shocked by anything since I wasn’t reacting to anything) but then he asked about Sarah and listened haltingly as I told him how great she was doing and even though the record executive kept promising me that he wanted to see his daughter there would always be another “setback” to keep him away but he added not unhopefully that Sarah was always “free” to visit. Seated at the large dining table were wives from Pacific Palisades with a few key members of the Velvet Mafia and Silver Lake hipsters and couples from Malibu and a good-looking chef with his own reality show. Conversations began as the food was served: the second house in Telluride, the new production company, the frequent trips to the plastic surgeon, the tantrum so violent that the police were called, all the exertion that led nowhere. I listened to it all, or imagined I did. There were too many words I didn’t understand the meaning of anymore (
After the initial site reading indicated—no, confirmed—that the house was infested, I had been driven back to the Four Seasons, where I wired a transfer into Miller’s account. I was told “the process” would take two days to complete and I did not want to know the specifics of how they planned on cleansing the house. Obviously, I told myself, this was something they knew how to do—they were professionals; they had proved this to me during the ISR—and I would stay out of their way for those two days by traveling to L.A., under the auspices of the Harrison Ford meeting, where I would retrieve my father’s ashes from the Bank of America on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks. Carrying out this plan was my only focus (I was not going to be waylaid by anything) and so by two o’clock on that Thursday afternoon I had already booked a flight and—after meeting with Marta at the hotel to explain that the house on Elsinore Lane was being fumigated and she would be staying with the children at the Four Seasons until I returned on Sunday—I was driving to the Midland Airport. While steering the Range Rover down the empty interstate, I called ICM and asked them to set up the meeting with Ford’s people for the following day since I was flying in that night and was leaving Sunday morning. Everything went so efficiently that it was almost as if I had willed it. There was no traffic, I was whisked through airport security, the plane left on schedule, it was a smooth flight and we landed before the estimated arrival time at Long Beach (since so much of LAX was under reconstruction). When I spoke to Jayne while driving down the 405 toward Sunset she was “glad” (which I interpreted as “relieved”) that I was doing this for myself. I had opted out on the Chateau Marmont since it was a haunt from the drug days and stayed at the Bel Air Hotel instead; it was close to the dinner party that the producer of the Harrison Ford project had invited me to when he heard I was coming to town, and also to my mother’s house in the Valley. It wasn’t until I was ensconced in my suite at the Bel Air, sorting through a stack of Harrison Ford DVDs the producer had messengered over—along with directions on how to get to his house—that I realized there was one thing I had left undone: saying goodbye to Robby.
On Friday afternoon the Harrison Ford meeting occurred without Harrison Ford. The project that Ford and the producer and the two studio executives were interested in me for concerned a father (a tough rancher) and a son (a lonely drug addict) overcoming the obstacles of loving each other in a small town in northeastern Nevada. I sold them whatever I could muster up, which was absolutely nothing since I had no interest in the project. I was told to think about it and promised numbly that I would, and then voices asked about Jayne, and the kids, and the new book, and what happened to my face (“I fell”), and since I was somewhere else during the entire meeting it seemed over in a matter of minutes.
Later that afternoon, I drove to the Bank of America on Ventura Boulevard to retrieve my father’s ashes. I did not leave the bank with them.
I had dinner with my mother and two sisters and their various husbands and boyfriends on Saturday night in the house on Valley Vista in Sherman Oaks (an exact, if much smaller, replica of the house on Elsinore Lane, with an identical layout). My mother and sisters understood (once the press reported I was the father of Jayne Dennis’s son) that only when I had acquainted myself with Robby to the point at which he felt comfortable enough would my family meet their grandson and nephew. This was the understanding that Jayne and I, and our therapists, had reached—everyone except for Robby (who knew nothing about this arrangement and had never, to my knowledge, inquired about aunts or a grandmother). The saddest moment of the night came when I realized—once they asked—that I carried no photographs of my son. There were questions about Jayne, about life back East in the suburbs, about the damage to my face (“I fell”). My sisters marveled at how much I had begun resembling our father as I moved toward middle age. I just nodded and asked my sisters about their recent triumphs and dramas: one was an assistant to Diane Keaton; the other was just out of rehab. I helped my mother’s boyfriend—a man from Argentina whom she had been living with for the past fifteen years—grill salmon. Dinner was calm, but afterward, out by the pool, while smoking cigarettes with my sisters, a tense debate ensued about what to do with Dad’s ashes (I did not say anything about what I had found in the safe-deposit box earlier that afternoon) and then morphed into various old issues: the girl he was living with at the time of his death had a boyfriend—had I even known about this? I couldn’t remember. Of course I couldn’t remember, my sisters argued, since I had run away and refused to deal with anything. And then, in rapid succession: the invalid will, the lack of an autopsy, the conspiracy theories, the paranoia. I escaped this by heading upstairs to retrieve something from my old bedroom. (This was another reason that I was in L.A.) Plus the backyard was haunting me; the pool, the chaise longues, the deck—they were all identical to the backyard on Elsinore Lane. As I stood up to leave, my sisters commented on how guarded I seemed. I told them I was just tired. I didn’t want to keep our father alive, which is what we did whenever we had these inevitable conversations. I did not tell them anything about what had been happening to me during the last week. There wasn’t enough time. Inside the house I stopped at the top of the stairs and gazed down into the living room. My reaction was dulled.
Not only was my bedroom just as I had left it as a teenager but it was also Robby’s room as well. I had stayed here often when I visited L.A., after I made the move to Camden and then to New York, and over the years part of this large space overlooking the San Fernando Valley had slowly transformed itself into an office, where I stored old manuscripts and files on shelves built into a walk-in closet. This was where I was heading. I immediately started rummaging carelessly through stacks of papers—drafts of novels, magazine essays, children’s books—until the floor became littered with them. And then I finally located what I was looking for: the original manuscript copy of
It made itself apparent the moment I hit page 207 in the original manuscript.
On page 207 was the drawing of a face.
I had drawn a face onto the thin sheet of typing paper (leaving enough space between the chapter breaks to fit it in).
And beneath the face I drew the words, scrawled in red pen: “I’m B a c k.”
This image of words scrawled in blood was used later on, but I had cut the scene that preceded this warning.
This chapter had been omitted.
And I had also removed the crude drawing of the face from any subsequent manuscripts.
Something became confirmed.
This was a copy of the manuscript I had shown no one.
