“Just because I asked you to help Evelyn out today, I don’t want you to think that I don’t recognize your professionalism as a photographer,” Ava said as we were driving back to Portola Valley from the city. “This book you’re making for us, it’s going to be a real artwork. Today was just greasing the wheels. You know the kind of thing you sometimes need to do, when people have a lot of money and you want to keep them happy.”
33.
“I have these friends,” I had told Elliot the first night we met. “Wonderful people. The best friends I ever had. They sort of took me under their wing. They’re like my family.”
The weekend we went to Mendocino I had told him the whole story about what happened with Ollie. That terrible moment in the courtroom when it felt as if the building were crashing down over me, and after, packing my son’s belongings in cardboard boxes and trash bags. My worries about Dwight losing his temper with Oliver and Cheri ignoring him. My hope of someday—when the lawyer was finally paid off—hiring a new attorney, a better one, and trying to get the custody order changed. But all that seemed like an impossible goal.
“You’re not the first person on earth to get a DUI,” Elliot said. “You go to AA. You don’t drink anymore. Can’t you at least bring your son over to your apartment sometimes?”
“I keep asking, but Dwight never allows Ollie to spend the night at my place,” I said. “It’s like going to the principal’s office. Every time I stand on Dwight’s doorstep to see Ollie, I feel like this pathetic loser.”
“Never mind what they think about you,” Elliot said, “so long as you get to spend time with your son.”
“But Ollie never seems to want to see me anymore,” I said, quieter now. “I think he’s angry at me. Even though he’s not close with his father, I’m the one he blames.
“Then there’s the whole thing about the Sacramento relatives,” I continued. “He’s always getting invited to these elaborate birthday parties on weekends. Bouncy houses and magicians and trips to a water park.”
“One thing Ollie doesn’t get over there,” Elliot said—he took my hand here—“is you. He might not even know it yet, but he needs his mother. Once you get to spend some real time with him again—not just an hour here or there—you can rebuild his trust.”
An idea had occurred to me, in fact: something that would entice Ollie to make an overnight visit, if his father okayed it and we could find a weekend when he wasn’t all booked up with social engagements. I’d bring him to Swift and Ava’s.
In the years since my marriage had ended, I’d come to feel that what I offered Ollie now—because it didn’t come with the trappings of family life—was no longer enough. But at the Havillands’, family life was always going on. I knew the house on Folger Lane would be just about irresistible to an eight-year-old boy, with the pool and all the things Swift had bought for Cooper when he was a kid: the jukebox, the pinball machine, the professional-quality air hockey table, the DJ turntables and mixing board. What were a bunch of PlayStation games and a Wii compared to that? And I could offer my son Ava and Swift—Swift in particular, who was in certain ways just like a boy himself.
Ollie would love Swift. And as a boy who had asked for a puppy since he was three years old, I knew he’d love the dogs. As the son of a father who always seemed to be yelling at him for not cleaning up his room, Ollie would love the relaxed, easy way life went on Folger Lane, where a person’s one responsibility was to have fun.
The next day, over lunch in their garden, I asked the Havillands if I could bring Ollie over one weekend day. “I’d love for you to meet him,” I told them. “I know he’d love it over here. And he’d love you.”
No need for convincing. “It’s about time we had a kid over here again,” Swift said. “With my boy off at that expensive business school of his.”
“We have a kid here,” Ava said. “I’m looking at him. What Swift really means is, he could use a playmate. So by all means bring Ollie over, Helen. The sooner the better.”
That night I called my ex-husband to suggest that Ollie spend the night with me the following weekend. “If you want to ask Oliver, be my guest,” he said. He put our son on the line. “Your mother has something to ask you,” he said, handing over the receiver.
”I have these friends who’ve got a pool,” I told Oliver. It was a bribe, and I knew that, and I didn’t care. “Also they’ve got a boat. I was thinking it might be fun, if you came over here next weekend, we could spend some time over there. Maybe have a cookout or something.”
“I don’t know how to swim,” Ollie said. His voice was flat, wary, as it nearly always was now when I talked with him.
“It could be a good opportunity to work on that,” I said. “And they have dogs.”
He hesitated.
“Three of them,” I said. “Their names are Sammy and Lillian and Rocco. Sammy loves playing Frisbee.”
Partly I hated it that I was using the Havillands and their dogs as bait this way. But I just wanted to get Ollie back with me, one way or another, someplace where we could settle in with each other a little.
“Okay,” Ollie said.
We set a date for the following weekend. I’d be picking Ollie up Saturday morning, bringing him over to Ava and Swift’s. Swift would grill burgers. Ava would make her homemade ice cream. There was no telling what else Swift would come up with, but I knew it would be something Ollie had never experienced before, something wonderful.
What I didn’t feel I could do—because I didn’t want one thing to go wrong, or risk upsetting Ollie—was include Elliot. I was nervous telling him, but he said he understood.
“You’re wise not to introduce your son to the man in your life until you feel really sure of where you’re headed,” Elliot said. The man in my life. He was calling himself that.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m a patient man. Meeting Ollie means a lot to me. I want to do this right. I plan to be in your life—in both of your lives—for a long time.”
34.
The weekend came.
I changed four times before making the drive to Walnut Creek to pick my son up at his father’s house. Dress, shorts, dress again, jeans. In the end I decided that the best idea was to look as if I hadn’t been trying so hard, which was what brought me to the jeans. I had also noted, the last time I’d attended one of Ollie’s games, that his stepmother, Cheri, appeared to have put on weight, so I liked it that I was thinner than usual, myself, and definitely slimmer than the woman for whom my husband had left me.
“I hate it about myself that I still care about looking good when I go over there,” I told Ava.
“You’re human,” she said. “Look at Swift and me. I don’t have a doubt in the world that he adores me, but on the rare occasions when I know we’re going to run into the monster woman”—this would be Swift’s first wife, Valerie, Cooper’s mother—“I go and do something crazy like get my hair blown out.
“It’s not about anything between Swift and me. It’s about me and the ex-wife,” she offered. “Same as it is for you, probably. You probably want to look good around your ex-husband, but more than anything I bet you just want to look better than his wife. And make sure she notices that.”
“I hate how women can get with each other,” I said. “It’s like we never graduated from junior high.”
“You know one of the things I love about our friendship?” Ava said. “There’s none of that kind of crap between us. I never worry about you that way. We don’t have this sick competition going on. And I know you’re not after my husband the way so many other women are. With you, it’s just not an issue.”
I knew this was supposed to be a compliment, but thinking about what she’d said as I drove along the freeway to pick up my son, I couldn’t help but feel, as I often did, small and colorless. So invisible I could be jumping off a diving board naked and the most sex-obsessed man I ever met wouldn’t even look up.
There was one who would, though. Elliot. He wa
sn’t like Swift, but to him, for some reason, I was the most desirable woman on the planet.
“I’m not going to be the kind of jerk who calls you a dozen times a day,” he said to me, on one of the many occasions when he did call me. “But I just want you to know, that’s how often I feel like calling. Not to mention how often I think about you. Which is constantly.”
We had spent the night together two nights in a row that week, but now we wouldn’t be seeing each other all weekend.
“I might be an idiot in some ways,” he told me, “but one thing I’ll never do is interfere in your relationship with your son. That’s the most important thing in the world for you.”
I kissed him then. One thing I could always count on from Elliot (in fact, there were many) was his understanding.
“I just want you to know,” he said. “I’ll be missing you like crazy this weekend. I’ll probably have to drown my sorrows in rereading the tax code, or watching every Thin Man movie.”
That was Elliot for you, I thought. It could be the most beautiful day outside, and he’d be happy holed up in his study with the blinds down, watching old movies or working on his laptop. Whereas someone like Swift would be off on his motorcycle. Or taking a seminar on tantric sex. Or just practicing it.
I registered a small, tight feeling then, like a constriction on my heart. When a relationship was really good, you didn’t think critically about your partner the way I was inclined to do. You didn’t compare him to your friend’s husband, or find yourself observing, as he stood there in his old bathrobe, making the coffee, that he really did have terrible posture and a poochy belly. Or that the bathrobe was made out of this cheap kind of terry cloth, the kind your friend’s husband would never be caught dead wearing.
But there was this other part, and it confused me: Hearing Elliot say how much he’d miss me that weekend, it occurred to me that I would miss him, too. As much as this was true, I also felt a kind of relief that Elliot wouldn’t be around for my weekend with my son. If he were, I’d be worrying about what the Havillands thought about him.
And who was I, anyway? I, who owned an equally unstylish bathrobe, and probably looked as ridiculous in mine as he did in his. I, who also loved old movies, and would have liked to spend a whole afternoon—even a sunny one—watching three in a row with him. If I had felt more confident about Elliot’s ability to be enough for my son, I could have suggested that he be the one—he, and not Swift—who could come along with us on fun excursions and cook out together, to help Ollie get past that hard, bitter place he inhabited, in which he viewed his mother as a person who’d abandoned him. I would have chosen Elliot, not Swift, as the man to hold out to my son that weekend with the message: See, you can have a good day with your mother. And if there’s one, there can be more.
But the truth was, I knew my son wouldn’t be that impressed with Elliot. The lure for Ollie would be Swift and the picture of life on Folger Lane. The pool, the dogs. But mostly Swift.
At the time, I admitted none of this—not even to myself. As guilty as I felt for looking critically at Elliott, I felt equally guilty for being as contented with him as—more and more, when we were alone together—I was. Sometimes, now—remembering all Ava had told me—I found myself worrying that there might be something wrong with me for being so satisfied with someone so seemingly ordinary as Elliot. As if I had made the choice to have a smaller, lesser life. Opting for simple, uncomplicated contentment over large and extraordinary passion.
Don’t settle, Ava had said. When I was with Elliot, I didn’t feel I was doing that. But every time my car pulled up in front of the house on Folger Lane, the doubts returned.
35.
Cheri was on the phone, as she often was, when I got to my ex-husband’s house to pick my son up for our weekend together—the first in over three years. My son’s stepbrother, Jared, sat on a booster seat in front of a half-eaten Pop-Tart, gesturing with an uncapped felt-tip pen. Seeing me in the door, Cheri pointed in the direction of the living room, where I could hear the sound of cartoons. Dwight was out golfing, probably. Ollie was on the couch in his pajamas. He looked pale, and his neck, in the stretched-out pajama top, seemed skinny and pinched, birdlike. There was a bowl of cereal on the coffee table and a bunch of toys on the floor that must have belonged to Jared. My son didn’t look up.
It was never my style to make some big, dramatic entrance, even when I had been aching to put my arms around him. I’d learned, over the course of the sad gray months, then years, since he’d moved away to Walnut Creek, that it took Ollie a few hours—sometimes as long as a day—to get comfortable with me again after we’d been apart. It no longer surprised me as it first had to see his blank, impassive expression when I came to pick him up. I knew that when I hugged him, his body would be taut and wary. Sometime later, if I was lucky—right around the time I had to say good-bye—he’d fold into me in the old familiar way, and I’d glimpse for a moment the way it had been before between us. Then it would be time to bring him home, and I’d feel the armor come up.
“Hey, Oll,” I said. “Good to see you.” I lowered myself onto the floor beside him.
He was sucking his thumb, a habit I knew he was trying to break because kids at school teased him about it. When he was alone, or anxious, he reverted to his old ways.
“Want me to help you get your stuff together?” I said. I could be irritated at Cheri, or Dwight, for not having taken care of this, but what was the point?
“I want to finish my show.”
I sat down next to him on the couch, resisting the impulse to pick him up, to press him up against me. I rubbed his back. Ran my hand over his hair. Sometimes, when I came to pick him up, he’d have a buzz cut—for convenience, I figured—but this time Ollie was overdue for a trip to the barbershop, and his toenails were long. He looked like a boy whose mother had not been watching out for him as closely as she should.
Although Ollie had been going back and forth between his father’s house and my apartment for three years now, somehow we’d never gotten around to buying him a real suitcase or duffel bag for his stuff. With Cheri on the phone still, I reached under the sink for a plastic trash bag to gather his belongings for the weekend.
Two sets of underwear. Two pairs of socks. In the old days, when he lived with me, we used to make a game of matching the pairs, but now they were all thrown in the drawer together. All white. Cheri probably found that easier than keeping track of all the interesting designs—cars, dinosaurs, Transformers—that I used to buy for him.
I reached in the drawer for his Boston terrier shirt that he loved, though it was too small now, and a couple of others—one long-sleeved, one short.
“We need to bring your swim trunks,” I told him. “At the friends’ house where we’re going, they’ve got a pool.”
“Nobody ever showed me how to swim,” he said. The implication was clear enough: I should have taught him.
“I’ll be in the water with you,” I said. “They’ll have a noodle.”
“You said they have a dog,” he said. Wary as usual.
“Three of them.”
“Do they get cable?” he said.
“Wait till we get there,” I told him. “We’ll be having way too much fun to watch TV.”
“I was going to watch a show about robots,” he said. His voice had a quietly resentful tone I knew well. As if every wrong thing in the world right now was my fault.
“Cheri has a DVD player in her van,” Ollie said, once he’d buckled himself into the backseat of my Honda. I hated it that the law now required children to sit in the backseat, instead of up front next to you, where you could talk. Evidently this was safer, but driving this way, with Ollie behind me, I always felt more like a chauffeur than a mother.
“Well, I prefer to have a conversation,” I said. “I haven’t seen you in two weeks. I want to hear what’s going on at school. What’s Mr. Rettstadt been teaching you lately?”
“Nothing.”
&
nbsp; “I don’t believe that. Tell me one thing.”
“Blah blah,” he said. “Blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blabaddy blabaddy bladda bladadda blah.”
“I went to the library,” I told him. “I got a stack of books for us. There’s one about insects.”
“I hate insects.”
That didn’t used to be so, back when he lived with me, when we’d spent the better part of an hour studying an anthill. But this was not a point to win.
“There are other books,” I told him.
“I hate reading.”
In the end, he fell asleep on the drive. I had thought we might stop at a park we sometimes went to, where he liked to ride his scooter, but by the time we made it across the bridge it was past noon, and I knew Ava would have lunch ready for us, so I headed straight for Folger Lane.
“I think you’ll like these friends,” I said when he woke up, a mile or so from their house. “They’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”
I hated the sound of my own voice, saying this stuff. I sounded like a flight attendant.
“Ava, the wife, can’t walk,” I told him. “She has a wheelchair. She’s got a special car that lifts her up into the seat.”
“What time is it?” Ollie said. Thumb in mouth then. Eyes glassy, staring out the window. “When do we go home?”
Pulling into their driveway, I was thinking I’d made a terrible mistake. My son would not allow himself to have a good time. Ava and Swift would try their best, but later, after we left, they’d look at each other and say, “Thank God that’s over.” They’d be kind, but agree not to ever invite us over again. They might even come to the sad but obvious conclusion that it was probably for the best that I did not have custody of my son.
Then Ava was throwing open the door for us. Lillian came right over to Oliver and started running around in circles the way she always did when she met someone new, and Sammy wagged his tail, making a happy yipping noise. But the big surprise was Rocco, who usually growled at everyone who wasn’t Ava, but appeared to take an immediate liking to my son. From the moment Ollie walked in the door, Rocco was licking his hand and following him.
Under the Influence Page 13