The Truth About Lorin Jones by Alison Lurie Read Free Book Online Page B

Bob Milner proposed to her she probably didn’t even ask herself what it would mean to her daughter, or mind that it would be the end of her own career. And, like the virtuous heroines of Victorian literature, she would not bear a grudge, especially against a man; she was infuriatingly forgiving. A college junior gets a freshman pregnant, so that she has to drop out of school to be married, and then he leaves her, and all the effort and expense of the next twenty years fall on her, and that’s just how Things Happen.
    For years Polly thought she had learned everything she needed to know from her mother’s mistakes. So, even though what she wanted in high school was to be a painter, she took care to finish college and then take a degree in art history: she wasn’t going to end up a glorified secretary like Bea. And when she began to go out with boys, she was careful not to catch a baby.
    But, having forgotten her painful early attachment, Polly was condemned to repeat it. Over and over again she became involved with unreliable men. Usually they were Jewish, and often they had something to do with art or literature, like Carl Alter. Or, of course, like Leonard Zimmern.
    At home everything was as she had left it that morning: bed unmade, dishes in the sink, yesterday’s Times on the sitting-room floor, and a general look of dust and emptiness.
    The apartment was also empty in more than the psychological sense; and this was Polly’s own fault, the result of one of her fits of bad temper. During that awful spring a year ago Jim had asked if it would be okay for him to ship his desk to Colorado, and Polly had shouted that as far as she was concerned he could have anything in the place he wanted. Jim must have known she’d spoken rashly, but he had taken her at her word. Saying that he hoped she would soon follow, he decamped to Denver with nearly half their furniture, plus one of the two signed Rauschenberg lithographs and the little Frankenthaler that had been their wedding present to each other. After he had gone, the apartment looked like someone who had been in an accident: its walls were scarred with lines of dust where bookcases and bureaus had stood, and by tender pale rectangles with a blackened nail hole in the center of each, like skin where bandages have been ripped off over a half-healed puncture wound.
    Even now, the rooms were half bare, Polly had read recently that after a divorce the man’s standard of living goes up by an average of seventy percent, while the woman’s is reduced by half. It hadn’t been that drastic for her; but even with Stevie’s child support she hadn’t been able to replace most of the kidnapped objects, and she’d let the housekeeper go this summer when she left her job. As long as she had Stevie, she didn’t really care about the stuff, but now —
    “I want my pictures and furniture back,” she cried aloud. “I want my son back, damn it.”
    Talking to herself. Well, they said that was what happened when you lived alone: you became eccentric. Polly had also noticed that her mood swings were wider: she was up one day, down the next, as if she were on a roller coaster, with the same sense of giddiness and danger.
    Stevie had been gone only two weeks, but already she was miserably sick of living alone. And this was just the start. For the next three months she would be wandering in a funk around this big empty apartment without even the Museum to go to. Nothing moved here now unless she moved it; nobody spoke unless Polly spoke to herself, or turned on the radio to fill the rooms with the lively voices of totally deaf people. When she talked back to them, even shouted at some idiotic adman or cheered some commentator on “All Things Considered,” they didn’t answer; it was as if she didn’t exist. Of course, Polly wasn’t crazy: she knew they couldn’t hear her, but all the same it gave her a bad, slightly insane feeling, as if she had disappeared.
    Now that Stevie was