The Oswego Suggestions: Or, Adriane Tries to Write

new tone

2008-10-28T08:06:00.001-07:00

Maude Oswego, with her back to her daughter and her head in the refrigerator door, asked the girl to call pops up from hell and drag him kicking and screaming to dinner. She was looking for the Fresca cans she had asked Luigo to chill.
Hours ago, Luigo had put the fresca in the freezer. The cans had exploded--frozen sludge over everything, like something out of Ghostbusters--and Zed, with the amp up to nine, nearly, by the sound of it--would protest to have heard nothing. When Maude turned around from the scene of the bombing, she saw her daughter sitting at the countertop, swaying lightly from side to side--left to right, left to right. The girl was highlighting, in broad sweeps of lemon yellow, whatever thick book she was posing with that day. Extracting a shrapnel chunk of can with one hand, Maude slammed the freezer drawer with the other. Her daughter did not look up.
"Get Jareth to do it," the girl said.
"Jareth is studying."
Leona raised the book so that its spine was made visible to her mother, who leant contraposto on the sub-zero. The spine read, in gilt letters, "Constitutional Law, Vol. II."
"How was Volume One?" Maude said.
The girl shrugged as if to say that the book had been pretty awful but she had endured. "Ask Celia to do it," she said.
"Celia is out."
"Can I be out? Just pretend I"m out." She looked faux-dotingly at her mother. Maude had tied a muslin apron over a kimono-like wrap-dress of flowing, alarming fuschia-hued silk. Did microwaving tupperware really neccessitate an apron?
"The goddamn soda exploded and I'm all in a tizzy," Maude said. "Just do it,"
Maude had a habit of tapping her nails when she was waiting, and she was doing that now, as if to enforce via an imitation of water torture's slow pulse how much she was really suffering. Here, now.
And so Leona, with a slam of Con Law part deux, loped out of the room with an exaggerrated sense of duty in every step, though her footfalls, falling as they did on the plush wall-to-wall white carpet Maude had newly installed, barely resounded.

To get to the basement Leona walked through the dining room, where the table was set, to the den, where an L-shaped leather couch faced a console of white wicker on whose top shelf sat a television. The set was on, playing The Simpsons. The show was on mute, with subtitles for the hearing impaired, in Espanol. A single shoulder enwrapped in gritty hemp poncho rose above the seabed of leatherette like a volcanic island. Within the poncho was Leona's brother, Jareth.
"Studying?" she said swayingly.
"Spanish," Jareth grunted.
As she cut, in scissored steps, toward the basement door, Leona happened to glance outward through the sliding glass doors to the pool, where lollygagging in a chaise lounge, one thin arm folded over the pits of her eyes as though to block out a sun which had long ago lowed, lay Celia.
"She's out alright," Leona yelled back through the complex of rooms toward her unhearing mother. "Out." Pause. "Side." And with that, she threw open the door to the basement and flung herself down the dark triangle of steps toward the room, which bayed warmly below like a sleeping dog.
Paul was down there, his two wiry feet planted parallel in flip-flops. He was sitting on the red sofa holding the blue guitar and playing over and over again a chord which appeared to be broken. Only at the very bottom step did Leona locate her father. Zed Oswego lay prostate on the studio carpet, one long monkeyish arm folded over his paunch, the other reaching up and over the mixing board on the desk above, where ever so gently he was twisting and untwisting a dial. His eyes were closed. They opened only after he looked up for the reason as to why Paul had stopped playing the E-minor chord; There was a 21-year-old girl standing in the center of the room, arms-crossed like an angry teacher, waiting to speak. "Mom says dinner." She let out a breath. "What're you working on?"
"The Opera," Paul said.
"What part?"
"The prodigal son returns to find the Casino."
"His house is a Casino?"
"NO!" Zed said, ignoring his daughter as he sat upright in lotus position and turned toward Paul , nearly blacking out with the speed of that effort after the hour spent lying on the ground. "That's what Genius Paul wants."
"Is it?" Paul said.
"It's just between. The little part of reality between two behemoths from the Devil."
"Dense," Leona said, and headed up the stairs two-at-a-time, veering in a bee-line toward the chocolate brick of Con Law, a sort of Bible that promised to regulate the insane.

When Jareth, aged fifteen and dopey in his affections, saw Paul at the dinner table, he smiled sheepishly and pulled out the chair beside him. A gaunt man with a stooped posture, Paul's hair--long, grey, wiry and crimped--mimicked his form. He was never without his flip flops--"my havaianas," he called them, as in "Has anyone seen my havaianas?" He even drove in the things, drove a powder-blue Volvo sedan whose backseat folded down for "equipment" or a mattress. Paul might as well have been a boarder--the car was a permanent fixture on DePauw street, never parking in the driveway--out of courtesy he said, but really out of a deep fear of having his car blocked--a tragedy which too often befell him out in LA. He lived in a rat-trap apartment in Mar Vista, payed for by steady royalties, but slept most nights on the basement's red velour pullout couch--one of the few pieces of furniture that was a holdover from Mr. and Mrs. Oswego's first East Village apartment, and he liked it for its location--in the studio--as much as he liked it for its scent, a nostalgic perfume of pot, sage, sex and the strange reek of bitter carrots. Still, Paul rarely ate dinner with the family. Jareth understood. Paul, as did he, preferred three-dollar buckets of Popeye's fried chicken to what his mother put on the table. He had explained to Maude that Chef Luigo's cooking "didn't agree with him" as he had been "raised differently." But tonight, he was slathering ketchup over a slice of low-fat cottage-cheese shrimp quiche and telling Maude a story.
"...And I had been seeing you around with your Diet sodas, and you're a lovely lady--"
.........PART MISSING FROM NOTEBOOK.......

... both of them lacking the spark of Zed, whose dumb prattle and doting questions needled him toward the center of conversations. Paul was alight now, with Zed at his side, asking "Jareth, honey, could you pass the ketchup? That looks marvelous--what Paul is doing."
"Tastes like a shrimp french fry!" Jareth said, for he had done already, as usual, what Uncle Paul had done.
"And so I was saying," Paul continued, "We became the major shareholder." He shoveled a forkful into his mouth and chewed, smiling.
"That's marvelous!" Maude said, clapping a single clap like a monkey alarm clock.
At this Leona perked up. "Major shareholder of what?"
Aside from Celia, who on her cell phone held below the table's ledge was furiously typing texts to the disadvantage of her as-yet untouched dinner, Leona was the only Oswego whose plate remained undampened by ketchup.
"What are you the major shareholder of?" Leona asked again.
For a former cokehead, Paul's talk was remarkably smooth, as though he'd been the son of a salesman--which, in fact--he had been.
SALESMAN SPEECH in other notebook.

..........................................

There were several valuable things in the Oswego household, none of which--thank the Lord!--the thieves had bothered taking. When Maude awoke from beauty rest to her brisk morning walk, she turned on the television. The voices of the people on screen helped wake her up, and the sight of all the thin Midwestern bitches whose clear enunciations showed in the shadowed pits of their cheekbones was a kind of kick in the ass to exercise. This morning there was the usual remote, and the usual red "ON" button, but in lieu of the television--a gaping maw of dust and fuscillating wires, a kind of pothole in the room in which her eyes remained sunk.
"JARETH" she yelled, not toward her son's room--three doors down--but to the absence of the set. The effect was such that her son remained asleep while Zed, who had hit the hay only three hours earlier and consistently dreamt peacefully through the snozzy reverb of the midwestern announcers to rise at the decent hour of noon thirty, was at 6.45 a.m. awakened by his wife's shrill death rattle.

The Stripping Views

2008-07-21T10:00:00.000-07:00

I am obsessed with Proulx this week.

Working on my Dialogue

2008-07-15T10:59:00.001-07:00

I'm rethinking how I write dialogue, what my process is. If I want to make each character's voice sound different, I need to think of them not as voices in my head but as voices I'm overhearing

When Jareth got home he found his mother in the backyard, sitting beside a woman in a sable coat. He went out there with two glasses of Campari sodas that Leona, clicking through the channels, had said they had asked her to bring out, though he might as well.
His mother was squealing out a high giggle, her slim fingers pawing at the lawn chair. The woman opposite was sitting back coolly, the harsh lines of her square face stretched into a smile that stayed toothless. She was the image of control; Hair, wet with grease, was pulled into a tight ponytail; The unclasped fur lay draped over the shoulders of her black turtleneck, from the sleeves of which peeked thin tan, thin wrists aglimmer with tennis bracelets of diamonds—or imitation diamonds, maybe.
“Oh, Jareth, our savior,” his mother said when she saw him. “This is absolutely top of the line. And with the lime slices, like mother likes them.”
“It’s really too much,” said the woman, though like her host she accepted the glass.
“This is my wonderchild,” Maude said, winking at him, “My Jareth.”
“I’ve heard, as they say,” said the woman, “A lot about you.” She had an accent Jareth could not place. Vaguely Southern in its lilts, the Rs were held long, the Os were flat, and it seemed to come from some place where hard work mattered, where books, when read aloud, were meant to imbibe lessons.
“This is Cleo,” Maude said. “A woman who before today I had only heard about in passing.”
“Your mother was famous at our house,” Cleo rasped. “We used to talk about you while dad was reading through the paper, reading out loud the articles. And over the albums. I think there are some pictures that you sent from… from before. One of you in a very bright coat. Printed like a –like a what are those called?—like a giraffe.”
“Oh, what an awful thing that was. Coonskin or something, and with a fake print. To think I had been a vegetarian.”
“Goodness. We were forcefed everything,” Cleo said. “No room for error.”
“Ah! Anwyay,” said Maude, touching Jareth lightly on the arm to show she still remembered him. “We’re cousins.”
“I’m your—what was it?—second aunt?” Cleo said, holding the lime slice and looking at it. “I’m once removed in any case.”
“Removed is for marriage,” Jareth said.
“I’m second then. And pleased to meet you.” She extended a hand. A diamond ring glimmered. He shook it.
“Sit down, honey,” Maude said, pointing toward a vacant lawn chair with a seat covered in pine needles. “Stay a while with your poopsy mother and your charming aunt. She was just talking about what she does.”
“It’s not so interesting,” she said. She sucked the lime and then made a face.
“What is it?” Jareth said. He wiped off the needles, sat down.
“Hospice nursing. If someone’s about to go—I sit with them, spongebath, read out loud the articles, give the morphine. I could get you loads of morphine if you wanted it, baby,” she said with a sharp, high laugh. The laugh resembled Maude’s.
“None for him, thank you,” Maude said. “He’s a good boy. Against all odds.”
Cleo described how if someone were about to bite it, a service called her, and she changed into her scrubs, and showed up at the house. And she mostly lived there, on a couch or something. Her boyfriends hated it. She’d be gone for weeks then back again. They’d call up crying, leave her by cheating. Anyway—back to the dead people. The dying. The wives cried, the husbands cried, the children stayed silent and confused. It was most interesting how the day or two before someone would go, Cleo would know it. Know it for sure.
“How do you know it?” Jareth asked. His mother was rubbing his back with her manicured nails and he didn’t want it to stop, so he asked the question—to keep Cleo going.
“Oh,” she said. “They do something wild.”
“Oh?” Maude said.
“People who haven’t walked for months—you know, bedridden—they throw off the sheets, the IV. They get up and walk around. A man—he had cancer, didn’t eat much or at all, he had been a cook they said, and he got up and scrambled eggs, made breakfast for his family. It gives the family hope, which is unwise. I’m always sad to see them do it.”
“What do people do?” Jareth said.
“One man even went golfing.”
“Wowzers,” Maude said.
“Made his wife drive him to the Tee. I went along in the backseat with my crosswords. I can really steam through those things, you know. I get it from Uncle Larry.”
“Yes,” Maude said. “He’s really still quite good.”
“Does your husband do them, too?” Cleo said.
“Ha!” Jareth let out a laugh. He liked Aunt Cleo. “He doesn’t do shit.”
“He does shit,” Maude said. And they laughed.
“Are you married, Aunt Cleo,” Jareth asked. He looked at the ring.
“I’m married by the law but not by the heart,” she said.
“What does that mean?” Jareth asked.
“You’ll see in time,” Cleo said.
“It’s a lot of work to love someone forever,” Maude said.
“Duh,” Jareth said, rolling his eyes at his mother. “I just mean—are you divorced?”
“Not legally,” Cleo said. “It’s too much paperwork for no good. My next go-around I’m just going to hop over a broom or something easy.”
Leona was opening the sliding doors. They all turned to see her coming out.
“If you’re coming out, Leona, do you mind bringing us the box of cigarettes on the kitchentop and a match?” Maude asked.
“I’ve got a lighter in my pocket,” Cleo said.
Leona grumbled. The sliding door closed—turning the glass into a mirror reflecting the trees of the backyard and, in the spots between their leaves, the light colors of the sunset. Then the door reopened and Leona, in an overlarge shirt that served as a nightgown, emerged holding the pack of cigarettes and the novelty lighter Jareth’s father had once bought in Louisiana that was shaped in the figure of a woman. Toward the three of them she dragged a fourth lawn chair, letting fall the pines that covered it as she pulled it toward them. “There’s nothing on TV at five o’ clock,” she said, by way of an acknowledgement as to why she was just now bestowing them with her presence.
“Cleo, this is my eldest and wisest,” Maude said.
“We met briefly,” Cleo said. “While you hadn’t gotten home yet, the clever thing entertained me.”
“We talked about Uncle Larry,” Leona said. “And smog.”
Cleo lit a cigarette. In the light, Jareth thought her rather pretty. And she was good at holding the thing, too. Like a woman in an advertisement for cigarettes, her dainty slim, ringed fingers seemed more elegant than the cigarettes themselves. When she sucked it, it was like she was a woman who knew what she needed.
“Leona goes to Harvard,” Maude said. “She’s the smart one.”
“Beats me, honey,” Cleo said. Cleo had been majoring in Physical Therapy. She had dropped out because she fell in love. She married the bastard. Then, bored, she’d gone to Nursing school. Just a little place, up in the hills, but she loved it. Did Leona love school? She shouldn’t ever drop out for a man.
“I won’t,” Leona said. “I assure you of that.”
“So it’s not for a man,” Cleo said. “I haven’t yet met a girl who dropped out when it wasn’t meant for a man or from a man to begin with.”
“I’m just trying to figure out what I want to do,” Leona said.
“That’s what school’s for, I thought,” Cleo said. “Take a little of this, a little of that, a little of him, a little of the other one—“
“We’re proud of her,” Maude said. “She wants to know why she’s going to school, then she wants to go back, and do that thing. Right?”
“Sure,” Leona said.
“And that thing isn’t a man?” Cleo said. Dropping her voice then, and inhaling she said, “I haven’t met one yet.”
“Well I’m the one, then,” Leona said.
“She’s practically sexless,” Jareth said. “Trust me.”
“Well that’s nice,” Leona said.
“What?” Jareth said, “It’s what you want people to think?”
“She’s figuring things out,” Maude said. “I wish I’d done the same, to be honest.”
“Oh, you never made a bad decision in your life, baby,” Cleo said. “Look at this,” She waved her hand about the backyard—the small pool with its grotto, the garage with the lights on inside and the dull, tinny music Zed was playing fizzing out through the cracks in its lowered door, on which hung two crossed black fishing nets.
“There are some things I would take back,” Maude said.
“Like what?” Jareth asked.
“She had you,” Leona said.
“I’d marry a man with more money,” Maude said, grinning. “I’d have majored in finance, something practical. I’d have a law degree.”
“You’d wear aprons and make cakes and secretly booze out of a hall cabinet,” Leona said.
“If I were to do it over, I’d be born a girl,” Jareth said.
“You’d be Celia,” Leona said.
“If I had to do it over,” Cleo said, slow, and drawn out, “I’d have come out here six years ago. I’d have tried to get into show business.”
“Gross,” Leona said.
“It’s not all it’s cracked up to be, is what she means to say,” Maude said.
“Well, it’s the money,” Cleo said.

just a first edit of the first vomit draft

2008-06-16T22:57:00.000-07:00

"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….
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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.

3.2, lensed through Bennet

2008-06-13T22:58:00.000-07:00

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

chapter 3 first write vomit

2008-06-13T03:21:00.000-07:00

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”

I like this part

2008-05-25T22:13:00.000-07:00

The part I like this morning:

"Despite the pastoral setting, the place was called by everyone (including teachers) the “alley”—a reference to the places of deviation they had learned about in movies, where in small towns with rigid puritan standards, the grace of civil engineers had gifted teenagers the unlit backroads."

Anyway, here's the backstory to it. Sooooooo GDS:

Labelled in Waeburn’s hallways as a stoner, Jareth hid beneath overlarge ponchos sold on the sidewalks in front of East LA’s unobscured headshops by sad-eyed Guatemalan immigrants. During lunch, he’d head over with Bresios and two or three others—sometimes Paul Dine would be there with Mitzy Hanks, if they weren’t making out in the dark of a music practice room, or there’d be Leg Rouland carrying the bummy prop of a skateboard (named by his Hollywood parents, “Legend,” a title he’d tried to shed). They'd meet at the strip of Eucalyptus trees that edged the student parking lot, where they’d slump down, backs to the wall, to sit in the pile of dry leaves. Despite the pastoral setting, the place was called by everyone (including teachers) the “alley”—a reference to the places of deviation they had learned about in movies, where in small towns with rigid puritan standards, the grace of civil engineers had gifted teenagers the unlit backroads.
This smoking of Jareth’s was a pittance of a rebellion, spoil-sport really. His father, with a bowl of his own in the third drawer beneath his computer in the garage studio, couldn’t be said to care. The most his mother had ever said was, when finding in his sock drawer, his pipe (a cheesy cat-faced thing he’d paid too much for when he was 13), “You know this kills brain cells?” What a cliché, he had thought, as she had simply placed the embarrassment on the top of his dresser to stare at him with its gummy, muck-filled eyes.

Lots new over the weeekend

2008-05-25T22:12:00.000-07:00

At age 16, Jareth Oswego, despite all the family’s grumblings against the institution, was still at Waeburn.
When they first enrolled Leona, Waeburn had seemed the only, obvious choice. Classes were capped at fifteen, students were not allowed to use coloring books (they inhibited creative thinking), and the dining-hall cuisine, engineered 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 the dusty, red-earthed bowl of Tacoma Canyon by outdoor hallways. From the sky it was a spider—legs out and awry, splayed.
Some of the lawns between the halls had been landscaped with dry, imported Bermuda sod that scratched the legs of those who sat down Indian-style; Others had been left to the Eucalyptus trees whose dusty leaves clogged the gutters, changing the rhythm of the rain so that over some of the halls, water would fall in unobfuscated sheets. In LA it did not rain often, but like most things here, when it did, like most things, it did so in a showy, draining way. A single day of drizzle predicted five more to follow, and you sickened of the drudge of it. No weather was ever a relief from previous weather until—gah!—it was over with the suddenness of a snap.
Like the weather, moods shifted in showy patterns—driven with TV schedules. A bad episode of Boston Public would have the teaching staff irritable for seven days—until the next, when principal SkinnerTK would chastise the wrongdoer down in his office, to be scolded but not expelled (because in TV, unlike in real life, you did not want the trouble-makers to stop the plot from churning forward). They would mope over the happenings in the teachers’ lounge, feeling, until justice had been enacted onscreen, that it would never be enacted anywhere.
Jareth saw the same fawning behavior in his classmates; a single good episode of Dawson’s Creek would entirely affect the nature of the girls’ crushes. Where once his long-limbed, So-cal classmates would moon over the cluster of boys who actively discussed weight-lifting, gym runs, and the bleaching of hair in the manner of “Dawson,” it was when Katie Holmes’ character chose “Joey” instead that the girls’ attention shifted. Now, they pointed and nodded toward those pudge-faced, quiet puzzlers. Suddenly Matthew Velner, his hooded eyes sunk under sleeplessness, his pale skin—secluded from the glare of the sun by long nights spent programming computer games in his basement lab—was grumbling in Physics as to the correct etiquette one should use to dump a girl (long-limbed Tracy Tanner) for her best friend (long-limbed and blonde Diane Wheatus). The response—from a moronic, bleach-haired Dawson—was always an “I don’t know man, but—“ followed by a prescribed routine whose steps imitated something he had seen somewhere on TV. First take her to dinner, explain it after you’ve ordered, and have a nice drive afteward around a lake, some lake, with trees and people walking out around it.
The Oswegos watched as much TV as any of them. But the family’s attitude toward the set was as towards an intruder. Their mother, walking into the den, carried with her the catchphrase “What is this garbage?” no matter what was playing—a documentary on natural habitats, a film starring Meryl Streep as an Edwardian lady. And no matter their response, she’d cross to the other end of the room, her arms over her chest, to watch for a few minutes without speaking, before retreting with a blasé “Ughhhhhhh.” Jareth’s father would come into the den with a crossword puzzle, slump into the big armchair, and live in a world that came without TV, only speaking to shout out clues: “Four letters, Disagreeable neccessity.”
Leona would be the one to know: “Onus?” she’d ask, as if it was something she did not already know—granting her father that.
All media, aside from music, was background noise to their father.
It was as if Zed could not hear dialogue. A night at a play. The backdrop lit in fiery blue, the color of the zinnias of gas burners, and the characters moving before the scrim sparring with their hands in the air. At intermission they had stepped outside for some air. Leona, biting her nails, was thinking about how the play—which concerned a sister to be married off—could comment in its most biting lines on her own female imprisonment. Jareth was talking to his mother about if they should paint the trim in the guest-room that same blue color because, Maude had said, “It’s just so so lovely.”
Zed had interrupted to ask if they want anything, had walked to a neighboring vendor, bought a candy-bar, and had come back into the family’s conversation, chewing it.
“Well I thought she was terrible,” Leona was saying to her mother.
“Who was?” Zed asked.
There was one female actress on the stage—played by, if Jareth remembered correctly, Tava Shu.
“The one female actress on the stage,” Leona had said. “Who’s getting married off?”
“Oh right,” Zed had said, and walked off to eat his candy bar beneath a hooded lamp. Jareth saw someone approach him—a fan in a tweed sportcoat a size too large who stood with his hands in his pockets, leaning into his father. Their conversation was animated, crackling—Zed punched the guy on the shoulder. Maybe they had known eachother from way back. When Zed did not return to meet the family in their box later, when the lights had gone up, and then again, when the clapping had started and they had gone down the stairs into the lobby, Maude had said “For god’s sakes he’s always the one missing. My children are more dependable.” They had gone out onto the street with the rush of the crowd, with the plan to just drive home and hope he’d be there.
On the street, Leona had elbowed Jareth. They both saw it—a sports bar with a crusty sign, a vaguely gothic look to the stained-glass window and sour notes of rage eminating from within, the tinkerings of some bad rock band as insulated by egg-cartons stapled to the walls. Leona asked their mother to “Give her a second” and, leaving the family there on the street, had crossed to open the club door, disappear within, and re-emerge from their father from whose blithering lips protruded a cigar whose fancy green and gold label bespoke of a rare import.
In the car, snapping into his seatbelt, he had said, simply, “I didn’t much care for the play,” and mom had laughed.
“I will not recommend you for the board of the Tony’s,” she said, cackling.
“That thing won a Tony?” Dad asked, drumming his fingers on the glove compartment.
“Six,” Leona said from the backseat, seething a little.

Though watching television with his father who, oblivious to the set at all, didn’t change much, watching with his sisters was a completely different experience. Celia simply stopped on shows he would have been embarrassed to watchon his own—teenage dramas that played like morality tales (who to dump, how to dump, how to be dumped), MTV reality shows whose sparring housemates played for the cameras, and, holiest of holy, makeover house shows, wherin families switched houses for a weekend to redecorate eachothers’ parlors with loud paint and cheap, Swedish furniture.
But watching with Leona was xxxx. Never content with what was playing, she’d switch for a while and land on something inane—an infomercial wherein Tori Spelling was attempting to sell some sort of washable apron, a long-run episode of Friends, a Ricky Lake special on Eating disorders with double stages—one housing the anorexics, another the obese.
When it’s just the two of us, we can get really terrible. Amy goes to Harvard but took a semester off to deal with “emotional problems” (“Namely,” Amy flippantly tells the postman and others who ask, “the emotional problem of Harvard itself”). So she is too smart to be enjoyable company for daytime TV. She makes dissonant comments such as when, during a special on eating disorders, The Tyra Banks Show faces off five chairs of anorexic girls versus five chairs of obese girls, and Amy says, “What is she trying to achieve, some sort of Hegelian dialectic?” Or, during The Simpsons (my favorite, witness the tee described above), she makes the lucid observation: “Look at how Mr. Burns unconsciously authors every plot. Polluter providing death through nuclear smoke? Or angel granting life through low-wage paychecks.” It’s completely exhausting.
X
X
X
X
At Waeburn, the seasons themselves followed studio schedules. In the spring and fall, the parking-lot at pickup time (3 – 3.15) would hum with talk of “Pilot season.” Cell numbers were exchanged. A pretty mother, leaning on the rolled-down window of a dad in an Escalade, was netting herself an audition. Those thin, gawky fathers who hauled leather briefcases would pull out from them piles of pages—a script!—to hand it into the waiting tote of another dad, who, bored during pickup, would page through the thing, smiling through his teeth.
Parental gossip, as usual, surrounded the fables they devised for their children: Oren is doing so well in English that his teacher recommended, god forbid!, he skip a level; The other day a stranger—a total stranger!—asked Celia if she would consider a modeling career. But, as though aware of the cliché nature of their own dialogue, talk would veer quickly away. Conversations ran to the fables of the worlds they were busily creating: I don’t know how they’re going to kill of Gwen’s character—she won’t stand for it; If Marissa marries him in the season Degan’s writing right now, ratings will spike and crawl down; or, I heard they built three submarines out in Mexico. A hatchet job.
Some seasons—especially during the summer and early Fall, when the snow had cleared from Toronto’s streets—parents would be out of the picture entirely. At the orphanage-sized homes of friends, parties would come without supervision, watched only by maids long ago bought into the childrens’ alliance. Children not of the Studio system, The Oswegos were triply cursed: Cursed with parents who were nearly always home, cursed with questions they would always have—What’s a dolly, Daddy?—and cursed with not knowing the importance, the absolute importance, of Denton Swire in the fourth grade whose mother was not a recognizable Gwen, let’s say, but ran Fox Dreamworks Pictures. That was why Greg Marcel was friends with the brash loser, that was why Mitzy had to spend so many weekends at his house, that was why, in Science Lab, though Swire had dropped the test-tube thus ruining the experiment, Paul Dine had provided him with his good results.
Still, even among those children of stars whose faces recalled a mash-up of their recognizable parents, in a school of 512, the Oswegos netted stares. Jareth, the middle child, had followed his eldest sister, Leona, and was trailed, one grade below, by the youngest, Celia, 14 going on 15. 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 when faced with the two that could not live up—nor the reputation of Celia, whose looks had landed her on both the pages of C-list teen fashion mags and on the tongues of all but the shyest boys in Jareth’s grade (11th). No, the reputation to plague Jareth and all three Oswegos at high-school, in their twenties, and in 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; as ingrained into their identity as the dots inscribed on dies.
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. Zed’s VH1 backstory—his rise into fame due to cokehead bassist and high-school pal Rick Moldin, the ensuing tours with their group The Gadabouts, and his gradual fadeout to domesticity in a mansion in the Malibu hills which he shared with his wife, a groupie he’d met when she was 18—was known to the school’s population who could trace, in the face of his dark-haired son, the father’s youthful moonface.
Jareth’s pale, soft face was round as a platter, cut into with the hard lines of a slim nose, thin lips, and the tired trails which drained from the tear ducts down into the corners of Jareth’s mouth, which hid a set of too-small, rounded teeth so perfectly aligned as to be the reason, Margerie Durnham told her friends at a sleepover in the tenth grade, why she loved him. Though Jareth would never know it to be love, he would sense Margerie’s strangeness. He took her quiet stares not as affection but as that other terrible hunger he had become more adept at recognizing—a starvation for fame, or for the proximity to it, which burned in the guts of even the best at pretending not to care.
Having a teenage rebel for a father bestowed the Oswegos with an innate reputation--they were not to be messed with. So how difficult it had been for the three of them to rebel.
It started with Leona, the eldest, who having graduated just two years prior, had been pointedly clever, industrially studious, and had made it a point not to be associated with a father who at age 20, had dropped out of a small community college on the Eastern shore of Massachusetts to follow a “dream” in the form of a choking, sputtering van driven on a cross-country tour. She was—and oh, what an ungodly word it was in the Oswego household—practical.
Leona was the type of messy-haired, uncaring girl who excelled at every academic. She was rude and she was brilliant. But it was in music class that she gleaned her first “F.” When handed a recorder she failed, purposefully, to elicit the correct sound. Her own notes, ricocheting down the concrete halls, strained like the peachy wail of a cat. A stab at chorus fared no better. She was a low mutterer, who hid in the third row behind Mario D’Ambreezio (the only boy, who if it were not for our contemporary age’s acquiescenes, would have been turned a castrati). When called out by the frustrated conductor who worried the Oswego girl did not truly know the lyrics, Leona was asked to solo her rendition. The correct lyrics to “Little Drummer Boy” were not “Watermelon watermelon Scooby dooby doo." The following quarter, she was not asked to return to chorus and so spent the period (8th) in total segregation. Forced to sign up for the only elective that still had open slots, "Winter Sports," she sat out on pick-up basketball games, coloring the thick wedge of her sneakers with the white-board erase pen she'd been given to keep the score.
To Jareth, Leona’s rebellion was a success; she had been the only Oswego to flee the scene.
Harvard had begun as a name only to be whispered. The symbol of all stratifications, all achievements, all placeholders Zed Oswego, in his throaty dinner lectures against “our country,” which to him, existed either in the Midwest, where the fat people they saw at Disneyland were from, or in the “hallowed halls of Harvard,” where bowtied scrooges “made up numbers.” The Gadabouts, despite their origins twenty minutes North of Cambridge, had played at Harvard Yard only once, playing a protest concert against Vietnam that had gone down in the books because of its headlining act, SOME FAMOUS PROTESTOR, who, Zed Oswego had never personally met, despite his stories to the contrary. Harvard, as an institution to be a part of and not to protest, was the ultimate rebellion.
The acceptance letter came in a thick brown envelope. In the recently remodeled kitchen of the Oswego home, on the marble island standing solitary in the sea of tile, Leona read the Congratulations that would island her forever from the family she felt weighted by. She only needed, she told her parents at dinner, a signature. Maude Oswego, though she would not admit it to her husband, was somewhat proud, and called up a “Celebration Dinner” (a pseudo-Thanksgiving, imported via a Deli on 3rd street) which her father endured, spearing peas with a single fork tine.
This fall, that was where Leona was— sitting around on lawns raked of reddish leaves that fell from the trees, or on wooden chairs pulled around circular tables, where she talked about philosophers, or on futons, alongside black and white and asian students, smoking hashish from gleaming hookahs and talking about how, even if they turned out to be Shakespeare, the earth would fall into the sun and it would all be meaningless. At least, that was how Jareth Oswego understood her life. She had been away now for a year and a half, having spent the intervening summer interning at a magazine in New York, whose name he had never heard of. Despite how close they had been in high school, she rarely wrote. This fall she would come home for her first Thanksgiving—four days which he looked forward to as a clean, crisp break from the soddy mess of fall spreading before him otherwise without interruption.
Labelled in Waeburn’s hallways as a stoner, Jareth hid beneath overlarge ponchos sold on the sidewalks in front of East LA’s unobscured headshops by sad-eyed Guatemalan immigrants. During lunch, he’d head over with Bresios and two or three others—sometimes Paul Dine would be there with Mitzy Hanks, if they weren’t making out in the dark of a music practice room, or there’d be Leg Rouland carrying the bummy prop of a skateboard (named by his Hollywood parents, “Legend,” a title he’d tried to shed) and they’d meet at the strip of Eucalyptus trees that edged the student parking lot, where they’d slump down, backs to the wall, to sit in the pile of dry leaves. Despite the pastoral setting, the place was called by everyone (including teachers) the “alley”—a reference to the places of deviation they had learned about in movies, where in small towns with rigid puritan standards, the grace of civil engineers had gifted teenagers the unlit backroads.
This smoking of Jareth’s was a pittance of a rebellion, spoil-sport really. His father, with a bowl of his own in the third drawer beneath his computer in the garage studio, couldn’t be said to care. The most his mother had ever said was, when finding in his sock drawer, his pipe (a cheesy cat-faced thing he’d paid too much for when he was 13 and didn’t know better), “You know this kills brain cells?” What a cliché, he had thought, as she had simply placed the embarrassment on the top of his dresser to stare at him with its gummy, muck-filled eyes.
Jareth didn’t turn to pot in the rebellious sense that maybe the Dawsons of TV turned to pot. It wasn’t only a rebellion but yes, an escape. In the sense that Leona paged through the Ivy League brochures hoarded in the folder labeled “Pre Calc” (an assurance that her parents would never open it), Jareth found life on the side-lines (the “alleys,” the headshops, the poolside chaises of spoiled-rich Legend) to be an escape.
Because really, anyone born into the name of Oswego needed this; this forgetting.
For Leona, escape came in dreams of stratospheric lecture halls where, raising a hand and standing to the teacher’s call, she’d answer with a rebuttal well-spoken enough to move the classroom to tears, a standing ovation, maybe, or just a glance from a scrubby man in a tweed jackets, its elbows worn, whose soft, surprised glance would seem to say—I never thought I’d find someone who understood. Jareth understood this in his sister and she understood, in him, the cat-eyed pipe and his bummer friends, that girl Mitzy with the raggled hair, whose measly crush on Jared was enough to launch the boy into hour long daydreams.
But to Leona and Jared, Celia was unexplainable; divinely strange as an immaculate conception. The thing—almost the entire problem, the entire distance between them—was that she was born extra-terrestrially, numbingly beautiful. Her elder siblings had inherited the face of a malcontent rocker from their father, but Celia’s mother, a former groupie, would say often that Celia came from her. Still, she had never looked like this—long limbed, tanned by the LA sun, with blonde hair from god-knows-where (the French grandmother no one had ever met, she posited) and the peaked, upturned nose of a Norwegian elf.
In the Oswego house, Celia was a gazelle trapped in a WalMart. Late night conversations between the parents, held over pillows, would concern how they could have produced such a creature. In the kitchen, dining-room, living-rooms and basement—even out by the chaises that lined the lima-bean shaped pool, where she sprawled over magazines whose inserts fluttered away in the heady breezes—Celia’s beauty was either adamantly ignored, unacknowledged, or mocked as distastefully conventional. To see her prancing about the house, Leona would chide, “Looking for your whitening powder?” Even their mother, exhausted by the more forgetful, irresponsible daughter sweeping under the couches for a missing sock or cellphone, “Sweetie, the mirror is over there.” Bursting with love, Zed would call her into his studio to deliver a drink or a snack with the mocking, disturbing tone of a horror-show Humbert Humbert: “My fawn?”
It was a farce carried out not in cruelty, but in sincerity, out of love, as a way to temper the girl. For the Oswegos understood that in West LA, where girls like Celia were instantly accepted, she had been given no reason to rebel, to forge a personality. She was born into a life without suffering. And so, the Oswegos understood without saying, they must manufacture it. At home, then, Celia’s beauty was a farce, because in the sun-drenched halls of Waeburn, it was everything.

"He was a gentleman with red whiskers who always went first through a doorway."

2008-05-24T11:52:00.000-07:00

Also--to follow up on my question, "Why write in China, if not about China?" Everyone here is always saying, 'Oh, by living in China you're learning so much'--First of all, that's true in the way in which it was meant, but second of all, it's true in the opposite way. Living here affords me time to not work which affords me time to teach myself. The taking on of this immense task has me TEACHING myself in a totally productive way, re-reading books that "work" in a way I've never read books before. No longer reading for sentences (as I did in my teens when learning to write) or for sociological truths (freshman, sophomore) or for author's intentions and grand human truths (junior, senior). I am now reading to steal mechanics: How did they transition, pass time, why did I care what happened next? How did they "get in" a character?

"Ford Madox Ford writes wonderfully about getting a character up and running - what he calls "getting a character in". Ford and his friend Joseph Conrad loved a sentence from a Guy de Maupassant story: "He was a gentleman with red whiskers who always went first through a doorway." Ford comments: "that gentleman is so sufficiently got in that you need no more of him to understand how he will act. He has been 'got in' and can get to work at once." -- James Wood writing something something something

In journalism I have learned to spot "getting a character in" as Leiby's "writing with muscle." I think I need to re-attack the novel with 'muscle.' Anyway, I'm learning a lot by myself right now. And it has nothing to do with China.

2008-05-24T11:30:00.000-07:00

From a Slate review of "Living Lohan," (E!, Mondays at 10:30 p.m. ET):

"Living Lohan, however, is not just a symptom of cultural decay but an active agent of it, commodifying the very youth and soul of Ali Lohan—younger sister of poor little Lindsay."

From a NYT article on the bad dialogue great plotting glossy "Emperor's Children" by Yale-educated Messud (and reviewed by Yalie Megan O'Rourke):

"Although none of her classmates appear as characters in the novel, Yale did provide inspiration. There she met peers who had grown up attending dinners and cocktail parties with their literary parents and friends, “worlds that were to me only mythical,” she said.

“The certainty that that gave people was novel and fascinating, and I think initially wholly enviable,” she continued. “And then over time it became clear that it involved struggles and burdens of a different kind.” Recognition of those burdens, she said, provided the seed of the complicated relationship between Marina and her father.
....
Ms. Messud does not shy away from portraying unappealing sides of her characters. Susan Taylor, a bookseller at Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza in Albany and Market Block Books in Troy, N.Y., said that although she enjoyed “The Emperor’s Children” and was intrigued by its characters, she “didn’t want to be any of them or go out and have a cup of coffee with any one of them.”

She added, “I thought, ‘You have every privilege in the world and you still can’t figure out how to make your life work.’ ”

HOW TO MAKE MY LIFE WORK
1. Why am I in China
2. Why am I in China
3. Why am I in China
It's economically feasible to be writing a novel here, sure, but there could not be a place more fucking distracting. My one hour of CHinese class per day is really more like four if you count transportation and study time, and then I've got my social life to live up to which is like, a silly seven hours per day of nothing, and then I've got my TV watching which, given the content of the novel, feels sometimes like homework. Oh my god, and then you've got Gossip Girl which is like, a solid four hours per day. So

I googled "writer's colony" for fifteen minutes today, switched to "fellowship" then googled people who had either broken my heart or whose heart I had broken, to make sure they weren't more successful than me yet. (Read: Hadn't published shit outside of their places of summer internment.) Penultimate thoughts: I'm more ambitious than I pretend to myself to be. Ultimate thoughts: I really think "The Emperor's Children" is problematic and I need to write about it. It's a novel that feels filled in. It's... Okay

When you go into an art gallery and you see an aesthetically beautiful painting of something which could have been captured in either
a. a photograph
b. a mutated digitized mucked up photograph
You're taught to ask why, specifically, is this a painting? Why is this story being told in this way? If it could have been made in ANY other way than painted on canvas, the day's criticism would have it that it should have been. The difficulty of answering this question is why so many, over the decades, have declared the form dead. Now it can be answered with the retort: "It could not have been conveyed in any other way." Obvious retorts are Richters that play on the form of the photograph or of the squeeged paint itself, Sol LeWitts that are staged, or even simple moody Tuymans and glooging glugging Neo Rauschs whose visual language anyway, evokes ad campaigns from the 50s and 60s.

Now lets jump to what Alice Adams said about writing fiction, I think it was her at least... Saying that a novel can never be summarized because... Because a "story" is precisely that which takes a "story" to tell; It simply unfolds as is without extra fabric.

The Emperor's Children is all extra fabric. It reads like a long outline, meticulously plotted which has been filled in with mushily readable writing. It's akin to a needlepoint. I could have seen the image in the needlepoint without all the thread, if I had simply looked at the pattern.

Clearly the same is not true in oh, on one end of the spectrum a Pynchon novel--the language is the plot, the images make the plot whirl--or on the other end of the spectrum, a William Maxwell short story--where the leaden language without hyper hijinks creates its own mood and where outline would read as story-less, without suspense. Messud has basically written the plot of a teledrama and filled it in with palatable writing. I kept thinking the whole time of what Ian Frazier said at some talk--when you have a "crazy" impulse in your writing, go with it. Messud NEVER went with it. Sure there are "crazy" descriptions but they're tempered tempered tempered and boring boring boring.

That was an insane rant.

I wish Bootie Tubb wasn't such an obvious Stevie stand-in (from Conrad's "Secret Agent") because that's the trick IIIIII WANTED TO STEAL, having Jareth's drawing at the opening of my novel (all of its tricky squares) stand in for Stevie's whorls:

"Mr Verloc, getting off the sofa with ponderous reluctance, opened
the door leading into the kitchen to get more air, and thus
disclosed the innocent Stevie, seated very good and quiet at a deal
table, drawing circles, circles, circles; innumerable circles,
concentric, eccentric; a coruscating whirl of circles that by their
tangled multitude of repeated curves, uniformity of form, and
confusion of intersecting lines suggested a rendering of cosmic
chaos, the symbolism of a mad art attempting the inconceivable.
The artist never turned his head; and in all his soul's application
to the task his back quivered, his thin neck, sunk into a deep
hollow at the base of the skull, seemed ready to snap."

I clearly need to have Gloria see that.

2008-05-20T21:37:00.000-07:00

Chapter 1

A light rectangle in a dark room.
Of all the children spread before Gloria—they called their teachers by their first names—it had to be the Oswego boy whose response to the assignment--Draw your house--had turned out, at least as best she could see, to be undrawn, blank. And oh, he’d been given nearly twenty minutes. You were always disappointed. From the child sized bucket seat in which she had pooled herself, seeing the page through the fan slowly dicing the LA heatwave, it was a blind eye, blinking madly.
Seated at the boy’s elbow, Evan Bresios, a fellow fourth-grader, could see better. On the whole--yes, 90% of the page was blank, but in the center two slim rectangles drawn in the faint, bluish graphite of a mechanical pencil floated like snow angels. Onto their lengths were tacked 6 cubes per side so that—if you were counting—in total the page held 24 squares, some of which had been labeled in the crabbed, boyish handwriting of Jareth Oswego, who now stared not at his oeuvre but out the window, which faced not to the Malibu surf but to the hills, dry with scrubbrush, tossed toys, a single Nerf gun whose neon had been bleached by the sun to bone white. It appeared that he thought he was done. For the assignment—Draw your home—such a composition was as unrevealing as an ice-cube tray; empty boxes surrounding cornrows of dead-air.
It was the best Jareth could do.
In the house in which he had grown 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 that 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 tub, 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 desired to reference; More than one teacher had written him off as a “space cadet” (a trill which evolved, in his teens, into “pothead”). Years later, onto his third lover by now, Jareth Oswego 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, he would note how two steps ahead of a meter maid, a civilian in cargo shorts was depositing quarters—an act of saintliness that were it not for his gaze would have died unobserved. And he kept watching, half testing himself, half attempting to prove something he knew not to be true—that he was a keen observer of the world. He catalogued the details—the city employee’s standard issue black Reebok’s, the good samaritan’s car keys which she held in her right hand by grace of a neon pink keychain (a bottle opener shaped like a shark). But he would not notice that across the restaurant, a family had entered—their faces vaguely familiar, like the faces of statues bathed in 100 years of rain. When they waved at him—the child had waved, smiling—he found he could not remember who they were.
These were the sorts of things Jareth Oswego was expected to know but that he did not. Things like the names of old friends (the family had run his mother’s yoga studio), the feelings of his lover (she had left him for his inability to be kind to her in the small ways that she was kind to him), and the layout of his house (gargantuan).
And so, when asked in the third grade (maybe it had been the fourth? He could not remember) to sketch the house where he lived—Jareth Oswego had disappointed everyone, not least of all his teacher.
A twenty-something East Coast transplant, a bored nail-biter who ensconced herself in cable-knit sweaters, Gloria had been drawn to the West by wishy-washy ideas of fame that she was just beginning to give up on. No great beauty, she hadn’t tried for acting, instead attempting a screenplay to which she had never actually devoted herself, thinking that at any time—halfway through—some agent seeing her type in a coffee shop would approach and strike up a conversation. Her script centered on a farmer who, discovering a pot of gold…and that was where it had ended, 24 pages later, on the line of dialogue delivered between his two quibbling teenaged daughters, “Let’s go to the mall!” As only the starving can be, Gloria was hungry. Overlooked in her youth—the middle child, the least beautiful—she sought the opposite. But when she made it out here, she was soothed somewhat by fame’s proximity. There was a neighboring farmer in her plot outline who, by grace of the gold finding, finds love in the form of the prospector he harbours.
And she could get even closer, she thought. The idea had hatched that morning, waiting for the bus because—she would explain later, at a dinner party, to her friends, she had felt sorry for a man wearing a sandwich board. The board read “Star Maps,” and, feeling “charitable,” she said, at just that moment, she handed him ten dollars. The bus having come just then, the wrapped map was shoved into her purse—which she happened to still be carrying at the dinner party where she relayed the story. Her host, a college friend, cleared the pits of the olives they had sucked, earlier, from the living room table. Together they unfolded the map. As his pointer finger sketched a snail-trail along the PCH up to Sunset, Tacoma, the 405tk split, and Gloria sat back—shocked 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 read out the names: “Bresios. 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,” the host, Brian, had said, smirking. “How’d ya like that.” Patrick had been serious in college, had majored in Economics, had driven out to LA only to follow a girlfriend who left him for an “LA loser.” Brian was no fanboy, no starfucker, (in local parlance) and yet it was Patrick who was the one who had asked, “What’s he like?”
What are they like. Like—Her description had been hasty—they’re perfectly normal, they’re the same, they’re picked up in over-large cars, they, they, they they learn Spanish from their maids, they don’t know (she remembered a clean-up session after a ceramics demonstration given by a volunteer mother) they don’t know how to properly use a sponge. (It must be squeezed of the dirty water before it can be used again.)
She provided the relevant details, falsified fables, all the while thinking of how she herself was not interested in what they were like. They were children. She was interested in where they lived.
Born back somewhere near oh, god, Milwaukee, she’d found escape as so many children have since the advent of the television. When she had stayed home sick (an excuse she probably feigned) she watched Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and later, sucked at the straws of her sodas while consuming whole marathons of Cribs, the MTV show where musicians—mostly rappers—took cameramen on private tours of their barely-furnished homes, focusing on their bedrooms (“Where the magic happens”) and on collections of souped-up sportscars they kept glistening and waxed. One show, a high-school drama, intrigued her in even its establishing shots, as the camera dollyed to a sedan, probably, traced a beachfront highway and glanced up at the hills, at the houses that grew up from the brush like teeth from the flesh of the mouth.
Gloria had ended up in La Brea--inland, five miles off the beach, where the smog hung low and dense and where the cigarette smoke of an unemployed roomate clogged the old drapes, lending her whole life a fogginess that lifted only when the bus reached the PCH with its extended, unfettered views of the sea on the left and, on the right, the pseudo-Mediterranean villas angled toward the oceans like racing sailboats on the same tack. Her heart lurched to see the houses. Though the LA she had found here was no more glamorous than the clapboard she had come from, Gloria understood that it was in these mansions that fame had hidden itself, furrowing into chenille carpets, crawling into the potted aloe veras and rising, inflamed, phoenix-like into the eyes of fame’s offspring—the unremarkable children who stared back at her from across their desks.
If she could ask them to describe their houses, she thought, the effect would be her own, personalized Cribs, smacking of an authenticity heretofore unseen. That night on the way back from Brian’s, the windows of the bus, lit from within by the green, lavatorial light, had turned to mirrors. To see out, Gloria had to put her face right to the glass. Islanded in total darkness, the small amber squares of lighted windows were the only things visible—rectangles of warmth in floating darkness. How like a constellation it was, she thought, how aptly named. You could learn to navigate if you could only learn their names.

Of all the children, Jareth Oswego had to be the one with a blank page. Evan Bresios—looking on—gave a sneer, then turned his nose down to his own paper, which he was vehemently “coloring in” a deep cobalt.
“That’s a strange color for a basement,” Gloria had said, in passing. “Is that a pool?”
These sort of questions tested Bresios’ patience—at base he was an artist, misunderstood. The pool, he explained, using a stubby finger to walk her through it, was outside, on the deck that faced the ocean (such a location allowed for an “infinity effect”). This indigo swathe was above his father’s screening room, made to stand in for what he was now labeling neatly, the “artificial sky.” There were shooting stars, and a switch at the side of the room could change the “time” to daybreak, evening. Of course. Gloria should have known. Walking from the basement up and out to a stoop flanked by two aloe vera plants sagging in their terra cotta pots, stood the Bresios father himself, burly and bowtied, his remaining family members standing shoulder-to-shoulder by his side with the ease of manner of a prison lineup. Beneath him, a placard, “Jimmy Bresios, President of ABC-TV Development Division! in the unassuming manner that below the busts of Caesars, Gloria had noted how sculptors simply allotted a number. These children—these strange children. Having been given everything, they did not yet know to hide it away.
So what a disappointment to see the Oswego boy’s sketch. She leaned over Jareth now. Yes, there 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 that, with the crayon labeled “Azure” he spent the rest of the period coloring.
When Jareth 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 with pneumonia for those two weeks when he was five, 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 ran her manicured finger down one of Jareth’s ice-cube trays.
“And where’s your room?” she asked, her voice weedy, prying.
“I haven’t fit it in yet.” 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 silk of luffing oversized cargo pants), and running into Bresios, now prone to hide his chiding eyes behind the mirrored shades of Aviator sunglasses.
That teacher, whoever she was, had it been Gloria? had said, “Well I guess it’s alright” or some other apology for a cutting remark he had, by now, forgotten. And then she had said, “You’re the only one here who seems to know you don’t have to show anything you don’t want to.”
It wasn’t, Jareth had wanted to say, that he didn’t want to share the life he saw, it was that he didn’t seem to see it himself. He would like, he thought then, for her to come over and sitting in the corner—the drawing pad on her lap, draw it. He would like her to show him what she saw.

At age 16, Jareth Oswego, despite all the family’s grumblings against the institution, was still at Waeburn. It had seemed to the Oswegos, when they first enrolled Leona, to be an obvious choice—and the rest of the kids simply stuck to the regimen. At Waeburn Pluralistic School, classes were capped at fifteen, students were not allowed to use coloring books (they inhibited creative thinking), and the dining-hall cuisine, engineered 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 was connected over 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 your legs if you sat down Indian-style, or had been left to the Eucalyptus trees whose dusty leaves clogged the gutters, changing the rhythm of the rain so that over some of the halls, water would fall in unobfuscated sheets.
It did not rain often. The weather was dry, and the neon squirt guns of the kindergartners, left out for a week, would be brought in a different, lighter shade, having been 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 the youngest, Celia, 14 going on 15. 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 when faced with the two who could not live up—nor the reputation of Celia, whose good looks had landed her on both the pages of C-list teen fashion mags and on the tongues of all but the shyest boys in Jareth’s grade (11th). No, the reputation to plague the three Oswegos—at high-school, in their twenties, and in 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, as ingrained into their identity as numbers planted into the ivory faces of dies.
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. Zed’s VH1 backstory—his rise into fame due to cokehead bassist and high-school pal Rick Moldin, the ensuing tours with their group The Gadabouts, and his gradual fadeout to domesticity in a mansion in the Malibu hills which he shared with his groupie wife—was known to the school’s population who could trace, in the face of his dark-haired son, the father’s youthful moonface. Jareth’s pale face was round as an apple, cut into with the hard lines of a slim nose, thin lips, and the tired trails which drained from the tear ducts down into the corners of Jareth’s mouth, which hid a set of too-small, rounded teeth so perfectly aligned as to be the reason, Margerie Durnham told her friends at a sleepover in the tenth grade, as to be the reason that she loved him. Though Jareth would never know it to be love, he would sense Margerie’s strangeness. He took her quiet stares not as affection but as that other terrible hunger he had become more adept at recognizing—a starvation for fame, or for the proximity to it, which burned in the guts of even the best at pretending not to care.
Having a teenage rebel for a father bestowed the Oswegos with an innate reputation--they were not to be messed with. So how difficult it had been for the three of them to rebel.
It started with Leona, the eldest, who having graduated just two years prior, had been pointedly clever, industrially studious, and had made it a point not to be associated with a father who at age 20, had dropped out of a small community college on the Eastern shore of Massachusetts to follow a “dream” in the form of a choking, sputtering van driven on a cross-country tour.
Though in every academic Leona Oswego excelled, it was in music class that she gleaned her first “F.” When handed a recorder she failed, purposefully, to elicit the correct sound. Her own notes, ricocheting down the shining linoleum halls, sounded like the strained, peachy notes of a cat. A stab at chorus fared no better. She was a low mutterer, hidden in the third row behind Mario D’Ambreezio (the only boy). When called out by the frustrated conductor, worried she did not truly know the lyrics, she was asked to solo her rendition. The correct lyrics to “Little Drummer Boy,” she would learn, were not “Watermelon watermelon Scooby dooby doo" The following quarter, she was not asked to return. She spent the period (8th) in total segregation in the elective "Winter Sports," where she sat out on pick-up basketball games, coloring the thick wedge of her sneakers with the white-board erase pen she'd been given to keep the score.
To Jareth, Leona’s rebellion could be measured as a success in that she had been the only Oswego to flee the scene. Harvard had started as a name only to be whispered, a rebellion in the utmost—the symbol of all stratifications, all achievements, all placeholders that Zed Oswego, in his throaty dinner lectures, had attempted to rail against. The acceptance letter came in a thick brown envelope, and in the recently remodeled kitchen of the Oswego home, on the marble island standing solitary in the sea of tile, Leona read the Congratulations that would island her forever from the family she felt weighted by. That night, at a family “celebration” dinner, her father grumbled, spearing peas with a single fork tine.
This fall, that was where Leona was—Harvard—where lawns were raked of reddish leaves that fell from the trees, where kids sat around circular tables naming philosophers, where black and white and asian students sat forward on the edges of futons, smoking hashish from gleaming hookahs. At least, that was the part of the dream that Jareth Oswego understood. His sister had been away now for a year and a half. She’d spent the intervening summer interning at a magazine in New York, whose name he had never before heard, and despite how close they had been in high school, she rarely wrote. This fall she would come home for her first Thanksgiving—an ample four days which he looked forward to, the soddy mess of fall spreading before him otherwise without interruption.
Labelled in Waeburn’s high school hallways as a stoner, Jareth hid beneath overlarge ponchos bought on the sidewalks in front of East LA’s unobscured headshops. During lunch, he’d head over with Bresios and two or three others—sometimes Paul Dine would be there with Mitzy Hanks, if they weren’t making out in the dark of a music practice room, or there’d be Leg Rouland carrying a skateboard (named Legend by his Hollywood parents, a name he’d tried to shed) and they’d meet at the strip of Eucalyptus trees that edged the student parking lot, where they’d slump down, backs to the wall, to sit in the dry pile of leaves. Despite the pastoral setting the place was called by everyone (including teachers) the “alley”—a reference to the places of deviation they had learned about in movies, where in small towns with rigid puritan standards, teenagers were forced by civil engineers to the unlit backroads.
This smoking of Jareth’s was a pittance of a rebellion. His father, really, couldn’t be said to care. The most his mother had ever said was, when finding in his sock drawer, his bowl (a glass thing he’d paid too much for when he was 13 and didn’t know better), “You know this kills brain cells?” What a cliché, what spoilsport. Anyway, it wasn’t really rebellion that drew Jareth to the stuff, he understood. It was simply that anyone born into the name Oswego desired escape. And that for Leona, escape came in her dreams of the stratospheric lecture halls at Harvard where, raising a hand and standing to the teacher’s call, she’d answer with a rebuttal well-spoken enough to move the classroom to tears, a standing ovation, maybe, or maybe just a glance from a scrubby man in a tweed jackets, its elbows worn, whose soft, surprised glance would seem to say—I never thought I’d find someone who understood. Jareth understood his older sister.

But then there was Celia. To Leona and Jared, their younger sister’s rebellion was unexplainable; divinely strange as an immaculate conception. The first thing was that she was beautiful—extra-terrestrially, numbingly so. In the Oswego house, Celia was a gazelle trapped in a WalMart. Late night conversations between the parents, held over pillows, would concern how they could have produced such a creature. In the kitchen, dining-room, living-rooms and basement of the Oswego house—even out by the chaises that lined the lima-bean shaped pool—Celia’s beauty was either adamantly ignored, unacknowledged, or mocked as distastefully conventional. To see her prancing about the house, Leona would have been the one to chide, “Looking for your whitening powder?” Even their mother would say, “Sweetie, the mirror is over there” and their father, lovingly, would call her, in the mocking, disturbing tone of a horror-show Humbert Humbert, “My fawn.”
At home, Celia’s beauty was a farce. In the open halls of Waeburn, it was everything.

It is an afternoon back in September, or October maybe, when Jareth, aged 16 and one half, is out in the “alley” with Evan Bresios. The smoke has cleared their lungs and the two of them, sitting cross-legged in the moldering Eucalyptus leaves, are quiet—nothing left to say but to watch the action in the parking lot. Gloria, the fourth grade teacher, can be seen behind the dusty windshield of her Honda, sitting in the frontseat paying attention only to her sandwich, whose crunching wrapper is unhearable through the glass. Barker, the principal, only about 100 yards away, is whispering into his cellphone—probably, Bresios says, a call to a mistress. Jareth snorts a giggle. Either way, they’re both too absorbed to notice anything, or perhaps it’s an adamant unnoticing, a desire not to be the one to intervene. In either case, if they’d wanted to suspend kids like Jareth or Evan, they could have done it years ago—probably at the camping trip on Catalina when, accused of offering pot to a younger girl who’d gone running to the authorities, they’d endured a “talking to” offered by a teacher sitting on a log bench, and rebutted by simply denying. In the end, it was probably their parents that saved them. Kids like Evan and Jareth were assets to the school’s endowment; to kick them out wouldn’t be good business. So it’s Jareth’s privilege that’s brought him to the edge of this lot, in a desire to escape it, just as it’s Jareth’s privilege that allows his rebellion to sustain. He chooses not to think about the second part, especially not now, as the smoke hits his lungs, washing the world in an invisible fog, in which things move slowly enough to catch them.
And then in the parking lot, there’s Mitzy, moving too quickly, tugging Paul Dine whose worn flannel is tied around her waist in a loose knot. The two have probably been out in a music room, fucking.
“Is your stuff gone?” Mitzy says, looking at the red-eyed boys, eyeing the imprint of the glass bowl in the exterior pocket of Jareth’s cargo pants.
“We just cashed it,” Bresios says, nodding. It’s okay though, Dine says, he’s got more out in his car, and so Mitzy sits down next to Bresios, her back to the cool wall, as she waits for Dine to come back from his car—a 1957 Chevy xxx with a fold-down back seat and an interior of red velour, very retro. He keeps his stuff in not the glove compartment (too easy to find) but in the fold-out drink holder, which when not folded out provides a neat slot next to the radio. Dine, the son of single-mother Tracey Dine, a character actress in A-list films that mostly take place in the forties and fifties (she’s got that look about her, that hard-set grimace, that hair that fluffs around the head like a whirling storm) has a vaguely retro look about everything he does, which is why, Mitzy likes him. He seems not to belong not only to Waeburn, with its stomach-clenching 60’s architecture of social oppression. The three of them actually sit there not talking; Mitzy’s thankful for that, and the two stoned boys are just watching the pot hit them.
When Dine gets back, they smoke his stuff, Jareth and Evan yes, would like a little more, and the converation turns to the suck-i-tude of school in general, and in what had elapsed earlier that day. Mitzy saw the horror-show that was second-period debate—the rhetoric assignment the rest of the school’s been buzzing about—and Dine, who’d seen it too, fills in the details.
“It was harrowing,” Dine starts. “First rate classic.”
“It was your sister, man,” Bresios says, elbowing Jareth, who’s suddenly all ears, attempting to grab his eyes off the glare starring out from the waxed cars catching the sun in the parking lot. “What? Celia? What’d she do?”
A giggling silence. “I can’t believe you don’t know about this,” or some other equally dismissive comment from Dine.
“She never does anything,” Jareth says. “What is it.”
“Oh is this the thing with Celia in Debate?” Mitzy asks. She’s the type of tomboy who likes to play that she’s above this gossip. It’s funny here, to her, to hear the boys gossip in the way she pretends to hate the girls for doing. At home she’s got four sisters, which is why, she knows, she needed this niche.
“What is it?” Jareth needs to know. “You know about this—“ he says, accusing Bresios of not spilling earlier.
“I heard about it from Luckor,” Dine explains. Luckor is the dark, gossipy Russian boy always trying to get in on the ins with the smokers. He has third period with Bresios, ceramics, and while the two are spinning pots they always talk, though Bresios will claim not to enjoy it. “So she’s in Debate, right? What’s the topic again.”
“The topic,” Bresios says, now taking on the role of teller, “was International Aid.”
“Right,” Dine says, “The topic was international aid. Like, what countries to give your money to if you have extra money. So, like, you’re supposed to want to give it to the poorest countries that like, with the money, would be able to help themselves instead of just like, needing you later for more money or some other stuff.”
“You don’t teach a man to fish,” Mitzy says. “Or wait, the opposite.”
“You do teach a man to fish; you don’t give him a pole,” says Bresios.
“Right.” Mitzy says.
“GET BACK TO IT,” Jareth’s nearly screaming.
They look out at the lot. “Quiet down man,” Dine says, before restarting.
“So there’s Celia in the front of the class and this is the topic. The guy before her, Luckor says, gave some speech where he was like, ‘We should give the money to England because if we do, since their government is more competent than ours, they could like, help the countries that really need helping and we wouldn’t have to think about it anymomre. It’s like, he wants to outsource competency or some shit.’”
“Get to Celia,” Jareth says.
“Celia has the rebuttal,” Dine says. “She says you can’t give to the rich. Because, the rich, by being rich, have no idea what to do with money.”
“True,” Mitzy says, leaning over him toward the curb, to ash a cigarette he hadn’t seen her light.
“So old Rube” (Rube is the teacher of the 10th Grade Debate) “has been spending the past month telling them to use examples, like personal examples.”
“Oh god,” Jareth says, pressing his fingers to his eyes so he can see the red constellations of blood there, “I know where this is going.”
And still, Jareth listens. Like watching Nascar for the crashes. You have to know the terrible things in your own life, you want to hear them—the draw of the sublime, the draw of a cliff-edge off of which you hope you do not throw yourself. He listens to Dine recount, with fill-ins from Bresios, who’s heard it too, and Mitzy, whose accounts from the girl’s locker room after 3rd period Gym prove essential.
And Celia’s speech, as far as Jareth understands it, is like this:
SPEECH

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

2008-05-18T20:53:00.000-07:00

It's now at the point where it's just a story I know the whole of and I just have to tell it. I've reformed to that thing that Ellen Zweig told me where every morning you read what you did yesterday, fix it, and then write 3 hours past the fixing.

SOMEDAY THE BOY YOU GONNA LOVE IS GONNA CALL YOUR NAME 666

2008-05-18T07:54:00.001-07:00

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

Though he’d been given by now, oh, what was it?—about twenty minutes—the Oswego’s boy’s paper still appeared to be blank; a blind eye blinking upward toward the ceiling of the bungalow that housed the fourth and fifth grades, in which three hung fans slowly wheeled in an attempt to throw off the hot, dark heat of the Malibu afternoon. It was to these fans that the boy now looked and not to his page—dominated by two long rectangles onto whose lengths were tacked 6 cubes per side, drawn in the faint, bluish graphite of a mechanical pencil. In total, the page held 24 squares—an outpouring of artistic sentiment prompted by the assignment given to the class—Draw your house. Jareth Oswego’s final effort was as unrevealing as an ice-cube tray; empty boxes surrounding cornrows of dead-air.
In the house in which Jareth had grown 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 that 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 tub, 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” (a trill which evolved into a “pothead” in his teens). Years later, onto his third lover by now, Jareth Oswego 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, he would note how two steps ahead of a meter maid, a civilian in cargo shorts was depositing quarters—an act of saintliness that were it not for his gaze would have died unobserved. And he kept watching, half testing himself, half proving to himself something he knew not to be true—that he was a natural observer of the world. He catalogued the details—the city employee’s standard issue black Reebok’s, the good samaritan’s car keys, which she held in her right hand by grace of a zippo keychain. But he would not notice that across the restaurant, a family had entered—their faces vaguely familiar, like the faces of statues that have undergone 100 years of rain. When they waved at him—the child waved, smiling—he found he could not remember who they were.
These were the sorts of things Jareth Oswego was supposed to—was expected to know—but that he did not. Things like the feelings of his lover and the layout of his house. And so, when asked in the third grade (maybe it had been the fourth? He could not remember) to sketch the house where he lived—Jareth Oswego had disappointed everyone.
Perhaps most disappointed by the Oswego boy’s effort was Gloria—they called their teachers by their first name. A twenty-something East Coast transplant, a bored nail-biter with oily hair and ensconcing, all consuming cable-knit sweaters, teacher Gloria had been drawn to the West by wishy-washy ideas of fame she was just beginning to give up on. She was no great beauty. Her one attempt at screenwriting had ended at 24 pages—but it was not her own fame that she truly, hungrily sought. Instead, it was a sort of proximity to it.
Born back somewhere probably in oh, god, Milwaukee or in some little cold cabin near Lake Eerie, she’d found escape as so many children have ever since the advent of the heinous machine—in the false families of the colored box, who lived in houses that grew up from the Malibu hills like teeth from the flesh of the mouth. When she had stayed home sick (an excuse she probably feigned) she watched Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and later, sucked at the straws of her sodas while consuming whole marathons of Cribs, the MTV show where musicians—mostly rappers—took girls with names like Gloria and Emily and Nancy and Susan on private tours of their barely-furnished homes, which focused mainly on the collection of souped-up Hondas they kept glistening, waxed in their pseudo-Tudor garages.
Gloria didn’t even like cars. But the genre of TV show, the “sneak peak” had given her an idea one morning, as she stood beneath the rat-trap apartment she could afford inland, five miles off the beach, where the smog hung low and dense and where the cigarette smoke of her waitress roomate clogged the old drapes, lending her whole life there a sort of fogginess that wiped away when the bus reached the PCH with its extended, unfettered views of the sea on the left and, on the right, the pseudo-Mediterranean villas angled toward the oceans like sailboats on a tack. Her heart lurched to see the houses. Though the LA she had found here was no more glamorous than the cabin or the apartment or whatever hole she had come from, Gloria understood that it was in these mansions that fame had hidden itself, furrowing into chenille carpets, crawling into the potted aloe veras and rising, inflamed, phoenix-like into the eyes of their offspring, the unremarkable children who stared back at her from across the desks.
If she could ask them to describe their houses, she thought, it would be like her own, personalized version of Cribs, an authenticity heretofore unseen. The idea had hatched that morning, waiting for the bus because—she would explain later, at a dinner party, to her friends, she had bought “on a whim” a “Star Map” from a man wearing a sandwich board. She had given him ten dollars and, the bus having come just then, deposited the wrapped map in her purse—which she happened to still be carrying.
Her host, a college friend, had cleared the pits of the olives they had sucked, earlier, from the living room table and they unfolded the map. She removed 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 again 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. As her host’s pointer finger sketched a snail-trail along the PCH up to Sunset, Tacoma, the 405tk split, she read out the names: “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 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?”
What are they like, Gloria thought then. Her description had been hasty—they’re perfectly normal, they’re the same, they’re picked up in over-large cars, they, they, they they learn Spanish from their maids, they don’t know, she remembered a clean-up session after a ceramics demonstration given by a volunteer mother—they don’t know how to use a sponge properly. She provided the relevant details, falsified fables, all the while thinking of what she really wanted to see. She was not interested in what they were like; they were children. She was interested in where they lived.
That night, on the bus back, the windows of the bus turned to mirrors in the green, lavatorial light, she put her face right to the glass. With her nose smudging the window, she could see out, out into the lighted windows of the homes against the hills—islanded in the total darkness, small amber squares.

And now, Jareth Oswego, of all children, was the one with a blank page.
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” with a deep cobalt.
“That’s a strange color for a ceiling, Evan,” Gloria had said, in passing. “Is that a basement pool?”
These sort of questions tested Bresios’ patience—at base he was an artist, misunderstood. The pool, he explained, using a stubby finger to walk her through it, was outside, on the deck of teak that tacked toward the ocean. This indigo swathe was above his father’s screening room, made to stand in, for what he was now labeling neatly, the “artificial sky.” (There were shooting stars, and a switch at the side of the room could change the “time” to daybreak, evening.) Of course. She should have known.
The Bresios father himself could be found outside, burly and bowtied, flanked by an aloe vera plant on the stoop and his family, who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the ease of manner of a prison lineup. Beneath him, a placard, “Jimmy Bresios, President of ABC-TV Development Division. These children—Gloria thought, these strange children. Having been given everything, they did not yet know to hide it away.
So what a disappointment to see the Oswego boy’s sketch. She leaned over him now. Yes, there 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 Jareth 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 with pneumonia for those two weeks when he was five, 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 ran her manicured finger down one of Jareth’s ice-cube trays.
“And where’s your room?” she asked, her voice weedy, prying.
“I haven’t fit it in yet,” he 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, now prone to hide his chiding eyes behind the mirrored shades of Aviator sunglasses.
That teacher, whoever she was, had it been Gloria? had said, “Well I guess you don’t have to show anything you don’t want to.”
It wasn’t, Jareth had wanted to say, that he didn’t want to share the life he saw, it was that he didn’t seem to see it himself. He would like, he thought then, for her to come over and draw it, sitting in the corner—the drawing pad on her lap, like the court illustrators in the movies—and he would like her to show him what she saw.

At 16 and a half, 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, engineered 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 was connected over 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 your legs if you sat down Indian-style, or had been left to the Eucalyptus trees whose dusty leaves clogged the gutters, changing the rhythm of the rain so that over some of the halls, water would fall in unobfuscated sheets.
It did not rain often. The weather was dry, and the neon squirt guns of the kindergartners, left out for a week, would be brought in a different, lighter shade, having been 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 when faced with the younger Oswegos who could not live up; nor the reputation of the youngest, Celia, whose good looks had landed her on both the pages of B-list teen fashion mags and on the tongues of all but the shyest boys in Jareth’s grade (11th). No, the reputation to plague the three Oswegos—at high-school, in their twenties, in 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 faces of dies.
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. Having a teenage rebel for a father bestowed the Oswegos with an innate reputation--they were not to be messed with.

So how difficult it had been then, for the three of them to rebel.
It started with Leona, the eldest, who having graduated just two years prior, had been pointedly clever, industrially studious, and made it a point not to be associated with a father who at age 20, had dropped out of a small community college on the Eastern shore of Massachusetts to follow a “dream” in the form of a choking, sputtering van driven by a dude named Guy Moldin, a bassist who claimed their little band—three members and a small-town following—could make it in New York.
Though in every academic Leona Oswego excelled, it was in music class that she had gleaned her first “F.” When handed a recorder, she failed, purposefully, to elicit the correct sound. The shrill, chirpy squeaks that after three weeks of half-hearted practice she managed to eek out could be heard ricocheting down the shining linoleum halls like the strained, peachy notes of a cat. A stab at Chorus fared no better. She was a low mutterer, hidden in the third row behind Mario D'Ambrosio (the only boy). When called out by the frustrated conductor as to whether she truly knew the lyrics to "Little Drummer Boy," and asked to solo her rendition--Leona Oswego chimed in, pitch-perfect, with the lyrics, "Watermelon watermelon Scooby dooby doo." The following quarter, she was not asked to return and spent the period in total segregation in the elective "Winter Sports," where she sat out on pick-up basketball games, coloring the thick wedge of her sneakers with the white-board erase pen she'd been given to keep the score.
To Jareth, Leona’s successful rebellion could be measured best in that she had been the only Oswego to flee the scene. She had been accepted at Harvard. The place had been a name for her, a rebellion in the utmost—the symbol of all stratifications, all achievements, all placeholders that Zed Oswego, in his throaty dinner lectures, had attempted to lustily rail against. The acceptance letter came in a thick brown envelope, and in the recently remodeled kitchen of the Oswego home, on the marble island standing solitary in the sea of tile, Leona read the Congratulations that would island her forever from the family she felt distended by. That night, at a family “celebration” dinner, her father grumbled, spearing peas with a single fork tine.
This fall, that was where Leona was—Harvard—where lawns were raked of reddish leaves that fell from the trees, where kids sat around circular tables naming philosophers, where black and white and asian students sat forward on the edges of futons, smoking hashish from gleaming hookahs. At least, that was the part of the dream that Jareth Oswego understood. Labelled in Waeburn’s high school hallways as a stoner, Jareth hid beneath overlarge ponchos purchased in East LA headshops. During lunch, he’d head over with Bresios and two or three others—sometimes Paul Dine would be there, and Mitzy Hanks, if she wasn’t making out in the dark of a music practice room with Leg Fawkes (named Legend by his Hollywood parents, a name he’d tried to shed) and they’d meet at the strip of Eucalyptus trees that edged the student parking lot. Despite the pastoral setting—they often slumped down, backs to the wall, to sit in the dry pile of leaves—the place was called by everyone (including teachers) the “alley”—a reference to the places of deviation they had learned about in movies, where in small towns where puritan standards were high, teenagers were forced onto the backroads.
This was Jareth’s small rebellion. His father, really, couldn’t be said to care. The most his mother had ever said was, when finding in his sock drawer, his bowl (a glass thing he’d paid too much for when he was 13 and didn’t know better), “You know this kills brain cells?” What a cliché, what spoilsport. Anyway, it wasn’t really rebellion that drew Jareth to the stuff, he understood. It was simply that anyone born into the name Oswego desired escape. And that for Leona, escape came in her dreams of the tall lecture halls at Harvard where, raising a hand and standing to the teacher’s call, she’d answer with a rebuttal well-spoken enough to move the classroom to tears, a standing ovation, maybe, or maybe just a glance from a scrubby man in a tweed jackets, its elbows worn, whose soft, surprised glance would seem to say—I never thought I’d find someone who understood. Jareth understood his sister. He understood the ways in which she was crazy and she, she understood her brother’s soft-spoken delusions. They were the two Oswegos who were most connected.
And then there was their younger sister Celia. To Leona and Jared, Celia’s rebellion was unexplainable; divinely strange as an immaculate conception. The first thing was that she was beautiful—extra-terrestrially, numbingly so. In the Oswego house, Celia was a gazelle trapped in a WalMart. Late night conversations between the parents, held over pillows, would concern how they could have produced such a creature. In the kitchen, dining-room, living-rooms and basement of the Oswego house—even out by the chaises that lined the lima-bean shaped pool—Celia’s beauty was either adamantly ignored, unacknowledged, or mocked as distastefully conventional. To see her prancing about the house, Leona would have been the one to chide, “Looking for your whitening powder?” Even their mother would say, “Sweetie, the mirror is over there” and their father, lovingly, would call her, in the mocking, disturbing tone of a horror-show Humbert Humbert, “My fawn.”
At home, Celia’s beauty was a farce. In High School, at Waeburn, it was everything.

It is an afternoon back in September, or October maybe, when Jareth, aged 16 and one half, is out in the “alley” with Evan Bresios. The smoke has cleared their lungs and the two of them, sitting cross-legged in the moldering Eucalyptus leaves, are quiet—nothing left to say but to watch the action in the parking lot. Gloria, the fourth grade teacher, eats a sandwich alone in her Honda, the crunching of the wrapper unhearable through the window glass. Barker, the principal, only about 100 yards away, is whispering into his cellphone—probably, Bresios says, a call to a prostitute. Jareth giggles, though they both know it’s probably a call to his wife, something dull like that. Nothing much ever happens out here.
And then there’s Mitzy, tugging Paul Dine whose worn flannel is tied around her waist in a loose knot. The two have probably been out fucking in a music room.
“Is your stuff gone?” Mitzy says, looking at the red-eyed boys, eyeing the imprint of the glass bowl in the exterior pocket of Jareth’s cargo pants.
“We just cashed it,” Bresios says, nodding. It’s okay though, Dine says, he’s got more out in his car, and so Mitzy sits down next to Bresios, her back to the cool wall, as she waits for Dine to come back from his car—a 1957 Chevy xxx with a fold-down back seat and an interior of red velour, very retro. He keeps his stuff in not the glove compartment (too easy to find) but in the fold-out drink holder, which when not folded out provides a neat slot next to the radio. Dine, the son of single-mother Tracey Dine, a character actress in A-list films that mostly take place in the forties and fifties (she’s got that look about her, that hard-set grimace, that hair that fluffs around the head like a whirling storm) has a vaguely retro look about everything he does, which is why, Mitzy thinks, she likes him. He seems not to belong not only to Waeburn, with its stomach-clenching 60’s architecture of social oppression, but to the time in general, to the other cars in the lot glinting, waxed, beneath a too-bright sun.
When he comes back, they smoke the stuff, Jareth and Evan admitting they’d like a little more, and the converation turns to the suck-itude of school in general, and in what had elapsed earlier that day. Mitzy saw xxxxx and Dine, who’d seen it too, filled in the details.
“God I just had a harrowing second period,” Dine starts. “It was your sister, Jareth.”
Jareth’s suddenly all ears. “What’d she do?”
“Oh is this the thing with Celia in Debate?” Bresios asks.
“What is this?” Jareth needs to know. “You know about this—“
“I heard about it from Luckor,” Bresios explains—Luckor being the dark, gossipy Russian boy always trying to get in on the ins with the smokers. He has third period with Bresios, ceramics, and while the two are spinning pots they always talk, though Bresios will claim not to enjoy it. “So she’s in Debate, right? What’s the topic again.”
“The topic,” Dine says, now taking on the role of teller, “was International Aid.”
AID TO AFRICA – SPLENDA – PEEING IN POOL

2008-05-18T06:00:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-05-16T01:09:00.000-07:00

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.
xxxxxxxxxx
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.

2008-05-16T00:08:00.000-07:00

I will not make any more boring art

"the obvious starting point" / rewriting from Leona's perspective

2008-05-09T03:53:00.000-07:00

Wrote on plane to Hong Kong, having fun with it, setting up my Angel Clare's dairy

PREFACE (parenths as placeholder, don't think I need what's within?)

(When I think of 87 DePauw, of my year onscreen, of my year without love, of the year which ended my privacy, ended my childhood—that era we define by what is lost—I think of the splotch. Token of lost times, of unseen griefs, token of unseen tokens,)

The unpainted splotch was the shape of a Midwestern state—half of its borders were regular, taped-off and measured; the others held to the snaking lines of unseen rivers. Something—a tipped pail, a throbbing hand, the call of the lunchtime taco truck—had stopped a painter’s work on a morning or an afternoon or an evening in 1980, the year before I was born, the year my mother’s trusted advisor Gloria, having decided to reform various addictions through a career of interior decoration, had instructed that our house—really, a complex of stucco buildings rounding a lima-bean shaped pool—be painted a throaty, nail-biting salmon. The pink of bridesmaid’s dresses, Florida nursing homes, the curling insides of shells that schoolboys, trapped in biology classes, snicker over—thinking of vaginas—it was a hue my father called a “caricature of itself” but one which my mother defended. When the time came to repaint, she gave the workmen a chip only a shade less harrowing, “apricot infused with rose,” she called it, what women describe as a “healthy glow” when they can think of nothing kinder.
And it was then, in the 2001 repaint, that the splotch was lost to history, a shape whose borders no next generation would trace, standing, as I had so often, in the runnel of damp ground between two high walls—a space too thin for adults to squeeze into, as it had been perhaps too thin for the painter, who probably simply hadn't bothered to squeeze.
On the backside of our garage, the splotch faced the too-high brick wall of the neighbor’s house, an imitation Tudor. Built to recall the architecture of an era when voting rights came by the acreage, it came complete with a historically accurate high brick wall. The garage was my father’s own hideaway—remastered as a music studio, complete with an orchestra-sized collection of recording tables besotted with unnavigable knobs.
Between them ran a crevasse of moldering land where no sun came. This runnel of earth was my hideaway, smelling of wet-lawn and rubber hose, of car-exhaust and sunscreen left out to fester sourly. Being cool on hot days, it recalled a heavy sadness I had felt existed everywhere but had not found anywhere else. It was ruin--picturesque, sublime, a landscape of poverty crouching in wealth.
I was a child who indulged in cliché fantasies. Hiding with a hand on the splotch, I fantasized my parents—dollsized and frantic—calling my name, overturning sofas, parting the dresses hung in my closets to find a blank back wall with no girl lurking, and finally in desperation coming out to the porch to cry into their hands, having given up at just the moment I emerged beaming from a place they hadn’t even known existed, that its painters had not even known existed.
I do not know what I actually did in the hideout—but I know what I felt here.
It was before the repaint. I was nineteen and it was the winter—the days overcast and grey, no light coming in off the sea—and I had felt like my life was over. The lawns were soggy: a bout of El Nino and a computerized sprinkler system that could not, my father said, be overrun. Mush of earth and mush of the heart. Toeing around felled lawn toys (a “Super-soaker” nerf gun lost by a neighboring child, a wiffle ball battened down into the grass) and not yet knowing what I was doing, I walked straight to the splotch, feeling as I did how my heart lurched.
Two years away—college, roommates, a boy who had, I was coming to realize, “dumped” me, and who, I was further coming to realize, I had loved—had changed everything about the house I had grown up in. Carpets, once violet, had been relaid with eye-smacking white, over which the suck-mouthed vacuums of a hired maid service traced geometric tessellations, recalling to me those patterns inscribed on televised outfields. I had a feeling in the house that nothing could be touched. The most recent occupant of my childhood bedroom-cum-guestroom had been Gideon, my father’s oldest friend, a cokehead undergoing reform who at brunch had called me “little lady” as if he had not known my name. I slept on the couch, which had been re-smocked in floral the last summer, the summer I had spent studying in London, telling twenty-something Brits that though I had been raised in cultureless Los Angeles, it was a place to which I hoped never to return.
Despite all of the modifications, here was the splotch—decidedly un pink: slate blue grey of pebbles pulled from a shoe, of shadows stretching over sidewalks, of nets, stockings, dried glue. I traced, with a finger, its shape. And as I did, through a kind of xxxxxiopry, I understood what it had meant to me.
I had been a child accustomed to gifts—dresses of velvet with sleeves that puffed, a dollhouse the size of a sofa whose every room was lit by miniature electric lamps, a set of beanbag chairs that faced each other as if for conversation. Upon matriculation to Harvard: leather-bound notebooks, a fountain pen, two suitcases of ostrich leather too heavy to carry down the stairs.
Hidden from the commandeering eye of Gloria, from redecorations, redoings, from my mother when she had not looked for me, from my father whose music filtered through the garage wall though he would not come—the splotch was the one thing that was mine.

I walk in and Celia is on the phone, my father is on a stool pulled up to the kitchen’s island, reading the funnies, and my younger brother, Jareth, is sprawled out on the living room sofa clicking through channels without lingering. The set is old, and between channels, you trudge through a soft black pause, seconds seeming minutes, before the figures resolve--fathers return to bedsides to bestow advice, lovers return to barstools to leave eachother, children return to schooldesks to give eachother saddened eyes. In the black of one such click Jareth sees my reflection and says, typical, “What’s up sis,” like some line from one of the shows he’s watching....

I compiled everything.

2008-05-07T08:56:00.000-07:00

21,000 words of okay out of 40,000 words!
/
350
=
60 pages of ok! 120 of shit...

I am awesome. Vacation time.

Why does it take three days to write a 20 page story and 2 months to write a 60 page story? and where can I find brideshead, revisited in Beijing?

how to segue. studying hardy. switching perspective four times.

2008-05-06T22:29:00.000-07:00

Call from Guole → Leslie, they want to buy the house next door, too for the daily trailers given the small lot size of the Oswegos.

“Goodbye,” Leslie said, huffy, urgent.
“Yup,” Guole said.
Without any real motivation, Guole did not flip the phone closed but stayed on the line. He could hear Leslie —it was the sound of the Learning Channel’s ranging leopards, of Lifetime’s raging lovers—the escalated breathing of something angry.
“Yes?” Guole said.
“Oh, forgot this thing was on,” Leslie said. And then there was silence, the beep, the operator’s weedy electric voice. Guole listened to the end of her rant and then flipped the phone closed, returning it to his front pocket where tucked between the folds of silk-lining the digital face read the time, 3:45.
Across the street, a boy who appeared to be about age eight was walking down the sidewalk with a conscious slowness. Stooped slightly under the weight of an oversized backpack of zipped yellow and blue silk, he was carrying out a conversation on his own cell-phone. From where Guole stood he could only discern bits of the conversation: “Page 38…All of the fractions… No, not the evens, just the odds…” It was the sort of dialogue he had forgotten existed, great stuff—heavy with nostalgia, with a sort of real-time boredom that had been edited out of the high-pace dramas he’d been scouting for in recent months. If only they could get another ear like Mamet’s writing TV… But, for the moment, reality would have to do. And, clapping his hands as he turned on his heel to face the Oswego stoop, as a TV host turning from the contestants toward a studio audience, Jerry Guole said for no one but himself, “School’s Out.” It was, he was aware as he said it, bad dialogue. And he took the first step.
The boy, named Terry Dunn, was actually twelve years old and was an occupant of number 97 Oswego, on the inner (and poorer) side of the street in real-estate bereft of ocean views. Dunn was not headed toward his own home but to that of Margaret and Alan Clare, who in number 85 occupied a squat ranch home whose large plate glass windows, facing out toward the street, betrayed lace-curtains nearly-completely parted toward the view of a long black car in the Oswego drive. Terry Dunn, who had his own key somewhere in the front pocket, was still rooting for it when Margaret opened the door. Her face, gaunt and ovular, was given a sort of roundness by the hurricane of hair flowering round and by a wondrously retro pair of oversized tortoise-shell glasses, secured to her person by a neon-pink ribbon that lapped around the back of the neck. “Alan’s in the kitchen,” she said, motioning Terry inside. After she had latched the door, the pair walked down the long dark hall of beige carpet that made up the front entry, turning left at the living room—two pillowed couches, a doilyed piano—and entering the kitchen, whose scrubbed, lemon-scented linoleum was bright with the light that came from that oversized, plate glass window which, facing the West and the length of the street, dominated the room and lit up Alan Clare like floodlights on the foot of a stage.
With a hand leading automatically from the bowl of yogurt on the kitchen table to his thinset mouth, Alan Clare sat with his shoes off and his socks nearly touching the oversized window, a magazine spread over his lap. The first thing people noticed about the boy was his size—6 foot four and thin, the joints (the knees, the elbows) knobby with skin.
“My gosh,” Margaret said to her son, pulling down her glasses so they fell against her chest where they were held by the neon-pink ribbon, “You eat more delicate than a sea otter.” Turning to Terry, and pulling him out a chair at the kitchen table, which was covered by a rubber mat—checked in white and blue—“The boy’s been eating that solitary bowl of yogurt since noon.”
“My dad says I eat too fast,” Terry said, having thrown off his pack, and resting his elbows on the table.
“You do,” Alan said, not looking up from his article.
“Does not,” Margaret said, and, changing the subject, leaned in to Terry, “We haven’t done anything today. Just been watching the scene across the street.”
“Oh?” Terry asked out of politeness. “What scene.”
“Black car pulls up to the Oswego’s—”
“That white house?”
“It’s the music people, and the father with the big beard.”
“Oh okay,” Terry said. “I know ‘em. My sister went over there for a pool party a couple of years ago.”
“Oh yeah?” Margaret said, but the boy not going further, she kept on. “Well, black car pulls up there around noon, guy gets out in a fancy suit, brings out another guy with a big film camera.”
“They’re making a movie there?”
Alan chimed in. “Could just be an ad.”
“Well anyway,” Margaret said, “That was our day.” She looked over at her son, whose doings of nothing she lovingly railed against. “Now tell me about yours.”
The exploits of middle schoolers—Terry Dunn’s two Bs in Science, a paper he feared to write in English class about whether the main character of a book about talking animals feared fame—bored Alan Clare, who continued to read on the races of solar powered cars across a stretch of mudcracked desert as he listened to the coos of his mother coddling the stranger’s son to assuage the sexless boredom of old age. Aged 23, a recent graduate of MIT with an advanced degree in engineering, Alan Clare had been living at home for approximately six months—a window of time in which he had been, Margaret told her friends, “Figuring out what exactly he wanted to do.” In actuality, Alan Clare spent very little time per week—an hour or so—thinking about what he wanted to do next. And during that time, he was high. After a lifetime heavy with a achievements, he was spending much of his time smoking pot out of a bowl he had blown by hand in an MIT mandatory crafts workshop, a little blue pipe he was very proud of, which in the light of his bedroom window upstairs shone cobalt as a right-rvrs* star.
With a degree in engineering you could build things, you could fix things, you could, in the words of his mother “build your own world if you wanted to.” But all of Margaret’s maternal instincts were fine with keeping the boy at home, so she didn’t prod him, but watched him, wondering who the boy had become when he was away, and wishing he might talk about it.

2008-05-06T22:09:00.000-07:00

"...And so are we all novelists, that is, we have a habit of writing fictional futures for ourselves, although perhaps today we incline more to put ourselves into a film. We screen in our minds hypotheses about how we might behave, about what might happen to us; and these novelistic or cinematic hypotheses often have very much more effect on how we actually do behave, when the real future becomes the present, than we generally allow."
--John Hawkes, "French Lieutenant's Woman"

I'm like, you know, digging

2008-04-29T20:19:00.000-07:00

The new thing to fuel me is coming home drunk to write poetry. Maybe I'm turning into a high school sophomore and then i'll cycle up again, grow to 45, grow wings, write this damn thing. These are the things I put into the word doc, "rantzzz5":

In the apartment, even when there's no electricity
my hands still graze on the worthless switches.
It's as with your face and my thoughts of it--
there is something in me that will not learn or close.

How much more full-time can you get
than hating yourself. It takes all his energy--brick of days,
brickles--the slow tumble of the gamepiece as it hits the falling walls.

We shuttle through fonts, bogus and slow
and there are no other ways to say it than the way
we should have used already, "I'm sorry."
but what's with the sinking regret that I don't feel
long corridor walled in mahogony, some dark wood
that won't allow for escapes, or for light,
or for anything between the lathes but carpet, festered and deep,
a stream our lives are running into and over--delight of kitten heels
treading false grass. The coconut fronds, knit in mother's wool.
Like a latrine your heart wells up! Foolish mothers!
Keep your children from the door! There are men in the streets with pistols,
pistils, epistles, and they are here to ruin lives.
Carry your shoes in your hands.

Parlance of radio gods
in the earbuds and the alleys
hearable from far off. Through this heat
your coat is like a swimming pool which children eye;
delight begging drowning from the worried mothers
gathered poolside around the latest corpse--
always another child.
Just as the one you'll choose
is always another girl,
talking sweetly through mouthfuls of crushed ice.
Telling myself it's better that way:
You through the alleys are dully traceable
I can predict the next turn and the next
a system like heatwaves lapping eachother.

I'm thinking of that story, where we take a spaceship to a land like North Korea
where the people speak also, Spanish, and a mushy mix of Japanese and French
they call Hanguoren--the word I know in Chinese to mean, "Korean."
The problem when we get there is there is not any water
We have taken the ship so far and forgotten how to drink.

THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR

2008-04-27T07:56:00.000-07:00

A bad writing day... Broody Salter & the rainy feeling of Benadryl hangovers.

There were reasons that Leona came to number 82—reasons that she told herself, and reasons that were true. Out front—a tangle of cords held down with duct tape connected a brood of trucks—beige vans, a pair of trailers parked diagonally across the lawn as if they’d just stopped by for a second (they’d been that way for months). A single miata, cornflower blue, with a sucked-dry coffee cup tossed on the passenger seat, stood parked halfway through a hedgerow like a sprawled cat. Leaning against the scowling grill of a Winnebago, a stranger taking a cigarette break threw her a look aggressive with boredom, furiously un-curious, the look, Leona thought, all un-beautiful girls must grow used to receiving.
She could say she came here to get away from it all: Mess of film and mess of lawn, the cluttering fawns of high school girls, the thinset line of her mother’s lips or the oblong fade of the bathtubs into which she so often seemed to be sinking. But these were not the reasons. It seemed to her that when people said to get away from it all they so often meant to fly towards another thing.
The door could be opened with a push—15-year-old chewing gum sealed the front lock. The dark line of an umbrella against the bleached slats of the front hall; small marks of fingers around the switches; the smell of laundry in the upstairs bedroom—these were the signs of some past occupants never seen. The current tenants were easier to track—a flannel shirt balled-up near the fireplace, a bowl of ash and then candles—seven of them—holding down the center of a room, and a sleeping bag, stained and filthy, hung half-way out a window to dry. Her finger gently running against the molding of a bedroom’s threshold door, Leona looked out over the old bag, nothing out past it but the ocean. Bright blue of dusk and the water empty; Just a darkness bright enough to seem lit from behind, a sheet of paper held against a flame.
The back wall of the house facing the ocean, was now gone, spilt down the cliffside, soft rubble streaming down the scrubbrush and purplish soil. You could sit out at the room’s edge and stare down—the drop, 15 feet and then a roll forever, down to the surf. This was the spot she had seen Alan occupy, a book in his hands, his eyes on the words. And the blanket hung to dry, the shards of ash in a hand-thrown pot—these things were Alan’s, for it was Alan who came so often to 82, who had gummed down the lock, who had swept out the fireplace and left a flannel shirt dark with soot. She had seen him over the candles, two or three of his friends flicking down the lighter over the bowl, taking breaths and laughing out. When she came here it was less out of a desire to leave what she knew than a desire to run into him, to ask the silly question, “What are you doing here?” called for in film scripts that require motives stabler than the romantic tug of an emptied house, facing the surf, its structure gone, the scent of its walls humid as bread gone bad.

Experiment

2008-04-21T10:12:00.001-07:00

When I read Marsha Pessl (Sp.) and thought--"This is too easy" part of what I thought was "too easy" was the voice. But wait, if I think something's too easy, why don't I just do it? I think I would HATE my book if it were present first person from Leona's perspective, but that also makes the most immediate sense. Here's a quick experiment.

“So how balanced are you?” Alan asks. “I’ll tell you. You’re about as balanced as this shoe”—he's adjusting the position of the shoe on his bent knee, so that it does not tip. I ask him, "Which is how balanced?" and he gives the long-wise answer:
“It’ll stay balanced forever if everything in the room stays absolutely still forever. "
"Which is," I say hastily, "Unfeasable."
We're having the conversation we always seemed to be having, and he's doing the thing he always seemed to be doing—taking it too much in jest. The dogged scent of a neighbor's cigarettes slowly filters into the room, smelling like it has passed through layers and layers of glued wallpaper.

“Whatever,” he says, letting the shoe fall off the edge of the bed. It tumbles once over and lands to smother one of a pair of worn corduroy slippers. These are the shoes he has kept half-tucked beneath every bed he's occupied over the past two weeks.

“If that’s not a symbol, I don’t know what is,” I say, ablasldkfjalksdfj

oh god i'm so tired. more to come post full time job week ajsdflkjasdf

Leona's flight with Alan

2008-04-20T10:31:00.000-07:00

I keep just writing parts I feel like writing instead of in sequence. I think maybe that's healthy. I think maybe reading Ann Beattie again makes my dialogue a Walt Disney'ish "Apprenticeship" of her Noel Coward.

“So how balanced are you?” Alan asked. “I’ll tell you. You’re about as balanced as this shoe”—he was adjusting the position of the shoe on his knee, so that it would not tip.

“Which is how balanced, again?”

“It’ll stay balanced forever if everything in the room stays absolutely still forever and ever.”

“Which is what I’m saying,” Leona said. “That’s not a situation I would wish on anyone.”
They were having the conversation they always seemed to be having, and he was doing the thing he always seemed to be doing—taking it too much in jest. Someone in the room over was smoking and the scent seemed to be seeping in. She smelled it more and more.

“Whatever,” he said, letting the shoe fall off the edge of the bed, tumbling over and landing to smother one of a pair of worn corduroy slippers he had kept half-tucked beneath every bed he occupied in the past two weeks.

“If that’s not a symbol, I don’t know what is,” she said.

He flipped on his side, peeking over the rumpled duvet to see where the sneaker had landed. He giggled, and then said, in the high, overeager voice of a child. “You’re smothering me?”

“This is the situation,” she said, pointing at the shoes. "It's like a Ouija board."

“Riiiiight,” he said. "It's the situation if you were a shoe. And if I drop you.”

“And if you were a shoe.”

“Which we’re not.”

“Right—because we have agency.”

“Right,” she said, “Which is why the forever and ever situation can never take hold.”

“Right,” he said, “Because someone will always move first.”

“Yeah,” she said, “Or you’ll lose your job. Pretend your dad gets sick and you have to get back to LA.”

“Mmmmm. I really want those curly fries they serve on Southwest,” he said. She gave him a look. He said, “I know I don’t take these things seriously.”

“Ugh,” she said, “Neither do I. Which is the whole problem—right?”

“If it’s not a problem with you, it’s not a problem with me,” he said. And he rolled to the edge of the bed, slipping his feet into his slippers, standing up, stretching with a crack of knuckles. “I’m going to go get us some ice.”

In the hallway, a woman with extraterrestrial eyeshadow gave him a long stare. Her bathrobe was open at the collar and he peeked—breasts like mangoes, mushrooms, whatever grew toward the ground, he couldn’t remember how things grew. Potatoes grew under the ground, tomatoes grew on vines. Mushrooms were natural—a fungi—a different kingdom. The word he had wanted was mangoes, but there was something bizarrely exoticised and racist-sounding about a mango, even though most every country ate them now. The slippers were thin enough that he could feel the carpet beneath his feet—swish, swash. Its patterning showed zillions of monkeys, climbing zillions of rope ladders, woven of plants in endless patterns of locking diamonds. It was good to be in a hotel like this, it was nice, and nice to hold a bucket of ice, and nice to see the woman in the bathrobe with the hallucinatory eyeshadow. When they’d first started traveling like this, absorbing the stench of the hotels, all the other patrons always seemed to be traveling in schoolgroups; there had never been any icebuckets. Back in the room, she was maybe taking a shower, maybe reading—he had a few minutes. Past the ice-room, a second hallway veered to the right—more numbers listed on the doors: 1305, 1307. A roomservice tray, half-finished, left-out. He leant down and plucked a half sandwich, chewing it for a few bites before putting it out on the next tray. Hopefully there weren’t cameras there, watching him. He was a very sloppy guest. The hallway ended on 1349. The year of Columbus, he thought, and then remembered that was definitely not it. He seemed to be losing his grasp on his knowledge.

When he walked back, holding the ice-bucket, stopping to fill the ice-bucket, and continuing back to the room, he noticed the monkeys in the carpet—they were upside down now, having not been designed to be seen from the angle of departure, and he remembered how he composed the clever phrase he would use to tell her about it when he’d come back in the room. But when he came back in the room, with the ice-bucket, having just eaten the bites of that sandwich—chicken avacado—was when he realized she was gone. Her purse was still there, her phone, wallet—with the money inside, he later recognized—and a half-eaten cookie on the bedside table, the mark of her chapstick on the glass of tepid tea. The one note: A business card, left facing the door on the bright, creased white duvet of the still made-bed.

“Leslie Bennet,” was the name on the card. A mobile phone number had been circled, and in hand, writing said, “Call me.”

Alan sat on the edge of the bed. He flipped the card—its reverse was blank—and put it down on the bed. He didn't feel like calling. It could be a prank, a ruse, she could have just left a card on the bed and stepped out--maybe to deal with the woman next door who had been smoking. In the room was her stuff and the blank TV. He
turned on the TV. There were a few channels but there was nothing on. In a minute he would call the number, but for a moment, he just needed to do this. He could still smell her in the room—a citrus shampoo, worn sneakers, the damp bindings of the rain-soaked books she had carried with her. On TV, the newscaster smiled. He turned the TV off. He gave the number on the card a call, and flipped it over. With a complimentary hotel pen, writing on the blank side, he wrote down the time. An instinct he did not know he had told him he would need to remember this moment, and to try to trace it back from here. It had started at 12.04, in a town not West still of Jacksonville, East of the Union Jack bar they'd stopped in ironically and spent too much time uncomfortable under the uncomfortable flags. He thought, as a priest bemoans the death of a child who dies a virgin, of how she would now never make it to Graceland; It was a place he himself had no interest in going to, but its loss now struck him as a specific tragedy—palpable as dropped fruit.

2008-04-17T22:50:00.000-07:00

I need to remember John McPhee's advice that anytime you feel like you're going crazy off the deep-end with language, to just keep going in that direction. And also, remember Peter Cameron's advice to ground every scene to keep the action straight. Language, crazy; action, grounded.

Sturdy Outlines

2008-04-17T12:57:00.001-07:00

ACT 1--THE WORLD UNWATCHED - 40 PAGES

1. Leona is socially invisible in High School
1.5 The Oswegos in High School
2. Celia's presentation
3. How they get cast (ABC boy --> Father)
5. Family dinner, Mom admits to pre-interview
6. Guole arrives at the house--announces what's going to need to change (In car, art department) and thinks about buying the house crumbling into the sea
7. Alan/Margaret see Guole pacing outside
8. Leona opts to go literally invisible
***
0. THE HOUSE neighborhood history
3. The neighborhood reaction to the vans
2. Leslie Bennett's sweeping remodel
4. The first episode filming: Jareth meets cameraman
5. Sets up trailer in Alan's drive
5.5 Leona's hideout in crumbling house--finds stoner circle
6. End on Leona and Alan--something about how people see eachother

ACT 2: FAME, and PENANCE for greed- 60 PAGES
**"Recasting"**
1. The editors as fates
2. Celia as star
3. Jareth's new high school sex life
3.5 THE MONEY
4. Leona and Alan = Love of the unwatched
6. Margaret watching through glass
7. Bennett in his trailer, watching the dailies--Last Tycoon repetitions
**"Penance"**
3. House falling into the ocean
4. Celia cheating with the exterior shots crumbling cameraman
5. The cousin shows up on the stoop
5.5 Going to church--as a family
6. Swimming in Sunday Best
7. Pool party--Leona is given the opposite of what she wanted, Alan cannot love her
8. Crumbling house crumbling

ACT 3: THE HORRIBLY HEART-RENDING HEALING OF A WOUNDED FAMILY - 50 pages
1. Dad's roadtrip to fat-camp
2. Jareth driving
3. Steal the magazines from 7-11
4. The Madonna Inn's banana cream pie
simultaneously
1. Leona and Celia = Bernice and Marjorie
2. Mom and Cousin = Thelma and Louise
--All of them, Lynchian neighborhood scare, absurdism of Sunset Boulevard's Dead Monkey, some other plot point draws them down.
MARGARET
ALAN
LEONA
BENNETT? GUOLE?

SOMETHING NEEDS TO HAPPEN BETWEEN A SHOW VISIONARY AND A SHOW ACTOR...

Sturdy Outlines

2008-04-17T12:09:00.001-07:00

Research Thursdays

2008-04-17T00:59:00.000-07:00

Found during research. "I met Coco at a swimsuit contest, she said come in and meet Barry, and I was hired!"

"they pitch new families."

"Critical to their selection was finding a home with more of a feminine feel, a lovely pool, and a games and exercise room," explains Dirk. The house they chose also has five bedrooms, each with a balcony and tremendous views of Los Angeles. The six-women 'cast' share three bedrooms, and up to 10 production staff are on site at any one time. There is also space in the guest house for the crew."

2008-04-17T00:24:00.001-07:00

I know I should start in the middle, as Angie says, but I also know that there's this mystery I'm obsessed with that churns out in the writing as the plot progresses. Even if I think I know what's going to happen, the reason I'm writing the story is to figure out how it's going to happen differently. What do these people want from eachother? What do they want to say to eachother? I want to write the perfect beginning, keep going, and be forced to re-write the beginning due to what happens. It would be easier, surely, to skip the re-write steps and just write the thing.

The Location Scout

2008-04-16T20:44:00.000-07:00

INTRO WITH WHAT HE’S SEEING OUT THE WINDOWS

Jerry Guole had always been a scout. In the fifth grade, wearing a badge that proclaimed it literally in embroidered writing above an embroidered tent and an embroidered firepit, he had led his fellow sufferers through the dry scrubbrush that held the San Bernadino county foothills from their inevitable slip into the ocean, and ended the hike at the Raffles Resort, its pool gleaming like a ring-pop dug up from the bottom of a box of Wheetabix. Slim mothers in jet-black one-pieces hovered poolside—dozing on chaises, leaning over tinkling drinks. The ratpack changed quickly from their uniforms into pajama tops, their bathing suit bottoms, and hid the uniforms, cans of cooking supplies, the fold-up stove—in the cavernous space between two rocks, a hiding space found by Guole when he had retreated to take a piss. The boys played the part of tourists’ children, strolling confidently through the lobby, spaced in groups of two and three. Martins faked a German accent loudly, Toby Briar carried the cell-phone his mother had made him pack in case of grave emergency, and the blonde boy Guole remembered admiring but whose name he could no longer recall, had patted him on the back as they walked past the concierge and said, “I love you, my brother” in the stilted English of the Spanish Conquistadors they had seen in the videotape played in history class. After long, leisurely swims—side-stroke, back-stroke, drowning matches and cannonball contests—the boys took naps on the chaises lined up along the platform—stealing sidelong glances at the women sleeping beside them under the brims of floppy sunhats.
In High School, Guole was the kid whose popularity, to the teachers, was non-sensical—seemingly based completely on his unimpeachable confidence. A gawky half-Chinese, half-Norwegian (son of a Military Pastor serving in Hong Kong), Guole was adept at mathematics (though he seemed not to try) and could memorize historical facts with forthright ease. In the cafeteria, Mrs. Logan observed him flirting confidently with Beverly Hills offspring, as though just another one of them—though after school Guole took a bus way out to LaBrea, to an apartment whose smoke-filled curtains kept his nervous mother in the dark all day. She worked at home making gift baskets—compiling soaps, muffins, jams and flowers—and cinching the tops with clear cellophane that came in rolls she’d unfurl over the kitchen floor, a layer of clarity over a muddle of 60s avocado, repaired with slabs of tessellating 70s stars. The father, a studious, religious man who in his youth had pioneered exploratory outings on in Hong Kong’s nearby islands, was dead.
Guole stayed away from home. He had an eye for glamour and his house had none of it. Later he would understand that he had simply found something he was good at, and stuck to it. This was the moment in the VH1 documentary about his life when his career took over his personal life. It was in High School that at scouting, he became unimpeachable.
Take what Guole still thought of as the shining moment in what would become a long career. A flirty girl, crammed beside him in the backseat of a friend’s Datsun, upon receiving a call on her enormous cell from an arrested friend who reported that the last party had just been broken up. Beneath a wave of blonde bang, Guole could see the girl’s oversized earring sparkle. She had said first, “I’m with Guole,” then over the other end of the phone line her friend had said something inaudible, then she had giggled and said—and it was this he would always remember—“It’s like he can smell cops. He can hear a party from miles away.”
Guole could not smell cops. He could not hear parties. He could see scenes. The slobbering boys on the balcony, hussling eachother about the keg—and forty feet away, the suddenly illuminated bedroom light of the nextdoor Beverly Hills mansion. He could imagine the husband, pacing in a bathrobe, placing the call. ENTER: Cops. At school, a whisper in Science Lab from the Lancaster girl—whose father, she had bragged to him at lunch, would be shooting a pilot in Venezuela over the weekend—to Justin Terraza, whose newly formed punk band was, according to LA Weekly, pretty good, was the perfect set-up for a late-night affair, and so that was where they were going in the Datsun, to the Lancasters, who would open the door at 1.30 and let the show start at 2.00, after Terrazza’s gig had finished up at the Bowl and he had enough time to get out of the Valley and a few drinks in him. START: Scene: Blowout party. Teens swivel, gyrate, hum. The band onstage is crashing xxxxxxx.
This job required these sort of earsx xxxxxxx the eyes for this job, the intuition as to what family on a block would let up a yard for a Claritin ad (look at the cars for a vanity plate) but he had also developed a new set of skills. Driving along the meandering routes that skirted the cliffs in the Pacific Palisades, Guole’s head was in two places at once. He still made visual tallies of the scenery on the ground, but now, given twenty years in the business, understood the city’s mapping. He could simultaneously see it all from above—the small black dot of the Lincoln Towncar as it snailed along the cliffs, following the roads as they wheedled around the lots of variegated mansions. There was the set where in 88, they had shot the xxxx scene in the David Lynch that had gotten Holly arrested. There was where the xxxx twins had xxxxxx. That was the xxxx and that was the xxxxxxx. The twenty years of footage to come from a single block, edited together, made in itself a kind of narrative that made a story that could only be understood coherently when the premise was, Here are all the dreams that America has of what kind of a thing could happen here. It was a topography of fantasy, built in layers through the years, cellophane replacing silt.

*****

The Oswego Mansion, at 83 De Pauw, was at the end of a very long block of history. The Pacific Palisades had long been the trough for the set-aside families of Hollywood’s creative minds—the type of men who needed space to think, as if the air up here—finally free of the smog from car grilles down by the beach—would be a help to those who sought to fill it with shrubs of smoke grown from the mouth-wet tips of weedy cigars. First had come the newly moneyed directors of the teens, orchestrating their homes with fantasmagorical precision. Butting from a scrubby cliff, a Yorkshire Tudor complete with brickwork that tessellated in the XXXXPATTERNOFGOLDSWEATERSxxxxx, had been dreamed up out of a mind that had never been further East than a car trip to Nevada; nearby, the quiet Mediterranean villa looking out over the sea sported wall torches of melded beach shells, a detail overseen by the actress wife of a Silent film director who had come closest to Greece in her role as Kalypso in the version of Homer’s epic, a remake which as sex-filled and violent as the original, with none of its other charms.
In the thirties, the Directors had moved Southward, choosing the overlarge manses of Beverly Hills closer to the studios, on the lots of newly knocked down farms. These were grander—they had grown wings, sprouted guest-houses, tennis courts, gardener’s villas and were close enough to the golf course so the children could bicycle there, before getting their licenses at thirteen and taking the parents’ Rolls to trundle to the beach for a day baking by the Santa Monica pier. Pacific Palisades were too far from the lawns, the surf, the parties and the strip of Montana where the restaraunts were at which you should be seen dining. Claro’s with its candles, Montego’s with the lace in the windows and the pretty hostess who had slept with Gable on the night that reached her pinaccle of fame.
The Pacific Palisades became that retreat of those who sought the “air” to clear their heads, but no longer the directors, for whom “air” had been a euphemism for grandeur. In the thirties, the houses were occupied by the writers. They sought here, in homes of overambition, overgrown by the climate’s atypical ivy—a mutty mix of bougeanvilla and forsythia nettles—if not placid stillness and total removal, the idea of that removal. They were aware that they occupied homes since abandoned; the best of them sought here an image of the shunned lover. They would take these homes and love them. Their wives—brought along from less glamorous apartments where they had felt “cooped up” felt this romance in a different way. These were the homes of the former greats, and now they were theirs to fix up and untangle. The long halls of guestrooms for the visiting dignitaries would now be occupied by children, who must be fed and bathed and kept out of their father’s study. The stillness sought, the placid silence, was now pierced by hoots and ballyhoos—children out in the pool, the domestic cries of “what’s thats?” shouted to wives trilling at the ends of long, corded telephones that they had brought out to the garden.
In the sixties, the money for these men was gone. Run like the hills still crumbling down to the sand. Some directors moved back here—artistic visionaries who pretended to shun the studios that fed them, seeking removal from systems—but the bulk of buyouts came from the pockets of actors, actresses, handsome men and women who cooed on tours given by chirping Real Estate agents in suits with padded shoulders, who after their clients had signed the contracts, thought to ask if they couldn’t also sign an autographed photograph. At home they threw long, fishlike dresses over the backs of settees. They fought in the foyer, ignored the missing top of the nule post after they had hurled it, broke the terracotta angels on the stoop with the drunken drive up the xxxxxxx with Barley in the frontseat after they had come from xxxxxx. The eaves filled with smoke—cigarette smoke, bitterer and brighter, coming from a sadder place.
It was here where Dietrich, Davis, Baccall and Russell had their most damning scenes—acting that was utterly natural, that came from no place. xxxxxxxxfights out by the poooooolllxxxxxxxxxxxx
Idea that to not act in the occupying place→ what scenes elapse!

A few blocks later and they had found DePauw street, spiking to the right, curving alongside the redrock hills that fed down into 200 yards of scrubbrush before a strip of coastline and the sea. Here, the mansions thinned out and grew wings, got room to grow like goldfish turned, by the size of their tanks, to koi.

Etched in 1907 to follow the meandering cliff, DePauw’s oldest homes stood on the side of the road furthest from but facing out toward the water, the former homes if not of Clarke Gable and Katherine Hepburn, then of their co-stars and, perhaps, directors. On the left-hand side of the road, as the car headed north, stood the wreckage of modern design, attempting not to falsify a more beautiful past, but to remain sleek and pale forever. Time, however, had taken a chunkier bite out of these more exposed homes, and cracks, black with mold, marred their skins. Windows, facing ocean winds, had in some cases been boarded with plywood. One home—a low, one-story ranch circa 1976, fitted-out for Bill and Joan Brady, had been sucked out, through one wall, to sea—standing now at the cliff-edge like a toy dollhouse—its interior bared, bars of golden light falling now across the tufty beige sand of its wall-to-wall carpets. The central staircase, gnawed by risen surf, was a white thing bruised like a man who had endured a scuffle. Bill Dean’s boy, the mop-headed smoker, had written, in the margin of his school copy of Call of the Wild, across from the sentence, “Nature does not abate the lives of men,” the note “Man v. Nature” (preparing as he well should have for the teacher’s tests) and aside to that written, “DePauw street is half gone.” The street wasn’t half-gone but it would be, and at the end of the curving tentacle of houses who could claim ocean-view, 1804 DePauw would be next, its fall inevitable.

*****

Guole watched the block unreel. First came the Dreyer mansion

sorry I haven't written in four days.

2008-04-14T14:28:00.000-07:00

"Like all beautiful things it will make you suffer" she said to the boy, over gChat. They were talking about pollen. "That should be," he said, "the first sentence of your novel."

I wanted to take a nap but I kept thinking

2008-04-09T03:45:00.000-07:00

How does Hardy do that thing where he shows you something from afar and zooms? I can't do that thing.

In the mornings the boy came out with the black dog, leading him down the hill, around the bend to where the park where the cliffs were, down to the gutter so often stuck with leaves. The next time anyone came out of the house it wasn’t usually until around a quarter to eight, when all three of the children piled into the dark SUV parked diagonally in the drive— the eldest daughter first in cropped hair, chirping and howling for the others to follow; then the youngest, wearing an outfit that that clung to her skin; and then the boy again, forgetting something in the house and jogging back in or perhaps looking down at the pavement, picking something up—one time, 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.

In the house the parents sat out of view in dark shaded places. At the island in the center of the kitchen, a glass of half orange juice, half seltzer before her, Maude sat on a high stool, turning the page of her newspaper. In the basement Zed, clumsy at 60, bumped something—a microphone stand—and the stand fell, making a thick, metallic slam on the parquet dance floor she had installed in 1983 when the eldest, Leona, was just born and she had thought to shape up with the high kicks of step aerobics.

From the street the 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 in the late morning shade. 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, thought Margaret, 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.

Alan was sitting in the kitchen reading Parade and he looked up when Margaret said, "Oh good it's the IRS out to get them for years of ducking." His mother was leaning against the plate glass window in the kitchen of the squat ranch house she had been renting for the ten years since the divorce. She was holding her right hand over her eyes. Out across the street, in the steep drive of the Oswego's stucco peach castle, silhouetted against the sunset was a long, black towncar against whose side leaned a man in a black suit, speaking into a cellular phone. The man wore sunglasses, shiny shoes, a tight toothbrush moustache--other than that, he might have been allright.

"Doesn't look like the Feds to me," Alan said, and told his mother to look at their vanity plate as he put down the copy of Parade (He hadn't wanted to read it anyway, it was just there).

2008-04-08T20:22:00.001-07:00

Last night I fell asleep with my computer. The last sentence on the page:

He sought the curried favors of several wronged judges, who sheened the temporal piecrust to a tabula rasa.

Of course. The temporal piecrust. How could I forget.

Lessons I'm telling myself

2008-04-08T13:20:00.000-07:00

ENOUGH of overwrought McKewan-y character description. I need to just launch into the story with an Ann Beattie-ish opener. She has this incredible deep awareness of every small detail of the scene, of where everyone is standing, what they're wearing, what sort of neighborhood this is, and yet she doesn't pause a second to give a single breath of backstory. It just goes. When I was on the short-story writing college schedule, this was what I always chose to imitate. There's no reason this project should be any different given its scope. Okay--assignment for Sunday. The 15 page opener--high school, Celia, no backstory, her introduction, father has no wealth, show will be picked up by ABC, Leslie & Guo swooping in on the lawn, Alan and Margaret see them from across street. End on Cynthia. Some chilling detail in the opener pops up in the end.

Make it loopy--Pynchon, Wallace, Antrim
Make it quick--Beattie, Fox, McPhee
Tell it straight--WRITE IT LIKE A NEWSPAPER STORY

This is what I keep telling myself as I keep getting more and more bogged.

IN CHINA I CAN'T FIND THE BOOKS I NEED

2008-04-08T12:59:00.000-07:00

AN EMAIL TO MY MOTHER asked her if for my birthday present, she can track down the following titles and send them to me in a mass package. This is a list of all the writing styles I'm missing in my apartment that contains only awful Roth, overdone P. Cameron, Zadie Smith's lesser works, and the heavy, perfected, drenching Atonement. Plus Hardy. Remember the story in "Like Life" about the poet who goes to the middle of America? There's a terriffic passage that I get in my head from that--

"It was like a dog's song, her heart, put in funny. Like a cab that pulled up shortly in the rain, to a curb, to stop there."

And I know I can't be getting it totally right and it's killing me.

1. Lorrie Moore - "Like Life" - Slim, grey volume with green bar on spine & on cover.
2. The World According to Garp (John Irving) -- believe it's a purple book with white text, could be in Alex's room (lent it to him a while ago)
3. The Book of Daniel - E. L. Doctorow (Blue, black and white--thick)
4. Oh, England England - Julian Barnes (thin red with yellow text on spine)
5. Park City - Ann Beattie (black and white with yellow text on cover--thick)
6. Desperate Characters - Paula Fox (slim purple volume)
7. Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon (bronze spine--**this might be too big for it to be worth it to ship**)
8. The Secret Agent - Joseph Conrad (I have two copies--one I know is penguin with a tiffany blue spine, the other is maybe dark brownish)

Could you buy
1. A collection of short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald? Annnnnything. It's so good.

What's funniest to me about the list is how I know my mother will find them based on color, and how I know what color each of them is.

2008-04-08T00:35:00.000-07:00

The Waeburn Pluralistic School netted its fair share of celebrity offspring. 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.

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. At age twenty-three, their father, Zed, 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. 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.

Leona, the eldest, having graduated just two years prior, had been pointedly clever, industrially studious, and made it a point not to be associated with a father who at age 20, had dropped out of a small community college in Northampton, Massachusetts. In music class, when handed a recorder, she failed to elicit the correct sound. The shrill, chirpy squeaks that after three weeks of half-hearted practice she managed to eek out could be heard ricocheting down the shining linoleum halls like the strained, peachy notes of a cat birthing its first litter. A stab at Chorus fared no better. She was a low mutterer, hidden in the third row behind Mario D'Ambrosio (the only boy) and an overweight Chinese girl that the horrible pack of boys behind her called, "The Asian Tiger." When called out by the frustrated conductor as to whether she truly knew the lyrics to "Little Drummer Boy," and asked to solo her rendition--Leona failed. The pianist reached her cue, and Leona Oswego chimed in, pitch-perfect, with the lyrics, "Watermelon watermelon Scooby dooby doo." She was not asked to return the following quarter, and spent the period in total segregation in the elective "Winter Sports," where she sat out on pick-up basketball games, coloring the thick wedge of her sneakers with the white-board erase pen she'd been given to keep the score.

What Leona was good at--was very good at--was arguing. Around the school, she had made a name for herself by giving frequent, rousing, angry speeches at town meetings the leader of a philosophy club that met weekly. The club was poorly attended. Toby was a co-founder, and brought with him three of his friends. "The Rub-a-Dubs," Leona called them to her mother, leaning forward on the kitchen island, picking at a snack, for something about them reminded her of the types in the children's song about some lone men, lost at sea in a piece of domestic equipment. These were the boys who, in high school, seemed only to buck and bray in social waves. They were forty-year-olds in seventeen-year-olds bodies, and all would go on to the Ivies--Princeton, Princeton, Yale--as she thought back on it, where, though she fell out of touch quickly, they would surely have similarly out-of-place girlfriends with whom they'd talk politics. But before all that, in High School, there was no one for them--a sea, and then there was Leona, the first girl to be half decent. Despite her frowsy dresses, her mushroom earrings, her pointed gestures away from makeup, Leona found she could not live in a world without boys' attention, and found she could easily convince herself that they were all in love with her. This was enough to get by.

Leona Oswego's previous teachers were disappointed when confronted with the second Oswego--one year younger, the shy and brooding Jareth. Mrs. Henry, particularly, an obsessive who taught English, Rhetoric, and a period (for fun) of French would often wonder aloud why he wasn't as outspoken as that sister of his, whose quick, clever essays had gotten the girl into Harvard where she was studying, of all unneccessary things--Greek.

Jareth Oswego was what they called, in the lounge, a dark horse. In over-large, unmarked tee-shirts, the boy was a sitter-out. He was pretty enough to have been popular--he had his famous mother's high, chiseled cheek bones, his father's lanky frame, the over-large blue eyes of two dawdling grandmothers, and the mussy, tousled hair of a farm pony. New girls to Waeburn were intrigued and, after a three-minute conversation, disgusted. He was sardonic, sarcastic, biting, and judgmental. He smelled of the sepia scent of pot, top-ramen, the salt of skin. In classrooms, he quickly ducked into corners, set up on his desk his binders and notebooks, crossed his arms, and tuned out. It was too easy to chalk up any rebellion on Jareth's part to the desire to be known apart from his sister. He simply saw High School in a way she had not--as a place where trying, in all its forms, was not appreciated. As a place where, whatever happened, was not part of the real world and would not have any ramifications.

What he was good at, he was good at. Jareth Oswego was good at music. He could understand quickly what did and what did not sound good. He picked up instruments as a good cook picks up tips. This was not surprising--he had the genes of his father to thank--and he did not give as much energy into band class, orchestra, and chorus (he sang, as well) as he would have another Waeburn student with his talents (the children of Judy xxx xnad xxxx were all five of them excellent at piano).

One Wednesday, over the sub-sandwiches delivered to the teacher's lounge, Mr. Gardner, the composition teacher who made it a point to wear each day a bow-tie, surprised his peers by telling them that the boy turned out to be particularly adept at playwrighting. Jareth, he protested, had style, had an ear. Other one-acts had concerned teenaged suicide, the use of a dead bird as a symbol for a dead relationship, a grandfather going slowly crazy through increasing alzheimers, but Jareth's play had simply been about two kids deciding whether or not to go to 7-11. "The boredom, the fury," Gardner said, picking out the last tomato, "it was all there."

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

If Leona despised High Schools' happinesses, and Jareth seemed to float through the world unaware of any of its systems at all, Celia was simply a practical girl. High School, she understood, even at age 15 in the 10th grade, was a landscape of symbols and surfaces. A girl could get ahead and have the most fun by simply being pretty, and so it was to this task that she devoted all of her energies.

Leona and Celia: The Prettier Sister

2008-04-07T08:28:00.001-07:00

+ I think of my story when I'm swimming in the pool. There's a rhythm to the lines. But when I get out of the water, it seems that every two sentences need a thousand more between them. The "head-draft" had Celia's physical description popping up in sentence three so I think need to find a way to more quickly structure her in. Anyway, for Wednesday, I've given myself a 15-page assignment on Celia in High School which will be chapter 1. I thought the other night of, if this were a movie, what's the obvious first scene. The answer: I think it's Celia's show-and-tell presentation about the loss of her father's wealth, which leads Robbie, whose father is the president of ABC, to talk about it at the dinner table, which leads ABC to send G. Blandings (the location scout) out to the property alongside Leslie Bennett, to scout (Which will be seen by Alan and his mother, Margaret, who live across the street). This, I hope, is the start of that: The Oswegos in High School, before Celia's presentation. It also sets Leona up as our lensing narrator

Leona was incapable of being like her sister, Celia. A dose of Modernist fiction, ingested too early, along with the elbow-jabs endured on daily trips down hallways infested with Hollywood offspring had taught her to disdain all knowledge gleaned from surface. She hated shallow beauty, romantic comedies, the giggles trilling from the music rooms where the High School’s couples sloppily kissed. She was too tall, too broad shouldered, and posessed too plain a face—this she knew—and at heart simply feared the shame that comes of cold rejection. She had long ago succeeded in convincing herself that her refusal to engage in the flirtatious rituals of her peers—a capella, group luncheons, afternoons out at the megaplex bordering the school parking lot—was due to the higher knowledge that she could only love and be loved where there was a meeting of minds.

In short, she believed she could only convince someone to love her back through cleverness.

Such opportunities were rare. The boy at the videostore who shared a fetish for pre-code Paramount releases—she had gone to coffee with him. At a summer program for prospective art-school applicants, she had kissed a fellow malcontent whose mixtape ended on a long, slow song that burned wordlessly forever. And then there was Toby, a dark-haired fan of philosophers long dead (he was really a “fan” in the full sense of that word) who was too short for her at 5’6", but who proved, in his devotion, that somewhere, sometime she would be loved for her biting wit, for the very strangeness she cultivated.

Celia, on the other hand, skipped-over the same world with the extra-terrestrial grace of a gazelle in a Wal-Mart. Her long, tawny legs drew stares in the grocery store, as she lazily pushed the cart down the lean aisles walled with cans. She had the air, at fifteen, of needing nothing, of eating nothing, of loving nothing--not really, that is. Leona was a talkative complainer, a hater of the world's unfair systems, an arguer and a spoilsport. Celia was all silence, speaking to the boys who stared across classrooms in what they interpreted as a coded language of gestures: her long, sweeping blonde hair could be pulled back behind an ear with the use of only a single finger; her desk could be tapped with pale, hard nails, in patterns of morse code; her legs could cross and uncross with the rhythm of waves lapping the hull of a retreating ship. Celia smelled good--her soaps were fruit-flavored, purchased at specialty shops, and in the messy bathroom off of her messy bedroom, cluttered every surface.

Leona was adamantly unkempt; on a weekend trip to Las Vegas, her mother, with whom she had shared a bedroom and who had carelessly forgotten to bring along a comb, was shocked to find that her daughter had not only brought none, but that the girl protested to not even own “one of those things.” (Celia, of course, had several.) Even in high school, Leona wore purposelessly sexless garb: navy knee-high socks, loafers worn down from years of sloughing through streets, dresses culled from the four-for-a-dollar piles at the Estate sales of washed up actresses who, after being elbowed out of manses in the hills, had wound up in the chock-block suburbs of the valley, their possessions spilled out onto dry, Bermuda grass they could no longer pay anyone to water. Chunky, vomit-colored bracelets of bakelite, bauble earrings the size and hue of mushrooms, the dark high-collared dresses of widows in mourning—these finds Leona shelled out her father’s money to buy, running her fingers over their cigarette-stained, fork-flecked surfaces, sitting beside her on the passenger seat as she sped North up the 405 in the soft-edged, smog-hazed grey-blue of an LA dusk.

Later, Leona would perhaps realize a disease of vanity in the loving of only that which society had discarded, but at the time she could not see what she did as anything but natural. She loved the beautiful, unloved—this was what she told Richard, the short, dark, philosopher who’d sit out with her and smoke in the public park at night. She liked to think of the past lives of her finds, of all the sad, Grey Garden women who’d worn the things before her. There was a type of immortality in it. She loved, she’d say, not that which made her beautiful, but that which was, innately.

Her mother would agree: the clothes did not make the girl beautiful. They bulged at the hips, they gave the girl broad shoulders, thick ankles. They were evidence that Leona “did not make an effort,” she’d say, to their father in bed, wondering if she should be concerned. “It’s the same as I was at that age, Maudy,” Zed Oswego would reply (to many of his wife’s queries), flipping to the next page in whatever he was reading, letting her talk on. “Leona’s not Cee,” he’d say.
“That,” Maude would say, chuckling, “Is for sure.”
Maude and Zed Oswego often wondered aloud how they had produced a daughter like Celia—blooming with a natural beauty that must, they exclaimed aloud, have come from somewhere. The same musings were not left for Leona. In short, Leona was not the pretty one, and they knew that her life would not be less happy, but it would be harder, and that was something that mattered. If no where else, it mattered in High School.

The Waeburn public school netted its fair share of celebrity offspring. 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. In a school of 500, even among the children of stars, whose faces against all light reminded their watcher of a mash-up of their two strange parents, the Oswegos still netted stares. Leona, the eldest, having graduated just two years prior, had made a name for herself aside from her strange garb, by giving frequent, rousing, angry speeches as the leader of a poorly-attended philosophy club that met weekly. Her previous teachers, when confronted with another Oswego--Jareth, one year younger--would always wonder why he wasn't as outspoken as that sister of his, whose quick, clever essays had gotten the girl into Harvard where she claimed to be pursuing the most useless and backwards of disciplines--Greek.

Jareth Oswego was a dark horse himself, but not like his sister Leona. In over-large, unmarked tee-shirts, the boy was a sitter-out. He preferred the corners of classrooms, and spoke up only when called on to deliver a cutting, sardonic reply. He was adept in Playwrighting, Mr. Gardner told the other teachers over subs one day in the teacher's lounge. The boy, he protested, had style. As Leona had carved a way for herself to stand outside of the light thrown off by her father, Jareth's soft ways were designed to slip under the radar. He did not seem, given Leona, to be an Oswego. Teachers called students like these "Space Cadets." They were always losing their backpacks, calculators, watches and receipts. They showed up late to gym classes without even modestly crafted excuses. On test days, they forgot pencils, and yet when tested showed to have somewhere, at some time, actually done the homework. Their passage through the grades seemed at each juncture like a miracle, and other students admired their spirited lack of trying. Jareth Oswego was clearly a stoner, though no adult had ever willed to catch the boy. xxxx

And he was nothing like Celia.

If Leona despised High Schools' happinesses, and Jareth seemed to float through the world unaware of any of its systems at all, Celia was simply a practical girl. High School, she understood, even at age 15 in the 10th grade, was a landscape of symbols and surfaces. A girl could get ahead and have the most fun by simply being pretty, and so it was to this task that she devoted all of her energies.

The House: Setting up the 2nd chapter description of 82 DePauw

2008-04-02T03:35:00.000-07:00

They started playing bizarre 60s french music that sounds like Insane Clown Posse at Drum&Bell, otherwise the following would have actually maybe made sense. I'm rushed for time. More to come later tonight. Control + F for "Milk Dud."

Kind of thinking of how I can set up an insane EM forrester howard’s end length description of the mansion… Also how I can develop Jareth. Am thinking about giving him a male baby-sitter who he esteemed but father hated.

THE HOUSE

In the house where Jareth had grown up, toddling among brass doorknobs, there were rooms into which he had never gone. In the fourth grade, severe, dark Gloria—they called their teachers by their first names—had passed out sheets of blank paper. A twenty-something Midwest transplant, Gloria would get tired by the end of the day and would sit out of the light thrown by the Eastward facing windows in the early afternoon, kneading her temples. She had retired to the too-small, plastic chair behind her desk when Emily, a serious, twittering girl in pink spandex, had asked what they were to do with the sheets. Gloria, slouching, twiddling in the desk drawer looking for her cell, had paused a moment to think, and said, “Just draw a picture of your house, okay?”
Emily asked whether or not they were to include portraits of the family. Gloria assented—“Sure.” But Joey, whose parents were divorced and who could not be fairly asked to draw two separate families, protested. “You can,” Gloria said, “do whatever you want—but include the house.” A few minutes of quiet drawing elapsed before a second question from Emily: “How do you show a room that’s always in the dark?” Gloria asked for clarification. “I mean, what if you have a home theatre and you don’t know what color the walls are?”
It was maybe mid-project that Gloria found she had stumbled on what any other girl, drawn to the teaching position in Malibu of all places for the glory of those chalky mansions, biting into the California scrub-brush hillsides like a mouthful of loose teeth left in a corn-cob, should have long ago assigned. She took a meditative moment, checking the phone for calls—there were none—pushed back a bit from her desk, cleared her throat loudly, and explained to the class how what was “really important,” was to show the size of the thing, the schemas and space. She wanted the strange shapes of Malibu pools, the light thrown from the sliding glass doors that shut the home office off from the sunroom. Behind the blank doors students had squared-off to represent garages, she wanted to know about the cars—if you did not know the year, model, and make, you could just try to draw it.
Over the hulking, over-large frame of Maybelline, one desk to his right and already busy filling in flower boxes on a boxy, triangle-roofed cottage quite different from the nearby apartment he had seen her walk into—Emily began to sketch. The girl shied away from the crayons at the center of the table, took up a mechanical pencil, and eeked out a measured pseudo-blueprint of a typical Malibu mansion: a shell-shaped staircase swelled up to a second foyer, on which Emily had gone so far as to designate the space taken up by her mother’s Nordic track and a potted aloe vera, whose presence was noticed, heretofore, only by the Peruvian maid assigned to water it daily. What was labeled “Emily’s Room” was the shape of two-business cards, placed in an L, and took up airspace that walled the potted plant, between bedroom A and bathroom 4A. She inspected her drawing—the window-seat, how could she have forgotten!—and looked over, past Maybelline’s hog-wash fantasy, to her family friend Jareth’s, to see if she might have missed anything he had included. (Were pipes or wiring necessary? Did they really have to use jarring colors?) The boy lived right down the block, and she had seen his home, been mystified by the koi swimming loosely in the front pond.
On Jareth’s paper could be seen only a square box, containing twelve more boxes—six on each side of a slim hall, and nine of them unlabelled. These were rooms, it could be presumed, which must be entered via swinging, shell-shapes he had sketched to symbolize doors. The doors opened into nothing; Lids swinging into blank space. Eyes batting shut. Emily pointed to the empty rooms—her pointer finger walking down the hallway, turning right—as if moving a piece on a Clue gameboard, and said: “What’s in here?”
Jareth did not know. These were the rooms in the house into which he had simply never been. Brass knobs which he had never opened—they might be pantries, closets, the bedrooms of sisters not yet born.

Gloria herself had ended up in a flat overhanging a garage, sharing a living room with an older woman whose smoke clogged the drapes. The two bonded over squalor: Gloria was allowed to leave dishes in the sink if the other woman did, their magazines pooled around the overstuffed armchairs in the living room, the severed faces of starlets winking in the light splashing out of the TV during the older woman’s required evening viewing—Lives of the Rich and Famous coupled, sometimes, with Cribs. Gloria would drink diet cokes through a straw and think of how lame this was, all this was.

It was like a personalized version of Cribs, she thought, scanning the sheets. “And this room, what’s this?” she asked Emily, who said, “It’s for billiards. But I never go in there.” Gloria could have been a xxxxxxxx thief. Boyfriend would want to know hahahahahhahahaha he can break in steal all their shit.

So yes, all right, she wanted to see how the other half lived. In which case, the paper of the boy next to Emily—a nine-year-old Jareth Oswego—must have been the greatest disappointment. For some, the drapes will never be pulled aside, the smoke will never clear. It was this way for Gloria, a forgettable girl who was given nothing before she fought for it, and on whose fridge today hangs the drawing—blank as a tray of ice-cubes, cornrows of dead air.

Leona and Alan

2008-03-31T04:37:00.000-07:00

Halfway through the immense outline I just got sick of the work of writing a boring boring outline, and decided to keep myself excited about the project by going on a dig into whatever meaty slice I really wanted to be working on. I used the first paragraph of a story I had earlier been working on and realized it was exactly the voice of Leona's character—she's judgmental, insecure and narcissistic in that typical Ivy-League way, but at the core she wants to be loved. The challenge in this chapter (and how it fits into the book) is to show how a girl can create divergent fictions around a single incident. This, of course, is how the editors operate based on the footage they have. I don't think we should ever know what Alan thinks, but we should be aware that Leona is deluding herself, and that the boy if in love with anyone, is in love with Celia.

My goal: When Leona, in her bed, imagines Alan, her memories should replay the "dailies" of her "shooting" with him much as Leslie Bennett, in his trailer located LITERALLY in the Alan family drive-way, replays the incidents of the day and decides how to prompt the next day's action to create coherent narratives. I am thinking about changing from my outline of a chapter wholly told through Leona's gaze to break away in a Barthelme-ish last paragraph to Leslie's trailer as he watches snippets of leftover Leona/Alan footage (Leona, who opts to get her head blurred out, cannot be shown in final cuts) and thinks of a sort of pre-TV, pre-lapserian time when he could have just watched this scene without projecting upon it a narrative. It's just two kids, a couch, a TV. A book on a dresser. Leona in her rumpled sheets. It's just people moving through rooms. Etc.

Okay--here's the day's efforts. And by day, I mean 4.30 - 8 spent at Zarah on Gulou Dongdajie.

IN THE MARGINS OF THE BOOK HE HAD LENT HER, THE BOY HAD WRITTEN, "Man v. Nature." It made Leona flinch: how soppy, how obvious and poorly seen, she thought. But…at the same time…She noted his crabbed handwriting, the care with which he had set down the phrase. It was cute to imagine Alan using a regular old pencil, like a child sitting at a desk doing homework after-hours, the lamp casting its spot of peach light on the page, a single circle in a dark room, and within the circle—Man v. Nature.It was cute to imagine him sharpening the pencil—pausing to open the desk drawer and, finding no sharpeners there, splitting at the graphite with the edge of a razor blade. It was nice, she guessed, to just imagine him in a little room alone, reading.
And these ruminations set her to loving him again, without reason, with only heartache. It was difficult to be a girl in love, she thought, tossing on the rumpled duvet, thinking of how the moonlight might look against her body in just this position. She lay sprawled open like a starfish, her limp hands dangling off the bed’s edges like the sculpted, heavy useless things of a Michaelangelo. It was as if she were watching herself in a movie. Like watching herself as she would watch a sort of character with whom she empathized, to whom she felt good things should be coming. It was difficult.
A part of her knew that Alan loved her and a part of her could never know. If he did not love her, the knowledge would be too hard to bear. It was not only the rejection that must be reckoned with—another hatchmark in a long line—it was the sheer waste expended in the years she had spent loving him—two years, nearly. And it was only just this week that they had reached some sort of crest.
Crest—she liked that word. It was a wave, but it also recalled the intimacy of toothpaste. Crest. She imagined a tube of his toothpaste in a dirty glass cup, kept on the lip of a porcelain sink. She could really love him.
So yes, it started with the book. And it kept going.
The book was a childish collection of Victorian lyric poems. Everyone knew by now that the Victorians hadn’t been any good at poetry but Leona still paged through the thing—scanning for the poem that would be clearly, succinctly addressed from him to her. She read an awful one about finches—a drowned bird found and raised to sing “sweetly”—and then she put the thing down. Maybe he was gay.
That was what it was. She thought of the way he dressed—tight, pressed trousers, worn European-looking sneakers, shirts always with collars (and the collars rumpled as if someone had just been kissing him at the neck). At the house, when he had ostensibly come over to lend her the book and to borrow Weekend at Bernie’s, he had not left right away. He had come in through the backdoor—the sliding glass doors that led from the pool to the den, where Celia had been watching television, and had repaired to the kitchen when she had got a call.
Project Runway was on—Celia had left it loudly running—and the two of them stood for a minute, watching it without sitting down. He had asked what the show was; she had explained and said, “It’s actually good”; and they had sat down—he, sitting back easily with his arm stretched around the back of the couch, she sitting with her arms crossed across her stomach, one leg crossed over the other, and her loose foot jittering. When she noticed its quaking she tried to stop it and every few minutes she would forget, and see it going again. The still-warm dimple on the couch between them—where Celia had sat before she had risen—seemed to nearly hum; Leona could feel its weight as if the absence were a body whose weight was greater than his own. Unmovable space. Dense emptiness, like spots of air between knitted webs of lace.
They could hear, over in the kitchen, Celia talking on her cell, yelling at one point with breathless, teenage urgency, “Ugh—kill me with a hatchet?” At that, Alan had snickered and looked over at Leona. Leona had wanted her look—slimly rolled eyes—to say, I would never act that way toward you, but afterward she realized how the gesture did nothing except show how truly judgmental she could be—of her own sister, no less. It was hard to win with Alan. And she knew, somewhere, in the hot buried place beneath her folded hands, that that was what she wanted, more than love—she wanted him to just like her. And then they had had a fight.
[Greg, Cameraman 7, whom she rather liked (he was prone to taking his lunches silently, alone, at the glass table on the veranda, doing a crossword while the rest of the crew ate out by the vans) was filming in there. Dane, the soundman holding the boom, stood in the threshold between the kitchen and the den, and looked over at the two of them—Alan and Leona—as though deciding which show was more interesting. She gave him a glare—a direct, pushy stare—and he looked back to Celia. A sidelong glance at Alan showed him to be all innocence—looking completely at the TV, as if she were not even there.]
Onscreen, the primly dressed gray-haired host wore a pink oxford open at the collar and moved around the workroom, touching the failed dreams of various designers. He had paused over a green dress whose maker sat on a nearby stool, crying into her hands, and said, looking from the weepy dress to the weepy girl, “Oh, this is too much.”
Alan, who hadn’t said anything so far, had said: “I sort of like it.”
The dress—with its saucy, frilly cuffs that poured out from two thin sleeves—was one of those unapologetically feminine things, made to rhumba in—complicated beyond measure. How these people sewed these things was insane to her—incomprehensible—not only in the physics of puffing those two-dimensional, silken sheets, whose movements operated by laws not known to her, but more so in the designers’ mental processes while doing it. How could a person, a human, who knew what beauty was, convince themselves that a puff could improve something, could improve anything.
About the dress, she said: “I mean, I guess?”
“You hate it,” he said, looking over at her with a smirk. “You hate everything I like.”
“That’s completely untrue,” she had said, accenting it with a little shocked guffaw. “I like Weekend at Bernie’s.”
“Ironically,” he said. “You like things through a haze of distance.” He held the word haze long, uses his fingers like a trill.
“I like like Weekend at Bernie’s,” she said. “Sans irony.”
“Right. A test then.” He lifted his right arm, pointed toward the screen. “What do you think of the other dresses?”
Her eyes washed over them. They were all dresses, intended for other women, for the fey, lean silhouettes of women who needed nothing, who consumed no food, who lounged on hard, white chaises in the windswept modern homes of Mediterranean beachtowns. She’d look awful in any of the dresses. But it wasn’t about her, she knew. She liked the simple one—black, cut with a diagonal seam down the front. She liked it for the buttons: little squares, sewn one-inch apart up the seam, made to be sexily, slowly unhinged. It had been designed by a girl who was now grasping her shears, holding them jokingly above the neck of a fellow competitor who sat in the breakroom, eating the last snickers bar that had been available in the vending machine. It was now 3 am in their studio and the girl was desperate.
“I like Rachel’s,” she had said, of the black dress.
“Hate it,” Alan had said. “Hate it hate it.” And then he had said, quickly—it was still part of the same sentence. “We’re incompatible.”
When he had said that, he had turned away from the screen, where the dresses were, and he had looked at her.

Four days later, she was thinking of that moment. She had measured the incident as an example of him loving her: he had thought of them as a couple, between whom compatibility could be measured. But now she saw it for what it was—they had been talking about dresses, and he had loved the frilly one, hated the one with its pleasant simplicity, its bosom-grazing dropline neck. It was not that he hated the things she loved, that they had a sparring comeraderie similar to oh… she didn’t know… it seemed too cheesy to admit she plainly thought of him as her Knightley. It was that they had talked about dresses. And boys who liked to talk about dresses were gay. And the book beside her on the nightstand now—the Victorian poems:
Man v. Nature.
Holding yourself back. So he could be gay. But then there was his arm. It had rested on the back of the couch, inches from her neck. He had not moved it. And she was sure that after twenty minutes, the human arm loses blood, the human arm must be moved, but he kept it there. He kept it there. Kept it there until Celia came back into the room, trailing two cameramen and Dane, that sound guy, whose eyes wandered all over Celia with a hateful glaze, Alan jumped up. He moved his arm. He said, “I better go” even though they had not yet decided the final dress (she had looked it up later that night on YouTube—it had been Angela) and then he said, “Oh, nearly forgot.”
Out of his bag he had pulled the book. And it had started with the book, this crest.

Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Alan’s father—in Palm Springs, car wreck, cousin, Leona being his date at the funeral, the frilly dress she chooses to please him, his disappointment, the poem read at the funeral, his recitation, hiding behind the garage of Alan’s house (next to their old house), showing him the place she knows—where the painters could not reach. Seeing Anabelle there. Knew her from camp as a child. Recollection of the incident (India, Sybelle) on the day where they had run out of lanyard string, and it had seemed an omen, because later that night the bear had come. Anabelle is beautiful. What is it to film a dead face? Why can they not show the dead on television? Leona wonders this, she looks at Alan. People are incomprehensible to her. She loves Alan because of the same way other people love characters on television. She knows nothing other than her own literary projections.

“Why are you doing this?” he said. She looked over the railing, and could see him stopped on the stairs, one flight down, peering up between the xxxxx bars.
“You’re doing this for all of the wrong reasons.”
What could she say to that. She said, “I’m sorry.”
He said not don’t be but “Don’t bother being.” And left.

If it were another girl it was probably Annabelle, who was certainly thinner than herself but was also a lot duller intellectually. Not to mention Anabelle’s duller pallor, given her smoking. She hated him for liking Annabelle—it seemed so, I don’t know, she thought, wrong for him to like blondes. It wasn’t just that it was conventional, Leona wasn’t being purposefully unconventional to not like Annabelle, but the girl was the sort of blonde the stereotype had been created for, or, if not created for, she was the sort of blonde the stereotype later came to swallow. She wore hats cocked at an angle, for god sakes. She owned capris, and read serious hardcover books and kept the covers intact. Leona had seen her through the window of Buck’s the other day, hunched over one of those sort of carved-out bread bowls of soup and an untouched stack of three bad Saul Bellow novels, their spines facing out to the street. If only some people could learn how to try instead of just to try. She probably didn’t even eat the soup. She was probably anorexic.
The other day at Buck’s, Leona had looked up over to the counter and seen him speaking with her. Anabelle must have just bought something because they were talking over a bag she held. He leaned down closer to her, breathing in her airspace. It was the type of lean that, when he’d done it to her, she’d interpreted as love.
How awful. She couldn’t bear to think of it now. Not with the covers rumpled and the moonlight streaming. Now it was better to think of other things, of the times when he had loved her or he could have loved her.

Re-tools of ch. 1

2008-03-29T05:01:00.001-07:00

In trying and re-trying to tool out a good "intro" to the first chapter, I ranted this one. It doesn't fit, OBVIOUSLY but the tone feels right

Episode-by-episode. You could see them falling apart episode-by-episode. The one where dad yells at Cynthia about the mayonnaise jar leads to the one where dad yells at Cynthia about fucking the cameraman and that leads to the one where the cameraman yells at dad about simply the way he's standing which leads to the one where Cynthia leaves completely, totally, gone--an empty zero at the center of every peopled shot--and that leads to the one where dad and the dogs are standing in the yard, gape-mouthed, looking out at a camera he no longer notices. And the dogs, animals trained to sniff out swine, seem not to notice either. Their eyes are empty. They nearly hum with forgiveness.

The camera.
It is like a first daughter sitting in an unlit room.
It can, with ease, be disregarded.

The light, out here. The light, the light! That’s what they’re always saying. Men carry silver umbrellas, point them toward the sun, and bathe our faces in the sought-after glow that comes of misdirections. They rove aimless, looking up toward empty skies, making the grandiose gestures of pizza chefs--kissing the tips of fingers, rolling round eyes toward the moon--amore, amore!

What is it they seek, at what times of day? The light comes throaty, like mustard poured through windows; it winnows on the backs of spoons; it catches in their mothers hair and stays there—netted—like a trumped seal, like some sort of abalone famed in Scotland. What are the things they want and don’t want? They want to see long spreads of wall-to-wall carpet, creeping up into the edges, infecting the world with softness. Carpet like a soft-fuzz lens. And they want to see swimming pools--thick, chalky as ice-cubes. They are drawn to water. They cluster at its edges in their black caps to seem, from the second-story balconies of neighboring mansions, like types of mold that grow near dampness. And then, of course, they want to see her face--poreless--her eyes empty as the lens itself, like a bicycle wheel with the sad spokes gone. Spokeless. When she opens her mouth, Leslie says, snapping shut the script, "It's just more of the same. Forever."

He's threatening to quit over her stupidity. As if that's not fuel. She's malleable. A pygmalion. He'd like to squeeze her throat in the same way he'd like to bang her. In the same way a grandmother, paging through a calendar of kittens, says, out loud, "They're too adorable" and thinks, momentarily, about an act of suffocation. Bosom, kittens. Bosom.

First stab at synopsis - half done

2008-03-29T04:55:00.000-07:00

The Oswego Suggestions is the story of a family broken apart by the process of appearing on reality TV. A behind-the-scenes glimpse, it reveals as much about today’s media-soaked American family as it tells of how our behavior changes depending on our audience, and of how watching the narrative of our lives—as told by another—can do little to help us make sense of them.
The story occurs during nine months in 2001, before September 11th and at reality TV’s first peak. It is told by Jareth Oswego, the son of washed-out rocker Zed Oswego who lives in Malibu. Jareth is a brooding, mopey bohemian, an unhappy intellectual whose quiet judgments of the family storming around him place him as a sort of Jude character within the society of his family. Unsure of his role in both his family and in the world at the start of the novel, this place is what he will, over the course of the story, come to better define—breaking out of the “role” chosen for him by the show’s editors, a panel of fates.
Motivated less by greed than the fatherly desire to give his clan all they ask of him, the modest, clumsy patriarch, Zed Oswego, is a former rock star who has toured the world and turned sweetly jaded, content to settle in a Malibu mansion and dote on his brood. Born a shy, nerdy boy in Northern Massachusetts, fame fell into his lap in the form of Rick Moldin, the high-school heavyweight whose garage-band act needed a bassist. Moldin’s narrative is typical of a VH1 backstory—a twittering, skinny energy-ball who never sought food or women, Moldin turned to coke in the 80s, nearly O.D.-ed in the nineties, and hasn’t been fit to tour for twenty years. He’s now a ghost seen around the house, huffing bowls of fruit loops, watching bad TV, swimming obsessively in their lima-bean-shaped outdoor pool (he’s been told to seek a sort of spiritual rebirth from the waters) and smoking endless cigarettes as thin and pale as he is. Because there’s no longer really a band, and because the men are now in their late forties (crotchety for rock stars), the money’s been running out. But Zed’s wife, Maude, continues to spend. Sure, Zed gets the odd producing gig for an old friend, but he’s too much of a pushover to tell Maude “no” when she wants to re-tile the bathroom (she’s an obsessive re-decorator). It’s Zed’s series of poor and eccentric investments, engineered to save Maude from knowledge of the embarrassment of their financial situation, that finally leads Zed to accept a producer’s offer to put the family on TV, buy them a new house, and assuage Maude’s latent desire for fame in whatever form.
And then there are the three kids—born in love, raised in love, they’re the sort of private-school exports that could only have been raised by overly-accepting ex-hippies.
Centrally, there’s Jareth, the brooding dark son who in his quiet hobby habits takes after his father. Jareth enjoys building circuit-boards in the basement, recording video art projects, and writing diatribes which he publishes on the internet. He gets stoned and watches Planet Earth. He’s a shy, gawky artist who is always seen in corners, darkly angsty about his role in broader society (a “Cameron” from Ferris Beuller’s Day Off). Pursued mercilessly by artsy, bratty high school girls—he’s a Junior, worrying about college—he’s just not interested. He’d rather hang out with Moldin, whose Joyce-ean life stories keep him quiet. When the camera crews come in—he’s drawn to Kenneth, a 23-year-old film student hired to take the house’s establishing shots. Their friendship blurs the line between what can and cannot be shown on screen, and it will end in a betrayal by Kenneth, who shows onscreen a shot that will make his career and destroy their friendship.
In his own family, Jareth is most connected to his eldest sister (by four years), Leona. An intellectual misfit, a Lisa Simpson, Leona should be a Senior at Yale. But she’s taken the semester off. Her depression—latent, and perhaps fictional—spiraled out of control when she was rejected by a long-term unrequited love. But her parents don’t know that was the cause, and neither does her school-appointed shrink. A compulsive liar, she’s petrified of their judgments and has never told anyone about him—about Alan. She would rather the world think of her as a sexless perfectionist, an in-control, un-rejectable genius whose sadness comes only from the fact that she’s too smart for her own good. Clearly Leona doesn’t get along well with her own family. She loves them, certainly, but important parts of her don’t yet know that. It’s over the course of the story, told over one year, that she will learn the depth of this love.
Leona’s bitterest enemy is her mother, Maude. Always distracted—is that a new sweater, Leona? It looks a bit tight—Maude is quick to judgment and quick to spontaneous action. What Zed fell in love with her for she still has—a devilish spark in her eye, the ability to put her feet up out the window on a road-trip, and childishly suggest they pull the car over at that hilarious looking drive-in, buy all of the donuts, and throw them to those seagulls over there. It’s this uncensored blabmouth energy that irks her two reserved children—Leona, and sometimes Jareth (who has more patience for her) and sets them to, when she’s not home, holing up on the couch and watching long films that to her are dull. She wished they’d go outside more, live more. Raised by a mother whose WWII-imposed strictness led them to crave fresh air, Maude xxxxx. Born a beautiful bombshell xxxxxx Dietingxxxxxxx Splenda.

Her favorite child, if such a phrase could be uttered (it wouldn’t be from her hippie-happy lips, but from judgmental Leona’s) is her daughter Celia, aged 16, a year below Jareth. The Paris Hilton of the Oswego clan, Celia has a Lolita-esque beauty so strong that it startles. Tan, long-limbed, deep-voiced and slow talking, Celia moves with a gazelle-like grace like an alien among her spazzy, impatient family members. She is incomprehensible to Leona, who is frankly jealous for Celia’s beauty (especially when she sees Alan interact with her) and for her own mother’s attention toward the other daughter, who offers less in terms of intellectual prowess—what Leona thought everyone should be striving for. Celia herself is far from an empty, beautiful shell. She is Marjorie in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Bernice Bobs her Hair—a girl who quickly understands how you get ahead, and who plays by those rules. She likes that boys like her but, like Jareth, doesn’t get a lot out of that.
Celia is the darling of the camera crews, and one of the reasons the family got picked up at all—out of the multitude of Hollywood families desperate enough for the on-camera attention.
It is Celia that Leslie Bennett has fallen in love with. And in the world of Reality TV, Leslie Bennett calls the shots. Bennet is a tennis-sweater wearing, doting pony of a man—his teeth are whitened, his mane is blonde, and he’s as comfortable in a pink polo spearing oysters with a silver tine as he is at the back-table of an East LA dive, pulling at a Kilkenny and having a heart-to-heart with a dude he’d really like to cast as a bouncer. He has always been able to talk to anyone, to make his fey-ness seem pitiable or fashionable. He can tell a story; Like Leona, he has the tendencies of a compulsive liar and he fears them in himself. He has not held down a relationship in a very long time. It could be because he is too busy—he keeps an ear constantly on his cell-phone, and has been known to sleep on the couch in his office—but it’s also because he too well understands people, he too easily reads the insecurities and needs of others, and he hates people for them. He tells himself he has not yet met his match. Bennet moves through the world with unfrilled effortlessness—he glides above the surface, skips from project to project like a tossed stone. What Leslie is drawn to in Celia is yes, that “star quality” he’s gotten a knack for spotting, but also that the girl, for being raised within the walls of Hollywood, does not see him as a god or a star-maker. Their relationship is perfectly civil, normal, and Bennet craves that normality. Their banter eludes Jareth and Zed, disgusts Leona, and makes mother Maude jealous enough to always try and butt in.

The action of the novel takes place over a nine-month period ending in late August 2001, when Leona returns to college, and starting on December 26th, 2000, the day after a Christmas when the family has less to spend on gifts than at other times of year and with money troubles on their mind, Maude decides that with the family all gathered together, it’s a good time to make a happy announcement. Of course, all are not happy. Leona, conveniently home for the holiday break and having three days earlier signed a document ensuring Yale that she would not return for the semester, is flustered by what the novel’s working title refers to—the list of “Suggestions” that Hollywood heavyweight Leslie Bennet urges the family underake before filming begins.
Having already signed the form that they would participate, Maude and Zed Oswego need only get their children to sign. Celia, a draw for the producers, has long-known of the whole scheme though for self-absorbed Jareth it’s a surprise—but, a pushover who’s not really that interested in pop culture, he’s not really in a place to say no. Leona, however, makes a quick decision to do whatever she can to stay disassociated. She opts to be removed from every frame, to be spliced out, blurred out, unmentioned. Her reputation at Yale, she fears, is already that of an Oswego daughter; as if she didn’t have the brains to get in there on her own merit.

WHY ARE YOU WRITING A BLOG ABOUT THIS SHIT. OTHER PEOPLE JUST WRITE.

2008-03-29T03:33:00.001-07:00

INTRODUCTIONSSSSS

I am a 22-year-old who took a year off of her life and decided to write a novel. If you care, I won a bunch of writing awards and and have a bunch of writing experience that doesn't translate into writing a novel, but yes--I've included a mini-resume after this rant.

So why this blog. Blogs are lame. Blog Blog Blog. Bloviate.

The explanation: My personality type is closer to Hildi's in "His Girl Friday" than to Anne Hathaway's in that shitty adaptation of Persuasion. I visited Emily Dickinson's attic hideaway in North Mass. and I almost cried--what a crappy life!

My background as a writer is in journalism. I fear--oh, how I fear it!--that all of my tendencies toward writing nonfiction stem from a desire for acceptance, made palpable in the narcissistic truth that I like to get published. When I write, I am never writing for myself, but instead for the entertainment of others. I imagine invisible sets of eyes--scary editors, judgmental mothers, ex-boyfriends, that guy with pale, slender hands, like gloves of cream over the bone, sitting over there in the lobby of the Kempinski hotel where I'm currently typing.

Spending a year writing a novel, holed up in the candled nooks of Beijing's cafes, it's too easy to forget these future readers. On several attempts to undertake this massive project I've given up with plaintive sighs of, "But no one's going to read it anyway!"

The internet changes all that. Which is not to say that anyone is necessarily reading my rants and hollers, but that it is now PHYSICALLY POSSIBLE that someone is, which allows me to create a very useful delusion that fuels my writing process, so that someday someone is more likely to read this--as they pick a volume up off the shelf with my name on the spine, open the first page, and become absorbed. This ghost of a reader is perhaps the self-deception at the heart of all blogs; this shitshow is no exception.

Thanks for reading.
Adriane

Mini Writing Resume--

Freelance Journalist:
I've been based in DC, NY, Hong Kong, and Beijing, where I have written for the Washington Post, Time Magazine, The New York Observer, Paste Magazine, The Grapevine, That's Beijing, Urbane, City Weekend, and Paper Magazine.

My work has won the following awards:
FICTION
The Yale Daily News Wallace Prize, First Place in Fiction 2007.
The Yale Literary Magazine, Francis Bergen Prize for Fiction 2006,
Willets Prize for Fiction 2007, 2006.

NONFICTION
The Atlantic Monthly Student Writing Contest, Nonfiction Second Place 2006.
The Yale Daily News Wallace Prize, Second Place in Nonfiction
Yale University John Hersey Prize for Journalism First Place 2007, Second Place 2006; Henry P. Wright Prize for Journalism 2005, 2006.
J. Meeker Prize for Composition 2004.
Lloyd Mifflin Prize for Seniors—Outstanding Work in English 2007.

The original problematic short story that prompted this quest

2008-03-29T03:10:00.000-07:00

The novel idea was based on when I just started writing a short story that went way too long. Here is the story, published in the Spring issue of the Yale Literary Magazine when I was a Senior.

What I want to save about this version is the question that ends the story. If you don't have the patience to read this, read the last paragraph. The story is problematic in its pacing, in its rushed character descriptions, in the general rushed nature of the telling. This, of course, is what "going long" fixes.

The Oswego Suggestions

A guttering comes up from the drive, from the huffing exhaust pipe of a van wheeling into its third attempt to parallel-park alongside the koi pond, where the whiskered mouths of gentlemanly goldfish latch open and closed to swallow mouthfuls of grey air. Through the scrim of palm fronds that hide the house from the street, the backing vehicle can be seen to read “Maid-4-U” in hopeful lettering, bold and red. Hired by the studio to swing by on the Thursday before shooting is set to start, this is the first sign that anything in our lives is capable of change. Predictably, I can be found only through the second story-window nitched above the portico, drooling into my rumpled duvet; still asleep.
In my dream the muffled footsteps of maids treading the carpets register as rainstorms; their Ecuadorian banter ricocheting off the bath tile comes across as the clacking of Morse code; and the long, slow sighs of the vacuums sound like the breathy skirting of subway trains braking into underground stations. So it isn’t until 1.37 p.m.—when a tentacle of buttery afternoon light edges across the wall-to-wall carpet to hit me in the face—that I open my eyes to the doorframe silhouette of a slouchy figure, holding forth a SwifferSweeper as if it were a Trident. For a tense moment, we both say nothing. Then, simultaneously, we mumble faint apologies. I pull at the duvet. The door closes (she closes the door) and she is gone. And I am in the dark again.
Maybe a half an hour later, mom walks down the hall with the svelte way of walking I can recognize by ear, due to the specific rhythm of the swish-boom boom of her hips and something about the crush of heels on velour piling.
She throws open the door—“Really, Jareth. It’s two o’ clock. Children are leaving school and standing at bus stops”—and pulls her neck back out into the hall.
A dream later and I can hear Cynthia tripping down the stairs on her cell. “Yes, pages forty-two and forty-three—one through thirty-one, just the odds.” Back from school.
I lie starfished on the bed for a moment longer. The prospect of awakening holds little to no joy. Even in the near darkness I have seen what mom is wearing; the first indication that she is strung tight today, that things are bad. It’s a lipstick-pink double-breasted Azzedine Alaia shoulder-padded 1987 “power suit,” speckled with buttons of brass, each holding the imprinted seal of a rope-wrapped anchor. Meant to invoke the splendor of multi-million dollar yachts, which themselves are meant to invoke the lives of gruff, seafaring gents from the 1830s, the buttons seem to me to be only images of sinking, of being sunk. Mom wears it to seem “classy.”
Forget the suit. There’s nothing to do but go downstairs, and I pad down in my pajamas (Halloween-print boxers, Bart Simpson tee) past a chorus-girl row of maids wiping the stairwell posts. Amy and Cynthia lie splayed out on the couch, clicking through channels. In the kitchen, the SubZero holds only the asparagus en croutte left by the caterers two nights ago, the dregs of a Chardonnay I am sure Mom has been sucking, and two shelves of diet sodas in prim airplane-sized mini cans. I close the fridge and immediately notice two things.
1. All of the carpets in the house (perceivable to me over the kitchen’s granite island) have been vacuumed in neat, straight rows, so that the blank carpet retains the sort of tessellating pattern mowed in to baseball stadium lawns.
2. On the outside of the SubZero’s door, a sheet of paper has been hastily taped (the wood-paneling expels magnets, so we keep a roll of 3M beside the fridge) and at the top of the sheet, mom’s over-worked, over-wrought all-caps reads, “OSWEGO FAMILY NOTICE” below which is written: “Things we don’t want cameramen to see / things to HIDE”:
French Muzzy “learning tapes” (Cynthia’s writing)
Diet Nestle Quick—pantry (Cynthia)
Computer guides for dummies (Cynthia)
MY closet (Cynthia)
Cynthia’s Madame Alexander Dolls (Dad)
Dvds, family room cupboard (Dad’s hand)
The garage (Dad)
Rock&Gem mag. Collection (Dad again)
Everything related or pertaining to me and my life including your lives (Amy)
Mom has not written anything. I suspect she has already hidden whatever it is that she is going to be hiding. I look at the carpet again, at the lines in the carpet the maids are writing with the suck-mouthed vacuums. Over the white-noise, I yell out, “Hey Amy,” and pop open a Diet Dr. Pepper (mini-size). “What’s with this list?”
Amy does not look away from the television (Will & Grace, Season 6, Episode 9: Strangers with Candice), but I hear her just fine, as in one gutsy, dorky breath she says, “We’re going to be on a reality TV show that’s basically just about our family and the cameramen come tomorrow so you need to hide what you don’t want them to see and no one told us until today because they thought we wouldn’t approve.”
All I can say is, “What, really?” and smirk over at her with a sort of stupefied smile. I set down my Diet Dr. Pepper on the speckled granite of the central island.
“No, that was a lie.”
“Wait, was it?”
“No, it was true.”
“So we really are going to be on TV.”
“Got it.”
So we really are going to be on TV. Huh. I look at the mini soda can, sitting lonesome on the precipice of the kitchen’s solitary island, and I am not looking at the can, I am seeing myself. I am newly made aware of how I would look to a television audience. Perhaps this outfit would incite the whoops and hollers of an afternoon special laugh-track: I’m wearing Halloween print boxers, the faces of ghouls plummeting down to the hem in a factory-mistake diagonal, and I’m drinking diet Dr. Pepper, a B-list soda in second-rate form. This is breakfast, no less, and it’s 2:39 p.m. So it’s understandable that the first thing to come to mind is not what I will hide (the cliché litany including my gay porn and my grandmother’s ashes—which ended up in my room balanced on the unused NordicTrac). The first thing I think is how all time will divide into two eras: the era wherein I walked downstairs in boxers whose easy-access fly often made my flaccid penis momentarily viewable, and the coming era of history—the era in which I will don Diesel jeans and get recognized by thirteen-year olds in New Jersey malls. The Jack Osborne narrative. Oh, god.
Cynthia and Amy and I spend the rest of the day sitting in front of the big TV, staring blankly, shifting routinely like patients with bed-sores, quieting the volume on Antiques Roadshow when a lone maid enters the scene in search of dust around the curios on the armrest end-tables. The maids have come, Amy explains, because reality TV necessitates that the house be pristinely clean. (“That’s reality.”)
I have never even really noticed the curios around which the maids are dusting. Now I take note of them as objects that a camera would locate in the foreground of an establishing shot, to lend the unfolding scene a hint of irony. I imagine, behind the tiny porcelain figurine of a maiden towing a drunk-looking lamb, how Cynthia’s mascara would look as it runs through her tears during just another break up scene. I see Mom and Dad fighting behind the foreground placement of a framed photograph of them in sixties wedding outfits (mom in a white mini, dad with a tuxedo tee) holding hands and smiling blindly into the flash.
At one point Cynthia’s cell rings (Gwen Stefani ft. Akon — “Sweet Escape”) and she jumps up and slides the glass door closed behind her, and fifteen minutes later her boyfriend’s face is pressed up against the same glass door, peering in past the glare to look for Cynthia. She hops up and then they’re gone and it’s me and Amy.
When it’s just the two of us, we can get really terrible. Amy goes to Harvard but took a semester off to deal with “emotional problems” (“Namely,” Amy flippantly tells the postman and others who ask, “the emotional problem of Harvard itself”). So she is too smart to be enjoyable company for daytime TV. She makes dissonant comments such as when, during a special on eating disorders, The Tyra Banks Show faces off five chairs of anorexic girls versus five chairs of obese girls, and Amy says, “What is she trying to achieve, some sort of Hegelian dialectic?” Or, during The Simpsons (my favorite, witness the tee described above), she makes the lucid observation: “Look at how Mr. Burns unconsciously authors every plot. Polluter providing death through nuclear smoke? Or angel granting life through low-wage paychecks.” It’s completely exhausting.
But before The Simpsons has even ended (it goes until 6:30), Mom is throwing open the door that from the garage to the kitchen, and asking, “Did TakeoutTaxi come yet?”
“Nope,” Amy says. “Where were you?”
“They’re bringing General Tso’s for you. Where’s Cynthia?”
“Hospital. Brothel. Cemetery.” Pause. “Boyfriend’s.”
“Right,” Mom says, slipping out of her pumps and hurling them on the granite kitchen counter, alongside three slurped-out diet sodas and the crumbs of the asparagus frittata crusty quiche thing. “Family meeting at seven. Where’s your father?”
“Haven’t seen ‘im.” Amy says. Then The Simpsons is back on for the final few bars until 6:30, and then there’s a re-run of Seinfeld (“Big Hands”) which we quietly watch as the sun sets over the lima-bean shaped pool. The pool is now barely visible through the plate glass sliding doors, as in the growing darkness, the broad expanses of glass reflect more and more clearly an image of ourselves. I look tired. I’ve only been awake for four hours but I am completely exhausted. The whizzing sighs of the vacuums are dying down, and at about 6.53 according to the digital clock on the face of the DVD player, I can hear the maids’ van start up and buzz off.
A few minutes later we hear Dad’s Miata parallel parking in the now-vacant spot adjacent to the koi pond. He walks straight in, throws his keys into a bowl by the door (ping!) and enters the living room with assumed bravado. “You fat, lazy bums,” he says, speaking of the bedraggled population on the mussed couch. “I work all day to keep you in business.” By the time we look up he’s already halfway in the refrigerator. “Nothing here but bean curd,” he says. “Cranberry Snapple—grrrrrrhhhh!”
“It’s not tofu. It’s quiche or something,” Amy says. “Pretty good.”
“Chinese for dinner, though,” I chime in. “It’s supposed to be here.”
“Where’s your mother?” Dad asks, as he extracts the quiche and closes the fridge door. And then there’s what’s on the door. “Fuck,” Dad says. “This goddamm list gives me a headfuck.”
* * *
After “family-meeting dinner,” wherein we discuss the general tso chicken (too sweet) and mom calls Cynthia four times on the girl’s cell before giving up, there is a bzzzzzz at the security doorbell outside the gate, and mom trots up to the beige intercom, and buzzes someone in. There’s shuffling on the walk. Mom strides out to the foyer to get the door, and her voice plashes over from the other room.
“Cynthia’s not here,” she says, cheery. “But otherwise they’re ready.”
“You look lovely Mrs. Oswego,” relays the confident voice of an MTV VJ. “Is that an Alaia?”
The man whom mother ushers in to the dining room has the trim, petite physique of a Wimbledon ball-boy. Arrayed behind him like a “V” of trailing geese is a team of five dudes, universally assembled in blazers, polos, distressed jeans, five-o’-clock shadows, and miniature beer bellies surging over the precipices of cinched leather belts. A pair of aviator shades peeks out from the lapel of a suit jacket formerly accustomed to holding folded pink kerchiefs. They nod toward the table, and mom seats them down one-by-one around us, making small-talk: “Great watch, Gregory. Cartier?”
“For Christmas,” Gregory says, tapping the watch-face. “It ticks.”
Mom giggles, sighs, looks around.
Amy says, “In cinema, clocks are symbolic of tension.”
There’s a pause.
Dad says, “Who the fuck are these men,” and pushes his chair back from the table. “Are you fellows the camera boys?”
“I’m the producer,” says the trim ballboy, extending a hand. “Leslie.” Mom introduces the other men: Gregory, Carl, Karl, Mike, Carl II. Then she introduces us: “My son Jareth. My daughter Amy who goes to Harvard. My husband, Rudy Oswego. And Cynthia’s up to no good somewhere.” She chuckles lightly at her own exaggeration.
“Well, Cynthia’s the star, so we can’t go tooooo long without her,” Leslie says, beaming.
“How long has Cynthia known about this?” I ask. But it’s unclear whether I have asked this question of my mother or of the man just introduced as Leslie. From the motion in the room—it cannot be discerned. Both ignore me. Carl One takes the opportunity to extend a fatty hand towards dad saying, shyly, “It’s an honor…an honor to meet you, Mr. Oswego.”
“Call me Rudy,” dad says. An hour later they’ll probably be talking about the new Shure57 mics in dad’s basement studio but for now we listen, glum, as the producers explain the concept: Wealthy family, famous father, party-animal kids. And Amy says, “Doesn’t this all sound a little bit like The Ozzbournes but less Goth?” and Mom bursts into muffled tears that she keeps contained from her mascara with a gloved hand, and Dad says, “Well, fuck it, because we ran out of money.” And I say, “Maybe if you had like, spent a single hour at the office and bought one less Miata for—” and Dad says, “Shut it you scrawny lazy gay—“ and Leslie says, “Hold it right there.” And we stop. We look upward.
Leslie is standing table-side, legs spread like he’s stretching his groin, the frosted spikes of his haircut illumined like a halo by the track lighting, and he is holding his hands up frozen around each other with the palms facing us, making in the negative space at the center of his hands a tenebrous, round-edged rectangle of proportion similar to a 35mm film frame. And he says, “Wow, this is great TV.”
Amy backs away from the General Tso, pushes away from the table, and says “Well, I refuse to be on it.”
“Oh, Amy,” Mom says, twisting an anchor on her blazer.
“Oh, Amy,” Dad says, “how unpredictable. How bold.”
* * *
Dad has prided himself on being bold. And on sarcastically commenting on the predictable behavior of others. He’s equally insufferable to watch television with (“If Maury Povich were alive in ’69, we’d have led him to the guillotine”) and he does not get along with Amy because they are too similar. In 1963 Dad founded a band that made music. He liked making music, and people liked listening to him, and people bought his records and he toured the country and the world and he keeps the pictures he took then in un-albumed boxes that teeter in the closet on the third floor. But in 1983 he and mom moved semi-permanently to LA—Roy from the band lived out here, and so did Shirley, so they would do gigs every once in a while, but could more-or-less live on what they had already made. Mom loved just having a house. She bought curtains (the wrong size, actually, all eventually replaced by a ballsy interior decorator), she “raised us kids” as any other private-school pick-up-line SUV mom raises her children, and Dad tried to “keep things stable.” He saw the diets that mom was always on, and so he invested the bulk of his estate in those little baby blue packets of fake sugar (Equal: dextrose with maltodextrin, aspartame). But this was right around the advent of another little packet—a little yellow packet called Splenda (sucralose) and within four months Dad had lost over 75 percent of his estate and five pounds by replacing his sugared coffee with “that mutherfucking chemical sludge.”
Yes, Dad swore a lot for the first couple of days. He went bowling with Larry, the loud caterer mom had once fired after baking too fatty a lobster bisque. Dad went out and came home wasted, then fell asleep face-down on the couch to the mournful tune of late-nite Ren & Stimpy reruns. Cynthia gave an oral presentation in school on the topic “What my parents do,” and concluded with a one-liner: “Some days,” she said, choking back (a laugh? a tear?) “we can only try for sweetness, and we can only taste pure shit.” It was a line the thirteen-year-old had heard her father say while, from a second-floor balcony outside the master bedroom, he had pissed into the lima-bean-shaped pool below in a flawless arc.
Cynthia’s maxim rang in through the ears of one boy sitting at that classroom who later that night would repeat it over the dinner table to his sputtering, laughing father—the president of ABC-TV, LA, who was at that moment looking for something to kick the pants off CBS’s now lame-ass Survivor, something a little more Ozzbournes and a little more old-school.
The show, Leslie explains over General Tso’s, will solve dad’s financial crises with a $250 million payoff for the first season, which would focus on how Dad deals with the fame of his past and the family of his present. The show would also follow dad on his newest business venture—the production and fiscal support of a new brand of calorie-free sugar-substitute sweetener. Would the product succeed? Find out next week. In the pilot, Carl One says, huffing excitedly, we will see him pacing the factory floor, smelling everything and sweetly.
* * *
But at 7 a.m. the next morning nothing seems so sweet. Wimbledon ball-boy Leslie is tugging at my achilles tendons while I moan, “It’s not fair, Amy gets to—“
The duvet is a crumpled croissant of pure warmth. My bedroom is a batcave of pure darkness. Leslie tugs me up and walks me straight to the shower.
“I don’t shower in the morning,” I say. “I shower at night.”
“Today you shower in the morning,” Leslie says, slamming the bathroom door behind me.
I stand in the bay of the shower with my clothes on—same Halloween boxers, different tee (“Mixology”) and I think that if there’s one time to take a shower with your clothes on, this is that time. It is an experience we should all have before we die, right? I turn the water on and the clothes cling to me like an extra, thicker layer of skin. When I exit the bathroom Leslie is sitting up straight on the lip of my bed, giving me a once-over. I’m still in my sopping PJs with a towel thrown around my shoulders—like a coat thrown over the body of a local teen saved from a fall through the ice. Straight-faced, Leslie says, “You took a shower with your clothes on.”
“I took a shower with my clothes on.”
Leslie only looks at me and sighs. Then he looks down at my feet, at the dripping water that is spreading out to soak the carpet. When I think back on the McMansion we lived in then it is this I think of—there is the vague feeling of being strangely watched, and the distinct sensual memory of the synesthetic residue of air-conditioned carpet, felt beneath squishing toes.
Despite my naturally showy nature (inherited genetically, natch), the prospect of starring in my very own reality drama becomes a lot less vainglorious when I consider that I will be seen only in terms of my relationship to my family. Amy is the lucky one—backing out completely, refusing to “ruin an academic career that exists solely through the denial of this family.” And so though her body drifts through various episodes, ghost-like, her head remains obscured by the muffled clouds of an editor’s dodged blurring. In a later episode, her ghost-head drifts above the very Bart Simpson tee I never again wore, for I have exchanged that rumpled, sleepy outfit for what the wardrobe girl, calls “a signature look”—jewel tone tees and velvet blazers, plum-wine Barneys Co-Op sweaters of cashmere, all topped with golden, imitation silk cravats.
Cynthia wears what she has always worn. “Cynthia’s the perfect child,” Mom says, as she rifles through racks of baby-doll dresses walling the spare bedroom that Leslie’s people have converted into a green room. “She’d look great in any of this stuff.”
“Stop it, Ma,” Cynthia says in a mockcountry drawl, “You done too much good by me.” Cynthia sits in a swiveling chair, puckering her lips before the illumined mirror, and I become aware watching her that I knew nothing of Cynthia. That she is a girl to me like a girl on TV.
* * *
Being on the show—I mean, really, being the character on the show—is like being at a coffeeshop with your friends and seeing someone cute or cool, or whatever, who is quietly studying and also quietly listening in on your conversation, and at some point you and your friends—I mean, the friends at the table sitting right by you—you all almost unconsciously begin to talk louder, to tell the stories that make you look good, daring, grown up. Your gestures toward eachother—elbow jabbing, shoulder-shrugging—become pronounced and play-acted. Yet the presence of that person is nearly unnoticeable.
The analogy is almost too similar to even be an analogy. Actually, both situations are exactly the same. Clearly, the camera is the quiet stranger, sipping a skim latte and brooding over their Tristram Shandy as you and your cohorts loudly replay last night’s brawl in the line outside Sirkus. “Did you see those guys doing coke on the windowsill?!?”
“Naaaaaah.”
For instance, Jerry—one of my favorite cameramen, whose beat forces him to stay in the kitchen—will be standing by the island, chewing on a sandwich and suddenly I’ll walk in the room, and he’ll pace toward the refrigerator, snaking to follow my everyday path, to film me as I look inside. I must now choose between the Rutabega Squash salad or drawers of sandwich meat and yellow American cheese. And though normally, I might have just grabbed a diet Dr. Pepper, I find myself making elaborate, inedible sandwiches formed of layers and layers of meats and cheeses. It isn’t dishonesty—I want the sandwich, I really do—it is a dishonesty of effort. Who cares about an added layer of flavorless lettuce unless it is to be eaten before millions of viewers, Rachael Ray-style—chewed through a smiley grin?
Leslie is supervising my wardrobe change after a fellow teen’s local birthday party (I need an effortless transition from swim trunks to cocktail attire), and he starts giving me notes. They’re written on a list, like the kind we had taped to the fridge, but his list reads “The Suggestions.” For instance, the producers don’t like it when I talk to Amy. She’s not even supposed to be seen, Leslie explains to me, so each time I approach her is a moment they cannot show on camera at all. They also don’t like it when I sit around all day and watch TV. “You don’t watch TV,” Leslie says “You are TV.”
“Leslie,” I say. “Cynthia can watch TV.”
“Cynthia is Cynthia,” he says.
“I am me,” I say. “I fish therefore I am.”
“Look, Jareth,” Leslie says, leaning down over the greenroom chair, like Santa over the lap of some idiot believer. “In all of the good, true movies, there is a misanthrope—a jaded, cynical soothsayer type who hobbles around spreading bad omens. He goes ‘blagh bleugh, you’re all gonna die and get fucked.’”
“Yes?” I say.
“This is what we want you to be.”
“Oh,” I say. “So that’s what’s with the cravat.”
“Yes,” Leslie says. “That is what is with the cravat.”
* * *
It’s easier to be the jaded, cynical misanthrope than someone actually involved in the action. In most scenes, I am standing off to one side, eating a gourmet, many-layered sandwich as my parents yell across the room, as Cynthia gets punched out by her boyfriend and cries herself to sleep, as Dad does shrooms in the basement with the bass player from the Moody Blues and Larry, caterer extraordinaire, man of steaks and seasonings. I learn to lean against a countertop suggestively, in the sixteen-year-old imitatio of the James Dean slouch.
On my half-birthday (February 2nd), Dad and I drive to a theater in the valley to see a screening of Day for Night (my pick). On the way we stop at a 7-11 on so Dad can buy cigarettes to smoke out of the window on our way down there and back. (He’ll have to hide them—they don’t fit with his new, cleaned up, Moby-esque Vegan rocker image.) And in the 7-11 I see a picture of my face, in the lower right hand corner of an issue of CosmoGirl, an orange-y glossy whose cover bears a model, frozen mid hoola-hoop. I steal it, and in the car I rifle through to the article about me. It takes up a single page.
“Meet Jareth Oswego,” it reads. “Why, hello Jareth Oswego,” I say. “How are you doing?” I show the mag to Dad. He grabs it hastily, and throws it out the window.
Craning my deck like a wind-hungry dog, I can see the magazine fluttering 200 yards behind on the 405. “You littered,” is all I can think to say.
“Good riddance,” Dad says. “Let’s just have a nice six hours away from your mom’s bullshit.”
“So the show is mom’s bullshit,” I say, looking out the window faking a forlorn angst I’m not sure I really feel. Sure, the houses and trees and cars are passing by, and sure they’re unknown to me—separate spaces reigned by strangers, separate worlds to which I can never go, to which I will never escape. Sure, I feel misunderstood, but it’s also fun to toy with Dad, to make him think I’m some idiot teen who really feels this angsty.
“The show is everyone’s bullshit,” is Dad’s reply. It’s impossible to know, just looking at Dad’s profile against the Hollywood Hills, what he is really thinking when he thinks of me or of mom. Even in the car, just the two of us, I catch myself watching his face like I watch his face on the show. When I watch the show, I watch to learn about him. I want to see some sidelong glance of his at Cynthia or at me, to see him in a moment where he isn’t sure I’m watching. I watch out of fear. Because I’m afraid of what he’d think of me, the scrawny son with the—what is that, a cravat?—the scrawny son with the cravat, who is watching a bright spot hundreds of feet back on the highway, from which the pages are still unfurling.
* * *
It is fourteen months since they started shooting when mom finds Cynthia in the pantry with one of the cameramen. I am sitting on the couch reading the funnies when mom says “This sandwich needs Dijon” and then the next thing I hear is mom saying, “You’re fourteen.”
Over the crinkling of the newspaper I hear Cynthia say, “I’m sixteen” and I hear the cameraman say, “Weren’t you supposed to be eighteen?”
I put down the paper to see Cynthia stomping out of the pantry and up the stairs, the cameramen in tow trailing black electrical cords, whose snaking movements rewrite the lines of the carpet. They are all serpents.
The cameramen are all gone now except for one doing exterior establishing shots through the double doors by the lip of the pool, who must not have heard the commotion through the glass. Mom’s sandwich rests before me on grandmother’s Fresca-ware. I pick it up and start eating. Sure, it is dry. Sure it needs some Dijon, maybe, but I am lazy and it is a Sunday and I am reading the funnies so I just sit there, soaking it all in: Cynthia’s cries upstairs; the deliberate misspelling of the noun “lasagna” in this week’s Garfield strip (“Lasan-YA”); the dry sandwich, sans lettuce, sans Dijon.
I am made painfully aware by the absence of cameras here, and by the shrill noises coming from upstairs, that I am not the main character of my own life. That the main character perhaps, of all of our lives, is Cynthia or Mom or Dad. Yes, perhaps Dad, who just entered the fall-from-innocence scene from stage left, carrying the prop of an elaborate juicer I recognize from infomercials, and delivers a line lifted from the last ten minutes of any hour-long TV office drama: “Why’s everyone so quiet in here?” He stops in front of the kitchen stairs, where, grabbing an apple from the fruit bowl, he runs in to mom, who is barreling down with two cameras towing her as she slips out of each pump, walks through the double-glass doors, sees Bo, Cynthia’s boyfriend, on a longchaise, waves toward him, and dives swiftly into the pool with all of her clothes on. Bobbing back up, keeping her nose above the water, she shakes her head with the cold. “That was fun, Jareth. You were right.”
Pretty soon we’re all in the pool, our clothes on, the water streaming everywhere in our shoes, in our ears, in our limp and sagging underwear. I can see in Cynthia’s upstairs bedroom, how the four cameras swing from her to gather, clumped, at the window that looks over the pool, to aim down on us.
* * *
The following Sunday we go to church. “What do they want us to go to church for,” I ask. “It’s Easter,” Amy says. “Cynthia’s narrative needed an element of rebirth, re-awakening.”
We drive up to a little church I’ve never seen before, with a stone tower and a plastic lamb nailed into the lawn like a trailer park flamingo. Men and women are gathered on the lawn outside the church, wearing the colors of springtime M&Ms and shifting from leg to leg like horses rubbing up against the fences.
“This is so not our scene,” Amy says, slouching.
“Look, Cynthia, there are cute Christian boys standing around everywhere,” Mom says. “And they’re bored to tears.”
“Aren’t we Jewish?” Amy asks.
“We’re Irish Catholic,” I correct.
“We’re atheists,” Dad says, and Dad’s word is final.
The church, it turns out, is Protestant. The minister talks about the saviour being reborn within each of us, as though an epic drama is being played en loop before us all on miniature TV sets, like the type affixed to the backs of airplane seats. I look down the row of my family, barricaded on four sides by “civilians” in the pews, holding bread-box sized cameras and grunting with the heft of them. At the end of the row is Cynthia, with flaxen gold hair. I can see her as the camera would see her—an innocent, a Paris Hilton circa Simple Life, a girl we see in “reality” before the bad things have been done to her. And then there’s Amy and then there’s me. I realize that if I were watching, I would not choose to love myself.
* * *
Cynthia. She is mother’s favorite because of the way, I think, that she lies in chairs. She has a certain rigidity to her expressions: her face is tight and glowering, her nose upturned, her hair swept in a certain sine-wave around the heart-shaped head. But her body sprawls, lollygags over chaises. When we do not know where Cynthia is she can be found in a longchair by the pool, a glass of half orange-juice/half seltzer set down on the concrete beside her, an Oprah’s book club novel in her lap, permanently opened to page 38 (for she’ll read no further).
Mom comes out and often makes small talk. She asks re: schoolwork. Re: boyfriend. But Cynthia’s replies are cryptic and badly managed. “Oh, it’s good,” she’ll say, then come home with a C+. “Oh, we’re fine,” she’ll say and come home crying, sobbing into a Barney’s sweater he bought for her in the wrong shade—plum wine. The excuses and re-explanations take twice the time-lapse as the original lies, and Amy sighs with the sighs of a beleaguered twenty something who may not have found happiness, but has better achieved a way to cover it up. Cynthia’s inability to cover up has perhaps made her the star of the show.
We, as a family, have professed to having never watched a single episode (Mom was on The View last week saying as much). But secretly we’ve all seen snippets of the program—it would be an absolute denial of the universal human condition (narcissism) to say otherwise. I hug my knees to my chest the first time I see myself on the unavoidable promos, and say, to Amy: “Do I really have that big of pores?” and Amy says, “Is my head really so blurry?” And we both laugh, good naturedly, but laughter still that is tinged with a certain darkness—a darkness that suggests yes, you really do have large pores as it simultaneously suggests yes, Amy, you really are so empty. Cynthia, however, seems to leave the show unscathed. When she arrives in Episode 1 after a trip to the mall with her boyfriend, and appears somewhat upset, and is shown (as I have earlier alluded) crying into a sweater box, the camera seems to neigh closer, pitying her. The sweater is shown to be the wrong color—the shot zooms in and out, in and out, to the tune of a sort of jack-in-the-box “Blaaaaayng” of absolute comic error. Cynthia is shown, everywhere, to be in the right.
Amy and I have seen the show, but not en totale. So when Mom and Dad are out (mother is at lunch, Dad at “work,” and Cynthia somewhere upstairs with Bo, the BF), we decide to watch the entire first season on the main living room television. At the first bar of the theme music, I can hear cameramen in the other rooms start to hum. The song is catchy—it’s one of Dad’s band’s old songs—“Saving Grace”—whose lyrics are about a female nurse who sleeps with dying patients. But the tempo has been sped up and re-hashed with a sort of jangly banjo to serve as an interlude between our awkward “reality” scenes, and on hearing the song the cameramen begin to wander over.
“We can’t work with the music,” one of them explains to the questioning, upturned snarl of Amy. “Even in the establishing shots they’ll hear it,” says Argento—the 23 year old film student someone hired to do only establishings. (He’s responsible for those long shots of leaves in the pool, of unmade beds, of the exterior of the house and the koi pond.)
“Isn’t this Meta,” says Jerry, my sandwich filmer. “I wonder what would happen if I filmed you watching yourselves being filmed.”
“Psychedelic, man,” Argento says. “Goes on and on forever…”
Jerry says: “Anyone else want a sandwich?”
* * *
When mom comes home from Fred Segal’s at 6:37, her grand entrance goes un-filmed. “I’m home,” she toots. “I’m home!” She wants someone to see her new Derek Lim platforms, her new oversized Proenza Schoeler tote. It’s the money from the show that’s fueling these purchases and by god, it’s these purchases that are fueling the show. She’s working here, people.
By the time she’s said “I’m home” the third time she’s already in the living room, a mute witness to the sight of me and Amy occupying the couch amid a minefield of cameramen and sandwiches (sans Dijon, a faux-pas in this house) spread about the turf around us. On the screen ahead she sees her own haggard face, the lines drawn around her eyes as if drawn by a stick in the sand.
“It’s on DVD now,” I explain, as if explaining. “There’s Diet Dr. Pepper in the fridge.”
Mom puts down her bags. “Why isn’t Cynthia here for this?”
* * *
A: Because Cynthia is still outside by the pool, an unread copy of Sojourner Truth spread spine-up beside her, as she enjoys sex with her boyfriend, Bo, who is completely nude. Leslie walks in, his headset fuzzing with a lot of static. “Let’s just not cover it,” he says. “Tasteless.”
“Taste?” Argento asks. “I need a paycheck.”
“This isn’t about you,” Leslie says. “I’m in love with her.”
Then everyone starts laughing.
“Cynthia,” mom yells out at her daughter, over the lip of the chardonnay bottle she’s tugging at. “Come in soon for dinner.”
* * *
We all eat dinner beneath the halogen lights, the umbrellas of reflected fluorescents beaming down on the catered porkchops stranded on beds of wilted lettuce. The sneering cameramen scan Cynthia’s face for guilt and my father’s face for amusement, but find nothing registered on either. It is Amy whose blurred face perhaps reveals the most: she is sipping her wine, or biting her lip, or stifling back a chuckle. I am too type cast to be an effective force of comic relief: here I am in a plum cravat, trying to spear a pea with a single fork tine.
It’s dark enough for the windows to have turned in to mirrors, reflecting back to me only myself, only Amy, only Dad, Cynthia, Mom. Staring over our dinners, we look like bottom-feeders, like koi sucking pond edges for algae, like the suck-mouths of vacuums squeezing over the bright carpet, eeking out illegible lines to mark our travel.
I give one of the cameramen a long stare and loosen my cravat, a gesture that seems to ask the question, Do you have everything that you want?
The recording light flickers off. The other cameras leave. But as they turn away, they seem to force another question, the central question burning beneath the clothes at the bottom of the pool, beneath the wilted magazine on the 405, beneath Cynthia’s hands, folded in her lap in the gesture of a prim shepherdess. The cameras seem to ask the question lovers ask: What do you see when you see me?