Alison Lurie - The Truth About Lorin Jones

“I know it’s here somewhere. I just can’t locate it right this moment, is all,” Lee drawled, smiling lazily. She was a sturdy, darkly tanned, handsome woman, a middle-aged version of one of Gauguin’s Polynesian beauties. She had a bush of shoulder-length black hair streaked with stone gray, a leathery skin flushed to hot magenta on her broad cheekbones, and knobbed bare brown feet.

While Polly waited, Lee shifted papers and slid drawers open and shut. She kept breaking off her search to answer the phone, to find a stamp for another guest, to offer Polly passion-fruit juice and nacho crackers (Polly declined, feeling her stomach rise), and to assure her that if she couldn’t get into the room tonight she’d be real comfortable on the porch swing.

Polly slumped against the desk with her duffel bag and her stuffed-up nose and her headache, listening to the irritating tinkle of the colored-glass wind chimes as they swayed in the sultry evening breeze. Maybe she should just get the hell out of here now and find a motel.

As Lee set down her sweating purple glass of passion-fruit juice and began to search again through sliding heaps of papers, Polly asked herself if maybe Ida, who had never liked her, had deliberately sent her to a dump full of crazies.

“Listen,” she said. “It’s getting late; maybe I’d better go look for a motel.”

“Hell no, you can’t do that.” Lee laughed almost nervously. “Ida’d kill me if I let any friend of hers go to a motel.”

“I’m not really a friend of Ida’s,” Polly protested. “I mean, I don’t know her that well, she just recommended —”

“Eureka!” Grinning broadly with triumph, showing strong white irregular Polynesian teeth, Lee held up a key. “I knew it was here somewhere.”

The first thing Polly did, after dumping her luggage on a garish orange batik bedspread and going out for a hamburger, was to call Hugh Cameron. She stood in a telephone booth at the front of the coffee shop watching a procession of tourists and weirdos pass along Duval Street, and trying over in her mind the speech she had rehearsed. (“This is Paula Alter from New York, you remember I wrote to you about Lorin Jones. I know you said you were busy, but I’ve come all the way to Key West to talk to you, it’s really important, so ... please ... if you could ...”)

As she listened to the ring, she imagined Cameron slowly, impatiently getting up from his chair, crossing the floor. ... He was a difficult, rude person, everyone in New York said so. He might shout at her or curse her — tell her to get lost, to fuck off.

The steady burring of the phone, at first menacing, gradually became mechanical. Either Hugh Cameron wasn’t home, or he wasn’t answering. Ill, exhausted, she slumped against the side of the booth. She wished she had never come here; she wished she had never heard of Key West, or of Lorin Jones. She was tired of chasing this elusive contradictory woman around the East Coast, tired of trying to sort through the lies and half lies of her former associates. Ultimately, it was Lorin’s fault that she was here in this steamy miserable place instead of home in bed.

Really, everything that had gone wrong for her over the last few months was because of Lorin Jones. If she hadn’t had to travel around doing interviews, she would never have agreed to Stevie’s spending the fall term with his father. Jeanne wouldn’t have moved in, so there would have been no awkward sexual encounter between them, and Betsy might never even have set foot in the apartment.

And it was Lorin’s fault, ultimately, that Polly was probably going to lose her son. Stevie still hadn’t definitely decided that he wanted to return to Denver after Christmas, but Jim said he seemed to be “leaning in that direction.” It was a typical Jim cliché, but Polly couldn’t help but imagine it literally; she saw Stevie standing just east of Denver, on some high snowy mountain road, leaning toward the city as if in a hard wind.

Also, when Jim last called, he had informed Polly that he had some “very good news”: his new wife was expecting a baby. When she heard this Polly felt a surge of irrational rage that made it impossible for her to congratulate him. How dare Jim have any other child than Stevie? This was followed by an even stronger rush of furious envy. I could have a baby, too, she thought, I’m not forty yet; but I never will. Probably I will spend the rest of my life completely alone.

Polly’s nose was running again; her head ached worse. She hung up, paid for the half-eaten hamburger, and staggered back to her room. There she peeled off her once-crisp shirt and slacks, now sweaty and limp. She brushed her teeth with disgustingly lukewarm water that refused to run cold, climbed into the low, creaking rattan platform bed, and more or less passed out.

She woke late the next morning, hot and sweaty in a heavy splash of orange sun from the window whose blind she had forgotten to draw last night — hot and sweaty, too, from the receding clutch of, yes, a wet dream. Well, no wonder; she’d been celibate for weeks, and before Jeanne for nearly a year. Now she was in a place where the very air, blowing from the fishing piers and the tidal flats, smelled of sex. The dream had had a shore and fish in it too, and — she remembered with irritation — a man. She lunged out of bed and went in search of a shower, preferably a cold one.

But as she stood in the cool flood of water Polly noticed something else: her flu was gone. For some goddamn reason, she felt perfectly well. Okay. What she had to do now was finish her research, go back to New York, write the book, and be done with it; through with Lorin Jones forever. She scoured herself dry with a coarse striped beach towel, and put on her Banana Republic jumpsuit, which seemed right for an explorer in dubious tropical territory.

Downstairs, after a late breakfast (sweet, pulpy fresh-squeezed orange juice, decaffeinated tea, and muesli), she tried Cameron’s number again from the guest-house phone, while Lee, who had insisted on hearing all about the project, openly listened. When he didn’t answer, Lee was optimistic.

“Aw, don’t worry. Probably the old guy was out last night; and he could be at work now. What’s his job?”

“I don’t know. He was teaching at some college in the Midwest about ten years ago, but nobody seems to know which one. But I figure he must have retired by now, since he’s back in Key West.”

“Well, still. He could be buying groceries at Fausto’s or anywhere. Why don’t you forget about your research for a while, go out and enjoy yourself? Have a swim; see something of the island.”

“I haven’t got time for anything like that, I’m afraid,” Polly said tightly.

“What’s the hurry, hon?” Lee gave her a wide friendly, maybe even more than friendly, grin. “You can stay here as long as you like; I’ll put you on the weekly rate. And it’s a really pretty day out, you should take advantage of it. There’s supposed to be a storm on the way.”

“A storm?”

“Yeah, it was on the TV this morning — not those newsroom idiots in Miami, but our local radar station, so it could be true. You wait half an hour, I’ll come with you.” She leaned so far over the cluttered bamboo desk toward Polly that her low-cut oversize tangerine muumuu gaped, revealing full brown breasts with enlarged mushroom-colored nipples. Her flesh had the heavy, inert luster that Gauguin admired, and Polly didn’t.

She hesitated only a moment before declining. It was the first offer, or hint of an offer, that’d come her way since the fiasco with Jeanne. But even if she’d found Lee attractive there was something about her, just as there was about Key West, that put Polly off: something loose and lazily overheated. Besides, even if she stayed longer on this loose, overheated island she had no time to waste: she had to check out all seventeen art galleries in the Yellow Pages, visit the Bureau of Vital Statistics and the library, and keep trying Hugh Cameron’s phone number.