Apprenticed to Venus
Page 6
“I don’t understand.”
“Hugo had to protect his bosses and himself.”
“Which one? Hugo Guiler or Ian Hugo?”
“They’re the same man. When Hugo Guiler decided to become an engraver he invented the pseudonym Ian Hugo so the other artists would think that he was a struggling artist, too, and take him seriously.”
I understood having to pretend you were like other artists so they would accept you. “Oh, now something makes sense!” I remembered my inkling that Anaïs had a very close relationship with the engraver of her books. “When I saw Ian Hugo’s engravings, they fit Anaïs’s writing so well I imagined he might be her lover. And he was, as her husband, I mean, before she married Rupert.”
“Not exactly.” The way Renate smiled I could see how much she enjoyed being in the know. “When Hugo was Ian, the artist, he and Anaïs pretended they were not married. That way Anaïs could promote Ian Hugo’s artistic work without it appearing to be self-serving.”
They had certainly succeeded in fooling my godmother. I couldn’t wait to tell Lenore that her artist friend Ian Hugo was actually Anaïs’s wealthy husband.
I felt Renate watching me, as if she could read my thoughts. I puzzled out loud, “I still don’t understand, though, why Anaïs said it was Ian Hugo who went dancing with us.”
“Perhaps she didn’t want you talking about Hugo Guiler in front of Rupert.”
“But if they’re divorced … Is Rupert jealous?”
“Why do you think Rupert should be jealous?” Renate again answered my question with one of her own.
“Maybe because Hugo is so elegant and sophisticated and Rupert seems, I don’t know, bland?”
Renate suppressed a smile. “Don’t let Anaïs hear you say that.”
“Oh, believe me, I wouldn’t.” I was still confused, though. “If Ian Hugo and Hugo Guiler are the same person, Rupert would be equally jealous hearing either name.”
“Perhaps Rupert doesn’t know that Hugo Guiler and Ian Hugo are the same person. Perhaps Anaïs wants to be free to talk about Ian Hugo, her book illustrator, without it bothering Rupert.”
“Oh, I see.” I thought that Anaïs’s new husband must be a very insecure man.
Renate said, “May I ask you another question?”
I nodded.
“Do you think that because Hugo uses two names or Ronnie and I have a secret marriage it makes us liars?”
Actually I did, but I knew that wasn’t the answer she was looking for, so I said, “Not necessarily. The rules of the worlds we live in can prevent us from openly being ourselves.”
“Exactly.” Renate nodded.
It seemed my answer had gained her approval, so I seized the moment. “Anaïs once promised me we would be friends. I want her to know she can trust me.”
“Well maybe we can all be friends. It depends.”
“On what?”
Renate didn’t respond. She stared out the window at the ocean. “Look, there’s a cormorant.” She pointed. “Maybe I’ll paint you with a cormorant.”
“You’re a painter! I’d love to see your paintings.”
“You can. I specialize in portraits of people alongside their animal spirit.”
“And I remind you of a cormorant?”
“Always fishing.” It sounded like a reprimand. As Renate studied me, I tried not to look fishy. Finally she said, “Maybe you will be able to do a service for Anaïs.”
“A service? I would. I would love to.”
“Depending on how well you can be trusted,” she said, watching something behind me. “Now you know quite a few secrets. Let’s see how well you keep them.”
“I will,” I promised. “I won’t mention anything to anyone about you being married to a famous football player. Or that Ian Hugo is Hugo Guiler.” Damn, now I couldn’t tell my godmother.
“Or what goes on at Holiday House.” Renate nodded in the direction behind me. “Be discreet when you turn around.”
“I’ll go to the ladies’ room.” As I rose and turned, I saw a man seated two tables away who looked so much like Frank Sinatra it had to be him! He was clasping hands with a blond woman who had her back to me.
When I returned from the bathroom, they had left—probably to use one of the apartments below. I saw that Renate was on the phone at the hostess’s desk. I’d been trying to think who she reminded me of, and now it dawned on me: it was Vampira, the local TV emcee of midnight horror films. Renate had the same long black hair and witchy beauty.
As I approached, she put down the receiver. “You’re invited to my house to see my paintings Wednesday next.”
CHAPTER 5
Malibu, California, 1964
AS MY BUICK BUMPED ALONG the dirt road on the east side of Pacific Coast Highway, I understood how Renate could afford to live in Malibu on a hostess’s salary. There were no ocean views on this side. Her house sat in the gloom on a barren, undeveloped expanse of scrubby chaparral and tilted telephone poles.
The carport under Renate’s characterless stucco was empty. Had she forgotten our appointment? I parked in the carport and walked around the house to find an entry door. I saw a faded red Volkswagen parked at the rear of the house but could find no entry other than the one under the carport, so I knocked on it.
Renate welcomed me and proudly showed me around. This was all hers, paid for with her wages. “My ex-husband was a doctor, but when I left him, all I took was my son and my freedom.”
Everything in her house looked as if it had been crafted by a class of third graders told to finish their projects before the bell rang. The spiral ladder leading to a sleeping loft seemed so narrow only a monkey could climb it. The huge velvet pillows that substituted for a couch had been basted with thick white thread that had never been removed. Renate’s unfinished canvases balanced on off-kilter, homemade easels.
“It must have been difficult being a single mother,” I said, thinking of my mother.
“No, I prefer to be my own boss.”
“I mean money-wise.”
“People always think that. But that’s because they aren’t artists. The secret to being an artist is to know how to live well without money.”
“How?” This was something I really wanted to know.
“With creativity! Plus, I don’t covet all those bourgeois possessions people hold so dear.”
“I know! My mother can’t let go of any possessions, and as a result, I don’t seem to want anything. Material, I mean.”
Renate’s smile was warm even though she didn’t show her teeth. “I knew you were copacetic.”
One of her paintings on the wall caught my attention. A naked woman, whose long black hair fell to her lovely bare behind, faced a smaller mirror image of herself walking out of a shadowy mountain pass. A raven perched at the naked woman’s foot.
“That’s my friend Raven,” Renate said. “She loved Edgar Allen Poe, so she purchased a pet raven in his honor.”
“So that’s her raven?”
“Oh, yes. The two of them bonded so deeply that she had her name legally changed to Raven. When her lovers would visit, the bird would screech and peck at them in a jealous rage.”
“Did she get rid of the bird?”
“No, she stopped having her lovers over.” Renate had the timing of a vaudeville comedian. I laughed, recognizing that I needed to respond to her humor to keep her approval. “My friend,” she continued, “then slept over at her lovers’ houses, but the bird fell sick with depression and wouldn’t eat. So now she doesn’t go anywhere, just stays buried at home with the raven.”
“It really is an Edgar Allen Poe story!”
“Yes, that’s what Anaïs said. Raven is part of our circle.” The circle I wanted to be part of.
“Are all the women in these paintings in your circle?” I looked around at the paintings of women in various degrees of undress, each posed with her animal spirit.
“My circle with Anaïs? No. Most of them haven’t ev
en met Anaïs.” Renate watched my reaction to her work. “Take your time.”
I took more time than I really needed to look at the highly saturated, acrylic paintings that recalled Salvador Dali’s trompe-l’oeil dreamscapes.
“It’s the kind of painting nobody does anymore,” Renate said, sighing. It was true; her surrealist style was dated and out of sync with the pop and op art of the day. Her paintings, like Anaïs’s novels, embodied a European prewar fascination with the subconscious, while Warhol’s soup cans and Vasarely's optics were reflecting our surface, modern realities.
I looked at Renate’s skillfully executed but somehow naive paintings: a slender woman lying alongside a panther, a woman with blue skin floating on a swan’s spread wing, a woman with the same eyes as her Siamese cat, a naked woman sitting lotus in a field, feeding grapes to a little goat.
I recognized Anaïs in a small, framed painting in metallic gold tones. At her feet, two fish swam in opposite directions as in the sign of Pisces. Anaïs was elevated in a recessed alcove like a saint, her body wrapped in a long, continuous strip of paper that bound her legs like a mermaid’s tail, or a mummy.
“Why did you paint Anaïs constrained like that?” I asked. “I think of her as such a free person.”
Ignoring my question, Renate ducked into her cramped kitchen. I wondered if the painting of Anaïs tightly bound had to do with her new husband’s possessiveness. I wanted to ask Renate why Anaïs had married Rupert Pole. Admittedly he was handsome, but he struck me as the male version of a pin-up. I could not understand why she would have given up Hugo for him, especially now that I knew Hugo was an artist as well as a businessman. But I didn’t ask why because of what Renate had said about my companion spirit being a cormorant—always fishing. I wouldn’t want to be painted next to a cormorant because its big beak would bring attention to my aquiline nose, about which I was self-conscious.
Renate served us green salad with marinated artichokes on Mexican tin plates that she set on a table made from a wooden door. I picked at the darkened, soggy leaves.
She stabbed a baby artichoke with her fork and waved it like a metronome. “The little service that I have in mind for you involves receiving a few phone calls and handling a small amount of mail for Anaïs. Do you think that is something you might like to do?”
“Sure,” I said. “Last month there was an ad on the English Department bulletin board looking for an author’s assistant. I really wanted the position, but it was filled when I called. Assisting Anaïs Nin would be a great opportunity.”
Renate took a bite of the artichoke and said, “I presume you want to be an author.”
“I think so,” I said, though now that I was majoring in English literature and had read the immortal authors, I realized I couldn’t compete.
“You would like to be an author’s apprentice?” Renate smiled.
“That would be great.”
“Apprentices do services for their mentors.”
“Of course.”
“I’m afraid to say it would not pay. But it would give you an association with a mentor.”
Mentor. The word beckoned like blazing Sirius in the night sky. I wanted to be Sirius B, the cool, circling companion of that scorching star. It was a word that belonged to the guys, who referred to a special male professor as “my mentor.” I was thrilled to hear the word applied to Anaïs. Her charisma had captured me the first time I’d met her, inspiring a conviction, however unfounded, that she was my destiny. Anaïs as my mentor? What did I care about money?
“I don’t need to be paid.”
Renate nodded in approval. “Ordinarily, as Anaïs’s best friend, I would not give such an important responsibility to anyone else. I would continue to do it myself. But there are complications since I married Ronnie and my son moved home.” Renate eyed my plate. “You’ve hardly eaten anything. Don’t you like it?”
“It’s good.” I fibbed to be polite. “I ate too big a breakfast.”
Renate gave me a stern, all-knowing look, but also a nod to credit my manners. With her aristocratic bearing, she carried her empty plate and my full one into the kitchen. “There’s a photo of my husband Ronnie on the shelf behind you,” she called out.
I located the framed black and white picture of a kneeling football player holding his helmet and smiling at the camera. Renate and Anaïs were marvels, I thought, both of them married to gorgeous, younger men.
“Where is Ronnie? Will I meet him?”
“No, he’s at the apartment he still keeps in Santa Monica so his father won’t suspect he’s living with me.” She returned with mints from the restaurant for us. “Ronnie goes there to try to write. He wants to be an author, too, but he keeps rewriting the same page over and over. His perfectionism is driving him crazy.”
“I do that,” I admitted.
Renate put out a palm for the cellophane from my mint just as a car screeched to a halt outside. Through the living room window overlooking the carport, I watched Anaïs emerge from a powder blue Thunderbird. She removed the kerchief tied under her chin and tousled her permed bob.
“You invited Anaïs!” I cried, delighted as a six-year-old at seeing Snow White coming up the steps.
“Your enthusiasm is charming.” Renate smiled.
Anaïs swept through the door, her black cape flapping behind her like the wings of a great crow. I recalled her statement about always dressing the part for an occasion and wondered if she’d conceived this as some sort of clandestine, cloak-and-dagger meeting.
“I had the most terrible drive here,” she announced. “I got so entranced by the sight of the ocean that I went through a red light. The other cars honked and an awful man in a pickup truck followed me to the turn-off, yelling at me.”
“Here’s pure water to relax you.” Renate poured a glass from the tap and handed it to Anaïs. “Sip it slowly.”
Anaïs perched herself on a stack of large pillows. She released the clasp on her cape and it fell in graceful folds so she appeared to be sitting on a draped pedestal. As Anaïs dutifully followed Renate’s instructions to take five little sips of water, Renate said, “Tristine told me that she would be thrilled to help you with some phone and mail issues. My intuition tells me she’s trustworthy, but you need to talk with her yourself to see how you feel.”
I grinned at Renate. She was trying to help me get the apprentice position.
After Renate offered Anaïs something to eat and Anaïs refused, Renate picked up her imitation crocodile purse and headed for the door. “Ronnie and Peter won’t be back until dinner time, so you two should be undisturbed. I have an appointment with my lawyer.” Renate explained that because her contractor had built her house with its only view through the carport, she’d stopped paying him, and he was suing her. After she left, we heard the gears of her Volkswagen as she pulled out.
Anaïs and I sat in awkward silence. Finally, Anaïs said, “Renate likes you very much.”
“I like her, too.” Why couldn’t I think of anything more interesting to say?
Anaïs gave me her reassuring smile. “We have so much catching up to do. I remember you wrote to me that you had an Italian boyfriend. What happened with him?” I hadn’t known she’d received my letters about Gerardo Palmieri, because she hadn’t replied.
“After I got back to LA and had almost forgotten him, he unexpectedly wrote me saying we should marry, and I should ask my father to sponsor him so he could become a lawyer here.”
“Do you see your father now?”
“Occasionally. We aren’t close.”
“Did you ask him to sponsor Gerardo?”
“Yeah. He just guffawed.”
“That was rude of him!”
I shrugged. “When I wrote back to Gerardo, he stopped writing me.”
“He wasn’t the right one.” She squeezed my hand gently. I recalled how safe and cared about she could make me feel.
“Is your father still married to the big buxom blonde?”
As I brought her up to date on my life, it seemed transformed by her interest. Through her vision I became a young heroine in an exciting drama with sad and funny parts and the promise of great adventure and romance ahead.
“And what about that man I saw you with at Holiday House?” she asked merrily.
“Ugh, I’m getting worried about myself. You told me I’d develop a Sabina, and you were right. In A Spy in the House of Love you wrote that Sabina achieved man’s detachment from sex. She could take pleasure without needing love, and afterwards she just wanted to leave, to get away. That’s how I am now.”
“Don’t worry. Your Sabina may be dominant presently, but she is only one part of you. You have a wise, clairvoyant self to advise you. You have a Djuna.”
I recalled the character of Djuna in Anaïs’s novels, the calm, centered one who reminded me of Anaïs herself. “I still don’t have a Djuna,” I said.
“She may not have fully emerged yet, but she’s there. Are you still writing a diary?”
“No, I stopped.”
“Oh no, why?”
“I don’t have time. My studies. And, I don’t know, I don’t like to look at my writing.”
“You are being too hard on yourself. The imperfections in a diary are part of the form. It’s a human document, full of stutterings. I hope you begin again.”
“I will.” All the learning I’d crammed into my head in college had touched only my intellect. No one spoke to my emotional and inner life as she did.
She said, “When I was your age, I longed for a woman writer to be my friend and guide.” Her melodic voice quivered with sadness. “I wrote to Djuna Barnes because I loved the novel she wrote, Nightwood.”