I like this part

The part I like this morning:

"Despite the pastoral setting, the place was called by everyone (including teachers) the “alley”—a reference to the places of deviation they had learned about in movies, where in small towns with rigid puritan standards, the grace of civil engineers had gifted teenagers the unlit backroads."


Anyway, here's the backstory to it. Sooooooo GDS:

Labelled in Waeburn’s hallways as a stoner, Jareth hid beneath overlarge ponchos sold on the sidewalks in front of East LA’s unobscured headshops by sad-eyed Guatemalan immigrants. During lunch, he’d head over with Bresios and two or three others—sometimes Paul Dine would be there with Mitzy Hanks, if they weren’t making out in the dark of a music practice room, or there’d be Leg Rouland carrying the bummy prop of a skateboard (named by his Hollywood parents, “Legend,” a title he’d tried to shed). They'd meet at the strip of Eucalyptus trees that edged the student parking lot, where they’d slump down, backs to the wall, to sit in the pile of dry leaves. Despite the pastoral setting, the place was called by everyone (including teachers) the “alley”—a reference to the places of deviation they had learned about in movies, where in small towns with rigid puritan standards, the grace of civil engineers had gifted teenagers the unlit backroads.
This smoking of Jareth’s was a pittance of a rebellion, spoil-sport really. His father, with a bowl of his own in the third drawer beneath his computer in the garage studio, couldn’t be said to care. The most his mother had ever said was, when finding in his sock drawer, his pipe (a cheesy cat-faced thing he’d paid too much for when he was 13), “You know this kills brain cells?” What a cliché, he had thought, as she had simply placed the embarrassment on the top of his dresser to stare at him with its gummy, muck-filled eyes.

Lots new over the weeekend

At age 16, Jareth Oswego, despite all the family’s grumblings against the institution, was still at Waeburn.
When they first enrolled Leona, Waeburn had seemed the only, obvious choice. Classes were capped at fifteen, students were not allowed to use coloring books (they inhibited creative thinking), and the dining-hall cuisine, engineered by one volunteer mother, was entirely organic. Modern in design when it was conceived in 1963, the school was a cluster of low-ceilinged, hooded concrete buildings connected over the dusty, red-earthed bowl of Tacoma Canyon by outdoor hallways. From the sky it was a spider—legs out and awry, splayed.
Some of the lawns between the halls had been landscaped with dry, imported Bermuda sod that scratched the legs of those who sat down Indian-style; Others had been left to the Eucalyptus trees whose dusty leaves clogged the gutters, changing the rhythm of the rain so that over some of the halls, water would fall in unobfuscated sheets. In LA it did not rain often, but like most things here, when it did, like most things, it did so in a showy, draining way. A single day of drizzle predicted five more to follow, and you sickened of the drudge of it. No weather was ever a relief from previous weather until—gah!—it was over with the suddenness of a snap.
Like the weather, moods shifted in showy patterns—driven with TV schedules. A bad episode of Boston Public would have the teaching staff irritable for seven days—until the next, when principal SkinnerTK would chastise the wrongdoer down in his office, to be scolded but not expelled (because in TV, unlike in real life, you did not want the trouble-makers to stop the plot from churning forward). They would mope over the happenings in the teachers’ lounge, feeling, until justice had been enacted onscreen, that it would never be enacted anywhere.
Jareth saw the same fawning behavior in his classmates; a single good episode of Dawson’s Creek would entirely affect the nature of the girls’ crushes. Where once his long-limbed, So-cal classmates would moon over the cluster of boys who actively discussed weight-lifting, gym runs, and the bleaching of hair in the manner of “Dawson,” it was when Katie Holmes’ character chose “Joey” instead that the girls’ attention shifted. Now, they pointed and nodded toward those pudge-faced, quiet puzzlers. Suddenly Matthew Velner, his hooded eyes sunk under sleeplessness, his pale skin—secluded from the glare of the sun by long nights spent programming computer games in his basement lab—was grumbling in Physics as to the correct etiquette one should use to dump a girl (long-limbed Tracy Tanner) for her best friend (long-limbed and blonde Diane Wheatus). The response—from a moronic, bleach-haired Dawson—was always an “I don’t know man, but—“ followed by a prescribed routine whose steps imitated something he had seen somewhere on TV. First take her to dinner, explain it after you’ve ordered, and have a nice drive afteward around a lake, some lake, with trees and people walking out around it.
The Oswegos watched as much TV as any of them. But the family’s attitude toward the set was as towards an intruder. Their mother, walking into the den, carried with her the catchphrase “What is this garbage?” no matter what was playing—a documentary on natural habitats, a film starring Meryl Streep as an Edwardian lady. And no matter their response, she’d cross to the other end of the room, her arms over her chest, to watch for a few minutes without speaking, before retreting with a blasé “Ughhhhhhh.” Jareth’s father would come into the den with a crossword puzzle, slump into the big armchair, and live in a world that came without TV, only speaking to shout out clues: “Four letters, Disagreeable neccessity.”
Leona would be the one to know: “Onus?” she’d ask, as if it was something she did not already know—granting her father that.
All media, aside from music, was background noise to their father.
It was as if Zed could not hear dialogue. A night at a play. The backdrop lit in fiery blue, the color of the zinnias of gas burners, and the characters moving before the scrim sparring with their hands in the air. At intermission they had stepped outside for some air. Leona, biting her nails, was thinking about how the play—which concerned a sister to be married off—could comment in its most biting lines on her own female imprisonment. Jareth was talking to his mother about if they should paint the trim in the guest-room that same blue color because, Maude had said, “It’s just so so lovely.”
Zed had interrupted to ask if they want anything, had walked to a neighboring vendor, bought a candy-bar, and had come back into the family’s conversation, chewing it.
“Well I thought she was terrible,” Leona was saying to her mother.
“Who was?” Zed asked.
There was one female actress on the stage—played by, if Jareth remembered correctly, Tava Shu.
“The one female actress on the stage,” Leona had said. “Who’s getting married off?”
“Oh right,” Zed had said, and walked off to eat his candy bar beneath a hooded lamp. Jareth saw someone approach him—a fan in a tweed sportcoat a size too large who stood with his hands in his pockets, leaning into his father. Their conversation was animated, crackling—Zed punched the guy on the shoulder. Maybe they had known eachother from way back. When Zed did not return to meet the family in their box later, when the lights had gone up, and then again, when the clapping had started and they had gone down the stairs into the lobby, Maude had said “For god’s sakes he’s always the one missing. My children are more dependable.” They had gone out onto the street with the rush of the crowd, with the plan to just drive home and hope he’d be there.
On the street, Leona had elbowed Jareth. They both saw it—a sports bar with a crusty sign, a vaguely gothic look to the stained-glass window and sour notes of rage eminating from within, the tinkerings of some bad rock band as insulated by egg-cartons stapled to the walls. Leona asked their mother to “Give her a second” and, leaving the family there on the street, had crossed to open the club door, disappear within, and re-emerge from their father from whose blithering lips protruded a cigar whose fancy green and gold label bespoke of a rare import.
In the car, snapping into his seatbelt, he had said, simply, “I didn’t much care for the play,” and mom had laughed.
“I will not recommend you for the board of the Tony’s,” she said, cackling.
“That thing won a Tony?” Dad asked, drumming his fingers on the glove compartment.
“Six,” Leona said from the backseat, seething a little.

Though watching television with his father who, oblivious to the set at all, didn’t change much, watching with his sisters was a completely different experience. Celia simply stopped on shows he would have been embarrassed to watchon his own—teenage dramas that played like morality tales (who to dump, how to dump, how to be dumped), MTV reality shows whose sparring housemates played for the cameras, and, holiest of holy, makeover house shows, wherin families switched houses for a weekend to redecorate eachothers’ parlors with loud paint and cheap, Swedish furniture.
But watching with Leona was xxxx. Never content with what was playing, she’d switch for a while and land on something inane—an infomercial wherein Tori Spelling was attempting to sell some sort of washable apron, a long-run episode of Friends, a Ricky Lake special on Eating disorders with double stages—one housing the anorexics, another the obese.
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.
X
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At Waeburn, the seasons themselves followed studio schedules. In the spring and fall, the parking-lot at pickup time (3 – 3.15) would hum with talk of “Pilot season.” Cell numbers were exchanged. A pretty mother, leaning on the rolled-down window of a dad in an Escalade, was netting herself an audition. Those thin, gawky fathers who hauled leather briefcases would pull out from them piles of pages—a script!—to hand it into the waiting tote of another dad, who, bored during pickup, would page through the thing, smiling through his teeth.
Parental gossip, as usual, surrounded the fables they devised for their children: Oren is doing so well in English that his teacher recommended, god forbid!, he skip a level; The other day a stranger—a total stranger!—asked Celia if she would consider a modeling career. But, as though aware of the cliché nature of their own dialogue, talk would veer quickly away. Conversations ran to the fables of the worlds they were busily creating: I don’t know how they’re going to kill of Gwen’s character—she won’t stand for it; If Marissa marries him in the season Degan’s writing right now, ratings will spike and crawl down; or, I heard they built three submarines out in Mexico. A hatchet job.
Some seasons—especially during the summer and early Fall, when the snow had cleared from Toronto’s streets—parents would be out of the picture entirely. At the orphanage-sized homes of friends, parties would come without supervision, watched only by maids long ago bought into the childrens’ alliance. Children not of the Studio system, The Oswegos were triply cursed: Cursed with parents who were nearly always home, cursed with questions they would always have—What’s a dolly, Daddy?—and cursed with not knowing the importance, the absolute importance, of Denton Swire in the fourth grade whose mother was not a recognizable Gwen, let’s say, but ran Fox Dreamworks Pictures. That was why Greg Marcel was friends with the brash loser, that was why Mitzy had to spend so many weekends at his house, that was why, in Science Lab, though Swire had dropped the test-tube thus ruining the experiment, Paul Dine had provided him with his good results.
Still, even among those children of stars whose faces recalled a mash-up of their recognizable parents, in a school of 512, the Oswegos netted stares. Jareth, the middle child, had followed his eldest sister, Leona, and was trailed, one grade below, by the youngest, Celia, 14 going on 15. The reputation which plagued him was neither his eldest sister’s—she had gone on to Harvard, to the chagrin of all of her former teachers when faced with the two that could not live up—nor the reputation of Celia, whose looks had landed her on both the pages of C-list teen fashion mags and on the tongues of all but the shyest boys in Jareth’s grade (11th). No, the reputation to plague Jareth and all three Oswegos at high-school, in their twenties, and in their life, was the reputation of their father. It was not something that could be “played down” or “lived up to”—it was like being born in another country, or of another sex, or into another creed; as ingrained into their identity as the dots inscribed on dies.
At age twenty-three, Zed Oswego had, with the swift motion with which other fathers unzipped parkas, drawn a twelve-inch imitation-Medieval pewter sword down the pale stomach of a live sow, exposing innards to a sold-out stadium. Zed’s VH1 backstory—his rise into fame due to cokehead bassist and high-school pal Rick Moldin, the ensuing tours with their group The Gadabouts, and his gradual fadeout to domesticity in a mansion in the Malibu hills which he shared with his wife, a groupie he’d met when she was 18—was known to the school’s population who could trace, in the face of his dark-haired son, the father’s youthful moonface.
Jareth’s pale, soft face was round as a platter, cut into with the hard lines of a slim nose, thin lips, and the tired trails which drained from the tear ducts down into the corners of Jareth’s mouth, which hid a set of too-small, rounded teeth so perfectly aligned as to be the reason, Margerie Durnham told her friends at a sleepover in the tenth grade, why she loved him. Though Jareth would never know it to be love, he would sense Margerie’s strangeness. He took her quiet stares not as affection but as that other terrible hunger he had become more adept at recognizing—a starvation for fame, or for the proximity to it, which burned in the guts of even the best at pretending not to care.
Having a teenage rebel for a father bestowed the Oswegos with an innate reputation--they were not to be messed with. So how difficult it had been for the three of them to rebel.
It started with Leona, the eldest, who having graduated just two years prior, had been pointedly clever, industrially studious, and had made it a point not to be associated with a father who at age 20, had dropped out of a small community college on the Eastern shore of Massachusetts to follow a “dream” in the form of a choking, sputtering van driven on a cross-country tour. She was—and oh, what an ungodly word it was in the Oswego household—practical.
Leona was the type of messy-haired, uncaring girl who excelled at every academic. She was rude and she was brilliant. But it was in music class that she gleaned her first “F.” When handed a recorder she failed, purposefully, to elicit the correct sound. Her own notes, ricocheting down the concrete halls, strained like the peachy wail of a cat. A stab at chorus fared no better. She was a low mutterer, who hid in the third row behind Mario D’Ambreezio (the only boy, who if it were not for our contemporary age’s acquiescenes, would have been turned a castrati). When called out by the frustrated conductor who worried the Oswego girl did not truly know the lyrics, Leona was asked to solo her rendition. The correct lyrics to “Little Drummer Boy” were not “Watermelon watermelon Scooby dooby doo." The following quarter, she was not asked to return to chorus and so spent the period (8th) in total segregation. Forced to sign up for the only elective that still had open slots, "Winter Sports," she sat out on pick-up basketball games, coloring the thick wedge of her sneakers with the white-board erase pen she'd been given to keep the score.
To Jareth, Leona’s rebellion was a success; she had been the only Oswego to flee the scene.
Harvard had begun as a name only to be whispered. The symbol of all stratifications, all achievements, all placeholders Zed Oswego, in his throaty dinner lectures against “our country,” which to him, existed either in the Midwest, where the fat people they saw at Disneyland were from, or in the “hallowed halls of Harvard,” where bowtied scrooges “made up numbers.” The Gadabouts, despite their origins twenty minutes North of Cambridge, had played at Harvard Yard only once, playing a protest concert against Vietnam that had gone down in the books because of its headlining act, SOME FAMOUS PROTESTOR, who, Zed Oswego had never personally met, despite his stories to the contrary. Harvard, as an institution to be a part of and not to protest, was the ultimate rebellion.
The acceptance letter came in a thick brown envelope. In the recently remodeled kitchen of the Oswego home, on the marble island standing solitary in the sea of tile, Leona read the Congratulations that would island her forever from the family she felt weighted by. She only needed, she told her parents at dinner, a signature. Maude Oswego, though she would not admit it to her husband, was somewhat proud, and called up a “Celebration Dinner” (a pseudo-Thanksgiving, imported via a Deli on 3rd street) which her father endured, spearing peas with a single fork tine.
This fall, that was where Leona was— sitting around on lawns raked of reddish leaves that fell from the trees, or on wooden chairs pulled around circular tables, where she talked about philosophers, or on futons, alongside black and white and asian students, smoking hashish from gleaming hookahs and talking about how, even if they turned out to be Shakespeare, the earth would fall into the sun and it would all be meaningless. At least, that was how Jareth Oswego understood her life. She had been away now for a year and a half, having spent the intervening summer interning at a magazine in New York, whose name he had never heard of. Despite how close they had been in high school, she rarely wrote. This fall she would come home for her first Thanksgiving—four days which he looked forward to as a clean, crisp break from the soddy mess of fall spreading before him otherwise without interruption.
Labelled in Waeburn’s hallways as a stoner, Jareth hid beneath overlarge ponchos sold on the sidewalks in front of East LA’s unobscured headshops by sad-eyed Guatemalan immigrants. During lunch, he’d head over with Bresios and two or three others—sometimes Paul Dine would be there with Mitzy Hanks, if they weren’t making out in the dark of a music practice room, or there’d be Leg Rouland carrying the bummy prop of a skateboard (named by his Hollywood parents, “Legend,” a title he’d tried to shed) and they’d meet at the strip of Eucalyptus trees that edged the student parking lot, where they’d slump down, backs to the wall, to sit in the pile of dry leaves. Despite the pastoral setting, the place was called by everyone (including teachers) the “alley”—a reference to the places of deviation they had learned about in movies, where in small towns with rigid puritan standards, the grace of civil engineers had gifted teenagers the unlit backroads.
This smoking of Jareth’s was a pittance of a rebellion, spoil-sport really. His father, with a bowl of his own in the third drawer beneath his computer in the garage studio, couldn’t be said to care. The most his mother had ever said was, when finding in his sock drawer, his pipe (a cheesy cat-faced thing he’d paid too much for when he was 13 and didn’t know better), “You know this kills brain cells?” What a cliché, he had thought, as she had simply placed the embarrassment on the top of his dresser to stare at him with its gummy, muck-filled eyes.
Jareth didn’t turn to pot in the rebellious sense that maybe the Dawsons of TV turned to pot. It wasn’t only a rebellion but yes, an escape. In the sense that Leona paged through the Ivy League brochures hoarded in the folder labeled “Pre Calc” (an assurance that her parents would never open it), Jareth found life on the side-lines (the “alleys,” the headshops, the poolside chaises of spoiled-rich Legend) to be an escape.
Because really, anyone born into the name of Oswego needed this; this forgetting.
For Leona, escape came in dreams of stratospheric lecture halls where, raising a hand and standing to the teacher’s call, she’d answer with a rebuttal well-spoken enough to move the classroom to tears, a standing ovation, maybe, or just a glance from a scrubby man in a tweed jackets, its elbows worn, whose soft, surprised glance would seem to say—I never thought I’d find someone who understood. Jareth understood this in his sister and she understood, in him, the cat-eyed pipe and his bummer friends, that girl Mitzy with the raggled hair, whose measly crush on Jared was enough to launch the boy into hour long daydreams.
But to Leona and Jared, Celia was unexplainable; divinely strange as an immaculate conception. The thing—almost the entire problem, the entire distance between them—was that she was born extra-terrestrially, numbingly beautiful. Her elder siblings had inherited the face of a malcontent rocker from their father, but Celia’s mother, a former groupie, would say often that Celia came from her. Still, she had never looked like this—long limbed, tanned by the LA sun, with blonde hair from god-knows-where (the French grandmother no one had ever met, she posited) and the peaked, upturned nose of a Norwegian elf.
In the Oswego house, Celia was a gazelle trapped in a WalMart. Late night conversations between the parents, held over pillows, would concern how they could have produced such a creature. In the kitchen, dining-room, living-rooms and basement—even out by the chaises that lined the lima-bean shaped pool, where she sprawled over magazines whose inserts fluttered away in the heady breezes—Celia’s beauty was either adamantly ignored, unacknowledged, or mocked as distastefully conventional. To see her prancing about the house, Leona would chide, “Looking for your whitening powder?” Even their mother, exhausted by the more forgetful, irresponsible daughter sweeping under the couches for a missing sock or cellphone, “Sweetie, the mirror is over there.” Bursting with love, Zed would call her into his studio to deliver a drink or a snack with the mocking, disturbing tone of a horror-show Humbert Humbert: “My fawn?”
It was a farce carried out not in cruelty, but in sincerity, out of love, as a way to temper the girl. For the Oswegos understood that in West LA, where girls like Celia were instantly accepted, she had been given no reason to rebel, to forge a personality. She was born into a life without suffering. And so, the Oswegos understood without saying, they must manufacture it. At home, then, Celia’s beauty was a farce, because in the sun-drenched halls of Waeburn, it was everything.

"He was a gentleman with red whiskers who always went first through a doorway."

Also--to follow up on my question, "Why write in China, if not about China?" Everyone here is always saying, 'Oh, by living in China you're learning so much'--First of all, that's true in the way in which it was meant, but second of all, it's true in the opposite way. Living here affords me time to not work which affords me time to teach myself. The taking on of this immense task has me TEACHING myself in a totally productive way, re-reading books that "work" in a way I've never read books before. No longer reading for sentences (as I did in my teens when learning to write) or for sociological truths (freshman, sophomore) or for author's intentions and grand human truths (junior, senior). I am now reading to steal mechanics: How did they transition, pass time, why did I care what happened next? How did they "get in" a character?

"Ford Madox Ford writes wonderfully about getting a character up and running - what he calls "getting a character in". Ford and his friend Joseph Conrad loved a sentence from a Guy de Maupassant story: "He was a gentleman with red whiskers who always went first through a doorway." Ford comments: "that gentleman is so sufficiently got in that you need no more of him to understand how he will act. He has been 'got in' and can get to work at once." -- James Wood writing something something something

In journalism I have learned to spot "getting a character in" as Leiby's "writing with muscle." I think I need to re-attack the novel with 'muscle.' Anyway, I'm learning a lot by myself right now. And it has nothing to do with China.

From a Slate review of "Living Lohan," (E!, Mondays at 10:30 p.m. ET):

"Living Lohan, however, is not just a symptom of cultural decay but an active agent of it, commodifying the very youth and soul of Ali Lohan—younger sister of poor little Lindsay."


From a NYT article on the bad dialogue great plotting glossy "Emperor's Children" by Yale-educated Messud (and reviewed by Yalie Megan O'Rourke):


"Although none of her classmates appear as characters in the novel, Yale did provide inspiration. There she met peers who had grown up attending dinners and cocktail parties with their literary parents and friends, “worlds that were to me only mythical,” she said.

“The certainty that that gave people was novel and fascinating, and I think initially wholly enviable,” she continued. “And then over time it became clear that it involved struggles and burdens of a different kind.” Recognition of those burdens, she said, provided the seed of the complicated relationship between Marina and her father.
....
Ms. Messud does not shy away from portraying unappealing sides of her characters. Susan Taylor, a bookseller at Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza in Albany and Market Block Books in Troy, N.Y., said that although she enjoyed “The Emperor’s Children” and was intrigued by its characters, she “didn’t want to be any of them or go out and have a cup of coffee with any one of them.”

She added, “I thought, ‘You have every privilege in the world and you still can’t figure out how to make your life work.’ ”


HOW TO MAKE MY LIFE WORK
1. Why am I in China
2. Why am I in China
3. Why am I in China
It's economically feasible to be writing a novel here, sure, but there could not be a place more fucking distracting. My one hour of CHinese class per day is really more like four if you count transportation and study time, and then I've got my social life to live up to which is like, a silly seven hours per day of nothing, and then I've got my TV watching which, given the content of the novel, feels sometimes like homework. Oh my god, and then you've got Gossip Girl which is like, a solid four hours per day. So

I googled "writer's colony" for fifteen minutes today, switched to "fellowship" then googled people who had either broken my heart or whose heart I had broken, to make sure they weren't more successful than me yet. (Read: Hadn't published shit outside of their places of summer internment.) Penultimate thoughts: I'm more ambitious than I pretend to myself to be. Ultimate thoughts: I really think "The Emperor's Children" is problematic and I need to write about it. It's a novel that feels filled in. It's... Okay


When you go into an art gallery and you see an aesthetically beautiful painting of something which could have been captured in either
a. a photograph
b. a mutated digitized mucked up photograph
You're taught to ask why, specifically, is this a painting? Why is this story being told in this way? If it could have been made in ANY other way than painted on canvas, the day's criticism would have it that it should have been. The difficulty of answering this question is why so many, over the decades, have declared the form dead. Now it can be answered with the retort: "It could not have been conveyed in any other way." Obvious retorts are Richters that play on the form of the photograph or of the squeeged paint itself, Sol LeWitts that are staged, or even simple moody Tuymans and glooging glugging Neo Rauschs whose visual language anyway, evokes ad campaigns from the 50s and 60s.

Now lets jump to what Alice Adams said about writing fiction, I think it was her at least... Saying that a novel can never be summarized because... Because a "story" is precisely that which takes a "story" to tell; It simply unfolds as is without extra fabric.

The Emperor's Children is all extra fabric. It reads like a long outline, meticulously plotted which has been filled in with mushily readable writing. It's akin to a needlepoint. I could have seen the image in the needlepoint without all the thread, if I had simply looked at the pattern.

Clearly the same is not true in oh, on one end of the spectrum a Pynchon novel--the language is the plot, the images make the plot whirl--or on the other end of the spectrum, a William Maxwell short story--where the leaden language without hyper hijinks creates its own mood and where outline would read as story-less, without suspense. Messud has basically written the plot of a teledrama and filled it in with palatable writing. I kept thinking the whole time of what Ian Frazier said at some talk--when you have a "crazy" impulse in your writing, go with it. Messud NEVER went with it. Sure there are "crazy" descriptions but they're tempered tempered tempered and boring boring boring.

That was an insane rant.


I wish Bootie Tubb wasn't such an obvious Stevie stand-in (from Conrad's "Secret Agent") because that's the trick IIIIII WANTED TO STEAL, having Jareth's drawing at the opening of my novel (all of its tricky squares) stand in for Stevie's whorls:

"Mr Verloc, getting off the sofa with ponderous reluctance, opened
the door leading into the kitchen to get more air, and thus
disclosed the innocent Stevie, seated very good and quiet at a deal
table, drawing circles, circles, circles; innumerable circles,
concentric, eccentric; a coruscating whirl of circles that by their
tangled multitude of repeated curves, uniformity of form, and
confusion of intersecting lines suggested a rendering of cosmic
chaos, the symbolism of a mad art attempting the inconceivable.
The artist never turned his head; and in all his soul's application
to the task his back quivered, his thin neck, sunk into a deep
hollow at the base of the skull, seemed ready to snap."


I clearly need to have Gloria see that.

Chapter 1

A light rectangle in a dark room.
Of all the children spread before Gloria—they called their teachers by their first names—it had to be the Oswego boy whose response to the assignment--Draw your house--had turned out, at least as best she could see, to be undrawn, blank. And oh, he’d been given nearly twenty minutes. You were always disappointed. From the child sized bucket seat in which she had pooled herself, seeing the page through the fan slowly dicing the LA heatwave, it was a blind eye, blinking madly.
Seated at the boy’s elbow, Evan Bresios, a fellow fourth-grader, could see better. On the whole--yes, 90% of the page was blank, but in the center two slim rectangles drawn in the faint, bluish graphite of a mechanical pencil floated like snow angels. Onto their lengths were tacked 6 cubes per side so that—if you were counting—in total the page held 24 squares, some of which had been labeled in the crabbed, boyish handwriting of Jareth Oswego, who now stared not at his oeuvre but out the window, which faced not to the Malibu surf but to the hills, dry with scrubbrush, tossed toys, a single Nerf gun whose neon had been bleached by the sun to bone white. It appeared that he thought he was done. For the assignment—Draw your home—such a composition was as unrevealing as an ice-cube tray; empty boxes surrounding cornrows of dead-air.
It was the best Jareth could do.
In the house in which he had grown up, toddling among brass doorknobs, there were rooms into which he had never gone, doors he had never opened, an entire floor, even—the loft reached by the flight of stairs that rose from his father’s studio—whose contents he could not describe. Aged eight, dark haired and slender fingered, with the shaded sills of sleeplessness that hang beneath the eyes of the bookish, Jareth was adamantly uncurious. Where others would snoop, the boy did not bother; conversations, held through paneled doors, did not draw his ear to the latch. For this, his parents called him “Wide Eye.” The name, Jareth would later learn, as he did his best to keep the Screenwriting for Dummies above the rising waters of his eldest sister’s lion-footed tub, referred not only to his tendency to stare, but to the angle of shot necessary to capture a whole picture at expense of its details. Perhaps this was the fault his parents had desired to reference; More than one teacher had written him off as a “space cadet” (a trill which evolved, in his teens, into “pothead”). Years later, onto his third lover by now, Jareth Oswego would be broken up with over the admonition, delivered in a San Francisco bagel bar, that he “Seemed to see nothing.” Looking out through the plate glass window to the street, he would note how two steps ahead of a meter maid, a civilian in cargo shorts was depositing quarters—an act of saintliness that were it not for his gaze would have died unobserved. And he kept watching, half testing himself, half attempting to prove something he knew not to be true—that he was a keen observer of the world. He catalogued the details—the city employee’s standard issue black Reebok’s, the good samaritan’s car keys which she held in her right hand by grace of a neon pink keychain (a bottle opener shaped like a shark). But he would not notice that across the restaurant, a family had entered—their faces vaguely familiar, like the faces of statues bathed in 100 years of rain. When they waved at him—the child had waved, smiling—he found he could not remember who they were.
These were the sorts of things Jareth Oswego was expected to know but that he did not. Things like the names of old friends (the family had run his mother’s yoga studio), the feelings of his lover (she had left him for his inability to be kind to her in the small ways that she was kind to him), and the layout of his house (gargantuan).
And so, when asked in the third grade (maybe it had been the fourth? He could not remember) to sketch the house where he lived—Jareth Oswego had disappointed everyone, not least of all his teacher.
A twenty-something East Coast transplant, a bored nail-biter who ensconced herself in cable-knit sweaters, Gloria had been drawn to the West by wishy-washy ideas of fame that she was just beginning to give up on. No great beauty, she hadn’t tried for acting, instead attempting a screenplay to which she had never actually devoted herself, thinking that at any time—halfway through—some agent seeing her type in a coffee shop would approach and strike up a conversation. Her script centered on a farmer who, discovering a pot of gold…and that was where it had ended, 24 pages later, on the line of dialogue delivered between his two quibbling teenaged daughters, “Let’s go to the mall!” As only the starving can be, Gloria was hungry. Overlooked in her youth—the middle child, the least beautiful—she sought the opposite. But when she made it out here, she was soothed somewhat by fame’s proximity. There was a neighboring farmer in her plot outline who, by grace of the gold finding, finds love in the form of the prospector he harbours.
And she could get even closer, she thought. The idea had hatched that morning, waiting for the bus because—she would explain later, at a dinner party, to her friends, she had felt sorry for a man wearing a sandwich board. The board read “Star Maps,” and, feeling “charitable,” she said, at just that moment, she handed him ten dollars. The bus having come just then, the wrapped map was shoved into her purse—which she happened to still be carrying at the dinner party where she relayed the story. Her host, a college friend, cleared the pits of the olives they had sucked, earlier, from the living room table. Together they unfolded the map. As his pointer finger sketched a snail-trail along the PCH up to Sunset, Tacoma, the 405tk split, and Gloria sat back—shocked into a stupor. It was like seeing your name on a gravestone in a cemetery of a town in which you had never lived.
She read out the names: “Bresios. Varner, Druberry, Realto, Oswego…” They were all there. It was a roster. Maeanne Varner, ponytailed, a little stupid, daughter of John Warner, head of yes, Varner Dreamscastle; Blake Druberry, grandson, an exhaustive IMDB search revealed, of the silent film actor of the same last name and a current star of recent romantic comedies she hadn’t at all enjoyed; and Debbie Realto, Ella Cunningham, the Madison twins, Evan Bresios—whose father was the head of development for ABC-TV, LA, and Jareth Oswego—
“Jareth Oswego,” the host, Brian, had said, smirking. “How’d ya like that.” Patrick had been serious in college, had majored in Economics, had driven out to LA only to follow a girlfriend who left him for an “LA loser.” Brian was no fanboy, no starfucker, (in local parlance) and yet it was Patrick who was the one who had asked, “What’s he like?”
What are they like. Like—Her description had been hasty—they’re perfectly normal, they’re the same, they’re picked up in over-large cars, they, they, they they learn Spanish from their maids, they don’t know (she remembered a clean-up session after a ceramics demonstration given by a volunteer mother) they don’t know how to properly use a sponge. (It must be squeezed of the dirty water before it can be used again.)
She provided the relevant details, falsified fables, all the while thinking of how she herself was not interested in what they were like. They were children. She was interested in where they lived.
Born back somewhere near oh, god, Milwaukee, she’d found escape as so many children have since the advent of the television. When she had stayed home sick (an excuse she probably feigned) she watched Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and later, sucked at the straws of her sodas while consuming whole marathons of Cribs, the MTV show where musicians—mostly rappers—took cameramen on private tours of their barely-furnished homes, focusing on their bedrooms (“Where the magic happens”) and on collections of souped-up sportscars they kept glistening and waxed. One show, a high-school drama, intrigued her in even its establishing shots, as the camera dollyed to a sedan, probably, traced a beachfront highway and glanced up at the hills, at the houses that grew up from the brush like teeth from the flesh of the mouth.
Gloria had ended up in La Brea--inland, five miles off the beach, where the smog hung low and dense and where the cigarette smoke of an unemployed roomate clogged the old drapes, lending her whole life a fogginess that lifted only when the bus reached the PCH with its extended, unfettered views of the sea on the left and, on the right, the pseudo-Mediterranean villas angled toward the oceans like racing sailboats on the same tack. Her heart lurched to see the houses. Though the LA she had found here was no more glamorous than the clapboard she had come from, Gloria understood that it was in these mansions that fame had hidden itself, furrowing into chenille carpets, crawling into the potted aloe veras and rising, inflamed, phoenix-like into the eyes of fame’s offspring—the unremarkable children who stared back at her from across their desks.
If she could ask them to describe their houses, she thought, the effect would be her own, personalized Cribs, smacking of an authenticity heretofore unseen. That night on the way back from Brian’s, the windows of the bus, lit from within by the green, lavatorial light, had turned to mirrors. To see out, Gloria had to put her face right to the glass. Islanded in total darkness, the small amber squares of lighted windows were the only things visible—rectangles of warmth in floating darkness. How like a constellation it was, she thought, how aptly named. You could learn to navigate if you could only learn their names.

Of all the children, Jareth Oswego had to be the one with a blank page. Evan Bresios—looking on—gave a sneer, then turned his nose down to his own paper, which he was vehemently “coloring in” a deep cobalt.
“That’s a strange color for a basement,” Gloria had said, in passing. “Is that a pool?”
These sort of questions tested Bresios’ patience—at base he was an artist, misunderstood. The pool, he explained, using a stubby finger to walk her through it, was outside, on the deck that faced the ocean (such a location allowed for an “infinity effect”). This indigo swathe was above his father’s screening room, made to stand in for what he was now labeling neatly, the “artificial sky.” There were shooting stars, and a switch at the side of the room could change the “time” to daybreak, evening. Of course. Gloria should have known. Walking from the basement up and out to a stoop flanked by two aloe vera plants sagging in their terra cotta pots, stood the Bresios father himself, burly and bowtied, his remaining family members standing shoulder-to-shoulder by his side with the ease of manner of a prison lineup. Beneath him, a placard, “Jimmy Bresios, President of ABC-TV Development Division! in the unassuming manner that below the busts of Caesars, Gloria had noted how sculptors simply allotted a number. These children—these strange children. Having been given everything, they did not yet know to hide it away.
So what a disappointment to see the Oswego boy’s sketch. She leaned over Jareth now. Yes, there at the southernmost end of the paper, a cube read, “Celia’s room”; at its opposite, “Leona’s”; and then on row labeled “Floor 1” a kitchen, dining-room and living room were as yet only half-described. Jareth had spent nearly all of the twenty minutes trying to recall how the back-parlor, in which he was never allowed, could be reached through the kitchen. His mind hopped up staircases, drained into sinks and flew through the French doors—whose panes were oiled with fingerprints—out into the back garden where a black hose lay twisted. Where did the hose begin? Where did the water come from? Best to start with the ocean that, with the crayon labeled “Azure” he spent the rest of the period coloring.
When Jareth thought down the long slim hallway on the second floor, he could only really say what was behind three of the doors—his room; his parent’s locked bedroom, and a closet stacked with towels that the maid opened and closed before bathtime. His parents’ bedroom. He had been inside only a few times—sent there on errands by Alma, or by the quaking call of his own mother’s voice when she had been sick with pneumonia for those two weeks when he was five, or one time—impelled by a door that had been left open. He had walked over, the seven year old had told himself, to close it. But when he reached the open slice of air between the frame and the knob, he entered.
The bed had been made, the sheets pulled tight to the sides and tucked into the frame. Along the right-hand side of the room, a long dresser of bleached wood held on its surface glistening minutiae: photographs in silver frames, small bottles of coloured water, a flecked comb of animal shell which he ran through his hair, looking at his face in a round mirror, before a sound at the other end of the hall—Alma opening and closing the towel closet—startled him and, laying down the comb on the bleached wood as he had found it, Jareth Oswego scrambled out, leaving the door—as he had found it—ajar.
It was a hot day for LA. The classroom was dark, the windows shaded and facing out not to the surf but to the hills, whose scrubby brush was studded by toys long tossed over the fence—tennis balls, a single rollerblade, a neon water gun bleached by the sun. Gloria ran her manicured finger down one of Jareth’s ice-cube trays.
“And where’s your room?” she asked, her voice weedy, prying.
“I haven’t fit it in yet.” He knew his room to be between Celia’s and Leona’s, across the hall from the exercise room—where the Nordic Track elicited unoiled weepings whenever his mother swept across it—but he wanted to be sure.
Exasperated, nearly laughing at the wasted effort (for why assign the class of the son of Zed Oswego to draw a blueprint if he alone could tell her nothing?), Gloria said what Jareth would recall years later—aged 16 and one half, sloughing down high-school’s halls in a pair of his dad’s old boots (steel tipped, tassled, hidden beneath the silk of luffing oversized cargo pants), and running into Bresios, now prone to hide his chiding eyes behind the mirrored shades of Aviator sunglasses.
That teacher, whoever she was, had it been Gloria? had said, “Well I guess it’s alright” or some other apology for a cutting remark he had, by now, forgotten. And then she had said, “You’re the only one here who seems to know you don’t have to show anything you don’t want to.”
It wasn’t, Jareth had wanted to say, that he didn’t want to share the life he saw, it was that he didn’t seem to see it himself. He would like, he thought then, for her to come over and sitting in the corner—the drawing pad on her lap, draw it. He would like her to show him what she saw.

At age 16, Jareth Oswego, despite all the family’s grumblings against the institution, was still at Waeburn. It had seemed to the Oswegos, when they first enrolled Leona, to be an obvious choice—and the rest of the kids simply stuck to the regimen. At Waeburn Pluralistic School, classes were capped at fifteen, students were not allowed to use coloring books (they inhibited creative thinking), and the dining-hall cuisine, engineered by one volunteer mother, was entirely organic. Modern in design when it was conceived in 1963, the school was a cluster of low-ceilinged, hooded concrete buildings was connected over the dusty, red-earthed bowl of Tacoma Canyon by outdoor hallways. The lawns between the halls had either been landscaped with dry, imported Bermuda sod that scratched your legs if you sat down Indian-style, or had been left to the Eucalyptus trees whose dusty leaves clogged the gutters, changing the rhythm of the rain so that over some of the halls, water would fall in unobfuscated sheets.
It did not rain often. The weather was dry, and the neon squirt guns of the kindergartners, left out for a week, would be brought in a different, lighter shade, having been bleached by the sun.
In a school of 512—even among those children of stars whose faces recalled a mash-up of their recognizable parents, the Oswegos netted stares. Jareth, the middle child, had followed his eldest sister, Leona, and was trailed, one grade below, by the youngest, Celia, 14 going on 15. The reputation which plagued him was neither his eldest sister’s—she had gone on to Harvard, to the chagrin of all of her former teachers when faced with the two who could not live up—nor the reputation of Celia, whose good looks had landed her on both the pages of C-list teen fashion mags and on the tongues of all but the shyest boys in Jareth’s grade (11th). No, the reputation to plague the three Oswegos—at high-school, in their twenties, and in their life—was the reputation of their father. It was not something that could be “played down” or “lived up to”—it was like being born in another country, or of another sex, or into another creed, as ingrained into their identity as numbers planted into the ivory faces of dies.
At age twenty-three, Zed Oswego had, with the swift motion with which other fathers unzipped parkas, drawn a twelve-inch imitation-Medieval pewter sword down the pale stomach of a live sow, exposing innards to a sold-out stadium. Zed’s VH1 backstory—his rise into fame due to cokehead bassist and high-school pal Rick Moldin, the ensuing tours with their group The Gadabouts, and his gradual fadeout to domesticity in a mansion in the Malibu hills which he shared with his groupie wife—was known to the school’s population who could trace, in the face of his dark-haired son, the father’s youthful moonface. Jareth’s pale face was round as an apple, cut into with the hard lines of a slim nose, thin lips, and the tired trails which drained from the tear ducts down into the corners of Jareth’s mouth, which hid a set of too-small, rounded teeth so perfectly aligned as to be the reason, Margerie Durnham told her friends at a sleepover in the tenth grade, as to be the reason that she loved him. Though Jareth would never know it to be love, he would sense Margerie’s strangeness. He took her quiet stares not as affection but as that other terrible hunger he had become more adept at recognizing—a starvation for fame, or for the proximity to it, which burned in the guts of even the best at pretending not to care.
Having a teenage rebel for a father bestowed the Oswegos with an innate reputation--they were not to be messed with. So how difficult it had been for the three of them to rebel.
It started with Leona, the eldest, who having graduated just two years prior, had been pointedly clever, industrially studious, and had made it a point not to be associated with a father who at age 20, had dropped out of a small community college on the Eastern shore of Massachusetts to follow a “dream” in the form of a choking, sputtering van driven on a cross-country tour.
Though in every academic Leona Oswego excelled, it was in music class that she gleaned her first “F.” When handed a recorder she failed, purposefully, to elicit the correct sound. Her own notes, ricocheting down the shining linoleum halls, sounded like the strained, peachy notes of a cat. A stab at chorus fared no better. She was a low mutterer, hidden in the third row behind Mario D’Ambreezio (the only boy). When called out by the frustrated conductor, worried she did not truly know the lyrics, she was asked to solo her rendition. The correct lyrics to “Little Drummer Boy,” she would learn, were not “Watermelon watermelon Scooby dooby doo" The following quarter, she was not asked to return. She spent the period (8th) in total segregation in the elective "Winter Sports," where she sat out on pick-up basketball games, coloring the thick wedge of her sneakers with the white-board erase pen she'd been given to keep the score.
To Jareth, Leona’s rebellion could be measured as a success in that she had been the only Oswego to flee the scene. Harvard had started as a name only to be whispered, a rebellion in the utmost—the symbol of all stratifications, all achievements, all placeholders that Zed Oswego, in his throaty dinner lectures, had attempted to rail against. The acceptance letter came in a thick brown envelope, and in the recently remodeled kitchen of the Oswego home, on the marble island standing solitary in the sea of tile, Leona read the Congratulations that would island her forever from the family she felt weighted by. That night, at a family “celebration” dinner, her father grumbled, spearing peas with a single fork tine.
This fall, that was where Leona was—Harvard—where lawns were raked of reddish leaves that fell from the trees, where kids sat around circular tables naming philosophers, where black and white and asian students sat forward on the edges of futons, smoking hashish from gleaming hookahs. At least, that was the part of the dream that Jareth Oswego understood. His sister had been away now for a year and a half. She’d spent the intervening summer interning at a magazine in New York, whose name he had never before heard, and despite how close they had been in high school, she rarely wrote. This fall she would come home for her first Thanksgiving—an ample four days which he looked forward to, the soddy mess of fall spreading before him otherwise without interruption.
Labelled in Waeburn’s high school hallways as a stoner, Jareth hid beneath overlarge ponchos bought on the sidewalks in front of East LA’s unobscured headshops. During lunch, he’d head over with Bresios and two or three others—sometimes Paul Dine would be there with Mitzy Hanks, if they weren’t making out in the dark of a music practice room, or there’d be Leg Rouland carrying a skateboard (named Legend by his Hollywood parents, a name he’d tried to shed) and they’d meet at the strip of Eucalyptus trees that edged the student parking lot, where they’d slump down, backs to the wall, to sit in the dry pile of leaves. Despite the pastoral setting the place was called by everyone (including teachers) the “alley”—a reference to the places of deviation they had learned about in movies, where in small towns with rigid puritan standards, teenagers were forced by civil engineers to the unlit backroads.
This smoking of Jareth’s was a pittance of a rebellion. His father, really, couldn’t be said to care. The most his mother had ever said was, when finding in his sock drawer, his bowl (a glass thing he’d paid too much for when he was 13 and didn’t know better), “You know this kills brain cells?” What a cliché, what spoilsport. Anyway, it wasn’t really rebellion that drew Jareth to the stuff, he understood. It was simply that anyone born into the name Oswego desired escape. And that for Leona, escape came in her dreams of the stratospheric lecture halls at Harvard where, raising a hand and standing to the teacher’s call, she’d answer with a rebuttal well-spoken enough to move the classroom to tears, a standing ovation, maybe, or maybe just a glance from a scrubby man in a tweed jackets, its elbows worn, whose soft, surprised glance would seem to say—I never thought I’d find someone who understood. Jareth understood his older sister.

But then there was Celia. To Leona and Jared, their younger sister’s rebellion was unexplainable; divinely strange as an immaculate conception. The first thing was that she was beautiful—extra-terrestrially, numbingly so. In the Oswego house, Celia was a gazelle trapped in a WalMart. Late night conversations between the parents, held over pillows, would concern how they could have produced such a creature. In the kitchen, dining-room, living-rooms and basement of the Oswego house—even out by the chaises that lined the lima-bean shaped pool—Celia’s beauty was either adamantly ignored, unacknowledged, or mocked as distastefully conventional. To see her prancing about the house, Leona would have been the one to chide, “Looking for your whitening powder?” Even their mother would say, “Sweetie, the mirror is over there” and their father, lovingly, would call her, in the mocking, disturbing tone of a horror-show Humbert Humbert, “My fawn.”
At home, Celia’s beauty was a farce. In the open halls of Waeburn, it was everything.

It is an afternoon back in September, or October maybe, when Jareth, aged 16 and one half, is out in the “alley” with Evan Bresios. The smoke has cleared their lungs and the two of them, sitting cross-legged in the moldering Eucalyptus leaves, are quiet—nothing left to say but to watch the action in the parking lot. Gloria, the fourth grade teacher, can be seen behind the dusty windshield of her Honda, sitting in the frontseat paying attention only to her sandwich, whose crunching wrapper is unhearable through the glass. Barker, the principal, only about 100 yards away, is whispering into his cellphone—probably, Bresios says, a call to a mistress. Jareth snorts a giggle. Either way, they’re both too absorbed to notice anything, or perhaps it’s an adamant unnoticing, a desire not to be the one to intervene. In either case, if they’d wanted to suspend kids like Jareth or Evan, they could have done it years ago—probably at the camping trip on Catalina when, accused of offering pot to a younger girl who’d gone running to the authorities, they’d endured a “talking to” offered by a teacher sitting on a log bench, and rebutted by simply denying. In the end, it was probably their parents that saved them. Kids like Evan and Jareth were assets to the school’s endowment; to kick them out wouldn’t be good business. So it’s Jareth’s privilege that’s brought him to the edge of this lot, in a desire to escape it, just as it’s Jareth’s privilege that allows his rebellion to sustain. He chooses not to think about the second part, especially not now, as the smoke hits his lungs, washing the world in an invisible fog, in which things move slowly enough to catch them.
And then in the parking lot, there’s Mitzy, moving too quickly, tugging Paul Dine whose worn flannel is tied around her waist in a loose knot. The two have probably been out in a music room, fucking.
“Is your stuff gone?” Mitzy says, looking at the red-eyed boys, eyeing the imprint of the glass bowl in the exterior pocket of Jareth’s cargo pants.
“We just cashed it,” Bresios says, nodding. It’s okay though, Dine says, he’s got more out in his car, and so Mitzy sits down next to Bresios, her back to the cool wall, as she waits for Dine to come back from his car—a 1957 Chevy xxx with a fold-down back seat and an interior of red velour, very retro. He keeps his stuff in not the glove compartment (too easy to find) but in the fold-out drink holder, which when not folded out provides a neat slot next to the radio. Dine, the son of single-mother Tracey Dine, a character actress in A-list films that mostly take place in the forties and fifties (she’s got that look about her, that hard-set grimace, that hair that fluffs around the head like a whirling storm) has a vaguely retro look about everything he does, which is why, Mitzy likes him. He seems not to belong not only to Waeburn, with its stomach-clenching 60’s architecture of social oppression. The three of them actually sit there not talking; Mitzy’s thankful for that, and the two stoned boys are just watching the pot hit them.
When Dine gets back, they smoke his stuff, Jareth and Evan yes, would like a little more, and the converation turns to the suck-i-tude of school in general, and in what had elapsed earlier that day. Mitzy saw the horror-show that was second-period debate—the rhetoric assignment the rest of the school’s been buzzing about—and Dine, who’d seen it too, fills in the details.
“It was harrowing,” Dine starts. “First rate classic.”
“It was your sister, man,” Bresios says, elbowing Jareth, who’s suddenly all ears, attempting to grab his eyes off the glare starring out from the waxed cars catching the sun in the parking lot. “What? Celia? What’d she do?”
A giggling silence. “I can’t believe you don’t know about this,” or some other equally dismissive comment from Dine.
“She never does anything,” Jareth says. “What is it.”
“Oh is this the thing with Celia in Debate?” Mitzy asks. She’s the type of tomboy who likes to play that she’s above this gossip. It’s funny here, to her, to hear the boys gossip in the way she pretends to hate the girls for doing. At home she’s got four sisters, which is why, she knows, she needed this niche.
“What is it?” Jareth needs to know. “You know about this—“ he says, accusing Bresios of not spilling earlier.
“I heard about it from Luckor,” Dine explains. Luckor is the dark, gossipy Russian boy always trying to get in on the ins with the smokers. He has third period with Bresios, ceramics, and while the two are spinning pots they always talk, though Bresios will claim not to enjoy it. “So she’s in Debate, right? What’s the topic again.”
“The topic,” Bresios says, now taking on the role of teller, “was International Aid.”
“Right,” Dine says, “The topic was international aid. Like, what countries to give your money to if you have extra money. So, like, you’re supposed to want to give it to the poorest countries that like, with the money, would be able to help themselves instead of just like, needing you later for more money or some other stuff.”
“You don’t teach a man to fish,” Mitzy says. “Or wait, the opposite.”
“You do teach a man to fish; you don’t give him a pole,” says Bresios.
“Right.” Mitzy says.
“GET BACK TO IT,” Jareth’s nearly screaming.
They look out at the lot. “Quiet down man,” Dine says, before restarting.
“So there’s Celia in the front of the class and this is the topic. The guy before her, Luckor says, gave some speech where he was like, ‘We should give the money to England because if we do, since their government is more competent than ours, they could like, help the countries that really need helping and we wouldn’t have to think about it anymomre. It’s like, he wants to outsource competency or some shit.’”
“Get to Celia,” Jareth says.
“Celia has the rebuttal,” Dine says. “She says you can’t give to the rich. Because, the rich, by being rich, have no idea what to do with money.”
“True,” Mitzy says, leaning over him toward the curb, to ash a cigarette he hadn’t seen her light.
“So old Rube” (Rube is the teacher of the 10th Grade Debate) “has been spending the past month telling them to use examples, like personal examples.”
“Oh god,” Jareth says, pressing his fingers to his eyes so he can see the red constellations of blood there, “I know where this is going.”
And still, Jareth listens. Like watching Nascar for the crashes. You have to know the terrible things in your own life, you want to hear them—the draw of the sublime, the draw of a cliff-edge off of which you hope you do not throw yourself. He listens to Dine recount, with fill-ins from Bresios, who’s heard it too, and Mitzy, whose accounts from the girl’s locker room after 3rd period Gym prove essential.
And Celia’s speech, as far as Jareth understands it, is like this:
SPEECH

Jareth drawing house
Celia’s presentation
Debate
Jareth hears about it
Terry comes home to Alan/Margaret’s who’ve been watching scout and tells about it

It's now at the point where it's just a story I know the whole of and I just have to tell it. I've reformed to that thing that Ellen Zweig told me where every morning you read what you did yesterday, fix it, and then write 3 hours past the fixing.

SOMEDAY THE BOY YOU GONNA LOVE IS GONNA CALL YOUR NAME 666

Jareth drawing house
Celia’s presentation
Debate
Jareth hears about it
Terry comes home to Alan/Margaret’s who’ve been watching scout and tells about it


Though he’d been given by now, oh, what was it?—about twenty minutes—the Oswego’s boy’s paper still appeared to be blank; a blind eye blinking upward toward the ceiling of the bungalow that housed the fourth and fifth grades, in which three hung fans slowly wheeled in an attempt to throw off the hot, dark heat of the Malibu afternoon. It was to these fans that the boy now looked and not to his page—dominated by two long rectangles onto whose lengths were tacked 6 cubes per side, drawn in the faint, bluish graphite of a mechanical pencil. In total, the page held 24 squares—an outpouring of artistic sentiment prompted by the assignment given to the class—Draw your house. Jareth Oswego’s final effort was as unrevealing as an ice-cube tray; empty boxes surrounding cornrows of dead-air.
In the house in which Jareth had grown up, toddling among brass doorknobs, there were rooms into which he had never gone, doors he had never opened, an entire floor, even—the loft reached by the flight of stairs that rose from his father’s studio—whose contents he could not describe. Aged eight, dark haired and slender fingered, with the shaded sills of sleeplessness that hang beneath the eyes of the bookish, Jareth was adamantly uncurious. Where others would snoop, the boy did not bother; conversations, held through paneled doors, did not draw his ear to the latch. For this, his parents called him “Wide Eye.” The name, Jareth would later learn, as he did his best to keep the Screenwriting for Dummies above the rising waters of his eldest sister’s lion-footed tub, referred not only to his tendency to stare, but to the angle of shot necessary to capture a whole picture at expense of its details. Perhaps this was the fault his parents had also desired to reference; More than one teacher had written him off as a “space cadet” (a trill which evolved into a “pothead” in his teens). Years later, onto his third lover by now, Jareth Oswego would be broken up with over the admonition, delivered in a San Francisco bagel bar, that he “Seemed to see nothing.” Looking out through the plate glass window to the street, he would note how two steps ahead of a meter maid, a civilian in cargo shorts was depositing quarters—an act of saintliness that were it not for his gaze would have died unobserved. And he kept watching, half testing himself, half proving to himself something he knew not to be true—that he was a natural observer of the world. He catalogued the details—the city employee’s standard issue black Reebok’s, the good samaritan’s car keys, which she held in her right hand by grace of a zippo keychain. But he would not notice that across the restaurant, a family had entered—their faces vaguely familiar, like the faces of statues that have undergone 100 years of rain. When they waved at him—the child waved, smiling—he found he could not remember who they were.
These were the sorts of things Jareth Oswego was supposed to—was expected to know—but that he did not. Things like the feelings of his lover and the layout of his house. And so, when asked in the third grade (maybe it had been the fourth? He could not remember) to sketch the house where he lived—Jareth Oswego had disappointed everyone.
Perhaps most disappointed by the Oswego boy’s effort was Gloria—they called their teachers by their first name. A twenty-something East Coast transplant, a bored nail-biter with oily hair and ensconcing, all consuming cable-knit sweaters, teacher Gloria had been drawn to the West by wishy-washy ideas of fame she was just beginning to give up on. She was no great beauty. Her one attempt at screenwriting had ended at 24 pages—but it was not her own fame that she truly, hungrily sought. Instead, it was a sort of proximity to it.
Born back somewhere probably in oh, god, Milwaukee or in some little cold cabin near Lake Eerie, she’d found escape as so many children have ever since the advent of the heinous machine—in the false families of the colored box, who lived in houses that grew up from the Malibu hills like teeth from the flesh of the mouth. When she had stayed home sick (an excuse she probably feigned) she watched Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and later, sucked at the straws of her sodas while consuming whole marathons of Cribs, the MTV show where musicians—mostly rappers—took girls with names like Gloria and Emily and Nancy and Susan on private tours of their barely-furnished homes, which focused mainly on the collection of souped-up Hondas they kept glistening, waxed in their pseudo-Tudor garages.
Gloria didn’t even like cars. But the genre of TV show, the “sneak peak” had given her an idea one morning, as she stood beneath the rat-trap apartment she could afford inland, five miles off the beach, where the smog hung low and dense and where the cigarette smoke of her waitress roomate clogged the old drapes, lending her whole life there a sort of fogginess that wiped away when the bus reached the PCH with its extended, unfettered views of the sea on the left and, on the right, the pseudo-Mediterranean villas angled toward the oceans like sailboats on a tack. Her heart lurched to see the houses. Though the LA she had found here was no more glamorous than the cabin or the apartment or whatever hole she had come from, Gloria understood that it was in these mansions that fame had hidden itself, furrowing into chenille carpets, crawling into the potted aloe veras and rising, inflamed, phoenix-like into the eyes of their offspring, the unremarkable children who stared back at her from across the desks.
If she could ask them to describe their houses, she thought, it would be like her own, personalized version of Cribs, an authenticity heretofore unseen. The idea had hatched that morning, waiting for the bus because—she would explain later, at a dinner party, to her friends, she had bought “on a whim” a “Star Map” from a man wearing a sandwich board. She had given him ten dollars and, the bus having come just then, deposited the wrapped map in her purse—which she happened to still be carrying.
Her host, a college friend, had cleared the pits of the olives they had sucked, earlier, from the living room table and they unfolded the map. She removed it from its sheeting hastily, self-concious that they were watching her, destroying its wrapping with the kind of gesture that said she had no interest in preservation, that the map held no use to her. And when she had unfurled it on the table, the names again shocked her into a stupor. It was like seeing your name on a gravestone in a cemetery of a town in which you had never lived. As her host’s pointer finger sketched a snail-trail along the PCH up to Sunset, Tacoma, the 405tk split, she read out the names: “Bresios—I teach his kid. Varner, Druberry, Realto, Oswego…”
They were all there. It was a roster. Maeanne Varner, ponytailed, a little stupid, daughter of John Warner, head of yes, Varner Dreamscastle; Blake Druberry, grandson, an exhaustive IMDB search revealed, of the silent film actor of the same last name and a current star of recent romantic comedies she hadn’t at all enjoyed; and Debbie Realto, Ella Cunningham, the Madison twins, Evan Bresios—whose father was the head of development for ABC-TV, LA, and Jareth Oswego—
“Jareth Oswego,” her host, Patrick, had said, smirking. “How’d ya like that.” Patrick had been studious, serious in college. He had majored in Economics, and driven out to LA to follow his girlfriend and complained of his job in finance in a studio, where he had been relegated to accounting. He was not a fanboy, a starfucker, they called them out here, and yet it was Patrick who asked, “What’s he like?”
What are they like, Gloria thought then. Her description had been hasty—they’re perfectly normal, they’re the same, they’re picked up in over-large cars, they, they, they they learn Spanish from their maids, they don’t know, she remembered a clean-up session after a ceramics demonstration given by a volunteer mother—they don’t know how to use a sponge properly. She provided the relevant details, falsified fables, all the while thinking of what she really wanted to see. She was not interested in what they were like; they were children. She was interested in where they lived.
That night, on the bus back, the windows of the bus turned to mirrors in the green, lavatorial light, she put her face right to the glass. With her nose smudging the window, she could see out, out into the lighted windows of the homes against the hills—islanded in the total darkness, small amber squares.

And now, Jareth Oswego, of all children, was the one with a blank page.
At Jareth Oswego’s elbow, Evan Bresios—looking on—gave a sneer, then turned his nose down to his own paper, which he was vehemently “coloring in” with a deep cobalt.
“That’s a strange color for a ceiling, Evan,” Gloria had said, in passing. “Is that a basement pool?”
These sort of questions tested Bresios’ patience—at base he was an artist, misunderstood. The pool, he explained, using a stubby finger to walk her through it, was outside, on the deck of teak that tacked toward the ocean. This indigo swathe was above his father’s screening room, made to stand in, for what he was now labeling neatly, the “artificial sky.” (There were shooting stars, and a switch at the side of the room could change the “time” to daybreak, evening.) Of course. She should have known.
The Bresios father himself could be found outside, burly and bowtied, flanked by an aloe vera plant on the stoop and his family, who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the ease of manner of a prison lineup. Beneath him, a placard, “Jimmy Bresios, President of ABC-TV Development Division. These children—Gloria thought, these strange children. Having been given everything, they did not yet know to hide it away.
So what a disappointment to see the Oswego boy’s sketch. She leaned over him now. Yes, there at the southernmost end of the paper, a cube read, “Celia’s room”; at its opposite, “Leona’s”; and then on row labeled “Floor 1” a kitchen, dining-room and living room were as yet only half-described. Jareth had spent nearly all of the twenty minutes trying to recall how the back-parlor, in which he was never allowed, could be reached through the kitchen. His mind hopped up staircases, drained into sinks and flew through the French doors, whose panes were oiled with fingerprints, out into the back garden where a black hose lay twisted. Where did the hose begin? Where did the water come from? Best to start with the ocean which, with the crayon labeled “Azure” he spent the rest of the period coloring.
When Jareth thought down the long slim hallway on the second floor, he could only really say what was behind three of the doors—his room; his parent’s locked bedroom, and a closet stacked with towels that the maid opened and closed before bathtime. His parents’ bedroom. He had been inside only a few times—sent there on errands by Alma, or by the quaking call of his own mother’s voice when she had been sick with pneumonia for those two weeks when he was five, or one time—impelled by a door that had been left open. He had walked over, the seven year old had told himself, to close it. But when he reached the open slice of air between the frame and the knob, he entered.
The bed had been made, the sheets pulled tight to the sides and tucked into the frame. Along the right-hand side of the room, a long dresser of bleached wood held on its surface glistening minutiae: photographs in silver frames, small bottles of coloured water, a flecked comb of animal shell which he ran through his hair, looking at his face in a round mirror, before a sound at the other end of the hall—Alma opening and closing the towel closet—startled him and, laying down the comb on the bleached wood as he had found it, Jareth Oswego scrambled out, leaving the door—as he had found it—ajar.
It was a hot day for LA. The classroom was dark, the windows shaded and facing out not to the surf but to the hills, whose scrubby brush was studded by toys long tossed over the fence—tennis balls, a single rollerblade, a neon water gun bleached by the sun. Gloria ran her manicured finger down one of Jareth’s ice-cube trays.
“And where’s your room?” she asked, her voice weedy, prying.
“I haven’t fit it in yet,” he said. He knew his room to be between Celia’s and Leona’s, across the hall from the exercise room—where the Nordic Track elicited unoiled weepings whenever his mother swept across it—but he wanted to be sure.
Exasperated, nearly laughing at the wasted effort (for why assign the class of the son of Zed Oswego to draw a blueprint if he alone could tell her nothing?), Gloria said what Jareth would recall years later—aged 16 and one half, sloughing down high-school’s halls in a pair of his dad’s old boots (steel tipped, tassled, hidden beneath the luffing cloth of cargo pants), and running into Bresios, now prone to hide his chiding eyes behind the mirrored shades of Aviator sunglasses.
That teacher, whoever she was, had it been Gloria? had said, “Well I guess you don’t have to show anything you don’t want to.”
It wasn’t, Jareth had wanted to say, that he didn’t want to share the life he saw, it was that he didn’t seem to see it himself. He would like, he thought then, for her to come over and draw it, sitting in the corner—the drawing pad on her lap, like the court illustrators in the movies—and he would like her to show him what she saw.

At 16 and a half, Jareth Oswego was still at Waeburn. It was where all the Oswegos had gone, an obvious choice. Classes were capped at fifteen, students were not allowed to use coloring books (they inhibited creative thinking), and the dining-hall cuisine, engineered by one volunteer mother, was entirely organic. Modern in design when it was conceived in 1963, the school was a cluster of low-ceilinged, hooded concrete buildings was connected over the dusty, red-earthed bowl of Tacoma Canyon by outdoor hallways. The lawns between the halls had either been landscaped with dry, imported Bermuda sod that scratched your legs if you sat down Indian-style, or had been left to the Eucalyptus trees whose dusty leaves clogged the gutters, changing the rhythm of the rain so that over some of the halls, water would fall in unobfuscated sheets.
It did not rain often. The weather was dry, and the neon squirt guns of the kindergartners, left out for a week, would be brought in a different, lighter shade, having been bleached by the sun.
In a school of 512—even among those children of stars whose faces recalled a mash-up of their recognizable parents, the Oswegos netted stares. Jareth, the middle child, had followed his eldest sister, Leona, and was trailed, one grade below, by his younger sister, Celia. The reputation which plagued him was neither his eldest sister’s—she had gone on to Harvard, to the chagrin of all of her former teachers when faced with the younger Oswegos who could not live up; nor the reputation of the youngest, Celia, whose good looks had landed her on both the pages of B-list teen fashion mags and on the tongues of all but the shyest boys in Jareth’s grade (11th). No, the reputation to plague the three Oswegos—at high-school, in their twenties, in their life—was the reputation of their father. It was not something that could be “played down” or “lived up to”—it was like being born in another country, or of another sex, or into another creed. It was a part of their identity as ingrained as numbers into the ivory faces of dies.
At age twenty-three, Zed Oswego had, with the swift motion with which other fathers unzipped parkas, drawn a twelve-inch imitation-Medieval pewter sword down the pale stomach of a live sow, exposing innards to a sold-out stadium. Having a teenage rebel for a father bestowed the Oswegos with an innate reputation--they were not to be messed with.

So how difficult it had been then, for the three of them to rebel.
It started with Leona, the eldest, who having graduated just two years prior, had been pointedly clever, industrially studious, and made it a point not to be associated with a father who at age 20, had dropped out of a small community college on the Eastern shore of Massachusetts to follow a “dream” in the form of a choking, sputtering van driven by a dude named Guy Moldin, a bassist who claimed their little band—three members and a small-town following—could make it in New York.
Though in every academic Leona Oswego excelled, it was in music class that she had gleaned her first “F.” When handed a recorder, she failed, purposefully, to elicit the correct sound. The shrill, chirpy squeaks that after three weeks of half-hearted practice she managed to eek out could be heard ricocheting down the shining linoleum halls like the strained, peachy notes of a cat. A stab at Chorus fared no better. She was a low mutterer, hidden in the third row behind Mario D'Ambrosio (the only boy). When called out by the frustrated conductor as to whether she truly knew the lyrics to "Little Drummer Boy," and asked to solo her rendition--Leona Oswego chimed in, pitch-perfect, with the lyrics, "Watermelon watermelon Scooby dooby doo." The following quarter, she was not asked to return and spent the period in total segregation in the elective "Winter Sports," where she sat out on pick-up basketball games, coloring the thick wedge of her sneakers with the white-board erase pen she'd been given to keep the score.
To Jareth, Leona’s successful rebellion could be measured best in that she had been the only Oswego to flee the scene. She had been accepted at Harvard. The place had been a name for her, a rebellion in the utmost—the symbol of all stratifications, all achievements, all placeholders that Zed Oswego, in his throaty dinner lectures, had attempted to lustily rail against. The acceptance letter came in a thick brown envelope, and in the recently remodeled kitchen of the Oswego home, on the marble island standing solitary in the sea of tile, Leona read the Congratulations that would island her forever from the family she felt distended by. That night, at a family “celebration” dinner, her father grumbled, spearing peas with a single fork tine.
This fall, that was where Leona was—Harvard—where lawns were raked of reddish leaves that fell from the trees, where kids sat around circular tables naming philosophers, where black and white and asian students sat forward on the edges of futons, smoking hashish from gleaming hookahs. At least, that was the part of the dream that Jareth Oswego understood. Labelled in Waeburn’s high school hallways as a stoner, Jareth hid beneath overlarge ponchos purchased in East LA headshops. During lunch, he’d head over with Bresios and two or three others—sometimes Paul Dine would be there, and Mitzy Hanks, if she wasn’t making out in the dark of a music practice room with Leg Fawkes (named Legend by his Hollywood parents, a name he’d tried to shed) and they’d meet at the strip of Eucalyptus trees that edged the student parking lot. Despite the pastoral setting—they often slumped down, backs to the wall, to sit in the dry pile of leaves—the place was called by everyone (including teachers) the “alley”—a reference to the places of deviation they had learned about in movies, where in small towns where puritan standards were high, teenagers were forced onto the backroads.
This was Jareth’s small rebellion. His father, really, couldn’t be said to care. The most his mother had ever said was, when finding in his sock drawer, his bowl (a glass thing he’d paid too much for when he was 13 and didn’t know better), “You know this kills brain cells?” What a cliché, what spoilsport. Anyway, it wasn’t really rebellion that drew Jareth to the stuff, he understood. It was simply that anyone born into the name Oswego desired escape. And that for Leona, escape came in her dreams of the tall lecture halls at Harvard where, raising a hand and standing to the teacher’s call, she’d answer with a rebuttal well-spoken enough to move the classroom to tears, a standing ovation, maybe, or maybe just a glance from a scrubby man in a tweed jackets, its elbows worn, whose soft, surprised glance would seem to say—I never thought I’d find someone who understood. Jareth understood his sister. He understood the ways in which she was crazy and she, she understood her brother’s soft-spoken delusions. They were the two Oswegos who were most connected.
And then there was their younger sister Celia. To Leona and Jared, Celia’s rebellion was unexplainable; divinely strange as an immaculate conception. The first thing was that she was beautiful—extra-terrestrially, numbingly so. In the Oswego house, Celia was a gazelle trapped in a WalMart. Late night conversations between the parents, held over pillows, would concern how they could have produced such a creature. In the kitchen, dining-room, living-rooms and basement of the Oswego house—even out by the chaises that lined the lima-bean shaped pool—Celia’s beauty was either adamantly ignored, unacknowledged, or mocked as distastefully conventional. To see her prancing about the house, Leona would have been the one to chide, “Looking for your whitening powder?” Even their mother would say, “Sweetie, the mirror is over there” and their father, lovingly, would call her, in the mocking, disturbing tone of a horror-show Humbert Humbert, “My fawn.”
At home, Celia’s beauty was a farce. In High School, at Waeburn, it was everything.

It is an afternoon back in September, or October maybe, when Jareth, aged 16 and one half, is out in the “alley” with Evan Bresios. The smoke has cleared their lungs and the two of them, sitting cross-legged in the moldering Eucalyptus leaves, are quiet—nothing left to say but to watch the action in the parking lot. Gloria, the fourth grade teacher, eats a sandwich alone in her Honda, the crunching of the wrapper unhearable through the window glass. Barker, the principal, only about 100 yards away, is whispering into his cellphone—probably, Bresios says, a call to a prostitute. Jareth giggles, though they both know it’s probably a call to his wife, something dull like that. Nothing much ever happens out here.
And then there’s Mitzy, tugging Paul Dine whose worn flannel is tied around her waist in a loose knot. The two have probably been out fucking in a music room.
“Is your stuff gone?” Mitzy says, looking at the red-eyed boys, eyeing the imprint of the glass bowl in the exterior pocket of Jareth’s cargo pants.
“We just cashed it,” Bresios says, nodding. It’s okay though, Dine says, he’s got more out in his car, and so Mitzy sits down next to Bresios, her back to the cool wall, as she waits for Dine to come back from his car—a 1957 Chevy xxx with a fold-down back seat and an interior of red velour, very retro. He keeps his stuff in not the glove compartment (too easy to find) but in the fold-out drink holder, which when not folded out provides a neat slot next to the radio. Dine, the son of single-mother Tracey Dine, a character actress in A-list films that mostly take place in the forties and fifties (she’s got that look about her, that hard-set grimace, that hair that fluffs around the head like a whirling storm) has a vaguely retro look about everything he does, which is why, Mitzy thinks, she likes him. He seems not to belong not only to Waeburn, with its stomach-clenching 60’s architecture of social oppression, but to the time in general, to the other cars in the lot glinting, waxed, beneath a too-bright sun.
When he comes back, they smoke the stuff, Jareth and Evan admitting they’d like a little more, and the converation turns to the suck-itude of school in general, and in what had elapsed earlier that day. Mitzy saw xxxxx and Dine, who’d seen it too, filled in the details.
“God I just had a harrowing second period,” Dine starts. “It was your sister, Jareth.”
Jareth’s suddenly all ears. “What’d she do?”
“Oh is this the thing with Celia in Debate?” Bresios asks.
“What is this?” Jareth needs to know. “You know about this—“
“I heard about it from Luckor,” Bresios explains—Luckor being the dark, gossipy Russian boy always trying to get in on the ins with the smokers. He has third period with Bresios, ceramics, and while the two are spinning pots they always talk, though Bresios will claim not to enjoy it. “So she’s in Debate, right? What’s the topic again.”
“The topic,” Dine says, now taking on the role of teller, “was International Aid.”
AID TO AFRICA – SPLENDA – PEEING IN POOL

After nearly twenty minutes, the Oswego’s boy’s paper—from where the teacher sat—appeared to be nearly blank. To Evan Bresios, seated just beside Jareth Oswego thanks to their shared taste in horror films, there appeared a little more substance: two long lines, off of each side hung 6 cubes, so that in total 24 squares had been drawn in the faint, bluish graphite of a mechanical pencil. This was supposed to be the layout of his house, as the assignment had dictated, but Jareth Oswego’s final effort was as unrevealing as an ice-cube tray, empty boxes surrounding cornrows of dead-air.
In the house where Jareth grew up, toddling among brass doorknobs, there were rooms into which he had never gone, doors he had never opened, an entire floor, even—the loft reached by the flight of stairs which rose from his father’s studio—whose contents he could not describe. Aged eight, dark haired and slender fingered, with the shaded sills of sleeplessness that hang beneath the eyes of the bookish, Jareth was adamantly uncurious. Where others would snoop, the boy did not bother; conversations, held through paneled doors, did not draw his ear to the latch. For this, his parents called him “Wide Eye.” The name, Jareth would later learn, as he did his best to keep the Screenwriting for Dummies above the rising waters of his eldest sister’s lion-footed bathtub, referred not only to his tendency to stare, but to the angle of shot necessary to capture a whole picture at expense of its details. Perhaps this was the fault his parents had also desired to reference; More than one teacher had written him off as a “space cadet.” Years later, onto his third lover, he would be broken up with over the admonition, delivered in a San Francisco bagel bar, that he “Seemed to see nothing.” Looking out through the plate glass window to the street, where two steps ahead of a meter maid a civilian was depositing quarters, he had tried to prove it to himself—to prove that he was an observer—but absorbed in organizing the scene before him (the city employee’s standard issue black Reebok’s, the civilian’s car keys in her right hand) he hadn’t noticed that across the restaurant, a couple had entered--their faces vaguely familiar—and when they waved to him, he couldn’t even remember who they were.
There were things Jareth Oswego was supposed to, was expected to know, but that he did not. Things like the layout of his house. And so, when asked in the third grade (maybe it had been the fourth?) to sketch the house where he lived—Jareth Oswego had disappointed everyone—not least of all his substitute teacher. An East Coast transplant drawn to the West by wishy-washy ideas of fame she was just beginning to give up on, Gloria—they called their teachers by their first names—had delivered the assignment—Draw a picture of your house—to a class of children raised in the mansions where she believed that fame hid crouched, furrowing into their chenille carpets, crawling into the potted aloe veras and rising, inflamed, phoenix-like in the eyes of fame’s offspring—the curiously familiar mashups of celebrity couples, who stared back at her at one of LA’s hippiest breeding grounds.
At Jareth Oswego’s elbow, Evan Bresios—looking on, gave a sneer, then turned his nose down to his own paper, which he was vehemently “coloring in” using a Crayola of deep cobalt blue.
“That’s a strange color for a ceiling, Evan,” the teacher had said, in passing. “Is that a basement pool?”
Bresios was baffled, misunderstood. The pool, he explained patiently, using a stubby finger to walk her through it, was of course outside, on the teak deck that tacked toward the ocean. This indigo swathe was the “artificial sky” above his father’s screening room. The father himself could be found outside, burly and bowtied, flanked by an aloe vera plant on the stoop and his family beside him, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the ease of manner of a prison lineup. Beneath him, a placard, “Jimmy Bresios, President of ABC-TV Development Division. It was as frank and unassuming as the titles below Roman busts alloting the numerals of Caesars. These were children who, having been given everything, did not yet know to hide it away.
So what a disappointment to see the Oswego boy’s sketch. He had labeled only a few of the boxes in his crabbed, boyish writing. At the southernmost end of the paper, a cube read, “Celia’s room,” at its opposite, “Leona’s”; and then on row labeled “Floor 1” a kitchen, dining-room and living room were as yet only half-described. Jareth had spent nearly all of the twenty minutes trying to recall how the back-parlor, in which he was never allowed, could be reached through the kitchen. His mind hopped up staircases, drained into sinks and flew through the French doors, whose panes were oiled with fingerprints, out into the back garden where a black hose lay twisted. Where did the hose begin? Where did the water come from? Best to start with the ocean which, with the crayon labeled “Azure” he spent the rest of the period coloring.
When he thought down the long slim hallway on the second floor, he could only really say what was behind three of the doors—his room; his parent’s locked bedroom, and a closet stacked with towels that the maid opened and closed before bathtime. His parents’ bedroom. He had been inside only a few times—sent there on errands by Alma, or by the quaking call of his own mother’s voice when she had been sick once, or one time—impelled by a door that had been left open. He had walked over, the seven year old had told himself, to close it. But when he reached the open slice of air between the frame and the knob, he entered.
The bed had been made, the sheets pulled tight to the sides and tucked into the frame. Along the right-hand side of the room, a long dresser of bleached wood held on its surface glistening minutiae: photographs in silver frames, small bottles of coloured water, a flecked comb of animal shell which he ran through his hair, looking at his face in a round mirror, before a sound at the other end of the hall—Alma opening and closing the towel closet—startled him and, laying down the comb on the bleached wood as he had found it, Jareth Oswego scrambled out, leaving the door—as he had found it—ajar.
It was a hot day for LA. The classroom was dark, the windows shaded and facing out not to the surf but to the hills, whose scrubby brush was studded by toys long tossed over the fence—tennis balls, a single rollerblade, a neon water gun bleached by the sun. Gloria—they called their teachers by their first names—stood over Jareth’s paper, running a manicured finger down one of the slim halls.
“And where’s your room?” she asked, her voice weedy, prying.
“I haven’t fit it in yet,” Jareth said. He knew his room to be between Celia’s and Leona’s, across the hall from the exercise room—where the Nordic Track elicited unoiled weepings whenever his mother swept across it—but he wanted to be sure.
Exasperated, nearly laughing at the wasted effort (for why assign the class of the son of Zed Oswego to draw a blueprint if he alone could tell her nothing), Gloria said what Jareth would recall years later—aged 16 and one half, sloughing down high-school’s halls in a pair of his dad’s old boots (steel tipped, tassled, hidden beneath the luffing cloth of cargo pants), and running into Bresios, whose eyes hid beneath the mirrored shades of Aviator sunglasses.
“You don’t have to show anything you don’t want to.”

Aged 16, and Jareth Oswego was still at Waeburn. It was where all the Oswegos had gone, an obvious choice. Classes were capped at fifteen, students were not allowed to use coloring books (they inhibited creative thinking), and the dining-hall cuisine, baked by one volunteer mother, was entirely organic. Modern in design when it was conceived in 1963, the school was a cluster of low-ceilinged, hooded concrete buildings, connected over a tract of land in the dusty, red-earthed bowl of Tacoma Canyon by outdoor hallways. The lawns between the halls had either been landscaped with dry, imported Bermuda sod that scratched when you sat down, or they had been left to the pines and Eucalyptus trees whose leaves clogged the gutters, changing the rhythm of the rain so that over some of the halls, the water fell over in unobfuscated sheets. It did not rain often. The weather was dry, and the neon squirtguns of the kindergartners, left out for a week, would be brought in having faded to different, lighter shades, bleached by the sun.
In a school of 512—even among those children of stars whose faces recalled a mash-up of their recognizable parents, the Oswegos netted stares. Jareth, the middle child, had followed his eldest sister, Leona, and was trailed, one grade below, by his younger sister, Celia. The reputation which plagued him was neither his eldest sister’s—she had gone on to Harvard, to the chagrin of all of her former teachers, who berated the younger Oswego for not showing the same academic chutzpah; nor the reputation of the youngest, Celia, whose good looks had landed her in the pages of B-list teen fashion mags and propelled her name to the tongues of all but the shyest boys in Jareth’s grade (11th). No, the reputation to plague Jareth and really, the three Oswegos, following them from high-school, through their twenties, into their life—was the reputation of their father. It was not something that could be “played down” or “lived up to”—it was like being born in another country, or of another sex, or into another creed. It was a part of their identity as ingrained as numbers into the ivory face of a die.
At age twenty-three, Zed Oswego had, with the swift motion with which other fathers unzipped parkas, drawn a twelve-inch imitation-Medieval pewter sword down the pale stomach of a live sow, exposing innards to a sold-out stadium. xxxxxBIOXXXX Having a teenage rebel for a father bestowed the Oswegos with an innate reputation--they were not to be messed with. And yet how difficult, how unfair, it was, to have a father so difficult to one-up. The three could only rebel in so many ways.

Jareth drawing house
Celia’s presentation
Debate
Jareth hears about it
Terry comes home to Alan/Margaret’s who’ve been watching scout and tells about it


In the house where Jareth had grown up, toddling among brass doorknobs, there were rooms into which he had never gone, white doors he had never opened, an entire floor, even—the loft reached by a flight of stairs above his father’s garage studio—whose contents he could not describe. When he thought down the long slim hallway on the second floor, he could only really say what was behind three of the doors—his room; a closet that kept towels which he had seen the maid open and close before bathtime; and, down at the end, his parent’s bedroom—a room he had only entered once. That time he had been unaccompanied. The bed had been made, the sheets pulled tight to the sides and tucked into the frame. Along the right-hand side of the room, a long dresser of bleached wood held on its surface glistening minutiae: photographs in silver frames, small bottles of yellow water, a flecked comb of animal shell which he ran through his hair, looking at his face in a round mirror before a sound at the other end of the hall—a maid opening and closing the towel closet—startled him and, laying down the comb on the bleached wood as it had been, Jareth Oswego scrambled out, leaving the door—as he had found it—ajar.
Such an upbringing did not seem strange to the boy until an afternoon in the fourth grade, at the tail end of a long, hot LA day spent cramped in a classroom whose windows, shaded, looked out not to the surf but to the hills, their drybrush quivering in the few winds that made it this high. Gloria—they called teachers by their first names—had walked the aisles, handing out blank sheets of paper, and asked everyone to draw a picture of their house. You could include the family if you wanted to, she said, but you didn’t have to. And now Evan Bresios, seated beside the young Jareth, was filling in, alongside the aloe vera plants flanking the front stoop, a sketch of his lineage with detailing whose obsessive style fell somewhere between that of a prison lineup and a baroque family tree; Though Evan adhered to only the most honest illustrative techniques, he managed to make his wealth seem show-offy, ornamental. His father, burly and bowtied, hovered above a placard drawn at his feet that read President of ABC-TV, LA as the titular placards below Roman busts so plainly allot the numerals of Caesars. A cross-section of the Bresios mansion, being scribbled on a second sheet, showed the house’s layout, down to a screening room in the basement with a ceiling of indigo, which Evan had labeled in the clunky vocabulary of a more typical fourth-grader, “the artificial sky.”
Jareth’s own sheet, staring upward toward the fans slowly wheeling in the classroom ceiling, was blank as a blind eye. In the twenty minutes that had elapsed since he had received his paper, he had drawn what looked to Bresios, leaning over to inspect his neighbor’s, like two ice-cube trays with lines between. To Jareth these were two hallways, labelled “1” and “2” to refer to their floor, off of each of which he had allotted six rooms per side. There were exactly twenty-four in total, into which swung quarter-circles—doors. Only a few of the rooms were neatly labeled with Jareth’s crabbed, boyish writing. “Celia’s room” read the cube at the southernmost end of the paper; at its opposite corner, “Leona’s”; and then on floor “1” a kitchen, dining—room and living room were labeled but as yet only half-described—Jareth had spent nearly all of the twenty minutes trying to recall how the back-parlor, in which he was never allowed, could be reached through the kitchen.
Teacher Gloria, a twenty-something with a sharp nose and East Coast smugness, sat at the front of the room, poured into a too-low bucket chair, biting her nails. She looked, in the seat of a child hidden behind the large aluminum desk, like an adult in miniature—seen backwards through binoculars.
A twenty-something East Coast transplant, Gloria had come West to see more of the world, the peach-colored Malibu mansions poking up like teeth out of the bushy hills, the Mediterranean villas tacked towards ocean views. She herself ended up inland, in the flat land where the smog hung, and the only trees were mop-headed palms browning in the drought. The former tenant—an older woman—had smoked; the sour scent of tobacco clogged the drapes. Peeled aside, the windowscape revealed three garages facing the block, whose employees in the morning paced the rainbowed puddles of oil, checking their watches, smoking cigarillos.
Earlier that week, while waiting for the bus, she’d watched their sauntering attract a tout—a man, grubby, wearing a sandwich board that advertised “star maps.” Gloria didn’t like to think of herself as someone who went in for those kinds of things, and so when she bought one—charitably—she told herself she was doing it “on a whim,” the phrase she repeated later that night at a dinner party, where her friends had spent most of the night complaining. When the host, a college friend, relocated to the living room, he cleared away the bowl of olive pits they had earlier spit out, and his girlfriend, a soon-to-fail screenwriter, egged Gloria on to unfurl the map. She did it gladly, removing it from its sheeting hastily, self-concious that they were watching her, destroying its wrapping with the kind of gesture that said she had no interest in preservation, that the map held no use to her. And when she had unfurled it on the table, the names shocked her into a stupor. It was like seeing your name on a gravestone in a cemetery of a town in which you had never lived.
She started—she was maybe a little bit drunk, she had to admit—but she started to giggle.
“Oh god,” she said.
“What is it?” the girlfriend asked, uncrossing her legs to lean over the map, on which Gloria’s pointer-finger was sketching a snail-trail along the PCH up to Sunset, Tacoma, the 405tk split.
“Bresios—I teach his kid. Varner, Druberry, Realto, Oswego…”
They were all there. It was a roster. Maeanne Varner, ponytailed, a little stupid, daughter of John Warner, head of yes, Varner Dreamscastle; Blake Druberry, grandson, an exhaustive IMDB search revealed, of the silent film actor of the same last name and a current star of recent romantic comedies she hadn’t at all enjoyed; and Debbie Realto, Ella Cunningham, the Madison twins, Evan Bresios—whose father was the head of development for ABC-TV, LA, and Jareth Oswego—
“Jareth Oswego,” her host, Patrick, had said, smirking. “How’d ya like that.” Patrick had been studious, serious in college. He had majored in Economics, and driven out to LA to follow his girlfriend, Tess, and complained of his job in finance in a studio, where he had been relegated to accounting. He was not a fanboy, a starfucker, they called them out here, and yet it was Patrick who asked, “What’s he like?”
“Does he suck the brains of the other children?” Tess chimed.
“Bleugh,” Gloria said, “I didn’t even make the connection.”
Though Gloria, a dullard, must be blamed somewhat for never connecting the shy, sunken eyed Jareth Oswego with his famous father, the fault cannot totally rest on her mopey, East Coast shoulders, for people of Gloria’s sort—floral-shirted, nail-biting—do not exactly fall into Zed Oswego’s demographic. And when the former rock-star, his face now paunchy and lined, his graying hair now pulled back in an elastic band, his feet—formerly accustomed to the sharpening steel-toes of cutaway cowboy boots—now lazed in socks within Birkenstocks—had attended a parent-teacher conference, she hadn’t thought anything more of him than as one thinks of a doting, blithering father, relying on his wife—who had sat beside him in a double-breasted business suit—to shepherd him along.
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And so that night, Gloria and her friends decided she must fix on some sort of assignment to get her into all these palaces of worship.
It was like a personalized version of Cribs, she thought, as she got up to scan the sheets.
Gloria sighed, twiddled in her drawer, checked her cell—which beeped (No messages received)—and crossed her arms, lowing her head into what might have been a nap
This would have been ’95, ’96, Jareth puzzled out.