gun lodged there that I now carried with me everywhere. On Fifth Avenue I could barely raise my arm to hail the cab that would take me back to the condo on 13th Street, the space I had first moved to in the spring of 1987 when I was a young and famous novelist and didn’t know anything except that luck kept sighing over me, a place where it seemed as if I had all kinds of time, a place where fame seemed to be a good idea and the flash from a light meter had been my only source of guidance. By now I was living with a young sculptor named Mike Graves (who was about twelve years younger than I) and sometimes he was in the condo on 13th Street, and sometimes he was in his studio in Williamsburg. I fell into the relationship not knowing what I was doing or whom I needed, and I assumed he felt the same, or at least I hoped he did. He had a grimness, a resolve, that I mildly responded to, and I liked the way he folded himself against me, and how he would trace his fingers over the scars on my leg, and I needed him on the mornings when summer lightning would awake me from nightmares and twisting in bed I would grasp his hand and moan my son’s name.
I actually had the cab drop me off on Third Avenue, half a block from the condo, and I floated into Kiehl’s to buy Mike a particular type of shampoo I remembered he kept in my apartment. Over the store’s speakers Elton John was singing “Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” and the song followed me back out onto Third Avenue. It had been a song my father had liked, and one night while we were driving through Westwood during the summer of 1976 when I was twelve he had even asked me who sang it, and when I told him he turned the volume up, and the fact that he liked the song made me grateful. Outside Kiehl’s I ran into a college classmate who had moved to Manhattan the same year I had and had just gone through his second divorce. (This wife had left him for someone on the Mets, and I vaguely remembered reading about it.) He was tan and had gray in his hair—which I immediately noticed, and I was suddenly ashamed of the coloring I’d had done to mine the day before in the Avon Center in Trump Tower. He had read about the disappearance of my son (actually taking hold of my hand as he told me how deeply sorry he was, a man I barely knew) and commented wryly about my breakup with Jayne (“Marriage is about love, and divorce is about money”), and when I answered certain questions he observed that I was speaking too slowly. I made vain gestures with my hands, trying to explain things. He had been through rehab recently, and as we compared notes I could tell—as he hurriedly walked away—that he knew I was high. His last words were “Well, maybe next time?” I walked across the street to a deli on the corner, where I bought a
And then I floated into a very soft place, surrounded by all the framed photos of Robby I had clipped from newspapers and magazines concerning his disappearance. This grim shrine to his biography sat in an orderly row on a shelf above my bed (“Your dark throne,” Mike called the sloping shelf, shivering). The heroin flowing through me, I thought about the last time I saw my father alive. He was drunk and overweight in a restaurant in Beverly Hills, and curling into myself on the bed I thought: What if I had done something that day? I had just sat passively in a booth at Maple Drive as the midday light filled the half-empty dining room, pondering a decision. The decision was: should you disarm him? That was the word I remember:
There was one last story to write.
I went back to Los Angeles in August and on the afternoon of the anniversary of my father’s death I waited in the parking lot of the McDonald’s on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks. It was 2:30. After composing myself sufficiently I left the car and limped into the restaurant (I was still using a cane). I ordered a hamburger, a small bag of fries, a child’s Coke—I wasn’t hungry—and I took my tray and sat at a table by the window. The 450 SL pulled into the parking lot at exactly 2:40. A boy—seventeen, maybe eighteen—who looked strikingly like Clayton— stepped out of the car. He was taller now, I noticed, and his hair was short and even though he had sunglasses on I recognized him immediately. I was holding my breath. I watched as he walked hesitantly toward the entrance. He had a shadow—this was evidence. Once inside, he spotted me and moved with confidence toward the table I was trembling at. The world became hushed. I pretended to be absorbed in the task of opening the paper the hamburger came wrapped in and then I lifted it to my mouth and took a small bite. Robby was sitting across from me but I couldn’t look at him or say anything. He was silent as well. When I looked up, he had taken off the sunglasses and was staring at me sadly. I started crying while chewing on the hamburger and wiped my face while trying to swallow. All I could say before turning away was “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” he said softly. “I understand.”
His voice had deepened—he was older now, and was no longer the shy boy I knew those months on Elsinore Lane—and there was something in him that suggested forgiveness. His secret life made him seem less brooding, less sullen. Something had been solved for him. The actor was gone.
I had to keep turning away from him because I was breaking down.
“Why did you leave?” I managed to ask in a hoarse voice. “Why did you leave us?”
“Dad,” he sighed. The word sounded different from how he had said it in the past. He placed his hand on mine. It was real. I could feel it. “It’s okay.”
I reached over and touched his face with the palm of my other hand, and then his shyness returned and he looked down.
“Don’t worry,” the boy said. “I’m not lost.”
He said it again, “I’m not lost anymore.”
I wanted another chance but I was too ashamed to hear his answer. I asked anyway. “Robby,” I choked, my face wet. “Please come back.”
But all he eventually saw was the flowering smile of acceptance.
He was standing outside, staring through the window at me for one last time.
He was looking at this story with affection.
I noticed my son had left a drawing behind: a landscape of the moon. It was so detailed that I had to linger over it, wondering about the patience required of my son to draw this particular moonscape. Where did this burning, ceaseless intention come from?
I also saw that one word was written on it, and I touched the word with a finger.
I didn’t know what brought him here. I didn’t know what called him away.
He was returning to the land where every boy forced into bravery and quickness retreats: a new life. Wherever he was going, he was not afraid.
The cream-colored 450 SL pulled out of the lot and turned right onto Ventura Boulevard, merging with the traffic until it was lost from sight and then the story ended.
The meeting lasted only minutes but when I limped back to my car it was twilight.
Across the street from the McDonald’s was the Bank of America where my father’s ashes were stored. What I hadn’t told anyone was what happened on the eighth of November when I had gone to retrieve the ashes. When I opened the safe-deposit box that day, its interior was grayed with ash. The box containing what remained of my father had burst apart and the ashes now lined the sides of the oblong safe. And in the ash someone had written, perhaps with a finger, the same word my son had written on the moonscape he had left for me.
