The Truth About Lorin Jones (7 page)

“Okay. That’d be nice.”

“Marvelous,” Jacky said sadly, meaninglessly. He waved one flipper for her to follow him into the back room.

“Here, let me,” he added as Polly began to struggle out of her poncho. “Goodness, it’s absolutely sopping.” He gave the rectangle of rubberized canvas a shake that seemed to express disapproval of more than its condition. “Now I’m going to hang this up right by the radiator, so it’ll be lovely and dry when you leave. And why don’t you give me that wet scarf, too?”

“Okay; thanks.” She handed over a sodden red-and-black rag; Jacky hung it carefully, yet with an indefinable air of distaste, over a collating frame.

“Now shall we go into my office, where we won’t be disturbed?... Good. Alan!” he called to the colorless young man. “Two cups of espresso, please. And no calls, please, for the next hour, unless it’s a serious buyer.

“So, how is it going?” he said, shutting the door and pulling forward an Eames chair for Polly. He leaned toward her over the desk, smiling with his large white perfectly capped teeth.

“Oh, pretty well.” Polly didn’t smile; Jacky’s fussy concern for her comfort, as if she were a possible client, hadn’t mollified her, but made her more suspicious. What was he going to try to sell her?

“I’m so pleased. You know, Paolo said before his stroke — Well, I think he was surprised, rather, that you hadn’t come to see him again. He wondered if you were making any progress. And he said that perhaps we should try to interest some writer with more experience.” Jacky flapped his hands deprecatingly. “But I said no, it has to be someone who hasn’t got so many other interests. Someone who can take the time to interview everyone: go to Wellfleet to see Garrett and down to the Keys to talk to that awful Hugh Cameron. And I’m convinced it should be a woman, too. Polly is the right person. That’s what I told him.” Jacky smiled. “Oh, that’s lovely, Alan.” He took the “tiny cup of coffee,” which in his big pale hand looked literally tiny.

“Well, thanks,” Polly said grudgingly. Why was Jacky telling her this? To flatter her and convince her that he was on her side? To make her feel nervous and dependent on him? Or both?

“Sugar?”

“Yes, please.” Polly held out her cup, then lifted the steaming espresso to her mouth and swallowed uneasily. Since Jacky Herbert was a man, she automatically distrusted him. He was also, of course, an art dealer, and — like most museum people — she was professionally suspicious of dealers. She knew that Jacky was currently engaged in gathering as many Lorin Jones canvases as he could find, with a view to selling them at large prices when Polly’s book appeared — indeed, he made no secret of this.

On the other hand Jacky (unlike Paolo Carducci) had always been lavish with praise of Jones’s work. More than once he had castigated himself in Polly’s hearing for not doing anything sooner about her paintings.

Also, like many people in the New York art world, Jacky was gay, and Polly didn’t usually distrust gay men. It was clear that some of them, like Jacky, would have preferred to have been born women if they’d been given the choice. Besides, she sympathized with them because, like her, they were so often attracted to the wrong type of guy.

“You’ve been interviewing Lennie Zimmern, I hear,” Jacky remarked after his assistant had left. “Hard work, I should imagine.” He made a wry face.

“Well; yes, rather. He doesn’t approve of personal biography.”

“He wouldn’t.” Jacky giggled. “Wouldn’t want his own written, I’d imagine. And whom else have you seen? Did you talk to what’s-her-name, Marcia, the father’s widow?”

“I saw her briefly. I didn’t learn a hell of a lot, though. You know Lorin Jones never lived with her, and they obviously weren’t close. I’m not sure I’ll bother to see her again.”

“I think you might, you know.” Jacky leaned forward.

“I don’t know. A friend of mine who works for
Time
says you should always go back for a second interview if you can. And bring a present, so they’ll feel obligated.”

“That sounds like good advice,” Jacky agreed. “I expect Marcia could tell you a lot, if she wanted to.”

“Maybe. There was something I meant to ask you about her, anyhow. Why aren’t there any of Lorin Jones’s pictures in her apartment? I mean, I already knew she didn’t have any, because we asked at the time of the show; but don’t you think that’s a little odd?”

“I don’t know that I do,” Jacky said. “I remember Marcia telling me that after her husband died Lorin came over and packed up all the paintings she had stored there, and shipped them down to Florida. Except of course
Who Is Coming?
”

“Yes, I remember.” Lorin Jones’s paintings tended to have mysterious, equivocal titles; one of Polly’s most difficult tasks would be to discover their meanings, if any.

“Of course that’s in the Palca Collection now; Paolo sold it for Marcia after Dan Zimmern died. It was Lorin’s wedding present to them, you know.”

“She never told me that.” The truth and nothing but the truth, Polly thought, but not the whole truth. “I’m surprised she wanted to sell it, considering.”

“I expect she had to. I doubt that her husband left her anything to speak of. Money never stuck to his fingers, from what I’ve heard.”

“I wish I could have met Lorin Jones’s father. You knew him, didn’t you?” Polly bent to open her wet briefcase and take out her tape recorder. “Hang on a minute while I start this thing, if you don’t mind.”

Jacky visibly hesitated, then smiled rapidly. “No, go ahead. You’ve already promised to let me edit the transcript, remember? In writing.” He giggled to take the edge off this caution. “If I’m indiscreet I can cut it out later, right?”

“Yeah, right,” Polly agreed.

“Well, let’s see then; what were you asking? Dan Zimmern. I met him three or four times, that’s all, when Lorin had her last show here in sixty-four. He was at the opening, shaking everyone’s hand as if he were the artist himself, very proud. And then he came back afterward several times. He’d always bring friends, and talk up Lorin’s work; what a famous painter she was going to be. He’d tell them they should buy one of her pictures, as an investment. I think a couple of people actually did. But he never stayed long. One minute he’d be all over the place, the next thing you knew he was gone.”

Yes, Polly thought; but at least he was there. Carl Alter had never made it to her first and only one-woman show, in Rochester during her senior year of college. “What was he like?”

“Oh, a big, good-looking old fellow; full of life. Smart too, probably, but he didn’t know beans about art. A macho type. He was on his third wife, and well over seventy, but still looking around, eyeing the girls at the opening.”

“Really.” Carl Alter too was on his third wife, his daughter thought.

“Oh, Polly. Before we go on, I must show you something.” Jacky levered himself up and opened a cupboard. “Look. This just came in, from that very sweet woman in Miami I was telling you about last week. She bought it in some little nothing gallery in Key West in nineteen-sixty-five, and she’s finally decided she wants to sell it.” He lifted a sheet of tissue paper. “You can see, it’s a watercolor sketch for one of the Florida paintings that was in your show,
Empty Bay Blues.
Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yes.” Lorin Jones’s most characteristic work hovered in a no-man’s-land — a woman’s land, perhaps, Polly thought — between representation, abstraction, and surrealism. Even in her least readable paintings, like this one, shapes that might be birds, fish, flowers, faces, or figures quivered and clustered. In reviews of “Three American Women,” the artists she was most often compared with were Larry Rivers and Odilon Redon. The large oil
Empty Bay Blues
merely suggested layers of shore, sea, sky, and cloud. But here, between the flow and slide of paint in the lower third of the watercolor, was something that might be either a lizard or a drowned woman.

“The light on the sea isn’t as ultramarine as in the oil, you see; more a kind of translucent mauve. Wonderful, really.” Jacky’s face expressed a genuine if mercenary adoration. “Paolo doesn’t care for the late paintings, but I think he’s very very wrong.”

“Empty Bay Blues
— That was one of the paintings you refused to show here, wasn’t it?”

“Please!” Jacky’s voice rose at least an octave. “It wasn’t me, I was a mere underling back then. ... But you mustn’t blame Paolo either, dear.”

“No?” Polly asked, trying not to sound skeptical, but failing.

“Really. You mustn’t put it into your book that the Apollo behaved badly to Lorin Jones, because it simply isn’t so. Paolo carried her for years when she wasn’t earning anything to speak of.”

Polly said nothing. I’ll put into my book what I goddamn want to put in, she thought.

“I guess I’d better tell you how it all was, so you’ll understand. Off the record, of course.” Jacky glanced at her tape machine.

“All right,” Polly agreed, affecting not to notice the direction of his gaze.

“I’ve never said anything about this to anyone before, by the way.”

“Mm.” I’ll bet, she thought, for Jacky was known to some people in the New York art world as The American Broadcasting Company.

“You’ve got to realize. Paolo did everything he reasonably could for Lorin, because he recognized from the start that she had real talent. But the trouble that girl gave him!” Jacky shook his large Roman head slowly.

“How do you mean, trouble?”

“Well.” He lowered his voice, but at the same time, fortunately, leaned forward, ensuring that the sound level on the tape would be preserved. “Between us, Lorin Jones was very very difficult to deal with.”

“Oh?”

“Terribly hard even to talk to, for one thing.”

“She was extremely shy,” Polly protested. “Everyone knows that.”

“Oh, granted. But you see, it was almost impossible to negotiate with her. Sometimes she wouldn’t answer Paolo’s letters for literally weeks. Or at all. In the end, he usually had to appeal to Garrett, and then Garrett would have to manage everything.”

“So you didn’t see much of her here,” Polly prompted.

“Not usually. Most young artists, you know how it is, they like to drop in every so often, or phone, just to remind you that they exist and are hoping for a sale. But not Lorin, ever, Paolo said. And she detested talking on the telephone. I had to call her once about something, and she whispered so low I could hardly hear her.”

You call that “difficult,” Polly thought crossly, but did not say. She was beginning to realize that Paolo’s illness might be to her advantage; that she might learn from Jacky what she would never have learned from his boss.

“But then, when she had a show, it was another story entirely. You absolutely couldn’t keep her out of the gallery. She had opinions about everything: what the announcement should look like, how the pictures should be hung, who should be invited to the opening.”

And why the hell not, Polly thought. “Really.” In spite of her effort, her tone was chilly.

“Let me assure you, no one values the artist’s prerogatives more than Paolo does,” Jacky hastened to say. “Still, there are limits. And Lorin caused him endless trouble, even the very very first time she was included in a group exhibition here. Most people her age would have been wild with joy to have two paintings in a gallery like this. But there was no sign of gratitude from Lorin, Paolo said. Or ingratitude either, one has to admit; she hardly spoke to him when she was here. All the complaints came through her husband. ‘My wife doesn’t think this painting really looks right next to hers’ — that sort of thing.”

“And would Paolo move the other painting, then?”

“Well, yes — very possibly. Of course, Garrett Jones was a very very important critic; maybe
the
most important back then. Naturally Paolo didn’t want to quarrel with him. They were friends, professionally speaking — still are, of course. You know how it is. But just between us, the Joneses drove him quite to distraction. ‘All right, she paints not badly,’ he’d say to me. ‘But there are other good young artists who don’t play the neurotic unapproachable prima donna.’ ”

“You don’t think that maybe —”

“What?”

“Well, I just wondered. I mean, suppose it was Garrett Jones who had all those complaints, really, only he put them off on his wife.”

“I shouldn’t think so.” Jacky frowned. “I mean, you’ve met Garrett; he’s a fairly reasonable man, for a critic. Some people think he has an exaggerated opinion of himself, but then, why shouldn’t he? He’s been right about the New York art scene time and time again.”

Or he’s forced his views on the New York art scene time and time again, Polly thought.

“And Lorin ... well... I mean, we all know that most artists are a bit peculiar. You have to expect that, aren’t I right?”

“I suppose so,” Polly said, realizing that as far as Jacky knew she was not now and never had been an artist.

“Well, Lorin was very very peculiar. And after a while, even her husband couldn’t cope with her.”

“Really,” Polly said as neutrally as she could manage.

“The main problem was, she simply wouldn’t let go of her paintings. She’d agree to have work ready for a show, and Garrett would promise to make sure that she met the deadline, and then nothing would appear. Over and over, it’d be like that. You see, she never thought a canvas was finished.”

“I expect that often happens,” Polly said, recalling her own experience.

“Well, not that often. Occasionally. But it was much much worse with Lorin. Even when her pictures were up on the walls she couldn’t let them alone. The day after her first one-woman show here, Paolo told me, he came back from lunch, and a little still life next to the elevator was gone. He thought at first that’d it’d been stolen, naturally. But it turned out that Lorin had taken it herself; she’d decided it wasn’t right yet. The assistant Paolo had then had tried to reason with her, but it simply wasn’t any use. She just wrenched the picture off the wall and carried it away. She never brought it back, either. But of course it was still listed in the printed brochure, and for three weeks Paolo had to answer questions about it. You can imagine how trying that was.