Apprenticed to Venus

by Tristine Rainer

  “I don’t want you to be late to work, dear.” She nearly pushed Hugo out the door, and when he started back for his umbrella, she grabbed it and ran to him holding it out. Once he was in the elevator, she rushed to the terrace.

  On the street below, Rupert was backing Cleo into a parking space. Hugo strode from the building and hailed a taxi only six feet away from where Rupert was leaping over the passenger door of his little roadster. Hurry, Hugo, get in the cab. He stepped in just as Rupert dashed to the front door. She watched Hugo’s taxi turn the corner, then ran to buzz Rupert in.

  They emerged from the Holland Tunnel as from the birth canal, the sky expanding into a huge blue dome filled with puffy clouds. The land stretched out from green fields to forests and hills.

  She had dressed in shades of purple, the color of new consciousness, with a violet wide-brimmed hat and scarf to protect her face and hair in the open convertible. Rupert looked dapper in a dark blue wool coat and a Tyrolean hat. She imagined they were two vibrant, romantic characters from a Frank Capra road movie running away together.

  Cleo chugged past lakes, farmhouses, grazing sheep, and storybook churches. When, at 9 p.m., Rupert pulled the car into the parking lot of a motel, her body was still chugging forward.

  He told her they would have to register at the motel as Mr. and Mrs. Pole. She felt a rush of pleasure at the sound of Mrs. Pole. Stop it, she reprimanded herself. This is just casual. It is not meant to last.

  Rupert said, “You’ll need a wedding ring.”

  She caught herself visualizing hands clasped with Rupert, each with matching wedding bands. She reminded herself sternly that she was already married, even though she never wore the engraved gold band Hugo had placed on her finger decades before. Years ago, she’d told him it no longer fit comfortably.

  “I bought you a ring from Woolworth’s for you to use on the trip,” Rupert announced. He dug the band from his coat pocket and placed it in her palm.

  “You shouldn’t have,” she teased, slipping on the almost weightless ring and waving it in front of him. “Mrs. Pole is ready.”

  As they were finding their bungalow, Anaïs spied a pay phone. “Oh, Rupert, I need to phone my publisher.”

  “At this hour?” Rupert eyed her doubtfully.

  “Yes, he gave me his home number. We have to reschedule some meetings. He said to call whenever I got to a phone.”

  After calling Hugo collect to assure him she was fine, she returned to the motel room to find Rupert already in pajamas sitting up against the bed’s headboard, studying a map in his lap. She bathed and, wearing only her silk nightgown and the cheap wedding band, cuddled up to him.

  He raised her chin with his hand. “I’m going to make you very happy with the trip I’ve planned.” He spread the map over her legs and with his finger traced the route he had drawn with a red pen. His finger slid off the map and onto her nightgown, still tracing a path of pleasure.

  In the morning, he retrieved the map from the floor and handed it to her. “You can be our navigator.” She watched as he instructed her how to measure the miles between towns and what the symbols meant, but her mind was on the calluses on his elegant fingers where he struck the strings of his guitar; gently, knowingly, the way he touched her.

  Although she proved useless at navigating from his maps, he complimented her on being a trooper, never complaining about the long hours in the cramped, topless car. She restrained her annoyance when he brought out the little notebook in which he faithfully recorded what they each ordered and owed for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Hugo’s junior accountant, she thought, but she was not about to let it spoil her romantic adventure.

  Contrary to her fears that she would suffer exhaustion, she found herself energized by their morning lovemaking and their play of touch in the car in anticipation of that night’s fireworks. She felt younger and healthier with each mile away from Hugo.

  They took the southern route via New Orleans so that they could visit Gore Vidal, who had rented a house in the French Quarter. Gore welcomed them and looked Rupert over with an appreciative eye. She knew it was risky to introduce them because Gore was also friends with Hugo, but she couldn’t resist making Gore envious of her for a change; Rupert was that gorgeous. While Gore was out in the afternoons, she and Rupert made love on the cool marble floor of his apartment, slivers of light through the slatted shutters falling in fine lines on their skin.

  Gore suddenly became the moralist. He who specialized in one-night stands took her aside and reprimanded her for deceiving Hugo. She used every charm she had to swear Gore to secrecy; he couldn’t be trusted with such juicy gossip about her.

  The road again: Lake Pontchartrain, Delta country, the Mississippi River, flat regions, cattle ranches, tumbleweeds, the Texas Panhandle, Santa Fe, Indian country, canyons with sculpted turrets, lunar expanses, red earth, the Grand Canyon, immense awe, eons of geological strata, the wind whispering of eternity. America so beautiful, its snowcapped mountains, its deserts, rivers, bison, deer, unfamiliar trees and birds. She loved the land and the young man who knew it, knew its history, told her stories of Navajo legends, Spanish explorers, wagon pioneers. Night and day together. Making love in cabins with fireplaces, in bare rooms with electric heaters, under pine trees in a sleeping bag, on the sloping sand dunes of Death Valley.

  She had told herself that she was doing this fling as much for her marriage as for herself. If she did not allow Sabina these excursions, she would not be able to stay in her marriage with Hugo. She’d told herself to keep this affair light. As long as she did not let herself fall in love with Rupert, she would be all right. Her marriage would be all right.

  But she had fallen in love with Rupert.

  Driving through the last stretch of fragrant orange groves on the way to Los Angeles, Rupert broke a long silence by asking, “Before you and your husband decided on divorce, did you want to have children?”

  Her stomach somersaulted. “In the beginning we both thought we would have children,” she answered, “but our life was so busy, it didn’t seem like a good idea.”

  “I want children,” Rupert announced. She thought she had worried about everything, but she hadn’t anticipated this.

  “I thought you wanted a life of adventure and freedom. That’s why you are choosing forestry.”

  “I do, but I’m conflicted because I also want a home and a family. I want life to be in harmony like music, and you can’t have music without a stable foundation.”

  She was in turmoil. At forty-four she might still bear him a child but could she take care of one? No, she could not imagine herself in that role now.

  They fell into silence again, inhaling the sweet scent of blossoming orange trees.

  CHAPTER 7

  Malibu, California, 1964

  TRISTINE

  THE RING OF THE PHONE in Renate’s living room brought Anaïs out of her narrative. She lunged for the receiver but changed her mind.

  “Hurry, Tristine, we have to leave. We don’t want Ronnie or Peter to find us here.”

  I didn’t understand why but quickly gathered my stuff, and we exited through the carport door. In front of our side-by-side cars, both with badly dented fenders, Anaïs gave me a kiss on each cheek. Then she wrapped her arms around me in a hug that held the warmth I’d longed for.

  “Do you think I could follow you back to where the highway inclines to Sunset?” she asked. “I have a terrible sense of direction and I’m afraid of missing the exit.”

  Another similarity between Anaïs and me, I noted. I got lost easily, too, though I chose not to tell her because I could manage the Pacific Coast Highway to Sunset and I wanted her to trust in me.

  As we caravanned along the coast, I had to keep my eyes from drifting to the white foam of the waves crawling between the beach houses. I focused on the moonlit dividing line on PCH, glancing back at Anaïs in my rearview mirror, the top down on her Thunderbird, strands of her hair blowing out from under her scarf, her f
lapping cape fastened at the neck, her pale face intently watching my car. Anaïs’s magic had entered my life again, and this time I was determined not to lose it.

  Later, as I was eating a plate of freezer-burned corn and peas at my apartment, I realized that nothing Anaïs had told me about running away with Rupert actually clarified anything. Not why I had to get USC stationery for her. Not why she was sending a letter to herself. Not why she’d divorced Hugo and married Rupert. In fact, what she’d shared about her affair with Rupert only raised more questions. How had she gotten Rupert to forget about having children? Or had she? She couldn’t have married him until she was divorced from Hugo and that had to have been after 1962, because when I’d met her she was still married to Hugo. Between 1947, when she met Rupert and drove cross-country with him, and 1963 or thereabouts when she divorced Hugo, Rupert might have married and had a kid with someone else. Maybe the Puritanical girlfriend. That would mean Anaïs would now be a stepmom to his kid, though I couldn’t visualize that.

  My brain felt twisted by trying to calculate her timeline. I took a bath to relax, but a schoolyard taunt ran through my head: Anaïs Nin is a liar. Anaïs Nin is a liar. I kept thinking about all the lies she had told Hugo and Rupert, and wondered: if she lied to them, how would I ever know when she was telling me the truth?

  I lowered my shoulders into the hot bath water. Anaïs was a liar, and that meant I shouldn’t trust her. But for some reason, I did trust her. More than I’d ever trusted anyone. Lying was supposed to be wrong, but Anaïs seemed so right. She knew how to live, she was a writer, she was beautiful and kind, she didn’t seem to age like everybody else, and she wasn’t a victim. Besides, she had told me the truth about her being a liar. How was it that lying was wrong but keeping a friend’s lie wasn’t? It bound you together like blood sisters.

  When I asked the English department secretary for some stationery, the busy, middle-aged woman just handed me a stack of letterhead and envelopes without asking the purpose. As a second thought, she had me enter in a ledger how many sheets I was taking and the date.

  I met Anaïs again at Renate’s house, though Renate wasn’t there. I presented the blank letterhead protected in a folder. Her reaction was gratifying. “You did brilliantly!”

  We got right down to her dictation.

  “You can address the letter to me by my pen name, Anaïs Nin, Apt. 14B, 4 Washington Square, New York.” That wasn’t her address when I’d met her. I guessed she’d moved after the divorce, but still kept a place in the city. “I’ll be there in two weeks,” she continued. “The letter should arrive before I do. It is an invitation for me to speak at your college.”

  “From my English department?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did they invite you?”

  “No, but I need to have West Coast invitations for the East Coast colleges to offer me engagements.”

  “Oh.” So I was writing a pretend invitation for her to show around.

  “The letter should come from you on behalf of the English department. You should say they are offering me an honorarium of $200.”

  “Alright,” I said uncertainly.

  “It just needs to seem professional. You should apologize that the college does not have the money to pay for accommodations, but that I will be welcome to stay with you, as usual, for as long as I wish in your guest room.”

  “I don’t have a guest room! I mean, you could stay with me if you need to, but I only have a single. I don’t think you would be very comfortable.”

  “Oh, don’t worry, I’ll never stay with you. But it’s customary to offer accommodations.”

  I didn’t understand what was going on. I rubbed my forefinger over my lower lip as I do when I’m anxious.

  “Oh, never mind. This isn’t going to work.” She lowered my hand gently and held it with her own surprisingly cool hand. “I’m sorry. Forget all this.”

  “No! I’ll have the letter for you in two days.”

  “Excellent! Why don’t we meet next time at the library downtown, so you don’t have to drive all the way out here again. The Central Library is near your college, isn’t it?”

  We made the arrangements and, hoping to get her to return to her love story with Rupert, I said, “You told me Rupert wanted to have children. You never had a child, did you?”

  “No, do you want children?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Until you, the only women I’ve known who were happy were my Aunt Anne and my godmother Lenore, and neither of them had a kid.”

  “Renate is happy and she has a son,” Anaïs commented, but I wasn’t convinced. Studying me, she said, “I heard a lecture once by Marie Von Franz, who was a student of Carl Jung’s, about the puella aeterna, the archetype of the eternal ingénue.”

  The eternal ingénue—that’s what Anaïs was and what I wanted to be: forever young and light and carefree. I made a note of the Latin term but later, when I looked it up at Doheny Library, I found that the archetype of the woman who never ages, never loses her sexuality, and never becomes a mother had a dark side too—of being unable to stick to anything, of always being afraid of being trapped, of never growing up.

  Anaïs shifted her position on the stacked pillows. “I’ve been meaning to ask, have you seen your godmother?”

  “I stayed with Lenore last Easter break. We went to her show at the American Craft Museum.”

  “You cannot tell Lenore that you saw me in LA.”

  “Okay,” I said, “But I don’t see what harm.”

  “That’s just the point. You don’t know what harm!”

  “Then tell me. Tell me the rest of the story about you and Rupert. Did he try to find someone else to have children with?”

  My question appeared to pierce her like a blade. “I suppose that’s a natural question. He was only twenty-eight then.”

  “But he was in love with you,” I said.

  “Not yet.” She gave a wry smile.

  CHAPTER 8

  Los Angeles, California, 1947

  ANAÏS

  UPON THEIR ARRIVAL IN LOS Angeles, Rupert insisted they first go to the beach in Santa Monica. Anaïs sat on the shore shivering as he played like a puppy in the surf. Charging out of the water, his embrace wetting her clothes, he whooped, “I could take you right here.”

  Instead he took her with rough, impersonal sex in a rundown Hollywood motel room, and she had perhaps the best orgasm of her life. Putting on his clothes afterwards, he announced, “I have to go back to my mother’s tonight. They’re waiting for me.”

  “I can’t stay alone in this dump!” Panic pressed against her esophagus.

  “You’ll be safe. Lock the door.”

  “You expect me to believe that a twenty-eight-year-old man has to sleep at his mummy’s house? It’s the girlfriend, isn’t it?”

  He stepped back as though from a frothing animal. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  As the motel door slammed behind him, she knew her uncontrolled anxiety had been ruinous. She ran after him, through the motel courtyard and onto the street, still in her bathrobe. “Rupert, please. Don’t leave me here!”

  He didn’t look back as he slid into Cleo and took off. Anaïs chased the car as it sped down the hill. Slipping on the steep, cracked pavement, she fell and caught herself, scraping her hand. Out of breath, she sat on the road as the last of twilight dimmed and watched as Cleo turned at the corner, huffing dark smoke from the exhaust pipe, and disappeared out of sight.

  Pushing herself up on her bleeding palm, she tightened her bathrobe and trudged up the narrow sidewalk of the dimly lit street. On either side were cottages and run-down apartment buildings with window grates that cast threatening shadows onto the small yards. The street was unfamiliar now, but in her bathrobe she could hardly ask directions to the motel.

  She heard her own crazy laugh. She was inside her own horror film. Sabina would have swept her cape around her, glad to be rid of Rupert’s ho
mespun earnestness. But where was Sabina’s bravado now when she needed it? Lost to her, disappeared, leaving a helpless, terrified child.

  Trying to control her rising panic, Anaïs ran up the rest of the street and saw the motel. She would phone Hugo; she needed to speak to Hugo. When she discovered that the motel had no phone, she dressed hastily, found a phone booth on Sunset Boulevard, and dialed Hugo.

  The unanswered ring intensified to a shriek. Hugo should have been there at that hour. The last two times they had spoken, he’d cut the phone call short, and she’d heard the anger in his voice. He must have learned that she had lied to him about the trip. Hugo was done with her too.

  She remembered the sleeping pills in her suitcase. She had brought them to help her fall asleep while on the road, but lovemaking with Rupert had made them unnecessary.

  In the motel room, her hand trembling, she emptied the bottle onto the scarred desk. She counted twenty-seven capsules. Enough to silence the piercing shriek cutting through her veins, bleeding into her muscles and nerves.

  She’d believed she would not relapse with Rupert because he was younger, because he was not the father image. But she had fallen in love with him, and he had walked out on her. It was enough to set off the cruel mechanism.

  She found a chipped drinking glass and filled it from the bathroom faucet. She felt a cold detachment because she had enough pills to end the shriek and the door banging, banging.

  She could barely hear the gentle voice beneath the cacophony. Take three pills, Anaïs. Just three. Try to rest until morning. Wait until daylight.

  She recognized the voice as that of Djuna. She followed its wise instruction like a child who has cried herself into a daze, though she tossed and turned and her blood howled all night.

  She gave up hoping for sleep at 6 a.m., showered, and carefully made up her stricken face, on which fine lines had spun overnight. Whatever happens, whatever Rupert says, she promised herself, I will not lose control again.