The Truth About Lorin Jones (29 page)

“Oh. Well. Thank you,” Polly kept saying, her spirits sinking lower with each revelation. She started to leave, but the yuppies wouldn’t allow it; they insisted on taking her around first.

“Aw, no, it’s no trouble. You’ve come all this way, for Christ’s sake. Anyhow, we love to show the place off, don’t we, Phil?”

“Right,” Phil agreed. “Besides, we’re grateful to you. It’s kind of thrilling to find out that a famous painter once lived in our house.”

“You know, it’s fantastic luck that we were around when you came,” his friend said, holding open the screen door. “Practically fate.”

“Ron’s right. See, most of the year we’re up in the Catskills and the place is rented out. We just come down for vacation in December; that’s the slow time in real estate.”

Polly followed Phil and Ron through the anonymous-looking low white rooms with their straw matting, glass-topped bamboo tables, waxy-leaved tropical plants, and bland framed posters, like some up-market resort hotel. Lorin’s spirit was wholly absent; nothing suggested that she ever could have lived or worked here.

Phil and Ron were unaware of Polly’s disappointment. Euphorically they showed her all their improvements (“You like the bathroom? Well, if you could have seen it before we moved in you would have absolutely shuddered, wouldn’t she, Ron?”) and invited her to have lunch with them on the deck; they wanted to hear
all
about Lorin Jones.

“Thanks, but I don’t think —”

“Oh no. You must, absolutely. It’s all ready anyhow. I’ve got a nice estate-bottled New York white wine in the fridge, and fresh croissants from the French bakery. And Phil’s made a great shrimp salad with sprouts and his special green sesame dressing. There’s lots more than we ought to eat.” Ron patted his perfectly flat stomach.

Polly opened her mouth to refuse politely. She didn’t drink at lunch on principle, and she would obviously learn nothing more here. But something blurry and laissez-faire — the backwash of her cold, or the indolent sensual spirit of Key West — seemed to have gotten into her, and she found herself accepting instead.

Halfway through the meal, she was glad she had. While she was describing Lorin’s early work, Ron suddenly put down his fork.

“Say, Phil,” he exclaimed. “Maybe that’s how the lizard got into the broom closet.”

“Hey, right! Come on, we’ll show you.”

Polly followed them into the house. There, on the back wall of the closet below a shelf, was an exquisite pencil drawing about two inches by three. From a few feet away it looked like a real lizard.

“It could be Lorin Jones’s,” she said, catching her breath. “Of course there’s no way of being sure. But why would it be in the closet?”

“Maybe this was where she saw it,” Ron said. “These lizards often come indoors.”

“They come into the house?”

“Oh, yeah,” Phil confirmed. “We see them all the time.”

“Ugh.” Polly looked around uneasily.

“They’re useful, you know. They catch insects: flies, mosquitoes, you name it.”

“You’re suggesting that she did this from life,” Polly said.

“I guess so. What do you think?”

“It could be,” she repeated. For the first time in many weeks, Lorin’s ghost was suddenly present to her, standing close beside her in the broom closet, drawing carefully on the whitewashed plaster with one thin pale hand. Drawing a self-portrait, Polly thought; a portrait of her own soul: thin, evasive, nervous, cold-blooded.

“You know, it’s a relief to think an artist made this picture,” Ron said. “We’ve always been a little leery of it, really.”

“Leery?”

“We weren’t really worried, of course —” Phil put in with a kind of laugh.

“Oh, yes, we were. You especially. You wanted to paint it over.”

“Well, see, we thought it might be some kind of — you know, superstitious stuff.”

“Voodoo,” Ron supplied. “There’s still a good bit of that here on the island, you know. Especially among the black population. Most of them are from the West Indies originally —”

“The Cubans, too,” Phil said. “There’s a waitress in the Fourth-of-July that I’m positive has the evil eye. And peculiar things do happen in the cemetery sometimes.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, well. I don’t know. You see funny moving lights at night. Or you hear noises —”

“It’s probably all just foolishness,” Ron interrupted. “You know how people like to talk.”

“I suppose so,” Polly said. She shook her head to clear it of foolishness. “Were there other pictures like this here when you bought the house?”

“No, nothing,” Ron said. “But of course most of the rooms had probably been painted since your artist died. Maybe more than once, in all that time. I mean, how long was it, between her and us?”

“About twelve years,” Polly admitted. She turned and scanned the walls. Under the glossy white paint, were there other larger, more beautiful, more disturbing drawings: reptiles, insects, birds, flowers, faces — ghostly visions, hidden from her now as so much about Lorin was hidden?

Polly walked slowly back toward the guest house in the increasing afternoon heat, feeling overfed, dazed, and disconnected, as if she were floating through a TV show with the color turned up too high. Maybe she was slightly drunk, or her cold was coming back. Or maybe she was suffering from climate shock; she had never been in the tropics before, or anywhere south of Washington, D.C. Maybe that was why everything looked so brilliant and nothing seemed real.

Probably I should go back to my room and try to sleep it off, Polly thought. Then I ought to go to the county courthouse and look for the records of Lorin Jones’s death — from pneumonia, according to her brother. Before she came to Key West Polly had accepted the diagnosis without question, but now it seemed the most blatant of lies. How the hell could anyone get pneumonia in this climate, let alone die of it?

Partly to delay a possibly futile task, partly because the sun was so hard and bright, Polly turned off onto a shaded side street. Here she had to walk more slowly, for heavy-scented sprays of flowers hung down into her face, and the sidewalks had been crazily heaved and split by twisting reptilian roots.

She checked Lee’s map again and saw that she wasn’t far from Hugh Cameron’s house. Maybe he’d be home now; maybe if she confronted him in person she’d have a chance of getting him to talk. She had to find him and interview him, because nobody else seemed to know what had happened to Lorin Jones after she left Wellfleet, how she got to Key West, what she did there, or how she died. If Polly couldn’t talk to Cameron there would be a great awkward gap in her book, and she would look like an incompetent ass.

The house on Frances Street was another low white bungalow, unremarkable except for a particularly odd tropical tree covered with what looked like purple orchids. And for its location: it was directly across the street from the town cemetery. Also, Polly realized despondently, the house itself looked like a tomb: closed up, almost abandoned. The front windows were shuttered and there was a drift of dead leaves on the porch; the high wooden gate to the back yard was overhung with brambly bougainvillea, blossoming a glaring scarlet. Either Hugh Cameron was out of town, or he was a slob who didn’t care what his place looked like.

Polly climbed the steps and rang the bell. No one came, and there was no sound from inside the house. Cursing her luck, wondering what the hell to do next, she walked slowly on down the street. In the heat of mid-afternoon it was silent and deserted. Presumably everyone was either at the beach or having a siesta. A sudden, demented impulse came over her, a desire to emulate them, to return to her room and the heated dreams of last night; or to doze half-naked on the hot sand, surrounded by the half-naked bodies of strangers. But it would be stupid and slothful to waste her time lying down either inside or out. She wasn’t here on vacation, she was here to work. And what she should do now was go back to Hugh Cameron’s house and leave him a note.

As she retraced her steps along Frances Street Polly noticed something moving at the far end of the next block, right by Cameron’s place. Yes! the side gate was opening under the bougainvillea, and a man carrying an extension ladder was coming out. It was definitely not Cameron, though, but a tall blond guy about her own age in white painter’s overalls, heading for a pickup truck by the curb. But if he’d been working on the house, this guy might know when Cameron would be back. Polly started to run toward him.

At the sound of her feet on the uneven sidewalk the man shoved the ladder into the truck and turned. From a distance of about thirty feet, he gave Polly first a glance of casual curiosity, then a grin of sexual appreciation; finally he held his arms out wide, mockingly, as if to catch her.

Polly stopped short at the opposite end of the block, abashed and angry. The painter grinned, shrugged, climbed into the cab, started the engine, and drove off.

Immobilized, Polly watched the vehicle turn the corner, displaying a legend on its side: REVIVALS CONSTRUCTION. The shiny aluminum ladder winked as it caught the sunlight, and the red rag tied to its end gave her an insulting little wave as it disappeared.

She continued to stand on the sidewalk, breathing hard, though she’d only gone a few yards — furious at both him and herself. Why hadn’t she just run on past, ignoring the bastard? Or, more practically, why hadn’t she walked up and spoken to him, asked where Cameron was? She’d lived in New York for years; she was used to being joshed and leered and whistled at by pig construction workers. If this guy imagined she was interested in him, running toward him, she could have turned on the chilly, scornful look that she always directed at those ignorant creeps.

It was this awful climate: the sun, the heat, the humidity: slowing her down, mixing her up. She set her jaw, checked the map again, and started at a steady New York pace for the center of town.

By half-past five Polly had called Hugh Cameron again three times unsuccessfully. She had refused Lee’s iced herbal tea and homemade carob cookies. She had discovered that the county courthouse records office was closed for the afternoon, and she had visited two more art galleries and found out nothing. In one of them the walls were covered with overpriced schlock seascapes and posters, and nobody had ever heard of Lorin Jones. The young woman in the other, more sophisticated, gallery had no idea that Lorin Jones had ever lived in Key West.

This gallery was air-conditioned, and her conversation with its owner pleasant; but when Polly emerged onto Duval Street a new blast of depression and hot air engulfed her. Already the shadows of the buildings were lengthening; she had been in Key West for twenty-four hours and accomplished zilch. She had collected no useful information, and she couldn’t reach the bastard she’d come to interview. All she had found was a tiny drawing whose authorship could never be proven. As Polly stood on the sidewalk trying to decide what to do next, tourists and hippies and freaks pushed past her, all headed in the same direction. They must be on their way to Mallory Dock, where according to Ron and Phil throngs gathered every evening to gawk at outdoor performers and the sunset over the Gulf of Mexico. Polly had no interest in either, but the flow of traffic and her own fatigue and lassitude pulled her along with the crowd. And maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. After all, sunset on Mallory Dock was an established local ritual, one that Lorin Jones must have known of — probably witnessed.

At the dock, a raised cement jetty on the far side of a large parking lot, the tourists were already thick. The pale, light-speckled sea was dotted with boats of all sizes from dinghy to trawler: sailboats plunged and turned, motor launches idled raucously, and in the middle distance a cream-sailed schooner rocked at anchor. Farther out, low gray-green mangrove islands floated on the horizon like vegetable whales.

A few members of the crowd sat on the low wall at the outer edge of the pier, gazing across the water. Others loitered at the stalls on the inland side, buying cheap shell jewelry, palm-frond hats, slices of red watermelon, bad watercolors, clumsy woven leatherwork, hand-painted T-shirts, and crumbly homemade cookies. But the press was greatest around the street performers: two clowns, one on a unicycle; a skinny contortionist; a huge sweating giant who juggled with flaming torches; a Caribbean steel band; and a pair of white-faced mimes accompanied by a performing poodle.

According to Ron and Phil many of the same acts came to Mallory Dock year after year. Could any of them have been here in Lorin Jones’s time? Not likely; in the late sixties most of these people would have been toddlers; only the mimes looked even middle-aged.

Since it was possible that Lorin had once seen them, Polly edged into the crowd around the mimes. In spite of their strenuous antics they seemed to be suffering from the heat and humidity as she was, and perhaps from a similar depression. Their movements were dreamy, exhausted, and artificial — even arty; their costumes classical. They might have posed for Picasso in his blue or rose period, or for one of his imitators. The woman wore a faded rose tutu; her partner, wrinkled azure tights and a lozenge-patterned tunic. But their faces were painted like clowns’ faces, and the man had on an orange fright wig and a red ball nose. Were they deliberately mocking the classic images of modern art, images that must float in the subconscious of at least some of the circling, gawking tourists?

As she watched, the scrawny poodle, which had been dyed a faded pink and wore a ruff and dunce cap, was encouraged to leap onto a high stool. The male clown then did a wobbly headstand, and the woman placed a tissue-paper-covered hoop between his uplifted feet. Then, with exaggerated moues and gestures, she urged the poodle to jump through the hoop. But each time it was about to do so, the clown pretended to lose his balance. He fell to the ground, miming consternation and embarrassment while the crowd laughed. Then, miming pain and woozy comic determination, he stood on his head again, and again the woman placed the hoop between his feet. Every time the man fell, the poodle hesitated and barked anxiously. Since its human companions remained silent, its harsh, excited yap was jarring.