Under the Influence (6 page)

G
iven how badly my life was going at this point, I couldn't muster much enthusiasm for finding a man. All I really cared about was staying sober and getting my son back. My social life mostly consisted of attending AA meetings. So when I signed up for Match.com, it was a distraction more than anything else.

They required you to put together a profile, of course. After creating a couple of versions of my story for the site, featuring a glamorous made-up history (something I was always good at), I opted to tell the truth—minus the DUI and the custody proceedings. Under “Hobbies” I mentioned photography and cycling, though I hadn't taken a photograph of anything besides other people's children for more than a year, and my bike was gathering dust. I gave my real age and noted that I had a child, though if that didn't totally scare a person off, and he read the rest of my profile, he would have learned that my son didn't live with me. For my profile picture I had not chosen—as so many appeared to have done—an image from my twenties, or a glamour shot of me wearing a cocktail dress or a pair of tight jeans and a come-hither look. I took my own picture, using a timer, with my camera set up on a tripod, in the kitchenette of my apartment, under fluorescent light.

After posting the bad self-portrait, I decided to include a couple of other images—not of myself, but pictures I'd taken on long-ago
photography outings with Ollie of places I loved around the Bay Area: the Russian River, the Marin Headlands, Half Moon Bay. There was one picture, too, that had been taken by my ex-husband, of my son and me sitting in a booth at a diner together in Point Reyes after a long hike in the elk preserve. I included that one just because I usually looked so serious in pictures, and in this one I was actually laughing.

My online profile (under the moniker “Shuttergirl”) sounded so boring I couldn't imagine anyone being interested. I posted it anyway, and found myself unexpectedly drawn into the process. Nights now, if I wasn't at the movies with Alice, at a meeting, or working a catering job, I'd be online, scrolling through my Match.com messages.

The results seldom yielded anything promising. Still I kept clicking through the profiles and the daily trickle of responses.

Hambone: “I saw your picture and you seem like a nice person. I'm looking for a friendly, kind-hearted woman who enjoys fishing and gospel music. I have what you might call the ‘teddy bear' type of build, but with the right gal to inspire me, I plan to enroll in Weight Watchers.”

Tantra4U: “My philosophy is that people should not be limited in their experience or tied down to a single person. I'm looking for an open relationship, without the restrictions society places on us that only limit our full potential to express our complete sexual identity. How about you?”

PeppyGramps: “Don't let my age discourage you from writing back.” (The author of this message admitted to being seventy-four.) “I've got plenty of pep in my step, not to mention a drawer full of pharmaceuticals.”

The vast majority of messages I left unanswered, but now and then—to my friend Alice's increasing chagrin—I'd write back to one of the men who had written to me, in which case there would probably be a follow-up telephone conversation. Most of the time I could tell in the first sixty seconds that the person on the other end of the line was not for me, but it wasn't always easy ending the conversation. Sometimes I just put it out there: “I don't think we're a match.” Once, when I did that, a
three-page response showed up in my inbox. The names its author called me shouldn't have bothered me, given that we'd never actually met, but even the words of strangers had a disconcerting power to unnerve me.

“Man-eating cunt,” he wrote. (The guy called himself “Rainbow-Seeker.”) “I know your type. Nobody's ever good enough for you. I wasn't going to mention this before, but it looks like you could stand to lose a few pounds, honey. Not to mention, you're no spring chicken. What's the story on your kid, anyway? What kind of mother doesn't live with her kid?”

Sometimes the men who wrote to me invaded my dreams. Most disconcerting was when the women did—the ex-wives they spent so much time talking about, years after the divorce. When this happened, I reflected that I'd probably like their ex-wives better than I liked them. I imagined what my ex-husband—living out in Walnut Creek with his new wife and baby son—would say about me if he were on a dating site. Or what he said about me to Cheri. Maybe even to Ollie.

She has a drinking problem. It's sad how substance abuse can ruin a person's life. She came from a screwed-up family, of course. If you met her mother, you'd understand why she's a mess.

He had a point. With the exception of Ollie, I didn't have a single relative I really loved. For that brief period of my marriage, I had believed myself to be part of a big, happy family. Then they were gone, and with them went my child. Besides my one friend, I was alone in the world.

That's how I felt when I met the Havillands.

A
couple of days after meeting Ava at that gallery that first time, Alice had called me up. “Who was that person you were talking to, in the wheelchair?” she said.

“Ava's an art collector,” I told her. “She invited me over to see her collection.”

“And you're going?” she said. I didn't tell her I already had.

“She has these original prints of some famous photographs of prostitutes,” I told her. “She said I reminded her of one.”

“Oh, great.”

“She wanted to hear about my photography.”

“Did she invite any of the retarded people over, too?” Alice said. There was that old bitterness to her voice. In the past it hadn't bothered me, but now it did. She almost sounded jealous.

“Developmentally disabled, not retarded,” I said. “But no.”

“Well, that's quite an invitation then.”

“She probably just felt sorry for me,” I said. “More than likely I'll never hear from her again.” Only I would, I knew. I had written the date on my calendar the minute I got home, not that there was a chance I'd forget it. Dinner at Vinny's with Swift and Ava, that Friday night. Now, here I was, lying.

“I thought we were supposed to get together yesterday,” Alice said.
She didn't say more, but this was when I realized I'd forgotten. We'd planned to see the new Coen brothers movie.

“Oh, no,” I said. “Things were crazy at work. I'll call you to reschedule as soon as everything quiets down.”

“Sure,” Alice said, but I knew from her tone she wasn't buying my excuse. My job was boring, but never crazy. “Just let me know when it's a good time.”

But I didn't call her. And the next time Alice asked me to go to the movies with her, I said I was busy. Ava and Swift had invited me to have dinner with them at a different restaurant. Mediterranean, this time. The time after that, when Alice called to suggest we catch a movie together, I said no. The Havillands hadn't invited me anyplace, but I hoped they would. And that was enough.

“I guess you're one of the popular girls now,” Alice said.

“W
e might want to do something about your wardrobe,” Ava said. It was a Saturday morning, and I had just shown up at Folger Lane to work on the photo project. Estella had already poured me a smoothie and set a carrot muffin on a plate for me, still warm from the oven. Swift was heading out to his qigong class. “Don't let her give you a hard time,” he called out to me. “I happen to like sweatpants.”

Even when she wasn't going anywhere, Ava always wore something interesting. That day it was a hand-painted silk blouse and a pair of linen pants with a silver necklace I'd never seen before, and earrings to match.

“I just threw these on because they were handy,” I told her. I was wearing a faded T-shirt and stretched-out pants.

“It doesn't matter if all you're doing is passing appetizer trays, or even cleaning toilets,” Ava said—not that she ever spent any time doing the latter. “It just makes you feel better when you've got a wonderful outfit on.”

“I guess I never think about clothes much anymore,” I told her. This wasn't completely accurate. I loved nice clothes. I just didn't own any.

“It's about valuing yourself, Helen,” Ava said. “And letting the world know that's the kind of person you are.”

Despite the number of times I'd been to their house, I'd never been upstairs, but now she took me there in her special elevator. “It's time you paid a visit to my closet,” she said.

Ava's closet was the size of my whole apartment, more or less. One wall held the shoes. (Never mind that they never saw wear.) She must have owned a hundred pairs, which were arranged—thanks to Estella, no doubt—by color, with a row of handmade cowboy boots lined up along the floor. Then there was the scarf and hat wall, and the purses. One whole rack held nothing but sweaters in every shade of cashmere but yellow. Ava hated yellow. Then there were the silk blouses, and the Indian tunics, and the floaty silk pants she favored because they concealed how thin her legs were, and the long dresses. She owned more basic clothes, too—though of only the highest quality. This was the section she studied, for me.

“We need to find you some good black pants,” she said. “That's a given. Black pants are a foundation of everything. You can build from there, but the pants are the starting point. Sort of like sexual attraction in a relationship. If you don't have that, it doesn't matter what other stuff you layer on top.”

She pulled a pair of crisp black linen trousers from a hanger and held them out to me. “We're about the same size,” she said. She pulled one of the cashmere sweaters off the rack then—a shade of blue somewhere between a robin's egg and the sky, and a scarf, mostly mauve and green, with a glittery blue thread running through it, unlike anything I'd ever worn or ever imagined wearing. She picked out everything, even stockings. Then a skirt—black leather—and a pair of boots, also black, to go with it.

“I couldn't take this,” I told her, catching sight of the label and fingering the leather, the softest kid.

“Of course you can,” she said, almost impatient. “This stuff is just hanging here. I'd love to see you put it to use.”

There was more: a wrap dress (“a little conservative, but you might go on a date with some investment banker type someday”) and another dress on the totally opposite end of the spectrum—short skirt, plunging neckline, draped to hug the body.

“One thing about this one,” she said. “You can't wear anything underneath it. Panty lines.”

I thought she'd probably leave me to try the clothes on by myself then, but she sat there waiting.

“Let's see,” she said.

I felt a little odd, but I pulled my T-shirt over my head.

“Oh my god, your bra,” she said. “You're way more buxom than me, so I can't help you with that one. But we definitely need to pay a visit to Miss Elaine.” This turned out to be Ava's lingerie consultant. A good bra fitter made all the difference, she told me.

I stepped out of my yoga pants.

“You have a great butt,” she told me. “But I knew that already. It was the first thing Swift said about you.”

I pulled the pants up and buttoned the waistband. As she had guessed, they were too long by a couple of inches, but otherwise the fit was perfect. Same with the cashmere top. I ran my hands over the sleeves, taking in the feel of the wool.

“There's nothing like cashmere against your skin,” Ava said. “Well, almost nothing.”

I stepped out in front of the mirror, arranging the scarf. “Try these,” she said, reaching into a drawer that turned out to contain earrings. She lifted out a pair of silver hoops and a cuff to go with them.

“Amazing,” she said, as she snapped the bracelet onto my wrist. “You could almost be me.” I had never seen the slightest resemblance between us, but I actually knew what she meant. “Me, if I were fifteen years younger with fabulous tits.”

She laughed. A long, soft trill, like water over rocks. “And ambulatory,” she added.

A
t the time I met Ava, I had been spending time—though not a lot of it—with a man named Jeff, a bank manager I'd met on Match.com (moniker: “EZDuzIt”). He hadn't divorced his wife yet, so I knew this was going nowhere. But more than that he showed so little enthusiasm about me—and truthfully, I didn't possess all that much for him, either.

I told myself it was good to have the company, and that at least when he was around, I was less likely to do things like writing long letters to my ex-husband that I knew better than to send, or crying on the phone to Alice about missing my son, and about the court-ordered parenting classes I still had to attend twice a week, in which we were given lists of good activities to engage in with a child.
(Do crafts. Read out loud together at bedtime. Attend library story hour.)
One day at my parenting class they'd passed out recipes for fun and healthy snacks—hard-boiled eggs turned into clowns, carrots and celery sticks arranged on a plate to resemble stick figures, with a cherry tomato for the head. (“Ollie and I once made potato chips from scratch!” I wanted to cry out to the parenting-skills teacher, who looked to be around twenty-one. “Every Christmas the two of us made a gingerbread house.”) As if my son was ever with me long enough for me to make him snacks, anyway. “You were always a great mother,” Alice had said. “You were just depressed—which was
understandable. And one night you had too much to drink. That's not such an unusual story.”

“It was a little more than that.”

“That cop probably never would have pulled you over if your taillight wasn't out. You weren't even speeding.”

Making excuses was a negative pattern, our counselor told us. The first step toward sobriety was to own our behavior.

My name is Helen. I am an alcoholic.

Jeff used to come over to my apartment on Tuesday nights. We didn't have sex that first time, but later it became our Tuesday night routine. Thai food or pizza. Followed by a ball game on TV, then bed.

The Tuesday after I met Ava, I called Jeff at work.

“I can't get together tonight,” I told him.

“What happened?” he said. “You sick?”

I didn't want to see him, I said. Not that night or ever. It confirmed what I already knew about Jeff that he accepted this news with about as much expression of emotion or curiosity as he had displayed in the rest of our brief relationship. He appeared to possess no interest in identifying the reasons for my choice or challenging it. I was off the phone in less than a minute, feeling an odd combination of anger at myself for ever spending time with such a person in the first place and relief that I wasn't going to do that anymore. I wasn't going to waste any more time with people who didn't matter. If I wanted to get my son back, I had to make a better life.

I credited Ava with my decision. Although I had seen her just a few times, I felt she had revealed to me a whole other way a person might live. As unlikely as it seemed that I, too, could accomplish this, the idea of having for one's partner a person whose presence in the room transformed it for you—someone who felt that way about you—seemed the only thing worth pursuing. If you couldn't have that, you'd do better on your own.

Before I met Ava, I had pretty much come to the conclusion that my situation was hopeless and it didn't much matter what I did—nothing
would ever change. Ava offered a picture of my future as filled with promise, and there seemed no more convincing proof of this than that she and Swift wanted to be part of it.

It was early December when I met Ava, and Christmas was coming up. I had attended the holiday concert at Ollie's school, picking my son out of the lineup of second graders in Santa caps singing “Frosty the Snowman.” But after, there was a party at the house of a boy in his class, and I didn't want to keep him from having fun with friends, so I only got to see him long enough to give him a hug. I wanted to wait and celebrate with my son on a day when we could actually spend some time together.

I knew what he really wanted, of course, same as he had all his life: a puppy. But there was no way Dwight was going to sign off on that one. I'd seen a man demonstrating a special kind of yo-yo on the street in San Francisco, doing amazing tricks, and at the time, the idea appealed to me of giving my son—a boy who now owned a few dozen video games—a present that didn't involve electronics. But when I got it home I couldn't make the yo-yo do any of the tricks I'd witnessed on the street. I hadn't even given Ollie the toy yet, and I already knew it would lie on the floor under his bed, untouched.

I went online and picked out a simple digital camera for him, smaller and cooler looking than the one I used to let him use back in the old days. I let myself envision the two of us exploring unusual places together the way we used to, taking pictures. Later, I could teach him about lighting and Photoshop. The idea of sharing those things with my son made me excited.

The next time I visited Folger Lane, Ava said she had a new project she wanted me to help her with. This involved photographing her art collection, which included not simply the work that hung on the walls of the Havillands' home but several roomfuls of drawings and paintings and sculptural pieces Ava had acquired over the years—some, like the piece she'd bought at the gallery that first night, possessing no significant value by conventional standards, others worth tens of thousands
of dollars. There'd be a carving made by some old woodsman whose work Ava had spotted once on a drive through Mendocino, and propped up against the wall next to it a Lee Friedlander print with authentication papers stating its value at twenty thousand dollars. Beautiful things, stacked in piles that spilled onto the floor, including boxes that appeared to have been received months before, still unopened. And of course, there were all the artworks already on display to be cataloged as well. The Picassos. The Eva Hesse, the Diebenkorn. Those carved bone Chinese figures I loved so much—the joyful fornicators—which I positioned on a piece of black velvet when I took the photograph so they'd be shown off to the best effect.

I told Ava I wanted to do this job for her strictly as a friend. I liked the idea of being able to give something of value to a woman capable of such vast, almost boundless generosity to others. The fact that the job would require dozens of hours presented no problem. I had too much time in those days, and I already recognized that there was no place I'd rather spend it than on Folger Lane. But Ava insisted on paying me forty dollars an hour, which was a lot more than I made as a caterer or shooting student portraits.

“You're doing me a huge favor,” she said. “I've been wanting to get this stuff documented for ages, but Swift is so particular about who comes over to the house that I haven't been able to find anyone he felt good about until now. He really likes you.”

I was flattered, of course. For a man like Swift to notice me at all seemed surprising. But the person whose attention and interest mattered the most was always Ava.