Sex & Rage. Eve Babitz

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      “But don’t you have any secrets?” Jacaranda asked.

      “Secrets?” he replied. “Secrets are lies that you tell to your friends.”

      He turned to look out the window and she saw his profile against an enormous bush, blooming with white oleanders. Her mother had always warned her about oleanders; they were poisonous and one was never to eat them.

      The white flowers threw Max’s elegant silhouette into a sort of bas-relief, like Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise, in Florence, golden. The sunshine was golden. The cigarette smoke and coffee smelled golden.

      Max sighed, paused a moment, and then turned to her. “Are you coming tonight?” he asked.

      “Coming?” she asked.

      “Didn’t Gilbert invite you? I’m having a few people over. For drinks. I’m at the Sacramento. Wear anything.”

      Diogenes was yawning and wagging and then Max was outside, a loudly backfiring carburetor, backing out of the driveway, and silence.

      All that remained were the dead roses on the window and Gilbert, who raised one eyebrow crossly like a brown-haired child who won’t eat.

      “Amazing, isn’t he?” Gilbert said.

      He got to his feet and then, suddenly, crude, stylized Gilbert, with his flat-footed crouch and his vanity and his doomed mouth, turned into Max, languid and intense, with Max’s fancy drawl.

      “Secrets,” he said, “are lies that you tell to your friends!”

      Jacaranda gathered together the broken ashtray, so no one would get cut, as she wondered what she’d wear that night, now that everything was going to be perfect.

The Little Black Dress

      She wore a little black dress, which in a mad dash she had borrowed from April. It was the kind of little black dress that Mae Leven always described as “decent.” April and Mae had found it on one of their perpetual treks out to Pasadena where two city blocks were lined with Salvation Army–type thrift stores. This little black dress cost $3.49 and was a Dior. With the jacket, it could be worn to court or to a funeral. Without the jacket, it was no longer quite so decent and Jacaranda was sure it would be the right thing to wear around someone like Max, who was ten years older than Gilbert (Gilbert was two years older than she). With little gold sandals, the dress was fine.

      She spent about an hour in the bathtub crooning “I’m So Lonesome I Could Die” to her black cat Emiliano (his nickname, after she remembered Viva Zapata!).

      She brought fresh flowers in from the tumbling-down hill where her landlady threw handfuls of wildflower seeds each spring. She stuck the wildflowers into a glass; and sang her entire repertoire of Hank Williams songs, which she had only recently begun to appreciate.

      In the little black dress, with its square neckline and Paris, France, drape, she looked all wrong in L.A., especially in her old station wagon with surfboards on top. But if she’d been in Paris or Rome or New York, she’d have looked smart.

      It wasn’t until it was too late that she realized she had only a large straw purse and not the little clutch purse the dress called for. On the phone April said, “A what?”

      “A clutch purse,” Jacaranda repeated.

      “Me?” April said.

      Jacaranda’s hair was even blonder after Hawaii and her skin was tanner than usual. She painted her toenails grape, which matched her eye shadow. Her eyes, lined in brown pencil, looked out with innocent-virgin deception and complemented her large mouth with its expression of eager vulnerability. Her hair, parted in the middle, hung straight down untangled.

      She looked as though she’d just stepped out of an opening-night intermission in London and not at all as if she lived on a hill apartment in Santa Monica with a roof that leaked.

      Outside, the ocean was spread out in a blue line, and the sun, an orange circle, hung just above it, about to set.

      She sang “Your Cheatin’ Heart” all the way into Hollywood.

The Sacramento Apts.

      The Sacramento was smack in the middle of Hollywood—the neighborhood called Hollywood, not the mystical state. It wasn’t in Beverly Hills or West Hollywood, which were both All Right, and it wasn’t down by the beach or in Trousdale or Bel Air or Encino, which were all All Right, too. It was in Hollywood, smack in the middle, which was not All Right. It never was All Right, even back in the twenties when Valentino, an unknown, got all dressed up and strolled down Hollywood Boulevard, hoping to be noticed and put into a movie.

      Of course, a few New York types thought “the Coast” was simply “the Coast” and that it didn’t make any difference where one stayed because it was only for two weeks and then one could go home to civilization, New York. And she’d heard they stayed in the Sacramento, which was why several New York comedians telling jokes about “the Coast” used to talk about Hughes Market, a block away from the Sacramento, a market nobody from L.A. ever went to because it was too expensive.

      But for Max to be in the Sacramento meant it had been misunderstood and that it, and the part of Hollywood it was in, were both perfectly fine, after all.

      It was one of those apartment-hotels with a lobby and a front desk and a manager, an elevator, thick walls, and high ceilings. Max lived in the penthouse, or what he called the penthouse, though it was hard for most people to think of a five-story building as having a penthouse.

      It was eight, exactly, when she knocked on his penthouse door.

      The door was flung open.

      “You’re here!” Max said, his blue eyes alight with how wonderful she was. “You dressed! You look marvelous. The best-dressed woman in Los Angeles!”

      “Except for the purse,” she said, showing him her car keys and cigarettes, which she’d brought along in her hand.

      Max was still tall and wore a caramel-colored polo shirt and denim pants that were almost, but not quite, jeans that were white. He wore espadrilles that were worn out. Everything about him looked clean and bright. His hair, which was still wet, had been combed back off his face but the same strand that fell down when it was dry had already begun falling, wet or no. He smelled like a birthday party for small children, like vanilla, crêpe paper, soap, starch, and warm steam and cigarettes.

      Anyone would have liked being hugged by him.

      Only she, so far, had arrived. But there was a folly of luxury the likes of which Jacaranda couldn’t believe. There it was smack in the middle of a geography that was All Wrong. (If she’d come in later through the back parking lot, she would have seen limousines lined up—limousines looking startled at slumming in such an unlikely spot. Hollywood wasn’t exactly a slum—it was just Not Right.)

      “I’m just fixing the salad,” Max said. “Tell me what you think.”

      On a buffet of white-tablecloth tables were the most beautiful dishes, all white, with stainless-steel Italian-designed silverware (a little finer than anyone else’s СКАЧАТЬ