The Truth About Lorin Jones

3

“COULD I HELP YOU?” A slight, colorless young man, who looked in need of help himself, drifted across the half-lit Apollo Gallery to where Polly Alter and her rubberized poncho stood dripping rain onto the polished parquet floor.

“I have an appointment with Jacky Herbert. At ten.” Polly checked her watch, holding out her wet wrist so that he could see, if he cared to look, that it was already five minutes past the hour.

“I’m sorry; I don’t think Mr. Herbert’s come in yet.”

“I suppose I’ll have to wait, then,” she said, not trying to disguise her annoyance. She turned her back on him and wandered toward the front of the gallery, where a sodden gray October light pressed against the streaming glass of the picture window, giving the scene outside the look of an aquarium. Swollen, bug-eyed metal fish crowded and honked for positions on Madison Avenue, and umbrellas bobbed and dodged like multicolored marine plants.

Polly was cross not only at Jacky Herbert but — and more seriously — at herself. After her uncomfortable and unfinished interview with Paolo Carducci, the owner of the Apollo Gallery, she had put off calling for another appointment. She might never interview Carducci again now, because he had had a stroke which had left him, according to report, half-paralyzed and almost speechless. With a frail man in his late seventies, she should have known better than to lose either her temper or a single day. She would have to make do now with Jacky, the acting director of the gallery, who had only begun to work there just before Lorin Jones’s final show.

Becoming more and more bored and angry, she turned from the window to inspect an uninteresting collection of formalist still lifes. Outwardly the Apollo Gallery, once one of the most successful in New York, looked much as it did when Polly first visited it twenty years ago. It still kept its premises above an expensive antique shop in the East Seventies, and served coffee from its mammoth, convoluted espresso machine. But in the last two decades the gallery had gradually yielded its dominant position. More aggressive dealers had taken over entire floors of Fifty-seventh Street skyscrapers, or moved into Soho warehouses with enough wall and floor space to house the largest and most aggressive works. The Apollo continued to show what, comparatively, could almost be described as easel painting. It still represented many established artists, and had loyal and wealthy customers; but it was no longer on the cutting edge of American art.

“Polly!” Jacky Herbert called. He circled the reception desk and moved toward her with his characteristic tiptoe gait, which gave the effect of speed without its usual results. “So lovely to see you.” Jacky was, as always, elegantly dressed: his suit and shirt and tie, in shades of glossy pale gray, fit as smoothly as sealskin. Also, he looked quite dry; either he had been here all along, or he had taken a taxi to the gallery instead of standing in the downpour waiting for a bus like Polly. “How have you been?” He bent and rubbed a soft shaved cheek smelling of lime toilet water against hers, and made goldfish kissing sounds in the air.

“Fine, thanks.” Polly did not make a kissing sound; she despised this mode of greeting; besides, Jacky had made her wait nearly fifteen minutes for no good reason. “How about you?”

“Oh, getting along.” Jacky gestured dismissively. He was a bulky man with grayed yellow hair, plump white ringed hands, shrewd flat gray eyes, and the handsome ruined profile of a Roman empress. In his youth he was said to have been a great beauty. Gossip attributed his remarkable collection of modern art to his early powers of seduction, and perhaps even of barter. Whatever the truth of this story, Jacky now lived an almost blameless life with a retired concert pianist named Tommy.

“And how is Mr. Carducci doing?”

Jacky made a tsk sound and shook his head slowly.

“Do they think he’s going to recover?”

“The doctor won’t say.” Jacky’s large pale face quivered. “I expect he doesn’t know himself. But I have to admit Paolo looked rather dreadful when I saw him day before yesterday.”

“That’s too bad,” Polly said, without feeling.

“We can always hope, that’s what I tell myself. Well now.” He forced a smile. “How about a tiny cup of coffee?”

“Okay. That’d be nice.”

“Marvelous,” Jacky said sadly, meaninglessly. He waved one flipper for her to follow him into the back room.

“Here, let me,” he added as Polly began to struggle out of her poncho. “Goodness, it’s absolutely sopping.” He gave the rectangle of rubberized canvas a shake that seemed to express disapproval of more than its condition. “Now I’m going to hang this up right by the radiator, so it’ll be lovely and dry when you leave. And why don’t you give me that wet scarf, too?”

“Okay; thanks.” She handed over a sodden red-and-black rag; Jacky hung it carefully, yet with an indefinable air of distaste, over a collating frame.

“Now shall we go into my office, where we won’t be disturbed?... Good. Alan!” he called to the colorless young man. “Two cups of espresso, please. And no calls, please, for the next hour, unless it’s a serious buyer.

“So, how is it going?” he said, shutting the door and pulling forward an Eames chair for Polly. He leaned toward her over the desk, smiling with his large white perfectly capped teeth.

“Oh, pretty well.” Polly didn’t smile; Jacky’s fussy concern for her comfort, as if she were a possible client, hadn’t mollified her, but made her more suspicious. What was he going to try to sell her?

“I’m so pleased. You know, Paolo said before his stroke — Well, I think he was surprised, rather, that you hadn’t come to see him again. He wondered if you were making any progress. And he said that perhaps we should try to interest some writer with more experience.” Jacky flapped his hands deprecatingly. “But I said no, it has to be someone who hasn’t got so many other interests. Someone who can take the time to interview everyone: go to Wellfleet to see Garrett and down to the Keys to talk to that awful Hugh Cameron. And I’m convinced it should be a woman, too. Polly is the right person. That’s what I told him.” Jacky smiled. “Oh, that’s lovely, Alan.” He took the “tiny cup of coffee,” which in his big pale hand looked literally tiny.

“Well, thanks,” Polly said grudgingly. Why was Jacky telling her this? To flatter her and convince her that he was on her side? To make her feel nervous and dependent on him? Or both?

“Sugar?”

“Yes, please.” Polly held out her cup, then lifted the steaming espresso to her mouth and swallowed uneasily. Since Jacky Herbert was a man, she automatically distrusted him. He was also, of course, an art dealer, and — like most museum people — she was professionally suspicious of dealers. She knew that Jacky was currently engaged in gathering as many Lorin Jones canvases as he could find, with a view to selling them at large prices when Polly’s book appeared — indeed, he made no secret of this.

On the other hand Jacky (unlike Paolo Carducci) had always been lavish with praise of Jones’s work. More than once he had castigated himself in Polly’s hearing for not doing anything sooner about her paintings.

Also, like many people in the New York art world, Jacky was gay, and Polly didn’t usually distrust gay men. It was clear that some of them, like Jacky, would have preferred to have been born women if they’d been given the choice. Besides, she sympathized with them because, like her, they were so often attracted to the wrong type of guy.

“You’ve been interviewing Lennie Zimmern, I hear,” Jacky remarked after his assistant had left. “Hard work, I should imagine.” He made a wry face.

“Well; yes, rather. He doesn’t approve of personal biography.”

“He wouldn’t.” Jacky giggled. “Wouldn’t want his own written, I’d imagine. And whom else have you seen? Did you talk to what’s-her-name, Marcia, the father’s widow?”

“I saw her briefly. I didn’t learn a hell of a lot, though. You know Lorin Jones never lived with her, and they obviously weren’t close. I’m not sure I’ll bother to see her again.”

“I think you might, you know.” Jacky leaned forward.

“I don’t know. A friend of mine who works for Time says you should always go back for a second interview if you can. And bring a present, so they’ll feel obligated.”

“That sounds like good advice,” Jacky agreed. “I expect Marcia could tell you a lot, if she wanted to.”

“Maybe. There was something I meant to ask you about her, anyhow. Why aren’t there any of Lorin Jones’s pictures in her apartment? I mean, I already knew she didn’t have any, because we asked at the time of the show; but don’t you think that’s a little odd?”

“I don’t know that I do,” Jacky said. “I remember Marcia telling me that after her husband died Lorin came over and packed up all the paintings she had stored there, and shipped them down to Florida. Except of course Who Is Coming?”

“Yes, I remember.” Lorin Jones’s paintings tended to have mysterious, equivocal titles; one of Polly’s most difficult tasks would be to discover their meanings, if any.

“Of course that’s in the Palca Collection now; Paolo sold it for Marcia after Dan Zimmern died. It was Lorin’s wedding present to them, you know.”

“She never told me that.” The truth and nothing but the truth, Polly thought, but not the whole truth. “I’m surprised she wanted to sell it, considering.”

“I expect she had to. I doubt that her husband left her anything to speak of. Money never stuck to his fingers, from what I’ve heard.”

“I wish I could have met Lorin Jones’s father. You knew him, didn’t you?” Polly bent to open her wet briefcase and take out her tape recorder. “Hang on a minute while I start this thing, if you don’t mind.”

Jacky visibly hesitated, then smiled rapidly. “No, go ahead. You’ve already promised to let me edit the transcript, remember? In writing.” He giggled to take the edge off this caution. “If I’m indiscreet I can cut it out later, right?”

“Yeah, right,” Polly agreed.

“Well, let’s see then; what were you asking? Dan Zimmern. I met him three or four times, that’s all, when Lorin had her last show here in sixty-four. He was at the opening, shaking everyone’s hand as if he were the artist himself, very proud. And then he came back afterward several times. He’d always bring friends, and talk up Lorin’s work; what a famous painter she was going to be. He’d tell them they should buy one of her pictures, as an investment. I think a couple of people actually did. But he never stayed long. One minute he’d be all over the place, the next thing you knew he was gone.”

Yes, Polly thought; but at least he was there. Carl Alter had never made it to her first and only one-woman show, in Rochester during her senior year of college. “What was he like?”

“Oh, a big, good-looking old fellow; full of life. Smart too, probably, but he didn’t know beans about art. A macho type. He was on his third wife, and well over seventy, but still looking around, eyeing the girls at the opening.”

“Really.” Carl Alter too was on his third wife, his daughter thought.

“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 understanding 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 financial 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.

This vision upset Polly, almost made her sick to her stomach — or maybe that was just the jolting of the bus. She mustn’t be unreasonable, she told herself; mustn’t become paranoid. That was what her colleagues at work would say; that’s what she would have said herself a few weeks ago.

But were her colleagues right, or was it that, away from her job, and from the deals and arrangements and assumptions of the New York art world, she was beginning to see it clearly for the first time?

That was what Jeanne, with her suspicion of all established “patriarchal” institutions, would probably have said. Jeanne took it for granted that these institutions were corrupt and to be avoided, though it was sometimes necessary to work with them until alternative decentralized, egalitarian, woman-centered structures had been established. Every second Tuesday evening she and some of her friends met in an apartment on First Avenue to discuss this and other political issues; as yet, Polly hadn’t joined them, though she had been invited.

Jeanne had moved into Stevie’s room three weeks ago, bringing with her a quantity of possessions surprising for someone who had lived in so many different cities and apartments. Polly had had to stack most of Stevie’s things in the spare room. But apart from this it had been a joy having her here. Jeanne was easygoing, well organized, sympathetic, and fair-minded; she was a lively conversationalist and an inspired cook. When Polly was alone she mostly opened frozen so-called gourmet dinners that, like airplane food, looked all right but tasted like reconstituted mashed potatoes, and she was always out of clean towels or butter or light bulbs, having to run down to the laundry room or out to the supermarket at awkward times.

Jeanne saw to it that they never needed anything; she brought flowers and books and chocolates into the house; she set her flourishing houseplants on the windowsills and added her large collection of classical tapes to Polly’s. If Polly wanted to work, Jeanne was quiet and unobtrusive; but she was always ready to go shopping or to a film or a gallery after work and on weekends, when her girlfriend’s suspicious, abusive husband was home.

Polly and Jeanne were so much together that Jeanne’s friend Ida had recently nicknamed them the Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat, after the characters in Eugene Field’s poem for children.

The gingham dog and the calico cat

Side by side on the table sat...

The reference was also to their taste in clothes: Polly wore a lot of checks and plaids, while Jeanne favored delicate, old-fashioned prints. When Polly looked the poem up she discovered that the characters fought like cats and dogs, and for a few days she worried about this, wondering if Ida had intuited some potential conflict. But so far she and Jeanne had never even disagreed seriously.

Polly’s worry about What People Would Think had also faded. All Jeanne’s friends knew she was in love with a woman in Brooklyn Heights, and Polly had taken care to tell Jim the same. His reaction had been, as usual, muted and neutral: “Oh, mmh.”

The only problem with having Jeanne in the apartment was her girlfriend, Betsy. Polly didn’t exactly dislike Betsy, but on the other hand she had nothing much to say to her. She was a bony, heavily freckled young woman (twenty-seven) with flyaway strawberry blonde hair and a hesitant, nervous manner. She was, Polly supposed, vaguely pretty; tall and leggy, with a miniature beaked nose like a little white parrot, and a swollen pink mouth that was always slightly open, as if she had started to speak and then stopped herself; something she often did. Her favorite painter was Salvador Dali, and she didn’t see the point of abstract art: the colors were kind of nice sometimes, she admitted, but it wasn’t awfully interesting or complex really, was it?

Because of Betsy’s husband’s growing suspicions (he had found an unequivocally affectionate but unsigned note from Jeanne, and thought his wife was seeing another man), she and Jeanne had begun meeting in Manhattan. Usually they came to the apartment during the day when Polly was out; but last night Betsy had stayed over for the first time, telling her husband the literal but deceptive truth: that she was spending the night with a girlfriend. (“Oh yes, Betsy’s here,” Polly had had to tell him when he phoned to check up. “Sure, just a moment, I’ll call her.”)

Of course Polly wanted Jeanne to be happy, but it had made her uncomfortable that Jeanne and Betsy were being happy in Stevie’s room and in Stevie’s bunk bed. Most of the time she managed not to imagine what they did together. Probably not much, she thought usually: there was something silly and pointless about the idea of two soft female bodies rubbing up against each other. But last night, though she tried not to, she couldn’t help listening and wondering what exactly Jeanne and Betsy were doing and whether they were doing it in the upper bunk or the lower one. In the lower bed there would be the problem of whoever was on top hitting her head — but maybe women only lay side by side, because otherwise how. ... Up above, there would be the danger of falling out. She lay awake for some time waiting for a thud, a scream, a thump.

On the whole Polly hoped they had used the upper bed, where nobody ever slept except now and then one of Stevie’s pals. That was stupid, because what difference could it make to Stevie, who would never know that Betsy had been here, anyway? Probably, Polly realized unwillingly, she was envious, because it had been over a year since she’d made love to anyone except, without much enthusiasm, herself.

When Polly got home from her interview with Jacky Herbert she was even wetter than she had been at the gallery, and chilled through. Jeanne took one look at her friend and insisted on her taking a hot shower at once.

“Well. All right,” Polly said. It was so long since anyone had been there to meet her and show any sort of solicitude that she still received it almost ungraciously.

“And I’ll make you a nice cup of cocoa.”

“You don’t have to do that.” Polly struggled out of her poncho.

“I know I don’t have to.” Jeanne smiled. “But I want to.” She headed for the kitchen.

“Has Betsy gone?” Polly called, pulling off her sopping loafers.

“Mm.” Jeanne gave a long breathy sigh. “I’ll tell you about it after you’re warmed up.”

“Not too sweet for you, is it?” Jeanne asked half an hour later.

“No, just right.” Polly sighed with satisfaction. She had finished her shower and now sat in old jeans and a favorite lumberjack shirt at the kitchen table, drinking cocoa spiced with cinnamon and topped with cream, and eating Jeanne’s homemade Scottish shortbread. “So is everything going well with Betsy?”

“I guess so.” Jeanne sighed again. “She says she’s going to tell her husband this week that we’re in love.”

“Oh, that’s good.” Jeanne did not reply. “Isn’t it?”

“It’s good if Betsy really does it. She promised she was going to speak to him once before, you know. But it didn’t happen.”

“Maybe she’s afraid of him,” Polly suggested, remembering Betsy’s husband’s tense, edgy voice on the phone.

“That’s what I think. But Betsy says not. She says she really did plan to tell him on Tuesday, but he came home with a terrible cold, and she hadn’t got the heart to do it. Apparently his colds always last at least a week.” Jeanne smiled joylessly and poured herself more cocoa, slopping it into the saucer in an uncharacteristically careless way.

“That’s too bad,” Polly agreed. “Still, I suppose it shows that Betsy’s a very considerate person.”

“It shows she’s very considerate of him.” Jeanne stirred her own cocoa crossly. “But there are three people involved here, right?”

“I see what you mean. Only, you know, I think she does love you.”

“Yes. I think she does.” Jeanne smiled again, but now very differently, in a sensual, reminiscent way that made Polly look away. “I know it’s going to be all right eventually; I just get impatient.”

“Well, sure.”

“I know, really, that soon we’ll be together every night.” Jeanne nodded, agreeing with herself.

“Every night, here?” Polly tried to make this question casual.

“Oh, no; in Brooklyn Heights. As soon as that creep is out of the house, of course I’ll move in.”

“Of course,” Polly echoed. But what she thought was: No more intimate conversations; no more homemade cocoa or shortbread. A chord of rejection and loss twanged in her, and the selfish wish that Betsy wouldn’t be able to get her husband out of the house until Stevie came home. “Well, I hope it’s really soon,” she lied, ashamed of herself.