Be Frank With Me (7 page)

“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.

B
ACK 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.

When would I learn? “Knock knock. Keep talking.”

“—The Manhattan Project, which led to the American invention of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Did you know that the
Enola Gay,
the airplane that dropped the first atom bomb, was built in Omaha in
1945
?”

“I didn't know that,” I said. “So, Frank, you must love school. You know more than most grown-ups I've met.”

“The other kids say I'm retarded.”

“I thought they said you were crazy.”

“They say that, too.”

“They're probably mad because you're smart and make good grades. Kids are stupid like that. The teachers love you, though, right?”

“I'll tell you what my mother says teachers don't love,” Frank said. “Being corrected.”

Sheesh. “You don't do that, do you?”

“Only when teachers make factual errors.” In the mirror, his shoulders hadn't tensed up, but he'd put his goggles over his eyes again. “Winston Churchill failed the sixth grade,” he added.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yes. Frank Lloyd Wright never finished high school. Neither did Cagney or Gershwin or Ansel Adams or Irving Berlin. Charlie Chaplin and Noël Coward never even finished grade school.”

“Is that true?”

“My mother keeps a list in the drawer of her bedside table. You can go look at it sometime if you don't believe me.”

“I believe you.”

“I want to go home now.”

“You're the boss,” I said and crept off the highway at the next exit. Neither one of us said anything for the rest of the trip. The next time I stole a look at Frank in the mirror, he was sleeping like a baby, his goggles down around his neck and his face pressed against the window.

When we pulled into the driveway I could hear Mimi hammering away on the typewriter through an open window. Frank started awake when I turned off the engine and ran for the house like an electrified rabbit with a live greyhound at its heels. I found him crouched outside Mimi's bedroom door, rocking in a little chair invisible to Earthlings like me.

“Are you okay?” I whispered.

“I just want to sit here with her for a while.”

I got that. I would have given anything to sit with my own mother again for a while. “That's fine. Just don't bother her while she's working, all right?”

He nodded and I decided to trust him. I went to the kitchen and hot-potatoed Mimi's cell phone out of my pocket and onto the counter so she would see and relieve me of it as soon as possible. Then I took the list of emergency contacts from another pocket and entered them into my phone so I'd never have to touch hers again, ever.

After all that guilty business was taken care of I sorted through the mail I'd picked up from the box as we came in, separating trashable junk from the bills. There was rarely much of anything else in her mailbox, though sometimes Mimi got fan mail, recognizable by virtue of being hand addressed and stamped. Or, more unsettlingly, stamp free, saying only “M. M. Banning” on the rumpled envelopes, missives clearly shoved through the mail slot by one of her fanatics. Every time I handed her one of those pieces of somebody's heart sealed inside an envelope, she tossed it in the trash unread.

Today, however, there was a postcard. It showed a shack with big stuffed animals—the kind you win at a fair and then lug around regretfully for the rest of the day—nailed all over it like lumpy and disheveled siding. I flipped the card over, thinking it might be some kind of nutty advertisement for a roofing company or maybe an invitation to check out an unusually depressing day care center. The card was addressed to Frank. I didn't mean to read it, but there was so little written there, my eyes couldn't help taking it in.

Outside Salt Lake City. Xander
.

Xander again. Who was Xander? I put the card, writing side down, by Mimi's phone, pulled a big knife from the drawer by the sink and started savaging basil for tomato sauce. I put a pot on to boil and slopped some olive oil and crushed garlic into a saucepan, and after that, cherry tomatoes. By the time I had the noodles draining in the sink, Frank wandered into the kitchen and said, “I'm hungry.”

“Lucky you,” I said, and put a plate of pasta in front of him.

“Can I eat this on the couch?”

“‘May' I eat this on the couch. No. Gentlemen do not eat on couches.”

“Why not?”

“Because mankind went to all the trouble of inventing tables to save good trousers from bad stains. Couches deserve the same consideration.”

“That makes perfect sense,” Frank said. Then, “She's never coming out, is she?”

“She will. She has to eat, too. Look, you got a postcard.”

Frank ignored the postcard, too caught up in the thrilling fork pursuit of tomato around the velodrome of his pasta bowl. I nudged the card toward him when he was done.

“Look, I got a postcard,” he said.

“You did? Spectacular. Who's it from?”

“Xander. He's back on our side of the Continental Divide.”

“Who's Xander?” I said, hoping I sounded more innocent than I felt.

“Xander is my piano teacher. When he's around.”

“Oh, yeah? How long have you been taking lessons?”

“Off and on since I was little.”

“You know, I've never heard you play.”

“I don't like playing much. I'd rather listen.”

“So why do you take lessons?”

“Because my mother says my gifts shouldn't be squandered. Also, Xander is my friend. He's been coming here to play our piano since before I was born. He tried to teach my mom to play. She says she wasn't any good because she was too old to learn, but she liked him and he likes our piano, so she gave him a key to our house so he could let himself in and play it anytime.”

I had to turn to the sink so he wouldn't see the avid look on my face. Not that Frank was much for reading facial expressions, but it shamed me to show my evil twin, Nosey Parker, to anything more sentient than a crusty skillet. “So, Xander stays here?”

“Sometimes. When he's in town. He makes money teaching piano lessons. He plays in restaurants, too, and fancy department stores until he gets a wad of cash up. Then he wanders all over the place until the money is gone. In my gallery I've mounted a retrospective of his postcards. Would you like to see?”

As someone who had vacuumed every inch of the house outside the forbidden zone of Mimi's office, I had to wonder where this gallery might be. Frank led me through the sliding doors, blasted right past the art installation in the tree and stopped in front of the garage. I'd seen the garage a million times, but had gone so far past not noticing it backed up close to the stucco security perimeter that I'd never even wondered why the car wasn't parked in it, ever. Unlike the house, it had a shake roof with moss growing on the wood shingles shaded by a eucalyptus tree, and stucco walls instead of floor-to-ceiling windows. All the better, I supposed, to stuff it floor to ceiling with junk.

Frank threw the door up with one hand and swept a bow to the interior, like Aladdin welcoming me to his cave. But it was neither cave nor junkyard, and in fact so not of a piece with the house that it took my breath away. The walls were whitewashed boards and exposed studs with a bank of windows on the backside tucked under the rough beam-and-plank ceiling that was also the floor to the loft spanning much of the garage. More light spilled in through skylights set on either side of the peaked roof. The concrete floor must have had some kind of seal on it because it shone like marble and there was neither oil stain nor faded memories of leaking radiator fluid to be seen anywhere. The oddest part was that there was nothing in the bottom floor at all, no old bicycles nor toys nor rusty tools nor screens to windows that didn't exist anymore. Not even a rake or a hose. I'd never been in a cleaner garage in my life. Or a bigger one. It could have housed a dozen tractors.

“Look how nice it is in here,” I said. “You could eat off the floor.”

“Even gentleman could?”

“No, gentlemen could not. I didn't mean you could literally eat off the floor. That's just something people say when a floor is really clean.
Most garages look like Dagwood Bumstead's closet, with junk falling out all over the place every time you open the door.”

Frank lit up when I said that. “Fibber McGee had a closet like that, too, but since it was a radio program they had to convey its overstuffed nature through the medium of sound. My mother is not an archivist like I am and doesn't believe in keeping things. She says the more you have, the more you have to lose. So if she doesn't have any use for something, it's gone before you can say ‘Fibber McGee's Closet.' Come on. The gallery is up here.” Frank scrambled halfway up a ladder of two-by-fours nailed between a pair of studs. There was a trapdoor up top that he pushed open and climbed through. He poked his head back into the frame of the hole to watch me ascend. “Careful,” he said. “The old lady fell off this ladder. And she was way closer to the bottom than you are.”

“What old lady?”

“The old lady my mother bought the house from. She built it when she was young. This garage went with the original house and the old lady couldn't get a permit to build a new one, so she never tore this one down. She turned it into her painting atelier.”

Once I got up there I could tell the old lady was an amateur, because she had everything a real artist could ever dream of in a studio but can seldom afford. Here there was not just light and space but wide cabinets with shallow drawers for storing drawings and slotted racks against the wall for canvases and an easel. A sink for cleaning brushes and counter space alongside it and even more drawers under that. A couple of sunflower-yellow straight-backed chairs arranged around a yellow table I couldn't imagine anyone getting up there in the first place, and a yellow wooden day bed and bedside table.

“Van Gogh at Arles meet Barbie's Dream House,” I said.

“Yes,” Frank said. “Or somebody got a very good deal on yellow paint. Look, here's the bathroom.” He opened a door and showed me a tiny bathroom fitted with a teacup-sized copper tub and a demitasse sink and one of those old-fashioned high-tanked toilets with a chain I
couldn't resist pulling. It flushed with a sound like a jet taking off from an aircraft carrier. Frank covered his ears and grimaced.

“Sorry,” I said when he uncovered his ears again. “It's just that I've never seen a toilet like that.”

“Van Gogh would have done the same thing,” he said. “He never saw one, either. Or these.” By the sink, he twisted the knob on the top of what looked like a vertical row of drawers. The lot swung open as one and presto—a tiny concealed refrigerator that released a puff of stale, chilly air. Another drawer by the fridge pulled out to reveal a little two-burner electric stovetop.