L.A.WOMAN by Eve Babitz Read Free Book Online

schizophrenia or the whole new field of psychopharmacology opening up, but after a while my friend finally turned cold when it turned out that Estelle hadn’t read Giovanni’s Room.
    â€œRead?” Estelle laughed. “Why should I bother with such foolishness?”
    â€œYou don’t read?” Shelly gasped.
    â€œCertainly not,” Estelle replied, peeling a grape in her chaise with her long Lincoln Continental Maroon polished fingernails.
    â€œBut books are—” Shelly cried, terror impaling her face into Hellenistic horror rather than classical Greek peaceful beauty like Estelle’s. “—books are necessary!”
    â€œNecessary? What on earth for?”
    â€œYou have to read,” Shelly cried, her face stolid as a sleeping boa, “or you can’t learn things.”
    â€œWhy should I be expected to do anything. Learn things? Read? I think it’s very silly of you young people these days to expect people—me—to do anything. Very silly. And I must say,” she must have had to add, “very boring and very tiresome of you—those your age I mean—doing all that. Doing anything is really so bad, but you—your generation—you do everything. It must stop.”
    â€œI don’t believe you,” Shelly now laughed, relieved.
    â€œBut it’s true,” Estelle said, her thumb impaled in a grape which was blacker than her nail polish, thank heavens. If it were green, Shelly might have never gotten out alive. “All of you doing what you’ll do. Not only is it silly, boring, and tiresome—it’s dangerous, of course, it’s bad and dangerous because you don’t know what you’re doing. But dangerous, bad . . . these things are details. Details give women wrinkles. I’m over fifty and I don’t have one line on my face. Details! Like good and bad!”
    â€œYou’re so funny,” Shelly decided, consoled that this niceold lady was only trying to be wicked and witty but didn’t know how.
    â€œNo I’m not,” Estelle replied. Her face settled into a hitman’s closed mask. Not a wrinkle anywhere.
    â€œIf I don’t go to UCLA I might come up to Berkeley this fall. I’ll call you, okay? And come over like this to see you again. . . . I like the older generation you know?”
    â€œHow on earth can a grown woman spend the fall in a place like Berkeley?” Estelle demanded of me.
    â€œSchool,” I said. “You know, UC Berkeley? School?”
    â€œOh, but all fall?” Estelle asked.
    â€œOh I’m going to be a lawyer one day,” Shelly smiled. “And help those more unfortunate than myself.”
    â€œAnd who might that be?” Estelle asked.
    â€œWhy the poor,” Shelly said, dripping brimfuls of her usual Gamma good intentions—the only sorority at Hollywood High that never got laid. “We’ve got to help.” Shelly went on, “I mean, we’ve got to do something.”
    â€œDarling,” Estelle turned to me and said, “I’m terribly sorry but it’s just too much trouble for me to get up. And show you out. Can you show yourselves out?”
    â€œShelly, we’re going,” I told her.
    â€œNow?” She was in the middle of her first sip of tea and her first cookie.
    â€œNow!” I said. “Hurry up.”
    â€œThat’s a good girl,” Estelle called out to me as I left, “and slam the door tight, sweetheart. Lock it!”
    Â·Â Â·Â Â·
    Fortunately Lola and Estelle formed a friendship originally based on the obvious premise that mascara—Maybel-line black cake mascara you spit into and brushed onto your eyelashes with a caked little brush which fit into the very same little red container—that mascara was the meaning of life. Since they were really the only two in Teretsky’s troupe who understood this simple reality, their