Black Swans: Stories

by Eve Babitz

It was paradise, but then, no one was surprised. Didn’t we all migrate here to assuage our conscience with avocados and sunshine?

It’s only temporary: you either die, or get better. —Something we used to say about life in general, feeling sophisticated and amusing in bars, back in the days when we thought how you behaved was the fault of other people.

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.

Is obsession born of jealousy still jealousy, or is it a new disease, a new “mood”?

it sounded as if it was hard enough to do that it was probably good for you.

I found myself wondering if I was not like Proust’s Duchesse de Guermantes, who, when her dearest friend from the past, Swann, comes to tell her he’s dying of TB, brushes what he says aside as though unable to hear, and she says something like, “If only I could find the right shoes, I’d be able to go to this party I’m already late for.”

That strange mixture that’s always been a major part of Hollywood—self-enchantment mingled with the ever-present fear of total disaster (earthquakes, fires, random murders)—lies beneath the physical reality of Hollywood, which sometimes looks too good to be true, as though we must have sold our souls to the devil for all those swimming pools and orange trees and young hopefuls basking in the sun.

And there was something in the voices of the men in the L.A.P.D. that was so full of being victimized, they sounded like movie stars giving interviews about not being able to go anywhere without being asked for autographs.

and I turned into mush, the way I always do, if someone I love because they’re beautiful suddenly looks as if they’re taking charge.

when he stretched, every muscle in his back sang.

Ojai, where everything was so green that it looked, as someone had described things in the old days, as if “it could come off in your hands.”

men who could dance couldn’t talk, and men who could talk, hated dancing.

By then, the jacaranda flowers had all fallen and squashed onto the streets in sticky mush, no longer turning the town lavender with clouds, but still they’d be there again next May and so would I.

Like heat in a foreign country, a foreign language—that’s the kind of heat it is.”

I thought one day we’d . . . but we never did, and like most men I have lingering around the edges of my invisible boundaries, what we do is exchange books and new restaurants.

native Californians, the kind who are never disillusioned by L.A. because it’s always what we expect. It’s life that’s the crusher.

he was exactly what I needed and was becoming what I wanted very quickly. (Usually the two are so far apart.)

The next morning he didn’t call or come by with roses, but that was okay, I hated him until around noon.