Cypresses

Arlo tells me he loves me, but before that, he’s at the kitchen table cutting a multi-million-dollar painting to shreds.

It’s a forgery, he says. A high-end, meticulous deceit. Arlo knows this because he made it, and because the real painting, all twelve million dollars of it, is rolled up in the corner with the Christmas wrapping paper he hasn’t put away.

“The thing about a good forgery,” Arlo said, the first day I ever met him, “is that it can only fool people for so long. Eventually, someone will find out it isn’t real.”

We were at The Met in Manhattan, where I stood puzzling over a Van Gogh piece, desperately trying to find a hidden meaning in the fine mess of scribbles. We were twenty-one, the age at which pretending to be an art snob was a rite of passage, some crucial part of growing up.

I said, “Then why even make a forgery?” and Arlo smiled, eyes impossibly blue, face impossibly alive, and said, “For the thrill.”

Arlo was Mike back then. Mike Smith, a New York transplant, a silly little farm boy who knew nothing about the city except where he knew too much—the museums, the exhibits, the rare collections. Anywhere art was, Arlo was, and I never found it strange, the way we’d visit rooms stuffed full of ancient artifacts and hundred-year-old paintings and Arlo would stand in front of them for hours, eyes tracing every inch. It was only later I figured out what he was really doing.

That whole first year I knew him, he trailed after me through the city, wide-eyed and embarrassingly sincere, so sure of himself that it echoed in everyone around him. But now, at the kitchen table, his hands are shaking, and when he looks at me, there’s something horrible in his expression, something afraid.

The thing is, someone will always find out a forgery isn’t real, and Arlo made a mistake. A tiny brushstroke a millimeter out of place. And for all that he’s revered in the underground art world, his name whispered into cocktails, passed between beautiful strangers on folded slips of paper—Arlo, Arlo, Arlo—he’s been quietly catching too much interest.

He says, “Are you okay?” in the same gentle voice he used the night we had our first kiss. I’d been deep in an upending grief over my mom’s dying when it happened, and we’d snuck onto the roof of an expensive silent auction we didn’t belong at to drink wine and listen to the rush of cars on the street. His hair was so dark in the reflection of lights, nearly black, and of the very few memories I have from those miserable months, I still remember wondering if the color was fake. 

In the years since, I’ve never once asked.

Arlo. Mike. James. Andrew. Names spoken in conference rooms, written with question marks on police reports. How many of them were real?

“Yeah,” I say, the same way I did on the roof that night, “yeah, I’m okay,” and go to help him clean up the pieces. 

***

The official story of our relationship, the one laughed about by friends and gushed over by acquaintances, is that Arlo and I were two young kids who met by chance in front of Van Gogh’s Cypresses and fell, timid and blissfully naive, into romance.

He was a small-town boy, lonely and lost in a new city, and I was the one with a dying mother, lonely and lost in myself, and so our meeting was one of fate, two souls destined to connect, a love story meant for novels. 

“What can I say?” Arlo would always tease. “Van Gogh has a way of bringing people together.”

But the real story, the one we never talk about, starts a few months after our first meeting, with a fight between me and my dad that lasted all through breakfast and ended at lunch when I stormed out of our house, running to the only place I could imagine. The argument burned bitter in my throat, and the ugly truth of it was that the pain I was fleeing from was the same thing that brought me to Arlo in the first place. 

I holed up in his apartment, tucked into his couch, listening to the faint sounds of a violin downstairs, the soft thump of neighbors walking above. Outside, a storm was starting in the distance. Arlo wasn’t home, and that’s probably the only reason I ever found the cracked-open safe with all his IDs inside. Four fake names, each with different job titles, different pictures. Badges and keycards and passes to museums and galas. 

Finding them felt like it did the day the doctors told us my mom’s cancer had come back. Like the ground slipping out from under my feet, the freefall promise that if I closed my eyes hard enough, I could rewrite the world around me, take it all back, make it anything I wanted. A father who wasn’t a disaster and a mom who wasn’t terminally doomed and a handsome charmer who smiled at me and meant it. 

Arlo, Arlo, Arlo. 

He came home hours later, tentative and slow with worry, a look on his face that meant he already knew what I found and decided to let me process, not sure if he was welcome to show up.

“Can we talk about it?” he asked, coming to sit next to me where I had taken refuge on the balcony. 

Across the horizon, the sky was turning soft, casting everything in shades of pink—the white of my shirt, the dark of Arlo’s hair. For a moment, we both watched the clouds, and I had the awful feeling he was trying to find the ground as much as I was. 

“Did you know Van Gogh was obsessed with cypresses?” he said softly, after the silence between us had settled too long. “He could see them out the window at the asylum he stayed at in Saint-Rémy. He called them ‘the dark patch in a sun-drenched landscape.’”

I stared at the side of his face. My dad never forgave me for the cardinal sin of looking just like my mom. He’d been angry enough in those days that sometimes he couldn't bear to be near me, and the resulting hollowness carved into my bones was something I could see reflected in Arlo. He looked tired, shadows bruised under his eyes, dressed in the black jeans and maroon sweater he’d worn the day before, like he hadn’t slept at all.

“I'm sorry,” he whispered. “I'm so, so sorry.”

That had been the most crushing part, out of everything else. The pain in his voice, the sudden knowledge that the cypress trees had always been real. It broke open a fragile expanse between us, turned Arlo into someone who almost existed and gave me the chance to finally say, “Who are you? Really?”

We ended up on the balcony until after midnight. It was the first time I saw Arlo cry, and in the years after, I’ve come to recognize the sharp pang of understanding for what it really was: longing, a buried desire to pretend. 

But that day, with Arlo pulling out secret after secret, some so deep he must have been desperate to tell someone for years, the lies hadn’t mattered. Arlo, the art thief who was actually from Queens. Arlo, whose real name I still didn’t know. I had scraped my soul clean for him about my mother, and he’d done the same for me, as much as he ever could for anyone, and the vulnerable act of it would send the rest of my life splitting into two distinct sections—before Arlo and after.

***

So Arlo is at the kitchen table and the jagged pieces of his forged painting are burning in the fireplace.

He’s going to return the real painting tonight. Return meaning he’s going to break into the museum, the same way he did months ago to plant the fake one and the same way he did an hour ago to take that fake one back. His plan had him leaving an empty frame behind, and he still needs to fill it before the morning staff finds out. There’s a lot to it, he says, an entire intricate system in the underbelly of the art world that I know very little about. Arlo has a security badge he swiped from someone, and a man on the inside he has to meet in two hours, and favors and favors to cash in. 

“And you’re sure you won’t get caught?” I ask.

Arlo’s eyes are soft when they meet mine. “I haven’t been caught yet,” he says, but his hands are still trembling.

I take his palm, trace circles along his skin, refuse to ask the questions I really want. What happens if you are? 

What happens if you aren’t?

Instead, I say, “I’ll be here, okay? No matter what.”

We’re both exhausted, too nervous to eat and too restless to sleep this early in the night, so we climb under the covers of his bed in our day clothes and huddle close, killing time before he has to leave. The city lights turn his room multicolored like a drawing, make his hair look as dark as it ever has, and in a whisper of breath that echoes against the walls, he says, “I love you.”

Outside the window, the buildings stretch up and up, black pillars against a neon skyline. Down on the street, a car comes to an abrupt stop, laughter floats through the air, horns and sirens wail. I let his words get swallowed up by the sound and don’t say anything, but I feel it all around me.

The thing I’ve learned about a forgery is that someone will eventually find out it isn’t real. A counterfeit painting in the fireplace and who knows how many in museums all over the world. Arlo and Mike and James and Andrew. Years ago we stood in The Met in front of a Van Gogh piece, two strangers with a lifetime of secrets between us. Sometimes I wonder if my mom would recognize the person I turned out to be.

“Are you okay?” Arlo asks.

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m okay.”

I get up and close the curtains. I’ve never asked Arlo if the Van Gogh was real. I can’t bear the answer either way.