Alison Lurie - The Truth About Lorin Jones

It wasn’t anything definite she did. But for instance, if you want to know, most of the time she wouldn’t even speak to me, not really. Okay, she was shy, but so what? After you know somebody a few years, you should get over shyness. But it was always the same: every time we saw her, almost every remark she addressed to her father. It was like I wasn’t in the room, only now and then she’d give me this sneaky Cinderella look.

No, Dan couldn’t see it. He was such a sweet guy, he always believed the best of anyone close to him, you know, and she was his baby daughter.

Oh, she knew what she was doing. Yeah, she knew, all right. I’m sorry to have to say this to you, seeing as how you’ve got to write a whole book about her, but Laurie Zimmern wasn’t a nice person.

10

A COLD DULL DAY in early December; an opening at the Museum. Polly was there, huddled on a sticky black leather bench in a back hallway near the telephone booth. She appeared to be waiting to make a call, but in fact she was hiding out.

She should never have come here, she thought; she should have gone straight home after her appointment at the endodontist’s. But she hadn’t wanted to admit that besides hurting her and frightening her and insulting her and giving her a first-class headache, Dr. Bebb had ruined her whole afternoon. It was bad enough that he had insisted on calling her “Paula” and told her that she probably ground her teeth at night, but he had also had the nerve to compare his work to hers.

“Marge Dunn tells me you’re an author,” Dr. Bebb had remarked as she lay tilted back nearly ninety degrees in his padded vinyl chair, staring up at a fizzing fluorescent light fixture and at his monstrously enlarged pale fat fingers, bulbous nose, and thick spectacles.

“Weh, noh exac-uh,” she replied, gagging as he began to pack her jaw with lumps of cotton.

“But you’re doing research for a book, right?”

“Euh,” Polly agreed, feeling betrayed by Marge, her regular dentist — who seldom hurt her even a little, and then always with advance warning and most apologetically.

“A novel, is it?”

“Euh-euh.”

“Nonfiction,” Dr. Bebb deduced, his pale enlarged face stretching even farther in a self-congratulatory smile.

“Euh.”

“Hard work?” He blew an airgun into Polly’s mouth. “Kinda like being a detective, I bet.”

What was this, an interrogation? Polly thought. She declined to make a noise for either yes or no.

“I said, kinda like detective work, your research, is it?” Dr. Bebb repeated, pausing with the electric drill in his fat hand.

“Euh,” Polly agreed, realizing that the sooner she answered, the sooner all this would be over.

Dr. Bebb smiled his fat smile. “Hold real still now,” he ordered, and lowered the drill. A loud, unpleasant vibration filled Polly’s head, and a jarring, buzzing pressure.

“Rinse, please,” he said finally. “You know, Paula, I sometimes think what I do here is kinda like investigative research,” he added, poking fat sausage fingers and a steel probe into her mouth. “Following a tooth to its roots. You never can tell ahead of time what direction a root will take, did you know that?” He moved the probe, producing a twang of high-level pain.

“Euh!”

“Sorry,” Dr. Bebb said unfeelingly. “So I figure we have something in common, right?” He paused again, instrument in hand, but Polly refused even to mumble a reply. We have nothing in common, you fat bastard, she thought.

Oh yes you do, a voice in her head replied. Haven’t you been probing for the diseased roots of Lorin Jones’s life? And aren’t you planning to fill them up with cement and cover the whole thing with a shiny white deceptive surface?

She should never have gone to Dr. Bebb, Polly thought as she sat by the phone booth. Or rather, she should have walked out five minutes after they met, because she knew by then what he was like. You might think that in a city the size of New York there would be a competent female endodontist, but Marge knew of none. She always sent her patients to Dr. Bebb. “He’s a good man,” she had insisted. “Howie” — her husband, a dental surgeon — “thinks the world of him.”

Well, maybe he’d fooled Marge and her husband, but he didn’t fool Polly. His specialty wasn’t ordinary repair work, but a combination of the murderous and the mortuary. She had recognized him as a natural enemy at once, but her natural animal reaction to threat — fight or flight — had been blocked by reluctance to appear cowardly and neurotic, and by Marge’s remark that if Polly didn’t have root canal work soon she would lose two upper molars, and eventually the ones below as well. So instead of hitting Dr. Bebb with her Peruvian tote bag, or climbing out of the dental chair and fleeing his office, she had stayed and let him kill her tooth and embalm it with cement, and give her a splitting headache.

But then, almost everything that had happened in the last week or so had given her a headache. The first one, minor but nagging, began on the Monday after Thanksgiving during Polly’s interview with Lorin Jones’s stepmother, who had portrayed Lorin as self-centered and spiteful. She had also related a story that, if repeated in the biography, would do Lorin’s reputation nothing but harm. Polly would just have to forget it, as she would have to forget a lot of the other stuff she’d heard lately; lies, all of it, probably.

Polly’s second and worse headache dated from the following day, when Betsy had moved into the apartment. It was great to have Jeanne in good spirits again, overflowing with affection, and turning out a remarkably inventive series of casseroles and fancy pastries.

Polly ought to be grateful to Betsy for having caused this transformation, but instead she was already sick of her. Unlike Jeanne, who taught full-time and had constant meetings of her department and a range of other scholarly and feminist associations and committees, Betsy was free most of the day. She had to be at the college only two mornings a week; otherwise she was always at home, and always occupying the bathroom: taking long strawberry and apricot bubble baths that left fuzzy red or orange rings in the tub, washing her clothes, or shampooing her fine crimped strawberry-blonde hair, which when wet took on the color of damp sawdust. The rest of the time she was wired up to a Walkman and soft-rock or romantic-classical tapes. Often, presumably unconsciously, she would hum or sing aloud in accompaniment to them. “Yeh-yeh, a-yeh yeh,” Polly could hear her warbling tunelessly as she highlighted in yellow Magic Marker the books and articles recommended by Jeanne, or wrote in her journal or ironed a blouse. Not until late in the afternoon, when Jeanne came home, did Betsy unplug herself.

Also, unlike Polly and Jeanne, Betsy was congenitally untidy. As she wandered about the apartment she left a trail of objects: shoes, sweaters, handbag, comb, bobby pins, coffee cups, spectacles (her pale blue eyes were nearsighted), magazines, and loose pages of the newspaper. As a result, she was always drifting (or, without her glasses, stumbling) from room to room looking for whatever she’d mislaid. “Darling, you’ve simply got to pick up as you go, so you won’t keep losing things,” Jeanne often said to her; but she spoke as one might to a spoiled yet beloved child.

Sensing that she was unwelcome, Betsy had tried hard to win Polly’s favor. For instance, she constantly offered to make lunch for her. Her specialty was tiny tasteless low-calorie open sandwiches: slices of avocado and pimiento arranged around a quartered hard-boiled egg on triangles of toast; or mashed water-pack tuna garnished with olives and watercress on Ry-Krisp. If she had depended on Betsy to feed her, Polly would have starved.