Apprenticed to Venus

by Tristine Rainer

  Then Neal and I would join them in Paris and the four of us would pal around; and Neal, after long bouts of copulation with me, would play the sax; and I would write, and Anaïs and Henry would argue over my writing in bistros, observers envying our foursome’s joie de vivre.

  In reality, Neal hadn’t answered my letters for over a month. Renate assured me that the sickening pain in my gut would lessen and eventually go away, but every time I thought about him forgetting me and enjoying himself with a more congenial woman who wasn’t possessive, the same hobnailed boot rammed my solar plexus.

  A few days later, I was returning empty-handed from checking the mail when I heard my phone ring upstairs and sprinted up the courtyard steps, hoping against hope it was Neal. But it was Anaïs calling to say that if I wanted to meet Henry Miller, I should be at her house in Silver Lake the following morning. Rupert would drive us together to Henry’s house in Pacific Palisades.

  I cried, “Oh, don’t take Rupert. I’ll come get you and drive you to Henry’s.”

  “It’s too late to change plans. I told Rupert everything.”

  “Everything? That you and Hugo are still married?”

  “No! Don’t even say that out loud. I told Rupert I had heard from old friends that Hugo cannot pay his rent, and that I’m indebted to Hugo for his taking care of my family and me when we had nothing. I explained that I want to help Hugo financially when I get my diary published and Rupert said it was a good plan. Isn’t Rupert wonderful?”

  “Maybe now you could tell Rupert the truth about—”

  “No! But along those lines, I need your help with Henry.”

  “Of course,” I said, though I didn’t think she would need my help. I was convinced that the moment Henry saw her, he would be besotted again.

  “We have to prevent Henry from telling Rupert that I’m still married to Hugo,” she said urgently.

  “Does Henry know?”

  “Henry met Rupert eighteen years ago when we visited him in Big Sur, and our social circles here overlap so he’s probably heard that I’m married to Rupert. Would you believe Henry and Hugo are still friends and talk on the phone?”

  “But Henry will protect you, won’t he? I’m sure he’s still in love with you.”

  She gave an embarrassed laugh. “Oh, I don’t think so. And Henry is completely unpredictable. If he gets riled up he could say anything in front of Rupert.”

  “Then don’t bring Rupert!” I didn’t want Rupert standing there when the sparks flew between Anaïs and Henry.

  “I have to bring Rupert. He’s part of my whole life now,” she said with her uncanny ability to remain unperturbed by her contradictions.

  Rupert drove the Thunderbird with the top down. Anaïs wore a kerchief and kept the window rolled up on the passenger side while I sat on the rump seat, my long hair blowing into my eyes and mouth. Anaïs bent towards me to speak, the wind whipping away her words.

  “Remember, you need to help keep the discussion on track with Henry,” she told me.

  “I’ll do my best,” I sputtered through a mouthful of hair.

  She turned back to the road, leaving me to savor my anticipation of what would happen when Henry Miller opened the door and saw Anaïs in her new Rudi Gernreich dress. She would start to give Henry a buss on each cheek, and despite Rupert standing there, Henry would take her face in his hands and kiss her mouth, and she would respond.

  When Henry opened the door to his surprisingly conventional white ranch house, I saw a bald troll holding onto a walker, and my heart sank. Anaïs air-kissed his wrinkled, sagging cheeks.

  Instead of kissing her mouth, Henry shoved a snapshot in our faces. “Look at my new girlfriend.” He grinned, sunlight through the paned window of the front door shining on his bald pate. “That’s Hoki. She’s brought me back to life!”

  Rupert said, “She’s very beautiful.”

  Anaïs said, “She’s very young.”

  “Twenty-seven,” Henry leered, his face crumpling like a squashed piece of paper. Goosebumps of revulsion crept up my arms as I imagined his young girlfriend touching that old man’s wizened body. As if reading my mind, Henry said, “She won’t touch me because she thinks, at seventy-five, I’m too old for her. But I’ll win her. I won’t give up. All for love, heh, Anaïs?”

  “Until you win her,” Anaïs said under her breath.

  “You think I’m deaf, but I heard that.” His troll eyes twinkled. “What has happened to your faith in the inspiration of Eros, Anaïs? What does it matter how it ends, heh? It’s all the insanely beautiful, hellish and holy chase, doncha know?”

  Anaïs made a beeline to a couch and chairs and settled there. We all followed, Henry shuffling on his walker. He lowered himself into his armchair where a profusion of books and his dashed-off watercolors covered a side table.

  “So Henry,” Anaïs began, “I’m here because the last time we corresponded you begged me to let you pay me back.”

  “Pay you back for what?” he snarled.

  “For all the help I gave you at the beginning of your career.”

  He immediately softened. “Yes, yes, of course. Anything, Anaïs, I owe you.” Grinning lasciviously, he turned to Rupert. “She gave me everything she had, doncha know? Everything.” He hummed to himself and added, “Even her typewriter.”

  He tried to raise himself from the chair. “Do you need money?” His hands went to his pockets as if looking for his wallet, a clown doing mime. His round face looked eager as a child’s. “Give me the chance to repay you.”

  “Thank you. You are a good friend, Henry.” Anaïs smiled. “What I need from you is your help in getting my diary published.”

  “Anything I can do! I’ll call Barney Rosset at Grove. I always said that diary was your ticket to fame.” His sentences trailed off into the introspective hum that Anaïs had described in the diary pages she’d let me read about her affair with Henry. “But you’ll make peanuts from royalties, Anaïs, doncha know, hmm, hmm. Pea-nuts!”

  “They must be paying you something, Henry; this is an expensive house.” Anaïs looked around. I could tell she was not impressed with its bourgeois conventionality.

  “Yeah, running it is expensive, too. And so are my children, and my ex-wives, and Hoki’s new Jag, and all the hangers-on who come here needing to be fed. Sell your papers to a university, Anaïs, that’s where you get the dough.”

  “I tried that.”

  “No luck? Those white-gloved special collectors at UCLA bought everything from me. They should pay for your diaries ’cause I’m in ’em.”

  “Well, actually, what I want is to publish the sections of the diaries you’re in. I’ve decided to start with the Paris years in the 1930s, instead of with the childhood diaries. No one’s interested in those. They are interested in you, Henry, as a literary figure. The only gratitude I need from you is your permission to publish my portrayal of you.” She whipped out a typed release from her purse.

  “Of course, of course.” He waved his hand as if that was all there was to it but then added, “I’ll need to have final say on what goes in and stays out, of course. Hugo, you know. We both owe a great deal to Hugo.” He hummed as he looked from Anaïs to Rupert, who sat straight up, alert and amiable.

  Anaïs pointed to the margin of the prepared release. “Why don’t I just write that in, ‘Henry Miller has the right to review the final edit.’” She scribbled on the three copies, then handed them to Henry along with her Montblanc.

  Henry took the releases. “I shouldn’t do this without having my lawyer look at it.” He eyed Anaïs.

  She looked stricken.

  “But because it’s you, damn the lawyers. They always say no. And I owe you, Anaïs. I really do. And Hugo, of course.” He hummed as he signed the three copies. “How is your husband, Anaïs? I haven’t talked with Hugo in a while.”

  Anaïs delicately touched Rupert’s hand. “Rupert, dear, could you put up the convertible top before we go? Tristine and I got so
blown on the way here.”

  Rupert clearly did not want to leave, but he scurried off to do her bidding.

  Before he was out of earshot Henry said, “What about the sex? You gonna to leave in all the sex? Hugo will know we were both lying to him. I don’t care what your arrangement with Hugo is, or with this doltish Rupert fellow, but Hugo is my friend, and I don’t want him to know I fucked his wife.”

  “I’ll leave out the sex. That way it will seem we were just friends.”

  “Ha! You won’t have anything left!”

  “That’s not true. We talked about books and art, our writing.”

  I exclaimed, “Oh, don’t leave out the sex. That’s the best part!”

  Henry set his mischievous eyes on me; he hadn’t noticed me before.

  Anaïs explained, “I let Tristine read the diary pages about us.”

  Henry said, “Very good. The young ones take us as models.”

  Rupert came back. “Top’s up.”

  Henry muttered loudly to himself, “So Anaïs is gonna take out the fucking so Hugo won’t know.”

  Anaïs shot me an urgent look.

  I said, “Henry, can students like me look at your papers at UCLA?”

  “If you want to ruin your eyes. Buy my books instead. It took thirty goddamned years to lift the ban on them in this country, doncha know? You should exercise your hard-won right to buy them.”

  “Yes.” Anaïs gave Henry her glorious smile. “I forgot to congratulate you on your Supreme Court victory. Your work was recognized as literary. Thirty years after I recognized it.”

  Henry said, “You’ll be making a mistake, Anaïs, if you cut the sex from your diary. Get your book banned like mine, hmm, hmm. That’s what makes the books sell.”

  Anaïs rose to leave, and I stood, but Henry set his sights on Rupert. “What about you, Rupert? How are you gonna feel when you read about Anaïs in heat with me?”

  “That was a long time ago,” Rupert said pleasantly. “Before I met Anaïs.”

  “Good attitude, Rupert kid, very good. Hmm, hmm. Besides, what do you have to complain about? She married you. I asked her to marry me, did ya know that? She wouldn’t leave Hugo. She never could leave Hugo, doncha know?”

  “We really have to get going.” Anaïs swept up two of the signed releases and deposited them in her bag.

  Henry raised his voice. “But what about Hugo, Anaïs? He’s going to know you are a liar when he reads your diary. A liar! Are you going to ask him for a release? Are you finally going to ask him for a divorce?”

  Oh my God. Henry had said it! I looked at Rupert for his reaction. He must have been zoning out, or maybe he just dismissed whatever Henry said as claptrap, because his eyes remained on Anaïs, concerned only by how upset she appeared.

  I tried again to derail Henry. “After Tropic of Cancer, which of your novels do you think I should read?” I asked.

  He ignored me. “Are you going to ask Hugo for a divorce?” he called to Anaïs as she hurried to the door where Rupert was waiting. “Do you want me to talk to him about it?”

  “I’ll send you the edited pages, Henry,” she trilled as we all exited.

  “Liar! Liar!” he yelled after us.

  As soon as we were settled in the T-bird, Rupert screeched onto Ocampo Drive as if wanting to leave Henry Miller in the dust.

  Anaïs said, “It’s sad that Henry has gone senile. He was always so much older than me.”

  “He sure is a crazy old coot!” Rupert responded, darting left onto Sunset.

  I chimed in, “Anaïs, I don’t know how you can stand that man.”

  She put up a palm, silencing me. “I’m editing the diary and I can’t allow my present feelings about Henry to color how I portrayed him then.” Lowering her hand, she took Rupert’s free hand. “The problem with Henry is that he’s never outgrown his adolescent romanticism. Like with that Hoki girl; he only loves what he cannot have. The moment he gets it, he loses his desire and becomes impotent. He can only perform in the realm of fantasy.”

  Anaïs was criticizing Henry for living in the realm of fantasy? Usually, everything she said was in celebration of the dream, the artist’s vision, and the imagination that she recommended as a better route to the unconscious than drugs. Trying to understand what she was saying now, I offered, “I’m a romantic.”

  “Oh, we’re all romantics.” She squeezed Rupert’s hand. “But Henry is the neurotic kind, always obsessed with the unattainable, the kind of romanticism that strangles life and real connection to others. I romanticize what is close at hand, what I can touch and connect with.” She leaned over to kiss Rupert’s cheek as he turned his head and caught her kiss on the lips.

  After meeting Henry Miller, Rupert looked a lot better to me. I wondered what it would be like if instead of being in love with Neal, who didn’t really love me, I were in love with a good-looking, not too smart, but loving man like Rupert. He certainly seemed to make Anaïs happy. I remembered that after I’d read her diary pages about her steamy affair with Miller, I’d teased her, “Henry must have been great in bed!”

  She’d given me a connoisseur’s knowing smile. “Rupert is much better.” She had chosen Rupert as I had chosen Neal, for the sexual passion, but she’d gotten devotion as well. I wondered why she received devotion from two husbands, while I’d never received it from any man.

  Sitting behind Anaïs and Rupert like their kid in the rump seat, I worried aloud, “I’m afraid I do have Henry’s negative kind of romanticism. I love Neal most now that he’s gone.”

  “Of course.” Anaïs turned around to face me. “But when Neal was living with you, you loved him just as much, didn’t you?”

  “I guess so.”

  “So you see, you’re not like Henry. He only loves a woman when he’s chasing her and she’s unattainable.” I thought about my relationship with Neal. I always felt I was chasing him because of his other women. I was the caboose on the roller coaster ride he led, up and down: He loves me, he loves me not (he spent the night with her). He loves me, he loves me not (he hasn’t answered my letters). Was I really different from Henry with his romantic pursuit of the unattainable?

  As if she could read my rumination, Anaïs offered me an encouraging smile. “The important thing is to find a man who can return your love in the present and celebrate that.”

  “Neal doesn’t return my love in the present,” I blurted. “I think he’s left me for good.”

  “Oh, Tristine, I’m so sorry. I know it’s not the same thing, but Rupert and I love you.”

  The water in my eyes I’d tried to hold back flooded down my cheeks, and Anaïs discreetly turned back to watch the road. Attempting to stop my tears, I stared through the portholes in the back of the T-bird at the green yards of expensive homes gliding by. I thought about negative romanticism, wanting only what I could not have, wanting Neal, who wasn’t coming back.

  He’d taken our sexual bond with him, and I knew I would never find its equal. That uninhibited intimacy, shameless, unlimited, had felt like true love. Felt more important than anything on Earth. I had expected that my loss of Neal would be a nuclear holocaust, annihilating everything in its wake: the houses, all the people, the plants, the very air. But here I was curled up in the Thunderbird’s rump seat, still alive, frightened as a child jolted awake by a nightmare but with my loving family close at hand.

  I realized with sudden, blessed relief that sexual passion, fabulous as it was, had no monopoly on love. The world went on, and all those I loved, except for Neal, had been spared: my mother, Renate and Anaïs, my friends, my cat. We shared the close-at-hand kind of romanticism. Perhaps it was Anaïs’s ability to romanticize real life that made her so irresistible. She was the ethereal stuff of dreams, yet so close, so present, so connected.

  When she turned around in her seat again, it was to talk excitedly about editing her diary for publication. “I’ve decided it should begin with a description of the iron gates of Louveciennes and Henry walki
ng up the path to the old house the first time I saw him. I’m going to leave Hugo out, as I did in the version I gave you, only entirely. There won’t even be a mention of my having a husband.”

  “So it will seem like you’re alone at Louveciennes?” I asked.

  “I’ll keep my mother and the housekeeper.”

  “Won’t people wonder how you could afford all that?”

  “I don’t think that’s what readers care about. Is that what you cared about when you read the pages I gave you?”

  “No, but I knew you were married to Hugo.” I caught my breath for saying it in front of Rupert but then recalled we were talking about her life in the 1930s when Rupert was just a boy. When I glanced his way, Rupert’s handsome profile was perfectly composed. I said to Anaïs, “If Hugo is not in the diary, people will think you were a single woman in Paris.”

  She thought for a moment. “Well, that’s how it should have been! I’m going to give my readers a perfect life. My rrreal life, only perfected.”

  Rupert responded to that, offering her an approving smile.

  I wondered if she would be able to pull it off after she published her diary—keeping her marriages secret. I wondered if other women would respond as I had to reading about her wild, dreamlike life in Paris. It had made me want to move there and live as she had, but now that Rupert had made her forget about Paris by building her the Silver Lake house, I realized I was happy to stay in Los Angeles. Wherever Anaïs was, that place, that time, would be magical; as in that very moment, the three of us driving together on Sunset Boulevard, gliding through the curve at UCLA where college kids lay on the grass making out, the T-bird pulling alongside a VW bus full of long-haired teens bopping up and down to the Beatles’ Help!

  Anaïs tuned the radio to the same station and raised the volume. The teenagers stuck their hands out the bus windows making peace signs, and Anaïs and Rupert separated hands to make v’s with their fingers, turning to me to join them. The three of us danced our fingers in the air as we drove into the age of Aquarius.