Fake Like Me

by Barbara Bourland

  “How you feeling?” she asked.

  “Tired,” I told her, “but—I don’t know. I mean. I love them.”

  “They’re more than good…God, it feels so different in here. Less dismal. That’s a real change.”

  “Did you hang out in here a lot before?” I asked.

  “Not really.” She shook her head, smoke coming out her nose.

  “Were you close with her?” I couldn’t help myself but ask, even as I wanted to pull the words out of the air and stuff them back in my mouth.

  “Ugh. I don’t want to talk about Carey,” she said, screwing up her face. I tried not to roll my eyes, but goddammit, I was getting sick of this. Carey was everywhere, in everything, but nobody wanted to talk about her. “I’m actually here for me—”

  I interrupted her. “Max, I have one question.”

  “Fine.”

  “Why did Carey stop making sculptures?”

  “I have no clue. Tyler knows, for sure. You should ask him.” She looked annoyed.

  “Fine. What is it?”

  “I have a favor to ask. Fleur, my writer, who was at the party, I don’t think you met her, anyway, she’s coming to live up here in a little bit and then we’re gonna work on the book for a month. You have to tell her everything. About me, I mean. And I’m going to need your help with all my photos.”

  I climbed down from the ladder, grabbed another jar, and climbed back up. “I don’t think you want me to do that.” I tapped the jar, and a shower of blue powder rained down onto Humility.

  “I’m a straight shooter.” She winked. “I’ve got nothing to hide.”

  “Okay. What about the year you had cornrows?”

  “Hilarious. Go ahead.”

  “The dad you fucked in the coatroom at Helen what’s-her-name’s bat mitzvah.”

  “Finger fucked. But yes, sure. That guy was such a pro,” she said wistfully.

  “What’s he doing now?”

  “He’s in prison for tax evasion.”

  “And Petey?”

  “Absolutely,” she said happily. “There’s a whole chapter on Petey.”

  “Charlie?”

  “Well. No. Ha. I mean, the, like, adult part of my life isn’t even a good story.”

  I exhaled heavily. “I have so much to do,” I told her. “I need to keep going. I don’t have time for your stuff, to be honest. I’m sorry—until these are ready to sit and dry, I’m busy all day all the time. I have less than a week to paint, but then I’m around.”

  “Then let’s get you an assistant,” she said, pulling out her phone and texting rapidly. “Pine City can always put up more people.”

  “No. Max, don’t worry about it. My last assistant got a way better job. Goat Group started giving health insurance.”

  “Are you sure? It’s no big deal.”

  “Nobody can know about this.”

  “That’s what NDAs are for. I want you to feel supported.”

  “I do,” I told her. “You can make me feel supported by keeping this to yourself,” I demanded, waving my arm over the room. She zipped her mouth and crossed her heart again, then reached into the canvas tote bag she’d brought with her and pulled out two cans of ice-cold seltzer.

  “Want?” she asked, pulling the tab, cracking it open, handing it off to me before I could even reply. I took a long sip and belched ten seconds later, loudly.

  Max laughed and we were both suddenly ten years old again. “Let’s have a beer,” she said.

  “I can’t drink and work.”

  “You cannot possibly do any more work today,” she insisted. “Come on. Let me feed you. It’s the actual least I can do.”

  I looked at Chastity from above, at the four greasy eggshell-and-pearl panels scattered with bombs of color, and mentally assembled it.

  “Lady…this is done,” she said approvingly, and I knew Max was right. This time, I didn’t feel the need to fight her; I didn’t feel the need to compete with her about my own work. I accepted what she saw, and she climbed up on the ladder, to be certain, and then we both looked at it from the stairs to the loft, then minutes later I’d locked up the studio and was seated in the passenger side of Max’s open-top vintage army jeep, seltzers in our hands. She drove us back to her house, taking the east exit and going left on the main road and left again, counterclockwise around the lake, a route I hadn’t yet taken. It felt quicker than going the other way.

  At the end of her driveway she turned down a hidden road to the left of the front door—that plain metal doorway set into the hill—and we careened toward a glass wall that parted just in time. Max pulled into a huge garage and threw the car into park. I ran my fingers over the spotless enameled bodies of the three other vehicles lining the space: one green vintage convertible, one shiny new electric SUV, and a jet-black motorcycle, its edges hard and matte. Max pushed open the nine-foot-high bleached-cedar door into the house and ushered me through it.

  “DANNY, make dinner!” Max yelled once we walked in, popping out somewhere on the third floor. I was taken aback at her rudeness. The Max I knew was privileged, sure, but she would never yell at anyone, certainly not her help. I stopped short and looked around for the person she was screaming at, but Max laughed at me.

  “I’m talking to the house,” she said, and right on cue the vocal stylings of a smooth California lady robot bubbled from a speaker in the ceiling.

  “Duck or pork?” asked the house’s disembodied voice.

  “Pork,” she said definitively. “You had the duck already, right? When Charlie made you dinner?”

  I nodded, squirming inside at the memory. “It was delicious.”

  “Forty minutes,” the house told her.

  “That’s the DANNI: the Digital Atmosphere Neural Net Infrared. It’s the ‘smart house’ thing,” Max said as she led me down the concrete waterfall that made up the central staircase. “It was designed after these ‘future houses’ that Charlie was obsessed with as a boy—those things they had at world’s fairs, you know, the ones that would show you how future people lived. He wanted to make one. The floors and walls contain the heating elements; the plumbing is a gray-water system that comes from the same stream that feeds the lake. It gets filtered, used, and eventually irrigates the property…this house is like a bunker, in its own way. It has a kind of self-sufficiency.”

  The ground-floor courtyard was filled with a handful of extra-long velvet sofas and an enormous round dining table. When we got to the kitchen—a room paneled seamlessly in bias-cut bleached cedar, same as the doors throughout the house—she pressed her hand into the wall. It moved away to reveal a hidden wine cellar the size of a standard living room, with walls made from a packed, damp chalk, like a real champagne cave in France. Max strolled through the racks, turning over bottle after bottle until she came across something that met her standards. I pulled angled red wine glasses off a shelf near the door. She popped the bottle open easily and splashed some into the glasses.

  “Did you see the house at the party?” she asked. “Or did Charlie show you around?”

  “The courtyard, the library, your office, and the deck,” I told her. “Is there more?”

  “Let’s walk,” Max insisted. She took me through each room in the house, through its seven bedrooms on the second and ground levels, where the beds hung on chains from the ceiling, floated on hidden platforms, were cast deep into the floor, or, in the case of the master, dug into the hill itself. Their bed was cocooned halfway inside a glass bay, stretching back five feet into the dirt of the hill. Tree roots, ants, rocks, and layers of soil were the only things visible through its windows, a layered, sedimentary view, a unique variation on the wide picture window. The walls were painted a glowing, velvety blue, and a ten-by-ten painting, a wild abstract made in the early 1960s by Joan Mitchell, was positioned opposite their bed. I stood in front of it for several minutes and let her colors pass through me. I felt them all: dandelion white, Kool-Aid pink, Italian teal, shining medieval goldenrod
, the cold blue of the bottom of a rain cloud.

  “Someone told me you were her aesthetic granddaughter at the party,” Max said as I stared. “I completely agreed with them.”

  “Milot is trying that one on. They’re calling me the ‘daughter of post-post-modern painting.’ It’s this whole riff on the idea that painting ‘died’ and it’s being ‘resurrected.’”

  “Are you?”

  “Well…No. I don’t think painting is dead. Despite the fact that ninety percent of famous living painters are men, painting still is and has always been an essential element in the art market, the hydrogen in their ocean of money. And secondly, no, I’m nobody’s daughter, that’s for sure,” I said, rolling my eyes. “I hate that we’re supposed to have these matrilineal bonds of motherhood and sisterhood. Like everything for women is about this kind of physical connection. But—men get to be themselves.”

  Max nodded, and we continued the tour. Plant life bloomed everywhere in the house, through living walls—vertical gardens integrated into the building itself—and she told me about many of the plants, moonflowers that bloomed only at night. She told me, too, about each painting and work of art we passed, and had a funny, loving, or kind anecdote about the artist who had created it, positive stories that built on whatever myths were already associated with each particular person.

  On the second floor, she took me into Charlie’s home office, the one I’d seen from the deck. The white-walled and white-floored room was filled with drafting tables and shiny red enamel stools. Slender drafts of installation plans, labeled with handwriting that was blocky and even, hung from clips on the walls. The air in the room was so still that the delicate papers fluttered from the breezes made by my body as we passed them by, and I felt that I was disturbing not just the drawings but Charlie’s own aura—the room rang with presence and particular, deliberate energy.

  We returned to the third floor, where the garage, Max’s office, and her darkroom took up most of the space, though there was a small box by the front door. “Where is that messenger,” Max muttered. “He was supposed to pick this up an hour ago. The lawyers called this morning and insisted that I box up the original design plans for the house immediately. But the messenger still hasn’t bothered to show.”

  “Why? What do they want them for?” I had to put one hand over the other to stop myself from reaching for the box. I was desperate to know how she did it—how someone so untrained, from nothing, from a backwater like me, learned how to translate her ideas into the magic of this house.

  “She didn’t tell me,” Max said flatly. “When it comes to Carey, we’re all supposed to go along with whatever.” Anger radiated from her, echoing against the cold walls that surrounded us, and I didn’t dare press any further. By the time we got to her darkroom, the feeling had disappeared, and Max was all smiles once again. She punched a code into the door to unlock it.

  “Eighteen thirty-nine?” I asked.

  “The year that commercial photography became available to the masses,” she said, the door clicking open. “There are so many people who come through this house for Charlie’s business that I’d rather they didn’t mess around in here.”

  She walked me slowly around the darkroom, a thousand-square-foot studio with a wall of purple-tinted windows, blocking out the UV. A framed black-and-white portrait of her as a teenager by Ellen von Unwerth hung on one wall. She started animatedly describing the works in process that hung from clips around the room and the differences between the vintage film stocks she was using, but I barely listened; I was thinking about Carey. It was impossible not to, in this house that reeked of the essence of her work—work that defined the place where life met death, where cold and hard met soft and yielding—despite the firm architecture Charlie had commissioned to contain it, or the décor Max had chosen to try to erase her. Max rifled through a flat file, wine still in hand, while I stared at the cement wall.

  “Look, here’s the one of you.” Max was holding up a photo. I snapped to attention.

  The picture was of me at sixteen years old, wearing a too-tight thrift-store halter dress and standing underneath the metal halo of an inner-city basketball hoop, its net long gone, deflated basketball in my hands, taken during her first and only visit to Gainesville. Max had surprised me by flying in for the weekend, so she could tell me all about filming her first movie.

  It was a complete disaster. My mother was particularly awful, trying the first night to get Max to go with her to the bar (without me), then eventually coming home so drunk that she passed out parked halfway inside the garage.

  Everything about my childhood that had previously seemed utterly normal to me—TV trays, Lucky Charms, bologna sandwiches with mayo and pickles on Wonder Bread, microwaved meat loaf, store-brand Kool-Aid, hanging out with boys who skateboarded in the parking lot at Walmart, getting our makeup done by my friend Jolie’s mother, Lea, who was a topless dancer and part-time hairdresser—all these things were suddenly unforgivably terrible once Max came to stay because she had literally never seen anything like it before. She was polite but asked so many sincere questions (Max didn’t know what mac and cheese was, even) that I knew my whole life was a garbage pit. It was like hosting an exchange student from Planet Money. Everything was a strange and curious wonder to her, which could only mean that every single thing in my life was something that Max and her friends, the glamorous girls who appeared in magazines, wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.

  The Saturday night of her visit, we walked along the highway after smoking a joint with two boys on the basketball court where she’d taken my photo. Straining for another cool thing to do, I suggested that we stop by the Sally Beauty in the Sun Towers strip mall and look at makeup. Max perked up right away. That was how we first bleached my hair and toned it with the wrong bottle, accidentally tinting it the palest of pinks, like the inside of a seashell, a color I had never seen before on a human person, only cartoons. Yet Max pronounced it beautiful and chic, and she meant it. That was the only moment of the weekend that she looked at me with awe instead of confusion.

  I remember thinking that Max would never want to be my friend after that trip, a prediction that came true once we got to college and she could brush me away without feeling badly—chip the barnacle of hideous me from the smooth, painted surface of the luxury yacht that was her life. I realize now that the experience of visiting Gainesville must have been agonizing for her, to witness the strange, manufactured, standardized poverty in which we lived. It must have been a waking nightmare, to see every sad contour of my life.

  My mother, to this day, keeps a green square of clean AstroTurf in front of the screen door because she thinks it looks “classy.” That Saturday night, when Max and I were walking home from the strip mall, Max stepped in a puddle and got dirt all over her boots. She wiped the mud on the AstroTurf mat, thinking she was being polite. But when my mother came home from the bar the next morning and saw the dirty mat, she slapped me hard across the face for making such a mess in front of a guest. I don’t think I even blinked—I was so used to it. It didn’t hurt. What I felt was humiliation—that she’d done that in front of my most important friend. And I think that I wanted Max to be shocked for me. But Max didn’t say anything at all.

  Then, to make it worse, my mother, who by that time of day was too drunk to drive, made us take the bus to the airport. Max and I barely spoke as the bus lumbered down the freeway; I mostly stared out the window. When I got home I discovered that Max had accidentally left a bottle of her expensive salon shampoo behind, and I used it on special occasions for the next two years until it ran out.

  We’d never discussed that weekend. Not ever.

  I held up the photo—that photo that has been in three museums, that photo I never look at, that photo she put in the ICP show years ago. This was the thing that prompted me to start painting again after the lost years, to make 31,492 (Hair Money).

  I looked at it and couldn’t believe how young I had been once
, or how beautiful. My face was defiant, sneering, angry; I saw myself so clearly, a little girl smarter than her circumstances who was yearning to follow Max onto the airplane, back to the exquisite cocoon of her life so that I too could one day emerge as something gleaming and precious.

  “I hated Florida,” I muttered. What I hated was that Max showed everybody where I came from, when I only wanted to be known for where I’d gone. I wanted to make more of my life than what I’d been given. Every time I pictured that photograph, I worked harder—even now I wanted to run to my studio, to overcompensate for it, for the image and the underlying fact that the photo was probably the reason that Parker Projects knew my name. But most of all, I hated that it still pumped gas into the oven of my being, that it could still motivate me, that competing with Max still mattered.

  “I don’t know how you did it,” Max said.

  “I read a lot of books.” I shrugged. “The schools weren’t so bad.”

  “You know what else I have,” she said, turning and darting toward a bookshelf in the back, covered in white banker’s boxes, labeled by project. She pulled a bottom one out, labeled MOST UNIQUE, and came back with a puffy photo album, the kind with plastic sleeves that you could once buy at the drugstore.

  “Look!” she said, and it was all the Polaroids I had sent her during our years of letter-writing. There was Randolph, my pet corn snake, at the car wash, pretending to be a hose; there he and I were at the movies, sharing a bucket of popcorn when we saw Before Sunrise. We were in the library reading a stack of plastic-bound books; we were at a college football game, Randolph wearing a tube sock with GO GATORS written on it in marker. There were nearly thirty pictures in all. I marveled that she had kept them for so long.

  “These are some of my favorite things in this whole stupid world,” she said.

  “He was such a companionable snake,” I said. “He was social. It was so funny.”

  “How long did he live?” she asked.

  “I don’t know, actually,” I told her. “My mom drove him to the swamp and let him out when I was at school. If he learned how to hunt, he maybe could have lived for a while longer. He was ten already.”