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 floor 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?
But as I had explained to Frank, nobody can foretell the future, particularly not me. The Student of All Fabrics in Frank was so fascinated with the guard’s jacket that he hadn’t seemed to notice the poke. “What kind of fabric is that?” Frank asked.
“Washable,” the guard answered.
“May I?” Frank asked, pointing at the guard’s sleeve. I opened my mouth to remind him not to point, but I figured that in this instance pointing was better than touching the guy without asking. Or pressing his cheek against the man’s lapels, the way he did with me.
“Knock yourself out,” the guard said.
Frank fingered the fabric. “Hmmm,” he said. “The texture is interesting. Rough. Scratchy. Stiff. Is it flammable?”
The guard guffawed. “A hundred percent polyester, so yeah, I’m thinking it would probably go up like a Roman candle on the Fourth of July.”
“I had the misfortune of sleeping through the July Fourth display this year,” Frank said, “so I suggested we purchase a few Roman candles for home use. I refer to the delayed ignition fireworks, of course, not the beeswax-dipped papyrus wicks the Romans invented as portable sources of illumination. ‘Not in this lifetime,’ my mother said.”
“Mom’s probably right about the fireworks,” the guard said. “Better leave that to professionals. Those things are dangerous to play with. Even for a smart kid like you.”
“My mother says I have a very large brain, which is, however, not always a corollary of genius. Einstein left his brain to science. It wasn’t any bigger than average but did feature an unusual number of grooves and fissures. That suggests an abundance of connections and agility of thinking not common in the general public.”
“Let’s go, Frank.” I wanted to leave before he launched a lecture on brain anatomy. “Thanks for your help,” I said to the guard.
“You’re welcome,” the guard said. “Have a wonderful day.”
“Thank you,” Frank said. “We will.”
“Nice kid, Mom,” the guard said. “Smart. Polite. You need to fill the house up with more like him. You need to fill up the world.”
I surprised myself by getting choked up by that. All I could do was nod and smile and hustle Frank out of there, making sure this time to keep a tight hold on his wrist. When we were out of earshot Frank said, “What a nice gentleman. Do you think that guard is a good painter?”
“Huh? What makes you think he’s a painter?”
“Someone needs to use his nailbrush more diligently. And turpentine. Gasoline might work, too. Oil paint is notoriously difficult to remove.”
If you never looked a person in the eyes, I guess it made okay sense to look them in the cuticles. “Maybe he paints houses,” I said.
“Roy G. Biv,” Frank said.
“Roy Who?”
“Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Roy G. Biv. It’s a mnemonic for recalling the colors in the visual spectrum.”
“Oh, that Roy G. Biv. Remember, Frank, I studied art in college.”
“How could I remember something I never knew? As I was saying, a house painter wouldn’t have that many different colors under his nails. Either he’s an artist or he goes up to the paintings in his galleries when nobody’s looking and gives them a good scratch.” Frank pondered his own fingernails. “I would like to try that sometime.”
“Don’t,” I said, a little more forcefully than I meant to. I was tired. I needed a day off. I hadn’t had one since I’d gotten there.
Mimi, of course, hadn’t had a day off since Frank was born.
“Why did the guard keep calling you ‘Mom’?” Frank asked on our way out of the museum.
“I guess he thought I was your mother.”
“Why do people keep assuming that?”
“Because I’m lucky?”
“Probably,” he said. “My mother always tells me before I go to sleep that she’s lucky to be my mom.”
THE NEXT TIME I dreamed of statues, In-the-Manner-of-Apollo was bent over my bed, evidently surprised to find me there. The full moon was shining through my open curtains, and in its silvery light his skin wasn’t pitted and worn at all. It was like alabaster. I couldn’t resist reaching up and laying my hand against his cheek. He put his hand on top of mine and curled his fingers around my fingers. “Who are you?” he asked. “And what are you doing in my bed?”
“Keeping it warm,” I said. When I said the word “warm” I awakened to the fact that the cheek my palm lay on was neither cold nor the least bit stony, and the hand that grasped mine had all its fingers intact.
That’s how I came to meet Xander.