The Truth About Lorin Jones (28 page)

“Listen,” she said. “It’s getting late; maybe I’d better go look for a motel.”

“Hell no, you can’t do that.” Lee laughed almost nervously. “Ida’d kill me if I let any friend of hers go to a motel.”

“I’m not really a friend of Ida’s,” Polly protested. “I mean, I don’t know her that well, she just recommended —”

“Eureka!” Grinning broadly with triumph, showing strong white irregular Polynesian teeth, Lee held up a key. “I knew it was here somewhere.”

The first thing Polly did, after dumping her luggage on a garish orange batik bedspread and going out for a hamburger, was to call Hugh Cameron. She stood in a telephone booth at the front of the coffee shop watching a procession of tourists and weirdos pass along Duval Street, and trying over in her mind the speech she had rehearsed. (“This is Paula Alter from New York, you remember I wrote to you about Lorin Jones. I know you said you were busy, but I’ve come all the way to Key West to talk to you, it’s really important, so ... please ... if you could ...”)

As she listened to the ring, she imagined Cameron slowly, impatiently getting up from his chair, crossing the floor. ... He was a difficult, rude person, everyone in New York said so. He might shout at her or curse her — tell her to get lost, to fuck off.

The steady burring of the phone, at first menacing, gradually became mechanical. Either Hugh Cameron wasn’t home, or he wasn’t answering. Ill, exhausted, she slumped against the side of the booth. She wished she had never come here; she wished she had never heard of Key West, or of Lorin Jones. She was tired of chasing this elusive contradictory woman around the East Coast, tired of trying to sort through the lies and half lies of her former associates. Ultimately, it was Lorin’s fault that she was here in this steamy miserable place instead of home in bed.

Really, everything that had gone wrong for her over the last few months was because of Lorin Jones. If she hadn’t had to travel around doing interviews, she would never have agreed to Stevie’s spending the fall term with his father. Jeanne wouldn’t have moved in, so there would have been no awkward sexual encounter between them, and Betsy might never even have set foot in the apartment.

And it was Lorin’s fault, ultimately, that Polly was probably going to lose her son. Stevie still hadn’t definitely decided that he wanted to return to Denver after Christmas, but Jim said he seemed to be “leaning in that direction.” It was a typical Jim cliché, but Polly couldn’t help but imagine it literally; she saw Stevie standing just east of Denver, on some high snowy mountain road, leaning toward the city as if in a hard wind.

Also, when Jim last called, he had informed Polly that he had some “very good news”: his new wife was expecting a baby. When she heard this Polly felt a surge of irrational rage that made it impossible for her to congratulate him. How dare Jim have any other child than Stevie? This was followed by an even stronger rush of furious envy. I could have a baby, too, she thought, I’m not forty yet; but I never will. Probably I will spend the rest of my life completely alone.

Polly’s nose was running again; her head ached worse. She hung up, paid for the half-eaten hamburger, and staggered back to her room. There she peeled off her once-crisp shirt and slacks, now sweaty and limp. She brushed her teeth with disgustingly lukewarm water that refused to run cold, climbed into the low, creaking rattan platform bed, and more or less passed out.

She woke late the next morning, hot and sweaty in a heavy splash of orange sun from the window whose blind she had forgotten to draw last night — hot and sweaty, too, from the receding clutch of, yes, a wet dream. Well, no wonder; she’d been celibate for weeks, and before Jeanne for nearly a year. Now she was in a place where the very air, blowing from the fishing piers and the tidal flats, smelled of sex. The dream had had a shore and fish in it too, and — she remembered with irritation — a man. She lunged out of bed and went in search of a shower, preferably a cold one.

But as she stood in the cool flood of water Polly noticed something else: her flu was gone. For some goddamn reason, she felt perfectly well. Okay. What she had to do now was finish her research, go back to New York, write the book, and be done with it; through with Lorin Jones forever. She scoured herself dry with a coarse striped beach towel, and put on her Banana Republic jumpsuit, which seemed right for an explorer in dubious tropical territory.

Downstairs, after a late breakfast (sweet, pulpy fresh-squeezed orange juice, decaffeinated tea, and muesli), she tried Cameron’s number again from the guest-house phone, while Lee, who had insisted on hearing all about the project, openly listened. When he didn’t answer, Lee was optimistic.

“Aw, don’t worry. Probably the old guy was out last night; and he could be at work now. What’s his job?”

“I don’t know. He was teaching at some college in the Midwest about ten years ago, but nobody seems to know which one. But I figure he must have retired by now, since he’s back in Key West.”

“Well, still. He could be buying groceries at Fausto’s or anywhere. Why don’t you forget about your research for a while, go out and enjoy yourself? Have a swim; see something of the island.”

“I haven’t got time for anything like that, I’m afraid,” Polly said tightly.

“What’s the hurry, hon?” Lee gave her a wide friendly, maybe even more than friendly, grin. “You can stay here as long as you like; I’ll put you on the weekly rate. And it’s a really pretty day out, you should take advantage of it. There’s supposed to be a storm on the way.”

“A storm?”

“Yeah, it was on the TV this morning — not those newsroom idiots in Miami, but our local radar station, so it could be true. You wait half an hour, I’ll come with you.” She leaned so far over the cluttered bamboo desk toward Polly that her low-cut oversize tangerine muumuu gaped, revealing full brown breasts with enlarged mushroom-colored nipples. Her flesh had the heavy, inert luster that Gauguin admired, and Polly didn’t.

She hesitated only a moment before declining. It was the first offer, or hint of an offer, that’d come her way since the fiasco with Jeanne. But even if she’d found Lee attractive there was something about her, just as there was about Key West, that put Polly off: something loose and lazily overheated. Besides, even if she stayed longer on this loose, overheated island she had no time to waste: she had to check out all seventeen art galleries in the Yellow Pages, visit the Bureau of Vital Statistics and the library, and keep trying Hugh Cameron’s phone number.

Some hours later Polly stood in yet another gallery where nobody had ever heard of Lorin Jones, going through the pretense of looking at the exhibit. The paintings were still lifes mostly, large acrylics thick with muddy reds and oranges, ugly derivatives of the recently fashionable new realism.

God, she thought, standing in front of a soupy overworked portrait of a television set and a dirty potted philodendron, I could paint as well as that. Better. What a farce it all was: a no-talent artist like this could get himself shows, grants, prizes, dealers, reviews, sales to museums and collectors (all described in the glossy brochure the gallery owner had pressed upon her). So why the hell had Polly ever quit?

Moving away from the pictures, she stared out the plate-glass window. A cloud had slid over the sun, changing everything. Like a stage set after the lights have been turned off, Key West had lost its meretricious charm; it looked faded, tacky, makeshift.

I should have kept on with my painting, she thought. Then maybe I wouldn’t be trying to write a book about somebody I never knew, can’t know. Who wouldn’t have liked me if I had known her, because she didn’t like critics and dealers and museum people; everybody says that. She would have hated me, probably.

And I might have hated Lorin Jones if I’d known her, Polly thought, staring out at the loose-leaved unnatural trees, the peeling white frame houses, and the potholed street. I do hate her, in a way, because of all the trouble that’s come into my life through her. And because she was a brilliant painter, and I’m not.

The whole thing was bitterly unfair. Why should someone self-centered and evasive and untrustworthy like Lorin have received this gift from the gods, instead of a warmhearted, straightforward, honest person like Polly Alter?

No sense in asking this. When thousands of people were starving and dying all over the world, a little divine slipup like giving Lorin Jones genius and enduring fame and Polly Alter nothing but unprofitable drudgery, and some old muddy canvases stored in a disused bathtub, didn’t even signify.

But in a way it wasn’t so much the gods’ fault as Lorin’s, Polly thought. When she was a child, an adolescent, her drawings and paintings had been warmly praised, just as Lorin’s were; she too had won prizes and honors. In college, and for a few years afterward, she had hoped, even almost expected, to become an established American painter. She couldn’t paint full-time, like Lorin, because she didn’t have a rich, influential critic for a husband; she had to support herself. She didn’t have an entrée to New York galleries, either. But she had struggled on, working and hoping, until it all went wrong.

And when had it all gone wrong? Polly knew exactly when. It had happened in Eastham, Massachusetts, on her honeymoon, at the moment when she came down to breakfast and saw Lorin Jones’s landscape over the sideboard in the dining room of the inn, above two turned wooden candlesticks and a bowl of oranges. She had gazed and admired; she hadn’t known yet, or hadn’t admitted to herself what it meant: that someone else, Lorin Jones, had already done everything she’d ever wanted or hoped to do in painting.

But unconsciously she must have realized what had happened to her. Because it was from that moment that her hand had faltered, her work had begun to go bad, as she struggled not to imitate Jones, to avoid her choice of colors, her characteristic subjects, her handling of paint. Without lifting a finger, just by being born twenty years sooner, Lorin Jones had destroyed Polly Alter as a painter.

And Polly couldn’t do anything about it. She couldn’t paint anymore, and she couldn’t even the score; she couldn’t hurt Lorin Jones, because she was already dead. Instead, she had contracted to exalt her rival, to make her even more famous and admired.

Or — the possibility hissed in her ear like a snake — she could write her book to show that Lorin Jones, however gifted, was a cold, selfish, vengeful, secretive person, and a complete neurotic. She could suggest that there is a choice sometimes between being a good person and a good painter, and that Jones had chosen the darker path.

Leaving the gallery, Polly headed north and west across the island in the direction of the house where Lorin Jones had once lived. If she was really lucky, its owner would be home and willing to talk. If she was really unlucky, the building would have been torn down and replaced by a motel or a grocery.

The sun had come out again, and the sky was the color of a gas flame, but nothing she passed seemed real. The sun was too large and glaringly luminous, the houses were too small and uniformly white, and everything that grew around them looked as stiff and unnatural as a Rousseau jungle: giant scaly palms like vegetable alligators; scarlet-flowering deciduous trees with enormous writhing roots and varnished leaves and long snaky pale brown creepers hanging down from above. Below them gardens burgeoned with unnatural flowers: oversized pink shrimps, glossy magenta trumpets with obscene red pistils, and foot-long crimson bottle-brushes.

The fauna were just as exotic and unreal as the flora. Huge speckled spiders swayed in six-foot webs between the branches of the tropical trees; little pale gray lizards skittered nervously along whitewashed fences, then suddenly froze into bits of dried leaf. In one yard there were white long-necked birds the size of turkeys; in another a tortoise-shell cat as large as a terrier.

And then, even worse, there were the people. A bearded bum with a foot-long iguana draped around his neck like her grandmother’s old fox fur; a woman walking two long-haired dachshunds in plaid boxer shorts; a man in a Karl Marx T-shirt and frayed canvas sandals getting out of a white Cadillac. A half-naked youth waved to Polly from an upstairs window; and in one of the flowering trees overhead a long-haired pirate in a red bandanna and gold earrings, pruning with a wicked-looking chainsaw, grinned and shouted at her to look out below.

As she made her way across town, Polly kept an uneasy watch for Hugh Cameron. She’d never seen a picture of him, but whenever she passed a tall, fair, thin man in his sixties (“pale and weedy” had been Garrett Jones’s phrase), she gave him a quick, suspicious stare. In front of the library (which was of shrimp-pink stucco) she almost crossed the street to ask the guy if he was Cameron, and only halted because another elderly man came out of the building at the same time and addressed her suspect as “Frank.”

The house Lorin had once rented was still standing. Like so many others on the island, it was a white frame cottage or bungalow — smaller than most, better cared for than some. Polly recognized the square pillars and the heavy shadowing overhang of the roof under which Lorin Jones had stood in her last known photograph.

In the side yard, behind a tall picket fence, two youngish men in Hawaiian shorts were sunning themselves on a deck. One had shielded his face with the
Wall Street Journal;
the other was reading
Christopher Street,
holding it horizontally over his head as a sunshade. Two gay Republicans, wouldn’t you just know it, had taken over Lorin’s old house.

While she stood and stared, the one reading glanced at her, then lowered his paper and sat up. “Excuse me, are you looking for someone?” he called.

“No.” Polly hesitated. “Well, yes, sort of.”

“Maybe we can help.” He came to the gate and leaned over it, followed by his friend.

Yes, it was their house, they told her, speaking almost in unison, but they knew nothing of its history. They’d bought the place three years ago, from an old lady who was dead now. No, they’d never met her. All they knew was she’d lived up in Miami and rented the place out for years to a succession of low-life types. It was an absolute wreck, a real disaster area. But since then they’d done it over completely; the former tenants probably wouldn’t have even recognized it.