I Used to Be Charming

by Eve Babitz

  One night, my lover and I went to a party; it was Halloween, so my wavy hair, stockings, black mascara, and adorable nose were OK. This particular set of friends hadn’t seen me in six months. Most of them were writers, but Jewish writers of comedy who didn’t drink like crazy. Most of them were “plump” and forever up or down on the weigh scales.

  The way those people treated me was as if I’d won the Nobel Prize for Literature—or is it the Pulitzer? They approached me as though I were, from some dramatic collision of circumstances, now the Queen—whereas before I’d been this droll woman they could pal around with who was often better with one-liners than they.

  “How did you do it?” they demanded, “you really look great!”

  They were not spouting accusations. Each one had a romantic notion that by losing all that weight, he or she too would turn into a fifties starlet. The transformation was so utterly a stumbling block that they sidled; they could hardly look at me, because they didn’t know me.

  “My dear,” my mother said at lunch, “it’s so lovely since you stopped drinking. You look your age. Sixteen.”

  I weigh less than I did when I was sixteen. I can eat candy these days and stay this weight. I can eat potatoes, rice, bread, meat, ice cream, chocolate mousse, it all! My drinking metabolism had been so out of kilter that it had been turning celery into fat, because I drank on my “Drinking Man’s Diet” a trifle too enormously. My lover, who is skinny, calls the way I now consume dinner “pigging out.”

  When people come to me to say that I am how I am because of “weight,” I am at a loss as to what to tell them. It’s not weight. It’s me. It isn’t because I lost those pounds and my pants tripped me, it’s because I am a new person and they are right not to recognize me. I don’t know me.

  People, bearing grudges from the olden days when I used to get drunk and insult people, approach me at parties—drunk—and insult me. They say hard things, things you have to be numb to laugh about and to return with wittier insults. Then, something happens to them; they sort of begin to explain that I had once said such-and-such and that’s why they said what they said. A case of mistaken identity, they suddenly see. I am not the same person. They go away in strange shame for what they’ve said to a person they didn’t know.

  The hardest part of all is being “beautiful.” I stopped drinking because I hoped to find some place that hadn’t been done—wasn’t being done—better. A place where I wouldn’t be automatically on a low rung. It’s hard to know what to say to people who ask how I did this; so, when they accuse, “You look so wonderful!” I answer, “Well, so do you.” My lover thinks I’m rude, that I should say, “Thank you.” But I cannot bring myself to act as though how I look is something I set about to do, when it was an accident, this perfection. I told you I never liked perfection. I, myself, would never set about to become a slinky willow . . . . All I started out knowing was that the most fashionable hotels were full, their bars were jammed. I didn’t know Versailles was empty. The ceilings all have cherubs, blue skies, and white clouds—the beds are enormous—and I’m Queen.

  Vogue

  September 1977

  SHOPPING

  ABSOLUTE luxury always has been champagne and caviar, or was until all-night supermarkets stole the show and you could shop in the still of the night, hushed in empty splendor. No one but you and three other people who came there to stay out of your way. Empty aisles, all yours.

  At last, not only can you stand there long enough to make up your mind whether to buy three-pound cans of coffee—anyway coffee, like everything, comes in so many sizes—or whether next time it has got to come down; but you also can take forever musing over how sophisticated Americans are these days when imported cheeses from far and wide sit where once Swiss was exotic. Products that have become stars on TV are finally where you can change your mind three times about buying them, and you can sink into a reverie smelling the Brylcreem because it’ll always smell like teenage romance unless some mean expert improves it.

  I had the beginner’s luck, when I first moved to West Hollywood, to be a couple of blocks from Ralph’s which not only was sort of an orchestra seat distance from the Sunset Strip but also was open twenty-four hours a day unless something like Christmas brought it to a halt.

  Until about 11 p.m., this Ralph’s was so fraught with live action that cashiers used to shake their heads sometimes; but one nevertheless proclaimed, “Work anyplace else? How could I after all this?” But at night, even Ralph’s—or the Ralph’s as I impatiently call it—would finally unwind. The hordes would scatter leaving the Ralph’s to 3 a.m. drifters like me catching up on the twentieth century, our carts rolling on silent wheels of rubber through the enchanted tableaux.

  In Los Angeles, the supermarkets all have kosher sections, health food sections, Mexican and Thai shelves. These packages of foreign hungers mirror the city with their bilingual instructions. The “Gourmet” section bespeaks with marmalade and Bird’s Custard, imported from England; teakettles and coziness uprooted, too. All those people. . . . In the daytime, remembering who you’re supposed to be is a full-time job in supermarkets; but, at night, there’s leisure to think alone in those empty aisles, a new luxury. Once, champagne and caviar were all there was. And they only came in one size.

  Vogue

  November 1977

  SUNDAY, BLUE POOL, SUNDAY

  A Story

  IT WAS HOT, of course, since it’s July. It was rich, which is not “of course” at all, since it’s hardly ever rich; it’s usually so-so. It wasn’t really rich, but it was rich enough for the house to overlook L.A. and for the pool to be so covered in bougainvillea blossoms that I could swim entirely naked when I swam—that’s how rich it was.

  The man whose house I swam in had always been my friend, since I was sixteen—half my life ago. He was now, maybe, fifty. His newest girlfriend had just gone off on some excursion; his wives had divorced and divorced him. But I’d always liked him—you could let your head fall backward and laugh loudly at the way he tricked language into his poetry, his fast-street, immensely brilliant Manhattan-bred poetry. I had always liked him, but it was his son I had once slept with, not him—he’d always been too married or too in the throes of one thing or another.

  Behold me now just as I am, Colette once said in a beautiful piece about how she was in her early thirties (my age) and alone, living in a one-room apartment on the first floor, a Parisian room near the Bois de Boulogne. Beholding herself in the mirror, just as she was.

  The man beholding me just as I was did so through the blue swimming-pool water where I swam naked and would get no tan marks; he let me swim suitless. That afternoon, I dried myself off and went to lie on his white bed that a manservant (it was that rich) came and made every morning. He beheld me in the dim room, sprawled across his bed where I waited for him to come out of the sun and be surprised. He said, “Oh, Jesus, how beautiful you are!”

  Now lookee here, kids, I have to tell you that the last time a man came into a room, saw me naked, and said, “Oh, Jesus, how beautiful you are!” was . . . I can’t remember. I think about maybe five years ago a very strange Middle Eastern Oriental yanked me in front of a mirror when I complained of being too fat, and said, “You are not fat. You are beautiful.”

  Now this man, the blue pool man, was no slouch. His smile has charmed the pants off many a charming girl. His words had charmed the diamond earrings off many a mature woman wise to the world (not so he could steal the earrings, so he could take her to bed without losing them). He is rich; his friends are smart, powerful men. And he’s got a pool you can swim in naked overlooking the city.

  Behold me, then, just as I am. I have brown eyes that can be vastly improved by mascara and eyeliner; my face is large; my forehead is high; I am not the nervous little fox with the dark circles under her eyes that Colette beheld in about 1910. I am taller than she, five feet seven, and two weeks ago I weighed 152; now I weigh 140. I didn’t look fat weighing 152 no matter wha
t Vogue would have you believe; I looked voluptuous because I am; but, on the other hand, it’s a whole lot better weighing 140. When I weigh 130, my friends think I’m dying and use words like gaunt. When I weigh 125, which is almost but not quite what Vogue might be able to deal with, I look as old as Jeanne Moreau when she’s just murdered someone.

  My last/current boyfriend was/is beautiful. He is tall and slender; he is grace itself and has the manners of someone whose mother hoped he’d marry better than she had. But he never—in the whole three years we have known each other or in the last six months, when things got hot—he never came into a room and gasped, “Oh, Jesus, how beautiful you are!” His manners were not that good. That was because he was not in love with me. I was/am in love with him. That was/is the trouble. The two weeks that I lost the twelve pounds ended on the Sunday I swam naked and got called beautiful. They were triggered by the realization that he didn’t love me. I loved him and he didn’t love me (he wasn’t “in love” with me was how he put it—a semantic problem if there ever was one).

  When I beheld myself at the end of the two weeks without the twelve pounds, my waist was a lot better, I had to admit. My ex/non-lover told my therapist that he “didn’t mind the contrast of being so slender and she so plump” (the swine!). He’d never said that to me; he’d always told me he liked flesh! Now it turns out in front of my mental cleaning lady he is not unaware that perhaps we’re clown-like together. I once told my lover who didn’t love me, when we were calm and civilized, that when I was suffering from periods of depression or actually acted crazy, he didn’t have to evaporate. He could, I even suggested, stick around and offer solace and maybe I’d get better faster. But a person who doesn’t love you doesn’t stick around when you’re not at your best. That’s part of not loving you.

  Some people stick around when you’re crazy even though they don’t love you, just out of Christian charity and all, but my lover, who wasn’t in love with me, had some notion that abandonment would, for some reason, “help.” Do you understand that? Are there others who think that leaving someone who pleads for you to stay is “help”?

  I realized he didn’t love me when he decided to go home for two weeks to his midwestern hometown in the middle of a 110-degree summer to see someone he used to know—I realized that no one in his right mind would go where it’s drop-dead heat unless he was in love. And if he were in love with this other person, then he was not in love with me. I realize this is cliché reasoning and all, but beholding me then, just as I am, that’s my way of reasoning.

  Sam, as we shall call the one whose pool is so beflowered that you can let bougainvillea petals float into your mouth swimming naked, used to lust after me so much that it gave him headaches and he’d always be asking for water to take his Fiorinals. So when we finally got to his manservant-made bed, I wasn’t surprised when he said, “I cannot make love to you and look at your face. Your face has always been too beautiful.” Which was more like it. When we finished making love that Sunday, we lay in each other’s surprised arms looking out the open wall of glass windows at the pink sunset sky and the lavender-tinted garden. All I could say was “I’m hungry.”

  Oh, I was so hungry, for the first time I could remember. I could eat shrimps and roast beef, and I did because he happened to have them in his organized manservant kitchen. We sat wrapped in towels, gobbling shrimps. I’d come to have him look over the uncopy-edited version of my new book, to have a real mind look it over and tell me the truth; his real mind. I hoped he still could tell me the truth and think I was beautiful at the same time. I can always find someone else to tell me all the truths—the ones about not minding us looking peculiar walking down the street together or not being “in love” with me.

  •

  Now, the day after the shrimp/roast-beef dinner, behold me again. In my mind last night (when I came home from Sam’s), I created this Colette scene for me and my soon-to-be ex-lover whom we shall call—let’s see—Scott, since F. Scott Fitzgerald was so weak and gentlemanly. I imagined a whole gorgeous Colette scene where Scott and I would meet, prearranged, in a restaurant’s private room. He would be looking forward to seeing me because, what with his escapades in the last couple of weeks (which began after I had crazily dragged him to my mental-health lady where he said he was not “in love” with me), it had been some time since he’d been able to talk comfortably to me and gossip and laugh and receive all the other slender gifts, all I had to give him, that he’d have missed. Although he didn’t know they mattered.

  In my scheme, we’d meet in a beautiful room, this imagined private restaurant dining room that perhaps would overlook a garden with a fountain. It would be in the afternoon, because I wasn’t about to have it wind up at night, when the possibility that I might be overcome by his beauty would make me want to be in bed with him again. I would arrive, twelve pounds less, my hair a few shades lighter, tan, and fresh from the bed of Sam, who cannot look at my face when he makes love to me because I am too beautiful.

  “Darling . . .” I would say, outstretching my hand and sliding down into one of the nice seats while a waiter handed us two elegant menus. (I’d be starving, of course, having just been with Sam.)

  We would have white wine from a silver cooler and he would find his beautiful self reflected in the polish. He also is thirty-three, but he is graceful and well-mannered. He’d be easy and proud of me, perhaps, because I would be so in control of myself and not like I’d been two weeks before when I realized he didn’t love me and had begun to cry and had run out into traffic. He might wonder where I got tan, but he’d never ask. He never asked anything. The same as he never was the first to call when we fought. Just as he never stayed with me when I fell into despair. He wouldn’t ask where I’d gotten tan.

  “What have you been doing?” he’d ask, all charming curiosity.

  “Oh . . . you know,” I would say to the menu, “the usual carryings on.”

  “You look wonderful!” he would say (not “Jesus! How beautiful you are!”).

  “So do you,” I would answer, “but you always look marvelous. So tan.”

  The waiter would pour the wine (which Scott doesn’t really like), and we’d clink and sip.

  “I have something to tell you, Scott,” I would then say. And he would know, then, that things weren’t going to be too funny. “But don’t worry,” I could add, “I’m not mad. I’m not anything. I’m all right. Don’t worry. No scenes.”

  “Well . . . What is it?” he would ask, realizing belatedly that he’d been holding my hand in a sympathetic grasp, and now disengaging it wasn’t the simplest thing on earth. I would make it easy for him by reaching for my wine.

  “Well, the thing is, Scott,” I would begin. (Oh, Colette, Colette, how did you do it? How did you manage these scenes so well? If it were really happening to me, things would have spilled all over the table by this time, and the waiter would have been an old friend wanting to know how my father was. Scott would have come into the lunch with a face totally shaken, knowing something horrible was going to happen from the tone of my voice over where we’d meet; he’d be so drawn and pale, I wouldn’t have the heart to do my beautiful speech.) “The thing is, Scott,” I would begin, “that since I’ve realized that you don’t love me, that you are not in love with me, I have had to think about a few things. One of them is that I realize that nowadays getting any kind of relationship with any kind of man is very nearly impossible, everything’s so scattered and me not being eighteen and all . . . I mean, if I had any sense at all, I’d be satisfied with your half-measure affection and not rock the boat. But you see, Scott . . .” (the waiter would come in and whoosh down some butter lettuce with freshly sliced mushrooms and divine dressing, and there’d be a pause) “. . . you see, I don’t mind being alone. Most of the women I know just hate being alone; it drives them crazy; they search for men; they do anything to keep them. I have many women friends who live with men like you who don’t love them and who just use them to cook an
d listen so they won’t be alone. The fact that I am sometimes amusing, in our affair, must be a bonus to you and for a long time I thought I could make you love me. But I realize that I cannot make you do anything; you don’t love me and you never have. You use the word love; you say you’re not ‘in love,’ and then you take my hand warmly and say that, however, you do love me.”

  “But I do love you,” he would say, worried, trying to capture me in his titanic gray eyes.

  “Well, good,” I would answer. “The thing is, Scott, that it’s very nice that you love me, believe me, I realize it is just dandy and all. But I’d rather be alone. Or with a companion who truly loves me. I realize, of course, that these days no one truly loves anyone, but in that case I’d rather be alone. Because if you look at it from my point of view, Scott” (and at this point, I’d dip a shrimp into some pale green sauce, brought by the waiter during the first part of my speech, and take a ladylike nibble), “it’s actually humiliating to be in love with someone who doesn’t love you.”

  “But I never meant to humiliate you,” he would say. “I never meant to hurt you.”

  “I know that, darling,” I’d say; the shrimps in this restaurant weren’t as good as Sam’s; but then, Sam’s a better chef than the guy they’ve got in the kitchen of this restaurant. “I know you’ve never meant to hurt me and I know that you always told me you were not ‘in love’ with me, but I was so stuffed with illusions, I thought I could change you . . . Could I have some more wine? Thanks . . .” I would watch as he poured carefully. He never dropped things from nerves the way I did. “So the real reason I invited you to lunch today was not just to explain the reasons I don’t think we should see each other anymore . . .”