The Family Fang: A Novel (24 page)

“Think of it this way, then,” he finally said. “Maybe they have no plan for us, maybe we don’t matter to them at all. Then these paintings are our secret weapon. It’s a trap we can use.”

“Go on,” Annie said, her eyes becoming clear and focused at the mention of the words
weapon
and
trap
.

“We say that these were Mom’s real idea of art, that she had labored beneath Dad’s insistence of what constituted artistic expression. We say everything that would send Dad crawling up the walls. And maybe we create so much chaos in their lives that they’ll have no choice but to reveal themselves publicly to set the record straight.”

“Camille will deny that she had anything to do with these paintings,” Annie continued, now seeming to admit that this
was
something, after all. “Caleb will have to come to the gallery to see for himself. She’ll come with him to try and reason with him. And we’ll be waiting for them.” Annie took another sip of the vodka, letting the alcohol seep through her system, turning bad ideas into good ones. “Yeah,” she said, smiling. “I like that.”

Buster was content to let Annie think they were constructing their own event rather than taking part in their parents’. He believed, truly, that they were simply doing the work their parents demanded of them. If Caleb and Camille Fang had gone to so much trouble to kill themselves, to disappear, they would need someone to return them to the world of the living. Who else but Buster and Annie? A and B. Buster looked at the finished tapestry he had created from the paintings, an unbroken chain of chaos and unsettling strangeness. It looked, if you were far enough away from it, like a portrait of his parents.

I
t took time, the planning. Annie and Buster were unaccustomed to this aspect of their family’s art, the space between conception and action. But with their parents gone, it was up to them, and Buster found himself excited about the chance to show someone, his parents, his sister, the world, that he could create weirdness with the best of them. So they started at the beginning, and Annie and Buster went about the slightly monotonous task of photographing each and every one of their mother’s paintings.

They used a rectangular swatch of black velvet they had purchased at the general store in the town square. They laid the velvet on the floor in the living room, bringing each painting, one at a time, into the room and placing it neatly on the velvet. They took the lampshade off of the lamp in the living room and Buster held it over the painting while Annie took a photo of it. After about fifteen paintings—grasshoppers eating the hollowed-out remains of a dead mule, children poking a lame bird on the beach with a sharp stick—Annie opted out of the task. “I don’t think I can keep looking at this stuff, Buster,” she informed him, handing the camera to her brother. “It makes me want to drink either more alcohol or none, and I can’t imagine either possibility.”

“It’s part of the process,” Buster said, staring at the painting through the viewfinder of the camera. He took the picture, checked its digital image to make sure it was acceptable, and then shuffled the painting to the side and replaced it with another, equally bizarre, painting. He had originally imagined, after his mother had claimed these paintings as her own, that she was sitting in the dimly lit closet of her daughter’s childhood bedroom, painting these images while her husband was away on some errand, the sharp, crackling fear of being discovered always with her. He imagined her visiting the paintings while her husband was asleep, staring at them for signs of why she might be so obsessed with creating them. Now, however, believing these paintings to be props for a larger, more important artistic work, the Fang reappearance, he imagined his parents laughing, working to outdo each other as they tossed out ideas for the paintings, his father’s hand on his mother’s shoulder as she carefully moved the brush across the canvas, his father murmuring words of encouragement. He imagined the two of them staring at the finished product with great satisfaction before hiding them in the closet of Annie’s bedroom until some unknown time when they could be discovered and they could perform the task for which they had always been intended.

Once they had the paintings cataloged, Annie and Buster began to whittle down the possibilities for this unveiling. Museums were out, they decided. There was too much lead-time required and the structures themselves were so big that it would complicate matters. They needed a space that would fill up, would focus entirely on the work of their mother, and would do it fast. So they concentrated on galleries, ones with which the Fangs had previously worked.

“There’s the Agora Gallery in New York,” Annie suggested. This particular gallery, in Chelsea, had once shown a video (security-camera footage that the Fangs had stolen plus Mr. Fang’s own secretive camerawork) of one of the Fangs’ earlier works: Buster left in a dressing room in a department store, walking through the store with the security guard, pointing to a random couple and saying that they were his parents, loudly insistent in the face of their denial.

They sent the gallery an e-mail, along with a few JPEGs of the paintings, and it was only a few hours later that they received a call from the owner of the gallery, Charles Buxton. “Is this A or B?” he asked when Buster answered the phone. “B,” Buster said, before he caught himself and said, “Buster.”

“Is this bullshit, Buster?” the gallery owner asked.

“Excuse me?”

“What’s the deal here? Are your parents putting you up to this?”

“Our parents are gone, Mr. Buxton,” Buster replied, his nerves starting to go haywire, the feeling coming over him that he would ruin the whole thing if he wasn’t careful.

“I know that,” he said. “I read about it in all the papers. And I also know that the Fang family isn’t known for doing things on the up-and-up.”

“This is real,” Buster said. “This is something my sister and I are doing, on our own, as a way to remember our mother.”

“You have any way of verifying that your mother painted these images?” Mr. Buxton asked.

Buster paused. There was no signature on the paintings, nothing that would suggest that their mother was the artist behind these works. Buster began to wonder if perhaps his mother and father had found these paintings, had bought them from another artist, in service of their greater work. “My sister and I talked to my mother about these paintings before she disappeared,” he finally said. “She admitted that she had painted them.”

“Something’s not right here,” Mr. Buxton said. “I remember your family. The show was a success, and I know that the personality of your father and mother played a large role in that, but I was interested primarily in the work. I was not interested, and I am still not interested, in being a part of the work. I don’t want to be a source of derision when I find out this is all just some Fang scam. It’s not worth it to me.”

“It’s real,” Buster said. “This is all very real.”

“That sounds like something your father would say, right before something really bad happened,” Mr. Buxton replied. Buster heard the line go dead, the conversation morphing into a single, steady tone.

“T
his is very, very strange, Buster,” Suzanne told him as she stared at the painting of the boy and the tiger. “It’s really great.”

Buster felt the sickening certainty that Annie would push him down a flight of stairs if she knew that he was showing Suzanne their mother’s painting, that he had told an outsider about their plan to bring their parents back from the wilderness. She was already slightly cool on the idea of Buster spending so much time with Suzanne, still relying on the old Fang tendencies to distrust anyone who wasn’t family. “Is her writing that good?” Annie had asked him when he returned home after another meeting with Suzanne.

“I think so,” Buster said. “I think she wants it to be, and I think I can show her how to make it good. It’s not just about that. I like her. She likes me. It’s an uncommon situation for me to be in.”

“Fair enough,” Annie said. “That’s nothing I want to stand in the way of.” Then, as if it weren’t the entire focus of her conversation, as if it were merely an afterthought, she had said to Buster, “Just don’t tell her about the paintings, okay? That’s just for us.” Buster nodded his assent.

And then, having talked about writing, his and hers, hashing out ideas, rewording lines until they were perfect, the two of them had reached a lull in the conversation. The drive-in had emptied around them without their knowledge, the entire parking lot dark. The floorboards of the car were littered with food wrappers and balled-up pages from failed attempts at storytelling. Buster was so unnerved by the quiet, the thought that Suzanne might take it as a cue to leave, that he decided he would show her the painting, tell her about his great plan for finding his parents, just to keep her in the car. If it seemed desperate, he did not care. If Annie would freak out later, he did not care. What he wanted was Suzanne beside him for ten more minutes. And then, as he opened the middle compartment to retrieve the painting, Suzanne pressed her body against his, forced her tongue into his mouth, probing the place where his missing tooth had once been. Her tongue rubbed that open spot of gum, and it made his ears burn, his tongue fuzzy.

“I want to do this,” she said, quickly slipping out of her uniform, her limbs seemingly double-jointed to have disrobed so quickly in such a cramped space, “if you want to do it.” Buster was not used to this experience, physical desire that was actually fulfilled. In his entire life, he had kissed five women. One of them had been his sister. This was, Buster understood, a terrible percentage. He could count on one hand the number of times he’d had sex and still have enough fingers left over to make complicated shadow puppets. He wisely remained silent, forced himself not to reveal anything that would tip Suzanne off that having sex with him might be incredibly underwhelming, and simply nodded. He removed her glasses, placed them on the dashboard, and followed her into the backseat of the car, shedding his pants on the way, somehow, unintentionally, keeping his shoes on. Yes, he decided, her legs wrapped tightly around his torso, forcing him to exhale so rapidly that it sounded like he just emerged from a burning building, he wanted this.

Now, Buster’s car still parked in the empty lot, his mouth aching from pressing his tongue against nearly every spot on Suzanne’s body, Buster wondered why he was still showing her the painting. Was it anything other than his own need to tell another person about his parents, the idea that he had figured out something complicated and unwieldy and was utilizing it in a way that made him seem capable? Was he honestly using his mother’s bizarre, violent paintings and his idea to put them on display to draw out his parents so as to appear more attractive to Suzanne? Was it working? he wondered.

“You think this is a clue?” she asked Buster.

“I think so,” he replied.

“It’s got to be more than that,” Suzanne said. Buster, his body twisted awkwardly in the backseat of the car, ran his hands over her right arm, the soft hair that lifted to meet his touch. He wished that he had waited to show her the painting. He wanted her to keep touching him, the way the multitudes of rings on her fingers rubbed against his skin.

The only real girlfriend he’d ever had, another writer who had published a collection of stories at the same time as
A House of Swans
was published, had told him that his emotions were incorrectly hardwired. “You are very sweet,” she told him after a year of dating, as they shared dessert at a restaurant, “but it’s like your family trained you to react to the world in a way that was so specific to their art that you don’t know how to interact with people in the real world. You act like every conversation is just a buildup to something awful.” In response to this, he acknowledged her concerns, said he needed to use the restroom, then ran out of the restaurant, leaving her with the bill, and never saw her again. He had desires, but they were complicated by his inability to understand those desires, and so he opted out of relationships.

And now, in the backseat of his parents’ car, he was tangled up with a half-naked woman, and he only wished that he had waited a little longer after having sex with her to show her a painting his mother had made. This seemed, he understood, to be a strange emotional response. Suzanne, to her credit, did not seem to care. Or, rather, she seemed to care very much, and this made Buster want her even more.

“I mean, if it was just supposed to be a clue, I don’t think she would have put this much effort into it. This looks like something that a person took a lot of time to create. It looks like something that meant a lot to her. I’m not saying that you’re wrong about it being a clue, but I think it’s more than that, too. Isn’t that what art is, right? It’s about one thing, but it’s really about a lot of things.”

“Okay,” Buster said. “But it is definitely, first and foremost, a clue. And whatever it also is, whatever deep stuff it says about my mom, I’m not sure that I want to know.”

“I don’t know,” Suzanne said, touching the barbed wire as if she expected it to puncture her skin, “that even your mom could tell you what it says.”

H
aving heard from five more galleries, none interested in his mother’s paintings, or perhaps wary of allowing potential chaos in their spaces, Buster began to realize that their parents had made a slight miscalculation in their plans. If no one would show the paintings, how would they return? Annie had gone so far as to contact Hobart for help with finding a gallery, something the old man resisted for a few back-and-forth e-mails before finally giving in to the insistence of the Fang siblings. No matter how it happened, Buster understood that some gallery, somewhere, would eventually show the paintings. The Fangs were still important enough as artists that someone would want to present an offshoot of their recognizable art. But that could take years. Buster did not think he could wait that long, could not live with the uncertainty. And he knew that Annie, if this went on much longer, would spontaneously combust.