He had me there.
“WHAT HAVE YOU done with Xander?” Mimi asked me not long after that. Frank was at school and I was mopping the kitchen before I headed out to the Dream House to get to work on my commission.
I was still struggling with the fact that Mimi had left her office during daylight hours so I needed a minute to come up with an appropriate answer. Finally I managed, “What?”
“I haven’t heard Xander playing the piano. I like to hear Xander playing the piano while I’m working. That’s why I bought that piano in the first place.”
“I can figure out how to turn the piano on for you if you like.”
“If I wanted to listen to the piano playing itself, I think I could manage to flip a switch,” Mimi said. “It doesn’t say much for your intelligence if you can’t hear the difference between a human being and a computer playing a piano.” She stormed off.
Everything irritates Mimi, I wrote in my notebook that night before going to sleep. I erased that and replaced it with, Everything I do irritates Mimi. That seemed a whole lot closer to the truth.
“XANDER WILL BE back before Christmas,” Frank mused while we were driving home from school the next day. “He doesn’t have any family but us.”
“Xander has no family?” I asked.
“He has a mother and a father and a sister and a dead sister but other than that no family to speak of, which I have surmised because he never speaks of them.”
“A dead sister? What happened to her?”
“I don’t know. Just last night my mother was saying how much he reminds her of somebody dear to her. Have you ever heard of Joe DiMaggio?”
“The baseball player? Xander reminds your mother of Joe DiMaggio?” I tried to remember what Joe DiMaggio looked like. Black hair. Big nose maybe? A good-looking guy as I recall, but not particularly molded In-the-Manner-of-Apollo.
“No, Xander reminds my mother of someone else. Are you familiar with screen siren Marilyn Monroe?”
“Xander reminds your mother of Marilyn Monroe?”
“I can only assume you’re unfamiliar with Marilyn Monroe as Marilyn Monroe is a woman and Xander is a man.”
“I know that, Frank. I’m familiar with Marilyn Monroe. Everybody on the planet is familiar with Marilyn Monroe.”
He considered this a moment. “Do you think they know about her on Mars?”
“I don’t know about on Mars. As you were saying.”
“As I was saying, Joe DiMaggio was married to Marilyn Monroe for two hundred and seventy-four days in 1954. While they were honeymooning in Japan Marilyn took a break to entertain our troops in Korea. ‘Joe, you’ve never heard such cheering,’ she told him. Joe said, ‘As a matter of fact, I have.’ Just before Christmas I am to be student of the week, which calls for me to stand in front of my class and tell the story of my origins and my life until the present day. I would like it if there were cheering but I’m not setting my heart on a big ovation because no one has received one so far, not even the kid whose dad is a firefighter who parked his fire truck on the playground and let us climb all over it. My entourage will be on hand for my presentation, of course. My mother will come, and she’ll call Xander and he’ll be there, too. Fiona will ask for a pass so she can attend as well.”
“So will I.”
“No thank you,” he said. “Please.”
FRANK WAS MORE restless than usual the night before his presentation. I heard him knocking around at all hours and finally decided to slip out and see if I could coax him back to bed before he woke up his mother and the rest of Los Angeles.
The living room lights were on and Frank was talking loudly enough to reach the top balcony of the biggest theater on Broadway. Then the lights went out and stars splattered the living room walls. They held steady for a moment, then revolved lazily around the room. “Since the dawn of time, mankind has been fascinated with the stars and planets that populate our galaxy,” Frank declaimed.
“That’s your old night-light,” I heard Mimi say. “I put that away when you started kindergarten.”
I peeked around the corner to see what was going on in there. Frank had closed the piano and put his night-light on top. It was one of those old-fashioned paper carousels with a lightbulb inside that gradually warmed the air above it and made its pinwheel vents spin the shade with its cutout stars faster and faster.
“I stumbled across it when I was looking for my marbles so that Fiona and I could play a high stakes game of Ringer at recess. I realized the night-light was just the thing I needed for my presentation.”
“It belonged to your uncle when he was a baby,” Mimi said. “It’s older than I am. Please be careful with it.”
“You told me all that when you were packing it for storage.”