Like a good lackey, I kept my mouth shut, busying myself solving children’s puzzles, looking for the thing missing from one picture that could be found in the other if you just looked closely enough.
“That’s why Xander calls me ‘Jeopardy,’” Frank was telling Dr. Abrams forty-five minutes later, when the two of them emerged from the inner office.
“Because you know all the answers.”
“Yes. Also because I am dangerous to be around. That’s what is known as a double entendre, a French term meaning ‘a word or phrase that can be taken two ways.’ If he were referring only to the scope of my knowledge, Xander said he’d just call me ‘Quiz Show.’”
“What did you and Dr. Abrams talk about?” Mimi asked Frank in the elevator.
“Buster Keaton,” Frank replied. “Also Xander.”
TO STAY OUT of Mimi’s hair, Frank and I spent most of August revisiting the L.A. sights he’d seen in the good old days of adventures with his mother. Stir-crazy as both of us were, I was all for adventures. On one condition: I could take Frank’s hand and hold it without asking first.
“Why would you need to do that?” he asked.
“I get scared,” I said. It was the first thing I thought of.
“Is it the fanatics at the gate?” Every now and then as we left on an adventure, we’d encountered one or more of Mimi’s faithful lying in wait outside the walls. College students, usually, or older men and women who must have been my mother’s contemporaries. They carried cameras or copies of Mimi’s book, and leaned down to peer at our faces as we drove out. I’m sure they were harmless, but it was a creepy business anyway. They hardly ever spoke, which was frightening enough. When they did say something, it tended to be along the lines of, “Oh, it’s nobody.” Never in my life have I felt more relieved to be a nobody.
“Yes, it’s the fanatics,” I said. I had underestimated how Mimi’s fans terrified poor Frank until I dropped the gate-code Post-it one day as I leaned out the driver’s-side window to punch it in. Frank saw me drop it and started howling. It took a while for him to calm down enough to explain the problem—that he was afraid a fanatic might find the code fluttering down the street and use it to breach the walls and come for us. Once I understood what was upsetting him I chased the piece of paper down, then chanted the litany of 1’s and 2’s and 0’s under my breath all the way up the driveway and into the house. Once we were safe in the kitchen I asked the kid to quiz me on the code and when I got the sequence right three times running—21 22 00 0—I ate the Post-it note in front of him. I’d hoped that would make the kid laugh. Instead, he thanked me.
Anyway. Frank’s introduction to the city’s cultural hotspots was not for the faint of heart. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the neighboring La Brea Tar Pits led to the Museum of Contemporary Art, which segued to the Norton Simon Museum, which brought us to the Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage, the Gettys Bel Air and Malibu, the Adamson Tile House, the Gamble House, the Jesse Lasky Hollywood Heritage Museum, the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Petersen Museum of Automotive History. Then there was the Ahmanson, the Geffen, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Disney Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, the Bradbury Building, the Greek Theater, the Griffith Observatory, the California Science Center, the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History. Who knew so much was stuffed between the beaches and the Hollywood sign?
When I dared suggest that we, meaning I, might be getting tired, Frank exclaimed, “Poppycock!” He was done up in Teddy Roosevelt Rough Rider regalia that day for our visit to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art—cavalry uniform, pince-nez, puttees, boots. The pince-nez had lost their grip on the bridge of his nose and fallen to the ground several times already. After lunch he’d stepped on them. I held my breath, worried he’d go into a tailspin. But Frank picked the frames up, shook out the broken glass, and balanced them on his nose again. “Ah, that’s better,” he said. “No fingerprints. Carry on!” I did, after I’d brushed up the bits of glass into a paper napkin I’d saved in case of emergency. As I’d gotten better acquainted with Frank, I’d taken to hoarding random things in my pockets, thinking to myself as I did so, “in case of emergency.” It was only a matter of time until I got my own subscription to Accidents Waiting to Happen Weekly.
I’D EXPECTED FRANK to lollygag in museum galleries, ogling every line and squiggle. Instead he dashed from room to room, doing an entire exhibition in the time it took me to consider one wall of paintings. The crazy thing about it was that he took everything in. I know this because I quizzed him. It was really kind of incredible how much the kid could assimilate in thirty seconds or less.