Under the Influence (15 page)

O
llie and I finally had something like a routine during those two weeks—the first time since he was five years old that I'd had a rhythm with my son. Because my apartment had only one bedroom, I'd set Ollie up in the living room, on an air mattress, but most mornings he'd come into bed with me sometime before sunrise, bringing a stack of library books with him, and we'd pile up the pillows and read till the sun came up. I'd make French toast or pancakes, and we'd play a round of a card game called Anaconda that Swift had taught him. Ollie usually won. Then we'd get dressed and I'd bring him over to Swift and Ava's, where he'd spend most of the morning playing with the dogs and swimming in the pool with Swift while I got a few hours' work in.

“I've got an idea,” Swift said. We were out by the pool. I was taking a midmorning break to have a snack. Ollie was stretched out on a beach chair after a game of Marco Polo with Swift, listening to Swift's iPod. Ava was reading a magazine. Estella had just brought out the Bloody Marys and my own nonalcoholic version of the drink.

“It's been way too long since we had a party over here. Let's invite the boyfriend over for dinner.”

“I don't know about that,” I said. In fact, I'd been missing Elliot, but Folger Lane didn't feel like the best place for getting together with him
after almost ten days of not seeing each other. And besides, Ollie would be here.

“It's about time we met this guy,” Swift said. Ava knew his name, of course, but she always referred to him as “the accountant.” Evidently Elliot's name hadn't registered with Swift either. “Why don't you call him up and see if he's free for dinner?”

When did he have in mind, I asked.

“Now.”

“I don't think it's such a great idea,” I said. “Elliot's never met Ollie. It might be better to do one thing at a time. First let Ollie spend a little time with just Elliot and me. Then we could all get together.”

“You overthink things,” Ava said. There was a sharpness in her voice I rarely heard in her, usually only when she was speaking to Estella, if she came home with the wrong kind of dog food or missed a spot vacuuming. Or—as had happened recently—when she'd told me about Carmen stealing Cooper's ring.

“It'll be fun,” she said. “We can all head over to the yacht club and have dinner on the boat.”

Not surprisingly, Elliott was free that evening, but as happy as he was to hear from me, he raised the same concern that I had earlier—though now, hearing him wonder if this was the right time and place for him to finally meet Ollie, I dismissed it with a certain sharpness of my own. “You overthink everything,” I told him. “And you worry too much.”

“I worry about things that matter to me,” he said.

“How about we just have fun for once, without analyzing every-thing?”

Elliot was quiet. “I thought we'd been having plenty of fun,” he said. “I just take this seriously, that's all. Meeting Ollie means a lot to me.”

“It'll be fine,” I said, sounding like Ava. “Swift has a grill on the deck of his boat. We can have hamburgers, and Ava will make s'mores. Swift will probably let Ollie steer the boat.”

We decided that Elliot would meet us all over at Folger Lane that afternoon. We'd have a drink, and a swim for those who wanted, then head over to the yacht club for dinner on the Havillands' sailboat.

“The Donzi?” Ollie asked. He'd heard all about Monkey Man's speedboat by now.

Swift shook his head. “That one's at Tahoe, buddy,” he said. “But don't you worry. I'm getting you out on that boat soon. And when we do, look out, baby.” He made a motion like a cowboy twirling his lasso.

We were out by the pool when Elliot showed up. Swift was in his swim trunks, Ava in one of her long gowns. Ollie was in the water—his swimming having progressed to the point where he was no longer in need of an adult at his side, though we kept close watch.

I registered Elliot's clothes first. A button-down shirt and baggy khakis, penny loafers. He must have gotten a haircut since I'd seen him last. This left a strip of neck exposed, pink and vulnerable, and a naked place around his ears also. I didn't want this to bother me, but it did.

I got up to greet him, put my hand on his shoulder, but didn't kiss him, though in other circumstances I would have wanted to.

“I want you to meet my friends,” I said. I figured it was best if we handled one introduction at a time. Swift and Ava first, then Ollie, once he got out of the water.

“I've heard a lot about you,” Elliot said, extending his hand over the table, which held a nearly empty bottle of wine. Swift was already opening a new one. Elliot had brought wine to contribute to the meal, too, but I knew it probably wouldn't pass muster with Swift.

“We know all about you, too,” said Ava. “Well, maybe not everything. But you might call this ‘meeting the parents.'”

“It's great that Helen's had friends like you two looking out for her,” Elliot said.

“She's the kind of person someone could take advantage of,” Swift said, looking Elliot in the eye. “There's a lot of sharks in the water.”

“I'm not one of them,” Elliot said. Meeting Swift's gaze.

“Of course you aren't,” Ava said, reaching a hand up to pat Elliot on the arm. “A mouse would be scarier than Elliot.”

They laughed. I didn't.

Swift tossed a towel to Elliot—thick pile, oversize, with a blue racing stripe on the bottom that matched the logo of one of the companies Swift had started. Back in the days when he still worked in Silicon Valley, Ava told me once, they gave these out as Christmas presents, along with matching, personally monogrammed bathrobes.

Now Swift was handing Elliot a cigar from his humidor of Cubans. Elliot's face took on a faintly pained expression.

“I hope you brought a change of clothes, pal,” Swift said. “We're going out in the boat later.”

“If not, we can give you something of Swift's,” Ava said. Elliot was a good four inches taller than Swift, and their builds were entirely different, but Elliot made no comment.

“It's a rule around here,” Swift added. “When a person doesn't go in the water on his own, we throw him in.” He let out his big hyena laugh. I looked at Elliot, who wasn't smiling.

Ollie was on the diving board now doing cannonballs, calling out for Swift to watch. “My husband has turned this kid into a fish,” Ava told Elliot.

“Next comes wrestling,” said Swift.

Later, when he got out of the water—in that moment that always clutched at my heart: the sight of my little boy, skinny and shivering, dripping by the side of the pool, teeth chattering but happy—I wrapped Ollie in one of the blue striped towels and brought him over to the table where the adults had gathered.

“There's someone I want you to meet,” I said. “This is Elliot.”

I could see my son taking him in: the shirt, the dorky pants, his pale white ankles and pale white hands. Elliot had not gone in the water.

“He's your boyfriend, right?” Ollie said to me.

Swift let out one of his big laughs again. “This guy doesn't miss a trick,” he said.

“Your mother and I are good friends,” Elliot said. “But I'm not going to lie to you. Sometimes if I'm lucky I get to take her out on a date. I was hoping we might get to go someplace fun with you sometime, too.”

“I don't want to go someplace else,” Ollie said. “I like it here.” He turned to Swift. “You want to play foosball?”

“I will destroy you,” Swift said. “Destroy, and then pulverize.” He lifted Ollie up over his head then and carried him—shrieking and laughing—to the pool house, where the games were.

This left Ava and me alone with Elliot. She started to pour him a glass of wine but he stopped her.

“I'm not much of a drinker,” he said.

She set down the bottle. “Oh my,” Ava said, and laughed a little, as if this were an astonishing thing. “No swimming. No drinking. Do you
ever
have any fun?”

“Yes, actually,” he said.

“I hope you like dogs, anyway,” she said.

“I love dogs,” he said. “I'd have one myself, if I wasn't allergic.”

I studied Ava's face.

“Isn't it odd,” she said, “that nobody ever says they're allergic to people?”

A
n hour or so later the five of us piled in the Range Rover with a cooler of steaks in the back—also oysters, wine, a bunch of take-out salads, and hamburger meat and buns for Ollie—and drove to the private marina where Swift kept his sailboat.

“I'm actually more of the speedboat type than a sailor,” he said. “But I keep the fast boat up at Tahoe. That's where we really crank up the horsepower.”

“Can we do that soon?” Ollie asked him.

“Do dogs piss on fire hydrants?” said Swift.

Swift and Ava sat in the front seat of the car with Ollie between them, so he could play with Swift's iPod. Elliot and I sat in the back. Since Swift had introduced him to Bob Marley, reggae had supplanted the albums that used to be Ollie's favorites—late-eighties and nineties music favored by his father.

“I shot the sheriff,” he was singing, off-key but loud. “But I didn't shoot no deputy.”

From the backseat, Elliot mentioned that he'd seen Bob Marley live, at a concert back in the seventies. I could feel how hard he was trying to come up with something Ollie might find worthy of notice.

“I was down in Jamaica one time with a buddy,” Swift said. “We got invited to a party at Bob's house. Crazy place.”

“You
met
Bob Marley?” Ollie said.

“We played soccer. Only Bob called it football.”

Elliot didn't say anything about this, but I knew he got seasick sometimes. I wasn't too worried about sunburn, because it was past four o'clock when we set out onto the bay in Swift's boat,
Bad Boy,
but Elliot had slathered himself with sunblock. Luckily, he hadn't brought along the hat he sometimes wore when we went hiking—designed to protect not only a person's face, but also his neck, with a string that went under the chin. It always reminded me of the bonnets worn by the little girls on
Little House on the Prairie
. That day he had his Oakland A's hat with him.

“I'm a Giants man myself,” Swift said.

“Me, too,” Ollie volunteered, though this was news to me.

I
t was gorgeous out on the bay, but the water was choppy. “I don't want to be a party pooper,” Elliot said, “but aren't we going to put a life jacket on Ollie?”

“I'm a great swimmer,” Ollie said. “Monkey Man said so.”

“Even good swimmers wear life jackets on open water,” Elliot offered. “In fact, I was just about to buckle one on myself.” He reached for a life jacket that was attached to the wall along the outer deck of the boat. “Better safe than sorry, right?”

Ollie looked at Swift. The grin on Swift's face was one I recognized from a few hundred photographs I'd sorted through for
The Man and His Dogs
—a wide, toothy smile suggesting his allegiance with Ollie and their mutual recognition of the absurdity of Elliot's suggestion.

“It's good we have some people like you in the world, man,” Swift told Elliot, “to keep people like me from getting too wild and crazy. We need a few rule followers to counterbalance the outlaws. Some people might say if you get hung up on life jackets, you're a pussy. But what's the harm?”

“I just want to make sure Oliver's safe,” Elliot said.

Swift took a puff on his cigar. “I hear your point, my man,” he said. “But I just can't get into wrapping some piece of Day-Glo orange Styrofoam around myself out here on the bay.” He picked up a life jacket himself then, waved it over his head like a lasso, and tossed it in the water. “Cramps my style.”

“Yahoo!” Ollie shouted. “Life preservers are for babies.”

“He hasn't been swimming that long,” Elliot said.

“It's probably a good idea,” I said. My head was throbbing. “I think Elliot's right.”

Swift put a hand on Ollie's shoulder. “You heard your mom, buddy,” he said. “Her boyfriend's got a really good point there. That guy's a lot more sensible than your old pal Mr. Monkey Man.”

“Did you make Cooper wear a life jacket when he was my age, Monkey Man?” Ollie asked. Though Ollie had yet to meet him, Cooper occupied a legendary status for him. Now he held Monkey Man's son up as the standard for coolness in all things. Cooper and Swift, both, like a couple of rock stars.

In the end, I buckled my son in his life jacket, tying the extra length of straps into a series of bows, which he undid, so the jacket—though nominally attached to his chest—would have offered scant protection in the event our boat capsized or if Ollie fell overboard.

I considered making an issue of this but decided against it. He was mad enough already. He blamed Elliot for having to wear the life jacket, though really, I should have thought of it myself.

“So I hear you play tee-ball,” Elliot said to him. “How's your team doing?”

“The season's over, but anyway, tee-ball's stupid,” Ollie told him, eyes on the water. “It's a baby game. All the dads are the pitchers, and they just throw these puffballs. Some of the kids on my team are so bad
they just stand there and don't even swing. The dads have to throw the ball so it hits their bat.”

“You've got to start somewhere, right?” Elliot said. “Pretty soon you'll be old enough for Little League. That gets more challenging.”

“I hate Little League,” Ollie said.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” It wasn't a great question, but Elliot was trying hard.

“Garbageman. Or bad guy. I'll probably rob banks.”

“If you're going to take people's money,” Swift said, “you want to do it the smart way. Create a start-up.”

Out on the bay, the water was dotted with sailboats. The sun was low on the horizon. “What do you say we cook up these babies?” Swift said, pulling four steaks out of the cooler, along with a couple of raw hamburger patties Estella had prepared for Ollie.

I could tell from the look on Elliot's face that he was feeling sick, but he said nothing.

Swift asked Elliot how he liked his steak. “I go for rare meat myself,” he said.

He and Ava exchanged looks. It often seemed that the two of them imbued all comments—whether made by them or anyone else—with sexual connotations. When it was just the three of us together, I didn't mind—and in fact, I got into the game with them. But with Elliot around, not to mention Ollie, the heat that always filled the space between them left me uncomfortable.

“Come to think of it,” Elliot said, “my stomach's a little off at the moment. Maybe I'll just stick to bread.”

Swift reached for one of the raw oysters Ava had set out on a platter with horseradish and lemon and a bowl of mignonette. He lifted the shell to his mouth and sucked down the oyster with a groan of pleasure.

“Nothing better than this,” he said. “Well, one thing, maybe.” He gave another meaningful glance in Ava's direction.

At that moment Elliot swung around, with a suddenness I was unaccustomed to from a man who generally moved with deliberation. He took a few steps to the side of the boat and doubled over, his head over the water. It took a moment for me to understand. He was throwing up.