Frank has a girlfriend now.
Isn’t he a little young for girlfriend?
Friend who is a girl.
Ah. Well. Everybody needs a friend.
Indeedy.
Heard any good jokes lately? Mr. Vargas texted.
Nope. You?
How do you know when you’ve met an outgoing mathematician?
Tell me, I texted back.
He stares at your shoes. Instead of at his own shoes. Get it?
Ha. I get it. Frank stares at my eyebrow.
So things are looking up for him.
Yes.
Ask Mimi for pages.
I sat there on the edge of the bed trying to decide how to respond to that. Xander opened the bathroom door. “The walls are closing in on me,” he said. “With this shut I can’t raise my elbow while I brush my teeth.”
I went back to texting Mr. Vargas. Would request be better coming from you?
“Don’t stand in front of the mirror,” I said to Xander. “Spit into the toilet instead of the sink.”
The last time I asked her for anything, he texted, Mimi decided to stay in Los Angeles.
I COULDN’T BLAME Mr. Vargas for sweating me for product. He was back there in New York with winter setting in and the publicity department hovering. While I was here in the land of milk and honey, doing what?
Xander, mostly.
Here’s the joke I decided I ought to tell Mr. Vargas: I ask Mimi for pages. She smiles and hands over completed novel. In the acknowledgments, she thanks me for my computer skills and inspiring “Pollyanna” outlook on life.
See, the way a joke works is that it presents you with an impossible situation. Your brain recognizes the situation as impossible so you laugh at the absurdity of it. Here’s what really happened when I asked Mimi for pages. She said, “When I am ready to give you something of mine, I will be sure to let you know.”
THEN JUST LIKE that it was Christmas.
This isn’t to imply things didn’t go on in the interim. Things happened. But if you’d like to keep believing in the perfection of Xander Devlin, kind of in the way I kept trying to convince myself Santa was real after I saw the guy in the red suit having a cigarette out back of the Westroads Mall, you’ll need to ignore certain events that occurred during this time:
To give me a break from my routine and to prove he is a stand-up guy, Xander offers to pick Frank up from school one Friday afternoon. I am moved and grateful, and spend the stolen hour conditioning my hair and giving myself a pedicure. When I emerge the car is in the driveway and I can hear them going at it on the piano. I decide not to interrupt and go to fold laundry and get dinner started.
After I slide the stuffed shells into the oven I smooth back my newly glowing hair and pad barefoot into the living room, where as it happens the piano is playing by itself. So I wander through the glass house and then into the Dream House looking for Frank and Xander, my panic gradually increasing to a crescendo when I find Xander in the yellow bed, napping.
“Where’s Frank?” I ask.
“Frank?” he echoes, still stupid from sleep.
I am in the station wagon, barefoot and burning rubber, before Xander can finish speaking the sentence “I must have fallen asleep.”
I am grateful that Frank, having decided he’d been forgotten and that he’d better walk home, chooses the route we take in the car. Did I say “walk”? Because after several blocks, Frank decides to hitchhike. I find him on the corner of Bellagio Terrace and Linda Flora Drive, right hand hiking up right trouser leg to expose a tempting expanse of burgundy and navy argyle sock, left thumb awag. A pose, Frank explained once safely ensconced in the backseat, combining the hitchhiking techniques of both Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert from that famous scene in 1934’s It Happened One Night.
“That was the first film to win all five marquee Oscars, a feat not repeated until 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a movie I have never watched,” Frank says.
“Don’t,” I say.
“Okay. The Gable/Colbert scene is so famous that it was mimicked in a Laurel and Hardy bit as well as a Looney Tunes short. It inspired generations of hitchhikers to prevail upon the kindness of strangers to help them reach their final destinations.”
As mutilated corpses stuffed into drainage ditches, I do not say. What I do say is, “It’s illegal to hitchhike before you’re twenty-one years old.”
“Oh. I didn’t know that. I know it’s wrong to indulge in criminal activities, but I do like those black-and-white-striped suits and matching caps that convicts wear. They’d make excellent pajamas. Do they let you keep them once your time is served?”
“Convicts wear orange jumpsuits that zip up the front now. The cut is not slimming, and a redhead like you should steer clear of head-to-toe orange,” I say.
“I will never hitchhike again.”
Miraculously, Frank and I arrive home without being discovered by Mimi, and well before the stuffed shells are ready to come out of the oven. “That looks delicious,” Frank says as I pull the pan out of the oven and slump, exhausted and relieved, against the counter. “Why aren’t you wearing any shoes?”
Xander disappears for days, without explanation. It is none of my business what he does with his free time, which is of course every hour of every day. Still this seems vaguely impolite, particularly when I have prepared a dinner for four centered on a kale-feta casserole that Frank hates but Xander loves.
The upside is that when Xander returns he has new, lunatic photographs to add to Frank’s collection in the gallery. When I ask Xander where he snapped a shot of what appears to be a woman’s back bearing a shoulder-to-crack tattoo that matches the mural she’s standing in front of, he says, “She’s just a friend.”
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.
( 15 )
THE 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 no
se 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.
Be Frank With Me Page 15