Alison Lurie - The Truth About Lorin Jones

Some hours later Polly stood in yet another gallery where nobody had ever heard of Lorin Jones, going through the pretense of looking at the exhibit. The paintings were still lifes mostly, large acrylics thick with muddy reds and oranges, ugly derivatives of the recently fashionable new realism.

God, she thought, standing in front of a soupy overworked portrait of a television set and a dirty potted philodendron, I could paint as well as that. Better. What a farce it all was: a no-talent artist like this could get himself shows, grants, prizes, dealers, reviews, sales to museums and collectors (all described in the glossy brochure the gallery owner had pressed upon her). So why the hell had Polly ever quit?

Moving away from the pictures, she stared out the plate-glass window. A cloud had slid over the sun, changing everything. Like a stage set after the lights have been turned off, Key West had lost its meretricious charm; it looked faded, tacky, makeshift.

I should have kept on with my painting, she thought. Then maybe I wouldn’t be trying to write a book about somebody I never knew, can’t know. Who wouldn’t have liked me if I had known her, because she didn’t like critics and dealers and museum people; everybody says that. She would have hated me, probably.

And I might have hated Lorin Jones if I’d known her, Polly thought, staring out at the loose-leaved unnatural trees, the peeling white frame houses, and the potholed street. I do hate her, in a way, because of all the trouble that’s come into my life through her. And because she was a brilliant painter, and I’m not.

The whole thing was bitterly unfair. Why should someone self-centered and evasive and untrustworthy like Lorin have received this gift from the gods, instead of a warmhearted, straightforward, honest person like Polly Alter?

No sense in asking this. When thousands of people were starving and dying all over the world, a little divine slipup like giving Lorin Jones genius and enduring fame and Polly Alter nothing but unprofitable drudgery, and some old muddy canvases stored in a disused bathtub, didn’t even signify.

But in a way it wasn’t so much the gods’ fault as Lorin’s, Polly thought. When she was a child, an adolescent, her drawings and paintings had been warmly praised, just as Lorin’s were; she too had won prizes and honors. In college, and for a few years afterward, she had hoped, even almost expected, to become an established American painter. She couldn’t paint full-time, like Lorin, because she didn’t have a rich, influential critic for a husband; she had to support herself. She didn’t have an entrée to New York galleries, either. But she had struggled on, working and hoping, until it all went wrong.

And when had it all gone wrong? Polly knew exactly when. It had happened in Eastham, Massachusetts, on her honeymoon, at the moment when she came down to breakfast and saw Lorin Jones’s landscape over the sideboard in the dining room of the inn, above two turned wooden candlesticks and a bowl of oranges. She had gazed and admired; she hadn’t known yet, or hadn’t admitted to herself what it meant: that someone else, Lorin Jones, had already done everything she’d ever wanted or hoped to do in painting.

But unconsciously she must have realized what had happened to her. Because it was from that moment that her hand had faltered, her work had begun to go bad, as she struggled not to imitate Jones, to avoid her choice of colors, her characteristic subjects, her handling of paint. Without lifting a finger, just by being born twenty years sooner, Lorin Jones had destroyed Polly Alter as a painter.

And Polly couldn’t do anything about it. She couldn’t paint anymore, and she couldn’t even the score; she couldn’t hurt Lorin Jones, because she was already dead. Instead, she had contracted to exalt her rival, to make her even more famous and admired.

Or — the possibility hissed in her ear like a snake — she could write her book to show that Lorin Jones, however gifted, was a cold, selfish, vengeful, secretive person, and a complete neurotic. She could suggest that there is a choice sometimes between being a good person and a good painter, and that Jones had chosen the darker path.

Leaving the gallery, Polly headed north and west across the island in the direction of the house where Lorin Jones had once lived. If she was really lucky, its owner would be home and willing to talk. If she was really unlucky, the building would have been torn down and replaced by a motel or a grocery.

The sun had come out again, and the sky was the color of a gas flame, but nothing she passed seemed real. The sun was too large and glaringly luminous, the houses were too small and uniformly white, and everything that grew around them looked as stiff and unnatural as a Rousseau jungle: giant scaly palms like vegetable alligators; scarlet-flowering deciduous trees with enormous writhing roots and varnished leaves and long snaky pale brown creepers hanging down from above. Below them gardens burgeoned with unnatural flowers: oversized pink shrimps, glossy magenta trumpets with obscene red pistils, and foot-long crimson bottle-brushes.

The fauna were just as exotic and unreal as the flora. Huge speckled spiders swayed in six-foot webs between the branches of the tropical trees; little pale gray lizards skittered nervously along whitewashed fences, then suddenly froze into bits of dried leaf. In one yard there were white long-necked birds the size of turkeys; in another a tortoise-shell cat as large as a terrier.

And then, even worse, there were the people. A bearded bum with a foot-long iguana draped around his neck like her grandmother’s old fox fur; a woman walking two long-haired dachshunds in plaid boxer shorts; a man in a Karl Marx T-shirt and frayed canvas sandals getting out of a white Cadillac. A half-naked youth waved to Polly from an upstairs window; and in one of the flowering trees overhead a long-haired pirate in a red bandanna and gold earrings, pruning with a wicked-looking chainsaw, grinned and shouted at her to look out below.

As she made her way across town, Polly kept an uneasy watch for Hugh Cameron. She’d never seen a picture of him, but whenever she passed a tall, fair, thin man in his sixties (“pale and weedy” had been Garrett Jones’s phrase), she gave him a quick, suspicious stare. In front of the library (which was of shrimp-pink stucco) she almost crossed the street to ask the guy if he was Cameron, and only halted because another elderly man came out of the building at the same time and addressed her suspect as “Frank.”

The house Lorin had once rented was still standing. Like so many others on the island, it was a white frame cottage or bungalow — smaller than most, better cared for than some. Polly recognized the square pillars and the heavy shadowing overhang of the roof under which Lorin Jones had stood in her last known photograph.

In the side yard, behind a tall picket fence, two youngish men in Hawaiian shorts were sunning themselves on a deck. One had shielded his face with the Wall Street Journal; the other was reading Christopher Street, holding it horizontally over his head as a sunshade. Two gay Republicans, wouldn’t you just know it, had taken over Lorin’s old house.

While she stood and stared, the one reading glanced at her, then lowered his paper and sat up. “Excuse me, are you looking for someone?” he called.

“No.” Polly hesitated. “Well, yes, sort of.”

“Maybe we can help.” He came to the gate and leaned over it, followed by his friend.

Yes, it was their house, they told her, speaking almost in unison, but they knew nothing of its history. They’d bought the place three years ago, from an old lady who was dead now. No, they’d never met her. All they knew was she’d lived up in Miami and rented the place out for years to a succession of low-life types. It was an absolute wreck, a real disaster area. But since then they’d done it over completely; the former tenants probably wouldn’t have even recognized it.