“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.
22.
There 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.
23.
At 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 fir
st 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.
24.
All 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 B
undy, 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.)
Under the Influence Page 9
