Anaïs Nin at the Grand Guignol

by Robert Levy

  Published by Lethe Press

  lethepressbooks.com

  Copyright © 2019 Robert Levy

  ISBN: 978159021717

  No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm, and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Author or Publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available on request

  Cover and Interior design by Inkspiral Design

  Cover art adapted from The Dance of Death (Totentanz)

  For

  Dr. Louise Bordeaux Silverstein,

  who first showed me the diaries

  and

  Mel Gordon,

  who showed us the way

  to 20bis Rue Chaptal

  “Before I go to bed, I look under my bed with fear.

  I fear the dark, the storms, the sea, the unknown

  and my own darkness.”

  Paula Maxa

  Paris

  1933

  While Hugo is in London, Henry comes to see me at Louveciennes. Emilia serves us a lovely lunch of steamed clams and a salade niçoise, as well as the festive carrot soufflé from my aunt’s recipe, all of which Henry takes to with his usual lustful brio. He drinks and I smoke, and we play with the dogs in the garden while we wait for Emilia to clear away the dishes. I watch as Henry tosses the ball out for Banquo, who brings it back for another go, just one more, one more, more. I retain a smile, but this surface contentment is an inaccurate reflection of what lies beneath, a mask I wear so that I might be found respectable and worthy of companionship. In truth, I am adrift.

  I give Emilia the afternoon off and send her home early. No sooner is she out and past the green garden gate than Henry and I set upon each other, hungry and wild, and we caress with an unmoored enthusiasm.

  “How long do we have?” he says, as we make our way up the stairs. “Tell me I can stay the night.”

  “Another night, but not this one. I have too many errands to tend to in advance of Hugo’s return. Then he is back here through the end of April.”

  “Damn it to hell. I did hear somewhere that April was the cruelest month.” Henry hikes my dress up and around my waist. “‘Breeding lilacs out of the dead land...’”

  “‘Mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain....’”

  “Hey, you know your Waste Land,” he says, and he presses himself against me, no time to disrobe before I feel him hard against my thigh. “I’m impressed.”

  “I know a great many things besides Eliot.” I smile, with a wicked knowledge born of experience. “Allow me to show them to you.”

  I move toward the bed, but “No,” he whispers in my ear, “right here,” and he takes hold of my buttocks in his rough tailor’s hands and seats me upon the windowsill.

  I fumble with his belt buckle, release him from the confines of his trousers and worn-out underwear. I help him from the remainder of his clothing, as he helps me from mine, our costumes shed so that we may be free from the staged production of our ordinary lives. We cross over as one into the more real world of fantasy, undiminished and undisguised, my native country above all others. For it is only in the act of pleasure that I can find myself, my true self. There, and in this diary.

  Henry thrusts himself inside me, and the whole of my body spasms, his iron embrace all that keeps me from crashing through the leaded glass at my back. I grasp him closer, tilt my pelvis so that the small core at my opening bears down upon his firmness. I squeeze my eyes shut and ride him faster, my panting breath unfurling into a quiet and steady prayer.

  “Please,” I whisper, “please,” not so much to Henry as to a distant god of mercy. This is the only way I know how to heal what has been broken.

  “Oh, Christ, Anaïs,” he mutters, and I scramble for leverage against the walls of the window casing, fingernails scarring the plaster with crescent-shaped marks, lest they find a softer target and draw blood. “You make me crazy,” he says. “There’s no one else but you. You know that. There’s no one else in the world.” The animal sounds of our lovemaking echo in my ears, ring out across the bedroom and through the open door, and we fall into a dance of wordlessness, into the language of movement, the divine alchemy of the physical.

  The wordlessness is just as well, since I cannot respond to Henry in kind. I cannot tell him there is no one else, because unlike him I am not so quick to lie. I know he believes these words as he speaks them, however, just as I know that, in another moment or five moments or ten, his imagination will steer toward one of his many whores. Or perhaps toward June, glittering and regal and imperious. The billowing curves of her hips and breasts, her severe face that captures the female and the male in its own golden ratio, she who commands the beauty of both sexes at once. Since she left for New York, a whirlpool of loss has opened inside me, one capable of swallowing me whole. My longing for her is so powerful it disturbs me.

  As Henry spends himself inside me, I wonder if he thinks of her now, and the affair that sent her away. The one that Henry and I have carried on for all these many months, that drove his wife from his arms. I wonder because I cannot help but think of June myself.

  I go into the city for my session with Dr. Allendy. The small office he keeps at his home address is uncomfortably warm, a strange humidity laced with pipe smoke that narcotizes me as soon as I enter.

  “Close your eyes,” he says. “Relax, and simply talk.” I lie upon the couch, and he steers me down the usual paths of analysis: my dissatisfactions with domesticity and my role as a wife; the highs and inevitable lows brought on by my various love affairs; the loss of June, and what it means for both Henry and myself. As the session progresses, I find myself unable to concentrate on the task at hand, to draw upon the usual connections and associations crucial to therapeutic success. Somewhere along the dance of my life, I have lost my footing, and I can no longer disguise it when I drop a step.

  “Anaïs? What is the matter?” Allendy strokes his beard as he stares down at me with his typical air of avuncular concern. “You do not seem quite yourself today.”

  “It is nothing,” I say, though neither of us is fooled by these empty words. “It is just...” I shake my head. “I am beginning to feel I am not present in my own life. That I have taken on the role of an observer. It is as if I am somehow outside of my skin, cursed to look on as I go about my daily business. I worry that I am becoming a stranger to myself.”

  “Perhaps this sense of separation is due to your work,” Allendy says. “Is it not possible that this secondary life on the page—your mirror life—is actually subsuming your everyday existence? Nowhere is this more acute than in the case of your obsessive diary writing.” I feel my journal from the corner of the room, where it burns inside my bag like a fiery cinder, an irrepressible itch in need of scratching. It begs to be written inside of, page after page and cover to cover. I am an addict, it is true, the diary no less than my opium.

  “Normally, I would be inclined to agree,” I say. “But it is not my writing that has caused me to feel this way. It is as if I have become my own ghost.”

  “Do you have any thoughts about what might be causing this sense of dissociation?” Allendy crosses and uncrosses his legs, brings his pipe to his mouth. I exhale, and contemplate how best to answer.

  “You want me to say it is because of June,” I say. “It is true that wanted to save her from the pallid existence she had made for herself, and the ruins of her marriage to Henry. But June is the death drive that counterbalances Henry’s vitality, his love of life. And now? Now, she is gone. Her choice, of course. She p
roved once and for all that she did not desire saving in the first place. Least of all by me.”

  “Then perhaps it is time for you to find someone else on which to focus.” He bites at the lip of his pipe before slipping it from his mouth. “Perhaps it is time for you find someone else to save.”

  “Perhaps it is.”

  I stare out the window, at the tops of the honey locust trees in Allendy’s garden, their flowers just beginning to blossom on the far side of the glass. “At Louveciennes,” I say, “behind the wide wooden trellis covered in thick ivy, the front of the house is faced with shutters. There are eleven of them: five windows onto the west rooms, and five onto the east, with a single closed shutter at its center. That center shutter is always closed, you see, because it is only there for symmetry. There is nothing behind it, no window or room whatsoever. Yet I often find myself dreaming that there is in fact a room, a place I call the sealed room. I imagine that if only I can locate the door and manage to unlock it, then what lies inside will prove the missing element that is destined to complete me at last.”

  “This sealed room,” Allendy says. “It is where your unknown self is kept from you, yes? Your own private mysteries, hidden away. The essence of your repressed desires.”

  I nod. “And so I am unmoored, and doomed to continue searching for what I have lost, the way I search for the room in my dreams. Unmoored more than usual, it must be said, in June’s wake.”

  “Yet she is not the primal cause of your malaise.” Allendy taps out his pipe in the ashtray, though his dark eyes remain fixed upon me, pinning me to the couch like a specimen. “Your feelings about her absence are but an echo of the original and formative event: the abandonment you suffered at the hands your father.”

  “Maybe so,” I say, and shift uncomfortably upon the couch, the room growing hotter. “I feel betrayed by her. An echo of the loss, as you say, that I felt as a child. The difference, however, is that June left because of Henry and me. She claimed I was the source of the entire rupture.”

  “You said Henry and June’s marriage was foundering long before they moved to Paris and crossed your path. In truth, your guilt is precisely the same self-blame you bore in the aftermath of your father’s abandonment. It stems from your unconscious conviction that if only you had managed to be a better daughter, then your father would never have left.”

  He smiles. “This desire for self-flagellation is a knot at the center of your resistant mind, Anaïs, one that is in desperate need of untying. Your shame is also the cause of your masochistic dreams, those in which you desire to be dominated. Indeed, to be punished, humiliated. Your intense desire for your father’s affections is coupled with your allegiance to your betrayed mother, aligned as you are with her sense of outrage. You find it easy to place yourself in her position, that of an abandoned lover, yes? This naturally lends itself to feelings of inadequacy. Have you had any erotic dreams about your father?”

  I smooth my dress over my knees, and look up to find him watching me. “How do you suggest I free myself from this cycle of self-punishment?”

  He puts down his pipe and stands. “I want to show you something.”

  I follow him out of his office and into the adjoining parlor. Against the far wall is a square slatted box the size of a wardrobe, the dark brown wood out of place amid the room’s black-and-white decor.

  “This is called an isolation accumulator.” He opens the door to the structure to reveal its metal interior. “It is a prototype created by a former colleague at the Vienna Ambulatorium, designed to stimulate the production of positive flow through the lessening of distractibility. I would like you to try it, to better open yourself to that which keeps you from healthful integration.”

  “And…how do I go about using it, exactly?”

  “You sit inside, and I shut the door.” Allendy slides a chair from the nearby table and places it in the box. “Then, you close your eyes, and you breathe. Consider your feelings of guilt and shame, and how these repressive emotions are ultimately of your own making. Picture them as particles of negativity among a sea of energy, energy that you are able to disperse, until you are awash in positive light alone.”

  Allendy steps away from the box. “I will open the door in twenty minutes, with time to share and evaluate your experience. That is all you have to do.”

  I enter the small chamber and settle into the chair, and he swings the door closed. I am sealed inside, with only the darkness as my companion. At first, the totality of silence is unnerving. There is a dull throbbing in my ears, though I soon recognize it as the sound of my heart beating, the blood as it pumps through my veins.

  I begin to relax into my seat. My mind wanders, and my thoughts drift from Allendy to my husband, from Hugo to Henry to June, a rotating cast of characters whose features blur together until I am faced with a single mask-like face. Or perhaps it is a mixture of faces, the skin there smooth and colorless and without any discernible attributes, unformed as a lump of clay. I attempt to shape the features into those of my father, but I find a stubborn resistance there, an unwillingness to summon him from the ether of my imagination.

  The smell of the sea, the touch of silt and sand and rock beneath my toes, and I am naked and stretched out upon a strangely familiar shore. The seaside of my youth in New York, perhaps, or maybe Cuba, I cannot say for certain. The waves make a gentle slapping sound, and a lone gull wheels overhead. The sun is low to the earth, a swollen and bloody ball in the process of sinking beneath the horizon. Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. The words taught to me by my father, just before he left us for good.

  How I prayed to God that he would return to me, that he would love me and possess me completely. The way a devoted husband loves a wife, with every fiber of his being. God never answered, however, and so I stopped praying. I began the diary instead.

  I sit up inside my reverie, and shield my eyes from the harsh glare. There is someone in the water, up to his or her neck and backlit by the blurred red orb of sun that hovers over the ocean like a glutted leech. Silver-yellow eyes gleam from their skull, twin flames flickering as they watch from the waves.

  The figure wades toward me, toward the shore, and now I can see that it is a man. He is tall and broad-shouldered, his face obscured as he approaches. At once, the sky blackens and a storm front rolls over the beach, angry clouds blotting out the sun and plunging the world into darkness. The tide rushes across the shore to drench my limbs, and a furious wind whips my hair about me, a conjured chaos descending everywhere at once as I stand and begin to run.

  A talon grip takes hold of my ankle and pulls me to the ground. A human hand, yet unlike any I have ever seen or felt, its strength icy and elemental. I struggle to free myself, my fingers raking across sand and rock. It is no use, however, and I am dragged back across the remainder of the shore and into the sea’s cold embrace. The weight of the ocean bears down upon me, saltwater stinging my eyes, my throat, filling my lungs with its unyielding pressure, and as I drown I attempt to scream.

  I know that I must rouse myself from this waking nightmare. And yet a strange comfort passes over me, a dark knowledge that it will all be over soon, if only I surrender to it. I must fight this impulse as well.

  I flail my arms, my palms smacking against smooth walls on either side of me, and I am back inside the strange box in Allendy’s office. Only the box is filled to the brim with seawater, and I am drowning here as well, still caught in the ocean’s relentless whirlpool. And all the while, the cold hand grasps my ankle, fingers stroking my calf and lengthening and extending like a tangle of hungry eels to coil about my thigh. A slender and viscous digit finds its way up and inside me, filling me as the brine fills my eyes and mouth, my ears and nose. I am consumed.

  A brightness flares in the dark, and I wince. Allendy stands before me, framed in the entry to the slatted box, the light of day animating motes of dust winking in the air around him. I leap up and hurry from the box, my hands clamped to my arms to keep fro
m trembling as I move past him and down the hall.

  “Anaïs?” Allendy calls after me. “Are you all right? You cried out.”

  “So sorry, doctor, but I forgot that I am due at home earlier than usual.” I calm my breath as I meet his watchful eyes. “We will continue this next week, yes?”

  “Of course,” he says, his expression tightening with unspoken concern. “We will pick up where we left off.”

  I thank him and head out onto Rue de l’Assomption. As I glance over my shoulder, I notice for the first time the resemblance between Allendy’s quaint townhouse and the house where we lived in Brussels when I was a child. How the whole of my existence becomes a vast echo over time and space, from which there is never any escape. I shake away the observation, just as I negate the conjured image of the predatory yellow eyes staring out from the dark ocean’s unsettled waters.

  I continue down the street, and give myself over to the dirty swirl of the city, allow its anonymous embrace to erase my panicked state. Still, the fear refuses to let me go. I conjured a horrible fate inside the box, it is true, one of a mysterious and unearthly creature drowning me, penetrating me, more. Another manifested daydream of submission, as Allendy would surely have noted if I had summoned the courage to reveal this disturbing product of my fragmented imagination.

  My dark desires, they have long carried a vast and primitive voluptuousness capable of opening doors between places I once thought locked forever, a rising tide of sensual oblivion I had hoped to bury for good. Forbidden pleasures rooted in taboo desire, transmuted by my imagination in much the same way I transform my intimacies into art. And who can say for certain where it is these desires might take me? Perhaps I will discover the door to my sealed room after all.

  Hugo has returned from his business trip. Following dinner, we retire to the living room, where we sit in front of the hearth. He is hard at work on his latest hobby, a detailed series of astrology charts, while I write in my diary, the dogs curled up together on the floor between us. After some time, I look up to find Hugo watching me, and any sense of focus or resolve dissipates like the early morning fog over the village. His gaze is soft, but it penetrates nevertheless.