Apprenticed to Venus

by Tristine Rainer

  I’d seen photos of her male psychiatrists Rene Allende and Otto Rank, both of whom she’d told me she’d slept with to “help return them to their bodies.” The thought of Anaïs giving charity sex to these aggressively ugly men revolted me. Yet, as they had, I was now playing on her saintly impulses to get what I wanted, and Renate knew exactly what I was doing.

  “How can your students be disappointed?” Renate chided me. “Did you promise them Anaïs’s appearance without even asking her?”

  I thought Anaïs would object, “Oh, I enjoy the appearances. They energize me,” as she always did when Renate tried to get her to slow down. Instead, she sighed, “I am getting tired of repeating myself. And I’m beginning to feel, I don’t know, insincere.” This was something new!

  In response to Renate’s and my double-take, Anaïs explained, “I say I value intimacy, but the crowds of people are the opposite of intimate. I don’t think all this celebrity is good for me.”

  “Now you see the horror of fame,” Renate said with satisfaction.

  “It’s not that bad, Renate.” Anaïs’s laugh was a tiny cough. “Besides, this would be for Tristine.” She smiled on me. “And it’s not like I have to get on a plane.”

  “And it will be intimate,” I promised. “It’ll only be the fourteen women from my consciousness group, my thirty students, and my five commune members.”

  “You moved into the commune, Tristine?” Anaïs exclaimed.

  “We found a mansion in Santa Monica. We have an acre of grounds and a big rolling lawn in front.”

  “I’ve visited communes.” Renate wrinkled her aristocratic nose. “I don’t object to the polymorphously perverse sex, but the houses are so unkempt.”

  “Not ours. We have the cleanest, most anally retentive commune ever.”

  Anaïs laughed, but Renate harrumphed. “Well, that doesn’t sound like the Birkenstock communes I’ve seen. What about Jadu?” Renate was always concerned about my cat. She’d identified him as my “familiar.”

  “He’s the house mascot,” I said.

  “I assume you play musical beds.” Renate raised a penciled eyebrow.

  “No! I told you, Renate, it’s a socio-political experiment.”

  Anaïs coaxed, “Come now. You can’t tell us that there isn’t at least one man in this commune you find desirable.”

  After Neal’s disappearance, Sabina had returned to me, and now my varied sex life provided entertainment for our little cabal.

  “Give us the latest installment in the Adventures of Donna Juana,” Anaïs commanded gaily.

  “Donna Juana has found a Don Juan,” I began.

  “That sounds promising!” Anaïs sang. “What’s his name?”

  “Don.”

  “No, his real name.”

  “Don Brannon. The problem is he’s my brother.”

  “No, Tristine!” Anaïs cried.

  “I thought you were an only child.” Renate scowled.

  “I told you before, I have a younger sister and a half-brother.” I was concerned about Renate; she was struggling financially, doing temp work assisting old people, and I was afraid the stress was affecting her usually impeccable memory.

  “Oh! Don is just your half-brother,” Anaïs exclaimed. “That’s not so bad.”

  “No, Don isn’t actually related to me at all. He’s one of my brothers in the commune.”

  “You call them brothers?” Renate said. “Why?”

  “Because we live together like a family, and Don says that because we’re brother and sister in the commune it would be like incest if we slept together.”

  Renate flipped her hand provocatively. “I don’t see how he can resist the convenience. He wouldn’t have to get in his car and drive, and you’d both get to sleep in your own beds.”

  “Oh, Renate!” Anaïs scolded.

  “I’m serious,” Renate insisted. “My perfect lover is one I could lower on cables to my bed from the ceiling when I want. When we’re finished doing it, I’d just press a lever and he’d disappear through a trap door into the rafters.”

  I chuckled, but Anaïs rolled her eyes. She’d warned me privately that Renate had let herself become bitter about men, and I should avoid her example. “Bitterness makes you prematurely old,” Anaïs frequently declared. “The secret to my eternal youthfulness is that I forbid myself bitterness.”

  “What does your Don look like?” Renate wanted to know.

  “Like Robert Redford. He runs the Writing Center at UCLA.”

  “That’s the kind of man you should be with,” Anaïs said. “Someone who shares your interests in literature. But are you sure he isn’t gay?”

  “I’m sure. He has different girlfriends spend the night on weekends. Really beautiful ones.”

  “Don’t give up on him then,” Anaïs urged. “When Donna Juana and Don Juan come together it creates a lot of fireworks.” She described her affair with a Don Juan who was an opera singer. “The thing to remember with a Don Juan is that he loses interest the moment you stop being elusive. You have to sustain the cat and mouse game.”

  I felt fortunate to have Anaïs as advisor to my love life. There wasn’t a romantic liaison with which she didn’t have personal experience. I was aware that she took vicarious enjoyment through my Sabina adventures, but it seemed only fair given how I, and thousands of other women, had enjoyed her erotic adventures in her novels and Diaries.

  Anaïs, Renate, and I often took turns telling tales of our Sabina seductions. As in all our conversations, we looked for the metaphors and myths embedded in our encounters. I learned to include poetic details as Anaïs did and humorous twists as Renate did.

  When Anaïs and I would have a private tête-à-tête to seriously discuss my search for the one man who would end my search as Rupert had ended hers, she listened with the concentration of a piano tuner. We compared my raunchy affair with an impoverished writer to hers with Henry Miller, my passion for a handsome poet/revolutionary to hers for Gonzolo, and my seduction of a young, gay film director to her attempts with Gore Vidal. These mirror encounters were not really about the men; they were about Anaïs and me, our game of twinship. They were about watching and being watched, the diarist’s obsessions.

  Now she gave me specific recommendations to seduce Don, offering before I left, “I’ll just have to visit and warm him up for you.” So a date was set for her to have dinner at the Georgina Avenue commune and afterwards address my class and women’s group.

  The morning of the event, she called to say she’d have to postpone dinner for another time, but she would be there at seven for the talk. I had warned my commune members, my class, and my women’s group not to tell anyone else about Anaïs’s visit or it would get out of hand.

  “I promised her an intimate evening, a furrawn.” I used the odd Welsh word Anaïs was then trying to popularize, my mouth gaping as for the dentist.

  “Furrawn,” she would say at her lectures, avoiding a yawning fish face by rolling the r and taking “awwn” in the back of her throat. “It means intimate conversation that leads to deep connection. We don’t have a word for it in English, or in French for that matter”—she’d give her guttural half-laugh—“so we have to borrow furrawn from the Welsh.” Privately she’d added to me, referring to her husbands, both of Welsh heritage, “It’s all the Welsh have: a useful word and good-looking men.” Her humor, what she had of it, was so dry that it evaporated before most people got it; but I knew to chuckle because her desiccated jokes were always indicated by her little cough-like laugh.

  At 6:00 people started arriving. Our commune’s spacious living room looked like an anthill, teaming with longhaired guys and braless young women in tight T-shirts, most of them crashers. The chairs I’d arranged in a large circle were insufficient and people sat lotus-style on the floor and sprawled on the stairwell, overflowing into the dining room, kitchen, and pantry. The whole thing felt like a huge, unruly surprise party.

  I hoped Anaïs wouldn’t be too
surprised when she walked in and saw what had happened to the intimate furrawn I’d promised her.

  When at 7:00 she had yet to arrive, I became concerned. Anaïs was always punctual. I saw Don standing under the wide arch to our dining room, looking more like Robert Redford than ever with the Sundance Kid mustache he’d recently grown. His arm was around a pretty brunette he’d invited. I was annoyed that he hadn’t asked me if he could bring her, but then, the house was full of crashers who hadn’t asked. They were becoming loud and disorderly. I tried to quiet them by lecturing about Anaïs’s work, but they lapsed into side discussions, too excited to pay attention.

  They fell silent, though, when we saw through the front windows the Thunderbird double park on the street, and a cloaked, regal woman stride alone up the inclined path to the porch.

  Anaïs was making an entrance for me! She swept through the open front door and, loosening the tie of her black cape, let it fall into red-bearded Bob’s outstretched arms. I’d thought that Bob, as a nuclear scientist, would have been immune to Anaïs’s charm, but he blushed through his freckles and later marveled, “It was like the appearance of a white witch in a Disney film. You could almost see a trail of sparkling fairy dust in her wake!”

  Sticking to the evening I’d planned, I ignored the crashers and said, “Before I give the floor to Anaïs, I’d like to introduce my fellow commune members, who are our hosts tonight.” They each stepped forward as I said their names. Anaïs looked directly into Don’s blue eyes when she said, “Thank you so much for allowing me to visit your beautiful home.” I could tell he was smitten.

  I then introduced my students, who shot up their hands. “And what about the women in your consciousness group, Tristine?” Anaïs said. “I’ve wanted to meet them for so long.”

  The women in my group half-raised their hands, including Clara, whom I’d wanted to impress by delivering Anaïs. Anaïs bowed her head in tribute to them. “You are to be honored for transforming the world by first transforming yourselves. The Women’s Movement has been an example of what I have always advocated, proceeding from the dream outward.” She quoted herself from the Diary: “‘The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.’”

  Then she ardently addressed the entire audience, making each person there feel as if she or he had the most intimate connection with her of all. She presented the persona they had come to see: the sensual, independent, liberated woman she’d invented in editing her Diary. She embodied the myth that her readers had embraced as a goddess of love, intimacy, kindness, generosity, romantic idealism, surrealist imagination, and sexual abandon. I saw her that night in all her glory as the consummate woman artist: a practitioner of performance art before it had a name, a visionary of life itself as imaginative theater. I had seen packed auditoriums in a frenzy of adoration, and with this smaller group she likewise played her artist/goddess role to the hilt, quoting herself in her French lullaby rhythm, dropping the names of political friends such as Eugene McCarthy and literary associates such as Rebecca West and Lawrence Durrell, encouraging the women before her to value their individuality, throw off their inheritance of guilt, and live their dreams as she had!

  My students eagerly asked questions about her diary writing, which she answered with practiced phrases: “I write to taste life twice,” and “It is a thousand years of womanhood I am recording, a thousand women.”

  Some of the young women from my class made passionate personal testimonials to the liberating impact of having read her Diary. One twenty-year-old proclaimed, “You are the mother of us all!” Everyone present looked dazzled, as if they had been touched in a tent revival and received a genuine miracle.

  Everyone except Clara, that is. She’d been leaning against the wall distancing herself from my students. Now Clara came forward, flipping a hand upward for Anaïs to spot her. Seeing how beautiful Clara was with her corona of fiery curls, Anaïs offered her most appreciative smile, but Clara did not return it.

  She said, “At the end of the second volume of your Diary, you tell us you left Paris because your husband was recalled to the US. But until then there was no mention of you having had a husband. Why is that?”

  “My publisher—” Anaïs began, but Clara interrupted her.

  “Nowhere do you tell us how you got money for your free life. Yet economic self-sufficiency is the first requirement for woman’s freedom, wouldn’t you agree?”

  Anaïs straightened to her full 5’5” height. Her singsong French accent became more pronounced when she answered, “Economic self-sufficiency is essential for woman, but it is not the only ingredient necessary for her freedom. Americans, in particular, are oppressed by the punishing assumptions of Puritanism.” She looked into receptive faces as she spoke, settling on Don’s. “America’s sexual Puritanism must also be examined and dispensed with.” There was a murmur of assent in the room.

  “But you haven’t addressed the question left unanswered in your Diaries.” Clara brought Anaïs’s attention back. “How did you make a living? Certainly it wasn’t from your writing. All you published in those years was a booklet of nonprofessional literary criticism on D. H. Lawrence. Not exactly a moneymaker.” There were a few titters from Clara’s supporters. She pressed, “Since it was your marriage to an international banker that made your free, privileged life possible, don’t you think you’re obliged to tell us that? It’s not fair to let women think that they can have a life like yours without a rich, permissive husband like yours.”

  There was a hush in the room, stunned fear for Anaïs as the naked emperor exposed by an insurgent. I could not believe what I was witnessing. Clara and Anaïs were playing out a battle that had been raging inside me: Clara on the left, whom I so admired, brave and honest, who challenged unfairness and hypocrisy wherever she found it. Anaïs on the other side, brave and dishonest, my mentor, whom I loved.

  Anaïs remained unflappable in the face of Clara’s accusation of deception. “I have given you so much of myself in the Diary,” she intoned sorrowfully. “No woman has revealed so much. I have given voice to the secrets that most women hide. Why do you demand more of me?”

  You could feel the audience, like an armada, slowly turn, guns swiveling towards Clara. She shrugged, as if to say, What can I do if you Americans, unlike the French, cannot appreciate a good intellectual row? She shot back at Anaïs, “The question is why you did not ask more of yourself. You intentionally misled your readers into thinking you were self-supporting. All that time you were being supported by Hugo Guiler, a banker!”

  Anaïs answered calmly, “Yes, that is why I added at the end of Diary II that the bank recalled my husband to America and we had to leave Paris. That much had appeared in the newspaper; it was public record. That is all I could include about my husband because I did not have his permission to portray him.”

  I knew this wasn’t exactly true. It sounded convincing, but not to Clara. She glared at Anaïs accusingly. “You mean that you, the renowned seductress, couldn’t get permission from your own husband, the one you still live with in New York?”

  How did Clara know about Hugo in New York? I’d certainly never said anything about him to her. But Anaïs would believe I had!

  I could tell Anaïs was furious because her voice became soft and controlled. She demanded of Clara, “Who are you?”

  “I’m a member of Tristine’s consciousness group.”

  God, Clara was making it sound like I was in on this! Don looked over at me, an eyebrow raised.

  Anaïs stood tall and her gemstone eyes bored into Clara. “Where did you get the false impression that I am still married to Hugo?”

  Clara said, “Mon Dieu, everyone in Paris knows about you and your double life! Hugo still has friends there, you know.”

  Anaïs’s panicked eyes darted to me and back to Clara. “I have no idea what you are talking about,” she said coolly.

  I glanced around and, to my horror, saw Rupert stationed on the front porch, stan
ding in the cold by the open door. He must have heard Clara say that Anaïs had a double life and still lived with Hugo! Yet his countenance remained blank. An actor playing possum?

  I jumped up. “It’s getting late, and we don’t want to exhaust Anaïs when she’s been so generous to meet with us.”

  There were groans and thirty hands shot up. Anaïs recognized only Don. I felt a charge between them before he asked, “Were you the model for Ida Verlaine in Henry Miller’s Sexus?”

  “You’d better ask Henry that question.” She laughed gaily, turning away to scan the room for Rupert. “Ah! I see my escort is here! I’m so sorry I cannot stay longer.”

  The crowd parted before her as she moved through them to the front door, squeezing proffered hands and returning eager gazes with her radiant, reassuring smile. I tried to catch her eye but couldn’t. Bob rushed up with her cape, and she wrapped it around her before sweeping away.

  She did not take Rupert’s arm as they strode to the T-Bird parked up the street. That night, no one could have guessed they were married, the way she kept her distance.

  Later, as I was coming out of the bathroom Don and I shared, I saw that he was at a desk in the ballroom studying. Evidently, he’d sent his date home.

  He gestured that I should come join him. I got my books and papers from my room so it would look as if I were studying, too.

  Right away Don asked, “Who was the younger guy she called her escort? Is that her rich husband?”

  I wasn’t sure how to answer. To people in Los Angeles, Anaïs usually introduced Rupert as her husband but since she had identified him as just her escort that night, I said, “A friend, I guess.”

  “What was all that about her having a double life?” Don gave me his irresistible Don Juan grin, and I noticed how neatly his blond mustache was trimmed over his white teeth. He seemed to be looking at me differently, not as a sister. Perhaps Anaïs’s fairy dust had succeeded in bathing me in its flattering light.