Be Frank With Me

by Julia Claiborne Johnson

  “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.”

  ( 10 )

  HE’S HERE,” FRANK said.

  “Who’s here?”

  “Xander.”

  That day I’d left Frank in his Teddy Roosevelt rig on a bench outside the ladies’ room at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for probably less than a minute. We’d decided he was too old to go in with me and stand outside my stall just so I could be comforted by the sight of his puttees while I peed, so I transacted my business, washed my hands and dried them on my shorts as I rushed out the door. I was so relieved to find him where I’d left him that at first I couldn’t take in what he was telling me.

  “Xander?”

  “XYZ,” Frank said.

  “Huh?”

  “Examine Your Zipper. Xander. Given name, Alexander. My piano teacher. Not Alexander the Great, although there is a sculptural representation of that Alexander here as well.”

  I yanked up my zipper and sat beside him. “Your Xander? Where?”

  “He was over there. He’s gone now.”

  It was hard for me to believe anyone could appear and disappear so quickly, unless Xander just happened to be as fast on his feet as Frank. I have to confess I’d been doubting Frank’s overall score on the truth-o-meter that day already, ever since we’d paused on our gallop long enough to examine an early Picasso together. I’d figured out by then that to slow the boy down all I had to do was ask questions. Question, really—one was usually enough to root him behind an imaginary lectern long enough for me to catch my breath. I may have mentioned that the depth and breadth of Frank’s knowledge was as dazzling as it was tedious.

  “What do you know about this painting?” I asked.

  “Picasso executed over twenty thousand works of art during his lifetime,” Frank said. “I use the word executed in the sense of ‘creating’ rather than in the cigarettes-blindfold-and-firing-squad-at-dawn sense. Most of Picasso’s paintings are considered brilliant. Some, mediocre. A few, tiresome. Take this one, for example. It used to hang over our fireplace until just before you came to stay with us. My mother got sick of looking at it so she gave it back to my father and he had so much Picasso already that he decided to give it to the museum.”

  “What?” I felt like I’d jerked awake in one of those snooze-inducing stadium lecture halls in college moments after the professor finished outlining the answers to every question on the final. “Your father? What are you talking about?”

  “Anonymous Donor. My father doesn’t like calling attention to himself.” Frank held his busted-out pince-nez in front of his eyes like a lorgnette and peered at the label posted on the wall by the painting. “That’s why he’s listed here as ‘Anonymous Donor.’ He’s a major collector. When he gets bored with stuff, he gives it to museums.”

  I couldn’t get any more out of him, which was frustrating as heck, since Frank generally left no fact unturned. I’ll say one thing for the kid. When he was done talking about something, he was done.

  But I wasn’t done with Xander yet. “Okay. If Xander’s here, where is he?”

  Frank shrugged. “I called his name and waved like this,” he said, throwing his arms around as if he were having a seizure from the waist up. “But he was wearing a headset. I don’t think he heard me.”

  “Why didn’t you get up and go tap him on the shoulder?”

  “Because I was under direct order to stay on this bench. Can we look for him now?”

  “Of course. Except I don’t know what Xander looks like.”

  “Oh, I can fix that. Follow me.”

  The Rough Riders would have had a hard time keeping up with Frank. A couple of guards on the other side of the esplanade called, “Hey, kid, no running!” I prayed I’d catch him before he knocked somebody over or palmed something he wasn’t supposed to touch.

  I caught up to him in the sculpture gallery, standing unruffled in front of an ancient statue of a young, curly-haired god some fisherman had netted in the 1920s in the Aegean Sea. One of the statue’s hands was raised like a footsore New Yorker flagging a cab; the other touched his chest lightly in a not-to-brag-but-check-out-this-body kind of way. I found myself wondering if the fingers on the raised hand had broken when they snagged that fisherman’s net. Maybe losing those fingers had been the price of finding his way out of the ocean again.

  Frank took off his cavalry hat and dabbed his brow with one of his buckskin gloves. “Xander looks like this guy, ‘In the Manner of Apollo, Greek, 300 to 100 B.C.’ Except Xander isn’t missing any of his fingers. His hair is blond, like yours. He isn’t made out of stone. He’s wearing more clothes.”

  Which wasn’t saying much, since the statue wasn’t wearing any clothes at all. Although if I were built like that, I probably wouldn’t want to, either. In real life, and by that I mean life outside of Los Angeles, you might come across one or two people in a lifetime with a physique like that topped with such an exquisite face and hair that begged you to run your fingers through it, assuming you still had fingers. In L.A., of course, guys like that worked as busboys in family restaurants and manned the checkout counter at health food stores. I have to admit, though, looking at that statue made me want to meet this Xander all over again.

  “Let’s go,” Frank said.

  “Wait. I’m still looking.”

  What intrigued me was that the statue’s chiseled face and upraised arm were pitted and dark compared to the unblemished marble of everything else. What happened to you? I wondered as I leaned closer to read his display card. What happened was this: After In-the-Manner-of-Apollo sank to the ocean floor, the tides gradually covered his nakedness in a blanket of sand so that only his face and arm were exposed to the friction of currents and nibbling undersea creatures. The price of his salvation, it seemed, was centuries of that face and hand being worn down by the elements.

  I got this crazy rush of longing then for my life back in Manhattan. I missed the unpredictable cocktail of people everywhere you looked. Missed flushing pink and looking away quickly when one of those insanely gorgeous guys I’d sit across from on the subway sometimes caught me staring. I even longed for the earnest, geeky boys who worked at the computer store and stuttered when I said hello and sometimes brought me lunch, a cold slice they’d saved from their pizza the night before. I wanted to see Mr. Vargas, who always had something nice to say or a silly joke for me and had stepped into the hole my father kicked open when he left. In that glass box on the hilltop with Mimi and Frank, I’d gotten lonesome for the everyday friction of ordinary life.

  Without thinking, I let go of the vise grip I had on Frank’s wrist and reached out to touch the broken stumps of In-the-Manner-of-Apollo’s fingers. I probably would have gotten busted for it if Frank hadn’t chosen that moment to crash to the floo
r at my feet.

  I knelt over him. “Frank?” I said, my hand hovering over his shoulder. His eyes were closed, but not that squeezed-shut closed of a kid who’s faking. His face was smooth and stony. If his cheeks hadn’t been so pink, he would have looked dead.

  “Is he all right?” the guard asked, looking at my crumpled pile of boy. “Do you need an ambulance? Does he have epilepsy? My cousin Rick had epilepsy. When we were kids he would fall over like that, boom, right in the middle of a kickball game.” The guard was old enough to be my father and had a sincere face that was as worn and pitted as In-the-Manner-of-Apollo, but not nearly as pretty.

  “I’ve never understood the allure of kickball, although polo has always appealed to me. Will Rogers had a string of polo ponies and a playing field on his Malibu estate, where games are played to this day,” Frank said. He rolled onto his back and opened one eye to look at me. “I was leaning.”

  I sat back on my heels. “What do you mean, ‘I was leaning’?”

  “I was imagining the statue tipping over the side of a boat in a storm. Because otherwise how did he end up at the bottom of the Aegean Sea? He’s made of marble. He can’t swim much better than I can.”

  I grabbed Frank by the scruff of his cavalry uniform and hauled him to his feet. “Don’t do that, Frank. It worries people. What’s wrong with you?”

  “The jury’s still out on that one,” Frank said.

  I hid my exasperation by dusting him off and retrieving his hat, touching both him and it without bothering to ask permission. I think Frank decided to roll with it because even he could tell I was irate. I thanked everything holy that we were in Los Angeles rather than New York, which meant the gallery was empty aside from the three of us.

  “Don’t be so hard on him, Mama,” the guard said. “Boys just don’t think, right, pal?” He gave Frank a conspiratorial poke. Me touching the kid without his okay was one thing, but I couldn’t imagine what would happen when a stranger broke The Second Rule of Frank. I braced myself for whatever massive wigout lay ahead. The plank, the hair snatch, or a full-on headbanging extravaganza?