The Truth About Lorin Jones

by Alison Lurie

  When Polly told Jones she was thinking of writing a book about Lorin he was graciously enthusiastic. He recommended her for the fellowship, and offered to supply photographs, letters, and the names and addresses of people she might like to interview. Now he and his present wife had invited her to visit them in Wellfleet before they closed the house for the winter and returned to New York, so that Polly could see where Lorin Jones had once lived and worked.

  But in spite of Garrett Jones’s cooperation and good manners, Polly didn’t trust him as far as she could throw him. Which, since he was a tall, heavy, elderly man who must have weighed at least sixty pounds more than she, was not very far. Probably, Polly thought, she couldn’t even push him any great distance. But she was going to have to push him, psychologically at least.

  She didn’t kid herself: the next twenty-four hours were going to be a battle. Probably Garrett Jones would do all he could to present himself in the most favorable light possible, and to conceal any evidence of the damage he had done to Lorin and of how unhappy she must have been in Wellfleet. Polly had to prevent him getting away with this — to cut through his sophisticated platitudes. The patience and tact Jeanne had always recommended would only go so far. Judging by what had happened when she had lunch with Jones in New York, they would only result in his telling her a lot of innocuous anecdotes with an air of courteous self-satisfaction. Eventually she’d have to push and shove, to confront him directly.

  There was no point in trying to be too nice, either, because when Polly’s book came out, in about eighteen months, Garrett Jones would stop speaking to her anyhow. If she was really lucky he might be dead by then, seeing that he was seventy-three now. Otherwise she would be in trouble, because though Jones didn’t have as much power in the art world as he once had, he was still formidable. If he wanted to, he could probably do her serious professional harm. But that was a risk Polly’d decided she had to take.

  Swerving sickeningly, the toy plane bounced down onto the end of Cape Cod and stuttered to a stop between stands of dusty-looking scrub oaks. In Central Park October still blazed with color: here the landscape was stripped and ashy, ready for winter.

  Shaky, half-nauseated, but relieved to be alive, Polly climbed out into a strong crosswind and gulped cold salty air. As she lugged her duffel bag toward the toy terminal, she thought at first that Garrett Jones hadn’t come to meet her. Then she recognized him, disguised as an old sea captain in jeans and windbreaker and visored cap.

  “Hello there, Polly! Grand to see you!” he shouted as she got within range. Before she could recoil he had put both hands on her shoulders and kissed her wetly on the cheek. Furious, she raised the arm that gripped her canvas bag and wiped her face with the back of her wrist.

  “Is this all your equipment?”

  “This is it.”

  “Traveling light, eh? I admire that in a woman. Here, let me.” Not waiting for a reply, Garrett Jones wrenched her bag out of her hand and, in spite of his years, started toward the parking lot with a lively, almost rolling seaman’s gait.

  “Well, and how have you been?” he called jovially, turning a bronzed, weather-beaten countenance toward Polly as she scrambled to catch up.

  “Fine, thanks.”

  “Did you have a comfortable flight?” He grinned, to her mind evilly.

  “Fine, thanks,” repeated Polly, determined not to show any weakness or fear. She felt caught off-balance, like some Amazon commander who has entered the field well prepared for war on land and is suddenly obliged to fight a naval battle. Until this afternoon she had never seen Garrett Jones in anything but a business suit; she had thought of him as an essentially urban, indoor type, someone who would be ill at ease in the country — to her advantage. In manner he had always been rather formal, addressing her as Miss Alter. Now he was affecting to be another person with another, more intimate, relationship to her. No doubt he was doing this to unsettle and confuse her.

  With a grin, or possibly a grimace, Garrett Jones slung Polly’s small but heavy bag into the back of an ancient green Volvo wagon, slammed the tailgate, and went around to unlock the passenger door. Polly detested having doors opened for her. She believed that the gesture, harmless as it seemed, was hostile: it was meant silently to establish that she was weaker than Garrett Jones and to put her under an obligation to him. But she suppressed her protest — it was bad tactics to start hostilities too soon.

  “So what would you like to do first?” Jones asked as he climbed in beside her. “I wish I could take you out for a sail, it’s a hell of a fine day for it, but my boat’s already in dock for the winter. I could try to borrow one from our neighbors, if you’d like.”

  Polly scowled. To go sailing with Garrett Jones in this windy, stormy weather would just give him a chance to finish what Cape Air had begun: that was, to make her sick and helpless; maybe even to nearly drown her. “Oh no thanks, Mr. Jones, don’t bother.”

  “Garrett, please.” He put his hand on Polly’s arm and smiled into her eyes in a false fatherly way. “And I hope I may call you Polly.”

  “All right,” she said ungraciously, thinking that this was the sort of question it was almost impossible to answer in the negative.

  “Grand. Well, if you don’t fancy sailing, the other notion I had was, I might drive around a little, show you some of the locations between here and Wellfleet that Laura used in her paintings.”

  “Yes, I’d like that,” Polly said.

  “Right, then.” Garrett gunned the engine and pulled out onto the road, swinging the wheel around as if he were navigating a sailing ship, and headed up into the dunes at top speed. Polly wondered if he was trying to terrify her with his driving, but since he too was at risk she decided not to worry about it.

  “Now.” He stopped the Volvo at the top of a grassy rise. “Here’s where Laura made the sketches for Deposition. About the same time of year as this, it must have been. Like to get out, probably you could see it better.”

  “Okay.”

  Garrett Jones started around to open the door for Polly; but she wasn’t having any more of that, thanks, and by the time he got there she had scrambled out and slammed it behind her. Score one for me, she thought. She leaned against the side of the car with the low sun and the hard wind in her face, squinting at the sweep of sandy hills, the twisted beach pines like giant bonsai, the flattened silvery crescent of ocean. It was clearer to her than ever that Deposition — the largest of the three abstracts Garrett Jones had lent to the Museum show — was in fact a landscape.

  Lorin Jones stood here painting this scene, she thought. At this time of year, maybe even this same hour of the afternoon, with the light coming low and from the left. I stand in her footsteps, am joined to her now by space and time. And also separated from her forever. A wave of loss and longing drowned Polly, as if the sea, the scrub, and the sand were dissolving and blowing over her in a fine haze of damp, gritty tears.

  “You remember that picture, Deposition,” Garrett said, leaning against the car beside her.

  “Naturally,” Polly replied irritably, jolted out of her mood.

  “You’ll recognize that hollow in the dunes, then, and the shack over there with the purplish roof. Might have thought it would’ve fallen down by now, but these old Cape buildings are tough.”

  I’m old, but I’m tough, Polly heard him say; don’t think you’re going to put anything over on me. It occurred to her that his phony old-salt costume had the same message. It also said: I am at ease here, in control; Cape Cod belongs to me.

  “I’d like to get a photograph of this view, if you don’t mind.”

  “Good idea.” He moved aside, allowing her to open the door for herself this time.

  “Deposition,” she said as she returned the camera to her tote bag. “Tell me, do you happen to know why she gave her painting that name?”

  “No idea.” Garrett Jones grinned. “You know, Laura always had trouble with titles. When she got stuck, she would shut her e
yes and open some book. Just the way my Aunt Mabel used to consult her Bible for spiritual guidance. Only with Laura it was usually Webster’s Dictionary: she’d open it and put her finger on a word, or maybe a couple of words, and that would be it. I figure this was one of those times. It needn’t mean anything.”

  “It seems pretty appropriate to me,” Polly contradicted, quoting from her notes: “ ‘Deposition: A statement under oath, taken down in writing to be used in court in place of the production of the witness.’ Isn’t that what a painting is, too? Or should be?”

  “Uh, yes, perhaps.” Garrett Jones gave her a surprised, shrewd look. Score another for me, Polly thought. In her mind she ran over her list of Lorin Jones paintings, wondering which had been named at random from a dictionary. Pigeon Hawk. Carbon Dioxide. Goatfish. Perispheres. Go. Yeah, maybe. But not Though They Know the War Is Over, They Continue to Fight.

  “Of course, one could read that title in other ways,” Garrett added, recovering. “You could think of a ‘deposition’ as simply something that is set down, deposited. Or as referring to the time of year the painting was done, the end of summer. It could mean a kind of abdication of nature’s power, as in ‘The king was deposed.’ Isn’t that so?”

  “Mm,” Polly conceded.

  “We’ll never know what it meant to Laura, though.”

  “I suppose not.” You’ll never know, anyhow, she thought silently.

  By the time the car turned, onto Marsh Road in Wellfleet, Polly had seen four presumed sites of Lorin Jones’s paintings — none of them as obvious as the first, since during the years Lorin lived on the Cape her work had become steadily more abstract — and had photographed them all. Her digestive system had returned to normal, more or less, and her mood was greatly improved. Not only the places Garrett Jones had pointed out, but everything she looked at seemed to bring her closer to her subject: the clear cool light, the spare oriental shapes of dune and pine and reeds, the muted colors, the greenish black calligraphy of the bare trees. She was possessed by a kind of euphoric déjà vu: at every other bend of the road she saw something magically familiar.

  “Fine view, isn’t it?” Lorin’s former husband roared against the wind as they passed a sweep of grassy marshland faded to buff and divided by a shimmer of choppy bay. “Ah, I should tell you. Abigail is awfully sorry, but she can’t join us this evening. She has a crisis over some article about houseplants.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad,” Polly replied vaguely and insincerely, not turning her eyes from the landscape. She had nothing against Abigail Jones, a pretty, faded woman in her fifties who was a freelance women’s-magazine writer, with little to say for herself and nothing to say about Lorin Jones. But if Polly had to confront Abigail’s husband, it would be a lot easier and more pleasant if she weren’t around.

  “So seeing as how I’m not much of a cook, I thought we might go out for dinner. There’s a pretty good seafood place in Eastham that’s still open this time of year. How does that sound to you?”

  “Oh, fine,” Polly said, thinking that it might also be strategically to her advantage to face Jones on neutral ground.

  “Good. Well, thar she blows.” With a crunch of sand and gravel, he turned into a driveway between browned lilac bushes.

  In spite of the implication of this announcement, Garrett Jones’s house, once also Lorin’s, was in no sense a whale. It was larger than Polly had expected from the photographs, and instead of standing in open fields was surrounded by carefully tended shrubbery.

  Inside, the place seemed to have little to do with either art or Lorin Jones. There were a few good small contemporary pictures, including one of Lorin’s that had been in Polly’s show, but the rooms in which they hung were unnaturally neat and overdecorated in conventional Early American Colonial style, presumably by Abigail Jones, for they looked exactly like one of her color features in Homes and Gardens.

  “The sitting room ... the dining room ... the study ... our bedroom.” Garrett Jones led Polly through the downstairs.

  “Very nice,” she felt constrained to say. “It’s not at all what I expected, though.”

  “Well, of course it was very different when Laura lived here. The house was damn near falling apart when I bought it back in nineteen-forty-nine, and there was no garden then, just long meadow grass right up to the walls. And of course the new extension wasn’t built. We didn’t even have electricity for the first few years. Abigail’s done wonders. ... Now let’s go upstairs, and I’ll show you Laura’s studio.” He led the way, rather slowly and heavily, up the steep, narrow staircase.

  “Here we are. Rather small for a studio, but it’s the only place in the house with unobstructed north light. Nothing much left from Laura’s time, I’m afraid. This is Robbie’s room now, our younger son, but he’s away at Choate, of course. Sorry about the mess.”

  By Polly’s standards, the mess was minimal. This room at least looked as if a human being lived in it; there was a reassuring clutter and shabbiness about the shelves of books and airplane models and shells and sports equipment, the posters of yachts and tennis stars tacked to the sloping wall beside the long dormer window. As if drawn by a magnetic force, Polly crossed the floor, pushed aside a gray corduroy curtain, and gazed out through the faintly green, bubbled old panes of glass, toward the misty sea.

  “You recognize the view?” Garrett Jones’s voice sounded close behind her. “Laura painted it over and over again, of course. It’s in Pigeon Hawk and Strata and a number of her other pictures.”

  “I recognize it,” Polly said, moving aside.

  “She made a lot of sketches from these upstairs windows. I still have a few of them; I’ll show you later. If you’ll come out here in the hall, for instance, you can see —”

  Reluctantly, Polly followed Garrett Jones and allowed him to demonstrate the scenes of various paintings, meanwhile wishing that he would go away so that she could be alone with them.

  “And now let me show you where you’ll be bunking.”

  Garrett tossed Polly’s bag onto a double four-poster in a painfully tidy guest bedroom full of antique prints and spool tables and hooked rugs. “Here you are. If you want to wash up, it’s right across the way.” He pointed with the full extent of his arm, like a captain indicating something on the horizon. “Oh, incidentally, I’ve put out a few more old photos I found. They’re here on the desk.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I figured you might like, say, half an hour to have a bit of a rest and change for dinner. Then we could take off about six, all right?”

  “All right, sure,” she echoed, looking down at her cord slacks, plaid shirt, and Shaker-knit sweater, thinking that she’d be damned if she was going to tart herself up to go to a Cape Cod restaurant with Garrett Jones.

  As soon as he had descended the stairs Polly went into the bathroom, lifted the pink-terrycloth-covered lid of the toilet — wouldn’t you know? — and sat down, less confident than before. She had realized that by driving her about, carrying her bag, and putting her up overnight, Garrett had set up the invisible expectation that she would behave like a polite houseguest. He had, in a word, set her up. Well, she would just have to forget about good manners.

  As she crossed the hall, Polly felt the magnetic force again, pulling her toward Lorin’s studio and its window. Again she stared out, over the fading ochre and gray and blue horizontal stripes of lawn, scrubland, marsh, sea, and cloud-streaked sky that, like several of Lorin’s paintings from this period, resembled geological strata. In some of them the rocks seemed to have been sliced vertically, as sometimes happens in nature. But here, too, out the window, was the same dark slash bisecting slipped layers of beautiful pale color: the tall gray trunk of a dead elm.

  Lorin Jones didn’t hate this place, as her friend Sally Vogeler had implied, Polly thought; she loved it. Here in this house, deep in this pale light-washed landscape, she knew it was so.

  Lorin stood here, where I am standing, she thought. She saw wha
t I see; she felt what I feel as I move down through the geological layers of her life. Joyful, apprehensive, confused; moved by the beauty of this place, oppressed by the heavy presence downstairs of Garrett Jones.

  Suddenly Polly shivered, as if in a draft: she had the conviction that Lorin Jones, who had so often stood by this window, was here now behind her. It wasn’t a totally new idea: she had felt the presence of Lorin’s spirit before, but only inwardly, metaphorically. Now the sensation was realer and stronger. As she turned around she almost saw Lorin’s wavery ghost in the shadows: the tangled dark hair, the wide sleepwalker’s eyes. She blinked; the image faded into shapes of furniture and patterns of wallpaper, and was gone.

  A soapy wave of longing washed over her. “Lorin.” She whispered the name half-aloud. “Lorin ... I’m here.”

  Downstairs somewhere a door slammed. Polly started and, not wanting to meet Garrett Jones again yet, retreated.

  Back in the guestroom she took up the snapshots he’d left for her. Three of them, blurred and light-struck, showed groups of people in outdated sports clothes. With some difficulty she managed to pick out Lorin Jones, but could recognize no one else. The last photo, larger and clearer, was of a small sailboat. Lorin stood in the cockpit, holding on to the mast and partly obscured by the sail; she wore an open white shirt over a dark bathing suit. On deck, nearer to the camera and in sharper focus, a man in brief bathing trunks was grinning into the sun. He was robust, handsome, blond — the sort of man women were instantly attracted to, the sort that Polly herself would have been attracted to before she knew better. Could it be Hugh Cameron, for whom Lorin had left her husband?

  No, of course not. It was — she recognized him now — Garrett Jones himself, maybe thirty years ago. Polly felt queasy, as if she had just seen a film run backward at top speed. Still, this photograph explained something she hadn’t understood, which was why Lorin had ever married Garrett.