Alison Lurie - The Truth About Lorin Jones

She scowled at her typewriter. To suspect another woman — especially Jeanne — of the faults that men had attributed to the sex for centuries was awful; blatantly reactionary. But the idea was there in her head, refusing to leave. She thought that Jeanne wasn’t always frank and direct; that in fact Jeanne sometimes treated her the way women were traditionally supposed to treat men: with charm and flattery and guile. The way she had once advised Polly to treat the men she was going to interview for her book.

She turned and regarded her friend, whose soft ponytail of hair and ruffled calico apron seemed almost a deliberate parody of the female role. How deft and delicate her gestures were as she stirred the thickening sauce, how pretty her small plump hands with their carefully manicured shell-pink nails!

And now it occurred to Polly that the scene in the apartment was like a caricature of a traditional marriage. She was the cross husband, in worn jeans and baggy sweater, owner of the home and its main economic support, working late. The tactful, charming, manipulative wife, in a flowered apron, was making supper, and the spoiled stepdaughter was pretending to help.

Jeanne cares more about Betsy than she does about me, Polly said to herself with an empty, sinking feeling. And she doesn’t love Stevie at all. Her sensible arguments and her teary concern were a sham; what she really wants is for me to shove him out of their way into the maid’s room, or move there myself. Well, fuck it. I’m not going to.

16

ON A DULL CLOUDY winter day, Polly Alter was trudging down Central Park West from her apartment to Jacky Herbert’s. Though it was only four in the afternoon, she was exhausted. Yesterday Stevie had come home, and Jeanne and Betsy had moved out, but at a heavy cost.

It had been a week of scenes and silences, of hysterical accusations and failed compromises. Polly had eventually told Jeanne that she could stay on in the spare room for as long as she liked. But when Betsy heard about this she went into a whiny, jealous panic. Polly was trying to separate them, she cried; she had no place to go — she couldn’t possibly stay at Ida’s by herself — Jeanne didn’t love her anymore — nobody wanted her — she would be so lonely and miserable she’d have to go back to her husband. After twenty-four hours of these desperate, contradictory claims, Jeanne capitulated. But Polly stood firm, determined that whether Jeanne stayed or not, Betsy should go.

In the next few days the Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat finally went for each other, both saying things of the sort you can’t forget afterward. Polly lost her cool and told Jeanne that Betsy was totally childish and manipulative and always weaseled out of paying for the groceries and left her hair combings in the sink. Jeanne said that Polly was insensitive and selfish and cut things out of the Times before anyone else had a chance to read it.

At one point they almost came to blows. Polly walked into Stevie’s bedroom and saw her paperback thesaurus lying on top of a suitcase. She picked it up, exclaiming, “Hey! This is mine, not yours.”

But Jeanne, unabashed, tried to snatch the book back, ripping its cover half off in the process. “Why are you always so petty? You might let us have this, at least,” she mewed, as if Polly had denuded her and Betsy of all other possessions. “I’m leaving you every one of my houseplants.”

“I don’t want your damned plants,” Polly barked, not letting go of the thesaurus. “You can take the whole lot.”

“You know you can’t move plants in this freezing weather.” Jeanne almost spat. “But you’d like to kill them, I suppose. Anyhow, we need this book.”

“I don’t know what you need it for,” Polly growled, hanging on. “You and Betsy never use it except to cheat on the Times acrostic.”

“We do not.” Jeanne was still pulling on the thesaurus; suddenly she looked as if she were about to cry.

“All right,” Polly said, ashamed of herself. “Take it then, what do I care.” She let go so abruptly that Jeanne fell over backward.

“Aow!”

“Sorry,” Polly muttered.

Jeanne knelt on the floor, holding the torn book to her robin’s-egg-blue cashmere bosom. “Oh, this is awful,” she wailed. “How can we be fighting like this?” She held out her arms, and Polly, beginning to cry herself, fell into them.

“If it weren’t for the damned housing shortage, we wouldn’t be,” Polly said. And for a moment, as they hugged each other, weeping and laughing, all was forgiven.

“Oh, Polly. I do love you, you know,” Jeanne cried.

“I love you too,” she gasped, kissing her friend’s soft wet cheek. “I’m going to miss you awfully.”

“Me too. I mean — you know what I mean.” Jeanne gave a sobbing laugh. “But Betsy needs me so terribly.”

I need you too, Polly thought, but she didn’t say this, because she knew it was no use. The moment passed, and Jeanne went on packing.

But the Jeanne who had left yesterday didn’t seem the same person she had known and loved. Polly looked at her as they all rode down together in the elevator, surrounded by suitcases and boxes and shopping bags (one of which later turned out to have contained, as if to demonstrate how stubbornly greedy and childish Betsy was, Polly’s thesaurus). For a moment she saw, not her dearest and best friend, but an unfamiliar pretty, plump, frilly blonde woman, nobody she knew. She helped this woman load the taxi that was taking her and her lover to Ida’s, and they parted with a long close hug and fervent pledges to keep in touch. But somehow, maybe because Betsy was standing there watching and scowling, it didn’t seem real. Maybe it would never be real between them again.

Well, I’ve won anyhow; I’ve got Betsy out of my apartment, Polly thought as the yellow taxi drove away down Central Park West under a cold cloudy sky, becoming smaller and then indistinguishable from other taxis. But as she rode the elevator back upstairs alone, she didn’t feel as if she had won anything; she felt deserted, diminished, damaged.

That stupid poem was right, she thought. In the end the Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat had not only eaten each other up in the erotic sense, they had almost destroyed and annihilated each other. Maybe they had been, after all, too different in tastes, opinions, and temperament: irreconcilable entities, like cat and dog.

Polly’s project had been another casualty of the battle. Without Jeanne’s sympathetic encouragement and Jeanne’s conviction that she was on the right track, she faltered on the march. The campaign to portray Lorin Jones as an innocent heroine grew harder every day; the stacks of notes in the folder marked DOUBTFUL — NOT TO BE USED grew thicker. Polly no longer felt even for a moment that she knew her subject intimately, let alone that they were profoundly alike. Instead, she had begun to think that her original idea had been a delusion — worse, a projection.

It wasn’t Lorin Jones whose life had been ruined by men. Her father had loved her and been proud of her; Jacky and Paolo had supported and promoted her until she became impossible to work with; Garrett, after over twenty years, was still obsessed with her; and Mac too had loved her passionately, even though she didn’t love him. Lorin hadn’t been deserted and damaged by men, as Polly had; she had deserted and damaged them.

But if this were true, to write the book Polly had planned would be to force Lorin Jones’s life into the mold of her own. Not only would it be professionally disastrous, it would be false to the truth.

“Most understanding of you to come round,” Jacky Herbert wheezed, holding out a plump white hand to Polly, then subsiding again onto his rouge-and-beige striped Empire sofa. He reclined there like an overweight seal in an Edwardian paisley dressing-gown, against a heap of Art Nouveau appliqué pillows. The entire apartment, or at least the part of it Polly had seen, was an eclectic and rather cluttered mix of all that had been most elegantly mannered in a century of interior decoration. The tide of furniture and objects, however, ended halfway up the graceful, high-ceilinged rooms: above were bare off-white walls hung with Jacky’s celebrated collection of contemporary art.