I Used to Be Charming

by Eve Babitz

  The Clothes at this concert were mainly khakis, walking shoes, sweaters, and pants, nobody was dressed amazingly, but then it was all outdoors and cozy and inspired and brilliant anyway, the way the originators like my father and John Bauer hoped it would be, and the way Mrs. Grant and the other wonderful ladies of Ojai long ago imagined—civilization in the country, a perfect combination, a divine melding of the outdoors and the very, very sweetly cultivated—one of the great things about living in Southern California as it started out to be, and somehow still manages to be.

  The tug-of-war that goes on within me about sitting through concerts at all, and the feeling that concerts are really the most sublime thing on earth and probably ought to be gone to as much as possible, still causes me trouble, but if you have to go to a concert, it’s probably most wonderful to go to these in Ojai, held in June, under the stars or gentle shade, hearing a young orchestra filled with technique and spirit and enthusiasm, and with the least expensive seats, the ones on the lawn behind the small bowl, where you can eat your picnic dinner and be there but not too there, the perfect way to hear music on a soft, California lawn, the air perfect, the people gentle, civilized, and kind as the avante-garde used to be and still, today, is.

  Between concerts, we went to Suzanne’s, this elegant place, except it was too early for us to have dinner, so we just had gazpacho and I had iced tea, Paul had a beer. Later, in Santa Barbara, we went to a cute French restaurant called Mousse Odile, where for the first time in the years since I went to Paris, I found celery root just like it’s supposed to be, perfect, and the best bread on earth too. Even the coffee was so great, Paul bought some to take home with him, but then Santa Barbara has always had secret great places and one of its secrets is that twenty-five miles inland is Ojai with its orange groves, music festivals, and the beauty of country life lived in the grand manner of people who want to be out where they can see stars at night, but not that out.

  Wherever Mrs. Grant is, I hope she’s in a place as divine as her farm in Ojai, but I doubt anything could be more divine than the place I remember, the kittens, the ruby-handled letter opener from China, and the cinnamon toast.

  Westways

  June 1995

  SANTA FE

  Angels We Have Heard on High

  WELL, if you think Santa Fe in summer is beautiful but just a little bit corny because it’s so perfect, in the winter Santa Fe is beautiful but not corny.

  Of course, there are many wonderful things to do in New Mexico any time of year but basically they all boil down to looking at the sky. You can go shopping in Santa Fe or skiing in the mountains above and look at the sky, come out of any place at sunset and look at the sky, go to the nearby pueblos, where even the Indians look at the sky and have been for eight hundred years. Or you can completely stuff yourself at lunch and go outside, look at the sky, and suddenly all the fat grams you’ve consumed just become one with the Great Zen of Realized Dreams that permeates Santa Fe and suddenly you know all you have to do is walk the entire gradual hill of Canyon Road—a place lousy with art galleries and fraught with cute-stranger eye contact—and suddenly, voilà, your dessert burns off and you’re ready for tapas that night at El Farol.

  If you suddenly decide you have to go to Santa Fe in December and you take the Shuttlejack (it’s called) from the Albuquerque airport, you’ll be amazed because it’s a foot and a half higher up for passengers than regular buses and you can see all those hills shaped like Hershey kisses and the land that goes from beaten tan to rose to iron rust as you get closer and closer to seven thousand feet above sea level where Santa Fe mysteriously endures, in beauty, a realized dream. By the time I arrived the snow had all melted from the sunshine all day and I had no idea, when I got to my room at the Inn on the Alameda, just how wonderful it was to be in a place that had fireplaces and piñon wood to burn when outside there was snow.

  In the morning, when I left the inn, if I turned right I’d soon hit the Old House, and if I turned left, I was just a short block from Canyon Road, the boulevard of realized dreams most days. In Santa Fe proper, they made a law in the 1950s that any building newly erected could be any shade of brown it liked, with trim either brown, white, or blue like the sky. I learned this on the elegant and fascinating walking tour that meets in front of the Eldorado Hotel at 9:30 in the morning, led by this ex-Angeleno named Alan who explains that everyone and everything in Santa Fe is from somewhere else; it’s the land of the romantic exile, a land, he said, “based on three things—the geology, the three different cultures [Spanish, Indian, and Anglo], and the altitude.”

  It is a city, to me, that depends on the influence of my two favorite elusive artist geniuses—Georgia O’Keeffe, whom we all today know for her skies, bones, and obedience to the spectacle she beheld out her doorstep, and Evan S. Connell, writer of the greatest book of American history ever attempted, Son of the Morning Star, a book about Custer’s last stand from not only the Anglos’ but the Indians’ point of view, and it was so lucidly and brilliantly written and about such shocking and amazing cruelty and weirdness that though I picked the book up just to browse through it because I had to wait for something, I soon was gripped in amazement and couldn’t put it down for three days till I was finished. Plus he wrote Mrs. Bridge, about how horrible being a good American woman can be.

  My goal on my first night was to see a school’s Christmas pageant, but I got lost on my way there because as I was out wandering on foot looking for the place, I suddenly heard angels singing from inside the Loretto Chapel. Actual angels, their voices cascading in breathless crescendos like from heaven, coming from inside the church. I tried the front door but it was locked, so I dashed around to the side entrance, and when a woman standing by the door asked if I was late I said yes, brazenly crashing a rehearsal of the Santa Fe Women’s Ensemble where they were putting the finishing touches on a new piece of Christmas music, modern music mixed somehow with Bach-type harmonies, made totally angelic by the sopranos, contraltos, and altos, totally angelic women’s voices so pure, so divine, such a realized dream for all with ears to hear—and they were going to perform in this incredible church on Friday and Saturday evenings, though I unfortunately wouldn’t be there.

  So if I were going to Santa Fe in December, I would call the choir and find out when they will be performing and then be there with bells on since to go to such an altitude, seven thousand feet, to hear such voices is surely one of those things that cannot ever be duplicated anywhere else.

  The next thing I knew, I was back under the cold night skies, and luckily, the great new restaurants, like Cafe Pasqual’s, were just a couple of blocks down the street, so it was easy to walk there, still under the spell of the angelic voices, and if you love fresh salmon and a totally romantic place to eat, this is one of the most elegant places on earth—and if you like, for lunch or breakfast, they have a large round table for people who come there alone, to sit and meet others, which is very cozy yet elegant—a typical Santa Fe style of life. For breakfast, there’s Celebrations, on Canyon Road, where I had pancakes fit for General Custer, Mrs. Bridge, or Georgia herself—or for lunch, the Shed, where the blue corn enchiladas and the chocolate dessert . . . And there are a great many stores and in December they smell of sage incense and sell lots of dresses and skirts, vests and jackets, in dark jewellike shades which, if you buy them there, will remind you of Santa Fe forever.

  I prefer Santa Fe in the winter—no one’s there but the angels and the sky, the clouds, the sunsets. Spirits hang in the air, exiled in this romantic place made from the geology, the three cultures, and the altitude.

  It’s not even in America, this place.

  Westways

  December 1995

  LOVE AND KISSES

  WHEN I was growing up, we girls spent every waking moment trying to be more kissable. Every one of our assets we exploited: our curly hair, our long eyelashes, our scent, our toothpaste, the way we talked—all to become adorable enough for boys to want t
o kiss us when we played spin the bottle and its more sophisticated cousin, seven minutes in heaven.

  You can get pretty disorganized kissing for seven minutes in a closet, but when I was twelve years old, we combined the two games so that when the bottle landed on a boy, you not only got to kiss him but also got to spend seven minutes with him in a closet—in “heaven.” I can’t remember if anyone ever really lasted the full seven minutes—parents and chaperones being the clever killjoys they were—but this was the fantasy we girls had: The bottle would land on the cutest boy (in those days, his name was Doug), and we’d get to kiss forever.

  When I was in junior high school, my favorite thing to read was love comics—pre–Harlequin romance stories about women wishing they could kiss someone but being unable to do so until the last frame. Boys read adventure comics, crime stories, Western trash. And when boys went to see a pirate movie with Errol Flynn and he kissed Olivia de Havilland at the end, they would squirm with nauseated revulsion and hide their eyes in the same way girls did when people were gruesomely killed. Fortunately, this boy stage didn’t last forever.

  It is almost as though kissing were invented by Hollywood as the only sensible ending to love stories—the golden moment when “happily ever after” was supposed to begin. I don’t think boys would have, of their own volition, kissed girls were it not for the lessons they eventually learned from the movies. At best, in pre-Hollywood times, if people kissed it was in illustrations of a gallant knight kissing her ladyship’s gloved hand, or in hearsay from the Bible like “So she caught him, and kissed him, and with an impudent face said unto him . . .”

  In junior high there was a boy all the girls were crazy about, Shaggy. He had the blackest hair, long enough to fall over his eyes, and in the hot sun he smelled of Brylcreem, a scent that ever since has hit me as an aphrodisiac. For almost a week of afternoons we would sit out on the concrete steps that surrounded the cafeteria, reading Mad magazine. We would laugh at the same things, and then he’d walk me to class and kiss me—both of us aflame with burning desire.

  One Friday night Shaggy dropped by my house in a car with a bashed-in windshield—not a good sign, since anyway he was only fourteen and way too young to drive. “We can’t go in that car,” I said. “We’ll get busted.” But he was fast and he wanted more than mere kissing. Suddenly one day he dumped me for this hot tomato named Julie with very impudent red lips. I didn’t see him much after that, but the truth was that if I could have done more than kiss him to keep him kissing only me, I would have. It was only later I discovered that some guys will leave you for hotter tomatoes no matter how far you go—love being the unfair thing it is.

  In high school, I knew another boy who had the lips all the girls wanted to kiss. We used to dream about kissing him, just as all the boys in school used to wonder what it would be like to kiss this girl named Cami, a cream puff in a tight skirt and powder-blue sweater to match her eyes. One rainy day during lunch, those two kissed each other in front of the whole student body and we all went limp. Time stood still for all of us—the moment more hot and steamy (and more innocent) than sex could ever be.

  Kissing involves all of your senses: sight, because you wouldn’t want to kiss anyone not striking you as adorable enough to touch your lips; sound, because once a kiss starts, moaning ensues and you hope it’s inspirational; smell, though who knows what to make of the current testings on men that reveal what turns them on most is the smell of pumpkin pie; touch, because touching is why we kiss someone at all; and taste, of course. In more ways than one, taste is everything in kissing.

  But there is one sense you don’t need to worry about in kissing, the stuff mothers used to call “sense enough to come in out of the rain.” This is the kind of good, “sound” sense that you need to have in your friends, but it’s not what you need in a lover. People who kiss you can get away with a lot, especially if you want to kiss them again. A lover who’s been mean to you can, with a kiss, stop you from leaving, if feeling you might never kiss him again makes you miserable.

  Kissing, if it’s done on both cheeks, is camaraderie; if on one cheek, is coy; but on the mouth, it can go anywhere—uphill to heaven or downhill to hellish squalor. The great thing about a kiss is its potential, its possibilities, its main line to commitment.

  Looking at photographs of people kissing, we are like voyeurs. We always hope that in the wonderful act of kissing, passion will take over, which is how we wish it to be for Rhett and Scarlett and all the stars who kiss in movies. We hope that even though it’s their job and they’re only actors and they’re surrounded by film crews, we hope that when they kiss, the kiss will get out of hand and take over and turn into passionate romance.

  Long ago, I came across a great book of Jacques-Henri Lartigue photographs with an elegant gold cover. In this book were pictures of his beautiful girlfriend in her incredible svelte stylishness. And I realized that the photographs we take of people we love—or that they take of us—symbolize to us what love is, like remembering the thrill of a kiss in the rain long, long ago.

  There are many kinds of kisses. Teen-lust kisses, kisses that bring comfort and joy and make life worth living, kisses of life and death and close calls, kisses of spontaneous victory, tribute, and relief. But the kisses I want to remember, the ones in which the world turned to mush, could never show up in a photograph—even if one could have been taken in a pitch-dark closet.

  The last man who kissed me seriously was way too young for me and beautiful enough to be a lot of trouble. His shoulders were like angels’ wings and his eyes like turquoise pools. He took me for a ride on his BMW motorcycle, and when he said goodbye, he kissed my cheek. Unlike other men’s kisses, this one landed straight in my dreams. . . .

  But I can’t be dreaming about him; it would end in complete disorganization of my senses, like memories of spin the bottle—a game that could start here on earth and end up in heaven.

  Vogue

  February 1996

  SCENT OF A WOMAN

  WHEN I was twenty-one, one of the great mortifications of my life was that the only damned thing that didn’t smell horrible on me was a perfume by Avon called Here’s My Heart. This was way before Avon got hip, and the scented cream came in a fake plastic Dresden-blue container with a white top. The first time I wore Here’s My Heart, I was fifteen and went out to a beatnik coffeehouse where this particular guy, a guy who was all-city football quarterback, a guy who was so wild that all the women were afraid of him, a guy who owned a red convertible, a guy who had golden hair and green eyes, took my hand as I entered this coffeehouse and went ape over my perfume. He was kneeling at my feet, begging for my phone number (he was eighteen)!

  So it wasn’t as if Here’s My Heart didn’t work. It’s just that it didn’t sound or look like anything that belonged on a beautiful woman’s dressing table. (In fact, I would put empty atomizers on mine, just to have the look of perfume.) I could not find a single sexy perfume in the department stores that smelled on me the way perfume always seemed to when it was wrapped around beautiful women—and since I lived in Hollywood, there were a lot of beautiful, great-smelling women around. (I smelled good, too; it was just I hated to admit it was Here’s My Heart by Avon because, jeez, it just wasn’t dignified!)

  I would search Saks and Magnin’s and all the other big department stores. Every time I met a woman who smelled wonderful, I’d find out what she was wearing, then run out and try it. Except on me, it never smelled the same. The first perfume I decided was malarkey was Joy, which my cousin and aunt could both wear without it smelling like gasoline. But on me, like most perfumes, it did. My mother, on the other hand, had such a great genetic gift, she could wear Chanel No. 5 and actually have it smell exactly the way it does in the bottle. (Whereas if I put it on, I smelled like old stationery.) In theory, I loved the smell of Fidji and Je Reviens and Fracas and various other French perfumes, but they either were too sweet on me or would give me a headache. Even Shalimar, which so many wom
en smelled delicious in, made me smell like the Whore of Babylon. In fact, the only thing that I actually didn’t mind the smell of was Vitabath, which in those days you could get only if you knew stewardesses who flew it in from Switzerland. It was called Babedes or something.

  Finally, my friend Jack, who used to know a stewardess who’d bring back Vitabath, invited me to the house of a friend who had a pool. “It’s great,” he said. “He’s away and we can go swimming. He’s in Paris with his wife. He wrote Charade, so he’s in Paris a lot. His name is Peter Stone.”

  I had just seen Charade (it came out in 1963) and was still quivering with how great Audrey Hepburn was, how marvelous she looked—her eyes, her voice, her Givenchy clothes. The clothes practically stole the movie. I couldn’t believe we were going to the house of someone who had had anything to do with this movie, even if he was out of town.

  With his wife, in Paris.

  Jack and I arrived on a hot, clear summer day, and he told me to change in the bedroom, where Peter Stone and his no-doubt beautiful wife would be if they weren’t in Paris. I looked at the dressing table and saw that, unlike a lot of women in Hollywood, she had only one kind of perfume, a single bottle called Le De Givenchy—the same guy who designed the great clothes for Audrey.