Apprenticed to Venus

by Tristine Rainer

  She told the students, who were confused by seeing her with hair a different color each month, “As long as I have to receive chemo, Rupert and I are having fun with it. One week he gets to make love to a blond, the next to a redhead, this week to a brunette!” Her laughter chimed.

  The end of our class was announced, as usual, by Rupert clanking pots and pans in the kitchen. All the lingering students finally out the door, Anaïs rushed to the bathroom to re-adjust her wig, and Rupert slipped on Piccolo’s collar for a walk, while I put on the kettle and assembled cups and Lipton tea bags.

  “I finally found out how I got admitted to film school without applying,” I said when Anaïs rejoined me. “When I was a grad student, I filed a half-page petition to take a film class but found out I couldn’t take a class in another department without dropping out of the English PhD program. So I withdrew the petition, but the cancellation form evidently got lost and the petition went through. The film department chair called the English department chair for a recommendation and got such a good one that he admitted me to the film program on the spot!”

  “Synchronicity!” Anaïs declared, knowing I understood exactly what she meant: through such meaningful accidents, life winks that you are on your path.

  “That brings me to the reason I asked you to stay today,” Anaïs began as we settled by the fireplace. “I know your dream now is to make movies, and what I am going to propose could delay that dream for a few years, so I want you to think about this carefully.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ve been meeting with lawyers and making arrangements for my literary estate.”

  I didn’t like the sound of “literary estate.” It was the plan for when she would be dead.

  “They told me I should select an authorized biographer,” she continued. “Would you be my authorized biographer?”

  Suddenly I was filled with confusion. The tide of indecision, in which I’d floundered before going to Indiana, rushed back in to swamp me. I had visualized finishing film school and getting into the movie business during the time she wanted me to spend writing about her life. At one time her proposal would have thrilled me, and I still coveted the hours alone with her that it would require, but I well knew what “authorized biography” meant. It meant leaving out her secrets and constructing a fictional version of her life to protect Hugo and Rupert. It meant telling her lies for her, which of course I’d already done, but doing so in print under my name. It meant crafting thousands of sentences that would hide the truth about her mariage a trois. It meant getting a biography published, but one that would be a ruse posing as scholarly research, a book that could discredit me for the rest of my life.

  “You don’t need a biography,” I said. “Your diaries are your autobiography. It would be redundant.”

  “Yes, I know. But there are rumblings about people and publishers interested in having a biography written on me. We don’t want some unsympathetic stranger snooping around in my life, do we? This would deter them.”

  “I see.” I could feel my forehead furrow and consciously tried to smooth it. If I wrote her biography I would be entirely identified with Anaïs for the next three years at least, probably my whole life. I already grated at being seen as just an extension of her. Often my association with her was the only thing people found interesting about me. Her shadow was so large, and the contours of mine were so similar, that I feared my identity would always be subsumed under hers.

  But how could I say no to Anaïs when she had created the teaching job that was supporting me, had fulfilled her role as my mentor in countless ways, had reached out to rescue me from despair in Indiana and tucked me under her downy wing? I knew how indebted I was to her and that it was my turn to repay her for my apprenticeship. If I was anything, I was a good soldier. The loyal one. The one who goes down with the ship. How could I say no to Anaïs?

  “Why don’t you think about it and let me know.” She smiled.

  The following week she phoned early, before I’d had my coffee. Tensing my shoulders as though expecting a guillotine’s blade, I waited for her to ask my decision about writing her biography.

  Her request was more urgent, though. In a strange, hoarse whisper she said she’d been flying back from a speaking engagement in northern California, when her abdominal pain became excruciating. “I have to go back in the hospital today, and I was supposed to appear Saturday at Royce Hall for that UCLA Fine Arts Speakers event.”

  “They can reschedule it,” I said.

  “No, it’s sold out. They say it’s too late to cancel. I want you to go in my place.”

  “I couldn’t,” I gasped. How could I do that with a few days’ notice? How could I take her place in any case? “People just want you.”

  “You won’t have to do it alone. I asked Jamie Herlihy, too, and he said yes immediately.” I heard the implied reprimand. She urged, “You can just read the paper you wrote about Diary II.”

  The idea of standing at a podium and reading a long paper of literary criticism to 2,000 Anaïs Nin fans who’d come for her feted charisma truly seemed like a bad idea. “Your audience will walk out. They’ll demand their money back.”

  “Jamie will just talk informally, so it won’t all be your reading,” Anaïs implored.

  Unlike me, Jamie Herlihy was a literary star in his own right. He had written All Fall Down and Midnight Cowboy. His wit and Irish theatricality could hold an audience, while for me, a nobody, to read a long academic paper, when people had paid their money to see Anaïs … They would be outraged.

  I said, “Renate should do it instead of me. It would be magical for people to see a living, breathing character from one of your novels.” Anaïs didn’t respond; I could hear muted coughing. I went on, “I could introduce Renate. Tell the audience how you wrote about her crazy adventures in Mexico and Malibu in Collages. Then I could read from Collages, and Renate would walk onto the stage. The real-life character! It would be surreal!”

  Another muted coughing fit.

  I added, “I bet Renate would love to do it!”

  Finally, Anaïs recovered enough to say, “It’s the wrong audience for Renate. Besides she’s moving this weekend, so she can’t.

  “Please do this for me, Tristine,” Anaïs pleaded. “I don’t have the strength to call anyone else.” Her voice was fading. I could hear the pain in it. A wave of fear unsteadied me as I realized she was going into the hospital again; she’d be hooked up to those ochre feeding-tubes again. I’d have to visit her there again, and that meant she wasn’t getting better. She was getting worse.

  “I’ll do anything for you,” I said, surrendering.

  Jamie Herlihy and I clung to each other in the greenroom. Our escort had just told us that Royce Hall was at capacity—they were turning away people, and the fire marshal had shut the doors.

  “I’ll be fine once I’m out there,” Jamie said nervously.

  “I won’t,” I said. “They’re going to be bored out of their minds by my paper.” I had the chills I was so scared.

  “Just improvise. That’s what I’m going to do. I’ll discover what I’m going to say once I’m up there.”

  “I can’t do that. I wish I could.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll warm them up for you!” he called as our escort led him down a long hall with dim floor lights on either side, a gangplank to doom I would soon have to walk.

  Twenty minutes later, I could hear bursts of laughter and applause from where I waited behind the stage. Anaïs’s audience loved Jamie’s ad-libbing, but they would not love my reading to them. Panic gnats threw themselves in concert against my temples. I didn’t feel steady on my feet.

  I needed to calm my panic or I would not be able to stand in front of that audience. It would be better to endure their anger and boos than to ruin the evening by failing to perform at all. I had been an actress, I reminded myself. I had been the lead in my high school plays. I didn’t have stage fright then. What was different now?
/>   Then I was playing a character, disappearing into another’s personality. Now I had no character to hide within.

  Out of desperation, I hit on a trick I that I’ve used many times since to deal with my stage fright. I make believe that I’m someone else going up on stage. I have been, at different times, Tom Wolfe, Hillary Clinton, and, once, the Holy Ghost. I decide that I won’t go up there and that this more capable being will go in my body, and he or she will do the talking. That night, I decided since the audience wanted Anaïs Nin, I would let Anaïs go on stage in my body.

  I assumed her graceful, erect posture as I climbed the fearsome steps to the podium. I set down my paper, paused and smiled as she would have, endowing love and understanding to the audience. I was grateful for the glaring lights that made the crowd a black empty space.

  “I apologize that unlike Jamie Herlihy, I cannot entertain you. I’m here because Anaïs is in the hospital, and she asked me at the last minute to read an essay I wrote about Diary II.”

  There was dull silence.

  I looked down at the papers in my shaking hands. Was the light bright enough to read? Barely. “I really do apologize that this literary criticism will be boring to many of you,” I said with Anaïs’s little laugh. “But this is what she asked of us, so please bear with me.” I spoke a little about the importance of Anaïs’s Diary and what she’d shared with me about her editing process, that each volume had been edited for its central theme.

  Dead silence.

  I explained that the topic of my paper was the theme of Diary II, Anaïs’s theory of subjective time as equivalent to relativity. I thought I heard a few groans. I knew the topic was as abstract, as intangible as the black nothingness out there, but all I could do was go forward. I began to read, concentrating on what I was saying. Looking out into the void, I used my dramatic training to emphasize what little conflict there was in my paper: Anaïs’s arguments with Henry Miller, her belief in the value of the diary’s immediacy versus his belief in the distillation of memory required for literature. As I read, I heard Anaïs’s voice coming through me, not her accent, but her rising and falling cadence, and since I quoted from her Diary extensively, her words mixed with mine. I poured all my love for her into reading her words.

  At one point, when reading a passage of hers about the power of the present moment, I paused for emphasis and held the pause. The present moment. The only sound was the rhythmic breathing in the darkened auditorium, in and out, the beating wings of a great seabird, carrying us together to Anaïs’s hospital bed.

  When it was over and the audience had applauded, I felt light as paper, weightless as a ghost. Hugging Jamie good-bye, I collected my purse and jacket from the greenroom. I couldn’t wait to be in my car on my way home, glad that it was over, ecstatic with relief that the audience hadn’t booed me, that their ardor for Anaïs was so great that they would have sat through anything for her.

  I felt my sleeve being pulled as I was almost out the door. I turned around to see the young woman escort who had led me with her flashlight down the dark tunnel to the stage. “Don’t go yet. There’s someone who wants to talk to you.”

  “I didn’t invite anyone.”

  “The audience. They’re asking for you.”

  She forcefully guided me to another door and opened it. There was a line of women, and when they saw me they smiled uncertainly, a hopeful, crazed look in their eyes. They were there for a piece of Anaïs.

  I felt safe as long as the women were ordered in a line, but as soon as I started to talk with the first one, the rest broke out of formation, surrounding me, crowding me, suffocating me. I couldn’t see a way out. I was frightened and tried to move through them, but they wouldn’t let me. I could see they had brought gifts for Anaïs, handmade scarves, paintings, flowers and handcrafted books. Their tender, unripe faces were full of rapture like those of my students the night Anaïs visited the commune.

  “You look so much like her!” a woman with a crooked smile cried, and others agreed.

  “You have to settle an argument.” A stout woman bustled forward with her middle-aged friend. “You really are Anaïs’s daughter, aren’t you?”

  An innocent looking girl pushed a hand-beaded purse into my hands. “I made it for her. I want you to have it.” Tears filled her eyes.

  “I’ll give it to Anaïs,” I promised.

  “I want you to keep it,” she said and, trembling, came close for a hug.

  Jamie eyed me suspiciously. I knew he was seeing me as the ambitious understudy eager to usurp her mentor’s place, a ruthless Eve Harrington in All About Eve. But he was mistaken. I didn’t want Anaïs’s place. I didn’t want the purse beaded for her. I didn’t want the gifts or the sweet-smelling bouquets thrust into my arms. I didn’t want the suffocating hugs. I didn’t want Anaïs’s borrowed fame. To my amazement, I no longer wanted fame at all. Being surrounded by these excited, delusional people frightened me.

  They showed me that people want to be fooled, and that it was easy to fool them. All I’d done was imagine myself as Anaïs, and people, needing her to be there, believed in the lie. It left me feeling inflated, pumped with helium, but also cynical. I’d satisfied the dream I’d held for so long of becoming Anaïs, if only for one night, but when it happened, it felt creepy—like being a body snatcher.

  Only three days later Anaïs, back from the hospital, phoned to find out how the event had gone. I still felt drained, as if my trick of becoming her in the auditorium and the rush of her fans had been a seizure that had left me limp, hollow, my ears ringing.

  “How did it go?”

  “Alright. They didn’t boo.”

  “What else?

  “I have a bunch of gifts to bring you. How did you get out of the hospital so soon?”

  “What do you mean?” She sounded affronted.

  “I mean all the other times you had to stay longer.”

  “Oh, they just had to fatten me up this time.”

  “Couldn’t they have waited until after your appearance?”

  “No, they thought I was that weak.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry. People really missed seeing you.”

  She said the purpose of her call was to invite me and Jamie to come tell her about the event, and she wanted both of us to stay after to meditate for her cure with the “white light people.”

  “What do they charge for that?” I asked skeptically.

  “Nothing. They want to help. It’s just white light, Tristine.”

  There was total gridlock on the freeway and I arrived almost two hours late. The house was dark except for lit tea candles everywhere, and the white light people, teenagers in diaphanous robes, were ready to begin. Anaïs’s eyes were shut so I put down the gifts and tried to creep unnoticed to an empty chair next to Jamie. The young men with scraggly beards and girls with long braids made a semi-circle around Anaïs, who sat up straight in a kitchen chair. The meditation, which one of the young men guided us through, was to feel the white light penetrating Anaïs’s body, healing all her cells from the top of her head to her toes. I threw myself into it. With the effort of moving boulders, I concentrated on that white light dissolving her cancer cells.

  My eyes were closed, but when I heard weeping, I opened them.

  Anaïs was coiled into herself. “I turned against God.” She struggled to speak between sobs. “Because of my father.”

  She looked like a trembling, terrified child instead of the woman I knew. The white light kids huddled together in consternation while Rupert rushed to her side and held her as she continued to sob uncontrollably. Jamie and I exchanged an alarmed look.

  As I sat there not knowing what to do, Renate’s revelation of Anaïs’s adult incest with her father broke through my willed amnesia. I had convinced myself that it had just been Renate’s drunkenness, but Anaïs’s desperate cry and her emotional collapse in front of my eyes gave it credence. Was I witnessing the Oedipal curse that Anaïs had escaped until then? I recalled the ter
ror and awe at the end of Sophocles’s tragedy, where King Oedipus is cursed for his violation of the ultimate taboo—along with all his supporters.

  Indeed, seeing Anaïs quaking with despair cursed me as well. It made me question her whole philosophy of self-healing through creativity. Anaïs had assured me, and proclaimed publicly, that diary writing and psychoanalysis had healed her from the wound of her father’s abandonment. She credited her analysis with Dr. Bogner for enabling her to move beyond her obsession with her father and write about other subjects. She’d even claimed to have forgiven her father!

  I had trusted that if I followed faithfully in Anaïs’s footsteps, I would eventually outpace the effects of father abandonment: the crippling insecurity, the need for approval in a man’s world, the abiding fear of loss, the attacks of anxiety and hyper-vigilance. I had believed myself blessed in one way: my intimacy with Anaïs, the person who shared my particular wound and had healed herself. She had gone on from an unhappy childhood like mine to a big life, savoring love, adventure, literary success, travel, and friendships. In maturity, she seemed to dwell not only on stage, but in life, in her wise and centered persona of Djuna. Her achievement of happiness had given me hope.

  Now it appeared that I had been deluded. For here was Anaïs near the end of her life, hunched in a fetal position, sobbing about her father, the wound he’d inflicted still not healed, and she had let a bunch of pimply faced, eighteen-year-old white light zealots do it to her. If this could happen to Anaïs, after all the maturity she’d worked for, after her thousands of hours of psychoanalysis, after her tens of thousands of journal pages, what hope was there for me?

  The leader of the white light group timidly leaned down to Rupert, who was holding Anaïs in his arms, her head buried in his chest, her hunched shoulders shaking as if palsied. “We’d like to try something we think might help.”