Be Frank With Me

by Julia Claiborne Johnson

  “I supervised twenty-five third graders on a field trip to the Bronx Zoo on my own and lived to tell the tale. I’m not worried.”

  Mimi ran her hand across her mouth while she pondered all this. I noticed her nails were gnawed to the quick. “Frank and I used to go on adventures all the time,” she said finally. “He was the cutest little boy you’ve ever seen. I was so worried somebody would kidnap him that I thought about hiring a bodyguard. But Xander was around more then.”

  “Xander?” I asked. “Who’s Xander?”

  As if she hadn’t heard my question, she continued, “Somehow Frank’s pediatrician got wind that I was worried some lunatic might snatch Frank, so she gave me a card for a psychiatrist who deals in anxiety issues. For me! Like I was crazy to think somebody would want to kidnap my son. I gather she’s not much of a reader, that one. Not familiar with my book. Too busy saving lives.”

  “I haven’t read your book,” I said. I don’t know what possessed me to say that.

  She must have stared at me for a full minute before she responded. “Did it occur to you to read it before you came to work for me?”

  “Bad enough to have me underfoot,” I said. “I thought you might not want me inside your brain.” Dear god, I prayed, keep Mimi out of my bedside table drawer. If she opened it, she’d find the dog-eared, food-stained copy of Pitched I’d bought in the New York airport and had read twice on the flight out and had dipped into many times since, when writing in my notebook left me too rattled to sleep.

  Mimi, who usually avoided looking at me at all, eyed me like my mother had after I presented my pajama-clad self to her, claiming I’d bathed when I’d only run water in the tub and stood at the sink making fashion-model faces in the mirror until I thought enough time had passed for her to believe I’d soaked and scrubbed. Mimi had to know I was fibbing. My mother always did.

  “That’s the most idiotic thing I’ve ever heard,” she said.

  I shrugged. “I majored in accounting. I guess I’m not much of a reader, either.”

  “I don’t believe you. Why would Isaac hire an assistant who doesn’t read?”

  “I’m good with computers.”

  “Good with computers. That’s all that matters now, isn’t it?” The funny thing was that she seemed more pleased than angry. “The car keys are on the hook by the door. Bring Frank home right away if he bites anyone or pulls his hair out or bangs his head against anything.” She went to the counter and scribbled some things on a pad of paper there, frowning intensely as she wrote. When she’d finished writing she tore the paper from the pad and handed it to me. “Take this with you.”

  She’d written out Dr. Abrams’s phone number at her beach house, along with the names and numbers of her emergency room of choice and Frank’s pediatrician, Dr. Not-a-Reader. “Frank doesn’t swim well, so if you stop at the beach, stay in the car.” She thrust her cell phone at me. “Here. Take my phone, too, in case you lose the paper. All the numbers are in there.”

  “I don’t lose things,” I said. “What if you need to call somebody?”

  “Who would I call?” she asked. “Take it.”

  I was halfway down the hall to gather Frank when Mimi called after me, “Alice. Thank you.” Alice, not Penny.

  AFTER FRANK GOT the tape off his eyebrows, he’d refreshed himself with a pass through Wardrobe. Now he was wearing an outfit more suited to an afternoon’s motoring: white canvas duster over chinos and a white shirt, leather aviator’s cap and goggles, a silk scarf and old-school binoculars around his neck. He had his plastic machete stuck in his belt and his pith helmet under his arm. “Is that what you’re wearing?” he asked.

  “What’s wrong with it?” I had on a T-shirt, Bermuda shorts, and tennis shoes, my New York-via-Nebraska idea of standard Southern California daywear.

  “Everything,” Frank said. “I know just what you need. Tartan! Let me get you my plaid cravat.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I’m not big on plaids.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” he asked. He launched into a brief-for-Frank disquisition on the importance of tartans as clan signifiers in Great Britain from ancient times forward, which segued into a history of the evolution of the striped necktie as a means of differentiating university rowing teams from afar. He paused to take a breath and I groaned, figuring this might go on a while. Instead, Frank used the air he’d taken in to bellow, “Gentlemen, start your engines!” Then he whipped the machete from his belt and charged the station wagon, carrying the pith helmet in front of him like a shield in his left hand and brandishing the machete in his right.

  After I got over my surprise at his enthusiasm for our adventure I was pleased to see how eager he was to go. So of course the car wouldn’t start. “Why?” I asked the ozone.

  Frank, mouthpiece for the ozone, answered me. “The battery’s dead. If an automobile isn’t driven for weeks or months, the cables should be disconnected to prevent the charge leaking out. However, my mother refused to allow me to perform the necessary operation. She said disconnecting the battery was abject capitulation. And that I would get grease on my cuffs.”

  “Abject capitulation to what?”

  “To her not driving.”

  “Does she ever drive?”

  “Sometimes not for weeks or months. As if the driving weren’t bad enough, once you reach your destination you have to find a place to park. God help you if you end up in a parking garage because chances are you’ll never find your car again. If you do find your car, then you’ve lost the stupid parking ticket. That’s it. You’re doomed. Why did you ever leave the house? Better to stay home. According to my mother.”

  “Don’t you ever go anywhere?” I asked.

  “We do,” he said. “In taxis.”

  After an eternity—or maybe what just seemed an eternity to me, as Frank was lecturing, not briefly, on the ins and outs of internal combustion engines, which segued into an explanation of Nikola Tesla’s alternating current (A.C.) engine, which, I don’t know if you know this, revolutionized the delivery of electricity over long distances, much to the chagrin of Tesla’s archnemesis and purveyor of the direct current (D.C.) delivery system, Thomas Edison—a guy from roadside assistance showed up at the gate carrying a briefcase-sized battery to shock our engine back to life.

  “Drive your car at least half an hour before you turn the engine off again,” he said once he got it up and running.

  “It’s not my car.” I signed the papers on his clipboard while he unclamped the jumper cables. “But don’t worry. We may not stop driving until we get to Belize.”

  The guy eyeballed the pair of us. “Not yours either?” he asked, nodding toward Frank.

  “Nope,” I said. “I’m the chauffeur.”

  “Nice gig,” he said. “Enjoy Belize. Don’t forget your sunscreen.”

  After the gate clanged shut behind the guy, Frank said, “I don’t think my mother would like it if you took me to Belize.”

  “I was joking.”

  “Your jokes are not funny. I wish you would say ‘knock knock’ when you’re trying to make a joke so I would know.”

  “Great idea,” I said. “Listen, Frank. I was going to take you to a museum today but since it’s getting late, let’s just go for a drive along the beach. No getting in the water, though. Okay?”

  “Just as well. The lifeguards say I swim like a drowning man. I don’t see why that matters as long as I don’t in fact drown.” He handed me the pith helmet. “This is for you, Alice. Sir Howard Carter didn’t wear sunscreen in the Valley of the Kings.”

  In that small gesture I saw another leap forward in my acceptance into the Banning household. “Thank you, Frank,” I said. “That’s sweet of you. Let’s leave the machete at home, okay?”

  And without complaint or hesitation, he flung the machete straight up into the air. I cringed and covered my head with my arms—I know it was plastic, but that sucker looked heavy. When it didn’t thunk to earth again I peered at
the sky, wondering if he’d somehow launched it into orbit. But there it was, lodged in the upper branches of a tree where, I noticed for the first time, a number of other items hung camouflaged by leaves and branches. A pair of kid’s sneakers I couldn’t imagine Frank ever wearing tied together by their laces, a Hula-Hoop, a tennis racket, a jump rope.

  “We ought to get a ladder out one day and take all that stuff down,” I said.

  “No,” Frank said. “It’s art. My mother and I hold hands and look at it together sometimes. We enjoy its random nature.”

  WE DROVE OUT the big Banning gates, south to Sunset, then looped west through all the fancy neighborhoods with Tudor mansions and Italianate palaces and faux Norman farmhouses tucked away behind clusters of palms and groves of citrus trees or stretches of lawn and rose garden. Sometimes you could see just a gatehouse here and a turret there peeking over a high wall or hedge. Lots of those big giant houses had FOR SALE signs posted out front. I couldn’t imagine who had enough money to buy even one of them, and we must have cruised past a dozen.

  When we hit the Pacific Coast Highway we hung a left, away from what my phone told me was Malibu and back toward the city of Los Angeles. As I drove I kept stealing glances right, to the beach, where I caught flashes of bikers and Rollerbladers and volleyball nets strung close to the highway. Closer to the water I saw bright beach umbrellas and blue lifeguard shacks on stilts and deep white sand and gray, cold-looking water. Which surprised me. I’d never seen the Pacific in close-up and I’d expected it to be blue and clear, like a kid’s crayon drawing of a tropical paradise.

  In the side-view mirror I could see Frank behind me, oblivious to the beach’s half-naked activity. He was leaning out his open window to enjoy the feel of the wind in his eyebrows and eyelashes and on his fingertips. His scarf snapped in the wind behind us.

  “Watch out for your scarf.”

  “Isadora Duncan met an untimely end in France on September fourteenth, 1927, when her scarf got entangled in the wheels of the convertible she rode in.”

  “That doesn’t sound like fun, does it?”

  “No. Thank you. Please.”

  “So watch out for your scarf.”

  Frank tucked it under his jacket and rolled the window up again. We drove along in silence for a while after that, slipping past the Santa Monica Pier with its miniature amusement park, complete with Ferris wheel and a little roller coaster pinned there against the sky.

  “You know what does sound like fun?” Frank said about then.

  “Lay it on me,” I said, thinking he was checking out the rides.

  “Lay what on you?”

  “Nothing. Tell me what sounds like fun.”

  “Going to the little airport where the antique planes take off. It’s around here someplace, but I haven’t been there since I was very young.”

  “But now that you’re practically antique—” I said.

  “I’m not antique,” he said. “Things fifty years old or older are considered ‘antique.’ Anything thirty years old to fifty is called ‘vintage.’ So I’m not even close to vintage, although of course you are swiftly approaching that.”

  “Thanks. So what does that make you?”

  “I’m a child. My mother, however, is antique.”

  “Well, let’s not tell her that, okay?”

  “Why not? It’s true.”

  “Lots of true things aren’t polite to say. If you’re not sure whether something you’re about to say might be rude, it’s better to keep your mouth shut. That’s the kind of tact your mother was talking about, by the way. Having tact, t-a-c-t, means knowing when to keep your thoughts to yourself.”

  When he didn’t have a comeback to that I checked him in the mirror and saw I’d upset him. His face, of course, was as impassive as ever; his shoulders were the tipoff. They’d risen to his ears, which I knew by then was step one to Frank going stiff and wordless on me. “What do you say we look for that airport?” I asked.

  “I would like to see it again,” he said. I pulled to the side of the road right away and found the place on my cell phone.

  When we got there I parked in the lot by the airfield and Frank climbed over the seat to get the windshield view of all the private prop planes and petite jets coming and going. The thing that got us out of the car finally was a bright yellow biplane that kept taking off and circling back to land again. Frank got out first and stood there with his goggles pushed up on his forehead and the binoculars pressed to his eyes, watching until it just kept going and lost itself in the horizon. There was something so poignant about Frank standing there with the wind blowing his coat and scarf around him that I got out to photograph him with my phone.

  It occurred to me I should take a picture with Mimi’s phone, too. So I fished it out of my pocket and snapped the photo, and then I did something unfathomable. I scrolled through her list of contacts. It was the same kind of awful impulse that makes people inventory bathroom medicine cabinets when they’re using the facilities at someone else’s house. Until that moment I’d always considered myself above that kind of thing. But there I was, my eyes flicking down the list, past several Drs. This and That; Emergency Room, two listings; Home; and Hospital, a few selections there, too.

  Had she handed me her own personal cell phone or one she’d gotten as a free bonus gift with a year’s subscription to Accidents Waiting to Happen Weekly? Where were her people, the Ellens and Eds, Dianes, Dicks and Sheilas most of us carry around in our pockets in case we really, really need to tell someone we’re in line at the grocery, waiting to pay for cat food? Or had she deleted the names of anyone who mattered to her, anticipating my snoop through her connections when I never would have suspected something like that of myself?

  I spun through the entire list. I told myself I’d come across Mr. Vargas’s name at the end of it, and that finding his name would validate me, the only person in the world Mr. V. trusted enough to send to M. M. Banning’s aid.

  There it was. Isaac Vargas. And after that, one more name. A name I’d heard before. Xander.

  “What are you doing?” Frank asked. He’d materialized at my elbow. I was so startled I dropped the phone.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I was just taking a picture of you with your mother’s cell phone. Look.” In one movement I picked the phone up and exited Mimi’s address book, feeling hugely relieved to have something as innocent as Frank’s photograph to show him.

  Frank studied the picture. “I look like the Little Prince,” he said. “My mother and I used to look at that book together when I was a kid.”

  “Of course you look like the Little Prince,” I said. It was something I’d noticed when I’d worked in the kindergarten. On the day kids brought their favorite books to class, you could see the Pippi Longstockings and Cats in the Hat and Corduroy Bears coming from a mile away. Bedtime Story as Destiny, I used to call it. And here we had another case in point: Frank, a snappy little dresser given to mood swings, scarves, and non sequiturs, just visiting our world from a small, eccentric planet of his own.

  Me? Harriet the Spy. Of course.

  ( 6 )

  BACK IN THE car we decided to try the freeway for the full-on traffic experience, driving toward the jagged cluster of downtown Los Angeles with the mountains propped up behind it like cardboard scenery. Though the “driving” I was doing felt more like being parked in Omaha at the Seventy-Second Street Wal-Mart, waiting for the store to open for its post-Thanksgiving Day sale. The freeway was so packed it was hard to believe there could be anyone left driving cars anywhere else in the world.

  “In the winter it doesn’t get very cold down here in the Los Angeles Basin but that far mountain is covered in snow,” Frank said, leaning forward between the seats to point it out to me.

  “Fascinating. But listen, Frank, gentlemen don’t point. Although I guess it’s all right to point at mountains. Mountains don’t have feelings like people do.”

  “You aren’t supposed to point at people? How
else are your eyes supposed to find them?”

  “Not that way. Nobody likes to look up and see people pointing and staring.”

  “Yes. That I know from firsthand experience.”

  “Have you ever been up there to play in the snow?” I asked.

  “Up there? No. I can see it from my school. Just before winter break they truck snow in from there and spread it on the playground for our Winter Festival. It’s more convenient that way.”

  And to think I’d been surprised people had their drinking water delivered. “That sounds like fun,” I said. “Back in Omaha, we have to get our snow the old-fashioned way. Falls on us out of the sky.”

  “Here, when the hills are on fire the ash falls like that, like snow. Or the mashed-potato flakes they use in movies as a stand-in for falling snow. Last summer there was a huge brushfire and no wind so this giant mushroom cloud of smoke hung in one place on the horizon for a week.”

  “Like an atom bomb mushroom cloud? That sounds scary.”

  “Exactly like that. Except it wasn’t scary. It was in the Valley.” Frank said “the Valley” as if it were a world away instead of a few freeway exits. “Did you know that Einstein’s one regret—you know Albert Einstein, don’t you?”

  “Mr. E equals mc squared? Everybody knows him.”

  “They do?”

  “Not personally. Since, you know, he’s dead.”

  “Yes, as of April eighteenth, 1955. Einstein’s regret was that he signed the letter a scientist named Leo Szilard wrote to Franklin Roosevelt in 1939 warning of the danger of the Nazis inventing a nuclear fission bomb many linked to the secrets unlocked by Einstein’s famous equation. That bomb would be capable of unimaginable carnage. Einstein, who was a pacifist, felt the letter Szilard wrote also linked him to the creation of the fabled Manhattan Project—”

  “That’s the one where the scientists tried to invent more affordable apartments in New York City, right?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Frank sounded troubled by this, like a guy who hadn’t noticed an open manhole at his feet until he’d fallen into it.