L.A. Woman. Eve Babitz
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Название: L.A. Woman
Автор: Eve Babitz
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Контркультура
Серия: Canons
isbn: 9781786892775
isbn:
And no wonder the way she looked at all we had sometimes made me see that it wasn’t just broken Crayolas after all. But of course I’d forget when she got a new neon pink Orlon sweater from Ohrbach’s which didn’t strike me as fair.
Andrea herself, most of the time when we were teenagers or children, seemed to pass through life like a pastel cloud smudged and blended into her surroundings. The quality of her voice became more reasonable too.
“I’m really an orphan,” she would explain to me. “My parents were the king and queen and when I grow up, I’m going to become the princess. That’s who I really am.”
“Really?” I asked, although I believed whatever Andrea told me without question since Andrea never lied and I was only ten.
“That’s right,” she said.
“Well, I always knew you didn’t belong living in Watts,” I agreed. “You’d be much more at home in your own castle. On your own throne. With lots and lots of gold and jewels and chocolate cake.”
“And my own library,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“And lots and lots of jazz musicians,” she added, “not just records. To play just for me.”
Since having musicians right there playing where I lived was what I grew up with, I preferred chocolate cake. They always let Andrea have all the chocolate cake she wanted, whereas Bonnie and I were stuck because all we had were advantages.
Chapter Seven
“DID YOU TAKE THE PIERCE ARROW to rehearsal?” I asked Lola on our walk up Canyon Drive. “I walked,” Lola said. “Right over that hill there. Through the coyotes.”
We paused and looked toward Bronson Canyon and west toward the hill Lola had once crossed on foot at dawn. It would have been at least two miles over coyote- and rattlesnake-infested hills till you came down past Valentino’s old house to where the Hollywood Bowl was. But to Lola, after so many hikes up Mount Hollywood, these low hills might have seemed nothing in the days when they weren’t covered with the houses built on them now.
“On Sunday mornings when your Aunt Goldie spent the night, I’d bring her breakfast in bed,” Lola said. “I was so surprised the first time I did this.”
“Surprised?”
“Because she’d never had breakfast in bed before,” Lola said. “She didn’t even know there was such a thing. And I was so unconscious, I just did it without thinking. Because I couldn’t conceive of what being poor meant – or even lower middle class. We always had Fraulein to do everything for us before we asked.”
“Well,” I said, “Goldie sure must know what breakfast in bed is now, thanks to you.”
“You know who knew all about being rich? Before anyone had to tell her, she just knew? Goldie’s sister, the younger one.”
“You mean Aunt Helen?”
“Helen knew everything,” Lola nodded. “Just everything. And she sang like an angel. What a voice that gorgeous beauty had, what richness – everything about her just had a glow – golden, that’s how she was. And she knew it.”
“Before she moved to New Jersey,” I said, “and ruined the whole thing.”
“These things happen,” Lola said philosophically.
“To dumb people, not Helen,” I said. “Every time she comes to visit us, you know what she says? She is driving up La Cienega to our house from the airport – you know La Cienega, that hideous street filled with ugly Lowry’s Prime Rib restaurants? – and she lets out this musical note sigh like a bell. ‘Ooooooo,’ she says, ‘I’d forgotten how green and beautiful L.A. is.’ She says that when we’re not even anywhere green and beautiful yet. She should get a divorce.”
“You selfish girl.” Lola casually shrugged.
“Well, she should,” I insisted.
Lola looked up toward the entrance to the park where Bronson Canyon now lay before us. A thin buzzing mass of sound came twisting from that direction.
“What is that?” Lola asked.
“Bagpipes,” I said. “A guy practices his bagpipes here because he can’t in his apartment, his landlord won’t let him. So he practices here.”
“Well,” Lola said, a birdlike alertness on her intently focused face as she listened for a moment, “he sure does need it.”
Chapter Eight
THE TOWN WAS SO MISERABLE, even for Texas, that once it had been named “Sour Lake,” nobody had the nerve to suggest it be improved. Or the energy. The energy it took to suggest the town at all was about all the miserable place seems to have once known. Attracting tourists by claiming the healthful waters of the sour lake were a cure was the idea behind Sour Lake, but few were attracted and the entire place would have folded, except so much oil was suddenly discovered (which was what had caused the lake to be sour, it turned out) that the wretched town of Sour Lake was still alive.
And Eugenia Crawley was twenty-three years old and still in it – stuck there in Texas, washing the dishes in her mother’s restaurant where she waited on tables and was wearing a pink checked outfit, a waitress uniform, she’d made herself. She made all her own clothes on the sewing machine, the kind you pumped – anyway, who needed an electric machine in Sour Lake? There wasn’t much reason to sew faster, sewing was all there was to do.
She was engrossed in a serial called The Girl in the Blue Dress which the Beaumont paper was running every day. It was about a girl who’d gone to Hollywood from a small town, determined to become an actress and planning to make herself noticeable by wearing only one color, blue. And every day she waited outside the studio for someone to choose her, to notice her, but they never did. Until finally, she was forced to leave her lodgings and wound up sharing a chaste arrangement with a young man who’d also come to Hollywood to make good and whose tiny Hollywood bungalow he let her share, without the slightest trace of anything vulgar. The platonic nature of their arrangement was a simple fact. That the two of them could live in a place where living together at all was possible struck Eugenia as perfect – a place where no small town restrictions, no gossip, could befoul their fun.
She’d tried to survive a year of life by herself in New Orleans where she had lived as a secretary, working in an office. But the office she worked in went broke and the jobs she tried to find were all hopeless. So she’d returned to Sour Lake and was still in it.
Perhaps she was too scared to leave or too loyal to her mother or just didn’t know where to go anyway, but once she began The Girl in the Blue Dress she found out where to go – Hollywood. Hollywood, where you could do whatever you liked. And nobody noticed.
She СКАЧАТЬ