Apprenticed to Venus

by Tristine Rainer

  I stepped in front of him. “You have to wait. She’s getting a procedure.”

  “I’m going in!” Stubborn as always. As he pushed past, he issued an order: “You can leave now.”

  “But she asked me to say goodbye before—”

  “I’m telling you to leave!”

  I was so upset at his rudeness that I fled down the hospital corridor.

  CHAPTER 32

  Silver Lake, California, 1976–77

  TRISTINE

  AS I DROVE TO VISIT Anaïs, now home after two weeks in the hospital, I dreaded learning what had happened when Rupert discovered Hugo at her bedside. Just when she and I had come so close! I’d run like a rabbit, frightened by Rupert’s bark instead of helping her. She’d been relying on me to save the day and in the end I’d failed her.

  She answered the door in an empress muumuu with a smock tied over it, looking much better, her color back. She apologized that she had to sort through some files while we visited. “I’m organizing my papers for UCLA.”

  I fetched a chair from the kitchen and set it outside her office door.

  Having seen her condition in the hospital, I was surprised by her strength as she lowered herself to her knees to remove the lid from a cardboard file box. I offered to get down on the floor to help her, but she refused and then ignored me as she examined the contents of a file.

  Finally I said, “Rupert told me at the hospital about Joan Palevsky’s donation to buy your diaries.”

  She didn’t respond, seemingly absorbed in deciphering a file name. Was this going to be it? I would squirm and talk, and she, doing busywork, would act as if she had not heard me? I declared, “I tried to stop Rupert, Anaïs!”

  “Dear Tristine.” She looked up at me affectionately. Was she giving me the extra sweet treatment before cutting me out of her life, as I’d seen her do with people who had not been sufficiently faithful? Or was she really forgiving me because, after my declarations at the hospital, she loved me now as my mother did, unconditionally?

  I ventured, “What happened when Rupert discovered Hugo at your bedside?”

  “I will tell you. Only first, let me tell you about my visit with Hugo, before Rupert barged in.”

  ANAÏS

  Hugo leaned his cane against her nightstand. That motion was enough to topple Anaïs’s glasses from the pyramid of mail and books. Looking down at the floor, he assured her that her glasses hadn’t broken and lowered himself, clasping the bars of her hospital bed, to retrieve them. Winded from his effort, he braced himself against the bed frame as he handed the glasses up to her.

  She managed to balance them again on the makeshift pyramid as Hugo, still kneeling and holding onto a metal bar on the bed, gazed up and declared his love for her, begging her to come home with him. She looked down on him beneficently, realizing that he could not walk out on her now—he couldn’t seem even to get back on his feet. Nor could he play on her guilt, because she was the one close to death who needed sympathy. It was the perfect time to confess to him.

  She said, “Hugo, darling, we have always had a sophisticated marriage, one based on love and respect. Several times I’ve tried to tell you that there was another man in my life, but you didn’t want to hear it.”

  “I don’t want to hear it now,” he grumbled, looking down at the linoleum floor, evidently resigned to remaining on his knees.

  “But you have to listen now, because this other man, his name is Rupert Pole, was not just an affair. I married him.”

  Hugo looked confused, as when he would wander into the kitchen, open a cabinet door, and be unable to recall why he was there. After a long delay, he said, “You couldn’t marry him. You’re married to me.”

  “Because I love you so much, I could never leave you and never divorce you. So I did something worse, something illegal.”

  She watched her words tear off the blinders he’d worn through their marriage. His face slowly fell and his voice capitulated. “I know lawyers who can take care of messes like that.”

  “I have a lawyer. A woman lawyer. It’s taken care of. But I’m dying and I have to clear things up with you.”

  This man had suffered so many shattering blows, she thought with compassion. The loss of his income and pension, his health, his pride in accepting an allowance from her. Now this, his memory of their happy marriage. “You were everything to me: father, husband, friend, and lover,” she assured him, “and it will always be so. I will make sure that after my death you will continue to receive your income and that your medical care will be covered by my estate.”

  “You’re not going to die! I’ll get you the best doctors at Sloan Kettering. You can’t stay in the hands of these bushwhack, West Coast doctors!”

  “This is where I want to be. I want to die in the house Rupert built for me here. Until then, I want to swim in my pool and feel the California light.”

  He was weeping.

  “Please don’t cry, Hugo. Please forgive me. My healer, Dr. Brugh Joy, believes it is my guilt for loving more than one man and my deceptions that caused my cancer.”

  He looked up. “No!”

  “You can help save my life, dearest, but only by absolving me. The situation I created was unusual, but please try to see it within the realm of the human and thus forgivable. Please forgive me, and be my savior one more time.”

  “Yes, yes, I forgive you! There is nothing to forgive. I always knew I only had a part of you. You were a creature of flight and had to fulfill your nature.”

  What a beautiful thing for him to say, she thought, and then he admitted, “I knew that to hold onto you, I had to let you go, or I would lose you completely.” He looked up from where he still knelt on the floor. “Thank you for staying my wife.”

  “Even if not yours alone?”

  “Yes.” He started to weep again.

  “Stop, Hugo, darling. I can’t bear to see you cry. Look in my eyes as we used to do for hours when we were first in love.”

  He raised his faded gray eyes to her obediently. She leaned down toward him to touch the side of his face. “Do you remember when I told you I had found the secret to happiness?”

  He wiped his eyes, trying for stoicism, for manliness. “I’m sorry, I don’t, Anaïs.”

  “My trick of displacement?”

  “Please don’t tease my bad memory. I’ve just received a shock.”

  “I’ve been using my displacement trick here in the hospital. Instead of writing in my diary about my pain, I write about music. I imagine death as a rising symphonic crescendo. My secret to happiness is that I give myself completely to the joyous moments when they come. And when it comes to the catastrophes, I use my imagination to displace myself.” She stroked his cheek. “You’re an artist, my talented Ian Hugo. You can transcend this pain with your imagination. Just think of me as on another journey.” He kissed her fingers as they brushed his mouth, and she bent down closer to him. “As for the joyous moments, dearest, we savored them together, and I am so happy it was with you. You have been my true husband for fifty years. Nothing and no one can take that away from us.”

  He was gazing at her now in wonder, as in their courtship days and early marriage.

  “Please, Hugo, get off the floor. There’s a chair you can sit on.”

  He grabbed for his cane but could not manage to get off his knees even when he pushed himself against the bed. He flailed, losing his balance, and caught himself on the bars of the hospital bed with both hands, his ebony cane falling to the floor.

  Once he realized he hadn’t broken anything he laughed, chagrined, and Anaïs laughed with him to ease his embarrassment. “Oh, we are a pair, aren’t we? One on crutches and the other in a hospital bed!”

  When their laughter finally subsided, Anaïs, wiping tears from the corners of her eyes, said, “Stay there. I think I like you kneeling.” She touched his face again. “Now, please, listen to me carefully. This is important. Rupert is young, sixteen years younger than I am. He is physi
cally able to lift me and prepare the foods I have to eat. He can take care of me. Would you deprive me of that comfort? That is why I have to stay with Rupert.”

  It wasn’t the only reason, of course. Sex had given her a connection with Rupert that she’d never shared with Hugo, but she had been so candid, finally, that this omission to save what remained of Hugo’s ego was inconsequential.

  Struggling for dignity, Hugo said, “I can’t go against your wishes, but at least let me come visit you regularly now that I know the truth.”

  “No, it’s too expensive, and it will be too hard on your health. There should be only one invalid at a time.”

  “But I can’t go on being banished like this,” he begged. “I’ll die of worry.”

  “I’ll speak to Rupert. I’ll ask him to let you phone,” she promised.

  But, of course, first she had to tell Rupert he was not her only husband.

  Rupert was in no state to listen to anything when he barged into her room.

  Hugo grabbed for his cane and successfully rose from his knees as Anaïs officially introduced them. “This is my husband Rupert Pole. Hugo Guiler.”

  Instead of putting out a hand to shake Hugo’s, Rupert bellowed, “What’s he doing here? I thought we agreed all visitors would go through me!”

  “I was as surprised to see Hugo as you are,” Anaïs said calmly, and begged Hugo to leave the room. “You understand, Hugo, dear,” she said, “so I can have the same talk with Rupert.”

  Leaning heavily on his cane, a fragile old man, Hugo shut the hospital room door behind him.

  Anaïs said to Rupert, “Sit down please, darling. We need to talk.”

  The heavy metal chair screeched as Rupert pulled it to her bedside and sat.

  “What’s going on?” he demanded. “Why is Hugo here? Does it have to do with all that estate-planning? That has got to stop, too!” She just watched him indulgently until he realized he was sounding like a bully. Abashed, he mellowed his tone and told her, “I have good news. We have a donation for the entire cost of UCLA acquiring your diaries.”

  Anaïs was overcome with relief. The money would help take care of Rupert and Hugo after she was gone! It would afford Hugo a full-time nurse when the time came and fund a literary trust to pay Rupert to keep her name alive. Ten years before, she’d re-written her Diary to cater to the times, a desperate gamble. It had paid off in a trifecta, with book royalties, fame, and now this bequest for her two men.

  “Rupert, you are going to have to look out for Hugo when I’m gone. You have to promise me.”

  “I promise, but we won’t talk about you being gone.” His anger had dispersed. It was a storm she had learned to let pass, knowing that when it did, his essential goodness would shine again. He gently lifted her bruised hand with the needle in it and kissed the damp palm. “You are going to get well.”

  “You and I both know that isn’t true.”

  “No, I don’t know that isn’t true!”

  “I believe you do know because otherwise you would not be eyeing my successor.”

  The veins reddened on his nose. “What do you mean? There could never be a successor to you.”

  “I mean your new girlfriend.” She was referring to the Japanese literature student who had come to pay respects to her and had caught Rupert’s eye.

  He overreacted and countered, “Anaïs, this is crazy! How much of that Darvon did they give you today?”

  She tried to stay in her wise, serene Djuna voice. “Rupert, I thank you for trying to protect me from the truth, as I always tried to protect you, but I want to tell you that it is alright.” She struggled to resist her tears at the thought that she would be gone and another woman would love him, would swim in her pool with him, would receive his caresses. She snuffled. “I approve of your choice. She is lovely. She is exactly the woman I would have chosen for you.”

  “Anaïs! What is this about?”

  “I never divorced Hugo.”

  “What do you mean? That IRS stuff again?”

  “I want you to forgive me as Hugo did when I told him that I married you while I was still married to him.”

  She waited for his rage to erupt, but her words had not yet hit their mark. “Are you talking about when we got remarried in Mexico? You’ve lost me.”

  “I have learned that some women,” she said in her most soothing voice, “at least myself, can love two men at the same time, though in different ways. And I believe it is true for a man, for you right now. I don’t doubt for a moment that you love me with your entire being, darling, and that does not preclude you from desiring someone young and healthy.”

  “Stop it! I’m sorry I even looked at her!”

  “Rupert, you will need a woman when I’m gone. I would prefer that you have someone to love and take care of you.”

  Now he had tears in his eyes, but she continued, “I tell you this because I am releasing you and forgiving you, and it is what I am begging from you in return. To forgive me for not being able to let go entirely of Hugo. As you know, he saved me and my family from poverty, and out of gratitude I could never injure him, and so I never asked him for a divorce.”

  “But you told me you were divorced. I …”

  She knew he was waiting for her to make some excuse, to retract her words. She’d always saved him by coming up with something, so that he could continue to believe in her. But this time she just gazed at him sorrowfully. He pulled back, realizing what she had managed to keep at bay all these years, the magnitude of her deception.

  She did not backtrack. She continued forward, fueled by the unfamiliar wildness of truth telling. “I could not deny myself the opportunity to love you and be your wife, so I became a bigamist. All the back and forth to New York? That was why. I had, I have, two husbands.”

  Though his jaw was still clenched, he looked defeated.

  “When I die, you and Hugo will both be beneficiaries of my estate.” She had his full attention now. “But for the all-important job of executor, I have chosen the man who understands and loves me the most, the one to whom I am most deeply bonded, the one who is my true love. You, Rupert.”

  “I love you so much, Anaïs!” he cried.

  “So please tell me that you forgive me. Set me free from guilt as I have freed you.”

  “I do.”

  “Please say the words, ‘I absolve you.’”

  “I absolve you, Anaïs,” he repeated with all his actor’s intensity.

  TRISTINE

  “Tristine! I’m free! I told them both the trrut. Everything,” she exalted, a youthful lilt in her voice as she placed a hand on the edge of her desk to help her rise from kneeling. Once upright, she raised both arms in triumph. “And they both forgave me!”

  What else could they do, I thought. Camille on her death bed.

  “No more guilt, no more hiding,” she sang, as if to make sure I understood the importance of her release after all her years on the trapeze. She had swung between those two men in terror of falling off, of one of them letting go of her, of inflicting pain on one of them, and now she rejoiced: “I’m really free!”

  I grinned back at her, ecstatic to see her so happy.

  “Rupert really has accepted the situation.” She pulled open a drawer in the corner file cabinet. “Hugo phoned here last Sunday, and Rupert greeted him as if they were old friends. Then Rupert handed me the phone and took Piccolo for a walk.”

  “That’s wonderful,” I exulted with her, though I had an unexpected aftertaste of envy. “So now Evelyn Hinz gets to write the truth in your authorized biography, now that your story has a happy ending.”

  “Tristine!” She broke into a pink-gummed whinny. “You really have gone Hollywood!”

  Knowing she was teasing, I came back, “Just because Hollywood knows people love a happy ending doesn’t make it wrong. They taught us in film school that the audience will forgive you almost anything if you give them a happy ending.”

  “Perhaps, but even with a h
appy ending, Hugo and Rupert would be seen as cuckolds.” I thought from the way she said “cuckolds,” making it sound in her high notes like a cuckoo calling, that she might not really consider that a major hindrance, but then she repeated the old warning: “My trapeze has to remain a secret, even after I’m gone. You can’t tell anyone until—”

  “I know, Rupert dies.”

  “Yes,” she said hesitatingly. “Until the last one dies. Which will probably be Rupert because he’s younger.”

  “Rupert doesn’t really have a girlfriend, does he?”

  “Oh, yes he does, and I’ve seen how they look at each other,” she said evenly, but then her eyes welled as she clutched my hand. “I know Rupert cannot be without a woman, and I don’t want him to be alone in this house when I’m gone, but Tristine!” Her tears overflowed. “I am suffering so from jealousy.”

  I was furious with Rupert. How could he be so careless as to let Anaïs know that he had found someone already? Why couldn’t he have waited? Why couldn’t he, at least, have been vigilant in hiding it, as she had been for him? I wanted her to be joyful again, as she had been only moments before, but her tears were smearing the ink on the manuscript in her hands.

  Not knowing how to comfort her, I restated what she had once said to me: “If you love someone, you will be jealous. If you weren’t jealous, it would mean that you don’t really love Rupert, and you do.”

  She clung to my words. “Dear Tristine, how did you get so wise?”

  “From you.”

  She gave me a grateful smile and pulled a tissue from a box by her typewriter. Drying her tears, she changed the subject, practicing her trick of displacement. “You know that little red bird you gave me at the hospital? You inspired me! I asked Rupert to tape-record the finches in the yard. He went out at dawn to capture their song so I could replay it at the hospital while looking at your sweet bird on my bedpost!”

  She then dashed around her office, placing files into storage boxes like a girl assembling her trousseau. She seemed so fully recovered that I dared to hope that Dr. Brugh Joy was right: guilt had caused her cancer, so released from her guilt she would be cured.