The Family Fang - Kevin Wilson [23]
“It’s not true,” Annie said.
“Well, kind of,” Minda replied, still smiling.
“Well, not really,” Annie said.
“Apples and oranges.”
“What?”
“Apples and oranges.”
“That doesn’t—”
“Well, I think it’s sweet.”
“And who is this close friend?” Annie said. “I don’t have any close friends.”
“It’s me,” Minda said, her smile less a smile and more like paralysis.
“Oh, Jesus Christ.”
“I told my publicist and she told some magazines and so now it’s official.”
Annie felt like she was traveling downhill in a machine whose wheels had, at that exact moment, come off, sparks shooting past her face, nothing to do but wait until things had come to a complete stop and she could get out and run away.
Once they found a restaurant far enough away from the arcade and were seated, Annie placed her hand flat on the table, palm down. Her index and middle fingers were swelling at a rapid pace and she was finding it difficult to bend them. While Eric ate a hamburger that looked like something a person who had never seen a hamburger would create if challenged to do so, Annie told him about Minda, the misunderstanding that had transpired, the closeness that inevitably occurs when two people are putting their creative selves into a singular project. She didn’t tell him about the arguments and the stalking and the occasional moments when she would relent and sleep with Minda, the times that she thought she should just smother her with a pillow and rid the world of one more insane person. Unlike Minda, she kept some things to herself.
“Well,” Eric said, his plate a pool of ketchup and mustard and mushrooms and fried onions and all the other things his hamburger had been unable to contain (Annie thought, “I could make a salad out of what fell out of your burger”), “what I really wanted to talk about, what I find most interesting about you, is your family.”
Annie felt a bubble of air travel into her brain, a searing pain that flashed and was gone. Her family. Could she perhaps just keep talking about her tits and her lesbian stalker?
“For instance,” he continued, “you don’t go by your real last name.”
“My agent thought it would typecast me, nothing but horror films. It sounds made up anyways, don’t you think?” she asked.
“A little. Is it?”
“I don’t think so. It’s Eastern European; it might have been shortened at some point. My father said that we were descendants of the first genuine wolf-man to cross the Atlantic and come to America. He had killed so many people in Poland or Belarus or wherever that he had to hitch a ride on a steamer to America to avoid being arrested and killed. And then he came here and, every full moon, killed a bunch of Americans. Later, he told us that his ancestor had probably created the whole story himself as an elaborate hoax and had changed his name to help sell it. That was less exciting for a kid to hear.”
“That’s what I want to talk about,” Eric said, his face bright, his left eye twitching. “You were ‘Child A’ in all those art pieces that your parents created. You were, for all intents and purposes, the star.”
“Oh, Buster was the star, for sure. He had it much worse than me.”
She thought of Buster, tied to a lamppost, stuck in a bear trap, making out with a St. Bernard, the numerous ways he’d been left in some bizarre situation and made to fend for himself.
“Still, you were placed in circumstances where you were doing some form of acting, some guerrilla-style, improvisational acting, so do you think that if you hadn’t been a member of the Fangs, you would be an actress?”
“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