Alison Lurie - The Truth About Lorin Jones

“Hey,” he said finally. “There’s something else I have to tell you.”

“Okay.” She laughed.

“It’s, uh. This bastard that you’re looking for, Hugh Cameron. ... That’s me. I mean, I’m him.” In the gathering dark his expression was impossible to read.

“What?”

“I’m Hugh Cameron.”

He’s kidding, Polly thought. It’s another catch-the-tourists tale, like the Sea-Cow Ranch and the five-foot pelicans (both already refuted, with hoots of laughter, by Lee). “Oh, you are not,” she said. “You already told me he’s in Italy. And you’re not anywhere old enough to be him.”

“I’m forty-eight.”

“Yes, well.” She smiled, though it was a few years more than she’d assumed. “If Lorin Jones were alive now she’d be nearly sixty. When she left Wellfleet with Cameron she was thirty-seven; that’s twenty-two years ago, and you would’ve been only —”

“Twenty-six.” Mac nodded solemnly, keeping up the joke,

“Right.” Polly smiled. “Besides, Hugh Cameron is a poet — he was a college professor.”

“Yeah. He was a professor, but he didn’t get tenure, so now he’s a contractor in Key West.” Mac still did not smile; his expression could almost be called grim.

Polly stared at him. “Prove it,” she said.

“Okay.” Mac sighed; then he reached into the back pocket of his jeans and took out a worn pigskin wallet stitched with thongs, such as Stevie had once made in Boy Scouts. “Here. Driver’s license, library card, food co-op, Visa —” He fanned them out on the damp wooden bar.

Cameron, Hugh Richard. H. R. Cameron. Hugh Cameron.

“Oh, my God,” Polly said slowly. Then a crazy laugh came out of her. She shoved her stool toward the ocean, away from him.

“I tried to tell you before, back in the house. Only I couldn’t. I knew you’d start asking a lot of questions, and I don’t like talking about those years now. It was a bad time in my life.”

“Yes?” Polly said half-consciously. I was right this afternoon, she thought, feeling disoriented, as if she had made it happen.

“And besides, I figured you wouldn’t sleep with me if you knew. You were so down on Cameron, that bastard, that creep, that shit, you kept saying.”

“Jesus.”

“Y’know, after I saw you on Frances Street, I kept kicking myself for losing my chance. When you turned up again on Mallory Dock, I thought somebody up there loved me.” He pointed at the sooty lowering clouds. “Then when I got to Billie’s I found out you were the woman from New York that’d been hounding me, so I decided to get out of there fast. And I started to leave, right?”

“Right,” Polly echoed, dazed.

“But the thing was, you looked so great, sitting there. I couldn’t let you go. I thought, what the hell, it’s karma, as my friend Sandy would say. You’ve got to play it out.”

“You’re Hugh Cameron,” Polly said, finally taking this in.

Mac nodded.

“So that was your house.”

“Yes.”

“And it’s not for rent; you live there.”

“Yes — no. It’s rented all right, from tomorrow.”

“But nothing else you told me is true.” Now she was trembling, furious. “You’re not living with a woman called Varnie; and I suppose your name isn’t even really Mac.”

“Most of it’s true. I was living with her, till yesterday anyhow. And Mac is what everybody calls me down here. I never liked the name Hugh, I don’t know why I stood it for so long. Back in Nebraska, where I come from, it was a sissy name. I had to take all these jokes at school. ‘Who? Who Cameron? You, Cameron.’ ”

“You lied to me,” Polly said, paying no attention to this story.

“Well, yeah. But it was in a good cause.” Mac grinned, but nervously. “Anyhow, you lied to me too.”

“I did not.”

“Sure you did. You told me you were a lesbian.” Mac was smiling now. “Last night when I took you back to the Artemis Lodge I was almost scared to kiss you. I let go real fast, in case maybe you’d hit me.”

“I should have hit you,” Polly said, with a short hysterical laugh.

“Come on. It’s not as bad as all that. I’m the same guy I was this afternoon.”

“No, you aren’t.” You see, the tall winged goddess said in her mind. You rushed into this like a greedy, sensual fool. Now you are punished.

“I didn’t have to tell you,” Mac protested. “I could have kept quiet. Only I thought we should start out straight.” He grinned awkwardly.

“It’s a little late for that,” she said, with an angry tremor in her speech.

“Better late than never.”

Polly did not trust herself to answer. She turned away from Mac, staring out over the ocean, milky green near the deck, but dark and shaky beyond the lights, like some kind of poisonous Jell-O.

“Hey, baby.” Mac leaned toward Polly and put a strong hand on her arm. “Let’s give this a chance. You don’t know anything about me really.”

“I know enough,” she replied, casting a miserable glance at him and then looking away over the churning Jell-O toward other countries full of folly and deception.

“Hell, what do you want? Do you want me to take you back to the guest house?”

“I don’t know.” Polly’s voice shook. “Maybe you’d better.”

“Okay.” Mac stood up.

“I have to think.”

“Okay. You want me to call you tomorrow morning?”

“Yes — no. All right.”

14

“THAT’S REALLY WILD,” LEE exclaimed, laughing aloud as she chopped tomatoes and peppers for a gazpacho and fed them into her blender. The machine’s low-pitched pulsing roar syncopated with the snaredrum spatter of rain on the roof of the veranda; the storm she had been predict ing had arrived. “And you never had any idea who he was?”

“I did think of it for a moment,” Polly said. “But then I decided I was crazy.”

“You really liked him, too, huh? You thought he was a nice guy.”

“Mh,” she admitted.

“Hell, maybe he is a nice guy,” Lee shouted over the sound effects.

“He lied to me,” Polly said stubbornly, accusing the guest-house manager of moral laxness.

“Still —” Lee broke off. “Well, anyhow you got to see something of Key West. ... Right, honey?” she added, grinning and starting on a red onion.

“Mhm,” Polly agreed miserably. She had spent a hot restless night, broken by thunder, flashes of sheet lightning, and finally the crack and boom of a bursting tropical storm. Again and again Mac’s face appeared before her, and his body. You’re really a slow learner, Polly dear, she heard Jeanne’s voice remarking.

Toward morning, the drenched flashlit leaves outside took the form of Lorin Jones’s last photograph, which now wore a mocking lizard smile. You thought he might be yours, but he’s mine, this reptilian Lorin said without moving her lips. Still mine, always mine.

“So overall you’re ahead,” Lee continued. “All you have to do is get the facts out of the guy this afternoon.”

“I wish I never had to speak to him again,” Polly said with emphasis, trying to convince herself of this.

“Now, honey.” Lee turned off the machine with a sinewy brown hand. “I understand how you feel. But after all, if he’s got the data you need —”

“And if he’ll give it to me.” Polly sighed. The rainstorm suited her mood, which was one of streaming depression. She felt like crying, but maybe it was only the onion.

“Why shouldn’t he?” Lee threw in a bunch of peculiar-looking herbs: dark blood-red basil and loose uncurled parsley.

“Because he didn’t want to in the first place, that’s why.” Again Polly sighed, almost groaned.