The Truth About Lorin Jones (13 page)

Lorin Jones stood here painting this scene, she thought. At this time of year, maybe even this same hour of the afternoon, with the light coming low and from the left. I stand in her footsteps, am joined to her now by space and time. And also separated from her forever. A wave of loss and longing drowned Polly, as if the sea, the scrub, and the sand were dissolving and blowing over her in a fine haze of damp, gritty tears.

“You remember that picture,
Deposition,
” Garrett said, leaning against the car beside her.

“Naturally,” Polly replied irritably, jolted out of her mood.

“You’ll recognize that hollow in the dunes, then, and the shack over there with the purplish roof. Might have thought it would’ve fallen down by now, but these old Cape buildings are tough.”

I’m old, but I’m tough,
Polly heard him say;
don’t think you’re going to put anything over on me.
It occurred to her that his phony old-salt costume had the same message. It also said:
I am at ease here, in control; Cape Cod belongs to me.

“I’d like to get a photograph of this view, if you don’t mind.”

“Good idea.” He moved aside, allowing her to open the door for herself this time.

“
Deposition,
” she said as she returned the camera to her tote bag. “Tell me, do you happen to know why she gave her painting that name?”

“No idea.” Garrett Jones grinned. “You know, Laura always had trouble with titles. When she got stuck, she would shut her eyes and open some book. Just the way my Aunt Mabel used to consult her Bible for spiritual guidance. Only with Laura it was usually Webster’s Dictionary: she’d open it and put her finger on a word, or maybe a couple of words, and that would be it. I figure this was one of those times. It needn’t mean anything.”

“It seems pretty appropriate to me,” Polly contradicted, quoting from her notes: “ ‘Deposition: A statement under oath, taken down in writing to be used in court in place of the production of the witness.’ Isn’t that what a painting is, too? Or should be?”

“Uh, yes, perhaps.” Garrett Jones gave her a surprised, shrewd look. Score another for me, Polly thought. In her mind she ran over her list of Lorin Jones paintings, wondering which had been named at random from a dictionary.
Pigeon Hawk. Carbon Dioxide. Goatfish. Perispheres. Go.
Yeah, maybe. But not
Though They Know the War Is Over, They Continue to Fight.

“Of course, one could read that title in other ways,” Garrett added, recovering. “You could think of a ‘deposition’ as simply something that is set down, deposited. Or as referring to the time of year the painting was done, the end of summer. It could mean a kind of abdication of nature’s power, as in ‘The king was deposed.’ Isn’t that so?”

“Mm,” Polly conceded.

“We’ll never know what it meant to Laura, though.”

“I suppose not.” You’ll never know, anyhow, she thought silently.

By the time the car turned, onto Marsh Road in Wellfleet, Polly had seen four presumed sites of Lorin Jones’s paintings — none of them as obvious as the first, since during the years Lorin lived on the Cape her work had become steadily more abstract — and had photographed them all. Her digestive system had returned to normal, more or less, and her mood was greatly improved. Not only the places Garrett Jones had pointed out, but everything she looked at seemed to bring her closer to her subject: the clear cool light, the spare oriental shapes of dune and pine and reeds, the muted colors, the greenish black calligraphy of the bare trees. She was possessed by a kind of euphoric déjà vu: at every other bend of the road she saw something magically familiar.

“Fine view, isn’t it?” Lorin’s former husband roared against the wind as they passed a sweep of grassy marshland faded to buff and divided by a shimmer of choppy bay. “Ah, I should tell you. Abigail is awfully sorry, but she can’t join us this evening. She has a crisis over some article about houseplants.”

“Oh, that’s too bad,” Polly replied vaguely and insincerely, not turning her eyes from the landscape. She had nothing against Abigail Jones, a pretty, faded woman in her fifties who was a freelance women’s-magazine writer, with little to say for herself and nothing to say about Lorin Jones. But if Polly had to confront Abigail’s husband, it would be a lot easier and more pleasant if she weren’t around.

“So seeing as how I’m not much of a cook, I thought we might go out for dinner. There’s a pretty good seafood place in Eastham that’s still open this time of year. How does that sound to you?”

“Oh, fine,” Polly said, thinking that it might also be strategically to her advantage to face Jones on neutral ground.

“Good. Well, thar she blows.” With a crunch of sand and gravel, he turned into a driveway between browned lilac bushes.

In spite of the implication of this announcement, Garrett Jones’s house, once also Lorin’s, was in no sense a whale. It was larger than Polly had expected from the photographs, and instead of standing in open fields was surrounded by carefully tended shrubbery.

Inside, the place seemed to have little to do with either art or Lorin Jones. There were a few good small contemporary pictures, including one of Lorin’s that had been in Polly’s show, but the rooms in which they hung were unnaturally neat and overdecorated in conventional Early American Colonial style, presumably by Abigail Jones, for they looked exactly like one of her color features in
Homes and Gardens.

“The sitting room ... the dining room ... the study ... our bedroom.” Garrett Jones led Polly through the downstairs.

“Very nice,” she felt constrained to say. “It’s not at all what I expected, though.”

“Well, of course it was very different when Laura lived here. The house was damn near falling apart when I bought it back in nineteen-forty-nine, and there was no garden then, just long meadow grass right up to the walls. And of course the new extension wasn’t built. We didn’t even have electricity for the first few years. Abigail’s done wonders. ... Now let’s go upstairs, and I’ll show you Laura’s studio.” He led the way, rather slowly and heavily, up the steep, narrow staircase.

“Here we are. Rather small for a studio, but it’s the only place in the house with unobstructed north light. Nothing much left from Laura’s time, I’m afraid. This is Robbie’s room now, our younger son, but he’s away at Choate, of course. Sorry about the mess.”

By Polly’s standards, the mess was minimal. This room at least looked as if a human being lived in it; there was a reassuring clutter and shabbiness about the shelves of books and airplane models and shells and sports equipment, the posters of yachts and tennis stars tacked to the sloping wall beside the long dormer window. As if drawn by a magnetic force, Polly crossed the floor, pushed aside a gray corduroy curtain, and gazed out through the faintly green, bubbled old panes of glass, toward the misty sea.

“You recognize the view?” Garrett Jones’s voice sounded close behind her. “Laura painted it over and over again, of course. It’s in
Pigeon Hawk
and
Strata
and a number of her other pictures.”

“I recognize it,” Polly said, moving aside.

“She made a lot of sketches from these upstairs windows. I still have a few of them; I’ll show you later. If you’ll come out here in the hall, for instance, you can see —”

Reluctantly, Polly followed Garrett Jones and allowed him to demonstrate the scenes of various paintings, meanwhile wishing that he would go away so that she could be alone with them.

“And now let me show you where you’ll be bunking.”

Garrett tossed Polly’s bag onto a double four-poster in a painfully tidy guest bedroom full of antique prints and spool tables and hooked rugs. “Here you are. If you want to wash up, it’s right across the way.” He pointed with the full extent of his arm, like a captain indicating something on the horizon. “Oh, incidentally, I’ve put out a few more old photos I found. They’re here on the desk.”

“Thank you.”

“I figured you might like, say, half an hour to have a bit of a rest and change for dinner. Then we could take off about six, all right?”

“All right, sure,” she echoed, looking down at her cord slacks, plaid shirt, and Shaker-knit sweater, thinking that she’d be damned if she was going to tart herself up to go to a Cape Cod restaurant with Garrett Jones.

As soon as he had descended the stairs Polly went into the bathroom, lifted the pink-terrycloth-covered lid of the toilet — wouldn’t you know? — and sat down, less confident than before. She had realized that by driving her about, carrying her bag, and putting her up overnight, Garrett had set up the invisible expectation that she would behave like a polite houseguest. He had, in a word, set her up. Well, she would just have to forget about good manners.

As she crossed the hall, Polly felt the magnetic force again, pulling her toward Lorin’s studio and its window. Again she stared out, over the fading ochre and gray and blue horizontal stripes of lawn, scrubland, marsh, sea, and cloud-streaked sky that, like several of Lorin’s paintings from this period, resembled geological strata. In some of them the rocks seemed to have been sliced vertically, as sometimes happens in nature. But here, too, out the window, was the same dark slash bisecting slipped layers of beautiful pale color: the tall gray trunk of a dead elm.

Lorin Jones didn’t hate this place, as her friend Sally Vogeler had implied, Polly thought; she loved it. Here in this house, deep in this pale light-washed landscape, she knew it was so.

Lorin stood here, where I am standing, she thought. She saw what I see; she felt what I feel as I move down through the geological layers of her life. Joyful, apprehensive, confused; moved by the beauty of this place, oppressed by the heavy presence downstairs of Garrett Jones.

Suddenly Polly shivered, as if in a draft: she had the conviction that Lorin Jones, who had so often stood by this window, was here now behind her. It wasn’t a totally new idea: she had felt the presence of Lorin’s spirit before, but only inwardly, metaphorically. Now the sensation was realer and stronger. As she turned around she almost saw Lorin’s wavery ghost in the shadows: the tangled dark hair, the wide sleepwalker’s eyes. She blinked; the image faded into shapes of furniture and patterns of wallpaper, and was gone.

A soapy wave of longing washed over her. “Lorin.” She whispered the name half-aloud. “Lorin ... I’m here.”

Downstairs somewhere a door slammed. Polly started and, not wanting to meet Garrett Jones again yet, retreated.

Back in the guestroom she took up the snapshots he’d left for her. Three of them, blurred and light-struck, showed groups of people in outdated sports clothes. With some difficulty she managed to pick out Lorin Jones, but could recognize no one else. The last photo, larger and clearer, was of a small sailboat. Lorin stood in the cockpit, holding on to the mast and partly obscured by the sail; she wore an open white shirt over a dark bathing suit. On deck, nearer to the camera and in sharper focus, a man in brief bathing trunks was grinning into the sun. He was robust, handsome, blond — the sort of man women were instantly attracted to, the sort that Polly herself would have been attracted to before she knew better. Could it be Hugh Cameron, for whom Lorin had left her husband?

No, of course not. It was — she recognized him now — Garrett Jones himself, maybe thirty years ago. Polly felt queasy, as if she had just seen a film run backward at top speed. Still, this photograph explained something she hadn’t understood, which was why Lorin had ever married Garrett.

Now she could pick out Garrett Jones in the other photographs, too: by his height, the breadth of his shoulders and chest, and the swatch of fair hair that flopped into his eyes in all four snapshots. Even today, she realized, it was there; Garrett hadn’t gone bald, and the same unruly lock, now grayed almost to white, still fell across his brow. He was still, for his age, a good-looking man.

Why did Garrett want her to see these photos, in which her subject was mainly an indistinct blur? Obviously, because he wanted her to know and write that when Lorin Jones married him he was a fine physical specimen; that they were, as Jacky Herbert had put it, a handsome couple.

And would she write that? Well, yes, because it seemed to be the truth; and because it explained the marriage. Lorin Jones was a genius, but she was also a woman. Why shouldn’t she, like Polly, have made at least one serious mistake in a rush of passion?

“No salad dressing for me, please.”

“Oh, that’s right.” Garrett gave a little apologetic chuckle. “I should have remembered,” he added, falsely implying to the waiter that Polly was his close friend or relative, though in fact they’d only lunched together once before. And probably the waiter believed him, Polly realized with irritation, because they didn’t look unalike, both being blunt-featured and stocky.

For nearly an hour, on the drive to Eastham and then in this expensive restaurant, Polly had followed Jeanne’s advice and behaved with careful politeness. She had put up with a second alteration in Garrett Jones’s appearance and manner, from scruffy old salt to country-club yachtsman (navy blazer, checked shirt, paisley scarf), and made no comment on his erratic driving. She had allowed him to overrule her proposal that they split the bill. (“Impossible. I couldn’t even consider it. No, this is my pleasure.”)

She had also listened to a series of anecdotes about famous painters he had known, without pointing out that she’d already heard several of them. She was used now to the way people who were being interviewed tended to drift into unrelated tales of their own lives; but Garrett was really carrying it to an extreme.

To calm herself, Polly took another gulp of the pricey white wine Garrett had insisted on ordering and had already drunk nearly half of. He had also chosen the most expensive item on the menu, broiled lobster. If she’d known he was paying she would have ordered that too, instead of baked cod.

Polly couldn’t explain to the waiter that she wasn’t related to or a close friend of Garrett Jones, but she could demonstrate it. Without making any effort to be discreet, she hauled her tape recorder out of her tote bag and set it on the red-and-white-checked tablecloth. That would show him that this was a professional interview.