Apprenticed to Venus

by Tristine Rainer

  A swell hit my face. The waves had become turbulent, and I wished the pain from their slap would overcome that of my remorse. I had lost precious time with her because of my resentments, my judgments, my fear. The water in my smarting eyes was indistinguishable from that of the briny ocean, but the clutch of my stomach and my jagged gasps for air told me that grief had found me. I heaved in waves of it, mourning for a world without her, for an era now gone forever. Never again would she enter a room and make me feel so not alone. Never again would I rush to her house to be met at the door by the marvelous.

  When at last the fist jerking on my ribs released, I floated, drifted; for how long, impossible to tell. No distance now between thought and feeling, no dissonance between my desire to be Anaïs and her desire for me to be me. No struggle now, just the motion of the sea, rocking like a woman keening, swinging like an infant in her mother’s arms.

  In idolizing Anaïs and seeking her reflective gaze of approval, I had allowed her to use me for her own ends. She took far more than my innocence. Yet I sensed that what I’d lost was less valuable than what I’d received: a mentor who shared my particular wound and inspired me to heal it through writing, a guide to owning my sexuality, an inspiration to value my creativity and inner journey, the model of a woman who could soak up so much joy. Thanks to her I didn’t give up hope for both devotion and passion in love. She taught me to embrace good times wholeheartedly when they come and to transcend life’s tragedies through the imagination, as she’d imagined herself in a symphony when dying. She gave me a hand up onto my life’s work, understanding that we are heroines who author our own stories; elect how we see them, choose what they mean, and choose again. Much of who I am came from Anaïs and has served me well.

  For the wonder of Anaïs was not that she had sunk so low as to commit adult incest; the wonder was how she’d matured since that freakish episode, how she’d expanded into a plenitude of self, accepting the errors and blindnesses as necessary, working diligently on herself, developing and growing to become a wise and compassionate woman who reached out to heal other broken souls. The wonder was that Anaïs, a deeply flawed person—a narcissist, a bigamist, a liar, and a deviant—was so lovable. The wonder was that from such a defective source shone so much light before her diminishment.

  The sun was fading, and as I returned to treading water, I became alarmed by my chill and exhaustion. Foolishly, Don Quixote chasing a metaphor, I’d swum too far in my grand gesture to say good-bye. I was not a strong swimmer, and nobody knew I was out there. Frantically, I swam in a crawl directly towards shore, but soon was spent. The immensity of the ocean roiled beneath me and tugged.

  In the distance, I could see the lighted windows of my house and wished I were there instead of in the cold, nacreous water. I remembered my dream where my guru woman stood at the Dutch window, calmly watching me tossed in the waves below. In the dream, I was in those waves but I was also my guiding presence, haloed at the window. Using the glow of those windows as my beacon now, I side-paddled in a switchback, pulled by the beckoning light, following the dream.

  When I reached the breakers, the moon had risen and the sun was stretched into an ovoid, resisting its eclipse. I gave myself to the crashing surf, elevated on a high wave, rising like flying, cresting in an explosion of foam and bubbles, gliding onto the grit of sand.

  As I climbed the old stairs on the side of the house, shivering, covered with goose bumps, my legs shaking, I felt the exhilaration of freedom. She was gone, and I had said good-bye.

  After a warm shower, wrapped in my robe, I opened the Dutch windows to the night and listened to the crashing waves below. Not far from the moon, I saw dazzling Venus, brilliant as a fiery diamond, and thought of Anaïs elevated on her giddy trapeze from spouse to spouse.

  Observing Venus that evening as I would for decades to come, I recognized that despite my scrutiny of Anaïs’s every word and deed, her mystery could be grasped only on her own terms of metaphor and myth. For in that realm it so happens that once in a hundred years or so, as often as Venus makes her transit across the sun or certain rare fire flowers bloom, the goddess of love descends to inhabit the body of a girl who will become a beautiful woman. The mettle of the young woman’s character will not matter; the more malleable, the better for Venus’s ends. Nor need she be faithful except to her own wild essence, like a fox or a heron. Perhaps, as Anaïs, the goddess also chose to become a writer, a diarist, to remind all women that beneath Earth’s girdles and jackets lies our limitless capacity for lust and love.

  Acknowledgments

  I WISH TO THANK MY agent Stephany Evans for her steadfast belief in this book, and my editor Chelsey Emmelhainz, who got what I was trying to achieve and whose clear vision and careful editing focused the text.

  A special thanks to two friends, novelist James Rogers and my former screenwriting agent Nancy Nigrosh, for reading and re-reading the manuscript, refueling me with their recommendations and enthusiasm, to Molly Friedrich for her generosity in giving me notes, and to those writer friends who read early versions and made suggestions, Diana Raab, Steven Reigns, Marijane Datson, Brad Schreiber, and Chip Jacobs.

  Thanks also to my young readers, Kateland Carr and Elena del Real, for sharing where the book resonated, to Michael D. Roback, MD, for advice and rollicking editing discussions, and to Nancy Bein, John Upton, Donald Freed, Jamie Rainer, and members of the Immaculate Heart Community for caring encouragement. I am grateful to Dean Echenberg, MD, and to Vancouver photographer Derek Lepper for digging in old files and sending images of me in the Malibu house from the early 1970s.

  I wish personally to thank Anaïs Nin’s excellent biographers, Deirdre Baer and Noel Riley Finch, in appreciation of their research and works upon which I relied, and to all those Nin friends and scholars who have shared with me their knowledge, including Paul Herron.

  There are two men, now deceased, who I must also thank: Nin’s editor John Ferrone, who read the manuscript at its inception and, even in his illness, gave me notes, and Rupert Pole, who gave me written permission to read Anaïs’s handwritten diaries and letters at UCLA Special Collections and to tell his complicated love story with her.