Apprenticed to Venus

by Tristine Rainer

  She did manage to control the mayhem inside her when he offered to drive her to LAX, saying he had to concentrate now on his studies, and even when he dropped her at the United terminal without a word about seeing her again. As she waited three hours for her flight, though, she wept uncontrollably amongst strangers who avoided looking at her.

  When she opened the door to her apartment with Hugo, she saw in the diffused light that Hugo’s book, glasses, and slippers lay where he always placed them. She was safe. She was home. Hugo slept, breathing heavily through his mouth, as she slipped past him and shut the bathroom door. She needed to wash off her excesses with Rupert so that when she awoke, she would be Hugo’s beloved wife again.

  She rose before Hugo the next morning to buy fresh croissants at the corner bakery. At breakfast he winked at her over his New York Times. “For a woman who has just driven cross-country and endured thirteen hours on a plane, you look beautiful, Mrs. Guiler.”

  “Why thank you, Mr. Beguiler.” There were advantages to being five years younger than her husband. Of course, the lowered blinds and the soft pink lighting that she’d installed in the apartment helped.

  She was thrilled to be in her own kitchen with her own husband, enjoying their Sunday brunch ritual. Hugo perused the arts section of the Times while she studied the book reviews.

  He turned his narrow, chiseled head to her. “Did you know Thurema Sokol is performing at Weill Recital Hall tonight?”

  “Of course. She had to return for the performance.” Anaïs was always amazed at how readily an appropriate lie would come to her in a pinch, yet when she tried to write fiction, she couldn’t make it up. All she could do was rewrite and disguise her diary entries.

  “It says that Thurema also performed at Weill last Thursday night. But how is that possible? Weren’t both of you still in Los Angeles then?”

  This is it. She stopped breathing. He’d caught her. “Oh, Thurema left Los Angeles before me. I decided to stay on for a few days to sightsee.”

  “But how could Thurema have driven back so quickly?”

  “She flew back.”

  “But you said she had to drive because she is afraid of flying.”

  “Yes, but she had no choice this time. At least she avoided one flight.”

  “What about her car?”

  “She got another musician to drive it back for her.”

  Hugo nodded. Did he know she was lying? Was he intentionally giving her enough rope to hang herself? Or was his love and trust so great that he simply accepted whatever she told him? She could never tell. People referred to her as a mystery woman, but he had his mysteries too.

  Within weeks, her sense of resilience and security was restored, and she became restless again. In the past, she would have escaped at every opportunity to parties, flirtations, possible new dalliances. But none of that interested her; she had been looking for her ideal partner in passion and she had found him in Rupert. What was the point of looking anymore?

  Despite her resolve not to put her security with Hugo in danger again, she wrote Rupert seductive letters reminding him of their passionate days and nights on the road. His replies were discouraging, telling her not to come to Los Angeles.

  She had pulled too hard on him. It had made him resist and escape. Now she would have to use reverse psychology to make him chase her. She had learned, and relearned the hard way, that the only way to keep a man smitten was to stay elusive. Like a bird she would have to make spirals around Rupert—swoop, circle, and then fly away.

  When Dutton published Children of the Albatross, she made a plan. Right after her book parties in New York, she would do a promotional tour west, ending in Los Angeles. She would send Rupert an announcement that she would be in Hollywood for a signing but not even suggest they see each other. Then she would wait to see if he took the bait, and if he did, she would have to fly away so he could chase her.

  Several months later, Anaïs appeared at Pickwick Bookshop in Hollywood. Her small audience had squeezed together to hear her soft voice.

  She returned the smile of a rotund bearded man, and behind him glimpsed Rupert, who had just arrived. She forbade herself to register any response to his handsome, smiling face, but instead turned to the erotic passage she had saved for this moment.

  She prefaced it by saying to the group, “In the novel, the young man’s parents have forbidden him to see the heroine because she is older and more worldly than he. Secretly he visits her apartment anyway.” She read with her musical rhythm:

  “He leaned over swiftly and took her whole mouth in his, the whole man coming out in a direct thrust, firm, willful, hungry. With one kiss he appropriated her, asserted his possessiveness. When he had taken her mouth and kissed her until they were both breathless they lay side by side and she felt his body strong and warm against hers, his passion inflexible.”

  As she continued reading with her French singsong inflection, she could feel the discomfort in her audience; they were unused to an elegant woman celebrating a moment of passion in her writing. But no one left, and when they crowded around to have her sign the copies they’d bought, Rupert included, she treated him with the same charming deference she offered the others. “To whom would you like me to inscribe it?”

  “Where are you staying?” he whispered urgently.

  To Rupert Pole, she wrote in her slanted handwriting. Looking forward to getting to know you better at Coral Sands.

  That was as much of an invitation as she was going to offer him. If he wanted to see her, he would figure it out.

  When Rupert left the Coral Sands Motel at 3 a.m., she was completely satiated. Don’t forget again, she told herself. Men want you most when you are most elusive. She would take one more night of pleasure with Rupert and then she would be gone—the bird who swoops and flies away. But where could she fly? She had no more book signings and she was not ready to be cooped up again with Hugo.

  Something new had emerged in her over the three weeks of her book tour: the satisfaction of true independence. She still had some of the advance money for her next novel in her purse, and she needed an adventure. She watched the white window curtain flutter as she lay in her motel room and imagined what her life could be like if Children of the Albatross somehow sold enough copies that Dutton would publish another of her novels. She would get another advance, and another, so that she would be financially independent. Then she really could be like the bird she imagined, circling her lover and flying off to freedom, a bird that did not have to migrate dutifully home to Hugo’s nest.

  CHAPTER 9

  Acapulco, Mexico, 1947-1948

  ANAÏS

  ANAÏS BOUGHT HERSELF A FLIGHT to Acapulco and, with the pleasure of Rupert’s embraces still on her skin, flew there alone. When she checked herself into the El Mirador Hotel, the setting sun tinted everything gold: the beach, the patio of her cabana, the skin of her bare arms and legs. At night she lay in a hammock, a warm breeze caressing her. Above, instead of pinpricks of stars, she saw huge, glowing orbs.

  Nature was so present that it annihilated her anxiety. It embraced her so powerfully that the sensuality of her surroundings was the only lover she needed. She was a woman drugged by beauty, and as the days and nights passed, she felt she never wanted to leave. She was at last free from guilt, from worry, from ambition, from memory, from Sabina’s hunger, from Lillian’s anxiety, from Stella’s fear. She was Djuna, her essential self, for once a woman alone experiencing joy.

  She spent the rest of her book advance on purchasing a little stucco house perched on the cliffs above Caleta Beach and the vast, sparkling ocean. She believed that in this sweet casita she had found an answer to the confusion of her life. She would not have been able to afford her own home anywhere else, yet she could not imagine a house she would rather have. Now if she left Hugo she would have a home of her own to go to, saving him from the trauma of her leaving him for another man. She’d have a peaceful space to write and not feel restless, a place nestled
in nature where Rupert would want to visit her. Acapulco was a sensual feast that would be even richer with a lover.

  Rupert accepted her mailed invitation to visit over his semester break, along with some cash for his flight she’d tucked into the envelope. He arrived carrying his forestry textbooks in his suitcase.

  Their first night together, they dined at one of the thatched-roof shanties that lined the beach below the cliffs of her house. The delicious grilled fish was so cheap Rupert insisted on paying for both of them. Afterwards he pulled her up the path to her quaint casita where he helped her light lanterns she’d purchased at the market, since the house had no electricity. In the soft light, to the rhythms of the surf, he gently glided his musician’s fingers over every part of her. From the jungle behind the house, parrots called and frogs croaked. As he took her to the center of herself, she called back to the creatures of the jungle.

  Drifting off to sleep, though, she felt as if she had insects on her skin and wondered if her old anxiety and guilt over Hugo were trying to trick her.

  Rupert suddenly jumped out of bed. “Anaïs, don’t move!” he commanded, grabbing a flashlight. “Keep your eyes closed.”

  She closed her eyes and froze, but cried out, “What? What is it?”

  She felt him remove something that had been crawling on her arm. She felt another tickle on her leg, a scratch; and then it, too, was gone.

  Whack! She jumped with fear. She thought of her father’s spankings, the whacks that had sexualized her too young because he hit her place of pleasure.

  Rupert said, “Okay, you can open your eyes, but I still forbid you to move a muscle.” It excited her when he took on that manly, in-charge tone.

  She opened her eyes and saw he held a shoe in his hand. Suddenly he dropped the shoe and tore off his Hawaiian shirt. “Move back!”

  She did and gasped, seeing a two-inch-long dark crayfish clinging to his bare, muscled torso.

  “How did crayfish get in here?” she asked.

  “Anaïs,” Rupert hissed, “that’s a scorpion.”

  He brushed it off, and before it could escape, picked up the shoe and slammed it on the tile floor.

  Her heart jumped again.

  Now, with the shoe in one hand and a flashlight in the other, he searched the bedclothes, the walls, and the floor, finding and thwacking four more of the deadly scorpions. He focused the flashlight’s beam into a corner crack in the stucco. Tiny red eyes gleamed back.

  “Rats! You have scorpions and rats in your house.” She heard the disgust in his voice.

  “What do we do?” she said. “It’s too late to go to a hotel.”

  He dragged the bed out onto the veranda. He ran the flashlight beam over and under the mattress, checking for vermin, and when he was satisfied it was safe he flopped onto the bed and welcomed her into his arms. She lowered herself to him gracefully, feeling him hard against her thigh; he was always ready for her.

  “You are my hero,” she murmured, making her French accent more pronounced. To reward his bravery, she adored him with her tongue. When he started to turn her over to enter her, she held him in place and mounted him. With his hands on her hips, she rode him, and when she came she threw her head back and saw thousands of glowing globes in the night sky.

  They slept restlessly until 4 a.m. when the rooster next door started crowing and a man in the house below started coughing. Already Anaïs was disillusioned with the purchase of her casita, and she suggested that they stay the rest of his visit at the El Mirador hotel. There they spent two weeks of sensuality: he studying his textbooks, she writing in her diary, and together snorkeling in the tropical waters. They barely spoke except for the language of the body.

  Underwater she felt as if she had entered her inner self, the eternal feminine, the silky comfort of the womb. Her body met with Rupert’s, moving without effort in the soft current. No thoughts here, no conflicts, no time, no past, no guilt, no husband—only the dissolution of water, the fluidity of now.

  He left her cheerfully, having repaired the screens of her little house and rid it of vermin.

  But when he was gone, her body yearned for him and she could no longer enjoy her solitude or her casita. So when she received a letter from Hugo saying he was coming to Acapulco to visit and that she should make reservations for them at the expensive American hotel, it was not entirely unwelcome. He enclosed a generous money order, enough to pay for a quick round-trip to Los Angeles. With two weeks of freedom until Hugo’s arrival, she telegraphed Rupert that she would be visiting LA on business and booked herself a room at the Coral Sands motel.

  Upon her arrival at the motel, the desk clerk handed her a note from Rupert, an invitation to dinner at his mother’s house. Rupert had warned Anaïs that his mother, Helen, and her second husband, Lloyd, son of the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright, were guarded about whom they let into their world. Likely they wanted to look her over.

  As Anaïs stepped out of a taxi at 858 Doheny that evening, she thought how perfectly the site expressed the family’s reserve. She was already forming the metaphors in her mind that she would use in her diary to describe it: The crossed arms of a giant tree guarding the entrance. The high stone wall surrounding the house like a castle moat.

  Anaïs tried hard to charm Rupert's mother, but found the short, restrained woman impenetrable. Seated next to Helen at the dinner table, Anaïs could feel her scrutinizing the side of her face, studying her crow’s-feet and likely searching for plastic surgery scars.

  Helen questioned Anaïs about her life in New York: did they know any of the same people? How long had it been, she asked, since Anaïs had gotten divorced?

  Feeling defensive, Anaïs said the first thing that jumped into her head. “I just got my divorce in Mexico.”

  “And do you intend to continue writing novels?”

  “Oh, yes. Dutton is planning on publishing my next one.” Well, she hoped they would.

  Helen commented, “The artist’s life is difficult. It does not create a base for a full life or stable relationships. Rupert has learned that, not only from having been an actor but from marrying an actress.”

  “So he told me.”

  “I read one of your books,” Helen said as she poured mint sauce from a chrome Bauhaus pitcher for the pink sliced lamb on Anaïs’s plate. “The book had a troubling title, what was it? Yes, House of Incest?”

  Accepting the perfectly presented plate, Anaïs looked across the table to Rupert for help. Where was her brave, manly lover now? Letting her be subjected to his mother’s scrutiny and digs without jumping in to support her.

  He got the message, finally, in Anaïs’s pleading eyes. “Mother,” he said, “the title refers to incest as a metaphor for self-absorption, for being able only to see other people as projections of oneself.” So, Anaïs thought, Rupert does listen. He can even repeat as his own what I’ve told him.

  “That’s very interesting,” said Lloyd.

  Anaïs looked at Rupert’s stepfather, the famous architect’s son, with sympathy. “My father was a world-famous musician,” she said. “Not as famous as Frank Lloyd Wright, of course, but I know what it feels like to be the child of a famous artist. Like you, I have had to work to create my own identity.”

  Rupert and his brother Eric turned their eyes on Lloyd as he was about to respond, but Helen slid in a question as smoothly as her silver-handled knife through the leg of lamb. “Do you enjoy cooking, Anaïs?”

  “Not really. It’s not my form of creativity. But Rupert has told me what a superb cook you are, and I greatly admire that.”

  “We believe it is an important bond for family life,” Helen said, nodding to her husband that he should begin eating.

  Rupert and Eric followed suit, but Anaïs’s throat was so tight that she had difficulty swallowing.

  “Delicious as usual, Mother,” Rupert enthused. “I love your cooking.”

  Better keep Mummy around, then, Anaïs thought.

  When they
all said good-bye to her at the front door—Rupert standing in the hallway with his family as though posed as for their annual Christmas card—Helen came straight out and told her that she was not the woman they had hoped their son would find.

  So she was surprised when she heard tapping on her motel room door later.

  “They’re asleep so I slipped out,” Rupert said.

  She might have objected, but she was hungry for him. Their best language was that of the body, and their lovemaking had become more passionate, more expert, more satisfying each time. With his hands and lips, he directed the tides of her blood, rising in waves, until a huge breaker overcame them, subsiding like bubbling foam. He left at 3 a.m. saying, “I have to get back before they wake up.”

  For the next eleven days, it became Rupert’s pattern to appear at 10 p.m. after his mother and stepfather had gone to sleep and to leave at midnight so he would be fresh for school. He was a phantom lover who came and went in the night, and it suited Anaïs just fine. She had truly achieved what she had not believed herself capable of: a lightness, a total acceptance of the present without anxiety over what would become of their relationship in the future.

  In the mornings she would walk to Musso and Frank’s Grill for breakfast where, from her booth, she overheard secret deals being made for blacklisted screenwriters. In the afternoons, she worked on her next novel set in Acapulco to submit to Dutton, confident of her phantom lover’s nightly visits. On her last night before she was to fly back to Acapulco, though, Rupert seemed reluctant to leave her at midnight.

  “I’m going to miss you.”

  “You see?” She teased him. “You were concerned my being in Los Angeles would interrupt your studies, but I didn’t at all.”

  “When will I see you again?” He had never asked that before.

  She lowered her lids, imagined herself flying off, while he chased after, trying to keep her in sight. “I suppose the next time my work brings me here.”