Apprenticed to Venus

by Tristine Rainer

  This is where I wanted her story to end, with her elation and freedom. With our friendship reconciled and my love proclaimed. She had flown higher than any woman, taken more emotional risks, and at the eleventh hour, pulled off a last triumphal arabesque. In the end, she’d told the truth to both husbands, and they loved her so much, they both forgave her to save her life.

  When I think about Anaïs and Hugo and Rupert, I don’t see how it could have been any other way. Both men kept themselves from knowing about Anaïs’s double life because they wanted to be with her. They both realized that having half of Anaïs Nin was better than all of any other woman.

  When Anaïs would say to me, “I am a woman ahead of my time, and that has been my greatest tragedy,” she was usually referring to her writing. But certainly she was ahead of her time in creating her own designer relationship, as well. Today women marry women, men marry men; no one thinks it odd when a woman marries a man sixteen years her junior. Interracial relationships are unremarkable, polyamory is a lifestyle option, and open marriages have their own online dating sites. Today, when over half of marriages end in divorce, people wonder if one form of relationship can fit all. Today I have girlfriends who’ve chosen never to marry and don’t regret it, others who have decided that what they really like is several lovers at the same time, and others who have chosen celibacy. Today, scientists speculate that some people, like some field mice, may have a “monogamy gene” while others lack it.

  Today, I suspect that Anaïs and Hugo and Rupert might have discreetly maintained their mariage a trois without all the lies and guilt from which she felt so joyously freed that afternoon.

  The story did not conclude with my Hollywood ending, though. Months later, Anaïs was back in the hospital and this time it wasn’t to fatten her up. It was to eviscerate her.

  “They removed everything, even her intestines,” Renate told me. “It’s too late. The cancer is everywhere.”

  I visited Anaïs at home after she was released, as soon as Rupert would allow. On an overcast morning, he let me in, instructing me to wait in the foyer. A priest, so young he still had acne, scurried by me to the front door. He had the blank, traumatized look of someone who has just seen through a portal into Hell.

  A weight plunged through me. Was I too late? Had the priest been there to give Anaïs last rites? As the weight fell, it snagged on a barb and pulled on my gullet hard. I thought I had put aside my judgments of Anaïs, but her calling for a priest felt like a final betrayal. Through all the years I’d known her, Anaïs had adamantly set herself against the Catholicism of her girlhood and called herself a pagan. Yet it had to have been Anaïs herself who’d instructed Rupert to request Extreme Unction. Rupert was, if anything, anti-papist.

  I remembered then that Anaïs had befriended the pop artist nun Sister Corita, who had belonged to the Immaculate Heart order of my high school. My resentment dissolved as I recognized I’d likely call for the last sacrament at the end, too. It was, after all, an irresistible deal, a get-out-of-Hell-free card. No matter how many sins you had committed in your lifetime, the Catholic sacrament would wipe your soul clean as a just-baptized baby’s.

  What I’d resented moments before now swayed me. If Anaïs could revert to her Catholicism, why couldn’t I do likewise? I prayed: Holy Mary, Mother of God, please let Anaïs still be alive and let me be the one to receive her last words.

  I heard slidings and brushings from behind the hospital screen set up in front of the bedroom area and the faint sound of whimpering. She was still alive!

  As a uniformed nurse retracted the screen, Rupert led me to a narrow hospital bed that had been set up next to the queen bed with its soiled lavender backrests. Rupert and the nurse disappeared into the kitchen, leaving me alone with Anaïs. I thought it was incredibly generous of him to give me these last precious moments with her.

  Her lids were half open, her face colorless, her skin stuck like damp silk to her skull. But she was breathing.

  I leaned down to kiss her and was taken aback by the stench around her. I avoided inhaling as I whispered, “I saw a priest leaving.”

  “I agreed to let a priest come,” she said in a hoarse, barely audible voice.

  I said, “I always thought the Catholic Church had an advantage in having the sacraments, especially the last one.”

  She didn’t say anything. She looked in pain. She tried to shift her body and the stench became worse. Rattled, I carried on, “I always thought Extreme Unction was the best sacrament. You get to have oil rubbed on your face, and, without having to do anything, all your sins are removed.”

  I looked for oil on her forehead, but not seeing any, assumed the nurse had wiped it off.

  Suddenly agitated, Anaïs tried to raise herself. In a voice surprisingly strong, she cried, “Extreme Unction? That’s for when one is dying!” She glared at me. “You think I’m dying?”

  Oh my God! How could I have been such an idiot? She wasn’t dying yet at all. I had imagined she was dying, which made it look as if I couldn’t wait for her to go! Now she knew what I’d tried so hard to hide: that I was eager for her to be gone so I could find out who I was—without her.

  I wanted to disappear through the floor. I stammered, “I just saw that priest, and—”

  “I gave him my confession! Usually Father Lucas comes but he couldn’t today so they sent a substitute.”

  I tried to backtrack. “No, I know you aren’t dying. I was just saying how Extreme Unction is my favorite sacrament. Confession is good, too. What did he give you for a penance?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? That’s amazing! I used to get ten Hail Marys and ten Our Fathers just for disrespecting my mother.” This was not going well. Anaïs had swooned back onto her pillow. She was now so still that I wondered if she really had died, and my negativity had been responsible. Wait, what had she said just before expiring? “Nothing.” That was quotable.

  But no, her lips were moving! I held my breath and bent my ear close. I heard her faint, plaintive cry, “I’ve started to wear my father’s ring. Why do you suppose I’m wearing my father’s ring?”

  I looked at her skeletal hands. There were no rings. I wondered if the painkillers she was taking had made her delusional.

  “I don’t see a ring,” I told her.

  “I put it on this morning. It’s too big. It falls off.” She giggled like a little girl.

  “Is it a wedding band?” I whispered.

  “That’s what I’m asking,” she cried impatiently. “Why am I wearing my father’s wedding ring?” She groaned, then cried out in pain, “Rupert! Help! It burns! Like a hot poker! It burns!”

  Rupert came rushing back with the nurse. Anaïs pleaded to them with a child’s helpless panic, “The bag broke again.”

  Rupert shooed me back into the entry hall, and the nurse replaced the screen. I wanted to leave, but Rupert, desperation in his bloodshot eyes, begged me to wait. “It will only take fifteen minutes. Please don’t go.”

  I stood again in the entry hall, shifting my weight from side to side, berating myself. Stupid! Why did I blabber on about Extreme Unction? My shame was displaced, though, by my rising anger. How could Rupert, and how could her doctors, have made her go on like this, in piercing pain, surrounded by her own stench? In our last phone conversation, Renate, who had mended fences with Rupert, had insisted that it wasn’t just Rupert and the doctors; Anaïs herself refused to let go. Renate had warned me not to visit anymore.

  I checked my watch impatiently; it had been more than twenty minutes. I promised myself that if Rupert ever thought to bring me a chair, I was going to say I had an appointment and leave.

  With nothing else to do, I worried Anaïs’s question: “Why am I wearing my father’s wedding ring?”

  I’d expected that Anaïs would show me how to die gracefully, with acceptance and wisdom, as she had shown me how to live. Instead, she seemed to be disintegrating like Dorian Gray from an ever-youthful beauty into a
terrifying specter. Her ghastly physical decay was accompanied by a psychological deterioration that made me think Freud had been right about Oedipal guilt. What else could her hallucination of her father’s wedding ring mean other than guilt for replacing her mother in his bed? What could her delusion of wearing her father’s ring and reaching, like Faust in the end, for the sacraments mean except that she believed her demon father had come to claim her, as Beelzebub had come for Faust? I was hyperventilating with fear of being swept into the vortex of her damnation.

  Stop it! I admonished myself. I was doing what I always did, interpreting my experience through some literary reference instead of knowing it directly. I was exaggerating and distancing my feelings as Anaïs had said I did in my diary.

  I no longer wanted to know myself secondhand. I wanted to know myself directly from my immediate experience and from within. So I asked myself one of the questions I’d been writing in my diary: What is the reality of this present moment?

  The reality was that Anaïs’s body and mind were being consumed by cancer and that there was nothing that she or I or anyone could do about it and that in itself was terrifying. She wasn’t Dorian Gray, or Faust, or Oedipus. She was Anaïs, frightened and dying (though perhaps not as quickly as I’d imagined), and she needed my comfort as her friend.

  When Rupert finally returned and brought me again to her bedside, he positioned a chair for me next to her. In addition to having been cleaned up, her sunken cheeks had been rouged. Fortunately, she seemed to have forgotten my woeful faux pas of mentioning Extreme Unction, as well as her delusion of wearing her father’s ring.

  “Oh, Tristine! I have to tell you!” she chirped. “Last night I dreamt that Rupert and I were making love in the pool, and this morning I told him my dream. You know, before we met Rupert couldn’t recall his dreams, but now we tell them to each other every morning. When I told him the lovemaking dream, he said, ‘Oh, but Anaïs, that was no dream!’”

  I smiled as if this were a new, delightful story—even though I’d heard it from both Anaïs and Rupert several times before. Nonetheless, it was the confirmation of the credo she wanted to leave me with: Life sets traps for you, and it is your job to escape, even if only by way of the dream.

  Eventually, Rupert closed the gate to all visits, commandeering what was left of Anaïs. Having had to share her for so many years with Hugo, it seemed he was getting even by keeping the last of her to himself. Truth be told, I was grateful that Rupert made it so difficult to visit, as I was grateful to Anaïs for giving me her myth of enduring romance through which to imagine her ending. I told myself that Rupert was taking loving care of her. I told myself that she and I had said good-bye as much as we’d be able. I rationalized that working to meet the deadline on my book was more of a tribute to her than waiting in the foyer until Rupert allowed me to see her in her pain and humiliation.

  The truth was I couldn’t bear to see her.

  So I threw myself feverishly into work and even more into play. I went to parties, attended film screenings, flirted with guys I had no memory of the next day, and started an affair with a horror film director I met in New York. I tried to forget about Anaïs’s suffering and the ghosts that lurked over her deathbed.

  Rupert still allowed me phone calls with her. I had first to leave a message on the answering machine, now always on. Returning my call, Rupert would invariably begin with a report on her condition as if it were the weather: “This is one of Anaïs’s bad days.” Or, as he announced, prefacing what turned out to be my last conversation with her, “This is one of Anaïs’s good days. She would like to speak with you.”

  I’d been struck by an unnamed fear that had prevented me from finishing the last chapters of my book, and impulsively I’d phoned Anaïs and left a message.

  Her hoarse whisper didn’t sound like her. “Rupert told me you had a question.”

  Now that I had precious minutes to speak with her, I didn’t want to spend them on something as trivial as a writer’s block. “I wanted to know how you are.”

  “Not so well,” she rasped. “How is your writing going?”

  The more I avoided explaining the reason I’d called, the more she pressed, so finally I described to her the apprehension that had caused the block. “It’s a fear of retaliation against women who reach too far, fly too high,” I said. “Like the backlash against George Sand, or Gore Vidal’s hostility towards you. I think we have to dim ourselves, so others don’t get threatened and do it to us.”

  “No! That is the wrong way to think about it! Don’t put yourself down. That’s the voice of guilt telling you to dim yourself.” She sounded like the lucid, nurturing mentor she’d once been, but that was followed by her convulsive cough. I could hear a struggle as Rupert tried to take the phone from her, but before relinquishing the receiver she managed, “I found that when I shone my brightest, I helped others the most. Stay elevated, Tristine!”

  Renate and I chortled over the obits. The New York Times reported that diarist Anaïs Nin was survived by her husband Hugo Guiler, while the Los Angeles Times named Rupert Pole as her surviving spouse. What irony: her secret had been made public in the newspapers, yet I was still sworn to keep it until both her husbands had died, which could be—and turned out to be—another thirty years.

  CHAPTER 33

  Malibu, California, 1977

  TRISTINE

  I SWAM, STROKE AFTER FRANTIC stroke, my eyes burning from the saltwater, reaching, thrusting into the void where she was now, all that she was now. Anaïs was in her element in this vast expanse of water; I wanted to be there—with her one last time.

  After Rupert had phoned to say he’d scattered her ashes near my house from the helicopter that morning, I’d stopped editing my book galleys and waited for the release of tears. But none came, as none had come when he’d informed me of her death. All I felt was a numb ache, and now here I was in a crazy, quixotic gesture, swimming out to her to say goodbye.

  When I was so far out that it seemed I was halfway between the shore and the horizon, I stopped and bobbed in the undulating waves, treading water. When a swell raised me I could see my house in the distance, small as the stick figure picture of it I’d drawn on the commune window. When I sank in a trough, I saw nothing but constantly shifting light and dark patches of blue. Anaïs and I were just specks of carbon in this great expanse of water. This was what I’d wanted all along: to merge, to be with her, to be her.

  I had wanted to be Anaïs but could not. We had affinities, yes; both hypersensitive, dramatic, tending toward narcissism, wounded by our fathers. Because of those affinities I had used her to define myself, had measured myself in relation to her accomplishments and come up short. I would never be as beautiful, as graceful, as self-disciplined, as focused as she, nor as good a dissembler. Though she’d tried to tutor me, I would never learn to play the geisha with men. That difference alone meant I’d never enjoy a madcap, artistic life like hers, free from earning a living, free of draining responsibilities.

  Our differences went back to how we’d responded to our fathers’ abandonment at eleven. She’d expressed her grief directly, passionately, begging her father to stay, crying inconsolably for years. I had responded to my father’s abandonment, as to the news of her death, with alarm and anger but no tears. Anaïs lied to others, especially men, but her acceptance of her feelings made her truthful with herself. I had lied to myself in denying my feelings, hollering, “Good riddance!” when my father absconded. My smartass personality protected me then, but left me blindsided when Philip deserted me.

  The timber that still rammed my gut whenever I thought of Philip abruptly made me aware of my body, fatigued from treading water. I turned on my back and squeezed my eyelids to shut out the sun. Its light blazed brightly against my lids, like fire burning through film, like awareness burning through the dark. Anaïs had felt her feelings directly when she was eleven, but when I’d reread her accounts of her reunion with her father when she was twen
ty-nine, there was something off-key, an indirectness, a distance, the hypnotic poetry of trauma. In her published writings, Anaïs had presented herself as in control of her adult reunion with her father, but when I read more closely I saw that it was her father who had seduced her.

  He invited her to spend a week with him at a Mediterranean hotel and the first evening engaged her in seductive conversations about their twinship, the same eyes, hands, feet, the same Don Juanism. He pulled her into his mad Nietzschean fantasy that as artists they were above the rules that govern other people. It was he, the parent, who refused his role as protector; it was he who was the perpetrator.

  Yet it was she who took on responsibility, telling Renate that she had seduced him. Why? Because, as I now recognized in myself, bravado was more tolerable than the helplessness of grief. It had to have been especially so for an adult, married woman, whose need for her father’s love was so great that she’d been unable to deny him anything. She’d covered her shame with Sabina’s audacious cape—the persona of seductress far preferable to the role of devastated victim.

  Following her feelings had led Anaïs to the trauma of adult incest, whereas denying my feelings had separated and estranged me from myself and from men. We each paid, in different ways, for our fathers’ abandonment. She was my reverse reflection, the puzzle of a mirror reflected in a mirror, reflected in a mirror—the narcissist’s funhouse. As she had sought twinship with her father, I had sought twinship with her, sought a glorified version of myself in her, and therefore could not abide our differences. I had lauded her bigamy because it partook of the bravado I admired in myself, whereas I demonized her incest, because I could not find myself in it. Nor could I forgive her insane act of incest until, in writing this book, I could forgive my own psychological breakdown in Indiana. I could not forgive her being such a flawed mentor until I could forgive myself for losing myself in her. I could not forgive her helplessness at the end—spoon-fed, carried from bed to chair, terrified by old ghosts—until I forgave myself for turning from her then.