The Family Fang - Kevin Wilson [97]
“It’s part of the process,” Buster said, staring at the painting through the viewfinder of the camera. He took the picture, checked its digital image to make sure it was acceptable, and then shuffled the painting to the side and replaced it with another, equally bizarre, painting. He had originally imagined, after his mother had claimed these paintings as her own, that she was sitting in the dimly lit closet of her daughter’s childhood bedroom, painting these images while her husband was away on some errand, the sharp, crackling fear of being discovered always with her. He imagined her visiting the paintings while her husband was asleep, staring at them for signs of why she might be so obsessed with creating them. Now, however, believing these paintings to be props for a larger, more important artistic work, the Fang reappearance, he imagined his parents laughing, working to outdo each other as they tossed out ideas for the paintings, his father’s hand on his mother’s shoulder as she carefully moved the brush across the canvas, his father murmuring words of encouragement. He imagined the two of them staring at the finished product with great satisfaction before hiding them in the closet of Annie’s bedroom until some unknown time when they could be discovered and they could perform the task for which they had always been intended.
Once they had the paintings cataloged, Annie and Buster began to whittle down the possibilities for this unveiling. Museums were out, they decided. There was too much lead-time required and the structures themselves were so big that it would complicate matters. They needed a space that would fill up, would focus entirely on the work of their mother, and would do it fast. So they concentrated on galleries, ones with which the Fangs had previously worked.
“There’s the Agora Gallery in New York,” Annie suggested. This particular gallery, in Chelsea, had once shown a video (security-camera footage that the Fangs had stolen plus Mr. Fang’s own secretive camerawork) of one of the Fangs’ earlier works: Buster left in a dressing room in a department store, walking through the store with the security guard, pointing to a random couple and saying that they were his parents, loudly insistent in the face of their denial.
They sent the gallery an e-mail, along with a few JPEGs of the paintings, and it was only a few hours later that they received a call from the owner of the gallery, Charles Buxton. “Is this A or B?” he asked when Buster answered the phone. “B,” Buster said, before he caught himself and said, “Buster.”
“Is this bullshit, Buster?” the gallery owner asked.
“Excuse me?”
“What’s the deal here? Are your parents putting you up to this?”
“Our parents are gone, Mr. Buxton,” Buster replied, his nerves starting to go haywire, the feeling coming over him that he would ruin the whole thing if he wasn’t careful.
“I know that,” he said. “I read about it in all the papers. And I also know that the Fang family isn’t known for doing things on the up-and-up.”
“This is real,” Buster said. “This is something my sister and I are doing, on our own, as a way to remember our mother.”
“You have any way of verifying that your mother painted these images?” Mr. Buxton asked.
Buster paused. There was no signature on the paintings, nothing that would suggest that their mother was the artist behind these works. Buster began to wonder if perhaps his mother and father had found these paintings, had bought them from another artist, in service of their greater work. “My sister and I talked to my mother about these paintings before she disappeared,” he finally said. “She admitted that she had painted them.”
“Something’s not right here,” Mr. Buxton said. “I remember your family. The