Dating Is Murder

“May I help you?” the café man asked.

“No, just hiding, thanks,” I said.

And then we were out of there, back up the escalator to the third floor, retracing our steps back to Robinson-May. To the parking structure. Freedom.

“So who were they?” I asked, sitting in Fredreeq’s Volvo, with the doors locked. She started up her car, preparing to drive me to mine. The good news was that Westside Pavilion parking is so labyrinthine, you can barely find your own car without a map, let alone someone else’s. Still, we were scared.

“Goons,” Fredreeq said. “Thugs. I didn’t want them messing up your face; that’s all I care about.” She dabbed her own forehead with a tissue. “Maybe they work for Kim Karmer or maybe Kim’s boutique homies are in league with the Sava

Go down. It was a phrase I’d heard twice in twelve hours. It didn’t sound good.

11

Sherman Oaks is an appealing ’hood, not as buff as Encino to the west, but a whole mountain range away from Westside Pavilion. An hour after my mall adventure, this mattered.

My friend Rex Stetson had bought a lot, gutted the tired two-bedroom occupying it, and put up a stark five-bedroom, eight-bathroom structure Joey and Fredreeq called the Mansion. I believed it would warm up when furnished, but right now the Mansion’s sole link to humanity was a pizza box left behind by the paint crew. Its link to the greater animal kingdom was all over the kitchen walls. Rex, honeymooning in Maui, had hired me to paint a mural as a surprise for his bride, Tricia. A frog mural. Tricia was mad for frogs. All kinds of frogs.

I’m not a trained muralist. Many children feel a compulsion to draw on walls, and I just never outgrew mine. My mother had turned a tolerant eye to my creations, and no subsequent landlord had cared what I did as long as I repainted before moving on, but the Mansion was my first commissioned work. I’d taken it on with trepidation.

The problem was not the work, which I loved, nor the money, which was generous. It was not the subject; to my surprise, within days of my starting, frogs and toads had seduced me with their habits, their lore, their protruding eyes. My previous relationship to amphibians had been marked by indifference, but for three weeks now they’d hopped their way into my dreams, daydreams, and greeting cards. The problem was, mansions are not greeting cards. If you don’t like a greeting card, you don’t buy it. A wall is different. I’d never met Tricia, but the Tricia in my head was assuming popelike proportions, her kitchen turning into the Sistine Chapel, which made me the Michelangelo of Sherman Oaks. It was no use telling myself she could paint over what she didn’t like, because now her frogs were my frogs. I had a personal as well as professional stake in them.

I unlocked the Mansion, happy to return after a five-day break. In the kitchen I turned on the boom box I’d brought from home with a croaking-frog CD A

I gazed back into his lovely red golfball-sized eyes, then turned my attention to his buddies on the adjoining wall-Darwin’s frog, Smith frog, pickerel frog, pig frog. The spring peeper. There was a spot near the Gaggenau cooktop where I was putting a neotropical Surinam toad, Pipa pipa. I’d just started painting when my brother called.

“I can’t leave the hospital,” P.B. said. “I can’t live in Santa Barbara.”

“Why, what did you do?” My stomach tightened in alarm. There were countless ways my brother could get in trouble, and I saw the coveted halfway house sprout wings and fly off.

“It’s Christmas next month.”

“Yes. So? Santa Barbara has Christmas.”

“Do you know this personally? Have you been there during Christmas?”

“No,” I said. “But I think we’d have heard something if they weren’t-”

“I have heard something.” P.B.’s voice dropped. “Ramon says it’s a town ordinance.”

I didn’t address Ramon or town ordinances. My brother, even at his most lucid, operates from a belief system independent of logic, conventional wisdom, or even empirical knowledge. Direct argument is futile. “Is Christmas that important to you?” I asked, trying to recall if he’d ever given me a present.

“It’s not for me, it’s for…”

“Yes?”

“People are listening. You’ll have to guess.”

I groaned. Making phone calls in the common room of a mental hospital, with all your friends and enemies eavesdropping, can’t be easy. But I didn’t want to play the game of going through the alphabet to guess the name of a person I’d never heard of for whom Christmas was important. “Can this wait till Thursday, P.B.? Because I’m having a frog issue.”

“In Germany, people used to put frogs in jars with little ladders and if the frog climbed the ladder to the top of the jar, they thought the weather would change.”

“Really?” I said, interested. Nearly everyone had a frog story, I’d discovered.

“But weather changes. Frogs want to get out of jars. No correlation. Didn’t anyone notice this? Tell me your issue.”

I put down my paintbrush. It’s rare for my brother to ask about my problems. Not that he doesn’t care; it just doesn’t occur to him. So I explained how my West African goliath started as a Fowler’s toad that I couldn’t get right, how the more I “corrected” him, the bigger he got, until I had the inspiration to turn him into a South African pyxie. It felt like cheating, like Monet using Wite-Out, but what are you going to do? People make mistakes. But when I kept on making them, the South African pyxie became a West African goliath, which was his final incarnation, as there is no known frog larger than Conraua (Gigantorana) goliath. And still, he kept growing. I’d fix one part of him, and then the proportion would be off somewhere else, and I’d enlarge that. A

“Aren’t you using a grid?” P.B. asked. “Drawing it first, then enlarging it for the wall?”

I sighed. He wasn’t the first to ask me this question. “No. I’m doing it freehand. It takes math skills to use a grid. I’m just… making it up as I go along. It’s more organic anyway.”

“Okay, then. The frog’s big because he has to be. In order for you to hear.”

“Hear what?”

“What he’s saying. Most people are visual-they don’t hear what they can’t see. Not blind people, but most other people. Someone here has to use the phone. Good-bye.”

I stood for a moment, phone to my ear, staring down the hallway into the Mansion’s whiteness. I hadn’t solved P.B.’s Christmas problem, and he hadn’t solved my frog problem, but he’d said something important. People don’t hear what they can’t see. I dialed Maizie Qui

The electric gate leading to the Qui

Emma, the two-and-three-quarters-year-old, stood on the porch, holding the hand of a short woman. I parked in the driveway and walked up the flagstone path toward them.