Be Frank With Me (16 page)

I come to fetch Frank and Xander from Dream House, where they are curating the collection for just an hour, they promise, until it is time for Frank to come in and do his homework. An hour has passed, then another half. When I let myself in through the side door to the garage, opening it sucks an unidentified flaming cinder out into the driveway. I chase it down and stomp it out, then go back in.

“What was that?” I ask Frank, who is leaning over the railing holding a tissue. He's wearing the seersucker suit with the watch chain across the vest plus his straw boater, and looks for all the world like a passenger using his hankie to wave good-bye as he departs on the
Titanic
.

“I am setting tissues on fire and letting them drift to the floor.”

“What? Why?”

“To observe air currents. It's a science project Xander invented to keep me busy.”

I am up the ladder before you can say stop, drop, and roll. “No more,” I say. “Give me those matches.”

“Xander said it's all right. The garage floor is concrete.”

“It's not all right. Give me the matches.”

Once I make Frank turn out his pockets and take off his hat and shoes and socks so I can be sure he has no matches concealed on his person, I go looking for Xander. He is sitting cross-legged on the bed, wearing headphones and sorting through photographs. At first he laughs at me. When he can see that I find nothing about this situation funny, his response is, “Relax, Alice. Let the kid be a kid for once.”

In late October, Frank and Xander plan an elaborate, supposedly surprise birthday party for me. Frank, of course, can't keep his mouth shut about it. So, in secret, I exhaust myself helping Frank make preparations that Xander “plans” but seems unwilling or unable to
execute. The big night comes, and no Xander. He is kind enough, however, to leave Frank a note, which Frank eventually finds in his pocket and shows me. “I don't do birthdays. X,” the note reads. Which means X does not see the gigantic fluffy white coconut cake he told Frank I would love. Nor the elaborate fake candles Frank insisted we make out of drinking straws fitted with crayon-drawn flames with glued-on sparkle.

To protest Xander's absence, Frank has a gigantic tantrum. I have sparkles in my hair for a week. It is longer than that before we see Xander again.

I am twenty-five years old now. But still not old enough to know better.

I hate coconut cake.

I almost forgot this one. Or I keep trying to forget this one. Xander and Frank are on the piano bench, finishing up a duet. Mimi stands behind them, one hand resting on Frank's head in that proprietary way mothers have that tells the world that this child is hers, she loves this child and this child loves her right back. Her other hand rests on the nape of Xander's neck. It's telling me something, but I'm not sure I want to know what.

T
HE SAD PART
about this stretch of the story, after my birthday and before Christmas, was how much Frank missed Xander. With Xander gone, Frank refused to touch the piano, and it wasn't worth the struggle to convince him that he should. When he wasn't at school all the kid wanted to do, ever, was hang out in the Dream House, sitting on the edge of its world, chin propped on one of the intermediate slats of the railing and legs dangling over the side, as if he were on a bridge, fishing.

After a day or two of trying to interest Frank in some fun activity like running round in the yard brandishing his plastic machete or giving me yet another tour of his gallery or watching
Casablanca
for the fifty billionth time, I gave in and sat on the lip of platform beside him, legs dangling and chin propped. Frank took my hand and said, “This is the disappointing part I tried to warn you about.” After that, we sat there holding hands for I don't know how long.

Something about the two of us sitting there like that reminded me of my mother keeping me company on the stoop the summer after my father left. I hadn't thought about that in years. I can hardly remember what he looked like, which seems wrong, since I wasn't all that little when he abandoned us. My mother had given me a box of photographs of him that I'd misplaced somehow, so there was that. But I think the real reason I lost his face was that I imagined every man who set foot on our block would turn out to be my dad. Over time all those faces that weren't his gradually wiped out the memory of the face that was.

I started drawing pictures to keep busy. But as time went on I found myself taking a pretty big slice of my identity from the fact that I was incredibly awesome at drawing horses and bulldogs, two animals seen on my block about as often as my father. “It's all in the ears,” I would explain to my grade-school fan base when they pumped me for my secrets. “They're triangles.” Solemn nods all around.

That mediocre knack plus my excellent grades and economic hardship got me a full ride at Nebraska. But I had no illusions about my artistic talent and more or less gave up painting when I moved to New York. The materials were messy and expensive. Also volatile and smelly, which didn't make me a popular tenant. I switched to doing pencil sketches and charcoal caricatures of tourists in Central Park, thinking maybe I could make some money doing that. But horses and dogs were far easier clients to satisfy and I quit the park after a few months. Art was for trust-funders, the truly talented, and deluded souls who thought they were. I had to make a living. But not as an accountant. I know it would be the sensible thing to do. But please, not just yet.

The last drawing I'd done was of Mr. Vargas's daughter Carolyn. I wanted to give him some kind of thank-you gift for my new job-not-in-accounting. I nabbed a snapshot from his desk, photocopied it, and worked from that. Drawing that way is kind of a cheat, since life's three-dimensional angles and shadows are frozen in time and two dimensions for you. But if he were half as pleased as my mother pretended to be when I gave her yet another drawing of the pony I'd never have, that would be fine with me.

I thought my portrait turned out well so I put it in a little frame. Mr. Vargas thanked me effusively but I couldn't help noticing that it disappeared from his desk right away. The last time I went to visit Mrs. Vargas in the hospital, though, I saw my drawing of Carolyn on her bedside table alongside a photograph of the freshly minted Mr. and Mrs. Vargas on their wedding day twenty years before. I am not the sort of person who cries in hospital rooms but I came very close to
doing it then. My art might not be good for much, but I guess it was good for something.

So the next afternoon when Frank and I reported for our Dream House vigil I came armed with a pencil and blank index cards. I sat at the yellow table churning out sketch after sketch of the kid in all his favorite outfits, which pleased him even more than I imagined it would. He got up and went to work in his gallery again, arranging and rearranging my drawings on the wall to form a narrative only he understood well enough to discuss with himself.

After that, it was only a matter of time until Frank had the bright idea of dragging out one of the big blank canvases in the atelier rack so I could cough out a portrait for him to give his mother for Christmas. This was his pitch: “What do you give the woman who has everything but money and living room furniture?”

“A coffee table?”

“My mother doesn't drink coffee. Also, coffee tables are a menace.”

“A menace? Says who?”

“Says William Holden. Or he might have if he had survived his deadly encounter with a coffee table on November twelfth,
1981
. What my mother needs is a portrait of me to hang over the mantel.”

“Except I'm not a very good painter,” I said.

“She won't care. My mother is fond of looking at pictures of me no matter how meritless they are. She keeps a box full of particularly embarrassing photographs from my childhood under her bed. Me in diapers or strapped in my high chair with baby food in my hair or asleep in a position which, based on posterior elevation in relation to the angle of neck and the squash of face against pillow, she calls ‘ass over teakettle.' I imagine that getting down on her knees to pull that box out must hurt a great deal because more than once I have seen her crying while looking at those pictures. That's why I think it will be such a good idea for her to have a large painting of me up high where she can see it without having to overtax her joints. I am
willing to offer you this commission because you are on the payroll already and I have no money to hire anybody else.” He turned out his pockets to illustrate their emptiness. “Also you have nothing else to do all day while I am at school so you might as well.”

He had me there.

“
WHAT HAVE YOU
done with Xander?” Mimi asked me not long after that. Frank was at school and I was mopping the kitchen before I headed out to the Dream House to get to work on my commission.

I was still struggling with the fact that Mimi had left her office during daylight hours so I needed a minute to come up with an appropriate answer. Finally I managed, “What?”

“I haven't heard Xander playing the piano. I like to hear Xander playing the piano while I'm working. That's why I bought that piano in the first place.”

“I can figure out how to turn the piano on for you if you like.”

“If I wanted to listen to the piano playing itself, I think I could manage to flip a switch,” Mimi said. “It doesn't say much for your intelligence if you can't hear the difference between a human being and a computer playing a piano.” She stormed off.

Everything irritates Mimi,
I wrote in my notebook that night before going to sleep
.
I erased that and replaced it with,
Everything I do irritates Mimi.
That seemed a whole lot closer to the truth.

“
XANDER WILL BE
back before Christmas,” Frank mused while we were driving home from school the next day. “He doesn't have any family but us.”

“Xander has no family?” I asked.

“He has a mother and a father and a sister and a dead sister but other than that no family to speak of, which I have surmised because he never speaks of them.”

“A dead sister? What happened to her?”

“I don't know. Just last night my mother was saying how much he reminds her of somebody dear to her. Have you ever heard of Joe DiMaggio?”

“The baseball player? Xander reminds your mother of Joe DiMaggio?” I tried to remember what Joe DiMaggio looked like. Black hair. Big nose maybe? A good-looking guy as I recall, but not particularly molded In-the-Manner-of-Apollo.

“No, Xander reminds my mother of someone else. Are you familiar with screen siren Marilyn Monroe?”

“Xander reminds your mother of Marilyn Monroe?”

“I can only assume you're unfamiliar with Marilyn Monroe as Marilyn Monroe is a woman and Xander is a man.”

“I know that, Frank. I'm familiar with Marilyn Monroe. Everybody on the planet is familiar with Marilyn Monroe.”

He considered this a moment. “Do you think they know about her on Mars?”

“I don't know about on Mars. As you were saying.”

“As I was saying, Joe DiMaggio was married to Marilyn Monroe for two hundred and seventy-four days in
1954
. While they were honeymooning in Japan Marilyn took a break to entertain our troops in Korea. ‘Joe, you've never heard such cheering,' she told him. Joe said, ‘As a matter of fact, I have.' Just before Christmas I am to be student of the week, which calls for me to stand in front of my class and tell the story of my origins and my life until the present day. I would like it if there were cheering but I'm not setting my heart on a big ovation because no one has received one so far, not even the kid whose dad is a firefighter who parked his fire truck on the playground and let us climb all over it. My entourage will be on hand for my presentation, of course. My mother will come, and she'll call Xander and he'll be there, too. Fiona will ask for a pass so she can attend as well.”

“So will I.”

“No thank you,” he said. “Please.”

FRANK WAS MORE
restless than usual the night before his presentation. I heard him knocking around at all hours and finally decided to slip out and see if I could coax him back to bed before he woke up his mother and the rest of Los Angeles.

The living room lights were on and Frank was talking loudly enough to reach the top balcony of the biggest theater on Broadway. Then the lights went out and stars splattered the living room walls. They held steady for a moment, then revolved lazily around the room. “Since the dawn of time, mankind has been fascinated with the stars and planets that populate our galaxy,” Frank declaimed.

“That's your old night-light,” I heard Mimi say. “I put that away when you started kindergarten.”

I peeked around the corner to see what was going on in there. Frank had closed the piano and put his night-light on top. It was one of those old-fashioned paper carousels with a lightbulb inside that gradually warmed the air above it and made its pinwheel vents spin the shade with its cutout stars faster and faster.

“I stumbled across it when I was looking for my marbles so that Fiona and I could play a high stakes game of Ringer at recess. I realized the night-light was just the thing I needed for my presentation.”

“It belonged to your uncle when he was a baby,” Mimi said. “It's older than I am. Please be careful with it.”

“You told me all that when you were packing it for storage.”

“I did?”

“You said we'd better put it away so we'd still have it to use when my little boy came along. It was a fragile old thing, you said, so we'd better put it in a box on the top shelf to keep it safe. That's where I found it.”

“We used to watch it together for hours,” Mimi said.

“Every night for half my life. I've missed that fragile old thing, but I understand the necessity of thoughtful preservation. Ninety percent of the films made during the silent era have been lost to history. Their negatives were printed on unstable and highly flammable cellulose
nitrate film and were destroyed in vault fires, tossed to make room for newer movies, or stored so carelessly that they crumbled to dust.”

“You're almost ten years old, Frank,” Mimi said. “I can't believe it.”

I had to make myself leave. Otherwise I would have had to admit that I was eavesdropping.

AS IT TURNED
out, neither Mimi nor Xander made it to Frank's presentation.

Though I wasn't on the guest list, I knew it was slated for Friday at
2
:
00
P.M.
on the last day of school before winter break, to be followed by nondenominational refreshments and lively discussion. According to Frank. Which is why he nixed my idea of baking Christmas cookies. That morning I made brownies for Mimi to take and let it go at that. But I started to worry when Mimi didn't mention the presentation or how she planned to get there. When I delivered her lunch I knocked and waited. She didn't come to the door but I didn't leave her tray like I normally would have. I steeled myself and knocked again.

When she opened the door she didn't look happy. “I'm sorry to disturb you,” I said. “But I wanted to tell you that I made brownies for you to take to Frank's presentation. And to ask if you want me to drive you, or if you want to go on your own. His presentation is at two.” I could tell she wanted to close the door on me so I edged forward and angled my foot against it.

“Don't come in here,” she said.

“I wouldn't dream of it. I just need to know what time you want to leave.”

“I'm not going. He gave me the gist of it last night so I don't need to be there.”

“But he's expecting you.”

“I'm working,” she said. “That's what I was doing until you felt like you had to pound on my door and remind me of what you think my responsibilities are. Let me tell you what my responsibilities are. I
need to sit at my typewriter until my book is done so that Frank and I don't end up living in a refrigerator box. Now go away.”

I went. I didn't want to stop going until I got back to New York. I think the only thing that stopped me was the idea of Frank standing in front of his class, no entourage in attendance, getting an ovation from nobody. So I boxed up the brownies, got in the car, and drove to school.

THE VISITOR'S LOG
in the office was turned to a fresh page, so I flipped back to the one before it to see if Xander had signed in. He hadn't, but I was early so he might make it yet.

“I think this pen is out of ink,” I said to the student working behind the desk.