Black Swans

I’m always amazed at how books find us at the time we need them, as if there’s some omniscient, benevolent librarian in the sky.

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.

In our romantic lives, these moments of jealousy, which scorch our lover’s initials into our flesh and seem to brand us, often vanish into thin air sooner or later. But maybe, if we don’t cave in to them, they’ll vanish sooner, and we’ll be able sooner to try to describe what happened with phrases that fall apart in our hands, meaningless descriptions in voices clouded with scraps of holocaust, memorized episodes that have no context unless you’re inside the story trying to live through it. Once you’re out, all there are are empty spaces strewn in the past where the pain was too great and red-hot jealousy tore through our rooms, or why else would we have painted them all black? Nothing remains, as we look back, but a smile, and “Oh, yes, one night I crouched under a window . . .” But it’s a window too dark to peer through, and you find yourself saying, “I never knew real jealousy. . . .” It elapses into long ago.

And I was in love with his book, which I felt I could have written myself. Which is one of the troubles with writing; people who love your writing already think they’re you. They think if they sat down and wrote, it would be your book. Exactly what I thought about Walter.

But love, once it dyes our hearts purple, won't go away. Especially the kind of love we used to feel when we were young, the kind we wish we could feel again for someone new.

But then, as I read somewhere recently, narcissists always hurt the one they love the most.

From now on, I thought, only French mice will love me.

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

I discovered there was something else I had never considered-Plan C- don't turn to mush, don't leave, stay and resist. Tango's entire point.

Normal men aren’t going to love anyone who looks forward to anything but them. And I couldn’t help looking forward to being published.

We drove back through the valley, down to Ventura Boulevard, and over the hills to Hollywood and then west to the Château Marmont, waiting like Tangiers for strangers to find happiness. The land of self-enchantment had, once more, upheld its end of the deal—to be there for those willing to stay. By then, the jacaranda flowers had all fallen and squashed onto the streets in sticky mush, no longer turning the town lavender with clouds, but still they’d be there again next May and so would I.

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, as though we must have sold our souls to the devil for all those swimming pools and orange trees and young hopefuls basking in the sun.

We live in a world where whoever sedates us with the most glamour and captures our imaginations with the greatest intensity becomes history.

It’s not that that kills people,” he said, “it’s the fear. I mean, it’s okay to die. We remember that from our psychedelic days, don’t we? That we are divine?

In those days, and still now, I had a lot of women friends -- mostly in the black swan category-- who ignored convention and things society expected women to be, but didn't fuck your boyfriend, no matter what. Fucking people's husbands is for people from Ivy League colleges who read too much John O'Hara.

At the time, I didn’t think it was a tragedy, Zack’s fall, but later I wondered if the tragedies in life are only about when you could have been great but weren’t.

He was adequate, a typical mediocre white male whose career advanced because he was not entirely horrible. Women have to work so much harder than men to appear half as convincing.

I got home, thank God, at 6:45 and decided the thing to do was to be a black swan myself. Stick to my own kind- freakish, beautiful outsiders.

The rooms in those days were unfashionably sad enough to commit suicide in, and, in fact, that to me was the Château’s charm, that it didn’t have any objections to one’s committing suicide. Things since then had gone steadily downhill,

And so another season passed, and I hadn’t seen Brian, yet another terrible tangle with Peter went by, and anyone who loved me I avoided like the plague. Can things get worse? I kept wondering, and surprisingly, they did. Until finally I read this book by Fay Weldon, and she talks about a woman married to a depressed man and explains there’s nothing you (i.e., women) can do about them. And fiction got through to me where facts had feared to tread.

But to be corrupt, you must once have been innocent - and I guess some people never were.

You know you’re doing the right thing if you don’t have to tap-dance.

Still, if you ask me, some parts are just as beautiful as my dream version—even more beautiful if you subscribe to the Tennessee Williams decadence-as-poetry theory that ravaged radiance is even better than earnest maintenance.

Hollywood, after all, is the home of those whom silent star Mae Murray called the “self-enchanted.” And having grown up in Hollywood, I’ve known a lot of self-enchanted people. Not since the pharaohs thought they were gods have so many human beings believed that they themselves (and not their publicists or destiny or some larger force) were responsible for the fact that so many other human beings worshiped them.

And he left. What discipline. I guess that is what they mean by “character” on the East Coast: leaving summer behind.

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

At least the Château Marmont kept looking as if when you entered a room you might be in Tangiers when you left. But then, my friends are the type who love Tangiers, and I’ve always been afraid if I went to the actual place, I’d never come back.

Of the nine million Harlequin Romance and Silhouette Ecstasy books for women today, sold and read by the ton, no hero appears whose primary quality isn’t arrogance. If any man appears at first helpful, cheerful, and polite, he’s the villain. The man who at first appears hopelessly mean and insensitive, he’s the hero. It’s cornography. Margaret Mitchell’s inspiration for Rhett Butler was Valentino in that tango. It’s a twentieth-century malaise.

But the trouble with life is, just when you think you’re having a happy ending, things are changing, because there are no endings except death.