The Truth About Lorin Jones Read Online Free Page B

for his parents’ troubles. (“Why are you always yelling at Dad?”) It was Polly whom her own mother argued against. (“Really, dear, you’re beginning to sound like one of those radical students that have been giving Bob so much trouble lately.”)
    Meanwhile Jim went around looking ill and caved-in, begging her to change her mind and come with him, promising her anything else she might want: a separate studio, frequent trips to New York and Europe. The first six months they were apart, for what he told everyone was a “trial separation,” he kept phoning, writing, pleading. He even finally pretended to understand her position. (“I guess you have to do what’s right for you and your art.”)
    That first summer alone in New York was terrible for Polly. Rage and depression consumed her. If it hadn’t been for Elsa, she probably would have cracked up, or given in and gone to Colorado. For the first few weeks she didn’t even have Stevie, who had been sent to stay with his grandmother so that he wouldn’t have to witness his father’s departure and the departure of half the furniture.
    The apartment was not only empty of furniture that summer; it was empty of friends, because everyone Polly knew, with the single exception of Jeanne, had turned out to be on Jim’s side, and even if they felt like seeing Polly, she didn’t want to see them. They claimed to be neutral, but they all kept telling her what an exceptional person Jim was, and saying that she ought to hang on to him even if it meant leaving the Museum, because good men were scarcer than good jobs. If she really cared for him, they said, she’d reconsider. They told her how much she was hurting him, how much he loved her; they said he’d probably never get over it. (What a laugh. Fourteen months after Jim moved to Denver he was remarried.)
    When she talked it over with Elsa she came to realize that in the past thirteen years she’d acquired a new set of friends: better off, more conservative politically, and more apt to be conventionally married. Though she still considered herself a feminist, she’d lost touch with most of the members of her old consciousness-raising group, who didn’t get on with Jim; she saw them only once or twice a year now, and always alone. “I had lunch with Wild Wilhemina today,” she would report disloyally afterward, using the nickname she’d invented to amuse him. “Oh, really?” Jim would reply, grinning in anticipation. “What’s she into these days?”
    Without realizing it, Polly had accepted Jim’s mild but persistent idea of who they were; of who she was. She had betrayed her old friends for him; and she had betrayed herself. She herself had become conventional. She hadn’t noticed this because it had happened so slowly, and because she was bamboozled by superficialities. She had thought that she was different from the wives of Jim’s scientific colleagues: she believed her free, sometimes foul language, and her Mexican embroidered smocks and African jewelry and brown-rice casseroles outweighed the fact that she lived on Central Park West and read New York Magazine the day it came, while Mother Jones and Ms slumped unopened for weeks in the wicker basket in the bathroom. Probably Jim’s friends had been quietly laughing at her all those years.
    The worst discovery of the summer was that, as if Jim’s parting wish had been a curse, she wasn’t able to paint. Alone in her studio weekend after muggy weekend, with the boxes of toys and winter clothes shoved aside, she stared at canvases that seemed to have dissolved into ugly messes of color like spilt or vomited food: a half-scrambled egg dropped on the floor, or regurgitated pizza. Somehow Jim’s departure had destroyed her creative will. And even if she could have finished something, it wouldn’t have had any future. The loose, painterly style she had developed in college wasn’t fashionable anymore. Unless you were already famous no gallery wanted