Black Swans: Stories

by Eve Babitz

Nowhere does it have a word that lies in the gutter weeping into that serious intensity of red-hot black days and nights of raging hell that my friend Proust and I mean by jealousy. Nor does my dictionary mention that curious aftereffect (common to all agony) whereby one morning it’s all gone; you wake up feeling just fine and realize you’ve painted your entire apartment black so that later on, to explain, you must remark uneasily, “All that, and when I saw him last week he was just a bald shrimp. God, jealousy sure is a mad dog from hell with rabies. I did the porch black, too.” Mother Nature blots out everything, and leaves only empty spaces in our past where pain once raged and jealousy tore through our souls. If we survive how it felt, what it tasted like. Few among us are brave enough for folly like that. Only artists, in fact, seem able to touch those memories, bringing evidence that indeed there does exist what my dictionary describes as a “mood” of jealousy.

If love and comfort are combined to mean a sort of ring of safety, then anything that endangers that safety, like a sister or brother or parents all dressed up to go out and leave us all alone, will clot our innocent, childish, valentine natures with murderous rages.

I don’t know what Freud could have been thinking when he used such a dainty word, “sibling,” for the razor-blade-in-the-heart feeling I got whenever the word “sister” was mentioned. Even today, though my sister

is one of my closest friends (despite her disfigured hand, not a pretty sight in a close friend), I can still feel this violence burning away, although what I mean by “sister” and who my actual sister is are two different things, thank heavens, at last.

The thing about jealousy that makes it so confusing is that it throws us out of civilization and beyond the bonds of humanity and allows us to believe that crimes like suicide and murder and spying are necessary. We can’t even tell where envy—which I always define as what one feels about success and money and material objects amassed by other people—leaves off and turns into jealousy, and where jealousy forgets itself and hardens icily into obsession. Is obsession born of jealousy still jealousy, or is it a new disease, a new “mood”? Is envy a common cold, jealousy a serious illness, and obsession a critical condition? Because jealousy sometimes seems like a critical condition . . . and then something can happen, a voice of reason can intercede, and the whole thing will vanish like the morning dew.

In our romantic lives, these moments of jealousy, which scorch our lover’s initials into our flesh and seem to brand us, often vanish into thin air sooner or later. But maybe, if we don’t cave in to them, they’ll vanish sooner, and we’ll be able sooner to try to describe what happened with phrases that fall apart in our

hands, meaningless descriptions in voices clouded with scraps of holocaust, memorized episodes that have no context unless you’re inside the story trying to live through it. Once you’re out, all there are are empty spaces strewn in the past where the pain was too great and red-hot jealousy tore through our rooms, or why else would we have painted them all black? Nothing remains, as we look back, but a smile, and “Oh, yes, one night I crouched under a window . . .” But it’s a window too dark to peer through, and you find yourself saying, “I never knew real jealousy. . . .” It elapses into long ago.

He was not remote, elevated, or windy enough for me; by God, I liked my men humiliating or at least impossible to get to—and with Brian, why before I even knew him, I was hurting his feelings, or could have if he’d had less class.

cliché that I was, I went back to his house for more demonstrations of demonism, squalor, and life without hope among the clinically depressed.

And fiction got through to me where facts had feared to tread.

I stood there, totally stunned, melted, marbleized in sweetness of memory and guilt for having allowed my own trivialities of romantic life to so overwhelm my common decency, my true lovers. The ones who loved me.

We live in a world where whoever sedates us with the most glamour and captures our imaginations with the greatest intensity becomes history.

And I thought Vicky was very brave, since if she didn’t like men and still liked sex, who else was left?

Just her presence made people want to be brilliant.

If all I had in life was someone who loved dancing slow, I’d be happy, really—there’s something about dancing slow in a crowded place; it’s like having sex in public.

It’s funny because we live in this place where it’s so easy to consummate flirtations, and it’s supposedly easy to get a divorce, but love, once it dyes our hearts purple, won’t go away. Especially the kind of love we used to feel when we were young, the kind we wish we could feel again for someone new.

I wanted to look up to and admire men, not be like Joan Didion, whose writing scared the hell out of most of the men I knew.

Joan Didion, who knew how to wear clothes, was too brilliant and great for anyone to write like and too skinny and sultry to look like. I thought if I couldn’t be Joan, then I’d have to be dowdy and/or crazy, like Virginia Woolf.