The Truth About Lorin Jones

by Alison Lurie

  Alone, Polly scraped tabbouli into a bowl and covered it with plastic wrap. As she opened the fridge to put it away she was reminded that somehow she had to use up the crunchy peanut butter, grape jelly, raisin bread, milk, Pepsi, and hot dogs left behind yesterday by Stevie. There was no use saving any of it as she’d ordinarily do, because this time he wouldn’t be home in a week or so; he’d be gone the whole fall term. Logically, Polly could see the point of this. It would give Stevie a chance to know his father better, and free her to travel and do research for her book. But illogically she felt awful about it. Her son had been gone only twenty-four hours, and already she missed him terribly.

  And what would happen to Stevie while he was away? Raising her eyes from the sink, Polly stared past the smudged glass in the direction of Colorado. Her view was restricted, for though the building was on Central Park West, her apartment didn’t face it, but confronted another building the color of birdshit and a vacant lot littered with broken glass and stunted sumac.

  When Stevie looked out of the windows of his father’s new architect-designed split-level in Colorado (clearly pictured in the background of a snapshot of him taken earlier that summer), he wouldn’t see a dirty brick wall and piles of trash, but a wide-open vista of mountains and plains and long drifting Ansel Adams clouds. Would New York, and this apartment, seem cramped and dirty then, a place he didn’t want to come home to?

  Jeanne thought it was a good idea for Stevie to stay in Colorado for four months. She believed he needed a maturing experience; also she believed that Polly had invested too much in him emotionally. She thought it was a mistake to care too deeply for male children, or become too close to them, since they would inevitably grow into men — that is, into aliens.

  But whatever Jeanne said, Polly couldn’t think of Stevie as an alien. He wasn’t like most males; he had been raised on nonsexist principles from birth, read aloud to from Stories for Free Children, given dolls as well as trucks to play with, taken to women doctors and dentists. For years his freedom from prejudice had been Polly’s greatest pride. Over Christmas and spring vacations, and for two weeks in July when he went to stay with his father, she held her breath, fearing that he would come back infected with ugly paternalist ideas; but he never had. But what would happen when he was exposed to these psychological germs not for a week or two, but for nearly four months?

  Jeanne didn’t understand what she felt about Stevie, and she probably never would, Polly thought, because she had no children of her own. She didn’t understand, either, what it meant to be married; how much you invested, how long and desperately you tried to make things work out. Often, when Polly related something Jim had once done or said, she saw a particular look, between amusement and impatience, cross her friend’s gentle, rounded features. Rather slow, weren’t you? Rather dense? this look said.

  What if Jeanne was right? Polly thought as she rinsed a plate. What if even now the child she loved was turning into a man like other men?

  There were so goddamn many dangers in this culture. Magazines, books, newspapers, television were heavy with overt and covert sexist propaganda, and Polly wouldn’t be around now to point it out to Stevie. Some of the kids he played with had already been brainwashed, she’d seen the signs. And Stevie’s father, Jim Meyer, was in many ways the most dangerous companion he could have, because his sexism was so well concealed. After all, Polly herself, though an adult, had been deceived by him. For fourteen years she had believed him to be a decent, generous, sensitive, nonchauvinist man.

  Jim Meyer had first appeared one afternoon at the auction gallery where Polly then worked. He was a tall, solid man about her own age, with regular features and wide gray eyes rimmed with sooty, transparent skin, giving him an intriguingly — and as it turned out, deceptively — sophisticated and world-weary air. (Stevie had inherited this characteristic; even after nine hours of sleep he and his father both looked as if they’d been up all night.)

  Jim had come in to arrange the sale of some valuable but not very interesting nineteenth-century paintings and furniture that belonged to his grandmother, who was moving to a nursing home. Polly was drawn to him at once, not only by his looks, but by his good manners. Since she was obviously working for a living, and not a society girl amusing herself while she waited to make a good marriage, many of the people Polly had to deal with at the gallery treated her like a typist or even like a housemaid. But Jim was considerate, even deferential. As it turned out, he was incapable of being rude to anyone.

  Though she was attracted to Jim Meyer, Polly didn’t expect much to come of it, partly because he was a medical researcher. From years of living with her stepfather, Bob Milner, she had formed the false opinion that scientists were like icebergs. Nine-tenths of them was under the surface, and most of that nine-tenths was ice. She didn’t get her hopes up when Jim kept returning to the gallery on various excuses; she assumed that he came to see his grandmother’s paintings and furniture before they disappeared forever. His attachment to them made her both sad and impatient — though of course she’d seen the same thing in other consignors.

  “That big shipwreck picture, you know, it used to hang over the hall table in the Maine house, next to the barometer,” he told her one day, for the second time. “You see the woman screaming and drowning there in the corner, and the big wave coming for her? When I was a kid I used to imagine I was just outside the painting, in a rowboat, and I was going to throw her a rope —”

  “Listen.” Unable to stop herself, Polly interrupted the story, though the sale catalogue in which this picture appeared was already at the printers. “Excuse my asking, but why are you selling this painting, if you like it so much? ... I mean,” she went on when Jim didn’t answer, “couldn’t you work something out with your grandmother? For instance, maybe you could have it appraised, and then buy it from her gradually.”

  “I guess I could. But the thing is, I don’t figure I have a right to a picture like this. It ought to be in a museum or somewhere it could be appreciated properly. I don’t really know anything about paintings.”

  “Says who?” Polly asked, turning around from the shipwreck to confront Jim.

  “I don’t know. I guess it was my mother who pointed it out first. ‘Jim’s a scientist,’ she always said. ‘He has no feeling for the arts.’ ”

  “Oh, bullshit. Listen, it’s not like that. There isn’t any race of special privileged people who deserve to own paintings because they’re so damned sensitive and aware. You like this picture, you should hang on to it.”

  Jim Meyer, typically, gave no sign that her argument had convinced him; but the following day, to the great irritation of Polly’s boss, he withdrew three of his grandmother’s pictures from the sale. He also invited Polly to dinner to thank her; and that was how the whole thing started.

  All Polly’s feminist friends liked Jim because he was so agreeable and good-looking and well informed, so obviously crazy about her, so respectful of her work. When she admitted that back in high school and college she’d wanted to be a painter herself, he was impressed and enthusiastic. It was a goddamn shame that she’d never had the time to go on with it, he said.

  For the first time in nearly twenty years, as Polly had later explained to her therapist, she felt really happy and secure. Jim appeared to be all any liberated woman could want. He read the books and articles Polly lent him, and agreed with their conclusions; he supported the hiring and promotion of women at his lab. He tried unfamiliar dishes, and went with her to look at the work of new artists.

  In return Polly made an effort not to shock Jim’s colleagues and family with her language, or lose her temper. In fact, Jim was so patient with her outbursts that she gradually gave them up. Yelling at him was like punching the tan beanbag chair in their bedroom; he didn’t argue or answer back, only sagged and looked deflated.

  There was only one problem: though she loved and trusted Jim, he didn’t always turn her on. His gentle and affectionate lovemaking was s
ometimes almost on the verge of boring her.

  For years, Polly tried with some success not to notice this. She blamed herself for still being susceptible to a stupid false adolescent idea of the desirable male — the Gothic myth of the Dark Stranger: reckless, willful, undependable. In the daylight hours she mocked this myth, deploring those of her friends who seemed to have bought into it. But sometimes late at night, as she lay in bed beside Jim Meyer and listened to his regular, almost apologetic snoring, the phantasm returned, and carried her into hot, windy, luridly lit regions whose existence her husband did not suspect.

  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 a
bout 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.)