Alison Lurie: The Truth About Lorin Jones

If Lorin Jones had had loyal women friends, like Polly’s friend Jeanne, one of them might really have done what Polly had imagined doing. But so far Polly hadn’t been able to locate any woman who knew Lorin well in her later years. It was beginning to be clear that after her marriage she didn’t have many close friends of either sex; that she was, or rather became (Polly largely blamed Lorin’s husband for this) a shy, solitary person — in the end, almost a recluse. Not only had this probably contributed to her untimely death, it had made the task of her biographer much more difficult.

Though Polly hadn’t had much to do with men lately, all that was about to change. Over the next six months she would have to interview several of them — and not just any men, but the exact same ones who had discouraged and denigrated and exploited and neglected Lorin Jones. It was their fault, ultimately, that the world would never see the beautiful paintings Lorin would have made if she’d lived.

Among them were:

1. Lorin Jones’s dealer, a suave elderly person named Paolo Carducci, founder and owner of the Apollo Gallery, which after 1964 had refused to show Jones’s work.

2. Professor Leonard Zimmern, Lorin’s half-brother, who seemed to be more or less devoid of feeling for his sister, since he had by his own admission hardly seen her over the last few years of her life. After she died, though, he had been quick enough to go down to Key West and collect her unsold paintings, of which he was the legal owner.

3. Lorin’s ex-husband, the famous art historian and critic Garrett Jones, who had been all gracious elderly charm at the time of Polly’s show, eager to lend pictures and photographs, to locate and speak to other collectors. To hear him talk now, Garrett had always done all he could for Lorin and her career. But the record suggested otherwise. While they were married, Lorin had paintings in group shows at the Apollo Gallery in 1954 and 1955, and in 1957 and 1960 she had two successful one-woman shows. She had another show in 1964, the year after she and Garrett separated, and then nothing. Polly had no proof that Lorin’s former husband had deliberately wrecked her career, but it would have been pretty damn easy for him to do so.

4. The man with whom Lorin Jones had lived after her marriage broke up, an unsuccessful ex-hippie poet called Hugh Cameron, who took Lorin to Key West and then left her when she was ill and dying. Polly had never met Cameron, but she had heard plenty about him.

Of course, there was no guarantee that any of these men would even begin to admit their guilt; probably they would lie like hell in order to protect their own self-esteem and reputation. If Polly had any choice in the matter she would have had nothing to do with them. But because no one else knew the facts, she would somehow have to get them to tell her the truth about Lorin Jones.

How this could best be accomplished was now being discussed by Polly and her friend Jeanne, in Polly’s untidy New York apartment on a hot late-summer evening. Polly was still sitting at the round oak table, her elbows on either side of a handmade brown pottery mug, her small square chin propped on her fists. Jeanne, who had made the tasty supper (cold chicken, tabbouli, and cucumbers in yogurt, followed by lemon sherbet), was sunk among cushions on the sofa, smoking one of her endless cigarettes. She never stood when she could lounge, or sat when she could recline.

If an uninformed observer had been told that one of these two women was a lesbian, Polly would have been the natural candidate. Though she had hardly thought about what it might be like to make love with another woman until she became friends with Jeanne, her short untidy hair and face scrubbed clean of makeup suggested scorn of feminine artifice; her checked workshirt and jeans and scuffed Birkenstock sandals, the uniform of both male and female gays in New York that summer, gave her a definite tomboy look.

On the other hand Jeanne, who had been erotically interested in her own sex since she was eight, was soft and generously rounded — an Ingres blonde, delicately powdered and rouged, in a scooped-neck pink T-shirt and a rose-flowered Laura Ashley skirt. Her voice was high and gentle, and none of her lovers had ever thought of calling her Johnnie, or even Jan. Lesbianism for Jeanne meant moving as far and fast as possible away from bisexuality, not toward it. In her view, it was natural for a woman who loved women to recoil physically from the masculine in any form. As a separatist she avoided the opposite sex whenever she could; she was still very disappointed that the Long Island college where she taught history and women’s studies had recently agreed to admit males.

Though Jeanne also distrusted men, she disagreed with Polly on the proper method of dealing with them. If avoidance was impossible, she counseled guile. Polly’s instinctive preference, on the other hand, was for confrontation. When she did those interviews, she said now, she wanted to be open about her own feelings.

“Yes. Of course, you would want that.” Jeanne gave a small indulgent sigh. She had once suggested — and maybe correctly — that it was Polly’s openness about her feelings that had kept her an assistant curator for five years.

“That’s what seems natural to me.”

“Sure, it seems natural,” Jeanne agreed; her intonation suggested that there wasn’t all that much to be said for nature. “Confrontation is always natural for you. But if you want results, you’ve got to keep your cool.”

Jeanne often urged Polly to keep her cool, cool off, or simmer down — not always with success. Outwardly she herself was not particularly cool, but rather mildly warm. She appeared to most men to be a sweet, pretty, easygoing sort of woman. Inwardly, however, she concealed a revulsion that went back to her deprived and abused childhood.

“Look, Polly,” she reasoned, dragging on her cigarette. “You know you’re going to have to spend hours, perhaps days even, with those people. If you want them to talk to you, you’ll simply have to prevent them from guessing what’s in your mind.”

“I’m not sure I can do that.”

“Of course, it’s not going to be easy,” Jeanne continued. “I know you.” She smiled. Though several years younger than Polly, she habitually took toward her (and toward all her close friends) a stance of maternal experience. “I think maybe the best thing for you would be to resolve right now to say as little as possible. Next time, simply turn on your machine, ask your questions, and whatever they answer, you just nod and grin. Let them blather on and condemn themselves. ... And they will, I’m sure of that.”

“I don’t know.” Polly frowned and shoved her heavy mug away, splashing the table with lukewarm coffee.

“What don’t you know?”

“What you said — it just sounds wrong to me. I mean, women have been smiling and lying to men for centuries. I figure it’s time for us to stop all that crap. I want to make it clear that I know what those guys did to Lorin Jones; then they won’t be able to waffle.”

“Waffle?” Jeanne laughed. “They’ll waffle whatever you do. But the proper way to treat a waffle is with syrup.”

“I can’t sweet-talk people; it’s not my thing. I’ve got to let them see where I’m coming from.”

“Oh, Polly.” Jeanne sighed. “You know what your problem is? You still believe deep down that if men really understood how we felt they’d be surprised and sorry. They’d repent and reform, and we’d all live happily together ever after. You’ve got to realize that they already understand quite well how we feel. And none of them give an S-H-I-T. ” Jeanne never uttered an obscenity; she preferred to spell out the words as if some invisible child were listening.