Apprenticed to Venus

by Tristine Rainer

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You said you were one of those women who got married to the same man more than once.”

  “I said I was like them.”

  “What does that mean?”

  For a moment she looked so angry I thought she was going to yell at me, but she closed her eyes and was quiet for a long time. Finally, when she opened them, her anger was gone.

  “I’ll try to explain,” she said. “I intended to divorce Hugo when Rupert asked me to come live in his forester’s cabin with him.” She smoothed the skirt of her soft wool dress and looked down, searching, it seemed, for where to pick up the thread of her story.

  CHAPTER 11

  Acapulco, Mexico, 1948

  ANAÏS

  WHEN THE PROP PLANE CARRYING Hugo bumped to a stop on the beach landing strip, Anaïs trudged through the sand to greet him. A cabdriver waited to take them directly to the American Hotel. It was luxurious compared to the El Mirador, where gossiping maids and the patron had seen her with Rupert. She intended to tell Hugo she wanted a divorce as soon as they were alone in their penthouse suite.

  After he’d tipped the hotel porters and appreciated the panoramic view of the ocean from fourteen floors above, he said soberly, “You’ve heard the news that Gandhi was assassinated?”

  “Yes, I’m grieving with the world.”

  They communed for a moment in silence, cooled by the hotel air-conditioning, he sitting on the king-sized bed, she perched on a settee covered with a tropical print, mourning the loss of a hero who had embodied their shared ideals.

  “Well, the world goes on,” Hugo said softly. “I brought three little surprises that should cheer you, dear. I hope you like them.”

  Poor Hugo, she thought, I’m sure I’ll like them more than you will like my surprise.

  He pulled a gift-wrapped box from his leather satchel. She could tell by its size and shape what was inside: Chanel 22, Coco Chanel’s personal scent that the famous designer allowed only a few select customers to buy. Receiving this almost illicit nectar always gave Anaïs a thrill but accepting it did not make her announcement of wanting a divorce easier.

  He leaned back, hands clasped behind his head, and told her his second surprise. “I resigned from the bank. I’m a free man!” He grinned. To her increasing alarm, he explained that the conflict between his banker self and his artist self had reached a crisis and that with his psychoanalyst’s help he’d decided to become, as she, a full-time artist.

  “But what about money?” Anaïs gasped.

  “I took an early payout on my pension.”

  “No!” Her hands gripped her face. “Your pension was there to take care of us in old age,” she moaned.

  “Anaïs, it’s fine. I’ve paid off our debts and we still have money to invest.”

  “Invest!”

  “Dearest, that’s what I do for other people. I can do it for us. Leave that part to me.”

  How she hated his patronizing tone. “This affects us both!” she cried. A divorce attorney she had once consulted in New York had told her that half of Hugo’s pension would be hers if they separated. Now what could she expect? They had always rented and owned no property, except for the rat-infested shack she’d recently purchased.

  A terrifying thought seized her. She had driven him to this disastrous act. Hugo had given up his pension in order to keep her from divorcing him. He had put her in checkmate.

  He knows. He’s always known I was cheating, she realized. He’s telling me that it was the bargain he made, offering me silence, in order to hold onto me.

  He confirmed her thoughts. “I’ve given you the freedom to explore whatever and whomever you wish in the name of your creativity. I understood. The artist needs to be able to play, to experiment, to try out ideas, and a writer, especially, needs to know lots of different kinds of people.” He parroted her words sarcastically, but then smiled. “Now we’ll have a chance to play together.”

  Play? With Hugo? It was hard to imagine. “It’s too late,” she said.

  “No it isn’t. You have to give this a chance.”

  She needed time to think. “What’s your third surprise?”

  He told her to open a leather satchel in the corner and in it she found a sixteen-millimeter movie camera. He explained that with his new freedom he was going to make experimental films and he wanted her to be his star.

  Actually, that idea delighted her. Being in Hollywood, overhearing actors, directors, and producers talk shop, she’d found herself wishing she were younger so that she could be involved in moviemaking.

  “Let’s just play and see what we come up with.” Hugo grinned boyishly. “We can experiment with your idea that film is the best medium for replicating our dream life.”

  Suddenly, she could see the twenty-three-year-old she had fallen madly in love with and married, the young idealist who wrote poetry and to whom every night she’d read her diary or her untutored attempts at short stories. He had always believed in her talent when she had no faith in herself. How could she deny him the same encouragement now?

  Lovemaking with Hugo was not as athletic and physically fulfilling as with Rupert, but it was emotionally fulfilling. All their years of marriage resounded like a 120-string orchestra: all the times they had touched, told each other their dreams at breakfast, decorated new dwellings, packed and unpacked, argued and made up, shared disappointments, consoled each other, helped each other dress to go out, slept side by side, melded as one vibrant harmony. With Rupert, making love was like the Liebestod, orchestrated to achieve a huge climax. With Hugo, it was the vibration of an infinite, encompassing resonance.

  While Hugo went to straighten out the realtor who had sold Anaïs the romantic shack she no longer wanted, she luxuriated at the hotel spa. Over a lobster dinner at the spotless restaurant of the American Hotel, Hugo told her proudly, “I got the realtor to return half your down payment and tear up the contract.”

  “He should return the whole down payment! It’s all that was left of my advance.”

  “Don’t worry about the money. We’ll have plenty of investment income.”

  “But my book advance was different. It was my own money that I made from my writing. And look what I did, I wasted half of it.”

  “Listen to me,” he said, taking her hand and rubbing the ringless finger where he’d once placed a wedding band. “All these years you’ve felt subordinate because you had to come to me for your allowance. I think I liked it that way. It made me feel important, kingly. But it made you resent me because you saw me as an authoritarian ruler.”

  “That’s true, Hugo, but I was also so grateful to you. You were such a kind and generous king.”

  “Now I want to be your equal, though, your fellow artist and companion, so you need to have your own income to manage without me.”

  What was he saying? Was he cutting her off financially? She had wished to be financially independent so many times. Yet having recently gone over the numbers, she’d figured out that even if Dutton published her next book, and the next, she would not have enough money to live anywhere except the rat-infested beach shack.

  But Hugo touched her wrist with his long fingers and added, “I’ve set up a separate entity in your name. From the interest, you’ll have $5,000 a year of your own to spend as you wish.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “I want you to be with me because you want to be, not because you have to be.”

  It was such an authentic gesture of love. She knew that Hugo could see the tears forming in the corners of her eyes.

  “Hugo, thank you. I do want to be with you, especially now.”

  She meant it, even when she later realized that with her own income she could easily purchase plane tickets and pay travel expenses to visit Rupert. Her own money would truly make her free to follow her heart; unexpectedly, her heart had returned to Hugo.

  CHAPTER 12

  Malibu, California, 1964

 
; TRISTINE

  I HADN’T BEEN EXACTLY BORED with Anaïs’s account of Hugo’s financial finagling, but I wanted her to return to the subject that interested me most. “Did your lovemaking with Hugo get better?”

  Her dry laugh cracked. “Sex with Hugo was like dancing with a man who can’t keep step. On occasion, to the right tune, he may catch the rhythm, but he will always revert back to his innate clumsiness.”

  “So if you didn’t like making love with Hugo, why did you wait so long to divorce him? You told me that a woman has an equal right to pleasure as a man.”

  “Exactly, which is why I continued my affair with Rupert. I needed the affair to sustain my marriage to Hugo, whom I loved as my lifelong partner.”

  “So did you join Rupert at his cabin in the woods?”

  She nodded.

  “What did you tell Hugo?”

  “I explained I wasn’t feeling well, which was true. I’d returned from Acapulco, not only to the coldest winter in New York history, but also to reviews of my book so chilly that Dutton dropped me. I was depressed and exhausted and I told Hugo I needed time at a rest ranch in California to be able to write again.”

  “Which was really Rupert’s cabin!” Encouraged by her mischievous smile, I said, “I bet it was romantic staying with a lover in the woods.”

  “You think that would be romantic?” She looked at me dubiously.

  “Yeah, Adam and Eve in paradise.”

  She exhaled a harsh “Ha!” and told me that the national park was too far from the social life she was used to, and that the few locals there were so square that she and Rupert had to pretend they were married. “The US Forest Service had rules that rangers couldn’t have female guests overnight in their cabins so we put on a show that I was Rupert’s writer wife who traveled a lot.”

  I had gotten it all wrong! “So that’s why Rupert introduced himself as your husband at the restaurant,” I said. “That made me think you’d gotten divorced, but you’re still married to Hugo!”

  “But, Tristine, we have gotten sidetracked from your recent ordeal with that awful Minor Inch.”

  “Yes, just before you got here, Renate started to tell me that Christopher Isherwood—”

  “—was very impressed when he met you.”

  “I’m surprised he even remembered me.”

  “Well, Renate reminded him and told him that a terrible injustice was being done to you at that conservative college because you were helping me with an intimate situation of great delicacy. As fortune would have it, Chris had met your Dr. Inch socially and phoned him on your behalf.”

  “Christopher Isherwood called Dr. Inch?”

  Preening, she continued, “Then, in New York, I told Gore Vidal about the phone call and invited him into our little conspiracy. Gore, who loves a conspiracy but doesn’t often get to join one, phoned your Dr. Inch, too, and told him what great promise you have in the eyes of the writers’ community.”

  “But he’s never even met me!”

  “It is our credo that artists support each other.”

  “Oh my god. Inch must have pissed himself!” Dr. Inch had lectured reverentially about Vidal’s books to our Twentieth-Century Authors class, and I’d seen a new hardbound of Julian on Dr. Inch’s desk.

  Anaïs, enjoying my excitement, added, “Gore likes having his fun at the expense of academics. The more he disdains them, the more they prostrate themselves to him.”

  Now I understood what had turned Dr. Inch around. He might not respect Anaïs, who wasn’t in the Acropolis or even on the marble steps of literary recognition, but he would have been awed and intimidated by calls from her celebrated friends.

  “Dr. Inch doesn’t like you for some reason,” I revealed to Anaïs, but immediately regretted it, realizing that Gore Vidal had probably badmouthed her to Dr. Inch, which was why Inch, in turn, had warned me against Anaïs’s writing.

  To my surprise, Anaïs shrugged it off. “Minor Inch may not like me but now he fears me, and that is better.”

  Her statement was so at odds with her feminine delicacy and the sweetness of her ageless face that I did not yet realize how telling it was. Anaïs might not be a great writer or know where to use a colon, but she understood power and had used it to save me.

  “What can I do to thank you?” I said in all sincerity, forgetting she had caused the problem in the first place.

  “There may be something,” she said.

  I became alert with caution.

  “Renate and I were talking …”

  Uh-oh. That’s how the two of them had come up with the lecture series scheme.

  She continued, “You said Dr. Inch is going to have Hugo phone you if he hears from him again.” She smiled slyly. “You’ll have to know what to say if Hugo calls you.”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Hugo has to believe that I really am booked for a series of lectures at USC and that I’m currently staying with you.”

  “You mean confirm what it says in the letter.”

  “Yes, and you may have to tell Hugo that I’m out at the moment.”

  “You want me to lie to him.”

  “Lies of love! I’m trying to protect him. You think your brutal honesty that hurts people is better? You just don’t understand, do you?” she retorted.

  I felt wounded. “You mean that you are still married to Hugo, and that you and Rupert just pretend you are married, but that Hugo still doesn’t know about Rupert?”

  She looked at the ceiling, as if all that were so obvious. And then it finally hit me as a rush of cold from an opened freezer door. “And the letter was meant for Hugo to see!”

  “Precisely.” She smiled.

  “You should have told me that,” I said, indignant that I’d been used in her intrigue without even being asked.

  “I’m sorry. I’m still learning how much I can trust you.” She reached for my hand. “Since I fell in love with Rupert, I’ve spun myself into a cocoon of lies. I can’t escape now.”

  I couldn’t resist. “What lies?”

  She gave me a concerned look. “If I tell you my secrets you’ll have to tell more lies to protect me. I still don’t know if you are willing to do that.” Her blue-green eyes held mine until I answered.

  “I’ll tell Hugo whatever you want me to say.” I was too ensnared in her maze of intrigue to figure a way out. And too excited by it to want to.

  She continued to hold my gaze, binding me to her mandate. She began, “Whenever I flew to California to be with Rupert, I told Hugo I was staying at the California rest ranch I’d made up. Even though I hated my life of drudgery with Rupert in the cabin—getting up at 5 a.m. to make his breakfast, washing and mending his clothes, and giving directions to pesky hikers when he was out all day—I couldn’t end our affair. I had searched for a man who could make love to me as Rupert did and I knew I would never find his equal. I was enslaved by what we shared in bed.” Her words were a complaint, but a connoisseur’s satisfaction crossed her face. “Sometimes I think it was the friction of our bodies that caused the forest fire.”

  “You were in a forest fire? Tell me about it! That must have been exciting.”

  “Rupert was a real hero. That is always exciting to women. He ran up the mountain toward the descending flames with the firemen. They told me to evacuate, and I packed the car but was too worried about Rupert to leave. Then I saw the saw the wall of fire barreling down the mountain, and Rupert running in front of it into my arms.

  “While we were speeding out of there in Cleo, it started to rain, and Rupert stubbornly insisted that we go back to check on the cabin. The rain had doused the fire, so we stayed. But then it rained for weeks, causing the hillsides to collapse. Rivers of mud surrounded the cabin and we were stranded there.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Sierra Madre, California, 1954

  ANAÏS

  RUPERT AND THE OTHER RANGERS worked eighteen-hour days digging ditches to divert the growing rivers. He came in
at night covered with mud and ash, still his buoyant self.

  To fill her days while he was out building barricades, Anaïs played with the six-year-old daughter of the ranger family that lived in a nearby cabin. One evening when he got home, Rupert found Anaïs and the child dancing pas de deux to a Tchaikovsky record. He ran to get his viola to accompany them, encouraging them on with his energetic bowing.

  That night when Anaïs joined him in bed, he was even more tender in his foreplay than usual. As he entered her, he whispered, “I want you to have my child.”

  He said it again when she served him his morning oatmeal. As she was about to put the milk away, he caught her hand. “Let’s get married and have a baby.”

  “Darling, I’m afraid I wouldn’t make a very good mother.” She touched the corner of his mouth and wiped away the tiniest piece of oatmeal glue. She heard the instant arousal in his voice from her slightest touch when he urged, “Marry me, Anaïs.” His poetic face was earnest and pure.

  “I can’t.” She had been leading him on, letting him think she was getting a divorce from Hugo; after a few years when that no longer held water, she’d let him believe that she had already divorced Hugo. Now she had to tell him the truth. She confessed that she couldn’t marry him because she was still married to Hugo, and there was no divorce pending.

  He pushed her away. She reached out to him, declaring how much she loved him. He crossed his arms against her.

  In the following weeks, his mood turned black. The rain stopped, but the winds began to blow, carrying soot that smarted in their eyes, filled their nostrils, and made their scalps gritty. All around her were twisted, blackened trees, cinder, images of death. Anaïs developed a persistent dry cough and an abdominal pain that stabbed her so severely at night she couldn’t sleep.