Apprenticed to Venus

by Tristine Rainer

  As we all walked out to the pool, Anaïs said, “We can go swimming later. You don’t need a swimsuit; it’s private here.”

  I dipped my hand into the water. “Oh! You haven’t turned the heater on yet.”

  “There is no heater. Rupert insists they’re too expensive to run.”

  “Have you tried swimming in this water?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes, it’s wonderful once you get used to it.”

  Anaïs might be able to transform that water from freezing with her imagination, but I wasn’t going to try.

  We followed her back into the living room, which was really the only room. Folding partitions demarcated the bedroom, but they were wide open, so the locus of the house seemed to be the queen bed with its violet bedspread and new side-by-side lavender backrests.

  Renate and I sat on a built-in bench along a brick wall, our legs squeezed behind a narrow coffee table. Anaïs placed a purple cushion on the ledge of the stone fireplace and sat with us.

  “I’m afraid to ask,” she said. “Do you have a $50,000 check for me?”

  “Do you want the check or the story first?” Renate said.

  “Is it a good story?”

  “Yes, I would say it’s a very good story,” Renate answered, taking the approach we’d discussed.

  “Go ahead then,” Anaïs said.

  Renate dramatized how we’d waited for Alan Rosen, imagining every possible scenario: he’d been in a traffic accident, he’d had a heart attack, he’d changed his mind when he saw the part of Malibu Renate lived in. And then we learned the awful truth: Alan Rosen wasn’t the millionaire producer he’d claimed to be. He was an Arizona millionaire’s gardener.

  Anaïs was outraged. “He cheated us! That’s against the law!”

  “What law?” Renate said, “There’s no law against swindling people of their dreams.”

  Anaïs laughed. Encouraged, Renate went on, “You have to admit it makes a good surrealist ending. You convinced me to live for an illusion to get your movie made, and we got robbed of that illusion by an illusory producer. The Vedantists are right; everything in life is just illusion.”

  I asked Anaïs, “What will you do now without the money to go to Paris?”

  “Oh my goodness, we have so much catching up to do. It calls for tea.” She prepared Lipton’s for us in her sleek new kitchen and began, “I thought with our movie deal I’d be able to dismount the trrapeze.”

  Renate shot me a mortified look. I knew that, like me, she felt responsible for losing the $50,000 and Anaïs’s chance for freedom.

  CHAPTER 24

  Greenwich Village, New York, 1965

  ANAÏS

  ON THE AIRPLANE, ANAÏS REHEARSED in her diary how to tell Hugo she was moving to Paris: I’m not leaving you, Hugo, and I would never leave you for another man. I’m moving to Paris to live my dream of being a writer. I’m sure, as a fellow artist, you can understand that.

  This is what she did say to Hugo, before hastening to add, “I’m not going to ask you for any money. I just want a quiet divorce. I’ll get started in Paris with the proceeds from the movie rights I wrote you about.”

  Hugo was silent. He refused to look at her.

  “Please say something,” she pleaded. “Please say that you’ll give me a divorce and we will remain the best of friends.”

  She saw he was fighting back tears. Why did he have to act as if this were a tragedy? She had good reason to believe he had taken a mistress again. This time she really did not care. There was no tightness in her chest, no jealousy, because she was ready to let go. To be her own woman. Why couldn’t Hugo flow forward with the changes in the air, as she did?

  She urged gently, “Hugo, I know we believed our marriage would be forever, but it’s not good for either of us to keep from growing as individuals.”

  “I haven’t stopped you from growing,” Hugo said angrily.

  She made her voice softer. “It won’t feel any different than when I’ve been gone in Los Angeles. For the past three months, you haven’t mentioned once in your letters that you wanted me to come home.”

  “I haven’t asked you to come back because I have nothing to offer you. When the bank job fell through I tried putting together a syndicate of Miami investors, but that went bust. I’m broke. I have nothing but debts. I can’t earn any money.”

  “Hugo, you’re exaggerating.”

  “I wish I were. I don’t know how I’m going to pay next month’s rent. I’ve gone through all our savings. I have a heart condition and doctors’ bills. And now you’re going to leave me.”

  He gave no resistance to the tears welling in his eyes. He broke down and wept, a hunched, broken man, his narrow, bony shoulders heaving.

  She kneeled next to him and held him. He lifted his head from his hands and looked at her, pleading, “Let me come to Paris with you.”

  She was horrified to see him this way and she would have said almost anything to save him, short of telling him he could join her in Paris. She kissed the tears from his face. “I won’t abandon you.”

  “Please don’t divorce me. We married for better or worse.” He clung to her.

  “Don’t worry, Hugo. I’ll fix things for you. Whatever money I make, half of it is yours.”

  With an efficiency that, to her own surprise, she could rally when necessary, she spoke to the manager of their building and moved Hugo into a smaller, cheaper apartment. Feeling like Galahad on his steed, she flew back to LA, having promised Hugo that with the expected option money she would keep him going until she could start earning from her writing in Paris. She felt like a man, buying her way out of a relationship; she discovered it did not feel bad.

  When she returned to the Hollywood apartment, she found Rupert in a state of helplessness almost as acute as Hugo’s. Rupert had gotten into an argument with his brother and stepfather about furnishings for the new Silver Lake house that his half-brother Eric had designed in the Wright tradition of Modernist purity. Rupert refused to pay for the Eames chair and Eero Saarinen table that would have set off the home’s low-slung lines; he was already anxious over having to pay a mortgage.

  Anaïs set out to make peace between the warring sides and creatively furnished the house so that Rupert didn’t bring his old furniture, yet didn’t have to pay for new designer pieces. She believed that once Rupert was reconciled with his family and installed in the new house, he would manage without her when she left for Paris.

  The first night after the move, she and Rupert unpacked and cleaned until eleven. Then Rupert grinned. “I think we better test the shower and the pool before we hit the sack.”

  He pulled her by the hand into the sparkling new bathroom, turned the shower on full blast so that it billowed with steam, undressed her and himself, and pulled her in. He opened a new bar of soap and gently washed her. She leaned against him with fatigue, but he said, “You’ll have to run to the pool so your body retains the shower’s heat.”

  Below them, the pool’s bottom, which Rupert had painted black, sank into infinite depths; above them, the night sky was endless. They emerged from the pool renewed and awakened, and Rupert picked her up and carried her to the freshly made bed as he had in their courtship days. He made love to her with a perfection she’d come to expect. Only this time they reached a new plane of connection. In the darkened house with its wall of glass, they were inside and outside at the same time, floating on their bed that floated in the night on the lake below.

  Her eyes opened to light pouring in through the wall of windows. She watched clouds and birds through the expanse of glass. With love’s moisture still between her legs, she stepped into the bathroom and, through its second door, entered the little study Rupert had built for her.

  Through high windows running the length of two walls, the sun filtered through tall pines and cypress. On the opposite wall, shadows of branches danced above the built-in desk where her portable Olivetti typewriter sat. Rupert had inserted a blank sheet of paper and rol
led it into position for her. It was sweet. She’d told him about her meeting with an East Coast literary agent who’d promised he could sell her Paris diaries if Henry Miller were in them. Rupert wanted her to pursue the possibility, but Anaïs knew it was impossible because exposing her affair with Henry would humiliate Hugo and she couldn’t do that to him, especially in his current state.

  Nevertheless, she lowered herself into her secretarial chair and began pecking at the keys with two fingers, holding her elbows high to tone her upper arms.

  Possible plan for editing the diary: Begin in 1931 with Henry coming up the path to Louveciennes the first time I saw him, as in a novel. It should be a Bildungsroman of universal woman with myself as the protagonist and others as continuing characters. Movement of my internal story will be from captivity, neurosis, and fear—to expansion, growth, fulfillment. Must edit for a central theme, as in a literary work, and cut out repetitions. Rupert not a problem—we hadn’t met—but Hugo—LEAVE HUGO OUT ENTIRELY!

  She stared at the last sentence. It would be like murder to eliminate Hugo from her diary, as if she’d never shared her life with him, as if they were never married. But it could be the answer. The first volume of the diary could be all about Henry Miller, as the agent had advised, and she could edit out everything about Hugo. If readers didn’t even know a husband existed, he couldn’t be seen as a cuckold.

  “Don’t let me interrupt you,” Rupert whispered as he left her a cup of coffee. She worked in the little office until he got home from teaching. Then he brought her a martini and insisted she come watch the sunset from their deck.

  As night followed day, the way they lived, together and separately, molded to the contours of the floating glass house. Everything flowed in an easy rhythm, and she discovered that she was happy there, happier than she had ever been. She loved rushing outside at dawn to catch the finches sipping dew from the mulberry bushes, writing in her private little study, and swimming with Rupert in the phosphorescence of twilight.

  On Rupert’s chamber music night, she lit the house festively and set a fire blazing. Glancing up from her diary as the group played, she saw reflected in the glass doors multiple arms bowing, a violin and cello floating freely as in a Chagall painting, the grand piano permeable as a ghost. She looked past the floating musicians to the dark pool and lake beyond, shimmering in the moonlight. There was nothing in Paris that she wanted, she realized, more than she wanted the present to continue forever.

  CHAPTER 25

  Silver Lake, California, 1965

  TRISTINE

  “SO I’VE PUT OFF SAYING anything to Rupert about getting a divorce and moving to Paris,” Anaïs confessed to Renate and me.

  “Actually, you dropped your plan to move to Paris altogether,” Renate said. “The plan for which Tristine and I busted ourselves to help you.”

  “I suppose I have dropped it,” Anaïs responded warily.

  “And yet, Anaïs”—Renate sat with her back straight against the brick wall—“you did not bother to tell Tristine and me. For this entire week you have let us suffer agonies of guilt for failing you. Could you not have told us that you no longer were depending on that $50,000?”

  “No, because I do need it!” Anaïs protested. “I’m not getting an allowance from Hugo and there’s no capital to draw on. And I need money to help Hugo!”

  Renate scowled. “You’re still trapped between your two men.”

  “No, I’m not trapped. Now I know what makes me happy. I don’t have to be alone and I don’t have to leave either of my husbands and move to Paris; I just have to recognize that what I want is what I have. We get to choose what makes us happy, and we get to revise and choose again.”

  “You are only choosing what you see as possible now,” Renate said.

  “No, I’m choosing how to see my life. I’ve realized that all we have to do is get clear about what we want and recognize it when it shows up, even if it doesn’t look exactly as we thought it would.”

  Renate countered, “Like Alan Rosen? We wanted a producer, so we embraced a faux producer when he showed up.”

  “Yes, because a gardener-producer was just what we needed at the time,” Anaïs said.

  Renate looked startled.

  Anaïs’s smile was full of mischief. “He watered our dreams so they would grow. He fed my belief that I could make money from my writing. I needed that. He gave you just what you needed, too, Renate. He gave you back your libido.”

  “He did not! What are you saying?”

  “You were attracted to him.” Anaïs smiled.

  “You were! You had a crush on him,” I chimed in.

  “I did not.” Renate glowered at me.

  I shrugged. “He was charming.” I was thinking about what Alan Rosen had brought into my life: He’d given me a taste for the movie business, enough to make me want more.

  Ignoring our teasing, Renate demanded of Anaïs, “So, if you still need money to take care of Hugo, what will you do now?”

  Anaïs’s turquoise eyes shone. “There’s always a creative solution if we can just imagine it. My new agent says that Harcourt, Brace and World want my diary if it’s about Henry. They’re all agog these days for Henry Miller, Henry Miller. So I’m going to have to pay Henry a visit and get a release from him.”

  “May I come?” I blurted.

  Both women scowled at my audacity. Then, perhaps remembering that she was the one who’d taught me not to miss new experiences, Anaïs smiled. “Yes.”

  Renate shot me a dirty look; she hadn’t met Henry Miller either, and like Anaïs, she made it her business to meet famous people in the arts whenever she could.

  “Actually, Anaïs, that’s very clever.” Renate raised an eyebrow. “Your new agent is right; Miller is a household name after all his censorship lawsuits. Your diary about him could be very successful. What will you do then?”

  “I’ll give money to Hugo,” Anaïs said, “and I’ll travel with Rupert.”

  Renate shook her head. “No, what will you do if your diary is so successful it makes you famous? It will be much harder to keep your mariage a trois secret if you become a public figure.”

  Anaïs looked as if the abyss had just opened at her feet.

  Renate pressed her point. “You should divorce Hugo now that you’ve decided you want to be with Rupert.”

  “I can’t. I can’t do that to Hugo in his condition.”

  Renate warned, “If you become well known, people in LA will talk about you with people in New York, and someone will put it together.”

  “You’re right.” Anaïs’s eyebrows knit crookedly.

  For some reason both she and Renate looked at me. “I’ll never talk,” I assured them for the umpteenth time.

  “You probably can trust those of us in LA,” Renate conceded, “but what about those in New York who know, like that Caresse Crosby woman, whose loyalties are with Hugo? She’s hard up for money now; what’s to stop her from going to the National Enquirer? You can imagine what kind of monster the tabloids would make you into: ‘The lying, cheating bigamist who financially ruined one husband and took the boyhood innocence of Frank Lloyd Wright’s grandson!’”

  “I’ve told you, Renate, Rupert isn’t a blood relative of the Wrights.”

  “That’s not the point. The tabloids don’t care about the truth. They just want a good scandal—like a woman bigamist!”

  Anaïs blanched, but insisted, “Nobody reads those things.”

  “Some people do.” Renate’s voice was grave. “The authorities could go after you and arrest you and put you in prison!”

  “I know what you are doing. You’re trying to scare me.”

  “Oh, don’t be scared, Anaïs. You’ll probably just go to federal prison, and I hear they’re like country clubs. Neither Hugo nor Rupert will visit you after being publicly humiliated, but Tristine and I will, won’t we?” Renate turned to me. She had succeeded in scaring me, too.

  “It’s not fair!” Anaïs cri
ed. “Now the law is keeping me trapped. I’m a writer. I need to publish when I have the chance!”

  “I agree it’s unfair,” Renate continued, “and so is firing teachers for being homosexual, but it’s happening every day. What’s to stop them from firing Rupert for moral turpitude when they learn about your mariage a trois?”

  Anaïs put her hands over her ears. “I’m not going to listen to you, Renate. You’re just angry that I didn’t tell you about my change of plans sooner. I was so caught up in the happiness of the moment with Rupert in this house that I forgot about you and Tristine. I let you suffer with guilt unnecessarily.”

  “And just for the sake of your vanity!” Renate cried. “Not wanting us to see your new house until you had it fixed up.”

  Anaïs put her hands together in supplication. “I’m sorry. Please forgive me.”

  Renate turned her head away and looked around the room instead of meeting Anaïs’s eyes. I could tell she’d accepted Anaïs’s apology, however, because she softened her voice. “The house is very nice, by the way.”

  I wasn’t ready to give up my fantasy of moving to Paris and bringing Neal along, even though Anaïs appeared to have changed her mind. I simply jiggered my fantasy so that Henry Miller entered the frame. I imagined that when Anaïs and I visited him he would see how enchantingly beautiful she still was and realize that nothing could ever equal their passion. They would run away together back to Paris and live on Henry’s royalties from Tropic of Cancer.