Polly said nothing. I’ll put into my book what I goddamn want to put in, she thought.
“I guess I’d better tell you how it all was, so you’ll understand. Off the record, of course.” Jacky glanced at her tape machine.
“All right,” Polly agreed, affecting not to notice the direction of his gaze.
“I’ve never said anything about this to anyone before, by the way.”
“Mm.” I’ll bet, she thought, for Jacky was known to some people in the New York art world as The American Broadcasting Company.
“You’ve got to realize. Paolo did everything he reasonably could for Lorin, because he recognized from the start that she had real talent. But the trouble that girl gave him!” Jacky shook his large Roman head slowly.
“How do you mean, trouble?”
“Well.” He lowered his voice, but at the same time, fortunately, leaned forward, ensuring that the sound level on the tape would be preserved. “Between us, Lorin Jones was very very difficult to deal with.”
“Oh?”
“Terribly hard even to talk to, for one thing.”
“She was extremely shy,” Polly protested. “Everyone knows that.”
“Oh, granted. But you see, it was almost impossible to negotiate with her. Sometimes she wouldn’t answer Paolo’s letters for literally weeks. Or at all. In the end, he usually had to appeal to Garrett, and then Garrett would have to manage everything.”
“So you didn’t see much of her here,” Polly prompted.
“Not usually. Most young artists, you know how it is, they like to drop in every so often, or phone, just to remind you that they exist and are hoping for a sale. But not Lorin, ever, Paolo said. And she detested talking on the telephone. I had to call her once about something, and she whispered so low I could hardly hear her.”
You call that “difficult,” Polly thought crossly, but did not say. She was beginning to realize that Paolo’s illness might be to her advantage; that she might learn from Jacky what she would never have learned from his boss.
“But then, when she had a show, it was another story entirely. You absolutely couldn’t keep her out of the gallery. She had opinions about everything: what the announcement should look like, how the pictures should be hung, who should be invited to the opening.”
And why the hell not, Polly thought. “Really.” In spite of her effort, her tone was chilly.
“Let me assure you, no one values the artist’s prerogatives more than Paolo does,” Jacky hastened to say. “Still, there are limits. And Lorin caused him endless trouble, even the very very first time she was included in a group exhibition here. Most people her age would have been wild with joy to have two paintings in a gallery like this. But there was no sign of gratitude from Lorin, Paolo said. Or ingratitude either, one has to admit; she hardly spoke to him when she was here. All the complaints came through her husband. ‘My wife doesn’t think this painting really looks right next to hers’ — that sort of thing.”
“And would Paolo move the other painting, then?”
“Well, yes — very possibly. Of course, Garrett Jones was a very very important critic; maybe the most important back then. Naturally Paolo didn’t want to quarrel with him. They were friends, professionally speaking — still are, of course. You know how it is. But just between us, the Joneses drove him quite to distraction. ‘All right, she paints not badly,’ he’d say to me. ‘But there are other good young artists who don’t play the neurotic unapproachable prima donna.’ ”
“You don’t think that maybe —”
“What?”
“Well, I just wondered. I mean, suppose it was Garrett Jones who had all those complaints, really, only he put them off on his wife.”
“I shouldn’t think so.” Jacky frowned. “I mean, you’ve met Garrett; he’s a fairly reasonable man, for a critic. Some people think he has an exaggerated opinion of himself, but then, why shouldn’t he? He’s been right about the New York art scene time and time again.”
Or he’s forced his views on the New York art scene time and time again, Polly thought.
“And Lorin ... well... I mean, we all know that most artists are a bit peculiar. You have to expect that, aren’t I right?”
“I suppose so,” Polly said, realizing that as far as Jacky knew she was not now and never had been an artist.
“Well, Lorin was very very peculiar. And after a while, even her husband couldn’t cope with her.”
“Really,” Polly said as neutrally as she could manage.
“The main problem was, she simply wouldn’t let go of her paintings. She’d agree to have work ready for a show, and Garrett would promise to make sure that she met the deadline, and then nothing would appear. Over and over, it’d be like that. You see, she never thought a canvas was finished.”
“I expect that often happens,” Polly said, recalling her own experience.
“Well, not that often. Occasionally. But it was much much worse with Lorin. Even when her pictures were up on the walls she couldn’t let them alone. The day after her first one-woman show here, Paolo told me, he came back from lunch, and a little still life next to the elevator was gone. He thought at first that’d it’d been stolen, naturally. But it turned out that Lorin had taken it herself; she’d decided it wasn’t right yet. The assistant Paolo had then had tried to reason with her, but it simply wasn’t any use. She just wrenched the picture off the wall and carried it away. She never brought it back, either. But of course it was still listed in the printed brochure, and for three weeks Paolo had to answer questions about it. You can imagine how trying that was.
“Um-hm,” Polly murmured, attempting to sound sympathetic. What came to her mind, though, was a red-and-gray semi-Pollock canvas in her own show, back in Rochester. As soon as she saw it at the opening, she’d wished she’d never let it out of the house. If only she’d had the courage to take the miserable thing away the next day! What Jacky had said earlier, though he probably meant it only as flattery, was true: she was the right, the only person to do this book. The more she found out, the surer she was of her instinctive understanding of what Lorin Jones must have felt and thought.
“Well, Paolo was determined that would never happen again, and it didn’t. I expect Garrett spoke to her firmly. Anyhow, for a while she was more reasonable. But then she left him, and things really got out of hand.”
“Um-hm?”
“The real trouble began with her sixty-four show, the last one. It was over a year late to start with, because Lorin couldn’t make up her mind that the work was ready, as usual, and Garrett wasn’t around to make her see reason. Then, just after the opening, I came in one morning, and there was Lorin Jones over by the window, with a dirty Bloomingdale’s carrier bag on the floor beside her, scrubbing one of the biggest canvases with a rag soaked in turpentine, and scraping at it with a palette knife.”
“Really.”
“I was horrified, I can tell you.” Jacky giggled. “What made it worse, I’d only met her once or twice at that point, and at first I didn’t recognize her, the way she was got up — in a dirty old black sweater and her hair all over the place. I assumed I had some crazy bag lady on my hands. I thought Paolo was going to kill me first and fire me afterward.”
“So what happened?”
“Well, naturally I rushed 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.”