The Family Fang: A Novel (10 page)

“Here it comes,” Annie whispered, turning to her parents. “This is me.” Donald Ray, his hand wrapped in a makeshift bandage, picked up the hotel phone and made a collect call to his family back in Little Rock. As the phone rang, tinny and soft in the receiver, the film jumped to Donald Ray’s home, the telephone shrilly ringing on the coffee table. As the camera pulled back, a woman leaned over to answer the phone. She listened for a few seconds and then said that she’d accept the charges. “Donald Ray,” she finally said, both angry and relieved to hear from him.

“Look real close,” Annie said. Behind Donald Ray’s wife, sitting on the floor and staring dully at the carpet, was Annie. “That’s you,” Buster said. “Watch now,” Annie said. “This is my big moment.” The Fangs watched their daughter on the big screen, her face empty of expression, seemingly unaware of the conversation going on beside her. It was, the Fangs would later admit, a fairly compelling performance. Then, suddenly, so fast that you would miss it if you weren’t looking, Annie looked toward the camera and smiled. The Fangs could not believe it had happened, the moment so jarring and unsettling that it took them a few seconds to realize what they had just seen. Annie had smiled at the camera. Her teeth bared. Fanged.

“Annie?” Mr. and Mrs. Fang said at once. In the seat next to them, Annie was smiling, beaming, the scene ended, her character not to return for the rest of the movie. She was, the Fangs now understood, a star.

Chapter Five

A
nnie needed to get out of town. Three days after her disastrous interview, the index and middle fingers on her right hand were still bruised and aching. Annie had used half a roll of electrical tape to secure the fingers together, fashioning a splint out of a popsicle stick snapped in half. Holding up her damaged hand, she looked at herself in the mirror. The black tape on her fingers made her right hand look like a gun and she aimed and fired at her reflection. If it got worse, the tips of her fingers turning black, she’d simply add more tape. She would cover her entire body in tape, like a cocoon, and when things had calmed down, she would emerge, something new and capable and better than what had preceded it.

The phone rang. She let it ring; she already had a machine full of messages from the
Esquire
writer, wanting to come over and “discuss the article,” which sounded to Annie like “have more sex so I can write about it.” The answering machine would take care of it. She loved the answering machine as if it were a living thing, the way it protected her from the bad decisions she was entirely capable of making. The machine’s robotic voice informed the caller that no one was home and to please leave a message. “It’s Daniel,” the caller said. “Pick up the phone, Annie.” Annie shook her head. “C’mon now, pick up the phone,” Daniel continued. “I can see you, Annie. I know you’re home. I’m looking right at you. Pick up the phone.” Annie turned toward the window and saw no one, wondered if Daniel was already inside the house. Had he ever returned the key she had given him when they were dating? She was losing faith in her answering machine, which had yet to cut off the message. “Annie, I love you and I want to help you,” he continued. “Just pick up the phone.” She gave up, reached for the receiver with her uninjured hand, and answered the phone.

“Where are you?” she said. “How can you see me?”

“I can’t see you,” Daniel answered. “I just said that so you’d answer the phone.”

“I’m going to hang up now,” Annie said.

“This is important, Annie,” he said. “Remember the last time we talked?”

“Vaguely,” Annie responded.

“I said I thought you were going crazy.”

“Okay, yes, I remember that.”

“Maybe I was wrong.”

“I know you were wrong,” Annie said.

“But I think you’re going crazy right now,” he continued.

“I’ve got a flight to catch,” Annie said. She made a mental note to book a flight after she got off the phone with Daniel.

“Just let me come over and talk to you for five minutes.”

“I can’t, Daniel.”

“I care about you, Annie. I just want to talk for five minutes and then you never have to see me again.”

Annie took a long, thoughtful sip of whiskey and wondered if she had hit rock bottom yet.

“Okay,” Annie answered. “Come on over.”

“Thank you,” Daniel said. “I’m on your doorstep right now.”

“What?” Annie asked.

“Yeah, you never changed your pass code for the front gate. I’ve been here for about fifteen minutes.”

“Why didn’t you just knock on the door?”

“I didn’t want to freak you out,” Daniel said.

“That’s nice,” Annie said, walking to the front door, her whiskey in dire need of a refill.

I
n the kitchen, Annie dumped eight Pop-Tarts on a platter and brought the breakfast pastries into the living room, where Daniel, his trademark Stetson now replaced by a porkpie hat, was waiting for her. Daniel lived on Pop-Tarts and sparkling water; Annie had never seen him consume anything else. Daniel, if she were blind and deaf, would be the sickly sweet smell of artificial strawberries and singed dough. He patted the cushion adjacent to him on the sofa but Annie smiled and took a seat on the rocking chair directly across from him, the coffee table an adequate barrier for their conversation. Annie rocked and rocked, an irritating squeak accompanying her actions. She felt like a tiny, narcoleptic dog should be in her lap.

“You said that you needed to talk to me,” Annie said.

“I do,” Daniel answered, Pop-Tart crumbs already covering the floor at his feet.

“About what?”

“Your career and what you’re doing to it and what you’re doing to yourself. I know you’re not a lesbian,” Daniel said.

“Is that all you wanted to say?” Annie said.

“What happened to your hand?” he asked.

“I punched my publicist in the face,” Annie answered, holding her injured but unshaking hand out in front of her. She was impressed by the steadiness of her nerves.

“Yeah, I heard she let you go.”

“We let each other go. We decided at the exact same time. Is this what you came to talk about?” she said.

“Paramount offered me the chance to write the third
Powers That Be
movie.”

“Oh . . . congratulations.”

“Thank you.”

“I didn’t know they had decided to make a third one,” Annie said, struggling to keep her facial features from betraying her confusion.

“Well, that’s why I wanted to talk to you.” Daniel took off his porkpie hat and twirled it in his hands. “This hat belonged to Buster Keaton,” he said.

“You hate silent movies.”

“I do,” Daniel said. “But I’ve got so much money now that I’ve run out of things to buy.”

“Daniel—”

“Okay, okay. When I agreed to write the third installment of
PTB,
they only had one request.”

“Which was?” Annie asked.

“They wanted me to write your character out of the film. They don’t want you to be a part of the franchise anymore.”

Standing at what seemed to be rock bottom, staring up at the unreachable world above sea level, Annie felt the ground beneath her feet give way yet again.

“They don’t want me in the movie?” Annie asked.

“They do not.”

“Did they give a reason?”

“They did.”

“Did it have to do with the naked Internet photos and my rumored mental instability?”

“It did.”

“Oh shit.”

“I’m sorry, Annie. I thought you should know.”

Annie, despite the voice screaming at her not to do it, began to tear up. She could not believe that she was crying about the lost opportunity to once again wear a ridiculous superhero costume and stand in front of a green screen for hours and say lines like “It appears lightning
can
strike twice.” It seemed ridiculous to her, even as she was crying, but it did not stop her from sobbing, the chair uncontrollably rocking, in front of her ex-boyfriend.

“It sucks, I know,” Daniel said.

“Does it suck?” Annie said. “Do you know?”

“I have a feeling that it sucks.”

Annie stood up, walked into the kitchen, and returned with the bottle of George Dickel. She took a hard slug from the bottle, felt a kind of resolve seep into her bones, a noir-like, hard-boiled toughness. Alcohol, she suddenly understood, would solve this problem. It would create other, more pressing problems, but for now, steadily rising into inebriation, she felt like she could handle the situation at hand. She could
deal with shit
.

“The third movie in the trilogy is never any good,” she said. “
Return of the Jedi,
Godfather Part III,
The Bad News Bears Go to Japan
.”

“Well,” Daniel said, “I’m going to write it, so it’s going to be pretty good, I think. Which is kind of what I want to talk to you about.”

Annie was trying to listen but she was unable to shake the image of herself dressed in a knock-off Lady Lightning outfit, sitting alone at a table at a mid-level comic book convention, drinking a diet soda and staring at her cell phone, which did not ring.

“Annie?” Daniel said. “I want to talk to you about the movie.”

Annie imagined herself in Japan, shilling caffeinated tapioca pearls, living in a closet-size apartment, dating a washed-up sumo wrestler.

“Annie?” Daniel said again.

Annie imagined herself doing dinner theater in a converted barn, playing Myra Marlowe in
A Bad Year for Tomatoes,
getting fat on carved roast beef and macaroni and cheese from the buffet during intermission.

“I want to help you, Annie,” Daniel continued, undeterred by Annie’s blank-faced analysis of her future. “And I think I can.”

Annie smoothed the crease in her jeans as if she was petting a catatonic dog. “You want to help me with what, Daniel?”

“I want to help you stop feeling so overwhelmed and I want to help get your career back on track.”

“Please don’t tell me to check myself into a mental health facility.”

“No, I’ve got a better idea,” Daniel assured her.

“It would have to be,” Annie responded.

Daniel rose from the sofa, placed his half-eaten Pop-Tart on the platter, and walked over to Annie, who already began to flinch. He knelt on the floor beside her. Annie felt the awkwardness of a marriage proposal forming in the air and she shook her head vigorously as if to disrupt the possibility. Then Daniel, no ring in hand, positioned his body into a crouch, like a catcher about to relay signs to the pitcher. His face was less than a foot from her own.

“The studio wants a draft of the screenplay in a month. I’ve rented a cabin out in Wyoming, nothing but empty space and wolves. I want you to come with me.”

“And do what? Watch you write my character out of the movie and eat antelope jerky?”

“No, so you can just relax. You can go hiking and get away from all this bullshit and calm down a little bit. And then, maybe, if things go well, we could give this relationship another try.”

“You want me to come to Wyoming and have sex with you?” Annie said.

“That’s correct,” Daniel said, smiling.

“And how will this help my career?”

“That’s the other thing I wanted to talk to you about. I thought that if we worked together on the script, we could find a way to keep Lady Lightning in the movie, come up with an idea so good that the studio would have to go along with it.”

“They’d just hire another actress,” Annie said, leaning forward, their foreheads almost touching.

“Maybe not. You come with me, clear your head, weather all this bad publicity, and maybe they’ll remember that you’re a bankable star with a lot of talent.”

“All this if I just come to Wyoming and sleep with you?”

“That’s it,” Daniel said.

“I had sex with a reporter from
Esquire,
” Annie said.

“Okay,” Daniel answered, genuinely unfazed.

“Three days ago. You can read about it in the next issue.”

“I don’t care,” Daniel said. “It’s just further evidence that you need to get the hell out of here for a while.”

Wyoming, to Annie, was represented by a blank, bleak space in her imagination. It was a place she could hide. The worst that could happen would be that she would sleep with Daniel and then get eaten by a wolf. She could live with that.

After she agreed, Daniel placing the porkpie hat on Annie’s head as if rewarding her for a sound decision, the two of them sat on the floor of her living room while she had another glass of whiskey and Daniel ate another Pop-Tart. Wasn’t this how adults acted? Annie wondered, feeling slightly proud of herself. Daniel showed her his most recent tattoo, a typewriter surrounded by dollar signs. Annie told him to roll his sleeve back down and she tried to pretend that it had never happened. By the time he had left her house, with plans to meet again in the morning to leave for Wyoming, Annie felt improbably sober and, if not happy, at least assured that she was capable of not fucking up everything she touched.

L
ater that night, having made plans to meet again in the morning, touched by the soundness of her decision to leave Los Angeles, Annie fried a slab of bologna in a pan and listened to George Plimpton read an audiobook of John Cheever stories, which she had bought but never listened to after losing out on the part of Cheever’s wife in a biopic that ended up never getting made. The soothing way that Plimpton’s cosmopolitan, almost British, accent filled the kitchen with tales of people that Annie would want to punch in the face under most circumstances calmed her, made her feel smart and capable and not at all crazy.

She slathered mayonnaise on two slices of white bread and added the now-charred slice of bologna to complete the sandwich. She filled a glass with ice and whiskey and, spurred by the cocktail-guzzling Cheever characters, dumped some sugar into the drink. She stirred it with her finger, called it an old-fashioned, and retired to the dining room table to enjoy her meal, pausing Plimpton’s voice in mid-sentence—“ . . . from bacon and coffee to poultry . . .”—the word
poultry
sounding, to Annie’s ears, like
poetry
.