just a first edit of the first vomit draft

"Lensing" as I'm now calling it shifts in Chapter 3 from Alan --> Leslie --> Alan. Chapters 2 & 4 lens Jareth --> Leona --> Jareth, I'm pretty sure. It's about watching from the outside v. seeing from the in.

Character notes--How I kind of keep track
Alan = Steve, kinda. Daniel Luxemburg definitely.
Leslie = probably Choire/David.S.
Marsha = kinda every mom in the world, kinda Ugly Betty
Guole = Larry David's agent on Curbed, State&Main director
Duane = the assistant on 30Rock
Matt Fischer - Sabrina
Jack Swwwwiit - Julia





In the mornings the Oswego boy came out with the spoiled, ugly pooch, leading the thing down the hill and around the bend to the park. The little greensward sported just a wooden slide, dried out by the air's salt to become unslideable, and beside that--two sun-faded rocking horses jostled on rusted springs-—were there even any children in this entire five-mile radius who rode the things? Had a child ever, in history, truly enjoyed a rocking horse?
The park looked down past the cliffs which fell, squelching and gnawed, to a thin twinkle of cars on a slick of grey highway and then out, out, out to the line of yellow coast that edged the sea. From up here you couldn’t see the trash on the beach and in the morning the violet shadows cast on the west-facing cliffs obscured the pock-marks of caves where the bums slept, their doors marked with tossed liquor bottles and scummy rags.
At one end of the park there was a playground but at the other—furthest from DePauw street—sat a statue of a judge or a governor—someone with a hard face who saw things as they were. 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, foul things that he smoked girlishly, using his fingers in unrhythmic ways while watching the dog take a shit, the anus squeezing, releasing, the dog running in a few circles afterwards, biting things, pissing on the pilings that held the manicured grass from tumbling cliffward. The boy would walk around kicking little stones, water-bottle caps, empty boxes of other peoples’ cigs. He’d seen condoms once or twice and leaned down perversely to inspect them, as children poking jellyfish dried onto the ocean’s edge. In fits of self-aware introspection, he’d run his fingers over the curved spines of the rocking horses—an unsubtle attempt to force his own nostalgia to a time when the horses seemed immense and lovely to ride on.
To Alan, who’d sometimes go to the parks in the morning in quick spurts of health-concious guilt, the boy’s routine screamed of practiced disaffection. Even the dog seemed an aesthetic choice—a pitbull, its droopy eyes bred to eschew tough sadness. When the boy finished his cigarette he’d always say, “Let’s go”—a fucking cliché thing to say to a dog, but what else could he say? That was what other people had taught the dog to know. The boy was Alan’s favorite Oswego.
Back at the boy's house there were always 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. Together, the dog and the boy trounced up the stairs two-at-a-time, the boy’s oversized tee luffing out its extra fabric, the whole pace quickened out of vanity, and the dog, huffing, would knock the trash off the stoop. Later in the day, a van-ful of hired gardeners would pick through it with gloved hands, like archaeologists handling dust-encrusted bones. The hired men never threw the stuff out—a wonder to Alan—but instead piled it neatly between the front door and a little planter in which, for whatever reason, nothing grew.
The boy went inside with the dog, then. Down the block the Magruders’ car pulled out, the husband driving gave a light wave, buckled his seatbelt midway down the block. On every second or third day, two women in spandex leggings, sweatshirts tied around their ample waists, strode by, chatting. Across the street Alan’s mother watched the news in the other room, the voices of the reporters buzzing above the gurgle of the coffee machine in the kitchen.
The next time anyone came out of Number 89 wasn’t usually until around a quarter to eight, when all three of the children emerged one-by-one sulkily, posturing against the morning, their shoulders weighted by packs, their hands blocking the sun from sleep-heavy eyes. There was something spoiled and awful about each one.
It was the oldest daughter who would come out first. Leona wore her hair cropped in a jag. She seemed to careen 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. She spoke brashly, too loudly—from across the street where Alan watched you could hear her chirping calls for the others to hurry. From the kitchen window he could see how dark her eyes were, sunk into the skull like thumbprints punched into a loaf of clay. She was pretty, sure he’d give her that, 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 divert by wearing rings of differing strangeness. In another year, Alan had remarked upon her ring with a lock, whose keyhole trailed a ribboned key. He had asked if it turned. It did not.
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 fruits—clusters of grapes hewn in plastic, a strawberry that functioned to pull back her long shine of blonde. She 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 have forgotten something in the house and jog back in, while Leona, hysterical, called after him. Other days, in the moments while Leona rooted for her keychain through her saggy, leather satchel, he would stare at a single spot on the pavement—a leaf, fletched with disease; a scratched CD, face-down; a pattern in the cement too complex to be understood by the mind’s of men in any era.
The SUV they grouped around was usually parked diagonally, its tires having squelched to a brake the night before at some ungodly hour. 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, 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 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 was divided. One side was given over to ocean views, the other side had been humbled with the views of neighboring backyards—of tethered Labradors, above-ground pools, and little-league T-ball set ups. It was on what Margaret and Alan called the “poor side of the tracks” that they lived in a single-story ranch house fronted by two large, single pane plate-glass windows, which looked out directly onto the Oswego mansion atop a slightly sloping hill at number 89.
Their own yard was 80% cement, commanded by a moon-shaped driveway of pure white that curved around a fat, Florida palm planted in a bed of rust-colored stones. When the sun set behind the Oswego house, it was here the shadow 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. Educated and chatty, they felt too self-concious to speak of the neighbors directly. It was a custom at the breakfast table to remark on the other family’s goings as though it were a dramatic soap they were forced to watch because, by god, it was the only thing on.
“Couldn’t be more wasteful,” Alan’s mother, Margaret, would say. Or, “Those poor gardeners, picking up after slobs,” or, remarking on the younger girl’s attire, “I can’t believe parents that would let them get away with wearing that out.”
But a year or so ago at a house tour—an open house of a property for sale down the block, which they had entered under the pretense of being a wealthier mother and son—they had spoken of it most directly. The exterior of the house to be sold resembled 89—two overlarge slabs of concrete rose windowless from both sides of a many-windowed central portico. The front door opened down to a long foyer that reached out into the back where an emptied pool was being slowly fed by a garden hose. Margaret, 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 Oswego’s. So ornamental. So trash.”
Alan had agreed. “The whole thing is like a wedding cake. No one ever wants to eat it.”
“I’d take a slice,” Margaret said jokily. And then, stopping on her way up, “You never know how important money is.”
Alan’s mother had married down a class. His father had been
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During the day the Oswego house seemed empty. 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 to make the place look garish. Down the street there was often a powder blue station-wagon 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 plashing down to the street, the house’s rear-most wing—an attached garage—had wholly fallen 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.” A faded yellow ribbon of “CAUTION!” swayed in light winds from its symbolic position at the front door.
Alan’s own declaration was that the house 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 holding six upstairs bedrooms, uncountable water closets, a massive kitchen tiled in slate—made such a slope difficult to actually fall down. There was no longer any furniture, but Alan—bringing with him Matthew Fischer and even finicky, smarmy Jack Switter—would often laze here comfortably on their sleeping bags of plastic-coated nylon, bunched like cocooned worms. Alan himself brought pillows from his mother’s couch—a set embroidered with dragonflies of magenta silk that she had removed to the closet in a redecorative fit. The pillows now lived here—the only furnishings in the spoiled house save a tureen 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, clusters of melted candles were the only hints of life.
The cluster in the middle of the room where they most often stayed marked the “View Room,” as 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 sublime suicidal impulse—the desire to jump. 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 of imported, moneyed breeds that could not bloom here too close to the sea—so too, Alan thought romantically, his slender-fingered hand with its bitten nails pawing at the slope of the 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 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 it play 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.
The outside, dark, turned the windows to mirrors. Alan watched his face, briefly illumined by flame, and how the oval of it fit squarely into the rectangle of the window pane, as if he was to be framed for a poster, for a painting.

3.2

Leslie Bennet walked onto any set with a kind of swagger. Onto the strewn, cord-entangled lawn of 89 DePauw, smelling of the dry, packed ends of cut lumber stacked on the drive, slid Bennet’s starched pink polo, like a birthday cake sent by the studio. Bennet picked his way up the walk, edging between the herds of scrambling crewmen—pretty craftservices girls in matching smocks, the lighting guys in coveralls taking a cigarette break—all Russians with intricate technical knowledge and bad teeth.
With a light, manicured hand, he touched their shoulders as he passed, gifting them—as if holding it out upon a tray—a bright, winged smile. It was a smile they could remember, he thought, a smile that showed good leadership, people skills. It was a smile he had seen on courtroom lawyers or stretched on the faces of the hosts of TV talk shows. With the corners of the mouth stretched and held there, as though parts of the face themselves were metonymy for waiting or doting, the smile implied a ground of generosity between the talkers and the convicted. Pegged to the sunken couches of TV sets, staring to the smile, the mourning mothers weeped.
Bennet had studied the smile in the leaking metal trailer adjunct to the main campus of Morsh Community, where, just a bright sixteen year old from a Christian community whose cabins built on Church grounds outside Detroit saved their devout, giving owners from property taxes, he had opted for business courses after high school hours. Playing devout son at home, at school he, like most teenagers was naturally drawn to what his mother—her froggy face puckered into a frown as she’d said it—“didn’t much approve of.” It was neither drugs nor (oh, lord) sex that caught him, it was the theatre, which basked in a wash of red and yellow lights like the very flames of hell that so consumed her. At night, when he returned late from rehearsals, it was from “Business Class,” which he attended only for the tests—passing with a B his natural sharpness did not deserve.
The theatre building, flamboyant in its largesse, occupied a domed outbuilding, really more of a bunker whose architect perhaps understood the complex relationship between high school theatre and hiding. Those students who ran the department could be seen scuttling across the school’s large lawns between classes. Past the closed and papered ticket booth, up behind the bleachers edging the football field and finally clipping quickly up the school’s main entrance—a set of plashing steps fanned inwards like an auditorium—was Leslie Bennet’s most ostentatious role as a member devout to the department. A popular boy nervous about his budding homosexuality, he retreated from acting (his natural forte) to directing, where that smile—the studied flecked, even teeth—had landed him at the head of the student direction track, whose alumni advisor—a withering handshake in a tube of sleeve—had gifted him him a going-nowhere set job that he had climbed anyway using this, this smile, which he now made use of on the Oswego lawn where his white-bottomed boat shoes—leather uppers with the clean rounded laces tied—didn’t hobble over the electrical cords but pranced among them, choreographed into a ballet. In this ungodly nest of crooked tents, of bearded, slovenly cameramen destroying oh, god… the ol’ lady’s own flowerbeds of delicate peony, he walked surely as a chest-puffed cowboy pushing through swinging saloon doors into a brawl.
Leslie Bennet was not a man peeved by detritus. He basked in ruin, became holy by chaos. He was the guy who fixed things around here. He was the man with a gloved hand, measuring dust, smelling it with a smile.
When Bennet had nearly made it through to the front door, two pre-school girls, asians with hair of oil-slick black, were sitting on the steps swinging their legs. They came attached to mothers whose eyes, shining with prideful hysteria, were poised to ask a question.
“Right,” Bennet said, tugging the longhaired one by the ponytail so that she smiled up at him. “I want both of you not on these steps—which some silly nitwit told you to sit on, but to sit on the steps of my trailer and I’ll be there in oh—“
He stopped a clipboard striding through into the house, and said, “I need your daily,” ripping out a sheet. The board was attached to the hand of a teens who looked up with a guffaw and then understood—by god if Bennet didn’t have the schedule of all goings on which, nobody better have it. A quick glance—2.30 was Dress—and then a momentary cooing the girls’ mothers in the soft, pleading voice of an understanding listener —“I’ll need them there in half-an-hour”—as he mounted the steps and pushed open the door of the Oswego home.
With his first pat of the foot into the long, waxed wooden spill of the foyer, the sounds of the outside—the squelching of a saw cutting timber, the light chattering of the craftservice girls hitting the upper register, the scraps between the gardeners and the electricians pulling cords through the plantings—it all faded, drawn down into a kind of silence which, relative to the clamour outside, was deep and thrummy as the hollow air within a bell. Some subconscious attitude made Bennet want to slip off his boatshoes, leaving them by the door like they did it in Japan. Up the stairs carpeted in white which rose before him, he could hear the voices of the family scuttling about. In quiet, quick movements someone was moving something—a pile of small boxes, perhaps, something complex but manageable—and giving directions to another. “Not here, here…the heavy one…Is there a blue label?”
He looked off to the right and saw Guole. Standing near the fireplace, a chubby palm down onto the mantle, Guole was holding in the other hand what seemed to be a Scotch on ice, in which someone had sunk a lime-green swizzle stick. His head, enwrapped in a complicated headset of metal bands and black microphones, lent him the effect of being entirely mechanized even as he was now, he was chuckling graciously, showily.
The front parlor was largely unused by the family, a relic of a room provided by the architect out of habitude for what moneyed families needed. Few guests had been received here, it seemed from the feel of the place. The piano, highly waxed and ungracious in its placement blocking the only front window, served the function of not an instrument but a shelf, on which photographs were displayed. Two couches—tautly upholstered in a fabric with a golden sheen looked unsat in, like poorly placed park benches on which you cannot imagine a swooning couple ever stopping for a rest. The wall color—powder blue—was tasteless and easy. Leslie strode over, his shoes imprinting the vacuumed carpets like the sunk footprints of astronauts into dust.
“It’s just the smallest inconvenience, ever so small,” Guole was saying into the mic, holding the smile onto his face even as he saw Leslie, “And sir, I’m afraid we’re going to have to continue this some other time…Over a bird, yes, certainly…Oh! I had completely neglected the most important holidays in all this whirl and twirl…Yes, oh, yes. Send my assistant the address at once… And oh, what a good time this has been... Yes, goodbye.”
Leslie had been standing there for over a minute, arms crossed. “So you’re going to Thanksgiving with who now—“
“First, it’s not Thanksgiving—something like Boxing Day, so who gives a damn. I hope there’s real bloody boxing but I’m pretty sure it has to do with presents, boxes, something something.”
“And who with? It’s this project?”
“To the gracious home of the chairperson of the Pacific Palisades something something committee. A woman with a very wide hat brim who said absolutely offensive things to Marsha the other day.”
“You’d said Jed finished permits on this what—four months ago?”
“Unforseen unforeseen,” Guole said, becoming patient explainer with the fat hand which was not holding the drink now reaching out to touch Bennet on the shoulder. “Where you’re standing is owned by the Oswegos. Done done, signed signed. Nextdoor however”—he gestured backward, as though throwing salt over the left shoulder—“property of the State, the feds, blah blah, the county.” He took a lug of scotch.
“What do we need with nextdoor?” Leslie asked. “Cute girl nextdoor? Goldmine in Basement Discovered by Film Crew?”
“Minor foible of mine, actually.” Guole had been planning on setting up the crew in the cavernously large garage. Any set needs a place for a small screening room in which to show a few canvas-backed chairs the on-site dailies. The place would also house a break-room for the cameramen, a lounge in which to play foosball, a few fridges with some sodas, a small, clean office for the producer with phones out, a few computers, enough desks for two assistants, the cramped office of a close-circuit TV editor and his small refrigerator of sandwiches, and a few cabinets along a back wall for the costume girls, who were currently moving into a guest room upstairs, but whose loot perpetually spilleth over, especially as designers would be making deliveries through the filming —they couldn’t ask to ring the doorbell!
Guole had thought, obviously, of the over-large garage out on the Southern end of the yard, bordering the pool. Zed wouldn’t have it. The savant’s studio currently housed in the basement was where he mixed music. It was in the garage that, due to its better acoustics, he recorded most instruments, going out at strange times in the night alone with an array of equipment that glinted in the soft moonlight.
“Daft of me to think this immense fucking monstrosity of a house isn’t large enough for five unemployed persons. I mean, if you’d wanted me to follow the man at night with some sort of night vision camera I suppose I could’ve. But that seemed…intrusive.”
They both laughed. “I just hate the effect of the green,” Bennet said. “That green light—so army-like, like we’re shooting hawks or something instead of watching people fuck.”
“And the crew house?”
“Problem solved,” Guole said. “Managed.” He wiped his hands against eachother; it was a soft clap.
“Who’d you buy out nextdoor?”
“Nobody,” Guole said, winking. “Have you seen your trailer?”
Bennet had not yet seen his trailer, but he also hadn’t seen Marsha up in costumes and dress was in an hour.

The green room was empty save for Marsha, who was ticking through a long pole of clothing on wooden hangers using a shoe horn. “Inventory,” she said, when he asked what she was doing.
The room was a bright guestroom whose quilted bed had been pushed against a wall to make room for what was here now—three racks of clothes whose sheeting of thin plastic was piled in the center of the carpet, a mountain of ghost flesh. Against the fourth wall hung three ovular mirrors edged in lightbulbs, a set-up imported from the studio with the familiar canvas-back chairs and wide, beech-wood countertop on which rested various scummed-up jars of colored powder. In one chair, a makeup girl slouched, napping, her head thrown back, a single-flip flop fallen from a sloped foot to rest on the wood beneath.
“And where is everyone?”
“Out by the pool. I just needed a last sweep. Too many cooks in the kitchen.”
Bennet walked to a window half-blocked by a rack of starchy jean-jackets, to look out at the pool where about fifteen were milling between the water’s edge and craft services, a table-clothed spread of pretzels and pita-sandwiches which had been nestled against a plaster-form of a lagunaic rock. He looked back at Marsha, ticking through the clothes—sections of jean and sections of white blazers whose sleeves poked out into the room like animal feelers, a rack of aubergine felt trousers and another of silken dresses which caught stray pulls of light in the afternoon dark of the house, like jellyfish operating on their own light-sources.
“The girl, Celia, is very pretty,” she said. “Very pretty in all of these.”
“And the boy?” Leslie said. “And the mother?”
“The mother’s well enough,” Marsha said. “Some colors suck the light from her face. The polaroids are on the table.”
Scuttling through the printed photographs with quick, spidery fingers Leslie said, “She won’t wear red anymore this year” and “Or, god—yellow. This jacket is awful.”
“It worked on the younger and the mother wanted a try.”
The youngest, Celia, resided in a neighboring stack of polaroids. Her shy smile was flirtatious. In several of the frames she was biting her lip in the same, measured spot, like some girl from a catalogue of clothing.
“She’s awful, isn’t she?” he asked Marsha, looking up. Still ticking through the hangers she sighed. An older woman with frazzled hair that bloomed around the soft, round face like a storm around an eye, she wore a necklace of glass baubles and an overlarge, knitted shift. Everything about her said that she had given up on her own sexuality and Leslie’s friendship with her based, on the large part on his complaints—about the studio, about the actors, about other men—was one of the most open and honest he held, even if he twinged slightly with guilt for having a love life at all while her complaints centered mostly around rent prices and visiting sisters. He hired her for every project.
“Not awful,” she said. “Rather nice.”
“You’re always too nice.”
“You’re always too judgmental.”
“She’s awful, isn’t she.”
“Well, she would be awful if she weren’t not awful. But she’s definitely not awful. Raised right.”
“I hate this thing she’s doing with her lip.”
Sighing and coming over, she said, “I think she just had a crush on the cameraman I asked to do these.”
“Oh?”
“Or really she’s just excited,” Marsha said.
“How awful,” Leslie said. Retreating back into a canvas chair, he spread his legs and put his hands, palm-down onto his knees. “Isn’t it awful, Marsha, how people want fame? Isn’t it awful that they don’t know better?”
Marsha raised her eyebrows. Without moving her feet, she reached her hand out to a rack, picked off of a thin dress of cobalt whose neck was encrusted with set glass rhinestones. It was a dress to be worn by someone gracious.
“Is it?” Marsha asked, shoving the gown forward. “You get this.”

After a diet coke out by the pool with craft services, where he talked with three of the cameramen hired to do establishing shots, who he then learned had been born in Poland, China, and Argentina, Leslie Bennet headed through the slight, scrubby underbrush of the forestral sward that bordered 87 and 89 DePauw. He was looking for his trailer. A question asked of a running-hand led him to the side-door of 87 into a darkened madhouse. Several electricians mounted on tin ladders were jabbing at the wall, holding secondary tools between their teeth. Due surely to their efforts, the lights were flickering on and off, on and off, and through the kitchen—its granite countertops blasted in the fallen plaster loosened by their toying—Bennet walked toward womanly voices, to find a former living or dining room which now housed five or six beanbag chairs on which were slumped beer-bellied men in tee-shirts and low-pulled caps typing into separate laptops.
“They’re scripting,” Guole said, grabbing Bennet from out of nowhere by the shoulder and walking him steadily through—past a darkened room of chairs facing scratchy TVs whose screens were playing the footage of closed-circuit cameras recording the goings-on outside the Oswego home. A flight of stairs led, tread-by-tread, into a beeping paper-strewn office of grey machines and a staff of seven or eight, walking between the desks, speaking into cell-phones, head-pieces, land-lines and wristwatches—yes, wrist-watches. There was a man called Drune good with electronics, whose microphone-enabled wristwatch worked like a speakerset.
“Your headquarters,” Guole said, not waiting for a flourish but pacing back down the stairs two-at-a-time with the shouted-up explanation, “Someone says there are neighbors out, rubber-necking this car crash. I’m going to go see about it.”
Hearing Guole’s heavy voice on the stair-treads, Leslie Bennet’s staff revolved to notice their boss, looking fresh and dapper compared to how they all felt, near the tail ends of long periods of sleeplessness.
A quick introduction, a friendly speech about working together, and a hasty nod-off, something along the lines of “I’m going to go see about Dress” were all that were required for Leslie to free himself back to wandering. Even the girl, Luelle, responsible for orders that included of course, clothing, who asked if she should tail along, was shoved off with an undertanding, “I’ll take care of it” as with a trademark smile Bennet twisted in the office threshold to the hall leading off the other side of the flight of stairs, down a long hall whose end could not be seen.
On the opposite side of the staircase was a room whose function was not yet served—there was only a large, round table on the center of which rested some unplugged equipment—a conference room to chat with the studio or advertisers, some other squalor. Past that nearly empty room, two new, leatherette sofas angled toward a half-torn-down wall whose empty, jagged edge had been made into a sort of window with plastic-sheeting duct-taped to the crumbling edge. The view through it was foggy—and the quality of light was friendly. Something about it seemed to take off the glaring edge of the LA sun, lending the room the feeling of nascent rain that would come gently, without thunder. Tucked between the couches, a small refrigerator. Bennet noted his requests had been filled—three bottles of gin kept cold, soda water, limes in various degrees of ripening to be split over the next few days in order of their coloration. The cups, however, were nowhere to be found and he made a note of it to give to Luella as soon as he returned so that they’d have some sustenance in the evening, a nice quiet payoff for their hard prep.
Continuing down the hallway, the house cornered as it opened onto the wing that lead at a ninety-degree angle out to the ocean, backing the fence that ran between the two houses. Here in the corner that mended the two spars of wings was a sort of sunroom, designed for no purpose, the shallot-topped bookcases empty.
As he walked into the next wing, Bennet could see why it had been kept unfilled. The floors sloped down so that if a marble dropped, it would roll through all the rooms toward where Bennet himself was walking down the hall. To his right, the windows looked to neat views half-obscured by trees of the backrooms of the Oswego mansion—Leona’s bedroom, he could see, the parent’s bathroom with its fogged glass, and out past the low garage, whose roof could be seen to hold a few tossed, long-lost balls and even a small plastic helicopter crashlanded on the tar. On Bennet’s left-hand side stretched the ratty yar. Overgrown grass crowded the concrete edging of a sunken pool, in whose depths four inches of rust-colored rain water had settled, still as the surface of a table. Past the pool, unfenced, was anendless views of the ocean sun-pocked, gunmetal grey beneath white sky. The effect was so sweeping as to be frightening. Sublime, Leslie recalled from art history courses, was the word for it. A threat that sang you to it like a Siren. You wanted to scramble across the lawn and dive into the water; But you didn’t want to.
Through these rooms, the cleaning crew which had fixed up the front had clearly not yet swept. He found discarded butts of waxen candles, half-burnt by local teens or sadder varieties of vagrants, a radio with the batteries gone, a poster showing the face of a well-known mountaineer advertising a variety of cigarettes. One room past the poster, there was no sign of shuffling life, no vagrant thumbprints marking the lightswitches. It was a small room that had not yet been breathed in. Its door was the only one Bennet had come across that had been closed, and now, of course he opened it.
The handle turned easily into a room that was clearly the end of all of the rooms. The wall Bennet now faced, the floor sloping toward it, was gone, empty, replaced by a savage tangle of yellow CAUTION tape that was the only thing holding anything in the room from the endless, empty ocean, toward which the floor sloped hungrily. Bennet stood at the edge of this tape, looking through a hole in the plastic hastily put up by some intern, and stared out at the ocean. At this safe point, you could not see down the cliff, though Bennet tried peeking. You could only see out.
The sky—white, empty—made the stark white of the walls of the room seem dark. He found himself thinking of a man he had met in Berlin when he had studied there—a Fulbright come for the study of theatre. It was at a gallery opening where he had come with an art-ambitious German boyfriend, where he had found himself, unwanted, bored, standing beneath a light with his back to a white wall. A man—attractive, older—had approached, wearing a plum smoking jacket whose frayed lapels suggested that other men often pulled him toward them.
“You look like an art piece yourself there,” the man had said, revealing a rotted, gold-encrusted tooth among the first four.
“And you’re scaring me,” Bennet had said, swilling whatever wine was left in the bottom of his cup, slurping it down, sucking back his teeth as though preparing to spit.
The man looked him up and down. “Oh you are. You do.”
“Yup?” Bennet said, facetiously. “And why?”
“Anything against a white wall,” the man said, gesturing to the schlock on the walls of the gallery—abstract paintings, if Bennet could remember—“looks like art. A newspaper clipping. A urinal.”
“What a compliment!” Bennet had chirped.
“I’d fuck you,” the man said and, taking Bennet’s empty wine glass, walked away. Bennet was probably supposed to follow him, but instead he waited, watching his boyfriend, who was talking with someone else, until the boyfriend saw him staring and winked. They’d gone to Trev’s apartment that night. The place was tastefully minimal—decorated in low, cheap furniture of a student trying to afford his taste level. After sex Leslie had asked, “The walls”— and paused.
“Yeah?” Trev had said.
“You didn’t keep them white.” The walls in the bedroom were dark, shadowy blue; the livingroom was magenta, the kitchen avocado.
“Oh, how awful.”
“What’s awful?”
“That you want white walls.”
“And?”
“Dull, trite, middle of the road.”
Trev had actually turned aside. Had the nerve to turn aside related to some aesthetic comment that hadn’t even been explained. They’d broken up later, for reasons not unrelated to this and these attitudes, relating to taste and acceptance. What was a year in Germany anyways. He hadn’t been deluded or absurd about the commitment. He hadn’t wanted to be in anything more, but then there was what Trev said, when he explained what the man had said. “So if you keep going down the line of argument, it would make sense that if your house was all white it’d all be, I don’t know, fucking gorgeous.”
“I like things ugly,” Trev had said, and rolled over to kiss him, up the neck, around the mouth, the eyes, the cheeks.
“I’m not ugly,” Bennet had said, his eyes open.
“You look great against a blue wall.”
And they’d made up. But Leslie had wondered if he was afraid of white walls, being the center of attention, of putting himself out there. His own apartment in the hills was “Sand,” chosen by a decorator who other people said “knew.” Leslie Bennet could never put himself out there, like someone to be framed beneath a spotlight. He was for bluescreens, bluewalls, the secondary houses crumbling down while the first family raged nextdoor. And he wondered for not the first time if this was a failure, if wanting to control the lives of others came not out of a genuine thirst for power but a fear of being the one controlled.
As he turned around and paced the halls back to his office, having quietly shut the last door behind him, he thought that if you had to be on one side or the other, he had made the right choice, but perhaps—thinking of the white walls—he had made it for the wrong reasons.
Bennet’s cell-phone, which he checked on his way back, had six new messages—two calls from Guole with updates, one from an agent on a new picture whose clumsy star had broken a wrist in some boating accident, two from kids working below him on the Oswego Project—a call from Duane alerting him of film-stock delivery delays that would delay the start tomorrow by what the camera-crew said might be an hour, “no big deal, just putting you in the know” and another from Margaret at casting, wondering if he’d gotten a look at the “Asian beauties” she’d “sent over.” The sixth call was from his boyfriend, Greg, whose message—purely sexual in tone, cadence, and meaning—had to be quickly deleted out of a guilt related to the vulgar, ingrained since the early days outside of Detroit in the Christian community which had since shunned him.
When he had returned to his office the employees were seated staring ahead at screens of complex numbers. Duane nodded him toward the staircase, where the two Asian girls were seated. A lunchbox, open, contained a half-eaten red-apple, a box of milk, and a complex array of Tupperware he could only racistly assume had once held noodles, something to be eaten with the chopsticks held in the box’s clear upper compartment.
Descending three steps to hug and kiss the mothers, Bennet spouted into speechifying. “Now I’m casting for a girl who can love grape juice. You were the two most loved and I just need to see you both—now, you may both be useful to me at some point, you’re not enemies here, girls—so I just need to see you make a certain kind of face.
In the dark of number 87, a house partly fallen into the ocean, its electricity spurting from a generator huffing on a side-stoop, two girls born of parents from Wuhan, Chengdu, Dali and Beijing, broke into smiles, showing chipped teeth, big gums, squinting eyes and ears which in the action of the face seemed to stick out further beneath the silken hair. He measured how they held it, saw the winking corners of the mouth, saw the dimple in the other cheek—the symmetry or asymmetry. Smiles, Bennet had learned to recognize. This was his expertise.
“I want the one without the ponytail,” he shouted up the stairs to Duane, as he rubbed the other one on the head, her mothers face collapsing. “It’s never you,” she told the daughter. “It’s never us.”
The girl, her face releasing from the starch of the smile, looked up to Bennet and tried again. She had not yet learned how to make a thing seem genuine.
Turning back to his assistants, when the girls were gone, Bennet had an announcement.
“I just went through this house,” he said. Luella turned in a rolling chair. “And I like what I see. This house has grits, guts, grandeur. It’s epic. This is man versus nature shit, and I think it wouldn’t be stupid if we staged a couple of scenes over here. What if the kids like to play around the other house?”
“They do,” Bartelby said. Back in the corner, he was a researcher with a pen tucked behind an angled, elfish ear.
“Even better,” Leslie continued. “People love ruins. Since the eighteenth century picturesque tourists wheeled around all over those crumbling cottages, this is the shit we like to see. It’s about time. It’s like—we’re all going to fall into the ocean, here, people. We’re all gonna fall in. That house, over there—it’s too new, shiny, bright. I want the comparison. I want… I want ruins.”
Three days later and Bennet would run into Guole in the studio coffeeshop, on a jaunt back to speak to Drexel about some possible hires. “What’s this I hear about you wanting to film out on 87,” Guole said, emptying sugar and leaving the paper packets torn on the countertop. Bennet explained.
“It’s fucking gorgeous. Endless sea views. Danger. I can see kids scuttling, kids in trouble hiding. I can see local teens making out in those long grasses. It’s so un-LA.”
“I thought you wanted very LA.”
“I plot as I go,” Leslie said. “And the house is the best thing that could have ever happened.”
“Well we don’t have a permit to film there, is why I’m saying this.”
“What?” Bennet said.
“I said we can’t film there.”
“And—“
“Makes the city look bad, county, township, whatever. They don’t want to look like a slum.”
“So they like to look noveaux riche, bad brass fixtures all over that godawful house. And that piano?”
“Yes,” Guole said, sipping the coffee—not sweet enough—and going back for a third packet. “I endured Boxing Day for you and there’s no way you’re filming out there.” He lidded the cup, walked away, and that was that.


Alan, sitting with his feet up on the windowsill of his mother’s kitchen, watched the men in the yard across the street. At night they cleared out. A few lights, held on to long poles with metal clips, attracted the darting bugs of evening….
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Mother in the next room watching TV news—ruins? GOES over to explore the house. Leona love. Maybe the garage scene--there will be no hiding from the cameras.