Under the Influence (11 page)

N
ow 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.

T
hough 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.

“Wouldn't he need to know about something like this in advance?” I asked her. “If you're planning to go public with the entire foundation that night?”

Ava laughed. “Oh, honey,” she said. “You really are a babe in the woods. Swift never pays any attention to details. Set him up with one of his old fraternity brothers and a bottle of Macallan's, and he's happy. Particularly if there's a good-looking cocktail hostess nearby.”

Ava, on the other hand, was a worker bee. And so was I.

I was to go through all the old family photographs and digitize them. Then Ava and I would select the images that best told the story
of Swift's life—scrappy go-getter, entrepreneur, family man, dog lover. And lover of Ava, of course. Simultaneous with the presentation of the book at the birthday celebration would be the opening of the first of what Ava envisioned as hundreds of free spay-and-neuter centers to be built around the country. The party would be the social and philanthropic event of the season, guaranteed to be written up in the society and financial pages of all the major news outlets. With Swift's face—as captured by my camera—grinning over it all.

“Here's what came to me in the night,” Ava said. “We'll combine the photographs with pictures of all the dogs his charitable contributions have saved in shelters that we've been supporting around the Bay Area and Silicon Valley.

“You'll take the portraits, of course,” she said.

“I'm not an animal photographer,” I told her.

She shook her head. To Ava, there was no meaningful distinction between dogs and humans, except that dogs were nicer. If you were a portrait photographer, you could take anybody's portrait, including that of a dachshund or a mutt.

“It would be like the pictures you take now of the children at all those schools,” Ava said. “Except instead of children, you'd be capturing images of rescue dogs. And of course, being you, you'd do it in a way that made people fall in love with every dog and want to take out their checkbooks, the way Swift has. And we'd combine the pictures with the photographs you've been assembling of Swift over the years as a way of putting a human face on the foundation.”

“I don't know anything about animal photography,” I said again. “It's a very specific art.”

“You'll learn.”

Ava never had much patience for potential problems. “This would be a gorgeous, coffee-table-size book, a special limited edition only available to our guests at the party and big donors to BARK. I know you'll do an amazing job,” she said. “This book will make the
connection between human beings and animals, and show how interrelated our lives are.”

But what about logistics, I asked her? It wasn't like at a school, where they gave me a room with my lights set up, with a team of classroom aides shepherding my subjects into the room one by one.

Ava would make all the arrangements for me; employees of all the Bay Area shelters knew her well already. It was up to me to capture the essence of each dog I photographed, the same way I did with schoolchildren.

Just like that, it was settled. Ava had an uncanny ability to infuse every one of her projects with potential and promise. In her eyes, at least, everything she touched would be not simply successful but the most successful ever. Before I knew it she had me set to work on the first step of the undertaking: sorting through more than twenty boxes of family photographs. Some were from Swift's family, dating back to his childhood in New Jersey and his days in high school, where he was evidently a star wrestler. More came from his first marriage: his wedding, the birth of his son, trips to Disneyland and Europe. My job was to go through all of these, locate images that didn't include his ex-wife, Valerie, and select the ones that should be converted to a digital format. In some cases, I might actually be able to crop the image to exclude Valerie from the frame.

“I guess that might sound harsh,” Ava said. “But if you knew her, you'd understand. I have no use for that woman.”

“We'll want pictures of his years at his company, of course,” she added. “Swift taking Cooper to ball games. Meeting me. Pictures of Swift in the pool and on his boat, all the things he loves. Ending up with the two of us and our dogs.”

“I even thought up the title for our book,” Ava said. “We'll call it
The Man and His Dogs
.”

It turned out to be an enjoyable project, working my way through the pictures, observing all the stages Swift had gone through before he married my friend. (
My friend
. Just calling Ava that still thrilled me.) It
was interesting to see what an awkward-looking kid he'd been—shorter than virtually all his classmates, with too-curly hair and glasses and, later, what appeared to be a bad case of acne. Around age sixteen he must have gotten into wrestling and his body changed. He was still short, but his arms were thickly muscled now, and his calves bulged. The photographs suggested that he carried himself differently, too: not swaggering, but confident.

In photographs from later in Swift's high school career, he was nearly always grinning, with a succession of unusually pretty girls on his arm, most of them taller than he was. Then came college; he joined a fraternity and bought a car. A beat-up Mustang first, then a Corvette. Then a Porsche.

Swift was a man on the move. Even when he was nineteen years old, you could tell that about him. Nothing was going to get in his way.

Well, maybe the marriage had, for a while. The first one. But Ava had instructed me to get through that part of the story in a single page. That left plenty of space for the part that mattered. Her.

A
va said she'd love to accompany me on my shooting expeditions, but there was a lot going on at home now having to do with the foundation. The surprise was that Elliot, whose schedule was flexible since he worked for himself, said he would come along with me to help.

Unfortunately, Elliot was allergic to dogs, but he said it would be worth enduring a few minor sinus issues to accompany me to the animal shelters just for the time we'd get to spend together in the car. While I was shooting, he could look over files on his laptop or catch up with his reading.

“I can't think of anything I'd rather do,” he said, “than spend a bunch of afternoons driving around with you, helping you do something you love.”

We had a lot of time to talk on those car rides, to places like Napa and Sebastopol and Half Moon Bay. We'd talked plenty already, but this was different. Maybe it was being off in the car that way, just the two of us, that made the difference. We talked about things we hadn't up until then.

When Elliot was growing up, in upstate New York, outside of Buffalo, his family had a farm where they raised dairy cows and chickens. His father's younger brother came to work on the farm one year. Uncle Ricky. Everybody loved Ricky, including Elliot. He was one of those
people who simply by walking into a room was able to command everyone's attention, making them forget who they were talking to before.

“I know the type,” I said, thinking of Swift.

“My dad was a quiet guy,” Elliot said. “Like me. Boring, I guess you could say. If you were stuck on a road in a snowstorm, he'd be the guy you'd call to come with his truck and get you out of there, or the one who'd stay up all night with a cow having a hard time birthing a calf. But he wasn't what you'd call a live wire the rest of the time, like Ricky.”

Ricky managed the books at the farm, handling the sale of milk and cream, the payroll. This was a pretty big operation at the time, had been in the family for five generations, and while nobody would have called their farm a gold mine, they made good money.

“Young as I was,” Elliot said—eyes on the highway, as always, with both hands on the wheel—“I could feel something was going on between my uncle and my mother, though I was not of an age to understand what that might mean. I just knew she acted different when she was around him. Happier. But distracted.”

Elliot's father must have noticed, too. There was a fight one night, and a lot of yelling. Next morning when Elliot got up, Uncle Ricky was gone. A while after that, Elliot's sister Patrice was born. Nobody said anything, but it occurred to Elliot later that very likely his father always wondered if she was his, or, more likely, knew she wasn't. Not that he treated Patrice any differently. Their dad was not the kind of man to favor one child over another, no matter what the story was surrounding that child's birth.

“Not long after Ricky left,” Elliot told me, “we found out that he hadn't been paying any of our creditors. We owed more than sixty thousand dollars at this point, and back taxes on the farm. A whole lot of money that should have been in the revenue account was missing.”

They all knew who was responsible, of course. They just didn't know where he was. Then or ever again.

“We lost the farm,” Elliot said. “My dad went to work at a hardware store and my mother stopped getting out of bed. If it happened today, we'd understand my mother was suffering from depression, but back then all I knew was that she hardly ever got out of bed or said anything anymore, or if she did, it was something weird, like telling my father we needed to stock up on Campbell's soup in case there was a nuclear attack. She had this thing about Bob Barker—that he was hypnotizing people through the TV, and if you watched
Truth or Consequences
something would happen to your brain. One day it hit me: The guy was a ringer for Uncle Ricky.

“I stopped bringing friends home after school,” he said. “My dad just poured himself a beer when he came home from work and sat in front of the television. If there was going to be dinner, I was the one who made it.”

I put my hand on his shoulder. I knew what it was like to be so embarrassed about a parent you never wanted anyone to see where you lived.

We drove along in silence for a while then. I knew Elliot had more to say but figured he'd speak when he was ready.

“The year my sister entered high school, my mother killed herself,” he said. “Closed the garage door, got in the car, turned on the ignition.”

I asked Elliot if his father ever remarried. He shook his head. “I don't think he ever stopped loving her,” Elliot said. “He was that type.”

“I guess I never knew anyone like that,” I told him. I was better acquainted with men who left than those who stayed.

“You've met one now,” Elliot said, putting his arm around me.

“You've come a long way from farming to accounting,” I told him.

“You know why?” he said. “I never got over the way my father lost every cent he had, just because he didn't know anything about his own finances. He hadn't kept good books, or any books at all. He let everything
he loved slip through his hands because he was too busy taking care of the day-to-day running of things to keep an eye on the books. And then there was nothing left to run and no more land to take care of.”

“So you decided you'd get really good at numbers,” I said.

“I know it's just about the most unglamorous career there is, in most people's eyes,” he said. “But an accountant can be a hero, too, if he saves his clients from financial ruin.”

“It's a fine thing,” I said. Though that perception of accounting as a boring profession filled with passionless bean counters was precisely the one Ava had expressed to me. And truthfully, it was one I'd held, too.

“I guess you could say I'm obsessed,” Elliot said. “Because when I open up a person's taxes or their business records, I don't want to miss a single decimal point. I'm the guy who reads annual reports for fun. Always on the lookout for something that doesn't add up.”

I studied his face then: not the kind of face that would inspire anyone to look twice if he walked in the room, even if he was wearing something other than his baggy Dockers and button-down shirt, though if you looked closer, he was actually a good-looking man. But he was not a person who needed anyone to notice him, or one to draw attention to himself.

“I wish I could be more of a hero in your eyes, Helen,” he said. “Or a guy like your friend Ava's husband there, who can probably fly her to Paris for Valentine's Day, or just build them an Eiffel Tower in their backyard if it's too hard for her to get there. Maybe it will be enough for you one of these days that I'm an honest man who loves you with all his heart.”

“I wasn't comparing you to Swift,” I said. Though I had done that.

“But I was,” he said. “And I'm aware of all the ways I fall short in the eyes of people like those two.”

Something about the way he said it—“those two”—made me stiffen. This should have been where I'd tell him he was wrong, that they'd said
he sounded like a terrific guy for me and they couldn't wait to meet him. Only they hadn't said that. All I could say was how it was for me.

“Swift and Ava have been wonderful to me,” I said. “I owe them so much.”

“I just hope they don't try to collect at some point,” Elliot said.