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.