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.