Apprenticed to Venus

by Tristine Rainer

  Then he’d place the sax, carefully as always, back in its case and say, “Do you want a massage?” and I would refuse to answer. He’d say, “Roll over. On your stomach.” He’d knead the anger right out of me, making my body yearn with desire for him. He’d say, “Turn on your back.” Then he’d try to kiss me, but I’d turn my head away. He’d gently turn my face to him and kiss my wet eyelids. When his lips would claim mine, I tasted my tears, his kiss sweeping me, pulling me, into a spiraling black hole. I wanted only him and what he would do with my body.

  I was in love, but this was no way to live. I needed to talk to Anaïs. I desperately needed her wise Djuna advice for how to handle my turbulent, self-destructive emotions. But I had failed her and I didn’t dare call her again. I wouldn’t have known where to phone her, in any case. For all I knew, she could still be in New York, or back in LA, or nowhere. She’d said she would not survive if she lost both her husbands. That no longer seemed an exaggeration to me. I knew I would not survive losing Neal, and she’d have that loss twice over.

  I did try repeatedly to reach Renate. Ronnie always answered the phone. Finally I acquiesced to his demand that I quit calling. Anaïs must have instructed Renate, who in turn had instructed Ronnie, to cut me off.

  So the last person I thought would be phoning me on a Saturday night, when I was home alone throwing a catnip toy for my kitten, was Anaïs. Her voice was a whisper as if she were trying not to be heard. “Come to my place tomorrow. Be here at eleven.”

  Driving to Anaïs’s apartment, I felt sure she’d blame me for the collapse of her trapeze. My anger flared at the injustice of it; I’d tried to stop Rupert’s call.

  She greeted me with air kisses on both cheeks.

  “I’m so glad to see you!” I said.

  “Yes, I’ve been gone longer than I expected.” I heard the blame in her voice.

  She told me to have a seat on the nubby couch as she disappeared into the kitchen to make tea. I looked around and tried to determine if the Bekins boxes stacked along the walls contained Rupert’s possessions or hers.

  Anaïs settled herself with her cup of tea. Despite my intent to wait for her lead, I blurted, “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to stop Rupert from phoning you in New York.”

  She listened as I stammered through my explanation of what had happened at Curtis Harrington’s party and after. She took my hands in hers and said soothingly, “Thank you for trying, Tristine.”

  I had to know. “What happened when Rupert called your New York apartment?”

  Her eyes and mouth turned down in her sad, Pierrot clown face. She sighed. “I’ll tell you. But first I have to ask, did Rupert make a pass at you?”

  “No! He took me to Curtis’s Christmas party as your friend. Ask Curtis.”

  “But you did make a pass at Rupert.”

  “No! Did he tell you that? It’s not true!”

  “It’s alright. You can tell me the truth. Rupert is young and attractive. I know how these things happen.”

  “I’m telling you the truth, Anaïs. I don’t even find him attractive. I’m madly in love with someone else.”

  “You are? When did that happen?” Her smile transformed her beautiful, tired face into that of a funny little girl with gopher teeth. “That’s wonderful! Who is he?”

  I told her of my passion for Neal, and how the overwhelming power of sex that D. H. Lawrence described in his novels now possessed me, how Neal had moved in with me the morning after our first night together, and how, just as she’d predicted, Sabina had fled when I fell in love.

  She smiled. “Musicians are the best lovers.”

  “But Neal doesn’t believe in monogamy. He sleeps with other women, and I’m tortured by jealousy!” I begged for her guidance.

  She shut her eyes to consider my ordeal, but they quickly flashed open. “Tristine!” she cried. “You let him move in with you!”

  I hadn’t worried about Neal living with me because I thought I’d never hear from Anaïs again. “Hugo hasn’t called my place,” I tried to reassure her.

  “But he will! I told him I’d be staying with you.” She berated me, “How could you be so careless? Right now Hugo could be phoning your apartment, and Neal might answer just like Ronnie did at Renate’s!”

  “I’m so sorry! I haven’t been thinking much since Neal moved in. My brain isn’t working well.”

  Anaïs gave an angry sigh. “Have you told Neal what to say if anyone calls for me?”

  “No. I didn’t want to tell him anything without your permission. I took an oath not to discuss it with anyone except Renate, remember?”

  She scowled. “We can’t take the chance of Neal being there if Hugo calls.”

  Did she expect me to tell Neal to move out? I would do almost anything for her, but not that. My resentment rose like a rogue wave. I’d tried to help her keep two husbands, and she expected me to give up my one lover?

  “I don’t want him to move out.” My voice quavered with defiance.

  She looked at me in surprise. A sequence played across her face—outrage, deliberation, resolve—before she said, “We need a creative solution, then.” She took a sip of her tea and closed her eyes. When she opened them she said, “Don’t tell Neal anything, not even that you know me.”

  “I did tell him that I went to Harlem with you once and we heard Mango Santamaria.”

  “Does he know anything about Hugo and Rupert?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Good. Change your phone number. Tell the phone company that you have a heckler threatening you. Call them right now from my phone.”

  I did as she said. It wasn’t easy to persuade the operator that the heckler was dangerous, but Anaïs knew exactly what to say. She rapidly scribbled on her pad of violet notepaper, tore the note off, and handed it to me. Thanks to the many phone pranks I’d pulled in grammar school and my high school dramatic training, I was able to do a convincing cold reading of her note.

  “He said he was going to break into my place and tie me up and whip me until I begged him to fuck me.” I sort of stammered on the “fuck me,” but it worked for the reading.

  The phone operator gasped.

  Anaïs handed me another square of violet paper. “He said he was going to get all his friends, and they were going to line up and do it to me all night.”

  I held the receiver so that Anaïs could hear the operator. “Did he say anything else?”

  She scribbled another note.

  “He said he would hang me from the rafters and force”—I couldn’t read the writing—“cunnifungus … on me.”

  “What?”

  Anaïs scribbled too fast now.

  “He said he was going to bring over three girls who would put a dildo in every horizon.”

  “Horizon?”

  Anaïs mouthed the right word.

  “Orifice,” I corrected.

  “What else?” the operator asked.

  “Isn’t that enough for you to change my number?” I asked the operator, breathless and flushed. I felt like the butt of the joke, as when Anaïs and the two businessmen in the Mexican café had exchanged smirks over my inexperience.

  Putting down the receiver, I asked Anaïs, “How do you know all those dirty things to say?”

  “Oh, I’ve had my own dealings with the phone company. You have to make it sound terrrible or they won’t change the number.” She shrugged. “And I wrote pornography for a wealthy collector when all the artists in the Village were doing it. The old man always wanted more of the rough stuff. Would you like more tea?”

  I hadn’t touched my now very brown tea. I took the Lipton’s bag out of the cup and took a sip.

  We sat in silence until I said, “Once they change my number, how will Hugo get in touch with you?”

  “Never mind.” She rubbed her forehead with her manicured fingers. “There are other people I can trust.”

  It took a moment before I noticed my stomach had clenched from the stab wound. She meant sh
e’d replace me and wouldn’t need me anymore.

  “If there’s anything else I can do for you,” I offered, hoping to hold onto my apprentice position. “I can still help with your writing and correspondence.”

  She nodded. “There may be something.” Her eyebrows furled in thought. “I’m still conceptualizing this.” She studied me for awhile. “If you are going to help, you have to know what happened.”

  “When Rupert called you at Hugo’s?”

  “That, but there’s so much more. So much has changed.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Greenwich Village, New York, 1964

  ANAÏS

  WHEN ANAÏS RETURNED TO CONVINCE Hugo that the rest ranch hadn’t been a lie, she found the situation to be worse than she’d feared. Hugo had taken a mistress, a Haitian-born dancer he’d met at his modern dance class. Driven by jealousy, Anaïs snuck into the back of the theater where the dancers rehearsed and observed Hugo and his mistress gyrating to wild drums. From the communication of their hips, Anaïs imagined that Hugo had, at last, found a woman attuned to his frenzied rhythms, and she panicked.

  Needing to speak to someone, she phoned Renate. Ronnie picked up, but Anaïs heard Renate wailing. Between Renate’s heaving sobs and Ronnie’s attempts to explain, she finally made out that Renate had found her son unconscious on the living room floor and could not revive him. Peter was dead from a heroin overdose. Renate had had no idea that Peter had been using drugs and blamed herself. Anaïs wanted to return to Los Angeles immediately, but Ronnie insisted that Renate, distraught with grief and guilt, would not see anyone.

  Anaïs was overcome with guilt for her own blindness. She and Renate’s other friends had considered Peter the child of their artists’ community. Yet preoccupied with their romantic intrigues, creative projects, and parties, none of them had noticed that their beloved boy was drowning. They’d let him slip away unseen and alone.

  With a devastating clarity, Anaïs recognized that it didn’t matter that Hugo was finding satisfaction in another woman’s arms. It didn’t matter that she also loved and lived with Rupert. People needed to keep watch over one another, so that none were lost; people needed to be reminded that they were loved. She and Hugo had cared for and loved each other for three decades. They should not allow denial and a failure to communicate destroy a marriage that had sustained them both.

  Denial was not benign; secrets were not benign. It was time for them to face and accept that they were bonded, but that their marriage could not satisfy their sexual needs. It was time for them to be open with each other, to have an open marriage. She would tell Hugo that she knew about his affair and that it was all right with her; they could love each other and have other lovers in their lives. It didn’t have to destroy their marriage.

  When Hugo got home late that night and tried to slip under the covers without waking her, she snuggled up and wrapped her arms around him. She told him that he did not need to feel guilty that he had a mistress, because she had someone too.

  Hugo flung her off, took his pillow, slammed the bedroom door, and abandoned her for his office.

  Although she knew that Dr. Inge Bogner would never intervene on her behalf with Hugo, Anaïs expected to gain some clarity when she arrived at the psychoanalyst’s Upper East Side apartment. Dr. Bogner had first been Hugo’s analyst. Years before, the German analyst had accepted Anaïs as her patient as well, with the proviso that she would never betray the confidences of either partner. Indeed, although she knew all about Anaïs’s bigamy, Bogner had been scrupulous in keeping it secret.

  Dr. Bogner greeted Anaïs with a smiling face that was welcoming, yet disconcerting, because only one of her eyes moved. The other eye perpetually gazed into space because it was crafted of glass with a painted gray-green iris. The psychoanalyst settled into her armchair opposite Anaïs and picked up her knitting.

  After weeping with grief over Peter’s overdose, Anaïs blurted that she had asked Hugo for an open marriage. She expected that Bogner would congratulate her for attempting, at last, to be candid with Hugo. But the analyst, uncharacteristically, broke her rule of not revealing one partner’s feelings to the other. “You may be ready to drop your denial, Anaïs, but Hugo is not ready to drop his.”

  “Why not? I’ve offered him the perfect solution. Openness for both of us.”

  “I don’t believe Hugo is capable of an open marriage.”

  “But he’s capable of having an affair!”

  Bogner seemed to nod, or was she just catching a stitch in her knitting? The analyst then raised her face and looked directly at Anaïs with her functioning eye. “Can you ask Hugo for a divorce now?”

  “So he can marry his mistress without me in the way? Absolutely not!”

  “Are you prepared to divorce Rupert?”

  “No, I need Rupert more than ever now that Hugo has a mistress!”

  The solution of an open marriage that could release Anaïs from her abiding guilt and terror of discovery had appeared like a strip of film through Hugo’s editing machine window and then flown out with a zip. She had no choice but to continue on the trapeze.

  Anaïs was alone in the apartment, and Hugo was out late again, probably dancing with his young mistress. The phone rang.

  A nurse at New York Hospital said, “Mrs. Guiler, I’m sorry to tell you your husband has been in an accident.”

  No! Please God, not Hugo! Not after Peter’s death.

  “He’s going to be alright, Mrs. Guiler. Given he’s in traction.”

  It took her a while to sort out that Hugo had fallen from kicking too high in class and had fractured a leg.

  The next morning, Anaïs arrived at Hugo’s hospital room and spent the day with him, waiting to face down the mistress who never showed. A week later, when Hugo and a traction apparatus were delivered to the apartment, there had still been no sign of the young woman who likely was gyrating with someone else now.

  Once Hugo and his pain pills and bedpan were hers to deal with, Anaïs almost wished the mistress would claim him. Millie had gone, inconveniently, on her Christmas leave, and Anaïs found herself having to feed and nurse him day and night.

  There was nothing to do but turn Hugo’s helplessness into an opportunity. She rented a nurse’s cap and mini-skirted white uniform from a costume store and wore it with high heels to attend to him. After several weeks of her flirtatious ministrations, their marriage settled into an affectionate, unspoken understanding that she would continue her periodic trips to Los Angeles and he would hold onto her by remaining in denial.

  Anaïs resolved that from then on she would be not just a liar, but the best liar; not just desirable, but unforgettable; not just a bigamist, but the most wonderful wife any two men could imagine, so that neither would ever wander from her again.

  That was, unfortunately, when Rupert phoned at 1:20 a.m. Anaïs, who had been sleeping on the daybed in Hugo’s office, picked up the receiver. She could hear Hugo pick up the other line from his hospital bed in the master bedroom. She knew he could hear Rupert’s drunken rant. “Tell me the truth, Anaïs! Are you still living with Hugo?”

  Remaining calm, she said, “Hugo broke his leg, and I’m caring for him.” She promised to call Rupert back. He hung up in a huff.

  She made up a story for Hugo that the caller was a crazy stalker who showed up at her book signings. She said that Dr. Bogner had told her not to contradict the stalker’s fantasies or he could become dangerous.

  Three days later, she found out that Rupert would be arriving in New York the following morning to be with her. Her mind went into overdrive. Her first instinct was to keep her husbands as far from each other in the city as possible. God forbid that they run into each other. Then she realized that unless she introduced them, neither husband could recognize the other, and that, actually, it would be easier for her to have them only blocks apart. That way, in an emergency, she could get from one to the other in minutes. So she booked Rupert a room at the Washington Square Hotel, dir
ectly across the park from her apartment with Hugo. Washington Square Arch in the middle of the park would be the demarcation between Hugo’s kingdom and Rupert’s domain.

  As soon as she had intercepted Rupert and enticed him to the hotel, she told him she had to leave for her Cue editing job. Taking a taxi, she arrived within minutes at the elevator to her fourteenth-floor apartment. When she didn’t find Hugo in his hospital bed, she was rattled, until she saw him hobbling around on crutches with Millie’s help.

  “Oh, Millie, I am so glad you are back.” Anaïs threw her arms around the Haitian woman’s neck while Millie kept her grip on Hugo. Anaïs stepped in front of Hugo, so he didn’t have to twist to see her. “Darling, I have big news!”

  Both Hugo and Millie looked at her expectantly.

  “Cue has given me an assignment to oversee a new French edition! The only thing is, I’ll have to work day and night until we go to print.”

  Hugo pulled away from Millie’s support and stepped with his crutches toward the bed. “That’s enough, Millie. Let me have a word with my wife, if you would,” he said, using the paternalistic tone that got on Anaïs’s nerves. She anticipated his speech on how he was the breadwinner in the family, and she was his precious helper, and presently he needed her help.

  Instead he asked, “Have you talked to them about salary?”

  After reprimanding her for not using his help in the negotiations, he urged her to take the job. Surprised, she asked him why.

  “Nothing, just things are just a little slow with my investments right now.”

  Things had been a little slow for years now, ever since Castro had nationalized the assets of Hugo’s wealthy Cuban clients. Bad as she was with numbers, Anaïs thought she was better than Hugo had proven to be with their money since leaving the bank. Every profit he made with his investing, he threw away on extravagant spending.

  She asked him gently, “Do you think you could ask the bank for your old job back?”

  She was afraid he might explode at this suggestion, but he said, “I already have.”

  “And?”