Death of an Orchid Lover (10 page)

I
LURCHED OUT OF BED A LITTLE BEFORE NINE.
G
INA’D MUMBLED
something during our alcoholic interlude the night before about having to be at the Pacific Design Center at noon, so I let her be.

Outside, it was a bright Monday morning. Fluffy clouds floated over the Hollywood sign. I took La Cienega south, driving slowly, letting the cool spring air chip away at my hangover. Jefferson Airplane’s
Surrealistic Pillow
was in the cassette player. Traffic was light. Young women walked their dogs; joggers reinforced their hearts.

As I pulled across Melrose I had to stomp on the brakes to avoid being squashed by a bus. I sat in the intersection screaming obscenities, staring as a bus-side placard, which told me I should watch
Nash Bridges
Friday nights on CBS, swept by six inches from my bumper. A man in a toga saw me yelling and gave me the peace sign. At his feet a lava lamp stood idle, with its white goop congealed at the bottom of the purple liquid. Then he held up a sign. THOU SHALT NOT LEND UPON USURY UNTO THY BROTHER. As I drove away I gave him back the peace sign.

At home, I dealt with the canaries and went out to the greenhouse. I didn’t have time to do my rounds properly, but I thought I’d breeze through and see if anything startling had happened. I stumbled across the discocactus. The bud had done its thing. The spent flower lay across the cephalium. I cursed, told myself there’d be more buds, wondered about the conversation I was having with myself.

Stoneburg Studios was on Hollywood Boulevard, east of the run-down tourist disappointment around Vine. All the street parking was metered, and I didn’t have any change. I parked in the lot at the Pep Boys across the street, went into the store through the lot entrance and out the front, jaywalked over to the studio.

It was an audition for Mighty Blue toilet bowl cleaner. The copy reinforced my recent pigeonholing as the dumb husband with the smart wife. I was to be scrubbing my fixture when she came in with her squeeze bottle of Mighty Blue and showed me what a cleaning ignoramus I was. The tag was, “Don’t spend so much time in the bathroom.”

I knew the actress I read with—you see the same faces over and over at these things—and afterward we stood on the sidewalk and talked. She told me she’d been in a pilot that had a good chance of making the next year’s midseason replacement schedule. She described it as
“Melrose Place
in Santa Fe.” She seemed very happy about it, and I congratulated her. She asked what I’d been up to. I told her about the Olsen’s mall things. “Wow,” she said. “Sounds great. Easy money. Ever do any near Studio City? I’ll come visit you.” I had one scheduled for Sherman Oaks that very weekend, but told her no, they did them only on my side of the hill. I
didn’t want people I knew seeing me stand around a mall selling ladybugs.

She went off to an acting class. I went off to the Pep Boys and thence to the truck.

There were a couple of beat-up bikes lying in Laura’s driveway, with a couple of eight- to ten-year-old boys standing over them. At first I thought they were playing hooky. Then I remembered that a lot of the schools in L.A. are on a year-round plan. At any particular time, a third of the students are on the streets. The kids are in school for four months, take two off. Then four more on, two more off. No wonder they’re mixed up.

I nodded a hello. The kids grunted back. I headed to Laura’s apartment. One of the cars under the overhang was a Honda Accord, close to twenty years old. Its light blue paint was wearing off in that peculiar way you always see on old Hondas. The car hadn’t been there the other night. Laura’d had a similar model back in the Altair days, and I was willing to bet this one was hers.

She came to the door with Monty the cat flung over her shoulder, wearing jeans and an ancient red sweatshirt that said
YOU’LL NEVER KNOW IF YOU DON’T TRY.
I looked at her and asked myself, Could this woman have committed murder? It didn’t seem likely. But I still wasn’t sure.

She ushered me in, gave me some iced tea, pointed me toward her sofa, took the
Frasier
chair. Monty sniffed my pants leg and lay down at her feet on the one-step-up-from-shag carpeting.

“You know,” I said, “I still can’t get over how we hadn’t
seen each other in fifteen years and now I’m playing Paul Drake for you.”

“Paul who?”

“The detective on the old
Perry Mason
series. The guy that went around digging up clues for Raymond Burr.”

“You’re upset that I called you. Your resent that I brought you into this.”

“
Upset
is too strong a word.
Puzzled
is more like it. I still don’t know why you didn’t call your friend Helen when the cops took you to the station. Or a lawyer.”

“I don’t know any lawyers. And I can’t afford one. As for Helen, she has problems of her own.”

“What kind of problems?”

She shook her head slightly. “That didn’t come out how I meant it. All I meant was that I didn’t think to drag her into this.” She smiled. “I thought to drag you into it.”

“Because of my vast knowledge of the criminal justice system.”

“Yes.”

There was a pay stub from Apple One, the temp agency, on the coffee table. “You’re still temping,” I said. She’d been temping when I’d known her fifteen years before. She’d be doing it forever.

“I can’t hold myself down to one job,” she said. “When you get a role, it can tie you up for weeks at a time, or take you far away, and I would violate my responsibility to my employer if I were to leave suddenly.”

It all came back to me, all the psychobabble her crowd had favored in the Altair days.
Responsibility
was another big word, like
commitment
and
intention
, and they flapped it around in the breeze like they were the only ones who’d ever heard of such a thing.

“Did you ever consider just giving it up?” I said. “Saying,
fine, I’ve given acting my best shot, but it just wasn’t in the cards, and now it’s time to move on with my life. Maybe doing community theater, just to keep the old chops honed.”

She wasn’t angry, wasn’t sad, only amazed that I’d come up with such an idea. “Of course not. An actress is who I am. To be anything else would be to reject who I am. I couldn’t live that way.”

I took a sip of my tea, stood, went to the photo of Werner Erhard. Werner—the est-holes all called him by his first name, like they were close personal friends—stared out at me with benevolent antagonism. His name was a pseudonym, I remembered. He was really Jack Rosenberg. Hiding his Jewishness. “So why’s Werner’s picture still up?” I asked.

She shrugged and got up. “I guess I keep him around to remind me of the old days.” She went to the door, lit a Virginia Slim. “Why does anybody put things on their walls, other than those that are there for the pure aesthetics of it? Pictures of your family, things from when you were a child.”

I thought of the Jefferson Airplane poster in my hallway. “Because they mean something to you. A remembrance of things past.”

“Well put, Mr. Proust. And that’s exactly why Werner’s still up there. That was an important time in my life. I’m not going to repudiate it because I’m not into those things anymore.”

She came back in, got rid of her cigarette, stood close to me. “Can I ask a favor?”

“Sure.”

“Would you throw me some lines?”

“Didn’t get enough work with your scene partner?”

“He got an under-five on
The Young and the Restless
and couldn’t make it. We’re putting the scene up in class tomorrow,
and I feel if I don’t work on it at all today I’ll lose my momentum.”

“I haven’t read anything but commercial copy in years.”

“I just need to hear the lines. If we can run it a few times, I think I’ll be all right until tomorrow morning.”

“I’ll give it a shot.”

“Wonderful.” She picked a Samuel French script book off her tiny dining table. Actors are always carrying them around. Any play that ever gets a semi-significant production eventually ends up in one, or one by French’s competitor, Dramatists Play Service. Many were the hours I spent at the French store on Sunset Boulevard, scanning the shelves for interesting material.

I looked at the cover.
Chapter Two.
“CORNS?” I said.

“I’m perfect for Faye.”

GORNS. Good Old Reliable Neil Simon. Let the artsy types scoff. “So I must be Leo.”

“Right. This is the scene where he and Faye almost sleep together. Here, let me show you where it starts.” She found the place and handed me the book. I smiled when I saw the penciled-in cuts, the pink-highlighted Faye lines, the places in the margin where Laura’d made notes to herself.
Take a beat. Let him come to me. Just like snarvx.
At least it looked like
snarvx.

“You’re supposed to have your shirt off,” she said, smiling. “But I think we can skip that.”

“If it would help …”

“No, that’s okay. Let me just get ready.”

I was afraid getting ready would entail much fluttering of eyes and elephantine breathing sounds, but all she did was take a couple of deep breaths. “Let’s go.”

I read off the first line. She responded. We traded back and forth. As Laura invested the lines with the sadness behind
the laughs, I remembered how good an actress she’d been. Now, with more years of tedious life experience behind her, she was wonderful. When we finished the scene, I told her so.

“You helped a lot,” she said.

“No, I—”

“Stop it, Joe. I don’t know why you quit. Can we go through it again?”

“Okay. You want me to do anything differently?”

“No. You’re fine. You’re perfect.”

We did the lines again. I was able to raise my head from the script a bit more, give her more eye contact. When we were done she said, “Can I tell you something?”

“I guess so.”

“You’re already better in this scene than the actor I’m working with in class.”

“I can’t believe that.”

“Believe it. I mean, he has the lines down, and he knows the blocking, but I’m really getting more out of you than I ever do from him.”

We went through it twice more, then took a break. We discussed her motivations in the scene, and then we were off onto pacing and nuance and back story.

We started up again, and ran the scene until a warning light went on in my head. Danger, Will Robinson, point of diminishing returns approaching. It always happened; you’d do a great run-through, but the next would be slightly less satisfying, and after that nothing useful would come out of the rehearsal. Eventually you’d both give up, and sit around munching pretzels and badmouthing people.

So we tried a time or two more, but it was pointless. Out came the pretzels. Laura began telling me about some of the plays she’d been in since I’d known her before. It was time to
deal with what I’d come there for. “Have the police been by lately?”

She seemed startled that I wanted to discuss Albert’s murder. “A couple of calls to clarify things, but that’s it.”

I nodded. For a guy who wanted to ask a bunch of questions, I was having trouble deciding which ones to ask. “So how did you and Albert get together?”