Apprenticed to Venus

by Tristine Rainer

  “Yes, it is different and much harder.” Anaïs took Renate’s bloodless hand in hers. “That is why we are here—to celebrate your refusal to despair. If you can choose life, it will give Tristine and me inspiration no matter what befalls us in the future.”

  Renate remained silent, angry and unmoved.

  Anaïs urged, “Refusing to despair doesn’t mean you don’t love Peter. It’s just acting as if there were a world worth living in without him. It’s an absurd, surrealist act.”

  At the word “surrealist” Renate’s eyelids fluttered. Anaïs tried to press the scroll into her hand, but it fell to the floor as tears rolled down Renate’s pale face. She gave Anaïs a helpless, apologetic look. Anaïs held her gaze as if the connection might transmit to Renate her own fierce hope.

  They stayed that way for many minutes. I watched, awed, as if at a live birth or a ritual fire being built. Renate straightened and bent forward from her crushed pillows. Anaïs quickly reached behind her to prop them up.

  With a note of her old irony, Renate said, “I suppose if I’m going to pretend to be alive, it should be for something as completely illusory as getting a movie made.”

  I had just witnessed Anaïs raise Renate from the dead.

  CHAPTER 23

  Malibu, California, 1965

  TRISTINE

  THREE WEEKS LATER, ANAÏS PHONED me, sounding breathless. “We’re going to a party in Malibu on Sunday where Renate’s director friend Jimmy Bridges and his producer, Alan Miller, are going to be. Have you heard of Alan Miller?”

  “No.”

  “Well, me neither, but he’s the producer on Apple Lose Her.”

  “Apple Loser?”

  “The Western with Brando.”

  “Appaloosa! Did James Bridges tell Renate he would be interested in directing Spy?”

  “No, Renate said that Bridges has gone commercial. He told her we should get a European director like Antonioni.”

  If James Bridges didn’t want to direct her novel, I could not understand why Anaïs was so thrilled. “How will you get to Antonioni?”

  “Jimmy said we need a big producer first, and that Alan Miller, this producer we are going to meet, is a very cultured man, and while he was not a good producer for Apple Loose Her, he could be right for our film, and Jimmy will introduce us at this party! And you’re coming!”

  “I won’t be any help.”

  “Of course you will. I need Renate to go, and Renate needs both of us.”

  I was uncomfortable with Anaïs’s fantasy that my youthful presence could supplant Peter’s absence. But I wanted to see a Malibu party. Besides, if I wasn’t home Sunday afternoon when Neal dragged in after his night out, he might not take me so much for granted.

  When I arrived at Anaïs’s apartment, she said that Rupert’s brother had picked him up to visit the construction site so that I could drive us to the party in the T-bird. She glanced at me in the driver’s seat. “You look good driving a Thunderbird, Tchrristine. Is that a new dress? It suits you.”

  I’d fretted over what to wear. I was able to live on my scholarship and loans by almost never buying new clothes. Now, though, I wanted to reflect Anaïs’s sense of costume, dressing creatively with an awareness of color and nuance. So, using my aunt’s employee discount at Bullocks, I’d bought a new dress—a flowered synthetic in a vintage 1930s bias cut, a dress I imagined Anaïs wearing in Paris when she was having her affair with Henry Miller.

  The repaired and repainted T-bird bounced so much on Renate’s dirt road that I feared we would end up in a ditch, but Anaïs didn’t notice. She was too preoccupied with her plan to present A Spy in the House of Love to Alan Miller. She would play hard to get, she said, so it would be my job to talk up her novels. “You’re studying English literature. That gives you the most credibility,” she assured me.

  After we picked up Renate, the three of us cooed over one another’s clothes. Renate wore a low-cut black sheath that could be interpreted as mourning garb, and Anaïs was resplendent in a violet A-line dress. I had to park several blocks up the street on Malibu Colony Road, which was really an alley behind the strip of beach houses.

  Anaïs, Renate, and I entered the open front door to find guests in shorts and bikini swimsuits milling about. I was immediately self-conscious for being overdressed, but Anaïs and Renate were unfazed. They were used to standing out and carried themselves like regal movie stars of an earlier era.

  We wandered around until Renate found her friend, James Bridges. He and his partner Jack Larson enclosed Renate in a long hug. She started to tear up but fought it off and, with her formal Viennese manners, introduced Anaïs and me. I stared at Jack Larson because I recognized him as Superman’s sidekick, Jimmy Olsen, from the TV series.

  James Bridges, whom I now thought of as Superman’s partner’s partner, told us that he’d seen Alan Miller earlier, but that the producer had disappeared upstairs for a high stakes poker game. We should just enjoy ourselves and circulate until the game broke up.

  Anaïs, Renate, and I settled into director’s chairs on the second-floor deck enjoying the ocean view. Several people wandered out to the deck but, not seeing anyone important, moved on. A few people recognized Renate and awkwardly offered condolences about Peter, then rushed away.

  Renate shrugged. “People in Hollywood think bad fortune is infectious.” She rose to leave. “I’m going to see if Jack will give me a lift home. I’m afraid I will be the kiss of death for your movie quest, Anaïs.”

  Just then, we heard a group of men guffawing and cursing on their way down the stairs. Someone growled, “You’re never getting me into another game, Alan. No one can be that lucky.”

  Through the open French doors, we could see several men shaking hands. Someone punched the arm of a smiling man. “Hey, Alan, if you make a movie with all the money you just skinned, gimme a job, will ya? I’m gonna need it after today.”

  Anaïs hissed to Renate, “The winner is Alan Miller. Stay!”

  Renate sank back into her chair just as Alan strolled out onto our deck. He sat in a director’s chair and started counting a huge stack of bills. He had small, well-shaped hands, though the rest of him was muscular and stocky. We all stared at the cash, waiting for him to finish counting.

  When he got to the end, a young actor who’d gotten up to leave said, “How much?”

  Alan answered him with a George Raft interpretation. “If I told you I’d have to kill you.”

  To my surprise, Renate jumped in. “Do you always win?”

  “Except when I get slaughtered.” Alan laughed. “I should put it into my development fund,” he continued good-naturedly as if we were all old friends, “but this is play money. I’ll buy my wife a present.”

  “How thoughtful of you. What will you get her?” I was impressed by Renate’s flirtatiousness.

  “She’s been hawking me to send her to a fat farm so she can lose fifteen pounds. I think she looks great, but it’s her thing.”

  Anaïs asked, “Is your wife here?”

  “No, she’s decorating our ranch in Arizona. She’s not into the Hollywood scene.”

  “No, we aren’t ordinarily, either,” Anaïs said.

  “What are y’ doin’ here?” Alan asked.

  “I’m a neighbor,” Renate said. “I live up the road. Jimmy Bridges invited us. Anaïs is a famous novelist.”

  We three introduced ourselves.

  “I’ve heard of your work,” Alan commented to Anaïs. “You have any novels that would make good movies?”

  This was falling into our lap! Jimmy Bridges must have prepped Alan Miller.

  I said, “She has lots of novels,” complying with Anaïs’s request that I talk up her work. “The book we think is a natural for a movie is A Spy in the House of Love. It’s the story of a woman who loves her husband but feels compelled to have secret affairs with other men. She’s followed by a detective who is in some ways her own conscience.”

  Anaïs and Renate loo
ked at me, impressed, and Alan brightened.

  “A Spy in the House of Love,” he repeated. “Great title. It sounds like James Bond meets The Naked Kiss.”

  “Who directed The Naked Kiss?” Renate asked. “I haven’t heard of it.”

  “Sam Fuller,” Alan said, pulling a cigar out of the flat side of his jacket. The other side, with all the cash in it, protruded like a breast. “Anyone mind if I smoke?”

  I think we all minded, but no one said so. And when Alan blew out his cigar smoke, it didn’t smell bad to me.

  “I have this development fund,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “Bunch of dentists and lawyers in Arizona want to get into the movie game. Buy some books. Develop some scripts. I have an open invitation at Paramount to give ’em first look.” He turned to Anaïs. “If you want to get copies of your novels to me, I’ll give ’em a read.”

  Anaïs jumped up. “I have copies in my car!”

  Alan followed us out to Malibu Colony Road where I’d parked the T-bird. Anaïs opened the trunk and loaded Alan’s arms with her novels.

  “How do we reach you?” Anaïs dug in her purse for a purple card to write on.

  “Alan Rosen.” He gave her his phone number.

  “Alan Rosen? You aren’t Alan Miller, the producer?”

  “Naw, I’m the kind of producer Alan Miller comes to for money.”

  “So we’re going to the horse’s mouth?” Renate said.

  “That or the horse’s ass.” Alan Rosen roared and carried the books to his Mercedes.

  “You just gave your books to the wrong producer,” Renate said to Anaïs.

  “No,” Anaïs chirped. “My intuition tells me he’s the right producer. I liked the way he talked about his wife.”

  In the T-bird, on the way to drop Renate at her house, we laughed about the confusion caused by Alan Miller and Alan Rosen. We were convinced that everything had happened just the way it was supposed to. We agreed that I would call the number Alan Rosen had given us the next day to make sure he was legit and leave him my phone number and Renate’s, but not Anaïs’s. She would remain the slightly mysterious, elusive author.

  When I got home in my flirty, feminine new dress, Neal was waiting for me. The more evasive I was in answering how I’d been invited to a Malibu party where John Huston, director of The Maltese Falcon and The African Queen, was a guest, the more Neal wanted to know. He assumed I’d been with another guy, and with his mounting jealousy I felt Sabina’s power return to me. That night Neal’s lovemaking was sweetened with emotion and, for the first time, he whispered that he loved me; though afterward he withdrew, as if his declaration had stolen something from him, something he wanted back.

  The next morning I phoned Alan Rosen’s number and got an answering service, but he called right back and asked to have a two-week exclusive so he could read through all the novels. He invited the three of us to lunch at the Old World on Sunset.

  The lunch with Alan got rescheduled a few times and when it was finally set, Anaïs couldn’t come because she was flying back to New York to prepare Hugo for her move to Paris.

  She’d instructed me: “You and Renate are my representatives. Tell Alan that you both should have some participation in the project.” She added invitingly, “So you’ll have money to join me in Paris. I’m counting on you, Tristine, to keep Renate engaged.”

  Keeping Renate engaged turned out to be easy, since both she and I were soon living alone and needed each other’s company. Renate had asked Ronnie to move out because she could now care for herself, and Neal had packed all his things, excited about an invitation to join up with other civil rights activists in Selma.

  During this lonely time, my new closeness with Renate sustained me. We talked for hours on the phone every night. Renate’s mind was a garden of strange knowledge; there wasn’t an esoteric subject about which she was not informed: Joan of Arc, contraception in the Middle Ages, the culture of the Chumash Indians in Malibu, Jung’s book on flying saucers, the Vedantist concept of pain as illusion. Listening to Renate speak was like reading a book by a great writer. It saddened me that her true talent of discourse was just thrown to the wind, given away; never to receive recompense, recognition, or appreciation except by Anaïs, who’d taken sentences from Renate’s lips and placed them in her fiction. For my part, I would have been happy simply to listen to Renate’s stories all night, especially about Anaïs. But Renate challenged me to keep up with her, making me volley sentences, testing my memory, and heightening my game like a tennis pro with a fledgling. Always our nightly conversations began and ended with our shared business of moving Anaïs’s movie project forward.

  The Old World was an eatery frequented by aspiring actors and directors. Alan Rosen was waiting for us at a street-side patio table where we almost had to shout to be heard over the traffic.

  After we ordered salads, he said, “I talked with my investors, and we think the safest thing would be for us to tie up all the novels.”

  Renate kicked my leg under the table but kept her voice professional. “That would be quite expensive, to tie up all of Anaïs’s work.”

  “You have to help me here.” Alan smiled. “I was thinking $50,000 up front. I’m going to need a five-year option for that price.”

  I could not believe my ears. $50,000! Renate nodded, not agreeing or disagreeing.

  “What about the back end?” I asked. I’d been talking to friends, and this was something they always asked about. I wasn’t sure what it was.

  Alan said, “Look, I know you two want to be producers but I’m not going to promise you anything I can’t deliver. Would you consider taking associate producer if I paid you Writer’s Guild minimum to write the screenplay?”

  We hadn’t actually thought we could be producers, real or associate, nor screenwriters, but we both kept silent. Finally, I said, “You’ll have to talk to our agent.” We didn’t have an agent, and Renate gave me a surprised look, but she went along with my bluff.

  Alan said, “I’ll have to get all this OK’d by my people, too.”

  Alan told us to get started on a film treatment for Spy and have our agent call him.

  Renate and I were as excited as twelve-year-old girls. She phoned the Writer’s Guild and found out that at minimum, what we would get paid to write one screenplay was more than I could make in five years of waitressing and more than Renate had ever made in her lifetime as a painter.

  “We have to call Anaïs in New York,” Renate said. “She might not want us to write the screenplay. Remember she said she wanted Marguerite Duras, who wrote Hiroshima Mon Amour.”

  I hadn’t thought about that, or the fact that neither Renate nor I had ever written a screenplay and didn’t know how. It all just seemed to be working as magic.

  We phoned Anaïs and she was agreeable to everything, including our writing the screenplay. Renate asked a neighbor who was a William Morris agent to negotiate the deal. The agent said he didn’t know Alan Rosen, but money was money. In a few phone calls, he’d worked out the terms. All that remained to be done was to sign the papers at Alan’s office and collect our commencement check and Anaïs’s $50,000 option check.

  Renate planned a little celebration party. Alan was to come at two in the afternoon and at four Raven, Bebe, Joan Houseman, Curtis Harrington, and others were to arrive. At a few minutes before two, Renate placed a bottle of Mumm’s into an ice bucket, opened the door to the room she hadn’t set foot in since Peter’s overdose, and set out the champagne and hors d’ oeuvres in there.

  By 2:20 p.m., she and I sat alone in that haunted room. We had, out of nervousness, eaten all the cheese and crackers. We kept checking the time. Alan was late.

  “He must have gotten lost,” Renate said. When he was an hour and a half late and it was time for the guests to arrive, I called his number.

  An operator with his answering service told me, “We are no longer taking messages for Alan Rosen.”

  “Do you have another number for h
im?” I asked.

  “That’s all I know. His service was discontinued for non-payment.”

  When I told Renate, she frowned. “This is not a good omen.” She phoned the agent.

  “Let me do some research,” the agent said. “I told you I’d never heard of him.”

  When Renate’s guests arrived, they tried to keep her spirits up. They knew what a big step it had been for her to entertain again. But after several hours of waiting, without any word from Alan or the agent, they made their exits, hugging Renate.

  When the agent finally did call back, Renate held the receiver so I could hear. “Well, he told the truth about one thing; he does live on a luxury ranch in Arizona,” the agent said. “He’s the gardener. Before that he was a card mechanic at a Vegas casino. Once a con man, always—”

  “Oh no!” Renate cried.

  “Don’t feel too bad,” the agent said. “He had me going, too. And you’re not the first hopefuls duped into thinking he was a rich movie producer.”

  “But why us?” Renate asked. “I can understand why he’d pose as a producer to get into poker games. He made money that way. But he didn’t get money out of us.”

  “That’s the interesting part. The woods are full of these guys posing as producers. They do it to live out the fantasy,” the agent said before taking another call.

  Renate looked at me, crestfallen. “What are we going to tell Anaïs?”

  “We have to tell her the truth,” I said.

  While Renate agonized over how this cruel hoax might push Anaïs into another breakdown, I worried about how it would affect Renate.

  When Anaïs phoned to find out how it had gone, Renate bluffed, “We can’t talk right now. A little emergency with the plumbing.” She hung up with a sigh of relief. “We have a reprieve until Tuesday. Anaïs wants us to come see the new house.”

  Even though I’d been to the site before, I got lost driving to the Silver Lake house. By the time we drove up the steep hill to Hidalgo and into the long, narrow driveway, Renate and I were both thoroughly frazzled.

  There was still evidence of construction around, piles of bricks and paint cans by the back door. Rupert had apparently taken the Thunderbird to his teaching job, so we parked in the open garage. As we were about to knock on the door, Anaïs came around from the side wearing a Grecian-style white muumuu, her swimsuit straps visible at the neckline. She said we were at the back door and insisted we follow her along a walkway around the low-slung, modern house. When we entered and stepped past the cramped entry hall, the space opened into an expanse that floated above the trees. Anaïs glided toward a long wall of windows and slid open a glass door onto the outside deck. Beyond the rectangular pool where the narrow yard dropped off, Silver Lake Reservoir gleamed.