Alison Lurie - The Truth About Lorin Jones

“I can’t do that,” Polly said with irritation. “He’s in Denver now.”

“In Denver? Oh, yeah. Right.”

“He’s been there since September,” Polly said, positive that her father hadn’t bothered to listen to her before, or more likely hadn’t bothered to remember. She would have thought he was losing his memory, except that he’d always been like that.

“Well. You must miss him.”

“Very much,” Polly said crossly.

“He’s coming home for Christmas, though, hum?”

“Yeah. But I don’t know, he may go back to Colorado again for the spring term.”

“Ah. Well, that’s too bad,” Carl Alter said without concern or emphasis. “But you can visit him, that’ll make it all right.”

What a stupid, callous thing to say, Polly thought, feeling the familiar angry buzz in her chest. She should fly to Denver, stay in a motel, and have a couple of restaurant meals with Stevie, and that would make it “all right.”

“That’s what you ought to do,” her father continued. “Go to Colorado and visit him. Yep. You do that.”

“Oh, is that so!” Polly cried, losing her temper. “Well, I’m surprised you should say that, considering you practically never visited me after I moved to Rochester.”

There was a moment of silence on the cross-country phone line. “That was different,” Carl Alter said finally. “You never wanted to see me.”

“I did, too,” Polly insisted; she was damned if she was going to let him get away with this.

“Aw, come on. Back in Mamaroneck, whenever I came to take you out for the day, you used to have a tantrum. Your mother told me so. She practically had to force you to come with me.”

“But that wasn’t — I didn’t —” Polly stuttered furiously, and fell silent, not trusting herself to speak without swearing.

“Never mind, Polly-O. I understand how it was. But you and Stevie, that’s different. Right?”

“I guess so,” Polly said flatly. Goddamn it, of course it was different. She loved Stevie; until this fall they hadn’t ever been separated. But what was the use of saying this to someone like Carl Alter? What was the use of shouting at him?

“So if he’s in Denver, you go see him, okay?”

“Okay,” Polly said flatly.

“And I tell you what else you do. You find out what Stevie wants for Christmas, and I’ll send it to him.”

“I don’t see the point of that,” Polly said, again fighting for control. “You won’t remember anyhow.”

“I will so; I promise. What the hell —”

“It’ll be the same as it was with me,” Polly cried furiously. “You were always promising! Two years running, you promised to buy me an Etch A Sketch.”

“An Etch A Sketch?” Carl Alter repeated at the other end of the United States.

“It was a kind of screen with dials, you could draw pictures with it, and I kept asking you — Oh, never mind,” she added, ashamed now of her outburst. “I’ll ask Stevie what he wants, but you know it’s probably too late for the Christmas mails already.”

“I tell you what. Maybe I’ll send him a check, he can pick out something himself.”

“Yeah, that’s a good idea,” Polly said wearily, thinking that of course it would never happen; less angry now with her father — because what was the use? — than she was with herself for having blown up at him after all these years. “You do that,” she added.

DANIELLE ZIMMERN KOTELCHUK,

former sister-in-law of Lorin Jones

Hey, Polly, before you start, I want to apologize for never getting down to New York. See, what happens is, I plan to go, every so often; but somehow I never make it. When you live on a farm, even a part-time one, there’s always just too much to do on weekends: there’s the garden, and the horses have to be fed and exercised, and the dog’s about to have puppies, it’s one damn thing after another. That’s one reason.

I guess the other is, I’ve gotten to hate the place. And of course Bernie never liked it. But it’s weird, a city girl like me. Though I still love Paris: I go there every summer for a couple of weeks if I can. But I realized the other day, literally all I’ve seen of New York in nearly three years is Kennedy Airport.

Okay, you want to hear about Laurie. I’ve been thinking what I could tell you that’d be useful. There ought to be something; I knew her for nearly twenty years. But I never felt I knew her all that well, or that we had much to say to each other.

No, I don’t mean I didn’t like her. I liked her well enough, but she just wasn’t on my wavelength.

Well, for example. I’m pretty much up front, always have been, and Laurie was the elusive, silent, secretive type. When I first met her, I thought she was a kind of Rima, a bird girl — did you ever read Green Mansions ? Those immense eyes, and all that untidy dark hair. Her husband treated her that way, as if she were some fragile woodland creature, too delicate for this world.

I don’t know. Probably she realized it was part of the deal, if you look like that.

Well, you must have noticed that thin women attract a different kind of man than plump ones do. If you’re underweight you get older men, fatherly guys, who like to think of women as frail and helpless. They want to protect you and shield you from the world.

Right. Whereas if you’re overweight you draw the opposite type. Whatever their age, what they basically are is little boys who want to be taken care of. If you’re really built like a house, guys like that take one look at you and cry “Mommy!”

I think it’s harder to be too thin. Especially if you’re small, too; then you get the aggressive macho types, who like to refer to their wives as “the little woman.” And if you’re really unlucky you can attract the kind of man who’s looking for someone vulnerable, so he can hurt her or even destroy her.

No. In my opinion, most of the time it’s not luck; it’s a choice. I tell my women’s studies students, what they’re doing when they order that double fudge sundae, or shove it away, is choosing the kind of man they want, the role they want to play in a relationship.

Yeah, I think Laurie was doing that too, probably unconsciously. But Garrett certainly fit the pattern. He was always running after her with a sweater. And when the family got together, he was the one who did all the talking, and told us what a great artist she was going to be. Later on, when she began to get a reputation, he’d boast about her most recent success.

I think she was very embarrassed by it. When Garrett started quoting her latest review, or telling us what important collector had just bought one of her paintings, she always looked kind of miserable to me.

Oh, sure, I think she was very gifted. Nobody doubts that now, do they?

Yes, when I was married to Lennie we had a couple of her paintings. But he took them when we split. I got the kids and the house and most of the furniture, it was a fair deal. Lennie was never mean, not about money anyhow.

No, I don’t miss them that much. I prefer more content in art. I know it’s totally unfashionable, but what I really go for is nineteenth-century French realism: Courbet, Manet. Delacroix and Géricault even. Of course that’s my period. I like a lot of color and action.

We didn’t see them all that often. Lennie’s father enjoyed having his family around on holidays, so he’d make an effort to get us all together. But he and Marcia were traveling abroad a lot of the time.

Yes, we saw more of Laurie the first couple of years we were married, before her mother died. We used to stay at Lennie’s father’s house in White Plains whenever we came down to New York. Lennie didn’t get on too well with Dan, but he liked Celia, even though she was his stepmother. But she was less like a classic stepmother than anyone I ever met.