Alison Lurie - The Truth About Lorin Jones

Well, that year, her junior year, she had three paintings in the student show, and it was clear to anyone who had any sense that they were by far the best of the lot. Garrett wanted to meet the artist, so I introduced them. I still blame myself for that, rather, though of course how could I have known? Anyhow, they met. Laurie saw her chance, and she took it.

Single-minded. You can say that again. She certainly didn’t let anything stand in her way. Or anyone. His wife meant less to her than an old paint rag. You know he was married then, I assume.

And I suppose you also know that he was married to my present wife.

Oh yes, he was.

No, if you want to know, that doesn’t surprise me at all. Garrett never mentions it now, but he and Roz were married for seven years. When he got the appointment at Bennington she gave up a first-rate job in New York to go with him, and took one in the dean’s office at half the salary.

Oh yes, I knew them well. Until Laurie Zimmern appeared on the scene we were good friends, the three of us, we did everything together.

I loved them both. They were fine-looking people, big and fair and full of energy. And extremely happy together. Roz had such warmth and wit and high spirits, she was always ready for anything, and Garrett was brilliant. I was only a few years younger, but I looked up to him intellectually: he knew so much, and his artistic taste and judgment were always impeccable.

Well, you see, another thing I’ve learned over the years is that some men, even brilliant men, are hopelessly weak where women are concerned. And of course there’s a certain sort of woman who can sense this, and use it to her own advantage.

I don’t think it had anything whatsoever to do with love, at least not on her side. If you want to know my opinion, the only thing Laurie Zimmern ever loved was her painting.

Oh, I suppose she was beautiful. Well, she would have had to be, to interest Garrett, and she would have had to be gifted.

Yes, it’s true people often say that. And I can’t deny there’s a similarity, especially in her early paintings. But even then Laurie’s work always had a kind of mystical, surrealist side to it that mine never had — that I never wanted it to have, either.

No. It wasn’t a matter of influence; it was something more basic, I think: a similar way of seeing the world. Of course I did teach her some technical things. And I suggested the names of a few past artists whose work she might look at. That’s really all you can do for someone like that. It’s ironic, you know: it’s not the best students one can actually teach, it’s those who are merely clever and talented.

Very good. And if she hadn’t gone off the deep end and run away with that ridiculous young man — if she’d lived — I think she would be recognized now as one of the most important painters of her generation. Yes, absolutely.

I don’t see any contradiction. Genius has nothing to do with character; some of the greatest artists have been saints, and others have been bastards.

Oh yes. We see a good deal of Garrett and Abigail. At first Roz didn’t even want to hear his name, and one couldn’t blame her. But after Laurie left him and he remarried it was easier. We both like Abigail very much. Besides, it’s a long time ago now. And Roz is such a wonderful, generous woman: she doesn’t bear a grudge. As she says, an elephant never forgets, but who wants to be an elephant?

Of course, it will never be quite the same, but what ever is in this life? The four of us get on very well. Last summer we went on one of those Swan cruises together. We toured the Greek islands, and I did quite a lot of watercolors.

Yes, it was a great success. If my legs hold up we’re going to try one to the hill towns of northern Italy this coming spring.

9

ON THE NIGHT BEFORE Thanksgiving, in her stepfather’s house in Rochester, Polly lay in bed in the attic room that had been hers since the age of nine. The steep slope of the ceiling and its freckled, flaking whitewash were as familiar to her as her own skin, now also beginning to freckle and flake. Her childhood books were still on the shelves behind the door, her old posters — Monet and the Beatles — still on the walls. The burnt-sienna homespun curtains that she had hemmed herself were sun-faded, but they caught on the handle of the casement window in the same old way.

Her attic was still, Polly thought, the only really attractive room in the house. The others were comfortable enough, but wholly unaesthetic; there was no vulgarity or pretension in their decoration — only utter lack of taste. In the sitting room forest-green upholstery clashed with olive-green carpeting and sea-green brocade curtains, all of the most durable quality; Early American furniture contended with heirloom Victorian and Danish Modern. The pictures and ornaments had been chosen solely for their symbolic value: family photographs, footstools covered in tapestry roses by Polly’s mother, ashtrays and a magazine rack made by her half brother in school, and an embarrassing sub-Degas pastel of a ballet dancer that had won her a prize in seventh grade. Even worse were the souvenirs of Bea and Bob’s vacations: tourist-shop watercolors of Provincetown and Paris, a gilt papier-mâché tray from Rome, a Royal Wedding plate from London, and a huge hideous prickly-pear cactus from New Mexico. (When she was eleven Polly, having heard that alcohol was a sure if slow poison, had tried to kill this monstrous plant by pouring sherry into its pot, and the following month gin. The cleaning lady had been accused of tippling, but the cactus had thrived, and continued even now to thrive.)

As Polly used to complain rudely and hopelessly when she was a teenager, the house didn’t have to look this way. It was large, well designed in the style of the 1920s, and built to last. An English professor just around the corner on Crossman Terrace whose children Polly had gone to school with had an almost identical house; but it was beautiful inside as well as comfortable, full of elegant furniture and pictures and leafy green plants arranged with thought and care.

But it wasn’t only for aesthetic reasons that Polly always felt uncomfortable in Rochester. The house reminded her, still, of what her life there had been like. Walking into it was like walking into a thin fog, a damp miasma of ancient anger and depression.

The move to Rochester had been great for her mother, she saw that now; it was what Bea had always wanted, a stable marriage to a reliable man who had progressed steadily if not brilliantly from physics graduate student to full professor. After what she’d been through it must have been great to have a big comfortable house near the park and two sons who were born at respectable intervals and had Bob’s placid temperament and his talent for math and science.

But in this happy family Polly was an outsider. She hated math; she had bad moods and screamed and wept and threw things. She was too old for her new family — ten and thirteen years older than her half-brothers. She didn’t match her mother and Bob and the boys, with their straight hair and neutral light-brown coloring. She didn’t even have the same name as they did; a girl in her class once asked if she was adopted. Often people who came to the house for parties didn’t know who she was. “You must be the baby-sitter,” a woman in a shiny red dress with beads on it said to her once in the kitchen.

Her mother did try to get Polly to baby-sit, but usually she wouldn’t, because her little brothers always ganged up on her as soon as their parents were out of the house, and wouldn’t mind what she said. They were stupid, spoiled little kids, she thought then; now they only seemed totally dull and conventional.