Be Frank With Me

by Julia Claiborne Johnson

  Ah. Then it was Xander who took the car, not Mimi. Now I remembered I’d noticed the faint tang of milled lumber in the station wagon when I’d gone to rescue Frank. In my panic I’d mistaken it for the smell of my own desperation. Thank god I hadn’t decided to investigate Mimi’s office.

  “Who’s your girlfriend?” Xander asked Frank.

  “Alice is not my girlfriend,” Frank said. “She’s way too old and bony.”

  “I don’t know,” Xander said. “She looks pretty good to me.”

  ( 12 )

  WHO IS THIS Xander, Xactly? Mr. Vargas texted. I worried for his editorial dignity if he ever discovered emoticons.

  Xander Devlin, I typed back. Julliard graduate and general handyman. Seems harmless. After I pressed “send,” I deleted our exchange. I was paranoid about leaving even the most innocent back-and-forth there ever since Frank had coyoted my phone.

  It was Saturday and I was in the kitchen making lunch while Frank and Xander played a game in the living room with Mimi. The game was called “Frank, Xander, or Piano.” It was a sort of combination of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey and name-that-tune, in which Frank and Xander sat on the piano bench while Mimi, on the couch and blindfolded with one of the ubiquitous black T-shirts, listened to a few bars of a song. When it stopped, Mimi had five seconds to name the player manipulating the piano’s keys. Frank was the official timekeeper, which meant he got to shout “TICK-TICK-TICK-TICK-TICK-TIME’S UP!” like the world’s happiest time bomb.

  You might think this an easy game, since one of the players was a Julliard graduate, one a computerized piano, and one a nine-year-old boy, but Xander had come up with a way to mix up the material—some ragtime, a little classical, and a few choruses of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” that kept Mimi guessing, or pretending to guess. I could hear her laughing, as well as Frank’s monotone “ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.” I had never managed to make Frank or Mimi laugh like that.

  Not only was Xander more fun to be with than I was and worked a black T-shirt way better; he’d replaced the shattered sliding glass doors in three days using only the most primitive of tools. When I asked why he didn’t use an electric saw to cut the two-by-fours, he’d given me one of those cripplingly gorgeous Jay Gatsby smiles of his and said, “An electric saw? Around Frank?” He’d also snaked every drain in the house, vacuumed lint from the dryer engine and dust from the refrigerator coils, and changed all the fluids in the station wagon. When he wasn’t doing something useful, Xander played the piano with the joyful abandon of a golden retriever fetching an old tennis ball.

  What’s his story? Mr. Vargas asked.

  He just shows up from time to time, says Frank.

  Why?

  Started as Frank’s piano teacher. Now mostly fixes things. Far as I can tell.

  Did Mimi send for him?

  That hadn’t occurred to me, though it made perfect sense. Which bothered me, since I was the one who was supposed to be fixing things, or having them fixed. Dunno. I put my phone down to toss the salad. When the light started flashing I picked it up again.

  How old is this Xander?

  Old, I typed. The first time I saw Xander in daylight I’d been surprised by the lines across his forehead and bunched at the corners of his eyes. Veins mapped the back of his hands and his blond hair was a little silvery at his temples. But then I realized I sounded like Frank when he decided I was older than Methuselah for being in my twenties. I changed Old to Older than I expected. Forty at least. Midforties, maybe. Not fifty.

  So. Young, Mr. Vargas wrote. Mind the feelings of your geriatric audience.

  I was about to write You’ll never be old. But I flashed on the most wrenching thing Mr. Vargas had said to me at his wife’s funeral. “She never got to be old. We were going to be old together.”

  Sorry, I wrote instead.

  Forgiven. Keep an eye on him.

  If Mr. Vargas only knew. With Frank finally settled in at school, I’d been taking my lunches that week over the sink to give me a clear view of Xander working in the yard.

  Xander seems okay, I wrote. He’s a charming guy. Fun. Frank loves him.

  Nonetheless. Remember, your job is to protect Mimi from cads and swindlers.

  And here I thought I was supposed to be transcribing Mimi’s manuscript, of which I hadn’t seen a page. I was thinking about how to answer that when I felt somebody’s eyes on me. Frank stood in the doorway, wearing a deerstalker hat and a tweedy caped overcoat, with one of those pipes that blows soap bubbles clenched between his teeth. He was staring at my kneecaps with such concentration it’s a wonder they didn’t spontaneously combust.

  I pocketed my phone. “What’s up, Sherlock?”

  Frank took the pipe from his teeth and said, “I’m Frank.”

  “I know, Frank.”

  “What you may not know is that Sherlock Holmes has been depicted on film hundreds of times, perhaps more than any other fictional character. My favorite on-screen Sherlock was portrayed by Basil Rathbone, a cadaverous Brit who popularized the deerstalker hat, Inverness coat, and pipe. His films were made between the years of 1939 and 1946, a time when a war-torn world took solace in the idea of a lone gentleman of towering intellect rescuing the world from its demons. What does cadaverous mean? I tried to look it up in Webster’s but I am not a good speller. When I find a word I’m looking for there, it’s usually serendipitous.”

  “Cadaverous? Thin to the point of being skeletal,” I said. “Hey, what did the skeleton say when he walked into the bar?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll have a beer and a mop.”

  Xander got to the party in time to award my joke with a chuckle and a rasher of twinkle. “That’s one of my favorites,” he said.

  “Favorite what?” Frank asked. “I don’t understand.”

  “Knock knock,” I said.

  “Oh. That means it’s a joke,” he explained to Xander.

  “I got it. That’s why I laughed, Frank. See, the way a joke works is that it presents you with an impossible situation your brain recognizes as impossible, so you laugh at the absurdity of it. A skeleton, for example, couldn’t walk into a bar.”

  “Franklin Delano Roosevelt walked into a bar,” Frank said, “an event rendered practically impossible by a bout of paralytic poliomyelitis he suffered in 1921.” Frank acknowledged his own comic gem with a rat-a-tat-tat hahahahaha. “Why aren’t you laughing?” he asked when we didn’t join in.

  Xander ponied up a pretty convincing courtesy laugh.

  “Why isn’t Alice laughing?” Frank asked.

  “I’m slow on the uptake,” I said.

  “I’m hungry,” Frank said.

  “Your timing is impeccable,” I said. “Lunch is ready. Can you tell your mother?”

  “She went back to work,” Xander said.

  “Oh. Good.”

  Xander was leaning against the doorway, wearing another of the black T-shirts and unconsciously stroking his opposite shoulder. It was a thing I’d noticed well-muscled guys in T-shirts do sometimes when they talk to women, the way girls with hair like mine toss it back when they’re talking to men.

  “Can we have lunch together?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Can we sit at the table? Or do we have to stand over the sink?”

  So much for thinking a pane of glass rendered me invisible to the outside world. “I have to take Mimi’s lunch first,” I said, making myself very busy arranging it on a tray. “You boys start without me.”

  Frank sat at the plate I’d fixed for him. “FDR?” he said to Xander. “More like FD Aren’t!”

  My braid swung over when I bent to pick up the tray and I swatted it back. Xander turned just as I passed him and our forearms brushed, which was too bad because I knew I’d have a better chance of keeping an objective eye on him if we never touched, ever.

  A WEEK LATER, when I drove home from dropping Frank off at school, Xander was out front of the garage jumping rope with a ferocity
that suggested boxing ring more than playground. “There she is again,” he said. The sound of the rope striking pavement made an interesting counterpoint to the clacking of typewriter keys floating out of Mimi’s office window. I ducked back inside the station wagon for my purse, then occupied myself with getting the keys situated just right inside it. That took all of about thirty seconds. I’d hoped that would give Xander time to get back to his regime.

  But Xander had dropped the jump rope and pulled the neck of his T-shirt, stretched out and riddled with the tiny holes from hundreds of washings, straight up over his face to mop his sweat. According to his T-shirt, at The Ritz 21 Club Bar-B-Q in Lubbock, Texas, a person could Dine and Dance in Cool, Air-Conditioned Comfort. I pretty much memorized the street address, zip, and phone number of The Best Meet Market This Side of Mississippi. As long as my eyes stayed on his shirt I wasn’t eyeing the kind of ribs Xander had on his menu.

  Once his midsection was undercover again I was able to manage, “Yes. Here I am. Again.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “Taking Frank to school.”

  “In general,” he said. “You’ve been making yourself scarce.”

  “I’ve been very busy,” I lied, and walked briskly toward the house.

  “Doing what?”

  With Frank being gone most of the day, the sad truth was that I’d had a hard time keeping myself busy in a way that made me glad I had a college degree. “Working,” I snapped. “I work here, you know.” I sounded every bit as hostile as Mimi. More.

  “Wait a minute, Alice.” Xander touched my elbow and stopped me in my tracks. “Are you mad at me for some reason?”

  “Why would I be mad at you?”

  “I don’t know. But it’s clear I’ve made you angry. That, or you just don’t like me.”

  “Do you really need everybody to like you?” I asked.

  “Isn’t that what everybody wants?”

  “Mimi doesn’t.”

  Xander laughed. “Mimi does as much as anybody. She just doesn’t want to let on.”

  “She’s stopped typing,” I said. “I have to go.”

  “Why?” he asked. “Whether Mimi’s typing or not has nothing to do with you.”

  “Thanks for the pep talk, Xander,” I said. “Now I feel more useless here than ever.”

  For a second I was sure the inevitable earthquake Angelenos dread but try not to think about had come. But it was just me, crying. Huge, rattling sobs you might expect at a graveside, not standing in a sunny driveway on a Bel Air hilltop with a view of the ocean when the smog didn’t get in the way. I felt as surprised by my tears as Xander looked.

  “Hey,” Xander said. “Hey, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything by that. Are you okay?”

  I couldn’t nod or shake my head or anything. Xander took my purse and asked if I had any tissues in it. When I couldn’t answer he shuffled through it quickly, gave up on it as a resource for comfort, and put it on the driveway next to his jump rope.

  He patted me on the back a couple of times. “Go on,” he said. “Let it out.”

  I am nothing if not obedient so I cried harder. Next thing I knew I was against his T-shirt and his arms were around me and he was apologizing for how sweaty he was. “I’m sorry I said whatever I said that hurt you,” he added.

  I pushed myself off his chest. “Thanks,” I said. I’d left two damp handprints where I’d pressed his T-shirt against his skin, as if I were a starlet leaving her mark in wet cement out front of the Mann’s Chinese Theatre. “Wow, look how sweaty you are,” I said, tipping over from sobbing into laughing a little. “I can’t even sweat as good as you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s something my mother used to say. It means nothing you can do will make a person like you as much as they like somebody else. Because you can’t even sweat as good as that other person does.”

  Xander used the flat of his palm to brush my face dry and handed me my purse again. “There,” he said. “Aren’t you glad that’s over, Oklahoma?”

  “Nebraska,” I said.

  “I wasn’t off by much.”

  “Just the whole state of Kansas. And yes, thanks, I feel better. I guess I needed that.”

  “After you’ve ridden a bus cross-country twenty or thirty times, all those states in the middle start to run together.”

  “I took a bus from Nebraska to New York once. I remember every mile.”

  “I bet you do,” he said, and smoothed my hair back from my face with his fingertips. “By the way, with all respect to your mother, I have a feeling that your sweat is every bit as good as mine.”

  That’s how it started between us.

  ( 13 )

  IT’S NOT LIKE I meant for anything to happen.

  That first day we were lying in a tangle of sheets in the atelier’s big painted bed, me curled up against Xander with my back to him because the fact of him close up was a lot to take in. I had to laugh at the absurdity of somebody like me ending up in the altogether with a guy who looked like him.

  Xander propped up on his elbow and wiped the perspiration off his face with a corner of the sheet. “What’s so funny?” he asked.

  All I could think to say was, “You don’t appreciate just how yellow everything is in here until you’ve lived it for a couple of hours.”

  “Welcome to the Dream House,” he said.

  “The Dream House?”

  “Frank told me that’s what you call this place.”

  “I do?”

  “Barbie’s Dream House meets van Gogh at Arles,” he said in an uncanny imitation of Frank’s monotone.

  “Oh. I had forgotten about that.”

  “How could you?” he said. “It’s perfect.” He picked up my hair and wrapped it around his wrist. My braid was the first thing he’d undone before we started. It had seemed to take forever, in the very best way possible. “You have the most amazing hair,” he said. “You should wear it down more.”

  “It gets in my way,” I said. “It’s a distraction.”

  “Your hair isn’t the distraction. You’re the distraction.”

  Later, after we’d had a chance to catch our breath again, I asked, “So, what else did Frank tell you about me?”

  “That you’re five feet, eight inches tall, weigh a hundred twenty-seven pounds and were born October twenty-fifth. He wouldn’t tell me what year because he said a gentleman never discusses a lady’s age.”

  “How does he know all that?”

  “He also mentioned you don’t need corrective lenses to drive and that you’re an organ donor. Make of this assortment of facts what you will.”

  “Frank’s gone through my purse?” I sat up in bed, clutching the sheet to my chest because I felt more naked then than I had a few minutes ago. I guess my purse wasn’t the Fort Knox I’d thought it was.

  “So what? So have I. How could you not have tissues in that Mary Poppins satchel of yours? Aside from the usual purse stuff, you have a set of tiny screwdrivers and a flashlight and Band-Aids and a box of raisins and a pair of argyle socks and a notebook and dental floss, but no tissues. Explain that to me.”

  “I ran out of tissues.”

  “Ah. So I guess you aren’t completely perfect after all. Listen, Alice. Don’t get mad at Frank. The kid can’t help himself. He lacks executive function. Although when I was growing up they called it other things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Impulsive. Irresponsible. Eccentric if you were born rich. Crazy if you weren’t.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with Frank that can’t be fixed,” I said.

  “If you ask me, there’s nothing about Frank that needs fixing,” Xander said. “I’m a big fan of crazy. Without it there’d be no van Gogh at Arles. For all we know, no Barbie’s Dream House, either.”

  “Frank’s not crazy,” I insisted.

  “Fine,” he said. “He’s eccentric. Come here.”

  I slid out of bed and started
dressing. “I can’t,” I said. “I have to go.”

  “What’s your hurry?”

  “I have to make Mimi’s lunch.” I turned my back on him while I buttoned my shirt. He sat up on the edge of the bed and grabbed my wrist.

  “Aren’t you the responsible one,” Xander said. He turned my hand over and kissed my palm, then folded my fingers over the kiss for safekeeping and slid his fingers up my arm. If he did that to make sure every follicle on my body was at attention, I’m guessing he wasn’t disappointed.

  “I really have to go. Right now.”

  “Not so fast, Suzy Homemaker.” He stood up and put his hands on my shoulders, then eased one around to cradle the nape of my neck. I couldn’t help noticing that I was dressed but he was still naked. The few boyfriends I’d had in my life, no Apollos they, had always been careful to cover themselves as quickly as I did after they relinquished the sheets. Xander pulled my face to his and kissed me again and then I didn’t have any clothes on either. After that, I showered in the copper teacup-sized tub, dressed, and scrambled down the ladder before he could talk me into another round.

  When I looked back over my shoulder before I left the garage, Xander was at the atelier railing watching me go. He stood in a shaft of sunshine from the skylight that had turned his hair into a halo but wasn’t doing his face any favors. He looked completely different from below, all hollows and tendons and long afternoon shadows. How old was he, anyway? I realized then that I’d paid more attention to Frank’s lectures on movie magic than I had realized. For the first time ever I appreciated the importance of flattering angles and carefully orchestrated lighting.

  I DON’T THINK I’d ever been happier to hear Mimi’s typing. It meant she hadn’t noticed I was running late. I hoped. I made an omelet and a salad faster than you could say I’ll-have-a-double-cheeseburger-with-a-side-of-fries and delivered it to her office. By the time I got there the typing was over so I knocked my lunchtime knock. Mimi must have been just inside the door because she opened it immediately.