A Field Guide

I’m sick today, with the kind of head cold that would probably be sizably corrected by a stint in a bath of something mentholated and grimly medicinal. But I got into the bathroom to run the tap and was feeling enormous and sardonic and too Bea Arthur by half, and the prospect of an hour’s basting with Vicks felt like just another starless and wearying thing in a starless and wearying week.

So I took instead a few of the old glass bottles that line the tub’s edge and ran them in, and got in and closed my eyes and stayed very still until I felt appreciably more like Cleopatra swanning down the Nile, or an ill but very elegant girl in an English novel of the 1920s who was very smart and very brave and obviously going to die very very young. I stayed there until the bathroom took on some of that hotel bathroom glow, all divine scents and chrome fixtures and smart dark on the walls and then I wrapped myself in two bath sheets and hoped for the best.

Which was, it turns out, entirely futile: I’m still absolutely sick, still squinty and runny and moping theatrically around the house like Isadora Duncan with a migraine, but at least I smell delicious. Which, even when it’s only me here cocooned in this cloud of scent and slant of sun, makes for vastly more agreeable company for all.

The other comfort of my days is Eve Babitz. Who? You ask? By God, I say! Although that’s not entirely fair, because I only heard of her last November and it felt like a secret being passed along.

All the descriptions of her I’ve read – ‘A Joan Didion who parties’, ‘Hollywood’s Best Girlfriend’, ‘The Best Girl in America’, reportedly from a Beatle, – inevitably seem more about someone else than her. She was always more than the sum of her parts, which were nothing to sneeze at: the goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky, the (nude) star of the famous photograph of Marcel Duchamps playing chess, the periodic lover of Steve Martin, Ed Ruscha, Jim Morrison—Jim Morrison!! She was enormously talented –and, one suspects, behind all the cocktails, vastly more serious than credited to be-- but always in on the joke, launching her career with a fan letter to Joseph Heller that read, in its entirety:

Dear Joseph Heller,

I am a stacked eighteen-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard. I am also a writer.

Eve Babitz

She seems custom-engineered for cult status: the kind of sex appeal where glasses seem like a joke, an exacting talent unbowed enough by writerly neuroses to go for cocktails often in the middle of the day, to while away untold hours contemplating a friends’ unusually ravishing eye makeup or French lace skirt or funnily sexy way of smoking without entering a coma of self-recrimination. Sharp and clever and self-loving, with charisma that could level a building. And the kind of starburst persona who inspires even her detractors to rise to their best work; as a male contemporary once said, ‘In every young man’s life, there’s an Eve Babitz, and usually it’s Eve.’

She is also about as different from me, and maybe from you, as it feels possible to be. I read her moody, funny, atmospheric stuff (I particularly like Slow Days, Fast Company) and contemplate her aphorisms, like “sex is our art.” I reflect on the degree to which my art is not sex and then laugh for about thirty minutes and sometimes cry a little. And probably Eve’s languor and polyeverything looks about as natural on me as that time I tried Joan Didion’s famous packing list and spent an entire two weeks in Paris looking like a Missouri ballerina with a gland crisis. So I stick to my knitting, and she sticks, irreproachably and inimitably, to hers. But at least I get to take her tour of LA, cocooned here in my terry as snow falls and my head aches, and I imagine the sirocco whaling up 63 street, and being a girl seems a little more powerful for a while.

It's been a dark week in our house. For once, this is not a metaphor.

I am not a huge one for symbolism or the occult or the Long Arm of Fate creeping out to grasp one from, for instance, the bathroom cupboard, but it was hard to find it entirely coincidental that, at the end of Obama’s speech last week, I walked back into my office to do some work to discover three wall lights had entirely burnt out.

This is, as they say, a true story.

In a week like this, I think it’s helpful to run directly up against the unknowability of the universe—the open question of how did we get here, and the absolute mystery of how we get ourselves out of it— and I find there are few better simulacra than the sheer brick wall of an entirely opaque and truly short story. No context to assist in deciphering, no themes to be underscored—just the invisible, unfathomable workings of another’s mind, the extraordinary distance between us made palpable on the page.

You don’t know why it’s doing what it’s doing, but there’s an unmistakably strong hand on the wheel, and the odds seem good it knows where it’s going. Practicing faith makes keeping it easier.

All of which is to say, it’s a superb time for Mary Ruefle.

There are many, many things in her book My Private Property that I don’t understand, that slow me down. I dogear the corners of pages to return to, and by the end the book lies next to my pillow at a tilt, off-balance with the weight of my confusion. The one about the keys! Why that story is called Little Golf Pencil! All of that really is wrapped around a shrunken head ‽ I try not to take the mystery personally. I take it line by line, stretch out a hand, let myself be walked down unfamiliar paths. And then WHUMP, genius or hope lands in the center of the page like an anvil, and suddenly you know why you came:

You are a woman, the ten years have passed, you love your children, you love your lover, but there are no longer any persons on earth who can stop you from being yourself—you have put your parents in the earth, you have buried the past. Of course in the meantime you have destroyed your life and it has to be completely remade and there is a great deal of grief and regret and nostalgia and all of that, but even so you are free, free to sit on the bank and throw stones and feel thankful for the few years or one or two decades left to you in which you can be yourself…

If you are young and you are reading this, perhaps you will understand the gleam in the eye of any woman who is sixty, severnty, eighty or ninety: she cannot take you seriously (sorry) for you are but a girl to her, despite your babies and shoes and lovemaking and all of that. You are just a girl playing at life.

You are just a girl on the edge of a great forest. You should be frightened but instead you are eating a lovely meal, or you are cooking one, or you are running to the florist or you are opening a box of flowers that has just arrived at your door—and none of these things is done in the great spirit that they will later be done in.

And then a page later you’re back in the bramble patch again, tearing and catching and lost, but now with something to hang onto until the other side.

I’m reading it again today, and again tomorrow, and God knows on Friday, with a glass or two of wine in the bath and my TV unplugged in protest. I like to think Mary would approve.

PS: It’s tempting to read these pieces quickly, in sequence, to try and discover The Theme. I think there’s a strong argument to be made that searching for the theme, the narrative, the argument, the Hook has more or less ruined us as a group, but that’s a topic for another time. All I can say is take this slowly. God is in the details, if anywhere: let them in.