Be Frank With Me

by Julia Claiborne Johnson

  Before we left I wrote “Mr. Vargas” in Sharpie on Frank’s hand.

  FRANK SAT WITH Mr. Vargas and talked to him all the way to the department store. Nobody bothered staring at Frank and his seatmate, Nobel Prize winner Albert Einstein, because Fake Marilyn Monroe and Artificial Charlie Chaplin, en route to Mann’s Chinese Theatre to pose for photographs with tourists, were in the back of the bus sharing a newspaper. As they left, I nudged Mr. Vargas to make sure he noticed. We watched the two of them walk away from their stop together, holding hands. I couldn’t help thinking things might have worked out differently for real Marilyn if she’d gone for a guy with a sense of humor while she was alive.

  At the mall, though, locals you’d think would be jaded were thrilled to see Half-Pint E. F. Hutton, monocle screwed into his eye socket and holding his Grandpa Einstein’s hand. They parted in front of us and spun in our wake in sync, like choreography for a 1950s Warner Brothers musical.

  Once we were inside the store, Frank stopped abruptly. “Hey. Wait a minute,” he said. “Is this the kind of place where a fellow could buy a trench coat, or is it all handbags and lipstick?”

  “There must be a men’s department,” Mr. Vargas said, “where I could also buy pajamas.”

  “I thought you wanted to find Xander, Frank,” I said.

  “I do, but I thought we could squeeze in a little shopping, after, since we’re here. My mother hates department stores. I don’t know why. Agreed, a Los Angeles department store is not as exciting as a souk in Casablanca, but it does have indoor plumbing.” Then Frank Banning, Private Eye, held up his finger and got a look of intense concentration on his face. “Shhh,” he said even though he’d been the one doing all the talking. “Do you hear it? Xander’s here.”

  “I hear it,” I said. I did. The joyful abandon, like a golden retriever fetching an old tennis ball.

  “By the escalators,” Frank said. “Over there.” He aimed his elbow to direct our gaze. It wasn’t that much better than pointing with his finger, but still, I can’t tell you how gratifying that concession to good manners was to me. There might be hope yet that Frank would remember to chew with his mouth closed someday, too.

  He was right. Xander was over there. In a tux, at a baby grand. A lot of the shoppers brushed past without a second look. The armchairs around the piano, however, were filled with old ladies who’d lost interest in fashion around Mamie Eisenhower’s time but who still had it in them to appreciate a handsome man at a piano. Alec sat on the piano bench next to Xander looking unbearably adorable in a tiny tux of his own. Things were looking up for Xander’s net worth. I had a feeling he’d earn a wad of cash big enough to carry him at least as far as Akron before this performance was over.

  He finished the piece with a flourish and acknowledged the spatters of applause. “I’m Xander Devlin,” he said, then swept his palm to Sara, standing in the curve of the piano. “My darling sister Sara, who puts up with all my nonsense.” Then he put the hand on Alec’s curls. “And, of course, the star of any show, my nephew Alec.”

  Frank, who’d been watching the whole performance through his monocle, lowered it and said to me, “Aha! Brother and sister. Like William and Eleanor Powell.”

  Xander locked eyes with me across the piano. He bolted, abandoning his nephew on the piano bench. He beat it out of there so fast that the two adoring old ladies he dove between checked to see if he’d made off with their handbags. Sure, he was handsome, but those ladies weren’t born yesterday.

  “Xander!” Frank yelled. “No running!” Then the kid took off after him.

  “I have to—” I said to Mr. Vargas.

  “—go after him,” he said. “Yes. I know. Run.”

  ( 25 )

  IF YOU ASKED me why a chicken would want to cross the road in Los Angeles, I would have to say it was because that chicken loved pancakes so much he wanted to be one.

  Frank chased Xander out of the mall and down the diagonal slash of the glass-encased escalators splitting its facade. Many double-wide shoppers-with-bags placidly taking in the palm trees and Hollywood Hills got their zen in a wad when I elbowed past, hot on his trail. I burst out onto the street to a symphony of screaming brakes and horns honking. Xander was across the way already. Frank was frozen in the middle of the road, a bus lurched to a stop so close to him that the kid could have reached out and rung the handlebar bell on the bike in the rack on its front.

  I heard someone screaming Frank’s name before I realized I was the one doing it. Without thinking, I lunged into the street to grab him before he lay down on the pavement. I got Frank back on the curb somehow without remembering the particulars. Once I had him safe there, I crouched to shove my face into his line of sight. “Frank, what were you thinking? You could’ve been killed. You could’ve caused an accident. Don’t ever do anything like that again. Do you hear me?”

  Frank grabbed the light pole alongside us in both hands then and slammed his forehead against it, saying, “stupid, stupid, stupid,” in between blows.

  “No, no, no, no, Frank,” I said. “Shhhhh. Stop.” I pried his hands free and put myself between him and the lamppost.

  Xander, bless his deadbeat heart, had waded through the traffic and knelt, tux be damned, next to Frank. When he began singing quietly, Frank stopped. “Frank Loesser!” he shouted. “‘What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve.’ My grandparents danced to that at their wedding!”

  It was like magic, the way that calmed Frank down. And how much it made me squirm. I realized that was the song Xander had played when he came back to the glass house post-Christmas. Yes, the very number I’d egotistically assumed he’d trotted out for me. Now I had to think it had been Xander’s way of telegraphing Frank that his itinerant male role model was back in residence. Mr. Vargas was so right about me. I really did give myself too much credit sometimes. I felt so embarrassed that pounding my head against a lamppost almost seemed like a good idea.

  “Hey, pal,” Xander said. “Come here. Can I see your head?”

  “Don’t tell my mother,” Frank pleaded.

  “Your secret’s safe with me.” Xander brushed the kid’s hair back with two fingertips. His forehead looked surprisingly okay. Just a little red. “Now let me see your thumbs.” Frank held them out for Xander to inspect. They looked even redder. “Good thing your thumbs took the hit for your brain case,” Xander said. “You got off easy this time. Next time you might not be so lucky. What’s up with you, little man?”

  “I needed to find you. I have had about enough of people disappearing on me.”

  “I hear you,” Xander said. “But you know what’s the best thing about me? As long as there’s breath in my body I’ll come back sooner or later. I’m not so easy to shake.” Xander fingertipped Frank’s hair forward to cover the red spot. “There you go. Good as new. No one will be the wiser.”

  Then Xander vanished into the crowd.

  Before I had time to get into a lather about it, a cab pulled up and Xander bounded out of the backseat. “Sorry to duck out on you like that,” he said. “You can’t flag cabs in most of Los Angeles the way you do in New York. About the only upside of not driving is that you know where all the cabstands are. Alice. Frank, your chariot awaits. Get in.”

  “But Frank only rides in taxis with his mother,” I protested.

  “Until today,” Xander said. “Today our boy becomes a man. You first, Alice. Then Frank.”

  “Since you’re coming back to live with us, Xander, Alice will give you your wallet back,” Frank said. “You’ll have to sleep on the living room couch though because your home away from home burned down in the fire.”

  We got in with Frank sandwiched between us. Before the cab pulled from the curb, the kid started throwing himself around in the backseat and chanting, “Stop stop stop stop stop.”

  “Everything’s okay, Frank,” Xander said. “Calm down. Alice and I are right here with you.”

  “Everything is not okay. We’re leaving Our Good Friend Hi
m behind.” Frank leaned across Xander and rolled down the window. He was the only one who’d noticed Mr. Vargas had materialized on the curb, holding his side and panting.

  I caught Frank by his knees before he was able to fling his entire body out the taxi window. “Dr. Einstein, I presume!” he bellowed, semaphoring wildly. Mr. Vargas looked up, smiled and waved. Frank must have noticed the name I’d written out on his hand then because he tacked on, “Mr. Vargas! I say old man. Your chariot awaits!”

  Mr. Vargas got in front with the driver and we set off for Bel Air. Frank hooked his fingers over the back of the front seat and replayed our adventure for the two of them, leaving no incident unturned. I locked the door on my side and collapsed against it, closed my eyes, and let myself be lulled by the drone for a while. When I opened my eyes again I looked across at Xander, who was staring out the window on his side, frowning.

  It was late afternoon by the time we got home, although it felt like it should have been midnight. Frank insisted the cab drop us off at the gate and made us wait until it had rounded the corner before he entered in the code. Then he grabbed Mr. Vargas by the hand and started up the drive with him, swinging his arm so vigorously that I worried he’d dislocate Our Good Friend Him’s shoulder.

  I started up the hill behind them but Xander stopped just inside the gate. “Are you coming, or aren’t you?” I asked.

  Xander was taking in the pile that had once been the Dream House. The blackened skeleton of the Mercedes. The empty eye socket of Mimi’s office under its tarpaulin eye patch. I’d forgotten that he hadn’t seen the carnage in daylight yet.

  “It isn’t pretty, is it?” I asked.

  “Sara told me the manuscript burned in the fire. I can’t go in there, Alice. I can’t face Mimi.”

  “Well, you’re in luck,” I said. “Mimi’s gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  I shrugged. “Nobody knows.”

  “Is that why Frank was so eager to find me?”

  “I guess.”

  “The way Frank ran out into the street after me today,” he said. “He could have been killed.”

  “It’s a wonder he wasn’t,” I said. “You know Frank would follow you anywhere. How could you run from him like that?”

  “It wasn’t my fault the kid followed me.”

  “Nothing’s ever your fault, is it, Xander?” I said. “You know what? You’re the one we should call Jeopardy. You’re dangerous for Frank to be around. That kid needs a role model, not a partner in crime. You need to grow up, or get lost for good.”

  I started up the driveway without him. “Alice, wait,” he said. “Listen. For just a minute, okay?” He grabbed my elbow. “You’re right. I’m too old to be this stupid. I’m going to change. I promise.”

  “Prove it,” I said.

  “Prove it? How?”

  “Tell me what happened to your sister.”

  BE INSIDE IN a few, I texted Mr. Vargas. Are you okay with Frank?

  More than okay, he replied. Take your time.

  “We’re good,” I said, and put my phone away. “Why don’t we sit down someplace?”

  Xander marched up the driveway in front of me, eyes averted from the rubble, every line of his body crying out for cigarettes and a blindfold. We sat on the front stoop with our backs against the blue slate entranceway. It was warm from the afternoon slant of sun and we could see all the way to the ocean over the top of the stucco wall.

  Xander didn’t linger on details. “My sister and I were in a car accident together,” he said. “I lived. She died. That’s all you need to know.”

  “No it isn’t. What was your sister’s name?

  “Lisa.”

  “Who was driving?”

  “I was.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Twenty. Lisa was fifteen. That day.”

  Ah. That would explain I don’t do birthdays. “So how did it happen?”

  “I wasn’t drunk,” he said.

  “I didn’t say you were.”

  “Everybody thought I must have been until I tested clean. My problem wasn’t something you can just sleep off.” Xander put his hands on his thighs and rubbed them back and forth against his jeans, as if he meant to warm them up or wipe them clean of something. “I hate talking about this,” he said.

  “Too bad,” I said. “Go on.”

  “Okay. Well. We were on the way to the store to buy soda for her birthday party. I thought that would be as good a time as any to give Lisa her present. It was something I’d been practicing all summer in empty parking lots. There’s not a lot to do for fun in a small town in Vermont if you don’t drink or do drugs. I couldn’t play the piano all day, although now I wish I had learned that ridiculous Vangelis piece she was crazy about for her birthday instead.”

  “What ridiculous Vangelis piece?” I asked. “Who’s Vangelis?”

  “I forget how young you are sometimes,” he said. “You probably weren’t born yet. You couldn’t get away from that song that summer. The one from Chariots of Fire.”

  Oh. The piece he’d been trying to get under his belt since forever. “Forget Vangelis,” I said. “I want to know what happened to Lisa.”

  “I showed her how to send a car into a three-hundred-sixty-degree skid is what happened. Lisa and I were big fans of trashy action movies with insane car chases. She loved that spin just as much as I thought she would right up to the point where I lost control of the car and it slammed into a tree.”

  Xander’s parents never forgave him. The State of Vermont did, after eighteen months of a three-year sentence for criminally negligent homicide. So did Sara, after she was grown. She’d even demonstrated his absolution in her eyes by naming her son Alexander, after him. “But Sara was just a kid when it happened,” he said. “I think she forgave me because she thought I was all the family she’d have left someday. Now that she has a family of her own, I’m sure there are days she wishes I’d never been born. I know her husband feels that way. So I try never to stick around long enough to let her down.”

  He’ll only disappoint you.

  “If you think you’ll always let people down, that’s all you’ll ever do,” I said.

  “You sound like my mother,” he said.

  “You’re old enough to be my dad.”

  There are worse places for a relationship to die, I guess, than on the front stoop of a glass mansion with a view of the ocean at sunset above its stucco wall. As these things go, it wasn’t even all that painful. Xander and I sat there together for a while, watching the sky go pink. “We used to eat our lunches here,” he said at last. “This was the only place you could still see the water after the wall went up out front.”

  “We?”

  “The crew who built that wall. Also, Mimi couldn’t watch us here.”

  “‘Mimi couldn’t watch us.’ What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “When we worked around the back she used to stand at the glass and stare at us. I guess she thought we couldn’t see her. The other guys thought she was weird, but she just seemed lonely to me. So I decided somebody ought to talk to her. Her mind must have been a million miles away the day I did because she didn’t seem to notice me until I rapped on the glass. She almost jumped out of her skin. It was like she’d seen a ghost or something. I guess she decided I was harmless though because she came out every day from then on to chat with me. As it turned out, we had things in common. We talked about missing the seasons. The East Coast. New York. I helped her pick out the piano. She asked me to fix things. The rest you know.”

  XANDER LEFT WITHOUT coming inside. He said his sister was expecting him.

  “What about Frank?” I asked. “He’s expecting you, too.”

  “I need to sleep,” he said. “Tell him I’ll be back first thing tomorrow to patch things up with him.”

  “Tell him yourself.”

  “No thanks. There’s too much going on in there. I’ll be here half the night if I come in. I need to sleep. Frank
will understand.”

  “Go,” I said. Frank was right. This was the disappointing part. Frank might understand why Xander didn’t show up as promised—or he might not. Then who would have to pick up the pieces? Not Xander. But in the end it wasn’t up to me to talk him into staying. No point in trying to explain to Xander that nobody likes being let down, particularly not kids. With children in the house, you’re on call around the clock whether you like it or not. You don’t get the luxury of enough sleep when that was what you needed most to keep yourself from going over the edge. You’d think somebody Xander’s age would’ve figured that one out already. Maybe if he started sticking around more he’d get it. Alec would teach him. Or Frank, who’d taught me. Frank was the master.

  MR. VARGAS WAS out cold on the white couch, like a man who’d trained himself eons ago to grab shut-eye in whatever foxhole he stumbled into. Frank had changed into his Robin Hood attire. He was standing over Mr. Vargas with a suction cup arrow notched into his bow, carefully fitting it over one of his Good Friend Him’s eyelids.

  “Frank,” I hissed. “Personal space.”

  Mr. Vargas startled all of us then with a snore so loud and sudden that he woke himself up. Frank and I escorted him to bed, Mr. Vargas insisting that he really wasn’t tired.

  I made Frank some dinner and let him eat it on the couch in the family room for the first time ever while we watched Double Indemnity together. I didn’t want to put him to bed until I was sure he was spent. Otherwise I figured he’d sneak in on Mr. Vargas to complete his research on the utility of suction cup arrows for extracting eyeballs. When he finally fell asleep on the couch I picked him up and carried him into his closet. I was pretty impressed with myself for being able to carry him so far without breaking a sweat. I guess I’d gotten a lot stronger than I’d been when I first came to live with them. I guarantee you Frank hadn’t gotten any smaller.

  After that I went and sat on the piano bench and looked out the windows. Since Mr. Vargas’s arrival, we’d taken to leaving the curtains open at night so we could enjoy the twinkling lights outlining the higher hills in the distance. It was the only time you could really imagine what the views from the house must have been like once.