“Really,” Jeanne said again, but this time her expression was more thoughtful. “You know what I think?” she added. “I think you are becoming just a bit obsessed. I think you’re falling in love with your subject.” She smiled.
Polly turned and looked up at Jeanne. She ought to be joking, of course, but maybe she wasn’t. “You think I’m in love with a woman who died in nineteen-sixty-nine?”
“I’m uneasy about your feeling for her, that’s all. It just, well, doesn’t seem absolutely healthy to me. All you think about lately is Lorin Jones.”
“I’m writing a book about her, for God’s sake,” Polly explained, trying to keep her voice calm and not succeeding.
“I know that,” Jeanne said, with a sigh of resignation. “And I know you want to get those interviews typed. You don’t have to come to Ida and Cathy’s with me unless you like.”
You’re damn right I don’t, Polly thought, but did not say.
“They’ll have to understand that I’m living with a workaholic, that’s all.” Jeanne laughed gaily. “I’ll tell them you’ll phone as soon as you’re finished, all right?”
Alone in the apartment, Polly continued typing for ten minutes, then stopped to reheat her coffee. For the first time she felt the disadvantages of having become Jeanne’s roommate. She didn’t like being blamed for not wanting to visit Ida and Cathy, who weren’t really her friends, and would probably be happier if she didn’t come, so they could analyze her character the way they always did with people who weren’t there. They talked in a kind of catty way, even in a bitchy way —
Polly scowled, catching herself in a lapse of language. Jeanne, among others, had often pointed out how unfair it was that when women were compared to animals it was always unfavorably: catty, bitch, cow, henpecked. While for men the comparison was usually positive: gay dog, strong as a bull, cock of the walk.
She turned on the tape recorder again and typed another page, then stopped, thinking of Jeanne again. She didn’t like being called a workaholic, even affectionately. She didn’t like being given permission not to see people she didn’t want to see. It was, yes, as if she were a child, with a managing, overprotective mother.
Of course, when she really was a child, Polly never had an overprotective mother. Bea was only twenty when her daughter was born, and she’d had trouble enough protecting herself. She looked out for Polly the way an older sister or a baby-sitter might have done, without anxiety, encouraging her to become independent as fast as possible. Later, when Polly’s half brothers came along, Bea had showed impulses toward overprotection, but her husband frustrated them; he didn’t want his sons “made into sissies.”
According to Elsa, Polly’s former shrink, any close relationship between women could revive one’s first and profoundest attachment, to one’s mother. Physically, of course, Jeanne was nothing like Polly’s mother — Bea Milner was much smaller, for one thing. But to a child all grown women are large. And psychologically there were similarities: Jeanne, like Bea, was soft and feminine in manner, and given to gently chiding Polly for her impulsiveness, hot temper, and lack of tact. Elsa’s view had been that Polly needed Jeanne to play this role because she hadn’t had enough “good mothering” as a child, and that Jeanne needed to play it because she was a highly maternal woman without children.
But I’m not a child anymore, Polly thought. I don’t want mothering. Anyhow, I’m four years older than Jeanne, the whole idea is stupid. She poured her coffee and added less sugar than usual.
Again she started typing and stopped. Something else Jeanne had said was bothering her. What?
Yes. Jeanne had accused her of being in love with Lorin Jones. That was ridiculous, realistically. But if love meant admiring someone, thinking about her all the time, speculating about the tiniest details of her life, wanting to know everything she’d ever done, talking about her to everyone —
Yes, and staring at her photograph, imagining impossible scenarios in which they might meet. ... In the latest one, it turned out that Lorin Jones wasn’t really dead; it was someone else who had died in Key West, and Lorin had been living and painting on a tiny island off Cape Cod for fifteen years. Polly would somehow discover this when she went to Wellfleet (of course, Garrett Jones and his wife wouldn’t know it themselves).
She would hire a motorboat to take her to the island, and land on a tiny pebble beach just as the sun was setting over the water. She would walk up a narrow sandy path through scrub oak and juniper, and there would be an old gray shingled house half-concealed by blackberry brambles. The door to the big studio in back would be open. Inside a tall slim woman in her late fifties, still beautiful, though her long dark hair was streaked with gray, would be standing at an easel. At first she would be distressed that she’d been discovered, but Polly would reassure her: she would look into Lorin’s fringed dark eyes and promise never to reveal her secret.
Soap-opera stuff, Polly thought, giving an angry shake of her head. But she had to admit it suggested that there might be something in what Jeanne had said. It hadn’t occurred to Polly before that she might be in love with Lorin Jones, not only because she was dead, but because she was a woman; but naturally it had occurred to Jeanne.
In Jeanne’s view, love and sympathy between women was natural and beautiful; it was heterosexual relationships that made trouble. It couldn’t help being that way, she said, because women and men were emotionally incompatible, and even sexually incompatible except in the most mechanistic sense. The male’s natural instinct was for a quick, anonymous squirt of seed; the female’s for a long, tender cherishing. That was why she and Betsy were so peaceful and happy together.
It was probably true, Polly thought, that when people were of different sexes it was harder for them not to misunderstand and hurt each other. I’ve had many more women friends than men. And felt more comfortable with them, and trusted them more.
Except for Stevie. And at this thought, a familiar desolation and anxiety rolled over Polly like a cold smelly mist. She still missed her son awfully. She called him every week, but that almost made it worse. Usually the connection to Denver was good, and her son’s voice so loud that he could have been in his room at home, talking on the toy telephone he’d got for his eighth birthday and strung along the hallway of the apartment.
What agreeable conversations they used to have, Polly on the kitchen stool, and Stevie lying on the bunk bed in his room, pretending to be in the jungle, or on a space station. “I’ll tell you a secret,” he used to whisper sometimes; and Polly would learn something he hadn’t been able to say to her face. “It was me that ate the rest of the mint chip ice cream, but I’m sorry.” “This is Captain Mercury 5000 calling. I don’t like Miss MacGregor at all, and none of the other kids do either.” Sometimes he would say, “Tell me a secret, Mommy.”
Now the distance was real, but they didn’t really talk.
— Stevie?
— Hi, Mom.
— How are you, pal?
— I’m okay.
— And how’s everything in Denver? How are you liking your school?
— It’s all right.
— Did you get your allergy shots this week?
— Uh-huh.
— And how were they? Did they hurt?
— They were okay. You know.
— So what’s happening out there?
— Nothing much. I got a new video game, it’s called Space Lords.
— Space Lords?