Eve Babitz

he dared you not to laugh with him. He dared you to despair. He dared you to insist that there was no dawn, that all there was was darkness, that there was no silver lining, that the heart didn’t grow fonder by absence. He dared you to believe you were going to die—when you at that moment knew, just as he did, that you were immortal, you were among the gods.

JACARANDA couldn’t quite remember when it was that she had glided from the banks of the Nile onto the barge. Perhaps because even that first night nothing had looked very different from the rest of the world. Well, of course, things were a little finer at Max’s, better silverware. Ease.

Bungalow Mornings

The parties would last till 2 or 3 a.m. The girls would tempt Etienne and he’d choose one, perhaps a pretty little laughing blonde he had besieged with dozens of roses, color TVs, and even diamond stud earrings—anything her little heart desired. They were high in Trousdale, hanging above L.A. with the jasmine. Although oleanders overgrew the gates, Etienne’s oleanders were pink, not white. At about midnight, suddenly, the whole thing would become too boring and Etienne would start spewing insults at the little blonde. Or, worse yet, forget her and start fresh on some new woman who crossed his path.

Jacaranda, of course, being in love with Max, didn’t care too much about Etienne’s intentions (except it wasn’t nice, what he’d said to April, so before that evening was finished Jacaranda poured pineapple juice all over his fresh cream silk suit). Since Jacaranda cared so little about what Etienne was doing, she usually wound up being the one with whom Etienne slept. By two or three o’clock, Jacaranda would be the only unpassed-out woman extant, and she, Max, and Etienne would have a nightcap and discuss the evening, until one of them was sent home in a Rolls-Royce limousine—Max.

Jacaranda kept muddling through, able to arise each morning looking just slightly tangled and confused, a look that was almost cute, especially when she frowned and moaned, “Oh, God! Oh, no. Oh, I couldn’t have!”

As for Etienne, he seemed pleased with Jacaranda’s bravado. It was as though the more pasty-faced and impossible she became with each passing month, the more it pleased him watching her drunkenly delude herself that she was sailing along, walking on water. Jacaranda’s kind of foolhardy determination made Etienne’s eyes grow madly hot. There was something in Etienne that made him sympathetic to self-destruction of all kinds, for he would have gladly blown himself to smithereens for fun, if only it wouldn’t have interfered so permanently with his plans.

Aboard the barge there were a few things you could commit which earned the title “sin.” Fucking children, shooting anything up, killing someone, killing someone and not remembering, butchering property or animals or love, being lobotomized, stealing, wrecking art, committing suicide or enjoining someone to commit suicide, giving some rare case of V.D. to “every one” of the “dear friends” in the entire world’s linkup, blowing up a church, selling arms to heinous monsters, burning down a National Park—none of these things could be seriously considered by those aboard the barge as a sin; “unfortunate timing” perhaps, or, at worst, “a deplorable misjudgment,” but “sin? My dear, what shall you have to drink? Are you going to Castelli for the opening? I can’t decide what to wear, can you?”

One day, a woman friend of hers who was a famous writer wrote to an editor of a very prestigious magazine and told him about Jacaranda, who’d written this little tour de force about learning to surf. Jacaranda sent in the piece. The man sent her a check for $250. The piece was published. It was given the magazine’s center-fold spread with lots of white around it. People began calling her, saying, “I didn’t know you could write.”

That was another sin.

She could get published in a sound journal that meant business and didn’t publish fly-by-nights. She was twenty-eight. It was time for her to O.D., not get published.

Etienne, being a man of action, opened the door of his Silver Cloud, sat her down next to him—just the two of them alone—and said: “Don’t write.”

Max, trying to keep his banner of truth before him, said, “You should write poetry; you have a gifted ear for language. You shouldn’t write prose or anything that is all tarted up with ‘ideas’ and ‘facts.’”

The women, one by one, took her into the bedrooms of parties and said, “Don’t write, darling. It’s not nice.”

Anyway, writers all had drinking problems in the twentieth century, and once she got the $1,080 check, she was obviously a writer and it was obviously the twentieth century, so of course she had a drinking problem.

She discovered what most writers insist is true nowadays, which is that they can only write for three hours a day at the most, so what else is there to do but drink?

“And then, once you get a job, you can get your own apartment and own car and own cute little kitten,” Jacaranda went on.

“But what’ll I do before then?” Sunrise said, worried.

“What any other girl with no money does,” Jacaranda said.

“Oh, but hooking, I don’t know . . .”

“Call your mother.”

“My mother?” Sunrise cried. “I haven’t even seen her in fifteen years.”

Jacaranda felt the warmth of Janet Wilton’s tantalizing behind-the-scenes manipulation. She felt that between Wally Moss and Janet, where she sat right then, she was perfectly safe. And if she could only get Shelby in with her, she’d be safe and happy.

All along, since just before she’d come to New York, she’d promised herself that the moment she set foot on the plane back to L.A., she’d order three brandies and get herself back to normal. But after the tea at Sonia’s and New York in general, she was afraid she’d miss something if she wasn’t careful. She’d missed so much already.

All her life she’d skated along making most people think that she was not really there and would never be able to remember what she saw, or put it together afterward even if she did. But now people who had read her pieces were careful not to leak any secrets that weren’t souped up. People would take her aside when she first got to parties to tell her they’d just had an abortion, were writing a screenplay about it, and to ask whom did she think they ought to get to direct.

Jacaranda liked it a lot better when people thought she was Shelby’s girlfriend or some fly-by-night art groupie. The more someone liked her writing, the fewer clothes she felt she had on.