Apprenticed to Venus

by Tristine Rainer

  Anaïs stared at Bogner, suddenly feeling calm and clear. Something had shifted inside her. A new idea. A new way of being.

  By moving to Paris, she could leave both Hugo and Rupert without having to choose between them. She could refrain from fatally wounding either, because she would not be leaving him for another man. She would be leaving to become her own woman.

  She was giving birth to a new self. She was springing out of the chrysalis. Soon she would be airbound, one last swing from New York to Los Angeles and back, and then she would spring off the trapeze for good and fly to Paris, with a financial safety net that, somehow, she would create for herself.

  CHAPTER 22

  Los Angeles, California, 1965

  TRISTINE

  WHEN ANAÏS WAS TELLING ME about this swerve in direction, I felt disoriented. So much had changed about her life, and Renate’s, and mine, in such a short period.

  “Tristine, the trapeze is collapsing,” Anaïs cried.

  I offered to help her write to libraries as Dr. Bogner had suggested, but she waved that idea aside, saying she’d already phoned them, and none had money to acquire her diaries.

  “I need you to help me figure out another way to get money to move back to Paris.”

  If there was one thing I knew nothing about, it was how to make money.

  She surprised me by declaring, “You have what I want. You live independently.”

  “Well I do it with waitressing, and my scholarship, and student loans. I don’t think you would like living as I do. Maybe you could teach?”

  “It doesn’t pay enough. I see how little Rupert brings home.”

  “What about getting some kind of grant?”

  “I’ve already tried that.” She sighed. “I applied twice for a National Endowment and was denied.”

  I was out of ideas. I was still trying to grasp her new goal of moving to Paris and leaving the very husbands I had tried to help her hold onto. She would be leaving me as well.

  As if she’d read my thoughts, she said, “Maybe you could come to Paris, too. You could study at the Sorbonne.”

  “I don’t think I can leave Neal.”

  “Bring him to Paris! The Parisians love American jazz.”

  I knew she was right about that, but I was still trying to adjust to her about-face. I looked at the Bekins boxes along the wall; one was unsealed and filled with books. “Are those packed boxes in preparation for your move to Paris?”

  “No. Those are for the move into the house Rupert built us in Silver Lake. It’s almost finished. He intends to cement me in place there. Then I’ll never get to Paris!” She seemed to be hyperventilating, but she calmed herself and took a very deep breath. Her neon eyes flashed as she reiterated my new assignment: “Tristine, we need a bold idea. Something to get a lot of money quickly.”

  “Maybe you could write a potboiler bestseller like Harold Robbins?” I tried.

  “I have a potboiler story alright. But I don’t dare write it.”

  “How about really getting a movie made from one of your novels?” It was evidence of just how little I knew about the movie business that I would have suggested this.

  Anaïs liked that idea, though. “Which of my novels do you think would be best as a movie?”

  “Without question, A Spy in the House of Love.”

  “Yes, I think so, too.” She nodded. “We just need a producer to option the book and commission a script.”

  “I don’t know any producers,” I said.

  “Or a director who can get a movie made,” she said.

  “What about your friend Curtis Harrington?”

  “I thought about Curtis, but he only does horror films and, anyway, he’s gone commercial.” The way she said “gone commercial,” it sounded like heinous treason. She knitted her thin brows. “Renate’s the one who knows everybody in the movie industry.”

  “But she’s grieving now,” I said, feeling on delicate ground. I’d never known anyone who’d endured tragedy as huge as Renate’s, but instinctively I recognized there could be no pain like the death of one’s child.

  Anaïs was pensive for a long while, and in the quiet, it felt as if we were saying a prayer for Renate.

  Finally, Anaïs stated, “It would be good for Renate to take on this movie project with us.”

  I didn’t know which part of Anaïs’s pronouncement shocked me more: that she thought getting involved with a movie project would be good for Renate after her son’s death, or that I would be participating.

  Anaïs continued enthusiastically, “I’ll call Renate to see if she’ll meet with us.”

  “I don’t think I should be there,” I said.

  “You have to be there.”

  “I don’t think she’s going to want to see me at a time like this.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  “Peter’s age,” Anaïs said softly. She looked at me tenderly, and in that moment I understood a momentous thing was about to happen in my life. It was an alarming idea, akin to providing a new kitten for a friend whose beloved cat had died. Anaïs had begun to see me as Renate’s replacement for Peter.

  The next time Anaïs phoned me she reported, to my relief, that Renate was still refusing any visits. To keep our movie project moving along, she suggested we have lunch at the Chateau Marmont café. She asked if I would pick her up; Rupert no longer allowed her to drive because she’d smashed up the T-bird again.

  The Chateau Marmont parking lot was closed off, so I parked on Sunset, and we hiked up the steep driveway to the hotel. A handsome young waiter with gelled hair took our lunch orders, and Anaïs pulled from her purse a nine-by-twelve envelope filled with thermofaxed pages. Handing it to me, she smiled. “It’s from my diary of my Paris years. I’ll need to have it back, though, so don’t let it out of your sight and don’t let Neal see it.”

  “You’re going to let me read your diary?”

  Seeing my delight, she grinned her big gummy smile. I opened the top flap and riffled through typed pages with scattered dates: March, 1934; November, 1934; January, 1935.

  “You typewrote it?” I asked, disappointed that the thermofaxed pages weren’t of handwritten originals.

  “No, I handwrite it first, but I selected and typed out the entries about my relationships with Henry Miller and Gonzolo Mores for you. Gonzolo was my Paris lover who was a Marxist like your Neal. I thought that reading about my sexual frenzy with them might help you with yours.”

  “That is so great of you! But my relationship with Neal isn’t just sex,” I clarified. “I’m completely in love with him.”

  “Oh, I was in love with Henry and Gonzolo, too.” The waiter brought our iced teas, and we paused to hydrate ourselves after our uphill hike. “When I first fell for Henry,” she resumed, “I thought that I would never desire another man. Henry owned my body.”

  “Like Neal owns mine.”

  “But I learned from Henry.” Her dry laugh cracked her words. “Perhaps I learned too well how to take sex for its own sake. He taught me a taste for the new and the aphrodisiac of danger.”

  I had to admit that danger was part of Neal’s appeal—the danger of his politics, of his sexual wildness, of not being able to hold onto him. “Why are we attracted to men like that?” I asked.

  “It’s projection. Do you know what that is?”

  “It’s when you see yourself in another person.”

  “It’s more covert than that.” The waiter delivered our niçoise salads and she picked up her fork with her left hand, and I did likewise. “We choose men who play out parts of ourselves we aren’t ready to acknowledge. As I did with Henry and Gonzolo. They were both rebels from convention, like your Neal.”

  “Are you saying that I feel I can’t live without Neal because he’s playing out my rebelliousness for me?”

  “Exactly, Tristine! So you don’t have to! Neal is your man from the earth, as Henry was mine. Neal is your revolutionary firebrand, as G
onzolo was mine.”

  Urgently, I went to the heart of my dilemma. “But it’s swept me away. I don’t know who I am anymore. I’m so consumed with what Neal does, where he’s going, who he’s with. How can I get rid of this jealousy?”

  Anaïs shrugged. “If you love someone, you will feel jealous.”

  So it was that simple. All of Neal’s intellectual justifications couldn’t change the nature of feelings. “Should I go out with other guys to make him jealous, so he knows what it feels like?”

  “No, those are not good games to get into.”

  “So I just have to suffer?”

  She thought, closing her eyes. When she opened them, she said, “In the pages I gave you, you will see that I suffered from jealousy, too. When Henry told me his wife was coming from New York to join him in Paris, I was consumed with jealousy.”

  As Anaïs spoke, I could tell she was pulling the memories together. “My way of dealing with it was to defuse the enemy through seduction. But I didn’t expect that June, beautiful, mysterious June, would be even better at the game of seduction than I was. Now I was obsessed with them both, Henry and June. I was jealous of Henry’s relationship with her and of her relationship with him. I projected different aspects of myself onto them. Henry was the writer I wanted to be. June was the woman I wanted to be. Are you attracted to the woman Neal is sleeping with?”

  “I think it’s more than one woman and I haven’t met any of them.” Then I told her something very private. “I have a fantasy image of his other woman, though. She’s soft and blond and passive, the opposite of me. In my nightmares she is in the shower with Neal, and he loves her.”

  “She is also a projection of a disowned self.” Anaïs nodded. “How are you even sure Neal really has other lovers, and it isn’t all your imagination?”

  “Because I pester him with questions, and sometimes he answers them honestly.”

  “You shouldn’t do that,” Anaïs said.

  “I know, but I can’t help myself. What can I do? Tell me, please!” I confessed to her how my obsession with him had extinguished my purposefulness and intelligence. “I’m like the professor in The Blue Angel who falls for Marlene Dietrich, and it destroys his life.”

  She laughed so heartily that the few other people in the café looked up from their copies of Hollywood Reporter. “Be careful of exaggeration,” she said, but seeing my chagrin, she softened her voice. “I hope you are putting this in your diary.”

  I nodded. “So I’ll remember it someday.”

  “No, so you can move through it.”

  I must have looked perplexed because she explained, “It’s a process of addition.” She put down her fork and raised her hands like a conductor with a baton. She pointed to my left shoulder with the imaginary baton. “You feel this”—she pointed to my chest—“and then you feel this”—and to my right shoulder—“and then this. It doesn’t matter if the feelings contradict each other.” She swung her graceful arms, bent at the elbow, as if I were her orchestra. “All that matters is that the feelings are true to their moment.” She lowered her arms and picked up her fork again. “And don’t make judgments on yourself as you write. You have to give yourself that freedom.”

  This was something I thought I could do. Had she suggested I break it off with Neal, or give him an ultimatum, or try to negotiate ground rules, or any other Dear Abby advice, it would have been useless. I was so adrift in the storm of my passion that to ask me to quit would be like asking a sailor on a bucking sailboat to jump off into the turbulent sea. Anaïs was just asking me to cling to the ride and record it.

  As we descended the steep Chateau Marmont driveway, stepping sideways and holding onto each other to keep from falling, she offered one more bit of advice. “You can never be fulfilled through another no matter how much you love him.” She squeezed my forearm. “You must complete yourself.”

  She pulled away from me and, arms outstretched, twirled in circles down the remainder of the incline. “You must own your own wildness!” she called, the skirt of her dress swinging at her knees, her graceful movements those of a slim girl. I imagined her releasing the grip on her trapeze, swooping up and gliding on an air current towards Paris, and I was seized with the same panic I felt at the thought of losing Neal. I couldn’t live without her.

  In the following weeks, I devoured the thermofaxed pages from Anaïs’s diary. Unlike the overworked poetry of her novels, the prose of her diary was so alive it throbbed with a heartbeat. It was hard to believe that someone could write a diary that was so readable; mine certainly wasn’t.

  Her descriptions of her life in Paris when she was near my age filled me with longing: wearing beautiful clothes, arguing about literature in cafés with Henry Miller and his friend Larry Durrell, Henry throwing her onto the unmade bed of his Clichy apartment, visiting whorehouses in Montmartre with him, embracing his wife June as if falling into a mirror of beauty, taking drugs and staying up all night with June, dashing from husband to lovers in taxis, danger and arousal in a whirlwind rising to a tempest. If she had given me her diary pages to give me perspective, they had the opposite effect. Reading about her sexual frenzy only gave me more appetite for mine with Neal.

  The next time Anaïs phoned me, I gushed over her diary, which pleased her, but not enough to let me out of the visit with Renate she’d finally succeeded in arranging. Renate had capitulated because she wanted Ronnie to have a break from his caretaking. Anaïs requested that when I pick her up in Hollywood I return her diary pages, which reluctantly I did.

  As I drove us over the bumpy road to Renate’s, I only wanted out. I didn’t want to witness Renate’s tragedy. I didn’t want to be Peter’s replacement. It was enough that my own mother worried about me obsessively, and while I was drawn to Anaïs’s bright, light energy, the shroud of darkness surrounding Renate frightened me.

  “I’ll go walk on the beach while you talk with Renate,” I told Anaïs.

  She seized my forearm with the most commanding touch I’d ever felt. “No, I have this all planned.”

  After Renate answered the door in a pale negligee, she went directly back to her bed, waving a weak hand toward the room where she’d found Peter’s body. “I will never open that door again.”

  Her milky skin was translucent with a sickly pallor and, in a haunting way, she was more beautiful than before. I found myself visualizing her as Mary in Michelangelo’s Pieta, her dead son stretched over her lap, his knees slouched sideways, his head lolled back.

  Anaïs and I settled next to Renate’s bed as she reclined against a pile of pillows. On the bed stand were water, medicine bottles, and a small, framed photo of a fat-cheeked man in a monk’s robe and turban, whom I later learned was Swami Vivekananda.

  “We brought you a custard pie from Du Pars,” Anaïs chirped as she opened the cardboard box.

  Renate turned away as if the pie’s golden skin were offensive to look at. I was too uncomfortable to say anything, but Anaïs chatted away about women in New York wearing boots and heavy eye makeup and all the graffiti in the subways, about her nervous breakdown in Washington Square Park, her decision to break from both Hugo and Rupert, the various ways she’d thought of to make money to move to Paris, and about the artists she was going to look up when she got there.

  Tenderly she said, “Renate, you should come too. We’ll start over together.” Renate didn’t even acknowledge her presence, but Anaïs kept right on. “Tristine can come also if she wants, but I don’t know if she will because she has big news; she’s fallen in love.” Anaïs smiled at me encouragingly and put me on the spot. “Tell Renate what you said to Neal when he walked you to your car the first night.”

  “You mean, ‘Your place or mine?’”

  “She’s our daughter!” Anaïs lilted. Renate made a choking sound before turning her head away and staring into space.

  Anaïs continued on with tidbits of gossip about artists they both knew. Eventually, she came back to the topic of raising mone
y and getting a film made of A Spy in the House of Love.

  Renate was unresponsive, nearly catatonic.

  “I heard that your screenwriter friend Jimmy Bridges is about to direct his first feature,” Anaïs said brightly.

  Renate set her icy eyes on Anaïs. “It’s a Western.”

  “But with Marlon Brando,” Anaïs said.

  Renate’s white hand squeezed a fistful of the afghan next to her as if she would fling it. “How can you ask this of me, Anaïs?” she cried. “To help you get a movie made, when I don’t want to see anybody. I don’t want to talk to anybody. I don’t want to live.”

  Remaining perfectly calm, Anaïs said, “That is exactly why I am asking you to help.”

  I felt myself pull back, questioning Anaïs’s judgment.

  She continued gently to Renate, “Do you remember the Artist’s Credo we wrote together?”

  As if with great effort, Renate said, “No.”

  “I brought my copy.” Anaïs produced from her purse a sheet of onionskin paper rolled like a scroll and held with a thin ribbon. “Do you remember any of the items on it?” she asked, even though Renate had closed her eyes.

  Renate opened her eyes and spat, “‘Let’s celebrate the individuals who struggle to create a world of freedom, beauty, and love.’” She added bitterly, “A lot of good it did.”

  Anaïs asked, “Do you remember the very first statement?”

  “Stop this, Anaïs!” Renate snapped. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  “The one we thought was so important we put it first.”

  Anaïs prided herself on being sensitive to the feelings of others. Why was she being so insensitive now?

  “‘We celebrate the refusal to despair!’” Anaïs read from her unfurled paper.

  “That was then,” Renate said indignantly. “Before.”

  Anaïs replied, “When I wanted to give up living you reminded me about it.”

  “With all due respect for your pain, Anaïs, this is different.”