Be Frank With Me - Julia Claiborne Johnson Page 0,23
behind clusters of palms and groves of citrus trees or stretches of lawn and rose garden. Sometimes you could see just a gatehouse here and a turret there peeking over a high wall or hedge. Lots of those big giant houses had FOR SALE signs posted out front. I couldn’t imagine who had enough money to buy even one of them, and we must have cruised past a dozen.
When we hit the Pacific Coast Highway we hung a left, away from what my phone told me was Malibu and back toward the city of Los Angeles. As I drove I kept stealing glances right, to the beach, where I caught flashes of bikers and Rollerbladers and volleyball nets strung close to the highway. Closer to the water I saw bright beach umbrellas and blue lifeguard shacks on stilts and deep white sand and gray, cold-looking water. Which surprised me. I’d never seen the Pacific in close-up and I’d expected it to be blue and clear, like a kid’s crayon drawing of a tropical paradise.
In the side-view mirror I could see Frank behind me, oblivious to the beach’s half-naked activity. He was leaning out his open window to enjoy the feel of the wind in his eyebrows and eyelashes and on his fingertips. His scarf snapped in the wind behind us.
“Watch out for your scarf.”
“Isadora Duncan met an untimely end in France on September fourteenth, 1927, when her scarf got entangled in the wheels of the convertible she rode in.”
“That doesn’t sound like fun, does it?”
“No. Thank you. Please.”
“So watch out for your scarf.”
Frank tucked it under his jacket and rolled the window up again. We drove along in silence for a while after that, slipping past the Santa Monica Pier with its miniature amusement park, complete with Ferris wheel and a little roller coaster pinned there against the sky.
“You know what does sound like fun?” Frank said about then.
“Lay it on me,” I said, thinking he was checking out the rides.
“Lay what on you?”
“Nothing. Tell me what sounds like fun.”
“Going to the little airport where the antique planes take off. It’s around here someplace, but I haven’t been there since I was very young.”
“But now that you’re practically antique—” I said.
“I’m not antique,” he said. “Things fifty years old or older are considered ‘antique.’ Anything thirty years old to fifty is called ‘vintage.’ So I’m not even close to vintage, although of course you are swiftly approaching that.”
“Thanks. So what does that make you?”
“I’m a child. My mother, however, is antique.”
“Well, let’s not tell her that, okay?”
“Why not? It’s true.”
“Lots of true things aren’t polite to say. If you’re not sure whether something you’re about to say might be rude, it’s better to keep your mouth shut. That’s the kind of tact your mother was talking about, by the way. Having tact, t-a-c-t, means knowing when to keep your thoughts to yourself.”
When he didn’t have a comeback to that I checked him in the mirror and saw I’d upset him. His face, of course, was as impassive as ever; his shoulders were the tipoff. They’d risen to his ears, which I knew by then was step one to Frank going stiff and wordless on me. “What do you say we look for that airport?” I asked.
“I would like to see it again,” he said. I pulled to the side of the road right away and found the place on my cell phone.
When we got there I parked in the lot by the airfield and Frank climbed over the seat to get the windshield view of all the private prop planes and petite jets coming and going. The thing that got us out of the car finally was a bright yellow biplane that kept taking off and circling back to land again. Frank got out first and stood there with his goggles pushed up on his forehead and the binoculars pressed to his eyes, watching until it just kept going and lost itself in the horizon. There was something so poignant about Frank standing there with the wind blowing his coat and scarf around him that I got out to photograph him with my phone.
It occurred to me I should take a picture with Mimi’s phone, too. So I fished it out of my pocket and snapped the photo, and then I did something unfathomable. I scrolled through her list of contacts. It was the same kind of awful impulse that makes people inventory bathroom medicine cabinets when they’re using the