“Is there anybody you want me to call?” I said. “Relatives? Frank’s dad?” Alice, I thought. Shut up already.
She pulled herself together enough to say, “My relatives are all dead. Frank’s dad is not an option.” She put the pack in her lap, blew her nose gingerly, then stared, glassy-eyed, out the hole where the sliding door had been. She got so still I couldn’t see her breathe. I was a little worried she’d slipped away with her eyes open, like people do in the movies, and was fighting the urge to go find a mirror to hold under her nostrils when she said, “Fireworks.”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s nice that they’re high enough to see over the wall.”
“I bought this house for the views. Can you believe that? Also I knew my mother would hate it.”
“Did she?”
She put the ice pack back on her eyebrow and sighed. “She was dead by the time I bought it. But every day I hear her complaining about one thing or another, so it’s like she’s still right here with me. I’ve lived here more than half my life now. I’m older now than my mother was when she died.”
She seemed to expect me to answer, so I coughed up, “Well, if you’ve stayed so long, you must really love it here.”
“I hate it here. It was crazy to buy this place. I laughed when the real estate agent showed it to me. ‘I’m too famous to live anywhere that has windows where walls should be,’ I said. He assured me this house would work for me because the driveway was so steep and the road that led to it wasn’t on maps thirty years ago. ‘If you were still married to a movie star, your privacy might be a concern. But nobody cares about writers. You’ll be fine.’ Ha! I don’t know why I listened to him.” She held the ice pack to her brow again. “Not that many people care about writers, but for the ones who do—no driveway is too steep.”
“Why did you stay?”
“I didn’t want to give my mother the satisfaction of being right.”
“Wasn’t she dead by then?”
“Yes. Anyway, I called somebody from the studio and they came with a crew and finished that wall in two weeks. Anybody who says you can’t build Rome in a day has never been to Hollywood.” She lowered the ice pack and groped for another tissue. “This is leaking. You didn’t screw the top on tight enough.” She tossed the ice pack at my head.
I caught it, checked the seal, and dried it on my shirt. “It’s not leaking. The wet is from condensation.”
“It’s leaking,” she insisted, and hauled herself up off the couch. I tried to give her a hand but she shook me off and vanished down the hall. The doctor had been very clear that using the ice pack was important to her healing quickly. But Mimi slammed the door and started typing before I could talk myself into going after her. If the swelling didn’t go down in a timely fashion, too bad. I wasn’t her mother. I let her go.
( 8 )
AS NOTED, I am not one for complaining, so I wasn’t about to tell Mimi how my night alone with Frank really went. Our night together went more like this: It was late and we were exhausted when we got home. We tottered in through the hole where the door had been but only made it as far as the living room couch before collapsing.
“You need to take a bath before you get in bed,” I said after an eternity slumped there. I hoped the little boy on the outside would wrestle down the insomniac old man trapped inside Frank and that both parts would tumble into bed together and fall asleep.
“Why?”
“Because you’re—dirty.” I’d wiped his face and hands before we went to the hospital, but neither of us had bothered to change our clothes. We looked like fugitives from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, a movie I’d never seen and prayed Frank hadn’t, either.
“I don’t want to take a bath,” he said. He reached into his duster pocket. “Cigarette?”
“What?” I thought I couldn’t have heard him right, but he produced a cellophane-wrapped rectangular pack with a label written in French. I was about to hit the ceiling when I noticed the word chocolat. “Where did you get these? I thought they stopped making candy cigarettes.”
“I exchanged them for letters of transit.”
“Casablanca,” I said.
“I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
I drew one from the pack. “Here’s looking at you, kid.”
“We’ll always have Paris.” Frank looked very pleased with both of us. He shook a cigarette from the pack and arranged it between his third and fourth fingers before palming it to his face. Happiness, I’d noticed, was a facial expression that almost came naturally to him. Fear, discomfort, confusion—those made him roll down the shades and bar the door. Which said a lot for Frank, if you ask me. Say you had to pick just one emotion you could convey to others easily. I’d like to think I’d go with happiness, too.
“You know what I’ve always wondered?” Frank said. “Why anyone would join the French Foreign Legion. Aside from the uniform. I like those hats very much. I wish I had one. I have a fez.”