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

said if after seven years ofmarriage I still couldn’t come, what was the difference? So he’s gone. Now tell me who’s the sickening one?”
    â€œYou’re both just awful,” Lola replied instantly. “Just terribly terribly awful. And”—she began to laugh her he-he laugh—“you mean you and a bunch of grown women are just going to lay around and—”
    â€œIf you’re laughing at me,” Joanne said, “you’re one of them.”
    And since Lola couldn’t stop laughing even though it meant being one of them, I have the feeling that it must have been that day when learning all of a sudden a new oppressed class had definitely emerged from the masses heretofore unidentified and lacking definition—and it was her. Only she refused to remove her mascara or let her hair go gray or take off her pancake makeup or let people who had only just gotten around to having orgasms tell her that she didn’t know about men and women. When it was the only thing she had ever known that hadn’t oppressed her—outside of Sam—one bit. Not one.
    Maurice Teretsky had a slavish thing about women’s feet so overpowering that it was all he could do when he first saw Lola to keep from throwing himself at hers and licking them forever, wrecking her audition.
    â€œGood, very good,” he said professionally, not wrecking her audition, “now you will be one of us.”
    â€œOh,” Lola said.
    â€œYou will come back this afternoon for your first rehearsal. What is your name, katchka?”
    â€œVogel,” Lola said, professionally. “Lola Vogel.”
    â€œAhhh,” he sighed, “and what size are your feet?”
    â€œMy feet?” Lola asked.
    Goldie, sitting beside Maurice, tensed into an iron bar of requited suspicions. Her stonelike trance and Lola’s raised eyebrows asking “My feet?” made him exercise his tremendousdiscipline over his reckless urge to lick each of her toes ragged.
    â€œIt’s her, isn’t it?” Goldie demanded.
    â€œYou may go,” Maurice politely said now to Lola.
    Lola made a slight bow and left the stage.
    â€œI knew it was someone,” Goldie seethed, “I knew it.”
    â€œBut my dear child,” Maurice said, “I never saw her before today.”
    â€œI’ll die,” Goldie moaned. “Ohhhhhh.”
    Â·Â Â·Â Â·
    Sitting beside Maurice Teretsky, Lola attempted to breathe lightly and through her mouth. Breathing through her nose when she was around Maurice made her gag, the smell of freshly chewed garlic was so devastating after he ate his breakfast. Trying to offer him Dentyne didn’t work because he believed chewing gum was an American abomination, but a week after Lola’s induction into the troupe when Maurice had had time to pick a fatal fight with Goldie and clear the decks for someone new, he decided that Lola chewing gum was “charming.”
    â€œExcept when you are on stage,” he explained. “And those are the only two faults in your performance.”
    â€œYou want me to wear a bra?” Lola asked.
    â€œYou must, my dear,” Maurice said, “you must.”
    â€œBut it’s so . . . artificial.”
    â€œPerhaps,” Maurice sighed, “but so is art. And we are artists. We must accept these things.”
    â€œI guess.” Lola sighed, learning to breathe with her mouth already.
    Ever since Lola supplanted Goldie (unbeknownst to Lola until months after she’d been supplanted by Molly), she had become Maurice’s little katchka (which, she found out, was Yiddish for goose). Sitting next to him during auditions became one of their shared intimacies.
    â€œI didn’t mind so much sleeping with him because at five P.M . he drank a glass of parsley juice and thinned out the garlic, but peee yew I’m telling you, during those auditions—in the mornings—the