Fake Like Me

by Barbara Bourland

  That’s when the rain stopped and the sun shone through, warm yellow beams dissolving the clouds.

  Tyler was doing a backstroke and Marlin was towing Jes around, dragging her through reeds and into the sand. Jes actually smiled (not at me, and no teeth, but it was a smile) and then it was true summer.

  We played around in the sun, floating on our backs, in the space that separated Carey’s rotten cedar dock from the finished one on the other side. I swam over to it without thinking, climbing up the shiny aluminum ladder and scrambling across the polished maple of that finer Eliot dock, before I turned and looked back out at the three of them.

  They’d stopped swimming and stared at me, hard, as though I’d done something wrong. Suddenly, I remembered Susan saying that I looked like Carey. Maybe she was right, from a distance, when my hair was plastered wet to my skull, maybe we were the same, two muscular little women with big eyes and big boobs, and what I thought was a shiver ran down my spine.

  But it wasn’t a shiver—it was a pair of hands that touched me. Warm, bony hands that wrapped around my waist and shoved me off the edge of the dock.

  Chapter Nine

  When I came up to the surface, someone was laughing, and the outline of a foot kicked water in my face. Max—smeared with dirt, still wearing her organza ball gown from the night before—sat on the edge of the dock. A thirty-five-millimeter camera, a Leica rangefinder with a wide-angle lens screwed onto the front, hung from her neck on a worn leather strap. Her long legs reached out toward me, water dripping from her polished toes, and the musical scales of her laughter bounced over the waves.

  “You’re still in your dress,” I said, pointing to the muddy hem. Max looked down as though this was completely normal.

  “I slept in it,” she said, aiming the camera at me and hitting the shutter. “That’s the privilege of being a lady of the manor. I sleep in my gowns. Plus, Charlie went to the city.”

  “Are you high?” I asked plainly.

  “Not anymore,” she said, pulling the camera away from her face and peering at me with one big blue eye. A strip of extra-long false lashes was only half glued to her eyelid. I squinted back at her.

  “Cross my heart,” she said lucidly. “I’m in control.” She pointed the camera at the studio, capturing the truck’s nose peeking out of the door. “What space were you in before?” she asked.

  “My studio,” Marlin said.

  “This is better,” Max stated decisively. Marlin glanced away. “For her,” Max corrected quickly.

  “Speaking of—” I pulled myself out of the channel, took off my t-shirt, and then my shorts, and squeezed the water out of each. “I have to get going. I gotta shop.”

  “No!” Max yelled. “You’re abandoning me.”

  “Tick tock,” I said, shaking my head, turning back to the studio. “Summer is short.”

  “See ya,” Marlin called out. To my surprise, Tyler scrambled after me, grabbing Marlin’s keys and holding open the door to her truck.

  “I’ll give you a ride,” he said, checking the time. “You don’t have time to walk back. The D-spot closes at ten, and it’s a forty-five-minute drive.”

  “The D-spot?”

  “Home Depot,” he said. “I assume you need more plywood. Framing, too.”

  “Uh…maybe, I’m not sure,” I lied, clipping my seat belt.

  “Who do you think you’re talking to?” He laughed, backing out.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I replied.

  “That painting we moved into the lobby—it’s done. I know it. You know it.”

  “Uh…maybe. Hard to tell, sometimes.”

  “If it’s done, then what do you need this space for?”

  “Um.” I hadn’t thought about what I was going to say. “Stuff?”

  “You’re a terrible liar.”

  “I’m a great liar. Not right now. I didn’t have one ready.”

  “I called Susan to chew her out this morning and she said you were working on one piece. I didn’t correct her, by the way.”

  “Thank you,” I replied.

  “How many were destroyed?”

  “Two,” I lied, smoothly this time. “They take a lot of time and space. I’ll be out of here by August twenty-fourth. That’s the ship date.” I looked out the window, and the air collapsed silently between us.

  I thought about Max’s remark that he had a “new girl every summer,” and Jes’s repeated use of the phrase. I thought about Cady saying he was manipulative. I could sense that he was involved with somebody, though after forty everybody is probably emitting that same exact beacon, the one that comes from a lifetime of falling in love over and over and never choosing.

  He dropped me at my truck, and I thanked him again for the ride.

  “See you,” he said genially.

  “See you.” I climbed in my truck and followed his taillights back down the driveway, where we turned our separate ways.

  * * *

  I sat in the parking lot of Home Depot with a leaking Bic pen and a spiral-top notepad, doing arithmetic.

  Six paintings, four panels each. Seventy-four days left, including thirty to dry (if I cut everything with Liquin, heavily), leaving me forty-four days to paint. Prudence—who went rather quickly—took thirteen days. Times six? I didn’t have it.

  Forty-four days. Forty-four days. Forty-four days. Six weeks, two days. Seven hundred and sixty-eight square feet of paint.

  I lowered my head to the steering wheel and sighed, watching the condensation of my breath appear and disappear, over and over, on the textured plastic of the horn. The breath flashed in and out so fast, moving all at once, the world’s fastest, smallest tide.

  A tide. A body moving all at once. Swelling in unison.

  A tide.

  That was it: The only way to do it was like a tide—all at once.

  Of course. Then—oh then, I could take my time. Everything would dry, no question. I could mess up and add a layer if I had to, scrape them back. Oh—this was roomy, this was brilliant, this was the way to get it done. I raised my head, climbed out of the truck, and skipped into the warm fluorescent embrace of the store.

  Yet what seemed like a genius solution in the parking lot of a Home Depot on a ketamine hangover was significantly more distressing once I stood in the lumber aisle. I needed—shit—four panels per was a total of twenty-four sheets of five-eighth-inch plywood, at roughly eighty-three pounds per sheet was…nearly two thousand pounds.

  Oh God. I sat down in the middle of the aisle and kept adding.

  Plus two-ply lattices—one per panel; twenty-four sheets, twenty-three pounds per, another, what, five hundred, six hundred pounds? Each panel, backed with fiberglass, required twenty-four linear feet of wood to frame plus four feet to angle the corners, twenty-eight feet, times thirty-six, was…oh God…a thousand? Ish? Yes. One thousand and eight. Plus trash cans for mixing, foam to carve the molds, canvas drop cloths, four or five dehumidifiers, the big kind, however many they had, at least a dozen gallons of Elmer’s, and four or five pounds of drywall compound.

  I ordered from an associate at the counter, who promised they could deliver everything the following day. She rang me up, and then I remembered the sawhorses; I’d need…oh, two per panel, so…forty-eight of those, too.

  “What kind of truck do you have?” she asked.

  “Nissan,” I said. “Six-foot bed.”

  “It’ll be delicate but we can rope those in tonight if you want,” she told me. “Tip the guys if that’s okay,” and I almost hugged her. The bill wasn’t bad: five grand.

  Five was only the beginning. I needed pigments, and dozens of gallons of medium, Liquin, Galkyd, and turp too—not to mention resin, silicone, bleach, rubber, beeswax—and so I sat with my notebook, adding it all up while they loaded the truck. When they finished and the tips were dispersed, I called Pearl once—no answer. I checked the time and called again: nothing.

  On the third try, Jonah picked up.


  He didn’t sound happy. “You know we’re closing right now,” he said, annoyed, instead of the usual “Pearl.”

  “I have a big order,” I said. “And I need it delivered ASAP.”

  “Where to?”

  “Pine City.”

  He let out a long whistle. “You did it.” He was impressed.

  “How soon can you get a truck up here?”

  “I can get Terry to do it, probably on Tuesday, maybe Wednesday.”

  Rattling off my list and confirming the quantities took another twenty-five minutes and cost over twenty-two thousand dollars, plus fifteen hundred for delivery. Jonah dutifully took it all down, and at the end, he said Good for you, and I could hear his smile.

  “Hey, Jonah?” I asked, right before we hung up.

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t tell anybody, okay?”

  He paused. My whole body tensed.

  “Buy me a drink sometime,” he said. “And we’ll be even.”

  This time it was my smile you could hear through the phone.

  He hung up. I called the Irish bar where Jonah often went after his shift and asked to charge a hundred-dollar tab to my card in his name, with a note that said, Here’s a dozen until I can buy you one in person. The bartender asked, Plus tip? I said, Sure, high on charges. I’d spent twenty-eight thousand dollars in less than an hour, on top of the six I’d charged on my way out of Manhattan, So yes, plus tip, thirty bucks, have a great night. She said, You too, dear, and then I rested my forehead on the steering wheel and sighed.

  I should have done this earlier. I should have sat down and talked it out with someone and made a legitimate, workable plan and not hightailed it up here and made one painting and gotten drunk and sunburned and fucked off for an entire night on animal tranquilizers like an asshole. I should take it all more seriously. I still had to pay for the crating, the shipping, and accidents; there would almost certainly be multiple mistakes to come, I would screw up, oh God, the whole thing was so complicated, what was I doing? It was supposed to be fine art. These were supposed to be objects I’d spent two years on. Not forty-four days. This was fraud. This was wrong. I was a cheat. Above all else I was a liar. Someone would find out and nobody would buy the paintings and I would be thirty-four thousand dollars in debt with no job and no career and everything would be over forever. I’ll be a warning sign, the cautionary tale professors tell their students, an apocryphal mistake.

  And then I did what I always do: shoved my feelings into the bottom of my body where I didn’t have to look at them and went back to the studio.

  Carey’s studio. No—my studio.

  * * *

  Pine City took no interest in me until they knew who I was and saw for themselves what kind of paintings I made. This was exactly what I expected—what I’d grown to expect from everyone else—and it didn’t bother me in the slightest.

  For what is the point of a career, if not to legitimize yourself?

  The point of a career as an artist, you might say, if you are lucky enough to have one, is to express yourself. Sure. Of course. Self-expression is the thrust of it. But it also becomes about identification; it becomes the bedrock of who you are as a person. I think there is something about accomplishment—where you become so embittered by the realities of how hard it is to make it, to get anywhere at all, even to a place where you’re broke and living in a rotting shack in upstate New York and sleeping on a borrowed fifty-year-old mattress—that it is no longer possible to connect emotionally with anyone who had it easier than you or, more particularly, differently from you.

  The struggle to be a working artist is its own special kind of challenge. It involves so many compromises and instabilities and trade-offs, you find yourself automatically discounting anybody who had it normal—anybody who had a five-year plan after college or, more likely, graduate school. Is it legitimately hard to get a decent corporate job and climb the ladder and go into a fluorescent-blinking-cubicle cage every day and make shapeless conversation with people you can’t stand, to cash the indignity of such a paycheck every other week, to stick it out so you can feed your family, afford a home and a car and retirement? Yes. It is. It is very hard, but it is a different kind of hard from knowing that you ought to fly yourself to Venice and lie about a meeting with a collector so that you have an excuse to go to a party in a palazzo that you know will be photographed and thus place you on the party pages in the correct section of the intellectual department store, even though you don’t speak a word of Italian, even though your bank account will subsequently be empty for weeks, which will eat you up inside until something comes of it, which it often does, often enough that you make those kinds of bets with unnerving frequency.

  A five-year-plan kind of life is a different kind of hard than lying on the floor and waiting for paint to dry—than stuffing your brain with random information on blind faith that it may ferment and hatch and become something new—than putting all of yourself into something that eventually somebody will buy and take away from you.

  I’m not saying a risk-heavy lifestyle of erratic creative production is better than any other way: only that what it is, is mine. It is what I know. Every shade and stripe of every possible variety of connection is about wanting, above all else, to be known; for someone else to see as much of you as possible. Shared experience is important. It’s not everything, but it’s something, because nobody wants to be explaining at forty to a hostile audience why they are the way they are, but you don’t want to punch below your weight class, either, and wind up with somebody who only loves you because they don’t know any better—because the day they do know better is the day they’ll walk out the door.

  What I mean is, if you’re somebody like Tyler, or somebody like me, it’s hard to form new friendships. I wasn’t insulted by the way he’d come around after the first-quarter buzzer, and I took him at face value when he gave me Carey’s studio because I truly did appreciate it. And—she was dead. She didn’t need it.

  But I was wary about the others. I had no idea what they meant to each other, or what Carey’s studio meant to them. I couldn’t see their allegiances, their hurts and scars, the depth of their love for each other. I knew it was there, like how you know the air is there, but I couldn’t even begin to guess at the particular chemical makeup of the thing or how much oxygen was in it—or whether or not it would explode under pressure.

  * * *

  It took an eternity to physically unpack, assemble, and space forty-eight sawhorses, but I did it, and when it was finished it was the middle of the night and all I wanted to do was collapse. I considered sleeping in the truck bed, but double-checked the loft, though it looked empty from below.

  Miraculously there was a long orange sofa, a vintage four-seater spackled with smears of paint, shoved all the way at the back. It faced the wall. I couldn’t be bothered to move it, so I fell into it, pulling a stiff canvas drop cloth over myself as a blanket.

  I lay there, picturing Carey doing the same, unwilling to sacrifice the minutes it took to return to her white bungalow, working as hard as I did—no, harder—but I could not picture her quitting, walking in here and saying no, no more, I don’t need this, it’s not for me. Painting was hard, but I knew what would happen if I stopped. It would be like the days after Ohne Titel, when I was lost and depressed and devastated. Carey was the same. Obviously. It killed her to stop. There had to be a reason, I thought. I worried that it was the nature of the labor itself—that eventually you had to quit or you’d die alone, become the rich, ugly old maid of my imagination. Working like this kept you estranged from people. I had an awful thought: What if—what if, even with success, and travel, and friends, and lovers, and a beautiful home, all the things I want, all the things she had—what if, no matter what, it simply became too lonely? Carey worked, alone in this room for months on end, years on end, while Jes and Tyler—what—fell in love? I thought about Jes’s possessive meanness, performer Jes, who managed to be the center of atten
tion by doing something extraordinary. Was the temptation to perform because Carey wanted to be more like Jes? Was she afraid of losing Tyler? Had she lost him already—was it an attempt to get him back?

  These questions ran ragged in me, little hamsters on their wheels of doubt and anxiety, and I drifted alongside them until morning.

  At dawn I rolled onto the floor, willing myself awake, face pressed to the cold concrete, trying to muster the energy to get up. When I turned from one side—ugh studio, so much work—to the other, facing the dirty orange tweed, I noticed the cardboard edges of shoe boxes poking out beneath the upholstered skirt. Seconds later I was on my feet, dragging the sofa aside to reveal a treasure trove of boxes beneath, and then I was wide awake, active, cutting open the tape that held the first box closed with the edge of my thumbnail. The nail broke. I bit it off, spat it to the side, and wrenched the box open.

  It held a hundred or so small drawings on cheap penny sketch paper. They had a juvenile quality to them, a kind of childish, overly detailed look, like a Disney cartoon, too earnest. I didn’t like them at all—they seemed very teenage, illustrated—and many of them were signed Maria. The next box held assorted photos of a young couple in the late 1970s, camping with two little toddlers, a boy and a girl; the same images that had been on the sketches, clearly drawn from these photographs. Halfway through the pile of photos, sliding them through my fingers like they were playing cards, I stopped and closed it back up. This stuff wasn’t Carey’s—it looked like a Goodwill haul, the kind you’d pick up in bulk for collage work—and still I’d gone through it like a hungry dog rooting through the trash. I was bitterly disappointed. There was nothing to get, not from this, and I was embarrassed on her behalf, this Maria girl, for her terrible work. Don’t let this trash get into your brain, I told myself, and shoved the boxes against the wall and tried to banish them from my consciousness.