The Family Fang: A Novel (7 page)

“Probably not,” she answered.

“That’s what I’m interested in,” Eric said. “I have to admit, I think you’re a pretty talented actress. I thought you deserved to win the Oscar for
Date Due
and you even managed to subvert the cartoonish sexuality of Lady Lightning by giving the character a postfeminist spin in the two
The Powers That Be
movies, shooting lightning bolts at Nazis and whatnot.”

“Yes, well, I think we can agree that everyone loves watching Nazis getting hit with lightning bolts.”

“Well, anyways, you’re a good actress but I wrote my thesis in college on your parents’ career, I’ve seen nearly every piece your family has created, and I really feel that your strongest work, when you were doing the most unexpected and emotionally resonant acting, was in those art pieces.”

“When I was nine years old,” Annie said. She felt like she was going to be sick. This magazine writer was expressing her worst fears, what she’d convinced herself was not at all true, that being a Fang, the conduit for her parents’ vision, was perhaps the only worthwhile thing she had ever accomplished.

“I’m going to get a drink,” she said, and pushed away from the table. It was two in the afternoon, but it was the afternoon, and evening followed the afternoon, and she was going to drink. She was going to drink well into the evening, she believed. She asked for and received a glass of gin, no ice, no mixers, no olive. She brought it back to the table and took a get-to-know-you sip that got the ball rolling.

“What I meant,” Eric continued, as if he had been waiting to say this all day, “is that there is such a wealth of complexity in those performances. Underneath the initial shock of the act, there’s something that, if you watch closely, becomes apparent.”

“And what’s that?” she asked, another sip, so clean and medicinal it felt not unlike surgery under light anesthetic.

“There’s sorrow, a sadness from knowing that you are forcing these events on unknowing people.”

How many times had he watched those videos? What had he been looking for? She had never, if she could help it, viewed a single one of the Fang pieces after it had been edited and completed, the finished product. When she remembered certain events, they were unconnected and random, a flash of color spilling out of her mother’s body, a broken string on a guitar. They came back to her in waves and then receded for months or even years before they would return.

She looked up from her drink and Eric was staring at her, his face calm and radiant.

“You were always the best Fang,” he said, “at least I think so.”

“There’s no best Fang,” she said, “we’re all exactly the same.”

A
few weeks earlier, just as the naked pictures fiasco had begun to subside, Annie’s parents had called, ecstatic. Annie was reading a four-page note from Minda, two pages of which were a sestina that used the repeating words
Fang, blossom, locomotive, tongue, movie,
and
bi-curious
. She was happy to put the note down.

“Excellent news,” her father said, and Annie could hear her mother in the background saying, “Excellent news.”

“What’s that?” Annie said.

“We got an e-mail from the MCA in Denver. They are very interested in exhibiting one of our pieces.”

“That’s great,” Annie said. “Congratulations. Is it new?”

“It’s so effing new,” Mr. Fang said, “it’s only just happened.”

“Wow,” Annie said.

“I know, wow, exactly, wow,” her father said.

“Dad,” Annie said, “I’ve got lines to run.”

“Well, good, okay,” Mr. Fang said, and then Mrs. Fang yelled from somewhere very close to the phone, “Just tell her, honey.”

“Tell me what?”

“Well, the piece would revolve around those pictures of you that sprung up recently.”

“The naked pictures.”

“Right, those pictures. Well, the museum contacted us to see if your, um, performance was a Fang event.”

“Oh.”

“We said that you had created a very powerful critique of the media culture and the price of fame.”

“Uh-huh,” Annie said.

“You know, Child A creating an event on such a grand scale that it spanned the globe. It’s a Fang experience to the nth degree. And we haven’t done a Child A piece in a long time.”

“Because I’m not, you know, a child.”

“Well, I just wanted to let you know. Thought you’d find it exciting.”

“It is,” Annie said, suddenly wondering how that sestina ended.

“We love you, Annie,” her parents said, in unison.

“Yes,” Annie replied. “Me too.”

T
he next morning, Annie circled her room and stared at the magazine writer, stripped down to his underwear, in her bed. His briefs were neon purple, which Annie did not find attractive or unattractive, simply a detail worthy of notice. She was not hungover, which meant she hadn’t been that drunk the night before, which meant this wasn’t a completely terrible idea on her part. “Right?” she told herself, coffee brewing in the kitchen. “This wasn’t a completely terrible idea on my part.” Eric roused and seemed surprised, understandably, that Annie was standing over him, staring intently at his neon-purple ass. “I’m making coffee,” Annie said, and hurried out of the room.

They sat across from each other at her dining-room table, which she never used. She ran her hand across the fine wood grain. It was a good table. She should eat here more often.

“So, we violated some pretty basic rules regarding interviewer-interviewee conduct,” he said. Annie had only half-listened to what he had said. What kind of wood was this? she wondered.

“But that could make for an interesting article,” he said, “a postmodern, new-journalism method of celebrity profile.”

Annie looked over at Eric. He wasn’t using a coaster for his mug of coffee. She slid one across the table and gestured toward his cup. He did not seem to understand and kept right on talking.

“How do you include such a significant detail regarding your relationship with the subject without overshadowing the rest of the article? Would you include the personal conversations along with the on-the-record comments? And once you’ve slept with someone, where does the line end?”

Annie wanted to smash the table in half.

“You’re going to include this in the article?” she asked.

“I don’t see how I could leave it out; we had sex.”

“Well, I see how you could leave it out,” Annie said, her hand throbbing from bending her injured fingers into a fist that she was now tapping forcefully against the table, “you just leave it out.”

“I don’t think so.”

“This is not good,” Annie said, pacing back and forth.

“I’ll send you the article before I turn in the final draft,” Eric said, “to verify any quotes or differences in our recollection of the events.”

“No, I’ll wait for the issue like everyone else.”

“Should I call you later or—”

“Just leave,” Annie said, cutting him off, not wanting at any cost to know what the
or
might entail.

“I really think you’re incredible,” he said, but Annie was already heading to the bathroom, locking the door behind her.

Maybe she was going crazy. She didn’t feel crazy, but she was sure that this was not the way that sane people behaved. She heard the front door open and then close. She pressed a washcloth against her face and imagined that she was a giant, remorseless, half-bear, half-man creature. She pounded all of her enemies into the earth, leaving bloodstains in all directions, buzzards circling overhead. She killed everything that needed to be killed, and when she was done, when all had been made, if not right, at least less wrong, she crawled into a cave, dark and deep, and hibernated for months, waiting for a new season to arrive and find her sated. She looked at her own hands; her right hand was purple, swollen, perhaps broken. She could not smash anything without breaking herself.

She walked back into the kitchen and placed the dishes in the sink. She picked up the phone and dialed Sally’s office number, relieved to be shuttled to her voice mail.

“Sally,” she said, walking, as always, straight into the sun, “I think I fucked you over again.”

the portrait of a lady, 1988

artists: caleb and camille fang

N
one of the Fangs could deny it: Buster was beautiful. As he walked to the front of the stage, his evening gown ridiculously sequined, his long, blond curls bouncing with the rhythm of his confident stride, the rest of his family began to realize that he might actually win. As Mr. Fang continued to film the proceedings with his video camera, Mrs. Fang clutched her daughter’s hand and whispered, “He’s going to do it, Annie. Your brother is going to be Little Miss Crimson Clover.” Annie watched Buster, his face paralyzed with happiness, and immediately understood that, for her brother, this was no longer about making an artistic statement. He wanted that crown.

T
wo weeks earlier, Buster had outright refused. “I’m not going to wear a dress,” he said. “It’s an evening gown,” Mrs. Fang told him, “a kind of costume.” Buster, nine years old, was not interested in the subtleties of wordplay. “It’s still a dress,” he said. Mr. Fang, who had recently used a good portion of a grant from the Beuys Foundation to purchase a Panasonic VHS/S-VHS camcorder to replace the one broken by an irate zoo employee, zoomed in on his son’s face, tight with repulsion. “Artists are notoriously difficult,” Mr. Fang said and then Mrs. Fang looked into the camera and told him to please leave the room.

“Just get Annie to do it,” Buster offered, feeling the inescapable claustrophobia of his parents’ desires. “Annie winning a beauty pageant is not a commentary on gender and objectification and masculine influences on beauty,” Mrs. Fang replied. “Annie winning a beauty pageant is a foregone conclusion, the status quo.” Buster could not argue; his sister could win the Junior Miss category of the Crimson Clover pageant even if she was sobbing uncontrollably and shouting obscenities. She was the beautiful Fang, the one who could insert herself into a situation and gain the attention of anyone, which allowed for the other Fangs to continue their secret actions. So Buster understood that Annie was the beautiful one and Buster was, well, not the beautiful one. He was, well, something else. Whatever he was, he was not the Fang who wore a dress and competed in beauty pageants. Could he please not be that?

“Buster,” his mother continued, “we have other projects lined up. You don’t have to do anything that you don’t want to do.”

“I don’t want to do it,” he said.

“Okay, fine. I just want to say one thing. We’re a family. We do things that are difficult because we love each other. Remember when I jumped that car with a motorcycle?”

After plastering a town in Georgia with flyers for a daredevil stunt, Mrs. Fang, in special makeup to look like a ninety-year-old woman, drove a rented motorcycle off a ramp and over a parked car. She barely cleared the car and then wobbled for a few feet before crashing into a ditch, but was unhurt. There was an article in the local newspaper and it was subsequently picked up by national news organizations. Mrs. Fang had never, in her entire life, ridden a motorcycle, much less jumped over a car with one. “I could die,” she told her children, who were pretending to be her great-grandchildren, just before she hopped on the motorcycle, “but whatever happens, just go with it.”

Of course Buster remembered. In the car on the way back home, their mother chugging whiskey straight from the bottle, she let the children peel off the latex makeup to reveal her own face, smiling and kind.

“I was terrified. I didn’t want to do it when your father suggested it. I refused. And then I thought, how could I ever ask your father or one of you to do something difficult if I didn’t go through with it? So I did it. And it was incredible. What you’ll find, I think, is that the things you most want to avoid are the things that make you feel the greatest when you actually do them.”

“I don’t want to do it,” he said.

“Fair enough, kiddo,” she said, miraculously smiling, cheerful. She stood, brushed off her pants, and walked down the hallway to her study. Annie walked into the living room where Buster was still on the floor and said, “Man, Mom’s pissed.”

“No, she’s not,” Buster said, correcting her.

“Oh, yes,” Annie said.

“No, she’s not,” Buster said again, less confident.

“Oh,” Annie said, softly stroking Buster’s head as if he were a puppy, “yes.”

That night, Buster’s ear against the door of his parents’ bedroom, he could hear snatches of their conversations, whispered transmissions,
I did
and
But maybe
and
He won’t
and
Well, Jesus Christ
and
It’ll be fine
. He stood up and walked into Annie’s room. She was watching a silent film where a woman was trapped inside a barrel heading toward the edge of a waterfall and the hero was miles, dozens and dozens of miles, away. “This is the best part,” she said and waved him over. Buster rested his head in her lap and she pinched his earlobe gently, rolling the flap of skin between her thumb and forefinger like she was making a wish on it.

On the TV, the barrel bobbed in the water, bouncing off of rocks, headed toward certain doom. “Oh,” Annie said, “this is gonna be good.” Just as the hero arrived at the edge of the falls, the barrel tumbled over and disappeared in the spray of water. At the bottom of the falls, shards of wood rose to the surface. “Goddamn,” Annie whispered. And then, a form beneath the water, the heroine resurfaced, a look on her face like
motherfucker, I can’t be killed
. She swam to the bank of the river and climbed out, shaking any last remnant of death from her body. The music slow and deliberate, the heroine marched, uncaring as to where her beau was and why he had not arrived in time, in the direction of the villain, ready to
put things right
. Annie turned off the TV. “I can’t watch anymore,” she said, “I’m going to kick a hole in the wall if I watch anymore.”

“Is there anything you wouldn’t do if Mom and Dad asked you?” Buster asked his sister.

She considered the question. “I wouldn’t kill anybody,” she said, “and I wouldn’t do something to an animal.”

“Anything else?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, obviously bored with the question. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

“I don’t want to be a girl,” he said.

“Well, sure,” Annie answered.

“I’m going to do it though,” he said, at that moment making his decision.

“Well, sure,” Annie answered.

He pulled away from his sister and stepped into the hallway, the burden off his shoulders and then, after just a second of lightness, resettled on him.

He pushed open the door of his parents’ bedroom. His mother was wrapping rubber bands around his father’s fingers, the appendages tomato-red and segmented in ways that suggested amputation. They looked surprised to see him but made no move to hide their actions.

“I’m going to do it,” he told them and Mr. and Mrs. Fang whooped with delight. They beckoned to him and he jumped onto the bed, worming his way in between them. “It’s going to be great,” Mrs. Fang whispered to Buster, kissing his face over and over. Mr. Fang snapped the rubber bands off of his hands and then clenched and unclenched his fists, a pleasant, easy feeling passing over his face. Then the Fangs draped their arms over Buster and fell asleep, Buster the only one still awake, the weight of his parents’ bodies holding him in place and easing him into something that was not sleep but felt safe.

B
uster made the final strides to the edge of the stage with a previously unknown confidence, his heels clacking on the slick walkway, clack-clack-clack-clack-clack, his rear swinging in time to the rhythm. When he reached his mark, he turned sideways, raised his lead shoulder, hand on hip, cocked his head, and looked out at the audience, who cheered. As he turned and walked back to the other girls, he lifted his hand just over his head, a gesture of farewell that could not be bothered to do more than acknowledge the fact that the audience was being left behind in favor of something much, much better. The other two girls looked at him, a stranger, no one they’d ever seen before, with nothing but bad intentions. Buster stared them down and then took his position in line, the final three.

Buster could hardly focus, his teeth bared as though he was about to eat a small animal. He was loving this. The glamour of the dresses and shoes and hair and fingernails, the attention from people who did not give him attention. The fact that, inside this costume, he was still Buster, which meant that, really, there was something essential inside of him that made this work at all. It was a magic trick, and he had to keep reminding himself not to reveal the secret, something so simple and easy if you knew how to look at it, which is what made it magical.

Blah-blah-blah, aren’t they lovely, blah-blah-blah, done so well, blah-blah-blah, all winners tonight, blah-blah-blah, second runner-up, blah-blah-blah, someone’s name that was not Buster’s or not Buster’s new name, Holly Woodlawn, blah-blah-blah, in the event that Little Miss Crimson Clover cannot fulfill her duties, blah-blah-blah, the new Little Miss Crimson Clover, blah-blah-blah, and then there was an explosion of applause. Well, shit, Buster had blah-blah-blah’ed the winner’s name.

He turned to his rival and saw that she was crying. Had she won or lost? Had he won or lost? He looked into the audience, searching for his parents, but they were lost in the camera flashes and the spotlight that seemed to envelop everyone onstage. And then he felt someone’s hands on his shoulders and something so light it almost didn’t exist being placed upon his head. A bouquet of crimson clover was jammed into his hands. “Hug me,” he heard the first runner-up bark, and he kissed her cheek and lightly placed his hand across her back. Now it was time for the inevitable, the thing that made Buster’s crown art instead of artifice.

They had rehearsed for days, the different permutations of this event. Buster being dismissed immediately in the first round. Buster going out in the final ten. Buster being sent offstage when the final three were announced. Buster finding himself sashed and applauded but not crowned. And, without as much vigor, they practiced for this, the stage empty save for Buster, sparkling and shiny, the focus of everyone in the auditorium, a vacuum that pulled all the air into his own lungs.

He waved as he had seen the women do in the videos, not actually waving but instead turning, as if mechanized and fully wound. Tears began to fall down his cheeks, the heavy mascara raccooning his eyes and staining his face. He toed the edge of the stage, steady on his unsteady heels, and as he seemingly adjusted the crown, he leaned forward, out over the edge, bowing gracefully, and then snapped his body back to its original position. As planned, his wig flipped off and over his head, skittering across the stage behind him, the only sound for miles. And then there was the sound of the entire audience pulling that surfeit of air out of his lungs, necessary for them to now gasp, for some to scream, for the whole room to, as the Fangs dreamed, tear apart at the seams.

With an easy shift in his posture, slumping his shoulders, repositioning his pelvis, he became an obvious boy, the movements so natural that it echoed the way a chameleon changed color, the gradual but effortless reshading. Buster then stumbled on his high heels and ran to the crown, freed it from the tangles of the artificial curls, and returned it to its rightful place atop his head. Sprinting down the stage toward him, one of the directors of the pageant made a grab for his crown, but Buster ducked away from her and she lost her balance and tumbled off the stage. This was the familiar ending to all Fang events, the understanding that things had shifted and now you were in trouble, in danger, on your own.

“Say it,” Mrs. Fang shouted to Buster, who seemed too stunned to proceed. There was a final stage to the event before they could reconvene and retreat, the scene of the crime disappearing in the horizon. Buster was to toss the crown into the audience and shout, “A crown, golden in show, is but a wreath of thorns.” Instead, Buster was clutching the crown to his head like a piece of his skull that had come unattached. “Drop it,” Mrs. Fang said, “just toss that thing.” Buster leaped off the stage and ran down the center aisle, past the Fang family, out the door, and into the night. Mr. Fang continued to film the confused faces of those in the audience, then zoomed in on the first runner-up, crying and hiccupping and shaking Buster’s wig like a cheerleader’s pom-pom. “This is good,” Mr. Fang said. “It could have been even better,” Mrs. Fang replied. “No,” Annie said, still clapping for her beloved little brother, “no it could not.”

T
he Fangs found Buster hiding under their van, conspicuously sparkling as he shifted his weight upon the uncomfortable asphalt. Mr. Fang knelt down and helped his son inch out into the open air. “What happened to the line from Milton?” Mrs. Fang asked. Buster flinched at his mother’s voice. “You were supposed to throw the crown away.”

Buster looked up at his mother. “It’s my crown,” he said.

“But you don’t want it,” Mrs. Fang said, exasperated.

“Yes I do,” he replied. “I won it. I’m Little Miss Crimson Clover and this is my crown.”

“Oh, Buster,” she said, pointing at the crown atop his head, “this is what we rebel against, this idea of worth based on nothing more than appearance. This is the superficial kind of symbol that we actively work against.”