The White Album (29 page)

“Frankly it’s an expensive business to get into,” Marvin Saltzman said
.
He was turning the pages
of Sanders List,
the standard orchid studbook, published every several
years and showing the parentage
of every hybrid registered with the Royal Horticultural Society, and he seemed oblivious to the primeval silence of the greenhouse beyond the office window
.
He had shown me how Amado Vazquez places the pollen from one plant into the ovary of a flower on another
.
He had explained that the best times to do this are at full moon and high tide, because phalaenopsis plants are more fertile then
.
He had explained that a phalaenopsis is more fertile at full moon because in nature it must be pollinated by a night-flying moth, and over sixty-five million years of evolution its period of highest fertility began to coincide with its period of highest visibility
.
He had explained that a phalaenopsis is more fertile at high tide because the moisture content of every plant responds to tidal movement
.
It was all an old story to Marvin Saltzman
.
I could not take my eyes from the window
.

“You bring back five thousand seedlings from the jungle and you wait three years for them to flower,” Marvin Saltzman said
.
“You find two you like and you throw out the other four thousand nine hundred ninety-eight and you try to breed the two
.
Maybe the pollenization takes, eighty-five percent of the time it doesn’t
.
Say you’re lucky, it takes, you’ll still wait another four years before you see a flower
.
Meanwhile you’ve got a big capital investment
.
An Arthur Freed could take $400,000 a year from M-G-M and put $100,000 of it into getting this place started, but not many people could
.
You see a lot of what we call backyard nurseries—people who have fifty or a hundred plants, maybe they have two they think are exceptional, they decide to breed them—but you talk about major nurseries, there are maybe only ten in the United States, another ten in Europe
.
That’s about it
.
Twenty
.
”

Twenty is also about how many head growers there are, which is part of what lends Amado Vazquez his legendary aspect, and after a while I left the office and went out to see him in the greenhouse
.
There in the greenhouse everything was operating as usual to approximate that particular level of a Malaysian rain forest—not on the ground but perhaps a hundred feet up—where epiphytic orchids grow wild
.
In the rain forest these orchids get broken by wind and rain
.
They get pollinated randomly and rarely by insects
.
Their seedlings are crushed by screaming monkeys and tree boas and the orchids live unseen and die young
.
There in the greenhouse nothing would b
reak the orchids and they would
be pollinated at full moon and high tide by Amado Vazquez, and their seedlings would be tended in a sterile box with sterile gloves and sterile tools by Amado Vazquez’s wife, Maria, and the orchids would not seem to die at all
.
“We don’t know how long they’ll Hve,” Marvin Saltzman told me
.
“They haven’t been bred under protected conditions that long
.
The botanists estimate a hundred and fifty, two hundred years, but we don’t know
.
All we know is that a plant a hundred years old will show no signs of senility
.
”

It was very peaceful there in the greenhouse with Amado Vazquez and the plants that would outlive us both
.
“We grew in osmunda then,” he said suddenly
.
Osmunda is a potting medium
.
Amado Vazquez talks exclusively in terms of how the orchids grow
.
He had been talking about the years when he first came to this country and got a job with his brother tending a private orchid collection in San Marino, and he had fallen silent
.
”
I didn’t know orchids then, now they’re like my children
.
You wait for the first bloom like you wait for a baby to come
.
Sometimes you wait four years and it opens and it isn’t what you expected, maybe your heart wants to break, but you love it
.
You never say,’that one was prettier
.
’You just love them
.
My whole life is orchids
.
”

And in fact it was
.
Amado Vazquez’s wife, Maria (as in
Phal
.
Maria Vasquez
“Malibu,” the spelling of Vazquez being mysteriously altered by everyone at Arthur Freed except the Vazquezes themselves), worked in the laboratory at Arthur Freed
.
His son, George (as in
Phal
.
George Vasquez
“Malibu”), was the sales manager at Arthur Freed
.
His daughter, Linda (as in
Phal Linda Mia
“Innocence”), worked at Arthur Freed before her marriage
.
Amado Vazquez will often get up in the night to check a heater, adjust a light, hold a seed pod in his hand and try to sense if morning will be time enough to sow the seeds in the sterile flask
.
When Amado and Maria Vazquez go to Central or South America, they go to look for orchids
.
When Amado and Maria Vazquez went for the first time to Europe a few years ago, they looked for orchids
.
“I asked all over Madrid for orchids,” Amado Vazquez recalled
.
“Finally they tell me about this one place
.
I go there, I knock
.
The woman finally lets me in
.
She agrees to let me see the orchids
.
She takes me into a house and
...
”

Amado Vazquez broke off, laughing
.

“She has three orchids,” he finally managed to say
.
“Three
.
One of them dead
.
All three from Oregon
.
”

We were standing in a sea of orchids, an extravagance of orchids, and he had given me an armful of blossoms from his own cattleyas to take to my child, more blossoms maybe than in all of Madrid
.
It seemed to me that day that I had never talked to anyone so direct and unembarrassed about the things he loved
.
He had told me earlier that he had never become a United States citizen because he had an image in his mind which he knew to be false but could not shake: the image was that of standing before a judge and stamping on the flag of Mexico
.
“And I love my country,” he had said
.
Amado Vazquez loved his country
.
Amado Vazquez loved his family
.
Amado Vazquez loved orchids
.
“You want to know how I feel about the plants,” he said as I was leaving
.
“I’ll tell you
.
I will die in orchids
.
”

4

In the part of Malibu where I lived from January of 1971 until quite recently we all knew one another’s cars, and watched for them on the highway and at the Trancas Market and at the Point Dume Gulf station
.
We exchanged information at the Trancas Market
.
We left packages and messages for one another at the Gulf station
.
We called one another in times of wind and fire and rain, we knew when one another’s septic tanks needed pumping, we watched for ambulances on the highway and helicopters on the beach and worried about one another’s dogs and horses and children and corral gates and Coastal Commission permits
.
An accident on the highway was likely to involve someone we knew
.
A rattlesnake in my driveway meant its mate in yours
.
A stranger’s campfire on your beach meant fire on both our slopes
.

In fact this was a way of life I had not expected to find in Malibu
.
When I first moved in 1971 from Hollywood to a house on the Pacific Coast Highway I had accepted the conventional notion that Malibu meant the easy life, had worried that we would be cut off from “the real world,” by which I believe I meant daily exposure to the Sunset Strip
.
By the time we left Malibu, seven years later, I had come to see the spirit of the place as one of shared isolation and adversity, and I think now that I never loved the house on the Pacific Coast Highway more than on those many days when it was impossible to leave it, when fire or flood had in fact closed the highway
.
We moved to this house
on the highway in the year of our daughter’s fifth birthday
.
In the year of her twelfth it rained until the highway collapsed, and one of her friends drowned at Zuma Beach, a casualty of Quaaludes
.
One morning during the fire season of 1978, some months after we had sold the house on the Pacific Coast Highway, a brush fire caught in Agoura, in the San Fernando Valley
.
Within two hours a Santa Ana wind had pushed this fire across 25,000 acres and thirteen miles to the coast, where it jumped the Pacific Coast Highway as a half-mile fire storm generating winds of 100 miles per hour and temperatures up to 2500 degrees Fahrenheit
.
Refugees huddled on Zuma Beach
.
Horses caught fire and were shot on the beach, birds exploded in the air
.
Houses did not explode but imploded, as in a nuclear strike
.
By the time this fire storm had passed 197 houses had vanished into ash, many of them houses which belonged or had belonged to people we knew
.
A few days after the highway reopened I drove out to Malibu to see Amado Vazquez, who had, some months before, bought from the Freed estate all the stock at Arthur Freed Orchids, and had been in the process of moving it a half-mile down the canyon to his own new nursery, Zuma Canyon Orchids
.
I found him in the main greenhouse at what had been Arthur Freed Orchids
.
The place was now a range not of orchids but of shattered glass and melted metal and the imploded shards of the thousands of chemical beakers that had held the Freed seedlings, the new crosses
.
“I lost three years,” Amado Vazquez said, and for an instant I thought we would both cry
.
“You want today to see flowers,” he said then, “we go down to the other place
.
”
I did not want that day to see flowers
.
After I said goodbye to Amado Vazquez my husband and daughter and I went to look at the house on the Pacific Coast Highway in which we had lived for seven years
.
The fire had come to within 125 feet of the property, then stopped or turned or been beaten back, it was hard to tell which
.
In any case it was
no longer our house
.

1976—78