The Family Fang: A Novel (20 page)

Chapter Nine

A
nnie and Buster stepped off the plane and walked into the terminal, safely arrived in San Francisco. There had been much discussion in regards to attire before they had begun their trip. Buster had suggested fedoras and rumpled suits, unfiltered cigarettes, tie clips. Annie thought perhaps matching black suits and Lone Ranger masks, crushed-up amphetamines, manicured fingernails. Buster, it seemed, wanted to be a detective and Annie wanted to be a superhero. They finally agreed that they needed something that would not draw attention to them, understated but still uniform in some way. Buster donned a white dress shirt, the sleeves rolled up past his elbows, a pair of dark blue jeans, and black leather sneakers. Annie wore a white V-neck T-shirt, dark blue jeans, and black leather flats. On their wrists, they wore the kind of watches that scuba divers swear by, heavy and solid and waterproof, synchronized and precise. In their pockets, a heavy wad of cash, pens that were half the size of regular pens—for surreptitious note-taking—a handful of Red Hots to keep them sharp, and the address for Hobart Waxman, their best, their only, chance at finding their missing parents.

Their baggage claimed, rental-car key in hand, Annie and Buster began the trip to Hobart’s house in Sebastopol, praying that the old man, nearing ninety, was sharp enough to give them the answers they needed, but dulled enough by age that he would be incapable of giving them a bum steer. While Buster navigated and Annie drove, they discussed the different ways to go about getting Hobart to give up their parents’ location.

“Do we rush in, all angry and threatening, try to scare it out of him?” Buster asked, but Annie quickly vetoed that idea.

“We don’t want to give him a heart attack. I say we play it cool, pretend we’re just here to learn more about our parents, now that they have probably passed away. We get him talking and then, slowly, we shift the conversation to where they might be if they aren’t really dead.”

“But if he really knows where they are,” Buster countered, “he’ll be suspicious of us showing up out of the blue. I’ve never met him and you haven’t seen him in twenty years or so. He’ll know we’re after our parents. That’s why we have to rough him up a little.”

“No,” Annie said emphatically. “We cannot beat up a ninety-year-old man.”

“Rough him up,” Buster said, correcting her. “Just get up in his business and make him see that we’re not playing around.”

“Just, okay, just try to think of something else,” Annie said. “How about this? One of us talks to him, keeps him busy. The other one pretends to use the restroom and then starts searching the house for clues. If we find something, then we’ve got him nailed. He’ll have to play ball with us.”

“That’s not bad,” Buster admitted. “I like that.”

“Poor guy won’t even know what hit him,” Annie said.

T
wo weeks of brainstorming and all that Annie and Buster had come up with was Hobart Waxman, all the while they were hoping for the telephone to ring and offer them even the smallest of clues. Right after the news of their parents’ disappearance had been revealed, there was a startling amount of interest in the Fangs. All the major newspapers carried some mention of the suspected abduction. In the arts section of the
New York Times,
there had been a front-page article about Caleb and Camille. Though Annie and Buster were mentioned several times in the article, the siblings had wisely decided not to comment. The phone rang constantly for a few days and then it stopped as suddenly as it had begun. The news cycle had moved on, and all that was left was Annie and Buster and their belief that their parents were waiting to be discovered.

Annie checked in periodically with the police to see if any of their parents’ credit cards had been used. They had not. Not a single withdrawal had registered on their bank accounts. The two of them also searched through date books and random numbers on scraps of paper but found nothing that would bring them closer to their parents’ current location. The gallery owner who had once represented their parents was now dead. They had no other family. All they had was Hobart.

Their parents did not think much of the history of artistic accomplishment thus far, had constantly rebuffed their children’s suggestions of worthwhile art. Dada? Too silly. Mapplethorpe? Too serious. Sally Mann? Too exploitative. Hobart Waxman, however, he was the real deal. Even though Hobart had never visited the family in Tennessee, had never even met Buster, if there was another person with whom the Fangs would share the details of their grand disappearance, it would be him. It was not much to go on, but what else did they have? What else had their parents given them to work with?

Annie remembered the way her parents would breathlessly describe one of Hobart’s most famous pieces, the one that had first brought him to prominence. It was called
The Uninvited Guest,
and in this piece Hobart would break into the mansions that littered the West Coast, giant structures with an army of servants. Once inside, he would live in these vast houses, dozens upon dozens of uninhabited rooms, without being detected for days, weeks, even months. He would sleep in closets, steal food from the kitchen, and watch television, taking pictures of himself to document the visit. In a few instances, he was discovered, arrested, and jailed for some period of time, but in most cases, he simply exhausted the possibilities, slipped out during the night, no sign that he had ever been there in the first place except for a card thanking the owners for their hospitality.

“It was so perfect,” Caleb had explained to Annie when she was still a child. “He forced the art onto unsuspecting people; he made them a part of the piece, and they didn’t even know it.”

“But if they didn’t know what was going on,” Annie asked, confused, “how would they appreciate it?”

“They’re not supposed to appreciate it,” Caleb said, slightly disappointed with her. “They’re supposed to experience it.”

“I guess I don’t understand,” Annie said.

“The simplest things are the hardest to understand,” Caleb agreed, pleased with Annie for reasons that she could not begin to know.

H
obart’s house was at the end of a long, curving driveway, nothing but fields for miles in any direction. When they pulled up to the house, a small cottage with a barn-like studio in the backyard, they saw no car, no sign of anyone being home. “This is even better,” Buster said as they idled in the car. “We’ll do a little sleuthing while he’s away.” They stepped out of the car and Buster walked around the house to the studio, while Annie looked through one of the front windows. She knocked on the door and, when no one appeared, she tried the knob, which unlocked. Should she enter? Did this feel like a movie? Annie was not sure, though she did think that life was best when it felt like a movie, when, even if you hadn’t read it, you knew there was a script that would tell you how things would end.

Inside, the house was spotless. There were a few pieces of expensive-looking modern furniture, a chair that Annie believed she had seen on a postcard in a museum. She walked over to a desk that held a notepad and a telephone, a small pile of mail. She looked through the mail, found no clues, and then tilted the notepad to look for indentations in the paper from previous scribbling, but it was pristine. She picked up the phone, pressed *69 to find the last caller, but Hobart seemed not to have this service. The wastepaper basket was empty. That was it. Annie had exhausted the detective skills that she had learned from movies.

She started to walk down the hallway, which led to more rooms, when she heard her brother say, “Um, Annie?” She turned toward the kitchen, the sliding glass door open, and saw Buster, his posture very erect, his eyes wide open, and then she heard a voice from behind her brother. “Don’t move, honey, or I put a hole in your boyfriend here.” She then noticed Hobart Waxman, bent by age, standing behind Buster, one hand gripping the back of her brother’s neck. “So, Annie, he has a gun,” Buster said. This, Annie decided, was most certainly like a movie. She felt a panic begin to take over because she had seen this kind of movie before and it usually ended with unpleasantness, a struggle for a gun, an accidental discharge, police sirens in the background. “Hobart?” Annie said, and the old man peeked around Buster and squinted at Annie. “Wait,” Hobart said, relaxing his grip on Buster’s neck, “is that Annie Fang?”

“It is, Hobart,” Annie said.

“So is this Buster?” Hobart asked. Buster and Annie both nodded.

“Oh, hell,” Hobart said.

“Could you put away the gun?” Annie asked.

“I don’t have a gun,” Hobart said. “It’s just my hand jammed up against his back.” He held up his hand, wriggling his fingers.

“It felt like a gun,” Buster said. “You roughed me up a little.”

“I did no such thing,” Hobart said.

“I’m sorry, Hobart,” said Annie, as the two men walked into the living room. Hobart dismissed her embarrassment with a wave of his hand, embraced her, and then gave her a kiss. “I haven’t seen you since you were a baby,” he said. He turned to Buster and then said, “She was the most beautiful child I’d ever seen.” Buster nodded, smiling, at Hobart, and then began to back away into the hallway. “Well,” he said to Hobart, “while you and Annie talk, I’m going to use the restroom.” Buster then, as he turned away from Hobart’s gaze, winked at Annie and brought a finger to his lips as if to quiet her. Annie grabbed him as he passed her, pulling him back into the kitchen, her grip tight on his arm. “Okay,” Buster said, still broadly smiling, “I’ll go later.”

“I saw you in that movie,” Hobart said, pointing at Annie. “The one where you play a librarian who gets mixed up with skinheads.”

“
Date Due,
” Annie replied.

“That’s it,” Hobart said, clapping his hands together.

“She got nominated for an Oscar for that,” Buster said.

“She should have won,” Hobart added.

“Thank you,” Annie answered, blushing.

“And this one,” Hobart said, gesturing toward Buster. “I read your wonderful book about the couple who adopts those feral children. I’m terrible with titles.”

“
A House of Swans,
” Buster said.

“He won the Golden Quill for that,” Annie said.

“I saw you wrote another book but the reviews were not very good and so I didn’t get around to reading it.”

The color went out of Buster’s face, but he recovered, smiling, and shrugged. “You didn’t miss much,” he replied.

“It’s even better than the first book,” Annie offered.

“Well, now that I’ve finally met you, I’ll read it,” Hobart said.

“You’re probably wondering why we’re here,” Annie said, getting things back on track.

“I heard about your parents, of course, so I imagine you want to talk to me about them,” Hobart said.

Buster and Annie nodded.

“What would you like to know?” he asked them.

“Where are they?” Annie said.

“What?” Hobart asked, confused, the smile fading from his face.

“Where are our parents?” the Fang children asked in unison, inching closer to Hobart.

Hobart sighed deeply and then pointed toward the living room and said, “Let’s sit down and talk.”

H
obart took nearly five minutes to find a comfortable sitting position on his George Nelson–designed Kangaroo chair. Buster and Annie sat side by side opposite Hobart on a black leather sling sofa, feeling as though they were waiting for a bus that was very, very late.

“I have no idea where your parents are,” Hobart told Annie and Buster.

“We don’t believe you, Hobart,” Annie replied.

“If they didn’t tell you two what they’re up to, what in the world makes you think that they would tell me?” he asked.

“They love you,” Annie said, the strange tremor of jealousy creeping into her voice. “You were their mentor. They would want to tell you, the one person who would respect their artistic principles enough to never tell anyone else.”

“You two have no idea what you’re talking about,” Hobart said, squinting in a way that suggested he was staring at the visible waves of craziness that were emanating from Annie and Buster. “Your parents hated me.”

“No they don’t,” Buster said, keeping his parents alive in the present tense. “They had some kind of anxiety of influence issues with you maybe, but you were the only artist they ever respected.”

“I haven’t seen or talked to them in at least ten years,” Hobart said, his face slowly showing signs of anger, his bald head turning the earliest shade of sunburn. “I mean, for crying out loud, Buster, I’ve never even met you before, their only son.”

“We don’t believe you,” Annie said once again. Buster leaned slightly, perhaps an inch or two, away from Annie, just enough that she noticed the separation, and then he said, “I kind of believe him.”

“No,” Annie said, leaning toward Buster so that their shoulders were once again touching. “We do not believe you.”

“Well, unless you want to try and beat it out of me, and I’ve seen what kind of a fight this one puts up,” Hobart said, pointing at Buster, “I don’t think we have anything else to talk about.”