Alison Lurie - The Truth About Lorin Jones

If she could have reached Jeanne her resolution might have been strengthened; but Lee, who should have been on the same side, was no help. In spite of what some people might have taken as a sexual rejection, she had remained friendly and interested. “Had a good time last night?” she had asked at breakfast, and when Polly admitted that it hadn’t been too bad, and that she was meeting Mac again today, Lee grinned knowingly. Probably she was a sexual addict herself; probably most people in Key West slept with anybody they fancied who came along, regardless of their sex, occupation, age, marital status, or political party. Sure, go on, enjoy yourself, she had said to Polly, more or less; Polly had listened to her, and now look what had happened.

The whole trip to Key West had been a waste of time and money, a useless expense of spirit. Today, for instance, she had spent hours in the newspaper files at the county library without finding a single reference to Lorin Jones. She had also gone to the county courthouse and, after an interminable delay, seen a certificate that listed the cause of Lorin’s death as “pneumonia.” Lennie Zimmern had told her what he thought was the truth; but Polly still had doubts.

She stared across the cracked and tilted sidewalk and the potholed street at the cemetery opposite. Could Lorin Jones be buried there? And if so, how could Cameron stand to look out every day on the grave of the woman he’d deserted and allowed to die?

This Key West cemetery wasn’t like the ones up north. There were no weeping willows, no pruned shrubbery, no clipped lawns and orderly, ranked tombstones. Instead, behind an iron gate and a cyclone fence topped with barbed wire (what for?) was a wide expanse of untidy open land crowded with funeral monuments. No, not monuments, Polly realized — tombs. Soapy white marble and rough gray stone packing cases lay scattered in the long faded grass, like the debris of a freight-train wreck. Some were crowned with statuary or elaborate scrolled carvings, and many with garish arrangements of plastic flowers: waxy crimson and orange roses, purple pansies, white lilies. Most unpleasant of all, under several of the nearest tombs the earth had shifted or buckled, so that they canted up into the air at a crazy, improper angle. You could almost imagine that the dead people inside, Lorin among them, were trying to get out, or had already gotten out. Maybe that was the reason for the barbed wire. Maybe they were there, invisible, all those evil spirits who, like Lorin Jones, had died violently or too soon, clinging to the cyclone fence with their thin dry lizard hands, clamoring for the lives they had lost.

Polly checked her thoughts, annoyed; such morbid fantasies weren’t her style. They must be the result of Phil’s and Ron’s gossip yesterday about voodoo, or of something heavy and hot and abnormal in the climate. Besides, Lennie Zimmern had said that his sister’s ashes had been scattered in the ocean off Key West; she wasn’t even here.

All right, she would give Mac five more minutes, Polly decided; then she’d leave. There was probably nothing here anyhow. It had been more than fifteen years, after all, and Lennie’d been to the house on Aurelia Lane then and taken everything back to New York.

Two minutes. One minute. Okay, the hell with it. But as Polly started down the walk, the Revivals Construction pickup turned the corner.

“Sorry!” Mac called, parking on the wrong side of the street with a screech of brakes and leaping onto the curb. “Been waiting long?”

“It’s okay.” Late three times out of three, she thought; it must be a character trait. No point in complaining, though; she’d probably never see him again after today.

Mac gave her the warm, uneasy smile of someone who deserves and expects to be scolded. “Had a good day?”

“So-so.” Polly shrugged.

“Sorry to hear that.” He grinned; it was clear that he wasn’t particularly sorry — or, to be fair, particularly glad. “Shall we go in?”

Behind its closed shutters and drawn bamboo blinds the interior of Hugh Cameron’s house was silent, shadowy and almost cool. At first Polly could see nothing; then she began to make out, floating halfway between the floor and ceiling, a very large painting. It might be — it was, surely —

“That what you were looking for?” Mac asked.

“I — I think so,” she said in a strangled, panting voice.

“Wait a second.” There was the rattling sound of a blind being raised. A slotted golden light widened across the tiles; the huge canvas glowed out, white and umber and peach, patched with vermilion and scribbled with black writing. Yes: it had to be one of Lorin Jones’s late graffiti paintings, but looser and more brilliant than any she’d ever seen. What might be an M or an H had been scrubbed in thick pale color down one side of the canvas, in the manner of a pastel Franz Kline; and a line of fine writing ran diagonally up from the opposite corner.

“Yes. It’s Lorin’s, it’s got to be!”

“Really,” Mac said indifferently.

“I don’t understand it. Lorin Jones’s brother was supposed to have come here after she died and collected all her work, and he never even mentioned this picture.”

“Mh?”

“I don’t see how he could have missed it.”

“Maybe it wasn’t in the house,” Mac suggested, gazing idly through a sliding glass door at a pool surrounded by unnaturally white plastic furniture and unnaturally green shrubs. He doesn’t care, he’s not interested, Polly thought. And he’s not interested in me either, not anymore. She should feel relieved, but instead she felt hurt and miserable.

“You mean Cameron could have hidden it?” she said.

Mac shrugged, not turning around.

“You couldn’t hide something like this; it’s too big.”

“Sure you could,” he said. “Put it out back against the fence, cover it with an old drop cloth or something.”

“Maybe. I suppose that would have been like him, the creep.”

“What makes you think he’s a creep?” Mac strolled back into the center of the room.

“Everybody says so. For one thing, he walked out on Lorin Jones when she was dying. He didn’t even try to help her.”

“That’s what they say?”

“Mm.”

“And that’s what you’re going to put in your book, huh?”

“Yes, why not? I’m planning to tell the truth.” Polly turned back to the picture; holding her head sideways, she tried to decipher the line of writing. “ What is... what is the morning, ” she read out. “It looks like mouning, or maybe it’s warning — of wind. What do you think?”

“Let me look.” Mac came up close behind her. “It’s meaning, I think,” he said after a pause. “ What is the meaning of wind under the sea? ”

“It sounds like verse. Lorin Jones’s dealer, he thinks the words in these late paintings mostly came from Hugh Cameron’s poems.”

“Could be,” Mac said.

He’s bored with me, he’s waiting for me to leave, she thought. All right, forget about him. Concentrate on your job. “I’ll have to check,” she said. “The trouble is, I haven’t tracked down much of Cameron’s work, though I know —”

Polly started; Mac had just rested his hands on her shoulders. “— there were at least two volumes of poems, but I haven’t —” She turned and opened her mouth to finish the sentence; he closed it with a long kiss.

I’m not ready for this, Polly thought, feeling herself sinking; I didn’t expect — Her eyes focused on a wall of bookshelves behind his head. Cameron’s books. And Cameron’s poems must be here somewhere — “Wait,” she whispered when Mac paused for breath. “Not now — not yet —”