Alison Lurie - The Truth About Lorin Jones

“No? What will it be like, then, Polly?” Lennie leaned across the table, fixing his bright dark eyes on hers, and giving her a penetrating smile. “I know,” he said, grinning. “It’s going to be a no-holds-barred indictment of the patriarchal system. Isn’t that right?”

Polly’s immediate impulse was to tell Lennie to go to hell and walk out. But she checked herself; she had to get on with him, because among other things he held the copyright on Lorin Jones’s work. He knows it, too, she thought furiously.

Seeing from her face that his guess was correct, Lennie grinned more broadly. “Lolly as an unrecognized genius destroyed by the male establishment, that’s the idea, isn’t it?”

“And what if it’s true?” Polly burst out. “But I suppose you wouldn’t see it that way, would you?” she added more coolly, trying to match his infuriatingly detached tone.

“I don’t know how I see it,” Lennie replied after a pause. “All I know is, nothing’s that simple.”

Since Polly could hardly object to this truism, she did not reply. For a few moments the tape recorder whispered on, preserving the dissonances of dishes clattering, blurred voices, and Manhattan traffic.

“Listen, Polly,” Lennie began again, speaking now without irony, and smiling at her with a patronizing intimacy that had no basis in their relationship. “I’ve known you awhile now; let me give you some advice. Forget the idea of writing a biography of my sister. You’ve got her paintings, that’s all you need to make a good book. Besides, if you go on the way you’re going, you could find out things about Laura you don’t want to know.”

You mean I could find out things you don’t want me to know, Polly thought. She made a meaningless noise — the gas escaping from the pressure of holding down this and other angry speeches.

“Think about it.” Lennie looked directly into her eyes and put a sinewy brown hand, furred with dark hair, on hers. “All right?”

Polly snatched her hand away. “All right, I’ll think about it,” she said, internally vowing not to.

But during the long ride home on the bus, Polly did think about it; or rather, she thought about Lennie Zimmern. How dared he tell her what to write? How dared he try to come on to her? And not for the first time, either. On more than one occasion in the past she had caught Lennie giving her this same calculated, intense, half-erotic look — a look that said, How about it?

What made it more infuriating was that Leonard Zimmern was exactly the sort of egotistic, willful man that Polly once used to get involved with. And though she had never given him the least encouragement, it was as if he somehow knew this, and could plug into her neurosis whenever he wanted to.

For it was a neurosis, Polly knew that now; and one with its roots in her earliest childhood. If you could really learn from experience, she would have learned to distrust this type years ago, by observing her father, who was totally undependable. He was now on his third wife, Polly’s mother having been the first.

It might have been better, Polly sometimes thought, if her father had just walked out of her life for good when she was four; she would probably have adjusted to that more easily. But instead, for the next five years, Carl Alter kept turning up — though never reliably — to take his daughter out for the day. And Polly’s mother, Bea, always made her go with him. She had read somewhere that almost any father was better than none, and she believed then — and still believed — almost everything she read if the author was a man and was called Doctor.

How often Polly had mutinied, as if she knew instinctively how hurtful the experience would be! How she had balked and protested when her father appeared at the front door of their row house! Even after she’d heard the bell she would sulk in her room, deliberately not changing into the “nice clean dress” laid out on the bed. Her mother would call again and again, her voice growing shriller and more anxious; finally she would come upstairs to pull off Polly’s T-shirt and jeans, drag a brush through her matted brown curls, and cram her unwilling body into the freshly ironed nice dress, pleading in whispers with her daughter to be reasonable, to cooperate.

Usually, Polly would clumsily let herself be got ready. But sometimes, without knowing it was coming, she would have one of her temper tantrums. She would feel her face getting hot, and then suddenly her head would be full of big noisy black horseflies like the ones at her grandparents’ farm, buzzing and stinging, and she would hear herself shout: “I won’t go, I won’t!” and before she knew it she would be screaming and kicking the floor. Even today those flies were still in her head somewhere, Polly knew, and sometimes they rose and swarmed.

When Polly was finally ready, Bea would give her a little shove out the door, and she would stump down the faded, fuzzy-striped stair carpet, looking as cross and ugly as she knew how. Which was fairly cross and ugly, for even when she was a child Polly’s small stubborn chin, straight dark brows, and high coloring lent themselves well to angry moods.

As she followed her father along the gritty sidewalk, scuffing her patent-leather Mary Janes on purpose against the frost-heaved blocks of cement, Polly wouldn’t even look at him. She would make her way as slowly as possible toward his stupid beat-up old car, a prewar Ford coupe that the previous owner had daubed a streaked chalky yellow with housepaint; it was known as The Yellow Peril. Her father used the back seat as a combined wastebasket and laundry basket, and it was always littered with empty beer cans, squashed cellophane and silver-paper packets of Camels, old newspapers, and grimy shirts and towels and socks.

Polly would ignore the smile and flourish with which Carl Alter held open the door of The Yellow Peril for her. She wanted to hurt him, she knew that now: to punish him for being such a crummy father, for ruining her whole day, for not coming to see her sooner, for leaving her in the first place. Okay, she might have to go with him, because of what Bea Alter referred to as “the legal agreement.” If she didn’t, Polly half believed back then, both she and her mother could be arrested and sent to jail. But she wasn’t going to like anything her father might show her or tell her or give her. So there.

What followed, every time, was an elaborate process of wooing. Never since those days had Polly been courted with such skill, charm, invention, and indulgent patience — the art had probably died out, and just as well. Her father never made any comment on her flushed face or bad temper. He rattled on as they drove away, telling jokes and stories, whistling or singing:

Over the white and drifting snow

A ghostly voice came calling:

“Where are you going to, Polly-O?

Where are you going this morning?”

He never seemed to notice that she didn’t answer, or that she was sitting in an angry bundle with her arms tight to her sides, as far away from him as possible on the ripped yellow-straw seat covers that always scratched her legs.

“Hey, Polly-O, look at that crazy red dog running round in circles... that funny sign on the truck over there,” Carl Alter would call out as The Yellow Peril, its exhausted exhaust system coughing and roaring, jolted its way down Mamaroneck Avenue. Or, “Knock-knock —” and after a stubborn silence from his daughter, supplying her line, “Who’s there? ... Victor.” Polly would squinch her eyes shut; she would set her jaw so as not to ask “Victor who?” She would vow not to give in.

But in the end she never could keep it up. Her father always knew so many funny new jokes; he thought of such surprising things to do. She would resist him as long as she could, but it was no use: a giggle would escape her at the punchline of a shaggy-dog story; or without meaning to she would find herself running beside him when he chased the pigeons in front of the courthouse, calling, “Come on, Polly-O! If you catch one, they’ll let you keep it.” What a stupid thing for a grown-up to do, she thought a few years later; how dumb he must have looked, that tall rumpled awkward man, running after a pigeon through the dry fallen leaves and waving his long arms around, and Polly-O stumbling after him, probably looking really dumb, too. Nobody can catch a bird. So why did he shout for everyone to hear, “That’s it, Polly-O! You almost had him that time!”