The Truth About Lorin Jones (18 page)

“No. If you want to call it that. All I know is, he had a Scotsman’s instinct for where the money was. As long as Laura had funds he stuck to her like rubber cement. When the cash was used up, and her paintings weren’t selling anymore, he just peeled off.”

“Yes, I heard — I mean, Jacky Herbert said Cameron wasn’t around when Lorin was dying.”

“No. He was up in Maine. The goddamn creep.” Garrett’s voice roughened. “Let’s forget about him; it’s all ancient history now. Here. Take a look at this.” He pulled the old black portfolio toward him and, with some difficulty, untied its frayed and faded tapes.

Inside there were only a few sheets of paper: three or four large drawings with pencil notations about color, evidently preliminary sketches for paintings. Underneath them, covered with a sheet of creased tissue that Garrett lifted off carefully, was a big gouache of what might have been an explosion of fireworks, or a lake in the woods in autumn, the whole scene speckled and shimmering with red and orange and gold, almost pointillist.

“Oh!” Polly cried. “I’ve never seen — I didn’t know —”

“It’s not finished, of course.”

“Really?” It was true, there was a large irregular white area in one lower corner, streaked with a vague wash of ochre; but patches of nearly blank canvas were not uncommon in Jones’s work.

“Well. Maybe it’s finished, in a way. Maybe that’s how Laura wanted it.”

“It’s beautiful.” She stared for a long moment at the painting; and then up at Garrett accusingly. “You never mentioned — This could have been in the show.”

“Yes, I suppose so. But — Well, I suppose I didn’t want it there. That little pond — You can see it’s a pond?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it’s over in the woods in Truro. Laura and I used to go there sometimes together, the first autumn we were here. I don’t like to look at it much now.”

“I see.” It’s where they made love, Polly thought. This brilliant storm of light and color was the memorial of, the transubstantiation of, an erotic encounter.

She stared at Garrett, but his face was averted toward the window. “You could sell it,” she suggested, feeling as she spoke that this was crass. “I’m sure the Apollo Gallery —”

“I don’t want to sell this picture, damn it.” Garrett’s tone was rough. “I tell you what,” he added more gently. “Why don’t you take it?”

“Me?” Polly’s voice rose.

“Yes, you.”

“Oh, I couldn’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Well, I mean, for God’s sake. It’s too valuable.”

“I don’t need money,” Garrett said almost angrily. “I’d like you to have it. That is, if I could be sure you wouldn’t hang it anywhere I’d ever have to see it again, or sell it to some damned collector or museum, at least until I’m gone. I don’t want to come across it unexpectedly somewhere, you know what I mean?”

“Yes; I understand.”

“Good.” Garrett cleared his throat. “Now, about this other material. I expect you’d like to have copies of some of the drawings.”

“I’d like a copy of everything, really,” Polly said eagerly. “Of course, I’ll pay —”

“Don’t worry about it. There’s a fairly good Xerox place in P’town. I can go there after I take you to the plane. Or, if we left a little early” (he checked his watch) “they might be able to copy the stuff before your flight.”

“That’d be fantastic,” Polly said. It came into her mind that Garrett was being generous and helpful. “You know, I’m amazed that you would go to all this trouble for my book. I mean, I really appreciate it.”

“Thank you.” Garrett smiled. “But why should you be amazed?”

“I just meant — uh, well, I meant,” Polly stuttered. “Some men might bear a grudge, I mean about last night.”

“That’d be foolish, considering the circumstances.” Garrett laughed. “Actually, you know,” he added very casually, “sometimes women who love other women are surprised to find they can also enjoy men — or rather, they can enjoy a man who understands what they prefer physically.” He gave her what was surely a meaning look. “I remember when I was living in the Village, back in the thirties —”

“I’m not like that,” Polly interrupted. She had heard before of men who prided themselves on their ability to, as they put it, “convert” homosexual women.

“Ah. Pity.” Garrett smiled briefly, and pulled Lorin’s gouache toward him along the table. Carefully, he lowered the protective covering over it.

The proposed gift was a bribe, Polly thought. I have just refused the implied bargain, and so it’s been withdrawn. She felt angry but relieved, for now Garrett was no longer decent and generous. He was exposed instead as a dirty old man who wanted to buy sex with his dead wife’s painting — even worse, with a painting of the place where he and she had once made love. Crass, horrible, disgusting.

Yet as the colors dimmed under the worn tissue, Polly felt a stabbing pang of loss. She thought that she would probably never in her life see this picture again, and almost wished that she had accepted Garrett’s implied bargain.

“Well, maybe we should pack up,” he said with a wheeze. He moved the drawings onto the table, lifted the shrouded painting, and replaced it in the old black portfolio. Slowly he retied the tapes; then he held the portfolio out toward Polly. “Right. Here you are.”

Startled, she took a step back. “I can’t,” she exclaimed, abashed by her own thoughts. “I don’t deserve —”

“Of course you do.” Garrett grinned at her. “You don’t know how glad I am that someone’s finally writing the truth about Laura. And how especially glad I am that it’s someone like you.” He looked at Polly with an expression at first warmly friendly, then uncertain. “Or maybe you don’t really care for this picture.”

“Oh, no!” she cried. “It’s wonderful.”

“Well, then.”

Still Polly hesitated. But a soft reverberation in her ear, Lorin Jones’s voice, or her own voice — and, after all, hadn’t Garrett said they were the same? — seemed to whisper:
Take it; I want you to have it.
Slowly, she held out her arms.

Oh yes, I remember Laurie Zimmern from college. Of course, she was only at Smith for one year, my sophomore year. Then she transferred to Bennington, which was really a much better place for her. She was a strange girl, young woman, I suppose you’d say now. Even for Bennington, where it was more fashionable to be strange then; I believe it still is.

I don’t recall how we got to be friends. I think perhaps it was because of a book of Beardsley drawings that I’d bought, and Laurie asked if she could borrow it. I remember thinking at the time that she was like a Beardsley drawing herself, all long smooth curves of black and white. She was very striking then, beautiful really, very slim, with white skin and those great dark eyes, and masses of dark hair. She wore it in a long bob with thick bangs, like some ancient Egyptian princess. It looked odd back then, when most everyone had short bouncy curls.

If your hair didn’t curl naturally, you put it up on rollers or got a permanent wave.

Her clothes were very odd too, by our standards. I remember the first evening of my sophomore year, going down to dinner in the dorm. There were the new freshmen in their candy-striped or madras-check dresses, or flowered skirts and blouses with Peter Pan collars, like what all the rest of us were wearing. And there was Laurie, in a long flounced red gypsy skirt and a ratty black scoop-neck cotton jersey. I felt sorry for her, but I thought she’d soon notice that her clothes were all wrong and do something about them. Only she didn’t. Then for a while I thought she must be on scholarship, and couldn’t afford to buy anything new. Well, you know, I was awfully conventional then. It was the way I’d been brought up.

But it turned out that Laurie wasn’t poor: her parents were quite well off. She wore those sorts of clothes because she wanted to. Most of them she found in secondhand shops — of course, this was long before that became fashionable. I used to shudder sometimes at what she’d bring back from the Salvation Army. To tell you the truth, I still feel that way. I’d never buy anything used; one has no idea where it’s been or what odd diseases its owner might have had.

Oh, no, she went to real stores sometimes. We even went shopping together once. I remember it because Laurie did this really strange thing.

It was in New York, over spring vacation, and she took me to Klein’s on Union Square. I’d never been there before, and I was appalled by the crowds, all those people pushing and shoving. And there were these awful warnings against shoplifting posted up everywhere: a crude drawing of a woman with staring eyes looking through bars, and underneath it said in both English and Spanish, in great black capital letters: DISHONESTY MEANS PRISON — DO NOT BRING DISGRACE ON YOUR FAMILY. I felt as if I were surrounded by thieves; I clutched onto my handbag like mad the whole time I was there.

But Laurie loved it. She found this dress on a rack — it was quite nice, black cotton with a square neck trimmed in black cotton lace. And she liked it so much that she said she thought she’d buy two. I assumed she was joking, but she explained that then she’d never have to bother about what to wear, because one of the dresses would always be clean.

Oh yes, she bought them both. And she actually did wear them when we got back to college, every single day that the weather was warm enough, for at least a month.

Yes, that seems rather enterprising, if eccentric, now; but by our rules at the time it was really shocking, almost crazy. You were supposed to put together a different outfit every day, repeating yourself as seldom as possible. When you wore a dress again you’d be careful to have new accessories, a different belt or scarf, you know. Even today ...

No, I think probably I was the only person at Smith who got to know Laurie at all well. You see, she didn’t really fit in, and of course she was very shy, too, and she said such odd things. Some people thought she was a hopeless neurotic; others just felt she was rather standoffish and affected. Most of my friends couldn’t see why I wanted to have anything to do with her. But I found her fascinating, really, especially at first. She was awfully well read for a freshman, for one thing. And I knew she was amazingly gifted.

I always thought it was a shame Laurie went into abstract art, because she could draw so beautifully. I still have some sketches she made of me and a pot of English ivy. But there certainly was something strange about her, and she wasn’t putting it on. I suppose it might have been better if she had been, in a way.

I didn’t mind Laurie’s being strange at first. I didn’t pay any attention to what my other friends said, until one evening toward the end of the year. I was writing a paper on Hawthorne, and Laurie knocked on my door and asked me to come and see what she’d done to her room. Because she was a freshman, she had one of the smallest rooms on the corridor, but she’d gradually decorated it so that somehow it looked much bigger, and not like a college dorm at all. There were a lot of little mirrors, and an Indian print spread on her bed, and heaps of embroidered pillows in bright colors, scarlet and crimson and plum, that you’d think wouldn’t go together, but they did. On the floor she had one of those big fuzzy-edged pale Indian rugs with a design of a tree full of peculiar birds. And she had strange posters, and lots of leafy tropical plants —

No, you have to realize, this was back in the nineteen-forties, those things weren’t clichés yet, they were original — weird maybe, but exciting. Laurie was way ahead of the fashion, you know. Because what most of us had in our rooms then were African violets and chintz armchairs and the Oriental throw rug from one of the spare bedrooms back home; and the girls who weren’t so well off had Bates Piping Rock bedspreads and curtains.

So naturally I was interested, and I followed Laurie down the corridor to see what she’d done now. She opened her door, shoved it back as far as it would go, which wasn’t very far, because there was something wedged up against it inside. I squeezed in after her, and she put on the light.

Well, it was upsetting. Everything had been turned backward or upside down. Laurie had tacked all her posters to the walls wrong side out, and shoved the furniture around, so that the chest of drawers and the desk couldn’t be opened: they were slap up against the walls, and you could see the raw unpainted wood in back. Her lamp was still on the desk, but it was upside down, balancing on its white pleated shade, with the brass base sticking up. The chairs all faced the walls, too, and the rug was upside down on the floor.

The worst thing was the bed. Heaven knows how she’d managed that, because our college furniture was solid oak, and very heavy. It looked quite dreadful, lying on its back with its square legs in the air, each one ending in a kind of metal claw caster, and the ribs of its slats were exposed, like something that had been killed. And the plants were awful too. All the pots on their sides and some of them upside down, spilling out dirt and leaves. It frightened me, really.

Well, I stood and looked at it. And Laurie looked at me, and gave me this little smile, and said, “Isn’t it nice?” I thought she was kidding, and I wanted to play along, so I said, “Oh, yes. But where will you sleep?” “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I won’t sleep for a while.”

Yes, she did leave it that way, but only for a few days. Then I think the maids — we had maids then, you know — complained that they couldn’t get in to clean, and our housemother made her put everything back.

I didn’t know what to think. If I’d been more sophisticated I probably would have wondered if she’d been smoking marijuana or something. I guess mostly I was amazed by the whole thing, and frightened, like I said. It was as if Laurie were saying, My life here is upside down, inside out, and backwards. She seemed so serious, and I couldn’t be sure it was a joke.

No, really, I don’t think that it was, quite.

Yes, it made a difference. I had to realize that Laurie wasn’t quite normal. And by the end of the spring term, when exams came, she’d gotten very strange. Of course, a lot of girls did become tense then, and do odd things; another friend of mine used to sit up all night studying in the bathtub — without water, of course — because it was so uncomfortable there she couldn’t go to sleep. But with Laurie it was worse, somehow. She didn’t eat properly, and in the end she sat through one exam, biology I think it was, without writing a single word.