The Truth About Lorin Jones (8 page)

“Um-hm,” Polly murmured, attempting to sound sympathetic. What came to her mind, though, was a red-and-gray semi-Pollock canvas in her own show, back in Rochester. As soon as she saw it at the opening, she’d wished she’d never let it out of the house. If only she’d had the courage to take the miserable thing away the next day! What Jacky had said earlier, though he probably meant it only as flattery, was true: she was the right, the only person to do this book. The more she found out, the surer she was of her instinctive understanding of what Lorin Jones must have felt and thought.

“Well, Paolo was determined
that
would never happen again, and it didn’t. I expect Garrett spoke to her firmly. Anyhow, for a while she was more reasonable. But then she left him, and things really got out of hand.”

“Um-hm?”

“The real trouble began with her sixty-four show, the last one. It was over a year late to start with, because Lorin couldn’t make up her mind that the work was ready, as usual, and Garrett wasn’t around to make her see reason. Then, just after the opening, I came in one morning, and there was Lorin Jones over by the window, with a dirty Bloomingdale’s carrier bag on the floor beside her, scrubbing one of the biggest canvases with a rag soaked in turpentine, and scraping at it with a palette knife.”

“Really.”

“I was horrified, I can tell you.” Jacky giggled. “What made it worse, I’d only met her once or twice at that point, and at first I didn’t recognize her, the way she was got up — in a dirty old black sweater and her hair all over the place. I assumed I had some crazy bag lady on my hands. I thought Paolo was going to kill me first and fire me afterward.”

“So what happened?”

“Well, naturally I rushed over and asked what the hell she thought she was doing. At first she wouldn’t even answer. I was actually getting ready to call the police. Finally she said, ‘I’m working on my painting.’ As soon as I heard that whispery little voice I realized it was Lorin. I didn’t even try to reason with her, I simply dashed back to the office and telephoned Paolo, and then I called her in to the phone. But he didn’t make a dent on her. Well, there wasn’t much he could do, really. It was still legally Lorin’s painting. Luckily, she didn’t ruin it; we sold it the next week.”

“Why the hell should she have ruined it?” Polly nearly shouted.

“Well, it’s possible,” Jacky answered huffily. “I mean, there is such a thing as overworking, or don’t you agree?”

“I suppose so,” she admitted, cursing herself for her outburst. Against her will, she saw the stack of muddy overworked canvases that was at this moment leaning sideways in a disused tub in the former maid’s bathroom of her apartment on Central Park West. “So that’s why the Apollo decided not to give Lorin Jones another show,” she said, trying to make this sound reasonable.

“No no no. What finished things here was much more serious than that. Lorin’s possessiveness about her work, you see, it just got worse and worse. It was pathological, I really think, poor girl. She began to think of her paintings as literally part of her, you see, and she couldn’t bear to be separated from them.”

“I imagine most artists feel something akin to that, in principle,” Polly said — though as a matter of fact she had often wished some supernatural force would suck her old canvases out of the tub and cause them to vanish forever.

“Oh, yes; in principle. But what that meant in practice, for Lorin Jones, what it came to mean, rather, was that she wouldn’t sell her work. It was all right if the buyer was a museum, or a friend, so that she could visit the painting whenever she liked. But otherwise —” Jacky sighed. “What really drove Paolo round the bend was the business of the Provincetown triptych.”

“You mean
Birth, Copulation, and Death,
from the Skelly Collection?” Polly knew the painting well — it had been featured in color in the catalogue of “Three American Women” and reproduced on a postcard; certainly it was one of Jones’s most important works.

“That’s right. Only if it hadn’t been for Paolo, it wouldn’t ever have
been
in the Skelly Collection. God knows what would have happened to it.” He sighed. “You see, the Skellys decided to buy
Birth, Copulation, and Death
the second week of the sixty-four show, and Paolo was really happy for Lorin. He thought she’d be grateful, naturally, to have her work in a famous collection like that. But instead she threw a fit. She’d met the Skellys at her opening, and she’d hated them. She said they never looked at the paintings, all they did was walk around the rooms kissing their friends and talking about money. They were awful people, she said, and she wasn’t going to let them have anything of hers. When Paolo told her it was too late for that she went perfectly white with fury. I think if she could have she’d have taken the canvases off the wall then and there and walked out with them. But they were far too large for that, thank God.”

“How upsetting.”

“Wasn’t it?” Jacky agreed, mistaking her meaning — which was probably just as well. “And you have to understand, Paolo was very patient with Lorin. He did everything he reasonably could; more, actually. He positively bent over backward.”

“Really.” In her mind, Polly saw the small, spidery figure of Paolo Carducci, with his shock of crimped gray hair, bent over backward.

“He called Bill Skelly, and asked very tactfully if they were quite quite sure they wanted the Jones triptych; he said that if not, he’d be glad to forget the whole thing.”

“But they wouldn’t let him, I assume.”

“Bill said nothing doing. Well, actually he got rather enraged. He suspected Paolo had had an offer he liked better, maybe from some museum, and his back was up, naturally. There was a lot of bad feeling between them for a while.”

“Really.”

“That wasn’t the worst, though. Because, you see, Lorin didn’t give up even then. Instead she did something quite mad: she phoned Grace Skelly, and in her whispery little voice she offered to buy the triptych back, dealer’s commission and all. And when Gracie asked why, Lorin told her. You can visualize the reaction.”

“I suppose so.” Polly imagined Mrs. Skelly, a handsome, expensively dressed, loud-voiced woman who attended most of the private openings at the Museum, hearing that in Lorin Jones’s opinion she was unfit to own one of her paintings.

“Well, after that Paolo literally didn’t dare hang Lorin’s work. I begged him to reconsider; I told him she was an utterly marvelous painter, and he should make allowances. That’s what I said, though my heart was absolutely in my mouth, because I’d only been working there a few months, you see.”

“And did he listen to you?”

“Alas, no. He simply wouldn’t have anything to do with Lorin anymore. He came right out and told her he couldn’t take the risk.”

“Why didn’t she go to another gallery, then?”

“Well, you know.” Jacky laughed and cleared his throat apologetically. “Word gets about. And Gracie and Bill — they’re lovely people, really, but they don’t like to be pushed around or called names by artists; they’re not used to it. They never hung the triptych, and they wouldn’t put it up for sale either. Kept it in the vault twenty years, till you borrowed it for your show. And probably Bill Skelly bad-mouthed Lorin a bit around town. Quite naturally. Nobody insults his wife and gets away with it.”

“So that’s how it was.”

“That’s about it. But you mustn’t put any of this in your book, promise. It’d be fatal. I don’t know why I told you, anyhow.”

You told me because you are a notorious gossip, Polly thought.

“Promise, now. On your honor as a biographer.” Jacky giggled.

“All right,” she said.

As Polly stood damp and swaying on the Madison Avenue bus, she didn’t yet regret this promise. Jacky’s tale wasn’t flattering to Lorin Jones; it even, as he suggested, cast doubt on her sanity. After all, throughout history works of art had been bought, and even commissioned, by collectors whose manners and morals left much to be desired: think of the Borgias, or J. Paul Getty. It was just one of the facts of life. Sooner or later these people died, and the work they had privately hoarded was placed on public view. To demand that only the wholly virtuous and refined be allowed to buy paintings would be like screening members of a theater audience for previous convictions.

Besides, there was nothing so awful about the Skellys. They were important collectors, and trustees of her Museum. They were famous for being interested in new young artists, and willing to take financial risks in support of their enthusiasms; they lent their extensive holdings freely and donated generously. It was not their fault that they had loud voices and a high opinion of themselves.

As for the Skellys’ failure to hang
Birth, Copulation, and Death,
there was no proof that this came from vindictiveness. Most major collectors owned far more art than they could display at any one time. Though they might buy a lot of new work, they preferred to show currently well-known artists. Probably the reason the Skellys didn’t hang Jones’s picture for twenty years was at first that she wasn’t famous, and then that she was dead and more or less forgotten.

Anyhow, there was no guarantee that Jacky’s tale was true, Polly thought as she waited in the steady rain for the Eighty-sixth Street crosstown. Jacky wanted her to think well of Paolo Carducci and the Apollo Gallery, to regard them as sympathetic to artists. He was quite capable of making up a hostile story about Lorin Jones out of innocent bits of material, like a homemade terrorist bomb. Maybe Jones did once say that she’d rather have her paintings in a museum — who wouldn’t? Maybe she didn’t care for the Skellys personally — why should she?

But whether the story was true or not, it was true that for twenty years Bill and Grace Skelly had shut one of Lorin Jones’s most important works away from view. If they had done it from fashionable prejudice, it was forgivable if regrettable. But what if Jacky was telling the truth? What if they had done it out of revenge, because Lorin hadn’t played along, hadn’t treated them with the grateful eagerness they expected, that Polly had often seen them expecting — and receiving — from artists?

As the bus crossed the wet park at Eighty-sixth Street, Polly had a vision. She saw, as Lorin Jones must have seen, a collection of dark air-conditioned vaults, storerooms, attics, and basements all over the Northeast. In each, one or more of Jones’s paintings was imprisoned, shut away from light and air and from anyone who might admire and love it. She saw Lorin Jones, a slight pale figure in black, pounding on the doors of these temperature and humidity-controlled dungeons, begging for the release of her imprisoned work. Against her, holding the doors shut, were ranged a mass of dealers, curators, collectors, and critics; in Polly’s mind they took on the evil, grinning faces of grotesques from an Ensor painting.

This vision upset Polly, almost made her sick to her stomach — or maybe that was just the jolting of the bus. She mustn’t be unreasonable, she told herself; mustn’t become paranoid. That was what her colleagues at work would say; that’s what she would have said herself a few weeks ago.

But were her colleagues right, or was it that, away from her job, and from the deals and arrangements and assumptions of the New York art world, she was beginning to see it clearly for the first time?

That was what Jeanne, with her suspicion of all established “patriarchal” institutions, would probably have said. Jeanne took it for granted that these institutions were corrupt and to be avoided, though it was sometimes necessary to work with them until alternative decentralized, egalitarian, woman-centered structures had been established. Every second Tuesday evening she and some of her friends met in an apartment on First Avenue to discuss this and other political issues; as yet, Polly hadn’t joined them, though she had been invited.

Jeanne had moved into Stevie’s room three weeks ago, bringing with her a quantity of possessions surprising for someone who had lived in so many different cities and apartments. Polly had had to stack most of Stevie’s things in the spare room. But apart from this it had been a joy having her here. Jeanne was easygoing, well organized, sympathetic, and fair-minded; she was a lively conversationalist and an inspired cook. When Polly was alone she mostly opened frozen so-called gourmet dinners that, like airplane food, looked all right but tasted like reconstituted mashed potatoes, and she was always out of clean towels or butter or light bulbs, having to run down to the laundry room or out to the supermarket at awkward times.

Jeanne saw to it that they never needed anything; she brought flowers and books and chocolates into the house; she set her flourishing houseplants on the windowsills and added her large collection of classical tapes to Polly’s. If Polly wanted to work, Jeanne was quiet and unobtrusive; but she was always ready to go shopping or to a film or a gallery after work and on weekends, when her girlfriend’s suspicious, abusive husband was home.

Polly and Jeanne were so much together that Jeanne’s friend Ida had recently nicknamed them the Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat, after the characters in Eugene Field’s poem for children.

The gingham dog and the calico cat

Side by side on the table sat...

The reference was also to their taste in clothes: Polly wore a lot of checks and plaids, while Jeanne favored delicate, old-fashioned prints. When Polly looked the poem up she discovered that the characters fought like cats and dogs, and for a few days she worried about this, wondering if Ida had intuited some potential conflict. But so far she and Jeanne had never even disagreed seriously.

Polly’s worry about What People Would Think had also faded. All Jeanne’s friends knew she was in love with a woman in Brooklyn Heights, and Polly had taken care to tell Jim the same. His reaction had been, as usual, muted and neutral: “Oh, mmh.”

The only problem with having Jeanne in the apartment was her girlfriend, Betsy. Polly didn’t exactly dislike Betsy, but on the other hand she had nothing much to say to her. She was a bony, heavily freckled young woman (twenty-seven) with flyaway strawberry blonde hair and a hesitant, nervous manner. She was, Polly supposed, vaguely pretty; tall and leggy, with a miniature beaked nose like a little white parrot, and a swollen pink mouth that was always slightly open, as if she had started to speak and then stopped herself; something she often did. Her favorite painter was Salvador Dali, and she didn’t see the point of abstract art: the colors were kind of nice sometimes, she admitted, but it wasn’t awfully interesting or complex really, was it?