Apprenticed to Venus

by Tristine Rainer

  That night I tossed on the sloshing waterbed as Philip slept. I was plagued by images of Anaïs costumed as the moon-goddess Astarte with her head in a birdcage, her sequined nakedness flashing light; Renate dressed in black like Morticia; Curtis Harrington impersonating a debased Roman slave; all of them actors in a demonic orgiastic ritual. I recognized the images from Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, which I’d seen when it screened at UCLA. Its frenzied finale had been disturbingly arousing, edited in fast cuts with multiple superimpositions of fire and occult symbols.

  I crawled out of bed, trying not to rock Philip awake. I opened the Dutch windows and let the damp ocean air blow on me, watching the moon move behind a mist of clouds. I thought about Renate’s past association with black magic. She’d told me she had been close friends with Marjorie Cameron, a self-proclaimed black witch, and that Cameron had been a follower of Aleister Crowley, who’d practiced sexual magic.

  I inhaled deeply in an attempt to restore my reason. Even if Renate and Anaïs had play-acted with people who practiced the occult, that didn’t mean Anaïs had intentionally seduced her father. The father who, I recalled with a chill, had himself been fascinated with the occult. I recollected the dark surrealism of Anaïs’s poetic novel House of Incest. Anaïs claimed it was about narcissism, being able to love in another only that which mirrors one’s self. But could it also be that, like her other so-called fiction, House of Incest was really a distillation of her life, and its imagery of Lot with his hand on his daughter’s breast the horrific truth about her father and herself?

  My mind was now piecing together shards of memory and fear, and something Anaïs herself had once told me: that as a child, the only time she got attention from her father was when she was naked in the tub and he would burst into the bathroom, the flash of his camera blinding her. Was that early invasion of her privacy why she could so blithely violate the boundaries of others? Anaïs sexualized everything, every relationship, even our daughter/mother bond—encouraging me repeatedly to swim naked in her pool though I always refused, voyeuristically directing my sexual liaisons, using the tent tapes as pornography. Why was I so sure she would stop at daughter-father incest?

  I had found a mirror to myself in Anaïs, but now that mirror was showing the image of a monster, and I wanted to shatter it. I was so angry at her, angry that I could no longer defend her as a feminist, angry that I’d let her use me for so many years because I’d idolized her, angry that when I needed her wise clairvoyance, I couldn’t trust her advice because I’d come to see her as a terrible guide. What kind of guide could she be if she was so perverse as to have seduced her father? An urge to expel Anaïs and her whole outré world rose in me like molten lava.

  I went back to bed, still queasy, and wished that I had a solid mattress under me instead of the undulating waterbed.

  Two months later, I flew to Indiana in my flimsy winter coat. I arrived right after a storm had completely covered everything with snow: a blank, white slate.

  CHAPTER 29

  Bloomington, Indiana, 1974

  TRISTINE

  I’D THOUGHT THAT BY MOVING to Indiana I would escape the dark surrealism that had tinged Los Angeles since the bizarre Manson murders, yet I found it waiting for me in America’s heartland, lurking like the phosphorescent mushrooms in the dank Hoosier woods.

  Indiana turned out to be like one of my recurrent childhood nightmares: of walking along cautiously, but falling nevertheless into a hole that pulls me into another dimension—mysterious, terrifying, where all that exists are the rock walls sliding by and the sensation of plunging into darkness without end.

  Things did not start out so badly. I rented a house with some photography students who blew up their grainy black-and-white images of fallow fields and lonely churches and plastered them on billboards set along the country roads. Though I ignored the rabid English department politics, I enjoyed my role as an avant-garde feminist lecturer from California, hired because I could teach both the traditional canon and the hot new field of women’s studies.

  Then, over summer break, the only good friend I’d made on the IU faculty blew his brains out in a soybean field. Soon after, a group of coeds from my spring semester’s Twentieth-Century Women’s Lit class declared that they, too, had been seduced by the romance of suicide thanks to having read Sylvia Plath’s Ariel in my class; though I resolved never to teach Plath again, her black gloves beckoned me as well.

  The bottom didn’t fall out, though, until Clara phoned to report back to me on Philip’s sustained silence. When I’d left him after summer vacation, we were on good terms. My understanding was that he was still my boyfriend, who would be waiting when I flew back at Christmas. But Clara reported that Philip had moved out of the beach house, given notice to the landlord, and taken an apartment with a new girlfriend to whom he was engaged, all without mentioning a word about it to me. And one other piece of news: I’d left my cat Jadu in Philip’s care, and Jadu was dead, either eaten by coyotes or hit by a car on Pacific Coast Highway.

  The hidden explosive device—buried when my father left—was triggered by Philip’s betrayal and detonated. Eight years before, when Neal had left me, I’d been surprised that all existence was not wiped out. Anaïs and Rupert and Renate had encircled and protected me from impact. This time, though, I was entirely alone.

  With detached interest, I watched myself become a perpetual motion machine that did nothing but shake and leak tears. It didn’t eat, didn’t sleep, and had no stop switch, although it somehow turned itself off for the hours I taught in the classroom. Anaïs had been right; she was the only one who had understood that although taking the job was the honorable and feminist thing to do, my emotions and nerves could not follow suit. I’d let happen what Anaïs had warned me about in the beginning: I had failed to protect myself from re-injury by a man.

  I hid in my upstairs bedroom, watching the endless, frigid rain roll down my windowpane and splash in the courtyard below. When the phone rang and Anaïs said hello, it was a voice from another life.

  “Tristine, are you alright? I got worried that I haven’t heard from you. How is it there?”

  “Not so good.”

  Gently she asked, “What’s the most immediate problem?”

  “I have a blister on my foot that’s infected.”

  “Have you been to the doctor?”

  “I don’t really have one here.”

  In no time I was telling her about Philip having abandoned me and the airless, black depression I’d fallen into.

  “Come home immediately, Tristine. You need the support of your women friends.”

  “I can’t bail on this job. I’d never get another.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’d have a permanent black mark on my name for breaking my contract. Chairs of English departments talk to the chairs of other English departments.”

  “I see,” she said calmly. “Alright, don’t do anything until you hear back from me. Just try to eat and sleep—and go to a doctor, any doctor. Remember, I love you.”

  The next day I received a forwarded letter from the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television accepting me into their graduate film program. The letter was baffling because, while I’d thought about going, I’d never applied to film school. Admission to UCLA’s grad film program in 1974, as now, was a coup and required an application with sample film work and recommendations, none of which I had and none of which I’d submitted. Yet when I phoned, the film department secretary assured me that I was expected to show up to register for classes the following week.

  When Anaïs called a few days later, I asked her, “Did you get me admitted to UCLA Film School?”

  “No, I don’t know anything about that.” She sounded confused. “I’m calling to tell you about a teaching job waiting for you here in Los Angeles if you will accept it.”

  She had cooked up a faculty position with International College in Westwood, a British-style tutorial progr
am started by some maverick UCLA administrators where, for a lot of money, students could get an advanced degree studying one-on-one with Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, Judy Chicago, Ravi Shankar, Yehudi Menuhin, Lawrence Durrell, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, or Anaïs Nin. So many students had signed on to study with Anaïs that she was able to tell the college she wanted me to co-teach with her. She would be the big name that pulled in the students and she’d meet with them at her house once a month, while I would do the bread-and-butter work of teaching them weekly.

  “Do you think it’s unfair that I’d be taking half the money and only doing a quarter of the work?” Anaïs asked me, concerned.

  “No!” It would be more than I was making at IU for a fraction of the time. I could pay the rent on the beach house by myself and have enough free time to go to film school and become a filmmaker. I didn’t understand how UCLA Film School had intuited my dream, but at this point I was willing to give myself over to fate, since all my intellectual effort to make a rational, politically correct career decision had landed me alone and miserable.

  The prospect of film school and the teaching job Anaïs had created for me were handholds to a new beginning. But I knew I lacked the will to start over in LA. I couldn’t face the shame of having been dumped by Philip and of my dumping my respectable academic career for the roulette wheel of filmmaking. Besides, I was so run down with weeping and malnutrition that I didn’t have the strength to terminate my teaching contract and get back to the beach house before it was rented to someone else. The lights had all gone out in me.

  It took all the energy I could muster to follow Anaïs’s instruction to see a doctor. When he examined my infected foot he scared me by saying that if I’d waited much longer, he’d have had to amputate. How could I have ignored a blister that bad? Between sobs I told him how I’d been jilted by my boyfriend and no longer wanted to live.

  He said, “If you don’t get it together in a week, I’m putting you in the hospital.”

  “You mean to amputate my foot?!”

  “No, a mental hospital.”

  I laughed, then realized he was deadly serious. When I left his office, I thought, Thank you, you just made my decision a lot easier. No way was I going to be locked up in a mental hospital in the middle of fucking nowhere!

  I ran home hobbling on that blistered foot, called the chair who had hired me and told him my mother had had a heart attack (which was true, though she’d recovered), and I needed to go home. When he kindly offered to find someone to take over my classes for the semester, I immediately booked a red-eye flight to LAX, threw some things into my suitcase, and phoned one of my devoted students to drive me to the Indianapolis Airport.

  While waiting for my student to arrive, I caught a glimpse of my gaunt, sallow reflection in the corroded bathroom mirror. There was no way that stricken face could return to Los Angeles and succeed at anything. Yet if I stayed in Bloomington I knew I would end up in that mental hospital.

  I studied my mouth in the mirror. It was not just sad, it seemed narrower, and … bitter. I looked ten years older. I recalled what Anaïs had said about bitterness aging you, but how could I get rid of it? My heart was permanently broken and my psyche shattered.

  I needed a new dream. One so buoyant that it could float like a hot air balloon and pull me out of the depths. As a child I’d imagined pretty clothes, a crown on my head, or a chocolate candy tree to keep myself from despair. I’d visualized myself as a famous movie star whom everyone wanted to touch, so I wouldn’t care that no one touched me. I’d promised myself I would become a famous writer with her picture in a magazine, so it would no longer hurt that I was all but invisible. Later I’d imagined myself as a distinguished professor of literature so that people would have to respect me.

  But having failed at those dreams, it was harder now to put my faith in a ginned-up fantasy to comfort myself. Now I knew the charlatan’s gears behind my compensatory trick. But I did it anyway. I looked at my tear-ravaged face in the mirror and told myself: You will go to film school and become the most renowned woman film director in the world. You will no longer be the fragile woman who was dumped and fell apart. You will be powerful and admired and you will direct movies that will win Academy Awards. No one will know that you fell off the wall and shattered. No one will be able to see the million cracks. It will not matter that you were admitted to film school without qualifying. No one will guess that you no longer care and have no hope, because you will act so driven that you will fool even yourself.

  CHAPTER 30

  Malibu, California, 1974-75

  TRISTINE

  I WAS ABANDONED AND ABANDONED again, and then I abandoned myself. I abandoned my hard-won career, and once I’d returned to LA, I abandoned my body to one man after another, just for the thrill.

  When my plane landed at 5 a.m. at LAX, I hit the ground running on adrenalin. Arriving by taxi at the beach house at dawn, I cleaned the house, re-arranged the remaining furniture, napped for an hour on the cold waterbed, and showed up at UCLA in time to register for a full load of film production classes. Now I had to keep running hard and fast enough to keep the wolf of depression from catching my heels.

  My mother could not have been pleased with my surprise visit after I told her that being an English prof hadn’t worked out and I’d enrolled in film school. But she allowed herself no sign of disappointment, sautéed me a plate of mushrooms—my favorite dish—and offered me furniture from her endless stash to replace what Philip had taken from the beach house.

  Likewise, my women friends came to my rescue. One held and rocked me for hours as I wept, another updated my wardrobe from her own closet, another helped me edit my assigned episode of Gunsmoke into a feminist satire so I wouldn’t miss my deadline, and when I wailed about losing Philip, Renate mocked his Cockney accent and shagged hair to make me laugh. For her part, Anaïs spent hours patiently explaining to me her understanding of the cyclical low point of the dark night of the soul and how to trust the slow, inner process of healing.

  She also picked up my ash-hot movie dream and ran with it like Renate’s former all-star husband toward the goal post. Her eyes glittering, she confided to me, “If I were a young woman today, I would choose filmmaking,” and she determined that I should become the female Fellini. She recommended films I should see, starting with her favorite, Ingmar Bergman’s Persona; on my behalf, she tackled her friends who had anything to do with the movies. She scored us dinner and lunch invitations into the homes of directors, actresses, and producers she knew. They were elegant, elderly people, mostly European expats, who would have been pleased to help me were they still active in the business.

  Anaïs was more successful looking out for me financially while I sustained the expense of film school. She promoted me as a freelance writer to supplement the teaching job she’d gotten me, telling magazine editors who wanted her for articles and reviews that they should hire me instead.

  Like the prodigal son, I received more attentiveness than before I’d left. Anaïs and Renate were determined to save me, probably to make up for having failed to save Peter. No young woman could have asked for more devoted mentors when most in need. Anaïs coached me in positive thinking: “You get to choose your reality. You choose your thoughts.” And Renate advised, “The cure to paranoia is to give events the most positive interpretation possible,” giving an example: “You are so lucky to be rid of Philip. The gods were doing you a favor.”

  Both Anaïs and Renate tried to teach me about the release of forgiveness, but I preferred the energy of my fame-and-fortune revenge fantasies. Sabina was back, and she provided me with an eventful sex life to make up for my absent love life. She seduced younger guys in film school as well as older guys already on the fringes of the film business.

  I was living the life Anaïs had invented by editing Hugo out of her Paris Diaries: I was a financially independent young woman with her own romantic house, where I invited lovers for the excitement each cou
ld bring, for as long as they pleased me. When dawn’s pink light tinted the ocean, I would kiss my lovers farewell so I could enjoy my beach house alone and begin a new day of making movies. When the English department chair in Indiana phoned and, to my surprise, said they were holding my lectureship for me, I had no ambivalence telling him I would not be coming back.

  As for Renate’s awful revelation that Anaïs, when she was my age, had slept with her father, I dismissed it as Renate’s temporary insanity brought on by hard liquor. Renate never mentioned the topic again, and I certainly would never ask Anaïs about it. Why would I think she would tell me the truth, anyway? I doubted there was anyone Anaïs told the truth to all of the time, though I’d also come to believe that she usually lied for the best of reasons, to help those she loved to love themselves.

  She was again my savior and inspiration, my morning and evening star. I’d become so accustomed to her solicitous care of me, that I’d all but forgotten Renate’s proviso: “Apprentices do services for their mentor.”

  The day before our last International College class of the semester, Anaïs phoned. “Would you stay for a chat, Tristine, after the students leave?”

  When I arrived at Anaïs’s house with the students, I was disturbed to see an off-kilter brunette wig hanging like drooping beagle ears on the sides of her small face. Though the question of her cancer always hovered, like a Halloween bat on a string, we darted around it. There was no denying now though that the chemotherapy was weakening her.

  Despite the fact that her visualizations had not made the cancer go away, she still held faith that, combined with chemo, the imaging would work. I, too, believed she was curing herself because she appeared so happy, more sparkling, lighter than I’d ever seen her. My heart might be so broken it would never heal, but she modeled for me the courage of gaiety in the face of a cancer that threatened to destroy all the happiness for which she’d worked so long.