The Truth About Lorin Jones

11

IN THE MAUVE AFTERGLOW of a warm December sunset, Polly Alter stood by the registration desk of a women-only guest house in Key West, dizzy with heat and travel fatigue. This morning in New York everything had been gray and gritty, like a bad mezzotint. She’d woken with such a sick, heavy cold that she called to cancel her flight, but all she could get on the phone was the busy signal. Giving up, she dragged herself and her duffel bag out to the terminal. There, aching and snuffling, she shuffled onto a plane and was blown through the stratosphere from black-and-white to technicolor. Five hours later she climbed out into a steamy, glowing tropical afternoon with coconut palms and blue-green ocean, exactly like a cheap travel poster.

It wasn’t only the scenery that was unreal. Most of the people she’d seen, beginning with the taxi driver, were weird. They moved and spoke in slow motion, as if something were a little wrong with the projector. Lee, the manageress of Artemis Lodge, was so slowed down she seemed drugged. It had taken her five minutes to find Polly’s reservation, and now she couldn’t find the key to Polly’s room.

“I know it’s here somewhere. I just can’t locate it right this moment, is all,” Lee drawled, smiling lazily. She was a sturdy, darkly tanned, handsome woman, a middle-aged version of one of Gauguin’s Polynesian beauties. She had a bush of shoulder-length black hair streaked with stone gray, a leathery skin flushed to hot magenta on her broad cheekbones, and knobbed bare brown feet.

While Polly waited, Lee shifted papers and slid drawers open and shut. She kept breaking off her search to answer the phone, to find a stamp for another guest, to offer Polly passion-fruit juice and nacho crackers (Polly declined, feeling her stomach rise), and to assure her that if she couldn’t get into the room tonight she’d be real comfortable on the porch swing.

Polly slumped against the desk with her duffel bag and her stuffed-up nose and her headache, listening to the irritating tinkle of the colored-glass wind chimes as they swayed in the sultry evening breeze. Maybe she should just get the hell out of here now and find a motel.

As Lee set down her sweating purple glass of passion-fruit juice and began to search again through sliding heaps of papers, Polly asked herself if maybe Ida, who had never liked her, had deliberately sent her to a dump full of crazies.

“Listen,” she said. “It’s getting late; maybe I’d better go look for a motel.”

“Hell no, you can’t do that.” Lee laughed almost nervously. “Ida’d kill me if I let any friend of hers go to a motel.”

“I’m not really a friend of Ida’s,” Polly protested. “I mean, I don’t know her that well, she just recommended —”

“Eureka!” Grinning broadly with triumph, showing strong white irregular Polynesian teeth, Lee held up a key. “I knew it was here somewhere.”

The first thing Polly did, after dumping her luggage on a garish orange batik bedspread and going out for a hamburger, was to call Hugh Cameron. She stood in a telephone booth at the front of the coffee shop watching a procession of tourists and weirdos pass along Duval Street, and trying over in her mind the speech she had rehearsed. (“This is Paula Alter from New York, you remember I wrote to you about Lorin Jones. I know you said you were busy, but I’ve come all the way to Key West to talk to you, it’s really important, so ... please ... if you could ...”)

As she listened to the ring, she imagined Cameron slowly, impatiently getting up from his chair, crossing the floor. ... He was a difficult, rude person, everyone in New York said so. He might shout at her or curse her — tell her to get lost, to fuck off.

The steady burring of the phone, at first menacing, gradually became mechanical. Either Hugh Cameron wasn’t home, or he wasn’t answering. Ill, exhausted, she slumped against the side of the booth. She wished she had never come here; she wished she had never heard of Key West, or of Lorin Jones. She was tired of chasing this elusive contradictory woman around the East Coast, tired of trying to sort through the lies and half lies of her former associates. Ultimately, it was Lorin’s fault that she was here in this steamy miserable place instead of home in bed.

Really, everything that had gone wrong for her over the last few months was because of Lorin Jones. If she hadn’t had to travel around doing interviews, she would never have agreed to Stevie’s spending the fall term with his father. Jeanne wouldn’t have moved in, so there would have been no awkward sexual encounter between them, and Betsy might never even have set foot in the apartment.

And it was Lorin’s fault, ultimately, that Polly was probably going to lose her son. Stevie still hadn’t definitely decided that he wanted to return to Denver after Christmas, but Jim said he seemed to be “leaning in that direction.” It was a typical Jim cliché, but Polly couldn’t help but imagine it literally; she saw Stevie standing just east of Denver, on some high snowy mountain road, leaning toward the city as if in a hard wind.

Also, when Jim last called, he had informed Polly that he had some “very good news”: his new wife was expecting a baby. When she heard this Polly felt a surge of irrational rage that made it impossible for her to congratulate him. How dare Jim have any other child than Stevie? This was followed by an even stronger rush of furious envy. I could have a baby, too, she thought, I’m not forty yet; but I never will. Probably I will spend the rest of my life completely alone.

Polly’s nose was running again; her head ached worse. She hung up, paid for the half-eaten hamburger, and staggered back to her room. There she peeled off her once-crisp shirt and slacks, now sweaty and limp. She brushed her teeth with disgustingly lukewarm water that refused to run cold, climbed into the low, creaking rattan platform bed, and more or less passed out.

She woke late the next morning, hot and sweaty in a heavy splash of orange sun from the window whose blind she had forgotten to draw last night — hot and sweaty, too, from the receding clutch of, yes, a wet dream. Well, no wonder; she’d been celibate for weeks, and before Jeanne for nearly a year. Now she was in a place where the very air, blowing from the fishing piers and the tidal flats, smelled of sex. The dream had had a shore and fish in it too, and — she remembered with irritation — a man. She lunged out of bed and went in search of a shower, preferably a cold one.

But as she stood in the cool flood of water Polly noticed something else: her flu was gone. For some goddamn reason, she felt perfectly well. Okay. What she had to do now was finish her research, go back to New York, write the book, and be done with it; through with Lorin Jones forever. She scoured herself dry with a coarse striped beach towel, and put on her Banana Republic jumpsuit, which seemed right for an explorer in dubious tropical territory.

Downstairs, after a late breakfast (sweet, pulpy fresh-squeezed orange juice, decaffeinated tea, and muesli), she tried Cameron’s number again from the guest-house phone, while Lee, who had insisted on hearing all about the project, openly listened. When he didn’t answer, Lee was optimistic.

“Aw, don’t worry. Probably the old guy was out last night; and he could be at work now. What’s his job?”

“I don’t know. He was teaching at some college in the Midwest about ten years ago, but nobody seems to know which one. But I figure he must have retired by now, since he’s back in Key West.”

“Well, still. He could be buying groceries at Fausto’s or anywhere. Why don’t you forget about your research for a while, go out and enjoy yourself? Have a swim; see something of the island.”

“I haven’t got time for anything like that, I’m afraid,” Polly said tightly.

“What’s the hurry, hon?” Lee gave her a wide friendly, maybe even more than friendly, grin. “You can stay here as long as you like; I’ll put you on the weekly rate. And it’s a really pretty day out, you should take advantage of it. There’s supposed to be a storm on the way.”

“A storm?”

“Yeah, it was on the TV this morning — not those newsroom idiots in Miami, but our local radar station, so it could be true. You wait half an hour, I’ll come with you.” She leaned so far over the cluttered bamboo desk toward Polly that her low-cut oversize tangerine muumuu gaped, revealing full brown breasts with enlarged mushroom-colored nipples. Her flesh had the heavy, inert luster that Gauguin admired, and Polly didn’t.

She hesitated only a moment before declining. It was the first offer, or hint of an offer, that’d come her way since the fiasco with Jeanne. But even if she’d found Lee attractive there was something about her, just as there was about Key West, that put Polly off: something loose and lazily overheated. Besides, even if she stayed longer on this loose, overheated island she had no time to waste: she had to check out all seventeen art galleries in the Yellow Pages, visit the Bureau of Vital Statistics and the library, and keep trying Hugh Cameron’s phone number.

Some hours later Polly stood in yet another gallery where nobody had ever heard of Lorin Jones, going through the pretense of looking at the exhibit. The paintings were still lifes mostly, large acrylics thick with muddy reds and oranges, ugly derivatives of the recently fashionable new realism.

God, she thought, standing in front of a soupy overworked portrait of a television set and a dirty potted philodendron, I could paint as well as that. Better. What a farce it all was: a no-talent artist like this could get himself shows, grants, prizes, dealers, reviews, sales to museums and collectors (all described in the glossy brochure the gallery owner had pressed upon her). So why the hell had Polly ever quit?

Moving away from the pictures, she stared out the plate-glass window. A cloud had slid over the sun, changing everything. Like a stage set after the lights have been turned off, Key West had lost its meretricious charm; it looked faded, tacky, makeshift.

I should have kept on with my painting, she thought. Then maybe I wouldn’t be trying to write a book about somebody I never knew, can’t know. Who wouldn’t have liked me if I had known her, because she didn’t like critics and dealers and museum people; everybody says that. She would have hated me, probably.

And I might have hated Lorin Jones if I’d known her, Polly thought, staring out at the loose-leaved unnatural trees, the peeling white frame houses, and the potholed street. I do hate her, in a way, because of all the trouble that’s come into my life through her. And because she was a brilliant painter, and I’m not.

The whole thing was bitterly unfair. Why should someone self-centered and evasive and untrustworthy like Lorin have received this gift from the gods, instead of a warmhearted, straightforward, honest person like Polly Alter?

No sense in asking this. When thousands of people were starving and dying all over the world, a little divine slipup like giving Lorin Jones genius and enduring fame and Polly Alter nothing but unprofitable drudgery, and some old muddy canvases stored in a disused bathtub, didn’t even signify.

But in a way it wasn’t so much the gods’ fault as Lorin’s, Polly thought. When she was a child, an adolescent, her drawings and paintings had been warmly praised, just as Lorin’s were; she too had won prizes and honors. In college, and for a few years afterward, she had hoped, even almost expected, to become an established American painter. She couldn’t paint full-time, like Lorin, because she didn’t have a rich, influential critic for a husband; she had to support herself. She didn’t have an entrée to New York galleries, either. But she had struggled on, working and hoping, until it all went wrong.

And when had it all gone wrong? Polly knew exactly when. It had happened in Eastham, Massachusetts, on her honeymoon, at the moment when she came down to breakfast and saw Lorin Jones’s landscape over the sideboard in the dining room of the inn, above two turned wooden candlesticks and a bowl of oranges. She had gazed and admired; she hadn’t known yet, or hadn’t admitted to herself what it meant: that someone else, Lorin Jones, had already done everything she’d ever wanted or hoped to do in painting.

But unconsciously she must have realized what had happened to her. Because it was from that moment that her hand had faltered, her work had begun to go bad, as she struggled not to imitate Jones, to avoid her choice of colors, her characteristic subjects, her handling of paint. Without lifting a finger, just by being born twenty years sooner, Lorin Jones had destroyed Polly Alter as a painter.

And Polly couldn’t do anything about it. She couldn’t paint anymore, and she couldn’t even the score; she couldn’t hurt Lorin Jones, because she was already dead. Instead, she had contracted to exalt her rival, to make her even more famous and admired.

Or — the possibility hissed in her ear like a snake — she could write her book to show that Lorin Jones, however gifted, was a cold, selfish, vengeful, secretive person, and a complete neurotic. She could suggest that there is a choice sometimes between being a good person and a good painter, and that Jones had chosen the darker path.

Leaving the gallery, Polly headed north and west across the island in the direction of the house where Lorin Jones had once lived. If she was really lucky, its owner would be home and willing to talk. If she was really unlucky, the building would have been torn down and replaced by a motel or a grocery.

The sun had come out again, and the sky was the color of a gas flame, but nothing she passed seemed real. The sun was too large and glaringly luminous, the houses were too small and uniformly white, and everything that grew around them looked as stiff and unnatural as a Rousseau jungle: giant scaly palms like vegetable alligators; scarlet-flowering deciduous trees with enormous writhing roots and varnished leaves and long snaky pale brown creepers hanging down from above. Below them gardens burgeoned with unnatural flowers: oversized pink shrimps, glossy magenta trumpets with obscene red pistils, and foot-long crimson bottle-brushes.

The fauna were just as exotic and unreal as the flora. Huge speckled spiders swayed in six-foot webs between the branches of the tropical trees; little pale gray lizards skittered nervously along whitewashed fences, then suddenly froze into bits of dried leaf. In one yard there were white long-necked birds the size of turkeys; in another a tortoise-shell cat as large as a terrier.

And then, even worse, there were the people. A bearded bum with a foot-long iguana draped around his neck like her grandmother’s old fox fur; a woman walking two long-haired dachshunds in plaid boxer shorts; a man in a Karl Marx T-shirt and frayed canvas sandals getting out of a white Cadillac. A half-naked youth waved to Polly from an upstairs window; and in one of the flowering trees overhead a long-haired pirate in a red bandanna and gold earrings, pruning with a wicked-looking chainsaw, grinned and shouted at her to look out below.

As she made her way across town, Polly kept an uneasy watch for Hugh Cameron. She’d never seen a picture of him, but whenever she passed a tall, fair, thin man in his sixties (“pale and weedy” had been Garrett Jones’s phrase), she gave him a quick, suspicious stare. In front of the library (which was of shrimp-pink stucco) she almost crossed the street to ask the guy if he was Cameron, and only halted because another elderly man came out of the building at the same time and addressed her suspect as “Frank.”

The house Lorin had once rented was still standing. Like so many others on the island, it was a white frame cottage or bungalow — smaller than most, better cared for than some. Polly recognized the square pillars and the heavy shadowing overhang of the roof under which Lorin Jones had stood in her last known photograph.

In the side yard, behind a tall picket fence, two youngish men in Hawaiian shorts were sunning themselves on a deck. One had shielded his face with the Wall Street Journal; the other was reading Christopher Street, holding it horizontally over his head as a sunshade. Two gay Republicans, wouldn’t you just know it, had taken over Lorin’s old house.

While she stood and stared, the one reading glanced at her, then lowered his paper and sat up. “Excuse me, are you looking for someone?” he called.

“No.” Polly hesitated. “Well, yes, sort of.”

“Maybe we can help.” He came to the gate and leaned over it, followed by his friend.

Yes, it was their house, they told her, speaking almost in unison, but they knew nothing of its history. They’d bought the place three years ago, from an old lady who was dead now. No, they’d never met her. All they knew was she’d lived up in Miami and rented the place out for years to a succession of low-life types. It was an absolute wreck, a real disaster area. But since then they’d done it over completely; the former tenants probably wouldn’t have even recognized it.

“Oh. Well. Thank you,” Polly kept saying, her spirits sinking lower with each revelation. She started to leave, but the yuppies wouldn’t allow it; they insisted on taking her around first.

“Aw, no, it’s no trouble. You’ve come all this way, for Christ’s sake. Anyhow, we love to show the place off, don’t we, Phil?”

“Right,” Phil agreed. “Besides, we’re grateful to you. It’s kind of thrilling to find out that a famous painter once lived in our house.”

“You know, it’s fantastic luck that we were around when you came,” his friend said, holding open the screen door. “Practically fate.”

“Ron’s right. See, most of the year we’re up in the Catskills and the place is rented out. We just come down for vacation in December; that’s the slow time in real estate.”

Polly followed Phil and Ron through the anonymous-looking low white rooms with their straw matting, glass-topped bamboo tables, waxy-leaved tropical plants, and bland framed posters, like some up-market resort hotel. Lorin’s spirit was wholly absent; nothing suggested that she ever could have lived or worked here.

Phil and Ron were unaware of Polly’s disappointment. Euphorically they showed her all their improvements (“You like the bathroom? Well, if you could have seen it before we moved in you would have absolutely shuddered, wouldn’t she, Ron?”) and invited her to have lunch with them on the deck; they wanted to hear all about Lorin Jones.

“Thanks, but I don’t think —”

“Oh no. You must, absolutely. It’s all ready anyhow. I’ve got a nice estate-bottled New York white wine in the fridge, and fresh croissants from the French bakery. And Phil’s made a great shrimp salad with sprouts and his special green sesame dressing. There’s lots more than we ought to eat.” Ron patted his perfectly flat stomach.

Polly opened her mouth to refuse politely. She didn’t drink at lunch on principle, and she would obviously learn nothing more here. But something blurry and laissez-faire — the backwash of her cold, or the indolent sensual spirit of Key West — seemed to have gotten into her, and she found herself accepting instead.

Halfway through the meal, she was glad she had. While she was describing Lorin’s early work, Ron suddenly put down his fork.

“Say, Phil,” he exclaimed. “Maybe that’s how the lizard got into the broom closet.”

“Hey, right! Come on, we’ll show you.”

Polly followed them into the house. There, on the back wall of the closet below a shelf, was an exquisite pencil drawing about two inches by three. From a few feet away it looked like a real lizard.

“It could be Lorin Jones’s,” she said, catching her breath. “Of course there’s no way of being sure. But why would it be in the closet?”

“Maybe this was where she saw it,” Ron said. “These lizards often come indoors.”

“They come into the house?”

“Oh, yeah,” Phil confirmed. “We see them all the time.”

“Ugh.” Polly looked around uneasily.

“They’re useful, you know. They catch insects: flies, mosquitoes, you name it.”

“You’re suggesting that she did this from life,” Polly said.

“I guess so. What do you think?”

“It could be,” she repeated. For the first time in many weeks, Lorin’s ghost was suddenly present to her, standing close beside her in the broom closet, drawing carefully on the whitewashed plaster with one thin pale hand. Drawing a self-portrait, Polly thought; a portrait of her own soul: thin, evasive, nervous, cold-blooded.

“You know, it’s a relief to think an artist made this picture,” Ron said. “We’ve always been a little leery of it, really.”

“Leery?”

“We weren’t really worried, of course —” Phil put in with a kind of laugh.

“Oh, yes, we were. You especially. You wanted to paint it over.”

“Well, see, we thought it might be some kind of — you know, superstitious stuff.”

“Voodoo,” Ron supplied. “There’s still a good bit of that here on the island, you know. Especially among the black population. Most of them are from the West Indies originally —”

“The Cubans, too,” Phil said. “There’s a waitress in the Fourth-of-July that I’m positive has the evil eye. And peculiar things do happen in the cemetery sometimes.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, well. I don’t know. You see funny moving lights at night. Or you hear noises —”

“It’s probably all just foolishness,” Ron interrupted. “You know how people like to talk.”

“I suppose so,” Polly said. She shook her head to clear it of foolishness. “Were there other pictures like this here when you bought the house?”

“No, nothing,” Ron said. “But of course most of the rooms had probably been painted since your artist died. Maybe more than once, in all that time. I mean, how long was it, between her and us?”

“About twelve years,” Polly admitted. She turned and scanned the walls. Under the glossy white paint, were there other larger, more beautiful, more disturbing drawings: reptiles, insects, birds, flowers, faces — ghostly visions, hidden from her now as so much about Lorin was hidden?

Polly walked slowly back toward the guest house in the increasing afternoon heat, feeling overfed, dazed, and disconnected, as if she were floating through a TV show with the color turned up too high. Maybe she was slightly drunk, or her cold was coming back. Or maybe she was suffering from climate shock; she had never been in the tropics before, or anywhere south of Washington, D.C. Maybe that was why everything looked so brilliant and nothing seemed real.

Probably I should go back to my room and try to sleep it off, Polly thought. Then I ought to go to the county courthouse and look for the records of Lorin Jones’s death — from pneumonia, according to her brother. Before she came to Key West Polly had accepted the diagnosis without question, but now it seemed the most blatant of lies. How the hell could anyone get pneumonia in this climate, let alone die of it?

Partly to delay a possibly futile task, partly because the sun was so hard and bright, Polly turned off onto a shaded side street. Here she had to walk more slowly, for heavy-scented sprays of flowers hung down into her face, and the sidewalks had been crazily heaved and split by twisting reptilian roots.

She checked Lee’s map again and saw that she wasn’t far from Hugh Cameron’s house. Maybe he’d be home now; maybe if she confronted him in person she’d have a chance of getting him to talk. She had to find him and interview him, because nobody else seemed to know what had happened to Lorin Jones after she left Wellfleet, how she got to Key West, what she did there, or how she died. If Polly couldn’t talk to Cameron there would be a great awkward gap in her book, and she would look like an incompetent ass.

The house on Frances Street was another low white bungalow, unremarkable except for a particularly odd tropical tree covered with what looked like purple orchids. And for its location: it was directly across the street from the town cemetery. Also, Polly realized despondently, the house itself looked like a tomb: closed up, almost abandoned. The front windows were shuttered and there was a drift of dead leaves on the porch; the high wooden gate to the back yard was overhung with brambly bougainvillea, blossoming a glaring scarlet. Either Hugh Cameron was out of town, or he was a slob who didn’t care what his place looked like.

Polly climbed the steps and rang the bell. No one came, and there was no sound from inside the house. Cursing her luck, wondering what the hell to do next, she walked slowly on down the street. In the heat of mid-afternoon it was silent and deserted. Presumably everyone was either at the beach or having a siesta. A sudden, demented impulse came over her, a desire to emulate them, to return to her room and the heated dreams of last night; or to doze half-naked on the hot sand, surrounded by the half-naked bodies of strangers. But it would be stupid and slothful to waste her time lying down either inside or out. She wasn’t here on vacation, she was here to work. And what she should do now was go back to Hugh Cameron’s house and leave him a note.

As she retraced her steps along Frances Street Polly noticed something moving at the far end of the next block, right by Cameron’s place. Yes! the side gate was opening under the bougainvillea, and a man carrying an extension ladder was coming out. It was definitely not Cameron, though, but a tall blond guy about her own age in white painter’s overalls, heading for a pickup truck by the curb. But if he’d been working on the house, this guy might know when Cameron would be back. Polly started to run toward him.

At the sound of her feet on the uneven sidewalk the man shoved the ladder into the truck and turned. From a distance of about thirty feet, he gave Polly first a glance of casual curiosity, then a grin of sexual appreciation; finally he held his arms out wide, mockingly, as if to catch her.

Polly stopped short at the opposite end of the block, abashed and angry. The painter grinned, shrugged, climbed into the cab, started the engine, and drove off.

Immobilized, Polly watched the vehicle turn the corner, displaying a legend on its side: REVIVALS CONSTRUCTION. The shiny aluminum ladder winked as it caught the sunlight, and the red rag tied to its end gave her an insulting little wave as it disappeared.

She continued to stand on the sidewalk, breathing hard, though she’d only gone a few yards — furious at both him and herself. Why hadn’t she just run on past, ignoring the bastard? Or, more practically, why hadn’t she walked up and spoken to him, asked where Cameron was? She’d lived in New York for years; she was used to being joshed and leered and whistled at by pig construction workers. If this guy imagined she was interested in him, running toward him, she could have turned on the chilly, scornful look that she always directed at those ignorant creeps.

It was this awful climate: the sun, the heat, the humidity: slowing her down, mixing her up. She set her jaw, checked the map again, and started at a steady New York pace for the center of town.

By half-past five Polly had called Hugh Cameron again three times unsuccessfully. She had refused Lee’s iced herbal tea and homemade carob cookies. She had discovered that the county courthouse records office was closed for the afternoon, and she had visited two more art galleries and found out nothing. In one of them the walls were covered with overpriced schlock seascapes and posters, and nobody had ever heard of Lorin Jones. The young woman in the other, more sophisticated, gallery had no idea that Lorin Jones had ever lived in Key West.

This gallery was air-conditioned, and her conversation with its owner pleasant; but when Polly emerged onto Duval Street a new blast of depression and hot air engulfed her. Already the shadows of the buildings were lengthening; she had been in Key West for twenty-four hours and accomplished zilch. She had collected no useful information, and she couldn’t reach the bastard she’d come to interview. All she had found was a tiny drawing whose authorship could never be proven. As Polly stood on the sidewalk trying to decide what to do next, tourists and hippies and freaks pushed past her, all headed in the same direction. They must be on their way to Mallory Dock, where according to Ron and Phil throngs gathered every evening to gawk at outdoor performers and the sunset over the Gulf of Mexico. Polly had no interest in either, but the flow of traffic and her own fatigue and lassitude pulled her along with the crowd. And maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. After all, sunset on Mallory Dock was an established local ritual, one that Lorin Jones must have known of — probably witnessed.

At the dock, a raised cement jetty on the far side of a large parking lot, the tourists were already thick. The pale, light-speckled sea was dotted with boats of all sizes from dinghy to trawler: sailboats plunged and turned, motor launches idled raucously, and in the middle distance a cream-sailed schooner rocked at anchor. Farther out, low gray-green mangrove islands floated on the horizon like vegetable whales.

A few members of the crowd sat on the low wall at the outer edge of the pier, gazing across the water. Others loitered at the stalls on the inland side, buying cheap shell jewelry, palm-frond hats, slices of red watermelon, bad watercolors, clumsy woven leatherwork, hand-painted T-shirts, and crumbly homemade cookies. But the press was greatest around the street performers: two clowns, one on a unicycle; a skinny contortionist; a huge sweating giant who juggled with flaming torches; a Caribbean steel band; and a pair of white-faced mimes accompanied by a performing poodle.

According to Ron and Phil many of the same acts came to Mallory Dock year after year. Could any of them have been here in Lorin Jones’s time? Not likely; in the late sixties most of these people would have been toddlers; only the mimes looked even middle-aged.

Since it was possible that Lorin had once seen them, Polly edged into the crowd around the mimes. In spite of their strenuous antics they seemed to be suffering from the heat and humidity as she was, and perhaps from a similar depression. Their movements were dreamy, exhausted, and artificial — even arty; their costumes classical. They might have posed for Picasso in his blue or rose period, or for one of his imitators. The woman wore a faded rose tutu; her partner, wrinkled azure tights and a lozenge-patterned tunic. But their faces were painted like clowns’ faces, and the man had on an orange fright wig and a red ball nose. Were they deliberately mocking the classic images of modern art, images that must float in the subconscious of at least some of the circling, gawking tourists?

As she watched, the scrawny poodle, which had been dyed a faded pink and wore a ruff and dunce cap, was encouraged to leap onto a high stool. The male clown then did a wobbly headstand, and the woman placed a tissue-paper-covered hoop between his uplifted feet. Then, with exaggerated moues and gestures, she urged the poodle to jump through the hoop. But each time it was about to do so, the clown pretended to lose his balance. He fell to the ground, miming consternation and embarrassment while the crowd laughed. Then, miming pain and woozy comic determination, he stood on his head again, and again the woman placed the hoop between his feet. Every time the man fell, the poodle hesitated and barked anxiously. Since its human companions remained silent, its harsh, excited yap was jarring.

Yeah, Polly thought. That’s how it is. Men are unreliable and incompetent show-offs, playing to the public for sympathy when they fail. The woman encourages the poodle, who’s obviously their child; but the man lets them both down. Right on. She shook her head to clear it and eased her way out of the crowd.

As the hazy sun slid toward the pale crumpled water, she headed back up the pier, idly scanning the stalls. Then, less idly, she halted near a table heaped with batik-print shirts that looked as if someone had thrown up on them in Technicolor. Behind) it stood someone she thought she’d seen before: the workman with the ladder who’d been at Cameron’s house earlier that afternoon. At least, this guy had the same golden tan, long narrow features, and streaked light hair. And, look, his faded green T-shirt, with the sleeves rolled to the muscled shoulders, was printed with the words REVIVALS CONSTRUCTION. Maybe her luck had turned; at least she’d been given another chance to find out where Cameron was.

She moved toward the stall, then stepped back, waiting for some customers to finish their purchase.

“Hey, lady!” Revivals Construction called to her. “Don’t go away. I’ve got just the thing for you.” Up close he looked more worn than he had at a distance: his tan was leathery and engraved with lines, especially around the eyes, and his hair wasn’t blond, but a bleached and faded brown.

Polly halted, prepared to give him a freezing look. But the guy’s tone was anonymous; probably he didn’t remember seeing her before. Very likely he routinely stared and whistled at any female that came within range. She moved forward again through the crowd.

“Thanks, honey.” He counted out change for a customer and handed over a plastic sack, then turned back to Polly. “Here. This’ll look real good on you.” From the pile of T-shirts he pulled out a rose-red one speckled in a white paint-drip design like an early Pollock.

“I don’t know —” Actually the shirt wasn’t half-bad. “How much is it?”

Revivals Construction gave her a sidelong smile. “For you, four dollars.”

Polly studied the cloth for flaws. “The one you just sold was six-fifty.”

“Yep. The uglier they are, the more they cost. ... Sure, it’s washable.” (This was to another customer.) “You can put it into the machine if you want. It’s up to you.”

“All right,” Polly decided, digging into her tote bag.

“I saw you before this afternoon,” she added as she paid. “Over on Frances Street.”

“Yeah.” He half smiled. “I saw you too.”

“I wanted to ask you something,” Polly persisted, a little discomfited.

“Sure. ... They’re all natural fabric, one hundred percent cotton, pure vegetable dyes, okay?... All right, ask me.”

“You were working on a house.”

“I was... What? Six-fifty each, like the sign says, two for twelve.” Three oversize teenagers in shorts had shoved their way through the crowd. “Extra-large, right over here. ... Listen,” he added to Polly. “This is a madhouse. Why don’t you meet me for a drink after sunset? Say in half an hour. ... Sure, we’ve got children’s sizes, wait a sec. They’re in a box underneath here somewhere. ... Okay?”

“Okay,” Polly agreed.

“Billie’s on Front Street. Out back in the garden, it’s quieter. You got that? ... Right. Here you are, don’t grab, please: kiddie sizes two, four, six, eight. If you don’t want that one, don’t throw it at me, just put it back on the table, okay? Jesus... So I’ll see you later.”

Around Polly as she turned to go there was a change in the crowd; a rise and focusing of sound, a movement away from the stalls and the performers toward the sea. Caught in a layer of smoky vapor, the sticky raspberry sun balanced on the shimmering horizon, then began to flatten and dissolve. There was a hush, then an increasing patter of applause; finally even a few cheers. Polly didn’t join in. The ceremony seemed to her not, as Phil had put it, “kind of cute,” but phony and self-indulgent. Even before the applause had slackened she had begun to make her way back through the crowd toward Duval Street.