by Alison Lurie
“I’ll start another pot,” Polly said.
“I told Betsy, I can’t go on like this. I can’t. I mean as long as she doesn’t acknowledge me, I feel as if I’m some kind of dirty secret in her life. I told her that. I said, ‘Betsy, my darling, I can’t go on with this relationship any longer unless it’s out in the open.’ ”
“And what did Betsy say?”
“She started crying, and said she just didn’t know what to do.” Jeanne sighed heavily and was silent.
“So what’s going to happen?” Polly said finally.
“I don’t know. But I told Betsy I’m not going to see her again until she tells him the truth. I can’t stand it, that’s all there is to be said.”
As it turned out, though, that was not all. For nearly an hour Jeanne sat sipping cup after cup of coffee with cream and picking at the angel food cake and weeping a bit from time to time, while she rehearsed the history of her affair with Betsy, and drew parallels between it and other affairs in her past. This was not the first time, Polly learned, that she had been hurt or betrayed. Jeanne then broadened her scope to relate events of a similar sort that had happened to friends and acquaintances.
Eventually she yawned, sighed, thanked Polly for listening, and dragged herself off down the hall to bed. Polly sat on in front of the unread Sunday Times. What she mainly felt, besides a painful sympathy for Jeanne, was a wistful disillusion. If even two women couldn’t be happy together, what good was it all?
Maybe, if you had to be in love, with all the problems and craziness that involved, it was better to be in love with someone who was dead. A dead person couldn’t do you any harm emotionally; she or he couldn’t criticize you or betray you or leave you. And you couldn’t do her any harm either, so there was no guilt.
As Polly lay in bed, slipping toward sleep, there was a soft knock at the door.
“It’s me,” Jeanne’s voice said. “Can I come in?”
“Sure.” Polly reached for the bedside lamp.
“I can’t sleep,” Jeanne whispered. She sat down on the end of the double bed and wrapped her ruffled pink flannel nightgown around her feet. “I keep thinking about Betsy. Just thinking the same things, over and over.”
“I know how it is. After Jim left, I had insomnia for weeks. Hey, I think I have some Valium put away somewhere.”
“I already took one.” Jeanne let out a long thin exhausted puff of wind. “It’s that room, you know. Especially that bunk bed. I keep thinking of how she was there with me. It’s like it was haunted.”
“Yes.”
“Listen, could I sleep here, just for tonight? I promise I won’t toss around or have nightmares; the Valium should start to work pretty soon.”
“Well — sure.”
“Thanks. You’re a real pal.” Jeanne gave her a grateful hug; then she shuffled around to the far side of the double bed and got in. She turned her back to Polly and dragged the covers completely up over her head. Polly wondered how she could breathe.
True to her vow, Jeanne was unconscious in five minutes. She did not jerk or thrash about, but lay quietly, giving out only a regular soft slur of breath and a steady animal heat. It was Polly, now, who turned and shifted her position. Over a year had passed since she had shared her bed with anyone, and she was acutely conscious of the new slope of the mattress; of the heavy, warm sleeping shape a foot away, and of its sex.
Well, here she was in bed with a woman, and what did she feel? Restless and uneasy; and not exactly excited, but keyed up, tense. Maybe what she wanted was for Jeanne to turn over, and put her arms around her, and hug her again.
But Jeanne was deep in a drugged sleep, and besides she was physically and emotionally exhausted by her scene with Betsy. And did Polly really want to do with Jeanne what Jeanne did with Betsy? What was that, anyhow?
These questions, and others related to them, kept Polly awake for over an hour, and when she finally dozed off it was into an uneasy slumber broken by bad dreams. In the last one she was shopping in the local A&P, only she was naked. She was searching the shelves for something to cover herself with, and finally she found a green plastic trash bag, and she pulled the bag over her head, and it only came down to her waist, and it was very hot and sticky, and she couldn’t move her arms, and she was trying to move them, to scream, to tear a hole in the bag, and she was naked and there were a lot of women in the aisles looking at her, and she gave a series of stifled desperate cries and woke in the middle of the bed, with Jeanne’s arms around her from behind.
“It’s all right, Polly,” Jeanne was saying to her gently. “It’s all right, it’s just a nightmare.”
“I thought —” Polly gasped as if she had been running. She turned over toward Jeanne, still trembling a little, and panting for air.
Jeanne, misunderstanding, gathered her closer. “It’s all right,” she crooned. “Do you want to tell me about it?”
In the dark, Polly shook her head vigorously. “No.” Then, since this sounded ungracious, she added, “But thanks. I’m glad you were here.”
“Me, too,” Jeanne said. “I don’t know what I would have done tonight without you. All the way back from Brooklyn on that awful subway, I felt I wanted to die. I almost hoped some crazy delinquent with a gun would get on.” She hugged Polly, holding her close but not tight. It wasn’t like what she was used to, it was more like being hugged by Stevie when he was little, or her mother; warm and fond and safe. Polly, with a half sigh, let herself relax into the warmth and softness.
“I’m glad he didn’t,” she said.
They lay quiet. The green numbers of the digital clock flipped on the nightstand: 4:23 A.M.
“It’s true about sleep being the balm of hurt minds,” Jeanne murmured. “I mean, I’m still perfectly miserable about Betsy, but I don’t want to die anymore.” She laughed a little sadly.
“That’s good.”
4:26 A.M. 4:27 A.M.
“I feel so much better,” Jeanne said, moving one hand to stroke the thick curls at the back of Polly’s neck above the pajama jacket. “If you want it, I’d like to make you feel better, too.”
Maybe I do want it, Polly thought. If I don’t try, I’ll never know. “All right,” she said uneasily. She swiveled farther toward Jeanne, and put her arms around Jeanne’s flannel nightgown.
“Polly, dear,” Jeanne whispered, and kissed her: a long, gentle, deepening kiss.
Gratefully, awkwardly, Polly reached up to touch Jeanne’s fine long hair, so unlike her own; and then the warm yielding flesh of her neck under the flannel ruffle.
“Oh, that’s nice,” her friend said. Her kisses were soft now, fluttering. “Oh, yes. Do that again.”
SARA SACHS VOGELER,
artist and illustrator
Yes, we were good friends for a while.
It was in about nineteen-sixty, sixty-one, when I was studying at Cooper Union, and Laura was still living in New York. I guess some people already knew who she was, but I’d never heard of her, though of course I’d heard of her husband. We met at the Modern: a guy I knew from school was working there, selling tickets; he introduced us. But he just said: “Laura Jones” — I didn’t connect it.
We got on pretty well from the start. There was a new show of drawings, and we went around it together. It turned out we liked most of the same things. Then we had tea in the members’ lounge; it was the first time I’d ever been up there.
Yes, of course Laura was nearly ten years older than me, but I didn’t realize it then. She had on the kind of clothes she always wore, paint-streaked jeans and sneakers and an old black turtleneck sweater. And no makeup, and a mass of long dark hair. She looked like a student too.
No, she didn’t seem especially shy.
I don’t know. Maybe she felt comfortable with me because I was young and kind of awkward. I was just a skinny kid from the Bronx, and I didn’t have any social manner.
We used to meet about once a week. We’d walk around the Village, go to galler
ies, have a sandwich and a malted, sketch in the park, that kind of thing.
I don’t know. We talked about painting, the work we’d seen, new techniques, you know. I remember Laura’d just discovered Piero della Francesca, and she wanted to try doing frescoes in egg tempera. I got interested too, and we went around to art stores and tried to find out about that.
No, it turned out to be too complicated, and awfully expensive.
Sure, we talked about other things: films, and books. And I guess I told her some of the trouble I was having at home, the way my parents were always after me to study something useful like bookkeeping, because they were afraid I wouldn’t get married.
No, I don’t think she ever gave me any advice. But she was a good listener, you know.
How do you mean, strange?
I don’t know, maybe. I mean most artists are kind of strange, compared to other people, don’t you think? I guess I’m a little strange myself, at least that’s what my husband tells me.
Well, for instance, there were a lot of ordinary things Laura didn’t like, hated really, and I didn’t like them either.
A whole heap of things. I can’t remember most of them now: TV, and pay telephones, and Léger and Stuart Davis, and wobbly Jell-O salad with fruit in it, and men in brown felt hats, and watches with metal bands. ... We had a word for all of them: we called them “creepos.”
Well, what happened was, she came to Cooper Union to look at a painting I was doing. A couple of people saw her there, and afterward they mentioned that she was married to Garrett Jones and had shown at the Apollo and been written up in Art News.
She hadn’t said anything about any of it to me. She’d told me she was married, but she didn’t say to who. I got the idea that he was an older man, and pretty well off, but she didn’t want to talk about him. I thought maybe it wasn’t going too well.
Yes, it made me feel a little funny. I didn’t understand why Laura’d never even told me she had a gallery. Now I see it differently: I think maybe her success embarrassed her. Maybe she thought she didn’t deserve it, kind of. I mean, she must have known she deserved it, but maybe she thought she wouldn’t have had it so soon without her husband’s help.
She didn’t say much about my work, not that I remember now. There was one drawing of a mouse that she liked, but that was just kind of a joke. I’d done it for my niece’s birthday. Most of my painting was abstract then, big canvases. It’s funny, though; I never thought of it before, but about ten years later, after I had kids myself, I went back to drawing animals for them, and that started a whole new direction in my art. My last show ...
Yes, we went to her place a couple of times, when Garrett Jones wasn’t there, and she showed me some of the small semiabstract flower canvases she was doing then, the ones everybody compares to Redon now.
They about knocked me over. I knew then she was way ahead of me.
I don’t know if Laura had other friends near her own age. I never met any. The important artists of her generation, people like Rauschenberg and Johns and Rivers and Frankenthaler, I don’t think she saw anything of them. What she met in New York was the middle-aged established painters, and then the dealers, the collectors, the critics. And the hangers-on, the creepos. At least, that’s the idea I got from her.
Yes, I tried inviting her to have lunch with some of us after class a couple of times, but it didn’t work out. Laura kind of froze up, and my friends thought she was snooty. The thing is, she was serious about painting, and she was really good, but none of them wanted to admit it. All they could see was that she was married to Garrett Jones, and he was promoting her. Afterward they said things like “Sure, I could show at the Apollo too, if I was sleeping with him.”
Not really. I only met him once, at a happening. You remember happenings?
This one was in a swimming pool at a New York health club. It was a good location for something like that, a big empty underground space, all Art Deco tiles and weird acoustics. There was a mixed audience: students, artists, musicians, and some collectors and café society types, because word was starting to get around. I was there with a couple of people from school, sitting on the tiles at the edge of the pool and waiting for things to start, and I saw Laura come in with this middle-aged man, that I knew had to be her husband. Anyhow, my friends recognized him. Laura stopped in front of us, and said hello, and sort of introduced us. She was got up like I’d never seen her before, very glamorous, in a long black skirt and an antique fringed silk shawl and silver chandelier earrings.
I was kind of nervous. I mean, Garrett Jones was incredibly powerful in the art world then, and I knew that to my friends he was the uptown establishment: the enemy, you know. And besides he was old enough to be my father.
Well, they just said hello, mostly, and went on past us and sat in some folding chairs that were reserved for important people, I guess. And the happening started. While it was going on I looked over a couple of times to see how they were liking it. Laura seemed interested, I saw her smiling, but it was obvious that her husband was disgusted. And then in the middle of everything, when they brought in buckets of fish and started throwing them at the audience and splashing us with water, Garrett Jones walked out, sort of pulling Laura behind him.
I guess I felt bad that she went along with him. I kind of looked up to her, and I wanted her to stand up for herself, you know? The next time we met, I didn’t know what to say to her about it, so I didn’t say anything, and neither did she.
Well, not much. After that we sort of drifted apart. For one thing, Laura was in New York less and less. Garrett Jones kept dragging her off to Cape Cod, and she’d be gone for months. We used to mail each other postcards, mostly of pictures we liked. And when I got married she sent me this drawing I showed you, of me being carried away over New York by a big bird. Because of Dave’s last name, you know.
I wrote to her when our first child was born, but I didn’t hear anything back. Then much later I found out she’d died down there in Florida, at about the same time. She probably never even got my letter.
I was really broken up, even though I hadn’t seen her for years. Every time I thought about her I started crying. Well, I was expecting again; I think that always makes you emotional. When the baby came and it was a girl we called it Laura, sort of after her. I always liked the name anyhow.
No. I wish we could afford one, but her prices are so high now, and with four kids to put through college...
What I think is, marrying Garrett Jones, it didn’t do Laura’s painting any good in the long run. It cut her off from the artists she should have known, and made them, well, kind of despise her. This was when pop art was coming in, and he was really stupid about it, he called it vulgar and self-serving. He couldn’t see beyond his own heroes, people like Rothko and Motherwell and Kline. Of course later on he went for color-field and hard-edge abstraction in a big way, but by that time Laura and he were separated.
The thing is, if it hadn’t been for Jones, Laura’s painting might have developed differently, been more contemporary. He kind of surrounded her and cut her off. She was really good, but her work was completely out of the mainstream, almost irrelevant to what was happening here in New York in the sixties.
Yes, I guess I do hold it against him. Even now.
5
WITH AN UNEASY LURCH and dip of its wings, the commuter plane swerved south toward Provincetown over a flat ocean like oily crumpled metal. Polly, who was one of only three passengers, caught her breath hard. Maybe we’re going to crash, she thought. I’ll never write my book, or see Stevie again, or Jeanne. It didn’t seem possible: only a few hours ago, in her traveling clothes, she had sat on the bed in which her friend — her lover? — lay asleep in a swirl of blankets and sheets and pink ruffled and flowered flannel nightgown, like a warm, untidy rose.
“I’m leaving for the airport now,” Polly told her softly, hoping she would wake.
“Mm?” Jeanne opened one pale-lashed hazel eye.
“Oh, right.”
“So long then.” Polly bent over Jeanne, who turned her head and gave her a soft sleepy kiss.
“Come home soon,” she murmured.
Come home to what? Polly wondered now. Had Jeanne’s kiss been romantic or only friendly? Was the odd, awkward, lovely thing that had happened last night the beginning of something serious, or was it just an incident? Polly didn’t know, and if she died now, she never would know.
Again the tiny plane hiccupped, tilted sharply, and righted itself. Polly could feel the contents of her stomach (weak sugary iced coffee and a soggy airport-cafeteria cheese sandwich) rise and contemplate departing by the nearest exit. She imagined being sick in the middle of the air; then as the toy plane listed sideways again she imagined herself drowning, trapped inside its tinny body — or would she die of the impact first, even over water? Fear and hatred of Garrett Jones made her clench her hands on her seatbelt. What the hell did he mean, telling her that Cape Air was perfectly safe? Probably he wanted her to arrive in Provincetown in a state of nervous confusion, so she wouldn’t ever really get it together to question him. Or maybe he hoped she’d crash on the way to Provincetown, and never arrive at all. She should have followed her original plan: rented a car and driven down from Boston. That would have taken longer and cost more, but when she got to Wellfleet she would have been well and alive.
Apart from recommending this awful flight, Garrett Jones had done nothing in the years Polly had known him to earn her distrust. At the time of “Three American Women” he was, she had to admit, unfailingly courteous and cooperative. He had sent several of his former wife’s paintings to the Museum, and provided information on the whereabouts of others; in a few crucial cases he had persuaded reluctant collectors to lend items for the show. Later on he wrote a brief, graceful appreciation of Lorin’s work for the catalogue. This essay, however, did not mention that Garrett and his wife had ever been divorced or even separated. “I don’t think that’s really relevant,” he had explained smoothly when Polly queried the matter on his proofs.