No, that was impossible. Anaïs was too pure and good to be the deceptive Sabina. I’d never seen married people so in love as she and Hugo. Anyway, everyone knew that novels were made up, not real life.
When my four-foot-eleven godmother returned from her weekend carrying a doll-sized suitcase, I was scribbling in my diary, trying to imitate Anaïs’s poetic prose. Lenore, excited about what she’d learned in her sensory awareness workshop, told me how they’d practiced eating a grape slowly and consciously. Her description of holding the pliant grape in her fingers made me think guiltily about touching Jean-Jacques’s penis, but Lenore, running in a little trot to turn on a Ravi Shankar recording, didn’t notice my flush. She went right to work patiently tying knots into a gauzy weaving spread out on one of the worktables. I knew that her weaving was one of her forms of meditation, so I tiptoed as I went into to the kitchen to phone Anaïs.
“You read my books so soon?” Anaïs trilled when I finally reached her. She invited me for tea, and I was so excited that when I hung up, I blurted to Lenore, who was covering up her work for the day, “I’m going to have tea with Anaïs Nin tomorrow!”
Lenore set her round gray eyes on me with interest. “It’s good that you get to know her. Did you have a chance to talk when you went to her apartment?”
“A little.” Wishing to divert our conversation from the previous evening, I asked, “How did you learn that Anaïs keeps a diary?”
“She tells everyone.” Lenore shrugged. “Though I don’t know anyone who’s actually read it. It’s part of the mythology she spins about herself. She claims she knew all the surrealists, that Antonin Artaud had a thing for her, and that she was responsible for Henry Miller getting published.”
“I thought Caresse Crosby published Henry Miller.”
Lenore’s owl eyes expanded. “You’ve read Henry Miller?”
“No, but I met Caresse at Anaïs’s apartment.”
Lenore, who loved artists’ gossip, descended effortlessly into one of the miniature chairs that surrounded her small coffee table. At fifty-three, she was limber as a child gymnast from daily yoga.
I sat on a low Japanese stool next to her and answered her questions about Caresse before finally getting in one of my own. “How did you meet Anaïs?”
“I went to a gallery show of an engraver I like, and Anaïs was there.”
“Was the engraver Ian Hugo?”
“Yes, did she tell you?”
“No, I guessed because he illustrated the novels she gave you.”
Lenore said, “Oh, I didn’t realize that. Let me see those books.”
I brought them over, and my godmother paged through the illustrations, repeating, “I like his work.”
When I asked her to tell me more about Ian Hugo, Lenore said, “He’s tall. Reserved. Very old world manners.”
“That sounds like her husband!”
“No, no, Anaïs isn’t married to Ian Hugo. Ian is just an artist. She’s married to some wealthy man.”
“I met her husband! He has the same name, Hugo, but it’s his first name. Hugo Guiler. He said he’s an international investor, and he is wealthy but he’s nice.”
Lenore picked up some pieces of lint and thread from the floor and rolled them into a tiny ball in her palm.
I asked her, “Does your friend Ian Hugo usually live in Los Angeles?”
“No, what would make you think that?”
“Something Caresse said about Anaïs going to Los Angeles a lot.”
“As far as I know, Ian lives in New York.” Lenore sounded impatient. “He’s represented by a SoHo gallery, and we have mutual friends here. I think that Anaïs tries to make people think she’s attached to Ian. At his opening, I invited him to come visit my loft, and she was standing next to him and just invited herself along.”
Lenore smashed the ball of lint in her palm with her thumb. “That’s when she saw my little weaving and begged me to let her have it.”
“I’m supposed to tell you how much she loves it.”
Lenore sighed. “I should have kept it.”
CHAPTER 3
Greenwich Village, New York, 1962
THE NEXT DAY, MILLIE BROUGHT a tea tray out to where I’d been seated under the shade of an umbrella on the terrace. After a few moments, Anaïs sailed out in a full-skirted Mexican sundress to join me.
She smiled mischievously. “So, has Jean-Jacques called you?”
“No.” My heart jumped. “Did he ask you for my number? Do you have it?”
“I haven’t spoken with him. Would you like me to give him your number? I’ll be happy to give you his.”
Embarrassed by my obvious eagerness, I shook my head but I felt transparent, as if she already knew what had happened with him. The fib I was about to tell burned my face. “He saw Lenore’s work and wanted to know if he could buy a piece, but we forgot to exchange phone numbers.”
“Oh, he saw her marvelous loft!”
“Yes, he had to help me in. I wasn’t feeling too well.”
“Lenore was out of town?”
I nodded and as I sat, hugging my midriff with crossed arms, she gently asked me delicately phrased questions about my night with Jean-Jacques. Bit by bit she untangled the knot of confusion, shame, and longing I held so tightly.
“So you think you are still a virgin?” she asked after considering all I had said.
“Technically.”
She laughed, and then we laughed together.
“He should finish the job!” Anaïs announced gaily. “He’s French, after all. He’ll know what he’s doing, and you can be sure he’ll be sensitive to you because he already has been.”
“That’s what I’ve been thinking. How did you know?”
“I was eighteen once, though I didn’t have the good fortune to meet a Jean-Jacques. Even if I had, I would have been too shy to let him know my desires. It’s not just men who enjoy sex, you know, although this Puritan American culture makes women ashamed of wanting equal pleasure.”
No one had ever spoken with me this way, not my mother or Lenore, certainly not the nuns, or even my girlfriends.
Anaïs urged, “You must tell him that you want him to deflower you, otherwise he will have no way of knowing.”
“I can’t. I couldn’t get the words out.”
“Sometimes it is pleasurable to be passive,” she said, “but it is not always good for you to hide behind shyness. A man cannot read your mind, and things can happen that you do not want if you are not clear.”
We both became thoughtful. I became aware of the sounds of traffic and a faraway jackhammer. Anaïs poured us each a tepid cup of tea.
“That was my problem when I married Hugo.” The sadness in her voice made it even more melodic. “I was twenty. He was twenty-four. And neither of us had had any experience with sex. I was much too shy to tell him how to please me, so he couldn’t learn.”
She must have seen the shock on my face because she quickly added, touching my hand, “This is entre nous. Do you know that term?”
“Between us only. Yes.”
“For the first two years of our marriage, I remained a virgin, because he was so afraid of hurting me. Then we went to a doctor who talked to Hugo, and after that he was able to penetrate me. It did hurt, though, because he was too large for me.”
I tried not to show my fear and repugnance, but it was no use.
“Don’t be afraid. It is unusual; and even so, if he had known how to prepare a woman so that her juices made her ready, it would not have been so much a problem. But he had developed bad habits during the time that we both thought only of his pleasure.”
“But that must have changed,” I said shyly, “because I saw how much in love you are. I’ve never seen a married couple so much in love.”
Her eyes shifted towards the entry hall but then returned to me. She touched my hand again, a sign that she was about to give me a piece of wisdom. “It is important that you choose the men in your life carefully so
the father wound is not deepened. It’s important that you choose as your first lover a man who is receptive and interested in your pleasure as well as his own, a man to whom you can tell what you want and what you don’t want.”
“But I don’t really know if Jean-Jacques is …”
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you how he is as a lover.”
“No!” I blushed. “I wasn’t going to ask that. I meant to say I don’t know if he’s really interested in me. I don’t know anything about him, if he’s married or has a girlfriend.”
“He probably has one of each in France. He comes from a wealthy old Parisian family. But he’s a black sheep because he’s an artist of sorts. He puts on ‘happenings’ in Paris. Have you heard of them?”
I shook my head.
“Happenings are a kind of street theater but without a script. The actors are not actors, just people he randomly chooses. They improvise their lines and business the day he phones them and tells them a location where to meet.”
She saw my smile and said, “You see? He’s playful, and that’s what you want in a lover.”
We fell silent when Millie appeared on the balcony. She set down a sliced apple and some moldy cheese and announced that she was leaving for the day.
After we heard the front door close, Anaïs declared, “You must go to Europe, Tristine! Have an affair with Jean-Jacques, and then he can sponsor you to visit him in Paris. You will see how much more sophisticated Europeans are about marriage. Here people are not faithful and believe they must get a divorce. The family falls apart; everyone is hurt. In Europe the man and the woman each have other lovers and stay married.”
“But that would hurt even more.”
“They are discreet. They love each other so they protect each other.”
“I don’t think I could ever keep secrets from the person I marry.”
The corners of her mouth curled indulgently, saying you’ll learn, but I didn’t want to. What was the point of being married, I thought, if you couldn’t share everything about yourself with your husband and he with you?
Anaïs lit one of her gold-tipped Sobranies from the box sitting on the wrought iron table.
“So what will it be?” She exhaled. “Will you ask Jean-Jacques to be your lover or would you like me to ask him?”
“To be your lover?”
“No.” She laughed. “You are naughty. I’ll ask him to be your lover if you are too shy to do it yourself.”
“I’m much too shy, but I don’t know if I want you to—”
“Don’t worry. He won’t even know I’ve spoken with you. He’ll believe it was his idea, and that I simply didn’t discourage him.”
“But where would we … ? Lenore is back at her loft, so we couldn’t …”
“That’s what hotels are for.” She moved the untouched cheese to the fruit plate and used the empty saucer as an ashtray. “What will you wear? I always prepare for occasions by dressing the part.”
“I don’t know.”
“You have to wear white. White lace like a First Communion dress but with a low neckline to show off your cleavage. We’ll go shopping together! Red heels.”
“I don’t know if I can afford that. I’m starting college, and—”
“It will be my present. To honor your courage! The new woman!”
She was enjoying the anticipation of my deflowering more than I was, and I realized that I could not back out for fear of disappointing her.
I changed the subject. “I read your novels. They’re mysterious and beautiful.”
“Thank you, Tchrristeenne,” she said, lengthening her embrace of my name.
I ventured, “I wondered if you put any of your diary in the novels.”
“Yes, the diary is the hothouse from which I pick the most exotic flowers.” She asked me, “Do you want to be a writer?”
“That or a famous actress. But I know I’m not pretty enough.”
She stubbed out her cigarette. “My father used to tell me I was an ugly child,” she said. “Is that what happened to you?”
“How did you know that?”
“I sense there are many affinities between us.” She smiled on me.
I felt as adopted children must when, at last, they meet their real mother and are too full of jumbled emotions to speak.
Artfully, she refocused the conversation. “Which of the women characters in my novels did you identify with?”
The question took me by surprise. I hadn’t thought about myself as any of the characters; they were all older than me. I wasn’t like the adulterous adventuress Sabina, or like Djuna, her intuitive, wise friend. “Maybe I’m like Stella because she is an actress and fearful,” I said. “Or maybe Lillian, because she is awkward and impetuous?”
Anaïs nodded.
I said, “I see you as Djuna because you are feminine and wise like her.” She smiled. I just had to ask: “Where did the character of Sabina come from?”
Anaïs raised one arched eyebrow. “My four women characters are all parts of myself and of all women. I believe that all women have these characters in them: Sabina, the seductress; Djuna, our wisdom; Lillian, driven to action by anxiety; and Stella, the fearful, reclusive one.”
“I don’t have a Sabina.”
“You don’t have a seductress? Are you sure? I think you will realize that you do.”
I thought about Sabina in A Spy in the House of Love, cheating on her husband. That would never be me.
Anaïs explained, “Think of Sabina as akin to the goddess Artemis, with her hounds and her bow and quiver of arrows chasing her prey. It’s the love of the hunt.”
Suddenly I had an inkling what Anaïs meant. When I was twelve, soon after my father left, my girlfriend and I had hunted the San Fernando Valley for guys to flirt with. For three Halloweens in a row, we dressed in the same black leotard cat costumes that revealed our pubertal curves, reveling in our power to ensnare the eyes of older boys and men as we sauntered through Encino Park at night.
We put on eye makeup and stuffed our bras and hunted for boys at movie matinees, bowling alleys, and miniature golf courses, thrilling to the game of pulling in guys like reeling in fish. It was the newness of the encounters, the rush of triumphant power, the intoxication of arousal when we made out with them, the giddiness of telling each other afterwards how the guy had tried to cop a feel.
I marveled that Anaïs had intuited I’d been a pubescent huntress, like Sabina searching for new encounters and untried caresses, when I’d forgotten it until just then. The nuns in high school had succeeded in making me demure, but now the wild thrill of those hot summer nights and the unthinking pleasure of kissing strangers in the air-conditioned La Reina theater came back to me and mingled with the recent charge I’d experienced when I’d felt Jean-Jacques’s penis. Yet I could not have articulated any of this and instead said to Anaïs, “Well, I know I don’t have a Djuna.”
“You’ll discover your Djuna, your inner wisdom, in time too,” she assured me with her calm, perceptive Djuna smile.
I stared at her in wonder. We had gone past ordinary speech to a kind of female code language she’d invented.
“Which of my novels did you like best?” she asked.
“A Spy in the House of Love, because I could follow Sabina’s story. In the other books I couldn’t follow a plot …”
I saw anger flash across her face. She said bitterly, “You have the American obsession with plot. You know nothing about accepting the writer’s donnée.”
“What is that?”
“Donnée, Donnée! The given. What the writer sets out to do in the work.”
Although I am not usually good about adjusting my words to the sensitivities of others, I knew in that moment that Anaïs could not take criticism of her work, and that I could never, ever say anything negative about it. I pleaded, “I want to understand. I’m going to reread the books. The language is so beautiful, they are like poetry. You can’t get it on first reading.”
“I am writing about the interior life, not the surface world of events and politics. The four women are playing out a kind of emotional algebra.”
“Algebra wasn’t my best subject,” I said still trying to smooth things over.
“No, mine neither.” She shrugged. “I didn’t finish high school. I’m self-educated.” This surprised me; she was so polished and literate, things I associated with higher education.
She continued, “You just need to feel what corresponds inside yourself to the women in my novels. They’re meant to help you read your own inner world. There are plenty of other writers who will tell you about the outside world.”
“I’m going to read them again that way.”
“But first you need to prepare yourself for your encounter with Jean-Jacques. You should read D. H. Lawrence. He’s the only male writer who understands women’s sexuality. Colette would be perfect for you, if she’s translated into English.”
“I will, but I only have two more weeks in New York.”
“Oh. I thought you were living with Lenore.”
“Only for this summer. I’m supposed to go home to Los Angeles for college.”
“You aren’t moving to New York for college?”
I wanted to ask her to help me stay. Seeing Paris would be nice, but it would be better if Jean-Jacques sponsored me in New York, near her. “My scholarship is only good in California, but if we could figure out a way for me to stay here …”
She didn’t respond. Afraid I’d been too presumptuous, I backtracked. “Anyway, I can come back to visit Lenore. And I could see you when you come to Los Angeles.”
She snapped, “How do you know I’ll be in Los Angeles?”
I had stepped onto a minefield, but there was no way out. “When Caresse said you go to LA.”
“On business, and I’m very busy when I’m there.” I saw the nervous movement she’d used to describe Sabina, covering her mouth with her hand as if holding back something. Then she lowered her hand and stood up, erect, poised. “I’m sorry, I’m going to be late for a meeting with Gore.” That was what she had said when she’d shooed me out the door the last time. I had no choice but to follow her to the elevator.
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