As she flies back home from Frankie’s funeral, Kristy remembers riding around with him back when they first met. When gas was (relatively) cheap (but not as cheap as it was in the Sixties). When the back roads weren’t clogged with SUVs, trailer trucks, McMansions, and townhomes like they are now. Somehow his old beater (you could still buy those then) had a cassette deck. Sometimes they listened to Sade’s Diamond Life. She knows they listened to other tapes, but right now—years later as she flies back west, back to her real life, on a Wednesday morning—she doesn’t remember them.
When Sade finished singing “Frankie’s First Affair” the first time they had listened to the album together, Kristy recalls asking Frankie “So is this how things are going to go for us?” She was joking, but he looked pained. He was about to blurt out something when the saxophone cut him off as if to underscore that Sade’s world was not theirs. The tape wasn’t theirs either. It was Frankie’s mother’s, the first tape she bought after she left his father, a New Yorker who hated smooth jazz, he said later. She played it to death that first year so that it hissed and sputtered when Frankie and Kristy were listening to it in his car three years later.
The song’s world with its Greek chorus (or was it a Nigerian chorus?) was not their world either. Anytime the two of them wanted privacy they could crawl into Frankie’s car and drive away from the city, away from the ocean’s glare and the places everyone saw on TV. Of course, they had to work to pay for gas. He stocked shelves and bagged groceries at a grocery store; she was a cashier there and, later, a clerk at a clothing store, and they had to pass their classes at the college. No one, parents or professors or counselors, really cared about what they did together as long as she didn’t get pregnant or catch AIDS.
When she thinks about this time in her life, 1995, the year they turned twenty, she remembers only the long drives, not quite up to the mountains while they listened to the tapes or Frankie talked and talked about the band he wanted to start and the tattoos he wanted to get and even the cars he wanted to drive. She had no eye for the scenery because she had lived in this area almost all of her life. The mountains and the ocean and the jacaranda had always been there. Even her parents were blasé about those things, and they had grown up on the East Coast, arriving in LA as young adults.
Kristy and Frankie never went into the mountains. He didn’t trust his beater on the roads up there, where the engine might overheat. Once, he borrowed his mother’s car, a sturdy Volvo with a CD player. So just that one time Kristy and Frankie braved the paved mountain roads, even stayed in a Motel 6 outside Palm Springs where they talked and talked into the night. She wore a nightgown, dark against her pale, pale skin, he a t-shirt and briefs. She fell asleep, ear pressed against his steady heart.
Were they having an affair? They were good kids, just turned twenty. Sometimes they had dinner at her house. Her father was shocked when Frankie turned down his offer of a cold Coors, the same beer her brother had been drinking since he was 15. Frankie politely explained that he was straight-edge. “Honey,” her dad said to her mom, “did you know that you’re straight-edge? You’re hip, like the kids.” She laughed, cutting her homemade lasagna into tiny pieces before eating one or two, maybe three. Kristy smiled, cutting her thin bar into similar tiny pieces. Frankie devoured his thick slab of lasagna, asking for seconds and thirds. Kristy’s mom eventually gave Frankie the rest to take home.
After washing the dishes, Kristy, her brother, and Frankie went out to the cottage to discuss the kind of band they wanted to start. Sometimes Frankie would pick up his guitar to demonstrate. Or any of them would play a song from a CD. She remembers playing “Devil’s Haircut” from Beck’s Odelay even though it wasn’t out until the next year and she couldn’t have had it on CD or tape. It was not like Beck Hansen was a friend of hers or her brother’s. Sometimes Kristy’s mom would stop by to play the drums. Eventually, Frankie did all of his practicing at the cottage. His mom was either trying to study or nagging him to study. Some days she threatened to send him back to New York to live with his father and his really young girlfriend. She conveniently forgot that Mary had left Jacob years ago. After a month or two, Frankie moved into the guest room upstairs. Once in a while he called himself Frankie Carter. Carter was Kristy’s family name.
It probably wasn’t an affair. Kristy was actually a virgin when she and Frankie eloped to Las Vegas in late 1996. Sure, the two of them had kissed and fooled around, but small as he was, he didn’t want to do too much in the car. The seats were cracked and taped, and you couldn’t move them back. Outside he was too nervous. He felt exposed. He was a city boy at heart, she realized. Perhaps that was the real reason he never wanted to drive into the mountains. The distance from home, from functional gas stations, scared him. He felt paralyzed beneath the rural sky swarming with stars. Or so she thinks now, flying over the part of the country where all that space and all those stars are routine.
Pulling down the window shade, she recalls when she and Frankie told her parents that they had gotten married, with two friends as witnesses. Frankie entered the house, waving the marriage license. Her mother was crying a little. Her father welcomed him to the family. Her mother told him to make sure that her daughter ate. Over grilled steaks and corn, her parents once again told the story of their elopement that had gotten them both fired from a job. Frankie announced that their band, the Future of Man, had been cast in a movie as the main character’s friends. Kristy’s father replied that he was “gifting” the cottage to the newlyweds. It was a joyous, happy evening. Kristy wonders what went wrong to later make her father hate her husband with such a passion. She hopes that he won’t hate him so much now that the younger man is dead.
The song “Frankie’s First Affair” runs through Kristy’s mind again. All along, she was the heart breaker. She left his band. Then she left him not once but three times. Once she left to help take care of her dying mother. But her father also claimed that Frankie was abusive, letting her support him while he stayed home with the baby. She never told Dad that she had gotten her job at the nursing home first. If Frankie had been hired at JB’s Music Store, she would have stayed home with their son. The second time she left Frankie because he was working all the time and Tyler was miserable in their trailer. The third time when she wanted to go back to the desert her father threatened to sue for custody of her son. Frankie stayed in the desert, working at that convenience store under another name, until she wrote him that she had to choose between their son and him. She added that she couldn’t speak with him anymore unless he was coming to see their son. But maybe Tyler would have been happier if he had lived with his grandfather, his jolly Pop-Pop, while she and Frankie drifted back together. He had braved life in an empty space beneath too many stars. She could have returned to the city with him. They could have brought the band back together. He would be alive now, holding her hand as the plane cruised through the vacant sky to return them to their past in California.
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