Apprenticed to Venus

by Tristine Rainer

  “Anaïs, I heard back on the forestry position I applied for. I’ll be working in Angeles National Forest near LA.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “They’re going to give me my own cabin in the woods. We could live there together.”

  Taken aback, she looked into his eager, open face. “Do you really want to endure your mother’s disapproval? I’m hardly the woman she’s dreamt of for you.”

  “But you’re the woman I’ve chosen. I’m in love with you!”

  She felt a rush of joy. She had longed to hear those words from the man she had searched for and found. But that warm wave of satisfaction was accompanied by a chill undertow. What about Hugo?

  “I love you, too,” she said.

  “I can’t imagine my life without you now,” he declared.

  “Well, we still don’t know each other very well.”

  “That’s why I want you to move to California. You said you were going to leave New York anyway and you told me you like it here.”

  “Yes, but I still have publishing business in New York.”

  “But you don’t have to live there. Now that your divorce is final.”

  “It’s not actually final.”

  “I heard you tell mother that you got divorced in Mexico.”

  “Well, there are complications. That’s why I have to go back.”

  His full lips turned downward. “Okay. Come in spring.” He raised her chin, forcing her to meet his eyes. “I need to know so I can endure waiting for you. Promise me.”

  She laughed, remembering how glad she had been that she’d said yes when he’d asked her to run away with him. “Yes.”

  He gazed at her, blue eyes glowing; his sensitive, young face illuminated with pure love. As he worked his way down from kissing her breasts, to her stomach, to finding the opening of her mound, he murmured, “You’ve ruined me for any other woman, Anaïs, Anaïs.”

  Flying back to Acapulco, Anaïs prepared to write in her diary as she often did by closing her eyes and allowing an image to come to mind. She saw herself suspended in space, and Hugo pulling her down by her ankle, a drowning man. Above, Rupert, like Adam on the dome of the Sistine Chapel, extended a muscled arm to lift her into his embrace.

  After recording the image in her diary, she came to a decision: She had to divorce Hugo.

  CHAPTER 10

  Malibu, California, 1964

  TRISTINE

  I UNDERSTOOD NOW WHY SHE’D chosen Rupert over Hugo. Her story was like that of Lady Chatterley, who’d divorced her rich husband in order to marry a simple man with whom she had great sex. Though I felt bad for Hugo, I admired Anaïs for staking all for the dream of passionate romance. She was my inspiration.

  Yet with all she’d revealed to me, I was still more confused about the timing of her divorce than ever. It appeared that she and Rupert had kept up their affair for sixteen years and then she’d finally divorced Hugo and married Rupert. Or could she and Hugo have already been divorced when I met them in 1962? Renate had said that Anaïs and Hugo pretended not to be married when he was Ian Hugo; could Anaïs have just been pretending to be married still to Hugo Guiler when I met her?

  Writing the pretend invitation letter for Anaïs was torture: typing and re-typing it, checking spellings in the dictionary, laboring the grammar. Knowing it would be read by English department chairs, any error could give it away as a fake—and it would be my fault.

  Anaïs and I met as arranged a week later outside the old Beaux Arts central library by the mosaics of sphinxes and snakes. I felt very continental when we rushed to greet each other on the elevated landing, exchanging pecks on both cheeks. We claimed a cement bench, and I presented to her the perfectly typed letter.

  She read through it quickly. Afterwards she was pensive. What had I done wrong? “What are these two dots?” she finally said, pointing to the greeting, Dear Anaïs Nin:

  “You mean the umlaut over the i in your name? I found a typewriter that had that key in the library.”

  “No, after my name.” She pointed with a French-tipped nail.

  “The colon?”

  “Oui,” she said impatiently.

  “It’s a business letter. Isn’t it?”

  She waved her hand. “I just use a comma.”

  It was my first inkling of the deficits in her education due to dropping out of high school and receiving no training other than in flamenco dancing. I was troubled by her ignorance of proper punctuation and alarmed when she pronounced, “Renate is right. The letter should actually be for a series of lectures.”

  “What does Renate have to do with it?”

  “The letter is partly her idea. She thinks it would be better if you invited me for a series of lectures covering two years.”

  Ugh. I would have to re-type the whole thing.

  Anaïs could read my face, even though I wasn’t aware anything showed on it. “What’s wrong, Tristine?”

  “I may not have enough stationery to get the typing correct again.”

  “Oh, we don’t have time for that anyway.” She took a black and gold Montblanc fountain pen from her large leather purse, uncapped it, and handed it to me. “You haven’t signed your name.”

  I noticed the very fine point on her fountain pen. “I might damage your pen,” I said. “I have my own.”

  “Yes, that would be better.”

  Anaïs smiled with approval as I pulled out a Bic ballpoint. I looked for something to write on. She offered her purse, but it was too soft. I dug out the Penguin orange-and-white paperback of Lady Chatterley’s Lover that I’d borrowed from the library to reread, set the letter on top of it, and signed my name. I was eager to have that letter out of my sight. I replaced the plastic cap on the Bic.

  “Oh, don’t put it away yet,” she said. “Just write in ‘and a series of lectures over a two-year period.’”

  I looked at her askance.

  She insisted with a note of sarcasm, “You know, use your little editor’s arrow.” She took the signed letter from me and studied it again. “Right here.” She pointed.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “Why not?”

  “The English department would never send out a revised letter without it being retyped.”

  “But it’s not coming from them. It’s coming from you, on behalf of the English department. It says, right here.” She pointed to the line that made me the most uncomfortable: On behalf of the English department at the University of Southern California, I am inviting Anaïs Nin …

  I said, “If the letter doesn’t look right, it won’t impress the East Coast colleges …”

  “Fine, but it has to go out today.”

  “Why?”

  “So it will get there before I arrive. Why are you asking so many questions? Just write it in. I brought a stamp.”

  I wrote in as small a hand as I could manage, and as I was writing, she was dictating yet another phrase to add, pointing with her white tipped nail.

  “Here add, ‘to include screenings of Ian Hugo’s films.’” Before I could object, she said, “Just insert it!”

  When I finished, she seized the letter and envelope, sealed the flap, affixed the stamp she’d brought, and took my arm, guiding me as a gentleman would. “I’m taking you to lunch to thank you for this little service,” she chirped, starting down the flight of steps. “We can look for a mailbox as we walk.”

  Arm in arm, we made our way down Fifth Street to Olive as unkempt people pushed by us. At the corner of Pershing Square she spied a mailbox into which she dropped the letter.

  After that we wandered up and down inclines and through narrow, seedy streets, as she repeated, “I know we’re in the right neighborhood, we just have to keep walking.” She directed us to an alley with uneven paving and piles of trash. “We’ll just cut through here, and it will show up.”

  But we emerged at a busy intersection I was sure we’d crossed before. She darted across the boulevard full of traffic. I hesitat
ed as the light turned yellow, but then chased after her, cars honking at me before I reached the other side. My anxiety skyrocketed. I was lost and following her, and she didn’t know where she was going.

  She turned onto a street where disreputable-looking men hung out in stairwells, but she kept up her fast pace with long strides, fearlessly, just as she had described her character Sabina. She stepped over the legs of a wino lying in the street, and I tried to do the same but flinched, paralyzed with sorrow for him. As I watched her ahead of me, I questioned how she could ignore the whimpering man’s misery, and something about his angular face made me wonder about Hugo when she’d divorced him. I was flooded with confusion again. When was that?

  Catching up with her, I decided just to ask. “At the end of the story you told me, you were going to divorce Hugo. But you were still married to Hugo when I met you.”

  She swung around to face me. “Are you trrracking me, Tristine? Did someone put you up to this?”

  “No! I just want to understand—”

  “Just say it,” she spat. “What do you want to know?”

  “Why did you wait so long to divorce Hugo, and what made you finally decide to do it?”

  We had emerged into a busy shopping area. She ducked under the canvas awning of a knife shop. “Haven’t you heard of those women who marry the same man more than once?”

  “Did you marry and divorce Hugo more than once? I love those stories.”

  She looked away from me. I sensed I’d struck a nerve, that this was something she was embarrassed about. Trying to sound nonjudgmental, I said, “I always wondered how that worked, how a woman who hated a man enough to divorce him could marry him again. I read about a woman who remarried the same man five times!”

  “Where did you read that?”

  “In a True Confessions magazine.”

  “I don’t know that magazine. Do you think they might want something from my diaries?”

  “I don’t know. It was just trash I read at the Sherman Oaks newsstand when I was thirteen. Besides, I found out the stories aren’t even true.”

  “When I was thirteen, I was reading Proust’s Recherché Temps Perdu in French.”

  I wondered if her comment was payback for my pointing out her ignorance of proper punctuation.

  She took off in her rapid stride again, and I had to hobble behind because I’d formed a blister on my foot. “Maybe we should have lunch another day,” I called to her.

  Taking pity on me, she came back and took my arm again. “Let’s just walk a little further this way. It will be worth it. The place has the best ceviche in Los Angeles.”

  “What’s that?” We had passed a few Mexican eateries advertising that they served menudo, which I knew was intestines. Ceviche sounded as disgusting.

  “It’s Mexican prepared raw fish. Delicious. You’ll love it. Rupert and I ordered it all the time in Acapulco.” With a maternal gesture, she lifted a bleached strand of my hair sticking to my neck. Her voice sweetened. “Now you tell me a personal story as we walk, as I told you my story of meeting Rupert.”

  I was struck dumb. Much as I had fantasies of becoming a writer, I had no idea how to tell a story. “I can’t think of any.”

  “Then tell me about how you got the university letterhead.” She kept us moving through what now seemed a maze of alleys. “Did you steal it?”

  I said I had asked for the stationery and the secretary had just given it to me; it wasn’t much of a story.

  “What were your feelings?” she asked.

  “Scared.”

  “When have you felt that way before?”

  That gave me an idea. I did have a story. I decided to tell her about the one time I had stolen something. It had only been the year before.

  “You never stole things as a child?” she asked, unbelieving.

  “No, never. Did you?”

  “Yes, of course. Money from my mother’s purse. Candy. It’s normal.”

  “Well, I was sensing that there was something not normal in my never having stolen anything,” I began. “I wanted to perform an act of rebellion against authority, just for the sake of doing it. I was tired of always being the good girl.”

  “That’s a promising beginning. Go on.” She smiled.

  “It was first semester, sophomore year, and we were reading Camus’s The Stranger in Dr. Inch’s world lit class.”

  “Who is Dr. Inch?”

  “He’s the chairman of the English department.”

  “What is his first name?”

  “Minor.”

  “Minor Inch? Rrreally?” She giggled.

  I nodded but wanted to get back to the weird, personal story I had never told anyone. “That was when I realized I was an existentialist.”

  She gave me a look of revulsion.

  “Aren’t you an existentialist?” I asked, surprised.

  “No!” She seemed irritated. “What does it have to do with your story?”

  “After reading the end of The Stranger, I wanted to prove I was an existentialist by doing an action, like the shooting at the end, that had no reason except my will. I decided to steal one shoe.”

  “Why just one?”

  “Because I would have no use for it. It would be a purely existential act with no motive or self-interest involved.”

  She stopped where we were, in a little cobblestone square we’d come to, and looked at me as if I were nuts. I tried to explain my thinking, but she pushed me. “Just tell me what you felt when you were taking the shoes.”

  “Shoe. Singular. First I walked through the shoe department looking for the easiest box of shoes to take without being noticed. I didn’t care if they were my size because I would never wear them anyway.”

  “Yes, but what did they look like? Were they platinum high heels with rhinestone encrusted straps? Were they fine leather loafers such as Greta Garbo would have worn?”

  “I think they were pumps. Two sizes too large for me. After I took them into a dressing room with a dress I’d grabbed off a rack, I removed one shoe from the box and hid it in my purse, leaving the other shoe, still wrapped in tissue, with the dress in the changing room. I hurried down the escalator afraid that I would be stopped and arrested for shoplifting. They wouldn’t believe I did it to understand existentialism. I burst through the circulating door out onto the street. When I was sure no one would see me, I threw the shoe into a trash bin and resolved never to do anything so stupid again.”

  She frowned. She did not like my story.

  She didn’t say anything but turned around slowly in a semi-circle. “There!” She pointed to an archway covered with grape vines, so low we had to duck to enter. Leading the way, she declared, “I found it by intuition!”

  The arbor led to a tiny covered patio only big enough for two cafe tables. We sat at one; two men in business suits occupied the other.

  Anaïs launched into her critique of my story as soon as we were seated. “What was your underlying motivation? We never find out. If you were going to do it, you, at least, should have taken a pair of shoes.”

  “No, then it wouldn’t have been an intellectual experiment.”

  “But it was a stupid, risky experiment with nothing to be gained. You said so yourself. What were the feelings that made you do it?”

  “I don’t see what it has to do with feelings!” I heard my voice rise. The businessmen looked up from their meal.

  “The story I told you was driven by feelings,” Anaïs said. “Feelings are where you find the trrut! Your trrut!”

  The idea was so completely foreign to me that I did a double take. Feelings were the last place I would look for the truth. As far as I could see, feelings misled people, made them screw up at school or at work.

  “I don’t trust my feelings,” I said.

  “Do you even know what they are?”

  “Yeah.” I shrugged.

  “I don’t think you do,” she said gently. Instead of arguing it further, she rose and glided over
to where a Mexican woman was cooking. The eyes of the businessmen followed her, and although they were in their mid-thirties, considerably younger than she, they exchanged a look of appreciation as she passed. It was the way she moved: like a dancer, at once delicate and erotic.

  Through open latticed doors, I watched Anaïs chattering with the plump woman patting tortillas who, with her hair in a puffy gray bun, reminded me of my mother. I suddenly felt guilty; here I was being taken to lunch by a fascinating novelist, while Mother was serving lunch to the bratty kids she babysat as she cleaned their house.

  Anaïs returned to the folding chair opposite me, descending gracefully, crossing her calves, and presenting her narrow ankles to the businessmen. They paid but lingered, clearly fascinated by her. They were in my line of sight, with Anaïs’s back to them, when she told me, “We’re in luck. They have ceviche today.”

  “Very fresh,” one of the businessmen chimed in.

  Anaïs turned and gave him her glorious smile. “Tell my young friend that it’s delicious. It’s her first time.”

  With great gusto, the men assured me I would love it, that this was the right place for the first time.

  Then Anaïs returned her attention to me as the cook brought us two glasses of Chablis and two plates of ceviche that carried the faint aroma of the sea. I couldn’t believe that I was going to have to put those glistening slices of raw fish into my mouth.

  “Just try it. It’ll be a new experience. If you don’t like it we’ll order you something else,” Anaïs urged.

  I hesitated.

  “Just do what I do,” she instructed. She squeezed lemon over the pale pink flesh on both of our plates. It seemed to shiver as her fork punctured a square slice. She lifted the entire square to her mouth and, without it touching her lipstick, popped it in. She closed her ruby lips and chewed. I copied her every move, girding myself for the worst. The two men were watching me, amused. Mercifully, the fish had been soaked in so much lemon and spices it tasted good and soon I was asking for more.

  Sipping her Chablis, Anaïs said, “Let me see your copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”

  I tried to indicate to her that the businessmen were watching us and listening, but she appeared not to care. She leafed through the paperback, finding the page she was looking for, and read aloud in her high, undulating voice, loudly enough for the men to hear: