L.A. Woman. Eve Babitz

pulled her reading glasses out of her purse beside the couch and scrutinized Claude’s face with more objective detachment. I waited, not breathing. Of course, Claude’s black wavy hair from being French wouldn’t go against him. They all had black wavy hair back in those days, back when they were dancing and touring with Teretsky, marrying the wrong people. All the wrong people marrying each other had black wavy hair and the absolutely impossible men had the same kind of grin beaming ravenously out of Claude’s autographed eight-by-ten glossy. So surely Lola would save me and stay while I perilously endangered my future, wrecked the vacation, and threw away the possibility to travel someplace halfway decent and see a Real City – New York – finally, which all my life I’d been told I had to do. For a bloodthirsty smile like Claude’s, combined with how black his wavy hair was, threw the whole fucking East Coast into shadow. For compared with the trouble I could be in in Hollywood over the next month, all the evil companions I might fall in with in New York just paled. In fact that summer, if I’d been asked, everything paled by comparison to me then when I thought of going anyplace outside L.A. Just bothering to go someplace other than Santa Monica was incomprehensible when I could just wake up every morning at dawn, yank on my bathing suit still on the floor from the night before when I’d yanked it off, hurry down to Hollywood and Gower to catch the 91S bus down Hollywood Boulevard and then Santa Monica Boulevard to Beverly Hills and transfer to the 83 going straight out to the beach until finally there I’d be, at 8:00 A.M. or so, able to feel the cool sand get warm as the morning sun glazed over the tops of the palm trees up on the palisades while waves of the ocean crashed down day after day so anyone could throw himself into the tides and bodysurf throughout eternity.

      “Your poor mother,” Lola sighed, resigned.

      “She said I had no one to stay with,” I said, determined. “She has to let me. If you’re here, she has to.”

      “Well,” Lola said, “it couldn’t hurt Luther to know I can stay away for a month. But you tell your mother. It has to be okay with her, you know? Gee, I never imagined I’d be staying here with you a whole month – and in the same neighborhood as me when I was growing up. You know, our old house isn’t far from here.”

      “Oh, Lola, thank God you’ve come,” I cried, although I’d known something had to save me – of course, I never would have dreamed someone as good as Lola, my parents’ only halfway-up-to-date friend from the olden days, would be part of the deal.

      I mean in those days, as far as I was concerned, all the Trotskyites and Stalinists and Republicans and Democrats and anyone else wearing a suit on the cover of Time magazine because of politics could go jump in a lake, and yet somehow, in the very midst of it all, there stood Lola. Picketing. Great legs, a figure which, when I was seventeen, I watched men drive into telephone poles over, a bizarre use of earrings, an altogether Cleopatra-girl slink to every move in her whole body, a demonically objective attitude about sizing things up and speaking her findings with a voice touched with nothing more than a glow of detached amusement over details she’d recount, laying to waste listeners, speechless when she told them, “Oh, didn’t you know, she and her father bathe together. How old do you think she is? Thirty-seven. The mother, you know, she died when the girl was only a child. No one, I guess, wanted to tell him – or her – I mean bathing! Together. Or am I too old-fashioned?”

      But of course she had never been old-fashioned enough to most of the people my father knew when political criteria were his pride and joy, although oddly enough in the end she was the only one we ever really wanted to see after all. Because old-fashioned she never became.

      Chapter Two

      AND BY THE TIME I saw her the summer I was forty she still really hadn’t seemed to become old. There she was – Lola – in this slinky turtleneck paisley jersey dress at seventy-two, leaving cars crashed into loud accidents commemorating her visits. Imagining how she once must have exploded and hissed and crushed through piles of men back when she was twenty-three or seventeen isn’t that difficult. Seen from behind, Lola still makes seventeen seem possible. It’s just when she turns around and speaks German like her mother that you can guess she’s nearly fifty and still be only twenty years off. From behind, you could make a mistake of half a century. The lynxy little pout in her walk, the elbows so trimly neatened at her sides, the self-consciousness in her feet like a girl unused to such high heels yet – from behind she could easily be mistaken for a teenager out for danger, any kind of danger she can find. Lola from behind looks very capable of stirring up trouble, trouble like nobody ever hoped to see.

      Trouble was Lola’s middle essence.

      It kept her back straight and her chin high and her expectations prepared for everything, for fathers and daughters who were thirty-seven no matter what they did in bathtubs.

      At least everything except Sam.

      Of course so far the worst person in Lola’s milieu was Lola herself and it seemed to her, perhaps, that she had to do all the heartbreaks in town and invent everything herself.

      Whereas once she met Sam Glanzrock, she could relax.

      Someone who didn’t even try and hide his ravenous appetites by smiling, not a single smile did he smile for a camera in all those years, not even so much as a bloodthirsty veiled transparent trick smile.

      All that remains of same from Lola’s photographs of those days is a weird suspicion. Not anything you would know was wrong.

      It was just that Sam’s hair was light brown, curling light brown hair.

      He hadn’t even bothered to hide under black wavy hair like in those days they all had. That’s how much trouble Sam was.

      (But I would know by the summer I was twenty-three when I met Jim what it was like having to be the one who breaks hearts, who causes trouble, who invents everything and is the worst, myself – but then anyone who saw Jim that night would have realized that I was looking for trouble myself.

      “Let’s go,” I said, “fast.”

      “Uhhhhhh . . . where?”

      “To my place, now – quickly, let’s go now.” Of course, anyone who saw me that night and had taken one look at Jim would have known I was safely aboard a raft heading over Niagara Falls. That night I was twenty-three and a daughter of Hollywood, alive with groupie fervor, wanting to fuck my way through rock’n’roll and drink tequila and take uppers and downers, keeping joints rolled and lit, a regular customer at the clap clinic, a groupie prowling the Sunset Strip, prowling the nights of summer, trying to find someone who promised I should, if I didn’t stay away, only run into trouble, endangering my life.)

      “How beautiful,” Lola remarked, dragging out the vowels in beauty so that it lingered in my ears. “How damn well fucking beautiful this man’s face is. And what a man, too. Isn’t that marvelous how he still is a man? A man with that hair and a face – and so beautiful – but there’s no doubt in my mind that he’s heterosexual, not one.”

      We stood looking at his photograph like we were always looking at photographs when I visited Lola in San Francisco, and he gazed back – a gaze that meant nothing but trouble. And Jim gazed back at us – only by then I was thirty and he was dead.

      “Didn’t he . . .?” she asked.

      “In Paris,” I said. “Too.”

      “How interesting,” she said pleasantly, turning to a photograph of me when I was ten. “Oh, look,” she cried, “you, when you were still a virgin. To think, I actually knew you when you were seventeen. What was the name of your boyfriend then?”

      “Claude,” I said, proud I remembered.

      Chapter Three

      “YOUR POOR MOTHER,” Lola would remark like a lament throughout the month she stayed with me. Her voice trying to sound shocked but managing only to well up with detached amazement and then vaporize into a mist of nostalgia from the days when Rudolph Valentino’s flaring