The Truth About Lorin Jones

by Alison Lurie

  Now she could pick out Garrett Jones in the other photographs, too: by his height, the breadth of his shoulders and chest, and the swatch of fair hair that flopped into his eyes in all four snapshots. Even today, she realized, it was there; Garrett hadn’t gone bald, and the same unruly lock, now grayed almost to white, still fell across his brow. He was still, for his age, a good-looking man.

  Why did Garrett want her to see these photos, in which her subject was mainly an indistinct blur? Obviously, because he wanted her to know and write that when Lorin Jones married him he was a fine physical specimen; that they were, as Jacky Herbert had put it, a handsome couple.

  And would she write that? Well, yes, because it seemed to be the truth; and because it explained the marriage. Lorin Jones was a genius, but she was also a woman. Why shouldn’t she, like Polly, have made at least one serious mistake in a rush of passion?

  “No salad dressing for me, please.”

  “Oh, that’s right.” Garrett gave a little apologetic chuckle. “I should have remembered,” he added, falsely implying to the waiter that Polly was his close friend or relative, though in fact they’d only lunched together once before. And probably the waiter believed him, Polly realized with irritation, because they didn’t look unalike, both being blunt-featured and stocky.

  For nearly an hour, on the drive to Eastham and then in this expensive restaurant, Polly had followed Jeanne’s advice and behaved with careful politeness. She had put up with a second alteration in Garrett Jones’s appearance and manner, from scruffy old salt to country-club yachtsman (navy blazer, checked shirt, paisley scarf), and made no comment on his erratic driving. She had allowed him to overrule her proposal that they split the bill. (“Impossible. I couldn’t even consider it. No, this is my pleasure.”)

  She had also listened to a series of anecdotes about famous painters he had known, without pointing out that she’d already heard several of them. She was used now to the way people who were being interviewed tended to drift into unrelated tales of their own lives; but Garrett was really carrying it to an extreme.

  To calm herself, Polly took another gulp of the pricey white wine Garrett had insisted on ordering and had already drunk nearly half of. He had also chosen the most expensive item on the menu, broiled lobster. If she’d known he was paying she would have ordered that too, instead of baked cod.

  Polly couldn’t explain to the waiter that she wasn’t related to or a close friend of Garrett Jones, but she could demonstrate it. Without making any effort to be discreet, she hauled her tape recorder out of her tote bag and set it on the red-and-white-checked tablecloth. That would show him that this was a professional interview.

  “Is that your tape machine?” Garrett asked as soon as they were alone.

  “That’s right.”

  “Hmf. Do you really want to use it now, at dinner?”

  Obviously I want to use it, Polly thought angrily, or I wouldn’t have brought it out. But she merely said: “I thought it might be a while till our food comes. And there’s so much you’ve told me already, about art and artists, that I really wish I’d recorded. I don’t want to miss any more.” Jeanne would be proud of me, she thought, not sure she was proud of herself.

  “Yes, but —”

  “Besides, you were just starting to talk about Bennington College, where you first met Lorin. How did that happen?” She pressed RECORD.

  “I don’t recall exactly,” Garrett said, after a pause in which Polly could see him wondering whether to refuse to go on.

  “But she was in one of your classes, wasn’t she?”

  “Er, yes.” Garrett took another swig of wine and capitulated. “The Tradition of the Modern, my big lecture course. But it was considerably later that we really got acquainted. In Laura’s last year.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  “I’d seen her in my class, of course. But it was her paintings I really noticed first, in the student show at the end of her junior year. I was very much struck by them: they were so strong, so original, not like most undergraduate work. And then when I connected the name with the face I was surprised again.”

  “Why surprised?”

  “Well, Laura was so slight, so shy, so ethereal-looking. Not at all what I would have expected from her work. It was amazing to me that such a quiet, beautiful girl could paint like that.”

  Yes, Polly thought. Because you expect gifted women to be noisy, ugly Amazons. “And then you began seeing each other?”

  “No. Not then. School ended, and she went home. But I have to admit I thought about her all that summer. In the fall, we met again at the faculty show and talked a little, and then Laura came to my office to look at a book on iconography that wasn’t in the library. I realized then that she wasn’t just very talented, she was intelligent and articulate — once you could hear what she said in that whispery little voice. And those are qualities you don’t always find in gifted artists. As you must have discovered.” Garrett grinned.

  “I know what you mean,” said Polly, who had had her troubles with stupid silent artists: last year there had been a male sculptor whose “statement” for the catalogue was almost illiterate.

  “And at the same time, you see, she seemed — how shall I put it? — lost in this world. She was a virgin, of course. But beyond that, she was the sort of girl — well, you’d almost be afraid to let her cross the street, she was so dreamy, so innocent, so vulnerable. So aware of her natural surroundings as a painter, and so oblivious to them in every other way. More Meursault?”

  “Not just yet, thanks,” Polly said. Garrett’s tongue seemed to be loosening; maybe it was to her advantage that he should drink most of the wine. “So you thought of marrying her already,” she murmured.

  “Not then, no. I didn’t even realize at first that we were falling in love.” He paused, turning the glass in his heavy red hand.

  “You didn’t know at first,” she prompted.

  “No.” There was another and even longer pause, broken only by the thin whirring sound of the tape recorder. She tried again:

  “But then —”

  Garrett remained silent, gazing past Polly. You loved Lorin too, she thought with a reluctant sympathy, and you lost her.

  Yes, she added to herself, hardening her heart, and how did you lose her? “Still, eventually you knew you were in love, and then you decided to get married,” she suggested.

  “No.” With an appearance of effort, Garrett turned his gaze back toward Polly. “I didn’t think that far ahead. We were just consumed by it, consuming each other — I don’t think young people feel that strongly now.”

  Young people? Polly thought. Yes, Lorin was young; but you were thirty-five.

  “These yuppies one sees everywhere today, they’re so rational and calculating. They don’t love impulsively, romantically, without thinking of tomorrow.”

  “No,” Polly agreed, wondering if in Garrett Jones’s mind she was a rational, calculating yuppie.

  “But that’s how it was with us. It wasn’t till late in the spring that it occurred to me that Laura would graduate soon and I might never see her again.”

  “Mm.”

  “It was after a lecture on French cathedrals. One of those freak warm nights you sometimes get in May, with sudden thunderstorms, and we all had to make a dash for it to get to the building where the reception was. Most of us had raincoats or umbrellas, but when Laura arrived she was sopping wet and barefoot, carrying her sandals, in trailing damp gauzy clothes that stuck to her body.

  “I tried to get her to go back to her room and change; so did several other people. She was shivering with cold, but she refused. She claimed she’d dry off soon, but naturally she didn’t. Finally she was persuaded to leave. I can still see how she looked walking away across the wet grass, through the oblongs of light from the windows. So slight and pale, with her long dark hair dripping down her back like some kind of exotic weed. There was something elfin and unworldly about her, almost not human.” Garrett
stared past Polly, into the past.

  Yes, she thought, the scene vivid in her mind. Then, with a little shock: he feels what I feel; we are longing for the same person.

  “What was I saying?” Garrett asked finally.

  “You realized you might not see Lorin again,” Polly prompted.

  “That’s right. I’d never said anything about the future, you know, and neither had she. But I knew she was planning to go to New York to study that fall. And that troubled me, too: the idea of Laura alone in the city, in the zoo the Art Students League was back then. She wouldn’t have enough time to paint, either; her father was willing to pay her tuition for a year, but he thought she should get a part-time job to help cover her living expenses. And I knew how easily she could be exploited by people in New York — By dealers. And by men too. I couldn’t let that happen.”

  “So you decided to marry her,” Polly said.

  Garrett shook his head. “I decided to ask her to marry me; I had no idea she’d agree. Almost no hope. She seemed so young, so beautiful, so gifted and free —”

  Again Polly felt an unwanted rush of sympathy. She beat it back down, focusing on the word free, recalling the facts of the case.

  “I see.” She took a breath, determined to have the truth out of him. “But you were married already, weren’t you?” she added, watching Garrett’s face.

  “Er, yes.” He blinked his bloodshot blue eyes in their net of creases. “Yes, I was, as a matter of fact. And does that shock you?”

  “No, not much,” Polly admitted, forced onto the defensive.

  “Times have changed.” Garrett sighed. “You young people, nothing much shocks you, right?”

  “Well, not that sort of thing,” Polly said, unwilling to be classed either as Puritanical or as totally immoral.

  “People were shocked then. Very. Some of them wanted to have me fired.” Garrett sighed again, then shook his head. “But that’s all ancient history. You probably weren’t even born then.” He smiled kindly but a little condescendingly at Polly.

  “Besides, you know,” he continued, “my marriage was really over by then.” He leaned forward across the table, gazing at her persuasively. “It was one of those impulsive, misguided wartime things. We’d hardly known each other, but I was about to go overseas with the navy —”

  “Mh,” Polly muttered. Impulsive; misguided. That’s what my father probably said, she thought, when people asked why he left my mother.

  “It was a mistake from the start. We weren’t ever any good for each other. Except physically.” His voice sank to a reminiscent murmur on the last words. Probably the tape would not pick them up, but Polly heard them.

  “With Laura it was so different,” Garrett resumed, clearing his throat. “The more I saw of her, the deeper in love we were. And then she needed me, not like Roz. I knew I could protect her, help her. She was so obviously gifted, and I had friends in New York, dealers and museum people, who would look at her work seriously if I asked them to. I knew she wouldn’t ever show it to them herself. She was terrified of strangers, you know.”

  “Mm,” Polly admitted.

  “So I knew that without me she wouldn’t have a chance. She might never be recognized as a painter — you know what the scene is in Manhattan — or at least, not for years. The problem was, my job was in Vermont, and Laura needed to study in New York: she’d already learned all she could at Bennington. I didn’t know what to do.” Garrett shook his head; the swatch of thick gray-white hair flopped into his eyes, just as in the old photographs.

  “So then —”

  “So then I was offered a place as regular art critic on a New York paper. It seemed like fate. ... Oh, thank you.” The waiter had returned with their dinner: Polly turned off her tape recorder and moved it from the table to her lap.

  “Ah. The lobster is excellent,” Garrett announced presently. “Let me give you a taste.”

  “All right,” she agreed. “And maybe you’d like some of my cod.”

  “Thank you.”

  Polly transferred a hunk of fish and some wedges of tomato and pepper to Garrett’s plate, and looked up to see him poking a fork dripping with pink meat and melted butter at her face, as if she were a small child. There was a struggle between indignation and guile, which the latter won: she didn’t want to antagonize her subject yet.

  “Nice, isn’t it?”

  “Very nice,” agreed Polly, who had swallowed the lobster with some difficulty.

  “Do have some more.”

  “No, thank you. ... You knew Lorin Jones’s father,” she remarked, trying for a casual tone while discreetly turning her machine on again. “What was he like?”

  “Dan Zimmern? He was a tough old dog.” Garrett Jones grinned and mashed sour cream and chives into his baked potato. Either because he no longer knew he was being taped, or because the wine had gone to his head, his manner had loosened considerably. “Wore out three wives. When I met him he was nearly sixty, but he was still damned handsome, almost like an old-time movie star. He was a charmer. Even the last few weeks of his life, when he was in the hospital most of the time, he fluttered the nurses’ hearts.”

  “Is that so.” My father could end up like that, Polly thought. Though he didn’t look like a film star, and wasn’t conventionally handsome, you could call him a charmer. She felt another surge of empathy with Lorin Jones.

  “Of course he was a complete philistine where contemporary art was concerned,” Garrett continued between bites. “Didn’t understand in the least what his daughter was up to. Though once she started to have some success he became very proud, went to all her shows.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard that.”

  “Dan wasn’t dumb, though. I remember something he said to me once. Or quoted, maybe: ‘In the absence of happiness, pleasure and power are the best the world has to offer.’ ”

  “Pleasure and power?”

  “In that order.” Garrett laughed. “And it was clear he had an appetite for both. All you had to do was watch him eat, or hear him talk about his job. ... When I first met him I thought he was a coarse cynical old, uh, fellow.” Garrett swallowed; had he been going to say “Jew”? “I was sorry for Laura, having a father like that.”

  “How did they get on together?”

  “Pretty well, considering. Dan was a warm-hearted guy; he really cared a lot for Laura, though he had no idea what went on in her head. I think she loved him too, in her way. And after a while, I began to appreciate him myself. I’m sorry now I never got to know him better.”

  Because you’ve grown to be like him, Polly thought, watching Garrett crack open a lobster claw and spear the meat into his handsome, ruddy old face. Once you were young and in love, but now you prefer power and pleasure. You’ve worn out two, maybe three wives.

  “Have some more wine.”

  “Oh no thanks.”

  “Come on. You might as well, it’ll go to waste otherwise. I’ve got to quit drinking now, because I’m driving home.”

  “Well. All right.” Polly allowed Garrett to fill her glass.

  “Not a bad Meursault. I remember the first time I tasted this wine, in France; in nineteen-thirty-seven it must have been, when I went to see the cave paintings in Lascaux with ...

  Before she could stop him, he was off on another round of name-dropping anecdote. She reached under her napkin and turned off the tape recorder.

  6

  GARRETT JONES CONTINUED TALKING through the rest of dinner and on the drive home — and was, Polly had to admit sometimes interesting or amusing. She herself said almost nothing; the unwelcome feeling had come over her that she was not behaving very well. Of course, under his courtly manner Garrett was an old-fashioned male chauvinist, who had probably made Lorin Jones’s life unhappy in many ways. But he had given up a good deal of his valuable — and, at his age, limited — time to Polly and her project; he had bought her an expensive seafood dinner, and answered all her questions. Worse still, he appeared to like and t
rust her.

  “So what?” said the impatient voice of Jeanne in her head. “All’s fair in war, remember?”

  Polly tried to remember this, but it wasn’t easy. As they turned into the driveway she had a strong stupid impulse to warn Garrett, to confess that she intended to betray and expose him as soon as she discovered anything to betray or expose.

  But maybe there wasn’t anything much to discover, and so it would be all right, she thought as they entered the house. “Nonsense,” said Jeanne’s voice. “All he’s given you so far is a lot of self-serving lies about how much he loved Lorin and helped her career. For Christ’s sake, don’t let him snow you. Just keep smiling, push him a little harder, and you’ll get what you came for.”

  Well, maybe, Polly said silently to Jeanne; except now his wife will be listening. You mustn’t expect too much.

  But as it turned out, Abigail wouldn’t be listening. “I guess your wife’s gone to bed already,” Polly remarked as Garrett switched on a green-shaded tole lamp in the sitting room.

  “My wife?” For a moment Garrett, who had been describing Venice in the 1950s, seemed not to know which wife she was referring to. “Oh, Abigail. Oh no, she’s in New York. She had some crisis about an article, didn’t I tell you?”

  “You mentioned it, but I thought —”

  For the first time, it occurred to Polly that she was alone at night in the middle of nowhere with an old man she had thought of for months as an enemy. On the other hand, what harm could Garrett do her?

  “She was sorry she couldn’t be here, but I assured her we’d manage. I can cook breakfast, at least.” Garrett gave a forced-sounding laugh. “Well, make yourself comfortable while I light the fire.” He moved an overpolished brass screen aside, stooped heavily before the hearth, and struck a match on the bricks.

  “There we are,” he murmured with satisfaction as the pale flames rolled up. “And how about a little Courvoisier?”