Under the Influence (28 page)

I
t had been more than nine years since the last time I walked through the door at Folger Lane. The last time I walked out. Eventually, I left Happy Times School Portraits and got a better job. A photographer in Piedmont who'd seen some of my work at a little pop-up gallery hired me to go into partnership with her. She said I had a real eye for capturing the true personality of my subject. She said I could always tell what was going on under the surface, behind the eyes.

Elsie and I run the studio together now, taking portraits—families mostly, the occasional wedding. Because the work we do is not cheap, our clients are generally the kind of people with plenty of money to spare—not as rich as the Havillands, in most cases, but you can tell from the clothes the children wear for these portraits, the smooth, well-tended skin and Pilates-trained bodies of the mothers, that these aren't the kind of people who drive around in a twenty-year-old car like my Honda Civic, or have a pullout sofa in the living room that serves as their child's bed. An upgrade from the air mattress.

Rare among our clientele—almost unheard of—are single parents. Single mothers, anyway. Judging by the photographs I take of our clients, you would think nobody ever had a problem bigger than a bad day on the tennis court. But of course I know well—better than I used to—that just because the image looks good doesn't mean it tells the real story.

Oliver, on the other hand, is exactly the person he appears to be. Still a little quiet, not a boy who has a million friends. Just two or three really good ones. He is loyal to his father and kind to his grandmother, adores his little brother, and is shy around girls. Though there is one now, Edie, who is crazy about him, and for Oliver, one is enough.

By the middle of his sophomore year, Ollie began receiving college recruitment letters from Division I schools. Never much for sports involving a ball, he is a wonderful, natural swimmer, which means that a good portion of one whole wall in our living room is filled with medals and trophies from meets. But one thing has been true all his life since that day out on the lake: For a boy who loves the water, he hates boats. He doesn't even want to ride the ferry to San Francisco.

I
n the years since we said good-bye in the driveway of the house on Folger Lane, I thought of Elliot often, of course.

One night I found myself on Match.com again. Not that I intended to post a profile, I told myself. I was just curious about the people who still did believe in the possibility of that kind of thing working out, as I no longer could.

I had identified a demographic for this hypothetical search of mine: male, between the ages of forty-five and fifty-five, living within a thirty-mile radius, with the key words selected
movies, photography, outdoors,
and
sense of humor
. There was no place to put a check mark indicating a preference for constancy or kindness or integrity among one's romantic choices. As I well knew, nobody's better at pretending to tell the truth, or convincing another person of his upstanding qualities, than a brilliant liar and con artist.

I scrolled through more than a dozen profiles that night, almost relieved to see no one there with whom I could imagine having dinner. Then there he was—not smiling, precisely, because Elliot never smiles for the camera, but looking out from the screen of my laptop with a perplexed expression. Call it rueful amusement.
What am I doing here? Again?
His moniker, as before, read JustaNumbersGuy.

“To be honest,” he'd written, “—and I can be nothing else,
unfortunately—I'm probably not much of a catch. Fuddy-duddy kind of a guy. I like old movies and new dental floss. I study the annual reports of companies, sometimes for my livelihood but also, believe it or not, because that is my crazy idea of what constitutes fun. It's like a detective mission: The numbers may look dry, but the stories they reveal can be filled with drama and intrigue, even larceny.

“In my younger days, I labored in government as that dreaded individual: an auditor for the IRS. More recently—having recognized that chances appeared increasingly slim of my being called on to pitch for the Giants, or to play the new James Bond, I have maintained a private accounting practice, with an abiding commitment to the truth in numbers. Consider it fair warning that even if I fall in love with you, if I find out your Schedule C contains something fishy, the jig is up.”

He had not added “LOL” after that line. If a person needed Elliot to explain that he was joking, she was not the person for him anyway.

It took a particular kind of individual to appreciate Elliot. I was one such woman. It had taken me a while. Too long. But here was the good news: He didn't have a girlfriend. We still had a chance.

“You might not guess it to look at me,” he continued, “but I'm a hopeless romantic. Your basic one-woman man. I thought I found her one time, and it turned out I was mistaken. So I'll be careful with my heart. You might have an easier time gaining access to the vault at Fort Knox. But should you succeed . . . well, you'll never find a more loyal or loving man.”

I sat for a long time studying Elliot's words on the screen of my laptop. No need to say how all of this struck me, I suspect. Loss is one thing. Regret over a loss that might not have happened had one known better is worse.

“You could give me a try,” he wrote
.
“Think of it as a service to your fellow citizens—the ones trying to bamboozle the government. The longer I go on this way, staying home every weekend, studying numbers the way I do, the more crooks there will be out there (all of whom are
probably a lot more fun to hang out with than I am) who'll be getting into hot water. All because I have nothing better to do than pore over their companies' annual reports.”

All the rest of that evening, I thought about clicking “Reply” to JustaNumbersGuy's profile. The next morning I thought about contacting Elliot again. Rejected the idea.

That night—under the influence of three cups of green tea, my beverage of choice these days—I went online, resolved to write him a letter. Clicked the coordinates of Elliot's profile. It had been withdrawn.

I took this as a sign. He'd met someone. Things were going well. I remembered, in fact, the speed with which—after just one date with me—he'd taken down his profile.

“I'm not the dating type, really,” he'd said. “Once I find a good woman, I won't be looking elsewhere.”

J
ust before the start of my son's senior year in high school, we left our old place in Redwood City for a real two-bedroom apartment in the East Bay. I had one year left with my son at home. I was finally able to afford a bigger place, and I wanted Ollie to have his own bedroom, at last. Before he was gone.

The day I moved out of our old apartment an odd thought came to me. I used to imagine that one night when I least expected it, I'd hear a knock at my door, and there would be Elliot on the step. Wanting to give it another try.

If he showed up now, I wouldn't be there anymore. Not that it was likely, I told myself. Not that he would ever do something like that. It was just something I might have wished for, only now it would never happen.

W
e had been living in the new place for six weeks, which meant I never traveled to Portola Valley anymore. Ollie was turning eighteen that winter. He was due to graduate in June, meaning he'd be moving out soon. Not in the way he did back when he was five. This time, he'd be going someplace he wanted to be—college—and as sad as I would be to watch him go, I would be happy about that, too.

As for me, I'd be forty-nine soon. Pushing fifty with a short stick, as Swift would have put it.

We had just finished cleaning up the kitchen after dinner, and I was sitting down with my tea. In the next room, I could hear my son on the phone with his girlfriend. A bowl of popcorn beside him, probably. I heard hip-hop on the stereo and easy, happy laughter.

“No, really,” Ollie was telling her. “We have to check it out. I could pick you up Saturday morning. Incredibly enough, I don't have a single meet all weekend. I bet my mom would even make us pizza if I ask.”

It was nothing earth-shattering, but that's what I loved. Normal life. Ordinary nights spent with the person you love in reasonably close proximity, reasonably often.

We were a family of two. Two was enough.

I took my shoes off and set my feet on the footstool. I unwrapped the piece of chocolate that constituted my one nightly indulgence. I reached
for that day's San Francisco
Chronicle,
set aside that morning. The headline caught my eye:

ANIMAL RIGHTS FOUNDATION HEAD INDICTED FOR FRAUD

Under the headline: a photograph of Swift Havilland, executive director of BARK USA. Grinning, of course.

The newspaper story was not the kind of news I generally followed—and the complexities of the fraud it reported on were a little beyond me. The gist was that a Portola Valley businessman who'd made his fortune in a technology start-up appeared to have siphoned tens of millions of dollars from his family-run foundation (its board consisting of himself, his wife, and their son) after large losses in his personal portfolio. As a result of an extensive investigation recently come to light, Swift was now being indicted for securities fraud, wire fraud, racketeering, money laundering, and a long list of other charges.

“Swift Havilland surrendered at his attorney's office on Monday to face charges,” the story went on. Because he was considered a flight risk, bail had been set at ten million dollars. Unable to make bail, the paper stated, Mr. Havilland was now being held at the federal correction facility in Mendota, California. Additional charges were expected shortly against Mr. Havilland's son, Cooper Havilland—a trader with DCY Capital Partners in Greenwich, CT—as well as his wife, Ava Havilland.

The newspaper story was a long one. I reached for my tea.

It seemed that Swift's financial troubles started slowly. Although he had a lot of assets, he spent a lot. To finance his lifestyle he'd taken out first and second mortgages on his family's homes and pledged some of the stock in his Silicon Valley company, Theraco, as collateral for more loans.

Swift's big problems had occurred in the stock market crash of 2008. That's when Swift had allegedly begun looting the BARK foundation he and his wife had established several years earlier.

He'd done it in a clever way, the story explained—arranging for millions of dollars from BARK to be put into an offshore company that he secretly controlled. After a complex series of mergers and name changes, Swift had liquidated that company and allegedly kept the money.

At this point in the story, a familiar name caught my eye: “Evelyn Couture, prominent San Francisco philanthropist.” According to the reporter, Mrs. Couture appeared to have fallen under the influence of Swift Havilland's powers of persuasion, donating millions to his foundation. But she hadn't stopped there.

When Evelyn had died in 2006, the
Chronicle
story stated, she had left her twenty-million-dollar Pacific Heights home to BARK. In 2009, BARK sold the home to a Cayman Islands company for two million dollars in cash and eighteen million dollars in securities. That Cayman company was actually owned, through a web of other companies, by a Liechtenstein-based trust controlled by—here came another familiar name—Cooper Havilland.

The securites that BARK received for Evelyn's home were basically worthless. The trust then sold Evelyn Couture's mansion to a development company that was turning it into condominiums, and then funneled the money back to the Havillands, father and son, who had pocketed more than thirty million dollars.

Was I surprised or shocked? In a funny way, the part of the story that shocked me most was that Swift got caught. By his own proud admission, he was a man who knew all the angles, and he knew how to play the system. I could still hear Swift's voice—and that big laugh—as he dismissed the small-minded, unimaginative bean counters of the world. He would never have believed that any paper-shuffling bureaucrats could unearth the inner workings of the elaborate scheme he'd concealed behind the façade of his animal foundation. But apparently they had.

It was only in a smaller story that appeared farther back in the paper a few days later that I learned how the crime, now known as
“Pooch-Scam,” had come to light. No names were given, and the only source was “a high-ranking individual in the U.S. Attorney's office.”

Evidently someone unaffiliated with the U.S. Attorney's office had been responsible for bringing Swift Havilland's alleged crimes to light. This person was a private citizen who had waived any remuneration under any state or federal laws.

“In an era in which stories abound of ordinary people seeking out their fifteen minutes of fame, not to mention the almighty dollar,” read the editorial that ran in the
Chronicle
the same day, “this quiet unsung individual, troubled by the appearance of improprieties, had spent years sifting through tens of thousands of pages of obscure public documents and records to piece the details of the alleged scam together. This individual had presented his evidence to the U.S. Attorney's office. And when they ignored his evidence, he persisted until at last they paid attention.”

Now, as a result of the hard work of this lone hero, the alleged perpetrator of a forty-million-dollar fraud had been indicted.

The newspaper described this person as having chosen to remain anonymous, but I knew his name, of course.

I
sat there for a long time, holding the newspaper. I was studying the photograph of Swift, but the person I was thinking about was Elliot.

Many times over the years, especially at night—my son asleep in the next room, with no sound but the occasional creak of the hamster wheel—I had thought of reaching out to him. If I still drank, these would have been the moments I would have taken out the wine, and once I'd had a glass or two, writing to Elliot might have felt like a good idea.

But I didn't drink anymore. I didn't make up stories, either. Or fantasies that things were real that never were. I was once a woman who wanted, more than anything, to be part of a family, and for a period of eleven months I believed the Havillands had made me a part of theirs.
I betrayed the love of a good man who would have stood by me forever, in favor of two people to whom I meant nothing more than an ice sculpture. Here today. Gone tomorrow.

How could I ask that Elliot trust me ever again, or believe anything I'd tell him, now?

That day at the hospital, though, as I sat in the lobby with my sleeping son wrapped in the blanket next to me, I had still believed we might find our way back to each other. For a few hours that night, I realized who the good man had been all along, and I still held out hope of a life with him.

After all this time, I had not forgotten a single moment of that night—the longest of my life.

It was sometime in the early hours of the next morning, probably, after the police officers and the child welfare advocate had concluded their interview with my son. Swift and Ava were long gone, back to their beautiful house on the shores of that beautiful lake, no doubt, delivering Swift's son back to the yellow sports car that would bring him to his beautiful fiancée. Carmen was gone, too, but to a different place, from which she would not be returning, her broken-hearted mother by her side.

Early that morning, I had placed the call to Elliot to ask if he could pick us up. He had answered on the first ring. He'd told me he'd be there to get us as soon as he could. Abiding the speed limit.

Sometime during the four hours it took Elliot to get to the police station, I had taken out my wallet. Inside, there was that card, the one on which Ava had written her name and number as the person to call in case of an emergency.

That night I'd crossed out Ava's name and written Elliot's.

I still had the card, and on it, the number.

I set down the newspaper. I picked up the phone.