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Authors: Nathan Walpow
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out where we knew each other from, finally realized she’d been in a visiting production at the Altair.
I lay on my tiny bunk thinking about Brenda. My mind must have considered this a huge imposition; next thing I knew a knock on the door startled me awake. The assistant director poked her head in. “Rise and shine, sleepyhead.” It was a quarter to nine.
I rose and shone, got made up, and went out to the backyard, where they were shooting. They were getting the kid scenes out of the way first so the dear little tykes wouldn’t get overtired and become pains in the ass. My “daughter” explained to my “son” how she felt safe playing in the yard now that Mom and Dad had stopped using those nasty chemical insecticides. “Son” replied that it was fun watching all the ladybugs. They shot the thing a dozen times, took a break, shot a half dozen more. Around eleven they had what they wanted, dismissed the kids, and moved on to my “wife” and me. They set us up by some rosebushes, where I, as the somewhat befuddled husband, held a pack of ladybugs up to my eye, while my wife, the clever one, told me how each one could eat eight gazillion times its weight in aphids. We rehearsed it twice, I developed just the proper look of amazement, and we shot the thing. We were such professionals that we got it right on the seventh take. I left for home at twelve-thirty.
Gina’d left a note saying she had a couple of clients to see and would call me in the late afternoon. I considered a swingthrough the greenhouse to make up for the one I’d missed in the morning because of my early call. But that special connection I always felt on my early-morning jaunts was never there later in the day. Trips to the greenhouse in the afternoon were for practical purposes, watering and disposing of bugs and removing detritus.
Such tasks seemed most unappealing at the moment, so instead of going out back I entered the Jungle with the itinerary Sam had given me. It said Brenda’s flight had been scheduled for five-twenty, Monday evening. She had a three-hour stopover in Paris, then on to Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital. She would have spent a day there before leaving for the bush.
I looked up. Maybe I could have saved her if I’d been more insistent. I’d offered to drive her to the airport, but she preferred the shuttle. It avoided those tearful good-bye scenes, she said. I pointed out we were several years beyond tearful good-byes. She laughed and said, “You never know.”
Now I shook my head. “You never do, do you, Brenda?”
The night before, Gina and I had talked about interrogating somebody. It was time to start. But with whom?
Half an hour later I pulled in next to a decrepit lime-green Renault Le Car in the Kawamura Conservatory’s tiny parking lot. My spot was marked STAFF ONLY. I silently dared the Parking Gestapo to do something about it.
The conservatory was in the northwest quadrant of the gargantuan UCLA campus, near Pauley Pavilion. A ramshackle wooden sign announced it was only open to the public on Saturdays and alternate Tuesdays. This was because they had no funding. The reason they had no funding, accordingto the late Professor Belinski, was pure unadulterated asininity on the part of the administration. Brenda’d been fond of pointing out how the football team always had all the money they wanted, even though they sucked a lot of the time. She never did get it about college football.
I found the full-time staff of the conservatory, one Eugene Rand, in front of the entrance, digging up an aloe that had been infested with aloe mite. Not even a tub of Cygon will cure aloe mite.
Rand was in his mid-thirties, a failed graduate student unable to find his place in the world, who’d migrated to the conservatory because he liked plants more than he did people, and who Brenda kept on staff because he would work cheap. He’d lost his hair early and blown large portions of his meager salary on
I lay on my tiny bunk thinking about Brenda. My mind must have considered this a huge imposition; next thing I knew a knock on the door startled me awake. The assistant director poked her head in. “Rise and shine, sleepyhead.” It was a quarter to nine.
I rose and shone, got made up, and went out to the backyard, where they were shooting. They were getting the kid scenes out of the way first so the dear little tykes wouldn’t get overtired and become pains in the ass. My “daughter” explained to my “son” how she felt safe playing in the yard now that Mom and Dad had stopped using those nasty chemical insecticides. “Son” replied that it was fun watching all the ladybugs. They shot the thing a dozen times, took a break, shot a half dozen more. Around eleven they had what they wanted, dismissed the kids, and moved on to my “wife” and me. They set us up by some rosebushes, where I, as the somewhat befuddled husband, held a pack of ladybugs up to my eye, while my wife, the clever one, told me how each one could eat eight gazillion times its weight in aphids. We rehearsed it twice, I developed just the proper look of amazement, and we shot the thing. We were such professionals that we got it right on the seventh take. I left for home at twelve-thirty.
Gina’d left a note saying she had a couple of clients to see and would call me in the late afternoon. I considered a swingthrough the greenhouse to make up for the one I’d missed in the morning because of my early call. But that special connection I always felt on my early-morning jaunts was never there later in the day. Trips to the greenhouse in the afternoon were for practical purposes, watering and disposing of bugs and removing detritus.
Such tasks seemed most unappealing at the moment, so instead of going out back I entered the Jungle with the itinerary Sam had given me. It said Brenda’s flight had been scheduled for five-twenty, Monday evening. She had a three-hour stopover in Paris, then on to Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital. She would have spent a day there before leaving for the bush.
I looked up. Maybe I could have saved her if I’d been more insistent. I’d offered to drive her to the airport, but she preferred the shuttle. It avoided those tearful good-bye scenes, she said. I pointed out we were several years beyond tearful good-byes. She laughed and said, “You never know.”
Now I shook my head. “You never do, do you, Brenda?”
The night before, Gina and I had talked about interrogating somebody. It was time to start. But with whom?
Half an hour later I pulled in next to a decrepit lime-green Renault Le Car in the Kawamura Conservatory’s tiny parking lot. My spot was marked STAFF ONLY. I silently dared the Parking Gestapo to do something about it.
The conservatory was in the northwest quadrant of the gargantuan UCLA campus, near Pauley Pavilion. A ramshackle wooden sign announced it was only open to the public on Saturdays and alternate Tuesdays. This was because they had no funding. The reason they had no funding, accordingto the late Professor Belinski, was pure unadulterated asininity on the part of the administration. Brenda’d been fond of pointing out how the football team always had all the money they wanted, even though they sucked a lot of the time. She never did get it about college football.
I found the full-time staff of the conservatory, one Eugene Rand, in front of the entrance, digging up an aloe that had been infested with aloe mite. Not even a tub of Cygon will cure aloe mite.
Rand was in his mid-thirties, a failed graduate student unable to find his place in the world, who’d migrated to the conservatory because he liked plants more than he did people, and who Brenda kept on staff because he would work cheap. He’d lost his hair early and blown large portions of his meager salary on
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