Be Frank With Me (13 page)

“You hungry?” I asked after we got out of the car and walked past a hot dog cart at the edge of the parking lot on our way to the sandpit.

“Not really.”

It was getting close to lunchtime, so I bought each of us a hot dog
anyway. We sat on a bench together while Frank wolfed down both his and mine. Then he bounded up and began circling the field of play, clockwise, monocle gripped in his right eye socket and hands clasped behind his back. He peered at the sky and muttered about the Kaiser, not the sandwich roll I'm guessing, while platoons of sweet, pudgy babies got pushed in those little swings that look like inverted leather biplane helmets and legions of toddlers dug tiny ramparts in the sand.

By the time we left the playground it was evident Frank had marshaled a successful campaign inside his head against the forces of evil, armed only with hope, pluck, and the ragtag playground troops circumstance had dealt him. Also, I saw that his preferred mode of interacting with other children was not interacting with them at all. The little kids, the ones who weren't too busy hitting each other on the head with plastic shovels to notice Frank, were thrilled to have such a colossus walking among them. That the colossus wasn't about to get down in the sand and play with them didn't diminish their excitement in the least.

BACK HOME, FRANK
made a mad dash for his bedroom and slammed the door. Like mother, like son. I stood listening to the faint fusillade of Mimi's typewriter keys sounding in the distance, enjoying a sweet-scented breeze rearranging the wisps of hair around my face.

Then it struck me that the breeze meant one of the flattened-out cardboard delivery boxes I'd taped over the door hole when the dry cleaner plastic tore must have slipped loose. I hadn't quite gotten around to finding workmen to fix that door. Frank and I had driven to the nearest Home Depot a week or so ago to ask for recommendations and pick up some supplies. But when I pulled into the lot, the station wagon was besieged by a scrum of out-of-work day laborers who elbowed each other aside and pressed their desperate faces against the car windows, shouting you need help lady you need help you need help in half a dozen different accents. Frank started screaming and we'd had to beat it out of there fast.

I hung up the car keys and went to the living room to retape the cardboard. But it had all been taken down and folded in a neat pile. The door hole was framed out in raw wood and a brand-new set of sliding doors leaned against the living room wall.

I stood in the framed-out doorway. In the yard, bent over two-by-fours laid across sawhorses, his back to me, a man in a tight black T-shirt was going at the lumber with a handsaw. Old school. I was so mesmerized by the ticktock rhythm of his arm going up and back, up and back, that I didn't hear Frank coming.

“There he is,” Frank said.

“There's who?” I asked. “Don't tell me that's Hanes.”

“I won't,” he said. “Because it isn't.” He ran across the yard and grabbed the guy by the biceps and pressed his face against his shoulder blade. Black Shirt lay the saw across the two-by-fours, turned around and swept Frank up as if he still weighed no more than a toddler. Frank's face went pink and he giggled wildly. I'd never seen him laugh like that.

Xander set the kid on his feet again and looked at me. “Long time no see,” he said and smiled in a way that made me feel noticed for the first time since I'd come to California.

Frank ran across the grass, grabbed my hand and dragged me forward. “Inside the Hanes T-shirt you will find Xander.” It dawned on me then that Xander, Frank's sometime piano instructor and itinerant male role model, must also be Mimi's Mr. Fix-it who did things around the house whenever he was in town.

“Xander was wearing an Egyptian cotton shirt with French cuffs and a spread collar this morning,” Frank continued, “but we decided for his trip to the lumber yard and subsequent carpentry, a T-shirt would be more appropriate. As you know, we have many boxes on hand.”

Ah. Then it was Xander who took the car, not Mimi. Now I remembered I'd noticed the faint tang of milled lumber in the station wagon when I'd gone to rescue Frank. In my panic I'd mistaken it
for the smell of my own desperation. Thank god I hadn't decided to investigate Mimi's office.

“Who's your girlfriend?” Xander asked Frank.

“Alice is not my girlfriend,” Frank said. “She's way too old and bony.”

“I don't know,” Xander said. “She looks pretty good to me.”

W
HO IS THIS
Xander, Xactly?
Mr. Vargas texted. I worried for his editorial dignity if he ever discovered emoticons.

Xander Devlin
, I typed back.
Julliard graduate and general handyman. Seems harmless.
After I pressed “send,” I deleted our exchange. I was paranoid about leaving even the most innocent back-and-forth there ever since Frank had coyoted my phone.

It was Saturday and I was in the kitchen making lunch while Frank and Xander played a game in the living room with Mimi. The game was called “Frank, Xander, or Piano.” It was a sort of combination of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey and name-that-tune, in which Frank and Xander sat on the piano bench while Mimi, on the couch and blindfolded with one of the ubiquitous black T-shirts, listened to a few bars of a song. When it stopped, Mimi had five seconds to name the player manipulating the piano's keys. Frank was the official timekeeper, which meant he got to shout “TICK-TICK-TICK-TICK-TICK-TIME'S UP!” like the world's happiest time bomb.

You might think this an easy game, since one of the players was a Julliard graduate, one a computerized piano, and one a nine-year-old boy, but Xander had come up with a way to mix up the material—some ragtime, a little classical, and a few choruses of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” that kept Mimi guessing, or pretending to guess. I could hear her laughing, as well as Frank's monotone “ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.” I had never managed to make Frank or Mimi laugh like that.

Not only was Xander more fun to be with than I was and worked a black T-shirt way better; he'd replaced the shattered sliding glass
doors in three days using only the most primitive of tools. When I asked why he didn't use an electric saw to cut the two-by-fours, he'd given me one of those cripplingly gorgeous Jay Gatsby smiles of his and said, “An electric saw? Around Frank?” He'd also snaked every drain in the house, vacuumed lint from the dryer engine and dust from the refrigerator coils, and changed all the fluids in the station wagon. When he wasn't doing something useful, Xander played the piano with the joyful abandon of a golden retriever fetching an old tennis ball.

What's his story?
Mr. Vargas asked.

He just shows up from time to time, says Frank.

Why?

Started as Frank's piano teacher. Now mostly fixes things. Far as I can tell.

Did Mimi send for him?

That hadn't occurred to me, though it made perfect sense. Which bothered me, since I was the one who was supposed to be fixing things, or having them fixed.
Dunno.
I put my phone down to toss the salad. When the light started flashing I picked it up again.

How old is this Xander?

Old,
I typed. The first time I saw Xander in daylight I'd been surprised by the lines across his forehead and bunched at the corners of his eyes. Veins mapped the back of his hands and his blond hair was a little silvery at his temples. But then I realized I sounded like Frank when he decided I was older than Methuselah for being in my twenties. I changed
Old
to
Older than I expected. Forty at least. Midforties, maybe. Not fifty.

So. Young,
Mr. Vargas wrote.
Mind the feelings of your geriatric audience.

I was about to write
You'll never be old
. But I flashed on the most wrenching thing Mr. Vargas had said to me at his wife's funeral. “She never got to be old. We were going to be old together.”

Sorry,
I wrote instead.

Forgiven. Keep an eye on him.

If Mr. Vargas only knew. With Frank finally settled in at school,
I'd been taking my lunches that week over the sink to give me a clear view of Xander working in the yard.

Xander seems okay,
I wrote.
He's a charming guy. Fun. Frank loves him.

Nonetheless. Remember, your job is to protect Mimi from cads and swindlers.

And here I thought I was supposed to be transcribing Mimi's manuscript, of which I hadn't seen a page. I was thinking about how to answer that when I felt somebody's eyes on me. Frank stood in the doorway, wearing a deerstalker hat and a tweedy caped overcoat, with one of those pipes that blows soap bubbles clenched between his teeth. He was staring at my kneecaps with such concentration it's a wonder they didn't spontaneously combust.

I pocketed my phone. “What's up, Sherlock?”

Frank took the pipe from his teeth and said, “I'm Frank.”

“I know, Frank.”

“What you may not know is that Sherlock Holmes has been depicted on film hundreds of times, perhaps more than any other fictional character. My favorite on-screen Sherlock was portrayed by Basil Rathbone, a cadaverous Brit who popularized the deerstalker hat, Inverness coat, and pipe. His films were made between the years of
1939
and
1946
, a time when a war-torn world took solace in the idea of a lone gentleman of towering intellect rescuing the world from its demons. What does
cadaverous
mean? I tried to look it up in
Webster's
but I am not a good speller. When I find a word I'm looking for there, it's usually serendipitous.”

“
Cadaverous
? Thin to the point of being skeletal,” I said. “Hey, what did the skeleton say when he walked into the bar?”

“I don't know.”

“I'll have a beer and a mop.”

Xander got to the party in time to award my joke with a chuckle and a rasher of twinkle. “That's one of my favorites,” he said.

“Favorite what?” Frank asked. “I don't understand.”

“Knock knock,” I said.

“Oh. That means it's a joke,” he explained to Xander.

“I got it. That's why I laughed, Frank. See, the way a joke works is that it presents you with an impossible situation your brain recognizes as impossible, so you laugh at the absurdity of it. A skeleton, for example, couldn't walk into a bar.”

“Franklin Delano Roosevelt walked into a bar,” Frank said, “an event rendered practically impossible by a bout of paralytic poliomyelitis he suffered in
1921
.” Frank acknowledged his own comic gem with a rat-a-tat-tat hahahahaha. “Why aren't you laughing?” he asked when we didn't join in.

Xander ponied up a pretty convincing courtesy laugh.

“Why isn't Alice laughing?” Frank asked.

“I'm slow on the uptake,” I said.

“I'm hungry,” Frank said.

“Your timing is impeccable,” I said. “Lunch is ready. Can you tell your mother?”

“She went back to work,” Xander said.

“Oh. Good.”

Xander was leaning against the doorway, wearing another of the black T-shirts and unconsciously stroking his opposite shoulder. It was a thing I'd noticed well-muscled guys in T-shirts do sometimes when they talk to women, the way girls with hair like mine toss it back when they're talking to men.

“Can we have lunch together?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“Can we sit at the table? Or do we have to stand over the sink?”

So much for thinking a pane of glass rendered me invisible to the outside world. “I have to take Mimi's lunch first,” I said, making myself very busy arranging it on a tray. “You boys start without me.”

Frank sat at the plate I'd fixed for him. “FDR?” he said to Xander. “More like FD Aren't!”

My braid swung over when I bent to pick up the tray and I swatted
it back. Xander turned just as I passed him and our forearms brushed, which was too bad because I knew I'd have a better chance of keeping an objective eye on him if we never touched, ever.

A WEEK LATER,
when I drove home from dropping Frank off at school, Xander was out front of the garage jumping rope with a ferocity that suggested boxing ring more than playground. “There she is again,” he said. The sound of the rope striking pavement made an interesting counterpoint to the clacking of typewriter keys floating out of Mimi's office window. I ducked back inside the station wagon for my purse, then occupied myself with getting the keys situated just right inside it. That took all of about thirty seconds. I'd hoped that would give Xander time to get back to his regime.

But Xander had dropped the jump rope and pulled the neck of his T-shirt, stretched out and riddled with the tiny holes from hundreds of washings, straight up over his face to mop his sweat. According to his T-shirt, at The Ritz
21
Club Bar-B-Q in Lubbock, Texas, a person could Dine and Dance in Cool, Air-Conditioned Comfort. I pretty much memorized the street address, zip, and phone number of The Best Meet Market This Side of Mississippi. As long as my eyes stayed on his shirt I wasn't eyeing the kind of ribs Xander had on his menu.

Once his midsection was undercover again I was able to manage, “Yes. Here I am. Again.”

“Where have you been?”

“Taking Frank to school.”

“In general,” he said. “You've been making yourself scarce.”

“I've been very busy,” I lied, and walked briskly toward the house.

“Doing what?”

With Frank being gone most of the day, the sad truth was that I'd had a hard time keeping myself busy in a way that made me glad I had a college degree. “Working,” I snapped. “I work here, you know.” I sounded every bit as hostile as Mimi. More.

“Wait a minute, Alice.” Xander touched my elbow and stopped me in my tracks. “Are you mad at me for some reason?”

“Why would I be mad at you?”

“I don't know. But it's clear I've made you angry. That, or you just don't like me.”

“Do you really need everybody to like you?” I asked.

“Isn't that what everybody wants?”

“Mimi doesn't.”

Xander laughed. “Mimi does as much as anybody. She just doesn't want to let on.”

“She's stopped typing,” I said. “I have to go.”

“Why?” he asked. “Whether Mimi's typing or not has nothing to do with you.”

“Thanks for the pep talk, Xander,” I said. “Now I feel more useless here than ever.”

For a second I was sure the inevitable earthquake Angelenos dread but try not to think about had come. But it was just me, crying. Huge, rattling sobs you might expect at a graveside, not standing in a sunny driveway on a Bel Air hilltop with a view of the ocean when the smog didn't get in the way. I felt as surprised by my tears as Xander looked.

“Hey,” Xander said. “Hey, I'm sorry. I didn't mean anything by that. Are you okay?”

I couldn't nod or shake my head or anything. Xander took my purse and asked if I had any tissues in it. When I couldn't answer he shuffled through it quickly, gave up on it as a resource for comfort, and put it on the driveway next to his jump rope.

He patted me on the back a couple of times. “Go on,” he said. “Let it out.”

I am nothing if not obedient so I cried harder. Next thing I knew I was against his T-shirt and his arms were around me and he was apologizing for how sweaty he was. “I'm sorry I said whatever I said that hurt you,” he added.

I pushed myself off his chest. “Thanks,” I said. I'd left two damp
handprints where I'd pressed his T-shirt against his skin, as if I were a starlet leaving her mark in wet cement out front of the Mann's Chinese Theatre. “Wow, look how sweaty you are,” I said, tipping over from sobbing into laughing a little. “I can't even sweat as good as you.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“It's something my mother used to say. It means nothing you can do will make a person like you as much as they like somebody else. Because you can't even sweat as good as that other person does.”

Xander used the flat of his palm to brush my face dry and handed me my purse again. “There,” he said. “Aren't you glad that's over, Oklahoma?”

“Nebraska,” I said.

“I wasn't off by much.”

“Just the whole state of Kansas. And yes, thanks, I feel better. I guess I needed that.”

“After you've ridden a bus cross-country twenty or thirty times, all those states in the middle start to run together.”

“I took a bus from Nebraska to New York once. I remember every mile.”

“I bet you do,” he said, and smoothed my hair back from my face with his fingertips. “By the way, with all respect to your mother, I have a feeling that your sweat is every bit as good as mine.”

That's how it started between us.