Apprenticed to Venus

by Tristine Rainer

  “‘In the short summer night she learnt so much. She would have thought a woman would have died of shame. Instead of which, the shame died. Shame, which is fear: the deep organic shame, the old physical fear which crouches in the bodily roots of us, and can only be chased away by the sensual fire, at last it was roused up and routed by the phallic hunt of the man …’ Lawrence knows how to tell a story through feelings!”

  The two businessmen were grinning with astonishment and titillation. They seemed to be enjoying some sophisticated game with Anaïs at my expense, and my cheeks burned like the red salsa on our table.

  “Do you know them?” I hissed.

  “No, I’ve never seen them before in my life.” She glanced back at one of the men, who lit up in a smile. “Are they bothering you? We can leave.” She started to rise.

  The two men rose as well. One said, “We have to get back to work … unless?” He let the unspoken question hang in the air.

  Anaïs’s guttural laugh was the throaty sound she’d described in her novels as Sabina’s. She gave me a questioning look. I felt paralyzed in the moment; I had no volition of my own. I was like an insect she’d pinned to a board.

  I glared at the dawdling pair of men who were too old for me and too young for her. Finally, they took the hint and left.

  As soon as they were gone Anaïs’s laughter, like a temple bell, cleansed the air. “I was just playing with them. I thought you were participating. No? Nothing would have happened. I am completely faithful to Rupert now.”

  “They thought we were prickteases,” I said.

  “Prrrickteases? I’ve never heard that one! Prrricktease! I have to tell Renate.”

  “It’s not a compliment.”

  “No? How is it used?”

  “When a guy is mad because you acted sexy but won’t follow through. I used to get called it all the time.”

  “Give me an example of a time you were a prrricktease.”

  I recalled again, as I had at her Greenwich Village apartment, my pubescent hunt for boys. “When I was just twelve, my girlfriend and I would put on makeup and look for boys to make out with at miniature golf or the movies. When I refused to go past kissing, the guy would call me a pricktease.”

  “So that’s what happens when girls don’t have chaperones,” she mused. “You were fortunate. At that age I couldn’t go anywhere without one of my older brothers.”

  “You think that was lucky? I think you were lucky to have older brothers.”

  “Perhaps.” She shrugged. “What’s interesting is that you were already a baby Sabina.”

  She went to pay the check rather than wait for the cook to bring it. Returning to our patio table, she leaned down, set her hands lightly on my shoulders, and said into my ear, “But where did Sabina go today, Tchrristine? Nowhere to be found! Into the ether like a genie! You should have flirted with them, had some fun, watched to see what would have happened. It would have given you a better story than a stupid shoe. You should write about being a prrricktease.”

  Thursday morning, after Anaïs had left for New York, I intended to sleep in. I’d been up late studying and didn’t have a class until the afternoon. But the phone jangled insistently at 8:30 a.m.

  It was the English department secretary who had given me the stationery. She told me that Dr. Inch wanted to meet with me in his office. I had never been called into a professor’s office before and I assumed it was because the secretary had conveyed a question I’d asked, about how I’d apply for a Fulbright scholarship to Italy. My heart took flight with fantasies of getting a Fulbright. I could live in Rome with Gerardo Palmieri as my lover or maybe in Siena with several Italian lovers.

  Dr. Inch, a slight, faded man, seemed dwarfed behind his huge wood desk covered with tall stacks of books and papers. He rose to search for something in one of his piles. After not finding it, he sat again, and peered at me disapprovingly.

  “I received a phone call, young woman, from a Mr. Guiler who said he had in his possession an invitation addressed to his wife from you on behalf of the English department.”

  I was stunned. “How did Hugo get that letter? It wasn’t mailed to him.”

  “So you admit you wrote it?”

  “It was for Anaïs Nin. She’s a writer. I’m apprenticing to her.” I hoped that Dr. Inch, as a literature professor, would look kindly on the fact that I was working for a writer.

  “I’ve never heard of her, and for your information, I choose whom to invite to speak on behalf of the English department!”

  “It wasn’t a real invitation; it was just for her to show around to eastern colleges.” I hoped I wasn’t breaking Anaïs’s confidence. I had to defend myself.

  Dr. Inch crossed his arms. “Now I know you are lying to me.”

  “I’m not! Why do you think I’m lying?”

  “East Coast colleges wouldn’t care whom West Coast colleges invite. They aren’t impressed by that.”

  My stomach sank. Of course, he was right. I hadn’t thought that taking a few sheets of stationery was a big deal but suddenly I realized that it was everything, my whole future. Dr. Inch could impede my graduation and applications to grad school. “All I did was type the letter for her,” I pleaded.

  “You didn’t just type the letter. You procured the stationery for it. We have your signature on record. This is a case of fraud, and I will see that you receive the consequences you deserve. I looked up your record, young lady. State scholarships are not intended for bad apples.”

  Oh, my God. I could lose my scholarship, everything I’d worked so hard for! “I’m not a bad apple! I’m not. I’m getting As. You can check. What are you going to do?”

  “I haven’t decided whether to recommend your suspension to the academic senate or the dean. You will be hearing from me. In the meanwhile, speak of this with no one.”

  “How did Hugo see the letter?” I heard how out of control my voice must have sounded to Renate through the receiver. Anaïs was in New York and hadn’t given me her new phone number there, so I’d phoned Renate as soon as I got back to my apartment.

  “You mean the letter you mailed to Anaïs? How do you know Hugo saw the letter?”

  I should have known Renate would answer my question with one of her own. I recounted what had just happened in Dr. Inch’s office.

  I was hyperventilating by the time Renate said gravely, “This is very serious. Let me think about it. Perhaps there’s a solution to protect you at that uptight university.”

  I didn’t think there was anything Renate or Anaïs could do about the destruction of my college career; they were so peripheral to that world.

  “Anaïs can’t show that letter now to any eastern colleges!” I warned.

  “She won’t. I’ll talk to her. Here’s what I want you to do. When you next see Dr. Inch, find out exactly what he told Hugo. Then be prepared for a meeting at my house with Anaïs the moment she gets back from New York. Don’t worry.”

  How could I not worry? Questions flew around in my mind like moths, eating holes in my brain. What would I do with my life if I couldn’t become a college professor? I didn’t want to end up a restaurant hostess like Renate; I’d held enough waitressing jobs to know what a dead end that was. Why had I thrown away everything I’d worked for just to please Anaïs Nin?

  Dr. Inch had said Hugo called Anaïs his wife. Was my suspicion right that they pretended they were married now, the way they’d pretended they were not married when Hugo was Ian Hugo? These were not honest people! And what was the truth about the letter, anyway? Dr. Inch had said that even if it really were from the USC English department, it wouldn’t impress eastern colleges, so what was the real reason Anaïs had me write and send it? What kind of game had she gotten me mixed up in?

  The questions flew around madly and collided with one another for a week. Another week went by, and I didn’t hear from Renate, Anaïs, or Dr. Inch. I made myself focus on my classwork, hoping that my good grades would bring me leniency when
the university’s discipline came down on my head.

  Just before Thanksgiving break, I got a call to come back to Dr. Inch’s office. As I pedaled my bike onto the campus, I imagined begging Dr. Inch to let my punishment be a public flogging before the Tommy Trojan statue, rather than expulsion, so my humiliation would be over all at once.

  I looked at the Romanesque campus with the greedy eyes of the doomed, as the whole student body had during the Cuban Missile crisis in my freshman year. The destruction of my life now felt as unreal as that end-of-the-world scare. I felt the same disconnection from my fate now as I had from the newscasts then of Soviet missiles and bomb shelters. Perhaps this was Meursault’s detachment at the end of Camus’s The Stranger—his acceptance of the universe’s indifference. What irony: I was being kicked out of the university now that I understood existentialism. There was no fair or unfair, only one event leading to another. I had taken the stationery; I would be punished. I decided to face my end as Meursault had his execution—with grim determinism.

  The middle-aged secretary waved me back to Dr. Inch’s office, her sympathetic eyes following me.

  Without looking up from the PMLA journal he was reading, Dr. Inch said, “Miss Rainer, let’s deal with your case.”

  “Okay,” I said apathetically.

  “You will have to perform a service administered by the student judiciary council.”

  Not really listening, I said dully, as I imagined Meursault would, “What charge?”

  “Destruction of university property, namely twenty sheets of departmental stationery. Unless, of course, you can return the stationery.”

  “I only have a few sheets left. Four.”

  “That would be fine, then.”

  What? Was he playing with me? Had he just said there would be no consequences if I returned the four unused sheets of stationery? How could he have done such a 180-degree turn?

  There was the hint of a smile on his narrow lips. “I will just leave you with this piece of advice, because you are a bright and well-connected young lady. You should choose a mentor who can write. Your Anaïs Nin is a terrible novelist and a poseur. An association with her will only damage your applications to grad school. You can do better, I’m sure.”

  I was speechless, not only over his derision of Anaïs, a writer he hadn’t even known existed in our previous meeting, but also because he was giving me advice about applying to grad school. No one at that university had ever talked to me about my future. He further surprised me:

  “Why don’t you take my graduate seminar in seventeenth-century drama next year? With my permission you can enroll for credit as an undergrad.”

  This was suddenly going very well, and I thought I should take advantage of the new direction. “Are you also the person who could write me a recommendation for a Fulbright?”

  “A Fulbright? Oh, don’t bother with that. They don’t grant them to girls.”

  I was so relieved at not having been expelled, I didn’t even notice a door slamming in my face. Instead, I remembered that Renate wanted me to find out what Dr. Inch had told Hugo.

  “Did you tell Mr. Guiler the invitation wasn’t real?” I asked.

  “No, I simply promised him that I would look into the matter, and I have.”

  “Has he called you again?” Something had happened to make Dr. Inch do a turnabout towards me.

  “No. And I do not wish to get involved. If he phones me again I will refer him directly to you.”

  If Hugo hadn’t phoned Dr. Inch again, what had caused him to go from treating me as a pest to be eliminated, to a pansy to be nurtured? I was pretty sure Renate would know. She had speculated that something could be done. Maybe her Gothic witchiness wasn’t all appearance.

  When I phoned Renate, she was effusively happy for me and pleased that I’d found out what Dr. Inch had said to Hugo. But when I asked her how Hugo had seen the letter mailed to Anaïs and why he’d made the call to Dr. Inch, she said sternly, “Don’t you know it is rude to ask so many questions?”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “It’s impolite. You make people feel that you are grilling them, like they are on the stand and you are cross-examining them. Where do you get that from?”

  “My father, I guess. When my mother fought with him, she’d always say, ‘Yes, counselor! No, counselor!’ because he fired so many questions at her.”

  “That’s right, Anaïs said your father is a lawyer.” Apparently, they talked about me. Then I heard Renate sigh into the phone. “Well, I suppose we cannot change your nature. Hopefully we can help you channel it. You would make an excellent lawyer.”

  “But I’m going to be an English professor now.”

  “Good. We Viennese consider professors respectable, unlike lawyers.” Then she invited me to her house the day after Thanksgiving when Anaïs would be back, promising that all would be made clear about Dr. Inch.

  “Tristine Raiiiner, I would like you to meet my son, Peter Loomer.” Renate introduced us when I arrived at her house before Anaïs. Peter had the kind of dark good looks that attracted me, and at the moment I had no one to sleep with, so it passed my mind that Renate intended to fix me up with her son. But Peter didn’t make eye contact with me, and I felt no sexual charge with him despite his James Dean looks. Behaving like the actor, his eyes studying the floor, he mumbled to his mother that he wouldn’t be home until after midnight and left, grabbing a leather jacket from a hook near the door.

  “Peter is shy around strangers,” Renate explained, evidently embarrassed that his manners didn’t match hers.

  Trying to put her at ease, I commented on a collection of masks I hadn’t noticed before on one of her walls. They all looked homemade: a red devil’s mask, a white ruffled lady’s mask, a long-nosed Venetian mask, several grotesque animal masks, and the scariest—a featureless bone-white mask. Renate explained that she’d made the masks out of papier-mâché as decorations for a party she’d thrown at her house where all the guests wore costumes to portray their own madness. She’d hung the masks from sumac branches, and in the flickering candlelight, the swinging masks danced amongst the masks of meandering guests.

  “I wish I could have been there. What was your costume for the party?” I asked her.

  “I held death masks on sticks in two hands. When I removed one, there would be another mask of death behind it.”

  I loved that—it was deep like existentialism but, as I was learning about surrealism, much more fun. I was attracted to Renate and Anaïs’s playfulness and creativity, yet my recent scare had shown me that they could be dangerous to my future.

  Renate went on to tell me that a friend of hers, Kenneth Anger, had directed an experimental film called Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome that recreated her party. In it, she, her son Peter, Anaïs, and Rupert had enacted a pagan ritual. She recommended I catch the film when it screened at college campuses on Halloween, rekindling my suspicion that Renate was a witch.

  Despite her warning on the phone that my questions were rude, I decided I couldn’t wait. “You said something could be done for me at my uptight university. Do you know what turned Dr. Inch around?”

  To my surprise, she smiled. “Do you remember meeting Chris at Holiday House?” I assumed she was referring to Christopher Isherwood, but I didn’t get any more information because we were interrupted by Anaïs’s arrival.

  Renate quickly departed to display some of her canvases at an outdoor art show, and Anaïs settled on her floor-pillow pedestal asking how I was.

  “I’m okay.” Actually my blood was racing. I felt like demanding, I’m owed some answers! But Anaïs’s warmth was shining on me. I recognized how beloved I felt in her presence, and my anger melted away as she introduced the subject so I didn’t have to.

  “Renate has kept me up to date on the drama that has gone on in your life since Hugo phoned your Dr. Inch. I am so sorry, Tchrristine. We never intended for it to harm you.”

  “Did you or Renate fix it
somehow with Inch?” She smiled as Renate had, a sign I took as permission to ask my questions. “Why did Hugo phone Inch in the first place? How did he know about the letter I wrote for you?”

  “Hugo and I are still the best of friends.”

  I contemplated that. My mother, after her divorce, would never be friends with my father in this life or the next. “Does that mean you showed Hugo the letter?”

  “No, he opened it when it arrived before I did,” she said.

  Was Hugo housesitting at her apartment or did she receive mail at his place? Whichever, I could not understand why she didn’t appear upset over his opening her mail.

  “Doesn’t he know it’s a federal offense to open someone else’s mail?” I said, indignant on her behalf.

  “Is it? I’ll have to remember that.”

  How could she be so literate, so charismatic, I wondered, and yet so ignorant about the things everyone else knew? She was a puzzle, a mystery, and though I now recognized she was devious and dangerous to my life, I was driven to know her secrets. “Do you still stay with Hugo in New York?”

  “Well, yes. New York hotels are impossibly expensive.”

  So she didn’t have her own apartment in New York. Renate had told me that Anaïs flew on holidays to save on the airfare, so I knew she tried to conserve on money, but I’d never heard of a couple being so friendly after a divorce that they could stay under the same roof, especially when one had remarried. If Anaïs still stayed at her ex-husband’s apartment, perhaps Rupert’s jealousy wasn’t so irrational after all. “Does Rupert know you stay with Hugo?”

  “Why do you want to know?” Her eyes were full of alarm. “Are you playing Perry Mason on me? I thought Renate talked with you about asking so many personal questions!”

  “I just want to know when you and Hugo got divorced,” I said. “How is that personal? It’s public record.” I surprised myself, talking back to her as I would my mother. Much as I was still enthralled by Anaïs’s presence, I was no longer intimidated, having heard Dr. Inch describe her as a terrible novelist and a poseur. I pushed further. “When you told me your story about falling for Rupert, you said you were going to divorce Hugo when you flew back to Acapulco. Did you get divorced then, and later remarry Hugo and divorce him again?”