“I don’t even know who we would call,” Marlin said. “I don’t know where to start.”
“I do,” I told them. “I know exactly what to do.”
* * *
Three weeks later, the completed frames were affixed to the dry paintings, like big plates of melted candy, or panels from a spaceship. They were flawless. We sealed my seven old maids in crates like wooden coffins and the preparators came. I hovered, buzzing like a fly, every muscle tense, as they loaded my paintings into the truck and drove away.
Tyler stood behind me as the white square of the sea container disappeared through the trees.
“I don’t want to give it up,” he said, looking around at Pine City.
“I know.”
“I would have done anything to keep this from you.”
“I know that too.”
I kissed him, to see what it would feel like, if there would be anything. It was a good kiss, one that had my back up against the truck and threw my judgment to the wind. For a split second, I wanted to bury myself in him, to run my fingers through his hair, to curl up in his bed with tea and bourbon and his body and mine. And then I remembered, and I stopped feeling anything at all.
When I let go, I got in the truck and drove, and drove, and drove.
I drove all the way to northern Florida, where I checked into a motel and slept through an entire day.
My mother’s house looked better than I expected. The rotting siding had been lifted and patched; the screen door hung neatly on its hinges. The spiky grass of the lawn was mowed evenly, and her car, a newer Civic, was washed and parked straight in the driveway. It was as though someone had lifted it up and set it back on track.
The bell rang loud and clear; she’d had it repaired. Through the screen, the house looked neater and tidier than I’d ever seen it; the carpet was vacuumed, the furniture was aligned, not askew. An elderly woman came to the door. At first, I didn’t recognize her. Her hair was short, curls brushed. She wore almost no makeup and walked with a bit of a shuffle, the hesitancy of age. But behind the sun spots and the wrinkles, she was still my mother.
“Honey!” she cried, almost jumping through the screen. “Honey. You came home. You know, when I didn’t get a check from you this month, I started to worry.”
“Sorry, Mom,” I said, hugging her tighter and tighter, burying my face in the sagging skin of her neck, relishing her smell: menthol cigarettes and coffee and sunscreen. “Things have been a little erratic. I can’t stay long. I can send more money soon.”
“That’s okay, that’s okay,” she said, keeping me in the hug, rocking me back and forth. “Things have been real good down here,” she said. “I got my sixty-day chip. It’s better than last time. I got a new sponsor.”
“That’s good, Mom.” We’d had this conversation before. “I’m proud of you.” I’d said that before too.
“I’m proud of you,” she said, crying too, and then she was backing away from me, holding my hands, looking me up and down. She looked like a mother—a grandmother, perhaps—in pressed Bermuda shorts and a teal tank top with big wide straps over Teva sandals. The bloat had melted away at long last, taking with it the glassy sheen of her once-vacant eyes. Her mascara was tidy, unsmudged.
Still—her fingers trembled as she lit a cigarette. “How long can you stay, baby?”
“About a week. I have to go, um, I have to go to Paris, actually.”
“Paris? Paris, France?”
“Yes, Mom. Paris, France.”
“Whatever for?”
“For work, Mom. My paintings are being shown in a really nice gallery there.”
“Oh my gosh, that is so exciting,” she said, buzzing around and around. “Oh my. Okay. We need Arnold Palmers. Not Laura Palmers like I used to do, ’course. Come in, honey, come in.”
She pulled me in through the screen door and told me all about her new friends, her sponsor, her job, what was going on with the house. She asked about my paintings, and I tried to explain. She wanted to know the names of the paintings, but I could see in her eyes right away that she didn’t understand.
“Jesus loves you, baby,” she said, loving, condescending, dismissive. “I’m sure God is in the details. I’m sure those paintings will make people feel the things that you call them. I taught you how to be those things. Isn’t it good to be reminded how to be? To remind others?”
I didn’t know how to tell her that those words taught me only how to follow, and never to lead. It wasn’t that they were fundamentally bad. They weren’t enough.
I didn’t want to fight with my mother. I wanted to be close with her for a while, while her eyes were open, and her breath smelled like coffee, and her recycling was empty, while she was, for this moment, alive.
When, later, she told me that she was sorry—she didn’t say what for and I didn’t ask—I said thank you, and I meant it. At one point when she went to fix dinner, I thought, Even if this try at sobriety fails, I’ll still have this day.
I stayed in the motel for a week, not wanting to disrupt her space or the tenuous peace between us. I met her sponsor and some of her new friends. I helped her clean out the kitchen and the garage, and then it was time to go. I sold the truck to a used-car dealership, took a taxi to the airport, and went to Paris to install my Rich Ugly Old Maids.
One Year Later
Chapter Twenty-Five
The last time I saw Pine City, I was thirty-five years old. They were standing on the sidewalk in front of the Young Museum, and they were huddled in a circle, sharing cigarettes and talking quietly.
It seems in my memory that everyone turned to look—that diamond-collared collectors craned their necks, that the young men in front of me whispered and stepped aside, that businessmen looked up from their phones—and that even Pine City stopped talking—as I crossed through the party, head held high, and made my way through.
I was almost an hour late. I wore a long black gown over sneakers. My hair was pink again, and bigger than ever. Everyone moved out of my way. I could have turned—I could have gone in any direction—but I made a beeline for the window that separated the courtyard from the party, the shortest path to his location. With my feet on black granite, his on white travertine, I held my hand to the window. Tyler spread his fingers to match mine. Marlin, Jes, and Jack gave a small wave. They were pallid, worn through with anxiety.
“Hold on,” I mouthed through the window. “I’ll come find you.” I picked up my dress and turned—which was when the crowd swept me up, and I was pushed away from Pine City in a wave to the museum’s formal theater. Though the whole museum was devoted to BODY OF WORK, the Carey Logan retrospective, it would be closed off until after the screening. The heat from a hundred pairs of eyes licked my skin as I found an empty seat and lowered myself into it, but I was safe in the knowledge that nobody actually saw me at all; I had finally become comfortable in my own skin—and separate from it too.
Max took the empty seat beside me as the lights went down. The room hissed with whispered rumors.
“Hi,” she said carefully.
“Hi.”
“I didn’t know you were coming.”
“I decided at the last minute.”
“I want—” When Max said want I turned away, because I didn’t care what she wanted, and she paused. “You haven’t answered any of my emails,” she tried. “Are we okay?”
“We’re the same,” I told her.
“The same as what?”
“The same as always,” I said evenly.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I want you to know how hard I fought to keep that photo off the cover.”
“The back cover,” I said snidely, and couldn’t help but laugh.
“I did,” she pleaded. “I want you to know that.”
“It’s fine.”
“How’s Berlin?” she tried.
“It’s good.”
“Everything changed after you left. I mean—well, you’ll find out about all of it ton
ight.” She pointed to the program. “Open it.” How quickly she cast off her sorry demeanor and began fizzing with excitement instead, and I thought, Max, you will never, ever change.
The program was nicely made; a keepsake. An article. Thick paper—tactile letterpress—a rich emerald ink. I didn’t pretend to be shocked.
BODY OF WORK
a film by Pine City
NOTE TO VISITORS: This film shows a graphic death by drowning. It is not suitable for children.
This film contains footage from:
DROP OUT PIECE
35mm film
Clarke, Maria
Born: 1971, USA
This film is the final work of Maria Frances Clarke, a performance artist and filmmaker previously known for her role as Carey Logan. Carey Logan was the fictive persona of Pine City, the collective of Tyler Savage, Jes Winsome, Marlin Mayfield, and Jack Wells.
DROP OUT PIECE is the last of Clarke’s seven known works.
Max took in my blank face with confusion, then—a funny kind of understanding.
“Well, it makes sense that he told you,” she whispered, disappointed. “I guess it doesn’t matter now.” As other people around us began to read, a murmur went through the crowd, and then people were talking loudly. The lights went down. I don’t know if Pine City took their seats. People were talking right up to the opening credits.
BODY OF WORK
A film by Pine City
The first page of the DROP OUT notebook was projected. People audibly gasped. Then—twenty-two minutes passed as we watched a woman who looked exactly like Carey Logan on the shores of the black lake. Sweating through her leopard coat, her white dress, she mixed cement and poured it into her boots. Then she walked into the water and she did not come back.
The atmosphere of the room was like a solar eclipse. One second, everything was normal—and the next, it was inside out, shadows dripping from every ceiling tile, spreading from beneath every seat, filling our throats, our chests. “She swam out of view,” someone said. “There’s nowhere for her to go,” someone else pointed out. “That was fake, right?” another asked. “I hope so,” their companion replied. Agitation shuddered through the room, the wooden armrests shaking, the velvet seats suddenly scratchy and too small.
The film cut to Tyler in his studio, a close-up, in front of an unlit forge. He looked tired. “We were twenty-one,” he said. “Me, and Marlin, and Jack. A mortician visited Senior Thesis and taught us how to sculpt a human ear. We were impressed. We made ears, as instructed. We got inspired, and stayed late in the studio, after the mortician had left. We made noses, and later that week, a head, a torso. It was soothing, a welcome distraction, from the pressure of our own thesis projects.”
Cut to Marlin, in her own studio, light streaming in from the window onto her lovely soft face, the Blake quote on the wall behind her: “We decided to try our hands at a whole body. The process was initially difficult, but we found a way to work that combined our preferred mediums: paint, ceramics, fiber. We could all draw—that great and bounding line—we all had the hand.”
Cut to Jack, in his studio, sitting on an apple box against the wall. “Marlin and I hand-built the bones, the legs, the skin, the shapes; Tyler painted the decay. When we were done, it was good. We knew it was good. But it wasn’t what we wanted to do with our careers.”
Tyler: “I don’t remember which one of us thought of it.”
Marlin: “I know that it happened at the Half King, at one of the outside tables, because in those days we all smoked. It was October, months after graduation, when we shared the living room of our apartment as a studio. Jes, we’d met earlier that year. She was living with us by then.”
Jes, sitting alone on the black stage of her theater: “Everybody was telling us to be smart. Galleries were rejecting the same work we were praised for in school—Marlin’s prints, my music and films, Tyler and Jack’s installations—telling us that they weren’t salable. We were told, again and again, that the market needed an easy conversation.”
Tyler: “The first months outside of school, in the cold hard world where nobody cared, were a shock. Jes got rejected from one gallery after three months of studio visits and talks about a show. I lost like five bartending gigs. Jack started doing drugs pretty hard. We were going nowhere fast.”
Jes: “We tried to talk to one of Jack’s professor friends about it. He said that it was a great-looking sculpture, but nobody was going to be impressed by four young rich kids who wanted to romanticize death. He talked about Rachel Whiteread, how House got torn down right away because people were so insulted that some privileged elite artist wanted to fetishize other people’s pain.”
Jack: “He asked me about it years later. I said he must have misremembered.”
Jes: “We were pissed off. We thought that the whole world was our enemy. We wanted to turn it upside down.”
Marlin: “We entered HARD BODY (7 TIMES A DAY) into the Young Foundation show, with a made-up backstory and a fake person, the whole thing. If it got any press, we were going to say right then and there that it was a hoax.”
Jack: “It was Jes’s idea to give it this, like, political dimension.”
Jes: “It was the ’90s. Everyone loved stories about women suffering. The history of art is littered with the bodies of dead women. That’s always been true. Think about Paris in the last century. L’Inconnue de la Seine. Every artist had this woman’s death mask on their wall, like it meant something that she looked happy when she drowned.” She sniffs. “But it didn’t mean anything.”
Jack: “We felt that our class position was holding us back. Class was a construction, we told ourselves.”
Tyler: “Everything that was selling was hyperrealistic figurative sculpture. We thought it was complete garbage. And even if we could have put our names on it, we didn’t want to. We wanted to make fully experimental works that could not be commodified. We thought we were Marxists.”
Marlin: “I couldn’t believe it when it won. That was—I mean, I was so surprised.”
Jack: “The prize was twenty thousand dollars. That was enough.” He shakes his head and lights a cigarette. There’s a brown drink in his hand. “That was all it took.” He takes a big swallow; it foams. It’s Coca-Cola. “I’m so ashamed,” he said.
Cut to Tyler. “We told ourselves that it didn’t matter. We thought we needed the money. We agreed to reveal it someday and then…we didn’t ever have a plan, actually. We always called revealing it ‘Plan A.’ ‘Plan B’ was to see where it went. We just kept saying, let’s use plan B for a little while longer.”
Marlin: “I honestly thought that someday it’d all be worthless. It was trendy, you know? Calculated. We didn’t believe it would go the distance, like it did. That’s—I mean, for me, that was why I didn’t want my name on it. I wanted to grow, as an artist. It’s hard to be rigorous and profitable. So…” She shrugs. “We separated the two.”
Jack: “It was easier to pay somebody else to deal with the brain damage of it all. And when it was done, they could go back to being themselves.” He stubs out the cigarette. “That was the plan, anyway.”
Jes: “Maria Clarke used to hang out with some of the theater kids from Juilliard. She was totally untrained, this runaway kid from upstate, and she’d been taking Method classes out of somebody’s apartment.”
Marlin: “Eliot&Sprain kept writing and writing to the email address we’d put on the entry form.”
Jes: “We thought about coming clean, but…then we figured out how to keep the money. The check would go to Carey Logan. Carey Logan, the business, could deposit the check.”
Tyler: “I assisted for a guy who had a great accountant. He set it up for us. A four-way partnership.”
Jack: “Maria was into the whole thing. Always. She told us that she was an experimental performer. She wanted to push boundaries.”
Tyler: “There are things you think about yourself at nineteen, and things you say about yourself, that
have nothing to do with living a real adult life.”
Marlin: “We had no idea how vulnerable she was. We thought class was this, like, idea, that you could change, that you could cast off. We genuinely didn’t get it. She didn’t have the tools we did. No home at Christmas was the tip of the iceberg. She didn’t have the basic building blocks of what you need to be a successful person—time management, emotional regulation, the ability to reflect on hindsight…” Marlin trails off. “She was not emotionally adept, or mature, in the ways we had been raised to be. She lived in one long reaction. That was invisible to us at the time. All we saw was how charismatic she was.”
Tyler: “I was so in love with her.”
Jes: “She was my best friend.”
Marlin: “I mean, I was in love with her. In the beginning. Like crazy.”
Jack: “We lived together, you know? We took care of each other. It felt like it was meant to be.” He lights another cigarette. “That’s probably the thing I want my children to understand. I loved her.”
Jes, briefly pictured picking up trash on the shoulder of the thruway in an orange vest labeled DUTCHESS COUNTY CORRECTIONS: “Oh. The practical stuff? When we signed with the gallery, I hacked into the recently connected Dutchess County public records database. I made a birth record for Carey for the same town Maria was from, so it would be easy for her. Same birthday, but 1970.” She spears a seltzer can, pushing until it crumples against the dirt. “That was a crime. I freely admit that. The DA gave me three months of community service.” She looks out at the highway. “We never registered Carey for a Social; we used the business tax ID for everything. Maria used her own ID whenever, booked her own travel. In public, she paid for things in cash or charged it to the company. That part—that part was easy. It’s astonishing how willing people are to believe in someone. Anyone.”
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