“What’s up with you?” I asked after an early sprint. “You’re going through this place like a dose of salts.” I was terrified of losing him. I wanted to hold his hand every minute, but I had to catch him first.
“If I slow down, I get too close. And if I get too close, I want to touch things. That’s why I can’t go on school field trips unless my mother comes, too. And sometimes not even then. Museum guards don’t like it when you touch things.”
“I bet they don’t,” I said.
Mimi had warned me that Frank was like a magpie, nabbing anything that attracted his attention and making off with it. When my hairbrush vanished early on, I came out to fix breakfast looking like someone who had combed her hair with a pillow.
“Sorry about the hairdo,” I said. “I can’t find my brush.”
“I’ll order you another,” she said.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Frank probably took it.”
“Why would he do that?”
“He’s got sticky fingers. Although his psychiatrist prefers calling it ‘insatiably curious.’ He sees something unfamiliar and spirits it away for further examination.”
“Surely he’s seen a hairbrush before.”
“Of course. But never your hairbrush. Put away anything you value if you want to see it again.” That’s when I’d decided I’d better start keeping Mr. Vargas’s notebook in my purse instead of in my bedside table drawer.
“On the bright side,” Mimi added, “living with Frank has forced me to be tidy.”
Although, honestly, she didn’t seem very cheered up by that at all.
TWO WEEKS INTO our cultural odyssey I’d awakened from a bad dream brought on, I suspect, by my aching feet. In it, I’d lost Frank at the Getty Museum, Malibu. He’d been transformed into one of the spooky white-eyed black statues that people its courtyard. But which statue? I’d been rushing from one to the next, telling each stony face that endless unfunny knock-knock joke that ends with “Orange you glad I stopped saying banana?”
I didn’t want to slip back into that nightmare again, so I got out of bed and went to the kitchen for a snack.
Which is how I happened on Mimi in one of her girlish white nightgowns standing in the mirrored foyer, brandishing a big sharp knife.
You can imagine the confusion that followed.
In case you can’t, it went like this: I screamed, she screamed, the knife clattered to the floor, and from somewhere down the hall, Frank started howling. Both of us rushed toward the sound, bumping into each other in our urgency to get to him. “Everything’s okay, sweetheart,” Mimi said as she gathered Frank into her lap. “I startled Alice, that’s all. She saw me trying to cut my hair. I couldn’t tolerate this mess another minute.” She gestured to her half-shaved, stitched-up head.
“You were going to cut your hair with a butcher knife?” I asked incredulously. “Have you heard of scissors?”
“I couldn’t find any scissors. I hide them because, you know.” Mimi nodded toward Frank. “I needed to do it someplace where I could see what I was doing. I didn’t want to hurt myself.”
It occurred to me all over again to wonder why the knives weren’t hidden, too. Or why a woman who hated to show her face in public lived in a house where even the ceiling of its entranceway was mirrored. That foyer made me crazy. There was no way to avoid seeing yourself from every angle every time you passed through it. Frank, naturally, loved it. He had some of his most satisfying conversations with himself there while examining his outfits from every angle.
“Why didn’t you wait until morning?” I asked Mimi. “I would have cut it for you.”
“I wanted it done already. It wasn’t like I was going to make my hair look any worse.”
Frank slid out of her lap.
“Where are you going?” Mimi asked.
“Bathroom,” he said. That night he was sleeping in a scarlet union suit, the kind with the back flap that buttons. “Do you need help?” Mimi and I asked in unison.
“I’m not a baby anymore,” he said.
After he left, Mimi and I sat there just looking at each other. “When my brother was a teenager he decided to shave with a hunting knife, like in frontier days,” she said.
“How did that end up?” I asked.
“In stitches. But my father was home so he was able to sew him up in the kitchen. He was a doctor, you know.”
“Yes. Frank told me.”
“He did? What else did he tell you?”
“That famously parsimonious eccentric billionaire J. Paul Getty dressed in threadbare clothing so people wouldn’t realize he was rich, and that he had pay phones installed in his mansions for his guests to use so he would stay that way. In 1957 Getty was quoted as saying ‘A billion dollars isn’t what it used to be.’”
“I was born in 1957,” Mimi said. After a pause she added, “Frank’s psychiatrist says it runs in families.”
“Says what runs in families?”
“How Frank is. Dr. Abrams says there’s a genetic element to his kind of eccentricity.”