by Alison Lurie
Yes, after I got home I put in a roll of film, and tried it out, but my heart wasn’t in it. I didn’t understand the controls, and the camera was too big for me anyhow; I couldn’t even hold it steady. The pictures came out a mess, and I shoved the whole thing away in a closet.
Well what happened was, a couple of years later, when I was nearly fourteen, Aunt Laurie died; and Dad went down to Key West afterward to sort out her things. He found maybe a dozen photography books, going back years. All the greats; Cartier-Bresson, and Stieglitz, and Bourke-White, and Walker Evans, and collections from the old Life. Sometime before she died Aunt Laurie had crossed out her name in all of them and written in mine. “Laura Zimmern,” and later on “Laura Jones” or “Lorin Jones,” was canceled with a long stroke of the pen, and “Ruth Zimmern” was written in underneath, in her fine narrow loopy writing, almost like nineteenth-century calligraphy; you’ve probably seen it.
So Dad sent the books on to me. I’d given up on art by then. The current family idea, and mine too, was that I was going to live on a farm and take care of animals, like my stepfather, Bernie.
Well, those books. They hit me like a bank of flashbulbs going off. I hadn’t realized photographs could be like that, but once I saw them I wanted to do the same. I got out the Leica, and this time I was big enough to hold it steady and understand the directions, and that’s how the whole thing started. I figure if it hadn’t been for Aunt Laurie, I’d be a fat contented country vet somewhere now.
Hell, no. Like Marcia always says, I’ve got no regrets. I just wish I could see Aunt Laurie again somehow and thank her, that’s all.
15
IN THE ILL-LIT, HIGH-CEILINGED hall of a university building, Polly sat on a wooden bench waiting for Leonard Zimmern to join her for lunch. Shufflings and murmurs reached her from the classrooms opposite, and a gust of chill snowy air slapped her face every time the outside doors swung open to admit students in the uncouth dress and weary, wretched expressions characteristic of exam period.
Polly also felt weary and wretched. She hadn’t even started her holiday shopping, and she had another dentist appointment this afternoon with awful Dr. Bebb. Stevie was coming home soon, which was something to look forward to; but according to Jim he was probably going back to Denver for the rest of the school year.
At least she could congratulate herself on having gotten out of Key West in time. It had been a near thing, though. After she changed her ticket, Polly had all but forgotten her project and given herself wholly up to Mac and to pleasure. They had jogged in a drifting fog by the ocean at dawn, swum in the rose-stained waves at sunset, and made love on the sand (romantically but rather grittily) by starlight. They had gone dancing again, bought palm-leaf hats at a flea market, and watched the shrimp boats unload.
They hadn’t been out to the reef, because the sea was still too high; but they’d gone fishing with a friend of Mac’s and brought home a six-pound kingfish that Lee had stuffed and baked for them and two of her guests. For three days Polly had hardly thought of her book, and the only work she had done was to help Mac and his crew tape and spackle sheetrock.
It still scared her to think how close she had come to really caring about Mac — no, she corrected herself, Hugh Cameron — and accepting his version of Lorin Jones. Because of course his story was just as partial and biased a view of Lorin’s life as Jacky’s or Garrett’s. Maybe more so. The trouble was, as Jeanne said, that though she knew all her informants were untrustworthy, whenever she got too close to one of them her vision blurred, and he turned into a sympathetic person; in Mac’s case, to worse than that.
But as Jeanne had pointed out, she had to look at the situation objectively. “Polly, dear. You may have had an exciting time in Florida, well, why not? But you know it would really be a mistake to take it seriously. This is somebody who deceived you, by his own admission; who was cheating on the woman he lives with; and who’s more or less stolen two very valuable paintings. I’m not blaming you. I know all too well how crazy I get sometimes myself when I’m in an erotic blur, so that I simply won’t let myself see what’s quite plain to everyone around me.”
It was plain to Jeanne, for instance, that Polly had been in a vulnerable condition the whole time she was in Key West: confused and credulous — almost as if she’d been under a voodoo spell of the sort that Ron and Phil had warned her about. Once home, though, she had more or less fallen apart.
It was Jeanne who had put her back together; Jeanne had been wonderful. She had sympathized, understood, and vigorously denied that Polly was in any way responsible for what had happened in Key West. It was clear to Jeanne that her friend had been lured into Hugh Cameron’s house, and then practically raped, when she was ill and miserable and exhausted — after all, hadn’t she come home with a streaming cold and a temperature of over a hundred? Hadn’t she had to be put straight to bed, and nursed back to physical and emotional health by her devoted Calico Cat?
What had happened in Key West was also partly, Jeanne had suggested, a side effect of Polly’s long concentration on Lorin Jones: of first a conscious and later and more darkly a subconscious identification with her subject. Finally she had even begun to have Lorin’s experiences: she had been exploited by Lorin’s dealers, for instance. (Jacky, as Jeanne had pointed out, hadn’t offered to go to Key West himself, or contribute to her plane fare, though when the paintings she’d found were retrieved and sold he would get a large commission.) She had been pawed and condescended to by Garrett Jones; she had been deceived and seduced by Mac/Hugh.
And even after Mac/Hugh had, as he put it, “come clean,” he was still dirty, still lying, Jeanne was sure of that. The story about Lorin Jones being addicted to speed, for instance, sounded to her like a parcel of lies; why, even Lorin’s own sister-in-law had never heard anything of the kind. It was clear to Jeanne that Cameron was a dishonest, dangerous person: superficially charming and clever maybe, but warped. Maybe even a borderline psychopath, she had suggested yesterday. “Gee, yeah, that could be,” agreed Betsy, who had been present at these discussions more often than Polly would have liked.
“Oh, come on,” Polly had protested. “He wasn’t that bad, you know.” But at this Betsy and Jeanne had regarded her with identical looks of anxious indulgence, like nurses in a convalescent hospital. Still a little infection there, I’m afraid, these looks said; and they were right.
Of course if Polly were to accept their view of Mac — of Hugh Cameron, rather — it would make her task much easier. She could go back to her original vision of Lorin Jones as a woman of genius damaged and finally destroyed by men and the male establishment; she could set aside all that didn’t belong in that story. Then her biography, as she had first planned, would be a well-documented assault on the art establishment. It would also be her revenge on the men who had injured not only Lorin but Polly herself — liars, exploiters, seducers. “They’ll be sorry when your book comes out,” Jeanne had said the other day, smiling her pussycat smile.
Sorry, and also perhaps vengeful in their turn. Polly’s biography would be bad-mouthed by Garrett Jones and Jacky Herbert and all their friends and supporters; it would be badly reviewed in the establishment press, and its sales would be poor; she’d have to expect that. There would be repercussions when she went back to work at the Museum: cold looks, cold words, the chilly withdrawal of her superiors. Gradually, a strong snowy wind like the one now outside this building would cut Polly off from the New York art world; it would blow her even further into a wholly female and largely lesbian society.
But though she might suffer professionally and financially, she would be supported and encouraged by others like herself. The feminist press would treat her work seriously. Ida and Cathy and the rest of Jeanne’s friends would accept and trust her, as one who had finally — though none too soon — spoken out against the patriarchal system.
Polly gazed at the stained wall opposite, and saw herself as if in a film of the future, in Ida’s living roo
m. She was sitting cross-legged in a circle of women at one of the study-group meetings she had up to now declined to attend. Her hair was chopped short, and she was wearing worn, woolly dark clothes and a serious, determined expression. Next to her on the lumpy braided rug made by a women’s commune in Vermont were Jeanne and Betsy. On the other side, holding her hand in a warm possessive grip, was another vague sympathetic female presence: Polly’s future lover, whoever she might turn out to be. (“I’m sure you’ll find someone nice soon,” Jeanne had said the other day, unconsciously echoing Polly’s mother.)
But why was this vision so flat and colorless? Maybe just because of the grayed winter light, and the stained plaster on which the scene was projected. Or maybe she was still rundown; she surely shouldn’t be depressed by a future in which she would be accepted, loved, and surrounded by intelligent, affectionate women who admired what she had done.
“Sorry about this place,” Leonard Zimmern said twenty minutes later, sliding a plastic tray the color of curdled mushroom soup onto a table in a kosher cafeteria. “The thing is, it’s the only restaurant near my office that’s not choked with tinsel and artificial holly this time of year.” He gave Polly a narrow glance and added: “I’m not going all Orthodox suddenly, don’t get any ideas. But the older I get, the more all this Christmas crap irritates me. Hope you don’t mind.”
“No, it’s okay,” Polly said, setting her coffee and bagel with cream cheese on the damp tabletop.
Lennie sat, and stirred his coffee. “So, you went to Key West and found Hugh Cameron,” he remarked.
“Yes,” she agreed.
“And I hear that’s not all you found.” Lennie smiled. “Jacky Herbert tells me you saw two of Laura’s paintings there. Including the big one from her last show that he thought was lost.”
“That’s right,” she said. “Cameron has them.”
“Really.”
Polly gave Lennie a look of ill-suppressed irritation. It was just like him not to show any surprise at her discovery — let alone enthusiasm or gratitude.
“I understand Herbert would like to get those paintings back for his exhibition.” He smiled narrowly and raised heavy black eyebrows threaded with gray.
“Mh.” Polly did not smile. The discovery of Lorin’s lost canvases was her greatest achievement so far; she wanted them in the new show, so that everyone could see and admire them; she wanted them photographed for her book. Yes, fine. But after that what would happen? Jacky wouldn’t give them back to Mac if he could help it; they would be sold to collectors who’d never known Lorin. But, as Jeanne had said, that was none of her business.
“Herbert suggested that we should all go together to his lawyer,” Lennie said. “He wants to send Cameron a letter demanding that he ship us the paintings, unless he can produce written proof that he owns them.”
“Mh,” Polly agreed uneasily. She knew all this; only yesterday Jacky had urged her to persuade Lennie to take such action as soon as possible.
“So you think that’s what we should do?”
“I suppose so,” she said, trying to speak positively, reminding herself that legally the paintings belonged to Lennie; that their recovery would be morally justified and professionally advantageous to her.
“I don’t care all that much for the idea of a lawsuit, you know. I always think of Bleak House.”
“Mmh.” Polly had never read Bleak House but was damned if she was going to admit it. Of course Lennie would go to a lawyer in the end, she told herself; he wouldn’t want to let two paintings worth at least twenty thousand each get away. But first, just for the fun of it, he was going to give her a hard time. He was teasing her now, as he had teased his sister years before. “Excuse me, I forgot the milk.”
The trouble is, she told herself as she picked her way between the crowded tables, I don’t like the idea of a lawsuit either. I don’t want to help take those paintings away from Mac. It’s against my own interests and maybe even illegal, she thought, holding her mug under the metal spigot, but I don’t want to be part of that.
“Hey, watch it,” a voice next to her cautioned. Polly looked down; her mug had overflowed and a puddle of milk was slopped around it.
“Sorry.” But Mac said Lorin had given him the paintings, she thought, releasing the lever. And even if she didn’t, they mean something to him; doesn’t that give him a sort of right to them?
“About those two canvases,” she said to Lennie, setting down her mug, now mostly lukewarm milk. “The problem is, they actually belong to Hugh Cameron.”
“Really?” This time he raised only one of his theatrical eyebrows.
“Your sister gave them to him, you see.”
“Yes? And what’s the proof of that?” he asked skeptically and hatefully.
Polly clenched her jaw. “It’s written on the back of both of the canvases,” she heard herself lie. “ ‘For Hugh with love from Lorin.’ I hadn’t seen it when I phoned Jacky,” she improvised.
“Really,” Lennie said for the third time, now with a descending intonation, drawing his eyebrows together. “I wonder who wrote it.”
“That’s why Cameron didn’t mention them to you when you were there, I guess,” she plunged on, appalled at what she had done, but trying to speak casually.
“It could have been.” Lennie shrugged. “It could have been anything. He was half out of his wits at the time, in my estimation.” He rotated his coffee mug. “Well. I can’t say I’m totally unhappy about it. I have enough trouble with the paintings of Lorin’s I’ve got now: the insurance and storage fees are ridiculous. And then, ever since that damned show of yours, some museum or other is always after me to lend them something.” He laughed slightly. “I’m certainly not going to get embroiled in a legal squabble. Let Cameron keep those paintings if he wants to.”
Well, you’ve done it now, Polly thought, shocked at herself. “I thought you didn’t like Hugh Cameron,” she said at random, recalling that Lennie had earlier described him — it was in her notes — as “a typical faux-naïf clinging to the role of artist and the role of child long after that was even faintly plausible.”
“I’m in no hurry to spend time with him, let’s put it that way. But I’ve no quarrel with Cameron; he put up with my sister a lot longer than most people would have, and he didn’t cheat on her the way Garrett did, as far as I know.”
“You’ve heard about that?” Polly asked.
“Uh-huh.” Lennie shrugged. “Most people who knew them have, I imagine.”
“Garrett was in love with her, though,” Polly said. “I think he still is, in a way.”
“Yes,” Lennie said savagely. “Lolly had that effect on men. From her earliest years.” He took an angry bite of sandwich that left yellow shreds hanging from his mustache and made him look suddenly carnivorous.
“Lolly; that was your sister’s nickname as a child.”
“Mm-hm.” He sucked in the rags of fried egg and wiped his mouth neatly; his expression was in neutral again.
“Do you happen to know how she got it?”
“I’m not sure, really. Probably it was short for what my father used to call her when she was a baby: Lollypop.” He took a sip of coffee. “So what else did you learn from Hugh Cameron?”
Polly glanced rapidly at Lennie, then away. Ridiculous to imagine that he knew what had happened in Key West. It was only his suspicious, probing professorial manner, developed no doubt over decades of intimidating students, that had caused her sensation of panic, her visible flush. She counterattacked:
“I learned several things you didn’t tell me. Or maybe you didn’t know them.”
“Really. Such as?”
“I found out how Lorin died, for instance.”
Lennie made no comment; he sat with the coarse white mug halfway to his thin, finely cut lips, waiting.
“She got a chill from swimming in the ocean for too long, when the water was still cold. And then she didn’t go to the doctor until it was too late.”
“Yes. Cameron told me that,” Lennie said on a harsh, falling note. “I wasn’t too surprised,” he added.
“You weren’t surprised by what?”
“The whole thing. Lorin was always attracted by water. And she was strange about doctors and hospitals, even as a kid. She didn’t like to have anyone poking about in her body. Or her mind, if it comes to that.”
“Who does?” Polly asked, wondering if Lennie was getting at her and her project, suggesting that Lorin would have disliked it. “But of course she was very sensitive.”
“Yes. Oversensitive, some might say.” Lennie gave a narrow smile. “And also I think she was rather interested in death.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well.” Lennie hesitated, maybe wishing he had not spoken, then continued. “By that time, you know, the few people she’d ever really felt safe with were dead. Her grandmother, and both her parents, and the maid they’d had all her life. Laura said to my ex-wife once that of course you never really trusted anybody you met after you were about ten — as if that were a quite natural human phenomenon.”
“That’s really sad,” Polly exclaimed, wondering at the same time if Lorin had been right.
“And then, the last time I saw her, when she came to New York after my father died, Laura told me this dream she’d had about him.” He paused.
“Yes?” Polly prompted.
“She said she dreamed that her father and Celia and all her other dead friends and relatives were standing at the far end of school playground that was half-covered in fog, calling to her. They were calling: ‘Rover, Red Rover, I charge you to come over.’ ”
“Ehh.” Polly sucked in her breath. He means, he’s suggesting that Lorin’s death was a kind of suicide, she thought. Not just the result of exhaustion, confusion, neglect, and self-neglect. “Hugh Cameron claimed that, those last few years, she was pretty heavily into drugs,” she said finally. “Speed mostly. But I don’t know if I believe —” She stopped, seeing Lennie's face twitch, his head jerk sideways, as if some invisible person had given him a stinging slap.