Fake Like Me

by Barbara Bourland

  The next five days were, as I expected, physically agonizing—worse. The lumber, forklifted inside the barn doors, was shrink-wrapped to the pallets in tall cubes, and I had to climb up the ladder to get the top sheets down. Eighty-three pounds is difficult enough when you’re on solid ground, harder still when you’re balanced on an aluminum staircase, so I broke two sheets in half—dropping them and watching them bend in slow motion, snapping and splintering—before getting the hang of it. Once they were down from the pile, they needed to be dragged across the expanse of the studio, which I did using one of the couch cushions and a drop cloth (it turned black in about five minutes) before angling them onto their sawhorses. I did this twenty-four times, and then I spent the entire next day with a makeshift table saw (a circular saw clamped to a sawhorse) making angled cuts on one-by-fours for the framing. I screwed framing to each panel—performed eight times per panel, twenty-four panels—192 repetitions of the same action.

  I didn’t see anyone from Pine City because I returned to my bungalow only twice in five days: once for a bag of groceries and my toothbrush, and once to shower. I longed for someone to visit me, to break apart the solitude, but I knew everyone would leave me alone. If I wanted to see people, I’d have to go to the Mission, or Max’s house, or, I guess, the nearest bar, which I still hadn’t found, but if I was going out, then my work wasn’t getting done, so I camped out at the studio, jumping in the lake to shower, using the studio kitchen to make coffee and sandwiches, and passing out every night on the orange sofa with a drop cloth for a blanket.

  I was an animal.

  Terry from Pearl showed up midway. We unloaded outside—I didn’t want him to see what I was doing, because Terry delivered to everybody—and in the end I wound up giving him a hundred in cash and asking him directly to keep the delivery to himself. He agreed readily. It obviously wasn’t the first time he’d been asked for a little discretion.

  It took an hour for me to drag everything inside. As I grabbed the final boxes, I heard a splash in the channel. Jes sat there, in a red plastic kayak, tapping her fingers along the paddle, snickering loudly. Though we made eye contact, I kept unloading as though I hadn’t seen her, as though everything I was unloading was a perfectly normal amount for one single painting. By the time I finished, she’d paddled away. I returned to the studio, panicked. How much did she see?

  Jes did not like me. She had no reason to keep my secret—in fact I suspected that she would be delighted to see me fail. Still—Tyler liked me, I thought, and so did Marlin, and Jack—I could get Jack to like me, if I tried hard enough. If I appealed to the unit, I didn’t think Jes would throw it out of balance. I resolved to stay out of her way.

  Next: flip the panels onto their framing. After that: gesso, forty-eight coats, with sanding between, followed by lattices to cut out of two-ply. To keep track of what belonged where, I let myself paint a teensy, tiny bit, labeling the panels and the sawhorses: O1, O2, O3, O4, H1, H2, H3, H4, and so on.

  Saran the paint bucket, Saran the brush. Stare down twenty-four sheets of two-ply and pencil in patterns you can barely recall.

  That’s when I broke—five days in—on the last step, only two lattices in, my arms so tired and my back throbbing and my quads burning and I hate pencils, I hate them, only Agnes Martin made pencils tolerable, in my hands they are crude and worthless. I cracked one in half, locked the doors, and left.

  * * *

  When I returned to the resort, Jack Wells sat on the deck of the Mission, reading, so I threw the truck in park to say hello to the only member of Pine City I’d yet to meet.

  He was alone, sprawled in an Adirondack chair, pajama pants and an Academy sweatshirt, nose in a book of short stories titled Faces at the Bottom of the Well by Derrick Bell.

  “Hi,” I said, introducing myself. “You must be Jack.”

  “The one and only,” he said, smiling a genuinely nice smile. “Welcome to Pine City. I’m sorry we didn’t get to meet at the party. Max said you weren’t feeling well.”

  “Ketamine is not my strong suit.”

  “Totally fair.” He pointed to the Mission. “I made a pot of coffee inside if you want some.”

  “I’d love that, actually,” I said. “I haven’t spoken to anyone in days. Refill?”

  He nodded, drained his mug, and handed it to me. “Thank you,” he said.

  I ducked into the mess hall and behind the bar, filling the heavy, rounded ceramic mugs from an old Mr. Coffee flecked with orange paint. I stirred packets of sugar and powdered creamer into my own cup, and as the coffee swirled and mixed, I stared through the windows at the lake. In the corner of my eye, I saw a black-suited man, surrounded by people from the party, the ones who had spoken so carelessly in front of Tyler. Charlie. He was pointing at the lake, at the buildings, one by one, explaining something, and then he brought them over to the east again, toward the path that led to Carey’s studio.

  “Do you see Charles Eliot a lot?” I asked Jack as I settled into the Adirondack chair beside him.

  He looked surprised. “No. Why?”

  “Oh, he was there, on the hill, with some curators from the party.”

  “That’s weird. What were they doing?”

  “Pointing, taking pictures.”

  “Where’d they go?”

  I pointed to the east. “Over toward their dock.”

  “The Carey Logan tour,” he said, annoyed. “See where she lived! See where she died! Bathe in the water!”

  “Oh, I’m sure that’s not it,” I said. I felt badly. “It’s such an extraordinary property. I’m sure he likes to show you guys off. This place is crazy,” I insisted. “I can’t believe it, almost.”

  “It’s nuts,” he agreed. “It’s such a liability. But it still works for me, even after all these years.”

  “Tyler filled me in a little, on the history. It must have been so much work.”

  “Oh. It was.”

  “Are you tempted to sell?”

  “Never ever ever. Sunk cost fallacy.” He laughed. “I think it was the wiring that pushed me over the edge. Tyler jokes that I’ll be making my grandchildren do their homework under the lights in my studio, like—you better appreciate the wattage, this is your inheritance!”

  I laughed. “I heard you have kids,” I offered. “I didn’t know anyone in Pine City had other responsibilities. I thought this place was a bacchanal.”

  “For everybody else, maybe, but I’m sober and married now, with, yeah, two kids,” he said. “They’re three and one, both girls,” he added, in that proud-parent singsong, and I made a gimme motion with my hand. Soon he was showing me a video of a round-cheeked toddler in a Spider-Man costume helping her year-old baby sister walk in the grass, his wife chasing behind them in a pencil skirt and sweater, laughing, and I was in love with them immediately.

  “Bell is three, and Audre is the baby, fourteen months, and Emmeline is my wife.”

  “That is a beautiful family,” I told him. “You’re so lucky.”

  “I know it. Thank you.”

  “What do you do during the year?”

  “I’m the chair of fibers at the Academy.” He said it like it was embarrassing.

  “That’s amazing,” I replied.

  “Yeah,” he said, shrugging, “it’s good. It’s good to be back there. I was teaching at Yale some, but the commute didn’t work with my wife.”

  “What does she do?”

  “Em is a public defender,” he explained. “She’s extremely busy. And I don’t have studio time during the semester anymore. Her mom comes and stays during the summer when she can,” he said, making prayer hands and raising them to the sky, “so that I can be here during the week.”

  “Wow. Lucky.”

  “For now,” he agreed, nodding. “I mean, my wife is on a roll. This time in our lives is about her. I never wanted to teach—hell, I never wanted to be sober either—but I couldn’t continue to be unstable without making her unstable, you know what I mean?�
��

  I laughed. “In theory. Definitely not in practice.”

  “You’re young,” he said. “You’ve got all the time in the world.”

  “It feels like I wasted it already.”

  “Oh, don’t give me that,” he said sincerely. “I must have heard your name twenty times this year.”

  “I’m freaking out, all the time,” I confessed. “I feel like I’m holding on by a thread.”

  “What’s next? I heard about your loft. I’m sorry, by the way. That’s—unimaginable.”

  “Thank you. I don’t know. Maybe—maybe I’ll buy a place up here.”

  “You like it?”

  “I like space. I don’t have any feelings about the actual place place. I mean, what do I want?” I ticked off my wants on my fingers. “I want a studio and a nice bed and to not be a million miles away from everyone I’ve ever cared about. It’s what everybody thinks about upstate, right? Like, it’s the idea of the country, but the fact that it’s outside the city is what counts. If we genuinely wanted to be rural and lonely and authentic, we’d move to Nebraska.”

  “Hudson looks like Greenpoint these days,” he said. “White people with bad haircuts.”

  “On my way up here, I passed the nicest-looking union hall I’d ever seen. I asked somebody about it when I got gas and they said, Oh, Local 110 is a locavore restaurant.”

  “We’re never on time, are we?” he said, laughing and shaking his head. “Baudelaire said we’re supposed to have our fingers on the pulse—that’s what makes us artists. But I’m late to everything.”

  “If I spent any time worrying about that I’d have to kill myself,” I agreed, swatting at a mosquito on my thigh—before choking on my coffee with a cringe of regret. “I’m so sorry,” I said immediately, wanting to claw it out of the air. “That was a terrible thing to say. Thank you, by the way, for letting me use Carey’s studio.”

  “Don’t stress,” he said. “It’s been a long time. It’s not Carey’s studio anymore.”

  “What was she like?” I heard myself asking.

  “She was a trip,” he said thoughtfully, looking out at the lake. His hands fiddled with his bookmark, pulling it out and lining it up with the bottom edge over and over. When he moved his thumb, I could see Eliot&Sprain engraved as the return address. “Did you like the work?”

  “I—yes. I mean—there are not a lot of us. My work is sincere, to be honest, and I got the impression that hers was, too.” He changed as I said this—closed up a bit—and I tried another tack. “Women are minimized so hard that when she was alive, I felt like I was in her wake, even if our work wasn’t actually similar. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I’m a Black man working in fiber, I’m sober, I’m a professor, I’m a dad. I’ve got about three role models and none of them are in my medium, even. Charles Gaines comes the closest. Jack Whitten, sort of, but he lived on an island. Hell yes, I know what you mean. I’m creatively lonely all the time.”

  “Right? It’s so dissonant. I want to be an individual, I want my work to be so unique that everyone says there’s nothing like it, but then, I’m always looking around, like, who’s making tracks? Who can I follow? How am I supposed to do this?”

  “Yeah. I think it’s unavoidable.”

  “I met her once,” I said. “Carey, I mean. She was the center of attention without doing anything.”

  Jack, looked at me intently. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it—it wasn’t quite suspicious, it was more than that—it was—careful. “That’s the most accurate description of her I’ve ever heard,” he said. “If there ever is a retrospective, I’m putting that in the wall text.”

  Or maybe—friendly. I breathed out. “Are you ever going to do one?”

  “That’s a hard topic around here. My personal feelings aside, I’ve had a hard time at shows where the person died only recently, you know? I hate seeing the bad work. I hate seeing the ephemera. It always strikes me as something that the artist wouldn’t have consented to if they were alive.”

  “Isn’t that true of all retrospectives? Isn’t it rifling through a dead woman’s purse, every time?”

  He pursed his lips. “Well…not when it’s a historical experience that is de facto presented out of context. I’d do it in fifty years, when everything is so different, and there’s a lens, a conclusion about this time. But I personally don’t have any interest in doing it now. We don’t know what she would have consented to. And I don’t know who it would serve—only the secondary market. And fuck those people.”

  I laughed. “I know what you mean.” I looked across the lake, toward Max’s house.

  “Your painting looks great over there, for the record.”

  “That was a definite surprise.”

  “You should be flattered. They don’t have any of our work over there,” he noted. I was surprised that he didn’t consider Carey’s interior design—the concrete tomb—within that great big our.

  “Ha. Well—it’s good to know that everybody’s burned by something,” I said, “even you.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said, laughing in agreement. The stylish young man who once parked a convertible on the sidewalk in front of the Guggenheim—not the curb, the sidewalk itself—leashing it to the railings with a yarn woven from his own hair, had found middle age, sweatpants, and fatherhood, and I liked him so very much. Jack Wells made me feel, for a moment, like I finally had someone to look up to.

  The conversation turned back to the other things we shared. We had a lot in common: He was from rural Georgia, a hundred or so miles from where I grew up; we went to the same school; we knew a lot of the same people, or rather, I knew of the people he knew, which I freely admitted, which he understood because once upon a time, he’d been my age, too, and so on and so forth.

  “I’m tucking in,” I announced, when the ache in my back screamed so loudly that I was reminded to go lie flat on my bed. “Thanks again for letting me use Carey’s studio. It means a lot.”

  “Don’t thank us. It’s truly fine,” he said. “She wouldn’t have cared.”

  “Really?” I asked, incredulous.

  To my surprise, he gave me a real answer. “No. Other people didn’t matter to her. She was kind of a dangerous person, but she had a real aura to her, a sort of unreality that was kind of magically pervasive.” The words poured out of him with a sudden rapidity. He didn’t sound angry—but he didn’t sound wistful, either. “Like you said, she was the center of attention without ever doing anything. You got the feeling that anything could happen when she was around,” he continued. “And in retrospect, whatever happened, happened because she made it happen.” Jack shrugged, turning his book over and over in his hands, staring out at the water. Then he shook his head and opened his book. “Anyway. Nice talking to you.”

  “You too,” I said. “See you around.”

  I went home to my bungalow with his description of selfish, magic Carey Logan burning a little hole in the back of my brain, feeling, for the first time, jealousy curdling around the edges. Carey had all of this—and she walked away, onto a stage and then into the water, like it was nothing.

  Chapter Ten

  When the backings and their lattices were done, I’d made it to the starting block. It was time to paint. No more setup, no more fucking around. I was back in the art of my business.

  The twenty-four panels were arranged adjacent to each other in long stripes: four panels across, six up, wide, roomy aisles between. Each stripe was its own row: Humility was first, closest to the door. Then Chastity, Modesty, Temperance, Purity, and finally Obedience lay blank and open below the steps to the hayloft. In a few weeks, I’d move Prudence in here, too, once she was firm enough to transport, and then they’d all be together again.

  I planned to work from front to back, at first, to stagger and rotate the drying times, and I made a chart, of what to do on what day, how to move forward, how to take one step at a time, but I was nervous anyway. No—I was more than
nervous. I was terrified.

  The chart directed that I should start with the base layers of Humility and Chastity. Both required large quantities of beeswax, petroleum, and resin in the medium. I’d tested the proportions with Galkyd and it had come out clean. Everything would be fine.

  There was no reason to be nervous. I knew exactly what to do.

  Yet—when I went to heat the beeswax, my fingers on the wheel of the lighter, I was overcome. First my hands went slack, and the things they held fell to the ground. Pearls of wax rolled across the concrete. Immobilized, watching the beads run from me, a crack of pain formed in my right clavicle and my breath stopped. Then the studio became a collapsing balloon, its walls and floor turning to rubber, rushing at me, deflating fast, impervious, airless. It felt as though the air itself was a plastic bag over my mouth and I could not breathe.

  I stared at the white ocean of gessoed wood in front of me. Carey had once filled this hangar, too, painting, glazing, and firing a veritable terra-cotta army into realistic facsimiles of dead bodies. My mind boggled to think about how much work that must have been: molding, casting, bisque firing, glaze firing, mistake after mistake, loss after loss. Yet: She wasn’t afraid to work so hard.

  I didn’t need to be either.

  I reminded myself that I had felt the weight of chastity, once. I had felt the forced perspective of humility, the delirium of purity, the rage of temperance, the blinding resentment of obedience, the shame of modesty, the regret of prudence. I had felt the burden of all those words on my body, in my body, through my brush; I could do it again. I was thirty-four years old and I was going to get my work done, and I was going to keep forming the life that belonged only to me.

  I swept the beeswax into a corner—the fallen pearls were dirty now, and I could not use them—and poured a fresh batch. This time, my thumb pulled the wheel, and the flame took on the burner, and the wax melted, and the resin poured into a bucket, the Galkyd ran like honey from its bottle, the petroleum scraped down, the pigment swirled, the medium was made.