Sublime

“WHAT do you think of New York?” Wally asked one day when he took her out to lunch. Without Janet and the Russian Tea Room, with just Wally at lunch, New York somehow felt sensible. “You mean, what do I think of New York?” she asked. “That’s what I asked,” he said. Jacaranda attempted gathering her thoughts and composing herself, but neither of

although Elaine will probably vanish as soon as they get wherever they’re going. She has a way of vaporizing at parties, being immediately absorbed into the revelry.

I am susceptible to frivolity. I know this about myself. I love beauty; I am weak to surfaces; I am apt to mistake eccentricity for character. I drink more than I should. I love overdressing; I love staying up past midnight; I love breakfasts at all-night diners, and the Irish coffees you order when you can’t decide whether it’s night or morning.

Every time she came to a corner with a newsstand on it, Gilbert Wood was glaring out of the cover of People, aflame with sex and rage. But he still hadn’t called her,

Joan Didion, who knew how to wear clothes, was too brilliant and great for anyone to write like and too skinny and sultry to look like. I thought if I couldn’t be Joan, then I’d have to be dowdy and/or crazy, like Virginia Woolf. Of course, there was always Colette, but then she was French—not living in L.A.—and even she scared men.

She made enough money to get her own West Hollywood apartment, gas, and drugs, and not have to be in a regular office where they expected her to wear shoes.

The Mysterious East Meets an L.A. Orange She resumed wishing she’d never come.

began engaging in flirtatious ways that I thought I wasn’t quite worthy of. But looking at photos of myself from that senior year I now realize I actually was cute enough to warrant their attention,