Dating Is Murder

“Because?”

“You need me to keep working for you.”

He stared. “You think I’d do that?”

“I think that you-” I couldn’t say love me. Yet. Even though he’d as much as said that. Even though I believed him. I said, “I think for you, the end justifies the means.”

“That depends on the end.”

I focused on my napkin. “That’s the wrong answer. It should depend on the means. There are lines you don’t cross, even to serve a greater good.”

“But whose lines? Drawn where? Good people cross lines all the time. On your behalf.”

I shook my head. “I don’t want them to.”

“Yes, you do. You just don’t want to know about it.”

Was he right? I raised my eyes to his. A waiter came and plunked down two small bowls of sliced fruit on the table between us. Neither of us looked at him. “But if I don’t want to know about it,” I said, “what am I doing with you?”

He picked up his fork. “That’s the question, isn’t it?”

Leaving Hugo’s, Simon drove east, toward Laurel Canyon.

“Where are we going?” I asked, alarmed.

“I’m driving you to work. We’re carpooling.”

“Carpooling? Nobody carpools. I need my car. How am I going to get home?”

“Esterbud.”

“No.” I could feel my temperature rise. “I’m not kidding. No. My God, this is L.A., you don’t leave people stranded without a car. What happened to civil liberties?”

“I’m not taking chances. I want you on the set tonight, not in jail in San Pedro.” He glanced at me. “I guess you don’t watch the morning news. I hope Joey’s got a lawyer. She’s getting slapped with a lawsuit.”

I closed my eyes. This was turning into a very long day, and it wasn’t even noon.

“Want to tell me what you were doing there?” Simon asked.

“No.”

“All right. We should have a talk one of these days about which laws you obey and which ones you ignore when it suits you.”

“We should,” I said. “You can explain the nuances of crime, like how driving people to the Valley against their will doesn’t constitute kidnapping. Seriously. What if I need to go to the store while I’m working, what if I need paints? How do you know I have keys with me?”

“I imagine your whole apartment’s in that backpack. Whatever you need, send Esterbud.”

“So nice seeing our tax dollars at work.”

“Wollie, you’d make my job easier if you kept your cell phone on. And returned your calls occasionally.”

When we got to Sherman Oaks, to the Mansion, which he found without asking directions, I did not say good-bye. I did not kiss him good-bye. I got out of the car with as much grace as possible and slammed the door behind me. I did not look back.

The way he gu

I looked out the window of the Mansion. There he was, not even bothering to hide. Esterbud. Parked in some kind of big Chevy with tinted windows. Drinking out of a liter bottle of Coke. That must be lunch. He’d be knocking on the door in an hour to introduce himself and use the bathroom.

I turned my back on Esterbud and his liter bottle and looked into the yellow eyes of my West African goliath, Conraua (Gigantorana) goliath.

He was monumental.

I’d avoided him for days, so the effect was stupefying. Either he’d grown recently, or the wall had shrunk. It was a poster for some low-rent sci-fi horror movie, it was an amphibian the size of a bear, a bald green grizzly holding the kitchen hostage. It was impossible that something that big existed, I don’t care what the book said, maybe it was a printing error, that ninety centimeters, no frog could be that long-

I opened up my favorite frog book, and found it. No, there it was. Ninety centimeters. I had it right.

Uh-oh.

The measurement was not SNV, snout to vent, the standard frog measurement. My favorite frog book was illustrating a point, measuring the length from nose to… toe. Ninety centimeters stretched out.

I opened up a second book. The snout-to-vent measurement of a West African goliath is thirty centimeters.

No. No, no, no. I’d given the West African goliath the torso of a normal-sized human. No wonder he looked like a freak. He was a freak. A mutant. Ninety centimeters is three feet. Three times the size of any frog inhabiting the earth.

My hand went to my mouth, stopping my exclamation. Technical accuracy, my last defense for this monstrosity, was no longer on my side. It never had been. I’d made a large math error. Science error. Whatever.

The phone rang. I answered. It was my brother.

P.B. started right in talking about his halfway house, and I stood, thinking about paint. White paint. Somewhere in this house were extra cans of Blush White paint. I’d find a paint roller and put the West African goliath out of its misery. No bridal couple wanted to walk into their new home and face a frog the size of a Saint Bernard. Three to five coats of paint ought to do it. If I started immediately, if the pain was quick-drying-

Except-the goliath wasn’t alone.

Alongside him was another frog, so tiny as to be nearly insignificant. I’d forgotten he was here, having avoided the wall recently. He was a blue poison-arrow frog, Dendrobates azureus, brilliant blue with black spots, his arms and legs a deeper shade of blue, sitting on a leaf, preparing to hop off in search of something to eat. A happy guy. Poisonous, dangerous, but happy. Beautiful.

“-to Santa Barbara,” my brother was saying. “But she won’t come.”

“Um, what? Your… girlfriend?” I asked, distracted. “With the body dysmorphic disorder? P.B., if she’s a patient, she can’t come. Maybe when she’s healthier.”

“No. She’s out of the hospital, but she still won’t come. She says her upper lip is too big. She says everyone in Santa Barbara will stare at her when she eats, so then she’ll stop eating and they’ll hospitalize her again. She says in her own neighborhood they’re used to her, but she can’t start over in a new town, she’s too old.”

I closed my eyes, awash with guilt. P.B. had never had a girlfriend before. This was a big moment in his life. I should be celebrating. I should be taking the time to discuss the mental problems of a woman I’d never met, whose name I didn’t know, instead of wishing he’d get off the phone. If you can’t take time for the people you love, what’s the point? If I’d taken time for A

I told P.B. I’d happily pick up this girl every Thursday from wherever she lived and drive her up to visit him at his halfway house in Santa Barbara, every single week, and anything else he could think up for me to do. Anything except encourage him to stay at the hospital, because I didn’t believe it was the right place for him anymore, and staying wouldn’t help his girlfriend’s upper-lip problem in any case. He told me I sounded subnormal.

“I am subnormal,” I said. “People’s lives are at stake, and I’m stuck in Sherman Oaks with a blue poison-arrow and a West African goliath that I need to drown in white paint.” If I can send the FBI out for paint rollers.

“You can’t paint over them,” he said. “That’s murder-suicide.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re the frog.”

Here we go. “The blue?” I asked, wondering why I’d even brought it up.

“No, the other one. The goliath. Female frogs are bigger than the males, you told me that. She’s big, she’s a girl; you’re big, you’re a girl. If you paint over her, you erase yourself. Suicide’s one thing, if you’re sad enough, but taking someone with you is murder. You don’t murder things, you save things. You put the blue next to the goliath as a talisman. You’re blackmailing yourself into staying alive.”

“P.B.,” I said, “I love you, but I don’t understand a word you just said.”

“I’m in a mental hospital,” he said. “Do the math.”

“Wise guy.” I hung up and started for the basement in search of paint, but my cell phone, now that it was on, had other ideas. It practically leaped out of my hand, frantic with unplayed messages.