Sex & Rage. Eve Babitz

was wearing white jeans and a white Mexican blouse with a big pink silk rose pinned to it. She had only brought very little with her; she knew someone would loan her a surfboard.

      The air felt funny when she landed, humid and ominous. They said a hurricane was on its way and that all inter-island planes for Maui were canceled.

      In the Honolulu airport Jacaranda bumped into Shelby Coryell, her old boyfriend from the beach. He was in the airport to pick up some air freight. He’d graduated from Chouinard Art Institute and, she’d been told, had gone to the islands for a two-week vacation the year before but had never come home. He was still out in the water in Hawaii.

      “I’m living with a girl on the North Shore,” he said, “at Sunset Beach.”

      “Oh,” she said.

      How dare he live with someone, she thought as they drove off to Shelby’s motel. She had always planned that Shelby would end up as hers. She decided to pull herself together and take him home to L.A. where he belonged, but when she got to his motel, she went for a walk on Sunset Beach, and there was Gilbert Wood.

      In the hurricane, while everyone was home drinking rum and listening to ham radios about rooftops and towns being lifted out to sea, Gilbert Wood was surfing.

      The waves were fifteen feet high and roared like lions and volcanoes. Gilbert Wood just crouched farther down on his surfboard and flattened his feet more. His left side, the side parallel to the waves, tilted slightly to enable him to drag his hand along inside the water, which left a white trail behind him the way his surfboard did, two white trails of foam and folly. He used his hand to practically confound the ocean, the day, and the hurricane. He was like a great beauty reaching for a cigarette in an officers’ club.

      And he was a great danger. He had ashy-colored hair, and in profile one side of his face was vicious. His mouth looked as though he’d just been hit with the news that he had a week to live and he didn’t care.

      Gilbert was an actor; he knew every last detail perfectly, of how beautiful he was. He was vain about danger, for hurricanes don’t care if one is an actor or beautiful.

      •

      ON THE PLANE going back to L.A., Gilbert said, “Have you met Max yet?”

      “Max who?” she asked.

      Gilbert did two things that impressed her. One was to bite the back of her neck with his sharp teeth so that time stood still. The other was to introduce her to Max.

Max

      Once Max noticed her, the only truth was Max’s truth.

      At Gilbert’s every morning at seven, the phone would ring. It would be Max. The first time this happened, Gilbert talked for a whole hour, laughing away throughout. Jacaranda asked, “Who was that at this hour?”

      “Oh, just Max,” Gilbert said, closing back up into his vain and dangerous self. There they were, in Gilbert’s apartment—the place she and Colman had always gone to before she left West Hollywood forever.

      “Max?”

      “Just some fag I met at Jerry Getz’s opening,” Gilbert said.

      Max noticed Jacaranda a whole month before she noticed him. She didn’t know that Max was bristling with curiosity over her affair with Gilbert, but it was, in fact, Max’s intense desire to uncover Gilbert’s secrets that kept Gilbert so wrapped up in Jacaranda. Before Max showed up, she and Gilbert would not have lasted together more than two days after they had returned from Oahu, and now it had dragged on for a month, with Gilbert insisting Jacaranda come over every night, and Jacaranda doing what Gilbert said, because he was so dangerous and there was something mysterious going on that she couldn’t figure out. She’d never have guessed it was just Max.

      “I invited Max up for coffee,” Gilbert announced one Sunday morning. Up until this point, it didn’t seem as though she was debauched at all, but the truth was that while she believed in being a washed-up piece of driftwood on the shore, she also believed in bold adventuresses, cigarettes, and suffered from one too many of anything. It was one of those “Oh, no, I couldn’t have” mornings for her again—not that Gilbert ever noticed. (One of the ways Gilbert cramped her style was by not noticing anything.)

      “You invited him up for coffee?” Jacaranda asked.

      “He wanted to meet you,” Gilbert said.

      “Me?” she asked.

      “He’s here,” Gilbert said.

      She looked at herself in the mirror. She looked a picture of health.

      Then she heard him, Max.

      MAX WAS A carburetor backfire in the driveway, an old green Jaguar with wooden paneling inside, and a dog named Diogenes. (Jacaranda thought, Diogenes! Really!) He emerged out of the Jaguar like a tall drink of water, like Cooper in Morocco; all he needed was a palm frond and a straw fan and he’d be complete. But he wasn’t in the French Foreign Legion and he, by no means, told the limpid, careless innocent truth the way it was spoken by Gary Cooper (because Cooper was too lazy to do otherwise). Max’s truth was sharpened by the sportsman honing of an artist whittler; like that Balinese carver’s reply to the question about Art, “I just do everything as well as I can,” Max just did truth as well as he could—he turned truth into a game, an art, when most others would just let truth pass by.

      He was about six feet three and he had bright golden hair, a golden mustache, and eyes that reminded Jacaranda of those improved postcard skies. His face was lean and his mouth was pale, his teeth were vampiric—a tiny touch too long, but not from age. His neck was a slender Lucas Cranach neck and his body was slender; every move he made was like spring water, clear and salt-free. He wore white tennis shoes, white jeans, a white cotton shirt, and a red bandanna. Max saw her staring at him from inside Gilbert’s window and, with one simple smiling motion, he bowed.

      “You’re here! Jacaranda Leven, right?” he drawled. (Oh—but a high-class sort of Savannah drawl from before Georgia was marched through, a drawl hardly extant in this world of redneck sentiments.) “I’ve heard so much about you.”

      Jacaranda said, “Oh . . . and I so little of you.”

      “Gilbert’s a fine man,” Max said, “but I’m afraid that boy’s a little short on character assessment.”

      Jacaranda should have dumped Gilbert’s “character assessment” of Max out the window, but instead she was thinking how sad it was that Max was a “fag” and what a pity it was that she would never be able to seduce him. He was so beautiful and that bow had made her eyes go dry, she’d forgotten to blink for so long. Perhaps what kept Jacaranda thinking Max was a fag was that there could be no other reason but a sexual one, in her opinion, for anyone at all to like Gilbert. He was without redeeming social value except for sex—Gilbert with his mean ash-green eyes and his monosyllabic replies and his rudimentary manly desires to climb Mount Everest and swim the Dardanelles.

      Instead of ignoring Gilbert’s “just Max” character assessment, Jacaranda resigned herself to Max being a fag. Maybe it was because she’d never tried to think what being a fag meant and what Gilbert’s idea of a fag could be. Gilbert might regard the whole world as a panorama of worthless rubble, peopled by macabre perverts and Cro-Magnon women, from the way he spoke of them. But once she resigned herself to Max being a fag, she saw Oscar Wilde in every move he made.

      Or maybe it was because she had never met a man who was passionate about elegance. What went on between men and women was based on a kind of enraged foundation that to Jacaranda could only be transcended through clashes-by-night sex. One of the things that made her laugh so much around Colman was the ridiculous distance between his grim dislike of his wife (and Jacaranda too) and his feelings that he was a prisoner of sex—and his love of his innocent lust. It was all balance. But then, she already knew that from surfing.

      As Max sat there, his eyes occasionally landing on Gilbert, who was talking on the phone