Black Swans: Stories

by Eve Babitz

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.

is difficult to tell any story about jealousy without the endings falling apart. Even the simplest tales—where one day you can’t remember what it was, exactly, that made you go to all that trouble over a skunk like that—don’t have the right ending.

Children, as we all remember, are the ones most impaled on the sharp recognition 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.

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

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.

It would almost look corrupt, except to be corrupt you have to have once not been, and nobody in this place was ever that.

I remember the day they met. It was raining in May at this May Day solidarity beatnik party in West Hollywood, with lots of Miles Davis and lots of people who were going to OD or knew someone who recently had.

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.

“Where does your money come from?” an innocent once inquired. “The bank,” Brian explained.

He took me upstairs to the wing of death, where three black full-time nurses, who’d been this woman’s guardians for the last few years in her own house, feeding her, taking her to the bathroom, sitting beside her in the night and day, were—Bee, Angie, and Joanna, standing over the dying woman, their hands fluttering darkly over her body—over her torso and face—mumbling, crooning prayer words—brushing against her like little ocean waves, ceaselessly, as though helping her soul to depart; it was as though through their flutter of black hands, her soul could free itself of her body, and it was a terrible mixture of truth, beauty, and intimacy. “My God,” I said, looking into his sharp green eyes. “This is how you help people die,” he said.

Such a perishing disease, a disease made out of fear that blew up the dimensions so that death itself was not a noble answer, but merely added insult to injury. Merely more humiliation.

So a lot of Hollywood architecture seems to have been designed to look good in a photograph rather than to keep out the rain.

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.

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.

Hollywood is a fiction that happened, a tornado of fabrication, a comedy of publicity. It’s as tenuous today as it’s always been, but it’s still standing. Whatever it is, it’s not over. Not yet.

I think one of the reasons it seemed in the seventies that we couldn’t lose was Watergate. There was Nixon, this man my father had been insisting was a crook for so long, who actually was a crook. And then we were getting rid of Nixon and were getting out of Vietnam and women could have abortions and the CIA was found to have illegally kept records on three hundred thousand citizens. It seemed a shoo-in that we’d won. And if we’d only had a dashing leader, we might have. But no, all the people who could have inspired us dumped girlfriends like Mary Jo Kopechne into ponds. If ever a country was ready to get rolling and be good, I thought it was us, then. But did this happen? No. Charisma on the wrong side happened. People on our side who could have kept their eye on the ball, got sidetracked. “White backlash” happened.

Haily looked like a smudged charcoal drawing of Kate done by someone with no talent.

where I grew up we believed there was such a thing as selling out and that those interested in the arts shouldn’t do it.

The sun was beginning to set, we’d been there so long with me trying to make clear what I thought was a tragedy, when Kate Lake had beauty, friends, a red-hot husband, a beautiful child, and a boundless future, like Marco Polo setting out. And except for the weird fact that someone nasty from New York could mistake her for a “Hollywood wife,” nobody who knew her thought of her that way because we didn’t think of Hollywood that way, that it was something to be sneered at.

‘Everything will work out, but badly.’

Architecturally, L.A. is a lot like epilepsy these days, full of grand malls and petit ones, enough to make you want to stay home or only go anywhere before anything opens.

I have found that malls are an acquired taste, like anchovies, and just as I’m beginning to think they’re not that bad, they’ve become something of the past.

Down in Buenos Aires, where white slave traders really did exist and were often Jewish, girls—often Jewish but also Italian and Spanish—were taken from their homes or the streets and hustled into bordellos, in a seaport town where lots of sailors brought lots of business and where there was lots of time to learn very complicated steps. Stravinsky wrote the tango in L’Histoire du Soldat in 1918; the high society in New York was frequenting low society, where people tangoed starting in 1913 to 1915, mingling with the hoi polloi. It was a ribbon through that time, tango, the way blues became later—the blues for white girls trapped in whorehouses who could never escape. And had lots of time to learn impossible steps.

Hating your partner was not a hindrance in tango.

In Argentina, of course, men are such brutes they brag about beating their lovers, but this is unfashionable talk in L.A. these days, we being the advanced people we are and women having so little sense of humor about black eyes.