Apprenticed to Venus

by Tristine Rainer

  “George Moore is going to take it to Rockefeller when he thinks the time is right. We have a dinner scheduled with Moore and his wife a week from Friday.”

  “What about your leg?”

  “I should be able to get around on the crutches by then. I’ll need your help, though. Cue has to let you go that night.”

  “You can count on me.” She smiled, feeling somehow … saintly.

  Thus began her frenetic daily swing back and forth across Washington Square Park from Hugo to Rupert, and Rupert to Hugo, a foreshortened trapeze at high speed. During the afternoon, while Hugo thought she was at Cue, she and Rupert—along with the other teacher families on winter break—visited the Met, MOMA, and the Natural History Museum. In the evening, she and Rupert made love in their hotel bed, enjoying a honeymoon they had never taken. But at 5 a.m. Anaïs had to wake herself, dress in her skirt and heels, and rush off to her supposed job that began before sunrise.

  Since crossing Washington Square Park in the dark didn’t feel safe, she would scurry along the park perimeter—Waverly to MacDougal, around the corner to Washington Square South and the entrance to the massive apartment complex where she and Hugo lived. She’d crawl under the sheets with Hugo, and when she heard him rattling his crutches to get up at ten she’d force herself awake to help him, make breakfast, shower, and put on a fresh dress for her supposed late-shift job. When Millie arrived to take over helping Hugo at noon, she’d dash from the Washington Square Park Apartments back to Rupert.

  At first, she found this frenzied marathon exhilarating. The same excitement she experienced 30,000 feet in the air on her transcontinental trapeze, she now discovered on her brisk walks just before dawn. Wearing her Sabina cape, street lamps glowing as in a de Chirico painting, she swept past the chess players, for whom commandeering their favorite table was worth arriving before dawn. A short Russian with a Lenin cap and a Trotsky goatee would bow to her and say, “Would her majesty care for a game?”

  She would laugh. “Not today, comrade. I’m already in a game.”

  That was when Sabina thrived. Sabina was back.

  For a week, she thrilled to this excitement of danger and beauty. Then she began to get paranoid from lack of sleep, thinking the Russian chess player’s narrow eyes were tracking her.

  On New Year’s Day, after sharing fireworks in bed with Rupert at midnight, toasting mimosas in the morning with Hugo, and rushing back to Rupert at noon, she noticed that the winter weather had suddenly turned clear, as if Mother Earth herself were celebrating the first day of 1965. Rupert suggested a walk in Washington Square Park.

  It seemed half of the Village had gotten the same idea. The park was full of people promenading around the fountain in both directions: mothers with baby carriages, old ladies leaning into each other, students with signs protesting American troops going to Vietnam.

  She and Rupert were halfway around the circle when she saw Hugo on his crutches, walking toward them with Millie’s help. Anaïs quickly shielded her face with her hands and hissed at Rupert, “The sun is burning my skin.” She tugged on him to turn around. “Let’s go look at the arch so I can show you the inscription by George Washington.”

  When they got to the marble arch, Rupert read the inscription aloud in his hammy actor’s voice: “‘Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair.’”

  Anaïs glanced back. Hugo and Millie were heading in the direction of the arch!

  She tried to pull Rupert through to the other side of the arch with her, but he resisted, jerking his arm back. “What are you doing? I’m not finished.”

  Letting go and positioning herself out of sight behind the arch, she beckoned. “Come on, I’ll treat you to lunch at the hotel.”

  Stubborn as always, Rupert remained on the other side of the arch, determined to finish reading the inscription. She heard him intone, “‘The event is in the hands of God.’”

  Then she heard Hugo’s voice! “Did I ever tell you, Millie, about the night that Duchamp climbed inside a door in this arch, and he and six others from the Art Students League spent the evening sitting at the top, setting off cap pistols and releasing balloons?”

  “That’s a good story,” she heard Rupert say to Hugo.

  Hugo, encouraged, answered Rupert, “That’s not all. They read a proclamation: ‘Whereas, whereas, whereas …’” Hugo was hamming it, too. “‘We hereby declare the Independence of the Republic of Greenwich Village!’”

  Rupert chuckled and asked Hugo, “Do you know where Duchamp’s door is?”

  “On the other side.” Hugo pointed his crutch toward the side where Anaïs was hiding. Rupert walked through the arch.

  Anaïs shook her head and mouthed, Not here. Had she known where the damned door was, she would have climbed inside it. Then Millie was following Rupert through the arch, Hugo shuffling right behind her! Anaïs stopped breathing.

  She thrust a flat hand at Millie, who was startled but nodded that she understood and retreated back through the arch. From the other side she heard Millie tell Hugo, “That’s enough for today.”

  Rupert gave Anaïs a shocked look of disapproval, likely mistaking her signal to Millie as unspeakable rudeness to a black woman with a crippled man. He hissed at Anaïs, “I’m going to bring them back here, so you can apologize,” and took off to fetch them.

  She seized Rupert’s arm, whispering, “Let’s go back to the hotel room and make love.”

  Rupert grabbed her hip and whispered back, “I’m going to fuck the rudeness right out of you, Anaïs,” as, to her relief, she heard the scrape of Hugo’s crutches on the gravel grow fainter.

  CHAPTER 21

  Manhattan, New York, 1965

  ANAÏS

  AS SHE WAITED FOR THE teller at the Park Avenue branch of First National City Bank to bring her $1,600 in cash, Anaïs calculated what was left in the proprietary account Hugo had set up for her. She had started with a principal of $50,000 that she was supposed to have left untouched except for the interest, but the last time she’d checked it had dwindled to $14,600, given her many withdrawals as “earnings” from her fictional jobs for each husband.

  The teller to whom Anaïs had given her passbook was taking a very long time. Anaïs needed that $1,600 today. Rupert expected her “earnings” to pay for the hotel; Hugo said he needed it to pay rent that month. Please God, don’t let there be a problem.

  The teller was leaning over the desk of a young man in an ill-fitting suit. What business was it of theirs if she was draining her account? Her heart pounding rapidly, she listed the things she had to get done to prepare for the crucial dinner with George Moore and his wife the following evening: hair and nails at Elizabeth Arden, pick up Hugo’s dry cleaning, get back to the hotel in time to find a place to hide the dry cleaning, meet Rupert for dinner. Next morning, up at five; remember to take Hugo’s cleaned shirts and suit with her to the apartment; into bed with Hugo; out of bed with Hugo; lunch with Rupert; back in the afternoon for final rehearsal with Hugo on his crutches; dress for dinner; phone Rupert from a phone booth to make sure that, as arranged, he was meeting her bookstore owner friend Maxwell for a movie; help Hugo into the taxi; and, finally, charm the bank president into hiring Hugo back.

  “Mrs. Hugo Guiler?”

  Anaïs looked up.

  The teller had brought over the man with whom she’d been in discussion, introducing him as her manager. He asked, “Did you not know that your husband closed this account?”

  Anaïs reached for the counter to steady herself. “That’s impossible,” she said calmly. “That account is in my name only. You must have it confused with Hugo’s other accounts here.”

  The manager had a piece of paper in his hand. “Here is the present balance in that account.”

  She saw only zeros.

  “Can you withdraw from any of your husband’s other accounts?” the girl said, trying to be helpful. The manager glared at her.

  “I don’t believe so,” Anaïs s
aid. She thought she might faint in the First National City Bank lobby. The bank president, George Moore, would be informed that Mrs. Hugo Guiler had caused a scene downstairs because her husband had covertly emptied her account. That would not make a good impression in advance of their crucial dinner.

  “I’m sure there’s some confusion.” Anaïs smiled weakly. “I’ll talk with Hugo about it.” She walked, slowly and with great dignity, out of the bank lobby.

  At 5 a.m. the day of the important dinner, she didn’t need an alarm clock; her exhausted body was on constant alarm. Through the window of Rupert’s hotel room, it looked as if the hotel were under a waterfall. Get up, dress, take an umbrella for the downpour.

  By the time she rounded the corner of the park where the chess tables were, her pumps and nylons were soaked and her expensive hairdo ruined. The little bearded Russian and his chess partner rose and bowed in unison, holding their umbrellas like Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

  She heard the little Russian shout through the downpour, “Not a good day for the game, your majesty.”

  Just then she realized that she’d forgotten Hugo’s suit. The dry cleaning was still in the hotel linen closet where she’d stashed it. She did a 180-degree turn and hurried back in the direction she’d come.

  She was running now, into the hotel lobby, up the elevator, to the linen closet. Thank God Hugo’s dry cleaning was still there. She plunged out the hotel door into the rain, her umbrella protecting the paper-wrapped suit and shirts.

  Now she was behind schedule. Even though she would have to pass the junkies sleeping on the park benches, it would be faster to cut through the park. She ran under the arch with her umbrella angled to shield Hugo’s dry cleaning from the downpour.

  Large muddy ponds had formed in the potholes around the fountain, so she skirted them. All of a sudden the heel of her left pump hit the ground at a sharp angle and she skated forward on it until she splashed bottom-first into a huge puddle, muddy water up to her waist. Hugo’s dry cleaned shirts and suit floated in their paper wrappers on the puddle’s surface, beginning to sink. Her wet hair plastered to her face, she moved through the muck to gather up Hugo’s soaked dry cleaning. She carried it clutched to her chest, holding her broken umbrella, and stumbled on toward the apartment. Then she stopped dead in her tracks, dropping the umbrella, the rain pouring down on her drenched hair, muddy clothes, and Hugo’s ruined dry cleaning.

  Dazed, she started for the fountain, rending patches of sopping paper off the dry cleaning as if it were her flesh; as if she were the heroine of a Greek tragedy descending the amphitheater steps.

  “I can’t do this anymore!” She flung down a dress shirt.

  “I don’t care!” She threw down the muddied trousers.

  “It’s over!” She stomped on Hugo’s expensive jacket.

  The game was up.

  She was driven with insane energy and, without purpose, she gathered up again the discarded clothing and stumbled with them to the center of the fountain. “Leave me! Go!” She flung away the men’s shirts and trousers as if they were her men themselves.

  Hitting the deluge of fountain water, she fell to her knees and collapsed under its torrent. Her nose and mouth filled with liquid.

  She was literally drowning in a pool of remorse like Sabina at the end of A Spy in the House of Love. She had written her own absurd ending! The thought made her heave out water with hysterical laughter.

  She raised herself out of the water, gasping for air. Through the rain she saw a form approaching. Suddenly she was terrified, aware of where she was and how it looked. She would be arrested and questioned. The police would see she had lost her mind and commit her to a mental institution. She tried desperately to think how to explain herself. Then she saw the Lenin cap of the little Russian chess player.

  He bent down with the formal bow of a Hapsburg duke, gallantly offering his hand.

  Accepting his small hand and rising, she sputtered, “Why did you follow me?”

  “I knew when you turned around it was a different move for you. I came to see if you might need some help.”

  “I do.” She shivered.

  “I am at your service,” the little Russian said, tipping his cap. He offered his elbow as he led her out of the fountain, patting her hand. “A woman like you will always have a man to look after her.”

  After mopping up the floor, showering, crawling into bed with Hugo, and rising to help him with his crutches, Anaïs told him at breakfast how upset she was that the dry cleaners had lost his order. She told him, also, that she had gone to the bank and learned that he had closed out her personal account.

  He pronounced, “You had gone into your capital. That was never the intent.”

  “And what am I supposed to live on?”

  “Your job at Cue.”

  “Cue has collapsed. No one is getting paid.”

  She watched Hugo stoically absorb the lie.

  Hugo said, “If I get my position at the bank back, we can return to my giving you an allowance.”

  An allowance. Like a child again, she thought. She wanted Hugo to get his job back, but she didn’t look forward to playing the role of banker’s wife again. That battle-ax Betty Friedan, who’d written The Feminine Mystique, was right: society made women dependent on their husbands to survive. She felt the craziness that had driven her into the fountain rise again. She wanted to yell at Hugo that he thought he was her superior when really he was a fool who didn’t know what went on right under his nose, but she caught herself. She had to hold onto what was left of her frazzled nerves and shaky body for one more day and night, for the dinner with George Moore.

  That night she played her old role of Hugo’s enchanting wife to the hilt. She entranced Mr. and Mrs. Moore with her practiced Parisian stories about Antonin Artaud, Lawrence Durrell, and Henry Miller. She squeezed Hugo’s hand under the table to reassure him of the good impression they were making. When she and Hugo got back to the apartment, they were hopeful he’d get his old job back. She held it together until the following afternoon, when she broke down in Dr. Bogner’s office.

  Anaïs gasped for breath between sobs, “I can’t do it anymore! I’ve become my mother!”

  “How do you mean?” Bogner asked, looking up from her knitting with her good eye.

  “All I do is work to take care of other people. I’m dependent on them and angry at them like my mother.”

  Bogner nodded, a sign for Anaïs to continue.

  “If I’d put the same time and energy into making a living for myself, instead of trying to help the men in my life, I’d be … I’d be free. Instead Hugo wants to make me dependent on an allowance again!”

  “Perhaps it’s not too late for you to be self-supporting.”

  To Anaïs this was an outrageous idea. She was sixty-two years old. The only real job she’d ever had was as an artist’s model before she’d married Hugo. The short time she’d worked as a lay psychotherapist in New York was literally under Dr. Otto Rank in bed. She hadn’t finished high school and had no secretarial or cooking skills.

  “It is too late.” She sighed.

  Bogner remained as impassive as her glass eye. “If money were not a problem, what is it that you would want to do?”

  “That’s impossible to answer,” Anaïs said. “Money is the problem.”

  “Use your creativity,” Bogner urged calmly. “Pretend you had all the money you could possibly need. What would you do?”

  “I’d just go back to giving money to Hugo and Rupert to prove my supposed jobs, only I’d finally get a raise.”

  Bogner allowed a flicker of a smile but was not deterred. “Let us imagine, for the moment, that you did not have either husband in your life, you’d never had a husband, and you had all the money you needed. What would you be doing?”

  “I’d be living in Paris,” Anaïs said without hesitation. “I wouldn’t even care if it were in a garret by myself. I’d be like Djuna Barnes and have a small audience of Frenc
h literary readers. That’s what I always wanted.”

  “Well it doesn’t sound like you would need a great deal of money to do that.”

  “But I would. I’d need money to get settled in Paris and to live on until I could translate my work into French and get it published.”

  “So you think you could make a living as a writer in France?” Bogner asked.

  “Maybe. Eventually. The two of my novels in print there sell more than all my books in English ever did. I don’t know why I insisted on writing in English to begin with. It isn’t my first language.”

  “Why do you think you avoided writing in French?” Bogner asked.

  “Because the French are so damn judgmental! I so admired French literature, especially Proust, that I thought I could never be accepted in French.” Anaïs heard her own hollow laugh. “Instead I wrote in English for an audience who never read Proust and doesn’t like the kind of writing I do.”

  “So it was a lack of confidence,” Bogner said.

  “Yes.” Anaïs pulled a tissue to mop her tears.

  “Could it be the same lack of confidence that keeps you from fulfilling your dream now? You have always been very successful at helping others to fulfill their dreams. Couldn’t you put that energy into living your own dream?”

  “When you say that, I feel terrified.”

  “Have you ever thought about trying to sell your diaries?”

  “I couldn’t. Can you imagine Hugo’s reaction to being exposed as a cuckold?”

  “Not necessarily published. There are libraries that buy the papers of authors prior to their deaths. Perhaps you could convince one to purchase your diaries and keep them sealed until after the deaths of anyone who might be hurt.”

  “Why would they pay money for my diaries? I’m not a famous writer. I’m a failure.”

  “Aren’t there people who are now famous writers like Miller and Durrell whom you describe in your diary?”

  Anaïs looked up. Her tears stopped. “Really, you think I could get enough money to move to Paris?”

  “It’s a possibility. And there are others. You should not have to stay with either of your husbands for purely economic reasons.”