“Oh, pretty well.” Polly didn’t smile; Jacky’s fussy concern for her comfort, as if she were a possible client, hadn’t mollified her, but made her more suspicious. What was he going to try to sell her?
“I’m so pleased. You know, Paolo said before his stroke — Well, I think he was surprised, rather, that you hadn’t come to see him again. He wondered if you were making any progress. And he said that perhaps we should try to interest some writer with more experience.” Jacky flapped his hands deprecatingly. “But I said no, it has to be someone who hasn’t got so many other interests. Someone who can take the time to interview everyone: go to Wellfleet to see Garrett and down to the Keys to talk to that awful Hugh Cameron. And I’m convinced it should be a woman, too. Polly is the right person. That’s what I told him.” Jacky smiled. “Oh, that’s lovely, Alan.” He took the “tiny cup of coffee,” which in his big pale hand looked literally tiny.
“Well, thanks,” Polly said grudgingly. Why was Jacky telling her this? To flatter her and convince her that he was on her side? To make her feel nervous and dependent on him? Or both?
“Sugar?”
“Yes, please.” Polly held out her cup, then lifted the steaming espresso to her mouth and swallowed uneasily. Since Jacky Herbert was a man, she automatically distrusted him. He was also, of course, an art dealer, and — like most museum people — she was professionally suspicious of dealers. She knew that Jacky was currently engaged in gathering as many Lorin Jones canvases as he could find, with a view to selling them at large prices when Polly’s book appeared — indeed, he made no secret of this.
On the other hand Jacky (unlike Paolo Carducci) had always been lavish with praise of Jones’s work. More than once he had castigated himself in Polly’s hearing for not doing anything sooner about her paintings.
Also, like many people in the New York art world, Jacky was gay, and Polly didn’t usually distrust gay men. It was clear that some of them, like Jacky, would have preferred to have been born women if they’d been given the choice. Besides, she sympathized with them because, like her, they were so often attracted to the wrong type of guy.
“You’ve been interviewing Lennie Zimmern, I hear,” Jacky remarked after his assistant had left. “Hard work, I should imagine.” He made a wry face.
“Well; yes, rather. He doesn’t approve of personal biography.”
“He wouldn’t.” Jacky giggled. “Wouldn’t want his own written, I’d imagine. And whom else have you seen? Did you talk to what’s-her-name, Marcia, the father’s widow?”
“I saw her briefly. I didn’t learn a hell of a lot, though. You know Lorin Jones never lived with her, and they obviously weren’t close. I’m not sure I’ll bother to see her again.”
“I think you might, you know.” Jacky leaned forward.
“I don’t know. A friend of mine who works for Time says you should always go back for a second interview if you can. And bring a present, so they’ll feel obligated.”
“That sounds like good advice,” Jacky agreed. “I expect Marcia could tell you a lot, if she wanted to.”
“Maybe. There was something I meant to ask you about her, anyhow. Why aren’t there any of Lorin Jones’s pictures in her apartment? I mean, I already knew she didn’t have any, because we asked at the time of the show; but don’t you think that’s a little odd?”
“I don’t know that I do,” Jacky said. “I remember Marcia telling me that after her husband died Lorin came over and packed up all the paintings she had stored there, and shipped them down to Florida. Except of course Who Is Coming?”
“Yes, I remember.” Lorin Jones’s paintings tended to have mysterious, equivocal titles; one of Polly’s most difficult tasks would be to discover their meanings, if any.
“Of course that’s in the Palca Collection now; Paolo sold it for Marcia after Dan Zimmern died. It was Lorin’s wedding present to them, you know.”
“She never told me that.” The truth and nothing but the truth, Polly thought, but not the whole truth. “I’m surprised she wanted to sell it, considering.”
“I expect she had to. I doubt that her husband left her anything to speak of. Money never stuck to his fingers, from what I’ve heard.”
“I wish I could have met Lorin Jones’s father. You knew him, didn’t you?” Polly bent to open her wet briefcase and take out her tape recorder. “Hang on a minute while I start this thing, if you don’t mind.”
Jacky visibly hesitated, then smiled rapidly. “No, go ahead. You’ve already promised to let me edit the transcript, remember? In writing.” He giggled to take the edge off this caution. “If I’m indiscreet I can cut it out later, right?”
“Yeah, right,” Polly agreed.
“Well, let’s see then; what were you asking? Dan Zimmern. I met him three or four times, that’s all, when Lorin had her last show here in sixty-four. He was at the opening, shaking everyone’s hand as if he were the artist himself, very proud. And then he came back afterward several times. He’d always bring friends, and talk up Lorin’s work; what a famous painter she was going to be. He’d tell them they should buy one of her pictures, as an investment. I think a couple of people actually did. But he never stayed long. One minute he’d be all over the place, the next thing you knew he was gone.”
Yes, Polly thought; but at least he was there. Carl Alter had never made it to her first and only one-woman show, in Rochester during her senior year of college. “What was he like?”
“Oh, a big, good-looking old fellow; full of life. Smart too, probably, but he didn’t know beans about art. A macho type. He was on his third wife, and well over seventy, but still looking around, eyeing the girls at the opening.”
“Really.” Carl Alter too was on his third wife, his daughter thought.
“Oh, Polly. Before we go on, I must show you something.” Jacky levered himself up and opened a cupboard. “Look. This just came in, from that very sweet woman in Miami I was telling you about last week. She bought it in some little nothing gallery in Key West in nineteen-sixty-five, and she’s finally decided she wants to sell it.” He lifted a sheet of tissue paper. “You can see, it’s a watercolor sketch for one of the Florida paintings that was in your show, Empty Bay Blues. Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Oh, yes.” Lorin Jones’s most characteristic work hovered in a no-man’s-land — a woman’s land, perhaps, Polly thought — between representation, abstraction, and surrealism. Even in her least readable paintings, like this one, shapes that might be birds, fish, flowers, faces, or figures quivered and clustered. In reviews of “Three American Women,” the artists she was most often compared with were Larry Rivers and Odilon Redon. The large oil Empty Bay Blues merely suggested layers of shore, sea, sky, and cloud. But here, between the flow and slide of paint in the lower third of the watercolor, was something that might be either a lizard or a drowned woman.
“The light on the sea isn’t as ultramarine as in the oil, you see; more a kind of translucent mauve. Wonderful, really.” Jacky’s face expressed a genuine if mercenary adoration. “Paolo doesn’t care for the late paintings, but I think he’s very very wrong.”
“Empty Bay Blues — That was one of the paintings you refused to show here, wasn’t it?”
“Please!” Jacky’s voice rose at least an octave. “It wasn’t me, I was a mere underling back then. ... But you mustn’t blame Paolo either, dear.”
“No?” Polly asked, trying not to sound skeptical, but failing.
“Really. You mustn’t put it into your book that the Apollo behaved badly to Lorin Jones, because it simply isn’t so. Paolo carried her for years when she wasn’t earning anything to speak of.”