Under the Influence

by Joyce Maynard

  “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.

  31.

  Ava 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 wa
s 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.

  32.

  It was June now, and I hadn’t been over to Swift and Ava’s for a while. Normally I was there almost daily, working on my photography project for Ava, but the Havillands had been off at Lake Tahoe, and then I’d been over at Elliot’s house in Los Gatos. He’d been on vacation, and I’d had no jobs, either, so we’d driven up the coast and gone camping for a few nights. That Saturday, when we got back, we’d gone bike riding, and the next night he’d invited a few of his friends over and barbecued chicken. Nothing like the kind of gatherings that took place on Folger Lane, but we’d had a nice time together. Nice. I couldn’t think the word now, let alone say it, without hearing Ava’s voice in my ear.

  Just nice?

  The morning after I returned from our camping trip, I headed over to the Havillands’ to get back to work on the book project. But above all, I wanted to see Ava. She was there in the driveway to greet me, calling out my name even before I got out of my car. Lillian and Sammy raced in circles around me like long-lost friends.

  “Do you have any idea how much I missed you?” she said. “I know I used to get along fine without you, but honestly I don’t know how.”

  She reached out her long, sculpted arms to throw around my neck. I breathed in her gardenia perfume.

  “Estella just came back from the market with the croissants and they’re still warm,” she said. “You have to tell me everything.”

  There wasn’t a lot to say. When I was going on awful dates, I’d had a million stories for her. Now that I was spending time with Elliot, there was only one.

  “I’m happy,” I told her. “I know it sounds crazy, but I think I might actually love this man.”

  “That’s great, honey,” she said. I couldn’t say why, but something in her response left me feeling faintly deflated. I had the sense I’d disappointed her, fallen short of her hopes. As if I was her child, and I was telling her I’d gotten into a program to become a dental assistant, when she’d expected me to be a cardiac surgeon.

  I had thought Ava might like to hear more about my trip to the Sierras. Or that we might talk about Elliot and me. I had been looking forward to telling her more, though not so much the intimate details.

  In the past, I had always told Ava everything. But I felt a new and unprecedented sense of protectiveness around this relationship. Still, I had pictured the two of us sitting in the garden, maybe out by the pool, sharing iced coffee and discussing our men. Planning a dinner—just the four of us, maybe. Though early on in my relationship with Elliot the Havillands had professed a desire to meet him, nearly two months had passed since we’d started seeing each other, and they had yet to follow up with an invitation.

  “Listen,” Ava said now, when we got in the door. “I’m hoping you can do me a favor. You remember Evelyn Couture?”

  This was the rich widow from Pacific Heights whom Swift had befriended somehow, who’d shown up—with her driver—at the Havillands’ last couple of parties. An unlikely friend for Ava and Swift, but you never knew who those two would take under their wing. I figured they’d noticed she was lonely. Maybe she had no family, or
the family she had only wanted her money.

  “She’s moving out of her house on Divisadero and moving into a condominium in Woodside,” Ava said. “And she’s just overwhelmed, trying to figure out what to do with all her things. I volunteered to help her.”

  Ava never acknowledged any limitations created by being in the chair, but I had to ask her. It seemed unlikely that the house would be handicapped accessible. What was she planning to do?

  “Those Pacific Heights mansions are impossible!” she said. “Maybe she’ll have some lovely giant of a houseboy to carry me up the stairs and set me on one of her velvet couches. More likely I’ll need to drop you off. I know you’ll be amazing at calming her down. Evelyn needs help making a plan. She has so much stuff in that house, she’d never know where to start.”

  There was no houseboy, of course. Ava left me at the house on Divisadero and went to Pilates, in a building that was handicapped accessible, and did some other errands in the city—hair, brows, therapist. I spent the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon with Evelyn Couture, helping her sort through the clothes she’d be donating to an upscale resale shop, the proceeds from which would benefit the ballet. Before I left (Ava having pulled up in front to retrieve me), Evelyn presented me with a brooch in the shape of a butterfly and a pair of earrings still in their Macy’s box with the price tag attached: $14.95.

  “That’s so Evelyn,” Ava said, when I showed her the earrings. “Let’s just hope she’s more generous with her donations to our foundation. We’ve got high hopes.”

  We both knew the big moment for that would be Swift’s sixtieth-birthday party, when the Havillands would go public with their plan for free spay-and-neuter clinics in all fifty states. The Havilland Animal Centers, under the auspices of BARK.