The Family Fang: A Novel (27 page)

Chapter Eleven

A
nnie stood in the middle of the gallery, surrounded on all sides by her mother’s art, feeling something akin to stage fright, something more exhilarating than simple anxiety. It was a feeling like she had spent ten minutes climbing the stairs of an impossibly high diving board, and was now standing on the edge, knowing there was only one way to get back down. Or, Jesus Christ, maybe she was just flat-out crazy, hoping her dead parents would come back to life and appear at this very location to look at some paintings.

Annie was wearing a little black dress with a halter top that tied in a bow at the back of her neck. It was very much like the dress that Jean Seberg had worn in
Bonjour Tristesse,
except Seberg’s dress had been designed by Givenchy and Annie had found this one at a Target in Nashville. Still, with her hair cut short like Seberg’s, she felt like a movie star in the dress. She reminded herself that she was kind of a movie star, but it felt better to pretend to be a full-on movie star than to actually be kind of a movie star. Buster was wearing one of their father’s tweed suits, slightly too big for him, but he said he thought it would catch their father’s attention when he eventually showed up to the gallery. Annie drank a glass of wine that someone handed her, nodded and smiled each time someone approached her, and waited for something to fucking happen.

Annie had done everything possible to make this event a success. She had used every contact she had to get the word out. She offered herself up for interviews about her mother’s work, talking to anyone in the hopes that each subsequent article would be the one that got her parents’ attention. In the weeks before the show, there had been articles in the
New York Times,
the
San Francisco Chronicle,
the
San Francisco Examiner,
the
Los Angeles Times,
ArtForum,
Art in America,
BOMB Magazine,
and essays in
Juxtapoz
and
Raw Vision
that sought to champion Camille’s work as an excellent example of lowbrow art. One of Annie’s main talking points was the idea that her mother’s paintings showed an artist who was seeking to move beyond the limiting, outdated forms of art that the Fang family had once made, was doing something perhaps more important, more difficult, and more artistic, and it was a shame that she felt the need to hide it from the world.

As she gave these interviews, Annie pictured Caleb having conniption fits, so upset that he would steal a car, hotwire it, and jam the accelerator until he arrived in front of the gallery, knocked over the table bearing wine and cheese, and started to deface the paintings with as much vigor as he could manage, which would be a lot, knowing Caleb. This was what Annie hoped for, at least, getting her parents so emotionally unsettled that they would make a mistake, would reveal themselves, would provide Annie the opportunity to publicly renounce them, once and for all and, Buster at her side, walk off into the sunset, slow curtain, the end.

An appearance by Caleb and Camille was also what Mrs. Pringle’s son, Chip, hoped for. It took Annie several phone conversations with Chip before she could keep herself from snickering at his name—Chip Pringle, for crying out loud—but even with her barely contained laughter, she understood that he was hoping this exhibit was mere prelude to the reappearance of Caleb and Camille Fang. He tried, several times, to get Annie to admit that this was an elaborate ruse conjured up to allow Caleb and Camille to reintroduce themselves to the world. Since this was exactly what Buster believed, and Annie, truth be told, had begun to realize that this might be exactly what her parents had planned, she let Chip believe this without ever actually confirming it. “Art,” Chip would say, breathlessly, without ever elaborating, and Annie would simply reply, “Art,” as if they were members of a secret club and this was their password.

While Buster circled the gallery, avoiding conversation with anyone, his eyes darting from the paintings on the wall to the activity in the room, searching for their mother and father, Annie stayed absolutely still, her sentry post one that allowed her to see the only entrance to the gallery.

Buster walked over, holding a handful of cheese cubes. “Nothing yet,” he said. Annie looked down at the cubes of cheese resting on Buster’s open palm. “Why didn’t you get a plate for those?” she asked. Buster studied his hand with evident surprise. “I didn’t even know I was holding these,” he said. “Give me one,” she said, and she placed one of the cubes in her mouth, the cheese warm and tangy on her tongue. Buster slipped the rest of the cubes into the inside pocket of his suit coat and dusted off his hands. Annie was beginning to wish that he would retire to the exact opposite side of the gallery.

“I keep imagining how it will happen,” he whispered to her. “An hour or so from now, the place will be as crowded as it’s going to get, and we’ll hear someone shout,
These paintings are fake!
And everyone will turn toward that voice, and Mom and Dad will walk right into the gallery and everything after that will be chaos. That’s how I hope it will go down.”

“I think Caleb and Camille are going to break in through the bathroom window, hide in there until the place closes, and then they’ll take every painting and drive back to wherever they came from,” Annie replied. As soon as she said this, she felt an instant regret, as though her dreaming up the scenario would cause it to come true. And she did not want that. She did not want her parents to sneak in, undetected. She wanted them in the gallery, surrounded by witnesses, face-to-face with Annie and Buster. Whatever came next, she could not quite imagine, but she was content to wish simply for their presence and allow whatever followed to come to her later.

“I’m going to keep walking around, scan the crowd,” Buster said, and then he pushed his way through the small crowd of people in the gallery and disappeared. Annie felt her nerves jangling around inside of her. She resorted to the old Fang technique, slowly numbing every part of her body, a forced death, and as she felt the numbness climb up the nape of her neck, slip inside her brain, she held that moment as long as she could. She let her thoughts fade out, like the final scene of
Sunset Boulevard,
the clarity of the image turning opaque, unfocused, and then slowly fading to black. After a few seconds, though it could have been hours, for all she knew, she opened her eyes, felt her body return to her, when she saw Buster moving quickly toward her, shrugging, a strange look on his face, almost sheepish. Annie stiffened, wondered what she had missed, and tried to quickly reclaim the parts of herself that she needed for what would come next. Buster was now almost beside her, and yet she still could not quite hear what he was saying, her ears still readjusting, recalibrating. “What?” Annie asked as he touched her arm, and Buster pointed toward the entrance and then said, “Lucy.” Annie looked across the room and saw Lucy Wayne, a woman she hadn’t seen in more than two years, smiling at her. And Annie, reborn and feeling brand-new, shining and perfectly calibrated, smiled right back.

Lucy, so short, barely five foot two, her black hair pulled into a bun, walked through the gallery toward Annie and Buster, who made no movement at all. Lucy held her hand out in a way that seemed as though she was trying to navigate through the dark, but Annie realized she was just waving, nervously, hello. Annie waved back. So did Buster. Lucy was wearing a white blouse, the first four buttons undone, with a pair of horn-rimmed glasses hanging from the V of her neckline, complemented by a black-and-white checkered skirt, and she looked, to Annie, like the coolest librarian on the face of the earth, someone who spent most of her time having sex in the stacks.

“Hey there,” Lucy said, tapping Annie on the shoulder. “You wanted to come to this?” Annie asked, still processing Lucy’s appearance in the gallery. “This is my kind of thing,” Lucy said, gesturing toward the paintings. “Weird shit,” Lucy said, still smiling, her dark eyes, almost black, gleaming with interest, “is what I live for.” When Annie seemed unable to respond, Buster said, “Well, you came to the right place. You’ll meet your yearly quota for weird shit with just one wall of this stuff.” Lucy retrieved her eyeglasses, settled them on her face, and began to walk over to one of the paintings. “Oh,” she said, holding the syllable for so long that it seemed as though she was humming, “this is good.” Annie still did not look at her mother’s paintings, could only imagine which bizarre image had sparked Lucy’s interest. She finished her wine, and, as soon as she felt the awkwardness of holding an empty glass, a young man in formal wear, holding a tray, plucked it out of her hand and continued on his way. Having spent years in Hollywood, Annie was accustomed to this situation, surrounded by weirdness, being taken care of by people she did not know.

Two hours into the opening, the gallery still filled with an abnormal amount of people for an exhibit of paintings by an experimental performance artist, there was still no sign of their parents. This did not worry Annie. She said to herself, “No worries,” and then realized she was saying it out loud.

So far, more than a dozen people, all of them right on the edge of being elderly, had come up to Annie to say how much her parents’ art had moved them, had done something indefinable to the way they saw the world. Annie always smiled, always nodded, but she was amazed by these people, what kind of wiring they possessed that would cause a Fang event to occupy a pleasant place in their memories. And then she realized these people were probably talking about seeing a representation of the original Fang event in a museum, which was even more astonishing to Annie. Was this how trauma worked? she wondered. Those closest to it remained dumbfounded by the fact that those who weren’t present could derive meaning from it? She felt the walls closing in on her, and she took a deep breath and refocused on keeping the world at bay. If her parents appeared—when her parents appeared—she would be ready for them. She had to resist that which others could not.

She had lost count of how many glasses of wine she had consumed. It could have been two or it could have just as easily been a dozen. The man who kept collecting her wineglasses prevented her from having a physical chart of her level of inebriation. She needed to pee, but she could not imagine abandoning her post. The thought that she would miss the moment when her parents returned was something she would not allow herself to contemplate. If she was not there to witness her parents’ reappearance, would it have really happened?

She could see Lucy, standing with Buster, examining her mother’s paintings, and Annie knew that she should be over there, talking to the woman who would be directing her in another movie, if all went according to plan. She and Lucy had been in touch by e-mail for the past few weeks, but she was unnerved to see her in person. Annie had purposely not mentioned the exhibit to Lucy, though she imagined that Lucy had read about it, having been a fan of the Fangs long before she ever met Annie, because she did not want Lucy to frame her within the context of the Fang family. But now, Lucy standing less than ten feet away from her, Annie found that she did not care, was happy that Lucy had come. Then, as if she could read Annie’s mind, Lucy walked over to her and said, “You haven’t moved since I got here. I keep thinking you’re doing some kind of performance piece here. You’re a living statue or something.” Annie shook her head. “I’m just being still,” Annie said. “I’m just thinking.”

“Can I ask you something?” Lucy asked her, and Annie nodded. “Buster said that the two of you are waiting for your parents, that you think they’ll show up tonight,” Lucy continued. She said it without any betrayal of how she felt about this idea. Annie looked for Buster, who was now sitting on one of the benches, talking to some of the elderly Fang fans. Buster could not keep his big mouth shut. “That is a possibility,” Annie admitted.

“But you don’t know?” Lucy asked. “I mean, they didn’t tell you this?”

Annie shook her head. Lucy’s eyes widened, her lip twitched in a manner that suggested either a smile or a frown that had been quickly abandoned. It seemed like Lucy wanted to say something more, but was keeping herself from saying. So Annie said what she thought Lucy wanted to say. “I know that sounds crazy,” she admitted.

“Honestly, for Caleb and Camille Fang, it does not sound crazy,” Lucy replied. She then looked around the room, as if checking to ensure that the Fang parents were indeed not in the gallery, and then she said, “It seems like some heavy stuff is going on. Should I go? I think maybe you and Buster need to be alone.”

“You can stay,” Annie said. She looked down and noticed that she was holding another glass of wine. It was as if her hands were performing magic without her knowledge or consent. “Please stay,” she said, not flinching even though she heard the desperation in her voice, her hope that Lucy might stay overriding her own embarrassment. When Lucy nodded her assent, Annie felt the strength necessary to move, and handed her glass to Lucy. “I have to use the bathroom, but I’ll be right back.”

As she walked toward the restrooms, she noticed that the crowd was beginning to thin out, that the opening had reached the point where there would be no more people to replace those who would depart. It was a critical point, knowing that someone in the gallery was the last person to arrive. Besides her parents, she reminded herself. Just before she made it to the restroom door, Chip Pringle grabbed her arm, offering the slightest bit of resistance, as if reversing her orbit, and he said, “Still no sign of them. I don’t want to ruin the element of surprise, but do you have an idea of when they might be here? Is that something you can tell me?”