Alison Lurie - The Truth About Lorin Jones

“All right,” Polly agreed, wondering if she should. A year — two years, it might well be — working for and with Garrett Jones, what would that be like? A week ago, even a few hours ago, she wouldn’t have considered it. But now the idea seemed vaguely possible. She no longer feared or distrusted Garrett — she almost liked him. And after all, he had known everyone in the art world for the last fifty years; his book could be really interesting.

“Good.” He smiled and closed his eyes.

Polly yawned, realizing how tired she was, then gathered her resources; she mustn’t let Garrett fall asleep yet. “Tell me a little more about the time you and Lorin spent here,” she said. “Were you usually in Wellfleet all summer?”

Garrett opened his eyes and shook his head as if to clear it: his gray forelock flopped. “Aw, no. Not me. I was reviewing regularly for the paper then. Had to be in New York for openings right through June. And even when there wasn’t anything on in town there’d be shows in other parts of the country. I was on a train or a plane half the time.”

“So Lorin was here more than you were?”

“Oh, yes. Much more. You see, already back then she was turning against New York, all that scene. Even before I had the house insulated and the furnace put in, she started coming up in May and staying on later and later into October. It was crazy, because it can get damn cold this time of year. The wind used to really howl through the walls.”

“How did she manage, then?”

“Wasn’t easy. She’d try to keep warm by turning on the kitchen stove and painting in there, or dragging an old electric heater around from room to room after her. You should’ve seen my electric bills. And even then, she sometimes had to wear gloves to work.”

“Really.” Polly saw it in her mind: the bare trees tossing outside the studio window; Lorin in paint-spattered jeans and sweater and black leather gloves, standing between her easel and the dull orange glow of an old-fashioned coil heater.

“Then, once we had the furnace, she started coming up here all year round.”

“For weekends, you mean?”

“More than that. Weeks at a time. Didn’t matter what was going on in New York, after a while. Some friend could be having an opening, or I might have bought tickets for a play, but Laura would just take off. Eventually she got to dislike the city so much she spent most of the year here.”

“All by herself?”

“Well, yes. Usually. Of course I came up when I could ... Garrett blinked, whether from guilt or grief or mere sleepiness Polly could not guess. “I didn’t come as often as l should’ve. I know that now.” He nodded his large, handsome old head slowly. “But it was an awful long trip when you couldn’t afford the plane, and I had so damn much traveling to do already.”

“Lorin didn’t go with you on your trips?”

“Not after the first year or so. There were a couple of disastrous times... I would’ve liked to have her along, though; it was lonely for me on the road.”

“It must have been lonely for her here, too,” Polly said, struggling with another impulse toward sympathy.

“She didn’t seem to feel it. People didn’t mean that much to Laura, you know. ... Even I didn’t mean all that much to her, as it turned out.” His voice had become shaky.

“How do you know that?”

“A man always knows, if he’s not a fool. And so does a woman, I think.” Garrett gave Polly a meaningful look. “Right?”

“I suppose so,” Polly admitted. I was a fool then, she thought, taking another gulp of brandy. Both of us were fools, trusting people to whom in the end we didn’t mean all that much. “Still, she married you,” she said, trying to console him. “She must have cared once.”

“Oh, I admit that.” His smile was wry. “But if she’d continued to care, she would’ve stayed in New York with me. Isn’t that right?”

“I suppose so.” Polly remembered her husband’s betrayal and felt another rush of sympathy for Garrett. “But did you ever say you needed her — did you tell her that?”

“Hell, sure I did. I explained to Laura a hundred times that I had to be in the city for my job, and I wanted her with me. It was like talking to a blank canvas. Sometimes she seemed to be listening, but she didn’t really hear.”

Exactly, Polly thought, recalling scenes from her own past.

“So do you think it was a mistake, your marriage?” she asked.

Garrett did not answer at once; he gave a long, heavy sigh and refilled his glass. “Sometimes I think both my first two marriages were mistakes,” he said at last. “I couldn’t make either of my wives happy, and they couldn’t make me happy. They couldn’t give me what I needed.”

“And what was that?” Polly asked. “I mean, for instance.”

“Well. For instance, I wanted children very much. But my first wife couldn’t have a baby, and Laura wouldn’t.”

“She didn’t want children?”

“No. I think she was afraid of it, the whole process, you know.” Garrett shook his head slowly. “Now I’m what our pediatrician calls an elderly father.” He smiled wryly. “But as far as I’m concerned, that’s better than never being a father at all, you know? People without kids, they don’t really care what happens to the world after they’re gone, unless they’re saints. They’re only interested in their own lives, isn’t that right?”

“I know what you mean,” Polly said.

“Of course you understand; you have children.” Garrett swayed toward Polly and put his hand on hers again. This time she did not remove it.

“I have a son,” she said, wondering where Stevie was at this moment and what he was doing.

“Yes, you told me.” Garrett gazed past Polly’s shoulder into the dim cream-flowered wallpaper. Then, slowly, he turned to her again, first smiling, then staring. “You know something,” he said suddenly in a different, stronger voice. “You kind of remind me of her. Laura.”

“Really?” Polly gasped as if the smoldering logs had exploded into a burning blaze of fireworks.

“I don’t know why.” He shook his head. “You don’t look much like her. There’s something, though. Maybe it’s the voice.”

“You think I sound like her?” Polly said, listening to the words as they issued from her lips in Lorin’s ghostly tones. She had never heard Lorin speak, and never would; as far as she knew, Lorin’s voice was never recorded.

“Mm, yes, a little.”

Polly stared at Lorin Jones’s husband. Suppose it was true — who had a better right to say so? And after all, hadn’t Polly suspected this all along? Hadn’t she noted the overlapping of their lives, marveled that both were only children, and Jewish; that they shared a county, a city, a profession? And even, almost, a name; Polly remembered her shiver of recognition when she heard that in childhood Lorin was known as Lolly.

Here, in Lorin’s old haunts, they had drawn even closer together. All day she had walked in Lorin’s footsteps; and sometimes, surely, Lorin’s ghost had walked beside her.

“This was her home; this was the place she loved,” Polly announced, sure of it now.

“That’s right.” Garrett sighed. “That’s why, when I realized she was determined to spend most of the year here, I began doing everything I could to find a teaching job nearby, so I could be with her more of the time.”

“But you didn’t find one.”

“No; I found one, eventually. Only it was too late. I came dashing up here to tell her about it, she was gone. Hadn’t even left me a note.”

“That’s hard,” Polly exclaimed.

“It about killed me, at the time. If you want to know.” Garrett nodded slowly twice. “You see, I’d had no idea. ... Laura’d never complained, never said anything. Only, more and more, she started avoiding me. And she wouldn’t talk to me about her work any longer. I guess I should have known; but she was always such a solitary person, and it came on so gradually. That last year or so —” He stared into the middle distance. “I knew she’d hit some kind of a serious block, but she wouldn’t let me help her, or make any suggestions about her painting. Finally, she wouldn’t even show me what she was working on. After dinner she’d go up to her studio and shut herself in. If I knocked on the door she wouldn’t answer. Sometimes she’d stay in there for hours, till it was past midnight or later, and I gave up waiting for her and went to bed.”