Death of an Orchid Lover Read online

  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.”

  He entered the greenhouse. We watched through the glass as he produced a plant shears from who knew where, dipped it into a bucket of God knew what, and snipped off a chunk of a plant that looked to me like dozens of others surrounding it. He shook off debris, came back outside, presented the cutting to Dottie. “Here you are, dear.”

  “Thanks ever so much, Albert.” She turned to me, gave me a big wink. “That Albert. Such a dear. If I were just ten years younger …” She shook her head. “I had better find Mo. She gets into trouble.”

  She opened the big crocheted bag in her lap, pulled out a pencil and a scrap of paper. “You’ll come see me. I’ll show you my plants. Come anytime.” She wrote on the paper, held it out until I took it, then wheeled away.

  “She’s quite a character,” Albert said.

  “Seems to be.” I glanced at the paper. Dottie lived in Hawthorne, a small city south of the Westside. I didn’t think I’d ever been there.

  Albert led me back inside, made an expansive gesture, and said, “What do you think?”

  I stuck Dottie’s address in my wallet. “It’s very impressive. But not what I expected. I thought orchids liked heat and a closed-up atmosphere.”

  He shook his head. His blond mane jiggled. “Folklore. In the early days, because the plants came from the tropics, they were grown in structures called ‘stoves,’ with coal fires and no ventilation. It made the plantsmen ill to work in there. Finally they deduced that orchids are mostly epiphytes. That means they live in trees.”

  I smiled. “I know the term. Epiphytic cacti, you know?”

  “Of course.” He momentarily bowed his head to acknowledge my wisdom. “Once those old plant people realized that, they began to tailor conditions better. These days, we know how to simulate the plants’ natural situation pretty darned well. Although people are always coming up with new wrinkles.”

  “Such as?”

  “The latest is—wait, I have a few here, let me show you.” He rooted around among the pots and brought me a fourincher that appeared to be filled with little pieces of rubber. “Shredded auto tires,” he said. “It shows a lot of promise as a medium. It doesn’t compact like bark does.”

  “Seems weird. What about nutrients?”

  “That’s what fertilizers are for.” He put the plant back. “One has to try strange things if one is to be successful with plants. I’ve seen so many odd experiments over the years.”

  “How many years?”

  “I’ve collected for over a quarter of a century. But I’ve really been seriously at it since I retired and moved to Los Angeles eight years ago. The climate back east made it difficult to maintain much of a collection.” He got all dreamy-eyed. “I love nurturing them. Bringing a plant along from a tiny seedling to what the catalogues call a ‘mature, blooming-size plant.’ Of course, even getting to the seedling stage can be tricky. Orchid seed is incredibly fine. There are thousands in each pod. And they are very difficult to germinate. Many people send their pods out for germination. I do my own.” He was beginning to sound like PBS.

  “Years ago,” he went on, “growers tried all sorts of media, and met with little success. They finally determined they had the best luck sowing the plants at the base of the mother plant. Eventually it was found that micorrhizae, symbiotic fungi in the medium, were instrumental in germinating the seed. Oh, just listen to me go on.”

  He picked up one of the plants with strap-shaped leaves, like the one Laura’d nearly defiled. Its stalk poked up ten inches or so, held in place by an elegant wire mechanism. The flowers were orange-red, with little yellow dots. “Look at this phalaenopsis,” he said. “Or moth orchid, to the layman. I made this cross myself. One reason hybridization is so difficult is that the results of a particular cross can vary widely, even if your stud plants are wonderful. You have to go through many inferior specimens to find the good ones.”

  He handed me the plant. “This is one of the good ones. I got an Award of Merit on it. One step short of the best. And I have high hopes for the next generation.”

  “Don’t we all.”

  He smiled, nodded. “Well. I suppose I ought to go back to my guests. Feel free to look around, and if you see something you want a piece of, come after me.” />
  “Thanks.”

  “I know you’re thinking that won’t happen. But you probably didn’t expect to get involved in succulents either, did you?”

  “Now that you mention it.”

  “You’ll see a plant you want and suddenly you, too, will have orchid fever.” He made his way outside.

  I replaced the plant on the bench and checked my watch. Nearly time to collect Gina and head back to the flatlands. I cruised a little more. No. It wasn’t going to happen. I had way too many plants as it was. No need to get launched on a whole new botanical family.

  I stopped by some big frilly orchids like the ones in corsages. Lots of pinkish-purples, with an assortment of other colors. Each erect stem had just a few leaves, but new growth sprang from the base of the old and the plants filled the pots. One bloom had a lustrous white surface that begged to be touched. I reached out to do so.

  “Shouldn’t touch the flowers,” someone said.

  I whipped my hand back, turned to see who it was. A woman wearing an enchanting half-smile was watching me.

  “Right,” I said. “Our fingers have oils.”

  My first impression was that she was well over fifty, but I quickly realized that was simply because her hair, pulled back in a French braid, had all gone silver-gray, a nice mix of darker and lighter tones. Once I got past the hair, I realized she was probably a few years younger than me. She had deep brown eyes. Her weight was appropriate to her height, which was nearly equal to my own. She wore loose black jeans and a white sleeveless top that revealed well-toned arms.

  She walked over, dug around the base of one of the orchids with her fingers, removed a dead leaf. Then she looked at me. “Go ahead and touch it. No orchid ever pooped out because someone touched it.”

  As I fondled the petals, another plant caught her eye. More digging turned up a second brown leaf. She saw me watching her, gave me a slightly embarrassed smile, and tossed the debris into a bucket marked COMPOST. “I heard someone say you’re into cacti,” she said. “I don’t quite understand that.”

  Were the plant police on duty? “Cactus-collecting invader on premises. Beware.”

  “It’s hard to explain,” I said. “It’s like, when you see a plant and you like it, you buy it. It just happens that most of the plants that I like happen to be succulents. They’re kind of… primeval, I guess is the best word, although actually they’re among the latest-developing plant families.” Now I sounded like PBS.

  “I wasn’t faulting you.”

  “I didn’t think you were,” I said. “And you? What’s the attraction with orchids? I mean, when they’re not in bloom they all look pretty plain, don’t they?”

  “The attraction comes out when they are in bloom.”

  “Maybe that’s the difference between your people and mine. You guys are willing to wait for the good stuff. We’re into instant gratification.” I pointed outside at the cymbidiums. “Take those, for instance. The flowers are nice, sure. But is it really worth looking at an ugly plant fifty-one weeks a year just for a week’s worth of bloom?”

  “They bloom much longer than that. At least two months.”

  “They do?”

  “Sure. Most orchids are long-lasting. Some aren’t, some last a week or less, but most go on for several at least. Not like cactus flowers. One, two days and that’s it, most of the time. Am I right?”

  “I don’t really grow cacti for the flowers.”

  “And I don’t really grow orchids for the plants themselves.”

  “Why do I have the feeling we’re having an argument here?”

  “It’s a discussion, not an argument.” She saw my discomfort, smiled, shook her head. “I’m sorry. I’m afraid I’m a bit of an evangelist sometimes.”

  “It’s okay.” I fingered a leaf, stuck my nose into a greenish-yellow flower, picking up a pleasant if faint scent. “They’re interesting, I guess.”

  “Interesting means a person hates something.”

  “Well …”

  “Cymbidiums can take direct sun, which most orchids can’t. You can grow them outside all year here in southern California. You can even put them in the ground. They’re terrestrials.”

  “As opposed to extraterrestrials?”

  Her smile told me she got the joke and knew I could do better. “As opposed to epiphytes. Plants which—”

  “Grow on trees. I know about epiphytes. I have a patio filled with epiphytic cacti. Rhipsalis and epiphyllums and stuff like that. I have an orchid too.”

  “What kind?”

  “An epidendrum. Someone gave me a cutting, and I stuck it in a pot and it took off. Flowers all the time. Kind of neat.”

  “She nodded. Well. I think I’ll go freshen my drink.” She didn’t have a drink.

  She stuck out a hand. “Nice meeting you…”

  I told her my name. “And you’re?”

  “Sharon. Sharon Turner.” She looked into my eyes for a couple of seconds, turned, walked away.

  I watched her go out, then followed. When I got outside, she’d already disappeared. I wanted to talk to her some more. How could I arrange that?

  It would have to wait. All my greenhouse conversations had put me behind schedule. I tracked Gina down and we bid adieu to Albert and to Sam. As we reached the front door, I scanned the place for Sharon. I spotted her in the kitchen and caught her eye. She smiled slightly, gave me a half-wave, turned away. I watched her a second or two more before going.

  3

  MY DATSUN PICKUP WAS STOPPED AT A RED LIGHT AT LAUREL Canyon and Mt. Olympus. I had Procol Harum in the cassette deck. “Conquistador” was on, not the live-with-orchestra version they play on the classic rock stations, but the one on the first album, the one only people with their musical heads still stuck in the sixties know.

  Cassette deck. It still sounded weird. My millions-of-years-old eight-track had finally given up the ghost the previous fall. After nearly mail-ordering a new one from the J.C. Whitney catalogue, I’d moved on to the nineties. Or at least the late seventies.

  “That woman,” Gina said.

  “Laura?”

  “No. The one you sort of said goodbye to when we left.”

  “Her name’s Sharon.”

  “You’re going to go out with her.”

  “Not that I know of. I’ll probably never see her again.”

  The light changed. We pulled away, continued down the hill, past Sunset, where Laurel Canyon turns into Crescent Heights. I thought about what Gina had said. I felt like a teenager whose mom had asked, “You like Susie, don’t you?”

  But Sharon was certainly intelligent and attractive. And we shared an interest in plants. Maybe asking her out would be an interesting idea.

  As we turned onto Santa Monica, a couple of blocks from Gina’s condo, she said, “You will, you know.”

  “Will what?”

  “Screw her.”

  “I love it when you talk dirty.”

  “Stop joking. This is serious.”

  “Why is it so serious?”

  “Because I don’t need you getting mixed up with some orchid woman.”

  “I’m not mixed up. Look, you’re acting weird. Will you tell me what’s wrong?”

  She shook her head. I dropped her at her condo and headed for Beverly Center.

  Most days I hung around the greenhouse, then maybe did some volunteer work at the Kawamura Conservatory at UCLA. Commercials paid well and made few claims on my time. And I didn’t really need much money. My father refused to accept any rent for the house, not that I pushed him very hard on it.

  My agent, Elaine Chen—who’s also my cousin; Chen is her married name—sent me on a couple of auditions a week. I got lucky on a fair percentage, and stole jobs from people who put all their waking hours into making themselves appealing to casting directors. I did maybe a half-dozen commercials a year, say twenty thousand dollars’ worth, and that was plenty. My daily rate had inched up to over a thousand, and with residuals I made out oka
y.

  The previous year I’d done a series of spots for Olsen’s Natural Garden Solutions, and somehow the chemistry between my “wife” and “kids” and me had touched a chord. People came up to me on the street and said, “It takes a bug to catch a bug,” and smiled knowingly. And I’d get embarrassed and hide in a doorway.

  Now, with warm weather breaking out and aphids having a field day with people’s roses and such, they’d brought the commercials back. And someone at Olsen’s ad agency had gotten the bright idea to take Diane Shostakovich—the actress who played my wife—and me, and dump us in kiosks at shopping malls, surrounded by stacks of biological controls, and have us tell the public all about them. Rather, Diane would tell them and I would act ignorant, the same role I played in the commercials.

  They’d scheduled a whole bunch of these appearances, which struck me as an easy, if inane, way to supplement my income. Plus, I got to go to exotic locales like pasadena, home of the Tournament of Roses, and Northridge, home of the Northridge Earthquake.

  My dog and pony show at Beverly Center began at one. I put on my fake wedding ring in the parking structure, then spent several hours listening to Diane spout interesting facts like “The descendants of a single female ladybird beetle can eat two hundred thousand aphids in one season” while we sold dozens of packs of them. And of lacewing larvae. And of parasitic wasps.

  Actually, I let Diane handle the parasitic wasps. Even though I knew they were minuscule and couldn’t possibly hurt me, I couldn’t get over the fact that they were wasps, a type of insect I have a completely irrational fear of. Diane, fortunately, had caught on to this back when we were shooting the commercials.

  We were off at five. Diane wanted a snack, so we went to the food court for frozen yogurts. She was thin, short, blond, in her late thirties. She’d been moderately successful in commercials and as a day player on TV, and did a lot of theater too. Regional, New York for a while. I’d met her long ago when she did a show at the Altair.