Apprenticed to Venus

by Tristine Rainer

  Anaïs kneeled Japanese-style, resting lightly on her ankles. I tried to imitate her, but my knees tottered on the way down. I attempted to balance on my heels, but they dug into my behind uncomfortably, so I sprawled, supporting myself on one arm.

  Still poised on her ankles, Anaïs leaned forward to pick up the miniature rake. She began to pull it slowly, carefully through the sand, creating a pattern of parallel rolling waves. I had the impulse to grab the rake from her hand, the movement looked so pleasurable.

  She said, her voice undulating like the waves drawn in the sand, “It’s like a diary, seeing the pattern my hand makes. A form of meditation. It changes every day: sometimes a mandala, sometimes straight lines.”

  She pulled the small rake so slowly that we became aware of every grain falling into place.

  “Rupert and I came back early because I had to have some medical tests.” She put the rake down and, with a flat palm, annihilated the perfect pattern she’d made. I almost cried out, Don’t!

  I asked, “Is everything okay?”

  “They removed a tumor.”

  I felt the sliding door and walls of the house about to collapse, glass shattering on the brick surrounding us. “No!”

  She put her hand to my face. “Don’t worry, Tristine. There are doctors now who can cure cancer just with your mind and your will.”

  Cancer. Everyone I’d ever known who’d had cancer had died from it.

  She continued gently. “My healer Dr. Brugh Joy says I’m an excellent candidate to make the cancer cells go away with my ability to visualize. I’ve had so much practice in my novel writing.”

  “But you will do the other, you know, medical stuff? Chemotherapy?” I wasn’t sure I’d pronounced the word correctly.

  “My visualizing will work.” She held my gaze with her aqua eyes. “I don’t want this to ruin your happiness. I’m not letting it ruin mine. We are here together right now, looking out at the pool and the lake, contemplating the sand garden.” She began moving the rake again in a delicate zigzag. “Our love for each other is here now, and our love for our men.”

  We sat in silence, the sunlight through the sliding doors making everything sharp. I could hear a high piercing ring that cut through all the beauty. I was in love and loved. I was bursting with happiness. I had Anaïs’s friendship. And she was dying. It was all dying.

  I phoned Renate when I got home. Though she had been present during Anaïs’s surgery at Cedars-Sinai, Renate hadn’t said a word about it to me. She made no apology.

  “You seemed so preoccupied with your love affair.” Even now she seemed reluctant to share the details.

  “What can I do?”

  “You have to stay positive. She staved it off for twenty years; she can do it again. Anaïs has the power within herself to transform the illusion of physical illness. You’ll see.”

  And because mind magic had worked to get Philip and me the beach house, and because Anaïs had so successfully manifested her desires in the past, I did believe she would heal herself.

  It took me until I was twenty-eight to finish all the course work and pass the PhD written and oral exams. By then Philip’s hip menswear sales were going so well that while waiting to hear back on the university teaching positions I’d interviewed for at the MLA convention, I took a break from earning my own way. Within the year I would have to accept a job that required I move out of state, and I wanted to enjoy my time at the beach house with Philip. I believed I’d found the best of Anaïs’s two worlds in Philip. As Hugo once was, Philip was a good breadwinner, and like Rupert, he supported my artistic ambitions without having such aspirations himself. I smiled, recalling what Anaïs had said when I’d once asked why she’d chosen Rupert.

  “Why do you ask?” Her tone a warning not to say anything negative about him.

  “I don’t know. You’re so extraordinary, and he—” I caught myself. “You’re an artist, and he isn’t.”

  With her soft, guttural laugh she’d told me, “I learned a long time ago, Tristine, that there can only be one star in a relationship, and I decided it should be me.”

  It was surprising, though, how quickly I got bored being the star of the relationship, unlike Anaïs. I loved Philip’s gentleness, his slow hand, the opium-dream length of his kisses, the assured gong of orgasm with him, but our lovemaking simply couldn’t compare to the inferno I’d known with Neal. With Philip’s new age otherworldliness and all the pot he smoked, our lovemaking was ethereal and dreamlike, but not mythic. More worrisome, Philip wanted to get married—in part because it would help with his immigration status, but also because he wanted to start a family, which I didn’t.

  To my surprise, with his paying all the rent and freeing up my time, I seemed to have lost my willpower. Even though I wasn’t teaching and was home all day, I couldn’t get anywhere on my PhD dissertation.

  I sat at my desk in a corner of the one-room house every day and was lucky if I squeezed out half a page. The sea and sky were gray and flat, the low-hanging haze stuck like a sigh in my chest. I was writing about other women’s lives. I wasn’t living my life as Anaïs had done, and I wouldn’t really be free to live until I finished the damned dissertation, and by that time Anaïs might be dead.

  I pushed away the negative thought, believing it could harm her. Maybe the problem, I considered, was that I needed a room of my own. Anaïs had a writing room of her own, even if it was the size of a closet. I asked Philip if we could put up some walls to create a private office for me. He had another idea. He bought me a big blue tent and pitched it so that it covered most of the downstairs deck.

  It was a romantic space, inviting fantasies of Arabian nights—its blue walls rippling in the breeze, the surf crashing on boulders a few yards away—but it proved unsuitable for writing. I sat huddled in the damp cold, using a Coleman lantern for light. Huge waves would swamp the tent when storms hit. When the sun dried the canvas walls I’d sweep out the sand, a Sisyphean task.

  I did find a use for the tent, though, with some of the women who had been in my consciousness-raising group. We’d accomplished our action of establishing a Women’s Studies program, but our work of consciousness wasn’t over because there were areas where we were still internally oppressed. I invited six friends to meet in the tent to explore that most primitive, forbidden, and inaccessible part of ourselves: our sexuality. What we liked. What we didn’t. What we needed courage to change.

  When I told Anaïs, she begged me to tape-record the sessions for her. So on the first night, gathered on large pillows in a circle, the surf pounding the rocks nearby, I asked my women friends for permission to start a tape recorder.

  “Why?” Clara demanded, flipping back a ringlet of copper hair. I should have remembered how much Clara disliked Anaïs.

  “Because she has cancer and can’t join us,” I said, “and this is something she’s always cared about.”

  When we voted, the majority ruled that I could start the recorder, on the condition that, as in our consciousness group, nothing any of us said would be repeated outside those canvas walls—with the one exception that Anaïs could listen to the tapes.

  Clara objected, “You’re all crazy. You don’t know what she’s going to do with those tapes.” Persuaded by Clara’s caution but moved by Anaïs’s illness, the group decided that Anaïs should have a limited window to listen to the tapes, and then I had to retrieve and destroy them. Even so, Clara insisted that when she was speaking the recorder be off.

  So began the tent tapes. We explored our sexual experiences and feelings, and put them into words for the first time with the same radical honesty we had brought to the consciousness-raising group. We used the same format as in the early days of the group, each woman speaking in turn on the night’s chosen theme, forming a circle around the Coleman lantern.

  The theme of our first night was first arousal. What were the earliest erogenous zones we were aware of? Mine were related to tickling. At what age did we discover mastur
bation? One woman never had! How did we pleasure ourselves? A teddy bear, the edge of the bed. To everyone’s surprise, our memories of first arousal had little to do with men—or women, for that matter. Horses, dogs, cats, and cartoon characters were more primary. One woman made us laugh by saying she first masturbated to the vision of turds falling into a toilet, and another described how she got off to the imagined advances of an ugly boy with pimples whom she hated. Another remembered her fantasy of a girl with a broken arm, which later morphed into men missing an arm, a leg, an eye. The dirties, the nasties, the ugly, for some reason, were prevalent in their earliest fantasies. Only mine were stereotypically romantic, a knight on a white horse in the forest. Even in my conveyor belt fantasies, I got rescued by a heroic boy.

  Over the following weeks, we explored what pleased us in the lantern light, what we endured, as well as our fantasies during intercourse. One woman imagined while having sex that she would be caught and punished for it. Another confessed she found the physical act of intercourse so funny that she giggled during it, which made her boyfriend furious. To my surprise and chagrin, I was the only one who didn’t have fantasies during sex about anything or anyone other than the man I was with. The other women’s reports were filled with a mad and colorful array of characters and creatures, and I was awed by the amazing variety within just our small group.

  Unlike our larger consciousness-raising group, in which there had been several lesbians, all the women here preferred guys. Nevertheless, I found myself listening carefully to hear if Clara had ever fantasized about women, as I had been having fantasies about her. She dismissed the question offhandedly, denying any interest. The narrow door through which I might have known Sapphic love closed that evening, sealing off a realm of pleasures.

  When Anaïs wanted something, she was anything but passive, and I had never experienced her lobbying me so intently as she did for those tent tapes. Upon her return from a European trip, she immediately phoned me to bring over the tapes. Our group had spoken with such unexpected openness that I regretted having convinced them to share the tapes with her. If we’d taken a vote again, I would have sided with Clara. She was right; we didn’t know what Anaïs would do with the tapes. Anaïs had recently asked me if I, or my students, had any erotic stories to sell; she said she was in touch again with “the Collector” for whom she and Henry Miller and other struggling Village artists had written pornography.

  Despite my misgivings, I delivered the recorded tapes with the reminder that in two weeks I had to pick them up and destroy them.

  I didn’t hear from Anaïs for several weeks, and then she phoned me. “Tristine! I need your help.”

  “Is it about the tapes?”

  “No, they’re wonderful. It’s that Henry Miller sent over this filmmaker Bob Snyder who did a documentary on Henry and wants to make one on me.” She explained that Snyder wanted to start with a scene of her teaching, and she needed some extras. “Could you get some of your students to be extras?”

  “I’m not teaching this semester.”

  “Well, just bring some friends. No one will know.”

  Since we were having the last meeting in the women’s tent that night, I asked the group if they wanted to go to Anaïs’s house to be her pretend students for the shoot. With the exception of Clara, they all wanted to. Clara demanded to know if I’d destroyed the tapes yet, and when I said they were still in Anaïs’s possession, she warned, “She’s going to figure out from the voices who’s who. So much for confidentiality.”

  None of us had thought about that. We all decided not to tape our last session for Anaïs. Everyone demanded that before the film shoot, I get back the tapes I’d given her.

  I made arrangements with Anaïs to pick up the tapes from her house twice, and twice she cancelled on me but promised she would have them ready the day of the film shoot.

  However, when I arrived at the Silver Lake house with my friends and asked Anaïs for the tapes, she pleaded, “Can’t it please wait until next week?” Then there was so much hustle and confusion with camera set-ups and lighting that everyone forgot about them.

  Bob Snyder instructed the extras, including me, to sit at Anaïs’s feet so that she could be filmed dropping pearls of wisdom to us. Ordinarily I would have been excited to see a movie being made, even this little documentary with its fake scene of Anaïs teaching, but I felt disconnected. I couldn’t take my mind off the phone conversation I’d had that morning with the chair of the English department at Indiana University. He’d called to find out if I’d decided to accept his offer of a tenure-track position.

  I’d prevaricated because, even after months of internal debate, I was still unable to decide whether to accept the offer. On the one hand, it would mean I’d have to leave everything I loved in my life: Anaïs and Renate, living with Philip at the beach house, my sisterhood of women friends. On the other hand, I knew I should grab a three-year, guaranteed tenure-track job at a major university in a market where suddenly there were no jobs to be had. Those of us on the cusp of the Boomer bubble had run like lemmings when told there was a need for more college professors, but no one had figured out that by the time we’d gotten our PhDs, the bubble would have burst. My fellow grad students were hissing at my rare good fortune to have any offers, even if they all had been in less than desirable locations.

  After the filming, when my friends gathered around Anaïs, I slipped out alone to the backyard. Standing by the hedge where the hillside dropped, I could see house lights begin to twinkle on the slopes below. They spread like the Milky Way down to the lake’s shimmering surface. I felt Anaïs approach and slip her arm around my waist.

  “What’s wrong, Tristine?”

  I told her about my inability to decide whether to take the Indiana job.

  “Oh, I thought you had already decided to turn it down.”

  “No; I don’t want to leave you and I don’t want to leave Philip, but Indiana is letting me create my own Women’s Lit classes, and if I turn it down I’ll be selling out the Women’s Movement, and all the women before me who fought for my opportunity, and my students who see me as an example. So I changed my mind. Then I changed it again. Over and over. It’s making me crazy. Either way I choose, it feels like I’m cleaving off half of myself.”

  “Why doesn’t Philip come with you?” she asked.

  “I knew that would be your suggestion. I knew you’d say, ‘Find a creative solution,’ so I begged him to come with me, but he said there was no market for mod men’s fashion in Indiana.”

  In fact, Philip’s response had shocked me. Sweet, passive Philip had said, unequivocally, “No.” He wouldn’t move to Indiana; he wouldn’t leave his work. I knew we would not survive long-distance. And even if after three years I were lucky enough to find a job back in California (which had been Renate’s recommendation), I didn’t believe Philip would wait. I’d begged him, “Tell me not to go. Just tell me to stay with you.”

  “I can’t do that,” he’d said gently. He sat on the waterbed that rocked under his weight. He dropped his head, and his hands disappeared into his blond shag.

  “Why not?” I sniffled.

  “Because later you would blame me.”

  I probably would.

  There were other problems in my relationship with Philip that I would have liked to present to Anaïs as she and I stood with our arms around each other’s waists, looking at the stars now twinkling above the hillside lights. But I realized it was all too complex, and my thoughts too jumbled, for her to deal with in the middle of a movie being shot about her. So I tried to keep my question simple: Should I give up the job offer and stay with Philip, who was unwilling to come with me? Or should I go so I could respect myself and likely lose him entirely?

  In the past, whenever I’d presented Anaïs with one of my emotional puzzles, she’d close her eyes as if about to plunge underwater. After several moments with her lids shut, she’d emerge with a brilliant insight that would solve the problem. I
t might be a revelation about one’s underlying motivations that, once recognized, brought clarity; or she might offer a metaphor that contained a nugget of wisdom.

  But Anaïs didn’t close her eyes and consider. She pivoted me, her arm around my waist, so that instead of looking out at the gleaming reservoir, we faced her brightly lit house.

  Together we watched a tableau through the glass doors as my friends socialized animatedly.

  Anaïs murmured in sympathy, “Can’t you ask the university for more time?”

  “I did. The chair said yes and offered me more money because he thought I was being a tough negotiator.”

  Her half laugh came from low in her throat, but she tried to be encouraging. “The Kinsey Institute is there, you know.”

  I snapped, “That has nothing to do with what I’d be doing there! I’m not a sexologist.” Immediately, I regretted my tone.

  “Of course not.” She sighed. “I just thought because you did that fascinating research with the women in your tent …”

  “I have to get those tapes back.”

  “I told you, I’ll return them!”

  Retreating in the face of her displeasure, I tried to pull her attention back to my problem. “Renate says whatever choice I make will be the right one, but I know whatever choice I make will be the wrong one.”

  She turned to me, her aquamarine eyes holding mine. “The problem isn’t your ambivalence, Tristine. It’s that you freeze instead of flowing forward.” She raised her right arm like a ballerina and let it glide sideways, suggesting a smoothly flowing river.

  “But how do I flow forward when I have to choose one path and I can’t?” I could hear panic in my voice.

  She offered an enigmatic smile. “I followed both paths until the way became clear.”

  She had managed to flow forward on two paths—to live in two places at once, to be the wife of two men at once—for seventeen years.