3.2, lensed through Bennet

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 fumes of cut lumber stacked on the drive, slid Bennet’s parched 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. With the pink tongue hidden underneath, the corners of the mouth stretched and doting, 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, where weeping mothers pegged to couches told all. He 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 dirt-poor Christian community outside Detroit, he had opted for business courses after high school’s hours before setting out for UMichigan, where that smile—the studied flecked, even teeth—had landed him at the head of student theatre direction, whose alumni advisor—a withering handshake in a tube of sleeve—had landed him a going-nowhere set job that he had climbed anyway using this, this habit 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 crookedly-set-up tents, of bearded, slovenly cameramen destroying oh, god… flowerbeds, he seemed to belong. The smile, though false in its intensity, was genuine. Because though a small, thin-boned man, Leslie Bennet walked as surely chest-puffed as a Clint Eastwood pushing open swinging saloon doors into a brawl. He was not a man swayed by detritus. He basked in ruin, became holy by chaos. It allowed him to tell himself that he was the guy who fixed things around here. He was that guy.
When Bennet had made it through to the front door, two pre-school girls, asians with hair of oil-slick black, who came with attached mothers of whose eyes shined with hysterical, prideful intensity.
“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 by, which was attached to the hand of a woman. “I need your daily.” Looking up with a guffaw at the mug attached to the hand, she sacrificed a stapled packet—the schedule of all goings on which by god if Bennet didn’t have, nobody better have. He glanced at it—2.30 was Dress—and then said to 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 as it hit the upper register, the scraps between the gardeners and the electricians pulling cords through the flowerbeds—it all faded, drawn down into a kind of silence which, relative to the clamour outside, was deep and thrummy as the hollow air held within the walls of a bell. Bennet was nearly moved to slip off his boatshoes, leaving them by the door like they did it in Japan. Up the stairs which rose, carpeted in white, before him he could hear the voices of the family scuttling about, and in quiet, quick movements someone moving something—a pile of small boxes, perhaps, something manageable.
He looked off to the right and saw Guole. The 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 could be assumed, from the unfurnished feel of the place. Commanding the room the piano, too new and ungracious in its placement blocking the only window, served the function of not an instrument but as a shelf, on which photographs should be displayed.
Standing near the fireplace, a 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 slim lime-green swizzle stick. Encircling, enwrapping Guole’s head, a complicated headset lent the man the effect of being entirely mechanized even as now, he was chuckling into a drooping microphone, chuckling graciously, showily. Leslie strode over, his shoes imprinting the vacuumed white carpets like the footprints sunk by men onto the clay surface of the moon.
“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…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 bye this has been. Yes, goodbye.”
Leslie had been standing there for over a minute, arms crossed. “So you’re going to New Year’s with who now—“
“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”
“And Jed finished the permits on this four months ago?”
“Unforseen unforeseen,” Guole said. “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.”
“What do we need with nextdoor? Cute girl nextdoor? Goldmine in Basement Discovered by Film Crew?”
“Minor foible of mine, actually.”
Guole was planning on housing the crew set-up in the garage. He needed a place for a small screening room in which to show a few canvas-backed chairs the on-site dailies, which would also house a break-room for the cameramen with a lounge in which to play foosball, a few fridges with some sodas, a small, clean office for the producer with a phone out, a few computers, enough desks for two assistants, the close-circuit TV editor and his small refrigerator of sandwiches, and a few cabinets along a back wall for the costume girls, who had set up shop upstairs and were currently moving in, but whose loot perpetually spilleth over.
He had thought, obviously, of the over-large garage out on the Southern end of the yard, bordering the pool. Zed wouldn’t have it. Though the savant’s studio was currently housed in the basement, it was in the garage that due to its better acoustics, he recorded the brass instruments anyways, going out at strange times in the night alone with an array of equipment and a tuba, horn, trumpet whose yellow brass caught the soft white light of the moon. Guole, a good enough scout, had simply not known.
“Right, daft of me to think this immense fucking monstrosity of a house isn’t large enough for five unemployed persons,” Leslie said, peeved.
“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 covered bed had been pushed against a wall to make room for what was here now—three racks of clothes whose sheething of thin plastic was piled in the center of the carpet, a mountain of ghost flesh. Against the fourth wall, 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 floor 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 jean-jackets, to look out at the pool where about fifteen were milling between the water’s edge and craft services, nestled against a plaster-form of a lagunaic rock. He looked back at Marsha, ticking through the clothes—sections of jean and xxxxx, xxxx of xxxxx, xxxxxx and xxxxxxxxx.
“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.”
“She won’t wear red anymore this year,” Leslie said, scuttling through them with quick, spidery fingers. “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, shyly smiling with the flirtatious glance of a woman loved by all who look. 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.
“Not awful. 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?”
“I think she’s just excited,” Marsha said.
“How awful,” Leslie said. Retreating back into a canvas chair, he spread his legs and put his hands, face-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 it a hanger which held a dress of blue, violet, whose neck was encrusted with set glass rhinestones that caught the yellow light hovering above the pool at 4.00 in the afternoon.
“Is it,” Marsha said, shoving forward the gown like a peace offering. “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 had learned had been born in Poland, China, and Argentina through a quick, smile-filled conversation, 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, its lock gummed, into a darkened madhouse. Several electricians mounted on tin ladders jabbed at the wall, holding secondary tools between their teeth as tango dancers hold roses. The lights flickered on and off, on and off, and through the kitchen—its granite countertops blasted in the fallen plaster loosened by the toying electricians—Bennet walked toward womanly voices, to find a former living or dining room which now housed three beanbag chairs on which sat three long-limbed woman typing into three separate laptops.
“They’re scripting,” Guole said, grabbing him from out of nowhere by the shoulder and walking him steadily through—past a darkened room of chairs facing scratchy TVs linked to closed-circuit cameras recording the goings-on outside the Oswego home—and up a flight of stairs which led, tread-by-tread, into a loud, blaring, paper-strewn office of grey machines and six, seven, eight people speaking into cell-phones, head-pieces, land-lines and wristwatches—yes, wrist-watches. There was a man called Drune whose microphone-enabled wristwatch worked like a speakerset.
“Your headquarters,” Guole said, and quick as that, he was gone, 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.”
Hearing Guole’s heavy voice on the stair-treads, Leslie Bennet’s staff revolved to see their boss, looking fresh and dapper—especially compared to how they all felt, feeling at the end of large periods of sleeplessness, feeling as though he could never comprehend the backlog of work that had fed through them before his quick arrival. Leslie felt guilty. He gave a hasty nod-off, something along the lines of “I’m going to go explore this place,” and he continued down a hall that spurred off to the right of the stairs. Here, the ground sloped more.
The windows on the right-hand side looked to neat views of the Oswego windows half-obscured by trees. On the left-hand side, open, endless views of sun-pocked gunmetal ocean beneath white sky. A yard below was overgrown, grass lush and hairy around the edges of a sunken pool, in whose depths four inches of rust-colored rain water had settled, still as the surface of a table. There was not much in these rooms. 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, of vagrants and their ashed-cigarettes, their thumbprints marking the lightswitches. And then, one room past that, the end.
Here, in the last room in the slim wing that fed out from the home out toward the ocean, the wall had completely fallen away, eaten out by the cliff, down to which the floor sloped hungrily. A tangle of yellow CAUTION tape spread throughout the room, halting passage through the room’s halfway point. 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. You couldn’t see, at this point, down the cliff, though Bennet tried peeking. Only out. The sky—white, empty—made the walls of the room seem dark. It was all an empty page for him, for Leslie Bennet. He found himself thinking of a man he had met in Berlin, when he had studied there—a Fulbright for the study of theatre. He had come with a German boyfriend to a gallery opening and 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. Bullshit me.”
“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 toilet.”
“What a compliment,” Bennet had said.
“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 talk with someone else, wink over. They’d gone to the boyfriend’s apartment that night and after sex he’d asked, “The walls”— and paused, unsure of footing.
“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 avacado.
“Oh, how awful.”
“What’s awful?”
“That you want white walls.”
“And?”
“Soooo dull. So trite. So middle of the road.”
He’d 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 actions, 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.
“He told me anything against white looks like a work of art, 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.
“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, putting himself out there. He could never put himself out there like an artist, like someone to be framed beneath a spotlight. He was for the bluescreens, the bluewalls.
He turned around and paced down the hall of number 87. Bennet’s cell-phone 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, and another from Margaret at casting, wondering if he’d gotten a look at the Asian girls she’d sent over. The sixth call was from Leslie Bennett’s 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 in the Christian community outside of Detroit.
When he had returned to his office the employees, sleep-eyed, were mostly seated staring ahead at screens of complex numbers. Duane, the one with the wristwatch, nodded him toward the staircase, where the two Asians 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 slender compartment. s
“Ah,” Bennet said. Descending three steps to hug and kiss the mothers, he 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 perched on a side-stoop partly obscured by bushes, two asian girls born of parents born in Wuhan, Chengdu, Dali and Beijing, broke into smiles, showing chipped teeth, big gums, squinting eyes and ears which seemed in the smile to stick out further beneath the mops of bangs and xxxxxxxxxxx. Smiles, Bennet had learned to recognize. This was his expertise.
“I want the one without the ponytail,” he shouted up the stairs to Clarisse, the girl who took notes, as he rubbed the other one on the head, her mother heavily sighing into a frown. “It’s never you,” she told the girl. “It’s never you.”
The girl, her face releasing from the starch of the smile, looked up to him 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 announcment. “I think we need a scene out here,” he said.

It was epic destruction. Man. V. nature. “People love ruins” need a scene out here

The guys come in to take establishing shots; befriend Jareth
The obsession with Celia’s wardrobe preparations

It took three hours on the first day to do Maude’s makeup and twenty-five minutes to do Celia’s. The numbers, meted on Maude’s decorative, small-numbered watch, were irrespective of the natural beauty of the daughter and the haggard lines of the mother, which mulling creams attempted to spelack. It was due to the makeup artist, a Mrs. Lila Warren, who though she was sure-as-rain she wanted the girl to remain unmottled and pure, wasn’t sure what she wanted from the mother. She asked Mr. Bennet at every step in her British lilt—an accent which on the set of Hollywood trash Bennet had always seen as mocking and over-grand. He hated to be around her.
“When you’ve got the red lips there’s something gratingly sexual about it, but with the peach—“
“I saw the peach, I liked the peach,” Bennet said, wiping with a thumb the top of a tube of lipstick.
“Yes I liked the peach, too,” Celia said, her bare feet up on the top of the makeup counter, her back thrown out to look at the racks of clothing upside down. She was a girl who seemed not to belong in furniture, Bennet thought. She was a star.
“I think I like the red,” Maude said. “I don’t think we like the peach, do you really, Celia?”
“I do,” she said again. I do.”
Once there was that decision decided on there were other decisions to be wheeled throughxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx