I confess. I caved. We watched what the kid wanted to watch. Which, for Frank, meant starting with the special features, “making-of” addendums on DVDs or broadcast specials that explained how the stories had been hammered out, which actors had by some twist of fate or ankle been cast or not cast in a role, and why the characters they played on-screen said or didn’t say the things they really had on their minds. Only after we’d watched those a few times did we see the movie itself.
Frank talked all the way through, drowning out the dialogue as he explained how an actor could open a living room door in one location and step onto a porch on the other side of the real, nonmovie world. As if I hadn’t sat through the same making-of documentary many times over, too, he’d explain to me why a particular make of car or member of the cast was parked in the corner of a frame, or how it was a failure on the part of the script supervisor if an actor held something in one scene that vanished in the next, only to reappear again in the one after that. Sometimes Frank sidled up to the screen, arranged his features to match the actor’s expression, and delivered the next line of dialogue in sync with the character.
With so much extracurricular stuff going on, there were times during our movie marathons when I found it hard to follow the film’s plot. Not so Frank. Though he seemed to have no interest in the narrative he still knew it intricately. Revealing the twist moments before it untwisted, telling you who was about to get it right between the eyes—nothing gave Frank more pleasure. When I tried to explain to him that giving away the plot was considered bad form even among film critics, he refused to believe me.
“If you could know what was about to happen, why wouldn’t you want to?”
“Because it ruins the surprise,” I said.
“But I don’t like surprises.”
“Well, most people do. At the movies anyway. So put a sock in it.” Which, during our Sunset Boulevard screening, translated into Frank crouched beside me, rocking and looking miserable even before the opening credits were over. He started to speak and I shushed him, which prompted him to rip off his shoes, fling them across the room, and start tearing at his socks. The look he had on his face frightened me a little.
“What are you doing, Frank?” I asked.
“I’m putting my socks in it. It being my mouth. Otherwise I will tell you that Gloria Swanson shoots William Holden before the movie even gets going, though she’s decades past old enough to know better than to do something impulsive like that.”
And then, like magic, Frank relaxed. For someone who’d just been all but frothing at the mouth, he was now remarkably serene. I think that must have been the first time I understood how impossible it was for Frank to bottle up information. He had so much knowledge trapped inside that giant brain of his that if he didn’t let some out from time to time, his head might explode just like his grandfather’s had.
“So, wait, William Holden is dead?” I asked.
“William Holden is dead,” Frank confirmed. “I was confused by that cinematic technique at first myself, as William Holden is a corpse as well as the movie’s narrator. By ‘William Holden is dead’ of course I mean Joe Gillis, the character William Holden plays, not William Holden himself.”
“Of course.”
“William Holden himself died November twelfth, 1981, after falling and striking his head on a coffee table.”
“Got it.”
“May I continue?”
“Please.”
“In the scene where Joe Gillis meets Norma Desmond she thinks he’s come to show her caskets for her dead chimpanzee. When the cinematographer asked director Billy Wilder how he wanted the chimp scene framed, Wilder is quoted as saying, ‘You know, your standard monkey funeral shot.’ Some connoisseurs of film believe that scene prefigures Joe Gillis’s death. I don’t understand why you’d need to prefigure Joe Gillis’s death when we’ve already figured out he’s dead. Can you explain that?”
“Search me.”
“Search you? Why? Do you have the answer on a piece of paper tucked in your pocket? Is that the sort of thing you’re writing when you’re scribbling in that notebook?”
“What notebook?” I asked, disingenuously. Had Frank seen me taking notes for Mr. Vargas?
“The one you’re always writing in. The pink one, with the unicorn on the cover.”
I changed the subject fast. “‘Search me’ is a way of saying ‘I can’t answer that.’ Do you want me to pick up those shoes for you?”
“Yes thank you please.”
I handed them to him and didn’t say another word. He hugged his shoes against his chest in a way I couldn’t imagine him hugging me and rested his head on my shoulder. “You’re bony,” he said, but left his head there anyway.
WHILE IT WAS true that I couldn’t touch Frank, that didn’t keep the kid from becoming an honorary citizen of my personal zip code. He especially enjoyed pressing his face against my shoulder blade, as if I were a pane of glass he needed to see through.