Apprenticed to Venus

by Tristine Rainer

  “I don’t know anything about a double life. I think Clara just has old gossip. Anaïs used to be married to Hugo,” I said, though I felt uncomfortable lying to Don; it wasn’t something we did in our commune.

  Don said, “It’s common knowledge she had an affair with Henry Miller. Was she married to Hugo then?”

  “I think she was.” I had to give Don something, and anyone could figure that out.

  He and I stayed up until 2 a.m. talking about Anaïs and her place in twentieth-century literature. We talked about Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, hot talk, suggestive words falling on top of each other. As it got later, there were longer pauses. I was hoping this was the night Don would come to my room. Renate was right; all he would have to do after was slip back to his bed in the sunroom, and no one would be the wiser.

  My heart was hopping in my ribcage with anticipation, but a loop of anxiety ran up and down my spine, recalling Anaïs’s look at me during Clara’s attack. What if Anaïs thought I’d betrayed her?

  Don must have noticed the anxiety on my face and perhaps misinterpreted it. He rose, yawning. “I’ve got to get some sleep. The damn sun through my windows will be waking me in three hours.”

  I didn’t get any sleep that night, not because I was getting Don’s kisses and thrusts, or even imagining them. I was turning on my pillow, twisting with agony at the thought that Anaïs believed I’d purposely lured her into Clara’s lair.

  The next morning, as Bob and I were determining if our homemade yogurt had set, the phone rang and I grabbed the commune kitchen receiver.

  “Something terrible has happened!” I heard Anaïs cry. “Come to the house tomorrow. Renate will be here.”

  The anxiety that had been running along my spine now circuited into all my nerves. I didn’t know how I could face Anaïs’s anger, and I feared Renate, who was capable of putting a curse on anyone who dared hurt Anaïs.

  When I arrived at Anaïs’s house, I saw that the front door had been left ajar for me. Renate was already there. I cried out, “I didn’t say anything to Clara about Hugo, Anaïs! I swear!”

  She looked at me severely. “Who was that woman who talked about Hugo?”

  “Clara Doherty. She was only invited because she’s part of my women’s group.”

  “How does she know about my staying with Hugo in New York?”

  Renate gasped. “Tristine, did you—”

  “No! I don’t know how she knows. She has a boyfriend in Paris.”

  “She probably heard gossip from that troublemaker Jean Franchette.” Anaïs frowned. “He’s always spreading lies about me.”

  I was confused for a moment. Who was Jean Franchette? I’d never heard of him. And what lies? Clara had spilled the truth.

  “It’s always those Marxist women who try to get me,” Anaïs flicked her French-tipped nails. “Don’t ever let that woman near me again.”

  “I won’t. I promise.”

  “I told you not to do any more public events!” Renate turned from Anaïs to me, scowling. “It’s too much stress.”

  I moaned, “I’m so sorry, Anaïs. It wasn’t supposed to be so public. But thank you for doing it. My students were thrilled.”

  Anaïs gave me a weak smile. “So, how did it go with Don afterwards? He’s terribly handsome.”

  “It didn’t go. He was definitely attracted to you but not me.”

  “Did you invite him to your room?”

  “No, you said to remain elusive.”

  “Elusive, yes. But you can’t expect him to be a mind reader.”

  My head fell into my hands with relief that her anger had moved to my failure to seduce Don. But I tried again to apologize for Clara’s attack. Anaïs put up an impatient hand. “Forget it. I have much bigger problems.”

  “What now?” Renate asked.

  “The I-R-S!” The way Anaïs said the initials made them sound truly frightening.

  “Oh no!” Renate shook her head. “I tried to warn you.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  Renate explained, “Two husbands. Two joint tax returns. One IRS.” Her voice was somber when she turned to Anaïs. “You could be facing criminal charges. What if they put you in prison after all you’ve worked for?”

  “It would destroy my literary reputation!”

  “Well, maybe not,” Renate considered. “It didn’t hurt Jean Genet’s. But prison would be extremely unpleasant. No privacy at all. You have to get a lawyer.”

  A lawyer’s daughter even though I’d been estranged from my father for years, I echoed, “You have to get a lawyer!”

  CHAPTER 27

  Los Angeles, California, 1966–71

  ANAÏS

  RIGHT AFTER NEW YEAR’S, ANAÏS met with a woman attorney who advised her to divorce Rupert. Anaïs begged the lawyer for a different, “creative” solution because she was finally happy with Rupert. When the lawyer mentioned an annulment Anaïs grabbed that alternative because the word was softer than divorce.

  “Rupert,” she began after their punctual five o’clock dinner, as he was carrying their dishes to the sink. “Remember I asked you several times to drive me to an attorney’s office?”

  He gave her a distracted smile.

  “I showed her a notice I received from the IRS. It seems that there is some sort of problem.” Now she had his full attention. He came back to the table and sat opposite her.

  Anaïs said pleasantly, “We need to dissolve our marriage and sign an annulment, and after the lawyer has cleared up the paperwork, we can get married again.”

  “An annulment!” Rupert looked in shock. “On what basis?”

  “Fraud.”

  “What fraud?”

  She couldn’t, she just couldn’t go ahead with this. She couldn’t tell him she’d had another husband for the past seventeen years. But she was far out on the ice now. She had accused herself of deception and there was no going back.

  “I lied to you about my age. You thought I was just a few years older than you.” She reached and stroked his cheek, tenderly. “I’m really … I’m so ashamed to say it … I’m sixteen years older than you!”

  A smile broke out on his face like the afternoon sun replacing the morning fog over their house. “Don’t you think there’s a reason, Anaïs, why I’ve never asked your age?” He grabbed her cold hand. “I don’t care.”

  “But I do. I’ve cheated you by taking your youth.”

  He laughed and lifted her balled fist to kiss it. Oh, why was he being so decent about this? She had to get him to sign that annulment but she could not tell him why.

  His clear blue eyes were full of love. “My youth is a small thing to give when I think about all you have given me. All the interesting people and places and ideas you have brought into my life.” He stayed close as he whispered, “We don’t need an annulment, you silly goose. There isn’t any woman of any age I’d rather be with.”

  Dear Rupert. How had she been so lucky to find a man who could love this way? How could she come out and tell him when, despite everything, he still hadn’t figured it out?

  But why hadn’t he figured it out, she wondered. Why hadn’t either of her husbands figured it out? There had been so many times it had been right there in their faces. Why had they accepted her blithe and often silly lies? They didn’t want to know. And why did they not want to know? Because they didn’t want to let her go, ever, just as she didn’t want to let go of either of them, ever.

  This was the honest conversation she should have with Rupert; with Hugo, too.

  “Well, as long as I’m confessing things, there’s something else. The IRS has no record of my divorce from Hugo and I can’t find my copy of the decree.” The tiny veins on Rupert’s nose and cheeks turned the color of spilled wine, and she knew his rage would follow.

  “Then what proof do you have that you’re divorced?” Rupert’s eyes were ice.

  “Well, I know I’m divorced from Hugo. And
Hugo knows we’re divorced,” she lied. “But the IRS demands paper proof. It could take years to unearth and cost a lot of money. Let’s just give them a paper annulment and get married again in Mexico.”

  In the end, Rupert decided that they didn’t need the warmongering US government to be a party to their union. After their annulment and a Mexican marriage, they continued to live and love happily as man and wife.

  CHAPTER 28

  Los Angeles, California, 1971–73

  TRISTINE

  HAVING SOLVED HER IRS CRISIS, Anaïs expected that I should also be able to manifest my desires. Whenever I saw her she’d ask, “What about your Don Juan?” grousing that I was doing something wrong by not having seduced Don. I’d come to the opposite conclusion, though. If he and I had violated our house incest taboo, it would have destabilized our commune family, and I would have missed the best two years of my life. I would have missed having genuine friendships with men and the experience of being part of a functioning family.

  We had embraced the ideal of community devoid of capitalism, and it had worked. Money was never a problem; we each paid less for food and shelter than before. We had the usual roommate disagreements about decorating and cleaning, and our political discussions occasionally led to shouting, especially about sexism, but I always felt a real equality and trust with the guys.

  I never had a steady boyfriend during my years in the Georgina house, but I never felt lonely. It was enough to be part of this intelligent, hip family with whom I shared meals and our earnest political ideals. We kept track of each other at anti-war demonstrations, boycotted grapes and Coors beer, harbored Berkeley Free Speech orator Mario Savio after his psychotic breakdown, and threw huge holiday parties that were the hot invite among the Westside’s liberal chic.

  On academic breaks the five of us would pile our sleeping bags into Bob’s van, bring along some joints, and take off on camping trips to Death Valley, the Santa Barbara hot springs, and the High Sierras. We rented a cabin at Lake Arrowhead where we tried acid together, confident that we would all be safe in each other’s company. We hiked, and swam in our birthday suits, and talked deep into the night under the open sky. For a latchkey kid who’d eaten alone in front of the TV and didn’t go on vacations, these were days of heaven.

  Then one evening I was upstairs in the ballroom working on my doctoral dissertation, which I’d changed three times already from Renaissance tragedy to Restoration comedy to women’s diaries. Actually, I had wanted to write about Anaïs’s Diaries, but my dissertation chair had objected that she was neither important enough, nor dead. He recommended I write about all women’s diaries, from the tenth-century Japanese diarists on through to the present, so I would have enough material for a “proper” PhD dissertation.

  I’d enjoyed learning about the early Japanese diarists whose aesthetic was to make imperceptible the line between fact and the imagined. But now I was trying to write about boring spinster and invalid Alice James, so instead of writing, I was fantasizing about a pirate with a British accent I’d met at our annual Halloween party. Our eyes had connected over the punch bowl and in less than two hours, his pirate breeches and my Old West saloon girl gown were on the floor of my upstairs bedroom, and we were naked on my mattress. For the life of me, though, I could not recall his name.

  I noticed Don standing over me. “Sorry to interrupt, but there’s a guy at the front door who says he met you at our party, Philip Forester?”

  Right! That was his name!

  Don and my other commune mates were gawking from the top of the stairs when I greeted Philip. In order to get some privacy, I took him to my bedroom and shut the door. With an adorable grin Philip produced from the pocket of his slinky shirt an expertly rolled joint, lit it, and handed it to me. I knew I shouldn’t smoke because it was a weeknight, and in our house pot was reserved for socializing on weekends. But I was entranced again by Philip’s Michael Caine-in-Alfie accent, his buttery hair and blue eyes, and his beautiful face that matched Anaïs’s description of Rupert’s sensitive face when they’d met.

  I had decided it was high time I found my own Rupert, a lover and devoted domestic partner, whose sensuous nature would keep me connected to the earth. I saw how happy Rupert made Anaïs, and I wanted that. So, copying how she materialized what she desired by writing in her diary, I’d written a portrait of a younger, less cornball Rupert in mine, and now assumed Philip was the manifestation.

  However, Philip Forester, who was repping a Carnaby Street fashion line in LA, didn’t fit in with my commune. Politicos, like my commune members, and hippies, like Philip, were in opposing camps. My commune family rejected Philip as a new age capitalist. It was West Side Story all over again: my leftist-feminist Maria in love with his mercantile, joint-toking Tony; my commune as Maria’s disapproving family.

  It was just the sort of romantic melodrama Anaïs and Renate would have loved. When it happened, though, Anaïs was on an extended trip to Asia for Westways magazine, accompanied by Rupert as her paid photographer, and Renate had sequestered herself “incommunicado” in her last creative resurgence, painting wall-sized canvases of trompe l’oeil nature scenes. I was on my own, and when Philip asked to share my room until his commissions came in, I ignored the commune rule that overnight guests not stay longer than two weeks.

  At the commune’s Sunday night meeting, Don, refusing to look at me, said, “Bob, as president of the house, has something to tell you.”

  Bob looked at me kindly through his colorless eyelashes and said, almost apologetically, “We have voted, and it was decided that if Philip does not leave immediately, you have to move out.”

  I failed to mourn the loss of my commune family—probably because Philip provided me with so much mood-lifting weed. Using a ritual that Philip had learned from the Beatles’ own swami to find a rental, I drew in lipstick on my commune bedroom window a child’s stick figure picture of a house with wavy lines behind it. Sure enough, in the next day’s LA Times classifieds, we found a beach house for rent that we could just afford.

  With its steeple roof, it looked like my drawing. Originally built as a real estate office, it had no heat or insulation, and its whitewashed walls resembled a movie set, the paint peeling as if an art director’s crew had aged it. Tall, unscreened Dutch windows opened onto the Pacific Ocean, which was so near it appeared we were at sea.

  I fall in love with houses the way I fall in love with men, at first sight, and Philip and I rented the beach house before anyone else could. We furnished it with a king-sized waterbed, dangled crystals on threads from the window frames, and from the rafters we hung a clear round fishbowl in which swam a brilliant blue betta that my cat Jadu watched circle all day. Philip bought me a Victorian claw-footed tub and placed it under a window. It was hooked up to the kitchen faucet by a removable hose and emptied onto our patio downstairs, which was always buffeted by waves.

  So began our life of play magic, getting high, bikini beach days in our ocean backyard, making love in our heated waterbed, and taking moonbaths together in the tub with the Dutch windows flung open onto the sea, unfiltered moonlight falling on our slender, wet bodies.

  I was ecstatic. I was going to be like Anaïs—in tune with the rhythms of nature and my inner rhythms, as she was when she’d lived on her houseboat on the Seine. I was going to have it all: Philip to love me, a house on the water, shelves full of books, artistic friends, the fun of filmmaking, a life of laughter and play.

  One afternoon, Anaïs phoned.

  “Oh, I’m so glad I reached you. I was so worried!” she cried. “I called the commune, and they said you weren’t there anymore.”

  “Didn’t they give you my new phone number?”

  “No. Rupert finally got the idea to try information.”

  “I’m fine. I’m great. I didn’t know you were back yet. Can I come tomorrow?”

  The next day at her front door, Anaïs sang, “Tristine, you have to visit Bali! Every person you meet there is an a
rtist! A whole country of artists!”

  Rupert stood at her side, beaming his Hollywood smile. He put down their tiny poodle Piccolo, who’d been squirming in his arms, and handed me his snapshots from Bali, pointing out his favorite—of Anaïs in a swimsuit, up to her calves in the calm surf.

  “Look at what a great figure Anaïs still has,” he boasted. “Like a girl.” She was then sixty-nine.

  My jaw dropped at how lithe and youthful and happy she looked. It was just the reaction Rupert was looking for. Satisfied, he left to take Piccolo to the park.

  I was bursting to tell Anaïs that I’d found my own Rupert and fallen in love, but she lilted, “Before we have our talk, let me show you the diaries I brought back from Japan.”

  She had them spread out on the lid of the grand piano and gracefully unfolded each accordion diary for me, one with images of dragonflies on its cover, another with delicate flowers, another in which she’d begun to write, black with a dashing orange stripe. I compared her delicate handwriting and neat margins with the uneven scribbling in my own journals. My writing was irregular and runaway, and my books were big, heavy things that would endure all my ramblings.

  When Anaïs closed the accordion diary and glided toward the sliding glass doors, I erupted with my news about living with Philip at the beach house, the words gushing up like soda from a shaken bottle.

  I begged Anaïs, “Will you and Rupert come to dinner at the beach house to meet Philip? He’s a great cook.”

  “Of course.” She smiled. “I can’t wait to meet him. I know Rupert and I will love him if you do.”

  My heart leapt in gratitude. I threw my arms around her, thanking her, the two of us standing at the unopened sliding glass door, the sun streaming in on the cold, clear day.

  “I fell in love, too,” she said, “with the rock and sand gardens in Japan. Rupert took me to Ryoanji, and the garden was so tranquil I wished I could bring it home.” She pointed down to a white rectangle at our feet. “So Rupert made me a miniature sand garden here.”

  Rupert had removed some of the floor bricks to create the sand-filled hollow at our feet. Next to the rectangle of white sand lay some small rocks and a miniature rake.