Cleopatra and Frankenstein(57)

“Good for you, Frankie.” He heard her exhale smoke. “Go after what you want in life, no matter what anyone says.”

“Mm,” said Frank. “Like you did?”

Growing up, his mother was always on some ski trip or another. And, before she stopped drinking, at some bar or other. She didn’t like the heat, so she packed him off to a Christian summer camp in Minnesota every year and spent August in Zermatt, Switzerland, where there was snow 365 days a year. She didn’t like the other mothers, so she never went to his school plays or diving meets when she was home. Just tell me about it afterward, Frankie. I’ll enjoy it more hearing it from you.

“I took care of myself,” she said. “And I don’t apologize for it.”

“You sure don’t,” said Frank. He rubbed his name off the window with his sleeve.

“I know!” said his mother. “What about a pet? Remember how I got you Brigitte to keep you company? You loved her.”

“Brigitte ran away,” said Frank sulkily.

“Nonsense,” said his mother. “Brigitte died of thyroid cancer. I just told you that so you wouldn’t be upset. Do you still believe she sent you those postcards too?”

After Brigitte disappeared, he’d been inconsolable. His mother’s cat, the arthritic Mooshi, who appeared to be prepared to outlive them all, had been no comfort. His mother herself had, of course, left for one of her trips soon after. A few days later, he’d found a postcard in the mail from Brigitte. She apologized for leaving and explained that she’d been invited to tour her off-Broadway show, a spin-off of Cats about her own life, around the world. A week later, there’d been a card from the Ritz Paris, then London, and later another from Zermatt, Switzerland.

“I’d forgotten,” said Frank. “I loved those cards.”

“Get her a cat,” said his mother. “It will do you both good.”

“She’s allergic,” he said.

“Then get her a hairless one. Get her a lizard! We all need something to look after.”

“What about someone to look after us?”

“You’re not children. You can look after yourselves.”

“Yeah, but I was a child, Mom,” said Frank. “I was one.”

Frank hung up the phone a little while after and spun his chair round and round, watching the ceiling turn. Talking to his mother bewildered him. He wished he loved her a little more or hated her a little less, something to tip the scale. Instead, he lived in the fraught balance between the two, each increasing the intensity of the other: the more he longed for her, the more disappointed he felt by her; the more disappointed he felt, the more he longed. He tilted his head back, closed his eyes and exhaled a long fuuuuuck.

“That’s pretty much what I want to do every time I talk to a client too,” a voice behind him said.

Eleanor. Frank had once seen an image of a tsunami wave carrying hundreds of species of sea life within it, sharks and stingrays and schools of silver-backed fish, all lifted high in the wave’s arc before crashing onto land. That was what it felt like whenever he was near Eleanor. They had never touched, never kissed, but his response to her was titanic. Everything in him rose to meet her.

“What about after talking to your mother?” he asked.

He opened his eyes and swiveled to face her.

“Ah.” Eleanor nodded. “The original difficult client.”

“Except she doesn’t have any money.”

“Come on.” Eleanor grinned. “How bad could anyone who birthed you be?”

She was standing in his doorway. Her curly brown hair was piled messily on top of her head. She was the only woman he had ever seen who used a pen to hold up her hair not as an affectation, as Cleo sometimes did with chopsticks or a long-stemmed feather, but out of absentmindedness. Her face, which some would describe as plain, but which had never seemed so to him, with its pale skin and round cheeks, unruly eyebrows and restless, dark eyes, was on full display. When she smiled, her teeth were surprisingly small, tiny cream squares that revealed, momentarily, the child she had once been, roguish and precocious, still visible inside the face of the woman.

“What are your thoughts on hairless cats?” he asked.

“Demonic. I prefer tortoises.”

“Live too long,” said Frank. “I don’t want a pet that will outlive me. It’s for Cleo, by the way.”

He watched for a change in her expression, but she was impenetrable, as per usual.

“A fish then?”

“Too mortal,” said Frank. “We’ll kill it in weeks.”

“Have you vetoed dog already for being too provincial?”

“Not allowed in our building.”

“I know! What about a sugar glider? My neighbors had one growing up. My brother and I loved it.”

“How is Levi?” asked Frank.

“His girlfriend came back,” said Eleanor. “So, happier.”

“What happened to the Hell’s Angel?”

“I don’t think we want to know,” said Eleanor. “Look up sugar gliders.”

Frank turned to his computer and typed the words into his search engine. Images of a small rodentlike creature with huge dark eyes and a long tail populated the screen.

“It’s crazy-looking,” he said.