Death of an Orchid Lover (4 page)

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 okay.

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.

A play she’d been rehearsing was opening the following weekend. I’d asked her several times to tell me about it, but she kept blowing me off. She seemed sheepish about it, making me think it was one of those shows you do for exposure but would just as soon your friends didn’t know about. I told her I wasn’t going to let her leave the table until she filled me in.

She shook her head. “It’s experimental yet commercial.”

“That usually means at the end everyone takes their clothes off.”

She laughed. “It’s really not bad. And only one person takes her clothes off.”

“You?”

“No, not me. The playwright’s the producer of
Huff and Petty
, you know, the cop show? And he’s getting some important people down to see it, and I have a pretty meaty part. Exposure, you know?”

“What’s it called?”

“Go Down Moses.
It’s about a fictional conspiracy between Grandma Moses and Robert Moses.”

“Who’s Robert Moses?”

“Some New Yorker who was involved in transportation improvement and things like that. He was a boyhood hero of the playwright.”

“When should I come see it?”

“You don’t have to, you know.”

“I want to.”

“You’re sweet. Can you come next Saturday? Friday’s opening, we’ve papered the house to make it look good for the critics, but we’re trying to get some people in Saturday so we have an audience to work with. I can probably get you comps.” Theater talk for freebies. From the word
complimentary.

“Comps are good.”

“I can get you at least two. Do you want to bring someone? I don’t really know a whole lot about you, Joe. I know you’re not married, but do you have a girlfriend or anything? Wait, I shouldn’t assume. Not in this business. A boyfriend?”

Gina would go with me. We’d spent years being each other’s dates when the occasion demanded.

Then I thought of Jill. Even after four months, I was having trouble remembering that Gina wasn’t available for me every Saturday night. And with Jill in San Francisco this weekend, there was a good chance Gina’d be tied up with her all the next. Maybe I could wait until later in the run to—

“Joe? Hello?”

“Sorry. Two for this Saturday would be great. And I’m straight, by the way.”

“Good,” Diane said. “I mean, good that you’re coming. It really doesn’t matter to me if you’re straight or not.”

“I don’t know why I said that.”

“You’ll meet Tom Saturday. My other husband.”

“I’m looking forward to it.”

Gina came over at seven. We drove to Trader Joe’s and picked up some frozen shrimp and stir-fry vegetables and cheap portobello mushrooms. Then we went to the Baskin-Robbins on Venice and got a couple of hand-packed pints. I asked the teenage girl behind the counter why two scoops cost $3.55, while a hand-packed pint, which was twice as big, was only a quarter or so more. Gina berated me for giving the poor kid a hard time. “Why doesn’t the American public figure this out?” I asked, and Gina gave me a glare and I shut up.

We cooked everything except the ice cream in my electric wok, then sat watching a
National Geographic
special on the giant squid. I complained that they never actually showed the beast, except in animation. Gina pointed out that they couldn’t do that, since nobody had ever seen a live one, and I said, “Still,” in that way you say “still” when you know the other person’s logic is faultless and you wish it weren’t.

A commercial came on. Gina got up to spoon out dessert. I cycled the remote, stopping on the lipstick commercial with Ziggy Marley prancing on the beach with Tyra Banks and some other models. Gina came back in, with huge dishes of ice cream in hand, and saw me watching it. She seemed as if she wanted to say something, but she refrained.

Three hours later. We were still on the couch, still munching, still soaking up mindless television. Ziggy Marley and his harem came on again. I perked up.

“You know,” Gina said. “It’s really okay with me if you go out with the orchid woman.”

“Thank you, O One-who-gives-permission.”

“I mean, you do need a girlfriend.”

“Tell me about it.”

She twisted around on the couch, put her hands on my shoulders, looked me in the eye. “We’ve been over this a thousand times. It’s not you.”

“I seem to be the common denominator, don’t I? Jeez, I haven’t had a Real Date since, what, last July with Iris.” In recognition of the ongoing spottiness of our social lives, Gina and I had long ago given Real Dates the capitalized status usually reserved for events like the Age of Reason and the Summer of Love.

I focused on Gina, realized she didn’t know what to say.

“I’m sorry, Gi. I shouldn’t lay this on you. You have a nice relationship. I shouldn’t bore you with my lack of one.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I have a nice relationship.”

There it was again. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Everything with Jill is fine.”

“Gi, we’ve been friends long enough that I can tell when you’re bullshitting. What’s wrong?”

“It’s nothing.”

“It’s something. What?”

She let go of my shoulders and slumped back in a corner of the couch. She doesn’t slump very often. She looked very small. “I think she’s seeing someone else.”

“Why do you think that?”

“I don’t know, it’s just a feeling I get, like she has something to tell me that she can’t get up the courage to tell me. I know she’s up in San Francisco visiting friends, but I can’t help wondering if she’s really with somebody else. Because otherwise why wouldn’t she invite me?”

A small admission: some part of me was happy at the prospect of Gina and Jill breaking up. Because, no matter
that our relationship hadn’t been romantic for seventeen years, sometimes I wanted Gina all to myself.

I shook my head. “She’s not good enough for you anyway. And if you break up, you’ll find someone else. You always do.”

“Oh, eventually I do, but they never stick.”

“Carlos would have stuck, if you’d let him.”

“Carlos’s chief attraction was his ass.”

“And a fine ass it was.”

“Not fine enough to make up for his …” She reached out a hand, as if expecting to pluck the word from midair.

“
Vapidity
is the word you’re looking for. Okay, you’re right about Carlos.”

She looked at me sadly. “Sometimes I think …” She stopped, seeming to wonder if she should go on, and phrasing in her head what she would say if she did. The telephonerang.

We looked at each other stupidly. “Are you going to answer it?” Gina asked.

“I guess so.” I checked my watch. Ten after midnight. I pulled myself up and went to the phone. “Hello.”

“Joe?” The voice was familiar but not instantly identifiable.

“Yes?”

“It’s Laura.”

“Oh. Hi.” A sequence of thoughts cascaded through my head. She wanted to convince me to get back into acting. She’d had a sudden urge to reinvestigate est and wanted me to come along. She wanted to ask me out on a date. “How are you?”

“Not good.”

“What’s going on?”

“It’s Albert.”

“Albert? Albert-from-this-afternoon Albert?”

“Yes. He’s dead.”

“Dead? What happened?”

“He was murdered. And they think I did it.”

G
INA WAS PRACTICALLY JUMPING UP AND DOWN ON THE
couch, trying to get me to tell her what was going on. I held up a hand to get her to wait.