Henry Oswald arranged for me to meet his brother, William, who’d gone to Cal Arts twenty years before. William Oswald lived in Tacoma, outside Seattle, so I had to drive up there. I spent the night before the trip with Richie at Passport Photos. He’d changed his attitude about art school now that he’d had some success. He thought it would be fun for me, and helpful for my career. “You’ll make contacts. You’ll know the right people,” he said. “And you’ll learn to speak all that mumbo jumbo. You’ll be able to explain your artistic vision.”
To meet William Oswald, I went for a relatively normal look: a new shirt, my cleanest jeans, and Nikes. I even got a haircut the day before. I drove to Tacoma on Saturday. I had a dozen of my best prints in a leather portfolio Richie had lent me.
William Oswald’s house was on a wooded hill, next to a small creek. I’d been to Henry Oswald’s house many times over the years, for Christmas and birthday parties. They were our closest family friends. William Oswald’s house wasn’t half as big as Henry’s. It didn’t have a pool. The driveway was gravel. He didn’t have a Mercedes. He had a Nissan Pathfinder.
Inside though, things got a lot more interesting. For starters, it was totally open space. The main room had a ceiling that went all the way up to the roof. There were big windows and expensive lighting and huge posters high up on the walls, some from movies, some from commercials. One poster had a giant eye, with something about Swedish TV written underneath it.
William offered me something to drink. I could see the resemblance between the two brothers. William had that same intelligence in his face. But he looked more childlike and more fun. His hair was mostly gray. His glasses had a little chain around them and rested on his chest. It was hard to imagine him naked, on peyote, running among the cacti at Cal Arts.
His wife might have been older than him. She had long silver hair and beautiful dark eyes. She was very warm and welcoming. She seemed smart and was probably very good at whatever she did in her own career. I had the random thought: That’s what Antoinette will look like when she gets old.
I had come for dinner, so that’s what we did; we ate dinner. At first it felt pretty awkward. I didn’t know what to say or how to be. I’d never met a real artist before. They got me to tell the story of Elliot Square, which they seemed to enjoy. I showed them the scar on the side of my nose, which was still pretty noticeable, though everyone told me it would go away.
After dinner I got out the prints. William brought them into his office, which had special lights and drafting tables and every kind of tool or gadget you could imagine. Along the walls, books and files were stored on shelves that went up ten feet. I noticed an old paint-splattered boombox sitting on the windowsill. I wondered if that was from his days at Cal Arts. It probably was.
William placed my prints on a worktable and turned the light on them. He studied them closely. I stood beside him. He looked for several minutes, pointing out a few things, telling me aspects of the printing process I didn’t know. Then he turned off the light. He said they showed promise. But he didn’t gush over them like Richie did. William Oswald was a pro in a different way. Richie was about attitude and excitement. William Oswald was more about details and getting things exactly right.
We talked a little about what I wanted to do, photojournalism or fine-art photography. I told him I didn’t know. He showed me a book by a contemporary photographer I didn’t know. These were very ordinary-looking photographs of suburban streets or department stores or people walking in an airport with their rolling suitcases. They weren’t like Robert Frank. They didn’t capture the sadness of an old man or the bored life of a waitress. They didn’t seem to capture anything. They were blank and sort of empty in a way.
“I don’t understand these,” I told William Oswald, flipping through the book. For a second I wondered if I’d blown it by being too honest.
“Well, of course you don’t,” he said, smiling. “You haven’t been to art school!”
• • •
On the drive home I called Kai. We still hadn’t had a real conversation since school started, but now that seemed ridiculous. She must have been thinking the same thing because she picked up after one ring.
“Guess who I just had dinner with?” I said.
“Who?”
“The guy who’s going to recommend me to Cal Arts.”
“Oh my God! What was he like?”
“He was a serious dude,” I said. It was a relief to be talking to her again.
“Well, you gotta be serious to make a living as an artist, don’t you?”
“Yeah. I guess so. He was so pro. His office, it was like, the best stuff, the best of everything.”
“What did he say about Cal Arts?”
“He seemed to think I would like it there. I guess he did.”
“Did he like your photographs?”
“He didn’t really say.”
“Wow, how scary!”
Kai was also deciding which colleges to apply to that fall. She had confessed over the summer her secret life of being a good student. She had a 3.5 grade-point average. And good test scores. Also, she had been sending her writing to different websites over the summer. One place wanted her to write a weekly column about being a senior in high school.
“What about you?” I asked. “Are you writing that column?”
“No. They wanted it to be about the party scene,” she told me. “Since they thought I was such a wild girl.”
“And you didn’t want to do it?”
“No. It was too weird. These thirty-year-old dudes wanting me to write about high school make-out parties? And anyway, no college wants to see that. They wanna hear about volunteering at the senior center or digging up artifacts in Mexico.”
“Yeah, you kinda have to play the game,” I said. This was a strange sentence to hear coming out of my mouth.
“I know,” said Kai. “It’s lame, but it’s true. You have to tell them what they want to hear.”