Fake Like Me Read online

  But they were the sun.

  Months later, all of the body parts Carey cast that night would be painted in various stages of decay and buried, on public and private property, without permission, through the entirety of New York State, though I didn’t know that at the time. When she returned and set her hand on top of mine, freeing me from the shrinking white dust with a light tap on each finger, someone took her picture. Though I felt the flash on my face, I wondered if I would show up in the image at all.

  “Don’t steal my fingerprints,” I said to her—the joke I’d been working on for twenty-four minutes.

  Carey looked at me. “I won’t,” she said, after a moment. “Hold on.” She reached into the mold and rubbed them away, erasing the whorls of my fingertips one by one. “There. Now you can be nobody.”

  “I’m already nobody.” I lowered my eyes, embarrassed.

  She placed one plaster-dusted fingernail under my chin, tipping it up. Her eyes went to my hair and back again.

  “No,” she said. “You’re a pearl.” She withdrew her finger.

  I blushed. “Thank you.”

  “You’re an artist,” she said. A statement, not a question.

  “I paint,” I admitted. “Well—I’m at the Academy. I want to be a painter.”

  “What are your paintings like? Like—really?”

  “They want to be bigger. But we’re not supposed to.”

  “You’re exactly like me,” she said. “You try to follow all the rules, but you don’t want to.”

  “I guess,” I agreed nervously.

  “Hmm,” she said. “I think you should let them. The work comes first, you know.”

  “Um—I’ll try it.” Nobody had ever given me permission to step outside the rules of the Academy.

  “Can I tell you something else that I’ve learned?” she whispered, eyes on fire.

  “Sure.” I leaned in.

  “These people”—she twirled that plaster-dusted fingernail ever so slightly to indicate the entire room—“these people will make not only your work, but you yourself into a commodity. They’ll buy you and sell you. Let them. But make sure you always do it on your own terms.”

  Before I could ask her what she meant, the other four members of Pine City were looking at us—the rays of their eyes burned my skin—and Carey closed up.

  “You can go,” she pronounced somberly, like a nun at school, and I did.

  As I headed for the door, dodging the elbows of a cluster of drunk bankers, their suit jackets off, ties loose, Tyler Savage wrapped an arm around Carey Logan’s waist and held her one inch above the floor, like she was floating, and he whispered something. They were steps behind me, and when she laughed, this big, open laugh, I stopped and turned at the sound. They didn’t notice me. She placed her hand on his cheek, and then—almost as if it was the first time, and maybe it was—they held each other against the wall and kissed so deeply that I knew I ought to look away.

  I didn’t think anyone would ever love me like that, or treat me with so much care.

  Somehow, I got a ride the four blocks back to the bus stop in time, doubled on the handlebars of a stranger who kissed me! hard! before pedaling away without so much as an introduction. And though it wasn’t the same as being kissed by someone like Tyler Savage or Carey Logan, I grinned the whole way back to the Academy.

  That was when I decided I would move to New York.

  * * *

  Two years later, I packed up my last dorm room and got on that Chinatown bus one final time. I landed in Brooklyn, subletting a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend’s roommate’s room for a year, and slept in a plywood cave on a lofted bed, a set of single-file dollhouse steps leading to the cold, dirty floors. I fell in love right away with a guitarist named Ben who lived down the hall. He had the biggest eyes I’d ever seen, and gentle fingers, and he was in love with a girl called Kate who was much prettier than I was. I found a job in a metal bar and spent my first twelve months in New York drinking and chasing Ben while he chased Kate and then eventually this ended in the spring, with me sobbing in the then detritus-park at the end of South 3rd while Ben walked away, shaking his head and apologizing. Five minutes later—tears dripping off my chin as I stared out at the river mournfully—I was approached by two pale, bearded Hasidic guys in their big satin jackets. They asked if I liked to party. We wound up doing coke behind a curtain in the back room of a nearby dive bar, and they told me that God was ashamed of me for being impure, and I was so coked up that I cried again and told them they were probably right. I hadn’t picked up a palette knife since arriving in New York, and I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Pine City, or any other real artists, and I’d lost myself. I was miserable and I truly thought that I’d ruined my life, that I had wasted the most precious opportunity I’d ever known, because when you are twenty-two every day feels like a year.

  One night I followed one of Ben’s friends to an ad hoc music venue in the city to see a sparsely attended folk concert. Cavernous and sticky with old beer, it was a ninth-floor walk-up somewhere off an alleyway in the Financial District, and I loved it immediately. The venue was full of art debris—blowtorches and canvases and weird, incomplete foam sculptures shoved against the wall to make room for the stage—so when I found out that the people who lived in the back were looking for a new roommate, I ran three blocks to the nearest ATM and took out all my money.

  Seven hundred dollars in tens later, out of breath from the stairs, I introduced myself to Cady, Atticus, and Jonny, the sloe-eyed twenty-somethings on the lease, and told them I was a large-scale abstract painter looking for a live-work space. They shrugged their sloping shoulders, ambivalent—until I gave them the cash, at which point they hugged me, showed me my room—really, a lightly partitioned drywall area—and gave me a key to the front door.

  “Jonny is leaving tomorrow for graduate school. We weren’t gonna make rent and it was already three weeks late,” Cady admitted, sheepish, blushing. “That’s why we were hosting Victory and the Beautiful. Only—they only have ten fans, and we didn’t feel right charging more than five bucks. Things were dire.”

  “You’re our angel,” Jonny said.

  The next morning, I ditched the sublet, in a shitty way, if I’m being honest—I think I left a note on a paper towel and taped it to the fridge—and moved into that loft on Dutch Street in the Fulton district of Lower Manhattan. Cady scored me a job, as a hostess at an upscale West Village restaurant, and Atticus cleared out a ten-by-fifteen-foot space in the living room. He was on one side, making sculptures, and Cady was on the other, painting, too, differently from me. Back in a world of artists—and away from Ben, away from Kate, away from dive bars—I started to make work again. The moment I picked up my palette knife, it was like whoever had been sitting on my chest suddenly stood up. I could breathe.

  I work primarily in oil, which has enough variations in tone, hardness, depth, and clarity to rival most spoken languages. It can be thick and weirdly inconsistent like an unpasteurized soft cheese; deliciously smooth and stable like a room-temperature buttercream frosting; or thin and weepy like a salad dressing. It can whip into a knot, pan into the ideal smear, beat into a creamy, airless gel. Stiff enough for peaks and valleys—yet smooths out cleaner and flatter than hot glass. Oil paint is needy: It must be paid attention to as it cures in the atmosphere, slowly, and it’s hard to cheat. It lives in the world and follows a linear time of its own devising. Essentially: It is so much work that it makes everything else disappear.

  The first time I used it, at a community arts class in the ninth grade, I dumped an entire, pudding-consistency cup of the palest teal, a half octave of opacity behind Tiffany blue, onto a ready-made canvas, then used a paper-thin metal knife to stretch it flat, into the flattest, densest rectangle, and then—the room around me fell away. I was hooked.

  Jonah, the cute desk clerk at Pearl Paint on Canal Street who never smiled at anyone but me, whispered one afternoon that Pine City bought an abandoned hot
el somewhere upstate. It was to be their private retreat, though he’d heard they might host a couple of artists the following year. Immediately I pictured receiving an invitation in the mail that said Welcome to Pine City. I told Jonah I was going to be there someday, and he rolled his eyes. Then I spent a thousand dollars on materials. He didn’t roll his eyes at my wrinkled pile of money, rubber-banded from the restaurant. When I left he looked at me with something that was either pity or pride or a mixture of both.

  Soon, I had my first show.

  It was in Brooklyn at a shitty gallery in Bushwick when I was twenty-three, and I called it Ohne Titel, “untitled” in German, which is still embarrassing. Only two of my paintings sold. The other eight I donated to a homeless shelter. The gallery dropped me afterward, making the radically uncreative argument that they had no real way to sell a series of near-identical untitled paintings by a young no-name female painter; it was too difficult, especially as long as I insisted the work remain untitled and that the wall text include basically no information. It was like trying to sell a plain white t-shirt with no brand name for two hundred dollars. Did I know anyone famous, they asked, who could help me? Did I have any well-known friends? Or maybe a group show that made it look like I was a part of a trend…whatever it was, something had to be done about my “identity problem.”

  Anyone could sell plain untitled abstracts by a young female painter with an identity, they insisted. All I had to do was get one.

  By contrast, Pine City, now crossing into their thirties, were becoming a reference point unto themselves. Their private retreat upstate had been photographed, celebrated, and fetishized, and their lifestyle was a romantic touchstone. At DIY venues without toilets or bars, people lined up around the block to see Jes’s performances. Marlin’s wheatpastes became sites of pilgrimage. Jack and Tyler’s site-specific installations, always mounted illegally at midnight, were now left up for a week or two, instead of being taken down immediately.

  And Carey—she had truly blossomed. The combination of her simple, direct persona and the elaborate morbidity of her imagination was irresistible, and collectors outbid each other again and again in their clamor to own her corpses. Her gallery, Eliot&Sprain, held elaborate presentations of her work, releasing limited-edition illustrated chapbooks describing all the body parts that had been discovered so far in THE BURIAL PROJECT, or sending invitations so extravagant they could be mistaken for a wedding for her FORGIVE/FORGET show. In that one, bodies stood upright, dancing with each other, at a party frozen in time. Dead, but alive; real, but simulated. Working-class, talented beyond measure, obsessively prolific, and coated in an easily digested political gloss, Carey’s professional identity was clear as a bell.

  The work itself, however, was what held my attention. It was so detailed, so labor-intensive, and produced at such a brisk pace—one show every year, radically rapid for artwork that complex—that I saw it for what it was: the compulsive productions of a restless mind. Carey was lucky that the world had decided it was salable; she would have made it either way. I knew this because I was exactly the same.

  I was jealous, and fascinated, and I wasn’t the only one. It seemed that everyone, even people outside the art world, now knew about their place upstate, knew what they were up to, who was in love with who, who was being invited. I was desperate to be their guest. I tried a dozen different ways to find out how to apply, but they had no listed phone number or website, and nobody I was friends with seemed to know them personally—only of them, like I did.

  I tried walking into Johnson Reuchtig, that cavernous, whitewalled cathedral of money on 21st Street and West End Avenue, to inquire at the desk. The gallery girl, her hair two long, shiny brown curtains that swept across the papers in front of her, looked at me with confusion and said with disdain that there was no formal process to apply. It was private property. I.e.: Get out. I felt like I’d tried to invite myself to a stranger’s summer house by asking when the deposit was due. In the intervening four years between Carey’s plaster show and that moment, Pine City had moved so many rungs ahead of me that the distance between us had become officially unnavigable.

  Then 9/11 happened. Cady, Atticus, and I were drinking coffee on a rooftop in Dumbo, sobering up after a party, when the first plane hit. We watched the towers fall from the waterfront in silence, then decamped to a bar to watch the news coverage. We weren’t allowed back in our neighborhood for weeks. As we waited it out on sofas back in Brooklyn, I felt a creeping relief: Maybe we could never go back, and then I wouldn’t have to paint anymore. I could do something else.

  But despite a layer of fine, brown dust, the loft was unharmed, and our landlord, scared to lose more income, offered fifteen-year leases when we returned, which we accepted gratefully. Broadly I thought of it as a ticking clock: I had fifteen years to make it.

  After the failure of Ohne Titel, I fell into a multiyear depression and supported myself with a variety of odd jobs as I tried on different careers, other than painting, but none of them fit. My studio portion of the loft remained covered in that fine brown dust for years. I was her, that weird, depressed young temp in your office who when pressed says she’s thinking about applying to law school because it’s something to say, but she’s taking cooking classes, too, and maybe working for an NGO abroad is the next step, helping people, but she’s also always wanted to do hair, and you think to yourself as she talks, I might be unhappy, but thank God I’m not that lost.

  I remained in the audience—went to shows, supported others in their successes—but stopped referring to myself as an artist. When asked about my work, I said I was on a sabbatical from painting. It was a pale, ivory-colored kind of lie. I wasn’t ready to tell anyone that I thought I would probably never, ever paint again—that I’d failed so spectacularly, I was too ashamed to try.

  In that way I left a door open for myself, because I was afraid to say I quit out loud.

  That open door was a gift. One day, painting came back to me, for the second and final time.

  It was unexpected—I saw a group show of young women photographers at the International Center for Photography, a show that had the startling effect of a hard punch—and then painting blossomed in my chest overnight, like a bruise. When I woke up, feeling the need of it aching beneath the surface of my skin, I made that familiar walk to Pearl and handed over all my savings to Jonah. He smiled and gave me his discount. A good omen. Then I called my latest employer (I was, at that time, the assistant to the assistant of an upscale florist) and quit.

  Two weeks later I’d created a rose-gold cataclysm that was nine feet high and eighteen feet wide. In that painting lived an expression of the pink hair on my head and what it cost me over the years. I calculated the time and money spent on my hair (my time being valued at $25.00 per hour) and arrived at a figure of $31,492.00, give or take a thousand. That painting was the pain of earning the money to begin with; the egoistic joy it brought me to spend it on such a temporary adjustment; the time wasted getting my hair yanked and cut and painted and blown out; and the burning on my scalp each and every time it was double-processed back into the trademark pink-champagne cloud that I’ve worn since my teens in some form or another. A name fell out of my mouth. One year and five more paintings later, I had a show, Accounting for Taste, at Parker Projects, a respectable gallery in Chelsea, and my career found its first real foothold.

  The first piece of mine to land in a real collection was 31,492 (Hair Money). Soon after, 7,067 (Tampons and Ruined Underwear Money); 6,413 (Fingernail Money); 278,388 (Teeth Money); 4,875 (Ripping Hair Out of My Cunt Money); and 7,049 (Bra Money) were getting packed up and shipped out, too. Parker sold them all. I got 50 percent. Parker’s tax man showed me how to keep most of it. Everything went back into my work.

  I had stumbled, if unwittingly, onto one of the art world’s invisible rules: Make something people can talk about. According to Claymont Parker, in my case, that meant two specific things: how detailed the paintings were, an
d the personal nature of the titles. “People are so bored of this masculine disaffected-artist-assistant-factory bullshit,” he said. “You’re part of a new wave of female artists whose work is personal. These paintings are very clearly the product of a young woman alone in a studio. So—intimate. Like Carey Logan’s sculptures.” Armed by his certainty and flattered by his comparison, I barreled forward.

  For the next three years, I painted during the week and worked weekends at the restaurant with Cady. Ostensibly these paintings would be my next show, but I was dissatisfied, not for any particular reason other than The work was not worth my satisfaction, and so I painted over them, again, and again, and again. The canvases grew heavier—a lot heavier—and I had to support the canvas substrate with plywood to stop it from sagging. The thicker and nastier they became, the more I loved them—yet they were still not done. During that time, Cady and Atticus both moved out; Cady got a Hunter studio (back when you could enroll and keep your studio for a decade), and Atticus moved to the Catskills with his boyfriend. I took over the lease and knocked down all the drywall and started to feel like a real artist—one who could afford all the rent for a space that I actually needed.

  I became an adult. For the first time in my life, I wanted to socialize. I went to more shows; I saw more work. I applied for a passport and traveled, to Venice and Miami and Switzerland and Berlin and London and even Paris, where my very own left hand was displayed inside a vitrine at the Palais de Tokyo—the skin loose and shifting—in Carey Logan’s 72 HOURS installation. She’d used at least one of the same molds from THE BURIAL PROJECT; I could tell it was mine from the fingernails, from their hard, geometric ridges. I was in a museum, I told myself, even if nobody knew about it. Spurred to action, I went on three residencies, where I made a dozen one-off paintings on commission purely to make money, mostly landscapes, though they were still abstract. I dated, albeit lightly and without consequence. And at last, I was invited to parties that the members of Pine City attended—sure, either they were leaving at the moment I was arriving or vice versa—but I was getting closer. I was working toward stature.