The Truth About Lorin Jones

by Alison Lurie

  This vision upset Polly, almost made her sick to her stomach — or maybe that was just the jolting of the bus. She mustn’t be unreasonable, she told herself; mustn’t become paranoid. That was what her colleagues at work would say; that’s what she would have said herself a few weeks ago.

  But were her colleagues right, or was it that, away from her job, and from the deals and arrangements and assumptions of the New York art world, she was beginning to see it clearly for the first time?

  That was what Jeanne, with her suspicion of all established “patriarchal” institutions, would probably have said. Jeanne took it for granted that these institutions were corrupt and to be avoided, though it was sometimes necessary to work with them until alternative decentralized, egalitarian, woman-centered structures had been established. Every second Tuesday evening she and some of her friends met in an apartment on First Avenue to discuss this and other political issues; as yet, Polly hadn’t joined them, though she had been invited.

  Jeanne had moved into Stevie’s room three weeks ago, bringing with her a quantity of possessions surprising for someone who had lived in so many different cities and apartments. Polly had had to stack most of Stevie’s things in the spare room. But apart from this it had been a joy having her here. Jeanne was easygoing, well organized, sympathetic, and fair-minded; she was a lively conversationalist and an inspired cook. When Polly was alone she mostly opened frozen so-called gourmet dinners that, like airplane food, looked all right but tasted like reconstituted mashed potatoes, and she was always out of clean towels or butter or light bulbs, having to run down to the laundry room or out to the supermarket at awkward times.

  Jeanne saw to it that they never needed anything; she brought flowers and books and chocolates into the house; she set her flourishing houseplants on the windowsills and added her large collection of classical tapes to Polly’s. If Polly wanted to work, Jeanne was quiet and unobtrusive; but she was always ready to go shopping or to a film or a gallery after work and on weekends, when her girlfriend’s suspicious, abusive husband was home.

  Polly and Jeanne were so much together that Jeanne’s friend Ida had recently nicknamed them the Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat, after the characters in Eugene Field’s poem for children.

  The gingham dog and the calico cat

  Side by side on the table sat...

  The reference was also to their taste in clothes: Polly wore a lot of checks and plaids, while Jeanne favored delicate, old-fashioned prints. When Polly looked the poem up she discovered that the characters fought like cats and dogs, and for a few days she worried about this, wondering if Ida had intuited some potential conflict. But so far she and Jeanne had never even disagreed seriously.

  Polly’s worry about What People Would Think had also faded. All Jeanne’s friends knew she was in love with a woman in Brooklyn Heights, and Polly had taken care to tell Jim the same. His reaction had been, as usual, muted and neutral: “Oh, mmh.”

  The only problem with having Jeanne in the apartment was her girlfriend, Betsy. Polly didn’t exactly dislike Betsy, but on the other hand she had nothing much to say to her. She was a bony, heavily freckled young woman (twenty-seven) with flyaway strawberry blonde hair and a hesitant, nervous manner. She was, Polly supposed, vaguely pretty; tall and leggy, with a miniature beaked nose like a little white parrot, and a swollen pink mouth that was always slightly open, as if she had started to speak and then stopped herself; something she often did. Her favorite painter was Salvador Dali, and she didn’t see the point of abstract art: the colors were kind of nice sometimes, she admitted, but it wasn’t awfully interesting or complex really, was it?

  Because of Betsy’s husband’s growing suspicions (he had found an unequivocally affectionate but unsigned note from Jeanne, and thought his wife was seeing another man), she and Jeanne had begun meeting in Manhattan. Usually they came to the apartment during the day when Polly was out; but last night Betsy had stayed over for the first time, telling her husband the literal but deceptive truth: that she was spending the night with a girlfriend. (“Oh yes, Betsy’s here,” Polly had had to tell him when he phoned to check up. “Sure, just a moment, I’ll call her.”)

  Of course Polly wanted Jeanne to be happy, but it had made her uncomfortable that Jeanne and Betsy were being happy in Stevie’s room and in Stevie’s bunk bed. Most of the time she managed not to imagine what they did together. Probably not much, she thought usually: there was something silly and pointless about the idea of two soft female bodies rubbing up against each other. But last night, though she tried not to, she couldn’t help listening and wondering what exactly Jeanne and Betsy were doing and whether they were doing it in the upper bunk or the lower one. In the lower bed there would be the problem of whoever was on top hitting her head — but maybe women only lay side by side, because otherwise how. ... Up above, there would be the danger of falling out. She lay awake for some time waiting for a thud, a scream, a thump.

  On the whole Polly hoped they had used the upper bed, where nobody ever slept except now and then one of Stevie’s pals. That was stupid, because what difference could it make to Stevie, who would never know that Betsy had been here, anyway? Probably, Polly realized unwillingly, she was envious, because it had been over a year since she’d made love to anyone except, without much enthusiasm, herself.

  When Polly got home from her interview with Jacky Herbert she was even wetter than she had been at the gallery, and chilled through. Jeanne took one look at her friend and insisted on her taking a hot shower at once.

  “Well. All right,” Polly said. It was so long since anyone had been there to meet her and show any sort of solicitude that she still received it almost ungraciously.

  “And I’ll make you a nice cup of cocoa.”

  “You don’t have to do that.” Polly struggled out of her poncho.

  “I know I don’t have to.” Jeanne smiled. “But I want to.” She headed for the kitchen.

  “Has Betsy gone?” Polly called, pulling off her sopping loafers.

  “Mm.” Jeanne gave a long breathy sigh. “I’ll tell you about it after you’re warmed up.”

  “Not too sweet for you, is it?” Jeanne asked half an hour later.

  “No, just right.” Polly sighed with satisfaction. She had finished her shower and now sat in old jeans and a favorite lumberjack shirt at the kitchen table, drinking cocoa spiced with cinnamon and topped with cream, and eating Jeanne’s homemade Scottish shortbread. “So is everything going well with Betsy?”

  “I guess so.” Jeanne sighed again. “She says she’s going to tell her husband this week that we’re in love.”

  “Oh, that’s good.” Jeanne did not reply. “Isn’t it?”

  “It’s good if Betsy really does it. She promised she was going to speak to him once before, you know. But it didn’t happen.”

  “Maybe she’s afraid of him,” Polly suggested, remembering Betsy’s husband’s tense, edgy voice on the phone.

  “That’s what I think. But Betsy says not. She says she really did plan to tell him on Tuesday, but he came home with a terrible cold, and she hadn’t got the heart to do it. Apparently his colds always last at least a week.” Jeanne smiled joylessly and poured herself more cocoa, slopping it into the saucer in an uncharacteristically careless way.

  “That’s too bad,” Polly agreed. “Still, I suppose it shows that Betsy’s a very considerate person.”

  “It shows she’s very considerate of him.” Jeanne stirred her own cocoa crossly. “But there are three people involved here, right?”

  “I see what you mean. Only, you know, I think she does love you.”

  “Yes. I think she does.” Jeanne smiled again, but now very differently, in a sensual, reminiscent way that made Polly look away. “I know it’s going to be all right eventually; I just get impatient.”

  “Well, sure.”

  “I know, really, that soon we’ll be together every night.” Jeanne nodded, agreeing with herself.

  “
Every night, here?” Polly tried to make this question casual.

  “Oh, no; in Brooklyn Heights. As soon as that creep is out of the house, of course I’ll move in.”

  “Of course,” Polly echoed. But what she thought was: No more intimate conversations; no more homemade cocoa or shortbread. A chord of rejection and loss twanged in her, and the selfish wish that Betsy wouldn’t be able to get her husband out of the house until Stevie came home. “Well, I hope it’s really soon,” she lied, ashamed of herself.

  GRACE SKELLY,

  art collector

  Of course, as everyone knows, we were the first major collectors to buy Lorin’s work. At the time almost no one who counted in the art world had ever heard of her. Everything was New York School, right? That’s all most people would even look at.

  No, I’ve never gone along with the crowd. I like to study a piece of art and judge it for myself. If I can relate to it emotionally and aesthetically, I don’t give a damn what anyone else says. I play my hunches, and it’s weird, but they almost always turn out to be right. Take graffiti art, a few years ago everyone was saying ...

  Oh, yeah, when I saw Lorin’s paintings, they hit me like a bomb. That was at her last big show at the Apollo, when was it?

  Nineteen-sixty-four, really? That long ago. Of course I was very young then, just a child bride really. But somehow I had an eye already.

  Well, you know how it is at big openings. There was a crowd, and a lot to drink, and nobody was paying much attention to what was on the walls. I wouldn’t be surprised if I was about the only person there who really looked at the work. But when I saw those marvelous paintings, I just knew I had to have one of them. And pretty soon I decided it would have to be the big triptych. It was an important piece, I just knew it. After I and Bill got back to the penthouse, it kept coming into my mind, the way a tune from a show you’ve just seen does sometimes, right? It was like a kind of obsession.

  Well, the kinetic energy there, and the, uh, interplay of values. There was a physical tension between the three canvases, too, a kind of almost sensual vibration. You know what I’m talking about, you know the work. Birth, Copulation, and Death. Well, that says it all, right?

  I told Bill the next morning, Honey, I can’t get that damn painting out of my mind. It’s really got something. I made him go back to the gallery with me. And when I pointed out all the exciting visual things that were going on in Lorin’s work, he saw them too. He has a real instinct, you know, though he’s not as quick on the uptake as I am sometimes. Last summer when we were in Rome...

  Well, you know Lorin was living in Florida by that time, so Bill and I didn’t see as much of her as we would have liked. But we got on together great, from the word go. She was such a sensitive, sympathetic person.

  Yeah, I know she was shy, with strangers and people she didn’t trust. There are a lot of assholes and climbers in the art world, I’m sorry to say. But it’s the goddamn truth. But when Lorin was with people she knew appreciated her, and understood the complex things she was trying to do in her painting, she opened right up.

  Oh, yeah, that’s true, she hated to be separated from her work. Her paintings meant so much to her, they were almost like her children, I used to think. But of course she knew she was always welcome to come out to our place in Southampton to see Birth, Copulation, and Death again whenever she liked. We’re used to having artists around, we know how to take good care of them. Jackson Pollock ...

  Well, no, actually she never visited us. It’s a hell of a long way from the Keys. And she was so passionately involved in her work down there by that time, I guess she just couldn’t bring herself to leave. She was always such an intense, dedicated person. It’s tragic that she had to die so young, isn’t it?

  But at least she died knowing her most important picture was in good hands. I mean, it’s a central work, right? Not only in Lorin’s career, but in terms of American painting in the sixties, as a whole. It looks ahead to the seventies, too, of course. And even beyond. Because Lorin was way ahead of her time. Everyone knows that now, but Bill and I saw it from the start.

  Oh yeah, sure, we told Lorin what we thought. Plenty of times. Artists need encouragement from people who count; they’re like kids, in a way. And I think knowing how we felt about her and her painting was a real help to her, in those last hard years. I’m sure of it.

  4

  “HOW’S IT GOING?” JEANNE, who had come in late last night from a meeting and slept even later, padded into the sitting room in her long rose-flowered chintz bathrobe.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Polly sighed. She had been up since seven, awakened as usual by the clatter and noisy cooing of the bedraggled pigeons that nested under the cornice of the building. She had gone for her usual run around the reservoir, made coffee, and sat down to transcribe last week’s interviews. “The more people I see, the more confusing it gets. It’s like they’re not even talking about the same woman.”

  “But there must be some you feel you can trust,” Jeanne suggested, yawning a little.

  “I suppose so. Sometimes I think everyone I interview is lying to me.”

  “Well, they probably are, one way or another,” Jeanne said comfortably, padding into the kitchen area. She refilled the kettle and set it on to boil. “Have you had breakfast yet?”

  “I drank some coffee.”

  “That’s not breakfast. I’ll make us something nice.” She began to open cupboards. “You know you should never try to work on an empty stomach.”

  “Jacky Herbert said that Lorin hated the Skellys and didn’t want to sell them her painting. There was a big brouhaha over it. And now Grace Skelly says they were close friends.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So which one do I believe?”

  “Heavens, I don’t know. Neither, probably.”

  “But suppose you had to decide?” Polly turned around from her typewriter to look at Jeanne.

  “I guess I’d go with Mrs. Skelly. At least she’s a woman. And according to you Jacky Herbert is a dreadful gossip.” Jeanne, unlike Polly, had no sympathy with male homosexuals. She regarded them as, if possible, worse than so-called normal men, because they were more cut off from the sensitizing and civilizing influence of women.

  “Oh, he’s not so bad,” Polly said. “He was sympathetic to Lorin all along, you know, but he couldn’t persuade his boss to go on showing her work.”

  “That’s what he says now.” Jeanne smiled. “You’re such a soft touch, Polly. You went to see Jacky Herbert full of perfectly natural suspicions, and you came home sorry for him. It sounds as if he completely snowed you.”

  Polly didn’t want to be sidetracked into another discussion of whether she was in danger of being “seduced” by the men she had to interview. “My instinct is, Jacky’s telling me more of the truth,” she said. “But where’s the proof? Mrs. Skelly sounded so sincere, and she gave me a great tea, smoked-salmon sandwiches and the most amazing brandied fruitcake. But somehow I didn’t believe a word she said.”

  “If you know what you think already, why ask me?” Jeanne said teasingly, spooning home-ground coffee into a paper filter.

  “I don’t know, though. I’ve been worrying about it all morning.”

  “I can see that.” Jeanne smiled. “But you really mustn’t let yourself become obsessive about this project.” She scuffed across the kitchen in the runover black ballet slippers she still wore in tribute to early ambitions as a dancer. Even now she continually took up and dropped classes in aerobics, “dancercise,” “expressive movement,” and yoga. “It’s only a book, after all.”

  “I’m not obsessive; it’s just that I want it to be absolutely first-rate,” Polly said.

  “And I’m sure it will be.” Jeanne sifted instant oatmeal into a pan of boiling water. “Now, what do you plan to do today? I’ve got to occupy myself somehow, or I’ll just sit and brood about what’s happening in that house in Brooklyn Heights.”

  “Today’s the day, th
en?”

  “That’s right.” Jeanne laughed nervously. Betsy’s showdown with her husband had already been put off twice, first because of his bad cold, and then because of a crisis at the computer company where he worked. The idea had come to Polly that Betsy was stalling, but she hadn’t said this to Jeanne. “I promised not to call, but I’m meeting her for supper at six; it should be all over by then.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Anyhow, don’t wait up for me.” Jeanne smiled as if in anticipation, then frowned slightly. “At least I hope it will be all over. Of course I know Betsy hasn’t any more feeling for that creep, apart from a sort of distant pity. But I still can’t bear the idea that she’s living in the same house with him. I’m a very jealous person, you know,” she added rather proudly.

  “Really?” Polly asked, doubting this.

  “I’ve been that way since I was tiny,” Jeanne continued from the stove, where the kettle was boiling. “More coffee?”

  “Okay, sure.”

  “I remember in fourth grade I was in love with a little girl named Eileen,” Jeanne went on. “She had maple-brown hair, just as shiny as if it had been varnished, and huge golden-green eyes. The awful thing was, Eileen didn’t love me. She liked me all right, but I just wasn’t important to her, and I knew it. I was in agony.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Well, I got her to agree that we should be best friends; I begged and insisted. But I was still jealous. I knew that if I had to stay home sick for two days Eileen would let someone else be her best friend; all they’d have to do was ask.” Jeanne put two bowls of oatmeal with cream and raisins on the table and sat down opposite Polly. “We used to play this game at recess, out behind the school,” she said. “We’d join hands in a circle, and one girl would stand in the center, and the rest or us would dance around her, and we would sing: