Black swans, p.19
Black Swans, page 19
ANYWAY, AFTER COOLING down for ten years, Walter rose above his vow about the Rockies because an even bigger bestseller he’d written was optioned by even richer producers, and he was offered a deal to come again to the West Coast and work with them on the script. “They said they’d put me in a house in Malibu,” he told me long-distance over the phone from his Greenwich Village home. “What do you think? Would I like it?”
“You can’t swim there,” I said. “It’s too rocky.”
“I told them I might want to stay at the Château,” he said. “They said it was my funeral. But you can walk places there and meet people in the elevator you know. We could go to that place across the street, the Imperial Gardens, it’s still there, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said; it had not yet become the Roxberry.
“Great,” he said.
By this time, I had a few books out myself, but since they weren’t best-sellers and I never went on Johnny Carson, he was so big about things, he’d even had friends of his review my books in places they might otherwise have gone unnoticed. Good reviews, not the kind that make you wish you were dead.
And so, we became friends, after all, thank God, because in spite of everything, he was still one of the few people who could make me laugh, even though he never looked into my eyes in the same innocent way again. A plight I didn’t think I deserved, but then he had a right to lost innocence. I just wish it hadn’t been me he blamed.
We both have changed; neither of us drinks anything anymore but iced tea, nor do we take drugs, though Walter got to that point avoiding twelve-step programs like the plague, whereas I plunged into twelve-step programs the way everyone does these days in L.A. who still cares about their looks (which is everyone I know)—with a vengeance. Though now his gorgeous brown curls are silvery white, his eyes are still almost as blue, and his body is still lean as a cowboy’s, and he still wears the boots and is still the one I could have spent my life with and not minded.
Sometimes I go pick him up at the Château and he anxiously stands by the driveway with his beach towel clutched in his arms like all he needs is a pail and a shovel to be eight years old. He’s practically trembling with anticipation.
“Do you think it’s warm enough,” he says, first thing, “do you think I can go in?”
He’s the only person I know who still considers swimming in the Pacific Ocean at Venice Beach fun. I haven’t been swimming in that water since my friend Bob-the-Surfer came down with the same leukemia a group of lifeguards from that area died of. The bay we have here that looks so beautiful is a deadly black swan after all.
We’ve both been terrible at our subsequent relationships. I don’t think I’ve been as bad as he, because I never expected to get married again or put any stock in living happily ever after. Walter kept looking and even wound up getting engaged to this perfectly lovely woman he met who was a lawyer in her forties (unlike his usual twenty-three-year-olds), and they invited everyone in New York to the wedding; he even was interviewed by some newspaper and quoted, saying, “I know, at last, what true happiness can be.”
“So what happened?” I asked. This time we were walking along the Venice Boardwalk, browsing for T-shirts.
“Well,” he said, “three days before the wedding, she told me she wanted to tell me her ‘heart’s desire.’”
“And?” I wondered.
“She wanted to quit the law firm,” he said, “and take a short-story course.”
“Oh nooo!” I said.
“I was stunned,” he said, “just stunned. Here I thought all she wanted to do was cook and have little soirees.”
“Like me, you mean?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, “that was the happiest I’ve ever been. I was even going to get her that Julia Child cookbook so she could make that roast pork thing you used to do. God, that was great. With mayonnaise—remember, when it spilled on the table cloth?”
“Well,” I said, “maybe she could cook and write short stories.”
“I left town,” he said. “I told her I had cold feet. I went to Paris and hid.”
“You didn’t leave with any of her friends, did you?” I asked.
“No,” he said, “I’m much better about that anyway. Besides, none of her friends were cute.”
“I can’t believe you just left her there, more or less at the altar,” I said. “Didn’t you tell her about Leonard Woolf?”
“I didn’t think I needed to,” he groaned. “She said all she wanted was to be old-fashioned and married, she never said a thing about short stories until the last minute.”
“God, Wally,” I said, thinking about the poor abandoned bride and her waking up to find him gone forever, “you’re worse than me.”
We walked along and I told him how I was expecting this writer we both liked, Renzo, who was coming to L.A. and was going to stay at the Château, and I said, “What shall I do with him?”
“Hah!” he said. “You’ll think of something.”
LONG AFTER WALLY left L.A., before we were friends again, I remembered about the black swans at the Bel Aire. I was talking to my friend Ginny about that rock-and-roll wedding and she had been there and had been with me when the guests, stoned, had sauntered down to the pond to admire the swans in their fabulous blackness, when suddenly the swans had risen up and chased everyone, biting one of the women who couldn’t run fast enough in her high heels. Tearing her dress.
“I should have learned from that wedding guest,” I said, “not to go there.”
“It was the bride,” Ginny said. “Don’t you remember? Her dress was white, it must have been the bride!”
“The black swans tore the bride’s dress?” I was stunned, but I knew in my heart she was right. If I had remembered before, I never would have taken Walter to the Bel Aire Hotel, no matter how hot it was. I never would have left at dawn, never would have come home and mailed that piece to Shep, if I’d known we were going to a place where swans ate brides. For in those days, I thought living happily ever after might be my destiny.
BUT BY THE TIME I remembered, of course, it was too late. Our history of broken glass, broken hearts, wrecked dreams, and Haiti had taken over, and my future was cast.
Acknowledgments
I want to thank Kenny Zarrilli for browbeating me into finishing this book. And I want to thank Annie Liebowitz, Amy Hempel, the late Laurie Colwin, Dan Wakefield, Jill Ciment, dear Diane Gardiner, Laurel Delp, Carolyn See, Carol Grannison, Ginny Ganahl, Judy Henske, Phil Blumberg, Léon Bing, and the great Sarah Kernochan for being inspirations. Caroline Thompson, a vision of loveliness atop her green horse topiary, Walter Hopps for the silver bullet, Jeanaette Aarons for the platinum, Victoria Wilson for the stamina, Erica Silverman for the irony, and Paul Ruscha for the pool. I want to thank Evert Lewis for the past revisited, and Robert Heckes for the present in taxis in the rain. Finally, I want to thank my darling neighbors, Kent, Nancy, and Emily Beyda for their sweetness, my cousin Laurie Pepper and my sister Mirandi Babitz, who are always beside me, through fat and thin.
About the Author
EVE BABITZ is the author of several books of fiction, including Sex and Rage, Eve’s Hollywood, and Slow Days, Fast Company. Her nonfiction works include Fiorucci: The Book and Two by Two. She has written for publications including Ms. and Esquire, and in the late 1960s, she designed album covers for the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and Linda Ronstadt.
Eve Babitz, Black Swans
