Under the Influence (19 page)

N
ow that I no longer had Ollie with me, one would think I'd be spending more time with Elliot. But I didn't. For one thing, we were getting closer to the date of the big surprise party for Swift, and I needed to finalize the book layout and get it to the printer. Ava wanted my help deciding on the menu and other party details. But that was not the only reason I was putting a little distance between me and Elliot.

After I introduced Elliot to Swift and Ava—the day of the disastrous boat ride—my friends had made it clear that they didn't think he was good enough for me. Since then, I'd tried to keep my life with Elliot separate from my time spent with the Havillands. They asked about him occasionally, but it seemed that as far as Ava and Swift were concerned, it was out of sight, out of mind. The one other time I had allowed these two important spheres of my life to intersect—the day of the big swim race—the tables seemed to have turned. Whereas in the past it had been Swift and Ava who registered reservations about Elliot, now it was Elliot doing the same about them.

“How much do you know about the way Swift made his money?” Elliot had asked me shortly after that party, where he'd met Evelyn Couture.

“We don't talk about business,” I said. “It's not that kind of friendship.”

“I'm just curious because I spent a little time online, checking a few things out,” he said. “This nonprofit of theirs is a privately run concern. Three board members: Swift, Ava, and Cooper Havilland.”

“There's no law against that, right?” I said.

“None at all,” he told me. “Just curious.”

Over the weeks that followed, Elliot kept asking more questions. I never knew the answers and I felt irritated that he was bringing them up. What would I care about Swift selling shares of stock to the foundation, or an insurance company in the Cayman Islands?

I assumed Elliot's research about BARK fell in the category of his research into genealogy, or the
Consumer Reports
ratings of the various models of car he was considering to replace his Prius—the idle curiosity of a number cruncher with too much time on his hands—and so I was increasingly impatient with Elliot's obsession. I couldn't see what the big deal was whether BARK had three board members or thirty, or how they'd arrived at their bylaws, and the fact that Elliot cared so much about all of this seemed to confirm Ava's opinion of him as a man with nothing better to do than hunch over a stack of spreadsheets.

One morning at his apartment, I'd gotten up to find him already at his desk scrutinizing figures again. It couldn't have been later than 6:00
A.M
. From the look of his hair, I could tell he must have been running his hands over his head a lot in the way he did when he was thinking really hard about something. Three empty coffee mugs surrounded his yellow legal pad.

I could hear Swift's term for accountants in my head:
bean counter
. And Ava's question to me:
Just nice?

“What are you trying to accomplish here, anyway?” I asked him.

“I just want to figure this out,” Elliot said. “How this whole thing works.”

Not all at once, but like a person caught in a strong and steady current that's taking her downstream, I felt my perspective changing. It was as if a piece of grit had gotten stuck in my eye, and as much as I wanted
it gone, it affected the way I looked at everything. Most particularly the way I looked at Elliot.

The care he'd always taken—that I buckle my seat belt, or apply antibiotic cream if I got a cut—had once seemed the characteristic of a tender and loving man. Now I heard Ava's voice in my head calling him “fussy” and “anxious.” I found myself getting irritated by Elliot's dogged attention to detail. We still had good times together—just the two of us, snuggling over a crossword puzzle, eating popcorn in bed while watching old black-and-white movies, trying off-the-beaten-path restaurants that Elliot had read about online. As long as it was just us, in our own little bubble, it was as close to perfect as I'd ever experienced. But when he brought up the Havillands, I shut down. Elliot was on a mission to locate evidence that something was wrong with how Swift conducted business. More and more, I was left to conclude that there was simply something wrong with Elliot.

O
ne night late that September Elliot called to say he had to see me and that he was coming over. I'd been avoiding him the past few days, helping Ava with the increasingly elaborate details of the upcoming birthday party. I was exhausted, and I wasn't up to fending off more annoying questions from Elliot about the financial structure of BARK.

I didn't make any effort at fixing myself up. I was in my pajamas when I opened the door. “I look awful,” I said.

“You look wonderful to me,” he said. “You look like yourself.”

In many ways, Elliot was an old-fashioned man. He was standing there in a suit holding a bunch of roses in one hand—the kind you get at Safeway, not a florist's, which was just like him. I once told Ava that Elliot must have been absent the day they handed out the rule book on romance. One time he brought me bath salts from CVS. Another time, when we were heading to the Sierras for a camping trip, he brought me long underwear.

That night, it turned out he had bought me a ring. It was a surprisingly large diamond for a person who was always careful about his money, in an absolutely traditional setting—the kind of ring your father might have given to your mother forty years ago, if you'd had a different father from mine. Even the first time I'd met him, on our blind date, he hadn't looked as anxious as he did now.

“I know you probably won't say yes,” he said. “But I urge you to consider this carefully. I can be a good husband for you. I won't just adore you. I'll watch your back. I don't think you ever had that before.”

Consider this carefully
. This was Elliot for you. Even at the moment of greatest personal significance, when it might be supposed that passion would overrule intellect, his orientation was always to take the quiet, sensible, contemplative route.

“I know I don't come across as Mr. Stud,” he said. “But there's one thing I do know. Nobody could ever love you more than I do, Helen. I'll never do anything to hurt you. You can count on me.”

I had always been a person who let other people—very often, men—decide what I should do with my life. That night, looking into Elliot's kind and anxious eyes, at the cellophane-wrapped roses, the deep lines in his face, the blue velvet box, I knew I loved this man. He moved me. And I trusted him. I pictured him at the jewelry store, picking out the ring in its old-fashioned setting, and a wave of tenderness overtook me. I imagined him then driving over to my house—going around the block a few times before he parked, maybe, with the awareness that in the likely event I'd turn him down these might be the last hopeful moments he'd know. I wouldn't break the heart of this good man.

“Marry me,” he said.

I sat there, studying his face and his large, surprisingly callused hands, which still looked as if they belonged to a dairy farmer, and remembered how whenever we got into the car, he'd reach across the seat to buckle me in, and how he had waited patiently for as long as I needed—two hours, sometimes, or even three—to get the photographs I needed of all those dogs.

I looked up at Elliot, standing there in his rumpled shirt, still holding the box with the ring.

“Okay,” I told him. “I'll do that.”

Even as I said it, I saw Swift's face that time on the boat with the life preserver, heard Ava's voice.
Low expectations
.

“You've made me the happiest man,” he said. “Well, as happy as a man like me ever gets, anyway.”

I accepted the ring. But I didn't put it on my finger. I held it in my palm for a moment, then returned it to the velvet box. “I'm not quite ready to tell people yet,” I told him. “I just want to get used to this a little while first.”

Really, though, I knew the reason I didn't want to wear the ring yet. I was afraid of what Ollie might say if I told him I was getting married again. Specifically, that I was getting married to Elliot, whose most enduring impression for my son had been that of a man determined to see him wearing a life preserver and leaning over the side of Swift's sailboat, throwing up. In their brief interaction since then, Elliot had made some progress with Ollie, but the truth remained that in my son's eyes, my accountant boyfriend was no Monkey Man.

Most of all, though, my reluctance to put the ring on my finger had to do with Swift and Ava, with whom Elliot had made no progress whatsoever. I didn't put on Elliot's ring because I didn't want to have to justify my decision to the Havillands.

A
lmost from the moment I said yes to Elliot, I began avoiding him.

Sometimes I'd see his name on the screen of my cell phone and just let it ring. Nights when I got home from Swift and Ava's, or after dinner with them at our Burmese restaurant or Vinnie's, or after a day in the city helping Evelyn Couture, I'd usually find a message from him.

“It's me,” he'd say. First hopeful but later, anxious, and eventually, discouraged. “Your fiancé?”

Sometimes I called back. When I did, our conversations were surprisingly brief. I could hear him on the other end of the line, wanting to connect in the way we had done in the past—talking about work, or something he'd read in the newspaper, or a doctor's appointment he'd had that day—the kind of thing people who are in a couple talk about. Ordinary life. As he spoke, I'd scroll through my e-mails.

“I'm thinking about getting an all-electric car,” he said to me. “Once we move in together”—this would be at his place—“we could put solar panels on the house and give up buying gas.”

“Sounds good,” I said.

More often now, when I got home at night, I'd send Elliot a text that I was just too tired to talk, that I'd check in tomorrow. Then the next day would come and I'd be off at the Havillands' again, putting the final touches on the birthday book, or driving into the city to help
Evelyn Couture with her endless packing, or picking up something for the party—antique Chinese lanterns, a bubble machine, the special place mats Ava had ordered featuring a giant picture of Swift at the center of each one so he'd be grinning up at you as you sat down to eat . . . at least until the caterers set down the plates, which were also special ordered and featured ten different breeds of dog.

Finally, after five straight days of messages, I called Elliot back. “I know I should have gotten back to you sooner,” I said. “It's just been so crazy with all these arrangements. Especially having to keep everything secret from Swift.”

“Do you really think Swift hasn't figured out there's going to be a party?” Elliot said. “The man's turning sixty. He's an egomaniac. He knows his wife would never let an event like this pass without a massive celebration. It wouldn't surprise me if she tried renting Candlestick Park.”

Ava had, in fact, considered a number of extravagant venues for the party, but in the end she decided to rent tables and set them up under a tent in the extensive grounds behind their house. They'd have more freedom then, she said. “If someone wants to tear off their clothes and jump in the pool, for instance,” she said. We both knew who that person would be.

After considering many options for the theme of the decorations, Ava had finally settled on one. Knowing how much Swift loved Lake Tahoe—in winter most of all—she had arranged to have a machine brought in to blanket the entire backyard with snow. In addition, she'd commissioned a life-size ice sculpture of Swift, posed like Michelangelo's David, but with champagne pouring from one crucial appendage.

Elliot wanted to know, of course, how Ava intended to keep this all a secret.

“She's arranging for Swift to leave town the day of the party,” I told him. “That way she can get him out of the house while the final preparations are made.”

“I thought Swift never wanted to go anyplace?” Elliot said. “Particularly without Ava.”

“She's organizing a special guys' trip to the Monterey Aquarium with Ollie,” I said—though this was a trip Elliot and I had planned on taking with my son. “The place Ollie really wants Swift to take him is Lake Tahoe, of course, but that's way too far for a day trip, and anyway, I don't want him going all that way without me. So we settled on Monterey.”

“Mr. Magician,” Elliot said drily. “The guy waves his wand and makes your dreams come true. If Swift were here, of course, he'd make a joke about his mighty wand.”

I decided to ignore this.

We'd have to work fast to get everything set up in a single day, of course. Our goal was to make sure that when Swift and Ollie walked in the door all the guests would be there, ready to party. Outside, a reggae band would be set up by the pool house; a fire pit would be blazing in the middle of the snow-covered yard; and various performers, including a fire-eater and a pole dancer, would lend additional drama to the extravaganza, just in case there wasn't enough.

During the cocktail hour, servers would pass foie gras, oysters, Dungeness crab, caviar, and flutes of Cristal champagne, to be followed by a sit-down dinner of rack of lamb, potato gratin, haricots verts, and an endive, pear, and walnut salad. At every guest's place (more than a hundred of them, mostly high rollers with the ability to write very large checks, as well as all the dinner party regulars) there would be a copy of
The Man and His Dogs
. We printed a thousand copies so the Havillands would have extras on hand to give out later as their foundation grew.

I had described all of this to Elliot over dinner at a restaurant in the city—a rare event. Now we were sitting across from each other drinking coffee. I had put the ring on my finger for the occasion, but the air felt tense between us that night, though we were both trying to act as if everything was fine.

“If this is how they celebrate Swift turning sixty, I'm trying to imagine what Ava's going to pull off for seventy,” Elliot said. “Assuming these two are still together.”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “If there's one relationship in the world I'd bet on, it would be the Havillands. I never saw two people more in love.”

“Love doesn't always display itself in the obvious ways,” Elliot said. “Not everybody has to announce to the world all the time how incredible their relationship is. Some people show how they feel by how they behave.”