The Truth About Lorin Jones (11 page)

“Would you like supper?” Polly asked. “There’s some tomato soup on the stove.”

“I couldn’t eat anything.” Jeanne started to walk about the kitchen aimlessly.

“What’s the matter, is something the matter?”

“Yes, it is.” Jeanne opened a cupboard door and slammed it shut. “She didn’t tell him.”

“Betsy still didn’t tell her husband about you?”

“That’s right.” Jeanne tried without energy or success to unbutton her puffy coat.

“Oh hell. I’m sorry.” Polly got up and went to put her arms around her friend. Because of the coat, it felt like embracing a half-inflated balloon.

“I can’t stand it, I just can’t!” Inside the balloon, Jeanne collapsed onto Polly, weeping. “It’s so unfair.”

“Yeah. ... There, there.”

“She says she can’t bear to hurt him. So I said, ‘I suppose you think it’s all right to hurt me,’ and she said, ‘No, but you’re stronger than he is.” Jeanne gave a choked sob.

“There, there,” Polly repeated, feeling helpless and indignant.

“She swears she’s going to tell him soon, but this wasn’t the right moment. So I said, ‘When is the right moment?’ ” Jeanne stood back on her own feet shakily, and wiped her wet powder-streaked face with the side of her hand, not improving its appearance.

“And what did Betsy say?”

“She said she just didn’t know. I think that’s a lot of C-R-A-P. I think she’s never going to tell him.” Jeanne tried again to unfasten her coat, but her hands were still shaking. “It was awful, Polly — I got so upset — I threw my plate on the floor, everybody was looking at me —” She choked on a sob. “Veal parmigiana.”

“What?”

“That was what I was eating. It went all over the restaurant floor.” Jeanne gave a miserable laugh. “It was so stupid and embarrassing, destroying innocent crockery.”

“I guess you have to, sometimes,” Polly said.

“No. It was awful; I was awful.” Jeanne finally succeeded in taking off her coat, and let it slump to the floor, something Polly had never seen her do. “The thing is, as long as Betsy’s husband doesn’t know what our relationship is, I’m in a completely false position.”

“Mm,” Polly agreed.

“I think he must know.” Jeanne bent to retrieve the coat, and dropped it on a stool from which it at once slid off. “Unconsciously, at least. Only he won’t admit it to himself.” She began to wander around the room again. “But maybe he’s too stupid. At least he knows Betsy doesn’t love him anymore. If she ever did.” She fell into a chair and looked around distractedly. “Is there any coffee left?”

“Sure.” Polly turned on the flame under the pot.

“I think maybe he knows, or suspects anyhow. Because whenever I come over he sulks and slams things around, and shouts for Betsy to hurry up and make lunch or something.”

“He sounds like a pig.” Polly set the coffee in front of her friend, together with a carton of the heavy cream she preferred.

“He is. A complete pig.” Jeanne nodded miserably. “She’s afraid of him, that’s what it is,” she added, dumping in sugar. “She says not, but I know she must be. After all, he’s already hit her once.”

“Betsy’s husband hit her?”

“Yes. He struck her in the face with a plastic flyswatter. He said afterward it was a mistake, he meant to swat a fly. I know those sorts of mistakes. My brother used to make them all the time.” Jeanne lifted her mug. “Thanks. That tastes good.”

“I’ll start another pot,” Polly said.

“I told Betsy, I can’t go on like this. I can’t. I mean as long as she doesn’t acknowledge me, I feel as if I’m some kind of dirty secret in her life. I told her that. I said, ‘Betsy, my darling, I can’t go on with this relationship any longer unless it’s out in the open.’ ”

“And what did Betsy say?”

“She started crying, and said she just didn’t know what to do.” Jeanne sighed heavily and was silent.

“So what’s going to happen?” Polly said finally.

“I don’t know. But I told Betsy I’m not going to see her again until she tells him the truth. I can’t stand it, that’s all there is to be said.”

As it turned out, though, that was not all. For nearly an hour Jeanne sat sipping cup after cup of coffee with cream and picking at the angel food cake and weeping a bit from time to time, while she rehearsed the history of her affair with Betsy, and drew parallels between it and other affairs in her past. This was not the first time, Polly learned, that she had been hurt or betrayed. Jeanne then broadened her scope to relate events of a similar sort that had happened to friends and acquaintances.

Eventually she yawned, sighed, thanked Polly for listening, and dragged herself off down the hall to bed. Polly sat on in front of the unread Sunday
Times.
What she mainly felt, besides a painful sympathy for Jeanne, was a wistful disillusion. If even two women couldn’t be happy together, what good was it all?

Maybe, if you had to be in love, with all the problems and craziness that involved, it was better to be in love with someone who was dead. A dead person couldn’t do you any harm emotionally; she or he couldn’t criticize you or betray you or leave you. And you couldn’t do her any harm either, so there was no guilt.

As Polly lay in bed, slipping toward sleep, there was a soft knock at the door.

“It’s me,” Jeanne’s voice said. “Can I come in?”

“Sure.” Polly reached for the bedside lamp.

“I can’t sleep,” Jeanne whispered. She sat down on the end of the double bed and wrapped her ruffled pink flannel nightgown around her feet. “I keep thinking about Betsy. Just thinking the same things, over and over.”

“I know how it is. After Jim left, I had insomnia for weeks. Hey, I think I have some Valium put away somewhere.”

“I already took one.” Jeanne let out a long thin exhausted puff of wind. “It’s that room, you know. Especially that bunk bed. I keep thinking of how she was there with me. It’s like it was haunted.”

“Yes.”

“Listen, could I sleep here, just for tonight? I promise I won’t toss around or have nightmares; the Valium should start to work pretty soon.”

“Well — sure.”

“Thanks. You’re a real pal.” Jeanne gave her a grateful hug; then she shuffled around to the far side of the double bed and got in. She turned her back to Polly and dragged the covers completely up over her head. Polly wondered how she could breathe.

True to her vow, Jeanne was unconscious in five minutes. She did not jerk or thrash about, but lay quietly, giving out only a regular soft slur of breath and a steady animal heat. It was Polly, now, who turned and shifted her position. Over a year had passed since she had shared her bed with anyone, and she was acutely conscious of the new slope of the mattress; of the heavy, warm sleeping shape a foot away, and of its sex.

Well, here she was in bed with a woman, and what did she feel? Restless and uneasy; and not exactly excited, but keyed up, tense. Maybe what she wanted was for Jeanne to turn over, and put her arms around her, and hug her again.

But Jeanne was deep in a drugged sleep, and besides she was physically and emotionally exhausted by her scene with Betsy. And did Polly really want to do with Jeanne what Jeanne did with Betsy? What was that, anyhow?

These questions, and others related to them, kept Polly awake for over an hour, and when she finally dozed off it was into an uneasy slumber broken by bad dreams. In the last one she was shopping in the local A&P, only she was naked. She was searching the shelves for something to cover herself with, and finally she found a green plastic trash bag, and she pulled the bag over her head, and it only came down to her waist, and it was very hot and sticky, and she couldn’t move her arms, and she was trying to move them, to scream, to tear a hole in the bag, and she was naked and there were a lot of women in the aisles looking at her, and she gave a series of stifled desperate cries and woke in the middle of the bed, with Jeanne’s arms around her from behind.

“It’s all right, Polly,” Jeanne was saying to her gently. “It’s all right, it’s just a nightmare.”

“I thought —” Polly gasped as if she had been running. She turned over toward Jeanne, still trembling a little, and panting for air.

Jeanne, misunderstanding, gathered her closer. “It’s all right,” she crooned. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

In the dark, Polly shook her head vigorously. “No.” Then, since this sounded ungracious, she added, “But thanks. I’m glad you were here.”

“Me, too,” Jeanne said. “I don’t know what I would have done tonight without you. All the way back from Brooklyn on that awful subway, I felt I wanted to die. I almost hoped some crazy delinquent with a gun would get on.” She hugged Polly, holding her close but not tight. It wasn’t like what she was used to, it was more like being hugged by Stevie when he was little, or her mother; warm and fond and safe. Polly, with a half sigh, let herself relax into the warmth and softness.

“I’m glad he didn’t,” she said.

They lay quiet. The green numbers of the digital clock flipped on the nightstand: 4:23
A.M.

“It’s true about sleep being the balm of hurt minds,” Jeanne murmured. “I mean, I’m still perfectly miserable about Betsy, but I don’t want to die anymore.” She laughed a little sadly.

“That’s good.”

4:26
A.M.
4:27
A.M.

“I feel so much better,” Jeanne said, moving one hand to stroke the thick curls at the back of Polly’s neck above the pajama jacket. “If you want it, I’d like to make you feel better, too.”

Maybe I do want it, Polly thought. If I don’t try, I’ll never know. “All right,” she said uneasily. She swiveled farther toward Jeanne, and put her arms around Jeanne’s flannel nightgown.

“Polly, dear,” Jeanne whispered, and kissed her: a long, gentle, deepening kiss.

Gratefully, awkwardly, Polly reached up to touch Jeanne’s fine long hair, so unlike her own; and then the warm yielding flesh of her neck under the flannel ruffle.

“Oh, that’s nice,” her friend said. Her kisses were soft now, fluttering. “Oh, yes. Do that again.”

Yes, we were good friends for a while.

It was in about nineteen-sixty, sixty-one, when I was studying at Cooper Union, and Laura was still living in New York. I guess some people already knew who she was, but I’d never heard of her, though of course I’d heard of her husband. We met at the Modern: a guy I knew from school was working there, selling tickets; he introduced us. But he just said: “Laura Jones” — I didn’t connect it.

We got on pretty well from the start. There was a new show of drawings, and we went around it together. It turned out we liked most of the same things. Then we had tea in the members’ lounge; it was the first time I’d ever been up there.

Yes, of course Laura was nearly ten years older than me, but I didn’t realize it then. She had on the kind of clothes she always wore, paint-streaked jeans and sneakers and an old black turtleneck sweater. And no makeup, and a mass of long dark hair. She looked like a student too.

No, she didn’t seem especially shy.

I don’t know. Maybe she felt comfortable with me because I was young and kind of awkward. I was just a skinny kid from the Bronx, and I didn’t have any social manner.

We used to meet about once a week. We’d walk around the Village, go to galleries, have a sandwich and a malted, sketch in the park, that kind of thing.

I don’t know. We talked about painting, the work we’d seen, new techniques, you know. I remember Laura’d just discovered Piero della Francesca, and she wanted to try doing frescoes in egg tempera. I got interested too, and we went around to art stores and tried to find out about that.

No, it turned out to be too complicated, and awfully expensive.

Sure, we talked about other things: films, and books. And I guess I told her some of the trouble I was having at home, the way my parents were always after me to study something useful like bookkeeping, because they were afraid I wouldn’t get married.

No, I don’t think she ever gave me any advice. But she was a good listener, you know.

How do you mean, strange?

I don’t know, maybe. I mean most artists are kind of strange, compared to other people, don’t you think? I guess I’m a little strange myself, at least that’s what my husband tells me.

Well, for instance, there were a lot of ordinary things Laura didn’t like, hated really, and I didn’t like them either.

A whole heap of things. I can’t remember most of them now: TV, and pay telephones, and Léger and Stuart Davis, and wobbly Jell-O salad with fruit in it, and men in brown felt hats, and watches with metal bands. ... We had a word for all of them: we called them “creepos.”

Well, what happened was, she came to Cooper Union to look at a painting I was doing. A couple of people saw her there, and afterward they mentioned that she was married to Garrett Jones and had shown at the Apollo and been written up in
Art News.

She hadn’t said anything about any of it to me. She’d told me she was married, but she didn’t say to who. I got the idea that he was an older man, and pretty well off, but she didn’t want to talk about him. I thought maybe it wasn’t going too well.

Yes, it made me feel a little funny. I didn’t understand why Laura’d never even told me she had a gallery. Now I see it differently: I think maybe her success embarrassed her. Maybe she thought she didn’t deserve it, kind of. I mean, she must have known she deserved it, but maybe she thought she wouldn’t have had it so soon without her husband’s help.

She didn’t say much about my work, not that I remember now. There was one drawing of a mouse that she liked, but that was just kind of a joke. I’d done it for my niece’s birthday. Most of my painting was abstract then, big canvases. It’s funny, though; I never thought of it before, but about ten years later, after I had kids myself, I went back to drawing animals for them, and that started a whole new direction in my art. My last show ...

Yes, we went to her place a couple of times, when Garrett Jones wasn’t there, and she showed me some of the small semiabstract flower canvases she was doing then, the ones everybody compares to Redon now.