Free The Truth About Lorin Jones by Alison Lurie Page A

over and asked what the hell she thought she was doing. At first she wouldn’t even answer. I was actually getting ready to call the police. Finally she said, ‘I’m working on my painting.’ As soon as I heard that whispery little voice I realized it was Lorin. I didn’t even try to reason with her, I simply dashed back to the office and telephoned Paolo, and then I called her in to the phone. But he didn’t make a dent on her. Well, there wasn’t much he could do, really. It was still legally Lorin’s painting. Luckily, she didn’t ruin it; we sold it the next week.”
    “Why the hell should she have ruined it?” Polly nearly shouted.
    “Well, it’s possible,” Jacky answered huffily. “I mean, there is such a thing as overworking, or don’t you agree?”
    “I suppose so,” she admitted, cursing herself for her outburst. Against her will, she saw the stack of muddy overworked canvases that was at this moment leaning sideways in a disused tub in the former maid’s bathroom of her apartment on Central Park West. “So that’s why the Apollo decided not to give Lorin Jones another show,” she said, trying to make this sound reasonable.
    “No no no. What finished things here was much more serious than that. Lorin’s possessiveness about her work, you see, it just got worse and worse. It was pathological, I really think, poor girl. She began to think of her paintings as literally part of her, you see, and she couldn’t bear to be separated from them.”
    “I imagine most artists feel something akin to that, in principle,” Polly said — though as a matter of fact she had often wished some supernatural force would suck her old canvases out of the tub and cause them to vanish forever.
    “Oh, yes; in principle. But what that meant in practice, for Lorin Jones, what it came to mean, rather, was that she wouldn’t sell her work. It was all right if the buyer was a museum, or a friend, so that she could visit the painting whenever she liked. But otherwise —” Jacky sighed. “What really drove Paolo round the bend was the business of the Provincetown triptych.”
    “You mean Birth, Copulation, and Death, from the Skelly Collection?” Polly knew the painting well — it had been featured in color in the catalogue of “Three American Women” and reproduced on a postcard; certainly it was one of Jones’s most important works.
    “That’s right. Only if it hadn’t been for Paolo, it wouldn’t ever have been in the Skelly Collection. God knows what would have happened to it.” He sighed. “You see, the Skellys decided to buy Birth, Copulation, and Death the second week of the sixty-four show, and Paolo was really happy for Lorin. He thought she’d be grateful, naturally, to have her work in a famous collection like that. But instead she threw a fit. She’d met the Skellys at her opening, and she’d hated them. She said they never looked at the paintings, all they did was walk around the rooms kissing their friends and talking about money. They were awful people, she said, and she wasn’t going to let them have anything of hers. When Paolo told her it was too late for that she went perfectly white with fury. I think if she could have she’d have taken the canvases off the wall then and there and walked out with them. But they were far too large for that, thank God.”
    “How upsetting.”
    “Wasn’t it?” Jacky agreed, mistaking her meaning — which was probably just as well. “And you have to understand, Paolo was very patient with Lorin. He did everything he reasonably could; more, actually. He positively bent over backward.”
    “Really.” In her mind, Polly saw the small, spidery figure of Paolo Carducci, with his shock of crimped gray hair, bent over backward.
    “He called Bill Skelly, and asked very tactfully if they were quite quite sure they wanted the Jones triptych; he said that if not, he’d be glad to forget the whole thing.”
    “But they wouldn’t let him, I