Читать книгу L.A. Woman - Eve Babitz - Страница 11

Chapter Two

AND BY THE TIME I saw her the summer I was forty she still really hadn’t seemed to become old. There she was – Lola – in this slinky turtleneck paisley jersey dress at seventy-two, leaving cars crashed into loud accidents commemorating her visits. Imagining how she once must have exploded and hissed and crushed through piles of men back when she was twenty-three or seventeen isn’t that difficult. Seen from behind, Lola still makes seventeen seem possible. It’s just when she turns around and speaks German like her mother that you can guess she’s nearly fifty and still be only twenty years off. From behind, you could make a mistake of half a century. The lynxy little pout in her walk, the elbows so trimly neatened at her sides, the self-consciousness in her feet like a girl unused to such high heels yet – from behind she could easily be mistaken for a teenager out for danger, any kind of danger she can find. Lola from behind looks very capable of stirring up trouble, trouble like nobody ever hoped to see.

Trouble was Lola’s middle essence.

It kept her back straight and her chin high and her expectations prepared for everything, for fathers and daughters who were thirty-seven no matter what they did in bathtubs.

At least everything except Sam.

Of course so far the worst person in Lola’s milieu was Lola herself and it seemed to her, perhaps, that she had to do all the heartbreaks in town and invent everything herself.

Whereas once she met Sam Glanzrock, she could relax.

Someone who didn’t even try and hide his ravenous appetites by smiling, not a single smile did he smile for a camera in all those years, not even so much as a bloodthirsty veiled transparent trick smile.

All that remains of same from Lola’s photographs of those days is a weird suspicion. Not anything you would know was wrong.

It was just that Sam’s hair was light brown, curling light brown hair.

He hadn’t even bothered to hide under black wavy hair like in those days they all had. That’s how much trouble Sam was.

(But I would know by the summer I was twenty-three when I met Jim what it was like having to be the one who breaks hearts, who causes trouble, who invents everything and is the worst, myself – but then anyone who saw Jim that night would have realized that I was looking for trouble myself.

“Let’s go,” I said, “fast.”

“Uhhhhhh . . . where?”

“To my place, now – quickly, let’s go now.” Of course, anyone who saw me that night and had taken one look at Jim would have known I was safely aboard a raft heading over Niagara Falls. That night I was twenty-three and a daughter of Hollywood, alive with groupie fervor, wanting to fuck my way through rock’n’roll and drink tequila and take uppers and downers, keeping joints rolled and lit, a regular customer at the clap clinic, a groupie prowling the Sunset Strip, prowling the nights of summer, trying to find someone who promised I should, if I didn’t stay away, only run into trouble, endangering my life.)

“How beautiful,” Lola remarked, dragging out the vowels in beauty so that it lingered in my ears. “How damn well fucking beautiful this man’s face is. And what a man, too. Isn’t that marvelous how he still is a man? A man with that hair and a face – and so beautiful – but there’s no doubt in my mind that he’s heterosexual, not one.”

We stood looking at his photograph like we were always looking at photographs when I visited Lola in San Francisco, and he gazed back – a gaze that meant nothing but trouble. And Jim gazed back at us – only by then I was thirty and he was dead.

“Didn’t he . . .?” she asked.

“In Paris,” I said. “Too.”

“How interesting,” she said pleasantly, turning to a photograph of me when I was ten. “Oh, look,” she cried, “you, when you were still a virgin. To think, I actually knew you when you were seventeen. What was the name of your boyfriend then?”

“Claude,” I said, proud I remembered.