The Truth About Lorin Jones

by Alison Lurie

  “And what did she say?”

  “She said, ‘No. Why should I?’ I couldn’t think of any reason, by that time.” Mac shrugged. “Excuse me.”

  Again he rose and loped across the raw floorboards to answer the phone. This time, though, Polly didn’t make any notes. She sat staring through the nearest skeleton wall without registering it. I see through you now, you cold bitch, she thought. You had a man like this, and you didn’t even love him.

  “Right,” Mac said into the phone on an up note.

  “Thanks. ... Hey, it looks like we’ve got a delivery for Monday,” he called.

  “Oh, good,” she murmured, her mind elsewhere.

  “How’re you doing?” he said softly, standing close, looking down at her.

  “Okay, I guess.” Polly gave him a quick uneasy smile. You ought to go now, you know what could happen if you don’t, she told herself. “Well, thanks for all the information.” She stood up, holding on to the back of the folding chair, since for some reason her legs felt weak.

  Slowly, Mac moved even nearer. “You know, I was in a hell of a panic all day,” he said, putting one hand on her bare arm just below the shoulder.

  “A panic?” Polly willed herself to take a step back, but couldn’t.

  “Yeah. I was scared you wouldn’t come.” He took hold of Polly’s other arm and pulled her to him.

  Wait a moment, for God’s sake, she told herself. You said you weren’t going to do this again, didn’t you?

  But it seemed, after all, that she was.

  “Why you?” Mac asked presently, raising himself on one elbow to look down at Polly as she lay on his rumpled sleeping bag and air mattress. “That’s what I want to know.”

  “Wha?” Polly did not open her eyes. In a moment she would remember who she was, where she was; but now she floated in a warm blur of satisfaction; she felt like a pile of pancakes in hot maple syrup. The idea struck her as comic, but she was too sleepy even to giggle.

  “Why should I like you so much? It doesn’t make sense. I mean, you’re not the kind of woman I thought I liked. I usually go more for the bohemian ladies.”

  “Mh?” Polly yawned and slowly opened her eyes. She felt at peace with the world and everyone in it — except for that destructive, hateful bohemian lady Lorin Jones.

  “I bet I’m not the type you usually go for either,” Mac said, grinning.

  She focused on him. “No, not exactly,” she fibbed; in the days when she went for men, it was exactly this sort of man she went for. “But at least you’re not an artist or a writer.”

  “The hell I’m not.” Mac sat up, half laughing. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Well.” Polly swallowed another yawn. “I mean, I know you used to write poetry, but it sounds like you gave it up quite a while ago.”

  “I gave up teaching it, that’s all. Hell, I had to. In the poetry business, if you haven’t made it on the national scene by forty, you’ve had it as far as college jobs go. God, you have such wonderful breasts.” He bent to kiss one slowly. “No, I’m still writing. I publish something now and then, and I’m getting a new book together.”

  “Sorry.”

  “That’s okay.” Mac stroked the lower curve of her breast meditatively. “I did try to stop once, you know. It was after Lorin died, when I was married and teaching back in Iowa City. I couldn’t get my second book published, and I got really depressed. But then I thought, fuck it, why should I quit doing something that gives me pleasure, and I’m not all that bad at? That’s how I still feel. And then, there’s always the chance that I might strike it lucky. I might write one really good poem, maybe even more. Whereas if I quit, I haven’t got a hope in hell. ... Equal time.” He moved to the other breast.

  “I used to paint,” Polly said suddenly.

  “Yes?” Mac raised his head and looked at her.

  “I had a show once.”

  “Uh-huh.” He gave her another slow look. “Only now you’re a biographer.”

  “I’m not a biographer, exactly. I’m just writing this one book.”

  “I’d love to read your biography.” Mac grinned. “I’d like to know how you got to be so fantastic in bed.” He traced a line of fluttering kisses down her stomach.

  “You’re not so bad yourself,” she replied, raising her hips to meet his mouth.

  “You know something, Polly,” Mac said, considerably later. “I could get really serious about you.” He pulled down a T-shirt stenciled REVIVALS CONSTRUCTION — navy this time rather than green. “What d’you think?” he added, when Polly, bent over her running shoes, did not respond.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “You mean forget it, huh?”

  “No. I mean, hell, I only just met you two days ago. Anyhow, I live in New York and you live here.”

  “We could fix that,” Mac said casually, smiling.

  “Yes? How?” Polly tied her other shoe and looked up at him. He’s kidding, she thought.

  “I could move to New York, for instance. Or you could move to Key West.”

  “I couldn’t afford that,” she said, smiling too.

  “Sure you could. It doesn’t cost much to live in the Keys if you’ve got a place to stay. Anyhow, you already own an apartment on Central Park West, right?”

  “Mm,” Polly agreed.

  “How many bedrooms?”

  “Three. But one is tiny.”

  “All the same. From what I hear about New York rents, I bet you could let it for enough to get by on here.”

  “Maybe. But what would I do in Key West, besides making love?” she asked, almost laughing.

  “I d’know. Write your book. Or you could take up painting again.” He shrugged. “Your kid could come too; I’ve got plenty of room. I bet he’d enjoy it here.”

  For a moment Polly imagined herself and Stevie in Key West; they were sitting on the worn front steps of Mac’s house, under the orchid tree. But probably he wasn’t serious; it was just a way of saying he liked her.

  “Think about it, okay?”

  “Okay,” Polly agreed, aware that she would whether or not she chose.

  “Anyhow, you’re going to be, around for a while now, right?” Mac said, a stutter of feeling interrupting the casual question.

  “I’ll stay till Tuesday. If I can change my ticket.” Polly glanced at him, then, shaken by what she began to feel, leaned nearer to blur it with a quick caress.

  “Good. And I hope I answered all your research questions.” Mac put one hand on the bottom of her jeans.

  “Yes — well.” With a sort of mental shake, Polly recalled herself to duty. “There was one thing —”

  “Mm.”

  “You were saying before, sometimes Lorin was still in the house, but in a way she’d be gone.”

  “Yeah. I suppose partly it was the drugs.”

  “Drugs?” Polly echoed, trying — far too late — to speak calmly. That’s what Lennie didn’t tell me, she thought. Or Jacky or Garrett. Or maybe they didn’t know.

  “You didn’t know she was into drugs?”

  “No,” Polly admitted. An addict too, a thin mean voice said in her head; you can tell everyone that too.

  “Yeah.” He cleared his throat. “We both were, for a while. It was no big deal back then, y’know.”

  “What sort of drugs?”

  Mac grinned. “Well, to start with, back on the Cape, it was grass and hash mostly. Down here I mainly stuck with that; you pretty much have to in my line of work if you don’t want to fall off a ladder or saw a hole in your hand. And we tried a little LSD and mesc on weekends, to see if it would do anything for our work.”

  “And did it?”

  “Not all that much. I wrote what I thought at the time was great stuff, but when I came down it mostly looked pretty empty. It did more for Lorin, but she couldn’t paint what she saw when she was high, she didn’t have the coordination. But after a while —” Mac broke off, staring at the rain that sluiced down the pla
stic back wall of the house.

  “Yes?” Polly prompted.

  There was a pause. “Well,” he said finally. “After a while Lorin got into speed. Nobody knew what it did to you, back then, see. And she liked it because she could work longer without getting tired. Anyhow, at first she just took some now and then when she was really into a painting. It didn’t get heavy till I was up in Maine.”

  “When were you in Maine?”

  “Sixty-eight, sixty-nine. I was going crazy because I didn’t have time to write, so a pal of mine got me a job at Colby, he —”

  “But that was when Lorin died,” Polly interrupted. “February nineteen-sixty-nine.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Mac said almost without irony.

  “I’m sorry. I —” Polly swallowed, then plunged ahead. “You were teaching at Colby College then?”

  “Mm. I came down here over Christmas vacation, though, and I could see that Lorin was in a bad way. She’d been working on a series of underwater paintings, and she didn’t want to take time off to sleep. So she went to this quack doctor and said she needed to lose weight, she wanted some appetite depressants. And the bastard gave them to her. I tried to tell her it was insane, because she was too thin already; she never ate enough. But she didn’t pay any attention.”

  “Lennie Zimmern told me Lorin died of pneumonia,” Polly said.

  “Yeah. That’s right, technically. She caught it going snorkeling. We always went out to the reef a couple of times every summer, but that last year Lorin got really hooked, and started wanting to go every week. She could get high just from lying facedown in the waves and watching the scene underwater. And of course if you were on something it was just about fantastic. There was one sort of little fish she specially liked; it’s sort of transparent, with long white wavy fins, and travels in bunches, I forget now what it’s called. There’s some of them in that picture over my sofa.”

  “And that’s how she got pneumonia?”

  “Mm-hm. See, she was impatient, and she went out to the reef in February before the sea had warmed up. And then she stayed in too long. Only I figure probably she didn’t realize it, because she was so strung out. She caught a bad chill. But she didn’t like doctors, so by the time she went to one it was too late.”

  “And you weren’t here.”

  “No. I should have been, but I wasn’t. I shouldn’t have left her alone, the state she was in, but I thought I had to be a good little boy and meet my classes.” Mac almost groaned with sarcasm. “I didn’t even know Lorin was in the hospital till the day before she died. And by the time I got home it was all over.”

  “I’m sorry,” Polly murmured, silently apologizing for everything she had thought and said over the last months about Hugh Cameron’s desertion of Lorin.

  “That’s okay. It was a long time ago, and, like I said, we hadn’t been getting on all that well.”

  Had he said that? Polly thought not, but she didn’t challenge him.

  “Only somehow that made it worse, you know?” Mac looked at her. “Hey, Polly,” he said, putting one arm around her shoulders. “You okay?”

  “I’m okay,” she said, wondering if it were true. “Well, I guess I feel a little awful. I didn’t know —”

  “Nobody told you, huh.”

  Polly shook her head. In her mind, Lorin Jones floated facedown in the salty aquamarine water of the Gulf, her long thin legs and arms spread in the shape of a pale star; her dark seaweed hair sloshed in the waves. Below her a school of little pale fish swam through branching coral. Her huge wet star-lashed eyes were wide open behind a snorkeling mask edged with white rubber. They did not blink, though, because she was dead.

  What the hell’s the matter with you? Polly scolded herself. Why should you feel like crying? Lorin Jones didn’t drown, she died in the Florida Keys Memorial Hospital. Anyhow, you don’t like her. “It’s stupid, I —” she said. Choking on the last word, she stood up and turned away.

  “ ’S okay,” Mac said. He came over to Polly and put his arms around her.

  “I didn’t —” She choked up again, recovered. “I mean, I didn’t even know her.” No, an internal voice said, but you’re planning to ruin her reputation, aren’t you? Pretty soon Lorin’s name will be mud, because of the dirt and muck you’re planning to spread on it, out of envy and spite and sexual jealousy. She’ll be dead and disgraced, isn’t that the idea? And you’ll be alive and successful. Isn’t that the idea? A spasm of self-revulsion shook her. Forgive me, she whispered silently to Lorin Jones. I won’t betray you, I won’t hurt you; it was a mistake.

  “Sorry. I’m all right now,” she said, blinking.

  Mac kissed her lightly, then looked around the raw, empty, darkening house. “Hey, this is sort of a dreary scene,” he said, checking his watch. “I tell you what, let’s get out of here and find ourselves some conch chowder, okay?”

  “Okay. But I’d better get back to the guest house first and clean up,” Polly heard herself say; she was surprised how normal her voice sounded.

  “Right. You do look kind of as if you’d been rolling around on the floor. But I don’t mind.” Mac hugged her again.

  Polly held herself stiff for a moment; then she leaned wholly and passionately into the kiss. You might as well enjoy it, she told herself, almost weeping. You haven’t much time.

  RUTH MARCH,

  photographer

  Yeah, I wanted to talk to you, like I told Dad. He says you’ve been getting all kinds of bad news about Aunt Laurie, really shitty low-grade stuff. So I wanted to even up the score.

  Sure, it’s true she died when I was thirteen. And the last time I saw her I was only eleven and a half. But I remember her just fine. I ought to, because she like changed my life.

  What she did was — But you have to understand how it all happened, the whole scene.

  Okay, it was Christmas vacation, the last year before my parents split up, and we were all down visiting Granddad and Marcia in New York. It was always kind of uncomfortable there; we didn’t go too often, and we never stayed very long. Half the time they were away somewhere, traveling in Europe or whatever. Granddad was a restless type; well, I dig that, I’m kind of like him.

  The way it always seemed to me back then, Dad didn’t have a real family; not like my mother’s folks in Brookline, who’ve lived in the same house for forty years, with all these uncles and aunts and cousins and neighbors around. Kids like their families to stay put, you know; I can see it already in mine, and he’s only three.

  Well, Dad’s mother and aunt were down in Florida, and all he had left in New York was his father and Marcia, and his sister, Laurie, who was my half aunt. That always seemed kind of weird to me, you know. There was a family joke that when I was real little I asked Ma, which half of Laurie was my aunt?

  I don’t know. I guess I thought it could be the left side of her, or maybe the part above the waist. I mean that wouldn’t have surprised me. Even a little kid could see she wasn’t like other people.

  For instance, she wasn’t like any of the other women in my family. She wasn’t really Jewish, only the part that doesn’t count according to Jewish law, and she didn’t know anything about Jewish things. Then she was real thin, not like the rest of us, and she had all this long shiny hair that always looked a little damp. She never said much, and she had a kind of drifty manner, as if she wasn’t even there in the room half the time. If she did notice Celia or me she didn’t talk to us the way most adults talk to kids. I don’t think she knew what a kid was exactly.

  Anyhow, we were all there in the apartment that afternoon. It’d started raining hard, and we couldn’t go to the park, so Marcia got out some paper and colored pencils to keep me and Celia occupied while the men watched television and she and Mom made dinner.

  You know how kids get typed, one is a jock and the other is a musician, whatever? Well, everybody in my family was good at words except me, so the idea was that because I liked drawing, I might grow up to be an artist lik
e Aunt Laurie. The trouble was, I couldn’t really draw worth a damn, and at eleven I was just finding that out.

  I was trying to make a picture of two horses I’d seen trotting in the park that morning, only I couldn’t get them right. I got more and more frustrated, and started jabbing the colored pencils into the paper. It was one of those soft cheap drawing pads they sell in the ten-cent store; it would have been okay for crayons, but Marcia’s pencils were too hard for it. I kept ripping holes in the sheets, then tearing them out, crushing them up, and throwing them around the room. Finally I got so mad I started a fight with my sister.

  Aunt Laurie didn’t seem to notice anything much, but while Mom was calming us down she put on her duffel coat and went out without saying a word to anybody. About an hour later she came back, dripping wet, and handed me a plastic shopping bag, and in it, all wrapped up, was this expensive camera, a Leica.

  Well, the honest truth is, nobody was much pleased. Mom thought the camera was much too expensive and complicated for an eleven-year-old, and she was right, too. “Oh, Laurie, you shouldn’t have!” That was what she said, and she meant it.

  Aunt Laurie told her it was a Christmas present. That didn’t go over very well, because nobody there celebrated Christmas, only Hanukkah. And besides, they all thought, if Aunt Laurie was going to give me a present she should’ve bought something for Celia too. Celia thought so too, naturally, though she didn’t whine about it or anything. But then it wasn’t as if she’d wanted a camera.

  I didn’t want one much either. I felt kind of hurt and insulted really. It was as if Aunt Laurie, the family artist, had been watching me and knew I wasn’t any good, not like her, and never would be. So she was sorry for me; and I couldn’t stand that, back then. Hell, I still can’t.

  But, you see, she knew somehow. When she saw me trying to draw those horses — to reproduce exactly what I’d seen, not like a painter but like a photographer — she knew what I needed. Only I didn’t understand then. For me it was as if she was saying, You might as well quit right now, baby. I didn’t get any other message, because I didn’t have any respect for photography at eleven; I didn’t know what it was, really.