Under the Influence (9 page)

T
here was just one story I did not share fully with the Havillands. The story about my son.

I had told Swift and Ava about Ollie, of course. They knew about the DUI and the custody case—the guardian
ad litem,
the terrible judge, and the fact that I went to Walnut Creek every other Saturday to see my son for a few hours, when he wasn't tied up with some family activity, though more often than not, he was. They knew that I still owed my lawyer a lot of money and that my ex-husband yelled at our son (though the worst part about Dwight, in Ava's eyes, was his refusal to allow our son to have a dog).

They didn't know that sometimes—not on my visitation day, just some random weekday—I actually drove the hour and fifteen minutes to Ollie's school, right when they let the kids out, just to catch a glimpse of him. I'd hold my breath when I caught sight of him coming out of the building with his too-large backpack, trudging toward his stepmother's SUV, his face concealed behind the hood of his jacket like someone in the witness protection program.

When Ollie was little, he'd been the kind of boy who greeted strangers at the supermarket and ran up to other kids at the swings or the monkey bars to ask if he could play. Now when he emerged from
school, he was nearly always alone. Though the steps in front of the school would be filled with other children, nobody ever seemed to call out to him.

He moved determinedly across the schoolyard toward Cheri's car, with no indication that he was eager to get there, or that anything would be better once he did. He kept his shoulders hunched, his head bent down, hands clenched—as if he were trudging through a wind tunnel or a hailstorm, as if some kind of trouble might appear around any corner and he couldn't let his guard down for a second.

If I managed to catch a glimpse of Ollie's face at one of these moments, what I saw was a tense, angry look, as impenetrable as a locked door. When he got close to the car, his expression didn't alter, even if—as was often the case—his stepbrother, Jared, was inside in the back, buckled into the car seat.

From where I'd stand watching, across the street, I could only see the back of Cheri's head, but it seemed to me that a woman picking up an eight-year-old from school would turn around, at least, to smile at him when he got into the car, ask him “How was your day?” or ask to inspect the art project he might have carried out—something involving toilet paper rolls and egg cartons and Popsicle sticks.

Only, she never did. The whole time she sat there in the pickup lane, Cheri faced the road, hands gripping the wheel. I kept my eyes locked on Ollie, meanwhile, as he slipped stiffly into the backseat, like a tired old man getting into a taxi at the end of a very long plane flight. I stood there, not moving, as the car pulled away. That was it: all I would see of my boy until Saturday.

I wanted to run over to him. I wanted to hear about every single thing that had happened in Ollie's day. I wanted to throw my arms around my son and bring him home with me, to take him out for a root beer float, anyway, where I would ask him to explain to me about the cardboard construction and laugh when he told me a corny second-grade
joke. But it wasn't my legal visitation time, and anyway—this was the saddest part—I knew Ollie would probably show no more evidence of enthusiasm for my presence at that moment than he did for his stepmother's. He looked like a person who believed he was all alone in the world, and I knew the feeling.

A
t least once a week, if I was over at the house in the afternoon and it got to be five thirty or six, one of the Havillands—sometimes Ava, sometimes Swift—would suggest that I stay for dinner.

“You're going to eat with us, right?” Ava said, the first time she invited me.

I never had plans. If I had any, I would have canceled them.

They'd feed me dinner. At a restaurant, or at home. Though always on the early side.

They went to bed by eight thirty. Not to sleep, just to bed, Ava added. Swift always gave her a massage first.

“We don't let anything get in the way of our alone time,” Ava told me. “Not even the dogs.”

I tried to imagine what it would feel like to end every day that way. With a man who adored me rubbing oil all over my body. And more, no doubt. The picture left me with a small, sad recognition that as close as the three of us were, there was a wall between the Havillands and me that would always exist. How could it be otherwise? I was the Little Match Girl, face pressed up to the windowpane, looking in at the warm table with the meal spread out, the glowing hearth. Not quite that, in fact: The meal would be offered to me. They would show me to a seat by the fire. It was the other
part, that unimaginable intimacy those two shared, that I could not fathom.

Still, it was no small thing that they included me in their dinners as often as they did. And, of course, the meals were always wonderful.

It wasn't just Estella who prepared great meals at Folger Lane. Ava was a wonderful cook, too—the kind of cook who doesn't rely much on recipes, but just opens the refrigerator and puts things together in a way that seems nearly effortless and always results in a marvelous meal. Their refrigerator and pantry were filled with great options: every kind of vegetable from the farmers' market, fresh bread from the bakery, runny cheese and the best olive oil, aged balsamic vinegar, five flavors of hand-packed Italian gelato.

Nights when Ava wasn't in the mood to cook, Swift would suggest that the three of us go out. They weren't the types to go in for trendy restaurants in the city, but they had their favorite spots a short drive from Folger Lane—a Burmese place where the owner always gave us his special table that was easy to get into with Ava's chair and sent over interesting foods to sample that weren't even on the menu, and our other regular spot, Vinny's. Once the two of them had their wine—and I my mineral water—Swift would lift his glass and grin. I knew what was coming then. More questions about my dating life. My sex life, if possible. My experiences with the men I met online had become Swift's preferred topic of conversation, and because it was Swift's favorite topic it became Ava's, too.

I wasn't sure why, but this had started to worry me. I sensed that in some way I couldn't understand, the two of them derived pleasure and maybe even excitement from hearing about my depressing meet-ups. As miserable as my dating life may have been—all those meetings in Starbucks or Peet's, or at some bar where the first thing you had to do was figure out if the person sitting there was really the one you'd come to meet, even though he looked twenty pounds heavier and ten years older—the stories I recounted afterward never ceased to entertain Swift and Ava.

A problem arose. I didn't know how I could keep it up. I had recently been thinking I wanted to take down my dating profile, but if I did, I worried about what I'd have to tell the Havillands on nights like these.

“So, tell us about this guy you were going to meet last night,” Swift said, settling into our usual booth at the Burmese place one Saturday. He had ordered a bottle of cabernet for him and Ava, and my usual Pellegrino. As he raised the glass to his lips, I knew I had to come up with a story. No doubt the reality would have been depressing, but for the Havillands I'd make it funny.

By this time my profile had been online for over a year, and the prospect of ever meeting a good man through a dating site seemed hopeless, even if I'd been more in the mood for a relationship. But I didn't want to disappoint my friends.

That night, when Swift started in with his question, an odd impulse took hold of me. Not totally unfamiliar, perhaps only dormant. Suddenly the old habit returned, my penchant for making up stories. I needed to create a picture of my life that was more enthralling than the real one.

“I don't know if I should tell you this,” I said, lowering my voice a little and studying the corner of my napkin. “I don't want you to think less of me. It's a little . . . twisted.”

A flicker of excitement crossed their faces. Ava reached for her drink. Swift set down his chopsticks.

“Twisted?”

I recalled the stories I'd told others over the years, to conceal the shameful truth about who I really was. I'd invented tragedies to explain the absence of my parents and extract both sympathy and admiration, and to create an alternative to the sorry reality. (My grandmother, Audrey Hepburn. The fatal illness that was going to cut my life short before I turned twenty-seven. The brother who'd rescued me when our canoe tipped over on a camping trip, then got swept away in a current.
One time, on a date with a man I knew I had no interest in seeing again, I'd described this rare syndrome I suffered from: Whenever I had sex, my body broke out in oozing sores.)

Once again at the restaurant that night, I felt a shiver of anticipation, the desire to spin out for Swift and Ava the most wonderful story, for no purpose other than to make myself more interesting. I thought of the
Arabian Nights
—a book I'd read to Ollie long ago, curled up together on the couch—and the picture came to me of Scheherazade, spinning irresistible stories with the knowledge that if she ever stopped, the king would have her beheaded.

“I really shouldn't tell you,” I said, whispering now, so the people at the table next to us couldn't hear. No one but Ava and Swift, who leaned in closer.

“I never did anything like this before. You might think I'm a terrible person.”

Only they never would. These were my friends for life. The two people I trusted to accept and care for me no matter what.

“It's just so . . . bad,” I said.

A look came over Swift's face—like a dog tasting meat, or blood. “Come on, Helen,” he said. He said it playfully, but there was something more beneath the banter.
Urgency.

“Okay, then,” I said, but I hesitated. “It's just so hard—”

“Honey,” said Ava. “It's
us
you're talking to.”

Long pause again. I took a breath, then another.

“We were coming back from the movies,” I said. “He was bringing me home, but he said he wanted to stop at Safeway before they closed, to pick up something. Lightbulbs. Don't ask me why.”

Starting this story, I studied the tablecloth, as a person might who was too embarrassed to meet anyone's eyes, but then I looked up at my friends—seeing in their faces a kind of rapt attention and eagerness I would more typically have expected to give to someone else than to receive. It was one of the things I loved about her, the way Ava always took
an interest in whatever I told her, but it was an unfamiliar experience, commanding undivided attention at the table as I felt I was doing at that moment. I
liked
this feeling.

“The store was empty, except for a couple of cashiers,” I said, almost whispering. “When we got there, they had already started turning out the lights.”

Long pause. I could feel Swift's breathing. I had him.

“He took me to the back of the store. The part of the store where they sell things like extension cords. And lightbulbs, of course.”

Another pause. Now I was drawing in breath myself, as if struggling to get out the next words, only I managed.

“He put his hands under my skirt,” I said. “He pulled an extension cord down from the rack and wrapped it around my wrists. He told me to bend over.”

“In Safeway?” Ava said. “Right there in the aisle?” Her voice was hushed, excited. Next to her in the booth, Swift had his large hand on her neck, and he was stroking it.

“Nobody else was around. They were closing in a few minutes. It was pretty dark.”

“Still.”

“You were into this guy in a big way?” Swift said. “You'd been making out in the car a little first, maybe, as a warm-up?”

I shook my head. “Up until this moment he hadn't laid a finger on me. He was sort of cold, actually. Aloof. But all of a sudden, something changed. Even his voice. It got all low and sort of rough. He had reached for something else off the rack. A spatula.”

“You've got to be kidding,” Ava said.

“No.”

“And then he did it?” Swift said. “The whole shebang?”

Here's where I gasped and put my hand up to my mouth, as if reliving it all. “Like you wouldn't believe,” I told him. “I never felt anything like that before.”

I looked him dead in the eye then. I felt like a whole other person. Someone fascinating.

“I have to meet this guy,” Swift said. “He sounds like a keeper.”

Up until this moment, I'd managed to keep my face the way I wanted: very serious, earnest even, and a little pained. As if in some altered state. Now was when I lost it. I burst out laughing, and for a split second I wondered if I'd gone too far. I might have made Swift angry, to have made a fool of him this way. But no.

“You really had me,” he said, shaking his head. Then he started laughing, too—that big laugh of his that I'd heard from clear across the art gallery that first night. “I've got to hand it to you, Helen.”

Ava let out her breath then—for the first time in a couple of minutes, it seemed. “There's a lot more to you than meets the eye, Helen,” she said. “I wouldn't have known you had it in you.”

“You'd do great in a poker game,” Swift said. “Or on Wall Street. You're the kind of person defense attorneys dream of, because they can put you on the witness stand and have you say anything they want, and you're going to sell it like every syllable's the truth. The God's honest truth.” And his large hand continued, gently, to stroke Ava's delicate neck.

A
ll that spring, every couple of weeks, the Havillands threw a party, and with a few exceptions the guest list was always the same group of regulars. This now included me.

The odd thing was that though the members of this group had just about nothing in common besides friendship with Ava and Swift, the parties always turned out to be amazing. One time, Ava hired a psychic who went around the room making predictions about everybody's life—with an emphasis on the sexual. Another time a helicopter landed out by the pool, and four reggae musicians got out and started playing on the steel drum and guitars already set out for them. There was a fire-eater, and a pair of break-dancers Ava had seen on the street in San Francisco and hired on the spot. One time Swift and Ava attached the names of famous people to our backs and we had to go around the room asking questions of our fellow guests until we figured out the name of our person. I was Monica Lewinsky. Swift was Ted Bundy, the serial killer. One time they hired a magician who somehow ended up with Ava's bra inside his top hat, and another time they hired a rock band that could play any hit you named from the last forty years. Each of us was supposed to take the microphone and sing the song of our choice. I chose Cyndi Lauper's “Time After Time.”

If not for the Havillands, I would never have known any of these individuals in Swift and Ava's inner circle, but now that I did, we shared
this odd bond. Not friendship, precisely, but a mutual recognition of our extraordinary good fortune in having a couple like the Havillands for our friends.

One person always present at the parties was Ava's massage therapist, Ernesto—a huge, swarthy man who dressed in black and had hands the size of ten-pound hams. The thin, pale woman who dispensed Swift's Chinese longevity herbs, Ling, came with her husband, Ping. I was never sure whether he spoke English, because he never spoke. There was a lesbian couple, Renata and Jo, who worked as building contractors, and met Swift and Ava when they'd done the handicapped-accessible additions to their house. Though he lived two hours away, in Vallejo, Swift's oldest friend from childhood, Bobby, always showed up with whatever woman he was dating at the moment. (That was Swift for you, I reflected. A man who never turned his back on his friends. It didn't matter that Bobby worked at a stone yard, operating a forklift truck, and lived in a one-bedroom studio. He and Swift were best friends and always would be.)

Always near the head of the table was Swift's attorney, Marty Matthias. Marty came from somewhere back East—Pittsburgh, maybe—and even after twenty-five years in California, still had an air of the coal mines about him. He didn't play tennis. Would rather submit to water torture than go for a hike. When I asked him once what kind of law he practiced, he said, “Whatever kind my buddy here needs to keep him out of trouble.” He had a doglike devotion to Swift, and Swift returned it.

“This guy,” Swift said once, at a party, making a toast to Marty to acknowledge some brilliant legal maneuver he'd pulled off recently on Swift's behalf. “This guy would chew a person's ear off and swallow it before he'd let me pay an extra nickel to the IRS. Right, Marty?”

Then there were Ava's friends Jasper and Suzanne, stylish and beautiful art dealers in the city. Most recently—but before they'd taken me under their wing—the Havillands had befriended a woman in her late seventies named Evelyn Couture, a widowed fellow dog lover who
owned an enormous house in Pacific Heights. On party nights, Evelyn Couture would be brought to the house by her driver. At first glance she seemed an unlikely member of these gatherings, but she appeared to love Swift, and he always seated her near himself at the long, linen-covered table. The night he'd hired the karaoke band, Evelyn got up and sang “How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?”

In addition to the regulars, you could always count on some newcomer—a person Ava had met on one of her walks with the dogs or in line at Starbucks whom she'd taken a shine to. I might have been one such person myself, except that I had quickly and magically been elevated to the next level, of those not simply putting in a one-time guest appearance, but installed as a regular. I worried that I wouldn't have anything to say, but it wasn't a problem. Most everyone liked to talk about themselves so much, they were happy to have someone who'd listen.

Although both Estella and Ava were excellent cooks, Ava always had these parties catered to cut down on the stress. All Estella had to do was prepare and pass around platters of olives and salami and cheese and roasted artichokes from North Beach and caviar on great bread. Estella usually brought along Carmen to help out with the postparty kitchen cleanup, and when she came to work, Carmen always had her textbooks from community college with her, in case there might be a lull in the kitchen that allowed her some time for studying. Even when she was washing dishes or mopping the floor, she had earphones on, listening to some book on tape. She was trying to improve her English, she told me. She didn't want to have an accent, and she didn't.

The first time I attended one of Ava and Swift's dinner parties, I brought a bouquet of gerbera daisies, not understanding that Ava would have ordered elaborate floral arrangements for every room in the house. The next time, when I asked what I could do to help, Ava suggested that I bring my camera.

“I've always wanted to make some kind of record of our gatherings,” she said. “Nothing posed. More documentary style. Black and white.
Like that photographer Sally Mann, who took all those great, raw photographs of her children naked over the years they were growing up.”

I obliged, of course. A place had been set for me at the table, but I barely sat down that time, or at any party after that one, because I was always taking pictures, and I wanted to catch the unexpected shots. I'd wander into the kitchen as Estella and Carmen cleared away dishes, or go out by the pool, where the guests hung out sometimes, or into the library, where Ava liked to sit by the fire, catching up with one person or another who might have some piece of news to confide that couldn't be shared with the whole group. Unlike Swift, who loved the group dynamic of parties, Ava was more interested in having a very long and deep conversation with one person at a time.

And because I knew how Ava felt about her dogs, I also followed Sammy, Lillian, and Rocco, trying to get images of them that might differ in some way from the hundreds that already existed. As Ava had once pointed out, I was very good at becoming nearly invisible—a skill I possessed even when I wasn't taking photographs. With the exception of Rocco, who still growled when he saw me, nobody seemed to notice I was taking their picture, or even that I was there.

For Cinco de Mayo, Ava procured a ceremonial Mexican dress for Estella to wear when she served the mole. (She was Guatemalan, of course. “Close enough,” Ava said.) Jasper and Suzanne brought one of their gallery's stable of artists with them—a very beautiful young woman named Squrl. Sometime after dinner I headed out to the pool house, with the idea of getting a shot of the festivities from a distance. As I stood outside the pool house framing my shot of the party a few dozen yards away, I heard a sound behind me from inside. I turned and peeked through the French doors, the curtain only partly covering the glass.

Only moments before, I'd been back at the main house snapping photographs of Suzanne's husband, Jasper, as he held forth on their upcoming visit to Art Basel. Now, through the curtain, I caught sight of
Suzanne and Squrl, sprawled on the deep-pile Tibetan rug, both nearly naked, their arms and legs entangled in a passionate embrace. I figured the image of Suzanne and Squrl was probably not the kind of shot Ava had in mind when she mentioned Sally Mann's photographs of her children, and left before either of them was aware I'd been there.

I saw other things through my lens: At one end of the garden, I witnessed what looked like a pretty unpleasant argument between Ling and Ping. I saw Estella slipping a rib eye steak into her purse. Possibly the strangest thing—which I took in, by accident, while trying to capture a portrait of Lillian—was the sight of Ernesto's meaty hand, viewed from under the table, resting without opposition on the thin white thigh of the herbalist, Ling, as her husband soundlessly chewed his meat in the chair directly next to her.

I didn't share any of this with Ava. As interesting as the photographs might have been, I didn't record these images with my camera. My own life might be fair game for amusing conversation over cocktails or dinner with my dazzling friends, but the intimate secrets of others were not my business, and so on the rare occasions when I'd snapped something I shouldn't have seen, I deleted the image. A photograph—once captured—held more power than most people knew.

One night, as the group of us gathered around the long teak table on the patio, Estella set down at its center a golden platter bearing a dish called Bananas Foster. Ava reached her long, thin, well-defined arm across the table and, with a very long match, ignited the dish, so flames leapt up around the edges.

I watched Ava's face then: the way the light hit her cheekbones and how beautiful she looked as it did. I tried to take all this in with my camera: the flaming bananas, the looks of amazement on the faces of the assembled guests. Fingers of smoke curled around us all, as if we were passengers on a glamorous ocean liner, making our way through the Strait of Magellan or circling a Greek island with every light on the deck illuminated. The ship's captain, obviously, was Swift.

There he sat at the end of the table, presiding over everything, leaning back in his chair with his white teeth clamped around a Cuban cigar and his hand caressing some part of Ava's body (knee, elbow, earlobe), almost as if we were their children gathered around, and they were the parents who'd given us life. Which, in a way, they had.

One night, as Carmen was clearing away the dishes—the bottle of Far Niente, the shells of a few dozen lobsters—Swift instructed us to step away from the table and into the garden, where each of us was presented with a gas-fired flying lantern, the size of a small kite, which we lit and then released. Our lanterns floated slowly upward—first above the roof, then beyond the trees, and higher into the night sky, until it seemed to me that we had created a whole new constellation, right there on Folger Lane.

None of us asked how (fire codes being what they were) this was possible. In Swift and Ava's world, everything seemed possible. Somewhere off in the kitchen, a Guatemalan mother and her American-born daughter scraped the remnants of our fabulous meal into the garbage. (Leftovers were never a good idea for the dogs. Too rich.) The rest of us just stood there in the darkness, around the glowing turquoise of the pool, watching our flickering lanterns float slowly toward the stars. They continued to stay aloft, and to glow, for many minutes. When the last one finally burned out, we all returned to the house for a glass of champagne and individual chocolate soufflés, with a cloud of crème fraiche on every plate and one perfect raspberry. Then gradually, one by one, we said our good nights and retreated to our own small lives, away from the strange and beautiful Shangri-la created by our amazing friends. I think we were all grateful to have touched down for a few hours, like weary travelers washed up by good fortune on that remote and glittering shore. For all the hundreds of pictures I took there—thousands—no photograph could capture what it felt like to find myself at that place, in the company of that magic couple.