Alison Lurie - The Truth About Lorin Jones

I didn’t want one much either. I felt kind of hurt and insulted really. It was as if Aunt Laurie, the family artist, had been watching me and knew I wasn’t any good, not like her, and never would be. So she was sorry for me; and I couldn’t stand that, back then. Hell, I still can’t.

But, you see, she knew somehow. When she saw me trying to draw those horses — to reproduce exactly what I’d seen, not like a painter but like a photographer — she knew what I needed. Only I didn’t understand then. For me it was as if she was saying, You might as well quit right now, baby. I didn’t get any other message, because I didn’t have any respect for photography at eleven; I didn’t know what it was, really.

Yes, after I got home I put in a roll of film, and tried it out, but my heart wasn’t in it. I didn’t understand the controls, and the camera was too big for me anyhow; I couldn’t even hold it steady. The pictures came out a mess, and I shoved the whole thing away in a closet.

Well what happened was, a couple of years later, when I was nearly fourteen, Aunt Laurie died; and Dad went down to Key West afterward to sort out her things. He found maybe a dozen photography books, going back years. All the greats; Cartier-Bresson, and Stieglitz, and Bourke-White, and Walker Evans, and collections from the old Life. Sometime before she died Aunt Laurie had crossed out her name in all of them and written in mine. “Laura Zimmern,” and later on “Laura Jones” or “Lorin Jones,” was canceled with a long stroke of the pen, and “Ruth Zimmern” was written in underneath, in her fine narrow loopy writing, almost like nineteenth-century calligraphy; you’ve probably seen it.

So Dad sent the books on to me. I’d given up on art by then. The current family idea, and mine too, was that I was going to live on a farm and take care of animals, like my stepfather, Bernie.

Well, those books. They hit me like a bank of flashbulbs going off. I hadn’t realized photographs could be like that, but once I saw them I wanted to do the same. I got out the Leica, and this time I was big enough to hold it steady and understand the directions, and that’s how the whole thing started. I figure if it hadn’t been for Aunt Laurie, I’d be a fat contented country vet somewhere now.

Hell, no. Like Marcia always says, I’ve got no regrets. I just wish I could see Aunt Laurie again somehow and thank her, that’s all.

15

IN THE ILL-LIT, HIGH-CEILINGED hall of a university building, Polly sat on a wooden bench waiting for Leonard Zimmern to join her for lunch. Shufflings and murmurs reached her from the classrooms opposite, and a gust of chill snowy air slapped her face every time the outside doors swung open to admit students in the uncouth dress and weary, wretched expressions characteristic of exam period.

Polly also felt weary and wretched. She hadn’t even started her holiday shopping, and she had another dentist appointment this afternoon with awful Dr. Bebb. Stevie was coming home soon, which was something to look forward to; but according to Jim he was probably going back to Denver for the rest of the school year.

At least she could congratulate herself on having gotten out of Key West in time. It had been a near thing, though. After she changed her ticket, Polly had all but forgotten her project and given herself wholly up to Mac and to pleasure. They had jogged in a drifting fog by the ocean at dawn, swum in the rose-stained waves at sunset, and made love on the sand (romantically but rather grittily) by starlight. They had gone dancing again, bought palm-leaf hats at a flea market, and watched the shrimp boats unload.

They hadn’t been out to the reef, because the sea was still too high; but they’d gone fishing with a friend of Mac’s and brought home a six-pound kingfish that Lee had stuffed and baked for them and two of her guests. For three days Polly had hardly thought of her book, and the only work she had done was to help Mac and his crew tape and spackle sheetrock.

It still scared her to think how close she had come to really caring about Mac — no, she corrected herself, Hugh Cameron — and accepting his version of Lorin Jones. Because of course his story was just as partial and biased a view of Lorin’s life as Jacky’s or Garrett’s. Maybe more so. The trouble was, as Jeanne said, that though she knew all her informants were untrustworthy, whenever she got too close to one of them her vision blurred, and he turned into a sympathetic person; in Mac’s case, to worse than that.

But as Jeanne had pointed out, she had to look at the situation objectively. “Polly, dear. You may have had an exciting time in Florida, well, why not? But you know it would really be a mistake to take it seriously. This is somebody who deceived you, by his own admission; who was cheating on the woman he lives with; and who’s more or less stolen two very valuable paintings. I’m not blaming you. I know all too well how crazy I get sometimes myself when I’m in an erotic blur, so that I simply won’t let myself see what’s quite plain to everyone around me.”

It was plain to Jeanne, for instance, that Polly had been in a vulnerable condition the whole time she was in Key West: confused and credulous — almost as if she’d been under a voodoo spell of the sort that Ron and Phil had warned her about. Once home, though, she had more or less fallen apart.

It was Jeanne who had put her back together; Jeanne had been wonderful. She had sympathized, understood, and vigorously denied that Polly was in any way responsible for what had happened in Key West. It was clear to Jeanne that her friend had been lured into Hugh Cameron’s house, and then practically raped, when she was ill and miserable and exhausted — after all, hadn’t she come home with a streaming cold and a temperature of over a hundred? Hadn’t she had to be put straight to bed, and nursed back to physical and emotional health by her devoted Calico Cat?

What had happened in Key West was also partly, Jeanne had suggested, a side effect of Polly’s long concentration on Lorin Jones: of first a conscious and later and more darkly a subconscious identification with her subject. Finally she had even begun to have Lorin’s experiences: she had been exploited by Lorin’s dealers, for instance. (Jacky, as Jeanne had pointed out, hadn’t offered to go to Key West himself, or contribute to her plane fare, though when the paintings she’d found were retrieved and sold he would get a large commission.) She had been pawed and condescended to by Garrett Jones; she had been deceived and seduced by Mac/Hugh.

And even after Mac/Hugh had, as he put it, “come clean,” he was still dirty, still lying, Jeanne was sure of that. The story about Lorin Jones being addicted to speed, for instance, sounded to her like a parcel of lies; why, even Lorin’s own sister-in-law had never heard anything of the kind. It was clear to Jeanne that Cameron was a dishonest, dangerous person: superficially charming and clever maybe, but warped. Maybe even a borderline psychopath, she had suggested yesterday. “Gee, yeah, that could be,” agreed Betsy, who had been present at these discussions more often than Polly would have liked.

“Oh, come on,” Polly had protested. “He wasn’t that bad, you know.” But at this Betsy and Jeanne had regarded her with identical looks of anxious indulgence, like nurses in a convalescent hospital. Still a little infection there, I’m afraid, these looks said; and they were right.

Of course if Polly were to accept their view of Mac — of Hugh Cameron, rather — it would make her task much easier. She could go back to her original vision of Lorin Jones as a woman of genius damaged and finally destroyed by men and the male establishment; she could set aside all that didn’t belong in that story. Then her biography, as she had first planned, would be a well-documented assault on the art establishment. It would also be her revenge on the men who had injured not only Lorin but Polly herself — liars, exploiters, seducers. “They’ll be sorry when your book comes out,” Jeanne had said the other day, smiling her pussycat smile.