by Alison Lurie
No, you have to realize, this was back in the nineteen-forties, those things weren’t clichés yet, they were original — weird maybe, but exciting. Laurie was way ahead of the fashion, you know. Because what most of us had in our rooms then were African violets and chintz armchairs and the Oriental throw rug from one of the spare bedrooms back home; and the girls who weren’t so well off had Bates Piping Rock bedspreads and curtains.
So naturally I was interested, and I followed Laurie down the corridor to see what she’d done now. She opened her door, shoved it back as far as it would go, which wasn’t very far, because there was something wedged up against it inside. I squeezed in after her, and she put on the light.
Well, it was upsetting. Everything had been turned backward or upside down. Laurie had tacked all her posters to the walls wrong side out, and shoved the furniture around, so that the chest of drawers and the desk couldn’t be opened: they were slap up against the walls, and you could see the raw unpainted wood in back. Her lamp was still on the desk, but it was upside down, balancing on its white pleated shade, with the brass base sticking up. The chairs all faced the walls, too, and the rug was upside down on the floor.
The worst thing was the bed. Heaven knows how she’d managed that, because our college furniture was solid oak, and very heavy. It looked quite dreadful, lying on its back with its square legs in the air, each one ending in a kind of metal claw caster, and the ribs of its slats were exposed, like something that had been killed. And the plants were awful too. All the pots on their sides and some of them upside down, spilling out dirt and leaves. It frightened me, really.
Well, I stood and looked at it. And Laurie looked at me, and gave me this little smile, and said, “Isn’t it nice?” I thought she was kidding, and I wanted to play along, so I said, “Oh, yes. But where will you sleep?” “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I won’t sleep for a while.”
Yes, she did leave it that way, but only for a few days. Then I think the maids — we had maids then, you know — complained that they couldn’t get in to clean, and our housemother made her put everything back.
I didn’t know what to think. If I’d been more sophisticated I probably would have wondered if she’d been smoking marijuana or something. I guess mostly I was amazed by the whole thing, and frightened, like I said. It was as if Laurie were saying, My life here is upside down, inside out, and backwards. She seemed so serious, and I couldn’t be sure it was a joke.
No, really, I don’t think that it was, quite.
Yes, it made a difference. I had to realize that Laurie wasn’t quite normal. And by the end of the spring term, when exams came, she’d gotten very strange. Of course, a lot of girls did become tense then, and do odd things; another friend of mine used to sit up all night studying in the bathtub — without water, of course — because it was so uncomfortable there she couldn’t go to sleep. But with Laurie it was worse, somehow. She didn’t eat properly, and in the end she sat through one exam, biology I think it was, without writing a single word.
It turned out that all she’d done for three hours was to pull out her eyebrows very slowly, hair by hair. I saw her afterward, and the strange thing was, she didn’t seem at all upset, and she didn’t look too bad either.
A bit like one of those fifteenth-century European portraits, a Memling perhaps. Odd, but rather elegant. You know it was fashionable in those days for ladies to pluck out their eyebrows completely.
I did see her once or twice over the next summer. We met in New York and had lunch and went to some galleries. I was glad to see her again. But we didn’t really keep up with each other after that.
Well, for one thing she’d acquired this rather crazy hatred of Smith College. She said it had a malevolent philistine atmosphere; and she wanted me to leave too, before I was poisoned by it. But of course I couldn’t leave Smith; I didn’t want to, anyhow. And then Laurie transferred to Bennington and made new friends; and that was it, really. We lost track of each other. I’m sorry about it now. I’ve never known anyone else like her.
No. Well, I did try to write about her, several times, but it never worked. Of course, the story would have been partly about my reaction to Laurie, but still. ... She always came out quite unbelievable, or simply weird, which wasn’t the point at all. I think that often happens when one tries to portray exceptional people. And if one excuses it by explaining within the story that the character is a genius, or is going to be famous, well, it’s rather like special pleading, isn’t it? It doesn’t convince. I think that in fiction, at least my own particular kind of fiction ...
8
ON A CLOUDY, SNOW-SOILED afternoon a week before Thanksgiving, Polly Alter strode into her sitting room with wet feet, damp windblown hair, and a heavy flat brown-paper package, which she placed carefully on the sofa. She peeled off her sodden coat and boots and flung them into the hall closet. Then she cut open the parcel and drew out Lorin Jones’s gouache of the pond in Truro, now professionally matted and framed. She cleared the sitting-room mantel, removing some battered brass candlesticks and Jeanne’s pots of trailing begonias, and set the painting in their place. Finally she stepped back and stood square before it, hoping for a kind of miracle.
Since she’d gotten back from the Cape, Polly had been having serious trouble with her project. What she couldn’t get over, or around, or out from under, was that Lorin Jones had been immature and self-destructive and mean enough to leave her relatively decent husband without warning for a low-grade opportunist, stopping only to clean out their joint bank account. The more Polly thought about this the worse she liked it. Before she and Jim separated they had discussed the move for months, and they had split their assets fairly and equally. According to Garrett, the theft — you couldn’t call it anything else — had been Hugh Cameron’s idea; but that only meant that Lorin was weak and suggestible as well as sneaky.
The immediate problem was, how was Polly going to handle this episode in the biography? Was she going to be equally sneaky and leave it out? Or was she going to expose her subject as a deeply flawed personality?
Though Polly still loved Lorin Jones, she no longer admired her unreservedly. And the magical sense of identity with Lorin was gone. The visit to Wellfleet, the transcendent experience of being in Lorin’s landscape and home, the hovering presence of Lorin’s spirit, appeared to her now as a kind of false, fleeting enchantment; or in more prosaic psychological terms, a temporary delusion.
To believe oneself haunted by Lorin Jones, possessed by her ghost — that was getting in too deep even for a biographer; maybe especially for a biographer. But now Polly floundered in muddy shallows, where every day she felt Lorin drifting farther away from her, dissolving further into a damp, lifeless collection of facts, a clutter of other people’s faulty memories and prejudiced opinions. To make anything out of this lumpish amorphous mass — this pond-spawn — seemed a more and more difficult task. She no longer had any clear idea of who Lorin Jones had been, or what Lorin had thought or felt. Sometimes she was so baffled and depressed that she considered taking Lennie Zimmern’s advice: give up the idea of a biography and just do a study of the work, a modestly expanded version of the “Three American Women” catalogue.
The trouble was, she didn’t even feel sure about the work any longer. When she held her off-color slides up to the light, or stared at the uninspiring gray-and-white reproductions, she felt nothing; she could think of nothing new to say. Some days she plodded on only because she didn’t know how she’d explain it to her colleagues at the Museum and to the Foundation if she quit. Maybe the Foundation would want its money back.
The interviews she’d done lately had been mostly upsetting or useless. According to the last one, when Lorin Jones was in college she was almost a textbook schizophrenic. Assuming that wasn’t true — and there was no way of proving this — either Janet Belle Smith (who was, after all, a professional writer of fiction) had been making up stories, or else Lorin Jones had put on a crazy act for Ms.
Smith out of some perverse sense of humor.
Jeanne had tried to help Polly through this period of doubt and anxiety, but she was still in a funk herself over her breakup with Betsy, and nothing she said seemed to help. The truth was, Jeanne didn’t really approve of Polly’s project, because she didn’t approve of individual biography as a genre. As a Marxist-feminist historian, she believed that it was counterproductive to write about atypical persons — so-called heroes and leaders. She preferred to analyze statistics, or investigate the lives of ordinary citizens. In her view, Polly had succumbed to the biographical fallacy — the old-fashioned patriarchal idea of history as “the lives of great men.” To extend this interest to “the lives of great women” was to play by male rules.
“Why not write my life?” Jeanne had joked last week, not for the first time. “Historically and sociologically speaking it’s just as significant as Lorin Jones’s. And you’d have a lot easier time collecting the data.” She laughed a little bitterly, perhaps with reference to the many times she had gone over the sad history of her affair with Betsy.
“That’s true, for sure,” Polly had said, also laughing. But she knew Jeanne wasn’t wholly kidding: like most of the people Polly had been interviewing, she really wanted Polly to pay attention to her and write about her instead of about Lorin Jones. Again, a sense of blocked communication and restless impatience washed over her.
Now, though, standing before the newly framed picture, Polly felt almost hopeful. The fireplace was cold and bare; it hadn’t worked since they’d moved in. But even in the gray indirect light that was all this room ever got, Lorin’s painting flickered and flamed rusty gold, fumous ochre, and steely blue. The flecks of color that suggested falling and swirling leaves seemed to tremble and flutter; those that suggested ripples on the surface of water shook and quivered. The canvas was alive with the dissolution and transformation of autumn, and with Lorin Jones’s passionate love of paint and of the natural world. Yes, Polly thought. This was the real thing: a work of genius. But what did it reveal about the woman who had created it?
She gazed until her eyes watered and the colors swam; until she felt herself standing in a storm of paint, no closer to an answer. Finally, dizzied, she turned away. She set Jeanne’s begonias on a windowsill and carried the candlesticks into the kitchen.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” she cried as she looked around. When she’d left that morning the room had been clean; now there were dirty dishes in the sink and crumbs on the table; the milk, eggs, bread, and jam had been left out, and the saucer of margarine was a viscid yellow pool with a dead fly in it. Before her quarrel with Betsy, Jeanne wouldn’t have left even an empty cup on the table; but depression had turned her slothful and scattered. “We broke up, that’s the phrase I use when people ask me,” she had said the other day. “But you know, for me it’s literal; I still feel as if I’d been smashed into pieces.” Polly’s anxiety about her book, meanwhile, had made her hyperactive, and impatient; no wonder they weren’t getting on as well as before.
Of course part of the trouble was sex. Since she returned from Wellfleet she and Jeanne had tried three times more to love and comfort each other, and it hadn’t quite worked. Polly felt loved but not satisfied, and Jeanne, it was clear, hadn’t really been comforted.
What Jeanne liked, it had turned out — or at least what she seemed to want and need now — was to kiss and cuddle and gently caress, to drift warmly and slowly toward and then away from a state of arousal without orgasm. No, she didn’t miss it, she had told Polly. The idea of a violent spasm rather revolted her, as a matter of fact; she’d often thought that it was mostly something men, with their more brutish and animal sexuality, had recently tried to foist on women. After all, for centuries nobody had ever talked about a female climax.
The trouble was, it wasn’t like that for Polly. At the beginning of each encounter she sighed and marveled at Jeanne’s silky rose-flushed skin, at her delicate, subtle strokes and fluttering, nibbling kisses. “Oh, that’s so lovely,” she would murmur, returning them with interest. “It’s you that’s lovely,” Jeanne would whisper, raising her pale loose curls from Polly’s thigh. But later on, when Polly started to really let go: to shout, to grip, to pant and thrash about, Jeanne would become still and draw back, looking at her friend with embarrassed concern, as if she were having some kind of fit.
For Jeanne too, it was clear, their encounters were not really satisfactory. There is a folk belief that men are melancholy after coitus; Polly hadn’t usually found this true; but Jeanne was always a little sad and silent afterward, though she tried to hide it. Polly would say, “Are you all right?” and Jeanne would answer, “Sure, I’m fine.” She was thinking about Betsy again, Polly suspected; but when asked about this Jeanne denied it.
The worst thing really, Polly thought, was that communication between them had begun to break down. For years, when they were just intimate friends, she and Jeanne had been able to tell each other everything. Now that they were intimate in another sense, they’d started concealing their thoughts and feelings from each other. Polly couldn’t tell anybody what was on her mind; she couldn’t even confide in her best friend, because Jeanne was her best friend, and if she knew how lonely and frustrated Polly sometimes felt after they had made love she would be hurt and miserable.
What Polly hoped was that once Jeanne had got over that stupid Betsy — who definitely didn’t deserve her — she would become more active and enthusiastic in bed, and happier afterward; not to mention more use around the house. If she didn’t, Polly didn’t know how long she could stand it.
Jeanne could have picked up before she left for the university, she growled to herself as she stood in the kitchen revolving these uncomfortable ideas. She knows how I hate mess. But if I mention it she’ll be cross and hurt. She’ll claim that she overslept and was late for work, or that she was restless and had an awful night — though she was snoring like a big tabby cat when I left.
But these thoughts were petty, unworthy of a true friend, let alone a lover. Polly shoved them aside. She cleaned up the kitchen — it only took a few minutes, after all — and dumped an ashtray full of Jeanne’s cigarette butts into the trash. Jeanne was supposed to be quitting smoking again, or at least cutting down, but as usual she was cheating. Finally she carried Jeanne’s scuffed ballet slippers back down the hall.
As she entered what had been Stevie’s room, Polly remembered with a flutter of joy that she would be seeing her son in less than a week. She was flying to Rochester next Wednesday, and Stevie would get in from Denver soon after. They’d have Thanksgiving at her mother’s as usual, and then fly back to New York together on Friday.
Jeanne would be away then: she was spending the weekend with Ida and Cathy, who were making Thanksgiving dinner for a dozen women. She had invited Polly to join them, but even if Polly hadn’t been going to her mother’s she would have hesitated. She ought not to hesitate; she ought to get used to, even welcome, the company of other gay women. The trouble was that though she liked most of Jeanne’s friends, Ida and Cathy always made her uncomfortable. Whenever she went there she felt that they (especially Ida) were watching her for signs of prejudice and wrong thinking.
Before Jeanne left, though, Polly had to have a serious conversation with her. Right now, Stevie’s room was full of Jeanne’s clothes, her books, her posters, her tapes and cassette player; her typewriter and her students’ papers covered Stevie’s desk. Sometime in the next week all this stuff had to be moved out. Polly could wait and hope that Jeanne would find the energy to take care of it; but probably in the end she’d have to do the job herself.
“Hi.” Slowly, Jeanne shut the apartment door behind her and put on the bolt and chain, something Polly usually forgot, and Jeanne mentioned. But now she said nothing; silently, Polly resolved not to say anything about the mess in the kitchen.
“Hi there.”
“How’s everything?” Jeanne set down a bag of groceries on the sofa and dropp
ed beside them with the same sort of inert gravity.
“Not too bad.” Polly turned around from the desk and raised her eyes to the mantelpiece, but Jeanne did not follow her gaze. “I brought Lorin’s painting home today.”
“Oh, yes?” Jeanne briefly turned her head.
“I think the framer did a pretty good job, don’t you? I was afraid that chrome strip might be too wide, but I’ve decided it’s really all right. And it’s great over the fireplace.”
“Yes. Nice,” Jeanne murmured.
“I don’t know how you can say that.” Polly smiled. “You’ve hardly glanced at the picture.”
“I don’t have to. I looked at the thing for hours when you brought it back from Cape Cod.”
Though it irritated Polly to hear Lorin’s painting called “the thing,” she suppressed this. “You know, it makes a big difference to me to have something of hers here. It’s weird, but it makes me feel maybe I can do the book after all.”
“That’s nice,” Jeanne said in the voice of one who was weary of Polly’s doubts.
“I was thinking, whatever you want to say about Garrett Jones, I’ve got to be grateful to him for this.”
“Not too grateful, I hope.” Jeanne stood wearily and began to unwind a long filmy white wool scarf.
“What do you mean?”
“Well.” Jeanne was taking off her coat now. “I mean, you wouldn’t want it to interfere with what you write.”
“How could it interfere with what I write?” Polly asked, beginning to bristle. “It’s just the opposite — it’s going to be a help, an inspiration, I hope, for God’s sake.”
Jeanne sighed. “I didn’t mean the picture. I just don’t want you to forget why Jones gave it to you, that’s all. Would you like a cup of Red Zinger?”
