Death of an Orchid Lover (12 page)

T
HE
P
ALISADES
O
RCHID
S
OCIETY MET AT A
M
ETHODIST
church, leading me to wonder if all their events were held at houses of worship. This one was in the middle of a neighborhood of houses that probably went for a million or more. It resembled one of the missions, with a big tower and white adobe walls and thick wood beams all over the place. It seemed more Catholic than Methodist. Not that I knew much about Methodists.

The meeting was in a community room on the second floor. At least seventy people milled around, more than I’d ever seen at any succulent function. A typical garden club crowd, with orchid modifications. Lots of old folks, in couples and in singles of both genders. A fair dusting of sturdily built middle-aged women. Some Asian-Americans, and a couple of guys who fit the gay cliché.

To the right of the entrance, near a table full of plants, a tall skinny woman with a buzz cut was selling copious quantities of orange tickets. A raffle. We’d tried it in our cactus club and it flopped.

Speaking of the cactus club, the plant display put ours to
shame. There were well over a hundred blooming plants on the table. They were mostly in plastic nursery pots, black gallon ones and smaller green ones, with a few baskets sprinkled through. Quite unlike the cactus folks, who had a mania for presenting their show plants in bonsai pots and other fancy ceramics.

Though one guy stood at the table with clipboard in hand, it didn’t look like the judging extravaganza Sam had led me to expect. I mentioned this to Gina. A voice at my shoulder said, “It’s downstairs.”

It was Sharon Turner. She had a sundress on, all pastel colors and soft lines. I introduced her to Gina. They swapped appraising looks. I asked Sharon about the judging.

“Do you want to see it?” she said.

“Can I?”

“If you can behave yourself.”

“I will, Ma, I promise. You coming, Gi?”

Gina shook her head. “I think I’ll hang around up here. Cover more territory that way.” She walked off toward the raffle table.

“Territory?” Sharon said.

“She’s helping me out with my helping Laura out.” Dottie Lennox cruised up. “If it isn’t my new friend.”

“Hi, Dottie.”

“You taking good care of him, Sharon?”

“I am.”

“Good. He doesn’t know anything about orchids. He needs someone to teach him. You remember, dear, how it was when you joined the club. How you didn’t know anyone, and how I had to take you by the hand.”

“Of course, Dottie, but we have to go now. We’re going to watch the judging.”

“How boring,” Dottie said, and rolled off.

I turned to Sharon. “Didn’t you say a friend brought you to your first meeting?”

“I did. Dottie’s a little bit, well, dotty. Come, let’s get downstairs.”

At the bottom of the steps she stopped. “Look, about yesterday—”

I shook my head. “Forget about it. I’ve gotten turned down before.” It came out more spiteful than I’d intended.

She opened her mouth. Nothing came out. She shut it and walked down the hall, stopping at a gray metal door. When we got there she said, “Some of the judges are pretty uptight. Just follow my lead, all right? Supposedly the judging is open to anyone who can keep their mouth shut, but—”

“My lips are sealed. And look, I didn’t mean to sound so nasty a minute—”

She shook her head. “Don’t worry about it. I probably deserved it.” She pulled the door open.

The judging took place in a utility room with cinder block walls and an unadorned concrete floor. Overhead pipes dangled from brackets, with valves and red handles here and there. A fan on a pole in one corner more or less pushed the warm air around. Four long tables sat under fluorescent fixtures, with six or eight people around each. One of the men caught my eye. Rather, his bad toupee did. Along with the thick black mustache inhabiting his lip, it made him look like Josef Stalin.

More tables along one side of the room held several dozen plants that were evidently up for judging. A handful of people walked around distributing them to the tables, all women except for one guy with a ruddy face and a shirt buttoned up to the neck. He was saying something about “a delectable
paph” when we came in. One of the women was a nun, or enjoyed dressing like one.

Sharon hesitated before selecting the table in the far right corner. We stood by while the judges there considered the plant before them. All but one were men, ranging from thirtyish to wrinkle city. The one woman had gray curls piled on top of her head.

The center of attraction was a dendrobium, with a stem resembling a fat reed and seven or eight white flowers with red and purple highlights. It sat at the middle of the table, naked to the world. Every few seconds someone would reach out and turn it, knit his brows, lean back in contemplation.

“Anyone?” said the guy who seemed to be running things. He had a wide face, reddish hair, a matching beard.

There were a couple of headshakes, someone said, “Not with that color break,” and suddenly the ruddy-faced guy was there, whisking the plant away, promising another momentarily.

Bearded Guy noticed us. “Hi, Sharon. What’s up?”

“I wondered if we could sit in for a while.”

He looked around the table. “Any objections?”

“Long as they’re quiet,” said a long-faced man chewing on an unlit pipe.

“Like mice,” Sharon said. “This is my friend Joe. He’s a novice. He’s interested in judging.” She told me everyone’s names. I immediately forgot all but Bearded Guy’s. He was Bob something.

I got us a couple of folding chairs and we squeezed in at the end of the table, with Bob on my right. The nun brought another plant, a cattleya. It sat there only a few seconds. There was a questioning look on one face, the slightest of nods on another, and the plant went off toward the staging
area. Next was a cymbidium with spikes full of bronze-colored blooms. Another subtle nod, and away it went.

“This is the preliminary judging,” Bob told me. “We pass the plants around, and if anyone thinks one has a chance for an award we set it aside for a good look later.”

“But you look at them for only a few seconds. How do you know—”

“After you’ve looked at a few thousand, you know. You don’t know for sure what’s going to award, but you know what’s not.”

“Do all these people vote on a plant?”

“In the prelims it’ll go to all the tables, and anyone can pick it for final judging, where it ends up with only one group.”

“And at the one table you just, what, average everyone’s scores?”

“Not everyone. Just the full judges and the probationaries. The other folks at the table are student judges and clerks.”

Another plant arrived. “Last of the preliminaries,” said the nun, standing by with a benevolent expression, like a parent indulging her children. Quick headshakes made their way around the table, and off the plant went, rejected in seconds.

They took a break. Most of the people at the table got up to stretch. I noticed some guy at one of the other tables watching me. Blue oxford shirt, brown hair combed straight back over one of the highest foreheads I’d ever seen. I vaguely recognized him from Albert’s party. Our eyes met briefly.

I turned back to Bob. “Why do you need monthly judging sessions? Why not just have judging at shows?”

“If we waited for shows, a lot of the plants couldn’t be judged because they wouldn’t be in bloom.”

“So really all you’re judging is the flower.”

“Pretty much. Although there are cultural awards too, where we take the whole plant into consideration.”

“Something else I’ve been wondering about. The names of the plants. They seem way too complicated.”

“Let’s go through one.” He picked a book up off the table and showed me a picture of several flowers, mostly white, with one or two violet spots on each petal and sepal. The pattern on the lip resembled a tiny angel with outstretched yellow and purple wings and outsized purple boots. The caption said “
Odontoglossum
Boreal ‘Sunset Sunspots’ HCC/ AOS.”

First is the genus, “
Odontoglossum.
Then Boreal is the grex, then—”

“The which?”

“It means a group of plants resulting from a crossing. Then Sunset Sunspots’ is this particular hybrid. HCC means Highly Commended Certificate, which is the lowest award. The AOS means the award came from the American Orchid Society.”

“And these awards, I understand, can mean money for the grower.”

Right. “If you can propagate an awarded plant, by divisions or ideally by mericloning—tissue culture, that is—you can make a significant amount of money.”

I remembered people at Albert’s discussing tissue culture. I had only the vaguest idea how it worked. Something about stimulating certain cells to grow up into entire plants.
Brave New World
, here we come. “If someone were denied an award, and felt it was because of a particular judge, that person could be upset and want to take it out on the judge.”

“You’re talking about Albert, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“It doesn’t seem likely.”

“But there are politics to the judging, right? In our cactus club, there are always people marking down plants because they know they belong to someone they don’t like. The entry tags are folded to hide the shower’s name, but if a judge has a thing about one of the entrants, they have a knack of recognizing the handwriting. Not to mention the plants. Once a plant gets to show size, it looks pretty much the same from year to year. You look at it, you say, I remember that, it’s John Doe’s plant. If you hate John Doe and you’re a judge you, whether consciously or not, tend to mark down his plants.”

“It’s not that easy to recognize an orchid from year to year. But, yeah, we have some of that.”

“Sometimes,” Sharon said, “the problem is that the judge doesn’t like the entrant’s lifestyle.”

Bob glanced over at her. “There’s some of that too.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

It took him a few seconds to answer. “See that guy over there?”

“The one with the hair,” Sharon said.

I looked. “Stalin?”

“Yes.” She giggled.

“What about him?”

Bob: “He, uh …”

“Just say it, Bob,” Sharon said. “The man’s a homophobe. If he knows a plant’s entered by one of the gay members, he’s almost certain to downgrade it.”

“It’s kind of embarrassing,” Bob said.

“Since we realized what was happening,” Sharon said, “when some of the gay members put plants in for judging, they have someone else fill out the entry form so he doesn’t recognize the handwriting.”

“But can’t he just read the names?”

“They go in with identification numbers.” She glanced toward another table, at which the guy with the big forehead sat kneading his earlobe and staring at a plant. “And the aides generally know about judges’ prejudices, and will try to keep certain plants away from them for the final judging.”

“That’s probably enough, Sharon,” Bob said.

“You’re right. He’s going to think we’re a bunch of bigots.”

The woman judge returned to the table. “Time to get going,” she called out, and the others took their places. The nun arrived with the first of the finalists.

It was a phalaenopsis called ‘Pollo Loco’ and it had white flowers with bright red highlights. All eyes were on it while the nun distributed score sheets and made sure everyone had a writing implement. Suddenly they were all talking about whether something was feathering or whether it was a color break. After a couple of minutes they marked their sheets. One of the guys tabulated the scores and announced that the average was 72.5. No award for this plant.

I asked Bob how one became a judge.

“There’s a training program. After a while you get to be a probationary and eventually, if you play things right, a judge. And there are senior judges. Albert, for instance, though I’d heard he was on the verge of giving it up.”

“How come?”

“Politics,” Sharon said.

Suddenly I was aware of how close to me she was sitting, how her thigh was barely touching my own. And I was experiencing feelings I’d gotten unfamiliar with. And I was thinking, this woman certainly is intelligent, and attractive, and gee, Joe, you haven’t been with anyone in a while, have you?

She saw me looking at her leg. Our eyes caught. She smiled, looked away.

“Oh, just look at this baby,” Bob said.

The “baby” was, I soon found out, a member of the genus
Pleurothallis
, no more than three inches across, with flowers at most three quarters of an inch wide. These, Bob told me, were the core of a group of miniatures known as pleurothallids. They were what the woman at Albert’s had been regaling us about, and now I knew why. The petals were iridescent, with green and purple predominant, the purple so dark it was almost black. Minute hairs grew from their edges.

Each person at the table wore a broad smile. There was no discussion, save for the guy with the pipe asking what the parents were. A couple of minutes later, the clerk added up the scores. 87. An Award of Merit. Someone slapped his hands together, and I thought they were going to break out into applause. Cooler heads prevailed.