The Truth About Lorin Jones (27 page)

“I don’t see the point of that,” Polly said, again fighting for control. “You won’t remember anyhow.”

“I will so; I promise. What the hell —”

“It’ll be the same as it was with me,” Polly cried furiously. “You were always promising! Two years running, you promised to buy me an Etch A Sketch.”

“An Etch A Sketch?” Carl Alter repeated at the other end of the United States.

“It was a kind of screen with dials, you could draw pictures with it, and I kept asking you — Oh, never mind,” she added, ashamed now of her outburst. “I’ll ask Stevie what he wants, but you know it’s probably too late for the Christmas mails already.”

“I tell you what. Maybe I’ll send him a check, he can pick out something himself.”

“Yeah, that’s a good idea,” Polly said wearily, thinking that of course it would never happen; less angry now with her father — because what was the use? — than she was with herself for having blown up at him after all these years. “You do that,” she added.

Hey, Polly, before you start, I want to apologize for never getting down to New York. See, what happens is, I plan to go, every so often; but somehow I never make it. When you live on a farm, even a part-time one, there’s always just too much to do on weekends: there’s the garden, and the horses have to be fed and exercised, and the dog’s about to have puppies, it’s one damn thing after another. That’s one reason.

I guess the other is, I’ve gotten to hate the place. And of course Bernie never liked it. But it’s weird, a city girl like me. Though I still love Paris: I go there every summer for a couple of weeks if I can. But I realized the other day, literally all I’ve seen of New York in nearly three years is Kennedy Airport.

Okay, you want to hear about Laurie. I’ve been thinking what I could tell you that’d be useful. There ought to be something; I knew her for nearly twenty years. But I never felt I knew her all that well, or that we had much to say to each other.

No, I don’t mean I didn’t like her. I liked her well enough, but she just wasn’t on my wavelength.

Well, for example. I’m pretty much up front, always have been, and Laurie was the elusive, silent, secretive type. When I first met her, I thought she was a kind of Rima, a bird girl — did you ever read
Green Mansions
? Those immense eyes, and all that untidy dark hair. Her husband treated her that way, as if she were some fragile woodland creature, too delicate for this world.

I don’t know. Probably she realized it was part of the deal, if you look like that.

Well, you must have noticed that thin women attract a different kind of man than plump ones do. If you’re underweight you get older men, fatherly guys, who like to think of women as frail and helpless. They want to protect you and shield you from the world.

Right. Whereas if you’re overweight you draw the opposite type. Whatever their age, what they basically are is little boys who want to be taken care of. If you’re really built like a house, guys like that take one look at you and cry “Mommy!”

I think it’s harder to be too thin. Especially if you’re small, too; then you get the aggressive macho types, who like to refer to their wives as “the little woman.” And if you’re really unlucky you can attract the kind of man who’s looking for someone vulnerable, so he can hurt her or even destroy her.

No. In my opinion, most of the time it’s not luck; it’s a choice. I tell my women’s studies students, what they’re doing when they order that double fudge sundae, or shove it away, is choosing the kind of man they want, the role they want to play in a relationship.

Yeah, I think Laurie was doing that too, probably unconsciously. But Garrett certainly fit the pattern. He was always running after her with a sweater. And when the family got together, he was the one who did all the talking, and told us what a great artist she was going to be. Later on, when she began to get a reputation, he’d boast about her most recent success.

I think she was very embarrassed by it. When Garrett started quoting her latest review, or telling us what important collector had just bought one of her paintings, she always looked kind of miserable to me.

Oh, sure, I think she was very gifted. Nobody doubts that now, do they?

Yes, when I was married to Lennie we had a couple of her paintings. But he took them when we split. I got the kids and the house and most of the furniture, it was a fair deal. Lennie was never mean, not about money anyhow.

No, I don’t miss them that much. I prefer more content in art. I know it’s totally unfashionable, but what I really go for is nineteenth-century French realism: Courbet, Manet. Delacroix and Géricault even. Of course that’s my period. I like a lot of color and action.

We didn’t see them all that often. Lennie’s father enjoyed having his family around on holidays, so he’d make an effort to get us all together. But he and Marcia were traveling abroad a lot of the time.

Yes, we saw more of Laurie the first couple of years we were married, before her mother died. We used to stay at Lennie’s father’s house in White Plains whenever we came down to New York. Lennie didn’t get on too well with Dan, but he liked Celia, even though she was his stepmother. But she was less like a classic stepmother than anyone I ever met.

She was a really nice woman. I didn’t pay any attention to her at first, she was so pale and dim and self-effacing. She looked a lot like Laurie, but she didn’t have her striking black-and-white coloring or her energy. When you walked into a room full of family, Laurie and Dan were the first people you noticed, and Celia was about the last.

Well, Lennie’d told me she was awfully intelligent, and when I finally started to talk to her, I found out he was right. Celia’d read just about everything, even in my field. All of Proust and Colette and Camus, for instance, and mostly in French. Balzac, though she didn’t appreciate him. Gross, he seemed to her — “earthbound” was her term — and greedy, and too interested in money. But that’s
la condition humaine,
like he said, right?

About all she ever did was read, and work in the garden a little. I never saw her cook or sew or clean or anything like that. Of course they had a live-in housekeeper, and Celia was already ill when I met her.

You couldn’t tell, except that she always seemed tired.

I think she knew she didn’t have much time left. She always used to ask me what’d been published in Paris lately that was interesting; and when I recommended something she’d call Scribner’s bookstore in New York and order it sent that day, first-class. I thought that was kind of silly and extravagant back then, but afterward I realized she’d been afraid she might miss something otherwise.

The infuriating thing is, the kind of cancer she had is curable now, it has only about a ten percent fatality rate. If she’d been born twenty years later she’d probably be alive today, and maybe she’d have accomplished something too, because she had such a remarkable mind.

I figure that Celia knew everything, really. Only she couldn’t do anything about it, at least it seemed like that to her.

For instance, she saw that Lennie and I were going to have a rough ride together, but that we’d both survive it one way or the other. And I’m sure she knew Lennie’s father was sleeping with some woman from his office, who turned out to be Marcia. And she knew Dan couldn’t stand her being ill.

He despised weakness, you see. Lennie inherited that from him. Except the kind of weakness Lennie despises isn’t so much physical or moral as intellectual. He can’t stand stupidity, even in kids, and you know all kids are stupid sometimes. I remember once his shouting at Roo, “Why must you be so childish?” But the thing was, she
was
a child, she was only about four then.

Yes. I never thought about it before, but I think Laurie despised weakness, too.

All kinds. But with her it was her own weakness as well as other people’s — probably more than other people’s.

No. She had a lot more drive and will than her mother, but she didn’t have her father’s stamina. Celia said to me once, “I wish Laurie were a little bit more like you, a little tougher.”

No, after Dan married Marcia we didn’t see them so much. We’d always go to New York for Thanksgiving, though, and Laurie and Garrett would usually be there.

It wasn’t very comfortable. Lennie didn’t get on with his dad, like I said, and Laurie couldn’t stand Marcia.

Well, she can be pretty hard to take, but she’s got a good heart. She still sends my kids presents on their birthdays, even though they’re grown up. Ridiculous presents, mostly. My youngest, who’s in the Peace Corps in Africa, got a five-pound box of Whitman’s Sampler chocolates from her last February, because she used to like them as a little kid. Of course it was congealed into a kind of chocolate soup by the time it arrived, but you have to appreciate the impulse.

Yes, every year till Laurie left Garrett. And we went to stay with them a couple of times on the Cape.

It was all right. The main trouble was, pretty soon we had two small kids, and they didn’t have any. Roo was always knocking something valuable over; and our Celia was a baby, and you know how babies cry, just for exercise sometimes.

Yes, I met Hugh Cameron a couple of times, not on the Cape, but later, before he and Laurie settled in Florida.

He was a child, that’s what I thought. And was going to be one permanently, you could see that even then. One of those innocents who make trouble wherever they go. Men like that, they ought to glow in the dark, as a warning to women.

Yes. They were like children, both of them, playing hooky from real life.

No. She made me awfully impatient sometimes, but I knew that in a way it wasn’t her fault. She was brought up wrong. Her mother was wonderful in her way, and Dan was all right too, but he was the original macho man. He liked sports and parties and excitement and bossing women around. But he was generous, and he was really fond of our kids; they still miss him.

The thing was, they were your typical patriarchal couple: Dan ran everything, and Celia just drifted around him. So naturally Laurie grew up assuming that men would take care of her. When she finally tried to stand on her own feet and take care of herself, it was too late. That’s what I think.

Yes. Something did happen to her as a kid. When she was about ten, I think. It was at a Parents’ Day picnic at the country day school she went to. Laurie sort of wandered away and got lost, and when they finally found her she was hiding all crouched down in a corner of a little wooden playhouse in the nursery-school yard, without any panties.

She hadn’t been raped or anything, I know that. The family doctor said so. But she’d been just about scared out of her wits.

Nobody ever found out what happened exactly. Laurie wouldn’t say; she would hardly talk for weeks. There was a terrific uproar, and her parents took her out of that school and sent her somewhere else.

It was bad for all of them. One problem was, everybody in the family blamed themselves for not watching Laurie more carefully. The one who blamed himself worst was my ex-husband. His dad had told him to go and find his sister, but he didn’t want to be bothered, so instead he just climbed up the fire escape behind the school and read an Ellery Queen mystery.

No; I don’t believe that people are ruined by one bad childhood experience. I mean, everybody’s got something they can blame their whole life on if they want to. I got knocked down and stepped on, they can say, and I’m just going to lie here in the mud for sixty years so everybody can see how badly I was hurt. I think you choose your own life. Events happen to you, sure, but it’s up to you to decide what they mean.

Well, if you’re really haunted by something, I think you should go to a good shrink, get it out of your system.

No, Laurie never did, not that I know of. It wasn’t her kind of thing. But of course that was a choice too.

I
N THE MAUVE AFTERGLOW
of a warm December sunset, Polly Alter stood by the registration desk of a women-only guest house in Key West, dizzy with heat and travel fatigue. This morning in New York everything had been gray and gritty, like a bad mezzotint. She’d woken with such a sick, heavy cold that she called to cancel her flight, but all she could get on the phone was the busy signal. Giving up, she dragged herself and her duffel bag out to the terminal. There, aching and snuffling, she shuffled onto a plane and was blown through the stratosphere from black-and-white to technicolor. Five hours later she climbed out into a steamy, glowing tropical afternoon with coconut palms and blue-green ocean, exactly like a cheap travel poster.

It wasn’t only the scenery that was unreal. Most of the people she’d seen, beginning with the taxi driver, were weird. They moved and spoke in slow motion, as if something were a little wrong with the projector. Lee, the manageress of Artemis Lodge, was so slowed down she seemed drugged. It had taken her five minutes to find Polly’s reservation, and now she couldn’t find the key to Polly’s room.

“I know it’s here somewhere. I just can’t locate it right this moment, is all,” Lee drawled, smiling lazily. She was a sturdy, darkly tanned, handsome woman, a middle-aged version of one of Gauguin’s Polynesian beauties. She had a bush of shoulder-length black hair streaked with stone gray, a leathery skin flushed to hot magenta on her broad cheekbones, and knobbed bare brown feet.

While Polly waited, Lee shifted papers and slid drawers open and shut. She kept breaking off her search to answer the phone, to find a stamp for another guest, to offer Polly passion-fruit juice and nacho crackers (Polly declined, feeling her stomach rise), and to assure her that if she couldn’t get into the room tonight she’d be real comfortable on the porch swing.

Polly slumped against the desk with her duffel bag and her stuffed-up nose and her headache, listening to the irritating tinkle of the colored-glass wind chimes as they swayed in the sultry evening breeze. Maybe she should just get the hell out of here now and find a motel.

As Lee set down her sweating purple glass of passion-fruit juice and began to search again through sliding heaps of papers, Polly asked herself if maybe Ida, who had never liked her, had deliberately sent her to a dump full of crazies.