Under the Influence (3 page)

M
aking the trip over to Folger Lane the next day—in Portola Valley, just two exits down the highway from my little apartment in Redwood City—I thought about Ava's instructions.
Tell me everything.
I was always good at stories, so long as they weren't mine. Not the real story, anyway. That one I kept under wraps, and the prospect that this woman who'd offered up such an unlikely invitation might seek it out had made me consider not showing up at all. Pulling my old Honda onto Folger Lane, I briefly considered making a U-turn and forgetting the whole thing.

I had never been inside a house like the Havillands'. Not that it was opulent in the way some houses are, like houses that you see in magazines, or even on the very road where Swift and Ava lived. There was a kind of joyful abandon to the house—the soft white leather couches covered with embroidered Guatemalan pillows, the collection of Italian glass, and the erotic Japanese etchings—the vases spilling over with peonies and roses, the wall of African headdresses, and the incongruously traditional chandelier scattering rainbows over everything, the bowls of shells and stones, a conga drum, a collection of miniature metal race cars, dice. Dog toys everywhere. And the dogs themselves.

There was so much evidence of life in the place—life and warmth. All of it seeming to emanate directly from Ava, as clearly as if the house were a body and she its heart.

In the front hall, on a sideboard, was the most wonderful object: a pair of tiny figures carved out of bone, no more than two inches high but perfect in every way, on an intricately carved base formed into a tiny and beautiful bed. It was a man and a woman, naked, entwined in each other's arms. I touched the piece with my forefinger, tracing the smooth curve of the female figure's back. I didn't realize it, but evidently I let out a long sigh as I did this. Ava noticed, of course. Ava noticed everything.

“There's that good eye of yours again, Helen,” Ava said. “Those are Chinese, twelfth century
A.D
. In ancient China, figures like these were presented to royalty on the occasion of a wedding, as a talisman for good luck.”

Lillian and Sammy were kneeling at the foot of her chair as we talked. Lillian was licking Ava's ankles. Sammy's head was in her lap. Ava was stroking it. Ava had instructed her Guatemalan housekeeper, Estella, to put Rocco in the car for a half hour. “He gets overstimulated,” Ava said. This served as Rocco's time-out.

“I call these two figures the joyful fornicators because they look so happy together,” said Ava. “So you should touch this piece every time you come over.”
Every time,
she said. Meaning there'd be others.

Lunch that first day was served in the sunroom by Estella (“my helper,” Ava called her), who set before us a tray of runny cheese, figs, and warm French bread, followed by a salad of pear and endive and a creamy roasted red pepper soup.

“I couldn't live without Estella,” Ava said, as the housekeeper retreated to the kitchen. “She's a member of the family.
Mi corazón
.”

Sitting in her chair across from me looking out on the garden—the sound of water running over the rocks, and birds, and happy dogs, and off in the distance, Swift on the telephone, having a conversation that involved a lot of easy laughter—Ava didn't ask how, as someone who called herself a photographer, I'd found myself passing trays of spring rolls at an art opening. Or what had happened to the son whose sleeping face I'd once photographed every night for a solid year—the mention of
whom, just one night earlier, had made me cry. When she offered me a glass of chardonnay and I told her I didn't drink, she made no comment.

I had dreaded the questions Ava might ask about my life. But she didn't ask about the past. Ava wanted to hear what was happening
now
. She wanted to know what we needed to do to make me a happy and successful person, as I clearly was not at the moment. Since she seemed so gloriously happy and successful herself, I decided that day to follow her instructions. On everything.

“We need to get you a life,” she told me. As if she were suggesting the purchase of a blouse or some interesting piece of kitchen gear from Williams-Sonoma.

Here's what I loved: Ava seemed more interested in who I was at that particular moment than where I had come from or what had brought me here. And in fact, this was true of her, too. Somewhere along the line I gathered that long ago, she had lived in Ohio, but in all the time we knew each other, I never once heard her mention her parents. If she had brothers and sisters, they were no longer relevant. If I hadn't been so invested in keeping my own story under wraps, I might have paid more attention to this aspect of my new friend, but as things were, it was one of the many things I loved about Ava, that I didn't have to explain the old story. I could create a new one.

The Havillands collected all kinds of things. Art, certainly. They owned a Sam Francis and a Diebenkorn, a Rothenberg horse and an Eric Fischl (names unknown to me before, but Ava eventually taught them to me)—also a Matisse drawing Swift had given her for their anniversary one year and a trio of erotic etchings Picasso had made in the last years of his life. (“Can you believe it?” she said. “The man was ninety when he created this one. Swift says that's what he wants to be like when he's ninety. A horny old goat.”)

But it wasn't just high-priced stuff that filled the Havillands' walls. Ava had a weakness for outsider art (outsider art, outsider people), particularly work made by the kind of people, like the man at the coffee
shop and the homeless people with dogs—and me, of course—who showed signs of having gone through hard times. On a prime spot, just below the Diebenkorn, hung a painting by one of the autistic artists from the gallery where we'd first met—a fishbowl, with a woman inside, staring out.

Ava wanted to show me a collection of photographs they had acquired recently: a series of black-and-white portraits of Parisian prostitutes taken in the 1920s. Something in the face of one of the women, she said, reminded her of me.

“She's so beautiful,” Ava said, studying the photograph. “But she doesn't know it. She's stuck.”

I studied the photograph more closely then, trying to find the resemblance to myself.

“Some people just need a strong person in their life to give them a little encouragement and direction,” Ava said. “It's just too hard, doing everything on your own.”

I didn't have to say anything. My face must have said enough.

“That's why I'm here,” she said.

A
va was thirty-eight years old—the same age I was now, which was a great omen, she said—when she had met Swift. She'd never been married. Wasn't sure she ever would be.

“I wasn't in this then,” she said, tapping the armrest of her wheelchair. “The day before I met him, I ran a marathon.”

I might have asked what had happened, but I knew she'd tell me when she was ready.

“I had a great life,” she said. “I traveled all over the world. I had some amazing lovers. But when I met Swift, I knew it was a whole different thing. There was this force field around him. I didn't just feel it when he walked into the room. Before I heard him pull into the driveway I'd know he was coming.”

He'd been married before, to the mother of his son, and when he and Ava met, had only recently extricated himself from that miserable relationship. “If I told you how much money she got,” Ava said, “you wouldn't believe it. Let's just say the house alone was valued at twelve million dollars. Then came the alimony and the child support.”

But the main thing was, he had his freedom. And the two of them had found each other. What was the price tag on that?

“Two weeks after we met, Swift sold his company and gave up his
office in Redwood City,” she told me. “For the next six months, we hardly got out of bed. It was so intense I thought I might die.”

I tried to imagine how that would work, staying in bed for six months, or even a whole day. What would you do all that time? What about things like food shopping and laundry and paying the bills? Considering all of this, I felt clueless and ordinary. Dull. I had always told myself I'd been in love with Dwight, and if I allowed myself, I could have summoned memories of times with him when the only thing that seemed to matter was being with him, but the woman I had become in the intervening years believed she would never again have a life of passion, and sometimes questioned if she ever really had.

“Just before my fortieth birthday we faced the first big test of our love,” Ava told me, pouring a second glass of Sonoma Cutrer as I reached for my Pellegrino. “The baby question.”

She'd thought she wanted a child. Swift knew he didn't.

“It wasn't so much that he had a child already,” Ava said. “He just didn't want to share me. He didn't want anything getting in the way of what we had with each other. Anything that would dilute it. And in the end, I knew he was right.”

Then came the accident. A car, I gathered, though I'm not even sure how I picked up that much. I heard the words “spinal cord injury,” delivered in a tone that made me know all I needed. Any thought of getting back the use of her legs appeared to have ended for her, as did any thought of having children.

That was long ago, she told me. Twelve years. She adjusted the silver cuff bracelet on her slim, elegant wrist, as if signaling the topic was now closed.

“We have a fabulous life,” she said. “And not because of this house, or the Tahoe place, or the boat, or any of the rest of it.” She waved her long, slim arm in the direction of the gardens, the guesthouse, the pool. “None of that matters, really.

“Funny how it works,” she said. “I never would have known what two people could experience together. The level of connection.” She devoted herself to Swift now—to loving and being loved by him. And then there were the dogs.

Was there a dog in my life? she asked me. (Ava never used the phrase “have a dog.” A relationship with a dog was a mutual one, with no ownership. Most human beings were unlikely to ever experience—even with a lover, a parent, or a child—the kind of unconditional acceptance and devotion a dog will offer to the human in his or her life. Though what she had found with Swift came close.)

There was only one problem with loving a dog, of course, and giving your heart to a dog rather than to a child.

Dogs died.

Just speaking these words out loud appeared difficult for Ava.

Promise you won't die,
my son had begged me once. Well, no, I couldn't do that. I might like making up stories, but I wasn't a liar.

Out on her patio that day, her wheelchair angled toward the sun the way she liked it, Ava had not seemed to mind doing all the talking.

“Take Sammy,” she said. He was eleven years old, the oldest of their three. Because of the care Ava gave to his diet—and the emotional health that came from being so well loved (a factor that should never be overlooked)—he would live many more years. Ava hesitated for a moment. Well, several, anyway.

But most people didn't have to live with the knowledge that they'd outlive their children. Whereas with a dog—she couldn't finish that sentence.

“We've had to deal with it in the past, of course,” she said. This was when she led me into the dining room to show me the portrait Swift had commissioned for her of the two dogs—a boxer and a mutt—who'd preceded the current group. The painting filled most of one wall of the room, facing the long walnut table.

“Alice and Atticus,” she said. “Two of the best dogs ever.”

I stood there studying the painting and nodded.

“Come over again soon, will you?” she said to me. “I'd like to see some of your photographs. And maybe you can take some portraits of the dogs. You can have dinner with Swift and me.”

I loved it that she was interested in my photography. But more than that, what made me happy was simply knowing Ava wanted to see me again. I put away the question as to why a person as extraordinary as Ava would want to be my friend. She said there was something she saw in me—something she'd seen in the face of that Parisian prostitute she'd pointed out to me. Maybe it was simply that I needed rescue, and Ava had a habit of taking in strays.

W
hen I was very young, and the other kids in my class would ask where my father was, I made up a story. He was a spy, I told them. The president had sent him on an assignment to South America. Then he was one of a small team of scientists selected to spend the next five years in a climate-controlled pod in the desert, doing experiments for the good of humankind.

Another time—different year, different school—I said my father had drowned in a tragic accident, rescuing American prisoners of war who'd been stranded on an island in the Pacific after the Vietnam War. He'd loaded them on a raft that he pulled single-handedly, holding a rope between his teeth and swimming through shark-infested waters off Borneo.

Later, in college, I was simply an orphan, left without family after a plane wreck of which I'd been the sole survivor.

The reason that I made up stories about my family was simple. Even when they involved great tragedy, the stories I invented were better—larger, more interesting, more filled with deep and powerful emotion, spectacular devotion and heroic sacrifice, and the promise of great things to come—than the actual details surrounding my origins. I preferred the idea of catastrophe or devastation to the truth, which was the dullest but also the saddest of all: the simple fact that neither of my parents took
much of an interest in me. It was plain, early on, that I got in the way of their plans. If they had any.

Gus and Kay (I addressed them by their first names because that's how my mother wanted it) were young when they met—seventeen—and divorced by the time Kay turned twenty-one, when I was three years old. I retain virtually no memory of that time, just a vague image of a trailer with a fan that ran all day long but still didn't cool things down. Or Kay dropping me off at day care for such long days that the woman who ran the center kept a box of extra clothes for me in one of the cubbies. (Much as, in later years, I kept a toothbrush in my pocket in the hope that a school friend might invite me for a sleepover. Any place was better than where I lived.)

I remember a great many bologna sandwiches and granola bars. A Top 40 station playing seventies hits, and the television always on. Old lottery tickets piled on the counter, never the winning number. The smell of marijuana and spilled wine. Stacks of library books under the covers of my bed: the thing that saved me.

I didn't know Gus well enough to pick him out of a police lineup, which is where he'd been a few times in his life. He paid us a visit twice while I was young: once when I was thirteen and he newly out on parole (something to do with check fraud), and again a dozen years later, when he'd called me up out of the blue to say he'd like to get to know me. I had actually bought this line, so when he failed to show up as promised three days later, I was devastated. I allowed myself to get my hopes up and then be disappointed again the next couple of times, until it became clear he wouldn't be stopping by after all. (Other men, yes. They came to see Kay, not me. And nobody stuck around very long.)

If there was one thing I knew growing up, it was that I wouldn't be like the two people responsible for my birth. I wanted to go to college. I wanted to have a good job, doing something I loved. More than anything, though, I wanted to live in a real house, with a family. When I had
a child of my own—and I knew I would—I would be a different kind of mother from the one who raised me. I'd pay attention.

As soon as I was old enough to ride a bicycle, I got myself to the library. They had these cubicles there where you could watch movies with headphones, so when I wasn't reading, that's what I did. As soon as we had a VCR of our own, I was always checking movies out at the library. When Kay was off drinking, or out with some man—which was often—I watched those tapes over and over, first in our mobile home and later, when we upgraded, at the apartment my mother and I rented off the highway in San Leandro. It seems obvious now that my love of movies had to do with the comfort I found immersing myself in a world and set of characters as far removed from what I knew as I could manage. Some days I'd be Candice Bergen, other days Cher. I particularly loved stories about loner girls, outsider wallflower types who catch the attention of some wonderful, kind, handsome man (rich, naturally) who sweeps them away from their dreary existence. Sometimes—if I'd been watching old movies late at night—I'd be Shirley MacLaine or Audrey Hepburn. Never myself.

After seeing
Sabrina,
I concocted the story that Audrey Hepburn was my grandmother. I doubt the kids at school even knew who she was, but their mothers did. One time I told the mother of one, who had come in to volunteer in our classroom, that I spent my summers at her house in Switzerland, and that as a child I had traveled with her to Africa, on one of her UNICEF trips. (A trick I learned early about lying well: You fill your story in with as many details as you can that will ring true with your listener. People might not know whether or not Audrey Hepburn had a granddaughter, but if they knew she worked for UNICEF, it wasn't such a big leap to the made-up part.)

Given how much time I spent with my made-up grandmother Audrey, it was not surprising that I spoke with an accent somewhat reminiscent of hers in
Sabrina
(part French, part British) and wore only ballet flats. One time I ran into a classmate and her mother at the community
pool. (I reflected, as always, what it might feel like to have the kind of mother who accompanied you to the pool, and rubbed suntan lotion on your back, and brought snacks.)

She had expressed surprise that I wasn't in Switzerland. “I fly out next week,” I told her. Then I stayed away from the pool.

Years later, when I was at college (I'd gotten a full scholarship) and word hit the news that Audrey Hepburn had died of cancer, that same woman sent me a note expressing her condolences. I wrote back to thank her, and to tell her my grandmother had left me a string of pearls, which I described as having been given to Audrey by one of the many men who'd adored her, Gregory Peck. I would treasure them forever, I said.

It would have been more difficult to maintain the illusion that my stories were true if I'd had good friends, but I didn't—and maybe it was the need to preserve my secrets that accounted for this. People on campus were cordial enough, but I didn't get close to anyone—and how could I? I was working very hard to maintain my grade-point average, which was important if I wanted to hold on to my scholarship. I was majoring in art, with a focus on photography, but I had signed up for a workshop in screenwriting. All my life I'd made up stories, so this made sense.

The workshop was taught by a writer-director who'd gotten one movie made, back in the seventies, and now ran screenwriting seminars at hotel conference centers. After it was over, he'd invited me for coffee—impressed with my knowledge of film history, he said. Coffee turned into dinner, which turned into a long drive to the ocean, on which he told me that he was fed up with the movie studios and the way they trashed his work, and all the shallow people an artist had to pander to if he wanted to get his movies made. His last project was shit, he told me. His marriage was shit. Hollywood was shit. It was so refreshing, meeting a girl like me, who still possessed the passion he'd once had about films. I still called them movies.

Jake started calling me up from Los Angeles, writing me letters. I never even asked myself if I liked this man; I was just so amazed that he'd taken an interest in me. Amazed and flattered, of course. One day he said, “Meet me in Palm Springs,” and when he sent me the plane ticket, I went. It had not occurred to me that I might make my own choices in life. I was waiting to see what the people around me wanted to do, and when someone offered a suggestion, I took it.

He said he was leaving his wife. Had left. Said we could make films together; he'd be my mentor. Said he'd drive north to my college campus to pick me up. He could attach a roof rack to his car—all I'd need to transport my belongings, I had so few. He'd be there by tomorrow morning. “I'm your family now,” he said. “The only family you'll ever need.”

A week later I had given up my full scholarship and moved out of my dorm room to go live with him. Six months after that, Jake was back with his wife. That was it for college. As a person who'd made up plenty of stories, you might have thought I'd recognize the signs when someone else was doing it. But I had trusted this man utterly, and for a while, after he left, I walked around in a state of shock, and the belief that I had evidently not deserved the love of this brilliant man. All failure and blame were placed firmly on my shoulders.

When I was with Jake, he had bought me a Nikon camera and taught me a little about light and composition, lenses and shutter speed. Now, to make money, I got a job taking photographs of camping equipment for an outdoor catalog. It was deadening work, but temporary, I figured, and the main thing now was being out of Kay's apartment and not having to go back ever.

Given that I had no money, no education, no connections to anyone besides the man who no longer returned my phone calls, the idea of working in the film industry now seemed unattainable. As soon as I had the money saved up, I bought a couple of good lenses and started learning how to use them. I figured I'd tell my stories one frame at a time. It
turned out I was good at it, and I started getting jobs. They weren't great jobs, but I got to use my camera, and I earned enough money to get my own little apartment.

Back in those days, I'd spend hours just walking down random streets, shooting pictures. It was on one of my walks that I met Dwight. He was working as a mortgage broker in an office next to a mattress store in a strip mall along the highway. I'd pulled my car over because a young woman out in front of the store had caught my attention. She was one of those people companies hire for minimum wage to put on a ridiculous costume and dance around with a sign, trying to entice shoppers to come into their store.

Something about the dancing mattress girl had moved me, reminded me of myself. (That could be me, I thought. I could stoop that low.) Trying to get someone to pay attention, only they never did. I took out my camera.

That's what I was doing when Dwight approached me on the sidewalk. “Nice camera,” he said.

It wasn't a particularly interesting opening line, but he was nice looking, and he had a kind of easy, backslapping manner that came in handy in his line of work. Later, I'd realize the other side of his affable style: He was that way with everyone, at least until the person was out of earshot. Paid to make friends and spin numbers in the most positive light, he had cultivated a certain way of talking that left me wondering, later, if any of it was real. He was like one of those announcers you'd hear on AM radio. Always friendly, always upbeat. At least on the surface. What lay beneath was anybody's guess, though eventually I'd learn, and when I did, it wasn't good.

The first time Dwight took me out for dinner, he told me about his family in Sacramento—four other McCabe brothers and a sister, all of them close. His parents were not only still married to each other, they actually loved each other. Whenever the family got together—and they got together a lot—they did things like play charades and touch football, and
exchange Secret Santa presents under the tree on Christmas Eve. They still lived in the same house where Dwight grew up, with pencil marks on the kitchen door molding recording the growth of all six children. It was my dream of a family.

“I told my mother all about you,” Dwight said a couple of days later, when he called me to go out with him again. “I was telling her about how hard it was for you, growing up. Not having your dad around and all, and your mom not being there much, either. She made me promise to bring you over to the house for Sunday dinner with the family.”

His parents would love me, he said. What a great storyteller I was. How much fun. Not to mention pretty, he said. Nobody had ever called me that.

That weekend in Sacramento I was so happy I couldn't eat—though I remember drinking more than I normally would, just to relax. Dwight's mother had made a ham with pineapple slices arranged over the top. I couldn't bring myself to tell her I was a vegetarian. That night I decided I wasn't anymore.

“Do you like to cook?” his mother asked me. From then on, the answer was yes.

The weekend after that Dwight brought me to his family's cabin in the mountains. He lit a fire and cooked us trout on the grill and that night there was no question we would be sharing the bed.

“I always wanted a girl just like you,” he said to me.

I wanted to ask, what kind of girl was that? Whatever kind of girl he was talking about, that's who I would be. And maybe it was my own willingness to adapt to whatever the situation required of me that made me seem like his ideal partner. But I didn't understand that until later.

I didn't have a best friend, but I told my boss at the company where I was taking pictures of tech devices that I had met a man I wanted to marry. “So you're in love?” she said.

I told her yes. Even now, I'm not entirely sure whether or not this
was ever so. I had developed, early on, the habit of low expectations, and of letting my life be directed by whatever person happened to come along who seemed to know better than I did what they were doing. The fact that a friendly, nice-looking, seemingly well-adjusted man showed an interest in me was reason enough to have an interest in him. Never having had anyone take any particular interest in me—not my mother or my father, and only briefly Jake, the screenwriting teacher. It was compelling when Dwight chose me as someone worthy of his attention and possibly even love. I felt not only lucky but supremely grateful—not simply for the love of this happy, apparently normal man, a person so accustomed to life going well that his favorite expression was “it's all good”—but almost as much so for his whole family, who seemed to embrace me as one of their own.