Black Swans: Stories

by Eve Babitz

To this day I can remember how surprised I was when I realized she was actually on fire and that it hurt and that I hadn’t meant to hurt her, I’d only meant to dispose of her permanently.

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.

Extreme weariness can make you rise above a lot of things that youthful exuberance would have tossed one into headlong, like shooting the rapids over Niagara Falls.

Anything difficult, as far as I’ve been able to determine, seems to work, and anything easy is just kidding yourself.

I told her, “Deep down, he’s really shallow.” “Deep down,” she laughed, “we’re all a little shallow.” “But he’s not kidding,” I insisted. And he wasn’t. Deep down he was seriously shallow.

A lot of men had lewd conversations about Emily because they were so afraid of her.

In the balm of those sunshine days, in a land where winter never raises ugly questions about survival and canning vegetables, fun was all the truth we needed.

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.”

I tried to be depressed about living in a honeysuckle-covered bungalow at the foot of the HOLLYWOOD sign, with tons of arty friends and lovers for glamour and excitement. But I kept forgetting that I was supposed to be miserable, kicked around, and bored. As long as I could go bodysurfing in Santa Monica and get tan enough to attract adorable men, I was too distracted to be world-weary and spiritually bereft.

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

“Well, in those days we thought we’d live forever. We thought the more we had to regret, the better. Besides, we didn’t believe death applied to us personally.”