The Family Fang - Kevin Wilson [24]
“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.”
The 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