Be Frank With Me

by Julia Claiborne Johnson

  “So, how far along are you?” he asked. I thought Mr. Vargas was talking to somebody newly pregnant.

  “I don’t have a word on paper yet,” he told me she answered. “But I have the beginning and the middle in my head.”

  M. M. Banning did have two very specific demands: a huge advance and an assistant, bankrolled by the publisher and hand-selected by Mr. Vargas because, she told him, “I’m a lousy judge of character. As you so delicately put it once.”

  “What happened to her could have happened to anybody,” Mr. Vargas told me.

  Not to me, I couldn’t help thinking. Never to me. I’m too careful. Some people in my college dorm might have said boring, but they were glad to call me to come bail them out of jail so their parents wouldn’t know where a night of carousing had landed them. The careless ones knew I’d be awake, sober, and studying. Boring saved their bacon more times than I could count.

  Mr. Vargas scribbled out the qualifications Mimi listed for the ideal assistant:

  • No Ivy Leaguers or English majors.

  • Drives. Cooks. Tidies.

  • Computer whiz.

  • Good with kids.

  • Quiet. Discreet. Sane.

  Before I worked for him I’d had a string of fresh-off-the-Greyhound jobs, the kind people my age go for when they’re not quite ready to settle into the practical careers they may have been wise enough to train for while they were in college. I had an accounting degree but hadn’t quite been able to bring myself to use it yet. I’d worked as a pet groomer, leaflet distributor, barista, sketcher of tourists in Central Park, black-shirted-to-blend-in catering staff, kindergarten assistant. When we met, I was working weekends at a computer store because my salary as a private school math teacher wouldn’t cover rent and food and insurance. At the store I had to wear a piece of plastic over my heart that read HI! I’M A GENIUS! ASK ME ANYTHING! After an hour of demonstrating shortcuts for managing his flow of information, Mr. Vargas told me I deserved every exclamation point on my name tag and asked me if I’d like to come work for him. “Does this job you’re offering me provide insurance and sick days?” I asked, though I had never missed a day of work in my life. It did. In those days when acquiring your own insurance was both astronomically expensive and hard to come by, a paying job that sounded glamorous and provided benefits sounded like a dream come true. The job came with insurance, sick days, and two weeks of vacation annually. Mr. Vargas didn’t have to ask me twice. I took it.

  Which is how I’d landed on M. M. Banning’s welcome mat being chewed out by one of the premiere voices of this or any generation. I pulled myself together before she called the cops and said, “I am the girl Mr. Vargas sent.”

  She put the phone in her cardigan pocket. “Well then,” she said. “If you’re done staring at me, I guess you can come inside.”

  ( 2 )

  HIS NAME IS Frank.”

  M. M. Banning and I were seated on the living room couch, watching her son playing outside in the hot, bright sun. The kid, dressed in a tattered tailcoat and morning pants accessorized with bare feet and a grubby face, looked like some fictional refugee from the pages of Oliver Twist, one who’d walked all the way to Los Angeles from Dickens’s London and had slept in ditches at night along the way.

  When I say Frank was “playing” what I mean is that he was assaulting a peach tree with a yellow plastic baseball bat, scattering the green midsummer fruit as if the future of the human race depended on it.

  “Does he always dress like that?” I asked.

  “Some version of it.”

  “That’s fantastic. Most kids don’t care about their clothes that much. They’re just as happy wearing T-shirts and a pair of shorts.” My mother always said that the best way to connect with anybody who was a mother was to find a way to compliment her child. An approach that served me well when I taught at the private school, even the times when it had been a stretch to come up with something nicer to say than “Your child is such a good little mouth-breather.”

  “I know.” She sounded more irritated with me than pleased.

  Strike one. I tried again. “Frank looks pretty energetic.”

  “I go to sleep exhausted,” she said. “I wake up tired.”

  Yes. I had a nice flight. Thank you so much for asking.

  Frank went at the tree again, but in a slo-mo, Kabuki kind of way—his swing stylized, his face a mask. I decided to give it one more go. “Hey, is that a T-ball bat?” I asked. “I used to coach the T-ball team at the private school where I worked.”

  “Then you should know a T-ball bat when you see one.”

  She’s not one for small talk, Mr. Vargas had warned me. No kidding. I gave up and settled in to watch the kid strip the tree of the last of its unripe fruit. It was awkward sitting so close to M. M. Banning when we’d just met, but there wasn’t much furniture in the living room to choose from. Just the white slipcovered couch we occupied and a black baby grand player piano that had been working through a selection of jaunty Scott Joplin rags since my arrival. There was a piano bench, but I thought it would be weird to go to sit on that. No rugs, but wall-to-wall carpet in the hallway. My mother would have been interested to hear that, since she found nothing in the world tackier than wall-to-wall carpet, even though we’d lived in more apartments with it than without. There were no photos on the piano, no art on the walls. Unfaded squares of paint, though, where pictures must have hung until recently. Looking around the room, you got the sense M. M. Banning and her son were just moving into their house, or just moving out.

  “Frank seems like an interesting kid,” I ventured finally.

  She took her glasses off and rubbed her nose. “He’s a character.”

  Outside, Frank dropped the T-ball bat and wandered over to have a word with the battered black Mercedes station wagon parked in the driveway. He and the wagon’s luggage rack came to some kind of understanding and Frank took off his belt, looped the buckle end, and opened the car door. He stood on its sill while he tied the notched end to the rack.

  M. M. Banning jumped up and went to the sliding glass door. She struggled with it, but the door was stuck.

  “Here, let me help you with that,” I said.

  “I’ve been meaning to get somebody to come out and fix this,” she said, “but the man I have do things is out of town and I don’t like having strange people in my house. What’s Frank doing out there?”

  The kid went about his business, slipping his wrist through the loop in his belt, then hopping down and closing the door, being careful to raise his arm to keep the belt from getting caught. Then he kicked a leg back, fell against the door, kicked and fell again, using his free hand to alternately mimic a pistol firing at the luggage rack and make his coattails flap behind himself. I was reminded of the black-and-white westerns I watched on TV in the afternoons after school. “I think he’s robbing a stagecoach,” I said.

  M. M. Banning put a hand on her chest and stepped back from the glass. “Yes. He’s playing. He’s all right. The door can wait. He’s fine. Calm down.” She didn’t seem to be talking to me.

  “No worries,” I said. I’m not a person who says slacker things like “no worries” or “enjoy,” but I’ve found the best way to handle anyone difficult—rich worrywart moms, the famished Manhattan vegan ordering a late lunch—is to exude the bland calm of the heavily medicated and go about my business. I kept fiddling with the door. “It jumped the track, that’s all.” I gave the door a fierce jiggle that popped it back in its groove. “When it’s stuck, you do this.” I showed her the lift-and-bounce maneuver. “Listen, when your guy comes back, tell him to replace this glass,” I said, tracing a long jagged line that split one of the giant panes. “That’s an accident waiting to happen. What cracked it? An earthquake?” I didn’t like thinking about earthquakes, but in Los Angeles, how could I not? Still, every place I’d ever lived in had come with its own brand of potential disaster—tornadoes in Nebraska, muggings in New York. I guess b
eneath my thick veneer of boring beat a heart primed to fall in love with danger.

  “Frank’s head cracked it,” M. M. Banning said.

  “Ouch. That kind of thing happens more than you might think. The glass is really clean, the kid isn’t paying attention. You should put stickers on the glass at his eye level so he’ll see the doors are closed when he’s running outside to play.”

  “Since you know so much about what I ought to be doing, will these stickers of yours keep Frank from pounding his head against the glass when the door has jumped the track and he’s frustrated because it’s hard to open?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well in that case, forget the stickers. I’ll have to show him how to get the door back on track.”

  “You do that,” she said, sliding the door closed again. Open. Closed. “Stickers. Ha. You’re not from New York, are you?”

  “I’m from Nebraska.”

  “Of course you’re from Nebraska. The Show-Me State.”

  “I think that’s Missouri.”

  “Those states in the middle are all the same,” she said, and opened the door to call, “Come here, Frank. Be quick.” She closed the door, using just her pinkie to move it as she squinted through the glass. “This could take a while,” she said, and checked her watch.

  “Coming, Ma,” Frank shouted. He freed himself of his shackles, put his belt back on, and holstered his imaginary six-shooter. Took a turn around the yard and stopped to snap a rose from its stem just below the blossom, stroking its petals intently and giving it some clinical sniffs before stuffing it in his breast pocket and then arranging the petal tips to form a sort of pocket square. Plunged through a border of lemon trees interspersed with huge lavender bushes. Ran back and forth alongside a big evergreen hedge, brushing his fingertips along its top. Clasped his hands behind his back and tilted toward the denuded peach tree until the tilt turned into a spectacular pratfall, set to a symphony of Looney Tunes whistles, explosions, shrieks and groans, all loud enough for us to hear through the glass. After that, Frank lay there for a while, first pretending to be dead, then scratching patterns into the dust with his fingers.

  M. M. Banning looked at her watch again. “Five minutes.” She opened the door and called, “Frank! While we’re young.” Then she looked at me and said, “While you’re young, anyway. How old are you?”

  “Twenty-four. Almost twenty-five.”

  “You look twelve.” She said it in a way that didn’t sound entirely complimentary. “I always looked young. Until I didn’t. I bought this house when I was about your age. It was the most expensive place on the market at the time. I’ve forgotten your name.”

  “My fault. I should have introduced myself. Alice Whitley.”

  “Alice Whitley. I guess you don’t look like ‘Alice’ to me. You look like ‘Penny.’” She pronounced it Pinny.

  “Why Penny?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even like pennies. When I was a kid they turned green if you buried them in the yard and tasted terrible when you hid them in your mouth. Ugh. That’s a bad taste you can’t forget. Alice. Alice, Alice. I’ll do my best to remember it. I’m no good with names.”

  “I could write ‘Alice’ on my forehead with a Sharpie if that would help,” I said.

  She laughed then, a short, joyless bark. “You need to meet Frank. He may like you. He likes young women with blond hair. He doesn’t care if they aren’t pretty.”

  That sounds cutting, but she was right. I’m not pretty. What I am is organized and diligent. I don’t complain much. I’ve worked since I was sixteen years old, mostly lousy jobs whose chief benefit lay in teaching me that procrastination is a loser’s game and that you’re better off ignoring insults from the public you serve doughnuts. My hair is pretty, I’ll give you that. It’s thick, blond, and shiny, and grows straight to my waist without petering out. Two of my great-grandfathers were named Vard and Thorsson, so go figure. I’ll let you in on a secret, though. Hair like mine is a burden. I’m always worried my face will be a disappointment when I turn around. Still, I’m not dumb enough to cut it off to punish it for being the best thing about me.

  Outside, Frank found one of the green peaches on the ground, rubbed its early velvet against his cheek and tossed it back and forth between his hands before hefting it onto the roof, following its trajectory with his eyes, as if he wished he could follow it there. After that he spun around a few times, staring up at the sky, before sauntering to the driveway, where he stepped onto a skateboard and sailed to the porch, arms extended for balance and swallowtails flapping behind him. He hopped off with a certain rubber-kneed grace and waltzed past both of us as if we weren’t there.

  “What were you doing out there with the station wagon?” M. M. Banning asked him.

  “Oh, you mean the stagecoach. I was robbing it. That’s why I called you ‘Ma.’ For historical verisimilitude. That’s what people called their mothers in stagecoach days. Ma.”

  “I’d rather not be ‘Ma’ if you don’t mind. I don’t see a ‘Ma’ as a woman with all her teeth.” Frank edged around his mother but she caught him by the shoulder and turned him to face me. “Hold on, cowboy. Notice anything?”

  “The door’s working again.”

  “What about her?”

  “That her?” He pointed an accusatory finger in my direction but couldn’t seem to focus on me exactly. I wondered if he needed glasses. “Who’s her?”

  “Who’s she. She’s Penny.”

  “Alice,” I said. “My name is Alice.”

  “Who’s Alice?” Frank asked. He fixed his eyes on the grand piano, maybe thinking “Alice” might be the invisible presence manipulating its keys.

  “I’m Alice,” I said.

  “What’s she doing here?”

  “She’s doing everything around here that I don’t have time to do anymore.”

  “Staff? Splendid. It’s so hard to get good help these days.” Frank shot his grimy cuffs and I saw he had silver links in them shaped like the masks of Comedy and Tragedy. He extended his hand palm up, as if he meant to take mine in his and kiss it.

  “Frank. Look how dirty your hands are. Go clean up. Use soap. Scrub your filthy nails. And come straight back when you’re done. What did I just say?”

  “Frank. Look how dirty your hands are. Go clean up. Use soap. Scrub your filthy nails. And come straight back when you’re done. What did I just say?” Frank hustled down the hall.

  “If you can believe it, he took a bath this morning,” M. M. Banning said.

  I shrugged. “He’s a kid.”

  “Young Noël Coward in there was never a kid. Wait till he starts telling jokes. F.D.R. is in a lot of them.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I wish. Once I took Frank to Disneyland with a boy from his class. We passed through a rough part of town down by the freeway, and the kid pointed to some guy on the street who looked like a drug dealer and said, ‘Look, a gangsta!’ Frank said, ‘Where? Is it Jimmy Cagney?’ White Heat was Frank’s favorite movie back then. For a while his idea of fun was sneaking up on me and yelling ‘Made it, Ma! Top of the world!’” Off my blank look she added, “That’s what Jimmy Cagney’s character shouts right before the cops blow him to kingdom come. It took Frank a couple of years to get tired of White Heat. I was glad when he moved on to Broadway Melody of 1940. Fred Astaire’s in that one. Eleanor Powell. That led him to My Man Godfrey with William Powell, who Frank likes to imagine is Eleanor Powell’s brother. After that, the Park Avenue accent started.”

  “The kids at the private school where I taught in New York lived on Park Avenue but tried to talk like they were dealing crack on a corner in Bed-Stuy,” I said.

  “I guess you’re trying to tell me to count my blessings. Where has Frank gotten off to? I’d better find him.” She hurried down the hall, leaving me to fend for myself.

  I was glad to have a break. By then the piano had abandoned Scott Joplin for Rhapsody in Blue. I sat on the bench and became so entranc
ed by the ghostly fingers working the keyboard that I was startled when Frank appeared at my elbow, smelling of soap and hair tonic, a combination I hadn’t smelled since I was a kid visiting my grandfather at an old folks home.

  Frank’s face was shining and he wore a cravat and smoking jacket over a pair of flannel pajama pants with rockets on them. “My piano instructor is on vacation,” he said. He addressed this to my left eyebrow.

  “I see,” I said. “So, Frank, you looked like you were having fun out there in the yard.”

  “I like playing by myself. This piano plays by itself, too, did you notice? There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “I think people pay extra for pianos that play by themselves,” I said. “Can I offer you a seat?” I patted the bench. Frank climbed aboard and sat so close that you couldn’t have slipped dental floss between us. I scooted over a little to make more room for him and he scooted after me.

  After an awkward silence I said, “I like this song.”

  “It’s one of my favorites.”

  “Do you play the piano?”

  “I do,” he said. “Not like he does, of course.”

  “Your teacher?”

  “Gershwin. This computer program is based on a piano roll Gershwin cut. He made dozens of piano rolls but very few actual recordings.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “It is a fact. I’m very good with facts. I refer, of course, to George Gershwin, not Ira. Ira was his older brother, born in 1896. George was born in 1898. Ira was the lyricist, which means he wrote the words. George composed the music. Friends thought George a hypochondriac until he suddenly died of a brain tumor here in Los Angeles in 1937 in the old Cedars Sinai hospital building, now owned by the Scientologists, who believe themselves to be more advanced humanoids from another planet come to rescue mankind from itself. Ira lived until 1983. Are you familiar with Fred Astaire?”