Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A.

by Eve Babitz

What I want to do is, one Saturday, we’ll wrap all our troubles in dreams and get in the car (you drive), and I’ll take you on my glorious Weekend in the wilds of Kern County.

When night falls we’ll go to a Basque restaurant, stuff ourselves, and go dancing at The Blackboard. And in the morning we’ll have brunch at the Bakersfield Inn, where tons of biscuits and gravy and chicken and scrambled eggs and bacon and just everything including champagne is only about five dollars. We’ll have fun.

In the back of my mind I thought, Anytime I want, I can forsake this dinner party and jump into real life.

I think it was around this guy that I began to wonder if anything was ever going to be nice again. He never understood anything I said.

It’s embarrassing if you love L.A.

cheerful shipshape vitality of the north violates my spirit and I long for vast sprawls, smog, and luke nights: L.A. It is where I work best, where I can live, oblivious to physical reality.

Twilight comes and I find I’m still sprawled out on my bed looking out the window, and the phone rings.

“I’m just sort of empty.” “Down?” “Well . . . maybe . .

“Yes,” I say, “. . . maybe tomorrow I’ll get started on something.” “Your voice sounds so . . . different.” “It’s O.K.,” I tell him. “Don’t worry.” “I miss you,” he says, with ceremony.

But all that work is his secret, not mine. Mine is looking out the window.

And perhaps the dream could have gone on unbroken, except that they never do.

He would be badly hurt but linger on,

I don’t really know if it was the flimsies or the dinner but I’ve often noticed that there is a moment when a man develops enough confidence and ease in a relationship to bore you to death.

Oh god, I said to myself. I shouldn’t have said anything. I just should have shut up and gone home and hoped he’d die on the soap and get better in real life. I never should have made him dinner.

“What have you been doing?” he said. “Oh . . . You know . . .” I said. I couldn’t say basketball.

I shift my eyes to the window again and outside to the patio where an orange-and-brown striped kitty has just leapt from a branch to the ground. I wonder if . . . (one of the tennis actors slides me a look) . . . I wonder if I’ll ever be able to have what I like or if my tastes are too various to be sustained by one of anything. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to get my big huge basketball player back like he was before. Or are all my occasional romances to fall to the ground after a month or so, like the jacaranda flowers?

You can care or not care at a baseball game, just so long as you’re inside the gates. You can casually chat with your friend and know that if anything happens you won’t miss it for the crowd will alert you and carry you through.

This is so cute i love sports

Baseball is easy to fathom, not like football, which people explain to me at great length and I understand for one brief moment before it all falls apart in my brain and looks like an ominous calculus problem.

Anyway, she helped me in a strange sort of a way when I was really down, down, down. And we have to stick together

I knew what she meant. Unless one is in the exact right mood, it’s impossible. Smoking has been so glamorous for so long, all those matches, those pauses, the lipstick on the tips—the smoke itself curling its casual way through the most nerve-wracking moments.

Women are prepared to suffer for love; it’s written into their birth certificates.

Trapped. There was no place to go but up.

truly awful thing about success is that it’s held up all those years as the thing that would make everything all right. And the only thing that makes things even slightly bearable is a friend who knows what you’re talking about.

God what a night. I was so glad you were home, standing up in all that wind while everyone else was blowing across the streets like tumble-weeds. I wonder if you wish you hadn’t been there, with the future looming up in such utter chaos before us. And meanwhile, the night was old and you were beautiful.

For some reason, telling each other about what we’d been doing made me and my sister laugh so hard we had to pull off the road. Joy tingled through my eyes when I saw us glide past the L.A. city limits. Oh god, I thought, home.

I decided enough was enough, I would be satisfied with just the sunsets in Los Angeles and forget finding the someone I didn’t mind. I had a collection of lovers to keep me warm and my friendships with women, who always fascinated me by their wit, bravery, and resourcefulness, and who never told you the same story twice.

I’d always gone everywhere alone. Being places alone makes you think. Being there with someone makes you hounded by details, like what time the other person wants to leave; details that drain energy when you are trying to discover the core of an event.

finally William put aside his romantic dreams about me, the way I’d abandoned mine the afternoon I came home from San Francisco for the very last time. The very last time. And everything would have stayed that way, too, if it hadn’t been for the sirocco, even though I hate blaming things on the weather.

If you had your choice of sleeping with a beautiful soft creature or a large hard one, which would you pick? I mean, if they both had the same amount of money?

If only it would rain—just rain.

The rain is freedom;

playing bridge, gossiping, and wondering what’s for dinner. I spent six months in Italy and it rained for five of them and oh! it was just heaven.

“I don’t like great big parties,” I said. “I like lying down with you.”

This cloud, I prayed, has simply got to have a silver lining. • The silver lining was rain. A sudden, mistaken rain that came all at once in the middle of the following Thursday, vanishing after five minutes upon noticing its blunder. No clouds, seventy-five degrees, no reason, but it rained.

you give everyone just what they want and then you get sad and bland . . . I used to wonder why you dressed the way you did—one minute I see you in those old shirts and that scarf! . . . and the next you’re at some art thing and I see women look at you when you don’t know it and they’re all wondering how in the hell you did it. You glow.”

it was going to be all right. In fact, it might even be funny.

It became clear to me that beauty has nothing to do with fashion, that love can conquer anything, sex is art, and let’s see . . . hope springs eternal. I love the rain.

I felt like a floppy, prize-winning iris, content to be an iris, all lavender and silken, the kind they call True Blue.

that a girlhood beside the Pacific Ocean makes one accept perfection like arms and legs, without getting all tarred up. Simple tricks like rain are what get me.

I fell in love with Shawn more when he picked up the check for breakfast and insisted that it all was on him. That’s when I fell in love with him, I remember now perfectly.

But even in L.A. it has to rain sometimes. It would never snow, it would never ever be so cold as to throw a blizzard on us.

Since both David and you promised to supply me with your own personal versions of this adventure, I’ve been expecting at least something. But neither of you has come up with a single morsel.

I was hers forever.

Shawn came up behind me and rested his chin on my shoulder and his palms on either side of me on the sill and it was absolutely silent and perfect, and I was beginning to feel the way you must on a long ocean voyage with Melvillean empty spaces.

I loved hearing Nikki laugh; I’d forgotten.

She and Shawn gossiped about people they’d known who died in accidents. I knew no one like that. All my friends died on purpose.

like it here. I never get to lie in the sun and it’s what I like to do best.”

I was a difficult, mean bitch, whose cat, it was rumored, bit men. (And whose cat did.)

he took my suddenly small darling hand in his huge rough one and it was just like love. It was peaceful. I was not used to things being peaceful with a man.

“We walked in the rain together when we were girls,” Jo said dreamily. “Nothing will ever replace that.”