The Truth About Lorin Jones Read Free Page A

as an alien. He wasn’t like most males; he had been raised on nonsexist principles from birth, read aloud to from Stories for Free Children, given dolls as well as trucks to play with, taken to women doctors and dentists. For years his freedom from prejudice had been Polly’s greatest pride. Over Christmas and spring vacations, and for two weeks in July when he went to stay with his father, she held her breath, fearing that he would come back infected with ugly paternalist ideas; but he never had. But what would happen when he was exposed to these psychological germs not for a week or two, but for nearly four months?
    Jeanne didn’t understand what she felt about Stevie, and she probably never would, Polly thought, because she had no children of her own. She didn’t understand, either, what it meant to be married; how much you invested, how long and desperately you tried to make things work out. Often, when Polly related something Jim had once done or said, she saw a particular look, between amusement and impatience, cross her friend’s gentle, rounded features. Rather slow, weren’t you? Rather dense? this look said.
    What if Jeanne was right? Polly thought as she rinsed a plate. What if even now the child she loved was turning into a man like other men?
    There were so goddamn many dangers in this culture. Magazines, books, newspapers, television were heavy with overt and covert sexist propaganda, and Polly wouldn’t be around now to point it out to Stevie. Some of the kids he played with had already been brainwashed, she’d seen the signs. And Stevie’s father, Jim Meyer, was in many ways the most dangerous companion he could have, because his sexism was so well concealed. After all, Polly herself, though an adult, had been deceived by him. For fourteen years she had believed him to be a decent, generous, sensitive, nonchauvinist man.
    Jim Meyer had first appeared one afternoon at the auction gallery where Polly then worked. He was a tall, solid man about her own age, with regular features and wide gray eyes rimmed with sooty, transparent skin, giving him an intriguingly — and as it turned out, deceptively — sophisticated and world-weary air. (Stevie had inherited this characteristic; even after nine hours of sleep he and his father both looked as if they’d been up all night.)
    Jim had come in to arrange the sale of some valuable but not very interesting nineteenth-century paintings and furniture that belonged to his grandmother, who was moving to a nursing home. Polly was drawn to him at once, not only by his looks, but by his good manners. Since she was obviously working for a living, and not a society girl amusing herself while she waited to make a good marriage, many of the people Polly had to deal with at the gallery treated her like a typist or even like a housemaid. But Jim was considerate, even deferential. As it turned out, he was incapable of being rude to anyone.
    Though she was attracted to Jim Meyer, Polly didn’t expect much to come of it, partly because he was a medical researcher. From years of living with her stepfather, Bob Milner, she had formed the false opinion that scientists were like icebergs. Nine-tenths of them was under the surface, and most of that nine-tenths was ice. She didn’t get her hopes up when Jim kept returning to the gallery on various excuses; she assumed that he came to see his grandmother’s paintings and furniture before they disappeared forever. His attachment to them made her both sad and impatient — though of course she’d seen the same thing in other consignors.
    “That big shipwreck picture, you know, it used to hang over the hall table in the Maine house, next to the barometer,” he told her one day, for the second time. “You see the woman screaming and drowning there in the corner, and the big wave coming for her? When I was a kid I used to imagine I was just outside the painting, in a rowboat, and I was going to throw her a rope