Dating Is Murder

10

Fredreeq wasn’t kidding. Worrying about me had disrupted her sleep, she said, calling at seven A.M. “Let’s shop,” she suggested.

“I can’t,” I said. “One, I can’t afford to, and two, I have to be at SMC at nine-thirty.”

“That’s fine. I gotta get the kids to school and, anyway, nothing opens till ten. Westside Pavilion. Eleven. Be there.”

SMC, or Santa Monica College, was one of those places that did for me what shopping malls did for Fredreeq. When I was young and impressionable, I saw the film Love Story and developed a yearning not just for Ali MacGraw’s glossy black hair and pea coats but for college campuses. Circumstances like money and family issues diverted me from getting a degree in the normal fashion, but did not keep me from enrolling in classes in various odd learning institutions. Part of this was longing for a legitimacy I felt belonged to the college-educated. Part of it was that I aspired to an actual career, like a teacher, not a series of jobs I’d invented or fallen into or the kind that could be done by a really gifted chimpanzee. Mostly, though, I took classes for the thrill of being on a campus. Even at Santa Monica College. There was little ivy, the grass was patchy, and the bathrooms utterly frightening, but Friday morning as I strolled to the counseling office, I could, without too much trouble, hear piano music in my head and picture autumn leaves swirling around me.

This semester, in lieu of an actual class, I was developing a strategy to get a degree. To that end, I’d acquired a counselor, Mr. Pinneo. Although it was our third appointment, Mr. Pinneo had not invited me to address him on a first-name basis. Probably this was a sound tactic with normal college freshmen, as Mr. Pinneo, like Dr. Theodora Zagan, looked about twenty.

“More transcripts, Wollie?” he asked, scratching his nose ring. We were in a tiny cubicle he shared with several people.

“Yeah.” I handed him the envelope. “I remembered an astronomy course I took eight years ago through DuMetz Community College. We met in the desert in the middle of the night to watch meteor showers. As you see, I got an A.”

Mr. Pinneo studied the document. “I’ll run it by my supervisor. I’m not sure it meets the Intersegmental General Education Transfer Curriculum requirement for your physical science. It might. Then again, it might not. Best thing to do meanwhile is sign up for a math class. Any of those in your past you might’ve forgotten?”

“No,” I said. “I barely took any in high school. But I’ve been studying the course-sequence chart in the catalog, in itself pretty challenging, as some course numbers go backward, meaning that Math 81 precedes Math 20-but anyway. Correct me if I’m wrong, Mr. Pinneo, and I hope I am, because by my calculations, I need to take Math 81 or 81T, then Math 84, then Math 31 or 31T, then Math 20 and 21 or 41 and 52, at which point I’ll be caught up with normal college juniors.”

Mr. Pinneo took from me the weighty catalog and peered at it. “You’re right.”

My heart sank. “And I have to take these courses one at a time, in sequence.”

“Unless you test out.”

“You mean the math-assessment test. I did that, remember? You have the results.”

Mr. Pinneo shuffled through a file that was extensive, considering I had not yet registered for classes. He withdrew a sheet of paper. “Yeah. Not real good at math, are you?”

“No. But after that test, I got a math tutor.”

“Good. How’s that going?”

A vision popped into my head of Annika, with her mechanical pencil, drawing for me Galileo, Newton, and Einstein as happy faces: Quantification, Gravitation, and Relativity. “It’s-it was going well,” I said. “So how long before I should take the assessment test again?”

Mr. Pinneo glanced at my test scores. “Maybe you just sign up for Math 81. Basic Arithmetic. That’s for people who haven’t-”

“-done long division since the Reagan administration. I know. But I can’t afford to stay here taking math, one class at a time, for the rest of my natural life. I’m hoping to transfer to UCLA.” UCLA had a beautiful campus. Equally important, it offered the graphic arts degree I was seeking. It would not admit me, though, until Santa Monica College had certified me, according to the terms of the Intersegmental General Education Transfer Curriculum.

“Okay,” he said. “Take the assessment test anytime before your registration date, which is”-he typed into his computer-“two weeks. You get one more shot, then you have to wait three months to retest. Meanwhile, might as well do the math. Without math, you won’t do squat in science. Good luck, Wollie.”

I walked out into the sunshine, squinting. The campus no longer seemed the symbol of possibility it had been a half hour earlier. I felt old, stupid, and poor. But I had to make this work, because my other dreams weren’t panning out. Marriage and children were remote possibilities, people were fleeing my life with alarming frequency-college was the one thing under my conscious control. It wasn’t cheap, but instead of three or four classes at a time, I’d take one. One per semester. But not if it was math. Not for the next seventy years. I’d had a better attitude when it looked like Doc would be around to help with homework. Maths 21 through 82 wouldn’t have fazed him; he’d gone to MIT.

They hadn’t fazed Annika either. “You are missing out on this fun!” she’d said, hearing of my math phobia. “Did you play with puzzles when you were small? This is geometry. In school, did you have code words with your girlfriends? This is algebra. Music, language, baking cookies, stars in the sky, everything is mathematics. It is just that no one has shown this to you, but I will show it to you and then everything will connect to everything else and you will be so happy.”

She’d done this. Annika had opened a window onto a world, just a crack. Enough to peek through. But now she was gone.

I missed her.

An hour later I was at Westside Pavilion, replaying my conversation with the blue-eyed guy. “The more I think about it,” I said to Fredreeq, “the more I’m sure he was talking about Annika.”

“No,” she said, leading me past the food court. “I’ve been thinking too, and I’m thinking industrial sabotage.”

“Industrial-? What industry?”

“How many industries are you involved in?” She took a left, heading to a boutique called Plastique, which was having a going-out-of-business sale. “Television, you nut. This isn’t just a show we’re doing, it’s a contest. People bet money on contests, which means other people are making money on the people betting money on this contest. Vegas people.”

“What people? Fredreeq, I’m not going to find anything in here.” I stopped in front of a Plastique Boutique mannequin. She looked like a heroin addict, her face featureless except for deep pink eye sockets, her emaciated torso wearing a shirt made of shoelaces.

“Never mind that. It’s a big bad world out there, with scams going down you’ve never even- Hello,” she said to a girl at a sale table, stacking sweaters in a desultory manner. “Can you tell me if Kim Karmer’s working?”

The girl didn’t look up from her sweaters. “No.”

“No, you can’t tell me, or no, she’s not working?” Fredreeq asked. A salesclerk at the register, I noticed, stared at us as she picked up a phone.

“I don’t know her schedule,” the sweater stacker said.

“Well, who might know her schedule?” Fredreeq asked. When the girl gave a world-weary sigh, Fredreeq grew frighteningly polite. “I’m sorry, am I bothering you? I’m not asking you to go out on a limb here and make eye contact-”

“What am I, a Web site?” The girl blinked spiderlike eyelashes. “You people come in wanting to know all this stuff, you could at least buy some clothes.”

Fredreeq put her hand on her heart. “Oh, are these clothes? I thought they were something that fell off the space shuttle. You know, sweetie, frown lines are not as sexy as you probably think. Another ten years and a laser’s going to have to remove those.”

I pulled Fredreeq to the door. “Why do you want to meet Kim Karmer?” I asked. “Is it even kosher for me to talk to another contestant?”

Fredreeq pointed at Robinson-May and made a beeline for the cosmetic counter. “The question is, Who else wants to know about Kim Karmer? What did that twit mean by ‘you people’? This fits my saboteur theory. Vegas is backing Savannah Brook to win the vote, and they’re nosing around you and Kim to come up with some dirt. It’s exactly like politics.”

I pondered this at the Clinique counter, while Fredreeq tried out lip crayons. It seemed so unlikely that the tall enigmatic man from Hot Aloo was haunting the mall, questioning surly salespeople. He was too… what?

What was it about him that so intrigued me? Aside from our odd conversation.

I was still pondering this when Fredreeq, now trying out powder blush on my face, looked back out at the mall. “Let’s go,” she said, eyes wide. I turned to see two men in leather jackets walking purposefully toward us from Plastique Boutique. They were not smiling.

“Come on.” Fredreeq took my arm and led me farther into Robinson-May, steering us behind a clothes rack. We watched the men go past, then we doubled back and out into the mall. Fredreeq’s fear was infectious, and I was tempted to break into a run.

We hurried past the movie theater and a seemingly endless number of stores devoted to children and babies, looking over our shoulders every fifteen seconds. We were nearing Nordstrom’s when I saw them, gaining on us. We did run then. Fredreeq, who does in heels things I couldn’t do barefoot, set a good pace. We flew through Nordstrom’s and down a passageway that overlooked Pico Boulevard. I was utterly lost now, but Fredreeq knows her malls. Eventually we were in a bookstore, racing down an escalator. A café within the bookstore was to our right, and on impulse I took Fredreeq’s hand and led her through the waist-high gate that separated customers from café workers.

We crouched behind a glass bakery case, face to face with soft pretzels, cheesecake, and Rice Krispies Treats. A green-aproned man came through a swinging door from the back room, but we were more concerned with our pursuers, rushing down the escalator. When they reached our level, they paused. Then, with teamlike precision, one took off into the book aisles, the other circling to another down escalator.

“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 Savannah Brook campaign, but either way… I went there to do an info share with Kim Karmer, but forget that now. Now she’s on her own. She might be the enemy or she might be the friend of the enemy, but either way, this is war and she’s going to go down.”

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