My phone flashed again. How is boy?
Frank? Speaking of genius. Never met anyone with so much random knowledge at fingertips. Unlike anybody. Have decided he’s next rung on evolutionary ladder.
Genius not everything cracked up to be. Intellectual prodigies not known for getting dates to prom. Stumbling block to becoming next rung on evolutionary ladder.
Frank has a girlfriend now.
Isn’t he a little young for girlfriend?
Friend who is a girl.
Ah. Well. Everybody needs a friend.
Indeedy.
Heard any good jokes lately? Mr. Vargas texted.
Nope. You?
How do you know when you’ve met an outgoing mathematician?
Tell me, I texted back.
He stares at your shoes. Instead of at his own shoes. Get it?
Ha. I get it. Frank stares at my eyebrow.
So things are looking up for him.
Yes.
Ask Mimi for pages.
I sat there on the edge of the bed trying to decide how to respond to that. Xander opened the bathroom door. “The walls are closing in on me,” he said. “With this shut I can’t raise my elbow while I brush my teeth.”
I went back to texting Mr. Vargas. Would request be better coming from you?
“Don’t stand in front of the mirror,” I said to Xander. “Spit into the toilet instead of the sink.”
The last time I asked her for anything, he texted, Mimi decided to stay in Los Angeles.
I COULDN’T BLAME Mr. Vargas for sweating me for product. He was back there in New York with winter setting in and the publicity department hovering. While I was here in the land of milk and honey, doing what?
Xander, mostly.
Here’s the joke I decided I ought to tell Mr. Vargas: I ask Mimi for pages. She smiles and hands over completed novel. In the acknowledgments, she thanks me for my computer skills and inspiring “Pollyanna” outlook on life.
See, the way a joke works is that it presents you with an impossible situation. Your brain recognizes the situation as impossible so you laugh at the absurdity of it. Here’s what really happened when I asked Mimi for pages. She said, “When I am ready to give you something of mine, I will be sure to let you know.”
THEN JUST LIKE that it was Christmas.
This isn’t to imply things didn’t go on in the interim. Things happened. But if you’d like to keep believing in the perfection of Xander Devlin, kind of in the way I kept trying to convince myself Santa was real after I saw the guy in the red suit having a cigarette out back of the Westroads Mall, you’ll need to ignore certain events that occurred during this time:
To give me a break from my routine and to prove he is a stand-up guy, Xander offers to pick Frank up from school one Friday afternoon. I am moved and grateful, and spend the stolen hour conditioning my hair and giving myself a pedicure. When I emerge the car is in the driveway and I can hear them going at it on the piano. I decide not to interrupt and go to fold laundry and get dinner started.
After I slide the stuffed shells into the oven I smooth back my newly glowing hair and pad barefoot into the living room, where as it happens the piano is playing by itself. So I wander through the glass house and then into the Dream House looking for Frank and Xander, my panic gradually increasing to a crescendo when I find Xander in the yellow bed, napping.
“Where’s Frank?” I ask.
“Frank?” he echoes, still stupid from sleep.
I am in the station wagon, barefoot and burning rubber, before Xander can finish speaking the sentence “I must have fallen asleep.”
I am grateful that Frank, having decided he’d been forgotten and that he’d better walk home, chooses the route we take in the car. Did I say “walk”? Because after several blocks, Frank decides to hitchhike. I find him on the corner of Bellagio Terrace and Linda Flora Drive, right hand hiking up right trouser leg to expose a tempting expanse of burgundy and navy argyle sock, left thumb awag. A pose, Frank explained once safely ensconced in the backseat, combining the hitchhiking techniques of both Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert from that famous scene in 1934’s It Happened One Night.
“That was the first film to win all five marquee Oscars, a feat not repeated until 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a movie I have never watched,” Frank says.
“Don’t,” I say.
“Okay. The Gable/Colbert scene is so famous that it was mimicked in a Laurel and Hardy bit as well as a Looney Tunes short. It inspired generations of hitchhikers to prevail upon the kindness of strangers to help them reach their final destinations.”
As mutilated corpses stuffed into drainage ditches, I do not say. What I do say is, “It’s illegal to hitchhike before you’re twenty-one years old.”