Under the Influence

by Joyce Maynard

  Always near the head of the table was Swift’s attorney, Marty Matthias. Marty came from somewhere back East—Pittsburgh, maybe—and even after twenty-five years in California, still had an air of the coal mines about him. He didn’t play tennis. Would rather submit to water torture than go for a hike. When I asked him once what kind of law he practiced, he said, “Whatever kind my buddy here needs to keep him out of trouble.” He had a doglike devotion to Swift, and Swift returned it.

  “This guy,” Swift said once, at a party, making a toast to Marty to acknowledge some brilliant legal maneuver he’d pulled off recently on Swift’s behalf. “This guy would chew a person’s ear off and swallow it before he’d let me pay an extra nickel to the IRS. Right, Marty?”

  Then there were Ava’s friends Jasper and Suzanne, stylish and beautiful art dealers in the city. Most recently—but before they’d taken me under their wing—the Havillands had befriended a woman in her late seventies named Evelyn Couture, a widowed fellow dog lover who owned an enormous house in Pacific Heights. On party nights, Evelyn Couture would be brought to the house by her driver. At first glance she seemed an unlikely member of these gatherings, but she appeared to love Swift, and he always seated her near himself at the long, linen-covered table. The night he’d hired the karaoke band, Evelyn got up and sang “How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?”

  In addition to the regulars, you could always count on some newcomer—a person Ava had met on one of her walks with the dogs or in line at Starbucks whom she’d taken a shine to. I might have been one such person myself, except that I had quickly and magically been elevated to the next level, of those not simply putting in a one-time guest appearance, but installed as a regular. I worried that I wouldn’t have anything to say, but it wasn’t a problem. Most everyone liked to talk about themselves so much, they were happy to have someone who’d listen.

  Although both Estella and Ava were excellent cooks, Ava always had these parties catered to cut down on the stress. All Estella had to do was prepare and pass around platters of olives and salami and cheese and roasted artichokes from North Beach and caviar on great bread. Estella usually brought along Carmen to help out with the postparty kitchen cleanup, and when she came to work, Carmen always had her textbooks from community college with her, in case there might be a lull in the kitchen that allowed her some time for studying. Even when she was washing dishes or mopping the floor, she had earphones on, listening to some book on tape. She was trying to improve her English, she told me. She didn’t want to have an accent, and she didn’t.

  The first time I attended one of Ava and Swift’s dinner parties, I brought a bouquet of gerbera daisies, not understanding that Ava would have ordered elaborate floral arrangements for every room in the house. The next time, when I asked what I could do to help, Ava suggested that I bring my camera.

  “I’ve always wanted to make some kind of record of our gatherings,” she said. “Nothing posed. More documentary style. Black and white. Like that photographer Sally Mann, who took all those great, raw photographs of her children naked over the years they were growing up.”

  I obliged, of course. A place had been set for me at the table, but I barely sat down that time, or at any party after that one, because I was always taking pictures, and I wanted to catch the unexpected shots. I’d wander into the kitchen as Estella and Carmen cleared away dishes, or go out by the pool, where the guests hung out sometimes, or into the library, where Ava liked to sit by the fire, catching up with one person or another who might have some piece of news to confide that couldn’t be shared with the whole group. Unlike Swift, who loved the group dynamic of parties, Ava was more interested in having a very long and deep conversation with one person at a time.

  And because I knew how Ava felt about her dogs, I also followed Sammy, Lillian, and Rocco, trying to get images of them that might differ in some way from the hundreds that already existed. As Ava had once pointed out, I was very good at becoming nearly invisible—a skill I possessed even when I wasn’t taking photographs. With the exception of Rocco, who still growled when he saw me, nobody seemed to notice I was taking their picture, or even that I was there.

  For Cinco de Mayo, Ava procured a ceremonial Mexican dress for Estella to wear when she served the mole. (She was Guatemalan, of course. “Close enough,” Ava said.) Jasper and Suzanne brought one of their gallery’s stable of artists with them—a very beautiful young woman named Squrl. Sometime after dinner I headed out to the pool house, with the idea of getting a shot of the festivities from a distance. As I stood outside the pool house framing my shot of the party a few dozen yards away, I heard a sound behind me from inside. I turned and peeked through the French doors, the curtain only partly covering the glass.

  Only moments before, I’d been back at the main house snapping photographs of Suzanne’s husband, Jasper, as he held forth on their upcoming visit to Art Basel. Now, through the curtain, I caught sight of Suzanne and Squrl, sprawled on the deep-pile Tibetan rug, both nearly naked, their arms and legs entangled in a passionate embrace. I figured the image of Suzanne and Squrl was probably not the kind of shot Ava had in mind when she mentioned Sally Mann’s photographs of her children, and left before either of them was aware I’d been there.

  I saw other things through my lens: At one end of the garden, I witnessed what looked like a pretty unpleasant argument between Ling and Ping. I saw Estella slipping a rib eye steak into her purse. Possibly the strangest thing—which I took in, by accident, while trying to capture a portrait of Lillian—was the sight of Ernesto’s meaty hand, viewed from under the table, resting without opposition on the thin white thigh of the herbalist, Ling, as her husband soundlessly chewed his meat in the chair directly next to her.

  I didn’t share any of this with Ava. As interesting as the photographs might have been, I didn’t record these images with my camera. My own life might be fair game for amusing conversation over cocktails or dinner with my dazzling friends, but the intimate secrets of others were not my business, and so on the rare occasions when I’d snapped something I shouldn’t have seen, I deleted the image. A photograph—once captured—held more power than most people knew.

  One night, as the group of us gathered around the long teak table on the patio, Estella set down at its center a golden platter bearing a dish called Bananas Foster. Ava reached her long, thin, well-defined arm across the table and, with a very long match, ignited the dish, so flames leapt up around the edges.

  I watched Ava’s face then: the way the light hit her cheekbones and how beautiful she looked as it did. I tried to take all this in with my camera: the flaming bananas, the looks of amazement on the faces of the assembled guests. Fingers of smoke curled around us all, as if we were passengers on a glamorous ocean liner, making our way through the Strait of Magellan or circling a Greek island with every light on the deck illuminated. The ship’s captain, obviously, was Swift.

  There he sat at the end of the table, presiding over everything, leaning back in his chair with his white teeth clamped around a Cuban cigar and his hand caressing some part of Ava’s body (knee, elbow, earlobe), almost as if we were their children gathered around, and they were the parents who’d given us life. Which, in a way, they had.

  One night, as Carmen was clearing away the dishes—the bottle of Far Niente, the shells of a few dozen lobsters—Swift instructed us to step away from the table and into the garden, where each of us was presented with a gas-fired flying lantern, the size of a small kite, which we lit and then released. Our lanterns floated slowly upward—first above the roof, then beyond the trees, and higher into the night sky, until it seemed to me that we had created a whole new constellation, right there on Folger Lane.

  None of us asked how (fire codes being what they were) this was possible. In Swift and Ava’s world, everything seemed possible. Somewhere off in the kitchen, a Guatemalan mother and her American-born daughter scraped the remnants of our fabulous meal into the garbage. (Leftovers were never a good i
dea for the dogs. Too rich.) The rest of us just stood there in the darkness, around the glowing turquoise of the pool, watching our flickering lanterns float slowly toward the stars. They continued to stay aloft, and to glow, for many minutes. When the last one finally burned out, we all returned to the house for a glass of champagne and individual chocolate soufflés, with a cloud of crème fraiche on every plate and one perfect raspberry. Then gradually, one by one, we said our good nights and retreated to our own small lives, away from the strange and beautiful Shangri-la created by our amazing friends. I think we were all grateful to have touched down for a few hours, like weary travelers washed up by good fortune on that remote and glittering shore. For all the hundreds of pictures I took there—thousands—no photograph could capture what it felt like to find myself at that place, in the company of that magic couple.

  25.

  I had started to dread reading through the responses to my online dating profile, they were so uniformly discouraging. Then one spring day, right around the time Ava’s tulips were coming out, I opened my laptop and there was a short note, different from the others.

  The man who’d written it (JustaNumbersGuy was his moniker) said he’d studied my profile carefully and (“based on my rigorous analysis”) thought there was a slim possibility (“keep in mind,” he wrote, “this is a pessimist speaking”) that we might get along. Or at least, he wrote, a meeting between us might be somewhat less dreadful than the rest of them were.

  It was hard to know, reading his note, whether he was a total nerd, or whether he was being funny. Possibly both.

  His name was Elliot, and he was forty-three—a good age to go with my thirty-eight, it seemed to me. Divorced, no children.

  “To be honest, I didn’t think that was a great picture you posted of yourself,” he wrote. “I suspect it did not do you justice. But I liked your face right away, and I also get the feeling you are the type of person who downplays her good qualities. Maybe I sensed this because I’m that way myself.”

  If his photograph were to be believed (as the profile pictures for so many of the men I’d met so far were not), Elliot was a nice-looking man—even handsome, in that nerdy kind of way, basically thin, though with a hint of a belly: the kind of man who probably owns a drawerful of white tube socks on the theory that by doing so he avoids any problems of matching them up when doing the laundry. If his picture was to be trusted, he appeared to be in possession of most if not quite all of his hair. He reported that he was six feet tall. (“You mentioned that you enjoy dancing,” he wrote, “and I see you are five foot five. I trust your own petite stature won’t cause you to rule me out as a dance partner, and will simply offer encouragement that this may not be a problem, since I am told my posture is not the best.”)

  I smiled reading this. But not, for once, out of a sense that the author of this note appeared to be a comically ridiculous candidate for my affection or a great subject for entertaining Swift and Ava at our next dinner together. I actually liked the sound of Elliot.

  “I’m not rich, by the way,” he wrote, “but I own a nice little place in Los Gatos, and it’s unlikely I’ll get fired from my job any time soon since I’m my own boss.”

  He worked as an accountant, he told me. “I know,” he said. “Boring, right? Next thing you know I’ll be telling you I’m interested in genealogy. Guess what? I am.”

  He had been divorced for seven years, following a marriage that had lasted twelve, he went on. The good part was that absolutely no drama existed there. He and his ex-wife, Karen, remained good friends. “We just grew apart,” he wrote. “That’s probably a boring thing to tell you, too, but in this case, I’d rather be boring than have one of those stories where the two people are leaving anonymous hate mail on the doorstep and dreaming up ways to murder each other.

  “I am going to guess that despite your characteristic dismissal of your finer qualities, you are a good photographer,” he wrote. “I arrived at this conclusion not from your profile picture, but from a number of the images you posted on your page, that I deduce may have been taken by you.

  “As for that picture of you and your friend,” he wrote, “well, what can I say? Something about the look in your eyes has caused me to return to it half a dozen times this evening. Looking at you in that photograph, I actually said out loud—though there was no one in the room but myself—‘I like this woman.’ More significant, perhaps, is the fact that as I was looking at your profile, I registered an unfamiliar sensation around the edges of my lips that suggested to me that I was smiling.

  “I have to tell you,” he wrote, “you are a beautiful woman.”

  Maybe he’s gotten me confused with Ava, I thought for a moment. Because Ava looked stunning in that picture, of course. Ava always looked stunning.

  Then I read the next line of his note to me, written as if in response to my thought.

  “And don’t think I have you confused with your friend, either,” he wrote. “Though I’m sure she’s a lovely person. But I’m talking about you, the quiet one, in possession of what I detected as a certain sadness, along with a true capacity for joy. The one on the right”—this would be me—“is the one I am hoping to persuade to have dinner with me. Soon, I hope.”

  26.

  When contemplating a blind date with someone encountered on a dating site, my general rule was to have a phone conversation first. You could tell a lot from a person’s voice, including some things that made it clear you wouldn’t want to meet him. (A lot went undetected, of course, which accounted for my many disastrous blind dates.)

  But when I wrote back to Elliot after receiving that first note, he suggested that we bypass the usual phone check-in and move directly to dinner. It reassured me when he told me that he was actually busy that night (because it had begun to occur to me that maybe this was some kind of weird stalker; after all, he admitted he’d spent an entire evening clicking back to my photograph at regular intervals). I wanted a man who had friends.

  “I’m tied up tomorrow, too,” he wrote, “though I’d much rather be having dinner with you. So how does Friday look?”

  Friday was one of the nights Ava and Swift and I often got together, so I hesitated. Then I stopped myself. It was a little ridiculous, I knew, to turn down a dinner invitation with a totally reasonable-sounding and not-unattractive man who seemed for whatever reason to have genuine interest in me, on the chance that my married friends might decide at the last minute to include me in their plans.

  “Friday’s fine,” I said.

  “I’d like to pick you up,” Elliot said. “But I also understand it might feel a little creepy for you to have a total stranger know your address. So let’s say we meet at the restaurant this time.”

  I recognized him the minute I walked in the door. Often, the men you met from dating websites barely resembled their photograph. But Elliot looked just like the profile picture he’d posted. As I approached the table he stood up. Bad posture: He’d been right about that. But he had nice hair and his eyes looked kind. He pulled out the chair for me.

  “I can’t help it,” he said. “I just have to tell you. I’ve been looking forward to this ever since I first saw your picture.”

  We were the last ones to leave the restaurant that night, and when he walked me to my car he took my arm, but not in the manner of the Vietnam vet with the marriage proposal. Firmly, but tenderly. “I would like to kiss you,” he said. “You have to tell me if that’s a problem.”

  “Not a problem,” I said.

  After, he stood there looking at me. “I want to remember this moment as clearly as I can,” he said. “Not that I’m likely to forget.”

  “I had a good time, too,” I said. Normally by this point, I would long since have noted at least one red-flag issue that discouraged any future exploration of a relationship. But the only ominous thing about Elliot was the surprising intensity of his feeling for me. It made no sense that I would have an effect like this on a man. I never had before.
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br />   There was another surprising element to my evening with Elliot. For the first time since I’d gotten into the routine of my dinners with Swift and Ava, I had not spent the evening taking mental notes of all the funny and ridiculous things I could tell them about later.

  Elliot asked if getting together for dinner again the next night would seem too soon. “I could pretend to be less eager,” he told me, “but I can’t think why I’d do that.”

  Tomorrow would be fine, I said. I had been hoping to make a trip to Walnut Creek that day, but as usual, Dwight had e-mailed me that afternoon to say he and the rest of the McCabe family were meeting up in Sacramento to celebrate Jared’s birthday. Bringing Ollie, of course.

  “I don’t want to scare you off by saying this,” Elliot said, “but this was the best date I ever had.”

  “I need to tell you something before we go any further here,” I told him, still in the parking lot. We had covered a lot of ground over dinner but not this one large fact about me that mattered most.

  “I have a son. Eight years old. He doesn’t live with me, but I wish he did. I lost custody of him a little over three years ago. I wouldn’t blame you if that gave you second thoughts about me.”

  For a long moment, Elliot just stood there. He took his time responding. “All this tells me,” he said when he finally spoke, “is that you’ve had a big hard loss in your life. Like most of us, if we’re honest. Next time we see each other, I hope you’ll feel you can tell me the story.”

  “I’m trying to fix things between Ollie and me,” I told him. “But it’s a difficult situation.”

  “Listen,” Elliot said, “I’m a man who prides himself on being sensible. But I’d better tell you now. I’m going to be crazy about you. I probably am already. The only thing in question for me is whether you could feel the same way back.”

  27.