Alison Lurie - The Truth About Lorin Jones

The worst thing was the bed. Heaven knows how she’d managed that, because our college furniture was solid oak, and very heavy. It looked quite dreadful, lying on its back with its square legs in the air, each one ending in a kind of metal claw caster, and the ribs of its slats were exposed, like something that had been killed. And the plants were awful too. All the pots on their sides and some of them upside down, spilling out dirt and leaves. It frightened me, really.

Well, I stood and looked at it. And Laurie looked at me, and gave me this little smile, and said, “Isn’t it nice?” I thought she was kidding, and I wanted to play along, so I said, “Oh, yes. But where will you sleep?” “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I won’t sleep for a while.”

Yes, she did leave it that way, but only for a few days. Then I think the maids — we had maids then, you know — complained that they couldn’t get in to clean, and our housemother made her put everything back.

I didn’t know what to think. If I’d been more sophisticated I probably would have wondered if she’d been smoking marijuana or something. I guess mostly I was amazed by the whole thing, and frightened, like I said. It was as if Laurie were saying, My life here is upside down, inside out, and backwards. She seemed so serious, and I couldn’t be sure it was a joke.

No, really, I don’t think that it was, quite.

Yes, it made a difference. I had to realize that Laurie wasn’t quite normal. And by the end of the spring term, when exams came, she’d gotten very strange. Of course, a lot of girls did become tense then, and do odd things; another friend of mine used to sit up all night studying in the bathtub — without water, of course — because it was so uncomfortable there she couldn’t go to sleep. But with Laurie it was worse, somehow. She didn’t eat properly, and in the end she sat through one exam, biology I think it was, without writing a single word.

It turned out that all she’d done for three hours was to pull out her eyebrows very slowly, hair by hair. I saw her afterward, and the strange thing was, she didn’t seem at all upset, and she didn’t look too bad either.

A bit like one of those fifteenth-century European portraits, a Memling perhaps. Odd, but rather elegant. You know it was fashionable in those days for ladies to pluck out their eyebrows completely.

I did see her once or twice over the next summer. We met in New York and had lunch and went to some galleries. I was glad to see her again. But we didn’t really keep up with each other after that.

Well, for one thing she’d acquired this rather crazy hatred of Smith College. She said it had a malevolent philistine atmosphere; and she wanted me to leave too, before I was poisoned by it. But of course I couldn’t leave Smith; I didn’t want to, anyhow. And then Laurie transferred to Bennington and made new friends; and that was it, really. We lost track of each other. I’m sorry about it now. I’ve never known anyone else like her.

No. Well, I did try to write about her, several times, but it never worked. Of course, the story would have been partly about my reaction to Laurie, but still. ... She always came out quite unbelievable, or simply weird, which wasn’t the point at all. I think that often happens when one tries to portray exceptional people. And if one excuses it by explaining within the story that the character is a genius, or is going to be famous, well, it’s rather like special pleading, isn’t it? It doesn’t convince. I think that in fiction, at least my own particular kind of fiction ...

8

ON A CLOUDY, SNOW-SOILED afternoon a week before Thanksgiving, Polly Alter strode into her sitting room with wet feet, damp windblown hair, and a heavy flat brown-paper package, which she placed carefully on the sofa. She peeled off her sodden coat and boots and flung them into the hall closet. Then she cut open the parcel and drew out Lorin Jones’s gouache of the pond in Truro, now professionally matted and framed. She cleared the sitting-room mantel, removing some battered brass candlesticks and Jeanne’s pots of trailing begonias, and set the painting in their place. Finally she stepped back and stood square before it, hoping for a kind of miracle.

Since she’d gotten back from the Cape, Polly had been having serious trouble with her project. What she couldn’t get over, or around, or out from under, was that Lorin Jones had been immature and self-destructive and mean enough to leave her relatively decent husband without warning for a low-grade opportunist, stopping only to clean out their joint bank account. The more Polly thought about this the worse she liked it. Before she and Jim separated they had discussed the move for months, and they had split their assets fairly and equally. According to Garrett, the theft — you couldn’t call it anything else — had been Hugh Cameron’s idea; but that only meant that Lorin was weak and suggestible as well as sneaky.

The immediate problem was, how was Polly going to handle this episode in the biography? Was she going to be equally sneaky and leave it out? Or was she going to expose her subject as a deeply flawed personality?

Though Polly still loved Lorin Jones, she no longer admired her unreservedly. And the magical sense of identity with Lorin was gone. The visit to Wellfleet, the transcendent experience of being in Lorin’s landscape and home, the hovering presence of Lorin’s spirit, appeared to her now as a kind of false, fleeting enchantment; or in more prosaic psychological terms, a temporary delusion.

To believe oneself haunted by Lorin Jones, possessed by her ghost — that was getting in too deep even for a biographer; maybe especially for a biographer. But now Polly floundered in muddy shallows, where every day she felt Lorin drifting farther away from her, dissolving further into a damp, lifeless collection of facts, a clutter of other people’s faulty memories and prejudiced opinions. To make anything out of this lumpish amorphous mass — this pond-spawn — seemed a more and more difficult task. She no longer had any clear idea of who Lorin Jones had been, or what Lorin had thought or felt. Sometimes she was so baffled and depressed that she considered taking Lennie Zimmern’s advice: give up the idea of a biography and just do a study of the work, a modestly expanded version of the “Three American Women” catalogue.

The trouble was, she didn’t even feel sure about the work any longer. When she held her off-color slides up to the light, or stared at the uninspiring gray-and-white reproductions, she felt nothing; she could think of nothing new to say. Some days she plodded on only because she didn’t know how she’d explain it to her colleagues at the Museum and to the Foundation if she quit. Maybe the Foundation would want its money back.

The interviews she’d done lately had been mostly upsetting or useless. According to the last one, when Lorin Jones was in college she was almost a textbook schizophrenic. Assuming that wasn’t true — and there was no way of proving this — either Janet Belle Smith (who was, after all, a professional writer of fiction) had been making up stories, or else Lorin Jones had put on a crazy act for Ms. Smith out of some perverse sense of humor.

Jeanne had tried to help Polly through this period of doubt and anxiety, but she was still in a funk herself over her breakup with Betsy, and nothing she said seemed to help. The truth was, Jeanne didn’t really approve of Polly’s project, because she didn’t approve of individual biography as a genre. As a Marxist-feminist historian, she believed that it was counterproductive to write about atypical persons — so-called heroes and leaders. She preferred to analyze statistics, or investigate the lives of ordinary citizens. In her view, Polly had succumbed to the biographical fallacy — the old-fashioned patriarchal idea of history as “the lives of great men.” To extend this interest to “the lives of great women” was to play by male rules.