“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?”