Under the Influence (8 page)

I
called my ex-husband. “I was thinking maybe I could bring Ollie back to my place when I come to see him this weekend,” I said, as if this wasn't such a big deal, just an afterthought, maybe. “If he spent the night, I could bring him home Sunday.”

I didn't want to sound too desperate. Three years had gone by now since I'd been able to put my son to bed or be there when he woke up. I felt the absence of him every hour of the day. Sometimes as a stab of pain. Other times, a dull throbbing ache. Either way, it was always there.

“Or maybe I could come on Friday afternoon instead of Saturday morning,” I went on. “I could bring him back Sunday.”

On the other end of the line, Dwight was quiet, as if looking for the right script. I never got the feeling—on those rare moments when Dwight and I talked—that anything he said was natural or spontaneous.

“It could be a good thing for you and Cheri,” I said. “You could get a babysitter for Jared. You two could have a date night.”

“I don't think that will work, Helen,” Dwight said.

“Or I could just come Saturday. Just have him for the one night this time.” Was my voice going up an octave, or did it just feel that way? Later, maybe, I'd try for a whole weekend. I wouldn't be greedy. For now, one night was all I'd ask for.

I could hear Dwight drawing his breath in the way he used to when the two of us were together. It was something he did when he had some difficult news to deliver: that the baby's diaper needed changing. That he wanted to play golf on a Saturday. That he had fallen in love with someone at work.

“Cheri and I just don't think it's a good idea,” Dwight said. “Every time Ollie sees you, he's all worked up for days afterward. We don't think he feels secure with you.”

“We just need more time together,” I said, trying not to let my voice rise, or to allow a note of desperation to come into it. His voice, addressing me now, was pure mortgage broker. Clearly I'd failed the credit report.

“Let's face it,” Dwight said. “The last time you had our son for any length of time, he got to see you led off in handcuffs.”

“That was more than three years ago, Dwight.”

“Maybe down the line, things can change,” he said. “But right now, that's where we stand.”

I stood there, holding the receiver. I didn't trust myself to speak.

Then suddenly, he was back to his smooth radio-announcer way of speaking. As if I were a long-lost friend or a customer. No difference between the two.

“Tell you what,” Dwight said. “If Oliver himself tells me he really wants to come spend a weekend with you, we'll let it happen. So far, that's just not the message I'm getting from him, but who knows what could happen down the line.”

Then came his favorite expression. “It's all good.”

A
va and Swift were in the garden having lunch when I arrived at Folger Lane. “We get big news about Carmen yesterday,” Estella said, setting down an extra plate. “First thing I say when she tell me is we got to tell the Havillands.”

Carmen had been chosen to receive an award for a paper she'd submitted to a contest for college science students—a report based on an experiment she'd designed, proving that fruit flies that were fed organically lived longer than those that consumed conventional produce. She had been selected, along with just four other students (the others, unlike Carmen, from four-year colleges) to travel to Boston and visit the campus of Harvard University, where she would read her paper at a national science conference.

“When they see how smart she is,” Estella said, “I bet they give her a scholarship.”

We all said how wonderful this was, naturally. “Next thing you know that daughter of yours will be married off to some Boston Brahmin who talks through his nose and spends weekends on Nantucket playing polo,” said Swift. Estella looked confused. She definitely didn't know what a Boston Brahmin was and probably had no clue about Nantucket, either.

“You're missing the point, sweetheart,” Ava told him. “Carmen's not
going to make her way by marrying some rich guy, like I did. She's going to make something of herself thanks to her own hard work and that great brain of hers.”

“She don't have to pay for her ticket,” Estella said. “Airplane. Food. Hotel. All free. They send her a shirt with the name of the school on the front to wear on her trip.”

“Fantastic,” said Ava. Estella's face glowed. I had never seen her so happy.

“She ask me if Boston is close to Cooper's school. Maybe he can show her the city.”

Only a person who knew her well would have noticed, but I saw a tightness cross Ava's features then. Swift was back to reading his
Wall Street Journal.

“Cooper's in New Hampshire, actually,” said Ava. “Dartmouth. Maybe another time, though.”

At this point I hadn't yet met Cooper, who was away at business school. But you couldn't spend more than ten minutes in Swift's company without his name coming up.

“My boy,” Swift called him now, after Estella had returned to the kitchen. “My boy's got the world by the tail. He can do anything he wants in life. He's got the golden touch.”

Just the weekend before, Cooper had flown to Las Vegas with his old fraternity brothers from Cal for the weekend. Now they were planning another trip—heli-skiing in British Columbia.

Though I had never met Swift's son, I'd seen pictures of him all around the house and I could tell that he was one of those people (like Swift, but even more so, probably) whom everyone noticed when they came into a room. He was a lot taller than his father, with the build of a rugby player, which it turned out he was. In every photograph he seemed to be laughing.

I knew from Swift that at the moment Cooper was trying to decide between a career in commercial real estate and the entertainment
industry—putting together financing for movies, licensing, that kind of thing. He'd do great in the music business, too, Swift had said. Once, on a night out in San Francisco, a sportscaster for the local NBC affiliate had given Cooper his card. “I was watching you at dinner,” he'd told Cooper. “You could have a career in television.”

“I told him a job in television gets you great seats at Giants games,” Swift said. “But the real money's in business. Once you make it there, you can buy your own season tickets.”

“He's one of those people everyone loves the minute they meet him,” Ava said. “Women in particular, of course. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.”

“That boy's going to be a millionaire before he's thirty,” Swift added. “He's got that drive. He has success written all over him.”

“Like someone else I know,” said Ava.

Cooper had a beautiful girlfriend, of course. Virginia. She could be a model, but she was a medical student.

“If I was in a coma, and this girl bent over the bed, I'd wake up pretty quick,” Swift said of Virginia. “The knockers on her—”

“Stop it, darling. You're terrible,” Ava said. She was always telling him this, but you could tell it was part of their game.

“I'm just being honest,” Swift told her.

“You're talking about our future daughter-in-law, sweetheart,” Ava reminded him. “The mother of our grandchildren.”

Everyone knew—had known for years, evidently—that Cooper and Virginia would end up married. They'd been together since they were sixteen, so seven years now, and they were perfect for each other. They were going to have a marvelous life.

I asked when he was coming home.

“It's always hard pinning Cooper down,” Ava said. “He's got so many irons in the fire.”

Swift stepped in then. “Cooper's been hired for a big internship at an investment firm in New York,” he said. “You know how it is with these
new account executives. They run them ragged until they've made their first ten million dollars.”

I made no comment. I tended to keep quiet about all the things I didn't know, and there were many.

Swift continued, “One of these days when we least expect it, we'll be sitting out on the patio with the dogs and all of a sudden we'll hear this big ruckus, and he'll come bursting into the yard and do a cannonball into the pool or something. Or he'll pull up in a Maserati he convinced someone to let him take out on a test drive. That's Cooper for you. The guy moves at Mach speed. With or without a sports car.”

“Sometimes I wish he'd slow down a little,” Ava said. I heard a small note of worry in her voice. But then Estella was back with a plate of warm brownies. More wine. The conversation about her daughter and Cooper appeared to be over.

“You be sure to tell Carmen how proud we are of her,” Ava told her.

“This Harvard,” Estella asked. “It's a good school?”

E
very night—before heading to my AA meeting, or if I went to an early meeting, after I got back—I called the house in Walnut Creek to speak with Ollie. When I did, I could almost see my son's hand on the mouse pad of his PlayStation as I tried to engage him in something that might pass for conversation.

“Yes.”

“No.”

“No.”

“Maybe.”

“I don't know.”

“Whatever.”

“Have you had a chance to try out the new camera yet?” I asked him. “I was thinking that maybe, if we had a little more time together, we could go do one of our photography expeditions like how we used to in the old days. If you spent the night over here, maybe.”

“I don't know.”

“We could make popcorn after and watch movies on the couch.”

Silence on the other end. Then Cheri's voice, calling to say it was bedtime. Just seven o'clock, but Dwight and Cheri believed in early bedtimes.

When I put down the receiver, I usually cried. Those were the moments I most wanted a drink. I fixed myself a cup of tea instead. All I ever had to do, when I was tempted, was think about the one thing that mattered: getting Ollie back. Not just physically under the same roof with me again, though that was a big enough challenge. The hardest part was getting my son to trust me again. Or simply to know me. Or to let me know him. It was the loneliest feeling in the world.

And then there were the Havillands. I sometimes said that Ava and Swift were like my family. But they were not like my family—not
my
family, the real one—in any way imaginable, which was what I loved about them. Other than having Ollie, I had lived my life—with the brief exception of that handful of years when Dwight's family appeared to have taken me in as one of their own—like a stray dog or an orphan, and after my son left, that's more or less who I was once again.

“I was wondering whose name you keep in your wallet,” Ava asked me one time.

At first I didn't understand.

“On that card you're always supposed to keep there, in with your driver's license,” she said. “Where it says, ‘The person to call in the event of an emergency is . . .' Whose name do you carry around with you?”

I didn't have a card like that, I told her. Or rather, the card that had come with my wallet, years before, had never been filled in. Not even when I was married.

There had been Alice once, of course. But even before she disappeared from my life she wasn't the type to make a big thing of our friendship. She was just sort of there.

“Now you can put our number there,” Ava said. She reached for my purse and took out my wallet, and in her elegant script—using the special pen she favored—wrote her name on the back of the card, alongside her cell phone and home numbers.

“Maybe we should just adopt you,” Ava said. “Like Lillian and Sammy and Rocco.”

Some people might have been offended by this, but with Ava there was no better compliment than to find yourself compared to one of her dogs.

A
fter Ava and Swift came into my life, and I sent Jeff the bank manager packing, I had stopped checking out my Match.com e-mails with recommended dating prospects. I seldom even opened the occasional messages that came my way from men who'd seen my profile, suggesting we meet for a drink.

There was a time when I had yearned for the attention of a man, but the urgency I once felt to find someone with whom I might share my deepest sorrows and joys had diminished once my new friends appeared. If I did find a man, it was hard to imagine where I'd even find the time to see him, I was so occupied with affairs on Folger Lane. Or—even less likely—how would I ever find someone whose company compared with that of the Havillands? Above all there was this: If I ever managed to get my son back, I'd have even less time for a man.

But a few weeks after we met, Ava decided I needed a boyfriend, and that finding him would be her project. She made me upgrade my dating profile with a better picture (though she wasn't entirely happy with the new one, either) and had me take out the part about my son. (“You can explain about Oliver once some guy takes you out for a nice meal,” she said. “One thing at a time.”) I complied with this less for any remaining dream I might have of finding someone than for Ava. If she wanted me to go out on dates, then I would.

Now my perspective shifted. A new factor had entered into my online experience, though I don't believe I acknowledged it to myself: This was the desire to keep Swift and Ava entertained. The stories I shared about the men who wrote to me (and I always shared them with Ava and Swift) accomplished this. They loved my stories, the more depressing the better.

Most of the responses I received to my new online dating profile came from precisely the kind of men you'd expect to hear from if your picture showed a pale, faintly shell-shocked woman with her hair pulled back, wearing no makeup and standing in front of her refrigerator, who didn't drink and listed her favorite activities as photography and watching old movies, but added that she didn't get around to those things so much anymore.

The demographics of the men who wrote to me now were skewed to those in their late fifties, or who tended to be unemployed, or newly sober, or still married but planning to separate any day now.

There was a recent widower who devoted several pages (sent, I noted, a little after 3:00
A.M
.) to the details of his dead wife's battle with ovarian cancer. Around page four he got around to the fact that she had left him on his own with four children all under the age of thirteen and not enough money to hire help. He was a terrible housekeeper, he wrote. Did I cook?

There was the ukulele player with the twitching eyelid (I found that out because I actually met him for coffee, or rather, chai), who was so worried about germs that he preferred not to shake my hand. Then came the guy who spent the entire duration of our walk together (my standard half-mile meet-and-greet stroll) describing in detail his struggle with eczema. There was a man—surprisingly attractive in his photograph—who had neglected to mention in our two-hour-long telephone conversation before we met that he was a dwarf. There was the one who wanted to hear (also on the first and only meeting) my attitude toward group sex.

“It makes you start wondering about your own self,” I told Ava, when she asked (as I knew she would) for my preliminary report on the latest prospective boyfriend. “If everyone I meet turns out to be that much of a loser, what does that say about me? Because I picked out these people. We talked on the phone before I agreed to meet up with them. These men actually sounded reasonable to me at first. What's wrong with me?”

“So you're human,” Ava said. “And optimistic. You're always ready to see the best in people. It's a nice trait.”

More and more, then, I began to adopt the attitude that it didn't matter so much who the men turned out to be, because even if they weren't so great (even if the date was awful) it would make a great story for Ava and Swift.

Even when I was in the middle of dinner with some Match.com person, I'd find myself imagining how much fun Swift and Ava and I would have later, when I recreated the scene for them at one of their favorite restaurants. And what difference did it make, really? All I really cared about, anyway, was my son. Finding a great man might actually get in the way of that.

Ava saw it differently, of course. “The dwarf could have been interesting,” she offered. “He's probably developed all kinds of amazing sexual skills to compensate. Might be an incredible lover.”

“Watch out for a guy who cuts his hair too short in the back,” said Swift, gesturing in the direction of the pool man, who had dropped by as we were discussing some recent dead-end date. “That's the sign of a rule follower. No fun in bed.”

I said nothing. But I took in every word either of them told me.

Out in the Havillands' backyard, a bottle of zinfandel and my ever-present Pellegrino on the table, I described the real estate developer who had clutched me so tightly in the parking lot after our first (and last) dinner. I had the feeling if I'd tried to free myself he might break my arm, I told my friends. He had turned out to be a Vietnam vet. The war, for him, had not ended.

(“I never sleep more than an hour at a time,” he'd told me. “I have these dreams. If I had a woman like you next to me, I think I might stop having the nightmares.” I couldn't say anything, he was clutching me so tightly.

“I want to marry you,” he said. “I'll buy you anything you want.”)

We were eating shrimp scampi prepared by Ava the night I shared my story about the Vietnam vet's proposal. Estella had come home from the farmers' market that day with the biggest shrimp I'd ever seen, and they were piled on my plate, covered in butter and garlic, over fresh pasta and peas, along with salad made with baby greens and Humboldt Fog cheese. I had never been a rosé drinker, but now, studying the wine in Swift and Ava's glasses, I felt the old urge to have a drink. This wine had the most beautiful color. Not pink, like the cheap rosé I'd observed Alice pouring in the past at certain lower-budget catering jobs, but a soft, peachy blush.

“It won't kill you to try,” Swift said, indicating the bottle.

I shook my head.

“This guy,” Ava said. “The vet. What did you say when he proposed?”

“I told him he had to let go of my arm,” I told her. “But if he wanted to talk awhile, I'd listen. I said I couldn't marry him because I didn't know him, and he didn't know me, either. We ended up sitting outside the restaurant for another three hours while he told me the story of a raid he'd been part of, into a remote jungle where he and his platoon had to dig up the bodies of some American marines who'd been slaughtered. Then carry them ten miles out, on their backs.”

“You've just got this big, open heart, Helen,” Ava said. “There's this thing about you that makes people know they're safe with you. That guy might be a little messed up, but he wasn't totally off base in recognizing something in you. And you trusted him, too. Some people would have figured he'd take out a bowie knife and slit your throat with it. But it never occurs to you to protect yourself that way. Swift and I need to instill in you a certain healthy layer of skepticism about human nature. Not
that we don't love you the way you are, mind you. We just don't want to see you getting exploited.”

“The world is full of sharks, Helen,” said Swift. “I think you may have found us just in time.”

I looked across the table at the two of them, side by side on the banquette. They were too young for this, of course, but for a moment I let myself imagine they were my parents. Not the parents I actually had. The ones I wished I'd had.

“So this guy with the post-traumatic stress problem?” Swift asked me. Protective, still, in that way I had not encountered before meeting the two of them. “What was he driving?”

It was a BMW, I told him. Brand-new from the lot, papers still taped to the window.

“You could do worse,” Swift offered. “Maybe you should reconsider.”

“Stop it, darling,” said Ava. “You're terrible. We need to be offering Helen emotional support and encouragement, not telling her to hook up with some crazy vet just because he drives a nice car.”

“Of course,” he said, showing those teeth again as usual. “For a second there I just forgot.”

That time with the Vietnam vet, the truth was enough of a story to keep my friends enthralled. But somewhere along the line, after I'd started reporting on my Match.com dates to Ava and Swift, I realized that the real stories were generally boring. This was when I called upon my old habit of embellishing details or, if necessary, changing them completely so I could provide Ava and Swift with a night's entertainment. I considered this my contribution to all those expensive restaurant dinners. Not that it was the food I cared about. It was the Havillands, and the amazing fact that they had chosen me to be their friend. Ava and Swift were better company than any man I was ever going to meet online.