She came closer, then smiled. “Oh, it is you-I wasn’t sure. I’ve misplaced my glasses again. Have you found our little Annika?”

“No.”

“Oh, thank God. I thought it might be bad news, for you to go out and talk to Gene first. I was just coming to get him for dinner-” A voice inside the house made her turn. “What is it, sweet pea?… Well, you need shoes on, don’t you? Hurry. Chop-chop.” She turned back to me. “Lupe and I talk and talk about this. What would make that girl walk away without a word to Emma is something we don’t want to think about. But that’s not helping anyone, is it? I’m supposed to keep those thoughts to myself.”

She walked me to my car, pointing with interest to the film shooting down the street, which made me think she wasn’t from L.A., film shoots being as common as sunscreen to us natives. I drove away from Encino, wondering about Annika’s life there. Now that I’d met Gene, I had a better sense of why a teenage girl might go elsewhere for emotional support.

Like Marie-Thérèse. She and Annika would have compared notes on host families, cities, classes. Boys. There had to be some way of getting Marie-Thérèse’s address, of forcing or tricking Au Pairs par Excellence to fork it over.

An hour later I got home. I was glad to see a fair amount of activity on my block, a deterrent to stalkers. I waved to a neighbor, then saw a woman sitting on my building’s steps rise as I approached. She was small, she wore a baseball cap, but she was a dish.

“Wollie,” she said, offering her hand. “Savannah Brook.”

I shook it. “Of course. I know. I’m-I admire your work.” What was I saying? How ridiculous, to be starstruck by a fellow contestant. Also, I felt huge next to her; she couldn’t have been more than five foot two.

She smiled. “Thanks. Got a minute?”

“Sure.” I invited her up to my apartment, but she was due on the Biological Clock set in twenty minutes, so we sat on the steps.

“I’ll cut to the chase,” she said. “I want to do a deal.”

“What kind of deal?”

She looked right at me, with perfect, doll-like features. “I’m going to win B.C.”

“R-really?” How remarkable. Where do people get that kind of confidence?

“Yes. The question is, by how much. I want a landslide. Kim Karmer’s a lightweight, but you’ve got a small following.”

“Do I?”

“Come on. The blonde with the boobs-it’s a type, it never goes out of style. You’ll pull in votes on looks alone. Kim too, but you’ll get more. I can live with that, but the swing vote’s up for grabs. The undecideds. I want them.”

I was losing that starstruck feeling. “Why do you need a landslide?”

“Okay. The producers are talking a sequel, Morning Sickness, if I get pregnant, and I have a firm offer from ZPX to host a miracle show, but they’re lowballing me on money. That’ll change if I can book mainstream network talk shows. But I can’t just win, I have to take every market, because my publicist can’t deliver the morning shows unless I’m a cultural phenomenon.” She stood, stretched, then sat back down.

“And what do you have in mind for me to do?” I asked.

“Tone down the warmth. I’m not asking you to act; we know that’s not your strong suit. Just do your awkward thing, that slouch. The worry lines so you look older. You know what I’m talking about. The wallflower. Bore the guys. Bing. Carlito.”

I felt a weird smile take over my face. “And what’s in it for me?”

“Five percent of my first paycheck from the next gig, if it comes as a result of Biological Clock, if I win by more than seventy-five percent of the final vote. A three-hundred-dollar bonus for each network talk show I book, one fifty if it’s cable.”

I stood. Smiled for real. Looked down on her from my height of six feet. “You know, Savannah, even if I had no ethics or self-esteem, I do have bills. Talk about lowball offers.” I unlocked the door of my building and enjoyed the look on her lovely, upturned face. “See you on the small screen.”

I called Joey to tell her about the day’s encounters.

“So much for Mercury trine Saturn,” she said.

He woke me out of a dead sleep.

“I can see you’re going to be a problem,” he said. “What would it take to make you stay home for the next month or so?”

I sat up. I was on my living room floor, on a deep pile carpet in a shade of violet at war with the lavender walls my friend Hubie considered the last word in decorating. The voice on the phone belonged to the man with blue eyes. The tall man. I recognized it easily now. “No power on earth,” I said. “Why? What’s it to you? And-”

“Then how about taking a vacation?” he said. “You don’t have to leave the continent; the East Coast, maybe. Or Canada. Thanksgiving and Christmas in the snow. Consider it.”

I considered it. I thought about Doc wanting to take me to Boston for the winter holidays, this year or one of the next fifty years we’d planned on being together. I’d never go to Boston now. These thoughts made me cranky.

“There are so many things,” I said, fully awake, “that I wonder about, like who are you and how’d you get my phone number and how do you know the routes I take and why are you following me and are your eyes really that blue or do you wear contacts-all these questions burning a hole in my brain, yet you don’t hear me waking you in the middle of the night”-I looked at my watch-“or, okay, eight-thirty at night and harassing you.”

“I don’t see how you could, since you don’t know my name or number.”

Funny how easy it was to talk when he wasn’t in front of me, that clean, well-dressed, six-and-a-half-foot body, the eyes. “Well,” I said, settling back against a sofa leg, “I could just randomly-”

“Hold on,” he said, “there’s my other line-”

Surrounding me on the floor were frog photos, color plates in books, photocopies from the library, one of which was crumpled, having been used as a pillow. I straightened it out. An oak toad. Bufo quercicus. He looked lonely. Frogs and toads nearly always live alone, dating only when forced to by the imperative to procreate.

“What I want,” he said suddenly, “is for you to live a long life. I want you to stop looking for Annika Glück.”

My heart started racing. “Do you know where she is?”

“No.”

My heart slowed back down. “See, that’s my problem. Have you ever thought you were going to die?”

“Everyone dies.”

“Yes. But what if you thought no one would miss you, no one would look for you, no one would ever know what became of you? What if you were dying, and that’s what was going through your head? And what if you were right?”

There was silence at the other end.

“Her mother,” I said. “Annika’s mother, Mrs. Glück-at first, I was doing this for her, a… proxy. Now she’s stopped calling. I’m not saying she doesn’t care anymore, but she’s not returning my calls. Her mother. You see?” I didn’t know where I was going with this, what I needed him to understand about it. “And now her boyfriend.”

“Damn. My other line again. Hold on, Wollie.”

At mating time, male frogs may sing out all at once, a cacophony of bleeps, chirps, croaks, hiccups. I wondered what it was that called to a female frog, which particular sound reached her heart and made her leap up and take notice. Her name, maybe?

“I have to go,” he said, coming back on the line. “I’ll answer any questions you have, but not now.”

“Answer one.” I was standing, looking out the apartment window, down onto the street, a new habit.

“Go ahead.”

“What’s your name?”

“Simon.” I pictured him smiling. “That was quick; I’ll give you another one.”

I thought of all the mystery surrounding this man, the myriad questions running through my mind, but only one popped out. “Are you married?”