The Truth About Lorin Jones (3 page)

Jim was completely faithful — unlike Polly, who twice when her husband was away at conferences let the hot winds blow her into bed with the wrong sort of man. After these episodes she was furious with herself and nervously guilty. She longed to be exposed and forgiven; but she had the good sense to realize that confession would hurt Jim far more than it would help her.

Though Polly went on working at the auction house after the wedding, with Jim’s encouragement she had begun to hope that she was an artist after all. Four months before Stevie was born she quit her job and tried to start painting. She cleared most of the boxes out of the narrow little room with the north light that had been meant for a maid when the apartment was built, and set up her easel.

But she had waited too long. Standing up for hours at a time exhausted her and made her legs ache and her belly feel swollen and heavy. When she sat down she couldn’t reach the easel properly. Her arm and leg muscles twitched like worn-out rubber bands; she grew restless and then angry. The one or two canvases she completed seemed to her ugly, clumsy, and empty of meaning.

Polly assumed it would be easier after the baby came, but it wasn’t, though Jim not only paid for a part-time housekeeper, but took equal responsibility for the remaining housework, and spent as much time as Polly did with their son. Stevie was a great kid; but he took up a lot of emotional energy. When she went back to the studio after feeding or changing or cuddling him, the spontaneity of her impulse was gone; she found herself scrubbing at her work and fucking up something that had begun well.

It was a bore staying home all day, too, talking only to Stevie and the housekeeper, both of whom seemed to have a mental age of about four: Stevie of course precociously. She missed being in touch with the New York art world; she missed using her mind and having grown people to talk with. So when Stevie started nursery school she took a part-time job at the Museum, which in a few years became full-time. Soon she was going to meetings, working on catalogues and exhibitions, seeing artists and dealers and collectors and critics. She painted less often; then not at all. The studio, though it was still called by that name, became a storeroom again.

As soon as Stevie was a little older and needed her less, Polly told herself and everyone else, she’d get back to her art. Meanwhile her life, if not exciting, was fun and satisfying, her marriage solid. Or so she thought.

Then, a year ago last spring, when Stevie was twelve, everything fell apart. One day when Polly was showering after work Jim came bursting in on her. She knew something extraordinary, maybe something horrible, must have happened, because he was usually so careful of her bathroom privacy. At first, all she felt was relief and joy when there turned out to be no disaster. Instead, Jim had just been offered an important job and a really big research budget in Colorado. With an impulsiveness Polly hadn’t seen in years, he threw out his arms, embracing both her and the yellow shower curtain printed with abstract designs, exclaiming that he couldn’t believe it, God, he had never expected anything like this.

For a while Polly shared his euphoria. She had been feeling a little stale; Denver would be an adventure, a change. It would be good to get out of Manhattan, which was becoming more crowded, expensive, dirty, and dangerous every year. And, as Jim said, it’d be great for Stevie: he could meet real kids and have a normal American childhood — which simply meant, Polly thought now, that he could have the kind of childhood Jim had had.

Then, slowly, it dawned on her that she wasn’t going to find a decent job in Denver. For Jim, it would be “the chance of a lifetime,” as he put it, sliding into cliché in his enthusiasm — but it wasn’t the chance of Polly’s lifetime. And after all, Jim didn’t have to go to Denver. He already had colleagues he liked, a good lab, adequate research funds. Whereas she had just got a raise at the Museum, and was working on an important exhibition (“Three American Women”). Was it fair to ask her to give all that up?

Jim, it turned out, thought it was fair. If Polly didn’t get a job right off, she could go back to her painting; wasn’t that what she’d always wanted? Anyhow, with the money he’d be making she wouldn’t need to work anymore. They could live well, travel, have full-time help. It was true, Polly said (or lied? — she didn’t know now), she did want to paint, but for that reason, too, she had to stay in New York, where the artists and galleries and collectors were.

While she still thought the matter was under discussion, Jim came home one afternoon and announced a unilateral decision.

“I can’t stall them anymore, Polly,” he explained, sitting down suddenly in the hall in a narrow-backed, hard Art Deco chair that nobody ever sat in. “I heard today that if I don’t take the Denver job they’re going to offer it to Frank Abalone. And hell, he’d really mess it up. He’s got a name in some circles, but essentially he’s a fraud, only nobody can prove it. Nobody even dares to try, after the way he ruined that lab assistant in L.A. I told you about that, you remember?”

“I remember,” Polly said, standing in the kitchen door with a head of half-washed escarole in one hand. “But hell, it’s not your responsibility, you know, what happens in some lab in Denver.”

“Yes it is, though,” Jim said. “It’s my profession.” He swallowed, looked at the new beige twist carpeting for a bit, then up again. “Anyhow, I told Ben I was going to take the job.”

“You told him you were leaving, just like that?” Polly stared at her husband and the chair that nobody ever sat on and thought: It was a sign; I should have known.

“I had to, Polly. They’ll have to start looking for someone to replace me as soon as possible.”

“I can’t believe it.” Polly’s voice rose; she had an impulse to throw the wet soppy head of lettuce at her wet soppy husband’s head. “Oh, shit. I thought you understood how I felt — Goddamn it, you said — I thought you’d do anything for me.”

“I would, honestly,” Jim insisted. “Anything but this.”

The next few weeks were horrible. Slowly but relentlessly, like a dirty oil stain seeping through the back of a badly prepared canvas, the apartment on Central Park West became fouled and darkened with distrust. Polly and Jim began to have long, increasingly exhausting conversations after they were in bed, lying side by side for hours but hardly touching. Finally, at two or three
A.M.,
they would make love in a weary, desperate way. Afterward she would lie as still as possible, not moving, with the sleepy, blurred thought that as long as she held Jim within her body, he couldn’t leave her.

It was at this point that Polly began seeing a therapist. She didn’t know yet that her marriage was breaking up; all she knew was that she and Jim had argued about his going to Denver until both of them were worn out, and now she was angry all the time and Jim was more and more silent and withdrawn. She knew they had to talk to someone else, to ventilate their feelings; that was why she made the appointment for them with Elsa.

The trouble was that when air got into their feelings it turned into a cyclone and blew them apart. Jim was revealed to Polly as a pathetic, selfish windbag, with a mind so closed that he wouldn’t even go back to Elsa after their first three visits; he claimed she wasn’t on his side. But Polly hung in there, and Elsa supported her through the worst months of her life.

Gradually she began to see how she had been deceived. Underneath his friendly, compliant manner, her husband was another MCP like all the rest. Worse, in fact, because at least the others were up front about it. With Jim there were never any remarks about women being weak-minded or unreasonable, there was no bluster or shouting. He was what an article she read later called a “passive-aggressive” male: a twentieth-century husband with the emotional tactics of a Victorian wife. He did exactly what he wanted, and made Polly look terrible at the same time.

Jim wouldn’t, he simply wouldn’t fight. When she shouted and started throwing things he remained infuriatingly sad and silent. He almost never raised his voice, even, so everyone thought of him as terribly good and patient and mature. It was Polly who seemed to be in the wrong, who seemed selfish and childish and unreasonable. It was Polly whom Stevie blamed for his parents’ troubles. (“Why are you always yelling at Dad?”) It was Polly whom her own mother argued against. (“Really, dear, you’re beginning to sound like one of those radical students that have been giving Bob so much trouble lately.”)

Meanwhile Jim went around looking ill and caved-in, begging her to change her mind and come with him, promising her anything else she might want: a separate studio, frequent trips to New York and Europe. The first six months they were apart, for what he told everyone was a “trial separation,” he kept phoning, writing, pleading. He even finally pretended to understand her position. (“I guess you have to do what’s right for you and your art.”)

That first summer alone in New York was terrible for Polly. Rage and depression consumed her. If it hadn’t been for Elsa, she probably would have cracked up, or given in and gone to Colorado. For the first few weeks she didn’t even have Stevie, who had been sent to stay with his grandmother so that he wouldn’t have to witness his father’s departure and the departure of half the furniture.

The apartment was not only empty of furniture that summer; it was empty of friends, because everyone Polly knew, with the single exception of Jeanne, had turned out to be on Jim’s side, and even if they felt like seeing Polly, she didn’t want to see them. They claimed to be neutral, but they all kept telling her what an exceptional person Jim was, and saying that she ought to hang on to him even if it meant leaving the Museum, because good men were scarcer than good jobs. If she really cared for him, they said, she’d reconsider. They told her how much she was hurting him, how much he loved her; they said he’d probably never get over it. (What a laugh. Fourteen months after Jim moved to Denver he was remarried.)

When she talked it over with Elsa she came to realize that in the past thirteen years she’d acquired a new set of friends: better off, more conservative politically, and more apt to be conventionally married. Though she still considered herself a feminist, she’d lost touch with most of the members of her old consciousness-raising group, who didn’t get on with Jim; she saw them only once or twice a year now, and always alone. “I had lunch with Wild Wilhemina today,” she would report disloyally afterward, using the nickname she’d invented to amuse him. “Oh, really?” Jim would reply, grinning in anticipation. “What’s she into these days?”

Without realizing it, Polly had accepted Jim’s mild but persistent idea of who they were; of who she was. She had betrayed her old friends for him; and she had betrayed herself. She herself had become conventional. She hadn’t noticed this because it had happened so slowly, and because she was bamboozled by superficialities. She had thought that she was different from the wives of Jim’s scientific colleagues: she believed her free, sometimes foul language, and her Mexican embroidered smocks and African jewelry and brown-rice casseroles outweighed the fact that she lived on Central Park West and read
New York Magazine
the day it came, while
Mother Jones
and
Ms
slumped unopened for weeks in the wicker basket in the bathroom. Probably Jim’s friends had been quietly laughing at her all those years.

The worst discovery of the summer was that, as if Jim’s parting wish had been a curse, she wasn’t able to paint. Alone in her studio weekend after muggy weekend, with the boxes of toys and winter clothes shoved aside, she stared at canvases that seemed to have dissolved into ugly messes of color like spilt or vomited food: a half-scrambled egg dropped on the floor, or regurgitated pizza. Somehow Jim’s departure had destroyed her creative will. And even if she could have finished something, it wouldn’t have had any future. The loose, painterly style she had developed in college wasn’t fashionable anymore. Unless you were already famous no gallery wanted abstract work now; they were looking for hard-edged color-field painting or photorealism.

Sometimes, alone in the apartment, unable to work, Polly gave herself up to storms of dizzying rage: cursing, smashing of glass, scalding, angry tears — all of them echoed, as July baked into August, and Elsa went on vacation, by bad summer weather: thunder and sheet lightning and a hot dust-laden breeze that didn’t clear the air. But in the end it was her rage that saved Polly from despair. In the temper she had tried so hard to control for years she found her strength. Goddamn it, she had reason to be angry. Goddamn this world, goddamn Jim Meyer. It was then, on a hot thundery evening, alone in the apartment after having refused for the second time to meet the husband of a friend for “lunch,” that she resolved to stop trying to please men.

The good effects of this decision were immediate. For one thing, it was a relief to stop searching faces at parties and openings to see if, maybe, here was someone interesting and unattached — (There never was, anyhow.) It was a relief to give up distorting her face and body: to eat whatever the hell she liked; to throw away the fashionable pointed shoes that hurt, and the tubes and bottles of colored grease and soot with which, though she’d called herself a feminist, she had continued to paint her face.

Over a few weeks Polly’s whole appearance changed, or rather changed back. In school and college everyone had called her “cute”: she was small and sturdy, with a solid rounded figure. She had thick untidy short curls, a naturally high color, big light-brown eyes, and a lively, sensual, puppy-dog expression. Now this self reappeared, not much the worse for wear. She strode purposefully on flat heels, stopped shaving her legs, never went to the hairdresser, and made no further effort to starve herself into thinness. Men on the street still gave her warm, interested looks, but she ignored them. She wasn’t ready to go out with anybody yet; maybe she would never be ready. Maybe that side of her life was over.

Last month, in their final session, Elsa had suggested that eventually she would be able to relate positively to men again. But Polly wasn’t counting on it. Even if she did meet a man who seemed possible, it wouldn’t be any use. If she couldn’t trust Jim, what man could be trusted? In the end no good had ever come to her from them, unless you count erotic pleasure. And Polly suspected now that erotic pleasure was the bait to a trap, a way to get the squirrel into the cage so that it — or rather, she — could spend the rest of her life running around a wire treadmill, breathless with love and fear.