Ultimately,
it was the wasp's fault that I plunged Gina into the pool of insecticide.
But maybe I shared the responsibility. I could have waited a couple
of days, until it was time to go over to Brenda's anyway to feed the
canaries, to find out just which variety of Euphorbia viguieri
I had. Gina would have been at work, helping people with too much disposable
income decide which overpriced furniture to dispose of it on. The Cygon
would have soaked into the ground, rendered relatively harmless.
I could have waited,
but I didn't.
The sequence of
events culminating in Gina's toxic bath began Memorial Day afternoon,
around four-thirty, the end of the beginning of another sunshiny Los
Angeles summer. An out-of-season deluge the night before had rendered
the air smog-free and the ground swampy. I was out back, nosing around
my collection of cacti and other succulent plants, killing time until
Gina arrived with the Jackie Chan videos essential to our planned evening
of comedic mayhem and take-out Thai.
I cruised by the
winter-growers on the bench outside the greenhouse. Old Sam Oliver kept
telling me that, since I lived on the relatively cool Westside, if I
kept watering the pelargoniums and sarcocaulons—the so-called
succulent geraniums—they'd stay green all year round. But they
weren't having any of it, dropping waves of leaves between the slats
of the bench and onto the redwood bark below. As if to mock both Sam
and me, the rain had accelerated the defoliation rate.
I entered the greenhouse
and noticed my Euphorbia viguieri was loaded with spider webs.
I had no problem with a living room that hadn't been vacuumed in weeks,
and my pickup truck resembled the aftermath of a hurricane, but anything
in the greenhouse was a different story. I started at the crown of big
oval leaves and worked my way down the two-foot stem, removing webs
and sucked-dry insects from the profusion of gray spines that would
make you think the plant was a cactus if you didn't know better. When
I got down to soil level, I realized the label was missing. A quick
search failed to turn it up.
One might wonder
why I couldn't just make another, since I knew which species it was.
But I didn't remember the variety. There were four, all impossible to
spell or pronounce, and for the life of me I couldn't recall which one
I had. I could look in Rauh's Madagascar book, but experience had shown
me no matter how many photos they put in the books, none of them would
match my plant. No, this would require a trip to Brenda's. My viguieri
was originally a piece she'd accidentally knocked off her gigantic specimen;
I just had to bring it over and match it up.
"Joe? You in there?"
I poked my head out of the greenhouse. Gina stood just outside the back
door with tapes in hand. She'd let herself into the house, just like
she always did. She had on a sleeveless yellow blouse and denim shorts
and sandals, and her hair was carelessly pinned up. She looked gorgeous—just
like she always did—and, just like always, I wouldn't tell her
so unless she needed to hear it, which was typically about once a month.
"What'd you get?"
I asked.
"Crime Story
and Rumble in the Bronx."
"Crime Story?"
I shut the greenhouse door and headed for the house. "Didn't we hate
that one?"
"Yeah. The one
with no comedy and all the gratuitous violence."
"As opposed to
the essential violence in the others. Remind me, why did we want to
see it again?"
"I thought we'd
give it another chance. Maybe we're missing something. Maybe there's
some inscrutable Oriental way of viewing it we haven't figured out yet.
If we still hate it we can skip right to Rumble." A slight pause.
"When was the last time you shaved?"
I rubbed my hand
along my chin. It did feel a little furry. "Last Thursday, I think.
For the Subaru audition. I planned on doing it again Wednesday, for
the Olsen's shoot. Why? Are you ashamed to be seen with me?"
"I wonder how you'd
look with a beard."
"Just like I did
sixteen years ago. You hated it, remember? Among other things, you said
it tickled your—"
"Of course I remember.
But tickling me isn't an issue anymore, and with the way your face has
filled out I think you'd look good with one now."
"I think I'd look
like a rabbi with one now. Besides, people with beards don't get commercials."
We went inside
and into the living room. Gina slid Crime Story into the VCR
and moved toward the couch. "Don't sit down yet," I said.
She gave me a dirty
look. She has this sixth sense about when I'm about to propose something
stupid. "Why not?"
"We have to go
over to Brenda's first."
"What for?"
"To check on the
canaries."
The look got dirtier.
"She just left for Madagascar, what, a couple of hours ago?"
"Actually, I'm
not sure her flight's even taken off yet."
"So why would the
canaries need checking on?"
"Maybe she forgot
to feed them before she left."
"She loves those
damned birds. We can assume they've been fed." She pointedly sat down
on the couch. "Therefore, there's no reason to go over there now." She
cocked her head. "This has something to do with plants, doesn't it?"
"No, I'm just worried
the birds might be freaking out because she's not there and—"
She jumped up and
wagged a finger at me. "You want to wander around her greenhouse, don't
you? You want to prowl around in there without her breathing down your
neck. She's not gone an hour and—"
"It's the canaries,
I swear."
"Your nose is growing."
"Okay, it's not
the canaries."
"It's the plants,
isn't it?"
"Yeah. But it's
not some prurient wandering mania. I have a very specific need." I told
her about the missing label.
"And this can't
wait a day or two?"
"If I don't figure
it out now, it'll bug me constantly and I won't fully enjoy Jackie.
I'll sit and sulk and make you miserable too."
"I will never understand
plant freaks."
"No one else does
either. Come on, she's only ten minutes away; we'll be back in half
an hour."
She gave in. She
always does, like I always do when she wants to go for ice cream at
one in the morning. We piled into my Datsun pickup and drove over to
Brenda's. We walked around back and carefully picked our way over the
soggy ground toward the greenhouse.
This brings us
to the wasp. It came out of nowhere and dive-bombed my head. I reacted
like I usually do when a wasp shows up. I took a flying leap.
If one were to
list the adjectives most often applied to me over the preceding ten
years, since I gave up the theater world, lazy would probably
rank number one. Lacking direction would be way up there. But
one that I'd never heard, in all my forty-four years, was well-coordinated.
Which helps explain why the space I took my flying leap into was the
one Gina already occupied, why my feet slipped on the muddy turf, and
why, when I grabbed for whatever was handy, it was Gina's arm. Three
death-defying seconds later she toppled backward and dropped hind-end-first
into a big puddle reeking of Cygon.
She unleashed a
stream of Spanish invective. I knew it was invective because Gina speaks
the tongue of her forebears only when she's cursing.
"Don't let it get
in your eyes," I said, trying to help her up without getting the smelly
liquid on myself.
"Goddamn it, Joe,
that's about the only orifice it isn't in." She managed to get to her
feet. Her eyes swept down, surveying the damage. "My shorts are ruined."
"I'll buy you some
new ones."
She wrinkled her
nose. "This stuff really stinks. What is it?"
"Cygon. Brenda
must have done a drench right before she left."
"Sounds deadly."
"To mealybugs,
scale, and the dreaded red spider mite."
"How about humans?"
"It's a systemic.
It has to get inside you to do any damage."
"Have I mentioned
my orifices?"
"Good point. You'd
better use Brenda's shower. Come on."
We hustled around
to the front door. I had some trouble with the lock. Gina jabbed me
in the small of the back. "I'm dying of insecticide here."
We passed through
Brenda's jumbled living room. She'd left one of the barred windows open
and a fan going for the birds, but it was still stuffy. Scores of botanical
texts, dozens of books on Madagascar, and an assortment of erotica competed
for space on the mismatched bookshelves. Native artifacts, heavy on
the zebu horn, filled the gaps. The curtains were a colorful print she'd
brought back on one of her forays.
Canary cage number
one stood on a brass stand in the corner. Muck and Mire chirped a greeting.
"Hi, guys," I replied.
"Can you talk to
the birds later?" Gina said. "This stuff is eating away at my skin."
We went down the
hallway and into the bedroom. A brass bed with a gauzy blue canopy dominated
it. In the far corner, next to the computer table, a vertical metal
framework lined with chicken wire divided off the three-by-three area
that was home to the rest of Brenda's canaries: Groucho, Chico, Harpo,
Zeppo, Gummo, and Brillo. "Go on into the bathroom," I said. "I'll find
you a robe or something."
"Okay."
I turned to the
walk-in closet and pulled the door open. A hint of Brenda's perfume
wafted out. Memories of evenings spent under that blue canopy flickered
through my mind and brought a smile to my lips. I stepped in and searched
for a bathrobe, but none turned up. "Hey, Gi," I said. "No robe. Is
there one in there?"
She didn't answer.
I exited the closet and yelled at the closed bathroom door. "Gi? Is
her bathrobe in there?"
Still no response.
I got concerned. Maybe she'd slipped and cracked her skull open. "Gina?"
Nothing. I rushed
toward the bathroom. I'd nearly reached it when the door opened. Gina
stood there wearing a stricken expression. She seemed smaller somehow.
Shrunken.
"What?" I said.
She didn't reply,
merely stared back over her shoulder toward the tub. For some reason
I thought there was a dead animal in there. A squirrel had gotten in
and starved to death, or a wild bird had come to visit its domestic
buddies and bashed its head in on the sliding shower door. But then
I, too, looked over Gina's shoulder, and that was when I saw my friend
Brenda Belinski.
She wore one of
the loose tank tops she favored, a green and purple stripe. Whatever
else she had on lay hidden behind the sliding door's frosted glass.
Her skin was waxy and her lips pale. Her auburn hair hung limply against
the white fiberglass of the tub. Her eyes were closed tight, as if squeezing
away some awful sight.
But it was her
mouth that grabbed my attention. Rather, what was in her mouth. It might
have been weirdly erotic under other circumstances, some Lewis Carroll
rendition of fellatio, if she'd exhibited even the slightest hint of
life. But she was deathly still. And the four inches of Euphorbia
abdelkuri jutting out between her lips was merely obscene.
