Black Swans Page 2

  Eve is still fighting back against those that would tell her how to write, what to write about, and how to spend her days. But there’s a tension throughout Black Swans, and it comes from the miracle of aging. The pieces are strung through with nostalgia, harsh pronouncements on new-construction shopping malls, and perhaps even harsher anecdotes about friends who sold out, married up, and, the greatest sin of all, left Los Angeles. Yet, though air has been let out of the bubble, it hasn’t burst. Eve is now well acquainted with loss, the hallmark of adulthood. She loses loved ones to AIDS (especially poignant in “Free Tibet”), to overdoses, to the East Coast and Midwest. The 1980s and ’90s find her in rehab, a fervent converter to twelve-step programs, calisthenics, and a vegetarian diet (her appetite was legendary). When she quips at the opening of the book, “It’s only temporary: you either die or get better,” she qualifies it with the parenthetical “something we used to say about life in general, feeling sophisticated and amusing in bars, back in the days when we thought how you behaved was the fault of other people.” Yes, it was all temporary. Compare that with Eve of her twenties as captured in Eve’s Hollywood: “Who says you have to mature? I don’t want to get old and die. I want to die . . . I don’t believe in facing pain unless it’s the kind you like.” It turns out that pain doesn’t care what you like or your beliefs. And death and getting better aren’t the only options—there’s a third, far less attractive one, which is simply getting old.

  That strange mixture that’s always been a major part of Hollywood—self-enchantment mingled with the ever-present fear of total disaster (earthquakes, fires, random murders)—lies beneath the physical reality of Hollywood, which sometimes looks too good to be true . . . The idea of middle age—never mind old age, God forbid one hundred years!—is the violent opposite of everything Hollywood is based upon, which, as anyone can see, is and has always been beauty . . . beauty without a whisper of fading, sagging, or wrinkling, although real girls do age, of course, no matter how self-enchanted they are. And age is a disaster.

  Age is a disaster. What’s a beach-going blonde to do with a currency that felt inexhaustible, only to realize that it does little but decrease over time? That blonde writes. Eve wrote. Here’s Eve, on the verge of recounting a hilarious and dark, speed- and LSD-enhanced love affair gone awry in the brilliant title piece “Black Swans”:

  Recently someone asked me when was the last time I was in a serious relationship, when I thought I might get married, and I said, “Oh, 1971. Before I got published and knew I was home free.”

  Yes, Eve, that’s what it feels like to be back in Los Angeles, maybe as one of the “shimmering charismatics,” writing, publishing, eating, dancing, driving, and obsessed with finding parking: Home. Free.

  Stephanie Danler

  January 2018

  Black

  Swans

  Jealousy

  It’s only temporary: you either die, or get better.

  —Something we used to say about life in general, feeling sophisticated and amusing in bars, back in the days when we thought how you behaved was the fault of other people.

  The dictionary I own does not define jealousy as pain. It uses words like “resentment,” “envy,” “mental uneasiness from suspicion,” and the effete “mood.” Nowhere does it have a word that lies in the gutter weeping into that serious intensity of red-hot black days and nights of raging hell that my friend Proust and I mean by jealousy. Nor does my dictionary mention that curious aftereffect (common to all agony) whereby one morning it’s all gone; you wake up feeling just fine and realize you’ve painted your entire apartment black so that later on, to explain, you must remark uneasily, “All that, and when I saw him last week he was just a bald shrimp. God, jealousy sure is a mad dog from hell with rabies. I did the porch black, too.” Mother Nature blots out everything, and leaves only empty spaces in our past where pain once raged and jealousy tore through our souls. If we survive how it felt, what it tasted like. Few among us are brave enough for folly like that. Only artists, in fact, seem able to touch those memories, bringing evidence that indeed there does exist what my dictionary describes as a “mood” of jealousy.

  “I would wonder what he was doing every night,” my friend says. “I’d think about driving over there; you know, just standing outside where no one could see? And once . . .” her voice grows secret at the enormity of the obsession; her voice stops, in fact.

  “Go on,” I urge.

  “Oh, well.” The voice weakens.

  “Once, I did.”

  “Did what?”

  “Stood outside. In the dark. It was awful.” I sit afterward, having telephoned nearly ten people. They have all broken down and spilled their guts at last: “I followed her once to her girlfriend’s,” or “I used to drive by his house to see if any lights were on.” And I, who know the blistering ravages of jealousy upon my ten telephone friends, am stuck with the juicy quote “I stood outside that window in the dark.”

  How does standing outside someone’s window convey the meaning of the “mood”? I ask myself. Besides, it’s so complicated—there are jealousies, and then there are jealousies. The swoop of moments clutching with such power and fading from a kiss is what I myself used to be inclined toward when I first fell in love. He and I would go to parties, and I’d see him smiling at some girl (“I saw him smiling at someone else” is another tantalizing observation people remember when speaking of jealousy). I myself would see him smiling and it made perfect sense, his smiling, for me to stomp through the party in a white-hot rage and tell the girl, “Get the hell away from my man!” Or his smiling made it perfectly sensible for me to leave without telling him or lewdly carry on with an innocent bystander or yank my hostess into a bathroom and demand to know how she could have invited a “slut like that” to her party. A couple of times it made perfect sense to kill myself. . . . But then he’d take me aside, you see, and look worried, concerned; softly he’d inquire, “Darling, what is it?”

  “You and that, that . . .” I’d feel it fading. It had made such sense just a moment earlier, and now the reality of his voice and skin seemed far more sensible; all else paled. “Nothing,” I’d say finally, “I got jealous. I thought you liked her better.”

  “I wish you didn’t feel that way,” he’d say, often, in the beginning. He hasn’t said it to me lately; it’s been nearly a year since his smiling at someone made suicide seem perfectly sensible. But I remember that one night; it was the night I’d run out of a party without telling him. I’d gone on to a bar until closing; it was so horrible—I so deeply suffered—that I drove by his apartment. And I stood outside his window.

  And yet, my most articulate friends, the wisest and most worldly, who’ve even managed to learn from their experiences, none has been able to expound on jealousy at length. A few began enthusiastically, clapping their hands in joy, saying, “How wonderful, what a great topic, jealousy!” Most have made general pronouncements about why they never suffered real jealousy. All have confessed, by the end, that there was a time they’d almost forgotten, a time “when I just stood looking at his window. God, it was awful.”

  The man I knew who suffered most gruesomely from jealousy was Richard Gardiner, a handsome devil, a lady-killer. He married a freshly beautiful young woman who was the catch of the season; all his friends, and every man who saw her, dropped everything and joined the chase. But Richard snapped her up, married her, gave her two children. It was settled quickly, Lydia’s future; Richard was a man of action. Now I myself had sort of known Richard all along, on and off; I’d been one of the thicket of women he’d plunged through in his youth. (Handsome devils like him are not to be sneezed at, after all.) Anyway, I was young and stuffed with happily-ever-after ideas, which, I thought, were natural law, automatically set off once a person got married. So I was quite surprised when not two months after the honeymoon, I found myself again looking at my living-room ceiling, having been lustfully flung down upon the living-room rug of my apartment by Richard, who was still too overcome with boyish impatience to last all the way down the hall to my bed. My ceiling and Richard were just the same as if he’d never gotten married at all. In fact, he “stayed late” at the office so often that he added a small “utility apartment” as his business grew, so that he could spend the night in case of an “emergency.” Everyone knew about Richard, and we all admired Lydia’s poise and elegant indifference to her husband’s flagrant philandering. I felt humbled by Lydia’s polish and knew that if my husband ever acted like Richard, I’d probably throw childish tantrums right and left, whereas Lydia, a swan, just chatted socially to her friends at parties while Richard was pillaging the countryside for phone numbers and vanishing, occasionally, for a few moments to show some irresistible creature the bathroom ceiling. For nearly five years it went on this way.

  “Guess what!” someone volunteered over the phone.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Lydia and Richard have broken up!”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, I suppose she was bound to get sick of it one day . . .”

  “It wasn’t that.” The voice trembled with glorious details.

  “You mean, Richard dumped her for one of his . . . ?” I wondered.

  “No!” The voice splintered, bursting into the full, unqualified glee such stories deserve. “Lydia decided she wanted to go out with some guy. And she told Richard.”

  “Some guy?” I attempted to stretch my intellectual understanding of society to establish room for the idea of “a date” at this stage of the war between men and women. “And she told Richard?”

  It seemed, after all, that Lydia knew nothing of her husband’s infidelities. She noticed only that in the last four years he hadn’t seemed interested in sex with her. She thought
he therefore wasn’t interested in sex, period, and it wasn’t that she minded all that much because she’d read that men’s sex drive did fall off as they got older, so Richard was probably just getting older. She was confident and reasonably concluded that he couldn’t possibly care if she enjoyed an occasional date now that he was too old (Richard was thirty-two). She’d met a man, she explained too, who’d asked her out, but naturally she could promise nothing until she consulted Richard, and thus one day Lydia asked if it would be okay if she went out on a date.

  Richard bought a gun.

  Richard tore their house apart with an ax.

  Richard went to the marriage counselor with Lydia and admitted to a couple of infidelities. Lydia was knocked for a loop, shocked, overcome, wracked with tears—she’d never, never suspected—and he’d done it twice, he’d confessed. Twice!

  Richard moved into his utility apartment and didn’t change the sheets for months. He slept in his clothes; he bled confessions all over everyone; he nearly died. (His friends found the gun and got rid of it.)

  Lydia quietly went ahead with her plans to date and told her friends that Richard was behaving childishly. Lydia was annoyed with Richard’s histrionics and felt he was doing it on purpose to bore her.

  One night, drunkenly blurting it all out to an old mistress, Richard said, “It was all right for me but not her! She’s a whore!” That was the way he had it figured in his jealousy, and today, he’s still occasionally shaken by the idea that Lydia is a whore, even though now that they’re divorced he’s home all the time and they spend weekends in the mountains together, leaving the kids with their grandmother, who cannot understand what this world’s coming to. Richard spent weeks outside in the darkness spying on Lydia’s windows, so even I, sophisticated and modern the way I am, have a hard time managing Lydia and Richard’s divorce settlement.

  I realize, reading through this, that I never should have spoiled my neatly illustrated tale of modern-day jealousy by adding these weekends of theirs. I ought to have stopped at the second mention of the word “whore.” But this is an example of jealousy’s inability to survive for long, even when it’s a matter of someone with Richard’s capacity for determining truth.

  It is difficult to tell any story about jealousy without the endings falling apart. Even the simplest tales—where one day you can’t remember what it was, exactly, that made you go to all that trouble over a skunk like that—don’t have the right ending.

  A couple of nights ago, I ran into a friend in a restaurant, an old just-friend friend, who asked me to sit, have a drink, etc. He was with a girl and introduced us. We talked for a while, when suddenly the girl leapt to her feet, snapped, “I’m sure that’s very fascinating,” and stomped out of the place, going with fury.

  “You were on a date!” I said. “Why did I sit down, oh, God!”

  “We’re just friends,” he mumbled quickly, dashing off after her, the lily-livered coyote. I poked hot needles into myself for having become so sophisticated that I can’t even spot a girl on a date, when he and I were once lovers. “Just friends, indeed!” she must have snarled to herself, until finally, with all the ladylike poise she could muster, she nearly turned the table over on her way out, sarcastically hissing through her teeth, “I’m sure that’s very fascinating.”

  Oh, I thought, I have been her. More than once. It’s so unfashionable to be jealous in our civilization that even I, if asked about jealousy, would at first say I didn’t know what real jealousy was and, if cornered, feel I’d confessed disgustingly enough by admitting a single night, one window, a smile. Jealousy is for primitives in colorful costumes, not for women in restaurants on dates: Where’re her manners? Poor thing. Her just-friend date returned and apologized for her.

  “She’s always doing things like that,” he explained. “She probably took a cab home. She expects too much. I’ve only taken her out seven or eight times; she’s in love with me or something.”

  “Why do you take her out?” I asked.

  “She’s an interesting girl,” he explained, logically.

  “You mean she’s intelligent and funny?” I wondered.

  “No, she never says anything,” he said. “She likes to hear me talk.”

  “Well, then,” I said, “it doesn’t make sense.”

  “I know,” he admitted, pouring himself some wine, acting blameless.

  Another story of jealousy down the drain. I mean, he said she was fascinating not because she talked but because she listened so well; only the trouble with that was that he didn’t like talking much himself.

  And she returned, smiling. “Just needed a breath of air,” she explained. “So smoky in here . . .” A swan lady, in fact, she gently rejoined us just in time for him to conclude a story of this thing she did when he was positive she was going to stab him, but kissed him instead.

  “Grist,” I had reminded him, he being a writer. But I hushed once she was back.

  She was not even grist for me, it turned out, for in my story she was taking a taxi home, sobbing hopelessly, not quietly joining the table. It didn’t balance out; the drama fell through; it didn’t make sense.

  Children, as we all remember, are the ones most impaled on the sharp recognition of jealousy. If love and comfort are combined to mean a sort of ring of safety, then anything that endangers that safety, like a sister or brother or parents all dressed up to go out and leave us all alone, will clot our innocent, childish, valentine natures with murderous rages. When my parents first brought my one-week-old sister home from the hospital, I, aged three, declared, “Throw her in the waste-paper basket.” They thought it was funny. But I knew what I meant, and it was only by the grace of a few moments in the nick of time that I actually refrained from burning my sister right up in her crib, and so I left her with only flesh wounds, her hand scarred into a claw that was remedied by plastic surgery when she was five. To this day I can remember how surprised I was when I realized she was actually on fire and that it hurt and that I hadn’t meant to hurt her, I’d only meant to dispose of her permanently. To this day I try not to imagine what would have happened if I hadn’t changed my mind and gotten my parents in time. Setting your own sister’s crib on fire is a hard one to forgive yourself for as it is, never mind sibling rivalry. (What a complacent name for the worst jealousy of all.) I don’t know what Freud could have been thinking when he used such a dainty word, “sibling,” for the razor-blade-in-the-heart feeling I got whenever the word “sister” was mentioned. Even today, though my sister is one of my closest friends (despite her disfigured hand, not a pretty sight in a close friend), I can still feel this violence burning away, although what I mean by “sister” and who my actual sister is are two different things, thank heavens, at last. Who I meant by “sister,” then, was one burned to a crisp in a shocking accident decades ago in an extreme episode of sibling rivalry. Who I mean by “sister” now is one whom I would never hurt. Which is another example of jealousy not panning out as expected; for in this story, actual humanity triumphed over rage and hatred, something we hardly imagine in our wildest hopes.

  The thing about jealousy that makes it so confusing is that it throws us out of civilization and beyond the bonds of humanity and allows us to believe that crimes like suicide and murder and spying are necessary. We can’t even tell where envy—which I always define as what one feels about success and money and material objects amassed by other people—leaves off and turns into jealousy, and where jealousy forgets itself and hardens icily into obsession. Is obsession born of jealousy still jealousy, or is it a new disease, a new “mood”? Is envy a common cold, jealousy a serious illness, and obsession a critical condition? Because jealousy sometimes seems like a critical condition . . . and then something can happen, a voice of reason can intercede, and the whole thing will vanish like the morning dew.

  Sometimes I think that jealousy, like skiing, is only for those with enough youthful stamina and energy to endure it. As people get older, they finally give jealousy up, or at least they put it off for as long as possible until there’s such incontrovertible evidence (like a husband saying, “I’m leaving you for another woman who’s much younger and cuter than you ever were”) that there’s nothing to do but rise above it or succumb. If one hasn’t the stamina to be easily jealous, it’s hardly likely that one will find the inner strength to rise above sordid emotions, although it’s not as difficult—it’s not as impossible—as a person with lots of zip might imagine. Extreme weariness can make you rise above a lot of things that youthful exuberance would have tossed one into headlong, like shooting the rapids over Niagara Falls.