Black Swans: Stories

by Eve Babitz

serious about writing but also serious about parties, dresses, love affairs, and gossip;

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.

Sometimes I think that jealousy, like skiing, is only for those with enough youthful stamina and energy to endure it.

But to be corrupt, you must once have been innocent—and I guess some people never were.

Emily is still in love with him and insists he couldn’t have dyed his hair, that it’s just a rinse. “It’ll wash out,” she says, determined to think he’s wonderful. And through her eyes, it might be true. Ever since she lost all that weight when they broke up, she has just stayed this Daisy Miller virgin, waiting for him to come home from the stupid winter madness.

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

“Don’t spend any time at all,” she said, “with people who don’t love you. If you find yourself being attracted across a crowded room, leave.” “Who will I see, then?” I wondered.

He has lots of future to look forward to. And he has Brian’s eyes, casing the horizon for fun.

What Hollywood seemed to the rest of the world (as opposed to what Hollywood actually was) has been the result of a tornado of fabrication. As George Orwell said, “Fiction is history that didn’t happen and history is fiction that did.”

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.

I figured I’d have to be an artist because, unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how to be bored, since I was always much too elated to imagine despair, no matter how doubtful my love life seemed to others.

By the time I got to that café in Cannes, the reasons that American girls used to go to Europe (to seek refinement, art, and deeper meaning to their lives) had changed. I mean, the Louvre is great, but how ya gonna keep them in Gay Paree after they’ve seen Gunfight at the O.K. Corral? Let alone Gone With the Wind.

I felt like a person who’d mistaken a mirage for an oasis, as if each of the counts had been cruelly transformed into “Greetings from the Land That Time Forgot!”

“it’s just so hard to believe that once there was a time, you know, back in the early seventies when I actually thought we’d won. I mean, I thought our side was so right, we could never lose again.” “But we were still in Vietnam,” he said, “even so.”

“It’s corny. I miss those corny movies sometimes, the kind you just eat popcorn and it’s all happening for you.”

“And as my old friend Irene Kamp used to quote some French guy who said, ‘Everything will work out, but badly.’ I’ve always known everything could fall apart at a moment’s notice, ever since Walter left—my old boyfriend who used to live at the Château. I’ve always tried to cultivate a disillusioned and world-weary attitude to counteract my rude streak of optimism, which gets in the way of reality. Not that anything works.”

Of the nine million Harlequin Romance and Silhouette Ecstasy books for women today, sold and read by the ton, no hero appears whose primary quality isn’t arrogance. If any man appears at first helpful, cheerful, and polite, he’s the villain. The man who at first appears hopelessly mean and insensitive, he’s the hero. It’s cornography. Margaret Mitchell’s inspiration for Rhett Butler was Valentino in that tango. It’s a twentieth-century malaise. In pornography women are all sluts; in cornography, which women read to get hot the same way, men are all scornful monsters who, three pages before the end, turn out to have been misunderstood and really quite rich, kind, and sweet. I understand that married women who read these books have a far better sex life than married women who don’t, which in my opinion is what’s wrong with being married.

I met Wally in 1971—the year I realized that if I kept on being a free-lance artist doing album covers, I was going to either starve or, worse yet, have to get married. (Getting a job didn’t occur to me.)