Death of an Orchid Lover (21 page)

I
SPENT THE RIDE HOME IN A FUNK.
L
AURA HAD LIED TO US.
It should have been upsetting, but not as upsetting as it was. Maybe that was because I’d set her up in my mind as a mistress of integrity, and she’d shown she wasn’t.

I called Gina as soon as I got back. “Guess what. Laura didn’t feed Monty Saturday night. I found the neighbor who

did.”

“Oops. There goes the old alibi.”

“I still don’t think she did it.”

“So why did she lie about feeding the cat?”

“Maybe she went somewhere else after she left Helen, somewhere she didn’t want us knowing she went.”

“Like where?”

“I don’t know. Damn it.”

“What?”

“What if she was playing me for an idiot? What if she really did it and sent me off to find some fake killer?”

“Why would she do that? You never would have gotten mixed up in the whole thing if she hadn’t gotten you involved.”

I don’t know. “As a smoke screen?”

“Doesn’t seem likely. You find out anything else today?”

I told her about Burns and about Yoichi. She said Yoichi sounded suspicious. I asked why. “She said, Oh, you know those Orientals,” trying to get my goat and failing.

When we were done with my day, we went on to hers. “I went to the Beverly Hills Gun Club,” she said.

“What for?”

“I hadn’t practiced in months.”

“And now you had a sudden urge to? You’re not going to begin carrying your gun, are you?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

“Please don’t.”

“We’ll see.”

“Gina—”

“I’m a big girl.”

“Yeah, okay, whatever. Just don’t shoot your toe off.” I glanced at my watch. “I’d better go.”

“To get ready for your big date.” “Uh-huh.”

“Talk to you tomorrow, then.”

“You want to have breakfast?”

“Okay.” She didn’t sound very enthusiastic.

“How about I come up and we do French Market again? How’s nine sound?”

“You sure you can make it?”

“What do you mean?”

“You might get lucky.”

“I’m not going to get lucky. It’s only a first date.”

Suddenly I felt awkward. Gina and I had had this kind of conversation a million times. Talking about our lovers. Sometimes including what we did with them after the lights went out. Sometimes in explicit detail. It had always felt
totally comfortable before. Now it was different. Not quite right.

I’d wanted to pick Sharon up, make it as much of a Real Date as I could manage, but when we’d set things up she said she might have to come straight from work, and why didn’t she just come to my place? I spent the time before she showed up straightening the house as best I could. I even vacuumed the living room. Half of it, anyway. Somewhere to the left of the coffee table the vacuum began gargling. Shortly thereafter, all suction ceased. My guess was that a belt had broken, but I didn’t want to dig around to find out.

At six-thirty, the appointed time, Sharon was nowhere in sight. Five minutes later I started to worry that she’d decided going out with me was a stupid idea and she’d blown me off. After five more I was sure. By a quarter to seven I was ready to call Gina and say, Let’s get married.

I hadn’t always been so distrusting of women. Only since I was twenty, when somebody I was dating said she’d come by, and I waited two hours before getting on the telephone and finding out she’d gotten hold of some acid and was blowing her mind in my bass player’s water bed.

I was pacing the living room, making up stories about what had happened to Sharon, when the half-used package of condoms in my nightstand somehow jumped to mind. It dated back to Iris, the UCLA coed I’d had a ridiculous couple of weeks with a year or so before. I found myself wondering if the damned things had an expiration date. Would pinholes develop if you kept them too long? Or would the nonoxynol turn sour and emit an evil odor when you tore the foil packs open?

I dashed into the bedroom and grabbed the little cardboard package from my nightstand. Durex Extra Sensitive.
Super thin for more feeling.
There was indeed an expiration date on the box, as if they were cough syrup or Tylenol, but it was a year away. I was opening the box to check the integrity of the foil packs when the doorbell rang.

I threw the box into its drawer and flung the drawer closed. I ran to the front door and opened it. Sharon stood there, wearing a pale yellow Izod shirt and khaki pants. Not her traditional black jeans. She apologized for being late, saying there was some last-minute stuff at work. We stood there awkwardly until I comprehended that the civil thing to do would be to invite her in. She slipped through the door and into the living room.

I gave her the thirty-cent tour. Most people give a fifty-cent tour, but at my place you get a discount because there’s not much to see, except the greenhouse, and it was too dark for that. This is the living room. This is the kitchen. “This is the, uh, bedroom.” She smiled and nodded and seemed genuinely interested. Then we got to the canaries’ room. “Oh, how cute,” she said, and insisted on being introduced to them all. So I named off Muck and Mire, and Groucho, Chico, Harpo, Zeppo, Gummo, and Brillo, more or less at random, since the only person who really knew which was which had left this mortal coil some months before.

I took her to Akbar, an Indian restaurant on Washington Boulevard a mile or so from the ocean. It’s more pricey than my usual Indian places, but it’s fun and neighborhoodish. They put tiny slivers of edible silver foil in some of the dishes, which is always good for conversation. “The first time I’d gone there, with Gina, the waiter had told us he had a photogenic memory,” and he always remembered my name, even though I showed up no more than three times a
year. Always with Gina, too, and the waiter remembered that as well, giving me a quizzical look when he saw me with Sharon.

We ordered some
somosas
to start, and a couple of the dinners. I had tandoori chicken. After considering the lamb, Sharon went for chicken too. I was glad she’d forgone the lamb. I had trouble with people who ate baby animals. Eating grown-up ones probably wasn’t all that much better, but I hadn’t gotten around to facing that moral dilemma yet.

The waiter departed. I said, “Want to hear about my big investigation?”

She gave me an indulgent smile. “Sure.”

I gave myself two dramatic seconds. Then I said, “Laura’s alibi doesn’t hold up.”

“She didn’t have dinner with Helen?”

“No, not that part. I mean after, when she supposedly went home to feed her cat.”

“How’d you find that out?”

I told her about my encounter with Laura’s feline day-care providers. Halfway through the story our
somosas
came. They’d made special ones, with just a bit of cauliflower mixed in with the potato, and they were excellent.

I brought Sharon up to date on my visit with Yoichi. When I told her he said the argument with Albert never happened, she shook her head. “He must be practicing selective memory. I heard it with my own ears.”

“I’m not doubting you. I’m just reporting what he said. You know, I’m getting the opinion everyone in the orchid club is hiding something.”

She gave me a look.

“Present company excepted, of course.”

We shelved the talk of murder when our entrees came. We discussed plants and movies, El Nino and the president’s
tribulations. She told me she lived in Westchester, near the airport, and I asked if the noise bothered her, and she said you got used to it. I told her about how I’d somehow stopped using my NordicTrack during the past year, and how I felt I was turning into a stack of flab.

Somehow we got onto the subject of her hair. She said it had all gone gray when she was in her late twenties, and she’d colored it until she’d come to L.A. eight years before. She couldn’t find her regular color, kept putting off locating a substitute, finally decided she was fine with the natural shade. I told her I liked how it looked, and she thanked me, and we had Meaningful Eye Contact until I developed a sudden interest in the chutneys.

We got into my theater days. She wanted to know if I’d ever gone to New York to try to make it in the big time. Then we went further back, to my childhood. I came close to telling her about my father’s prison stint. But I didn’t. I knew infatuation was taking its toll on my judgment. I suspected if I told her such things, I’d regret it later.

She told me about her kid days too. She’d grown up near St. Louis, gone to Yale, then moved around the country for ten years chasing a career. I asked what kind of career and she said, “Oh, you know. High finance stuff.” She burned out on that and settled in Los Angeles because she was sick of cold weather. She worked at Kasparian’s, an electronics repair place on Pico Boulevard, doing the books and helping customers and performing some of the simpler repairs.

“Quite a comedown from the world of high finance,” I said.

“Oh, I don’t know. I feel like I’m doing something useful now. Working with real people. I really wasn’t cut out for a high-pressure field like the one I was in.”

“And when did you join the orchid club?”

“Shortly after I moved here.”

“The friend that brought you in, have I met her?”

“No, she moved away a few months later.”

Eventually I looked down at my plate and discovered all the food was gone. I hardly remembered eating any of it. We ordered dessert. Sharon wouldn’t eat the foil on her
kheer
, which is a rice pudding-like concoction, so I ate it as well as my own. When the waiter came to clear the table and discovered I’d absorbed two doses of foil, he gave me a big impressed look. I asked him why. He said the foil gave you great sexual prowess.

He walked away. Sharon looked me straight in the eye. “Interesting stuff, that foil,” she said. “Maybe I should try some.”

“Maybe.”

She took my hand. Hers was nice and warm. “But that comes later, doesn’t it?”

“What does?”

“Sex, silly. We don’t know each other well enough for that, do we?”

Was this a test? Did she want me to play big macho man, jump up and say, Yes, we do, come home and do it to me now? “No. We don’t. Not yet.”

She smiled and nodded. Yes, it had been a test, and, yes, I’d passed. Richard Dawson was yelling in my head. “Good answer, family. Show us, ‘No. We don’t. Not yet.’” I got a hundred points and the audience was screaming, “Joe, Joe, Joe.”

Sharon withdrew her hand and pulled out a mirror and touched up her lipstick. Usually it bugs me when women check their makeup at the dinner table, but this time it didn’t. If the romance went sour, I’d look back on that moment as another one of those I-should-have-knowns.

With just the slightest of arguments—“All right, but I get the next one”—she let me pay the check. We went outside. I was ecstatic that she was already thinking in terms of the next one.

We walked on Washington, toward the beach. After a couple of blocks I thought it might be appropriate to hold hands. Or even put my arm around her. But I couldn’t quite bring myself to do either. I felt fifteen again, not knowing what was appropriate, not wanting to screw things up by asking for too much too soon. This from a guy who had been checking condom viability earlier.

We reached the beach, but it was too cold to walk on it, so we turned back. We got into the truck, drove home, got out, stood there awkwardly. “Do you want to come in?” I asked.

“What for?” Not the expected answer.

“I could make some tea, or coffee if you like. We could sit around and chat some more.”

She just stared at me with that same peculiar half-smile she’d had on the first time we met.

“We could watch reruns of
Seinfeld
on Channel 5. Look, I don’t know the answer to the question. You go out with someone, when you get back to whoever’s house you started at, you invite them in.”

“Are you sure tea and TV are all you were thinking of?” “What do you want me to say?” “Say what you’re thinking.”

“What I’m thinking? What I’m thinking is I’m very attracted to you and, much as I know how stupid it is to rush into physical stuff, part of me wants to get you in there and jump your bones.”