Apprenticed to Venus

by Tristine Rainer

  But I couldn’t do that. Come January, I either went to Indiana by myself or stayed in Los Angeles with Philip.

  I noticed how tired Anaïs looked under her makeup and wondered if her cancer had really retreated.

  Her penciled-on eyebrows lifted in alarm. “Excuse me. I have to take care of something. Bob is trying to put Rupert in the film.”

  We watched the director’s young assistant position fill lights around Rupert, who was sitting in a chair while Snyder held a meter next to his face.

  “Anaïs, he’s just using Rupert as a stand-in for your shot.”

  “No, I know what I’m talking about.” She squeezed my hand with her cold fingers before she rushed inside.

  I wanted her to stay. I needed her to reassure me that she was curing the cancer. That if I did decide to go to Indiana, she would be fine when I got back. I started toward the house, circling around the pool, stepping carefully because there was no light on that side of the yard.

  I glanced up and saw Anaïs leading Snyder out through the glass doors onto the flagstone patio. I stopped in my tracks, not wanting to interrupt, unable to tell if they’d noticed me.

  “Bob, we talked about this.” Anaïs’s voice wavered with anxiety. “Rupert is not to be in the film.”

  “Be reasonable!” Snyder made no attempt to keep his voice down. “Your audience will want to see your handsome husband. Rupert is very photogenic, you know.” Snyder pressed his stubby fingers together in supplication.

  “Yes, I know. But we agreed that Rupert would not appear.”

  Anaïs didn’t want Rupert in the film, of course, because Hugo would inevitably see it. But Rupert had been introduced as her husband to the director, as was customary in the LA arts circle we ran in. She could hardly explain that she had another husband in New York from whom she kept Rupert a secret. Snyder was a “small time” documentary filmmaker and “not very high class,” as Anaïs had described him to me. He could not be trusted.

  “I need to remind you, Bob,” Anaïs said, “that you agreed this film would be about my professional life, not my personal life.”

  “Are you trying to tell me how to shoot my movie? We need a balance, a balance. I’m the filmmaker here. I know.”

  She didn’t take the bait. She lowered her voice. “The audience of my work knows me only as Anaïs Nin, my professional name, which is also my maiden name. It would be too confusing to bring in Rupert Pole as my husband.”

  “Oh, that’s no problem.” Snyder sounded relieved. “All the young women are keeping their maiden names now. It just shows how ahead of the times you are. All we have to do is have you identify Rupert as your husband in the voiceover.”

  Right, I thought. Have Anaïs announce on film, for Hugo to hear, “This is my husband Rupert Pole.” I was shocked when Snyder then spoke as if he were some important Hollywood director and she were just his actress:

  “Let me remind you, Anaïs. The contract states that I have final cut.”

  “But I have creative control,” she objected.

  “That’s not in the contract.”

  She stepped back, fuming. “You tricked me. I said I wanted creative control.”

  “You signed the contract.”

  She calmed herself, lowering her head like a sorrowful Madonna. She said sweetly, sadly, “I’m sorry, Bob, I know you are the director and that you tricked me into giving you final cut, but we have to do this my way or there can be no film.”

  “Are you threatening me?” he snarled, but sounded scared.

  “Not at all. You have the contract on your side. Unfortunately, you will not have a film to cut.”

  “What do you mean? I already have film in the can.”

  “You mean the scene we just shot with the students? Let’s see what kind of film you can make out of that. I will no longer appear in the film.”

  She began walking away from Snyder, toward me. He yelled after her, “I’m calling Henry Miller!”

  Anaïs turned back. “Why would you call Henry?”

  “He got me into this. He told me plenty about you!”

  Henry knew about Hugo and Rupert; what if he’d told Snyder? What if it had been Snyder’s conniving plan all along to get Anaïs’s double life on film?

  She remained composed, however. “Henry lies,” she said. “You had better tell me what he said so that I can correct it.”

  “When we’re alone.” Snyder flung an arm toward me, now in his line of sight.

  “There’s nothing you could possibly say to me that Tristine cannot hear.” She acknowledged my presence with a nod. “Unless, of course, you are worried about being sued for slander.”

  “Never mind.”

  “Perhaps I should call Henry. We are very close. Perhaps he will have second thoughts about letting you finish your film on him.”

  “He wouldn’t do that. We’re friends.”

  Anaïs said, “I assure you my friendship with Henry is longer and more intimate.”

  Snyder looked like a confused bull in the ring, his neck weakened after the banderillos have planted their barbed sticks. He steamed in place, not daring to say another word.

  She turned her back on him and joined me. He pivoted the opposite direction and stormed into the house. He tugged on Rupert’s arm until Rupert rose from the chair and, looking confused, disappeared again into Anaïs’s study.

  “Clear the set!” Snyder snapped, and his assistant started to shoo out my friends, who told me later they’d felt rudely dismissed.

  I put my hands on Anaïs’s shoulders and kissed her on both cheeks. I hadn’t grown any taller since the first time we’d embraced, but she felt smaller and frailer. “Don’t let Snyder bully you,” I said.

  She smiled. “Don’t worry, I know how to handle Bob Snyder.”

  And she did. He’d managed to catch Rupert on film walking through the scene we’d shot that day, but in the final cut, Rupert is identified only as Anaïs’s escort.

  Anaïs and Rupert came to dinner at the beach house the following week. She’d promised to deliver the tapes to me then but said she’d forgotten them. A week later, I drove to her house, unannounced, so she couldn’t give me any more excuses. When I reached the end of the long, narrow driveway, I saw Rupert bringing out the trash.

  “Oh, Tristine, you should have phoned,” he boomed. “Anaïs is out of town. She’s accepting another honorary doctorate.”

  “I believe she left some audio tapes for me to pick up.”

  “Oh, those tapes you made with the women in your tent? We listened to those together.” He grinned lewdly. “They were very stimulating.”

  I felt a surge of anger. “Those were private! She wasn’t supposed to share them!”

  Rupert just continued standing there with a stupid, satisfied look on his face.

  “Do you know where the tapes are?” I walked toward the back door that led directly into the kitchen, but he blocked me with his thick frame. “I need to get them back,” I insisted.

  “I think Anaïs would like to keep them.”

  “She can’t keep them! I told her that.”

  “Well, you’ll have to talk to her. She’ll be back next week.” He escaped inside the kitchen door and locked it against me. I was furious and slammed my car door shut, intending to storm away, but I had to inch my car back out that narrow driveway.

  How could she? I fumed while speeding home on the Santa Monica Freeway. She had used our earnest and sensitive self-explorations as pornography for Rupert. I had told her the tent tapes were only for her ears; I’d told her about the women’s confidentiality, and that a special exception had been made for her. I had assumed she was part of our sisterhood. I knew she was a liar, but I’d thought that was only to men. I thought she understood; you might lie to a man but you would never betray a sister.

  How wrong I had been, I berated myself. Why would I have ever trusted Anaïs with the confidences of my friends? I knew how she was, adamant about others keeping her secrets,
but careless in exposing the intimacies of others. Luise Rainer, the actress Anaïs had compared me to when we met, and the writer Leslie Blanch had both accused her of publishing private details about their marriages revealed in confidence. Anaïs had betrayed those friendships in the Diaries, so what made me think she wouldn’t betray me and the friends I’d convinced to trust her? Clara was right. Anaïs wasn’t a feminist; she was a male-identified woman. She was of another generation, had never been in a consciousness-raising group, had gone from her mother’s house surrounded by her protective brothers to become Hugo’s bride at twenty, and had never lived without at least one husband at her side. Oh, she’d understood sisterhood well enough to benefit from our promotion of her as a woman writer, but she didn’t have a clue about the supportive trust that grew between women.

  When I phoned Anaïs the following week, I complimented her on receiving another honorary doctorate, but could not hold back my disappointment in her. “I told you those tapes were only for you! What am I going to tell the women who trusted me?”

  “Don’t tell them anything,” she replied lightly.

  “I want to come to your house tomorrow to pick them up.”

  “Why do you need them? Are you going to publish them?” Anaïs asked.

  “No! I’m going to destroy them.”

  “Oh, don’t do that. I’ll take care of them. They shouldn’t be destroyed.”

  “Are you going to publish them?” I asked her.

  “Who told you that?”

  “No one. You’re the one who said you were looking for erotic stories to buy.” I stopped short, knowing that when she was guilty she would just lie more. “Please let me pick them up.”

  “I don’t know where they are,” she said. “They got misplaced.”

  “Oh, don’t do this,” I moaned.

  “What do you mean?” There was a clear warning in her voice. I had stepped over the line.

  I was silent, afraid of what I might say.

  “Just tell those women,” she said in her most soothing voice, “that I returned them to you, and you destroyed them. They don’t need to know anything else.”

  “What will you do with them?” I asked. “Are you going to give them to that porn collector?”

  “I don’t know what you’re so worried about,” she said, dismissing my concern. “Rupert and I could hardly hear the voices over the sound of the waves.”

  I was so upset by the conversation that I immediately phoned Renate.

  “Those women trusted me, Renate,” I groaned. “If I lie and say what Anaïs told me to tell them, and then one of them discovers the tapes in that collector’s hands, or at the Kinsey Institute, or published somewhere, I couldn’t hold my head up!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Renate chided. “Those tapes aren’t going anywhere. Anaïs just wants to keep them. If they worked to arouse Rupert once, they’ll probably work again. It’s not so easy anymore, you know.”

  “What do you mean? He’s still crazy about her. They’re always spooning in front of everyone.”

  Renate’s great sympathy for Anaïs came through in her saddened voice. “She sees the way he gawks at all the young women who come there to pay her their obeisance.”

  “That’s the other thing. She treats those come-lately ‘Ninnies’ the same as me.”

  “That is not true, Tristine,” Renate objected. “Now you are being unfair.”

  “She praises them, encourages their writing, calls them her daughters …”

  “Stop! That’s just Anaïs wanting to hold onto every morsel of her celebrity. She knows it won’t last forever. It’s already fading. What time is it?”

  “Four twenty-five.”

  “I hate to interrupt this fascinating conversation, but John Houseman gave me two tickets to see Nureyev tonight at the Dorothy Chandler.”

  I couldn’t tell if she was inviting me, so I didn’t say anything.

  “Why don’t you meet me at the restaurant? They validate the parking.”

  I hesitated, but Renate clinched the deal. “Don’t you want to see that perfect male body in a leotard spinning and leaping across the stage?”

  The restaurant turned out to be so expensive that we just ordered vodka gimlets. I shared with Renate Anaïs’s advice when she and Rupert had last come to dinner, that I should stay in LA with Philip and pursue my interest in screenwriting.

  “Hmm. I’m not surprised Anaïs told you to stay with Philip instead of going for the lectureship. I completely disagree with her, but she believes a woman can’t be happy without a man.”

  “I’ve never heard her say that.”

  “Haven’t you heard her repeat, ‘A woman alone is not a beautiful thing’? What do you think that means? I’ve told her not to say it. The feminists don’t like it.”

  “I don’t think she really is a feminist.”

  “Probably not. I am though. It’s our one bone of contention; she disapproves of my solitude. Otherwise, we are completely copacetic.”

  The alcohol seemed to have gone to Renate’s head. She was suddenly capricious and more voluble than usual. “You know why Anaïs and I are so alike, don’t you?” She gave me a thin-lipped smile. “I mean besides our both being European transplants and culture hounds.”

  She was playing one-upsman. She liked to remind me that she had known Anaïs longer and was her closest friend.

  “Because you’re the same age?”

  “No, actually Anaïs is eighteen years older than I.”

  I was surprised. They looked the same age; I’d assumed they were. But maybe it was true what Anaïs had said, that Renate’s bitterness toward men had aged her.

  Renate used her cloth napkin to pat her lips, leaving a lipstick stain. She said, “Did Anaïs tell you that she and I were both in incestuous relationships?”

  At first I thought Renate was speaking metaphorically as we often did, but she continued, “My uncle molested me, and Anaïs had an incestuous affair with her father.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  The alcohol had changed Renate’s personality. Her usually precise enunciation was slurry in a few places. “You think I don’t know my uncle molested me? He lived with us. Ha! And all the while Freud was living next door, and my uncle was his patient. The great doctor probably knew what was going on and did nothing. I’m sure my uncle’s case is documented if you don’t believe me.”

  “No, I don’t believe you about Anaïs and her father. He abandoned her; that’s all.”

  “He abandoned her when she was a child. Hers wasn’t childhood incest like mine. When Anaïs was in her late twenties, your age, and already married to Hugo, she met her father again and seduced him.”

  How dare Renate play with me this way! She was drunk, and I didn’t feel safe around her.

  I’d put her in her place. “Anaïs and I talk about our fathers all the time, and she’s never said anything like that.”

  “No? I’m surprised.”

  “It’s impossible,” I insisted. “She wrote about a flirtation with her father when she was in her late twenties in her published Diary. The most they did was flatter each other and admire each other’s narrow feet, if that’s what you’re calling incest. She says she wanted to entice him into loving her, but as a daughter!”

  “Well that’s not what happened. She seduced him.”

  “You’re wrong,” I said. “Anaïs is the most joyful person I know. If she’d seduced her father the guilt would have driven her insane. That’s what Oedipus is about.”

  “Don’t you know Freud has been discredited?”

  “I’m not just talking about Freud. The incest taboo is a lot older than Freud.”

  “If you mean Oedipus Rex, it’s a play about a myth.” Renate handed a passing waiter her gimlet glass with a nod that she would like another. “You of all people know that Anaïs specializes in breaking taboos. You’ve even helped her.”

  “Bigamy is different from incest!” I protested.

&n
bsp; “Really? How so?”

  I was sure they were different but I couldn’t find the words to explain. The nausea churning in my stomach was making it hard for me to speak at all.

  Renate shrugged. “It’s not such a big deal.”

  “It’s the biggest deal!”

  “Tristine! I never imagined you were so conventional.”

  Conventional? What Renate was talking about was beyond the pale. The room was beginning to turn around me; the waiter and coffee station on my right were sliding counterclockwise to my left.

  “It was two consenting adults,” Renate said. “It wasn’t like me with my uncle. I was a child. But Anaïs planned it.”

  “Stop it, Renate! She would never do that!”

  “She seduced her father to hurt him the way he’d hurt her mother, by making him fall in love with her and then abandoning him.”

  That had the jolt of credibility. I could imagine wanting to make my father experience my mother’s pain to even the score. But not that way.

  “Personally I think she did it as a surrealist act,” Renate continued, apparently enjoying herself. “Breton and Artaud and that gang, they were all trying to outdo each other: who could push the boundaries the furthest, break the most taboos. Anaïs one-upped them!”

  That explanation, too, hit with a whack.

  “Anyway,” Renate said, “she only had intercourse with her father a few times and she was the one who ended it.”

  I felt clammy. I was going to throw up. I was too dizzy to make it to the ladies’ room. I wanted to lie down on the cool marble floor so I would not fall. I tried to breathe.

  “Have a sip of water,” Renate said.

  Through the unworldly atmosphere, my hand reached out and accepted the glass from hers. “Stop talking about it,” I pleaded.

  “I’m sorry.” Renate looked concerned for me. “I didn’t mean to upset you. Let’s just get a check and go see the ballet.”

  “You go. I have to go home. I don’t feel well.”

  “Suit yourself,” Renate said, “but I think you’re making a big deal over nothing.”

  Driving home, I staved off my nausea by thinking about the town of Bloomington, Indiana I had visited when interviewing for teaching positions. Going to that Midwestern college town could be a new beginning; a clean, blank slate. No Anaïs with her duplicity, no Renate with her never-mentioned dead son, no Philip with his perpetual pot smoking, no more guilt-inducing Christmases in my mother’s decaying house.