Death of an Orchid Lover (2 page)

Laura followed that with a fine turn in the title role in
Lysistrata
, one of our rare dips into the classics. She’d been an excellent actress. It was a pity that she was mired in the Equity-Waiver scene.

“I’m good,” I said. “And you? Still acting?”

“I am. Things have never been better. I did the lead in an
Unsolved Mysteries
last year.”

I hadn’t seen her in fifteen years and the best she could come up with was an
Unsolved Mysteries?
Things couldn’t be
that
much better.

“And how is your career going?” she asked.

“I’m not into acting anymore.”

“Then what do you do?”

“I grow cacti and succulents.”

“For a living? How unusual.”

“For pleasure.”

“Then what work do you do?”

“I kind of make a living doing commercials.”

“I thought you said you weren’t into acting.”

“You call commercials acting?”

“Good point. What does ‘kind of make’ mean?”

“It means if I didn’t live in my parents’ house I would have to find real work, but since I do, I don’t.”

“You live with your parents?”

“No. My mom’s dead. My father lives in another house.”
I remembered one of the things I’d most associated with Laura. “You still into est?”

Back at the Altair I’d suffered a plague of actors who were into pop-psych crazes, of which est was the worst. I couldn’t go an hour without one of them buttonholing me with talk of commitment and intention and keeping your word and the great works of Werner Erhard, the movement’s founder. One show we did, five out of six actors were into the thing.

I didn’t know if est had survived into the late nineties. It seemed to have been replaced by Scientology as the acting fraternity’s pop-psych drug of choice. Maybe poor Laura here was the last remnant, still spouting commitment and intention, a sad reminder of something deservedly left in the past.

“No,” she said, to my considerable relief. “I stuck with it for several more years. Then I somehow stopped being involved.”

“I see. So are you an orchid person now?”

“I’m becoming one. Isn’t it odd? For half a century I wasn’t at all interested in plants, and now suddenly I’m starting to know about cymbidiums and dendrobiums and all those other -iums.” She looked around. “Too noisy here. Let’s go outside.”

We passed through a den of sorts, filled with more orchids and featuring a big array of framed diplomas on the wall, like you’d see in a doctor’s office. An open door led us out into the fabulous mid-April day. Up above, a cloudless sky promised a fine growing season. A windstorm the night before had blown away most of the smog, and I got a good view of the mountains, with a smidgen of snow still on their peaks.

The place was landscaped to the hilt. Mostly tropicals, not the kind of stuff a succulent guy like me generally goes for, but I had to admit it was gorgeous. There were mature palms and huge split-leaf philodendrons. An enormous clump of
giant bird of paradise lorded over one corner of the lot. At the far end of the property, an impressive greenhouse sat reflecting the midday sun.

We stopped in the shade of a big king palm. Unseen speakers played classical music. Several blooming orchids sat on a small wrought-iron table. One had a three-foot stalk with scores of inch-wide yellow and red flowers. The inflorescences on the others were much shorter, with roughly half a dozen blooms apiece.

Laura reached into her purse, pulled out a pack of Virginia Slims, gracefully lit one. “You really should think about acting again,” she said. “Real acting. Not just commercials.”

“Oh?”

“No one ever really stops being an actor.”

“Is this going to turn into some airy-fairy thing?”

“No. You were good. I hate to see talent going to waste.”

“I didn’t have that much talent. Not like you.”

“Thanks. But I just think you ought to consider—” I smiled and shook my head. “Just drop it, okay? I’m not going back to the stage.”

She didn’t say any more, but I got the feeling I hadn’t heard the end of the conversation. She reached out and plucked an orchid off the table. The flowers were three inches across, shaped sort of like moths, mostly white with some dull red around their throats. There were only two leaves, straplike, hugging the surface of the potting mix. Laura reached a finger out toward one of the blossoms, stopped a fraction of an inch short. “One mustn’t touch the flowers,” she said, in the tone of a child who’s just learned some important rule. “Our fingers have oils.”

She carefully replaced the pot. “He gave me a few seedlings and keikis. That’s how I got started.”

“Who did?”

“Albert. He’s always giving people plants. Hello.”

Gina had magically appeared at my side. I made the introductions. Then: “Maybe you two met at the Altair. Gina worked there too.”

“Actress?” Laura said.

“Set design,” Gina said.

“Do you still do that?”

“Not exactly. I’m an interior designer.”

“I see. So are you two…”

“We’re just friends,” I said.

Laura looked amused. “Well,” she said. “I suppose I ought to mingle some more. But I’d love to get together, talk about old times. Let me give you my card.” She looked at her cigarette, which she hadn’t puffed on since she lit it, rubbed it out on the underside of the table, laid it down. She produced a business card from her purse. Above a phone number with a Hollywood prefix, it said,
Laura Astaire
, then,
Actor.
There weren’t any actresses anymore, it seemed. The Screen Actors Guild had awards for best performance by a male actor, and best by a female actor. Not that I’d ever be up for any of them, but by virtue of my commercial work I got to vote on them.

Laura handed over the card. She waited for me to produce one of my own.

“I don’t have one,” I said.

“My, my. You really
are
out of the game.” Out of her purse came a pen and tiny leatherbound pad. “Tell me your number.”

I did. She wrote it down, snapped the pad closed, made it disappear. Suddenly her arms were around me. The est people were into hugging. This was a typical est hug, where you stick your butt out in the air so there’s no possibility of any midbody contact. “Good to see you again, Joe. I’ll give you a
call. We’ll talk about acting.” She looked at Gina, who seemed horrified at the prospect of being hugged, picked up the dead cigarette, and walked back toward the house.

“You want her,” Gina said.

“I don’t think so. A little too brittle for me.” I looked her in the eye. “Do you?”

“Probably not. Anyway, I’m being faithful to Jill.” Something put my radar up. “Trouble in paradise?” She shook her head a mite too quickly. “No. Everything’s great. Come on, let’s go get some ribs.”

We moved on to the food area and filled our plates. Albert had brought in mass quantities of barbecued ribs and chicken. The rest was potluck. We found a couple of relatively isolated lawn chairs, but in a few minutes we were surrounded by the orchid people. They did their best to draw us into conversation. We did our best to stick to our own. We didn’t do badly, except for a woman who told us more than we’d ever care to know about pleurothallids, whatever they were.

S
AM CAME OVER HALF AN HOUR BEFORE I WAS DUE TO LEAVE
for a bug-salesman gig at Beverly Center. “Albert wants to make sure you don’t go without seeing the greenhouse.”

I got up from the soft patch of grass I’d found myself and looked around for Gina. She was deep in conversation with one of the guys from the kitchen. They were discussing bull-nose edges. Interior design talk.

I walked to the greenhouse, a structure maybe fifty feet long and twenty-five wide, with the summit of its peaked roof eight feet or so above my head. The clear parts were glass, and the metal frame looked like it could have withstood an 8 on the Richter scale. Quite a difference from my flimsy construction of fiberglass and two-by-fours.

A sign asked that I close the door behind me. I complied. Then I turned and wandered through, taking in the spectacle.

There must have been several thousand orchid plants. There were white flowers and purple ones and more white ones and more purple ones. Big red ones and little yellow ones and some in a peculiar pale green. Some had two
colors and some had three, and the count went up from there.

Some of the orchids would have looked at home on a high school senior’s wrist on prom night. Others I wouldn’t have suspected were orchids, were they not in an orchid house. Their blooms had weird wings, long spurs, whiskers, other appendages. Sizes ranged from dessert plate down to a quarter inch or less. Some of the flower stalks poked up to eye level; some dangled over the lips of pots. Every once in a while I would catch a whiff of scent. Sometimes I could track it down, sometimes I couldn’t.

The walls were hung with plaques of wood and bark and other natural materials, each with one or more plants magically attached and doing just fine in the absence of any noticeable trace of soil. Metal pipes crisscrossed overhead, and scores of plants descended from them in hanging pots, or in wooden baskets with no discernible potting mix in them, with roots gnarling around the slats and dangling below.

Every few minutes mist burst from nozzles on the pipes. It made it nicely cool and slightly humid, a far cry from the hothouse conditions I thought orchids liked.

In keeping with my taste in plants, I found myself attracted not so much to the ones that were traditionally beautiful, but more to the odd ones. I found one that resembled a bumblebee and one that looked like a tiny mountain man with a hat and beard. Nature found infinite ways to put a few basic flower parts together in order to attract pollinators and perpetuate the species.

Through the glass I noticed an outdoor bench full of plants with lots of colorful flowers, and I went back out to investigate. They were in one- and two-gallon pots and had long leaves like lilies’ Like most of the orchids, they were potted in a fine version of the bark chips people dump in
their yards for mulch. The average size was a half to three quarters of an inch. There was a little perlite in there too, puffy white particles that would inevitably float to the top of the pot, wash out, and litter the ground. I also saw a Styrofoam noodle or two.

The flower stalks bore a dozen or more blooms apiece, in colors from deep purple to white and everything in between, with all sorts of mottlings and stripings and other markings. The flowers were splendid. But I couldn’t help thinking how ugly the plants would be when they weren’t in bloom.

“You like those cymbidiums?” It was the older of the British ladies from the group by the fireplace. She was trundling her wheelchair along the concrete path.

“They’re very nice,” I said.

“They’re wretched most of the year. But my daughter Mo is fond of them, so we have some around the place. She doesn’t know orchids, of course. She grows roses. Did you know that?”

“I didn’t.”

“I’m the orchid person, not her. If it has to do with orchids around here, I know about it. I’m Dorothy Lennox. Everyone calls me Dottie.”

I introduced myself and held out a hand. She reached out and took it. Hers was thin and bony, the skin translucent, but her grip was firm. She leaned forward, spoke quietly so only I could hear. “My dear mother, God rest her soul, called me Dot, and I always hated that, but I never told her.”

“Then I won’t either.”

Dottie thought that the height of hilarity. Her laugh was a good-witch cackle. “You’re a funny young man. You should come to the orchid society meetings. It’s a bunch of fussbudgets. All those people worrying about the judging.”

“Then why do you go?”

“It gets me out of the house. I don’t get out of the house very often, you know, what with my affliction and all.” She slapped the bony tops of her thighs. “These don’t work too well. Oh, dear. Here comes Albert. I was going to steal a division of his
Dendrobium smillieae
, but now I won’t be able to.”

She’d obviously said it for his benefit. “If you want some of my
smillieae
, Dottie,” he said, “you shall have it.”