Be Frank With Me (10 page)

“I wish I knew,” Frank said. “She hides them from me.”

I believed that. “How about candles? I could light one on the stove and use it to start the fire.”

“She hides those, too.” Of course she did. I'd never seen one anywhere, ever. Not even a lousy birthday candle. “You could call her and ask,” Frank said.

“Your mother is in the hospital,” I said. “I'm not calling her. Let me think. You know what? We could light a twig on the stove and—”

“You cannot walk through this house carrying a stick that's on fire,” Frank said. “My mother has said that to me at least a million times.”

I was tempted anyway, but knew I shouldn't be modeling bad behavior for a lit firecracker like Frank. Also, without meaning me ill, it would be the first thing he'd tell his mother when he saw her again. “I guess we can't have a fire then,” I said.

“I have an idea,” Frank said. He disappeared down the hall. I gave chase as he beelined to the laundry room drawers where—Eureka!—he found a nine-volt battery and a roll of wire. Then he beat it back to the living room, where he took the round-tipped scissors from his bathrobe pocket—when did he palm those?—and cut a couple of pieces of wire, wrapped one around each of the batteries' terminals, and touched the loose ends against each other. The touch produced a spark that made the paper catch fire.

“You're a genius, Frank,” I said. “How did you think of doing that?”

“Oh, I do it in my room all the time,” he said.

WE WATCHED THE
flames reduce the logs to ember, then ash. I was so afraid of nodding off that I would have taped my eyelids open if there'd been any tape left. This had been the longest day of my life. How did Mimi function if all her nights were like this? How did Frank? One night alone with the kid and I was practically reduced to ash myself.

When Frank piped up with, “I'm tired now,” I jumped the way mothers catapult from chairs when their toddlers say, “I need potty.”

“Off to bed then,” I said, giving him the bum's rush to his bedroom.

“I don't sleep much in my room. If you want me to sleep, put me in my mother's bed.”

I sighed. “All right.”

In Mimi's room I pinned him tight under her blankets. “Go to sleep,” I said.

“You aren't leaving me, are you?”

“Do you want me to sit here until you fall asleep?” The thought of staying awake any longer made me want to cry.

“I thought we were having a pajama party. You have to sleep in here with me.”

“I'm not sleeping in your mother's bed without her permission. It's not polite.”

His face went blank. Blanker, I should say. Tired as I was, I hurt for him. “How about this?” I said. “I'll sleep on the couch in the family room. I'll be close enough to hear you if you want to talk. That's what makes a pajama party a pajama party, you know. Being able to talk to somebody else until you fall asleep.”

“That may be so. But what you may not realize is I have a hard time falling asleep. And when I fall asleep, I wake easily. And since I slept some in the tub already—”

“Frank,” I said. “I realize. Close your eyes. Close your mouth. Go to sleep.”

I crept out of Mimi's bedroom, leaving the door open and a light on in the hall. I fell on the couch and was out maybe fifteen minutes, maybe fifteen days. When I opened my eyes Frank's face hovered inches above mine. I was so exhausted I couldn't muster the strength to be startled. “What's up, Frank?”

“I am,” he said. “I couldn't sleep.”

“I gathered. So now what?”

“We could watch a movie.”

“It's too late to watch a movie. Or too early. What time is it?”

“Four
A.M
.”

“Have you always been like this?”

“Like what?”

I tried to think of a word that wouldn't wound his psyche for keeps. “Nocturnal,” is what I came up with finally.

“Nocturnal? That implies daytime sleep. I don't do that much, either. My mother says my brain's lack of an ‘off' switch is a sign of unusual intelligence.”

“Unusual,” I said. “Uh-huh.” I rubbed my eyes, sat up and yawned.

“You're tired,” he said. “Go back to sleep. I'll sit here and watch you. Or I could borrow your phone to make a movie of you asleep. Like Andy Warhol. His first movie was called
Sleep
. It was about—”

“Sleep. I get the drift. No thanks. I didn't come to California to be in the movies. Let's watch
Casablanca
again.”

Frank did a quick soft shoe—soft slipper, really—of joy that was so unexpectedly charming that it put me right back in the palm of his hand. He'd never spent a night away from his mother in his life, poor kid. She wasn't with him now because his hug had turned into a tackle that had landed her in the hospital with twenty-nine stitches in her scalp. You couldn't blame him for not sleeping. But you had to wonder what his excuse was every other night.

Frank slid the movie in the DVD player and the two of us rolled up in comforters, shoulder to shoulder but individually shrink-wrapped in our own little movie-watching cocoons. Frank fell asleep sometime during the mushy part, where Rick and Ilsa reminisce about the good old days in the Paris apartment when they thought Ilsa's husband was dead. I stayed awake watching all the way to the end.

I
T HAD SEEMED
six months long but July was finally over, which meant Frank was seeing his shrink every other week again. Mimi and Frank were in the two chairs available in the psychiatrist's outer office—Two chairs? Don't both parents ever come?—while I lounged against the wall, unsure whether in my role as chauffeur I should stay or wait in the car. When the doctor came to fetch Frank back into her inner sanctum, her eyes flicked to me; but Mimi didn't make a move to introduce us, so I didn't say anything, either.

Frank was done up in a three-piece glen-plaid suit, bow tie and pocket square, gold knot cuff links and watch chain strung across his vest. Very
Clarence Darrow for the Defense
. Mimi had on a turban she must have filched from Frank's closet, or maybe Gloria Swanson's, accessorized with a pair of the gigantic black sunglasses favored by very young and very old women in Hollywood who weigh less than a hundred pounds and carry yappy dogs in their purses as ballast.

“What happened to you?” Dr. Abrams asked Mimi. Because not even those jumbo look-at-me/don't-look-at-me glasses were big enough to cover the greening bruises gravity had started to dribble down her cheekbones.

“Eye lift,” Mimi said.

“Ah,” Dr. Abrams said. “Well, Frank, come on in. I like your suit.”

“Thank you. My mother's computer bought it for me.”

“Well, your mother's computer has excellent taste. Are you starting to think about getting ready for school?”

“Did you see my cuff links? My friend Xander gave them to me.
They represent the Gordian knot, which—” The door closed behind them.

“Getting ready for school? That's rich,” Mimi muttered. “For a kid like Frank, hell is other children.”

Either Mimi could read minds, too, or all the time I'd spent with Frank had made me slack about managing my facial expressions because Mimi took one look at me and said, “I didn't tell Dr. Abrams about the accident because it really isn't any of her business. She's not my psychiatrist. Have a seat. Read a magazine. Here's one I loved when I was your age.” She handed me a copy of
Highlights for Children,
then helped herself to a travel magazine. She started snapping through its pages like somebody looking for a Jell-O coupon she was pretty sure she saw, dammit, in that issue when she read it six months ago and she meant to find it if it was the last thing she ever did. “I don't need a psychiatrist,” she added.

Like a good lackey, I kept my mouth shut, busying myself solving children's puzzles, looking for the thing missing from one picture that could be found in the other if you just looked closely enough.

“That's why Xander calls me ‘Jeopardy,'” Frank was telling Dr. Abrams forty-five minutes later, when the two of them emerged from the inner office.

“Because you know all the answers.”

“Yes. Also because I am dangerous to be around. That's what is known as a
double entendre,
a French term meaning ‘a word or phrase that can be taken two ways.' If he were referring only to the scope of my knowledge, Xander said he'd just call me ‘Quiz Show.'”

“What did you and Dr. Abrams talk about?” Mimi asked Frank in the elevator.

“Buster Keaton,” Frank replied. “Also Xander.”

TO STAY OUT
of Mimi's hair, Frank and I spent most of August revisiting the L.A. sights he'd seen in the good old days of adventures with his mother. Stir-crazy as both of us were, I was all for
adventures. On one condition: I could take Frank's hand and hold it without asking first.

“Why would you need to do that?” he asked.

“I get scared,” I said. It was the first thing I thought of.

“Is it the fanatics at the gate?” Every now and then as we left on an adventure, we'd encountered one or more of Mimi's faithful lying in wait outside the walls. College students, usually, or older men and women who must have been my mother's contemporaries. They carried cameras or copies of Mimi's book, and leaned down to peer at our faces as we drove out. I'm sure they were harmless, but it was a creepy business anyway. They hardly ever spoke, which was frightening enough. When they did say something, it tended to be along the lines of, “Oh, it's nobody.” Never in my life have I felt more relieved to be a nobody.

“Yes, it's the fanatics,” I said. I had underestimated how Mimi's fans terrified poor Frank until I dropped the gate-code Post-it one day as I leaned out the driver's-side window to punch it in. Frank saw me drop it and started howling. It took a while for him to calm down enough to explain the problem—that he was afraid a fanatic might find the code fluttering down the street and use it to breach the walls and come for us. Once I understood what was upsetting him I chased the piece of paper down, then chanted the litany of
1
's and
2
's and
0
's under my breath all the way up the driveway and into the house. Once we were safe in the kitchen I asked the kid to quiz me on the code and when I got the sequence right three times running—
21 22 00 0
—I ate the Post-it note in front of him. I'd hoped that would make the kid laugh. Instead, he thanked me.

Anyway. Frank's introduction to the city's cultural hotspots was not for the faint of heart. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the neighboring La Brea Tar Pits led to the Museum of Contemporary Art, which segued to the Norton Simon Museum, which brought us to the Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage, the Gettys Bel Air and Malibu, the Adamson Tile House, the Gamble House, the Jesse
Lasky Hollywood Heritage Museum, the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Petersen Museum of Automotive History. Then there was the Ahmanson, the Geffen, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Disney Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, the Bradbury Building, the Greek Theater, the Griffith Observatory, the California Science Center, the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History. Who knew so much was stuffed between the beaches and the Hollywood sign?

When I dared suggest that we, meaning I, might be getting tired, Frank exclaimed, “Poppycock!” He was done up in Teddy Roosevelt Rough Rider regalia that day for our visit to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art—cavalry uniform, pince-nez, puttees, boots. The pince-nez had lost their grip on the bridge of his nose and fallen to the ground several times already. After lunch he'd stepped on them. I held my breath, worried he'd go into a tailspin. But Frank picked the frames up, shook out the broken glass, and balanced them on his nose again. “Ah, that's better,” he said. “No fingerprints. Carry on!” I did, after I'd brushed up the bits of glass into a paper napkin I'd saved in case of emergency. As I'd gotten better acquainted with Frank, I'd taken to hoarding random things in my pockets, thinking to myself as I did so, “in case of emergency.” It was only a matter of time until I got my own subscription to
Accidents Waiting to Happen Weekly
.

I'D EXPECTED FRANK
to lollygag in museum galleries, ogling every line and squiggle. Instead he dashed from room to room, doing an entire exhibition in the time it took me to consider one wall of paintings. The crazy thing about it was that he took everything in. I know this because I quizzed him. It was really kind of incredible how much the kid could assimilate in thirty seconds or less.

“What's up with you?” I asked after an early sprint. “You're going through this place like a dose of salts.” I was terrified of losing him. I wanted to hold his hand every minute, but I had to catch him first.

“If I slow down, I get too close. And if I get too close, I want to touch things. That's why I can't go on school field trips unless my
mother comes, too. And sometimes not even then. Museum guards don't like it when you touch things.”

“I bet they don't,” I said.

Mimi had warned me that Frank was like a magpie, nabbing anything that attracted his attention and making off with it. When my hairbrush vanished early on, I came out to fix breakfast looking like someone who had combed her hair with a pillow.

“Sorry about the hairdo,” I said. “I can't find my brush.”

“I'll order you another,” she said.

“You don't have to do that.”

“Frank probably took it.”

“Why would he do that?”

“He's got sticky fingers. Although his psychiatrist prefers calling it ‘insatiably curious.' He sees something unfamiliar and spirits it away for further examination.”

“Surely he's seen a hairbrush before.”

“Of course. But never your hairbrush. Put away anything you value if you want to see it again.” That's when I'd decided I'd better start keeping Mr. Vargas's notebook in my purse instead of in my bedside table drawer.

“On the bright side,” Mimi added, “living with Frank has forced me to be tidy.”

Although, honestly, she didn't seem very cheered up by that at all.

TWO WEEKS INTO
our cultural odyssey I'd awakened from a bad dream brought on, I suspect, by my aching feet. In it, I'd lost Frank at the Getty Museum, Malibu. He'd been transformed into one of the spooky white-eyed black statues that people its courtyard. But which statue? I'd been rushing from one to the next, telling each stony face that endless unfunny knock-knock joke that ends with “Orange you glad I stopped saying banana?”

I didn't want to slip back into that nightmare again, so I got out of bed and went to the kitchen for a snack.

Which is how I happened on Mimi in one of her girlish white nightgowns standing in the mirrored foyer, brandishing a big sharp knife.

You can imagine the confusion that followed.

In case you can't, it went like this: I screamed, she screamed, the knife clattered to the floor, and from somewhere down the hall, Frank started howling. Both of us rushed toward the sound, bumping into each other in our urgency to get to him. “Everything's okay, sweetheart,” Mimi said as she gathered Frank into her lap. “I startled Alice, that's all. She saw me trying to cut my hair. I couldn't tolerate this mess another minute.” She gestured to her half-shaved, stitched-up head.

“You were going to cut your hair with a butcher knife?” I asked incredulously. “Have you heard of scissors?”

“I couldn't find any scissors. I hide them because, you know.” Mimi nodded toward Frank. “I needed to do it someplace where I could see what I was doing. I didn't want to hurt myself.”

It occurred to me all over again to wonder why the knives weren't hidden, too. Or why a woman who hated to show her face in public lived in a house where even the ceiling of its entranceway was mirrored. That foyer made me crazy. There was no way to avoid seeing yourself from every angle every time you passed through it. Frank, naturally, loved it. He had some of his most satisfying conversations with himself there while examining his outfits from every angle.

“Why didn't you wait until morning?” I asked Mimi. “I would have cut it for you.”

“I wanted it done already. It wasn't like I was going to make my hair look any worse.”

Frank slid out of her lap.

“Where are you going?” Mimi asked.

“Bathroom,” he said. That night he was sleeping in a scarlet union suit, the kind with the back flap that buttons. “Do you need help?” Mimi and I asked in unison.

“I'm not a baby anymore,” he said.

After he left, Mimi and I sat there just looking at each other. “When my brother was a teenager he decided to shave with a hunting knife, like in frontier days,” she said.

“How did that end up?” I asked.

“In stitches. But my father was home so he was able to sew him up in the kitchen. He was a doctor, you know.”

“Yes. Frank told me.”

“He did? What else did he tell you?”

“That famously parsimonious eccentric billionaire J. Paul Getty dressed in threadbare clothing so people wouldn't realize he was rich, and that he had pay phones installed in his mansions for his guests to use so he would stay that way. In
1957
Getty was quoted as saying ‘A billion dollars isn't what it used to be.'”

“I was born in
1957
,” Mimi said. After a pause she added, “Frank's psychiatrist says it runs in families.”

“Says what runs in families?”

“How Frank is. Dr. Abrams says there's a genetic element to his kind of eccentricity.”

Frank chose that moment to come back from the bathroom. Both his hands were busy behind his back, probably buttoning that panel. Mimi said, “I didn't hear you flush.”

“I didn't use the bathroom,” he said.

“Then what were you doing?”

He brought his hands from behind his back, and held out a pair of scissors in his right hand. In his left was my kidnapped hairbrush. “Quite by accident I found these at the bottom of my laundry basket.”

I'd done the laundry yesterday, and they hadn't been there then.

Mimi sighed. “Well, I guess I didn't look everywhere for those scissors after all.”