The Family Fang - Kevin Wilson [99]
“You think this is a clue?” she asked Buster.
“I think so,” he replied.
“It’s got to be more than that,” Suzanne said. Buster, his body twisted awkwardly in the backseat of the car, ran his hands over her right arm, the soft hair that lifted to meet his touch. He wished that he had waited to show her the painting. He wanted her to keep touching him, the way the multitudes of rings on her fingers rubbed against his skin.
The only real girlfriend he’d ever had, another writer who had published a collection of stories at the same time as A House of Swans was published, had told him that his emotions were incorrectly hardwired. “You are very sweet,” she told him after a year of dating, as they shared dessert at a restaurant, “but it’s like your family trained you to react to the world in a way that was so specific to their art that you don’t know how to interact with people in the real world. You act like every conversation is just a buildup to something awful.” In response to this, he acknowledged her concerns, said he needed to use the restroom, then ran out of the restaurant, leaving her with the bill, and never saw her again. He had desires, but they were complicated by his inability to understand those desires, and so he opted out of relationships.
And now, in the backseat of his parents’ car, he was tangled up with a half-naked woman, and he only wished that he had waited a little longer after having sex with her to show her a painting his mother had made. This seemed, he understood, to be a strange emotional response. Suzanne, to her credit, did not seem to care. Or, rather, she seemed to care very much, and this made Buster want her even more.
“I mean, if it was just supposed to be a clue, I don’t think she would have put this much effort into it. This looks like something that a person took a lot of time to create. It looks like something that meant a lot to her. I’m not saying that you’re wrong about it being a clue, but I think it’s more than that, too. Isn’t that what art is, right? It’s about one thing, but it’s really about a lot of things.”
“Okay,” Buster said. “But it is definitely, first and foremost, a clue. And whatever it also is, whatever deep stuff it says about my mom, I’m not sure that I want to know.”
“I don’t know,” Suzanne said, touching the barbed wire as if she expected it to puncture her skin, “that even your mom could tell you what it says.”
Having heard from five more galleries, none interested in his mother’s paintings, or perhaps wary of allowing potential chaos in their spaces, Buster began to realize that their parents had made a slight miscalculation in their plans. If no one would show the paintings, how would they return? Annie had gone so far as to contact Hobart for help with finding a gallery, something the old man resisted for a few back-and-forth e-mails before finally giving in to the insistence of the Fang siblings. No matter how it happened, Buster understood that some gallery, somewhere, would eventually show the paintings. The Fangs were still important enough as artists that someone would want to present an offshoot of their recognizable art. But that could take years. Buster did not think he could wait that long, could not live with the uncertainty. And he knew that Annie, if this went on much longer, would spontaneously combust.
One afternoon, a package appeared in the mailbox, and Buster felt as if every bone in his body had, for a split second, rubberized. He steadied himself, touched the address label, and saw that Annie’s name was on it. Annie. Not Buster, who had spent so much time searching for his parents, but his sister, who seemed content, like an experienced assassin, to wait patiently for the perfect moment to kill