Alison Lurie - The Truth About Lorin Jones

“Really?” Garrett blinked.

“That’s right.”

“Ah.” He smiled broadly, easily, for the first time that morning. “Well. Excuse me. If I’d known —” He sat down at the highly polished Early American table opposite her. “You should have told me that last night, really,” he added pleasantly, leaning forward. “Now, shouldn’t you?”

“I suppose so,” Polly admitted.

“I realize it’s not the easiest thing to say.” Garrett’s whole manner had changed; it was open and friendly. “But it would have avoided a lot of trouble. I wouldn’t have made a fool of myself, or given you such a fright.” He laughed. “And, by the way, I want to assure you of my discretion. I won’t say anything to anyone.”

“That’s all right. I mean, thanks,” Polly added grudgingly, wondering whether she should believe him. But what difference did it make anyhow? She was a lesbian, since the night before last.

“That’s not much of a breakfast,” Garrett remarked, looking at her plate, on which the burned toast remained. “Let me make you some bacon and eggs.”

“Uh —”

“Come on.” He smiled. It was clear that his self-esteem and goodwill had been completely restored.

“No thanks.” Polly still felt cross and embarrassed. She cast around in her mind for something hurtful to say that would not be discounted as coming from a lesbian.

“Well, then, if you’ve finished breakfast,” Garrett interrupted her search, “I’d like to take you out to the barn, show you some of Laura’s work that’s still here.”

“I — all right,” Polly agreed, shelving her impulse in the service of a higher good.

“Now I don’t want you to get too excited,” Garrett cautioned over his shoulder as Polly followed him along a path beaten through long faded grass that matched his gray-blond hair. “Laura took almost all her finished work with her when she ran out on me. She couldn’t bear to be separated from any of it, maybe you’ve heard that.”

“Yes, I have.”

“I think myself it was because she remained a child in so many ways. Her paintings were, what do the psychologists call it, a kind of security blanket for her. Well, here we are.” Garrett shoved open the weather-beaten sliding door of the barn. He had resumed his windbreaker and peaked captain’s cap, and his aspect was again nautical and jaunty. “I keep Laura’s drawings in this old fridge. You should get yourself one, y’know. It’s as good as a safe if there’s a fire.”

From the rusted chrome shelves of the refrigerator Garrett removed a worn black portfolio tied with tapes and two manila folders. “Here, you can see.” He opened one of the folders and began to turn over sheets of paper. “It’s mostly just notes, unfinished sketches, that sort of thing. Just what Laura left behind when —”

He did not finish the sentence, but Polly was not listening anyhow. Her attention was fixed on the drawings: some of them quick sketches, others detailed impressions of a shed, a skeleton leaf, a sleeping cat. They were executed in pencil and pen, a few lit with white or brown chalk, others with streaks of blue or sea-green wash. Realistic as most of them were, there was an oddness, a characteristic attenuation Polly recognized instantly.

“I tell you what,” Garrett said. “Let’s take everything into the house where it’s warm.”

“Okay, sure.” Polly had not noticed the temperature; now she realized that a damp, freezing wind was blowing through the barn.

How can this be happening? she thought as she followed Lorin’s husband back through the long beaten-down grass. How can I deserve it, when I didn’t do what Lorin wanted last night? But maybe she had done exactly what Lorin had wanted, or at least what she had done: shut her husband out of her room, out of her life.

Inside, Garrett Jones cleared the dining-room table of its brass candlesticks and careful display of waxy-looking autumn fruit, and reopened the folders. There was more there than Polly had ever imagined or hoped for — not only drawings, but notes, bills, postcard reproductions of paintings —

“Oh, wow,” she exclaimed as he leafed through the contents. “I didn’t know you had all this stuff. You never said — nobody told me —”

“No one was interested, really. Not till you appeared.” Garrett smiled and turned over a half sheet of paper, across which was scrawled a shopping list in Lorin’s faint, spiky hand:

zinc white

toothpaste

grapefruit juice

narcissus bulbs

“You kept everything,” she murmured.

“I wrote and offered to send it all on to Laura, once she was settled,” Garrett defended himself, though Polly hadn’t meant it that way. “She never answered my letters. Or the lawyer’s. I used to wonder sometimes if that fellow tore them up.”

“Fellow?”

“That bastard Cameron. You’ve heard of him, I imagine.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Met him?”

“Not yet. I’m hoping to interview him when I go down to Key West next month, though.”

“Yes? Well, good luck.” Garrett’s tone implied that she would need it.

“Tell me about him,” Polly said, shifting her attention with difficulty from the drawings.

“About Hugh Cameron?” He almost sneered the name. “Well, I only met him a couple of times, and I didn’t pay him much attention. I didn’t imagine that he’d ever be of any importance to me, naturally.” Garrett shook his head. “He was just one of the usual crowd of rather scruffy young people at the Provincetown Arts Center that year. He wasn’t even a painter; he was a poet. Or rather, he called himself a poet, because he’d had a few nothing poems in the kind of magazines nobody reads.”

“I see.” Polly made a mental note to look up these poems.

“The truth was, he had the artist’s temperament without any talent to speak of. That’s not uncommon, you know. And all right, it’s a tragedy. But if you find yourself in that position, you’ve got to cut your losses, the way I did. If you don’t, pretty soon you’re just a pathetic phony.”

Polly looked at Garrett. You wanted to be a painter yourself once too, she thought.

“Anyhow.” Garrett cleared his throat. “The Arts Center not only houses would-be artists and writers during the off-season, they have readings, mount exhibitions. I was a member of their board at the time, and when I was on the Cape Laura and I usually went to their openings. That was how we met Hugh Cameron, sometime in October, as near as I can remember.”

“I see. And then?”

“And then nothing, as far as I was concerned.” Garrett shrugged. “I saw him again at another opening in April; I remember because Laura was talking to him for a while, I couldn’t imagine why. By then his time in Provincetown was almost up. They throw the fellows out on May first, you see, and rent the studios to tourists. He had no job, no money, no place to go from there.

“The way I read it, sometime that spring he probably took a hard look at Laura. He already knew she was a successful painter, and he guessed she had a little money — more than a little by his standards, probably, because from the start I let Laura put everything she made from her painting into her own bank account. She didn’t use it except to buy art supplies; I gave her an allowance for her clothes and housekeeping, and I paid for everything else.

“So I figure Cameron decided it’d be convenient for him to fall in love with Laura, and feed her a lot of hogwash about the integrity of the artist, and the destructiveness of the critic, and the need for truly sensitive people to abandon the conventional world and live for each other and their art. He tried to justify himself with that kind of talk afterward, to anyone who would listen.