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.