Under the Influence (16 page)

S
omething shifted after that. Of course I had told Elliot all about Swift and Ava's plans for their nonprofit, and their devotion to dogs, which Elliot seemed to accept as one of those things very rich people do with their money. But after our disastrous sailing trip, it seemed that Elliot developed a new obsession: studying the inner workings of BARK.

We were nearing the end of Ollie's time with me, and to mark it, Swift had taken Ollie to the go-kart track in Mountain View for a final blowout day. It was a field trip I would have liked to share with my son, but Ollie had made it plain he wanted this to be just the two of them, him and Swift. Meanwhile, I took the opportunity to drop in on Elliot.

It was the first time I'd seen him since that evening out on the Havillands' sailboat, and it had been much longer than that since I'd visited Elliot in Los Gatos. The last time I'd been over to his place, it had been immaculate, as usual, but that day his dining room table was covered with papers, and Post-it notes covered one whole wall. Scanning the scene, I spotted a paper with the name
Havilland
on it, and another referring to the BARK foundation.

“What are you doing?” I asked Elliot. “You're not even Swift's accountant. Is going over information about people's companies some kind of weird hobby, like stamp collecting or Ping-Pong?”

“It's public information,” he said. “They've registered as a nonprofit.”

“Don't you have anything better to do than snoop around in my friends' finances?” I knew my words were stinging, but I didn't care.

“Something's not right about all of this,” he said.

“You're just jealous,” I told him, “because I'm spending so much time with my friends.”

“I'm just concerned,” he told me. “You know how photographs can tell a story? Numbers can, too. And it's not always a good one.”

“Do you understand how much they've done for me?” I said. “And now for Ollie, too? He adores Swift.”

Elliot was silent for a moment. “Don't you think I'd love to have the chance to form a friendship with your son, too?” he said, finally. “If you gave me a chance.”

“I'm sure the opportunity will come up,” I said. “You two just didn't get off on the best foot.”

“I'd cook us all dinner,” he said. “We could take my telescope out to a spot I know where the ambient light is minimal. I'd show him Mars.”

“Maybe next time I get him,” I said.

“When the planets are aligned,” Elliot said, with a certain tone of bitterness. He was not talking about the sky.

I
t was Ollie's last day with me, and he wanted to spend it at Monkey Man's house, of course. He was in the pool, practicing his freestyle for the big Labor Day race while Swift held the stopwatch, timing him. Swift had promised Ollie they'd go up to Lake Tahoe if he won. They'd take the Donzi out—my son's dream. Though going anyplace with Monkey Man was good enough for Ollie.

Ava had been off at Pilates. I'd been up in the office for a couple of hours working on the invitations to the birthday party—still early, but Ava wanted to make sure everyone saved the date. I came downstairs to join Swift, Ava, and Ollie for our usual lunch.

We were standing by the edge of the pool, watching Ollie swim his laps. “He's some kid,” Swift said. “You've done a great job.”

I shook my head. “I can't take any credit at the moment,” I told him. “You know I've barely gotten to spend any time with Ollie for three years. These past two weeks have been the best I've had with my son since he was in kindergarten.”

“I've been wanting to talk with you about that, Helen,” Swift said. He sounded more serious than usual. “Ava and I have discussed this and we're in total agreement. We'd like to pay for a lawyer so you can get your boy back where he belongs. We need this kid around.”

“I haven't even come close to paying off my old lawyer,” I told him. “I could never accept a gift like that.”

“What's family for?” Swift said. “I'll call Marty Matthias. We'll get you a meeting.”

That night Swift and Ava took Ollie and me out to dinner at a Japanese restaurant. To her credit, Ava had suggested that I might like to invite Elliot to join us—she even used his name—but when I called him to suggest the plan he'd said he was busy.

It was one of those places where the waiter comes to your table and cooks everything in front of you on a sizzling griddle, while waving a samurai sword over his head. Of course Ollie loved this.

“I'm going to miss you a lot, buddy,” Swift told him. “You'd better promise to come back soon.”

Afterward, my son and I drove back to my apartment. He put on his pajamas. I climbed onto the air mattress next to him. I didn't want to make a big deal out of his leaving, even though I dreaded saying good-bye the next morning.

“I've been thinking,” I told him. “I was wondering how you'd feel if we talked to your dad about the possibility of you coming to live here for third grade. Just to give it a try.”

Oliver had been flipping through the iPod Swift had given him at the restaurant that night. He looked up at me. Not with that old wary sidelong glance, but directly, looking straight into my eyes. “I'd like that,” he said.

“I'm not saying you'll be going out to restaurants and getting fancy presents like this all the time,” I told him. “I'm talking about regular life. School. Homework. Chores.”

“I know,” he said. I wasn't sure if he even realized it, but he had draped one leg over mine, and his head rested on my shoulder. At that moment, nothing else mattered but the hope that I might have my son back for good.

Later, other things occurred to me. I hadn't told Ollie that Elliot
would be a part of our lives, too, if he came to live with me again. But I wasn't going to risk it. Having come this far with my son, I wasn't prepared to lose him again. What we had here seemed way too precious and fragile still. And the truth was, after that evening on the boat, I was uncertain of my future with Elliot, or whether I even had one.

T
he day after I brought Ollie back to Walnut Creek—mid-July, with all of Ava's roses in glorious bloom—Elliot left me three messages. I told myself I'd call him back as soon as I wasn't so busy, then I didn't get around to it.

He called again, close to ten o'clock on a weeknight.

“I know you're probably in bed, but we need to talk,” he said.

“Okay.”

“Not over the phone. I was hoping I could come over.”

I could tell from Elliot's voice that this was important. We hadn't spoken about it, but ever since I'd introduced Elliot to Ava and Swift and to Ollie, something had changed in my feelings about him. Knowing Elliot, he probably felt this, too, but hadn't wanted to ask anything of me during my last precious few days with my son. Now here he was on the phone, wanting to talk.

Ava hadn't said anything much about Elliot since that day they'd finally met, but that in itself said plenty. Swift had observed, afterward, that Elliot was probably a great guy to have in your corner if you ever got audited. Ollie had not even brought up his name.

Thirty minutes after I put down the phone, Elliot was at my front door. I had been wearing my bathrobe when he called and hadn't changed out of it.

“I know your friends don't think much of me,” he said, still standing in the doorway, clutching a brown paper sack that turned out to hold a loaf of the four-grain bread he made sometimes. He handed this to me. As usual, it could have served as a paperweight.

“I was trying to distract myself from thinking about you by baking,” he said. “It didn't work.”

“My friends like you fine,” I told him. Then stopped myself. One thing I treasured about the time I spent with Elliot was how we always told each other the truth. He told me about the time he had gotten a panic attack climbing Half Dome at Yosemite, and had to turn back. He told me that before the first time we met for dinner he had written down five interesting things to talk about, to avoid being tongue-tied. I had told him about how I sometimes made up stories, though I never did with him. I was a more boring person with Elliot, probably, but an honest one.

“I don't care what my friends think,” I said. Then I stopped myself again. I
did
care. He knew this.

“The thing is, I'm in love with you,” Elliot said. “And I know that's not going to change, but if you tell me you don't want to be with me, I'd better find out now, before I get in even deeper and it's even worse to lose you.”

I did not tell him I loved him back. I had never said that. I stood there, studying his kind, good face—the deep lines in his cheeks, around his eyes. His hair was mussed up from his habit of running his hand over his head when he felt worried about something, which was most of the time.

“Why don't you come in?” I said. He took a deep breath. He looked around the room in a way that suggested he was memorizing this place. As if this was going to be the last time he'd be here. He lowered himself onto the couch like a man who has walked a very long way to get here. Straight up a mountain.

“I know you probably think Ollie would never be able to get close to me,” he said. “But you're wrong. I'm the type of person that people tend
to appreciate more as time goes by. I think your son would figure that out over time. If you and I were together. If you'd give me a chance.”

I still couldn't say anything. I stood there, the brown-paper-wrapped doorstop of bread cradled in my arms.

“He'd see I was making you happy,” Elliot said. “Because I believe I would. I think you'd appreciate me more, too, as time went by.”

“I appreciate you now,” I said. “You're the best man I've ever known.” This much was true. I had other reservations about Elliot—mainly, that my best friends didn't think much of him—but I never doubted the goodness of his heart.

“Some people seem really great at the beginning,” Elliot said. “I was never that type. The type people always want to be around.”

“You're a lot of fun to be around,” I told him. “That time we took the portraits of the pit bulls? And the Chihuahua who kept humping my leg? That was a great day.”

“I would help you take pictures of dogs seven days a week if I could,” he said. “I'm always happy when I'm with you. Almost always. I wasn't happy on that sailboat, I have to admit.”

I had put the bread on the table and sat next to him on the sofa. “And I loved it when you brought me to the Academy of Science for the insect exhibit that I didn't think would be so interesting,” I told him.

“I wish we could have brought Ollie with us to that one,” he said.

“We had a good time, just the two of us.”

“I've never felt as happy with anyone as I am with you, Helen,” he said. “
Was
with you. I haven't gotten to see much of you lately.”

“I was going to call you back. I just got busy.”

He shook his head. All of a sudden he looked terribly sad. There was no point, ever, pretending with Elliot.

“It shouldn't feel like a chore, calling me. Or some kind of obligation.”

My friend Alice used to say she never trusted a man whose hands were too smooth. Elliot's were surprisingly rough. Maybe from his farm days, though that was long ago. Maybe just from puttering around in
his garden, where he had been laying a brick patio. If any man I knew had soft hands, in fact, it was Swift, the one who'd suggested that Elliot might be a little tame and boring for me.

“I needed some time to myself,” I said. “To be with my son.” But this wasn't the whole story, either, and he knew it. I never minded being around other people if those people were Ava and Swift.

“I know you care a lot about your friends,” he said. “But at the end of the day, they're off together in that big house of theirs, having all this mind-blowing tantric sex, according to them, and you're here all alone in your bed.” He stood up and looked at me, and his back—so often stooped—was straight.

“I'm the man who wants to be here with you.”

He did something surprising then. He reached for me—my face, my hair—and held on tight, with a kind of urgency that I'd never experienced from Elliot before.

He pulled me to my feet. He was kissing me. My mouth, then my neck, my eyelids. His hands were in my hair, and he was saying my name in a deep and hungry voice, almost growling.
Helen. Helen. Helen.

For once we weren't talking. I kissed him back. Once, and then many times. His hands pressed into my shoulder blades and down my back. He pressed his face into my neck and remained there for a surprising length of time before looking into my eyes again.

“I know I didn't get off to a great start with Oliver,” he said. “But I could be a good man for you. For both of you.”

For once I didn't hear Ava's voice in my ear. I didn't even think about my son at that moment. I reached out my hand to touch his and stroked his fingers. I pulled him down onto the sofa. I lay my head on his. I felt my whole body soften, and a long sigh came out of me, like the feeling when you finally get to take off tight shoes or unzip your dress, the feeling of pulling into your own driveway after a long time on the road.

“We could be a family,” Elliot said.

A
week after Ollie went back to Walnut Creek, a surprising thing happened. Dwight called to suggest that our son move back in with me for the rest of the summer.

“We're going through a rough patch,” he said. “He's just gotten so defiant. No respect for authority. All of a sudden he's saying things like ‘piss' and ‘badass,' and when I call him on it, he just mouths off more. I guess it's a stage, but Cheri's concerned that Jared's picking up Oliver's bad habits now. If you want to tackle it, be our guest.”

I didn't say anything, but I knew where our son had acquired his new vocabulary. Swift was always telling Ollie that the guys who got someplace in the world were the rule breakers, the outlaws. Once, when we'd been over at the Havillands, Ollie had told a story about his second-grade teacher, Mr. Rettstadt, and how he made them march all the way back to their bus, when they were on a field trip, because some of the boys started break-dancing in the line.

“What a pussy,” Swift had said. “He was probably just jealous he didn't have any cool moves of his own.”

Now in the car, bringing him back to Redwood City with me again, I tried to talk with my son about what was going on with his father and Cheri.

“Cheri's stupid,” he said. “All she ever does is talk on the phone.”

As much as I might have disliked Cheri, too (might have, and did), I knew I couldn't let that one go.

“You know I wish you could be with me all the time,” I told him. “But when you're with your father and your stepmother, it's important to try and get along, and you need to be kind. Kids don't know everything. That's why they have parents to take care of them.”

Ollie was quiet for a while as we drove over the bridge, with his clothes and his hamster on his lap.

“It's not like Dad wants to get rid of me or anything,” he said, in that way children have of naming their worst fear, in the hope that someone will tell them it's not real. “He just thought it would be a good idea for me to have a change of pace,” Ollie told me. “Jared's always getting into my stuff. Little kids are a pain.”

Ollie's face had that tough, diffident look I recognized well at this point. I knew him well enough to recognize what it concealed, which was hurt. “Plus I think I get on Dad's nerves,” he said. This part was spoken so softly I could just barely hear him.

“I've been thinking about some fun things we can do together now that we've got more time,” I said. “Go camping maybe. Visit the Monterey Aquarium.”

He looked at me warily. “What about Monkey Man?” he said. “I get to go over there, right?”

“Some of the time,” I said. “But some of the time I thought it might be fun if we hung out with Elliot, too. Remember him?” I didn't call him my boyfriend. I called him my friend.

“I want to hang out at Monkey Man's pool,” Ollie said. “I need to practice for our race. And we're going to Tahoe and ride in the Donzi.”

“Ava and Swift will probably want their privacy sometimes,” I said. “But you and I will have plenty of time for adventures.”

Ollie looked out the window for a while, studying the cars on the bridge. He'd been keeping count of how many were Mini Coopers. Every minute or two he'd call out that he saw another one.

“People don't like to have kids around when they do sex,” he said. He didn't look at me when he said this, just kept staring out the window, tracing imaginary letters on the glass.

“Making love is private,” I told him. “Someday when you're older, you'll have someone you feel that way about. You'll want to be private, too.”

“Like going to the bathroom,” he said.

“Not so much. But the privacy part's the same.”

“My dad and Cheri do it when they think I'm asleep,” he said. “They don't know I know.”

I thought a moment before addressing this one.

“Racing stripes,” Ollie called out. Another Mini Cooper for his count.

“People do that when they love each other,” I told him. Or not, I might have added, but didn't.

“I'm glad you didn't get married to anybody,” Ollie said. He announced this as if it was a done deal I'd be alone forever.

“Right now, I'm not married to anybody,” I said. “But you never know. Maybe someday.”

“That would be dumb,” Ollie said.

“Well, anyway, I don't have any plans to get married to anybody anytime soon,” I told him. This might have been a moment to mention Elliot, but I didn't.