The Truth About Lorin Jones Read Online Free

light that had been meant for a maid when the apartment was built, and set up her easel.
    But she had waited too long. Standing up for hours at a time exhausted her and made her legs ache and her belly feel swollen and heavy. When she sat down she couldn’t reach the easel properly. Her arm and leg muscles twitched like worn-out rubber bands; she grew restless and then angry. The one or two canvases she completed seemed to her ugly, clumsy, and empty of meaning.
    Polly assumed it would be easier after the baby came, but it wasn’t, though Jim not only paid for a part-time housekeeper, but took equal responsibility for the remaining housework, and spent as much time as Polly did with their son. Stevie was a great kid; but he took up a lot of emotional energy. When she went back to the studio after feeding or changing or cuddling him, the spontaneity of her impulse was gone; she found herself scrubbing at her work and fucking up something that had begun well.
    It was a bore staying home all day, too, talking only to Stevie and the housekeeper, both of whom seemed to have a mental age of about four: Stevie of course precociously. She missed being in touch with the New York art world; she missed using her mind and having grown people to talk with. So when Stevie started nursery school she took a part-time job at the Museum, which in a few years became full-time. Soon she was going to meetings, working on catalogues and exhibitions, seeing artists and dealers and collectors and critics. She painted less often; then not at all. The studio, though it was still called by that name, became a storeroom again.
    As soon as Stevie was a little older and needed her less, Polly told herself and everyone else, she’d get back to her art. Meanwhile her life, if not exciting, was fun and satisfying, her marriage solid. Or so she thought.
    Then, a year ago last spring, when Stevie was twelve, everything fell apart. One day when Polly was showering after work Jim came bursting in on her. She knew something extraordinary, maybe something horrible, must have happened, because he was usually so careful of her bathroom privacy. At first, all she felt was relief and joy when there turned out to be no disaster. Instead, Jim had just been offered an important job and a really big research budget in Colorado. With an impulsiveness Polly hadn’t seen in years, he threw out his arms, embracing both her and the yellow shower curtain printed with abstract designs, exclaiming that he couldn’t believe it, God, he had never expected anything like this.
    For a while Polly shared his euphoria. She had been feeling a little stale; Denver would be an adventure, a change. It would be good to get out of Manhattan, which was becoming more crowded, expensive, dirty, and dangerous every year. And, as Jim said, it’d be great for Stevie: he could meet real kids and have a normal American childhood — which simply meant, Polly thought now, that he could have the kind of childhood Jim had had.
    Then, slowly, it dawned on her that she wasn’t going to find a decent job in Denver. For Jim, it would be “the chance of a lifetime,” as he put it, sliding into cliché in his enthusiasm — but it wasn’t the chance of Polly’s lifetime. And after all, Jim didn’t have to go to Denver. He already had colleagues he liked, a good lab, adequate research funds. Whereas she had just got a raise at the Museum, and was working on an important exhibition (“Three American Women”). Was it fair to ask her to give all that up?
    Jim, it turned out, thought it was fair. If Polly didn’t get a job right off, she could go back to her painting; wasn’t that what she’d always wanted? Anyhow, with the money he’d be making she wouldn’t need to work anymore. They could live well, travel, have full-time help. It was true, Polly said (or lied? — she didn’t know now), she did want to paint, but for that reason, too, she had to stay in New York, where the artists and