Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [9]
I liked this arrangement. I preferred he spend the nights in my place, among the clutter of vintage straw hats on dresser tops, the chintz dust ruffle I’d tacked together for the brass bed and the sepia-tinted family photos in oval frames. The family photos weren’t of the DiMartinos nor of the Giancarellis, which was Mama’s maiden name. I bought them in flea markets and at garage sales. Grim old grannies and stern grandpas in round collars and derby hats stared down at me making love to a Chinese immigrant and set their mouths just a little tighter.
Frankie wasn’t a man of set habits. He was spontaneous in a scripted sort of way, the way good actors are. It must have been the Flash in him. Night after night he could deliver the same love grunts and bites, make the same smooth moves, and have them come across to me as unique, urgent, sincere. Back then, because I was into Improv in a big way, I didn’t think to ask who scripted my part in the Fong-produced Flash Kicks American Ass extravaganza.
He brought over old Flash videos and walked me through each shot, tried to educate me about the hidden Shakespeare: You see the Chinese Othello figure Flash cuts, or That’s just a choreographed Coriolanus with a bit more blood.
The ending Frankie gave each Flash video was pure Fong! Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris left piles of bodies behind. Frankie made customers out of both victims and villains. That’s why I fell so hard for Frankie. He leveraged buyouts of silver linings to every sad sack’s clouds.
We made love only after he’d rewound the tape. At forty-five, Frankie still had the Flash moves. And afterwards, we lay in bed and talked. Well, he talked; I mostly listened. I’m a good listener, the best. I know to pay attention. It makes the talker feel good, and all the while I’m filing away factoids for future use. Autodidacts are the best educated. I don’t mean to knock my SUNY marketing degree—it should get a twenty-three-year-old a job that pays more than minimum wage, it cost Mama and Pappy enough—but classroom education isn’t going to take anyone to the places that wisdom born of smarts will. I learned more in those two summer months in the cozy crook of Frankie’s arm than in the four debt-loaded years on the Albany campus.
Before Frankie insinuated himself into my life, I’d convinced myself that I was just another restless upstate daughter looking to make it medium-big and marry medium-nice in Manhattan. In that Before Frankie epoch, I didn’t read the papers or watch the news, but I knew, because all DiMartinos were Republicans, that the country had gone to the dogs, and the cities had been taken over by crack-cocaine addicts, rapists, muggers and welfare queens. Frankie changed all that. For Frankie, the New World was as green and crisp as a freshly counterfeited hundred-dollar bill. In the After Frankie months I became a news junkie, a fact hound. I started thinking like Frankie, a cornered rat with options. And suddenly life became interesting. Suddenly I was sniffing out possibilities where the world saw only problems.
About a month after we’d watched our first video together, as Frankie was slipping Flash Takes All into my rented recorder and explaining to me how the opening shot was his homage to “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” I whispered a confession. “I wish I’d had the Flash for a dad,” I said.
Pappy, forgive me; you aren’t the one I regret.
Frankie inhabits a Frankie-centric universe. “Think lover, not father,” he sulked. “Age doesn’t diminish … uh, drive and virility.”
Watch out, all you tigers and rhinos, I thought: the Flash would wipe out whole continents if he decided he was slipping. I hit the EJECT button on the VCR. “I wasn’t talking about us, Frankie.”
He pulled a tiny snapshot