chapter 3 first write vomit

Chapter 3: Alan / Leslie perspectives
3.1 ALAN’S LENS, INTRO ON NEXTDOOR HOUSE

In the mornings the boy came out with the black dog, leading him down the hill and down around the bend to the park with its two sun-faded rocking horses, its wooden slide dried out by salt. The park looked out down over the cliffs which fell, squelching and gnawed, down to a thin twinkle of cars on a slick of grey highway and then out, out, out and down to the line of yellow coast that edged the sea. You couldn’t see the beach trash from up here and the sun, risen in the East, cast the cliffs in quiet shadow in the morning, obscuring the pock-marks in their faces where the bums slept, the doors of their caves marked with tossed liquor bottles and dirty rags.
At one end of the park there was a playground and at the other—furthest from DePauw street—sat a statue of a judge or a governor—someone with a hard face. In the slot of air between his flowing iron cape and the hard leg of his throne, the boy kept a pack of cigarettes—slim, womanly things—which he smoked girlishly, using his fingers in unrhythmic ways, while watching the dog take a shit or nuzzle the tufts of grass around the pilings of a fence that kept the park’s grass from tumbling, cliff-ward, toward the ocean. When he finished his cigarette he’d say, “Let’s go,” and on the way out, would often run his fingers over the curved spine of a rocking horse, perhaps forcing his own nostalgia back to a time when the horse seemed immense and lovely to ride on.
When the boy came back to number 89, the dog was leashed. Together, they trounced up the stairs two-at-a-time, the boy’s oversized tee luffing like a poorly tacked sail. There were often a couple of things left out on the stoop—sodas in paper cups with the lids off, orange-handled floral shears, bad magazines whose matte pages took to the wind—and he would kick these aside to fall to the grass. Later in the day, gardeners hired by a company that brought them in a van would pick them up in canvas-gloved hands, like archaeologists handling dust-encrusted bones. They never threw the stuff out—a wonderment to Alan—but instead piled them neatly by the front door, between the house’s peach-painted stucco and a little planter in which for whatever reason nothing grew.
The boy went inside with the dog, the iron screen door banging tinnily and within, the other door banging too—wood on wood, a single drumbeat.
Then, twenty minutes, twenty-five. Down the block the Magruders’ car pulled out with a light-wave from the husband, who buckled his seatbelt midway down the block, the metal of the buckle catching the light. On every second or third day, two women in spandex leggings came striding, their sweatshirts tied around their ample waists, chatting.
The next time anyone came out of Number 89 wasn’t usually until around a quarter to eight, when all three of the children came out, sulky, posturing against the morning, their shoulders weighted by packs and carried books, their other hands obscuring sleep-heavy eyes from the sun, always too bright up here in the hills. The SUV occupied the drive, and was usually parked diagonally, its tires having squelched to a brake there the night before at some ungodly hour.
It was the oldest daughter who would come out first. Leona wore her hair cropped in a jag. She spoke loudly—you could hear her chirping calls for the others to go from across the street—and you could see how dark her eyes were, how sunk into the skull like thumbprints punched into a loaf of clay. She was pretty, but not in the way that made you look. Her face was square, the chin too large and her hands were fat and small, a fact she attempted to obscure by wearing too many rings of differing strangeness. A ring Alan had noticed had a lock on it, trailing out of the keyhole a ribboned key. He wondered if it turned. She carried heavy leather bags with the stitching gone or going, and she careened forward with the attitude of a much older woman, whose years of shuttling had lent her the air of a café awning sagging under a light rain.
Then the youngest girl would come lightly, wearing an outfit vacuum dried onto her skin—something yellow or pastel. In her hair she wore clips depicting animals—squirrels, pandas, a cat—or sometimes fruits—clusters of grapes hewn in plastic, a strawberry that functioned to pull back her long shine of blonde as if it were a curtain pull. Celia reminded Alan of a box of freshly bought crayons, all of the colors cut and smelling newly of wax.
Then there was the boy again. He would forget something in the house and jog back in, or in the moments before the eldest daughter had retrieved from that saggy old bag her keychain, he would stare at a single spot on the pavement—a leaf, fletched with disease, whose blooming coloration had seemed to him to be wonderful; another time in the joint of the curb he found a scratched CD, face-down, the victim of a quickly slammed car door that forever robbed the world of music.
Then the car would be gone. Alan left a few minutes later. He carried his lunch out in a brown paper bag. His mother watched him on the walk from their door to the van, he unzipped his backpack to put the bag inside. Such an action saved seconds; Alan was usually fifteen or twenty minutes late to the start of classes, as were the Oswegos, across the street, whose tardiness unlike Alan’s was not reported to their mother.
An hour or so after the block’s children had left, Alan’s mother, Margaret, would often see see the mother at 89, small-assed and sharp, walking with the twitter of sewing scissors around the garden, where she would kneel down showily, in the manner of a giggling teenager attempting prayer. For a few minutes a day she would smell or pull at some of the flowers. Later in the day the gardeners would come and sort out whatever messes she had made, for if she had brought out shears she would leave them somewhere half-heartedly, before stepping back into the house.
Who knew what went on inside that house. Margaret and Alan lived across from the Oswegos in number 83. The block, one side given over to ocean views, the other side humbled with the views of neighboring backyards—of tethered Labradors, above-ground pools, and little-league T-ball set ups—was neatly divided down line of wealth. It was on what Margaret and Alan called the “poor side of the tracks,” that they lived in a two-story ranch house fronted by two large, single pane plate-glass windows, which looked out directly onto the Oswego mansion, sitting atop a slightly sloping hill at number 89. Their own yard was 80% cement, taken over by a moon-shaped driveway that curved around a fat, Florida palm planted in a bed of red stones, and when the sun set in the evening behind the Oswego house, it would fall into a shadow which fell, a pure cornflower blue over the white, angelic concrete of the drive.
The mother and the son were prone to watching what dramas unfolded across the way, though, educated and chatty, they felt too self-concious to speak of them directly. It was a custom at the breakfast table to chat about the goings, to watch as the boy xxxxxxxx.



But a year or so ago at a house tour—an open house of a property for sale down the block, which they had gone to out of curiosity, pretending to be a wealthier mother and son whose real identity was somewhat revealed to the snooty agent, whose glancing inspection of the mother’s purse—from Nine West—showed the duo to certainly not be in the market. The exterior of the house resembled 89—two overlarge slabs of concrete rose, windowless, up from both sides of a many-windowed central portico area. The door, oversized, opened down to a long foyer, which reached out into the back where an emptied pool was being slowly fed by a garden hoze, nozzle down into the open belly. Maude, her hand on a nule post as she hauled herself upstairs to “Choose my future bedroom,” had said, “It’s probably the same layout as the Oswegos. So ornamental. So fancy.”
Alan had agreed. “The whole thing is like a wedding cake, which no one ever wants to eat.”
“I’d take a slice,” Margaret said.
During the day the Oswego house seemed empty. A gardener would come by and pull his mower across the lawn in thick stripes, stopping at the West side of the yard to put his palm to the paper bark of the Oswego’s birch tree, lean and have a cigarette. The mother and father would leave in their cars and return with bags or boxes or piles of papers. In the evenings, the spiffy small cars of guests would skirt the curbs all up the block and down by the cliffs, and at nine the lights out among the plants—buried like hooded mushrooms—would turn on and make the place look garish. Down the street there was often a powder blue stationwagon with deep, throaty scratch marks pulled by keys down its lean siding.
More interesting to Alan than the Oswego house was its neighbor—number 87. He would often go there; under cover of a bristly pine, a side-door’s lock had been gummed, to be easily pushed open into the kitchen. 87 had, for as long as he could remember, been abandoned. Positioned too close to the ocean-facing cliffs, with a large-lawn in front given over before the street, the house’s rear-most wing—an attached garage—had wholly fell into the ocean, and now faced, wall-less as a dollhouse, out to the elements. The rest of the home was somewhat intact but declared by neighborhood mothers “unsafe.” Alan’s own declaration was that it was fine. A dropped pen would roll West, down the floors that sloped out to the sea, but the enormity of the mansion—its two wings, given over to six upstairs bedrooms, uncountable water closets, a massive kitchen tiled in stone. There was no longer any furniture, but Alan—bringing with him Matt Fischer and even finicky, smarmy Jack Switter—would often laze here comfortably, having brought sleeping bags of plastic-coated nylon, in which they gripped and formed themselves like rolly worms. Alan himself brought pillows from his mother’s couch—a set, embroidered with dragonflies of magenta silk, which she had removed to the closet in a redecorative fit. These pillows lived here—the only furnishings now in the spoiled house save from a sink filled with the boys’ spent matches. On many windowledges and especially huddled in the center of a second story bedroom which was where they had made their most central fort. This was the “View Room,” Matt had named it, in reverence for the command centers of ships that flew through space in television shows. With a chunk of rose-painted wall missing—fallen down onto the back lawn, where it crumbled like toothy tofu among the long grasses—the room looked out, gaping, toward the sea. Alan would stand at its ledge and feel that common, boring suicidal impulse—the desire to jump to test oneself. The height was not so grand but the gesture, the gesture would be meaningful, easy to eulogize. Just like the wall–sucked out by Godly forces in the form of heaven-sent wind and pulled down by that old dullard, gravity, to fester and rot in a pile of musty, unkempt grasses—probably of imported, moneyed breeds, which left untended had not blossomed but taken over the yard of the house—so too, Alan thought romantically, his slender-fingered hand with its bitten nails, pawing at the slope of the right-hand wall, he had been positioned too close to the sea and oh, god, would probably end up with a brain as mushy and bleugh as the pile of rot below him.
There was another reason, though, that he sought the View Room was where Alan now stood, though Matt Fischer, down in the kitchen, had suggested they smoke down there so that his laptop could rest on the countertop while they watched from below as it played a DVD of some David Lynch film that Matt had insisted they screen in the house—the combo being, in his words in class that day, resonant.
Being situated on the home’s wing that angled out toward the ocean, the room had a back-view, through a fully-entact, wood-bordered French window, out to a shade tree quiet and lacy in the dark, and through to a bedroom of the Oswego home at number 89. The darkness by the ocean just after twilight seemed blue—a strong cobalt, as gazed through a café’s bottle—making the light from that room seem even more softly orange. In his field of vision there was the tail-end of a bed, covered by a fraying, soft quilt and then behind it, a full-length mirror that stood up on the floor at an angle. This showed, now, the white calves, the two feet—slightly pigeon-toed out, and the frayed nightgown—an oversized dress, probably designed to be mourned in—of Leona Oswego who, with neither makeup nor an awareness that she was being watched as she sat at the end of the bed—was fulfilling a cliché she would not have allowed herself in daytime, at school, where he had seen her snuffing and quiet in the halls. She was just brushing her hair. She lifted her top lip, bared her teeth—as though for inspection—and left the frame, probably to put the comb away. Then she was back at the end of the bed, and she fell backwards. Only her legs were now visible and she lay like that for a while. Downstairs, Matt was fussing.
“It’s not that the plot is even that interesting,” he was saying. “It’s that it’s interesting that someone looks at this plot and says, I can make something visual with that. I can make a movie out of that. It’s almost that you specifically can’t make a movie out of it, and he’s challenging himself in that way.”
“Mmmm hmmmm?” Alan called out. The legs weren’t moving much anymore. He took a candle from the ledge—it was not yet spent—and trundled downstairs, where the laptop on the countertop was buzzing through a read of the disc. He set the candle on the ledge and with one of the twelve-or-so lighters that had accumulated in the bowl of the sink—waterless, it had become just a receptacle—lit a single flame.
Across the street his mother, her feet up on the coffeetable his father had built in 1962, saw, momentarily, how her son’s face became illuminated by the flame and then passed out of it.



Enter Leslie Bennet; he loves detritus
How they take over the house next-door; what Leslie finds there
“People love ruins”
The guys come in to take establishing shots; befriend Jareth
The obsession with Celia’s wardrobe preparations
Jareth understands that he is landscape, she is star
Mom looks at her face in the mirror “People love ruins”