: “I honestly believe that without our connection to Carey, we would not have had the careers we did. Especially me. I was a bisexual girl from the suburbs who liked to draw. There’s a million of me. My success was one hundred percent because of her.”

  Jes, back in her studio: “I would have been fine in my career, but without the money we made from Carey Logan, we never would have been able to buy the place upstate. I got to spend a year cutting my last film. Millions of dollars changes things.”

  Tyler: “I never would have figured myself out if it wasn’t for her.” He looks down, away from the camera, and his voice breaks. “Maria taught me how to be a person.”

  There was footage from THE BURIAL PROJECT, that night on Grand Street. You could see me in the corner of the frame, standing in a line, scratching my arm awkwardly.

  Tyler: “THE BURIAL PROJECT was great because it gave us forty-two fresh casts to work from, and all these people who had ‘seen’ her ‘work.’ After that we made whatever we felt like, and all Maria had to do was show up for studio visits and openings and stuff like that. That was easy because she was with us all the time, anyway.”

  Jes, her face flat: “She was in love with Tyler. Absolutely, unequivocally. She didn’t want to share. Him, or her. They became a unit.”

  Marlin: “Problems began to appear—tiny little cracks—things that were inevitable. Tyler and Maria had this intense relationship. Jack and I split off. Jes was left all alone. We fractured. We became afraid—of being accused of being dishonest, of stacking the deck, so to speak, with five minds pretending to be one. Of being fraudulent.”

  Tyler: “That’s an important technicality. It would have rendered us ineligible for nearly every solo show Carey was in, every prize she won, all of it. We were breaking the rules, and the older we got, the more important those rules seemed to be. When we were young it didn’t matter, but when we were older…it began to eat away at us.”

  Marlin: “We met with a lawyer and talked about how to unravel it. The problem was that we’d sold all this work in her name, and if the value of the work plummeted, we’d be exposed to that liability. And of course, it was illegal.”

  Tyler: “We decided to at least start making our own money. We started to give in to the market. We were going to kind of ease out of it.”

  The film cut to Charles Eliot, standing in Eliot House. “There was no one else we wanted for this house. We asked her over to drinks and she agreed right away. We were thrilled.”

  Jack: “We were floored. How were we supposed to get in there if she was the only one who could be in the space? I mean, she was not—Maria did not have the skill set that Carey Logan had. I don’t want to say she wasn’t an artist. But she was a performance artist.”

  Marlin: “That was the beginning of the end.”

  Tyler, now smoking. “The house took five years. It was supposed to take two. She and I broke up. She took up with Charles. His marriage ended. She thought they were going to run away together. Then—he married Max, who was staying with us that summer. Maria was devastated.”

  Max went rigid.

  Jes: “By the time the house was done—work we had not agreed to, for which we received no credit, that had to be done through an increasingly demanding intermediary—we, Pine City, were ready to retire Carey Logan.”

  Jack: “The vote, among the four of us, was not unanimous. Marlin thought it was the wrong thing to do.”

  Marlin, looking frustrated: “I envisioned it working out poorly. That’s all I can say. I was outvoted.”

  Tyler: “Carey was going to simply cease to make new artworks—she would fade into the distance. At first it would be a long vacation, and then rehab and a romance in Thailand, or whatever. We would pay her for five more years to do nothing but acknowledge she was Carey Logan and make zero artwork.”

  Marlin: “She agreed to it pretty reluctantly.”

  Jes: “She was instructed to alienate and insult everyone she’d met through us. Slowly but surely, people would stop wanting to see her, and then they would forget about her. It happens every day. After a few years, we would spread the rumor that she’d gotten married and moved to the suburbs, and Maria would dye her hair a different color and start her own life.”

  Tyler: “We were pretty surprised when Eliot&Sprain announced that Carey Logan would be exhibiting a new performance piece, standing in the gallery, holding strangers, like a fucking graduate student.”

  Marlin: “I called her right away. I said you can’t do this. You can’t be Carey Logan. Give it five years and you can be yourself. Just—just go to a beach or something. Read books. Go to therapy. Untangle all of this and get back to your life. We’d talked about that several times. And then she said, and I’ll never forget this, she said, ‘Who is ever going to care about Maria Clarke? Who is ever going to want a washed-up fake like me?’ I mean, that broke my heart. We had—we took her life away, in some respects.”

  Jes: “We couldn’t stop her from performing. The boundaries identifying who owned Carey Logan had shifted over the years. She’d done so much work to pump up Carey’s career. I thought it was okay that she tried to make it her own.”

  Jack: “I didn’t like any of it. But I respected her need to try.”

  Tyler: “Sometimes it was interesting. OTHER PEOPLE’S RULES was pretty strange.”

  Jes: “I think it was the reviews for OTHER PEOPLE’S RULES that pushed her over the edge. She wanted to make a mark.”

  Marlin: “The problem with killing yourself and calling it an artwork is that you’re asking the people who loved you the most in the world to validate it.”

  Tyler: “We had a hard time doing that.”

  Jack: “I felt very, very guilty. I felt like we had killed her. That we were responsible for her death.”

  Tyler: “We probably were.”

  Jes: “I don’t feel responsible. It was her choice. As the only member of Pine City who was also a performer, I unequivocally respected her right to define her performance. It’s not that I don’t miss her. But I won’t undermine her decisions.”

  Marlin: “We didn’t tell her family.” She taps her fingers against the window. “I think about that every day when I wake up.”

  Jes: “Maria’s parents were upstate alcoholics who used to beat the living shit out of her. She hadn’t spoken to them since she was seventeen. I don’t feel any obligation to them whatsoever.”

  Tyler: “I saw the cameras on the beach and I knew.” H
e reddens, then chokes. “I tried CPR but she was already gone.”

  Jack: “I don’t know if DROP OUT is an artwork. She said that it was.”

  Marlin: “We’re in a weird position. It is fraud. If the value of the work plummets, we could be held liable for damages.”

  Max de Lacy, pictured in the elaborate gilded egg of her office: “I wanted to write about DROP OUT in The Art of Losing, my memoir that releases next month, because I deeply loved the woman whom I knew as Carey. She was a friend. I wanted her to have what she wanted. To be seen.” Max glimmers. The thing about Max is that she means it when she says things like this. The camera allows the light to bounce off the peonies painted on her wall, and cuts back to Max smiling; it’s an effect that makes her look as gauche and out of place in this film as a diamond bracelet in a homeless shelter.

  It cuts back to Tyler in his studio. The camera zooms out to show an empty room. “We’ve sold Pine City to Eliot&Sprain and consolidated our assets.” He looks around. “Today is our last day here.”

  Charles Eliot: “We have no legal action to pursue against Pine City at this time.” The camera zooms out to show him standing in front of the Mission, directing workers.

  Helen Sprain, sitting in the office of their Chelsea gallery: “This extraordinary property will become a true center for the arts in upstate New York. Performing arts space, a permanent collection, rotating exhibitions, funded residencies for marginalized artists—the Maria, as it’s now called, will be an anchor for the community.”

  Marlin, exiting her empty studio: “The next thing is the retrospective. We’ve loaned the museum everything we have.”

  Jack: “It’s not only the Carey work. It’s the work we made about her.”

  Jes: “I don’t care about the retrospective. We got what we wanted. Bring on the future.”

  Tyler: “I want to move on.”

  The closing credits dedicated the film to the memory of Maria Frances Clarke over a photograph of her standing in Tompkins Square Park. In a floral dress, holding a skateboard, grinning ear-to-ear, her hair long, dark, uncombed, she looked like a nineteen-year-old girl with everything ahead of her—and absolutely nothing like Carey Logan.

  * * *

  The audience was spooked. Some people were yelling into their phones and shoving past each other for the doors, while others stood, struck dumb, looking around for Pine City, who were not in the room. Most people didn’t seem to know whether they should be angry or outraged or excited or confused or what, and so they typed into their phones, searching for an article or a recap or anything that would tell them how to feel.

  Max, beet red with discomfort, stayed still. She hadn’t known a thing about Charlie and Maria.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to her, simply.

  “It’s fine.” She gritted her teeth. “That’s his job. To make people love him. He’s—he’s too good at it, sometimes.”

  Charlie appeared at the end of our row, all sorrow and regret, beckoning for Max with a furrowed brow. When Max stood I noticed that she was pregnant.

  “Oh my gosh,” I said instinctively. “Congratulations. I didn’t even notice.”

  “No, no, I’m carrying small, she could be a burrito,” Max said.

  “She?”

  “She.”

  “Congrats,” I said. She straightened up, then looked at the ceiling to force a tear to dispel over the surface of her eye.

  “Okay. I’m fine. It’s the hormones.”

  “Don’t worry about the photo,” I told her, impulsively giving the forgiveness she so craved. I had a thought in the moment that if I were ungenerous, it would be bad for the baby. And—I signed the release. I did. I was young, and I didn’t know better, but I did it, and I profited from it, too, in one way or another. I can confess that, now. I should.

  As Charles moved toward us, she took my hands with her tattooed fingers. “I think about it all the time. I think about it every day,” she said, urgently, squeezing my fingers. “I do. I do.”

  I looked into her big blue eyes. “I don’t,” I told her. “Not anymore.” When her husband was only a few steps away, I took back my hands and walked in the other direction.

  * * *

  The galleries, unlocked after the end of the film, were already packed. I pushed my way through, holding my dress in one sweating fist, and found myself back in their wonderland, though Pine City themselves were nowhere to be seen. The whole atrium was filled with FORGIVE/FORGET, rotten flower petals coated the floor, and the ceiling was draped with one of Jack’s ethereal nets. Carey’s bronzed heart, broken in two, stood gleaming on a pedestal. Every room contained a central work of Carey Logan’s, mixed with those by the other members of Pine City. Side galleries, drawn with velvet curtains, showed recordings of Maria Clarke’s performance works. The DROP OUT piece was playing, separate from the documentary, in a side gallery, and there was already a long line of people who wanted to watch it again.

  Then I saw a flash of pink and green.

  Prudence.

  She was on loan from a British collector. The wall text said she was the last piece of art made at Pine City. I reached up and touched her. This time, nobody stopped me. Instead, someone asked me to turn around and smile so that they could take my picture.

  That’s when I saw him in the crowd, watching me, in that same threadbare tuxedo. People were speaking to him urgently, tugging at his jacket. He kept his eyes on me, didn’t acknowledge anyone else, and pointed toward the exit.

  Outside? he mouthed. I nodded.

  The crowd was suffocating. I was pushing, shoving, squeezing to get through, as was everybody else, when I passed a room where Charles Eliot was holding court. “Well no, we had no idea,” he was saying to a group of people, looking elegantly disappointed. I paused, safe within a scrum of strangers, to watch him play this out.

  “Isn’t it fraud?” someone demanded.

  “There have to be damages. Right now—everything is fine. The work continues to hold its value.”

  Helen Sprain stood behind him, back-to-back, so they could work the largest number of conversations in the smallest possible square footage. She was elegant, with soft red hair, hard black eyeglasses, and a slightly oversize mauve wool suit.

  Charles said something out of the side of his mouth to Hen; she reached back and brushed his leg with one burgundy finger; he tapped her with his elbow and said a name; she leaned her hair into his and nodded in such a way that he could feel it—and all the while, they were carrying on multiple conversations with collectors, curators, artists, and the various personalities who had been issued a ticket. The Young Museum, I realized, was merely a venue. Eliot&Sprain had orchestrated everything: the work, the guest list, the timing—even, I realized, the seat assignments in the theater.

  Charles and Helen symphonically directed the futures of Carey Logan and Maria Clarke. Two artists for the price of one. Max appeared at Charlie’s side, hand on her big belly, and he brushed his cheek against hers. Max smiled. Hen turned and hugged Max, like she loved her—motherly, almost—while Charles looked on, something haunting his elegant face.

  Then I didn’t hear the noise in the room anymore, or feel the bodies shoving against mine. I thought only of Susan Bricklings-Young saying, the night of the turtle party, “He was so very in love with her. It was all so upsetting,” and I understood that she meant Charlie, and the breakup of his marriage. “She didn’t know what she had,” Susan said about Carey. Maria wanted to be with Charlie, but couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell him the truth about herself. And so—he married Max, after six weeks of dating.

  Charlie wasn’t Max’s prize, like I’d always thought. She was his consolation.

  And with that, the spell was broken. It didn’t matter anymore, not to me, what Max and Charlie did to each other, because I never wanted to see either of them ever again.

  I fought through the crowd until I burst through a fire exit, onto the sidewalk. Tyler was nowhere to be seen; the street was filled
with occupied taxis and throngs of people. A group of partygoers next to me lit up in a cloud of cigarette smoke. I bummed one, then held it between my fingers, unlit, while the city around me, dark and damp, honked and blinked and squealed.

  When the traffic moved, I spotted him—leaning, in that way that he was so good at—on a wall across the street.

  His hair, combed back, had turned almost completely gray. His beard was enormous; it hadn’t been trimmed in months. There were more lines on his face. He looked older, but the unhappiness he’d carried, the worry, the tender charge of fear and anxiety—that was gone.

  “You sold it,” was the first thing I said.

  “We did.” He shrugged. “You were right.” He took the unlit cigarette from my hands. “May I? I know you don’t want this.”

  “You’re right. I don’t.” My dress was still balled up in my other fist, and I let go of it, watching the wrinkled, sticky fabric tumble to the ground.

  He lit up and exhaled. “The Maria,” he said, shaking his head. “You were right about everything—about the retrospective, about Charles, about the film. He bought it from us shortly after you left, over market value, on the condition that we do the retrospective. They even liked the name. The Maria.”

  “Did he agree not to sue?”

  “No,” Tyler snorted. “He’s holding that card. But he’s as deep as we are. Now—he’s digging in deeper.” He looked at me with admiration. “You were truly right about all of it.”

  “That’s the thing about being cynical,” I said sourly, staring at the sidewalk, the smoke from his cigarette. “Sometimes you get to be right.”

  “When do you think people will start going there?”

  “The second it opens. Charles will wrap it all up in so much marketing, publicity, complicity—the next generation will stay there, show there, refer to it. Carey will become a romantic myth, like Joseph Beuys and his fat and felt and mountain people. Even tomorrow,” I told him, gesturing toward the crowd across the street. They were mid-twenties, stylish, curious; one of them watched us. I pretended not to notice.