As if Anaïs knew I was thinking about her as the goddess of love, she asked gaily, “How did it go with Jean-Jacques last night?”
Hearing her pronounce his name made my inner thighs, where he’d pushed against me, melt into butterscotch pudding, but I tried to keep my voice noncommittal. “Oh, he got me back to Lenore’s.” For the first time, I realized he must have told the limo driver to wait for him all the while he was upstairs with me. Had the driver told Hugo? Did Anaïs know? I was afraid she could see the flush that was now burning on my chest and cheeks.
“Jean-Jacques seemed very taken with you.” She smiled.
“He’s too old to be interested in me,” I protested, hoping she would contradict me. There was a twinkle in her aquamarine eyes, but perhaps to spare me further embarrassment, she changed the subject.
“So, tell me, how did Lenore Tawney become your godmother?”
“She and my mother were good friends when I was born. They were both Catholic—”
“I was once Catholic, too,” Anaïs said, adding, “It’s a very sexually repressive religion, you know.”
I nodded, feeling tongue-tied. During the night with Jean-Jacques, my Catholic repression had disappeared. I would have liked to talk with Anaïs about that, but I had no words to describe what had happened.
Anaïs waited a moment patiently, then shrugged as if recognizing that I was not going to say anything, and went back to the topic of my godmother. “You said your mother and Lenore were friends in the past tense. They aren’t any more?”
“Well, they lost touch after my father left.”
That statement captured her interest. She asked me questions about my father’s abandonment of our family and got me to tell her how he’d absconded in the middle of the night; how my mother, in shame, withdrew from her friends and hid in the house with the blinds closed; how later I’d found a letter to Mother from Lenore, worried about her silence. When I’d asked Mother about her early friendship with Lenore, she would say nothing, though she did reveal that Lenore’s husband died, leaving Lenore money to move to New York and become a successful artist. For years I hid my godmother’s letter as a secret passageway out of my limited life, and during my last year in high school I wrote and reminded her that she was responsible for my spiritual growth, and she’d invited me to come stay with her.
“And has Lenore addressed your spiritual growth?” Anaïs asked.
“Not really. She isn’t Catholic anymore. She’s a Buddhist now, though she might become a Hindu. Her art is spiritual, don’t you think?”
“Yes, I do. Very. Art is my religion now.”
“And mine,” I eagerly agreed.
Anaïs continued studying me, then gently asked, “How old were you when your father left?”
“Eleven.”
Her sympathy penetrated me like the heavy August heat, and she said with great sadness, “I was eleven, too, when my father abandoned our family.”
Startled, I stared at her lovely face, amazed that she of all people had been abandoned like me. She elaborated. “We had just come home from the hospital. I’d had a burst appendix. I thought Papa was leaving because of all the trouble and the big hospital bill I’d caused.”
She felt responsible for her father leaving, as I did, though in my case it had been because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. The summer of my tenth birthday, my mother, father, and I took a vacation, and my parents argued in the car the whole drive. Mother kept opening the passenger door, threatening to jump out, and he yelled at her to go ahead, even pushed her, while I sat invisible and mute in the backseat.
When we got to the grand, fairytale Banff Hotel in Canada, I had thought it would enchant them, as it had me. We were going to put on our best clothes and go to dinner in the hotel dining room, but they began shouting earsplitting curses at each other again. I put my hands over my ears and tried to make myself disappear, but this time, some cyclone seized and threw me out of my usual frozen silence, and I heard myself scream, “Stop it! Stop it! Don’t you see what you are doing to me?”
Astonished, they did stop. I saw my mother’s heartbreaking recognition of my pain, and my father took me for a walk in the woods even though it was pouring rain. Years later, he told me what I’d already known—that my outburst marked the moment he’d decided to leave.
I told Anaïs, “My father left us without any money when he split and moved to Mexico. He didn’t even say good-bye.” I had never told anyone this, but suddenly the misfortunes of my childhood no longer seemed a disadvantage, because they were like hers.
“We, too, were very poor after my father left,” Anaïs said.
“You were poor?” It was hard to believe.
She nodded and looked terribly sad. “I cried and begged Papa not to go, but he pushed me away violently and escaped out the door. A year later I started my diary as an extended letter to him to try to lure him back.”
“That’s not why I started my diary,” I said, disappointed that this detail was not the same. “I was glad my father left.”
“But that’s not possible, Tristine!” she cried. “He didn’t molest you, did he?”
“No! Nothing like that.”
“But then you must have cried over losing him. I couldn’t stop crying. I cried for two years.”
“I didn’t cry at all.” I remembered how when I learned he’d gone, I dug my cowgirl cap pistol from a pile of discarded toys, carried it to the front door and aimed at our suburban street, straight down the cement walkway. I hollered, “Bang! Bang! Good riddance!”
She looked at me in disbelief. “Didn’t you love your father?”
“I did when I was little.”
“When did you stop loving him?” Her voice was so silvery, I had to lean in to hear the question.
I thought back to the afternoon when I was eight and Mother was sitting with a cup of coffee at the kitchen table, something she never did because she was always sweeping the floor, or making our beds, or cooking the next meal, or cleaning up the last one, or planning a party for my father’s doctor and lawyer friends. I took the rare chance to sit down with her. Then I saw she’d been turning her head away from me because of a big bruise on the side of her face. She said she had tripped, but when I went into their bedroom, my father’s wooden clotheshorse was broken, the base split in two, the crossbar cracked and splintered. Suddenly I made sense of the banging and shrieking I’d heard the night before.
I said to Anaïs only, “I stopped loving him a few years before he left.”
“So early,” Anaïs exclaimed. “I didn’t stop loving my father until I was an adult, married to Hugo.” I was troubled by this difference, but then she asked about something I didn’t think anyone else could know. “Did you ever want to get even with your father for his abandoning your mother?”
“How did you know that?” I gasped. “I wanted to become a famous actress so I could give my mother everything my father didn’t. I imagined he would come to me begging and I would shun him.”
“How would you shun him?”
“Outside the stage door. The press would be there, and flashbulbs would go off for a photo of me spurning my father on the street.”
Her brows knit, making two delicate lines above her narrow nose. “In a way I understand that impulse. My father came back into my life when I was almost thirty. I wanted very much for him to admire and love me.” From the pain twisting her face, I gathered that hadn’t happened. Then she appeared to pull herself out of the memory, her tortured face recomposing itself into its usual sweet attentiveness. “Have you had any contact with your father since he left?”
“He practiced law in Mexico City for four years until my mother agreed to his measly divorce terms and then he came back to the States and restarted his practice. My little sister and I had to see him for a weekend every other month. He’d pick us up in his Cadillac with his new, big-bosomed wife.”
“Did you feel attracted to him then?”
“No!”
What a weird question! What was she getting at? She must be implying that I was attracted to Jean-Jacques, who was so much older than me, as a missing father figure. “You mean like in Freud? Like the Electra complex?” I said, proud of using the sophisticated term, knowing it would impress her.
“So you know about the Electra complex.” She did sound impressed. “Actually, though, Freud did not accept it.”
“I don’t accept it either!” She seemed startled, so I explained. “I was never attracted to my father, especially when he came back when I was fifteen. I was repelled by him.”
“Really? Why?”
“He wore silk iridescent suits, and his table manners were gross. He and his new wife lived in an apartment on Sunset Strip filled with gold-embossed furniture.”
Anaïs laughed a little whinny and covered her teeth with her hand. “Was your father in the entertainment business, Tristine?”
“No! He was an ambulance chaser.” She looked at me uncomprehendingly. “A personal injury attorney for auto accidents?”
“Oh.” That didn’t interest her. “My father was a famous musician,” she said reverentially. “His clothes were elegant, his manners were beautifully polished, and his home with his second wife was the ultimate in good taste.”
My heart plunged over the dissimilarity of our fathers. I wanted her beginnings to be identical to mine, so that I could believe I’d grow up to be just like her.
She took both my hands. “Dear Tristine, we are meant to be friends. Both wounded by the father. We have the same Achilles heel.” I did not yet understand the importance of what she said but I didn’t think she seemed wounded at all. She shone, and in her bright reflection, I hoped to find myself.
“Oh my goodness!” she cried. “I’m going to be late for my lunch with Gore!” She dashed to her floor-to-ceiling built-in bookcases, and I watched her select slim volumes from swaths of the same color on two shelves. I felt the tug of something like envy—but not envy, admiration—and a longing to be, as she, a woman who could write shelves of books.
“A Child Born Out of the Fog, Winter of Artifice, House of Incest.” Anaïs caressed each syllable of her titles. “This Hunger, A Spy in the House of Love, Under a Glass Bell.” She placed the books on the Moroccan table. “For Tristine!”
Seeing her lift a fountain pen from a holder in the shape of a kneeling Bacchus, I reminded her, “Actually the books are for Lenore.”
She smiled. “To be dedicated to Lenore Tawney, but for Tristine to read.”
She scribbled, For Tawney, an imaginative and poetic artist, and handed the book to me. On another volume she dashed off, It’s not weaving, it’s magic, and placed that book on top of the first one, and so on, until they were stacked in a pile balanced against my chest.
“Phone me so we can plan your next visit.” She wrote her number on a square of violet notepaper and placed it on the top book.
This would have been the perfect opportunity for me to give her the phone number at Lenore’s loft in case Jean-Jacques asked for it. I had it ready in my pocket, but with my arms around the books, I didn’t have a free hand. Anaïs guided me through the hallway and out the front door to the elevator. I walked stooped, with my chin pressing down on the top book to secure her note.
Anaïs touched the elevator button. “Please tell Lenore her weaving is hanging in my bedroom. With its gay little feathers entwined in the threads, I have to keep an eye on it, or it will fly out the window!” Her delight over the rambunctious weaving was so infectious that I found myself grinning.
“You look like a gargoyle.” She giggled. She must have seen my horror, for she added quickly, “Not you—you are lovely! The position I’ve put you in with your head jutting …” She stifled her laugh and ran back inside the apartment, calling behind her, “I’ll get you a bag for those.”
When she returned with a Bergdorf’s sack, her grin was so affectionate, it banished my angst over looking like a gargoyle. The upward curve of her smile mirrored the downward arcs of her eyebrows and eyes, giving the impression of features made of smiling crescent moons. Solicitously, she arranged the books for me in the sack, then surprised me with a long hug, her slender arms holding me as she spoke into my ear. “Come back and tell me what you think of my writing. We will be friends.” Her fingers turned my head to kiss me on one cheek, then guided my face the other direction to plant a delicate kiss on the other cheek. “How the French say au revoir,” she said.
I almost skipped back to Lenore’s loft, swinging the Bergdorf’s sack, elevated by her hug and its promise. I felt like a girl in a musical with the refrain of Anaïs’s singsong voice in my head, We will be friends.
I had found a world I wanted to live in. A sophisticated world where people owned life and enjoyed it. A world the opposite of the depressing confines I’d grown up in. Although I would defend my mother from anyone who criticized her, I hated how her mistakes had restricted my life. She should never have left the Women’s Army Corps to marry my father and have me. She should never have let herself fade into a housewife. She should never have gained 120 pounds after my father left. She shouldn’t have crammed all the junk she salvaged from the alley into our garage and closets and her bedroom and bathroom and the living room so there was no place to sit. She shouldn’t have gotten pregnant when she was forty-two and married a construction worker who hardly ever worked, and had another baby, and gotten poorer and poorer.
Anaïs was the antithesis of my mother: slender, cared for, sophisticated, and literate. She was the antidote to my mother’s depression and fears. Now that I’d had a glimpse of Anaïs’s world, now that she had promised we would be friends, now that I’d learned from her how the French kiss au revoir, and practiced another kind of French kiss with a real French man, I never wanted to go home to the San Fernando Valley.
To think I had stood in the kitchen with a steak knife held to my wrist when I was eight, waiting for the courage to kill myself. Thank goodness I was too afraid of the sight of blood to have done it, otherwise I would never have grown up to know what happiness felt like; I would never have met Anaïs Nin.
If only I could stay in New York and go to college at NYU, just a few blocks from her apartment. But my state scholarship only covered colleges in California. I was supposed to fly home and move into the dorm at USC in two weeks, and my godmother, not used to sharing her loft with anyone, was already impatient for me to leave. My only hope for staying in New York was if Anaïs could somehow make it happen.
When I got back to Lenore’s loft, I opened the largest of the books Anaïs had given Lenore. It was nearly a foot and a half high but only had seventy-two pages and lots of blank space. I ran my fingers over the indentations the title made in the heavy, soft paper. House of Incest. I paged through, captivated by the engraved illustrations: thick, black lines that swirled and ended in whimsical doodles. They gave me the feeling of weightlessness and freedom, mystery and excitement that I’d felt the night in Harlem.
I noted that the engravings were credited to Ian Hugo and thought it curious that the engraver had the same last name as Anaïs’s husband’s first name. Could Anaïs’s illustrator be the “other one” Caresse had referred to? Perhaps Ian Hugo was why Anaïs dallied on the West Coast, to work on her books with him.
The poetic prose of House of Incest intoxicated me, but I could not make out what it was about. I read through some of the other novels, and they were also incomprehensible. I would become entranced by a sensual description of an exotic setting but then nothing would happen there. I’d get interested in one of the characters, and she would disappear from the novel. She might show up in the next novel, but other than her name, everything about her life would be different. I recognized that the writing was like the surrealist paintings I loved, but I’d been weaned on Nancy Drew, Dickens, Jane Austen, and the Brontë sisters, and I needed a good plot. Anaïs, it appeared, either could not or would not write one.
This troubled me because I wanted to lo
ve Anaïs’s writing the way I already loved her. As I crawled between my freshly laundered sheets, I decided that the fault had to be mine; I had to be missing something. I tried to think what it might be but soon my mind drifted to Jean-Jacques, my feelings in the night—skin on skin, distant stars exploding.
The next morning, right after breakfast, I returned to Anaïs’s novels. I had to finish them before I could phone her. I’d saved A Spy in the House of Love for last because it looked so plain without any illustrations, published by British Book Centre (unlike the other books that had been published, I’d noted, by Gemor Press). It turned out to be the best read, though, sort of an inside-out detective story. I thrilled to this novel’s minor key. Its spare sentences suggested something secret and forbidden. Its mood incongruously brought back the thrill I’d sought as a kid going out alone at dusk by the incinerator in our alley.
The principal character, Sabina, who had appeared sporadically in the other novels, was in this one an actress living a double life. She had a loving husband but also many lovers whom she visited out of town for weeks. She lied to her husband that she was performing in regional playhouses, and for some reason he always believed her. When Sabina returned home, she felt relieved to be in her husband’s protective arms but soon itched to escape and enjoy her risky behavior again.
Much of this novel I couldn’t understand any better than the others, especially the ending where Sabina literally dissolved into a puddle of tears out of guilt when a detective she’d invited to follow her confronted her with her infidelity. Her friend Djuna then “reconstituted” her by saying that although Sabina had never been true to one man, she had always been true to the essence of love.
I wondered if Anaïs was the main character Sabina, the seductress wrapped in mystery and a black cape, traveling from lover to lover. The description of Sabina’s husband Alan sounded like Anaïs’s husband Hugo—“above average tallness so that he must carry his head a little bent.” Could it be that Anaïs had lovers in other cities, as Sabina did?
Apprenticed to Venus Page 3