The Family Fang: A Novel (21 page)

Annie felt her hands snap into fists, even though she was telling herself, “Stay calm, stay calm, calm down,” and then she felt Buster’s own hand reach into her fist and slowly uncurl her fingers until they were straight and steady. “I’m sorry,” Annie said. “We’re just trying to understand what’s going on and I don’t think either one of us is very good at finding things out on our own.”

“I am particularly bad at it,” Buster admitted.

“We don’t know what to do,” Annie continued.

Hobart remained silent, his right hand worrying the collar of his shirt, and Annie felt the pinprick of embarrassment for having failed in front of an audience. And not only was she no closer to finding her parents, she had stormed into Hobart’s life and upset the carefully constructed solitude of his final years. The mere mention of Caleb and Camille Fang seemed to have tripped something in Hobart’s memory that had been, until now, successfully hidden from introspection. Annie wanted to run out of the house, jump into the car, and drive away from this scene, but she found it impossible to move, the weight of her failure keeping her anchored to the sofa.

“Can I offer you a little advice?” Hobart asked them, breaking the silence. When Annie and Buster nodded, he continued, “Stop looking for them.”

“What?” Annie said.

“There are two options. The first is that they really are dead, that something awful happened to them, in which case, this wild-goose chase is merely prolonging the grieving that follows any death.”

“Hobart,” Annie interrupted. “Do you really think Caleb and Camille are dead?”

Hobart paused, carefully choosing his response. Annie and Buster waited, feeling that the fate of their parents rested on his answer. “I don’t,” Hobart admitted. “I’ll agree with you on that much. Your parents have such a force of will, a belief in what should and should not be, that I cannot imagine a scenario where their death is something as random and as tacky as a rest-stop murder. Crashing to earth in a homemade flying machine at the air show of a state fair. I can see that. Throwing themselves into the tiger attraction at a zoo during a school field trip. Sure, of course. Setting themselves on fire in the middle of the Mall of America. Oh, yes.”

“So they’re out there somewhere,” Annie said.

“That brings me to your second option.”

“What is it?” Buster asked.

“You let them stay missing,” Hobart continued. “They are alive, and they have constructed this bizarre little stunt and they didn’t even tell their son and daughter about it. They want you to think, obviously, that they really are dead. So do it.”

Annie looked over at Buster, who would not meet her gaze. The thought of giving up seemed as impossible as the prospect of actually finding her parents. But she kept imagining that moment, when she ruined what her parents had made, the looks of disbelief on their faces, and it made her heart beat faster.

“I used to tell all my students, not just Caleb and Camille, but any artist that showed some sliver of promise, that they had to devote themselves to their work. They had to remove all obstructions to making the fantastic thing that needed to exist. I would tell them that
kids kill art
.”

Annie and Buster both winced at the phrase, one they had heard their father recite any time the two of them had complicated one of the Fang projects.

“And I meant it,” Hobart continued. “It’s why I never married, never got involved with anyone at all. And your parents realized that they would have to find some way to overcome this theory of mine, some construction that would disprove it. So they intertwined their family and their art so tightly that it was impossible to untangle it. They made you two into their art. It was amazing, really. And then time passed, and maybe it’s because I never really built on my earlier successes, perhaps I was just jealous of them, but I found it was impossible for me to see any Fang art without feeling this horrible sense of dread, that something irreparable was being done to the two of you. And Caleb understood this, my reserved judgments about their work; so pretty soon he stopped writing to me, cut off all communication, and kept right on with their vision. Your parents were right. They beat me by completely inverting my theory. Kids don’t kill art. Art kills kids.”

Annie felt something electric travel up and down her body. Hobart looked at her as if he felt responsible for their entire lives, a sadness she could not entirely comprehend.

“That’s not fair,” Annie said, unable to stop herself from siding with her parents, no matter how much she might agree with Hobart. She did not want Hobart’s pity or perhaps she didn’t want it to come so easily.

“We’re still alive,” Buster added, and Hobart held up his hands in surrender.

“Yes, that’s true,” Hobart said, looking sadly at the two of them.

“So we just let them disappear?” Annie asked. “We let them get away with it?”

“You’re thinking about this in a way that makes you angry at your parents for not including you in this, for letting you think that they really are dead.”

“How else can we think about it?” Buster asked.

“That maybe your parents finally miscalculated,” Hobart said. “They have, however inadvertently, untangled the threads of family and art. You two are free.”

Neither Annie nor Buster made the slightest sign of movement. Annie waited for Hobart to continue, still struggling to accept how much sense he was making.

“You don’t have to follow your parents all over the country, hiding in plain sight, putting your lives on hold until their latest action can be revealed to the world. They forgot to keep you tied to them, and now you don’t have to follow them. Does that not seem like a good thing?”

“It’s hard to think like that,” Annie admitted.

“I imagine that’s true,” Hobart said, “after a lifetime of living otherwise.”

“I don’t know if I want to think like that,” Buster said.

“What do you two really want if you do find your parents? What would be achieved?”

Annie, who had surprisingly never spent a single session with a psychiatrist, began to get the intense feeling that she was in therapy. She did not care for it in the least. And there went her fingers, long and slender, transforming themselves once again into tiny sledgehammer fists. She struggled for an answer to Hobart’s question and, no acceptable reply forthcoming, she leaned back against the sofa, stumped. And then Buster said, “We want to find them and show them that they can’t do whatever they want, just because they think it’s beautiful.”

“That is not worth the effort,” Hobart replied. “I’m sorry, Buster, Annie, but even if you showed them, I don’t think they would learn anything from it. Your parents, like many artists, are incapable of acknowledging this fact. Caleb and Camille have spent most of their lives assuring themselves that art is all that really matters.”

“Can you at least think of anyone who could help us?” Annie said, still struggling to maintain the pose of a capable person, of following their plan of action, regardless of whether or not it made sense any longer.

“Not a single person. Their agent, as I’m sure you know, passed away some time ago and they never bothered to look for other representation. They had very few friends, if any, in the art world; certainly no one else was doing the kind of things that they were. There was that man who wrote the book about your family, but I cannot imagine, under any circumstances, your parents communicating with him.”

The author he was talking about was Alexander Share, an art critic who had written a critical study of the Fangs’ work,
Once Bitten: An Overview of the Perplexing Art of Caleb and Camille Fang
. He had convinced Caleb and Camille to agree to several long interviews over the phone and in person; Buster and Annie were not allowed to talk to him. As it became clear that Share had some real reservations about their work, Caleb and Camille shut off communication with him and tried to get the publisher to kill the book, but in the end it didn’t matter. It was published, and it didn’t amount to much; people had already, long before Alexander Share tried to make sense of the Fangs’ work, decided the value of this kind of art. “Criticism is like dissecting a dead frog,” Caleb said when the book was published. “They’re examining all the guts and shit and organs, when the thing that really matters, whatever it was that animated the body, has long since left. It does nothing for art.” When Annie and Buster asked why their parents had agreed to talk to Share in the first place, their mother said, “If you don’t get hung up on finding anything of worth, it’s kind of fun to dig around in blood and guts for a little while.”

Hobart went on down the list of possible accomplices, no one of note. “There were two artists who were pretty infatuated with all of you. The first one, Donald something-or-other, was basically a vandal, doing violent things to existing works of art. He was a supremely ignorant individual, but he was in awe of your parents.”

“Where is he?” Annie asked.

“He’s dead,” Hobart replied. “He fell off some sculpture he was trying to disassemble and cracked his head open.”

“Who’s the other person?” Annie asked, now finding herself simply amazed at learning something new, however trivial, about her parents.

“There was a woman, a former student of mine, actually, who managed to get close to your parents. She was young and beautiful and had the potential to make things complicated.” He paused to see if they understood his meaning. Annie kept her face impassive, and Hobart said, “Sex is what I was implying there. But she faded away after a while, once it was apparent that your parents had no interest in anything except making art. I believe I read in an alumni newsletter quite some time ago that she got married, had children, turned out to be normal. Usually, you hate when that happens, but it was the best thing for her. Conventional lives are the perfect refuge if you are a terrible artist.”

Annie remembered very clearly a surprisingly young woman who helped her parents with one of their earlier pieces. Her name was Bonnie, or perhaps Betty. She had acted as if Buster and Annie did not exist, could not acknowledge anyone but the two artists she hoped to impress. Often those who were infatuated with Caleb and Camille seemed compelled to pretend that Buster and Annie were invisible, in order to maintain the proper level of focus that her parents demanded. This was, to Annie at least, understandable.

“Anyone else?” she asked Hobart. He shook his head. It was getting late, the sky slowly, as if by magic, dimming. The old man was struggling to sit upright, his shoulders slumped and hands trembling so softly it seemed like he was holding a tiny, nervous animal in each cupped hand. “No one ever got close to Caleb and Camille,” he finally said. “It was just the four of you in your own little world. No one could compete with that.” The way that Hobart said this last sentence, Annie wasn’t sure if he thought this was a good or bad thing. Did he think their parents had loved them or held them hostage? She was afraid to ask.

“We should leave you alone,” Annie said. “We’ve bothered you enough, I think.”

“Don’t leave,” Hobart said, suddenly springing up. “It’s late. You can stay here tonight. I’ll make dinner.”

Annie shook her head. Buster nudged her with his elbow but she continued to decline. “We have to get going.”

“We haven’t even had a chance to talk about my work,” Hobart said, his obvious desperation causing his body to expand, to take up enough space to make Annie and Buster feel cornered.

“We have a plane to catch,” Annie said, though they had no tickets for their return trip, no place to stay. “Thank you for your help.”

“I didn’t do a goddamn thing,” he replied, shrugging. “I just gave you some advice that I don’t think you’re going to follow.”

Hobart took Annie in his arms, kissed her, and then shook Buster’s hand.

“You two are great artists,” Hobart said as the two siblings walked back to their rental car. “You can separate reality from art. A lot of us can’t do that.”

“Good-bye, Hobart,” Annie said as she started the car.

“Come back sometime,” he told them.

Annie pressed her foot gently on the gas pedal and the car pulled slowly down the driveway. Through the rearview mirror, she watched Hobart shuffle back into the house, shut the door, and then the entire house went dark.

A
s they drove back to San Francisco, Buster asked what they were going to do next. Their options seemed so limited that it was impossible to ignore the feeling of failure. Where else could they go but back home? They had no leads, the few possibilities having closed shut after their talk with Hobart. Annie could not imagine how to continue searching. Buster was now asleep in the passenger seat, softly snoring. She accelerated, her headlights cutting through the darkness in front of her, and she knew there was nothing left to do. She could not shake the feeling that this was a contest, her parents competing against her and Buster. And, following this line of thinking, she could not help but acknowledge that her parents had won. Her parents were gone, for an indeterminate amount of time, possibly forever, and the only thing she could think to do was to go back to their house.

Too late to catch any flights, Annie parked the car in the long-term lot and reclined her seat. Just as she closed her eyes, Buster said, still half-asleep, “What are we doing?”