The Family Fang - Kevin Wilson [107]
Chapter Eleven
Annie 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talking points was the idea that her mother’s paintings showed an artist who was seeking to move beyond the limiting, outdated forms of art that the Fang family had once made, was doing something perhaps more important, more difficult, and more artistic, and it was a shame that she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