Apprenticed to Venus

by Tristine Rainer

  “Shall I call you to see if you have spoken with Jean-Jacques?”

  “If there’s time.” Her enthusiasm for putting us together had vanished.

  I could hear the supplication in my voice when I said, “I’m going to read your novels again with your donnée.”

  “That’s fine.” Her lips curved in a smile, but its power of eternal reassurance was gone.

  She pressed the elevator button and instead of the hug for which I yearned, she air-kissed me on both cheeks. I stepped inside and watched her rush away before the elevator doors shut. The cage plunged to street level and jolted with a kick.

  CHAPTER 4

  Los Angeles, California, 1964

  I NEVER HEARD FROM JEAN-JACQUES or Anaïs. Although I wrote to her from LA, she sent back only a violet card announcing the French publication of her novel Ladders to Fire. Her world was now as inaccessible to me as Camelot. I dutifully embraced college life at USC, supplementing my scholarship with a waitressing job and joining a sorority that pledged me for my grades. I dated frat boys, drank beer from kegs at street parties, and had my hair frosted blond. In high school, I had pursued stage acting; in college, I gave up the theater to disappear behind the role of uncomplicated coed.

  Despite scoring the pill from student health, I was still a virgin at twenty, thanks to the ineptitude of the business majors, ROTC plebs, and frat boys at USC—and my own fears, which had returned as if the night with Jean-Jacques had never happened.

  However, the summer before my junior year, I wrangled a scholarship to study at Cambridge, England for a month, and given the affordability of Europe then at five dollars a day, I extended my stay to a three-month European tour, on which I was determined to find, as Anaïs had recommended, a European man to deflower me.

  When I saw the desk clerk who checked me in at the student hostel in Rome, I recalled Michelangelo’s David, which I’d stared at in Florence. If that was what a naked Italian man looked like, I’d thought, I was in the right country. To my everlasting good fortune, that’s what Gerardo Palmieri looked like.

  An hour after he had assigned me a tiny room in the hostel, Gerardo knocked on its door. Would I like to have dinner with him when he got off work?

  I was certain of my intentions and, having taken note how fast the European girls moved if they were interested in a man, I said, the words igniting sparklers in my mouth, “Yes, and I’d like you to make love to me after.”

  Gerardo recoiled for a moment, and instantly I regretted my bravado. But after a beat, he returned to the lyric pace of his practiced seduction. “I have a very special ristorante in mind. It is in the countryside.”

  After numerous courses and tiramisu, we lingered in the cafe’s courtyard, and I began to think he’d forgotten my request. Finally, Gerardo said, “Would you like to see my friend’s place in the mountains?”

  The gears of his little Fiat strained as we spiraled up the dark road. Halfway up the mountain that seemed to get higher with every round, I said, “I’m a virgin.” He didn’t say anything, just downshifted the straining gears.

  I expected after such a long drive we would reach a villa with a romantic view. So when he let us into the modest single apartment, I asked, “Where’s the view?” For the first time he appeared not to understand my English. What I did not understand was how difficult it was for a young man in those years to find a place for a rendezvous. He’d had to persuade the rare friend who didn’t live at home and didn’t have a roommate to vacate his precious apartment for us.

  It may not have had a view, but the tiny apartment was prepared for romance in every other way: a stereo, soft lighting, and a single bed in an alcove.

  Later, when Gerardo saw blood on the sheets, he said he hadn’t believed me when I’d claimed to be a virgin. Yet he could not have been more sensitive and gentle if he had. Even as he was kissing, touching, and preparing me, I mentally thanked Anaïs for her advice to choose a European man. Unlike the many women for whom the first time is disappointing, I triumphantly had an orgasm with Gerardo sometime before dawn.

  “Now I want you to teach me everything,” I told him. We began immediately, and in that glorious month, we made love at the beach with sand scratching our thighs, in his boxy Fiat, in my room in the hostel during siesta, and in courtyard apartments we had to vacate hurriedly at a specified hour.

  When my plane descended home, the Los Angeles basin looked unbearably flat and suffocating. Before I unfastened my seat belt, I had decided that I was going to become a college professor so that I’d have summers off and could go back to Italy for three months every year. My European trip had changed me. I’d learned about the US involvement in Vietnam, acquired a sympathy for socialism, and developed, as Anaïs had predicted, my own seductive Sabina persona. She descended the ramp with me at LAX, ready to take advantage of the “free love” ethos wending its way down the coast from San Francisco.

  My new sexual confidence and the new sexual freedom in the air worked handily with my new goal of becoming a professor. Since I would now have to spend inordinate hours cracking the books, I could no longer waste time with casual dating. If I met a guy I was attracted to, I intended to have sex with him right away to see if we were compatible, and then I could get right back to studying.

  No longer able to tolerate the restrictions of sorority life, I moved off Frat Row into my own apartment. Actually I moved considerably off campus, because the further one ventured into the surrounding ghetto, the cheaper the rent.

  My plans for devoted studying immediately went awry, though. I was just settling in for a full night of cramming for a morning essay test when a former sorority sister phoned to remind me that I’d agreed to a blind date she’d set up for that night. Despite my pleading, she would not let me out of it.

  When Harry Browne arrived at my apartment, my heart sank. He was old, at least thirty, with too short a haircut, and wearing a boxy business suit.

  He announced, “I made reservations for us at a restaurant in Malibu. The Holiday House.”

  Damn! It would take an hour and a half to drive to Malibu, three hours round trip. It would be midnight before we got back and I could start reading Cliff’s Notes on The Faerie Queene. My mood lifted, though, when we pulled into the parking lot and I heard the crashing surf, saw the glassed-in restaurant that hung over the Pacific in a graceful arc, and smelled butter and garlic infusing the salt air.

  When we entered, a brunette, chignoned hostess introduced herself as Renate Druks. Learning that this was our first time at Holiday House, she began her routine: “Our beautiful modernist building was designed by Richard Neutra in 1950—”

  “Is your accent German?” I asked, wanting to show off my travel experience.

  “Viennese,” she responded haughtily.

  As Renate guided Harry and me toward our window table, we passed by a glass-walled room where a private party was being held. I caught a glimpse of a woman who had Anaïs Nin’s petite figure, arched brows, and heart-shaped face. I heard that high, silent ring that accompanies coincidences we sense are fate, and I determined somehow to find out if the woman really was Anaïs.

  As Harry and I sat with leather menus in our hands, the October sun warmed the floor-to-ceiling windows and turned the ocean carnival hues. I noted that Harry was broad-shouldered and attractive, despite his parrot-like overbite.

  He held forth about a book he’d just written: “It explains Libertarian economics in a way people can understand.”

  I looked past him through the glass wall to the stylishly bohemian group enjoying their private party. They were bending in laughter like willows in the wind, reveling in the unfettered life I wanted, while I was worrying about an essay test and half listening to what Harry was saying. “In the next book I’m going to apply my Libertarian philosophy to the topic of sex.”

  That regained my attention. I imagined a nation of self-pleasuring Libertarians who didn’t believe that sex should be shared.

  Harry sho
ok the ice cubes in his second scotch and leaned in towards me. “There’s this myth that couples are supposed to have simultaneous orgasms. But my research shows it almost never happens.”

  “What research? Just your own?” I asked.

  “No, I’ve talked to men and women, married and single, and all these people told me that they feel like failures at sex because they don’t have simultaneous orgasms. But the truth is almost nobody does.”

  “That hasn’t been my experience,” I said. “Did you talk to anyone besides Libertarians?”

  Beyond the translucent wall, hors d’oeuvres were being served. A waiter held out a tray to the woman with Anaïs’s elegant carriage. Something she said to the waiter made him smile broadly and stand more erect.

  I excused myself from Harry for the restroom. On my way back, I stopped at the door to the private party, hearing the unmistakable jingle and cymbal song of Anaïs’s accented voice: “I don’t accept that your so-called objectivity is more true than my subjectivity.”

  I slipped inside the door and was about to approach her when the middle-aged hostess Renate stepped in front of me. “Excuse. This is a private party.”

  “I just want to say hello to Anaïs Nin.”

  “And who are you?” Renate glared at me through impossibly long eyelashes. I told her my name, and she crossed her arms. “I’ve never heard of you, and I am Anaïs Nin’s best friend.”

  “We met in New York,” I said as I dashed toward Anaïs.

  Renate, wearing three-inch heels, got there before me and announced, “Anaïs, you have a fan who wants to say hello, Tristine Rainer.”

  “I met you and Hugo in New York,” I reminded Anaïs.

  She shot a frightened look at Renate so I added, “We all went to Harlem, and Hugo—”

  “Tristine!” Anaïs broke from a young man with his arm around her. With his chiseled nose and even smile, he was handsome as a TV soap star. She quickly enclosed me in a hug, whispering in my ear, “You will keep my secret, won’t you?”

  “Yes,” I responded, though I wasn’t sure what it was.

  But when she returned to the side of the young man and nuzzled into him, I guessed that the secret was that they were having an affair. He must be “the other one.” I was impressed how much younger he was than Anaïs. His golden skin shone, and he had sun streaks in his brown hair. His short-sleeved shirt revealed shapely biceps and triceps. With the eagerness of a cocker spaniel, he gave me a firm handshake, and in a full-bodied voice, said, “I’m Rupert Pole, Anaïs’s husband.”

  I started to giggle, thinking he was joking; his chiseled good looks made him almost cartoonish. Immediately, I noticed that no one else in the group had registered amusement.

  Anaïs said to the others, “We went dancing one night, Tristine and Caresse Crosby and my book illustrator Ian Hugo.” Then she said to me, “Aren’t you attending that college in Westwood?”

  “No, I’m downtown at USC.”

  A lot of people confused UCLA with USC because both universities were in LA, but I was surprised Anaïs didn’t remember it was her husband Hugo Guiler who took us dancing, not Ian Hugo.

  “I’ll probably go to UCLA for grad school,” I offered.

  “And what will be your major?” asked a square-jawed man in his early sixties standing on the other side of Anaïs.

  “English lit,” I answered and told Anaïs, “I’ve been hoping to see one of your books on a syllabus, but the only woman writer I ever see is Emily Dickinson.”

  “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?” the man quipped in his high-pitched, British-inflected voice.

  “Have you met Christopher Isherwood?” Anaïs introduced the famous author, who bowed his head and put his hands together like a yogi.

  In reverence, I gasped. “I read your Berlin Stories in my Twentieth Century Lit class! I loved the structure of separate short stories that together made up the novel.”

  “Very insightful. Thank you.” His hand moved to the shoulder of an adorable mouse-faced boy standing close to him. “This is Don Bachardy.” Even though Don was at least thirty years his junior, I could tell by the way Isherwood hugged him that they were a couple.

  Don’s grin revealed a gap between his front teeth. He asked me, “What year are you in college?”

  I told him I was a junior as Renate pulled on my elbow. She said, “I think your good-looking date is getting worried about you.” The others followed her gaze through the glass wall to Harry Browne brushing wrinkles out of his suit as he rose from his chair.

  I wished I could stay and become a part of their group but reluctantly I let Renate guide me back to Harry. Before we reached him, I whispered, “Anaïs asked me to keep her secret, but I’m not sure what it is.”

  Renate hissed back, “She thinks you know.”

  “I guess she got a divorce, but why—”

  “Don’t speculate. Call me here tomorrow,” she whispered, before pulling out my chair opposite Harry.

  Later that night, Harry Browne discovered simultaneous orgasm. Although it disproved his Libertarian theory of sex for his next book, it made him obsessed with me. He just couldn’t believe that I wanted him to leave after it, but I had to get up to study for my test. He started phoning me the next morning, wanting to see me that evening, and when I said no, he wanted to take me to the Hotel del Coronado the following weekend. I had no interest in ever seeing him again.

  I felt victorious for having disproved his Libertarian theory of sex but also chilled at how impersonal the experience had been for me. It bothered me that I’d wielded my acquired ease with seduction as a weapon, leaving him wounded and me indifferent. Anaïs was the only person I knew who would understand the cold satisfaction I’d felt, for it was what she had described in her character of Sabina. I needed to talk with Anaïs again, but first I’d have to get past Renate, her gatekeeper.

  Right after my essay test, I phoned Renate and arranged to meet her at Holiday House the following afternoon. When I arrived, she offered me a drink, compliments of the house. I asked for plain tonic water.

  Renate took a seat and sipped the iced tea she had brought for herself. “Keeping secrets is something one gets used to, working here.” She blinked her impossibly long lashes. “Movie stars have their rendezvous in the motel rooms below the restaurant, so if you see any celebrities you must keep it mum. We offer them discretion.”

  I nodded, hoping I might see Robert Mitchum or Natalie Wood.

  “Actually, that would be a good test,” Renate added, “to see if you can be trusted.”

  “You mean with Anaïs’s secret?” I said.

  “Do you know what it is?” Renate asked, and I shook my head. I noticed she didn’t answer my question. She just wanted answers to her own. “Did you ever run into a student named Peter Loomer at UCLA?”

  “I don’t go to UCLA,” I reminded her. “I might go there for grad school.”

  “Please accept my apology for forgetting. And pardon me for asking, why you would want to go to UCLA for grad school?” She frowned. “They didn’t know what to do with Peter in that big, impersonal place.”

  “Who is Peter?

  “My son. He’s living at home now.” She sighed. “He’s such a sensitive, artistic boy. Anaïs illustrated her novel Solar Barque with pictures Peter drew when he was just seven. Have you seen it?”

  “No, but I’ve read her other novels. Most of them had illustrations by Ian Hugo. That’s one of the things I’m confused about. Why did Anaïs say she and I went dancing with Ian Hugo? I’ve never even met him. It was her ex-husband Hugo Guiler who took us to Harlem.”

  “You don’t know anything, do you?” Renate peered out the window, then turned her attention back to me. “Do you know who Ronnie Knox is?”

  “No.”

  “He was a star quarterback at UCLA. He played professionally for the Rams.”

  “I don’t follow football.”

  “Yes, it’s boring and violent.” She examined her buffed f
ingernails. “I wouldn’t know who Ronnie Knox is, either, except that he’s my husband. How old are you?”

  “Twenty.”

  “Ronnie is only nine years older than you.”

  Renate had to be near Anaïs’s age, almost sixty, I guessed. She and Anaïs and Christopher Isherwood seemed to be in some sort of cabal where everyone had much younger partners.

  “Ronnie’s father is his sports manager,” Renate continued. “If the old man ever found out that Ronnie married a bohemian twice his age, he’d kill him. Also, Ronnie is bound by product endorsement contracts that require him to remain a heartthrob bachelor. So it’s paramount we keep our marriage secret.”

  “I understand,” I said, but I wondered why we were talking about her young husband or her son.

  “As for me”—Renate looked at me deadpan—“I’d be ashamed if my bohemian friends found out I married a famous footballer.”

  I laughed. She smiled, pleased that I’d gotten her humor. She lowered her black lashes, and I could see they were definitely fake as she continued. “Some people live in two different worlds that have to be kept separate and secret.” I noticed how skillfully she’d applied her eyeliner to disguise the glue line and extend the wings. “Haven’t you at some point had to keep one side of your life hidden from the other?” She raised her artificial lashes, her piercing blue eyes holding mine.

  I considered. “I keep secrets from my mother.”

  “For instance?”

  “That I take the pill.”

  “Why can’t you tell her?”

  “She’d know I’m not a virgin anymore.”

  “Well, that’s ridiculous. You’re an adult woman.”

  “I know, but if I told her I’d have to deal with her hysteria and worry. It’s better for her and for me not to say anything about it.”

  “So you are protecting yourself and her?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s not so different from Ronnie and me, needing to protect ourselves from others’ foolish judgments,” she said. “And not so different from Hugo Guiler and Ian Hugo.”