The Truth About Lorin Jones

by Alison Lurie

  Jeanne was up in Vermont now, but Polly could still talk to her on the phone; Ida would have the number. She shoved back her chair and went into the kitchen.

  “No, she’s not in town,” Ida said in charged, emotional tones. “She’s in Vermont with Betsy. ... I don’t know when they’ll be back. They’re with friends.” Her pronunciation of the last word suggested that Polly was not in this category.

  “Can you give me the number there, please?”

  “No,” Ida said; it sounded as if she were breathing hard into the phone. “I don’t think I can.”

  Polly suppressed an impulse to swear. “Jeanne promised she’d call when she got there, you see, but she hasn’t,” she explained.

  “No. I shouldn’t expect she would.”

  “Why not, for God’s sake?” Her voice rose.

  “Jesus. If you don’t know that,” Ida said, with a slight but marked pause on the pronoun.

  Polly gave a loud, angry, uneven sigh. “Well, when you speak to her, tell her I’d like to hear from her.”

  “Oh, you would.” Now Ida’s voice began to shake. “There are a lot of people who genuinely care for Jeanne, in case you didn’t realize that,” she said. “People who respect her emotional commitments, her privacy, her personal integrity —”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “No. You wouldn’t, would you?” Ida’s tone had become so sneering that Polly lost her cool.

  “Oh, go to hell, you old bitch,” she cried, and hung up.

  Feeling even worse than before, she began to wander through the apartment, dim now in the fading winter light. There was nothing to see; only, out of one window after another, the backs of other apartment buildings, blurred by the drizzle of snow that had been falling all afternoon. From her bedroom, though, if she stood close to the cold glass and looked sideways, a narrow vertical strip of Ninety-second Street was visible. Everything in this elongated rectangle was black or gritty gray, like an early twentieth-century Ashcan School etching: a lamppost, a couple of snow-whitened cars, an attenuated Peggy Bacon cat, two figures walking hunched together against the wind. It was as false and limited a version of Ninety-second Street, Polly thought, as each of those transcripts on her desk was of Lorin Jones’s life. But it was all she could see, just as to her informants their reports were the whole truth.

  Every one of those people expected her to reproduce their narrow vertical view of Lorin Jones. And what’s more, if she didn’t, they would be angry with her. Whatever she wrote, she would satisfy some of them and enrage others.

  Suppose, just for the sake of argument, she were to write the biography of Lorin Jones that Jacky and Garrett expected, in which Lorin would appear as an eccentric, neurotic genius, and they as generous and wise and tolerant. They would be pleased, and reward her; they would see to it that her book was well and prominently reviewed — Jacky had already hinted as much. If she put her career first, this was the choice she would make.

  And suppose too, just for the sake of argument, that she were to accept Garrett’s job offer. Since she’d told him she was a lesbian, he probably wouldn’t bother her with any more sexual advances; at least he wouldn’t come on to her overtly. And as his protégée she would have many privileges. She would meet the most important artists and collectors; she would be invited to review for newspapers and magazines.

  And let’s not forget the money. If she were working for Garrett, Polly would be able to take taxis when the weather was lousy or the buses crowded; she would never have to descend into the dirty, threatening catacombs of the subway. She would travel business class on planes and visit museums in distant cities, and maybe even abroad. She would see the Prado, the Musée d’Orsay, the Hermitage, the Uffizi; famous private collections here and in Europe would be open to her.

  She might as well cultivate her professional connections, Polly thought, because it was clear now that after what had happened Jeanne’s friends would reject her. In fact, judging from that phone call, they already had. Even if she could write the book she had first planned, Ida would not forgive her. Feminist reviewers might praise and admire her, but she would never again be invited to Ida and Cathy’s study group; though she might one day sit on the floor of some other apartment in some other circle of women, with one hand in that of a shadowy lover.

  But maybe she wouldn’t care; maybe she wouldn’t write that book anyhow, but one that would please Jacky and Garrett, and become a success.

  Against the screen of grainy, drifting snow, Polly saw herself in this alternative future, at a party in an East Side townhouse. She was elegantly dressed in black, and carefully made up; her hair was professionally styled and smoothly blown dry (in this incarnation she would be able to shop at Bendel’s instead of Macy’s, and go to the beauty salon once a week). The people at the party gazed at her with interest; not only because she seemed so cool and confident, but because she was a figure of growing importance and power in the New York world of museums and galleries and artists and dealers and critics. Other expensive-looking men and women stood around her, some of them recognizably famous. Maybe she was involved with one of them, though not seriously. If her career really took off, probably she wouldn’t have the time or energy for a serious relationship: she would either be celibate or have brief affairs with men or women whom she didn’t like or trust very much; who didn’t much like or trust her.

  Maybe that was why the face of the central figure in this scene showed no joy or ease: her expression was wary, calculating, and self-conscious. She looked like someone Polly wouldn’t want to meet, let alone become.

  The idea that she was about to choose, not only a version of Lorin Jones’s past, but her own unattractive future, made Polly giddy, as if she were standing on the top of a steep hill instead of looking out of an apartment window in a snowstorm. And what made it worse was the blurry knowledge that, once she had chosen, she would forget that there had ever been a choice. From the crossroads at the crest of the hill you can see in every direction; but after you start down one of the paths the view narrows, and other landscapes vanish.

  The Polly in the circle of women and the Polly at the party in the townhouse would forget that there had been any alternatives. They would believe that they had taken the only possible route. The book they had written, the life they had chosen, the person they had become, would seem inevitable; as inevitable, say, as her separation from Jim.

  But how inevitable had even that been? Suppose she had agreed to go to Denver; probably she would soon have convinced herself — or rather, she would have become the person who believed — that keeping the family together was more important than anything else. She would have gone on loving Jim and believing that he was decent and trustworthy. Maybe she would have found another job in Colorado, or begun to paint in a different way that had nothing to do with Lorin Jones, and she would have taken that for granted too.

  Now, soon, the biography of Lorin Jones she would write, the life she would choose, would seem the only possible one. She would become an angry, depressed lesbian feminist or a selfish, successful career woman. And Lorin Jones would be established in the public mind as an innocent victim or as a neurotic, unfaithful, ungrateful genius; but it would all be lies.

  What she’d really like to do, Polly thought, resting her elbows on the crossbar of the window and watching the flakes of snow, like fine gritty ash, whirl and eddy and descend between the walls, was to write a book that would tell the whole confusing contradictory truth. She’d like to put in all the different stories she’d collected, and — as her father used to say — let the devil take the hindmost.

  Yes, but who would be the hindmost? Polly Alter would be that; her biography would be called unfocused and inconsistent, and would enrage everyone who was important to her.

  The heavy, damp depression that had been hanging above her head all day descended on Polly like a dirty, sopping-wet blanket. She wished to God she had never heard of Lorin Jones, who was
responsible for everything that had gone wrong in her life over the last year, right down to what had happened with Mac.

  It’s too late to brood about that, she told herself. You’d better make up your mind and get started on whichever goddamn book it’s going to be; the grant money will run out by May. But she felt too sodden and sluggish to move. Outside the window, the ash fell.

  After what could have been one minute or twenty, the buzzer from the downstairs door sounded. Slowly, Polly moved away from the window and the darkening, sliding snow. Jeanne, she thought foolishly; and then, more reasonably, that Stevie must have forgotten his keys. But it was only Federal Express announcing a delivery. “I’ll come down,” she called into the intercom, thankful for any distraction.

  The package turned out to be bulky and, she was surprised to see as she carried it back up in the elevator, from her father. It must be a present for Stevie. Not the check Carl Alter had said he would send, but almost on time for once in a lifetime. But when she opened the box on the kitchen table, the first thing that fell out was an envelope with her son’s name on it. Both a check and a gift, then: extravagant and unnecessary. As usual the wrapping paper was far too childish for Stevie; it was also inappropriate for a boy: cutesy little girls carrying miniature Christmas trees, for shit’s sake.

  She looked at the card, which had a bird on it, a white peace pigeon — no, a dove, probably; religiously inappropriate, too. “Happy New Year to Polly.”

  For God’s sake, she thought; it must be twenty years since her father had sent her anything. She pulled the paper apart and drew out a box marked — holy cow! — ETCH A SKETCH. The same damn Etch A Sketch she had longed for when she was eight years old, that her father had so often promised and never brought her. Polly began to laugh; then, surprising herself, to cry.

  Weeping foolishly, she took her father’s check into Stevie’s room, so that he’d find it there when he came home for supper. The sight of his books and posters, now restored to the shelves and walls, restored Polly slightly. Whatever happened to her, Stevie was back in New York.

  Yes, but what would he find here? she thought, looking up at an old wildlife poster that hadn’t yet been replaced with something more contemporary, maybe because it hung high in a corner. It was a blown-up color photo of a raccoon that Polly had bought many years ago because of the animal’s resemblance to Stevie as he had been at four or five: the round dark eyes set in a ring of almost transparent darker skin, the pointed face and clever, inquiring expression. He still looked like that, a little.

  The junior high school Stevie was about to return to was, according to report, worse than ever this year. Both his best friends had now left it: one for Ethical Culture and the other for Exeter. But Polly couldn’t afford to send Stevie to private school; he would have to stay where he was, in crowded, boring classes, a raccoon child threatened or attacked by teenage pit bulls. After a while, and not such a long while either, he might want to go back to the wilderness, to Denver; to Jim’s so-called normal American family, which would soon be even more “normal.”

  But suppose she were to write the book Garrett wanted, Polly thought, and become his assistant. Then she could afford to send Stevie to a private school, and soon he would be one of those sophisticated preppie kids you see around Manhattan. With an elegant mother who wasn’t home very much, because in her new super-career Polly would often be out of town or at parties and openings. She would have to hire a housekeeper, so that when Stevie came home from his snobby school there would be someone here to make his supper.

  These visions, and the idea that she now had to choose between not only her own two unattractive futures, but also Stevie’s, terrified and enraged Polly. In spite of the warmth of the apartment she was overcome with a kind of feverish shiver, as if she were coming down with the flu.

  But was there any other alternative? As she stared up at the poster, its background altered in her imagination. The leaves of the tree became larger and shinier; brilliant tropical flowers appeared among them. The raccoon turned into Stevie at his present age; but barefoot, tanned, and dressed in a pair of cut-offs and a T-shirt, straddling the branch. Below him, on the deck of a house in Key West, Polly herself (equally tanned) sat at a picnic table typing. She wore her old jeans and a faded shirt; her hair was tied back with a piece of red yarn, and she was smiling. It was the real story that she was typing, the whole truth about Lorin Jones, with all the contradictions left in. While she watched, Mac came out of the house, carrying two cans of beer.

  That can’t happen, Polly thought, it would be crazy, you know you can’t trust him. It would be crazy to trust somebody like Mac when every man she’d ever known, beginning with her father, had hurt her and abandoned her.

  But Carl Alter had said that she’d abandoned him, that she hadn’t wanted to see him. He really believed that. Jim probably believed that too. For them she was like Lorin, a damaging, rejecting woman. And now it was Mac who thought she didn’t want to see him again, because she had more or less told him so. He hadn’t called in over a week. Maybe he had given up on her.

  The way my father gave up on me, Polly thought.

  The interviews are finished now; I could go to Key West. I could take a chance, I could do it, she thought, taking in a breath and holding it. But it wouldn’t be easy. She sighed, imagining all the anger and trouble she would bring on herself: the scenes, the explanations, the packing; trying to rent the apartment (Jeanne and Betsy would want it, but could they afford it?), telling Jim and her mother and the people at the Museum and everyone else she knew. All of them would think Polly had freaked out. Leaving a promising career, running off to Florida just like Lorin Jones, and with the same man — wasn’t that really kind of weird and sick? everyone would say. She starts writing about Jones, and ends up living Jones’s life, for God’s sake! They wouldn’t expect it to work out, and maybe they would be right.

  But if she didn’t try it, how could she ever be sure?

  “And when you finish your book, what then?” her friends would ask.

  Well, she would say, I’ll just have to see. Maybe Stevie and I will come back to New York. Or maybe we’ll stay in Key West for a while, living on the rent of this apartment and Stevie’s child support. Maybe I’ll get a job in a local gallery or something.

  It wouldn’t be all tropical flowers. She would be a middle-aged dropout like Mac, living a marginal life in a beach resort; she would probably never be well off or well known.

  But no matter what happened afterward, I would be with him now, Polly thought, taking a great gasping breath of air as if she had just come up from underwater. I could write the book the way it ought to be. And I could start painting again if I wanted to. Even if it wasn’t any good at first, it might get better. As Mac said, you never know; I might strike it lucky one day. And if everything worked out — It was crazy even to think of it, probably, but if I really wanted to I could have another child.

  Polly looked at her watch. Half-past five. It was fully dark out now, and would probably be dark in Key West too, though the sun set later there. Mac and his crew would have finished work, and he would have gone back to the room he was renting from friends.

  Before she could lose her nerve, or change her mind again, she ran toward the kitchen. She stared at the harmless-looking wall telephone for a second, took a final deep breath, and picked up the receiver.

  A Biography of Alison Lurie

  Alison Lurie (b. 1926) is a Pulitzer Prize–winning author of fiction and nonfiction. Born in Chicago and raised in White Plains, New York, she grew up in a family of storytellers. Her father was a sociology professor and later the head of a social work agency; her mother was a former journalist. Lurie graduated from Radcliffe College, and in 1969 joined the English department at Cornell University, where she taught courses on children’s literature, among others.

  Lurie’s first novel, Love and Friendship (1962), is a story of romance and deception among the faculty of a snowbound New En
gland college. It won favorable reviews and established her as a keen observer of love in academia. Her next novel, The Nowhere City (1965), records the confused adventures of a young New England couple in Los Angeles among Hollywood starlets and Venice Beach hippies. She followed this with Imaginary Friends (1967), which focuses on a group of small-town spiritualists who believe they are in touch with extraterrestrial beings.

  Her next novel, Real People (1969), led the New York Times to call her “one of our most talented and intelligent novelists.” The tale unfolds in a famous artists’ colony where much more than writing and painting occurs. Lurie then returned to an academic setting with her bestseller The War Between the Tates (1974), and drew on her own childhood in Only Children (1979). Four years later she published Foreign Affairs, her best-known novel, which traces the erotic entanglements of two American professors in England. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985.

  The Truth About Lorin Jones (1988) follows a biographer around the United States as she searches for the real, and sometimes shocking, story of a famous woman painter —a character who appears as an eight-year-old in Only Children. The Last Resort (1999) takes place in Key West, Florida, among a group of ill-assorted characters, some of who appear in earlier Lurie novels. Truth and Consequences (2005) returns to an academic setting and plumbs the troubles of a professor with back trouble, his exhausted wife, and two poets — one famous and one not.

  Lurie has also published a collection of semi-supernatural stories, Women and Ghosts (1994), and a memoir of the poet James Merrill, Familiar Spirits (2001). Her interest in children’s literature inspired three collections of folktales, including Clever Gretchen (1980), which features little-known stories with strong female heroines. She has published two nonfiction books on children’s literature, as well: Don’t Tell the Grown-ups (1990) and Boys and Girls Forever (2003). In the lavishly illustrated The Language of Clothes (1981), she offers a lighthearted study of the semiotics of dress.