Under the Influence

by Joyce Maynard

  Ava called me the next morning.

  “So?” she said. “It’s already nine thirty. Why aren’t you over here? Swift and I want details.”

  “I thought you two might still be at the farmers’ market,” I said. This was not wholly accurate. The truth—and this was unprecedented—was that I had forgotten we’d talked about getting together. I had been thinking about my evening with Elliot.

  “We got back ages ago,” Ava was saying. “I’ve been listening for your car. Even the dogs miss you. Well, not Rocco, but the other two. You have to get over here immediately and tell us everything. The whole sordid story.”

  There was her laughter. Swift had probably come up behind her and was more than likely doing something not simply sexually suggestive but explicit.

  “I’m trying to concentrate!” she said. Then, “Disregard that! I was talking to Swift. You know how incredibly irritating he can be.”

  Untypically for me, I had been lying in bed when Ava called. I had been reading an e-mail from Elliot. Two of them, actually—one written the night before, after our date, the second written that morning.

  “The last time I remember feeling this excited,” he had written, “was back in 1992, when they came out with the renewable energy production tax credit.”

  I liked it that he had not felt a need to write “LOL” here, or type in a colon followed by a parenthesis, to make sure I knew he’d made a joke. I liked a lot of things about Elliot.

  “It’s a little out of character for me to say something along these lines, being as I am a bit of a pessimist,” he wrote. “But I think we might have something really good here.”

  I drove over to Folger Lane that afternoon. Ava had a cappuccino waiting for me, and croissants Estella had brought home from the good bakery, whose proprietor Ava was friendly with. On one of our recent trips she’d stopped there to deliver a hydrangea plant that she thought the woman would like, because the color matched her awning perfectly. That was Ava for you: errands that required parking the car, getting out, going into a place—the kind of thing that people who don’t have spinal cord injuries might regard as too much of a nuisance—never bothered her. Ava was always making stops, buying gifts for people, delivering them.

  “Well?” she said, handing me the croissant.

  “I liked him,” I told her. “He’s taking me out to dinner again tonight.”

  “That soon?” said Ava. “Doesn’t that feel a little excessive?”

  Swift had been out on the patio, but now he joined us. “No weirdness this time?” he said.

  I shook my head.

  “Is he short?” Ava said.

  “Normal. Tall, actually. Nothing wrong with his teeth, either.”

  “Did he let you split the check?”

  “No.”

  Ava asked me where he was taking me this time. I named a restaurant where I knew the two of them often ate, though not with me. Pricier than the Burmese place where we generally went.

  “Not too shabby,” she said.

  Swift asked about the kissing, how far he’d gotten.

  Though up until now I had told the Havillands everything that happened on my dates, this time I felt an unfamiliar reluctance to share the details of my evening with Elliot. I could have made up one of my stories, but I didn’t feel like it.

  “It was good,” I said, my voice a little flat, though maybe I was trying to make myself sound that way. “All good.”

  “That’s wonderful, honey,” said Ava. But I picked up something else in her tone then—or maybe it was only later that I registered this, and maybe I was only imagining it. She sounded faintly disappointed.

  “The guy isn’t still married, is he?” said Swift.

  I shook my head. “Divorced for ages. No terrible stories about the awful ex-wife.”

  “Something happens to men who’ve been on their own too long without a woman around,” Ava said. “It’s the old-bachelor syndrome. They get rigid and stuck in their ways.”

  “But he was married for twelve years,” I told her. “He and his ex-wife are good friends.”

  “Friends? Really?” she said. “I don’t understand how that could be. If Swift and I ever split up—which would never happen—I’d need to slit his throat. Maybe this Elliot person just isn’t the passionate type in the first place.”

  I started to say something, but stopped. Ava hadn’t even met Elliot yet, and already I was defending him.

  “I think he’s just a really nice person, is all,” I told her.

  “That’s great,” she said. “If nice is what you’re looking for.”

  28.

  Elliot and I had an even nicer time the second night. Hearing myself describe it that way—over at Folger Lane on Monday morning, having coffee in the garden with Ava—I registered immediate regret.

  “Not just nice,” I said. “Terrific, actually.”

  Ava seemed dubious. “I don’t want to throw ice water on this,” she said. “But when it’s right, you want to feel hot. Excited. Sweaty. Like you might die if you don’t see him again. And it had better be soon.”

  This was just the second date, I told her. “It’s not like I’m marrying the guy. Believe me, after some of the men I’ve been meeting, nice is no small thing.”

  “The night I met Swift, we went back to his apartment and we didn’t get out of bed all weekend,” she said. I had heard this before, of course—though in the original version it was six months. That probably came a little later.

  “Don’t get me wrong, honey,” she said. “I think it’s great that you’ve found someone you can spend time with. I just know you’re a person who has sold herself short in the past. You may think this Elliot person is the best you can expect, when he might not be.”

  “I’m not selling myself short,” I told her. “He’s great. And anyway, I just met him.”

  “Well, good for you,” she said, gesturing for Estella to take our cups away. “I think that’s wonderful. And if you still like him a week from now, you know we’re going to insist that you bring him over here, so we can check him out.”

  I did like Elliot even better a week from then, when he brought me over to his house on Sunday and we cooked dinner together. The day before, after I came back from seeing Ollie, we’d gone to the movies.

  We were kissing a lot, but we had not yet slept together. Elliot was a deliberate man—the kind of person who read all the reviews of a particular model of car before even taking a test drive. We had talked about sex. “I want it to be just right,” he said. “I’d like to feel, at that moment, that you’re going to be the last woman I make love with. For the rest of my life.”

  “That’s a pretty heavy responsibility,” I said. “Unless, of course, the experience kills you on the spot.”

  I’d intended to make a joke, and as a rule, Elliot had a good sense of humor. But not where this topic was concerned.

  Two weeks after we met, Elliot invited me to drive up to Mendocino with him for a long weekend, and I said yes, even though this would mean missing one of Swift and Ava’s parties. They were bringing in a sushi chef and had hired a group of Kodo drummers to play in the pool house.

  “You could have taken the most amazing pictures,” Ava said. “The drummers wear the traditional costumes from the thirteenth century. You should see the muscles in their arms. Not to mention the rest of their bodies.”

  The Mendocino weekend was when Elliot and I finally had sex. It wasn’t some mind-altering experience, but it was good—though later, driving home with him along Highway 1 past a beach where Ava and I had once brought the dogs, I found myself hearing her voice in my head, and it left me unsettled. I remembered the two of us sitting together in her sunroom that first time, Ava telling me about how it had been when she met Swift and she was so much in love she forgot to eat. “He had this really long hair back then that he sometimes tied in a ponytail,” she said. “One time, when he was sleeping, I cut a piece off.”

  I studied Elliot�
��s face as he drove—keeping a strict eye on the road as always, but smiling in a way that had to do with me, I knew, and the weekend we’d just spent. “Have you ever thought about not cutting your hair so short in the back?” I said.

  “No. What made you bring that up?”

  “Nothing in particular.”

  The next day, back at Folger Lane, Ava wanted to hear all about the weekend, of course. This time I was careful to convey another side of Elliot—something that revealed him to be more than a blandly nice person who wasn’t an ax murderer. I had taken a bunch of photographs of him on my phone, and I scrolled through them, looking for a good one.

  “He’s very playful and spontaneous,” I said, aware that none of the images on my phone conveyed that he was actually a good-looking man. “When the two of us were over at his apartment last week, making paella together, he put his arms around me and started dancing.” I told her about another time, the week earlier, when I’d come over after one of my trips to Walnut Creek to see Ollie, he’d had a bath ready for me, with candles all around and bath salts in the water. He left me alone in the bathroom, but after I got out of the tub, we sat together on his couch—I, in his old chenille bathrobe—and he rubbed my feet. We weren’t even lovers at that point—technically speaking. But no man had ever made me feel so loved.

  “Mm,” said Ava. But I knew she wasn’t changing her opinion. “So how’s the sex?”

  Always in the past, I would have been quick to volunteer everything. Ava was closer to me than any man, so I’d been quick to fill her in on even the most intimate details. But this time felt different. I registered a small but clear desire to keep certain parts of what went on with Elliot to myself. Though I hoped what I offered up was enough to suggest that things were good.

  “We found this creek bed, up in Mendocino, leading to a hot spring,” I told her. “There was a spot where we sank into the mud up to our ankles. Nobody was around, so we stripped down to our underwear and slathered mud all over each other and just lay out in the sun till it dried, then jumped in the water.”

  “He must have looked pretty funny, with those skinny legs and that little potbelly of his,” Ava said. I’d been the one who’d described his physique this way to her, of course.

  Still, the minute she said this, I felt something shift in me. At the time Elliot and I had slathered the mud on each other, it had seemed wonderful and sexy and romantic, lying almost naked with him that way. But hearing Ava’s take on it, the picture was suddenly different. Seen through Ava’s lens, all of a sudden Elliot looked faintly ridiculous. Pathetic, even.

  I wished I hadn’t told her about his belly.

  29.

  Now and then, if I was over at the Havillands’ by myself working on the art-cataloging project, an odd and disconcerting feeling came over me. Some possession of Ava’s would catch my eye, and it occurred to me how easy it would be to take this object home with me. Nobody would notice it was gone.

  Though they left twenty-dollar bills all over the house, I never pictured myself stealing a cent of the Havillands’ money. I knew where Ava kept her rings and the diamond pendant Swift had given her, and all the rest of the serious jewelry. I never would have touched those. And there were all those artworks—not the outsider art, but the insider stuff. The Diebenkorn. The Matisse. There were pieces in that house worth more than I’d earn in my whole life. I would sooner have given up a finger, or more, before I would have touched those.

  But sometimes I’d be alone on Folger Lane—Ava at Pilates, Estella out buying groceries, Swift off in one of his sessions with Ling the Chinese herbalist or the fencing instructor, or meeting someone about his foundation, and the urge would come over me—not so different from how I used to feel when it was that bottle of wine in the top cupboard that I couldn’t stop thinking about—to pay a visit to Ava’s enormous closet. After that first time she’d brought me there, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about it. There were so many beautiful things there I’d never seen her wear. I imagined how it would feel to have one of them hanging in my closet. Or a pearl necklace. Or just a pair of earrings. Or less.

  There was a ring I loved, in the shape of a fish. (Not a dog, for once. This was unusual for Ava.) There was a pair of earrings with a single red stone encased in a little golden cage. One time, alone in the closet, I held them up to my own lobes. I didn’t even know if they were rubies; I wasn’t that familiar with precious stones. I just loved the look of these: the red stones, the fine gold filament that held them in place. It would have been so easy to slip them in my pocket. My mind taunted me with the picture.

  Or I’d be in the kitchen fixing tea, and the thought would come to me: I could just take this one silver teaspoon—part of a set, each engraved with a different wildflower. In the same drawer, there was one spoon meant for a left-handed person. Ava and Swift weren’t even left-handed, but I was. If that spoon were mine, I’d make oatmeal every morning just so I could eat it with my special spoon.

  For one whole week, I couldn’t stop thinking about Ava’s bone china tea light holder—a little dome that sat over a candle on a matching bone china plate. It didn’t look like anything much until you lit the candle—preferably in a darkened room. Then a whole scene was revealed, carved into the china: a village lane, a horse and wagon, a cozy farmhouse in the woods, all glowing from the candle tucked under the china dome. I knew just where I’d set the tea light holder in my apartment, if it belonged to me.

  One night, when we were having dinner together, Ava had set this candleholder on the table. Thinking maybe I’d buy one for myself, I’d asked where she got it.

  “God only knows,” she said. “Someone probably gave it to us as a favor at one of those awful events we used to have to attend when Swift still ran his company. I’ve got drawers of that stuff.”

  I never would have taken the tea light holder. Or anything else. But if I had, I knew that unlike Ava, I would have treasured it.

  Ava didn’t pay that much attention to possessions, was the truth. She cared about the people she loved, and her dogs.

  This was a refreshing quality, in many ways. Though you could also have viewed her as spoiled for having so much stuff, individual objects—even treasures—held little meaning for her. Not even her expensive clothes—her leather jacket from Barneys, her velvet cape, the Fendi boots, the cashmere robe that hung next to her Jacuzzi. She was always dropping things off at dry-cleaning places, then forgetting about them. She did this so often that one day she put a couple of hundred-dollar bills in my hand with the instruction that I drop by every dry-cleaning place in town, just to see what items they might have that belonged to her.

  This took hours. It turned out some of the clothes I picked up that day had been sitting over a year. There was a linen skirt I particularly loved. If I brought this one back home to my apartment, instead of to Folger Lane, I thought, she’d never know. “Stop it,” I said out loud—same as I once did while reaching for a bottle.

  Sometimes I asked myself what it was about me that made those thoughts come into my head all the time, of stealing something from the Havillands. I considered whether this meant I was a terrible person.

  But it wasn’t as if I ever actually took anything. I knew I would never do anything to betray the trust of my friends, especially after all they’d done for me. I would never have risked losing the two of them, as I might if they knew about my covetous urges. I just loved Ava, and I loved the world she’d made, full of beautiful things. I wanted to be part of her world. I wanted some part of her world to be mine.

  30.

  Though Ava liked to say that Swift’s main purpose in life was loving her—and he said plenty, himself, to promote this idea—he seemed to be closeted in his office more and more these days. He appeared to have become increasingly involved in their project of creating the nonprofit animal organization, BARK. With the help of a number of friends—including Ling and Ernesto, surprisingly, and several young finance types who stopped by
often these days, and a buddy who’d sold his startup around the same time Swift had, for even more money, and Marty Matthias, naturally—he’d been having a lot of meetings designed to win funding for the group among some heavy hitters from his old days in the tech world. Evidently Evelyn Couture, the Pacific Heights widow, was talking about making a major bequest to the foundation, and he had met with her lawyers about that.

  By this point I’d come to understand that as much as Swift liked making phone calls and having meetings, of the two of them, the one who actually made everything happen was Ava.

  “Sending him off to schmooze up donors is a good way to keep Swift out of my hair,” she told me. “The boy loves sitting in a cigar room and shooting the breeze about the 49ers, and he’s great at getting people to take out their checkbooks. But you want to know something? He doesn’t know the first thing about creating a nonprofit.”

  Meanwhile, Ava was taking the project to an even higher level, she said. She had hired a web designer and a marketing team to get the concept of the charity out to potential donors all over the country. Though he hated flying, now she was sending Swift off to New York for a meeting, and another time to Palm Beach. Also Atlanta, Boston, Dallas.

  Sometime in late spring, when I showed up at their house for the usual combination of a walk with Ava and the dogs, plus work, followed by dinner—Ava was waiting for me in front of the house.

  “I had this fabulous idea,” she said. “I couldn’t wait to tell you about it.”

  It turned out that Swift’s birthday was coming up that October; he was turning sixty. (“Pushing sixty with a short stick” was how he’d put it.) Ava was planning to throw a big surprise party.

  He’d know she would never let his birthday pass without some amazing celebration. But she had an idea that would make the whole thing much more meaningful. She’d tie the launch of the first BARK spay-and-neutering center, to be located in San Francisco, to the birthday night, with a big announcement, a short film maybe. And—here’s where I’d come in—with my help, she’d create a commemorative book of photographs celebrating Swift’s career and his dedication to rescuing dogs, along with documenting the lives of the very dogs the BARK foundation would be serving.