by Alison Lurie
“Oh, Polly. Before we go on, I must show you something.” Jacky levered himself up and opened a cupboard. “Look. This just came in, from that very sweet woman in Miami I was telling you about last week. She bought it in some little nothing gallery in Key West in nineteen-sixty-five, and she’s finally decided she wants to sell it.” He lifted a sheet of tissue paper. “You can see, it’s a watercolor sketch for one of the Florida paintings that was in your show, Empty Bay Blues. Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Oh, yes.” Lorin Jones’s most characteristic work hovered in a no-man’s-land — a woman’s land, perhaps, Polly thought — between representation, abstraction, and surrealism. Even in her least readable paintings, like this one, shapes that might be birds, fish, flowers, faces, or figures quivered and clustered. In reviews of “Three American Women,” the artists she was most often compared with were Larry Rivers and Odilon Redon. The large oil Empty Bay Blues merely suggested layers of shore, sea, sky, and cloud. But here, between the flow and slide of paint in the lower third of the watercolor, was something that might be either a lizard or a drowned woman.
“The light on the sea isn’t as ultramarine as in the oil, you see; more a kind of translucent mauve. Wonderful, really.” Jacky’s face expressed a genuine if mercenary adoration. “Paolo doesn’t care for the late paintings, but I think he’s very very wrong.”
“Empty Bay Blues — That was one of the paintings you refused to show here, wasn’t it?”
“Please!” Jacky’s voice rose at least an octave. “It wasn’t me, I was a mere underling back then. ... But you mustn’t blame Paolo either, dear.”
“No?” Polly asked, trying not to sound skeptical, but failing.
“Really. You mustn’t put it into your book that the Apollo behaved badly to Lorin Jones, because it simply isn’t so. Paolo carried her for years when she wasn’t earning anything to speak of.”
Polly said nothing. I’ll put into my book what I goddamn want to put in, she thought.
“I guess I’d better tell you how it all was, so you’ll understand. Off the record, of course.” Jacky glanced at her tape machine.
“All right,” Polly agreed, affecting not to notice the direction of his gaze.
“I’ve never said anything about this to anyone before, by the way.”
“Mm.” I’ll bet, she thought, for Jacky was known to some people in the New York art world as The American Broadcasting Company.
“You’ve got to realize. Paolo did everything he reasonably could for Lorin, because he recognized from the start that she had real talent. But the trouble that girl gave him!” Jacky shook his large Roman head slowly.
“How do you mean, trouble?”
“Well.” He lowered his voice, but at the same time, fortunately, leaned forward, ensuring that the sound level on the tape would be preserved. “Between us, Lorin Jones was very very difficult to deal with.”
“Oh?”
“Terribly hard even to talk to, for one thing.”
“She was extremely shy,” Polly protested. “Everyone knows that.”
“Oh, granted. But you see, it was almost impossible to negotiate with her. Sometimes she wouldn’t answer Paolo’s letters for literally weeks. Or at all. In the end, he usually had to appeal to Garrett, and then Garrett would have to manage everything.”
“So you didn’t see much of her here,” Polly prompted.
“Not usually. Most young artists, you know how it is, they like to drop in every so often, or phone, just to remind you that they exist and are hoping for a sale. But not Lorin, ever, Paolo said. And she detested talking on the telephone. I had to call her once about something, and she whispered so low I could hardly hear her.”
You call that “difficult,” Polly thought crossly, but did not say. She was beginning to realize that Paolo’s illness might be to her advantage; that she might learn from Jacky what she would never have learned from his boss.
“But then, when she had a show, it was another story entirely. You absolutely couldn’t keep her out of the gallery. She had opinions about everything: what the announcement should look like, how the pictures should be hung, who should be invited to the opening.”
And why the hell not, Polly thought. “Really.” In spite of her effort, her tone was chilly.
“Let me assure you, no one values the artist’s prerogatives more than Paolo does,” Jacky hastened to say. “Still, there are limits. And Lorin caused him endless trouble, even the very very first time she was included in a group exhibition here. Most people her age would have been wild with joy to have two paintings in a gallery like this. But there was no sign of gratitude from Lorin, Paolo said. Or ingratitude either, one has to admit; she hardly spoke to him when she was here. All the complaints came through her husband. ‘My wife doesn’t think this painting really looks right next to hers’ — that sort of thing.”
“And would Paolo move the other painting, then?”
“Well, yes — very possibly. Of course, Garrett Jones was a very very important critic; maybe the most important back then. Naturally Paolo didn’t want to quarrel with him. They were friends, professionally speaking — still are, of course. You know how it is. But just between us, the Joneses drove him quite to distraction. ‘All right, she paints not badly,’ he’d say to me. ‘But there are other good young artists who don’t play the neurotic unapproachable prima donna.’ ”
“You don’t think that maybe —”
“What?”
“Well, I just wondered. I mean, suppose it was Garrett Jones who had all those complaints, really, only he put them off on his wife.”
“I shouldn’t think so.” Jacky frowned. “I mean, you’ve met Garrett; he’s a fairly reasonable man, for a critic. Some people think he has an exaggerated opinion of himself, but then, why shouldn’t he? He’s been right about the New York art scene time and time again.”
Or he’s forced his views on the New York art scene time and time again, Polly thought.
“And Lorin ... well... I mean, we all know that most artists are a bit peculiar. You have to expect that, aren’t I right?”
“I suppose so,” Polly said, realizing that as far as Jacky knew she was not now and never had been an artist.
“Well, Lorin was very very peculiar. And after a while, even her husband couldn’t cope with her.”
“Really,” Polly said as neutrally as she could manage.
“The main problem was, she simply wouldn’t let go of her paintings. She’d agree to have work ready for a show, and Garrett would promise to make sure that she met the deadline, and then nothing would appear. Over and over, it’d be like that. You see, she never thought a canvas was finished.”
“I expect that often happens,” Polly said, recalling her own experience.
“Well, not that often. Occasionally. But it was much much worse with Lorin. Even when her pictures were up on the walls she couldn’t let them alone. The day after her first one-woman show here, Paolo told me, he came back from lunch, and a little still life next to the elevator was gone. He thought at first that’d it’d been stolen, naturally. But it turned out that Lorin had taken it herself; she’d decided it wasn’t right yet. The assistant Paolo had then had tried to reason with her, but it simply wasn’t any use. She just wrenched the picture off the wall and carried it away. She never brought it back, either. But of course it was still listed in the printed brochure, and for three weeks Paolo had to answer questions about it. You can imagine how trying that was.
“Um-hm,” Polly murmured, attempting to sound sympathetic. What came to her mind, though, was a red-and-gray semi-Pollock canvas in her own show, back in Rochester. As soon as she saw it at the opening, she’d wished she’d never let it out of the house. If only she’d had the courage to take the miserable thing away the next day! What Jacky had said earlier, though he probably meant it only as flattery, was true: she was the right, the only person to do this book. The more she found out, the surer she was of her instinctive underst
anding of what Lorin Jones must have felt and thought.
“Well, Paolo was determined that would never happen again, and it didn’t. I expect Garrett spoke to her firmly. Anyhow, for a while she was more reasonable. But then she left him, and things really got out of hand.”
“Um-hm?”
“The real trouble began with her sixty-four show, the last one. It was over a year late to start with, because Lorin couldn’t make up her mind that the work was ready, as usual, and Garrett wasn’t around to make her see reason. Then, just after the opening, I came in one morning, and there was Lorin Jones over by the window, with a dirty Bloomingdale’s carrier bag on the floor beside her, scrubbing one of the biggest canvases with a rag soaked in turpentine, and scraping at it with a palette knife.”
“Really.”
“I was horrified, I can tell you.” Jacky giggled. “What made it worse, I’d only met her once or twice at that point, and at first I didn’t recognize her, the way she was got up — in a dirty old black sweater and her hair all over the place. I assumed I had some crazy bag lady on my hands. I thought Paolo was going to kill me first and fire me afterward.”
“So what happened?”
“Well, naturally I rushed over and asked what the hell she thought she was doing. At first she wouldn’t even answer. I was actually getting ready to call the police. Finally she said, ‘I’m working on my painting.’ As soon as I heard that whispery little voice I realized it was Lorin. I didn’t even try to reason with her, I simply dashed back to the office and telephoned Paolo, and then I called her in to the phone. But he didn’t make a dent on her. Well, there wasn’t much he could do, really. It was still legally Lorin’s painting. Luckily, she didn’t ruin it; we sold it the next week.”
“Why the hell should she have ruined it?” Polly nearly shouted.
“Well, it’s possible,” Jacky answered huffily. “I mean, there is such a thing as overworking, or don’t you agree?”
“I suppose so,” she admitted, cursing herself for her outburst. Against her will, she saw the stack of muddy overworked canvases that was at this moment leaning sideways in a disused tub in the former maid’s bathroom of her apartment on Central Park West. “So that’s why the Apollo decided not to give Lorin Jones another show,” she said, trying to make this sound reasonable.
“No no no. What finished things here was much more serious than that. Lorin’s possessiveness about her work, you see, it just got worse and worse. It was pathological, I really think, poor girl. She began to think of her paintings as literally part of her, you see, and she couldn’t bear to be separated from them.”
“I imagine most artists feel something akin to that, in principle,” Polly said — though as a matter of fact she had often wished some supernatural force would suck her old canvases out of the tub and cause them to vanish forever.
“Oh, yes; in principle. But what that meant in practice, for Lorin Jones, what it came to mean, rather, was that she wouldn’t sell her work. It was all right if the buyer was a museum, or a friend, so that she could visit the painting whenever she liked. But otherwise —” Jacky sighed. “What really drove Paolo round the bend was the business of the Provincetown triptych.”
“You mean Birth, Copulation, and Death, from the Skelly Collection?” Polly knew the painting well — it had been featured in color in the catalogue of “Three American Women” and reproduced on a postcard; certainly it was one of Jones’s most important works.
“That’s right. Only if it hadn’t been for Paolo, it wouldn’t ever have been in the Skelly Collection. God knows what would have happened to it.” He sighed. “You see, the Skellys decided to buy Birth, Copulation, and Death the second week of the sixty-four show, and Paolo was really happy for Lorin. He thought she’d be grateful, naturally, to have her work in a famous collection like that. But instead she threw a fit. She’d met the Skellys at her opening, and she’d hated them. She said they never looked at the paintings, all they did was walk around the rooms kissing their friends and talking about money. They were awful people, she said, and she wasn’t going to let them have anything of hers. When Paolo told her it was too late for that she went perfectly white with fury. I think if she could have she’d have taken the canvases off the wall then and there and walked out with them. But they were far too large for that, thank God.”
“How upsetting.”
“Wasn’t it?” Jacky agreed, mistaking her meaning — which was probably just as well. “And you have to understand, Paolo was very patient with Lorin. He did everything he reasonably could; more, actually. He positively bent over backward.”
“Really.” In her mind, Polly saw the small, spidery figure of Paolo Carducci, with his shock of crimped gray hair, bent over backward.
“He called Bill Skelly, and asked very tactfully if they were quite quite sure they wanted the Jones triptych; he said that if not, he’d be glad to forget the whole thing.”
“But they wouldn’t let him, I assume.”
“Bill said nothing doing. Well, actually he got rather enraged. He suspected Paolo had had an offer he liked better, maybe from some museum, and his back was up, naturally. There was a lot of bad feeling between them for a while.”
“Really.”
“That wasn’t the worst, though. Because, you see, Lorin didn’t give up even then. Instead she did something quite mad: she phoned Grace Skelly, and in her whispery little voice she offered to buy the triptych back, dealer’s commission and all. And when Gracie asked why, Lorin told her. You can visualize the reaction.”
“I suppose so.” Polly imagined Mrs. Skelly, a handsome, expensively dressed, loud-voiced woman who attended most of the private openings at the Museum, hearing that in Lorin Jones’s opinion she was unfit to own one of her paintings.
“Well, after that Paolo literally didn’t dare hang Lorin’s work. I begged him to reconsider; I told him she was an utterly marvelous painter, and he should make allowances. That’s what I said, though my heart was absolutely in my mouth, because I’d only been working there a few months, you see.”
“And did he listen to you?”
“Alas, no. He simply wouldn’t have anything to do with Lorin anymore. He came right out and told her he couldn’t take the risk.”
“Why didn’t she go to another gallery, then?”
“Well, you know.” Jacky laughed and cleared his throat apologetically. “Word gets about. And Gracie and Bill — they’re lovely people, really, but they don’t like to be pushed around or called names by artists; they’re not used to it. They never hung the triptych, and they wouldn’t put it up for sale either. Kept it in the vault twenty years, till you borrowed it for your show. And probably Bill Skelly bad-mouthed Lorin a bit around town. Quite naturally. Nobody insults his wife and gets away with it.”
“So that’s how it was.”
“That’s about it. But you mustn’t put any of this in your book, promise. It’d be fatal. I don’t know why I told you, anyhow.”
You told me because you are a notorious gossip, Polly thought.
“Promise, now. On your honor as a biographer.” Jacky giggled.
“All right,” she said.
As Polly stood damp and swaying on the Madison Avenue bus, she didn’t yet regret this promise. Jacky’s tale wasn’t flattering to Lorin Jones; it even, as he suggested, cast doubt on her sanity. After all, throughout history works of art had been bought, and even commissioned, by collectors whose manners and morals left much to be desired: think of the Borgias, or J. Paul Getty. It was just one of the facts of life. Sooner or later these people died, and the work they had privately hoarded was placed on public view. To demand that only the wholly virtuous and refined be allowed to buy paintings would be like screening members of a theater audience for previous convictions.
Besides, there was nothing so awful about the Skellys. They were important collectors, and trustees of her Museum. They were famous for being interested in new young artists, and willing to take financia
l risks in support of their enthusiasms; they lent their extensive holdings freely and donated generously. It was not their fault that they had loud voices and a high opinion of themselves.
As for the Skellys’ failure to hang Birth, Copulation, and Death, there was no proof that this came from vindictiveness. Most major collectors owned far more art than they could display at any one time. Though they might buy a lot of new work, they preferred to show currently well-known artists. Probably the reason the Skellys didn’t hang Jones’s picture for twenty years was at first that she wasn’t famous, and then that she was dead and more or less forgotten.
Anyhow, there was no guarantee that Jacky’s tale was true, Polly thought as she waited in the steady rain for the Eighty-sixth Street crosstown. Jacky wanted her to think well of Paolo Carducci and the Apollo Gallery, to regard them as sympathetic to artists. He was quite capable of making up a hostile story about Lorin Jones out of innocent bits of material, like a homemade terrorist bomb. Maybe Jones did once say that she’d rather have her paintings in a museum — who wouldn’t? Maybe she didn’t care for the Skellys personally — why should she?
But whether the story was true or not, it was true that for twenty years Bill and Grace Skelly had shut one of Lorin Jones’s most important works away from view. If they had done it from fashionable prejudice, it was forgivable if regrettable. But what if Jacky was telling the truth? What if they had done it out of revenge, because Lorin hadn’t played along, hadn’t treated them with the grateful eagerness they expected, that Polly had often seen them expecting — and receiving — from artists?
As the bus crossed the wet park at Eighty-sixth Street, Polly had a vision. She saw, as Lorin Jones must have seen, a collection of dark air-conditioned vaults, storerooms, attics, and basements all over the Northeast. In each, one or more of Jones’s paintings was imprisoned, shut away from light and air and from anyone who might admire and love it. She saw Lorin Jones, a slight pale figure in black, pounding on the doors of these temperature and humidity-controlled dungeons, begging for the release of her imprisoned work. Against her, holding the doors shut, were ranged a mass of dealers, curators, collectors, and critics; in Polly’s mind they took on the evil, grinning faces of grotesques from an Ensor painting.