The Family Fang - Kevin Wilson [96]
“Maybe she wasn’t, though,” Buster said, growing more and more excited as he kept talking. “This is something,” he said. “This is the something that we’ve been waiting for.”
“I don’t understand you, Buster. I don’t understand,” she gestured toward the paintings without looking directly at them, “any of this.”
“This is Fang art, unknown to the rest of the world. I don’t think she wanted us to destroy them. I think this is how they’ll come back, a way for Mom and Dad to finally reveal themselves.”
“These paintings?” Annie asked.
“A show,” Buster said. “We get a major gallery to show these paintings, the hidden art of Camille Fang. We get as much press as we can. We give them a public forum and let them disrupt it.”
“You’re not thinking this through, Buster,” she said.
“This is how we bring them back,” he continued, unflinching in the midst of Annie’s doubt.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t want any part of this.”
Buster looked at the paintings, the tools he felt certain his mother had left for him to utilize. He imagined them hanging on the walls of a prestigious gallery, a multitude of people bringing their faces as close as possible to the canvas in order to understand their intent. He imagined standing in the middle of the gallery, his sister beside him, and then watching as the sea of people parted and their parents revealed themselves to the world, reborn, no aspect of art beyond their control.
“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.
It 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