The Truth About Lorin Jones

14

“THAT’S REALLY WILD,” LEE exclaimed, laughing aloud as she chopped tomatoes and peppers for a gazpacho and fed them into her blender. The machine’s low-pitched pulsing roar syncopated with the snaredrum spatter of rain on the roof of the veranda; the storm she had been predict ing had arrived. “And you never had any idea who he was?”

“I did think of it for a moment,” Polly said. “But then I decided I was crazy.”

“You really liked him, too, huh? You thought he was a nice guy.”

“Mh,” she admitted.

“Hell, maybe he is a nice guy,” Lee shouted over the sound effects.

“He lied to me,” Polly said stubbornly, accusing the guest-house manager of moral laxness.

“Still —” Lee broke off. “Well, anyhow you got to see something of Key West. ... Right, honey?” she added, grinning and starting on a red onion.

“Mhm,” Polly agreed miserably. She had spent a hot restless night, broken by thunder, flashes of sheet lightning, and finally the crack and boom of a bursting tropical storm. Again and again Mac’s face appeared before her, and his body. You’re really a slow learner, Polly dear, she heard Jeanne’s voice remarking.

Toward morning, the drenched flashlit leaves outside took the form of Lorin Jones’s last photograph, which now wore a mocking lizard smile. You thought he might be yours, but he’s mine, this reptilian Lorin said without moving her lips. Still mine, always mine.

“So overall you’re ahead,” Lee continued. “All you have to do is get the facts out of the guy this afternoon.”

“I wish I never had to speak to him again,” Polly said with emphasis, trying to convince herself of this.

“Now, honey.” Lee turned off the machine with a sinewy brown hand. “I understand how you feel. But after all, if he’s got the data you need —”

“And if he’ll give it to me.” Polly sighed. The rainstorm suited her mood, which was one of streaming depression. She felt like crying, but maybe it was only the onion.

“Why shouldn’t he?” Lee threw in a bunch of peculiar-looking herbs: dark blood-red basil and loose uncurled parsley.

“Because he didn’t want to in the first place, that’s why.” Again Polly sighed, almost groaned.

“So what’re you going to do now?” Lee asked, pouring oil into the machine and muting its tone to a rumbling whir.

“I d’know. Maybe I’ll go look at some more galleries.”

“You might as well. There’s not much chance of a swim today, for sure.” Lee turned off the blender; the spatter of the rain continued, heavier and more insistent. “I’m sorry about the weather, honey,” she said. “But you can’t say I didn’t warn you.”

The lesson for today, Polly thought, as she tramped through a dense foggy downpour that afternoon toward the current Revivals Construction project. Last night’s lowering clouds had sunk even farther over the island, drenching the loose-leaved unnatural trees, the peeling white-frame houses, and the potholed streets. Expect trouble, don’t trust anyone — that was the lesson.

Though it looked finished behind its eight-foot board fence, the house Mac and his crew were remodeling was only a shell. Within, it had been gutted down to the beams and siding; its roof joists were exposed, and its interior walls were mere scaffoldings of two-by-fours snaked with electric cables. The whole back side of the house was gone, covered now only by a sheet of dirty translucent plastic down which the greasy rain slid, giving the skeleton rooms the air of a stage set under construction. A table saw and a jumble of tools and boards sulked under other plastic covers, and a leak over the front door dripped sourly into an orange paint bucket.

“Sorry this place is such a mess,” Mac said, spreading Polly’s dripping poncho over a stack of boards, above which a bare, lit bulb hung from the end of a cord looped around a roof beam. “I’d like to take you out somewhere, but I’m still waiting for a call from the supplier. I sent the other guys home; there’s nothing more they can do until we get a delivery of sheetrock. Here, sit down.” He pulled a paint-spattered folding chair toward her. “Like some coffee?”

“All right,” Polly said; trying to speak neutrally, She had resolved not to lose her cool or waste time in recriminations.

“So how’s everything going?” Mac crouched on the floor to spoon coffee into a battered percolator.

“All right,” she repeated.

“Still angry, huh?” he said, glancing at her over his shoulder.

“And why shouldn’t I be?” Polly asked, striving to keep her voice light. “After all those lies.”

“I could give you a couple of reasons.” Mac stood up; he looked at her knowingly, sensually. Then, registering her lack of response, he stopped smiling. “What the hell,” he said. “I came clean, didn’t I? And talk about lies, you’ve probably heard some whoppers about me from Garrett Jones and those other New York types.”

“I’ve heard about you, yes,” she replied, setting her jaw.

“From Jones?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact.”

“And you assume he always tells the truth, huh.” He grinned.

“It wasn’t only him.” Polly glanced at Mac/Hugh, noting with misery that he was still smiling, that he was still infuriatingly good-looking.

“Okay, who else?”

“Well. Mr. Herbert, at the gallery. He told me a few things, too.”

“Great. A cuckold and a ponce.” Mac rummaged among some hardware on a trestle table and came up with a bag of sugar and a carton of half-and-half. “That’s what an art dealer is, you know. When a guy like that watches a painter at work, he doesn’t see something beautiful being created. What he sees is shit flowing out of the end of her brush and turning into money.”

“That’s not fair,” Polly exclaimed. “I know Jacky Herbert — and Mr. Carducci, too — they honestly admired Lorin Jones’s work.”

“Sure they did.” Mac sat down cowboy-style on a battered bentwood chair. “As long as she could keep it coming, and they could skim their thirty percent.”

“That’s not —” Polly began, and stopped. Why should she defend Jacky or Paolo? She didn’t owe them, or any man, anything. Besides, that wasn’t what she should be doing here; she should be listening, collecting data. “So what’s your version?”

“You really want to know?” Mac tipped his chair away and gave her a hard look over the curved back.

“Yes, of course.”

“All right.” He lowered the chair. “I’ll tell you anything you like. Might as well set the record straight.”

“Okay,” Polly said. “Thanks,” she added ungraciously.

“Right.” The percolator had stopped bubbling; Mac squatted beside it. “Milk and sugar?”

“Just milk, please.”

“So what would you like to know?” he asked, handing her a chipped mug mockingly stenciled in red: KEY WEST—I WENT ALL THE WAY.

“Oh, anything. Everything,” Polly said, forcing a casual, friendly tone and cursing herself for not bringing her tape recorder; she was really fucked up today.

“I suppose Garrett’s story is that I moved in on Lorin, his sweet innocent little genius, and lured her away from him.”

“Something like that, yes,” she agreed.

“I bet he didn’t tell you that while she was living alone for months at a time in that freezing-cold farmhouse in Wellfleet, he was chasing around the country, sleeping with any broad who would have him.” Mac checked Polly’s expression and added, “I’m not inventing that. Everybody in the Arts Center knew it. When he was in P’town he was always trying to put the make on the female Fine Arts fellows.”

“Yeah?” Polly asked, expressing in her tone a doubt she didn’t feel.

“Yeah. He had a standard MO. He’d tell the woman how sensitive and sympathetic she was, and then he’d say how much he could do for her career, if he felt like it. You don’t believe me, you can ask anyone who was around then.”

“Okay, maybe I will,” she said coolly, thinking that Garrett hadn’t changed his approach in twenty years. “You knew him yourself?”

“Oh, sure. He was at half our parties and art openings, bragging about all the famous painters he’d met and the important pictures he owned.”

“Mm,” Polly murmured. Mac was telling the truth, she thought; it was the Garrett Jones she knew, seen through dark glasses.

“He talked a lot about Lorin too. He used to lay it on everybody what a great artist his wife was.”

“I think he loved her, you know,” she protested.

“If you want to call that love.” Mac made a face. “I could tell right away he didn’t have any real feeling for her; she was just part of his collection.”

“And did Lorin Jones know about her husband’s affairs?”

“Well, I think she had an idea. But that wasn’t the main problem. What really drove her crazy was the way he interfered with her work.”

“How do you mean?” Polly set her coffee cup on a roll of roofing paper and leaned forward.

“Garrett had all these theories, see. He was always making comments on Lorin’s paintings and telling her what other artists they reminded him of and how they fit into the developing contemporary tradition. He wanted to look at what she’d done every day. It got so heavy Lorin couldn’t stand being with him in New York, and she spent as much time as she could on the Cape. But of course Garrett came up to Wellfleet now and then, and whenever he was there he kept after her. She had to lock herself in her studio sometimes, she told me, to stop his voice going on and on. And even then he’d come and rattle the handle and talk through the door at her, y’know?”

“I can imagine.” But Polly didn’t need to imagine; she had a vivid memory of Garrett’s rattling the door of Lorin’s studio. “So when you turned up, she was about ready to leave him.”

“Yeah, I guess so. She wanted to get off the Cape too; she’d decided that landscape was about used up for her. I used to kid her afterward that she only came away with me so she could see Nebraska. Something I’d said once about the light out where I come from had gotten her interested. Well, I was on my way there, and I had a van big enough to haul her equipment. It was fate.” He laughed, not easily.

“So when you left the Cape you went to Nebraska.”

“Right. We took it slowly, camping out and sleeping in the van. It was a pretty good time. But then when we got there the place didn’t work for her. Something about the colors was wrong. ... Anyhow, after a few weeks we packed up again and drove back through Canada to the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, where I had a summer residency. But Lorin didn’t like that landscape either.”

“Why not?” Polly asked. Spoiled, restless, picky, she thought.

“I don’t know exactly. She said the White Mountains were too green. But anyhow, that fall we went west again, to Iowa City; I’d got a writing fellowship there for the year.”

“You had a fellowship in Provincetown, and then at the MacDowell Colony, and then at Iowa?”

“Uh-huh.” Mac half grinned. “I was hot back then.”

“And how did Lorin like Iowa?”

“Not too well.” He shook his head. “It wasn’t so bad for a while, but then the winter came, and she caught bronchitis and couldn’t shake it. And the art faculty drove her up the wall.”

“Really.”

“See, they were uneasy with her because she was a New York painter, and most of them were still into regionalism. But we got through the winter. Then a couple we’d met at MacDowell who had a house down on Seminary Street lent it to us for the off-season, so we came to Key West. And Lorin really dug it, even though it was summer, when it can get pretty damn hot here.”

“She didn’t mind the heat?”

“Not all that much. Up north she used to get sick a lot. And she was always cold in the winter, maybe because she was so thin. In bed in Iowa City her feet were like two beautiful icicles.” He laughed.

“You were a lot younger than she was,” Polly said, looking at Mac. He must have been beautiful then, she thought. Hell, he was beautiful now.

“Yes. Eleven years. But I never thought of her as an older woman, you know. Now with Varnie Freeplatzer, my friend up on Sugarloaf Key, the age difference is definitely part of the relationship. For her JFK and Martin Luther King and Woodstock are just a chapter in a history text, know what I mean?”

“Mm.” Polly nodded. “But it was different with Lorin?”

“Oh, yeah. I never felt she was any age really, or knew what age other people were. Maybe that’s why she made the mistake of marrying a pompous old fart like Garrett Jones.” He grinned.

“You’re awfully down on Garrett,” Polly said, feeling her own favorable opinion of him leaking away fast. “But you know, everybody says he was good to Lorin. And very generous.”

“Sure, as long as she belonged to him. Afterward — well, he made damn certain she didn’t get a dime in the divorce settlement.”

“She didn’t get anything?” Garrett lied to me, she thought, at least by omission.

“No. It didn’t even occur to her that she might ask for alimony until her father suggested it.”

“Dan Zimmern suggested that?”

“Right. He wanted her to hire a lawyer and sue, cite Garrett for adultery if he got nasty. But Lorin wouldn’t even discuss the possibility.”

“Really,” Polly said. “But she already had the money from their Cape Cod account, didn’t she?” she added, remembering.

“Yeah. Five thousand dollars. Of course, that was more back then; but it didn’t last forever. And then she sold some work from her show the next year, her last show.”

“And then what happened? Why did she stop exhibiting?

Mac paused, looking away and then back at Polly. “You’ve got to understand, Lorin wasn’t like other people,” he said finally. “She had a real close relationship to her paintings; she didn’t want to be separated from them. And it got stronger as time went on. She thought of them as part of her; her children, maybe.”

“Her children?”

“Yeah. What I think is, a woman usually has this maternal instinct, and if she doesn’t have kids it can settle on anything. And then she can’t let go. With one of my aunts, it’s her furniture: she’s nearly ninety, but she’s still polishing and dusting, you know?”

“Mm.”

“Well, Lorin was like that. Whenever she had to part with a picture it made her really miserable. Most of the time I knew her she was in mourning for the paintings she’d sold when she was younger. It seemed crazy to me at first, but it’s logical really. If you’re a writer you can keep your work forever; all you need is a copy machine. But suppose you could only make one example of a poem or a story, and if you wanted to eat you’d have to sell it to some rich bastard and maybe never see it again. Shit, it’d be like death, right?”

“Right,” Polly agreed.

“After I thought of that, I could understand how she felt. ... Excuse me.” At the other end of the house, where a khaki sleeping bag was laid on the floor, a phone had begun to ring.

As Mac crouched beside it, swearing into the receiver, Polly opened her canvas tote and scribbled on the back of a deposit slip: “Nebraska — May 63 — wrong colors. MacDowell — summer — too green. Iowa 63-4.”

“Sorry,” he said, as she put it away. “That asshole still can’t confirm delivery. I’ve got to hang around here awhile longer.”

“That’s okay.” Silently, Polly thanked the unknown asshole, whose delay would allow her further questions and — yes, all right — more time with Mac.

“Like some more coffee?”

“No, thanks.” Polly drank the last lukewarm inch, then leaned to set it on the roll of tarpaper. Probably thinking she was handing the cup to him, Mac also reached out; their hands collided, and an invisible charge passed between them. Oh God, I still want him, she thought.

“Tell me about those two paintings you still have,” she said, her voice uneven.

“Tell you what about them?” Mac asked, also unevenly.

“Well, for instance, how you happened to keep them. We all thought they were lost, you know. Lennie said he’d taken everything of Lorin’s away with him.”

“Yes; but those pictures weren’t Lorin’s. She gave them to me.” Mac met Polly’s stare; in this light, his eyes were more green than blue.

“But you never said you had the paintings. If I’d known, I could have borrowed them for the show.”

“Maybe. Only I didn’t feel like lending them.”

“That’s pretty selfish,” Polly said, losing her cool. “I mean,” she explained, “when you think how many people would really like to see —”

“Sure, they might. But the way I figured it, if I shipped those canvases to New York, I’d probably never get them back. A couple of years before she died, Lorin sent the Apollo Gallery two watercolors she didn’t care about anymore. When they were sold she didn’t get a cent; her dealer said she still owed him money.”

“I see.” And that’s something Jacky didn’t tell me, Polly thought. “So what did Lorin live on after she stopped selling paintings?”

Mac grinned. “She lived on me, mostly.” He checked Polly’s expression, shrugged. “It was what she was used to, see, having a man support her. That was what men did, in her experience. First her father, and then Garrett, and then she assumed it was my turn. She never worked a day in her life at anything but her art.”

A parasite, an exploiter of men, Polly thought. “And you accepted that,” she said.

“Sure; I went along with it at the time. I was just a kid; and I was in love. And I already had some idea how good Lorin’s work was. I figured that once her money ran out she’d sell some more pictures; I hadn’t realized yet how she felt about that.”

“I suppose it was fair,” Polly said. “You lived on her, and then she lived on you.”

“The hell I did!” Mac said, angry for the first time since Polly had met him. “I didn’t take Lorin’s money; I wasn’t brought up like that. I got a job here as a gardener, and I started applying to colleges for teaching gigs.”

“And Lorin? What did she do?” Polly asked, suppressing an impulse to apologize.

“She stayed home and painted.” Mac shrugged.

She painted, while you dug and weeded, and I typed catalogues, Polly thought, her sympathy veering further around toward Mac. “And how long did that go on?”

“I don’t know. Six months, nine months. Then I landed a job up in northern New York State as a visiting lecturer.”

“And did Lorin go with you?”

“No. She figured it was too much trouble to move all her equipment back and forth, and it was only for eight months anyhow.” Mac shook his head slowly. “But it was a bad eight months for me.”

Selfish and cold and inconsiderate, Polly thought. It was going to be really easy to write a negative account of Lorin Jones’s life; much easier than writing a positive one.

“So then you came back to Key West and worked as a gardener again?”

“Yes; and anything else that came along. Carpentry, roofing, repairs, painting houses.”

“And you didn’t mind that,” Polly said, trying not to make it a question.

“It was okay. The trouble was, I didn’t get much writing done. A lot of days I was just too wiped out after work; especially in the summers.” Mac grinned, narrowing his green eyes.

“I see.” Lorin ruined your life as an artist, just as she ruined mine, Polly thought. But wasn’t Mac leaving something out? “I expect Lorin did the cooking and cleaning though, didn’t she?” she added, trying to keep her tone neutral. “Or don’t you consider that work?”

“Don’t give me that feminist glare.” Mac grinned. “Sure, it’s work. Hard work. I should know, because Lorin wouldn’t cook or clean. I found that out as soon as we got to Iowa. She claimed she didn’t know how, and somehow she couldn’t learn. Of course she was brought up with live-in help, and Garrett always had a daily cleaning lady for her. When she was alone on the Cape she just piled the dishes in the sink and waited for the woman to come. She ate crazy things anyhow, mostly fruit and yogurt and soup and crackers. If I wanted a real meal I had to cook it myself. I tried to make her do the dishes sometimes, but it wasn’t any use. She’d forget, or else she’d leave food burned on the pans or break something, you know?” Mac laughed.

“Mm.” Polly had heard of this ploy; according to feminist rhetoric, it was known as “klutzing out,” and was always employed by men.

“See, what you have to understand is, the only thing that really counted for Lorin was her painting. Nothing else had any importance for her.”

“You make her sound rather selfish,” Polly said, trying it out.

“Selfish, I d’know.” Mac shook his head. “She was always handing out money to beggars and street performers. And she’d give you her last scoop of raspberry sherbet if you looked at it hopefully.” He smiled, gazing past Polly. “But she was the most self-centered person I’ve ever known.”

“Self-centered?”

“Mmh. You didn’t notice it at first, because Lorin didn’t give a damn about money or possessions or being the center of attention. All she wanted was to be left alone to paint. But if anyone got in the way of that, it was too bad for them.”

Yes, that sounds right, Polly thought. “But it must have been different with you, because she was in love,” she suggested.

“I was in love with her. I never said she was in love with me.” Mac shook his head slowly, as if disagreeing with some invisible person.

“You really think Lorin didn’t love you?” Polly asked, surprised.

“Not the way I loved her. But it wasn’t personal exactly. She just couldn’t care much for anybody or anything, not compared with her paintings. Not even sex.”

“She didn’t like making love?” Polly said, suppressing even with you.

Mac looked past her, through the scaffolding of what might one day be a bedroom. “Oh, she liked it all right sometimes. But it was a private thing with her. She never said anything, she just kind of went away into another world. I’m not complaining, though at the time —” He frowned. “I never knew how lucky I was till I had to cope with my wife, and her Guide to Married Love and Four Stages of Arousal.” He laughed crossly. “I never had to ask Lorin afterward if it had been all right for her. The only trouble was, when she was really into painting she just tuned out.”

“You mean she tuned out sex.”

“Yes, that too. For days sometimes. I used to get mad and swear that the next time she felt like it I’d say too bad, nothing doing, I was working on a poem.”

“And did you, ever?”

“Well, I tried it a couple times. But Lorin always got around me. She was so beautiful, for one thing. Her eyes and her mouth and her hands and all that long glossy dark-brown hair, that always looked a little wet even when it wasn’t. She could charm the seabirds from the air and the tuna out of the Gulf. And by God, she knew it.”

Lorin Jones hurt you worse than she hurt me, Polly thought, looking at the strong jutting lines of Mac’s averted profile, the cropped curl of piebald hair behind his ear. Never mind. I’ll fix you, she told Lorin in her head. I’ll tell everyone how you lived off men, how you sacrificed people to your ambition. They’ll hear of your selfishness, your slyness, your spitefulness.

“You think she turned on her charm deliberately,” she suggested.

“Yes. With me she did, anyhow. Lorin wanted to be sure of me, see; she wanted to be certain I’d always be there, in case she needed something. Once that was settled, she’d leave, without going out of the house, if you know what I mean.”

“Mm.” You’re still angry at her, Polly thought. And no wonder. “How come you never got married?” she added.

“I don’t know. I guess partly it was because Garrett dragged his feet so long over the divorce. When it finally came through, though, I asked her to marry me.

“And what did she say?”

“She said, ‘No. Why should I?’ I couldn’t think of any reason, by that time.” Mac shrugged. “Excuse me.”

Again he rose and loped across the raw floorboards to answer the phone. This time, though, Polly didn’t make any notes. She sat staring through the nearest skeleton wall without registering it. I see through you now, you cold bitch, she thought. You had a man like this, and you didn’t even love him.

“Right,” Mac said into the phone on an up note.

“Thanks. ... Hey, it looks like we’ve got a delivery for Monday,” he called.

“Oh, good,” she murmured, her mind elsewhere.

“How’re you doing?” he said softly, standing close, looking down at her.

“Okay, I guess.” Polly gave him a quick uneasy smile. You ought to go now, you know what could happen if you don’t, she told herself. “Well, thanks for all the information.” She stood up, holding on to the back of the folding chair, since for some reason her legs felt weak.

Slowly, Mac moved even nearer. “You know, I was in a hell of a panic all day,” he said, putting one hand on her bare arm just below the shoulder.

“A panic?” Polly willed herself to take a step back, but couldn’t.

“Yeah. I was scared you wouldn’t come.” He took hold of Polly’s other arm and pulled her to him.

Wait a moment, for God’s sake, she told herself. You said you weren’t going to do this again, didn’t you?

But it seemed, after all, that she was.

“Why you?” Mac asked presently, raising himself on one elbow to look down at Polly as she lay on his rumpled sleeping bag and air mattress. “That’s what I want to know.”

“Wha?” Polly did not open her eyes. In a moment she would remember who she was, where she was; but now she floated in a warm blur of satisfaction; she felt like a pile of pancakes in hot maple syrup. The idea struck her as comic, but she was too sleepy even to giggle.

“Why should I like you so much? It doesn’t make sense. I mean, you’re not the kind of woman I thought I liked. I usually go more for the bohemian ladies.”

“Mh?” Polly yawned and slowly opened her eyes. She felt at peace with the world and everyone in it — except for that destructive, hateful bohemian lady Lorin Jones.

“I bet I’m not the type you usually go for either,” Mac said, grinning.

She focused on him. “No, not exactly,” she fibbed; in the days when she went for men, it was exactly this sort of man she went for. “But at least you’re not an artist or a writer.”

“The hell I’m not.” Mac sat up, half laughing. “What do you mean by that?”

“Well.” Polly swallowed another yawn. “I mean, I know you used to write poetry, but it sounds like you gave it up quite a while ago.”

“I gave up teaching it, that’s all. Hell, I had to. In the poetry business, if you haven’t made it on the national scene by forty, you’ve had it as far as college jobs go. God, you have such wonderful breasts.” He bent to kiss one slowly. “No, I’m still writing. I publish something now and then, and I’m getting a new book together.”

“Sorry.”

“That’s okay.” Mac stroked the lower curve of her breast meditatively. “I did try to stop once, you know. It was after Lorin died, when I was married and teaching back in Iowa City. I couldn’t get my second book published, and I got really depressed. But then I thought, fuck it, why should I quit doing something that gives me pleasure, and I’m not all that bad at? That’s how I still feel. And then, there’s always the chance that I might strike it lucky. I might write one really good poem, maybe even more. Whereas if I quit, I haven’t got a hope in hell. ... Equal time.” He moved to the other breast.

“I used to paint,” Polly said suddenly.

“Yes?” Mac raised his head and looked at her.

“I had a show once.”

“Uh-huh.” He gave her another slow look. “Only now you’re a biographer.”

“I’m not a biographer, exactly. I’m just writing this one book.”

“I’d love to read your biography.” Mac grinned. “I’d like to know how you got to be so fantastic in bed.” He traced a line of fluttering kisses down her stomach.

“You’re not so bad yourself,” she replied, raising her hips to meet his mouth.

“You know something, Polly,” Mac said, considerably later. “I could get really serious about you.” He pulled down a T-shirt stenciled REVIVALS CONSTRUCTION — navy this time rather than green. “What d’you think?” he added, when Polly, bent over her running shoes, did not respond.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“You mean forget it, huh?”

“No. I mean, hell, I only just met you two days ago. Anyhow, I live in New York and you live here.”

“We could fix that,” Mac said casually, smiling.

“Yes? How?” Polly tied her other shoe and looked up at him. He’s kidding, she thought.

“I could move to New York, for instance. Or you could move to Key West.”

“I couldn’t afford that,” she said, smiling too.

“Sure you could. It doesn’t cost much to live in the Keys if you’ve got a place to stay. Anyhow, you already own an apartment on Central Park West, right?”

“Mm,” Polly agreed.

“How many bedrooms?”

“Three. But one is tiny.”

“All the same. From what I hear about New York rents, I bet you could let it for enough to get by on here.”

“Maybe. But what would I do in Key West, besides making love?” she asked, almost laughing.

“I d’know. Write your book. Or you could take up painting again.” He shrugged. “Your kid could come too; I’ve got plenty of room. I bet he’d enjoy it here.”

For a moment Polly imagined herself and Stevie in Key West; they were sitting on the worn front steps of Mac’s house, under the orchid tree. But probably he wasn’t serious; it was just a way of saying he liked her.

“Think about it, okay?”

“Okay,” Polly agreed, aware that she would whether or not she chose.

“Anyhow, you’re going to be, around for a while now, right?” Mac said, a stutter of feeling interrupting the casual question.

“I’ll stay till Tuesday. If I can change my ticket.” Polly glanced at him, then, shaken by what she began to feel, leaned nearer to blur it with a quick caress.

“Good. And I hope I answered all your research questions.” Mac put one hand on the bottom of her jeans.

“Yes — well.” With a sort of mental shake, Polly recalled herself to duty. “There was one thing —”

“Mm.”

“You were saying before, sometimes Lorin was still in the house, but in a way she’d be gone.”

“Yeah. I suppose partly it was the drugs.”

“Drugs?” Polly echoed, trying — far too late — to speak calmly. That’s what Lennie didn’t tell me, she thought. Or Jacky or Garrett. Or maybe they didn’t know.

“You didn’t know she was into drugs?”

“No,” Polly admitted. An addict too, a thin mean voice said in her head; you can tell everyone that too.

“Yeah.” He cleared his throat. “We both were, for a while. It was no big deal back then, y’know.”

“What sort of drugs?”

Mac grinned. “Well, to start with, back on the Cape, it was grass and hash mostly. Down here I mainly stuck with that; you pretty much have to in my line of work if you don’t want to fall off a ladder or saw a hole in your hand. And we tried a little LSD and mesc on weekends, to see if it would do anything for our work.”

“And did it?”

“Not all that much. I wrote what I thought at the time was great stuff, but when I came down it mostly looked pretty empty. It did more for Lorin, but she couldn’t paint what she saw when she was high, she didn’t have the coordination. But after a while —” Mac broke off, staring at the rain that sluiced down the plastic back wall of the house.

“Yes?” Polly prompted.

There was a pause. “Well,” he said finally. “After a while Lorin got into speed. Nobody knew what it did to you, back then, see. And she liked it because she could work longer without getting tired. Anyhow, at first she just took some now and then when she was really into a painting. It didn’t get heavy till I was up in Maine.”

“When were you in Maine?”

“Sixty-eight, sixty-nine. I was going crazy because I didn’t have time to write, so a pal of mine got me a job at Colby, he —”

“But that was when Lorin died,” Polly interrupted. “February nineteen-sixty-nine.”

“Yeah, I know,” Mac said almost without irony.

“I’m sorry. I —” Polly swallowed, then plunged ahead. “You were teaching at Colby College then?”

“Mm. I came down here over Christmas vacation, though, and I could see that Lorin was in a bad way. She’d been working on a series of underwater paintings, and she didn’t want to take time off to sleep. So she went to this quack doctor and said she needed to lose weight, she wanted some appetite depressants. And the bastard gave them to her. I tried to tell her it was insane, because she was too thin already; she never ate enough. But she didn’t pay any attention.”

“Lennie Zimmern told me Lorin died of pneumonia,” Polly said.

“Yeah. That’s right, technically. She caught it going snorkeling. We always went out to the reef a couple of times every summer, but that last year Lorin got really hooked, and started wanting to go every week. She could get high just from lying facedown in the waves and watching the scene underwater. And of course if you were on something it was just about fantastic. There was one sort of little fish she specially liked; it’s sort of transparent, with long white wavy fins, and travels in bunches, I forget now what it’s called. There’s some of them in that picture over my sofa.”

“And that’s how she got pneumonia?”

“Mm-hm. See, she was impatient, and she went out to the reef in February before the sea had warmed up. And then she stayed in too long. Only I figure probably she didn’t realize it, because she was so strung out. She caught a bad chill. But she didn’t like doctors, so by the time she went to one it was too late.”

“And you weren’t here.”

“No. I should have been, but I wasn’t. I shouldn’t have left her alone, the state she was in, but I thought I had to be a good little boy and meet my classes.” Mac almost groaned with sarcasm. “I didn’t even know Lorin was in the hospital till the day before she died. And by the time I got home it was all over.”

“I’m sorry,” Polly murmured, silently apologizing for everything she had thought and said over the last months about Hugh Cameron’s desertion of Lorin.

“That’s okay. It was a long time ago, and, like I said, we hadn’t been getting on all that well.”

Had he said that? Polly thought not, but she didn’t challenge him.

“Only somehow that made it worse, you know?” Mac looked at her. “Hey, Polly,” he said, putting one arm around her shoulders. “You okay?”

“I’m okay,” she said, wondering if it were true. “Well, I guess I feel a little awful. I didn’t know —”

“Nobody told you, huh.”

Polly shook her head. In her mind, Lorin Jones floated facedown in the salty aquamarine water of the Gulf, her long thin legs and arms spread in the shape of a pale star; her dark seaweed hair sloshed in the waves. Below her a school of little pale fish swam through branching coral. Her huge wet star-lashed eyes were wide open behind a snorkeling mask edged with white rubber. They did not blink, though, because she was dead.

What the hell’s the matter with you? Polly scolded herself. Why should you feel like crying? Lorin Jones didn’t drown, she died in the Florida Keys Memorial Hospital. Anyhow, you don’t like her. “It’s stupid, I —” she said. Choking on the last word, she stood up and turned away.

“ ’S okay,” Mac said. He came over to Polly and put his arms around her.

“I didn’t —” She choked up again, recovered. “I mean, I didn’t even know her.” No, an internal voice said, but you’re planning to ruin her reputation, aren’t you? Pretty soon Lorin’s name will be mud, because of the dirt and muck you’re planning to spread on it, out of envy and spite and sexual jealousy. She’ll be dead and disgraced, isn’t that the idea? And you’ll be alive and successful. Isn’t that the idea? A spasm of self-revulsion shook her. Forgive me, she whispered silently to Lorin Jones. I won’t betray you, I won’t hurt you; it was a mistake.

“Sorry. I’m all right now,” she said, blinking.

Mac kissed her lightly, then looked around the raw, empty, darkening house. “Hey, this is sort of a dreary scene,” he said, checking his watch. “I tell you what, let’s get out of here and find ourselves some conch chowder, okay?”

“Okay. But I’d better get back to the guest house first and clean up,” Polly heard herself say; she was surprised how normal her voice sounded.

“Right. You do look kind of as if you’d been rolling around on the floor. But I don’t mind.” Mac hugged her again.

Polly held herself stiff for a moment; then she leaned wholly and passionately into the kiss. You might as well enjoy it, she told herself, almost weeping. You haven’t much time.