“Frank,” I said. “I realize. Close your eyes. Close your mouth. Go to sleep.”
I crept out of Mimi’s bedroom, leaving the door open and a light on in the hall. I fell on the couch and was out maybe fifteen minutes, maybe fifteen days. When I opened my eyes Frank’s face hovered inches above mine. I was so exhausted I couldn’t muster the strength to be startled. “What’s up, Frank?”
“I am,” he said. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“I gathered. So now what?”
“We could watch a movie.”
“It’s too late to watch a movie. Or too early. What time is it?”
“Four A.M.”
“Have you always been like this?”
“Like what?”
I tried to think of a word that wouldn’t wound his psyche for keeps. “Nocturnal,” is what I came up with finally.
“Nocturnal? That implies daytime sleep. I don’t do that much, either. My mother says my brain’s lack of an ‘off’ switch is a sign of unusual intelligence.”
“Unusual,” I said. “Uh-huh.” I rubbed my eyes, sat up and yawned.
“You’re tired,” he said. “Go back to sleep. I’ll sit here and watch you. Or I could borrow your phone to make a movie of you asleep. Like Andy Warhol. His first movie was called Sleep. It was about—”
“Sleep. I get the drift. No thanks. I didn’t come to California to be in the movies. Let’s watch Casablanca again.”
Frank did a quick soft shoe—soft slipper, really—of joy that was so unexpectedly charming that it put me right back in the palm of his hand. He’d never spent a night away from his mother in his life, poor kid. She wasn’t with him now because his hug had turned into a tackle that had landed her in the hospital with twenty-nine stitches in her scalp. You couldn’t blame him for not sleeping. But you had to wonder what his excuse was every other night.
Frank slid the movie in the DVD player and the two of us rolled up in comforters, shoulder to shoulder but individually shrink-wrapped in our own little movie-watching cocoons. Frank fell asleep sometime during the mushy part, where Rick and Ilsa reminisce about the good old days in the Paris apartment when they thought Ilsa’s husband was dead. I stayed awake watching all the way to the end.
PART III
IN THE MANNER OF APOLLO
August 2009
( 9 )
IT HAD SEEMED six months long but July was finally over, which meant Frank was seeing his shrink every other week again. Mimi and Frank were in the two chairs available in the psychiatrist’s outer office—Two chairs? Don’t both parents ever come?—while I lounged against the wall, unsure whether in my role as chauffeur I should stay or wait in the car. When the doctor came to fetch Frank back into her inner sanctum, her eyes flicked to me; but Mimi didn’t make a move to introduce us, so I didn’t say anything, either.
Frank was done up in a three-piece glen-plaid suit, bow tie and pocket square, gold knot cuff links and watch chain strung across his vest. Very Clarence Darrow for the Defense. Mimi had on a turban she must have filched from Frank’s closet, or maybe Gloria Swanson’s, accessorized with a pair of the gigantic black sunglasses favored by very young and very old women in Hollywood who weigh less than a hundred pounds and carry yappy dogs in their purses as ballast.
“What happened to you?” Dr. Abrams asked Mimi. Because not even those jumbo look-at-me/don’t-look-at-me glasses were big enough to cover the greening bruises gravity had started to dribble down her cheekbones.
“Eye lift,” Mimi said.
“Ah,” Dr. Abrams said. “Well, Frank, come on in. I like your suit.”
“Thank you. My mother’s computer bought it for me.”
“Well, your mother’s computer has excellent taste. Are you starting to think about getting ready for school?”
“Did you see my cuff links? My friend Xander gave them to me. They represent the Gordian knot, which—” The door closed behind them.
“Getting ready for school? That’s rich,” Mimi muttered. “For a kid like Frank, hell is other children.”
Either Mimi could read minds, too, or all the time I’d spent with Frank had made me slack about managing my facial expressions because Mimi took one look at me and said, “I didn’t tell Dr. Abrams about the accident because it really isn’t any of her business. She’s not my psychiatrist. Have a seat. Read a magazine. Here’s one I loved when I was your age.” She handed me a copy of Highlights for Children, then helped herself to a travel magazine. She started snapping through its pages like somebody looking for a Jell-O coupon she was pretty sure she saw, dammit, in that issue when she read it six months ago and she meant to find it if it was the last thing she ever did. “I don’t need a psychiatrist,” she added.