Apprenticed to Venus

by Tristine Rainer

  She disappeared from the living room and when she came back she was carrying not her diary as I had expected, but her large purse, from which she pulled a small manila accordion file box. She riffled through the box, finding the index card she was looking for, and held it curved in her palm so that I couldn’t see the writing. “November 17, 1962. I told Hugo you were a student at UCLA and doing some typing for me.”

  Anaïs scanned another card. “I told Hugo that you had agreed to receive my mail at your Westwood apartment address and deliver it to me at the rest ranch along with my typing.”

  I used my notepad to take notes. It was an alternate history of my life!

  She carefully replaced that card and pulled out a card just behind it. “November 28, 1962. I rented a post office box at Flax Stationer’s in Westwood, four blocks from UCLA, in Tristine Rainer’s name.”

  She looked up at me. “I thought you were going to college at UCLA because Rupert studied forestry there, and I didn’t realize there was another university in Los Angeles.”

  She returned to scanning the card. “I picked up Hugo’s mail, sent in care of you at the stationer’s address. Did you know that at Flax’s you can put down a P.O. box number so it looks like an apartment number?”

  She told me to memorize my fictional previous address on Lindbrook Drive in Westwood. “This last trip to New York, I told Hugo that you had transferred colleges and now your rent was cheaper, so you could afford a phone.”

  I was taken aback that Anaïs had implicated me in her deception of Hugo over the past two years without my knowledge, yet tickled that, at least fictively, I’d been a part of her life.

  “This is beginning to make sense,” I said. “Because the letterhead on the invitation we sent was from USC and not UCLA, you had to tell Hugo that I’d transferred colleges, right?”

  “Yes, and you made the whole thing believable with your story about universities not wanting to take their own students. Is that true? Familiarity breeds contempt?”

  “It’s more like fear of incest.”

  “What!?”

  “Nepotism. Universities want diverse points of view, so they prefer students they haven’t taught.”

  “I will never understand those places, but it’s wonderful that you do.” She refastened the elastic band on her little lie box and returned it to a zippered pocket in her purse. “Hugo being able to reach me through you, and you reinforcing the validity of my trips out here, may restore his confidence in me.” Tears appeared in the corners of her eyes. “Please, help me, Tristine. I can’t change my story anymore; things are too unstable right now. I think Hugo’s having an affair. I have to go right back to New York because I’m afraid he’s going to divorce me!”

  She quickly wiped away tears that had leaked, leaving streaks of kohl on the sides of her face.

  My heart went out to her; I had felt bad for Hugo because she cheated on him, but if he had affairs, what else was she to do? Be a victim? Maybe she should just divorce Hugo and, like Lady Chatterley, marry Rupert for real.

  “I was wondering,” I asked her, “why Rupert introduced himself as your husband to me if he’s no longer with the Forest Service.”

  She looked down, pensive, as if this were a difficult question. When she looked up again the water in her aquamarine eyes sparkled against the smeared black of her mascara. “Renate thinks I should tell you everything. She thinks I can trust you.”

  “You can trust me.” I gave her my Girl Scout–honor face. “Why don’t you just let me read the cards in that box, and then I can ask you about the parts I don’t understand?”

  “No! I don’t think so.” She gave me a hard smile. “If you are going to understand”—she let out a sigh—“you have to let me finish my story about Hugo and Rupert.” She joined her hands in prayer-like entreaty. “Please do not judge me.”

  “No, I wouldn’t. I won’t.”

  “You must promise not to repeat to anyone what I am going to tell you. You may discuss it only with Renate.”

  “I already took an oath with you both,” I tried to reassure her.

  “My life depends upon it!” Her eyebrows knit crookedly again. “It is a terrible secret.”

  Oh, how I wanted to know. “I swear, and not just that oath we did at Renate’s. On the life of my mother whom I love more than anything!”

  I felt her studying my face, reading my earnestness. She smiled. “You are very tender.”

  Embarrassed a little, I added, “Besides, you should tell me everything so I don’t mess up with Hugo.”

  “That’s what Renate says. Where did I leave off last time?”

  “You’d recovered from surgery and were happy to be married to Hugo.”

  “That just about brings us to 1955. How old were you then?”

  “Eleven. It was the year my father left.”

  She nodded. “A pivotal year for both of us.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Sierra Madre, California, 1955

  ANAÏS

  AFTER HER HYSTERECTOMY, ANAÏS REALIZED that since she could not give Rupert the family he wanted; it was unfair to string him along. She had to tell him the truth and let him move on to the full life he deserved. She cared too much for him to tell him over the phone, though. So the next time Hugo flew to Switzerland to transfer client money, she booked a TWA Constellation to Los Angeles. During the eight-hour flight, she tried to prepare herself in her diary for Rupert’s rage when she told him she hadn’t asked Hugo for a divorce. As her hand flew across the paper, she realized she needed a gentler approach. It would be best to leave Hugo out of it entirely and explain to Rupert that her hysterectomy had thrown everything up in the air and it had all come down in a different place. It was the truth, after all. Not that she seemed to have any lasting physical effects from the surgery. Once she’d regained her strength and obtained estrogen for her hot flashes, she felt healthy, better than she had in years.

  Still, she had been reluctant to try intercourse with Hugo again because he was too large and would hurt her when he pounded too hard. Fortunately, he was sympathetic, and with great tenderness they found a way to share affection that worked for both of them, returning to their pattern of the first two years of their marriage, when they were both virgins. When they went to bed, they caressed, kissed, and held each other, sometimes for an hour before Hugo would roll over and go to sleep. At twenty, this kissing and cuddling had frantically aroused her, but she had not known what for, whereas now the heartbreaking past sexual disappointments with Hugo had spoiled her appetite.

  Reading what she had allowed her hand to write freely, she admitted to herself that she wanted to experience lovemaking with Rupert one more time. She needed to know that despite the hysterectomy, she could still feel sexual fulfillment. Only Rupert could give her that reassurance. He would intuitively respond to her desire for him to be gentle. She needed Rupert’s lovemaking to restore her. One last time.

  When Rupert picked her up at LAX and brought her to the cabin, the fireplace was ready to be lit, a mattress positioned in front of it, a bottle of wine and glasses set on the hearth.

  She felt shy. She’d forgotten how beautiful Rupert was: his golden skin, his ardent, sensitive face lit by the now-blazing fireplace. He offered her a massage, and she placed herself in his hands. Under his touch, her skin became smooth and elastic; her body came alive as he explored its curves and muscles. Her tightly knotted nerve endings released like sea anemones unfolding. He turned her over and played his hands over her breasts, her stomach, her inner thighs.

  As he was entering her, he called, “Anaïs, be my wife, my beautiful wife.” She tensed with guilt, but as he continued to caress her, as he moved inside her, she lost all thought. Their bodies spoke only pleasure, only desire mounting, rising, and ringing its great cathedral bell, high and low, proclaiming all the joy in the world. From the perspective of the body, this jubilee was everything, the only truth that mattered. All the rest was a lie.

  Rupert
ran his fingers over her skin again, bringing her down. She watched the glowing embers in the fireplace. She listened to her slow, relaxed breathing and had no regrets. Rupert had given back to her the life of the body.

  Now she had to give back to him his whole life, to free him for what he wanted and deserved—a wife, a child. Her lies were standing in his way. Her best hope was that after she’d told him the truth, he would allow her to remain his friend, that the love between them would not be completely destroyed.

  The next day he took her to Sunday brunch at a Greek restaurant in Sierra Madre. There were homegrown roses at each table and faded Kodacolor photos of Corfu on the walls. Rupert ordered two champagne brunch specials, an extraordinary splurge for him. He reached across the table to take her cold hands.

  She had observed that Rupert’s eyes turned a deeper blue as a measure of his mounting desire. They were royal blue when he whispered, “Did you hear what I said to you last night while I was in you?”

  “You whispered, ‘Be my wife.’ How wonderful that would be,” she began and, gathering courage, added, “and how terribly unfair to you.”

  His thick eyebrows furrowed. The color in his eyes faded, and in them she saw fear. It passed like a squall, and his habitual cheer returned. “Drink your orange juice,” he said. “It’s fresh-squeezed.”

  “In a minute,” she replied. “There’s something I need to tell you.” She took a breath and then she told him, with a terrible frankness, about the three-inch-long tumor that had been removed, how she had been given a full hysterectomy, and now the question of her ever being able to bear him a child was settled.

  She said, “You have told me how important having a family is to you. It’s what you want and what you have every right to. But now it cannot be with me. Darling, I let you go with all my love.”

  She finished and watched his compassionate face. She could not fathom what she saw. His eyes turned to indigo, and he said in a husky voice, “Drink your orange juice, Anaïs.”

  “Rupert, this is serious. Why do you keep trying to get me to drink my orange juice?”

  “There’s something at the bottom of your glass.”

  Could he mean a ring? Oh god, what cruel irony.

  She plunged her fingers into the juice, and sure enough, pulled out a quarter-carat solitaire ring covered with orange pulp. She tried to hand it to Rupert. “It’s lovely. Please keep it for whichever young woman is lucky enough to give you the family I cannot. I’m sorry. I should have told you sooner about my surgery. I just couldn’t do it over the phone.”

  “Anaïs, I’m in love with you.” He wrapped his hand around her sticky fingers holding up the ring. “It doesn’t matter about having children. That means nothing to me compared to you.”

  He lifted her chin and asked her to let him take care of her now by becoming his wife.

  His love crested over her and pulled her under. She could not see how she could divorce Hugo. She did not want to give up their cultured lifestyle and shared memories. Without Hugo she would lose the greatest booster of her writing. Without Hugo her very identity would be uprooted; she would fall into an abyss of insecurity.

  But if she said no to Rupert’s proposal she would lose an emotional and sexual connection so essential it was inexplicable, a love so romantic that her heart leapt in her chest whenever he walked through their dilapidated cabin door. She did not want to live without their engagement with music that took her to a transcendent state. Without Rupert’s physical love she would waste away and die. It was live now or live never.

  “Yes,” she heard herself say.

  As Rupert drove, Anaïs, in the passenger seat, pushed her foot down on an imaginary brake. Yet she remained mute, passively willing, carried as in a dream, as he hurtled the car towards the dusty town of Quartzite, Arizona. When they’d first driven cross-country he had noticed a justice of the peace’s office there. Sentimental and stubborn, Rupert was certain that Judge Hardly’s shingle would still be out and the office open. Anaïs’s only hope was that in the eight years since Rupert had spotted that sign board, the judge had retired. No such luck.

  She was about to become a bigamist.

  As pink-cheeked Mrs. Hardly led them into a little courtroom, Anaïs saw on a desk, next to the judge’s King James Bible, a large book titled Arizona Criminal Record. She imagined that after the marriage her name would be entered there. But which name? Anaïs Nin, Anaïs Guiler, or Anaïs Pole? They were all guilty.

  When the ceremony began, with the judge’s smiling wife as witness, Anaïs left her body. Detached, in a state of manic hilarity, she observed her wedding ceremony from up in the courtroom rafters. She had to keep from snickering at the thought of Judge Hardly performing a marriage that could hardly be legal.

  There was no one with whom she could share her dark mirth. The surrealists from her Paris days—Breton, Ernst, and Artaud—would have loved this wedding. They would have held a mad party to celebrate her mariage a trois. They would have carried her on their shoulders to showers of confetti, shouting, “Hail to la grande dame de l’absurd!”

  But there was no party, no spurting champagne, no all-night celebration. Instead, she and Rupert walked out of the judge’s office into the empty desert street and blinding sun. They sped directly back to Sierra Madre so that Rupert could be up for work the next morning at 5 a.m. As he drove, Anaïs glanced over at his handsome profile and tanned hands on the wheel, and she touched him, repeatedly and provocatively. She stroked his smooth young skin and the golden hairs exposed by his open shirt collar as she wondered what sentence she would get for bigamy.

  She recalled that Gore Vidal, when denouncing Virginia’s laws on sexual deviance, once said that the sentence for bigamy there was ten years in prison.

  “That’s progress,” he’d chuckled. “Used to be the death penalty.”

  Having recently faced death anyway, she thought, what did it matter? At least she was making one person happy, and Rupert, with his right hand now cupping her breast, a gold wedding band glinting on his left, was truly, innocently happy. He whistled a Bach sonata, his member rising for her in his good pair of slacks.

  Their honeymoon consisted of Rupert taking her hiking in the immolated mountains above their cabin. They tramped past trees with gnarled arms like blackened grape vines and basins of mud hardened into the shape of waves. She gasped when she saw their destination, a valley carpeted with poppies bright as a Buddhist monk’s robes.

  “It’s nature’s cycle for the chaparral to burn every century or so.” Rupert swept an arm dramatically. “Only after that huge conflagration, Anaïs, do certain rare fire flowers grow.”

  He bent to pluck a speck of white nestled in the spread of poppies and purple lupine. “This one! I remember seeing a sketch of it in an old book on fire flowers. A few of these might appear next spring, but after that, not for a hundred years or so.”

  She took the delicate white stem from him and when she held it up, the wind blew it in a frenetic dance. She thought it the perfect metaphor for her own regeneration after her scorching illness. Like this flower born out of ash, she had emerged from her near death as a new bride in white again. Like this rare bloom, hers would be a crazy dance that could not last.

  Anaïs had followed her heart leading to an illegal act that, at all costs, she had to keep secret. Any mistake, any slip of the tongue or lapse of attention, would cost her everything. She would lose both Rupert and Hugo, and she knew she would not survive it.

  She had chosen not to choose, and in so doing she had entered the land of neither and both, the land of the absurd where no ordinary laws applied. Other women dreamt of having more than one love, of combining the qualities of two men into one perfect husband. But only she had dared to live that dream.

  At first, her fear of being found out and arrested by the authorities scared her day and night. But in time, being married to two men felt no different from the years she’d spent traveling between husband and lover. Over the nex
t ten years, her swings between New York and Los Angeles became as regular as a pendulum.

  Rupert would greet her passionately, and there would be a honeymoon phase when she was able to appreciate those qualities that made him so lovable: his sensuality, his sweet nature, his optimism. After about two months, however, Rupert’s penny-pinching, his persnickety insistence that she do things his way, and his stubborn, provincial view of the world would get on Anaïs’s nerves so badly that she knew it would be better to arrange her departure than to release the wounding words on the tip of her tongue: “I can’t stand you any longer! You are a small man with a small mind and a small life!” It was kinder to tell him that she had to go to New York for an editing job.

  Just as her kinetic rise with Rupert peaked, Hugo’s potential energy pulled her back. When she was most fed up with Rupert, she felt most drawn to Hugo’s wit and the sight of his elegant fingers picking up the check at Café des Artistes. Reunited with Hugo, she basked in his pampering and reveled in their nights on the town. By the end of her second month with Hugo, however, it would begin to get stale. His flirtatious manners seemed old-fashioned; his obsession with material success, superficial; his artistic ambitions those of a dilettante.

  With the few close friends like Renate who held her confidence, she spoke of the pendulum as her “trrapeze!” It was no gay leap through the air, though, no acrobatics of freedom. It was a cage in which she swung precariously, lured by alternate baits, ensnared with her “two blind mice.” A trap set to collapse should she miss a beat.

  The biggest strain was keeping Rupert and Hugo blind. Her lies became so complex she’d had to design the filing system of her little accordion Lie Box. Each time she invented a new cover story, she dated and wrote it on a card. When the little boxes got too stuffed, she locked them inside heavy metal cash boxes on each coast.