The Truth About Lorin Jones (21 page)

Well, that year, her junior year, she had three paintings in the student show, and it was clear to anyone who had any sense that they were by far the best of the lot. Garrett wanted to meet the artist, so I introduced them. I still blame myself for that, rather, though of course how could I have known? Anyhow, they met. Laurie saw her chance, and she took it.

Single-minded. You can say that again. She certainly didn’t let anything stand in her way. Or anyone. His wife meant less to her than an old paint rag. You know he was married then, I assume.

And I suppose you also know that he was married to my present wife.

Oh yes, he was.

No, if you want to know, that doesn’t surprise me at all. Garrett never mentions it now, but he and Roz were married for seven years. When he got the appointment at Bennington she gave up a first-rate job in New York to go with him, and took one in the dean’s office at half the salary.

Oh yes, I knew them well. Until Laurie Zimmern appeared on the scene we were good friends, the three of us, we did everything together.

I loved them both. They were fine-looking people, big and fair and full of energy. And extremely happy together. Roz had such warmth and wit and high spirits, she was always ready for anything, and Garrett was brilliant. I was only a few years younger, but I looked up to him intellectually: he knew so much, and his artistic taste and judgment were always impeccable.

Well, you see, another thing I’ve learned over the years is that some men, even brilliant men, are hopelessly weak where women are concerned. And of course there’s a certain sort of woman who can sense this, and use it to her own advantage.

I don’t think it had anything whatsoever to do with love, at least not on her side. If you want to know my opinion, the only thing Laurie Zimmern ever loved was her painting.

Oh, I suppose she was beautiful. Well, she would have had to be, to interest Garrett, and she would have had to be gifted.

Yes, it’s true people often say that. And I can’t deny there’s a similarity, especially in her early paintings. But even then Laurie’s work always had a kind of mystical, surrealist side to it that mine never had — that I never wanted it to have, either.

No. It wasn’t a matter of influence; it was something more basic, I think: a similar way of seeing the world. Of course I did teach her some technical things. And I suggested the names of a few past artists whose work she might look at. That’s really all you can do for someone like that. It’s ironic, you know: it’s not the best students one can actually teach, it’s those who are merely clever and talented.

Very
good. And if she hadn’t gone off the deep end and run away with that ridiculous young man — if she’d lived — I think she would be recognized now as one of the most important painters of her generation. Yes, absolutely.

I don’t see any contradiction. Genius has nothing to do with character; some of the greatest artists have been saints, and others have been bastards.

Oh yes. We see a good deal of Garrett and Abigail. At first Roz didn’t even want to hear his name, and one couldn’t blame her. But after Laurie left him and he remarried it was easier. We both like Abigail very much. Besides, it’s a long time ago now. And Roz is such a wonderful, generous woman: she doesn’t bear a grudge. As she says, an elephant never forgets, but who wants to be an elephant?

Of course, it will never be quite the same, but what ever is in this life? The four of us get on very well. Last summer we went on one of those Swan cruises together. We toured the Greek islands, and I did quite a lot of watercolors.

Yes, it was a great success. If my legs hold up we’re going to try one to the hill towns of northern Italy this coming spring.

O
N THE NIGHT BEFORE
Thanksgiving, in her stepfather’s house in Rochester, Polly lay in bed in the attic room that had been hers since the age of nine. The steep slope of the ceiling and its freckled, flaking whitewash were as familiar to her as her own skin, now also beginning to freckle and flake. Her childhood books were still on the shelves behind the door, her old posters — Monet and the Beatles — still on the walls. The burnt-sienna homespun curtains that she had hemmed herself were sun-faded, but they caught on the handle of the casement window in the same old way.

Her attic was still, Polly thought, the only really attractive room in the house. The others were comfortable enough, but wholly unaesthetic; there was no vulgarity or pretension in their decoration — only utter lack of taste. In the sitting room forest-green upholstery clashed with olive-green carpeting and sea-green brocade curtains, all of the most durable quality; Early American furniture contended with heirloom Victorian and Danish Modern. The pictures and ornaments had been chosen solely for their symbolic value: family photographs, footstools covered in tapestry roses by Polly’s mother, ashtrays and a magazine rack made by her half brother in school, and an embarrassing sub-Degas pastel of a ballet dancer that had won her a prize in seventh grade. Even worse were the souvenirs of Bea and Bob’s vacations: tourist-shop watercolors of Provincetown and Paris, a gilt papier-mâché tray from Rome, a Royal Wedding plate from London, and a huge hideous prickly-pear cactus from New Mexico. (When she was eleven Polly, having heard that alcohol was a sure if slow poison, had tried to kill this monstrous plant by pouring sherry into its pot, and the following month gin. The cleaning lady had been accused of tippling, but the cactus had thrived, and continued even now to thrive.)

As Polly used to complain rudely and hopelessly when she was a teenager, the house didn’t have to look this way. It was large, well designed in the style of the 1920s, and built to last. An English professor just around the corner on Crossman Terrace whose children Polly had gone to school with had an almost identical house; but it was beautiful inside as well as comfortable, full of elegant furniture and pictures and leafy green plants arranged with thought and care.

But it wasn’t only for aesthetic reasons that Polly always felt uncomfortable in Rochester. The house reminded her, still, of what her life there had been like. Walking into it was like walking into a thin fog, a damp miasma of ancient anger and depression.

The move to Rochester had been great for her mother, she saw that now; it was what Bea had always wanted, a stable marriage to a reliable man who had progressed steadily if not brilliantly from physics graduate student to full professor. After what she’d been through it must have been great to have a big comfortable house near the park and two sons who were born at respectable intervals and had Bob’s placid temperament and his talent for math and science.

But in this happy family Polly was an outsider. She hated math; she had bad moods and screamed and wept and threw things. She was too old for her new family — ten and thirteen years older than her half-brothers. She didn’t match her mother and Bob and the boys, with their straight hair and neutral light-brown coloring. She didn’t even have the same name as they did; a girl in her class once asked if she was adopted. Often people who came to the house for parties didn’t know who she was. “You must be the baby-sitter,” a woman in a shiny red dress with beads on it said to her once in the kitchen.

Her mother did try to get Polly to baby-sit, but usually she wouldn’t, because her little brothers always ganged up on her as soon as their parents were out of the house, and wouldn’t mind what she said. They were stupid, spoiled little kids, she thought then; now they only seemed totally dull and conventional.

Lorin Jones also had a half brother she didn’t particularly get on with as a child, Polly recalled, feeling a faint echo of her old shiver of identification. Only it was worse for me, she thought: I had two of them.

When Polly was fourteen Bob Milner won a prize for a textbook on physics, and a reporter from the
Times-Union
came to interview him. Polly was at a friend’s house that afternoon, only two blocks away, but nobody called her to come home and be in the photo of Professor Milner and his family, or even mentioned her in the article. Bob said he was sorry about it afterward, when it was too late. “That’s okay,” Polly told him. “I’m not related to you anyhow.”

Her mother was different: Polly felt related to her, though she couldn’t understand why she liked Bob and the boys so much — didn’t she see how boring they all were? Bea at least wasn’t boring; she sometimes made surprisingly shrewd, even witty comments on people and events. But she was hopelessly unliberated and unambitious. She was still grateful to Bob Milner for marrying her and taking her to a dreary city like Rochester; she still couldn’t get over how nice he was compared to most men.

And the infuriating thing was that Bob
was
nice. He had always tried to do the right thing by Polly, she had to admit that. He paid to send her through college and graduate school; he never favored her half brothers over her when it came to presents or music lessons or trips. Of course, one reason he was so nice was that he’d always had everything his own way at home; Bea saw to that.

For instance, Bob Milner had been allowed to name his sons Albert and Hans after the two physicists he most admired; Bea had no input in the selection, any more than she’d had in the selection of Polly’s name — her father’s grandmother had also been called Paula. Once, when she was in college, Polly had asked her mother if she’d minded having her husbands choose the names of all her children. At first Bea had seemed not to know what Polly was talking about; then she smiled and rested her hands on the old treadle sewing machine at which she was piecing an ill-designed patchwork quilt. “No, it never occurred to me,” she said, shifting the folds of material. “But I don’t think names are all that important, do you?”

“I think they’re very, very important,” Polly had replied; at the time she had been thinking of changing her name to Stephanie, for no good reason that she could remember now.

Except maybe that was why I wanted to call my kid Stephen, she thought. I wanted him to be the kind of person I thought a Stephen or a Stephanie was then, probably because
of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
independent and artistic and brave.

And what kind of person was Stevie now? Polly sighed. At the moment, she had no idea.

It had been a real dismal scene, as he would have put it, ever since he got to Rochester. She was stunned when she saw him loping along the airport corridor toward her, looking inches taller in his new cowboy boots, and transformed outwardly into a Western preppie. His unruly brown hair (so like her own, and before always about the same length) had been cropped and tamed, and he wore an unfamiliar red ski parka covered with zippers and flaps and strips of Velcro.

“Oh, Stevie, baby!”

“Hi, Mom.”

Not only was his greeting constrained, for the first time in his life Stevie seemed to suffer rather than return Polly’s hug and kiss. On the way to her mother’s house he suffered rather than answered her questions. He hardly looked at her, but kept staring at the backs of Polly’s half brother Alby and Alby’s new wife, Carolee, in the front seat. Maybe her son was abashed by Carolee’s presence, though strangers had never made him shy before: on the way to La Guardia in August he’d had an animated conversation with the cabbie about tornadoes.

At home it was no better. Polly had been looking forward to this moment for months, but she was unable to break through Stevie’s reserve. At her suggestion he sat in the kitchen while she made the walnut cake he had always liked; he cracked nuts for it and licked the bowl, but his conversation was a series of monosyllables and platitudes. “Yeah ... No ... Sure, I’m all right... Dad’s all right... School’s all right... No problem,” he kept saying. Her beloved child, whose lively volubility had always been her joy, had become a polite, inarticulate stranger.

At dinner, though, he fell into the familiar noisy, banal style of conversation at the Milners’, dominated as usual by the men. He and Bob and Bob’s sons compared computer games and sci-fi films; they traded stories of mountain climbing and white-water canoeing, while Bea and Carolee provided a cheering section. Afterward Stevie helped the men wash up and then followed Alby and Hans into the study to play poker. It was always that way in this house: you practically never had a private conversation. She might as well resign herself to it; after all, tomorrow she and Stevie would be leaving for New York, and she’d have him to herself for two days.

She certainly hadn’t had him to herself yet, Polly thought the following evening, clearing the table while her mother scraped and rinsed the plates, as they had done in this same kitchen every Thanksgiving since Polly was nine. Bea Milner had a new dishwasher now, and leaves had been added to the dining table as the family grew, but otherwise everything was almost eerily the same as it had been thirty years ago. Presumably, some of Bea’s dreary forget-me-not china must have broken and her flowered linen dishtowels worn out from time to time, but they had been replaced with similar china and towels.

Meanwhile, Bob and his sons and Stevie were watching football on TV, just as they did every year, and Polly and her mother were cleaning up, even though they had also cooked dinner. The men usually pitched in after meals, but on Thanksgiving they were always exempt. Polly had resigned herself to this; it was something else that riled her now: the fact that Alby’s wife, Carolee, was in there watching football with the men.

“I don’t see why Carolee doesn’t have to help us,” she complained, covering a Pyrex dish of cranberry sauce with plastic wrap. “After all, she’s not a guest anymore, she’s part of the family now, isn’t she?”

“Mm, yes,” Bea agreed placidly. She was a small, sturdy, rather pretty woman with tinted and waved light-brown hair and a more lined, less defined version of Polly’s features. Her large round eyes were pale rather than dark, and there was something neat and birdlike about her movements. “But you know, dear, she’s a tremendous football fan. I think she gets just as excited by a game as Alby or Hans, don’t you?”