I had reached ground zero, but I had done what Jung warns those who would dive into the unconscious never to do: descend without a tether back into the real world. Not having his ties of home and family, I’d isolated myself and refused to come up for air.
I was determined to solve Anaïs’s riddle before I quit.
The mask should be held eighteen inches in front of the face.
Anaïs did not say I should not have a mask. She’d said to hold it far enough away not to confuse it with my essential self.
I had confused a lot of masks with myself. I’d worn the persona of an uncomplicated coed at USC, of the seductress Sabina to hide my fear of men, of a staunch leftist-feminist to stand up to my father, and the bright makeup of a happy-go-lucky party girl in film school to cover the cracks of my shattered trust.
Anaïs certainly had worn masks, too—dazzling creations, their beauty attracting her followers and their artificiality repelling her detractors. She’d switched them with her acrobat’s dexterity: the polished persona of an international banker’s wife, the mask of a surrealist artist, the seductress she’d named Sabina, her impersonation of a forest ranger’s wife, and the literary persona of a free, independent woman, created by eliminating any husbands from her public image.
No, Anaïs could hardly tell me to give up my masks when she’d so effectively flicked hers like flamenco fans. Maybe she was saying that personas, while seductive and useful, are not the dancer, and like the dancer’s fan, they can be discarded, replaced, or retrieved when the music changes. Perhaps I could lay aside my current persona of a glamorous, up-and-coming filmmaker to adopt the prematurely mature persona of a wise, how-to-write-a-diary author, and afterward lay it down and pick up my hip filmmaker persona again.
CHAPTER 31
Los Angeles, California, 1976
TRISTINE
RENATE’S PHONE CALL WAS A barbed hook that pulled me up from my submersion. “When was the last time you saw Anaïs?”
With a stab of guilt, I realized that while nursing my bitterness and looking inward, I’d avoided Anaïs for over five months.
“You better go right away,” Renate said sternly. “She’s in the hospital.” And she added bitterly, “You’ll have to call Rupert to get permission. He’s now her gatekeeper. He’s barred me from the hospital.”
“Why?”
“He never liked Anaïs spending time with me.”
To my relief, Rupert seemed pleased to hear from me. He arranged for me to visit Anaïs at the hospital on an evening when he would be delayed because he was meeting with Digby Diehl of the LA Times. He asked that I keep her company until 6 p.m., when he should be back at the hospital.
Anaïs was alone when I arrived, propped against a pillow, writing in a small journal with her winged glasses on. She looked tiny in the metal hospital bed. She wore a lacy negligee and a pink terrycloth turban that matched the color of her rouged cheeks.
To my surprise the room was bare of flowers or gifts. When word had gone out the previous year that Anaïs needed a transfusion, young women had circled the block at the Women’s Building downtown to give blood. Yet she appeared to have been forgotten now.
She glanced up and removed her glasses. Her heavily outlined eyes, once jewel bright, had faded to dull gunmetal. “Come in, Tristine.”
She leaned forward, an invitation to kiss her shrunken cheeks. Above her head hung a translucent bag containing yellowish liquid. When I leaned in to kiss her, I saw that the evil-looking tubing was attached to a needle embedded in her bruised hand and I felt queasy. Losing my balance, I fell towards the bed, her startled eyes flashing into mine. I threw out a hand to catch myself on the edge of her mattress.
She winced. As I pulled myself upright I cried, “I’m so sorry! I hurt you!”
She dismissed my concern with a wave of that poor hand, the tubing following like puppet strings. “I’m fine,” she assured me with a weak smile. “Pull up a chair.”
I started to lug over a heavy steel chair, the only one in the room; but it made such an ugly screech scraping the floor, I just perched my bottom on its edge. I placed my large purse on my knees and dug in it for the little toy bird I’d brought. Mother, who to her credit was never jealous of my devotion to Anaïs, had found the little stuffed bird in one of her boxes of junk. It had looked festive at Mother’s house with its real red feathers decorated with tiny pearls and mirrors, so I’d brought it to the hospital instead of flowers. As Anaïs took it from my hand, though, I thought what a puny gift it was, really just a Christmas decoration.
Trying to enhance it, I said, “I brought him to sing to you. But you’ll have to imagine his song.”
Anaïs cupped the bird in her palms tenderly as if he were breathing. “I love him!” she cried, and made the same fuss over that token gift as she’d made over my armful of Ginkgo leaves the first time we met.
I found myself whispering as to a child, “His feet have wire in them so we can put him wherever you want.”
“Attach him to the bed post!” she exclaimed, pointing to the foot of the hospital bed. “He’ll sing to me first thing when I wake up.”
Her big smile in her shrunken face fell then, and her voice took on the sad strains of a violin in minor key. “I miss the finches in the morning at home.”
“Renate told me you’ve been here almost a month this time,” I said. “I’m sorry I haven’t come before now. I didn’t know you were in the hospital.” I stopped, realizing from her astute look that it was futile to make excuses. I wanted to tell her that I was past the childish resentment that had made me stay away, yet I didn’t want to bring it up.
But she did. “Tristine, did I hurt you when I criticized your diary?”
“Yes, but you were right.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt you. The drugs I take for pain make it hard for me to think sometimes. And I assumed you were strong enough for criticism now. You have grown so much.”
“I’m not as strong as you think.”
“Please forgive me. I felt there were things you needed to hear and I was afraid I might not have time to tell you.”
“No, I should have—”
She waved her bandaged hand, wiping away the offense of my absence. “Thank you for coming while I’m in this awful place. I lose track of time here.”
And with that, she cleared the distrust between us. We were again the best of friends, blood sisters, naughty ingénues in a tête-à-tête. She insisted on being brought up to date on my life. I told her about the dream work I’d been doing and about the contract I’d signed to write the how-to book on diary writing.
“That’s wonderful! Get it done in a jiffy!” She raised her unbandaged hand from the bed and tried to snap her fingers, but could not make the sound. “Show me your book proposal so I can write you a preface. But don’t wait too long.”
She meant don’t wait until I’m gone, and this time I knew it was real. The knowledge that she would not be in the world opened as an infinite void before me.
I focused on her black-penciled eyes, the outlining thick and uneven, a child’s frightened eyes looking out from an attempt at grown-up makeup. Her voice became small. “They’re going to do tests tomorrow. I’m afraid this time.”
It broke my heart to see her so shrunken and fearful. She was begging me for reassurance. More than anything I wanted to give it to her, something to make up for my neglect over the past months. I would have said anything to comfort her, to give her a moment of peace, of relief; just that morning, on the phone, Renate had suggested a way.
“You know what Anaïs wants, don’t you?”
Renate had asked rhetorically, though I felt obliged to answer: “No.”
“She never really cared about money. She doesn’t want fame. She wants glory.”
“And how is glory different from fame?”
“Fame is in your lifetime and disappears. Anaïs has had that. What she wants, what she has always wanted, is glory—to be remembered foreve
r with admiration.”
So when Anaïs turned her head to me on the starched pillow and pleaded, “I’m afraid I’m dying,” I promised, “You cannot die, because you will always be remembered.”
I saw the corners of her thin lips curl slightly upward, so I continued, “Young women will read you for centuries to come. Over and over again, they’ll discover their sexuality through you. You are timeless because you have given voice to the eternal woman.”
Seeing a glint in her eyes, I went on, not caring that I was repeating myself, not caring that I was gushing, trying to express my passion to her with my hyperbolic declarations of her undying glory, standing like an acolyte, hands at my sides, crying out what was in my heart. “Through you, women will find their inner life. Coming of age will not have to be so lonely for girls anymore. You will have daughters of daughters, who will find the second birth by reading your diaries.”
She struggled to raise herself in the bed. “Prop up my pillow, please. I’m enjoying your company. I’ve been spending too much time with the wrong people.”
By “the wrong people” she must have meant Evelyn Hinz and those hippie white light people. I was glad she saw she should be spending time with me instead, but that meant I had to keep coming up with things to inspire her. I wanted to exclaim my love for her, to cry out that I could not bear to lose her, but I was afraid it would quicken her fear that she was dying.
I ventured, “I’ve been thinking about this card deck of women authors I had as a girl. There were cards for Louisa May Alcott and Harriet Beecher Stowe and Edith Wharton. Now they’re going to have to add your picture, and even girls of seven will know who you are.”
“What do girls do with the cards?”
“You’re supposed to play a game like Fish, but we made them trading cards and begged or poached our favorite authors from each other.”
“Did they have George Sand in the deck?”
“I don’t think so. Maybe it was just American women. But you’re an American author.”
“You see me as an American author, Tchrristine?” Her French accent was so pronounced that for a moment I doubted myself.
But I answered, “Absolutely! You’re as all-American as F. Scott Fitzgerald!”
As I said it, I realized how much like Fitzgerald’s mythic character of Jay Gatsby Anaïs was. She had Gatsby’s charm and generosity and his romantic readiness to stake all for the dream.
She was looking much better. Her eyes would never again be turquoise, but the sea’s depth had returned to them.
“Could you hand me that mirror?” she asked me. “And my makeup bag?”
Somehow I managed to remove them without toppling her makeshift pyramid of books, mail, and notepads on the nightstand. She applied a coat of pink lipstick, just a shade deeper than her turban, and pancaked her face. “Rupert will be here soon.” She gave me her freshened smile. “Now what was that about your women authors deck?”
“You’ll have your own card! You’ll be like the queen of spades!”
“Except I’d have to be the queen of hearts!” She grinned, her gums showing more than usual. It made her look like a nine-year-old who hadn’t grown into her teeth yet. For a moment time shifted and we were both little girls playing with our deck of women authors, revering them, and imagining what it would be like to be one of them.
She said, “I do hope they add George Sand to the deck. I’ve always wanted to be in her company, you know.”
Her words echoed what she’d told our first class of International College students, when she still looked healthy, before the chemo had drained her. She’d been discussing with the students the obstacles Aurore Dupin had faced as a woman writer in the nineteenth century, why she’d assumed the male pseudonym of George Sand and worn britches. Anaïs described how Sand had outraged the public by openly taking lovers such as composer Frédéric Chopin, and, more discreetly (it was rumored), her friend Marie Dorval.
“It would have been wonderful to live in Sand’s time,” Anaïs had exclaimed, “when friends had to travel long distances by carriage to visit, so would stay at each other’s houses for weeks on end, putting on plays and entertainment. There was time and opportunity for real intimacy between friends then.”
I’d wanted to ask her what she meant by real intimacy between friends. I needed to know if she had ever loved a woman like George Sand with Marie Dorval. My wound from Philip’s betrayal was still so fresh, and my distrust of men so jagged, that I had been wondering if I should change my sexuality to loving women. Anaïs was my model in so many ways, and if she’d known a woman’s love, I believed she could show me the way.
When we’d ushered the last of the students out and I stood alone with Anaïs in the entry hall, I found the courage to say, “Anaïs, have you ever had an affair with a woman?”
Her Mona Lisa smile contradicted her answer. “No.” I didn’t know whether to believe her, given her proclivity for deception.
She’d looked in my eyes and said gently, “Why do you ask?”
“I want to know everything about you. I was sure from reading the Paris diaries, that you and June—”
She was slowly shaking her head no.
“No? But the way you wrote—”
“I wanted that with June, but she denied me,” she said plaintively.
I still didn’t know whether to believe her. In her published diaries it certainly had sounded as if she and June Miller were in a passionate sexual relationship, but perhaps her love for June had been as my love for Clara: undeclared, unconsummated, and even more intense for that.
Standing in the hallway, Anaïs put her hands on my shoulders and brought her face close to mine. I thought she was going to kiss me on the mouth and I didn’t know what to do. It felt aberrant because she was so much older than I, but I loved her too much to pull away.
She didn’t kiss me. She whispered, “In my next life, I will love women.”
I heard my own husky voice: “There will be a place in my house for you.”
I was glad that, for once, without thinking, I’d found the right words. I’d found a way to tell Anaïs I loved her, even if inexactly as in a foreign language. The words of erotic desire could only approximate my passion for her, which was so much larger and more enduring.
In the two years between that intimate conversation at her house and my visit to the hospital, I’d learned that switching one’s sexuality was not really a matter of choice. Yet that day in her hospital room, I realized also that no relationship I’d ever had with a man was as intense as my ardor for Anaïs.
Feeling shy suddenly, I told her, “You know, you’re the star pioneer of the book I’m doing on diary writing. That astrologer had it right, Anaïs. Everything I do, everything I accomplish, came from you. I am continuing your work, only in my own way.”
Anaïs gave me her glorious smile of approval. She said, “You are my best daughter.”
Without modesty, I crowed, “I think so, too!”
“But I don’t see how you can say I write anything like Fitzgerald.”
“Not stylistically, but you both believe in the American dream, that we have the right to re-invent ourselves—”
Just then the hospital room door opened. I turned, thinking it was Rupert.
But the tall, stooped figure in the doorway, leaning on an ebony cane—was Hugo!
My eyes swung back to Anaïs, who was so panicked that she tried to climb out of her hospital bed but was pinned there by the stretched tubing.
She scolded Hugo, “I told you not to come!”
The disappointment on his long hound’s face was hard to witness.
“Anaïs,” he pleaded, “why do you refuse to see me? I know how ill you are.”
“How do you know?” She focused past him and I did, too, knowing that Rupert could arrive any minute.
“I spoke with your doctor,” Hugo said gently.
“You didn’t have my permission!” she cried.
“Anaïs, I’
m your husband.” He had tears in his eyes. “Do you want me to leave?” he offered pitifully.
“No, not after you’ve come all this way.” She sighed. “I didn’t want you to see me looking like this.” She touched spindly fingers to her pink turban.
“You are as beautiful to me now as the day you were my bride,” he said.
I interrupted, “I’ll guard the door so you two can have some privacy.” I hoped Anaïs would understand that I’d be on the lookout for Rupert.
She said, “Hugo, you remember Tristine.”
I tried to sound welcoming—“It’s nice to see you”—but added, amazed at the ease of my invention, “The doctor said that Anaïs is not to have long visits.”
“Right,” he said distractedly, clearly eager for me to leave.
As he watched me back out the door, behind him Anaïs mouthed, Stop Rupert!
I sat on a chair just outside Anaïs’s door trying to quiet the blasting alarms in my head. Anaïs had kept Hugo and Rupert apart for thirty years, and any minute now they were going to converge when she was too weak to deal with it. The only hope was to get Hugo to leave before Rupert arrived. As if I could delay Rupert by imagining it, I saw him sitting in gridlock on Sunset Boulevard and driving in circles, unable to find a parking place.
When I checked my watch for the tenth time, Hugo had been in the room with Anaïs for over fifteen minutes. I decided I should go in to interrupt them, but just then I heard fast footsteps approaching. I looked up to see Rupert sprinting down the industrial green corridor!
He looked flushed. I ran up to him. “You’re early.”
“We just drank champagne at the meeting. We don’t have to look for donors because Joan Palevsky is writing a check for the whole $250,000 for Anaïs’s diaries!” He pushed past me. “I have to tell Anaïs.”
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