Sex & Rage. Eve Babitz

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ the days of her childhood, she was formally educated in three city schools where she mostly sat drawing pictures of Frederick’s of Hollywood models dressed in comic-book high boots and masks, with garter belts, knives, and whips, with long wavy blond hair down to their waists in the back, cleavage in the front, and beauty marks dotting to the left of their left eyes. She had not been raised in any religion, though she assumed she was Jewish. She found matzah hidden underneath her grandparents’ brocaded satin couch cushions, over at their West Los Angeles house every Passover. She really believed that the great religions of the world so far had come into being before anyone had grown up by the ocean. She believed in the ocean. Jacaranda believed that the ocean was a giant lullaby god who could be seduced into seeing things her way and could bring forth great waves. “Great waves, great waves, great waves,” Jacaranda used to chant on bland days. On days when there were great waves, she would in silence bow her head toward the sea and thank it. She would talk to the water, implore it to hotten up. When the surf was hot, everything reached a state of hurling glory and perfect balance between her body and the tides and eternity. “You children who’ve grown up in California,” she was often told, “you don’t know what life is. One day you’re going to run into a brick wall.”

      “Like what?” she asked. “Snow?”

      Jacaranda spent the first summer after graduating from high school custom-painting surfboards for twenty-five dollars apiece in her parents’ garage and bought a new old ’59 Plymouth station wagon.

      By the time she got out of Santa Monica High School, she was a spare figure out on the beach wearing torn blue shorts or a torn blue bikini. From afar, she looked as if she’d washed up on the shore, a piece of driftwood with blond seaweed caught at one end. She had calcium deposits on her knees and on the tops of her feet that were caused by the pressure of paddling huge older boards out into the ocean. (These bumps were called “surf bumps” and even the scientists down at the Scripps Institute in La Jolla didn’t know exactly what they were.) From far away, she looked like all the other girls her age who were growing up near the water.

      Up close, her expression—when she wasn’t smiling—gave people the impression that she was brand-new—a child, almost. When she smiled, her perfect white teeth slashed the air with sudden beauty, giving her a glow of confidence that smacked of rude invincibility. (“Are those teeth real?” was the common question.) Her bangs were too long (down to her nose), making her eyes difficult to notice. (She’d always wished they’d been blue—blue the color of improved skies on postcards.)

      Mae Leven used to watch Jacaranda and April come in from the beach at sunset, with their hair tangled and salty and their taut arms and legs dragging sand into the house behind them, and she’d coo, “Oh, there you are. My two string beans.”

      By the time Jacaranda was eighteen, she no longer looked like a boy, even with April standing right next to her.

      People told Jacaranda she was lucky.

      But luck is like beauty or diamond earrings: people who have it cannot simply stay home and receive compliments unless they’ve an enormous sense of public duty. Jacaranda wanted to see things before her luck ran out and she came upon the prophesied brick wall.

      She imagined that she would be an adventuress and not need to go to UCLA or even Chouinard Art Institute, like Shelby Coryell, her one friend her own age. She would be an adventuress-painter, and just paint, because that’s what she’d be good at. Blue was everything.

      Outside, that first September, everyone had gone back to school and she had the whole empty beach to herself. Everything in the horizon looked clear and blue.

True Love

      Colman didn’t like the ocean.

      “It’s too cold,” he explained, shuddering in his black turtleneck. “How can you go where it’s too cold? That’s why I left New York.”

      “Cold?” she said.

      “Cold,” he enunciated clearly.

      But she was in love, so she moved in with him, way inland, to West Hollywood where he rented a ramshackle house all choked by passionflower vines. He had four ramshackle cats, named Harry, Dean, Stan, and Tentoes. His wife was divorcing him. He covered all his windows with black curtains because he hated the light in L.A., and daytime in general.

      He had black curly hair and was plainly a genius—just like her father. He taught acting and everyone in his class said he was brilliant. He was twenty-nine and she was eighteen the night they met in Barney’s Beanery, a ramshackle West Hollywood bar where she drank beer and flirted with artists at night. Barney’s was one of the oldest bars in West Hollywood. Most of the artists were surfers who lived at the beach.

      Colman was standing near the bar and his eyebrows went up gently when he saw Jacaranda. Everything Colman did made her laugh, and all he had to do was begin to tell a joke and she was lost.

      After three weeks, Colman told her his wife had changed her mind about the divorce and was moving back in with him and bringing her cats, Fred and Rooster.

      “More cats?” Jacaranda asked. “Your wife?”

      He raised his eyebrows and spread his hands out in a “What can I do?” gesture.

      Colman lied to her about everything and for a long time Jacaranda thought that that was what actors did offstage. But she found out most actors only lied for money in movies. He was entirely irresistible to all women, even Jacaranda’s grandmother, who took one look at him and started blushing and afterward said, “The Irish are a lovely people.”

      “But, Grandma, you don’t like Irish people because of their red hair, I thought.”

      “He has black hair,” she said.

      He was not too tall, five feet eleven, with pale Irish skin, and beautiful gracefully endearing eyes—there was nothing “wild Irish rose” about him. Even his lies weren’t wild. His lies always leaned toward the tame. He lied that things were dull and lifeless without Jacaranda. If she asked him what was “new, terrific, and exciting,” he’d sigh, yawn, and say, “Peace and quiet, my darling, just nothing but peace and quiet . . .” And she knew—three people would have told her—that he’d been with some starlet on the coats at a party the night before.

      What she loved about Colman was his New York accent. He talked like a Dead End Kid. Ever since Jacaranda was little and first saw television, Leo Gorcey had been her idea of “a man.” He was a lot like Mort Leven, but—instead of being Jewish—it was the Irishness that drove Jacaranda into peals of merriment; New York Irishness. New York Irishness was so exotic to Jacaranda that she had practically been able to overlook Elvis Presley’s Southern comfort. Jacaranda always felt that one day far off in the future—when she got over whatever it was about Leo Gorcey that drove her so crazy—she’d be able to take a leisurely cruise through the South. She loved Southern accents, but at the very moment when she was melting away from the effects of one, Colman would telephone and say, “Hi ya, beauty, what’s new, terrific, and exciting, huh?”

      Being in love with Colman made her look beautiful. He loved her in purple and she wore purple clothes, which did her a lot more good than old shirts and torn shorts. Purple made her hair look reddish golden and her skin look burning hot. She had a purple corduroy coat that would have stolen the show even on Rome’s Via Veneto, where B-movie starlets paraded on summer nights in La Dolce Vita.

      When Colman stood back, he could have been kissing her with his eyes, and Jacaranda СКАЧАТЬ