Halfway through the immense outline I just got sick of the work of writing a boring boring outline, and decided to keep myself excited about the project by going on a dig into whatever meaty slice I really wanted to be working on. I used the first paragraph of a story I had earlier been working on and realized it was exactly the voice of Leona's character—she's judgmental, insecure and narcissistic in that typical Ivy-League way, but at the core she wants to be loved. The challenge in this chapter (and how it fits into the book) is to show how a girl can create divergent fictions around a single incident. This, of course, is how the editors operate based on the footage they have. I don't think we should ever know what Alan thinks, but we should be aware that Leona is deluding herself, and that the boy if in love with anyone, is in love with Celia.
My goal: When Leona, in her bed, imagines Alan, her memories should replay the "dailies" of her "shooting" with him much as Leslie Bennett, in his trailer located LITERALLY in the Alan family drive-way, replays the incidents of the day and decides how to prompt the next day's action to create coherent narratives. I am thinking about changing from my outline of a chapter wholly told through Leona's gaze to break away in a Barthelme-ish last paragraph to Leslie's trailer as he watches snippets of leftover Leona/Alan footage (Leona, who opts to get her head blurred out, cannot be shown in final cuts) and thinks of a sort of pre-TV, pre-lapserian time when he could have just watched this scene without projecting upon it a narrative. It's just two kids, a couch, a TV. A book on a dresser. Leona in her rumpled sheets. It's just people moving through rooms. Etc.
Okay--here's the day's efforts. And by day, I mean 4.30 - 8 spent at Zarah on Gulou Dongdajie.
IN THE MARGINS OF THE BOOK HE HAD LENT HER, THE BOY HAD WRITTEN, "Man v. Nature." It made Leona flinch: how soppy, how obvious and poorly seen, she thought. But…at the same time…She noted his crabbed handwriting, the care with which he had set down the phrase. It was cute to imagine Alan using a regular old pencil, like a child sitting at a desk doing homework after-hours, the lamp casting its spot of peach light on the page, a single circle in a dark room, and within the circle—Man v. Nature.It was cute to imagine him sharpening the pencil—pausing to open the desk drawer and, finding no sharpeners there, splitting at the graphite with the edge of a razor blade. It was nice, she guessed, to just imagine him in a little room alone, reading.
And these ruminations set her to loving him again, without reason, with only heartache. It was difficult to be a girl in love, she thought, tossing on the rumpled duvet, thinking of how the moonlight might look against her body in just this position. She lay sprawled open like a starfish, her limp hands dangling off the bed’s edges like the sculpted, heavy useless things of a Michaelangelo. It was as if she were watching herself in a movie. Like watching herself as she would watch a sort of character with whom she empathized, to whom she felt good things should be coming. It was difficult.
A part of her knew that Alan loved her and a part of her could never know. If he did not love her, the knowledge would be too hard to bear. It was not only the rejection that must be reckoned with—another hatchmark in a long line—it was the sheer waste expended in the years she had spent loving him—two years, nearly. And it was only just this week that they had reached some sort of crest.
Crest—she liked that word. It was a wave, but it also recalled the intimacy of toothpaste. Crest. She imagined a tube of his toothpaste in a dirty glass cup, kept on the lip of a porcelain sink. She could really love him.
So yes, it started with the book. And it kept going.
The book was a childish collection of Victorian lyric poems. Everyone knew by now that the Victorians hadn’t been any good at poetry but Leona still paged through the thing—scanning for the poem that would be clearly, succinctly addressed from him to her. She read an awful one about finches—a drowned bird found and raised to sing “sweetly”—and then she put the thing down. Maybe he was gay.
That was what it was. She thought of the way he dressed—tight, pressed trousers, worn European-looking sneakers, shirts always with collars (and the collars rumpled as if someone had just been kissing him at the neck). At the house, when he had ostensibly come over to lend her the book and to borrow Weekend at Bernie’s, he had not left right away. He had come in through the backdoor—the sliding glass doors that led from the pool to the den, where Celia had been watching television, and had repaired to the kitchen when she had got a call.
Project Runway was on—Celia had left it loudly running—and the two of them stood for a minute, watching it without sitting down. He had asked what the show was; she had explained and said, “It’s actually good”; and they had sat down—he, sitting back easily with his arm stretched around the back of the couch, she sitting with her arms crossed across her stomach, one leg crossed over the other, and her loose foot jittering. When she noticed its quaking she tried to stop it and every few minutes she would forget, and see it going again. The still-warm dimple on the couch between them—where Celia had sat before she had risen—seemed to nearly hum; Leona could feel its weight as if the absence were a body whose weight was greater than his own. Unmovable space. Dense emptiness, like spots of air between knitted webs of lace.
They could hear, over in the kitchen, Celia talking on her cell, yelling at one point with breathless, teenage urgency, “Ugh—kill me with a hatchet?” At that, Alan had snickered and looked over at Leona. Leona had wanted her look—slimly rolled eyes—to say, I would never act that way toward you, but afterward she realized how the gesture did nothing except show how truly judgmental she could be—of her own sister, no less. It was hard to win with Alan. And she knew, somewhere, in the hot buried place beneath her folded hands, that that was what she wanted, more than love—she wanted him to just like her. And then they had had a fight.
[Greg, Cameraman 7, whom she rather liked (he was prone to taking his lunches silently, alone, at the glass table on the veranda, doing a crossword while the rest of the crew ate out by the vans) was filming in there. Dane, the soundman holding the boom, stood in the threshold between the kitchen and the den, and looked over at the two of them—Alan and Leona—as though deciding which show was more interesting. She gave him a glare—a direct, pushy stare—and he looked back to Celia. A sidelong glance at Alan showed him to be all innocence—looking completely at the TV, as if she were not even there.]
Onscreen, the primly dressed gray-haired host wore a pink oxford open at the collar and moved around the workroom, touching the failed dreams of various designers. He had paused over a green dress whose maker sat on a nearby stool, crying into her hands, and said, looking from the weepy dress to the weepy girl, “Oh, this is too much.”
Alan, who hadn’t said anything so far, had said: “I sort of like it.”
The dress—with its saucy, frilly cuffs that poured out from two thin sleeves—was one of those unapologetically feminine things, made to rhumba in—complicated beyond measure. How these people sewed these things was insane to her—incomprehensible—not only in the physics of puffing those two-dimensional, silken sheets, whose movements operated by laws not known to her, but more so in the designers’ mental processes while doing it. How could a person, a human, who knew what beauty was, convince themselves that a puff could improve something, could improve anything.
About the dress, she said: “I mean, I guess?”
“You hate it,” he said, looking over at her with a smirk. “You hate everything I like.”
“That’s completely untrue,” she had said, accenting it with a little shocked guffaw. “I like Weekend at Bernie’s.”
“Ironically,” he said. “You like things through a haze of distance.” He held the word haze long, uses his fingers like a trill.
“I like like Weekend at Bernie’s,” she said. “Sans irony.”
“Right. A test then.” He lifted his right arm, pointed toward the screen. “What do you think of the other dresses?”
Her eyes washed over them. They were all dresses, intended for other women, for the fey, lean silhouettes of women who needed nothing, who consumed no food, who lounged on hard, white chaises in the windswept modern homes of Mediterranean beachtowns. She’d look awful in any of the dresses. But it wasn’t about her, she knew. She liked the simple one—black, cut with a diagonal seam down the front. She liked it for the buttons: little squares, sewn one-inch apart up the seam, made to be sexily, slowly unhinged. It had been designed by a girl who was now grasping her shears, holding them jokingly above the neck of a fellow competitor who sat in the breakroom, eating the last snickers bar that had been available in the vending machine. It was now 3 am in their studio and the girl was desperate.
“I like Rachel’s,” she had said, of the black dress.
“Hate it,” Alan had said. “Hate it hate it.” And then he had said, quickly—it was still part of the same sentence. “We’re incompatible.”
When he had said that, he had turned away from the screen, where the dresses were, and he had looked at her.
Four days later, she was thinking of that moment. She had measured the incident as an example of him loving her: he had thought of them as a couple, between whom compatibility could be measured. But now she saw it for what it was—they had been talking about dresses, and he had loved the frilly one, hated the one with its pleasant simplicity, its bosom-grazing dropline neck. It was not that he hated the things she loved, that they had a sparring comeraderie similar to oh… she didn’t know… it seemed too cheesy to admit she plainly thought of him as her Knightley. It was that they had talked about dresses. And boys who liked to talk about dresses were gay. And the book beside her on the nightstand now—the Victorian poems:
Man v. Nature.
Holding yourself back. So he could be gay. But then there was his arm. It had rested on the back of the couch, inches from her neck. He had not moved it. And she was sure that after twenty minutes, the human arm loses blood, the human arm must be moved, but he kept it there. He kept it there. Kept it there until Celia came back into the room, trailing two cameramen and Dane, that sound guy, whose eyes wandered all over Celia with a hateful glaze, Alan jumped up. He moved his arm. He said, “I better go” even though they had not yet decided the final dress (she had looked it up later that night on YouTube—it had been Angela) and then he said, “Oh, nearly forgot.”
Out of his bag he had pulled the book. And it had started with the book, this crest.
Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Alan’s father—in Palm Springs, car wreck, cousin, Leona being his date at the funeral, the frilly dress she chooses to please him, his disappointment, the poem read at the funeral, his recitation, hiding behind the garage of Alan’s house (next to their old house), showing him the place she knows—where the painters could not reach. Seeing Anabelle there. Knew her from camp as a child. Recollection of the incident (India, Sybelle) on the day where they had run out of lanyard string, and it had seemed an omen, because later that night the bear had come. Anabelle is beautiful. What is it to film a dead face? Why can they not show the dead on television? Leona wonders this, she looks at Alan. People are incomprehensible to her. She loves Alan because of the same way other people love characters on television. She knows nothing other than her own literary projections.
“Why are you doing this?” he said. She looked over the railing, and could see him stopped on the stairs, one flight down, peering up between the xxxxx bars.
“You’re doing this for all of the wrong reasons.”
What could she say to that. She said, “I’m sorry.”
He said not don’t be but “Don’t bother being.” And left.
If it were another girl it was probably Annabelle, who was certainly thinner than herself but was also a lot duller intellectually. Not to mention Anabelle’s duller pallor, given her smoking. She hated him for liking Annabelle—it seemed so, I don’t know, she thought, wrong for him to like blondes. It wasn’t just that it was conventional, Leona wasn’t being purposefully unconventional to not like Annabelle, but the girl was the sort of blonde the stereotype had been created for, or, if not created for, she was the sort of blonde the stereotype later came to swallow. She wore hats cocked at an angle, for god sakes. She owned capris, and read serious hardcover books and kept the covers intact. Leona had seen her through the window of Buck’s the other day, hunched over one of those sort of carved-out bread bowls of soup and an untouched stack of three bad Saul Bellow novels, their spines facing out to the street. If only some people could learn how to try instead of just to try. She probably didn’t even eat the soup. She was probably anorexic.
The other day at Buck’s, Leona had looked up over to the counter and seen him speaking with her. Anabelle must have just bought something because they were talking over a bag she held. He leaned down closer to her, breathing in her airspace. It was the type of lean that, when he’d done it to her, she’d interpreted as love.
How awful. She couldn’t bear to think of it now. Not with the covers rumpled and the moonlight streaming. Now it was better to think of other things, of the times when he had loved her or he could have loved her.
Monday, March 31, 2008
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Re-tools of ch. 1
In trying and re-trying to tool out a good "intro" to the first chapter, I ranted this one. It doesn't fit, OBVIOUSLY but the tone feels right
Episode-by-episode. You could see them falling apart episode-by-episode. The one where dad yells at Cynthia about the mayonnaise jar leads to the one where dad yells at Cynthia about fucking the cameraman and that leads to the one where the cameraman yells at dad about simply the way he's standing which leads to the one where Cynthia leaves completely, totally, gone--an empty zero at the center of every peopled shot--and that leads to the one where dad and the dogs are standing in the yard, gape-mouthed, looking out at a camera he no longer notices. And the dogs, animals trained to sniff out swine, seem not to notice either. Their eyes are empty. They nearly hum with forgiveness.
The camera.
It is like a first daughter sitting in an unlit room.
It can, with ease, be disregarded.
The light, out here. The light, the light! That’s what they’re always saying. Men carry silver umbrellas, point them toward the sun, and bathe our faces in the sought-after glow that comes of misdirections. They rove aimless, looking up toward empty skies, making the grandiose gestures of pizza chefs--kissing the tips of fingers, rolling round eyes toward the moon--amore, amore!
What is it they seek, at what times of day? The light comes throaty, like mustard poured through windows; it winnows on the backs of spoons; it catches in their mothers hair and stays there—netted—like a trumped seal, like some sort of abalone famed in Scotland. What are the things they want and don’t want? They want to see long spreads of wall-to-wall carpet, creeping up into the edges, infecting the world with softness. Carpet like a soft-fuzz lens. And they want to see swimming pools--thick, chalky as ice-cubes. They are drawn to water. They cluster at its edges in their black caps to seem, from the second-story balconies of neighboring mansions, like types of mold that grow near dampness. And then, of course, they want to see her face--poreless--her eyes empty as the lens itself, like a bicycle wheel with the sad spokes gone. Spokeless. When she opens her mouth, Leslie says, snapping shut the script, "It's just more of the same. Forever."
He's threatening to quit over her stupidity. As if that's not fuel. She's malleable. A pygmalion. He'd like to squeeze her throat in the same way he'd like to bang her. In the same way a grandmother, paging through a calendar of kittens, says, out loud, "They're too adorable" and thinks, momentarily, about an act of suffocation. Bosom, kittens. Bosom.
Episode-by-episode. You could see them falling apart episode-by-episode. The one where dad yells at Cynthia about the mayonnaise jar leads to the one where dad yells at Cynthia about fucking the cameraman and that leads to the one where the cameraman yells at dad about simply the way he's standing which leads to the one where Cynthia leaves completely, totally, gone--an empty zero at the center of every peopled shot--and that leads to the one where dad and the dogs are standing in the yard, gape-mouthed, looking out at a camera he no longer notices. And the dogs, animals trained to sniff out swine, seem not to notice either. Their eyes are empty. They nearly hum with forgiveness.
The camera.
It is like a first daughter sitting in an unlit room.
It can, with ease, be disregarded.
The light, out here. The light, the light! That’s what they’re always saying. Men carry silver umbrellas, point them toward the sun, and bathe our faces in the sought-after glow that comes of misdirections. They rove aimless, looking up toward empty skies, making the grandiose gestures of pizza chefs--kissing the tips of fingers, rolling round eyes toward the moon--amore, amore!
What is it they seek, at what times of day? The light comes throaty, like mustard poured through windows; it winnows on the backs of spoons; it catches in their mothers hair and stays there—netted—like a trumped seal, like some sort of abalone famed in Scotland. What are the things they want and don’t want? They want to see long spreads of wall-to-wall carpet, creeping up into the edges, infecting the world with softness. Carpet like a soft-fuzz lens. And they want to see swimming pools--thick, chalky as ice-cubes. They are drawn to water. They cluster at its edges in their black caps to seem, from the second-story balconies of neighboring mansions, like types of mold that grow near dampness. And then, of course, they want to see her face--poreless--her eyes empty as the lens itself, like a bicycle wheel with the sad spokes gone. Spokeless. When she opens her mouth, Leslie says, snapping shut the script, "It's just more of the same. Forever."
He's threatening to quit over her stupidity. As if that's not fuel. She's malleable. A pygmalion. He'd like to squeeze her throat in the same way he'd like to bang her. In the same way a grandmother, paging through a calendar of kittens, says, out loud, "They're too adorable" and thinks, momentarily, about an act of suffocation. Bosom, kittens. Bosom.
First stab at synopsis - half done
The Oswego Suggestions is the story of a family broken apart by the process of appearing on reality TV. A behind-the-scenes glimpse, it reveals as much about today’s media-soaked American family as it tells of how our behavior changes depending on our audience, and of how watching the narrative of our lives—as told by another—can do little to help us make sense of them.
The story occurs during nine months in 2001, before September 11th and at reality TV’s first peak. It is told by Jareth Oswego, the son of washed-out rocker Zed Oswego who lives in Malibu. Jareth is a brooding, mopey bohemian, an unhappy intellectual whose quiet judgments of the family storming around him place him as a sort of Jude character within the society of his family. Unsure of his role in both his family and in the world at the start of the novel, this place is what he will, over the course of the story, come to better define—breaking out of the “role” chosen for him by the show’s editors, a panel of fates.
Motivated less by greed than the fatherly desire to give his clan all they ask of him, the modest, clumsy patriarch, Zed Oswego, is a former rock star who has toured the world and turned sweetly jaded, content to settle in a Malibu mansion and dote on his brood. Born a shy, nerdy boy in Northern Massachusetts, fame fell into his lap in the form of Rick Moldin, the high-school heavyweight whose garage-band act needed a bassist. Moldin’s narrative is typical of a VH1 backstory—a twittering, skinny energy-ball who never sought food or women, Moldin turned to coke in the 80s, nearly O.D.-ed in the nineties, and hasn’t been fit to tour for twenty years. He’s now a ghost seen around the house, huffing bowls of fruit loops, watching bad TV, swimming obsessively in their lima-bean-shaped outdoor pool (he’s been told to seek a sort of spiritual rebirth from the waters) and smoking endless cigarettes as thin and pale as he is. Because there’s no longer really a band, and because the men are now in their late forties (crotchety for rock stars), the money’s been running out. But Zed’s wife, Maude, continues to spend. Sure, Zed gets the odd producing gig for an old friend, but he’s too much of a pushover to tell Maude “no” when she wants to re-tile the bathroom (she’s an obsessive re-decorator). It’s Zed’s series of poor and eccentric investments, engineered to save Maude from knowledge of the embarrassment of their financial situation, that finally leads Zed to accept a producer’s offer to put the family on TV, buy them a new house, and assuage Maude’s latent desire for fame in whatever form.
And then there are the three kids—born in love, raised in love, they’re the sort of private-school exports that could only have been raised by overly-accepting ex-hippies.
Centrally, there’s Jareth, the brooding dark son who in his quiet hobby habits takes after his father. Jareth enjoys building circuit-boards in the basement, recording video art projects, and writing diatribes which he publishes on the internet. He gets stoned and watches Planet Earth. He’s a shy, gawky artist who is always seen in corners, darkly angsty about his role in broader society (a “Cameron” from Ferris Beuller’s Day Off). Pursued mercilessly by artsy, bratty high school girls—he’s a Junior, worrying about college—he’s just not interested. He’d rather hang out with Moldin, whose Joyce-ean life stories keep him quiet. When the camera crews come in—he’s drawn to Kenneth, a 23-year-old film student hired to take the house’s establishing shots. Their friendship blurs the line between what can and cannot be shown on screen, and it will end in a betrayal by Kenneth, who shows onscreen a shot that will make his career and destroy their friendship.
In his own family, Jareth is most connected to his eldest sister (by four years), Leona. An intellectual misfit, a Lisa Simpson, Leona should be a Senior at Yale. But she’s taken the semester off. Her depression—latent, and perhaps fictional—spiraled out of control when she was rejected by a long-term unrequited love. But her parents don’t know that was the cause, and neither does her school-appointed shrink. A compulsive liar, she’s petrified of their judgments and has never told anyone about him—about Alan. She would rather the world think of her as a sexless perfectionist, an in-control, un-rejectable genius whose sadness comes only from the fact that she’s too smart for her own good. Clearly Leona doesn’t get along well with her own family. She loves them, certainly, but important parts of her don’t yet know that. It’s over the course of the story, told over one year, that she will learn the depth of this love.
Leona’s bitterest enemy is her mother, Maude. Always distracted—is that a new sweater, Leona? It looks a bit tight—Maude is quick to judgment and quick to spontaneous action. What Zed fell in love with her for she still has—a devilish spark in her eye, the ability to put her feet up out the window on a road-trip, and childishly suggest they pull the car over at that hilarious looking drive-in, buy all of the donuts, and throw them to those seagulls over there. It’s this uncensored blabmouth energy that irks her two reserved children—Leona, and sometimes Jareth (who has more patience for her) and sets them to, when she’s not home, holing up on the couch and watching long films that to her are dull. She wished they’d go outside more, live more. Raised by a mother whose WWII-imposed strictness led them to crave fresh air, Maude xxxxx. Born a beautiful bombshell xxxxxx Dietingxxxxxxx Splenda.
Her favorite child, if such a phrase could be uttered (it wouldn’t be from her hippie-happy lips, but from judgmental Leona’s) is her daughter Celia, aged 16, a year below Jareth. The Paris Hilton of the Oswego clan, Celia has a Lolita-esque beauty so strong that it startles. Tan, long-limbed, deep-voiced and slow talking, Celia moves with a gazelle-like grace like an alien among her spazzy, impatient family members. She is incomprehensible to Leona, who is frankly jealous for Celia’s beauty (especially when she sees Alan interact with her) and for her own mother’s attention toward the other daughter, who offers less in terms of intellectual prowess—what Leona thought everyone should be striving for. Celia herself is far from an empty, beautiful shell. She is Marjorie in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Bernice Bobs her Hair—a girl who quickly understands how you get ahead, and who plays by those rules. She likes that boys like her but, like Jareth, doesn’t get a lot out of that.
Celia is the darling of the camera crews, and one of the reasons the family got picked up at all—out of the multitude of Hollywood families desperate enough for the on-camera attention.
It is Celia that Leslie Bennett has fallen in love with. And in the world of Reality TV, Leslie Bennett calls the shots. Bennet is a tennis-sweater wearing, doting pony of a man—his teeth are whitened, his mane is blonde, and he’s as comfortable in a pink polo spearing oysters with a silver tine as he is at the back-table of an East LA dive, pulling at a Kilkenny and having a heart-to-heart with a dude he’d really like to cast as a bouncer. He has always been able to talk to anyone, to make his fey-ness seem pitiable or fashionable. He can tell a story; Like Leona, he has the tendencies of a compulsive liar and he fears them in himself. He has not held down a relationship in a very long time. It could be because he is too busy—he keeps an ear constantly on his cell-phone, and has been known to sleep on the couch in his office—but it’s also because he too well understands people, he too easily reads the insecurities and needs of others, and he hates people for them. He tells himself he has not yet met his match. Bennet moves through the world with unfrilled effortlessness—he glides above the surface, skips from project to project like a tossed stone. What Leslie is drawn to in Celia is yes, that “star quality” he’s gotten a knack for spotting, but also that the girl, for being raised within the walls of Hollywood, does not see him as a god or a star-maker. Their relationship is perfectly civil, normal, and Bennet craves that normality. Their banter eludes Jareth and Zed, disgusts Leona, and makes mother Maude jealous enough to always try and butt in.
The action of the novel takes place over a nine-month period ending in late August 2001, when Leona returns to college, and starting on December 26th, 2000, the day after a Christmas when the family has less to spend on gifts than at other times of year and with money troubles on their mind, Maude decides that with the family all gathered together, it’s a good time to make a happy announcement. Of course, all are not happy. Leona, conveniently home for the holiday break and having three days earlier signed a document ensuring Yale that she would not return for the semester, is flustered by what the novel’s working title refers to—the list of “Suggestions” that Hollywood heavyweight Leslie Bennet urges the family underake before filming begins.
Having already signed the form that they would participate, Maude and Zed Oswego need only get their children to sign. Celia, a draw for the producers, has long-known of the whole scheme though for self-absorbed Jareth it’s a surprise—but, a pushover who’s not really that interested in pop culture, he’s not really in a place to say no. Leona, however, makes a quick decision to do whatever she can to stay disassociated. She opts to be removed from every frame, to be spliced out, blurred out, unmentioned. Her reputation at Yale, she fears, is already that of an Oswego daughter; as if she didn’t have the brains to get in there on her own merit.
The story occurs during nine months in 2001, before September 11th and at reality TV’s first peak. It is told by Jareth Oswego, the son of washed-out rocker Zed Oswego who lives in Malibu. Jareth is a brooding, mopey bohemian, an unhappy intellectual whose quiet judgments of the family storming around him place him as a sort of Jude character within the society of his family. Unsure of his role in both his family and in the world at the start of the novel, this place is what he will, over the course of the story, come to better define—breaking out of the “role” chosen for him by the show’s editors, a panel of fates.
Motivated less by greed than the fatherly desire to give his clan all they ask of him, the modest, clumsy patriarch, Zed Oswego, is a former rock star who has toured the world and turned sweetly jaded, content to settle in a Malibu mansion and dote on his brood. Born a shy, nerdy boy in Northern Massachusetts, fame fell into his lap in the form of Rick Moldin, the high-school heavyweight whose garage-band act needed a bassist. Moldin’s narrative is typical of a VH1 backstory—a twittering, skinny energy-ball who never sought food or women, Moldin turned to coke in the 80s, nearly O.D.-ed in the nineties, and hasn’t been fit to tour for twenty years. He’s now a ghost seen around the house, huffing bowls of fruit loops, watching bad TV, swimming obsessively in their lima-bean-shaped outdoor pool (he’s been told to seek a sort of spiritual rebirth from the waters) and smoking endless cigarettes as thin and pale as he is. Because there’s no longer really a band, and because the men are now in their late forties (crotchety for rock stars), the money’s been running out. But Zed’s wife, Maude, continues to spend. Sure, Zed gets the odd producing gig for an old friend, but he’s too much of a pushover to tell Maude “no” when she wants to re-tile the bathroom (she’s an obsessive re-decorator). It’s Zed’s series of poor and eccentric investments, engineered to save Maude from knowledge of the embarrassment of their financial situation, that finally leads Zed to accept a producer’s offer to put the family on TV, buy them a new house, and assuage Maude’s latent desire for fame in whatever form.
And then there are the three kids—born in love, raised in love, they’re the sort of private-school exports that could only have been raised by overly-accepting ex-hippies.
Centrally, there’s Jareth, the brooding dark son who in his quiet hobby habits takes after his father. Jareth enjoys building circuit-boards in the basement, recording video art projects, and writing diatribes which he publishes on the internet. He gets stoned and watches Planet Earth. He’s a shy, gawky artist who is always seen in corners, darkly angsty about his role in broader society (a “Cameron” from Ferris Beuller’s Day Off). Pursued mercilessly by artsy, bratty high school girls—he’s a Junior, worrying about college—he’s just not interested. He’d rather hang out with Moldin, whose Joyce-ean life stories keep him quiet. When the camera crews come in—he’s drawn to Kenneth, a 23-year-old film student hired to take the house’s establishing shots. Their friendship blurs the line between what can and cannot be shown on screen, and it will end in a betrayal by Kenneth, who shows onscreen a shot that will make his career and destroy their friendship.
In his own family, Jareth is most connected to his eldest sister (by four years), Leona. An intellectual misfit, a Lisa Simpson, Leona should be a Senior at Yale. But she’s taken the semester off. Her depression—latent, and perhaps fictional—spiraled out of control when she was rejected by a long-term unrequited love. But her parents don’t know that was the cause, and neither does her school-appointed shrink. A compulsive liar, she’s petrified of their judgments and has never told anyone about him—about Alan. She would rather the world think of her as a sexless perfectionist, an in-control, un-rejectable genius whose sadness comes only from the fact that she’s too smart for her own good. Clearly Leona doesn’t get along well with her own family. She loves them, certainly, but important parts of her don’t yet know that. It’s over the course of the story, told over one year, that she will learn the depth of this love.
Leona’s bitterest enemy is her mother, Maude. Always distracted—is that a new sweater, Leona? It looks a bit tight—Maude is quick to judgment and quick to spontaneous action. What Zed fell in love with her for she still has—a devilish spark in her eye, the ability to put her feet up out the window on a road-trip, and childishly suggest they pull the car over at that hilarious looking drive-in, buy all of the donuts, and throw them to those seagulls over there. It’s this uncensored blabmouth energy that irks her two reserved children—Leona, and sometimes Jareth (who has more patience for her) and sets them to, when she’s not home, holing up on the couch and watching long films that to her are dull. She wished they’d go outside more, live more. Raised by a mother whose WWII-imposed strictness led them to crave fresh air, Maude xxxxx. Born a beautiful bombshell xxxxxx Dietingxxxxxxx Splenda.
Her favorite child, if such a phrase could be uttered (it wouldn’t be from her hippie-happy lips, but from judgmental Leona’s) is her daughter Celia, aged 16, a year below Jareth. The Paris Hilton of the Oswego clan, Celia has a Lolita-esque beauty so strong that it startles. Tan, long-limbed, deep-voiced and slow talking, Celia moves with a gazelle-like grace like an alien among her spazzy, impatient family members. She is incomprehensible to Leona, who is frankly jealous for Celia’s beauty (especially when she sees Alan interact with her) and for her own mother’s attention toward the other daughter, who offers less in terms of intellectual prowess—what Leona thought everyone should be striving for. Celia herself is far from an empty, beautiful shell. She is Marjorie in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Bernice Bobs her Hair—a girl who quickly understands how you get ahead, and who plays by those rules. She likes that boys like her but, like Jareth, doesn’t get a lot out of that.
Celia is the darling of the camera crews, and one of the reasons the family got picked up at all—out of the multitude of Hollywood families desperate enough for the on-camera attention.
It is Celia that Leslie Bennett has fallen in love with. And in the world of Reality TV, Leslie Bennett calls the shots. Bennet is a tennis-sweater wearing, doting pony of a man—his teeth are whitened, his mane is blonde, and he’s as comfortable in a pink polo spearing oysters with a silver tine as he is at the back-table of an East LA dive, pulling at a Kilkenny and having a heart-to-heart with a dude he’d really like to cast as a bouncer. He has always been able to talk to anyone, to make his fey-ness seem pitiable or fashionable. He can tell a story; Like Leona, he has the tendencies of a compulsive liar and he fears them in himself. He has not held down a relationship in a very long time. It could be because he is too busy—he keeps an ear constantly on his cell-phone, and has been known to sleep on the couch in his office—but it’s also because he too well understands people, he too easily reads the insecurities and needs of others, and he hates people for them. He tells himself he has not yet met his match. Bennet moves through the world with unfrilled effortlessness—he glides above the surface, skips from project to project like a tossed stone. What Leslie is drawn to in Celia is yes, that “star quality” he’s gotten a knack for spotting, but also that the girl, for being raised within the walls of Hollywood, does not see him as a god or a star-maker. Their relationship is perfectly civil, normal, and Bennet craves that normality. Their banter eludes Jareth and Zed, disgusts Leona, and makes mother Maude jealous enough to always try and butt in.
The action of the novel takes place over a nine-month period ending in late August 2001, when Leona returns to college, and starting on December 26th, 2000, the day after a Christmas when the family has less to spend on gifts than at other times of year and with money troubles on their mind, Maude decides that with the family all gathered together, it’s a good time to make a happy announcement. Of course, all are not happy. Leona, conveniently home for the holiday break and having three days earlier signed a document ensuring Yale that she would not return for the semester, is flustered by what the novel’s working title refers to—the list of “Suggestions” that Hollywood heavyweight Leslie Bennet urges the family underake before filming begins.
Having already signed the form that they would participate, Maude and Zed Oswego need only get their children to sign. Celia, a draw for the producers, has long-known of the whole scheme though for self-absorbed Jareth it’s a surprise—but, a pushover who’s not really that interested in pop culture, he’s not really in a place to say no. Leona, however, makes a quick decision to do whatever she can to stay disassociated. She opts to be removed from every frame, to be spliced out, blurred out, unmentioned. Her reputation at Yale, she fears, is already that of an Oswego daughter; as if she didn’t have the brains to get in there on her own merit.
WHY ARE YOU WRITING A BLOG ABOUT THIS SHIT. OTHER PEOPLE JUST WRITE.
INTRODUCTIONSSSSS
I am a 22-year-old who took a year off of her life and decided to write a novel. If you care, I won a bunch of writing awards and and have a bunch of writing experience that doesn't translate into writing a novel, but yes--I've included a mini-resume after this rant.
So why this blog. Blogs are lame. Blog Blog Blog. Bloviate.
The explanation: My personality type is closer to Hildi's in "His Girl Friday" than to Anne Hathaway's in that shitty adaptation of Persuasion. I visited Emily Dickinson's attic hideaway in North Mass. and I almost cried--what a crappy life!
My background as a writer is in journalism. I fear--oh, how I fear it!--that all of my tendencies toward writing nonfiction stem from a desire for acceptance, made palpable in the narcissistic truth that I like to get published. When I write, I am never writing for myself, but instead for the entertainment of others. I imagine invisible sets of eyes--scary editors, judgmental mothers, ex-boyfriends, that guy with pale, slender hands, like gloves of cream over the bone, sitting over there in the lobby of the Kempinski hotel where I'm currently typing.
Spending a year writing a novel, holed up in the candled nooks of Beijing's cafes, it's too easy to forget these future readers. On several attempts to undertake this massive project I've given up with plaintive sighs of, "But no one's going to read it anyway!"
The internet changes all that. Which is not to say that anyone is necessarily reading my rants and hollers, but that it is now PHYSICALLY POSSIBLE that someone is, which allows me to create a very useful delusion that fuels my writing process, so that someday someone is more likely to read this--as they pick a volume up off the shelf with my name on the spine, open the first page, and become absorbed. This ghost of a reader is perhaps the self-deception at the heart of all blogs; this shitshow is no exception.
Thanks for reading.
Adriane
Mini Writing Resume--
Freelance Journalist:
I've been based in DC, NY, Hong Kong, and Beijing, where I have written for the Washington Post, Time Magazine, The New York Observer, Paste Magazine, The Grapevine, That's Beijing, Urbane, City Weekend, and Paper Magazine.
My work has won the following awards:
FICTION
The Yale Daily News Wallace Prize, First Place in Fiction 2007.
The Yale Literary Magazine, Francis Bergen Prize for Fiction 2006,
Willets Prize for Fiction 2007, 2006.
NONFICTION
The Atlantic Monthly Student Writing Contest, Nonfiction Second Place 2006.
The Yale Daily News Wallace Prize, Second Place in Nonfiction
Yale University John Hersey Prize for Journalism First Place 2007, Second Place 2006; Henry P. Wright Prize for Journalism 2005, 2006.
J. Meeker Prize for Composition 2004.
Lloyd Mifflin Prize for Seniors—Outstanding Work in English 2007.
I am a 22-year-old who took a year off of her life and decided to write a novel. If you care, I won a bunch of writing awards and and have a bunch of writing experience that doesn't translate into writing a novel, but yes--I've included a mini-resume after this rant.
So why this blog. Blogs are lame. Blog Blog Blog. Bloviate.
The explanation: My personality type is closer to Hildi's in "His Girl Friday" than to Anne Hathaway's in that shitty adaptation of Persuasion. I visited Emily Dickinson's attic hideaway in North Mass. and I almost cried--what a crappy life!
My background as a writer is in journalism. I fear--oh, how I fear it!--that all of my tendencies toward writing nonfiction stem from a desire for acceptance, made palpable in the narcissistic truth that I like to get published. When I write, I am never writing for myself, but instead for the entertainment of others. I imagine invisible sets of eyes--scary editors, judgmental mothers, ex-boyfriends, that guy with pale, slender hands, like gloves of cream over the bone, sitting over there in the lobby of the Kempinski hotel where I'm currently typing.
Spending a year writing a novel, holed up in the candled nooks of Beijing's cafes, it's too easy to forget these future readers. On several attempts to undertake this massive project I've given up with plaintive sighs of, "But no one's going to read it anyway!"
The internet changes all that. Which is not to say that anyone is necessarily reading my rants and hollers, but that it is now PHYSICALLY POSSIBLE that someone is, which allows me to create a very useful delusion that fuels my writing process, so that someday someone is more likely to read this--as they pick a volume up off the shelf with my name on the spine, open the first page, and become absorbed. This ghost of a reader is perhaps the self-deception at the heart of all blogs; this shitshow is no exception.
Thanks for reading.
Adriane
Mini Writing Resume--
Freelance Journalist:
I've been based in DC, NY, Hong Kong, and Beijing, where I have written for the Washington Post, Time Magazine, The New York Observer, Paste Magazine, The Grapevine, That's Beijing, Urbane, City Weekend, and Paper Magazine.
My work has won the following awards:
FICTION
The Yale Daily News Wallace Prize, First Place in Fiction 2007.
The Yale Literary Magazine, Francis Bergen Prize for Fiction 2006,
Willets Prize for Fiction 2007, 2006.
NONFICTION
The Atlantic Monthly Student Writing Contest, Nonfiction Second Place 2006.
The Yale Daily News Wallace Prize, Second Place in Nonfiction
Yale University John Hersey Prize for Journalism First Place 2007, Second Place 2006; Henry P. Wright Prize for Journalism 2005, 2006.
J. Meeker Prize for Composition 2004.
Lloyd Mifflin Prize for Seniors—Outstanding Work in English 2007.
The original problematic short story that prompted this quest
The novel idea was based on when I just started writing a short story that went way too long. Here is the story, published in the Spring issue of the Yale Literary Magazine when I was a Senior.
What I want to save about this version is the question that ends the story. If you don't have the patience to read this, read the last paragraph. The story is problematic in its pacing, in its rushed character descriptions, in the general rushed nature of the telling. This, of course, is what "going long" fixes.
The Oswego Suggestions
A guttering comes up from the drive, from the huffing exhaust pipe of a van wheeling into its third attempt to parallel-park alongside the koi pond, where the whiskered mouths of gentlemanly goldfish latch open and closed to swallow mouthfuls of grey air. Through the scrim of palm fronds that hide the house from the street, the backing vehicle can be seen to read “Maid-4-U” in hopeful lettering, bold and red. Hired by the studio to swing by on the Thursday before shooting is set to start, this is the first sign that anything in our lives is capable of change. Predictably, I can be found only through the second story-window nitched above the portico, drooling into my rumpled duvet; still asleep.
In my dream the muffled footsteps of maids treading the carpets register as rainstorms; their Ecuadorian banter ricocheting off the bath tile comes across as the clacking of Morse code; and the long, slow sighs of the vacuums sound like the breathy skirting of subway trains braking into underground stations. So it isn’t until 1.37 p.m.—when a tentacle of buttery afternoon light edges across the wall-to-wall carpet to hit me in the face—that I open my eyes to the doorframe silhouette of a slouchy figure, holding forth a SwifferSweeper as if it were a Trident. For a tense moment, we both say nothing. Then, simultaneously, we mumble faint apologies. I pull at the duvet. The door closes (she closes the door) and she is gone. And I am in the dark again.
Maybe a half an hour later, mom walks down the hall with the svelte way of walking I can recognize by ear, due to the specific rhythm of the swish-boom boom of her hips and something about the crush of heels on velour piling.
She throws open the door—“Really, Jareth. It’s two o’ clock. Children are leaving school and standing at bus stops”—and pulls her neck back out into the hall.
A dream later and I can hear Cynthia tripping down the stairs on her cell. “Yes, pages forty-two and forty-three—one through thirty-one, just the odds.” Back from school.
I lie starfished on the bed for a moment longer. The prospect of awakening holds little to no joy. Even in the near darkness I have seen what mom is wearing; the first indication that she is strung tight today, that things are bad. It’s a lipstick-pink double-breasted Azzedine Alaia shoulder-padded 1987 “power suit,” speckled with buttons of brass, each holding the imprinted seal of a rope-wrapped anchor. Meant to invoke the splendor of multi-million dollar yachts, which themselves are meant to invoke the lives of gruff, seafaring gents from the 1830s, the buttons seem to me to be only images of sinking, of being sunk. Mom wears it to seem “classy.”
Forget the suit. There’s nothing to do but go downstairs, and I pad down in my pajamas (Halloween-print boxers, Bart Simpson tee) past a chorus-girl row of maids wiping the stairwell posts. Amy and Cynthia lie splayed out on the couch, clicking through channels. In the kitchen, the SubZero holds only the asparagus en croutte left by the caterers two nights ago, the dregs of a Chardonnay I am sure Mom has been sucking, and two shelves of diet sodas in prim airplane-sized mini cans. I close the fridge and immediately notice two things.
1. All of the carpets in the house (perceivable to me over the kitchen’s granite island) have been vacuumed in neat, straight rows, so that the blank carpet retains the sort of tessellating pattern mowed in to baseball stadium lawns.
2. On the outside of the SubZero’s door, a sheet of paper has been hastily taped (the wood-paneling expels magnets, so we keep a roll of 3M beside the fridge) and at the top of the sheet, mom’s over-worked, over-wrought all-caps reads, “OSWEGO FAMILY NOTICE” below which is written: “Things we don’t want cameramen to see / things to HIDE”:
French Muzzy “learning tapes” (Cynthia’s writing)
Diet Nestle Quick—pantry (Cynthia)
Computer guides for dummies (Cynthia)
MY closet (Cynthia)
Cynthia’s Madame Alexander Dolls (Dad)
Dvds, family room cupboard (Dad’s hand)
The garage (Dad)
Rock&Gem mag. Collection (Dad again)
Everything related or pertaining to me and my life including your lives (Amy)
Mom has not written anything. I suspect she has already hidden whatever it is that she is going to be hiding. I look at the carpet again, at the lines in the carpet the maids are writing with the suck-mouthed vacuums. Over the white-noise, I yell out, “Hey Amy,” and pop open a Diet Dr. Pepper (mini-size). “What’s with this list?”
Amy does not look away from the television (Will & Grace, Season 6, Episode 9: Strangers with Candice), but I hear her just fine, as in one gutsy, dorky breath she says, “We’re going to be on a reality TV show that’s basically just about our family and the cameramen come tomorrow so you need to hide what you don’t want them to see and no one told us until today because they thought we wouldn’t approve.”
All I can say is, “What, really?” and smirk over at her with a sort of stupefied smile. I set down my Diet Dr. Pepper on the speckled granite of the central island.
“No, that was a lie.”
“Wait, was it?”
“No, it was true.”
“So we really are going to be on TV.”
“Got it.”
So we really are going to be on TV. Huh. I look at the mini soda can, sitting lonesome on the precipice of the kitchen’s solitary island, and I am not looking at the can, I am seeing myself. I am newly made aware of how I would look to a television audience. Perhaps this outfit would incite the whoops and hollers of an afternoon special laugh-track: I’m wearing Halloween print boxers, the faces of ghouls plummeting down to the hem in a factory-mistake diagonal, and I’m drinking diet Dr. Pepper, a B-list soda in second-rate form. This is breakfast, no less, and it’s 2:39 p.m. So it’s understandable that the first thing to come to mind is not what I will hide (the cliché litany including my gay porn and my grandmother’s ashes—which ended up in my room balanced on the unused NordicTrac). The first thing I think is how all time will divide into two eras: the era wherein I walked downstairs in boxers whose easy-access fly often made my flaccid penis momentarily viewable, and the coming era of history—the era in which I will don Diesel jeans and get recognized by thirteen-year olds in New Jersey malls. The Jack Osborne narrative. Oh, god.
Cynthia and Amy and I spend the rest of the day sitting in front of the big TV, staring blankly, shifting routinely like patients with bed-sores, quieting the volume on Antiques Roadshow when a lone maid enters the scene in search of dust around the curios on the armrest end-tables. The maids have come, Amy explains, because reality TV necessitates that the house be pristinely clean. (“That’s reality.”)
I have never even really noticed the curios around which the maids are dusting. Now I take note of them as objects that a camera would locate in the foreground of an establishing shot, to lend the unfolding scene a hint of irony. I imagine, behind the tiny porcelain figurine of a maiden towing a drunk-looking lamb, how Cynthia’s mascara would look as it runs through her tears during just another break up scene. I see Mom and Dad fighting behind the foreground placement of a framed photograph of them in sixties wedding outfits (mom in a white mini, dad with a tuxedo tee) holding hands and smiling blindly into the flash.
At one point Cynthia’s cell rings (Gwen Stefani ft. Akon — “Sweet Escape”) and she jumps up and slides the glass door closed behind her, and fifteen minutes later her boyfriend’s face is pressed up against the same glass door, peering in past the glare to look for Cynthia. She hops up and then they’re gone and it’s me and Amy.
When it’s just the two of us, we can get really terrible. Amy goes to Harvard but took a semester off to deal with “emotional problems” (“Namely,” Amy flippantly tells the postman and others who ask, “the emotional problem of Harvard itself”). So she is too smart to be enjoyable company for daytime TV. She makes dissonant comments such as when, during a special on eating disorders, The Tyra Banks Show faces off five chairs of anorexic girls versus five chairs of obese girls, and Amy says, “What is she trying to achieve, some sort of Hegelian dialectic?” Or, during The Simpsons (my favorite, witness the tee described above), she makes the lucid observation: “Look at how Mr. Burns unconsciously authors every plot. Polluter providing death through nuclear smoke? Or angel granting life through low-wage paychecks.” It’s completely exhausting.
But before The Simpsons has even ended (it goes until 6:30), Mom is throwing open the door that from the garage to the kitchen, and asking, “Did TakeoutTaxi come yet?”
“Nope,” Amy says. “Where were you?”
“They’re bringing General Tso’s for you. Where’s Cynthia?”
“Hospital. Brothel. Cemetery.” Pause. “Boyfriend’s.”
“Right,” Mom says, slipping out of her pumps and hurling them on the granite kitchen counter, alongside three slurped-out diet sodas and the crumbs of the asparagus frittata crusty quiche thing. “Family meeting at seven. Where’s your father?”
“Haven’t seen ‘im.” Amy says. Then The Simpsons is back on for the final few bars until 6:30, and then there’s a re-run of Seinfeld (“Big Hands”) which we quietly watch as the sun sets over the lima-bean shaped pool. The pool is now barely visible through the plate glass sliding doors, as in the growing darkness, the broad expanses of glass reflect more and more clearly an image of ourselves. I look tired. I’ve only been awake for four hours but I am completely exhausted. The whizzing sighs of the vacuums are dying down, and at about 6.53 according to the digital clock on the face of the DVD player, I can hear the maids’ van start up and buzz off.
A few minutes later we hear Dad’s Miata parallel parking in the now-vacant spot adjacent to the koi pond. He walks straight in, throws his keys into a bowl by the door (ping!) and enters the living room with assumed bravado. “You fat, lazy bums,” he says, speaking of the bedraggled population on the mussed couch. “I work all day to keep you in business.” By the time we look up he’s already halfway in the refrigerator. “Nothing here but bean curd,” he says. “Cranberry Snapple—grrrrrrhhhh!”
“It’s not tofu. It’s quiche or something,” Amy says. “Pretty good.”
“Chinese for dinner, though,” I chime in. “It’s supposed to be here.”
“Where’s your mother?” Dad asks, as he extracts the quiche and closes the fridge door. And then there’s what’s on the door. “Fuck,” Dad says. “This goddamm list gives me a headfuck.”
* * *
After “family-meeting dinner,” wherein we discuss the general tso chicken (too sweet) and mom calls Cynthia four times on the girl’s cell before giving up, there is a bzzzzzz at the security doorbell outside the gate, and mom trots up to the beige intercom, and buzzes someone in. There’s shuffling on the walk. Mom strides out to the foyer to get the door, and her voice plashes over from the other room.
“Cynthia’s not here,” she says, cheery. “But otherwise they’re ready.”
“You look lovely Mrs. Oswego,” relays the confident voice of an MTV VJ. “Is that an Alaia?”
The man whom mother ushers in to the dining room has the trim, petite physique of a Wimbledon ball-boy. Arrayed behind him like a “V” of trailing geese is a team of five dudes, universally assembled in blazers, polos, distressed jeans, five-o’-clock shadows, and miniature beer bellies surging over the precipices of cinched leather belts. A pair of aviator shades peeks out from the lapel of a suit jacket formerly accustomed to holding folded pink kerchiefs. They nod toward the table, and mom seats them down one-by-one around us, making small-talk: “Great watch, Gregory. Cartier?”
“For Christmas,” Gregory says, tapping the watch-face. “It ticks.”
Mom giggles, sighs, looks around.
Amy says, “In cinema, clocks are symbolic of tension.”
There’s a pause.
Dad says, “Who the fuck are these men,” and pushes his chair back from the table. “Are you fellows the camera boys?”
“I’m the producer,” says the trim ballboy, extending a hand. “Leslie.” Mom introduces the other men: Gregory, Carl, Karl, Mike, Carl II. Then she introduces us: “My son Jareth. My daughter Amy who goes to Harvard. My husband, Rudy Oswego. And Cynthia’s up to no good somewhere.” She chuckles lightly at her own exaggeration.
“Well, Cynthia’s the star, so we can’t go tooooo long without her,” Leslie says, beaming.
“How long has Cynthia known about this?” I ask. But it’s unclear whether I have asked this question of my mother or of the man just introduced as Leslie. From the motion in the room—it cannot be discerned. Both ignore me. Carl One takes the opportunity to extend a fatty hand towards dad saying, shyly, “It’s an honor…an honor to meet you, Mr. Oswego.”
“Call me Rudy,” dad says. An hour later they’ll probably be talking about the new Shure57 mics in dad’s basement studio but for now we listen, glum, as the producers explain the concept: Wealthy family, famous father, party-animal kids. And Amy says, “Doesn’t this all sound a little bit like The Ozzbournes but less Goth?” and Mom bursts into muffled tears that she keeps contained from her mascara with a gloved hand, and Dad says, “Well, fuck it, because we ran out of money.” And I say, “Maybe if you had like, spent a single hour at the office and bought one less Miata for—” and Dad says, “Shut it you scrawny lazy gay—“ and Leslie says, “Hold it right there.” And we stop. We look upward.
Leslie is standing table-side, legs spread like he’s stretching his groin, the frosted spikes of his haircut illumined like a halo by the track lighting, and he is holding his hands up frozen around each other with the palms facing us, making in the negative space at the center of his hands a tenebrous, round-edged rectangle of proportion similar to a 35mm film frame. And he says, “Wow, this is great TV.”
Amy backs away from the General Tso, pushes away from the table, and says “Well, I refuse to be on it.”
“Oh, Amy,” Mom says, twisting an anchor on her blazer.
“Oh, Amy,” Dad says, “how unpredictable. How bold.”
* * *
Dad has prided himself on being bold. And on sarcastically commenting on the predictable behavior of others. He’s equally insufferable to watch television with (“If Maury Povich were alive in ’69, we’d have led him to the guillotine”) and he does not get along with Amy because they are too similar. In 1963 Dad founded a band that made music. He liked making music, and people liked listening to him, and people bought his records and he toured the country and the world and he keeps the pictures he took then in un-albumed boxes that teeter in the closet on the third floor. But in 1983 he and mom moved semi-permanently to LA—Roy from the band lived out here, and so did Shirley, so they would do gigs every once in a while, but could more-or-less live on what they had already made. Mom loved just having a house. She bought curtains (the wrong size, actually, all eventually replaced by a ballsy interior decorator), she “raised us kids” as any other private-school pick-up-line SUV mom raises her children, and Dad tried to “keep things stable.” He saw the diets that mom was always on, and so he invested the bulk of his estate in those little baby blue packets of fake sugar (Equal: dextrose with maltodextrin, aspartame). But this was right around the advent of another little packet—a little yellow packet called Splenda (sucralose) and within four months Dad had lost over 75 percent of his estate and five pounds by replacing his sugared coffee with “that mutherfucking chemical sludge.”
Yes, Dad swore a lot for the first couple of days. He went bowling with Larry, the loud caterer mom had once fired after baking too fatty a lobster bisque. Dad went out and came home wasted, then fell asleep face-down on the couch to the mournful tune of late-nite Ren & Stimpy reruns. Cynthia gave an oral presentation in school on the topic “What my parents do,” and concluded with a one-liner: “Some days,” she said, choking back (a laugh? a tear?) “we can only try for sweetness, and we can only taste pure shit.” It was a line the thirteen-year-old had heard her father say while, from a second-floor balcony outside the master bedroom, he had pissed into the lima-bean-shaped pool below in a flawless arc.
Cynthia’s maxim rang in through the ears of one boy sitting at that classroom who later that night would repeat it over the dinner table to his sputtering, laughing father—the president of ABC-TV, LA, who was at that moment looking for something to kick the pants off CBS’s now lame-ass Survivor, something a little more Ozzbournes and a little more old-school.
The show, Leslie explains over General Tso’s, will solve dad’s financial crises with a $250 million payoff for the first season, which would focus on how Dad deals with the fame of his past and the family of his present. The show would also follow dad on his newest business venture—the production and fiscal support of a new brand of calorie-free sugar-substitute sweetener. Would the product succeed? Find out next week. In the pilot, Carl One says, huffing excitedly, we will see him pacing the factory floor, smelling everything and sweetly.
* * *
But at 7 a.m. the next morning nothing seems so sweet. Wimbledon ball-boy Leslie is tugging at my achilles tendons while I moan, “It’s not fair, Amy gets to—“
The duvet is a crumpled croissant of pure warmth. My bedroom is a batcave of pure darkness. Leslie tugs me up and walks me straight to the shower.
“I don’t shower in the morning,” I say. “I shower at night.”
“Today you shower in the morning,” Leslie says, slamming the bathroom door behind me.
I stand in the bay of the shower with my clothes on—same Halloween boxers, different tee (“Mixology”) and I think that if there’s one time to take a shower with your clothes on, this is that time. It is an experience we should all have before we die, right? I turn the water on and the clothes cling to me like an extra, thicker layer of skin. When I exit the bathroom Leslie is sitting up straight on the lip of my bed, giving me a once-over. I’m still in my sopping PJs with a towel thrown around my shoulders—like a coat thrown over the body of a local teen saved from a fall through the ice. Straight-faced, Leslie says, “You took a shower with your clothes on.”
“I took a shower with my clothes on.”
Leslie only looks at me and sighs. Then he looks down at my feet, at the dripping water that is spreading out to soak the carpet. When I think back on the McMansion we lived in then it is this I think of—there is the vague feeling of being strangely watched, and the distinct sensual memory of the synesthetic residue of air-conditioned carpet, felt beneath squishing toes.
Despite my naturally showy nature (inherited genetically, natch), the prospect of starring in my very own reality drama becomes a lot less vainglorious when I consider that I will be seen only in terms of my relationship to my family. Amy is the lucky one—backing out completely, refusing to “ruin an academic career that exists solely through the denial of this family.” And so though her body drifts through various episodes, ghost-like, her head remains obscured by the muffled clouds of an editor’s dodged blurring. In a later episode, her ghost-head drifts above the very Bart Simpson tee I never again wore, for I have exchanged that rumpled, sleepy outfit for what the wardrobe girl, calls “a signature look”—jewel tone tees and velvet blazers, plum-wine Barneys Co-Op sweaters of cashmere, all topped with golden, imitation silk cravats.
Cynthia wears what she has always worn. “Cynthia’s the perfect child,” Mom says, as she rifles through racks of baby-doll dresses walling the spare bedroom that Leslie’s people have converted into a green room. “She’d look great in any of this stuff.”
“Stop it, Ma,” Cynthia says in a mockcountry drawl, “You done too much good by me.” Cynthia sits in a swiveling chair, puckering her lips before the illumined mirror, and I become aware watching her that I knew nothing of Cynthia. That she is a girl to me like a girl on TV.
* * *
Being on the show—I mean, really, being the character on the show—is like being at a coffeeshop with your friends and seeing someone cute or cool, or whatever, who is quietly studying and also quietly listening in on your conversation, and at some point you and your friends—I mean, the friends at the table sitting right by you—you all almost unconsciously begin to talk louder, to tell the stories that make you look good, daring, grown up. Your gestures toward eachother—elbow jabbing, shoulder-shrugging—become pronounced and play-acted. Yet the presence of that person is nearly unnoticeable.
The analogy is almost too similar to even be an analogy. Actually, both situations are exactly the same. Clearly, the camera is the quiet stranger, sipping a skim latte and brooding over their Tristram Shandy as you and your cohorts loudly replay last night’s brawl in the line outside Sirkus. “Did you see those guys doing coke on the windowsill?!?”
“Naaaaaah.”
For instance, Jerry—one of my favorite cameramen, whose beat forces him to stay in the kitchen—will be standing by the island, chewing on a sandwich and suddenly I’ll walk in the room, and he’ll pace toward the refrigerator, snaking to follow my everyday path, to film me as I look inside. I must now choose between the Rutabega Squash salad or drawers of sandwich meat and yellow American cheese. And though normally, I might have just grabbed a diet Dr. Pepper, I find myself making elaborate, inedible sandwiches formed of layers and layers of meats and cheeses. It isn’t dishonesty—I want the sandwich, I really do—it is a dishonesty of effort. Who cares about an added layer of flavorless lettuce unless it is to be eaten before millions of viewers, Rachael Ray-style—chewed through a smiley grin?
Leslie is supervising my wardrobe change after a fellow teen’s local birthday party (I need an effortless transition from swim trunks to cocktail attire), and he starts giving me notes. They’re written on a list, like the kind we had taped to the fridge, but his list reads “The Suggestions.” For instance, the producers don’t like it when I talk to Amy. She’s not even supposed to be seen, Leslie explains to me, so each time I approach her is a moment they cannot show on camera at all. They also don’t like it when I sit around all day and watch TV. “You don’t watch TV,” Leslie says “You are TV.”
“Leslie,” I say. “Cynthia can watch TV.”
“Cynthia is Cynthia,” he says.
“I am me,” I say. “I fish therefore I am.”
“Look, Jareth,” Leslie says, leaning down over the greenroom chair, like Santa over the lap of some idiot believer. “In all of the good, true movies, there is a misanthrope—a jaded, cynical soothsayer type who hobbles around spreading bad omens. He goes ‘blagh bleugh, you’re all gonna die and get fucked.’”
“Yes?” I say.
“This is what we want you to be.”
“Oh,” I say. “So that’s what’s with the cravat.”
“Yes,” Leslie says. “That is what is with the cravat.”
* * *
It’s easier to be the jaded, cynical misanthrope than someone actually involved in the action. In most scenes, I am standing off to one side, eating a gourmet, many-layered sandwich as my parents yell across the room, as Cynthia gets punched out by her boyfriend and cries herself to sleep, as Dad does shrooms in the basement with the bass player from the Moody Blues and Larry, caterer extraordinaire, man of steaks and seasonings. I learn to lean against a countertop suggestively, in the sixteen-year-old imitatio of the James Dean slouch.
On my half-birthday (February 2nd), Dad and I drive to a theater in the valley to see a screening of Day for Night (my pick). On the way we stop at a 7-11 on so Dad can buy cigarettes to smoke out of the window on our way down there and back. (He’ll have to hide them—they don’t fit with his new, cleaned up, Moby-esque Vegan rocker image.) And in the 7-11 I see a picture of my face, in the lower right hand corner of an issue of CosmoGirl, an orange-y glossy whose cover bears a model, frozen mid hoola-hoop. I steal it, and in the car I rifle through to the article about me. It takes up a single page.
“Meet Jareth Oswego,” it reads. “Why, hello Jareth Oswego,” I say. “How are you doing?” I show the mag to Dad. He grabs it hastily, and throws it out the window.
Craning my deck like a wind-hungry dog, I can see the magazine fluttering 200 yards behind on the 405. “You littered,” is all I can think to say.
“Good riddance,” Dad says. “Let’s just have a nice six hours away from your mom’s bullshit.”
“So the show is mom’s bullshit,” I say, looking out the window faking a forlorn angst I’m not sure I really feel. Sure, the houses and trees and cars are passing by, and sure they’re unknown to me—separate spaces reigned by strangers, separate worlds to which I can never go, to which I will never escape. Sure, I feel misunderstood, but it’s also fun to toy with Dad, to make him think I’m some idiot teen who really feels this angsty.
“The show is everyone’s bullshit,” is Dad’s reply. It’s impossible to know, just looking at Dad’s profile against the Hollywood Hills, what he is really thinking when he thinks of me or of mom. Even in the car, just the two of us, I catch myself watching his face like I watch his face on the show. When I watch the show, I watch to learn about him. I want to see some sidelong glance of his at Cynthia or at me, to see him in a moment where he isn’t sure I’m watching. I watch out of fear. Because I’m afraid of what he’d think of me, the scrawny son with the—what is that, a cravat?—the scrawny son with the cravat, who is watching a bright spot hundreds of feet back on the highway, from which the pages are still unfurling.
* * *
It is fourteen months since they started shooting when mom finds Cynthia in the pantry with one of the cameramen. I am sitting on the couch reading the funnies when mom says “This sandwich needs Dijon” and then the next thing I hear is mom saying, “You’re fourteen.”
Over the crinkling of the newspaper I hear Cynthia say, “I’m sixteen” and I hear the cameraman say, “Weren’t you supposed to be eighteen?”
I put down the paper to see Cynthia stomping out of the pantry and up the stairs, the cameramen in tow trailing black electrical cords, whose snaking movements rewrite the lines of the carpet. They are all serpents.
The cameramen are all gone now except for one doing exterior establishing shots through the double doors by the lip of the pool, who must not have heard the commotion through the glass. Mom’s sandwich rests before me on grandmother’s Fresca-ware. I pick it up and start eating. Sure, it is dry. Sure it needs some Dijon, maybe, but I am lazy and it is a Sunday and I am reading the funnies so I just sit there, soaking it all in: Cynthia’s cries upstairs; the deliberate misspelling of the noun “lasagna” in this week’s Garfield strip (“Lasan-YA”); the dry sandwich, sans lettuce, sans Dijon.
I am made painfully aware by the absence of cameras here, and by the shrill noises coming from upstairs, that I am not the main character of my own life. That the main character perhaps, of all of our lives, is Cynthia or Mom or Dad. Yes, perhaps Dad, who just entered the fall-from-innocence scene from stage left, carrying the prop of an elaborate juicer I recognize from infomercials, and delivers a line lifted from the last ten minutes of any hour-long TV office drama: “Why’s everyone so quiet in here?” He stops in front of the kitchen stairs, where, grabbing an apple from the fruit bowl, he runs in to mom, who is barreling down with two cameras towing her as she slips out of each pump, walks through the double-glass doors, sees Bo, Cynthia’s boyfriend, on a longchaise, waves toward him, and dives swiftly into the pool with all of her clothes on. Bobbing back up, keeping her nose above the water, she shakes her head with the cold. “That was fun, Jareth. You were right.”
Pretty soon we’re all in the pool, our clothes on, the water streaming everywhere in our shoes, in our ears, in our limp and sagging underwear. I can see in Cynthia’s upstairs bedroom, how the four cameras swing from her to gather, clumped, at the window that looks over the pool, to aim down on us.
* * *
The following Sunday we go to church. “What do they want us to go to church for,” I ask. “It’s Easter,” Amy says. “Cynthia’s narrative needed an element of rebirth, re-awakening.”
We drive up to a little church I’ve never seen before, with a stone tower and a plastic lamb nailed into the lawn like a trailer park flamingo. Men and women are gathered on the lawn outside the church, wearing the colors of springtime M&Ms and shifting from leg to leg like horses rubbing up against the fences.
“This is so not our scene,” Amy says, slouching.
“Look, Cynthia, there are cute Christian boys standing around everywhere,” Mom says. “And they’re bored to tears.”
“Aren’t we Jewish?” Amy asks.
“We’re Irish Catholic,” I correct.
“We’re atheists,” Dad says, and Dad’s word is final.
The church, it turns out, is Protestant. The minister talks about the saviour being reborn within each of us, as though an epic drama is being played en loop before us all on miniature TV sets, like the type affixed to the backs of airplane seats. I look down the row of my family, barricaded on four sides by “civilians” in the pews, holding bread-box sized cameras and grunting with the heft of them. At the end of the row is Cynthia, with flaxen gold hair. I can see her as the camera would see her—an innocent, a Paris Hilton circa Simple Life, a girl we see in “reality” before the bad things have been done to her. And then there’s Amy and then there’s me. I realize that if I were watching, I would not choose to love myself.
* * *
Cynthia. She is mother’s favorite because of the way, I think, that she lies in chairs. She has a certain rigidity to her expressions: her face is tight and glowering, her nose upturned, her hair swept in a certain sine-wave around the heart-shaped head. But her body sprawls, lollygags over chaises. When we do not know where Cynthia is she can be found in a longchair by the pool, a glass of half orange-juice/half seltzer set down on the concrete beside her, an Oprah’s book club novel in her lap, permanently opened to page 38 (for she’ll read no further).
Mom comes out and often makes small talk. She asks re: schoolwork. Re: boyfriend. But Cynthia’s replies are cryptic and badly managed. “Oh, it’s good,” she’ll say, then come home with a C+. “Oh, we’re fine,” she’ll say and come home crying, sobbing into a Barney’s sweater he bought for her in the wrong shade—plum wine. The excuses and re-explanations take twice the time-lapse as the original lies, and Amy sighs with the sighs of a beleaguered twenty something who may not have found happiness, but has better achieved a way to cover it up. Cynthia’s inability to cover up has perhaps made her the star of the show.
We, as a family, have professed to having never watched a single episode (Mom was on The View last week saying as much). But secretly we’ve all seen snippets of the program—it would be an absolute denial of the universal human condition (narcissism) to say otherwise. I hug my knees to my chest the first time I see myself on the unavoidable promos, and say, to Amy: “Do I really have that big of pores?” and Amy says, “Is my head really so blurry?” And we both laugh, good naturedly, but laughter still that is tinged with a certain darkness—a darkness that suggests yes, you really do have large pores as it simultaneously suggests yes, Amy, you really are so empty. Cynthia, however, seems to leave the show unscathed. When she arrives in Episode 1 after a trip to the mall with her boyfriend, and appears somewhat upset, and is shown (as I have earlier alluded) crying into a sweater box, the camera seems to neigh closer, pitying her. The sweater is shown to be the wrong color—the shot zooms in and out, in and out, to the tune of a sort of jack-in-the-box “Blaaaaayng” of absolute comic error. Cynthia is shown, everywhere, to be in the right.
Amy and I have seen the show, but not en totale. So when Mom and Dad are out (mother is at lunch, Dad at “work,” and Cynthia somewhere upstairs with Bo, the BF), we decide to watch the entire first season on the main living room television. At the first bar of the theme music, I can hear cameramen in the other rooms start to hum. The song is catchy—it’s one of Dad’s band’s old songs—“Saving Grace”—whose lyrics are about a female nurse who sleeps with dying patients. But the tempo has been sped up and re-hashed with a sort of jangly banjo to serve as an interlude between our awkward “reality” scenes, and on hearing the song the cameramen begin to wander over.
“We can’t work with the music,” one of them explains to the questioning, upturned snarl of Amy. “Even in the establishing shots they’ll hear it,” says Argento—the 23 year old film student someone hired to do only establishings. (He’s responsible for those long shots of leaves in the pool, of unmade beds, of the exterior of the house and the koi pond.)
“Isn’t this Meta,” says Jerry, my sandwich filmer. “I wonder what would happen if I filmed you watching yourselves being filmed.”
“Psychedelic, man,” Argento says. “Goes on and on forever…”
Jerry says: “Anyone else want a sandwich?”
* * *
When mom comes home from Fred Segal’s at 6:37, her grand entrance goes un-filmed. “I’m home,” she toots. “I’m home!” She wants someone to see her new Derek Lim platforms, her new oversized Proenza Schoeler tote. It’s the money from the show that’s fueling these purchases and by god, it’s these purchases that are fueling the show. She’s working here, people.
By the time she’s said “I’m home” the third time she’s already in the living room, a mute witness to the sight of me and Amy occupying the couch amid a minefield of cameramen and sandwiches (sans Dijon, a faux-pas in this house) spread about the turf around us. On the screen ahead she sees her own haggard face, the lines drawn around her eyes as if drawn by a stick in the sand.
“It’s on DVD now,” I explain, as if explaining. “There’s Diet Dr. Pepper in the fridge.”
Mom puts down her bags. “Why isn’t Cynthia here for this?”
* * *
A: Because Cynthia is still outside by the pool, an unread copy of Sojourner Truth spread spine-up beside her, as she enjoys sex with her boyfriend, Bo, who is completely nude. Leslie walks in, his headset fuzzing with a lot of static. “Let’s just not cover it,” he says. “Tasteless.”
“Taste?” Argento asks. “I need a paycheck.”
“This isn’t about you,” Leslie says. “I’m in love with her.”
Then everyone starts laughing.
“Cynthia,” mom yells out at her daughter, over the lip of the chardonnay bottle she’s tugging at. “Come in soon for dinner.”
* * *
We all eat dinner beneath the halogen lights, the umbrellas of reflected fluorescents beaming down on the catered porkchops stranded on beds of wilted lettuce. The sneering cameramen scan Cynthia’s face for guilt and my father’s face for amusement, but find nothing registered on either. It is Amy whose blurred face perhaps reveals the most: she is sipping her wine, or biting her lip, or stifling back a chuckle. I am too type cast to be an effective force of comic relief: here I am in a plum cravat, trying to spear a pea with a single fork tine.
It’s dark enough for the windows to have turned in to mirrors, reflecting back to me only myself, only Amy, only Dad, Cynthia, Mom. Staring over our dinners, we look like bottom-feeders, like koi sucking pond edges for algae, like the suck-mouths of vacuums squeezing over the bright carpet, eeking out illegible lines to mark our travel.
I give one of the cameramen a long stare and loosen my cravat, a gesture that seems to ask the question, Do you have everything that you want?
The recording light flickers off. The other cameras leave. But as they turn away, they seem to force another question, the central question burning beneath the clothes at the bottom of the pool, beneath the wilted magazine on the 405, beneath Cynthia’s hands, folded in her lap in the gesture of a prim shepherdess. The cameras seem to ask the question lovers ask: What do you see when you see me?
What I want to save about this version is the question that ends the story. If you don't have the patience to read this, read the last paragraph. The story is problematic in its pacing, in its rushed character descriptions, in the general rushed nature of the telling. This, of course, is what "going long" fixes.
The Oswego Suggestions
A guttering comes up from the drive, from the huffing exhaust pipe of a van wheeling into its third attempt to parallel-park alongside the koi pond, where the whiskered mouths of gentlemanly goldfish latch open and closed to swallow mouthfuls of grey air. Through the scrim of palm fronds that hide the house from the street, the backing vehicle can be seen to read “Maid-4-U” in hopeful lettering, bold and red. Hired by the studio to swing by on the Thursday before shooting is set to start, this is the first sign that anything in our lives is capable of change. Predictably, I can be found only through the second story-window nitched above the portico, drooling into my rumpled duvet; still asleep.
In my dream the muffled footsteps of maids treading the carpets register as rainstorms; their Ecuadorian banter ricocheting off the bath tile comes across as the clacking of Morse code; and the long, slow sighs of the vacuums sound like the breathy skirting of subway trains braking into underground stations. So it isn’t until 1.37 p.m.—when a tentacle of buttery afternoon light edges across the wall-to-wall carpet to hit me in the face—that I open my eyes to the doorframe silhouette of a slouchy figure, holding forth a SwifferSweeper as if it were a Trident. For a tense moment, we both say nothing. Then, simultaneously, we mumble faint apologies. I pull at the duvet. The door closes (she closes the door) and she is gone. And I am in the dark again.
Maybe a half an hour later, mom walks down the hall with the svelte way of walking I can recognize by ear, due to the specific rhythm of the swish-boom boom of her hips and something about the crush of heels on velour piling.
She throws open the door—“Really, Jareth. It’s two o’ clock. Children are leaving school and standing at bus stops”—and pulls her neck back out into the hall.
A dream later and I can hear Cynthia tripping down the stairs on her cell. “Yes, pages forty-two and forty-three—one through thirty-one, just the odds.” Back from school.
I lie starfished on the bed for a moment longer. The prospect of awakening holds little to no joy. Even in the near darkness I have seen what mom is wearing; the first indication that she is strung tight today, that things are bad. It’s a lipstick-pink double-breasted Azzedine Alaia shoulder-padded 1987 “power suit,” speckled with buttons of brass, each holding the imprinted seal of a rope-wrapped anchor. Meant to invoke the splendor of multi-million dollar yachts, which themselves are meant to invoke the lives of gruff, seafaring gents from the 1830s, the buttons seem to me to be only images of sinking, of being sunk. Mom wears it to seem “classy.”
Forget the suit. There’s nothing to do but go downstairs, and I pad down in my pajamas (Halloween-print boxers, Bart Simpson tee) past a chorus-girl row of maids wiping the stairwell posts. Amy and Cynthia lie splayed out on the couch, clicking through channels. In the kitchen, the SubZero holds only the asparagus en croutte left by the caterers two nights ago, the dregs of a Chardonnay I am sure Mom has been sucking, and two shelves of diet sodas in prim airplane-sized mini cans. I close the fridge and immediately notice two things.
1. All of the carpets in the house (perceivable to me over the kitchen’s granite island) have been vacuumed in neat, straight rows, so that the blank carpet retains the sort of tessellating pattern mowed in to baseball stadium lawns.
2. On the outside of the SubZero’s door, a sheet of paper has been hastily taped (the wood-paneling expels magnets, so we keep a roll of 3M beside the fridge) and at the top of the sheet, mom’s over-worked, over-wrought all-caps reads, “OSWEGO FAMILY NOTICE” below which is written: “Things we don’t want cameramen to see / things to HIDE”:
French Muzzy “learning tapes” (Cynthia’s writing)
Diet Nestle Quick—pantry (Cynthia)
Computer guides for dummies (Cynthia)
MY closet (Cynthia)
Cynthia’s Madame Alexander Dolls (Dad)
Dvds, family room cupboard (Dad’s hand)
The garage (Dad)
Rock&Gem mag. Collection (Dad again)
Everything related or pertaining to me and my life including your lives (Amy)
Mom has not written anything. I suspect she has already hidden whatever it is that she is going to be hiding. I look at the carpet again, at the lines in the carpet the maids are writing with the suck-mouthed vacuums. Over the white-noise, I yell out, “Hey Amy,” and pop open a Diet Dr. Pepper (mini-size). “What’s with this list?”
Amy does not look away from the television (Will & Grace, Season 6, Episode 9: Strangers with Candice), but I hear her just fine, as in one gutsy, dorky breath she says, “We’re going to be on a reality TV show that’s basically just about our family and the cameramen come tomorrow so you need to hide what you don’t want them to see and no one told us until today because they thought we wouldn’t approve.”
All I can say is, “What, really?” and smirk over at her with a sort of stupefied smile. I set down my Diet Dr. Pepper on the speckled granite of the central island.
“No, that was a lie.”
“Wait, was it?”
“No, it was true.”
“So we really are going to be on TV.”
“Got it.”
So we really are going to be on TV. Huh. I look at the mini soda can, sitting lonesome on the precipice of the kitchen’s solitary island, and I am not looking at the can, I am seeing myself. I am newly made aware of how I would look to a television audience. Perhaps this outfit would incite the whoops and hollers of an afternoon special laugh-track: I’m wearing Halloween print boxers, the faces of ghouls plummeting down to the hem in a factory-mistake diagonal, and I’m drinking diet Dr. Pepper, a B-list soda in second-rate form. This is breakfast, no less, and it’s 2:39 p.m. So it’s understandable that the first thing to come to mind is not what I will hide (the cliché litany including my gay porn and my grandmother’s ashes—which ended up in my room balanced on the unused NordicTrac). The first thing I think is how all time will divide into two eras: the era wherein I walked downstairs in boxers whose easy-access fly often made my flaccid penis momentarily viewable, and the coming era of history—the era in which I will don Diesel jeans and get recognized by thirteen-year olds in New Jersey malls. The Jack Osborne narrative. Oh, god.
Cynthia and Amy and I spend the rest of the day sitting in front of the big TV, staring blankly, shifting routinely like patients with bed-sores, quieting the volume on Antiques Roadshow when a lone maid enters the scene in search of dust around the curios on the armrest end-tables. The maids have come, Amy explains, because reality TV necessitates that the house be pristinely clean. (“That’s reality.”)
I have never even really noticed the curios around which the maids are dusting. Now I take note of them as objects that a camera would locate in the foreground of an establishing shot, to lend the unfolding scene a hint of irony. I imagine, behind the tiny porcelain figurine of a maiden towing a drunk-looking lamb, how Cynthia’s mascara would look as it runs through her tears during just another break up scene. I see Mom and Dad fighting behind the foreground placement of a framed photograph of them in sixties wedding outfits (mom in a white mini, dad with a tuxedo tee) holding hands and smiling blindly into the flash.
At one point Cynthia’s cell rings (Gwen Stefani ft. Akon — “Sweet Escape”) and she jumps up and slides the glass door closed behind her, and fifteen minutes later her boyfriend’s face is pressed up against the same glass door, peering in past the glare to look for Cynthia. She hops up and then they’re gone and it’s me and Amy.
When it’s just the two of us, we can get really terrible. Amy goes to Harvard but took a semester off to deal with “emotional problems” (“Namely,” Amy flippantly tells the postman and others who ask, “the emotional problem of Harvard itself”). So she is too smart to be enjoyable company for daytime TV. She makes dissonant comments such as when, during a special on eating disorders, The Tyra Banks Show faces off five chairs of anorexic girls versus five chairs of obese girls, and Amy says, “What is she trying to achieve, some sort of Hegelian dialectic?” Or, during The Simpsons (my favorite, witness the tee described above), she makes the lucid observation: “Look at how Mr. Burns unconsciously authors every plot. Polluter providing death through nuclear smoke? Or angel granting life through low-wage paychecks.” It’s completely exhausting.
But before The Simpsons has even ended (it goes until 6:30), Mom is throwing open the door that from the garage to the kitchen, and asking, “Did TakeoutTaxi come yet?”
“Nope,” Amy says. “Where were you?”
“They’re bringing General Tso’s for you. Where’s Cynthia?”
“Hospital. Brothel. Cemetery.” Pause. “Boyfriend’s.”
“Right,” Mom says, slipping out of her pumps and hurling them on the granite kitchen counter, alongside three slurped-out diet sodas and the crumbs of the asparagus frittata crusty quiche thing. “Family meeting at seven. Where’s your father?”
“Haven’t seen ‘im.” Amy says. Then The Simpsons is back on for the final few bars until 6:30, and then there’s a re-run of Seinfeld (“Big Hands”) which we quietly watch as the sun sets over the lima-bean shaped pool. The pool is now barely visible through the plate glass sliding doors, as in the growing darkness, the broad expanses of glass reflect more and more clearly an image of ourselves. I look tired. I’ve only been awake for four hours but I am completely exhausted. The whizzing sighs of the vacuums are dying down, and at about 6.53 according to the digital clock on the face of the DVD player, I can hear the maids’ van start up and buzz off.
A few minutes later we hear Dad’s Miata parallel parking in the now-vacant spot adjacent to the koi pond. He walks straight in, throws his keys into a bowl by the door (ping!) and enters the living room with assumed bravado. “You fat, lazy bums,” he says, speaking of the bedraggled population on the mussed couch. “I work all day to keep you in business.” By the time we look up he’s already halfway in the refrigerator. “Nothing here but bean curd,” he says. “Cranberry Snapple—grrrrrrhhhh!”
“It’s not tofu. It’s quiche or something,” Amy says. “Pretty good.”
“Chinese for dinner, though,” I chime in. “It’s supposed to be here.”
“Where’s your mother?” Dad asks, as he extracts the quiche and closes the fridge door. And then there’s what’s on the door. “Fuck,” Dad says. “This goddamm list gives me a headfuck.”
* * *
After “family-meeting dinner,” wherein we discuss the general tso chicken (too sweet) and mom calls Cynthia four times on the girl’s cell before giving up, there is a bzzzzzz at the security doorbell outside the gate, and mom trots up to the beige intercom, and buzzes someone in. There’s shuffling on the walk. Mom strides out to the foyer to get the door, and her voice plashes over from the other room.
“Cynthia’s not here,” she says, cheery. “But otherwise they’re ready.”
“You look lovely Mrs. Oswego,” relays the confident voice of an MTV VJ. “Is that an Alaia?”
The man whom mother ushers in to the dining room has the trim, petite physique of a Wimbledon ball-boy. Arrayed behind him like a “V” of trailing geese is a team of five dudes, universally assembled in blazers, polos, distressed jeans, five-o’-clock shadows, and miniature beer bellies surging over the precipices of cinched leather belts. A pair of aviator shades peeks out from the lapel of a suit jacket formerly accustomed to holding folded pink kerchiefs. They nod toward the table, and mom seats them down one-by-one around us, making small-talk: “Great watch, Gregory. Cartier?”
“For Christmas,” Gregory says, tapping the watch-face. “It ticks.”
Mom giggles, sighs, looks around.
Amy says, “In cinema, clocks are symbolic of tension.”
There’s a pause.
Dad says, “Who the fuck are these men,” and pushes his chair back from the table. “Are you fellows the camera boys?”
“I’m the producer,” says the trim ballboy, extending a hand. “Leslie.” Mom introduces the other men: Gregory, Carl, Karl, Mike, Carl II. Then she introduces us: “My son Jareth. My daughter Amy who goes to Harvard. My husband, Rudy Oswego. And Cynthia’s up to no good somewhere.” She chuckles lightly at her own exaggeration.
“Well, Cynthia’s the star, so we can’t go tooooo long without her,” Leslie says, beaming.
“How long has Cynthia known about this?” I ask. But it’s unclear whether I have asked this question of my mother or of the man just introduced as Leslie. From the motion in the room—it cannot be discerned. Both ignore me. Carl One takes the opportunity to extend a fatty hand towards dad saying, shyly, “It’s an honor…an honor to meet you, Mr. Oswego.”
“Call me Rudy,” dad says. An hour later they’ll probably be talking about the new Shure57 mics in dad’s basement studio but for now we listen, glum, as the producers explain the concept: Wealthy family, famous father, party-animal kids. And Amy says, “Doesn’t this all sound a little bit like The Ozzbournes but less Goth?” and Mom bursts into muffled tears that she keeps contained from her mascara with a gloved hand, and Dad says, “Well, fuck it, because we ran out of money.” And I say, “Maybe if you had like, spent a single hour at the office and bought one less Miata for—” and Dad says, “Shut it you scrawny lazy gay—“ and Leslie says, “Hold it right there.” And we stop. We look upward.
Leslie is standing table-side, legs spread like he’s stretching his groin, the frosted spikes of his haircut illumined like a halo by the track lighting, and he is holding his hands up frozen around each other with the palms facing us, making in the negative space at the center of his hands a tenebrous, round-edged rectangle of proportion similar to a 35mm film frame. And he says, “Wow, this is great TV.”
Amy backs away from the General Tso, pushes away from the table, and says “Well, I refuse to be on it.”
“Oh, Amy,” Mom says, twisting an anchor on her blazer.
“Oh, Amy,” Dad says, “how unpredictable. How bold.”
* * *
Dad has prided himself on being bold. And on sarcastically commenting on the predictable behavior of others. He’s equally insufferable to watch television with (“If Maury Povich were alive in ’69, we’d have led him to the guillotine”) and he does not get along with Amy because they are too similar. In 1963 Dad founded a band that made music. He liked making music, and people liked listening to him, and people bought his records and he toured the country and the world and he keeps the pictures he took then in un-albumed boxes that teeter in the closet on the third floor. But in 1983 he and mom moved semi-permanently to LA—Roy from the band lived out here, and so did Shirley, so they would do gigs every once in a while, but could more-or-less live on what they had already made. Mom loved just having a house. She bought curtains (the wrong size, actually, all eventually replaced by a ballsy interior decorator), she “raised us kids” as any other private-school pick-up-line SUV mom raises her children, and Dad tried to “keep things stable.” He saw the diets that mom was always on, and so he invested the bulk of his estate in those little baby blue packets of fake sugar (Equal: dextrose with maltodextrin, aspartame). But this was right around the advent of another little packet—a little yellow packet called Splenda (sucralose) and within four months Dad had lost over 75 percent of his estate and five pounds by replacing his sugared coffee with “that mutherfucking chemical sludge.”
Yes, Dad swore a lot for the first couple of days. He went bowling with Larry, the loud caterer mom had once fired after baking too fatty a lobster bisque. Dad went out and came home wasted, then fell asleep face-down on the couch to the mournful tune of late-nite Ren & Stimpy reruns. Cynthia gave an oral presentation in school on the topic “What my parents do,” and concluded with a one-liner: “Some days,” she said, choking back (a laugh? a tear?) “we can only try for sweetness, and we can only taste pure shit.” It was a line the thirteen-year-old had heard her father say while, from a second-floor balcony outside the master bedroom, he had pissed into the lima-bean-shaped pool below in a flawless arc.
Cynthia’s maxim rang in through the ears of one boy sitting at that classroom who later that night would repeat it over the dinner table to his sputtering, laughing father—the president of ABC-TV, LA, who was at that moment looking for something to kick the pants off CBS’s now lame-ass Survivor, something a little more Ozzbournes and a little more old-school.
The show, Leslie explains over General Tso’s, will solve dad’s financial crises with a $250 million payoff for the first season, which would focus on how Dad deals with the fame of his past and the family of his present. The show would also follow dad on his newest business venture—the production and fiscal support of a new brand of calorie-free sugar-substitute sweetener. Would the product succeed? Find out next week. In the pilot, Carl One says, huffing excitedly, we will see him pacing the factory floor, smelling everything and sweetly.
* * *
But at 7 a.m. the next morning nothing seems so sweet. Wimbledon ball-boy Leslie is tugging at my achilles tendons while I moan, “It’s not fair, Amy gets to—“
The duvet is a crumpled croissant of pure warmth. My bedroom is a batcave of pure darkness. Leslie tugs me up and walks me straight to the shower.
“I don’t shower in the morning,” I say. “I shower at night.”
“Today you shower in the morning,” Leslie says, slamming the bathroom door behind me.
I stand in the bay of the shower with my clothes on—same Halloween boxers, different tee (“Mixology”) and I think that if there’s one time to take a shower with your clothes on, this is that time. It is an experience we should all have before we die, right? I turn the water on and the clothes cling to me like an extra, thicker layer of skin. When I exit the bathroom Leslie is sitting up straight on the lip of my bed, giving me a once-over. I’m still in my sopping PJs with a towel thrown around my shoulders—like a coat thrown over the body of a local teen saved from a fall through the ice. Straight-faced, Leslie says, “You took a shower with your clothes on.”
“I took a shower with my clothes on.”
Leslie only looks at me and sighs. Then he looks down at my feet, at the dripping water that is spreading out to soak the carpet. When I think back on the McMansion we lived in then it is this I think of—there is the vague feeling of being strangely watched, and the distinct sensual memory of the synesthetic residue of air-conditioned carpet, felt beneath squishing toes.
Despite my naturally showy nature (inherited genetically, natch), the prospect of starring in my very own reality drama becomes a lot less vainglorious when I consider that I will be seen only in terms of my relationship to my family. Amy is the lucky one—backing out completely, refusing to “ruin an academic career that exists solely through the denial of this family.” And so though her body drifts through various episodes, ghost-like, her head remains obscured by the muffled clouds of an editor’s dodged blurring. In a later episode, her ghost-head drifts above the very Bart Simpson tee I never again wore, for I have exchanged that rumpled, sleepy outfit for what the wardrobe girl, calls “a signature look”—jewel tone tees and velvet blazers, plum-wine Barneys Co-Op sweaters of cashmere, all topped with golden, imitation silk cravats.
Cynthia wears what she has always worn. “Cynthia’s the perfect child,” Mom says, as she rifles through racks of baby-doll dresses walling the spare bedroom that Leslie’s people have converted into a green room. “She’d look great in any of this stuff.”
“Stop it, Ma,” Cynthia says in a mockcountry drawl, “You done too much good by me.” Cynthia sits in a swiveling chair, puckering her lips before the illumined mirror, and I become aware watching her that I knew nothing of Cynthia. That she is a girl to me like a girl on TV.
* * *
Being on the show—I mean, really, being the character on the show—is like being at a coffeeshop with your friends and seeing someone cute or cool, or whatever, who is quietly studying and also quietly listening in on your conversation, and at some point you and your friends—I mean, the friends at the table sitting right by you—you all almost unconsciously begin to talk louder, to tell the stories that make you look good, daring, grown up. Your gestures toward eachother—elbow jabbing, shoulder-shrugging—become pronounced and play-acted. Yet the presence of that person is nearly unnoticeable.
The analogy is almost too similar to even be an analogy. Actually, both situations are exactly the same. Clearly, the camera is the quiet stranger, sipping a skim latte and brooding over their Tristram Shandy as you and your cohorts loudly replay last night’s brawl in the line outside Sirkus. “Did you see those guys doing coke on the windowsill?!?”
“Naaaaaah.”
For instance, Jerry—one of my favorite cameramen, whose beat forces him to stay in the kitchen—will be standing by the island, chewing on a sandwich and suddenly I’ll walk in the room, and he’ll pace toward the refrigerator, snaking to follow my everyday path, to film me as I look inside. I must now choose between the Rutabega Squash salad or drawers of sandwich meat and yellow American cheese. And though normally, I might have just grabbed a diet Dr. Pepper, I find myself making elaborate, inedible sandwiches formed of layers and layers of meats and cheeses. It isn’t dishonesty—I want the sandwich, I really do—it is a dishonesty of effort. Who cares about an added layer of flavorless lettuce unless it is to be eaten before millions of viewers, Rachael Ray-style—chewed through a smiley grin?
Leslie is supervising my wardrobe change after a fellow teen’s local birthday party (I need an effortless transition from swim trunks to cocktail attire), and he starts giving me notes. They’re written on a list, like the kind we had taped to the fridge, but his list reads “The Suggestions.” For instance, the producers don’t like it when I talk to Amy. She’s not even supposed to be seen, Leslie explains to me, so each time I approach her is a moment they cannot show on camera at all. They also don’t like it when I sit around all day and watch TV. “You don’t watch TV,” Leslie says “You are TV.”
“Leslie,” I say. “Cynthia can watch TV.”
“Cynthia is Cynthia,” he says.
“I am me,” I say. “I fish therefore I am.”
“Look, Jareth,” Leslie says, leaning down over the greenroom chair, like Santa over the lap of some idiot believer. “In all of the good, true movies, there is a misanthrope—a jaded, cynical soothsayer type who hobbles around spreading bad omens. He goes ‘blagh bleugh, you’re all gonna die and get fucked.’”
“Yes?” I say.
“This is what we want you to be.”
“Oh,” I say. “So that’s what’s with the cravat.”
“Yes,” Leslie says. “That is what is with the cravat.”
* * *
It’s easier to be the jaded, cynical misanthrope than someone actually involved in the action. In most scenes, I am standing off to one side, eating a gourmet, many-layered sandwich as my parents yell across the room, as Cynthia gets punched out by her boyfriend and cries herself to sleep, as Dad does shrooms in the basement with the bass player from the Moody Blues and Larry, caterer extraordinaire, man of steaks and seasonings. I learn to lean against a countertop suggestively, in the sixteen-year-old imitatio of the James Dean slouch.
On my half-birthday (February 2nd), Dad and I drive to a theater in the valley to see a screening of Day for Night (my pick). On the way we stop at a 7-11 on so Dad can buy cigarettes to smoke out of the window on our way down there and back. (He’ll have to hide them—they don’t fit with his new, cleaned up, Moby-esque Vegan rocker image.) And in the 7-11 I see a picture of my face, in the lower right hand corner of an issue of CosmoGirl, an orange-y glossy whose cover bears a model, frozen mid hoola-hoop. I steal it, and in the car I rifle through to the article about me. It takes up a single page.
“Meet Jareth Oswego,” it reads. “Why, hello Jareth Oswego,” I say. “How are you doing?” I show the mag to Dad. He grabs it hastily, and throws it out the window.
Craning my deck like a wind-hungry dog, I can see the magazine fluttering 200 yards behind on the 405. “You littered,” is all I can think to say.
“Good riddance,” Dad says. “Let’s just have a nice six hours away from your mom’s bullshit.”
“So the show is mom’s bullshit,” I say, looking out the window faking a forlorn angst I’m not sure I really feel. Sure, the houses and trees and cars are passing by, and sure they’re unknown to me—separate spaces reigned by strangers, separate worlds to which I can never go, to which I will never escape. Sure, I feel misunderstood, but it’s also fun to toy with Dad, to make him think I’m some idiot teen who really feels this angsty.
“The show is everyone’s bullshit,” is Dad’s reply. It’s impossible to know, just looking at Dad’s profile against the Hollywood Hills, what he is really thinking when he thinks of me or of mom. Even in the car, just the two of us, I catch myself watching his face like I watch his face on the show. When I watch the show, I watch to learn about him. I want to see some sidelong glance of his at Cynthia or at me, to see him in a moment where he isn’t sure I’m watching. I watch out of fear. Because I’m afraid of what he’d think of me, the scrawny son with the—what is that, a cravat?—the scrawny son with the cravat, who is watching a bright spot hundreds of feet back on the highway, from which the pages are still unfurling.
* * *
It is fourteen months since they started shooting when mom finds Cynthia in the pantry with one of the cameramen. I am sitting on the couch reading the funnies when mom says “This sandwich needs Dijon” and then the next thing I hear is mom saying, “You’re fourteen.”
Over the crinkling of the newspaper I hear Cynthia say, “I’m sixteen” and I hear the cameraman say, “Weren’t you supposed to be eighteen?”
I put down the paper to see Cynthia stomping out of the pantry and up the stairs, the cameramen in tow trailing black electrical cords, whose snaking movements rewrite the lines of the carpet. They are all serpents.
The cameramen are all gone now except for one doing exterior establishing shots through the double doors by the lip of the pool, who must not have heard the commotion through the glass. Mom’s sandwich rests before me on grandmother’s Fresca-ware. I pick it up and start eating. Sure, it is dry. Sure it needs some Dijon, maybe, but I am lazy and it is a Sunday and I am reading the funnies so I just sit there, soaking it all in: Cynthia’s cries upstairs; the deliberate misspelling of the noun “lasagna” in this week’s Garfield strip (“Lasan-YA”); the dry sandwich, sans lettuce, sans Dijon.
I am made painfully aware by the absence of cameras here, and by the shrill noises coming from upstairs, that I am not the main character of my own life. That the main character perhaps, of all of our lives, is Cynthia or Mom or Dad. Yes, perhaps Dad, who just entered the fall-from-innocence scene from stage left, carrying the prop of an elaborate juicer I recognize from infomercials, and delivers a line lifted from the last ten minutes of any hour-long TV office drama: “Why’s everyone so quiet in here?” He stops in front of the kitchen stairs, where, grabbing an apple from the fruit bowl, he runs in to mom, who is barreling down with two cameras towing her as she slips out of each pump, walks through the double-glass doors, sees Bo, Cynthia’s boyfriend, on a longchaise, waves toward him, and dives swiftly into the pool with all of her clothes on. Bobbing back up, keeping her nose above the water, she shakes her head with the cold. “That was fun, Jareth. You were right.”
Pretty soon we’re all in the pool, our clothes on, the water streaming everywhere in our shoes, in our ears, in our limp and sagging underwear. I can see in Cynthia’s upstairs bedroom, how the four cameras swing from her to gather, clumped, at the window that looks over the pool, to aim down on us.
* * *
The following Sunday we go to church. “What do they want us to go to church for,” I ask. “It’s Easter,” Amy says. “Cynthia’s narrative needed an element of rebirth, re-awakening.”
We drive up to a little church I’ve never seen before, with a stone tower and a plastic lamb nailed into the lawn like a trailer park flamingo. Men and women are gathered on the lawn outside the church, wearing the colors of springtime M&Ms and shifting from leg to leg like horses rubbing up against the fences.
“This is so not our scene,” Amy says, slouching.
“Look, Cynthia, there are cute Christian boys standing around everywhere,” Mom says. “And they’re bored to tears.”
“Aren’t we Jewish?” Amy asks.
“We’re Irish Catholic,” I correct.
“We’re atheists,” Dad says, and Dad’s word is final.
The church, it turns out, is Protestant. The minister talks about the saviour being reborn within each of us, as though an epic drama is being played en loop before us all on miniature TV sets, like the type affixed to the backs of airplane seats. I look down the row of my family, barricaded on four sides by “civilians” in the pews, holding bread-box sized cameras and grunting with the heft of them. At the end of the row is Cynthia, with flaxen gold hair. I can see her as the camera would see her—an innocent, a Paris Hilton circa Simple Life, a girl we see in “reality” before the bad things have been done to her. And then there’s Amy and then there’s me. I realize that if I were watching, I would not choose to love myself.
* * *
Cynthia. She is mother’s favorite because of the way, I think, that she lies in chairs. She has a certain rigidity to her expressions: her face is tight and glowering, her nose upturned, her hair swept in a certain sine-wave around the heart-shaped head. But her body sprawls, lollygags over chaises. When we do not know where Cynthia is she can be found in a longchair by the pool, a glass of half orange-juice/half seltzer set down on the concrete beside her, an Oprah’s book club novel in her lap, permanently opened to page 38 (for she’ll read no further).
Mom comes out and often makes small talk. She asks re: schoolwork. Re: boyfriend. But Cynthia’s replies are cryptic and badly managed. “Oh, it’s good,” she’ll say, then come home with a C+. “Oh, we’re fine,” she’ll say and come home crying, sobbing into a Barney’s sweater he bought for her in the wrong shade—plum wine. The excuses and re-explanations take twice the time-lapse as the original lies, and Amy sighs with the sighs of a beleaguered twenty something who may not have found happiness, but has better achieved a way to cover it up. Cynthia’s inability to cover up has perhaps made her the star of the show.
We, as a family, have professed to having never watched a single episode (Mom was on The View last week saying as much). But secretly we’ve all seen snippets of the program—it would be an absolute denial of the universal human condition (narcissism) to say otherwise. I hug my knees to my chest the first time I see myself on the unavoidable promos, and say, to Amy: “Do I really have that big of pores?” and Amy says, “Is my head really so blurry?” And we both laugh, good naturedly, but laughter still that is tinged with a certain darkness—a darkness that suggests yes, you really do have large pores as it simultaneously suggests yes, Amy, you really are so empty. Cynthia, however, seems to leave the show unscathed. When she arrives in Episode 1 after a trip to the mall with her boyfriend, and appears somewhat upset, and is shown (as I have earlier alluded) crying into a sweater box, the camera seems to neigh closer, pitying her. The sweater is shown to be the wrong color—the shot zooms in and out, in and out, to the tune of a sort of jack-in-the-box “Blaaaaayng” of absolute comic error. Cynthia is shown, everywhere, to be in the right.
Amy and I have seen the show, but not en totale. So when Mom and Dad are out (mother is at lunch, Dad at “work,” and Cynthia somewhere upstairs with Bo, the BF), we decide to watch the entire first season on the main living room television. At the first bar of the theme music, I can hear cameramen in the other rooms start to hum. The song is catchy—it’s one of Dad’s band’s old songs—“Saving Grace”—whose lyrics are about a female nurse who sleeps with dying patients. But the tempo has been sped up and re-hashed with a sort of jangly banjo to serve as an interlude between our awkward “reality” scenes, and on hearing the song the cameramen begin to wander over.
“We can’t work with the music,” one of them explains to the questioning, upturned snarl of Amy. “Even in the establishing shots they’ll hear it,” says Argento—the 23 year old film student someone hired to do only establishings. (He’s responsible for those long shots of leaves in the pool, of unmade beds, of the exterior of the house and the koi pond.)
“Isn’t this Meta,” says Jerry, my sandwich filmer. “I wonder what would happen if I filmed you watching yourselves being filmed.”
“Psychedelic, man,” Argento says. “Goes on and on forever…”
Jerry says: “Anyone else want a sandwich?”
* * *
When mom comes home from Fred Segal’s at 6:37, her grand entrance goes un-filmed. “I’m home,” she toots. “I’m home!” She wants someone to see her new Derek Lim platforms, her new oversized Proenza Schoeler tote. It’s the money from the show that’s fueling these purchases and by god, it’s these purchases that are fueling the show. She’s working here, people.
By the time she’s said “I’m home” the third time she’s already in the living room, a mute witness to the sight of me and Amy occupying the couch amid a minefield of cameramen and sandwiches (sans Dijon, a faux-pas in this house) spread about the turf around us. On the screen ahead she sees her own haggard face, the lines drawn around her eyes as if drawn by a stick in the sand.
“It’s on DVD now,” I explain, as if explaining. “There’s Diet Dr. Pepper in the fridge.”
Mom puts down her bags. “Why isn’t Cynthia here for this?”
* * *
A: Because Cynthia is still outside by the pool, an unread copy of Sojourner Truth spread spine-up beside her, as she enjoys sex with her boyfriend, Bo, who is completely nude. Leslie walks in, his headset fuzzing with a lot of static. “Let’s just not cover it,” he says. “Tasteless.”
“Taste?” Argento asks. “I need a paycheck.”
“This isn’t about you,” Leslie says. “I’m in love with her.”
Then everyone starts laughing.
“Cynthia,” mom yells out at her daughter, over the lip of the chardonnay bottle she’s tugging at. “Come in soon for dinner.”
* * *
We all eat dinner beneath the halogen lights, the umbrellas of reflected fluorescents beaming down on the catered porkchops stranded on beds of wilted lettuce. The sneering cameramen scan Cynthia’s face for guilt and my father’s face for amusement, but find nothing registered on either. It is Amy whose blurred face perhaps reveals the most: she is sipping her wine, or biting her lip, or stifling back a chuckle. I am too type cast to be an effective force of comic relief: here I am in a plum cravat, trying to spear a pea with a single fork tine.
It’s dark enough for the windows to have turned in to mirrors, reflecting back to me only myself, only Amy, only Dad, Cynthia, Mom. Staring over our dinners, we look like bottom-feeders, like koi sucking pond edges for algae, like the suck-mouths of vacuums squeezing over the bright carpet, eeking out illegible lines to mark our travel.
I give one of the cameramen a long stare and loosen my cravat, a gesture that seems to ask the question, Do you have everything that you want?
The recording light flickers off. The other cameras leave. But as they turn away, they seem to force another question, the central question burning beneath the clothes at the bottom of the pool, beneath the wilted magazine on the 405, beneath Cynthia’s hands, folded in her lap in the gesture of a prim shepherdess. The cameras seem to ask the question lovers ask: What do you see when you see me?
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