Alison Lurie - The Truth About Lorin Jones

“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.

“Is that your tape machine?” Garrett asked as soon as they were alone.

“That’s right.”

“Hmf. Do you really want to use it now, at dinner?”

Obviously I want to use it, Polly thought angrily, or I wouldn’t have brought it out. But she merely said: “I thought it might be a while till our food comes. And there’s so much you’ve told me already, about art and artists, that I really wish I’d recorded. I don’t want to miss any more.” Jeanne would be proud of me, she thought, not sure she was proud of herself.

“Yes, but —”

“Besides, you were just starting to talk about Bennington College, where you first met Lorin. How did that happen?” She pressed RECORD.

“I don’t recall exactly,” Garrett said, after a pause in which Polly could see him wondering whether to refuse to go on.

“But she was in one of your classes, wasn’t she?”

“Er, yes.” Garrett took another swig of wine and capitulated. “The Tradition of the Modern, my big lecture course. But it was considerably later that we really got acquainted. In Laura’s last year.”

“Oh, yes?”

“I’d seen her in my class, of course. But it was her paintings I really noticed first, in the student show at the end of her junior year. I was very much struck by them: they were so strong, so original, not like most undergraduate work. And then when I connected the name with the face I was surprised again.”