Apprenticed to Venus

by Tristine Rainer

  “Did she write you back?”

  “No, she snubbed me.”

  I wondered if Anaïs realized that I’d felt snubbed when she’d broken off communication with me, but instead I asked, “Is Djuna Barnes’s name where you got the name for your character?”

  “No! My character is entirely different from Djuna Barnes, but I heard she complained that I used her first name. She also complained that I wear capes as she does. But that’s in tribute! In Paris, I admired her so much. I wanted to be part of her lesbian clique, but she rejected me.”

  Her face looked stricken, but then she straightened her spine and appeared to throw off the rejection, announcing with a professional air, “Djuna Barnes is a wonderful, mysterious writer. You should have her on your personal reading list. I can give you the names of many neglected women writers. I’ll type them up for you, and we can talk about them.”

  “Thank you!” I was delighted she’d begun to mentor me.

  We then fell into silence. I was uncomfortable, wanting to fill the space; but she, it seemed, was perfectly at ease, withdrawing into her private thoughts.

  After many moments she gave me a Mona Lisa smile and said, “I have to go to New York on business. I wonder if you might write a letter and mail it for me when I go.”

  “Sure.” I whipped out a steno book I’d packed in my bag, ready to take her dictation with the shorthand the nuns had insisted I learn.

  Her thin brows furled unevenly, one pinched in while the other lifted, and she added, “The letter should be addressed to me and it should begin formally: ‘Dear Anaïs Nin.’”

  “Okay.” I assumed there was a reason why she was dictating a letter addressed to herself. “What address?”

  “Could you get some stationery from your university?”

  “Maybe. I could ask the secretary in the English department office.”

  “Perfect. Why don’t we meet here again on Thursday when you have the stationery and I’ll dictate the letter then.”

  “Don’t you have your own stationery?”

  “Of course, but this requires something else. But if you can’t get it …” She seemed terribly disappointed. I couldn’t risk being cut off because of her displeasure again.

  “I want to help you! I just need to understand,” I blurted. “I know I must have said or done the wrong thing at your apartment in New York. I really wanted to see you again and you said you were going to take me shopping and put me together with Jean-Jacques, and I still don’t know what I did wrong, but I’m afraid I’ll mess up again and somehow ruin your secret because I don’t know what it is.”

  “I’m so sorry, Tristine. You didn’t do anything wrong in New York. I was just afraid. When you said you wanted to see me in Los Angeles …” She sighed. “My life is so complicated between the coasts.”

  “Was it Rupert? Were you already having an affair with Rupert?” I couldn’t help myself now. “Renate told me he’s jealous and that’s why you said that Ian Hugo took us to Harlem instead of—”

  “That’s true.” She averted her eyes.

  “I want to be your apprentice.” I sat upright to look professional. “I’ll get the stationery. Whatever you want me to do. You can trust me, Anaïs. I want to help you!”

  My declaration captured her attention, and she contemplated me. She held my gaze for a long time, during which it seemed we had been staring into each other’s eyes since the beginning of time, connected in an ancient bond of women’s sympathy for one another.

  Her eyes dropped to her pale, veined hands clenched in her lap. “I’m afraid I will shock you, so I have to think how to explain. I don’t know where to begin.” She looked at me again, her face now distressed. “This is all so complicated. I don’t know how to trust you not to … Even I—” She stopped, helpless with anxiety. She turned her face away, and I saw her sad Pierrot clown face that I recalled from the limo ride to Harlem.

  I wanted desperately for her to confide in me, and my desire made me uncharacteristically expressive. “I think secrets are like big hairy apes.” I could see I’d gained her attention. “You have to spend all your time guarding them so they don’t get out.”

  “Yes! Because if the ape gets out,” she said, “it will be horribly destructive.”

  I touched her icy hand. “But if you share the secret with someone you can trust, you don’t have to guard it all alone.”

  A surprised smile lifted the corners of her mouth and lingered as she studied me. “Perhaps we have been reacquainted to help each other.” She inhaled deeply and began, “Remember I confided in you that Hugo and I had not been sexually compatible?”

  “Because you were both inexperienced when you married.”

  She nodded. “Our lovemaking never really got much better, though we loved each other and tried. It was a terrible thing because I was so happy with him in every other way.”

  “I could see you were in love. He was devoted to you.”

  “Devoted, yes, but from the time I was a girl I dreamt of a marriage of passion as well as devotion. Don’t you want that, too?”

  “Yes … I don’t expect to find it, though.”

  “Oh, Tristine, you can’t give up hope so young! I never gave up expecting both passion and devotion. And because with Hugo I had only devotion, I was always looking elsewhere for the passion.”

  I realized she was telling me that she’d had affairs while married to Hugo; it must have been what led to their divorce. So my inkling when I read A Spy in the House of Love was correct: Sabina’s sexual adventures were autobiographical; the cuckolded Alan was Hugo. I asked, “So were you Sabina then?”

  “Yes. In her desperate way, Sabina is hunting for the great passion that can subdue and defeat her.”

  So that was it! That was why, though I longed for one true passion, I behaved like Sabina, who seduced and discarded men for her own amusement.

  Seemingly out of context, Anaïs asked, “Do you know who Gore Vidal is?”

  I recalled she had twice dropped his name when she’d shooed me out of her apartment in New York. Was that what she was afraid to tell? She’d been having an affair with Gore Vidal?

  I said, “I know that he’s a famous writer, but I’ve never read anything by him.”

  “He’s best known for The City and the Pillar, published when he was only nineteen. By that age, he’d already published two other novels.”

  A cramp contracted my ribs. I was already twenty-one and hadn’t published anything. Actually, I hadn’t even written anything other than some short stories and term papers.

  “Gore was an enfant terrible.” Anaïs’s smile twisted. “I met him in 1946. He was only seventeen then, and I was forty-three.”

  Had she seduced an underage boy? I had never heard of statutory rape by a woman.

  “Was he your lover?” I whispered.

  She laughed but not with her high jingling notes. “Everyone knows Gore is homosexual. He never made a secret of it.”

  “Oh.”

  “Not that it mattered to me.”

  I must have looked confused because she sighed. “When I met Gore, he was part of a clique of homosexuals who included me at all their parties in the Village.” She looked at me pleadingly. “You must be patient. I am trying to explain so that you can understand.”

  I waited, and she began again. “I’d befriended the homosexuals because I didn’t want to be unfaithful to Hugo anymore. I thought that with the homosexuals, I could find companionship without temptation. I hadn’t realized what a hothouse of enticements I would be entering. The talk was all about sex, and everyone fell so easily into each other’s beds, the women as well as the men.”

  Oh my god, how could I have missed it? Especially after she’d told me that she’d wanted to be part of Djuna Barnes’s lesbian clique! It just hadn’t occurred to me that Anaïs went with women because she was so feminine. That should have been the tipoff, though; she was one of those femme lesbians I’d heard about. Renate had to be
one, too—all the paintings of her naked girlfriends! Probably Anaïs’s and Renate’s young husbands were shills. They were probably homosexual, too.

  I felt as if one of Renate’s artichoke hearts had gotten stuck in my throat. If Anaïs and Renate were lesbians, then they must think I was one, too, and that was why I’d been brought there! Or they believed I was one but hadn’t yet recognized it, so they wanted to help me. The secret was about me: that I was a lesbian, too. But how could I be when I liked sex with men? I didn’t even know if I could do it with women, especially women as old as Anaïs and Renate.

  Making my voice sound both accepting and neutral I asked, “Are you a lesbian?”

  “No!” She laughed her delightful jingle.

  “Oh.” I took a relieved breath but felt some disappointment on the exhale.

  Anaïs went on, “After I turned forty, I was having a midlife crisis like a man. I was in a sexual frenzy, especially for young, beautiful boys, hetero or not.” Her laugh cracked. “When I met Gore I’d already slept with enough homosexual young men to know it would be a disaster, but I couldn’t help myself. He was so brilliant and beautiful when he was young. Once, in a taxi, he grabbed me into a fierce kiss. I responded, inflamed with desire, and that frightened him. He told the driver to stop, jumped out of the cab, and fled to one of his boys.”

  “Ouch!” I said.

  “That wasn’t the worst of it.” Her face coiled with ire. “He used secret confidences we’d shared to parody me in his novels! And there was nothing I could do about it because I had to remain friends with him.”

  “Why?”

  “He was my only route to a real publisher.”

  I was confused. “I thought you had a publisher, Gemor Press.”

  “Those books were self-published. I handprinted all those books myself.”

  “What about the British Book Company?”

  “It was a vanity press in England.” Her sigh was more of a groan. “Hugo wasted so much of his capital on vanity publishing for me.”

  “Well, at least you handprinted some beautiful books.”

  “That’s true.” Wistfully, she lowered her delicate chin. Then she looked up and set her beryl eyes on me. “Actually, that is where the story you need to understand begins: in 1947, probably before you were born.”

  I quickly calculated. “No, I was born. I was three years old.”

  She took a deep breath, touched my hand lightly, and began the story of her search for passion. She may not have been able to create a plot in her novels, but in person, with her soft, lilting voice, she was as captivating as Scheherazade, dropping one veil, only to entice with another.

  CHAPTER 6

  Greenwich Village, New York, 1947

  ANAÏS

  AT FORTY-FOUR, SHE WAS MAD for sex and wild with anxiety. Hugo had given her money to hire someone to set the type for Gemor Press, and she’d hired Gonzolo Mores, one of her impoverished Paris lovers who had followed her to the US. For a time, she was having sex with Gonzolo in the Village studio she kept for him, and with Henry Miller, who had also followed her to New York, and with a half dozen other men, sometimes five different men in a day—younger ones, older ones, soldiers and film directors, men she met at parties, some straight, some not. She paused only when bedridden with bouts of exhaustion.

  Her only anchor in this tumultuous period was the tangible work of handprinting her novels. Gonzolo, after a burst of energy, had fallen back on his old habit of drinking wine before noon, and so Anaïs had taken over his task of positioning the type on the old clamshell press.

  One freezing winter night, she was working alone in the East Village studio where the hand press was housed. Wrapped in her winter coat with a dirty printer’s smock covering it, she locked in letters of Bernhard Gothic Light. Her fingers were blackened from inking the plate. Her back ached from working the pedal. Yet she loved this work for the respite it gave from her abiding restlessness. She had come to the point where she felt she would have to leave both Hugo and the United States. She had not been able to flower as a woman or as a writer in New York as she had in Paris. She was dissipating her time and her talent. Her relationship with Hugo had become a formality of duty and appearance, and she wanted out of its imprisonment. Yet she did not know how she could get Hugo to live without her; nor, when she was honest with herself, how she would get by without him, financially or emotionally.

  She put away the type into boxes, removed the ink-stained smock, and checked her face in the wall mirror. It was after 10 p.m., and she was exhausted but didn’t want to go home to the empty apartment. Hugo was on business in Cuba; she was free for the night—that is, as free as she had the energy to be. She decided she would make an appearance at the party Hazel Guggenheim was giving. Hazel was one of the wealthy clients for whom Hugo handled investments. She was a painter of minute talent, and because her sister Peggy Guggenheim was an important collector, there were always some interesting artists at Hazel’s large parties.

  Anaïs splashed her face with freezing water in the utility sink and re-applied her makeup, carefully penciling the arched eyebrows, blackening her eyelids with kohl, drawing the bow on her upper lip in red, and adding rouge to her pallid cheeks. Her hair was still perfectly set from getting a perm at Elizabeth Arden’s Fifth Avenue salon.

  She raised her arms and stretched from side to side, took some deep breaths for bravery, added some aqua rhinestone earrings dug from her purse to bring out the color of her eyes, exchanged her flat work shoes for high heels, and slipped into her alluring Sabina persona. How many more times could she act the fascinating literary woman of mystery who dropped that her next novel was under consideration at Random House or Dutton or Viking or Ballantine or Farrar, Straus and Company, omitting that each publisher had actually already passed because her precious, surreal style was considered fusty and dated, like herself? Such thoughts left a clammy coating of fear on her skin and a cramp of anxiety under her ribs. So she thrust herself forward yet again to rush to a Manhattan party, drink champagne, flirt, and promote her glamorous, enigmatic image.

  The taxi dropped her at Hazel’s swanky apartment building, and after giving her name to the doorman, she saw, holding the elevator door for her, a lanky, handsome young man wearing a full-length white leather coat. Another showy, artistic homosexual, she chided herself; what else did she expect going to a party at Hazel’s?

  As they rode the elevator together, she examined her ink-stained fingers, then noticed the young man watching, and thrust her hands into the pockets of her wool coat. He removed his hands from his pockets, opening them to her, palms up. His fingertips were blacker than hers.

  “You’re a printer, too!” she exclaimed.

  “It’s my night job.”

  “What’s your day job?”

  “Unemployed actor. What’s yours?”

  “Unemployed writer.”

  They laughed, and she noticed his beautiful teeth and classic features. There was the quality of a dreamer, a sensitive face. If only he weren’t homosexual, she thought, unbidden, he could be the one. But that was ridiculous; he was too beautiful and stylish not to be gay.

  As they arrived at the top floor, she started to unbutton her coat. He leapt to help her. Expertly removing it, he said, “My name is Rupert Pole.” His exhaled breath shot a current from her neck down between her thighs.

  They entered the party together and found Hazel, who had grown more plump since Anaïs had last seen her, and blowsier. Hazel tilted her cigarette holder upward as she took in Rupert standing next to Anaïs.

  When he went to get drinks, Anaïs quickly made disclaimers to Hazel. “Hugo wished he could be here. He’s in Cuba on business for another week.”

  Rupert returned, handed Anaïs a vodka gimlet, and settled with her on a divan.

  “Are you French?” he asked her. She noticed flecks of gold in his blue eyes.

  “I was born in Cuba, but my father moved us to France, where I lived until I was eleven.
Then my parents divorced, and Mother brought us to New York.”

  “But your accent seems too pronounced for you to have lived here since you were eleven.” She noticed his ascetic temples.

  “When I was twenty, the man I was married to was transferred to a bank in Paris. In France my accent came back and now doesn’t want to leave.”

  “The man I was married to” wasn’t a lie, though it was something she said when she didn’t want to discourage a man romantically. She kept Hugo hidden. She kept the fact that she’d been married for twenty-four years hidden.

  They talked about Rupert growing up among Native Americans in a Palm Springs adobe, about her Spanish blood and her famous Cuban musician father, Joaquin Nin, about Rupert having studied music at Harvard, his belief in pacifism and interest in Eastern spirituality. They talked about typefaces and makes of standing presses. All the while her eyes spoke another language: I want you, do you want me? Do you desire me? Would you hurt me?

  Rupert told her earnestly that he was giving up the theater and returning home to Los Angeles to study to become a forest ranger.

  “So we’re both leaving New York for gentler pastures,” Anaïs said.

  “You’re leaving, too? Where are you going?”

  “I want to move back to Paris. I don’t find the United States hospitable to the kind of writing I do.”

  “Where have you been in the States besides New York?”

  “Brooklyn.”

  “That’s New York.”

  “And I’ve been to Boston. I gave talks at Amherst and Dartmouth.”

  “Have you ever been west of the Mississippi? Have you ever seen the mountains in Utah or the Indian lands in New Mexico? Ever been to California?”

  “No.” She sighed. “All the publishers are in New York.”

  “But Anaïs, you haven’t seen the United States yet! You’re going to leave this magnificent land before you’ve seen it? The US isn’t just the East Coast, you know.”

  “You sound like my friend Henry Miller. He recently moved to Big Sur in California.”