Under the Influence (10 page)

I
had started to dread reading through the responses to my online dating profile, they were so uniformly discouraging. Then one spring day, right around the time Ava's tulips were coming out, I opened my laptop and there was a short note, different from the others.

The man who'd written it (JustaNumbersGuy was his moniker) said he'd studied my profile carefully and (“based on my rigorous analysis”) thought there was a slim possibility (“keep in mind,” he wrote, “this is a pessimist speaking”) that we might get along. Or at least, he wrote, a meeting between us might be somewhat less dreadful than the rest of them were.

It was hard to know, reading his note, whether he was a total nerd, or whether he was being funny. Possibly both.

His name was Elliot, and he was forty-three—a good age to go with my thirty-eight, it seemed to me. Divorced, no children.

“To be honest, I didn't think that was a great picture you posted of yourself,” he wrote. “I suspect it did not do you justice. But I liked your face right away, and I also get the feeling you are the type of person who downplays her good qualities. Maybe I sensed this because I'm that way myself.”

If his photograph were to be believed (as the profile pictures for so many of the men I'd met so far were not), Elliot was a nice-looking
man—even handsome, in that nerdy kind of way, basically thin, though with a hint of a belly: the kind of man who probably owns a drawerful of white tube socks on the theory that by doing so he avoids any problems of matching them up when doing the laundry. If his picture was to be trusted, he appeared to be in possession of most if not quite all of his hair. He reported that he was six feet tall. (“You mentioned that you enjoy dancing,” he wrote, “and I see you are five foot five. I trust your own petite stature won't cause you to rule me out as a dance partner, and will simply offer encouragement that this may not be a problem, since I am told my posture is not the best.”)

I smiled reading this. But not, for once, out of a sense that the author of this note appeared to be a comically ridiculous candidate for my affection or a great subject for entertaining Swift and Ava at our next dinner together. I actually
liked
the sound of Elliot.

“I'm not rich, by the way,” he wrote, “but I own a nice little place in Los Gatos, and it's unlikely I'll get fired from my job any time soon since I'm my own boss.”

He worked as an accountant, he told me. “I know,” he said. “Boring, right? Next thing you know I'll be telling you I'm interested in genealogy. Guess what? I am.”

He had been divorced for seven years, following a marriage that had lasted twelve, he went on. The good part was that absolutely no drama existed there. He and his ex-wife, Karen, remained good friends. “We just grew apart,” he wrote. “That's probably a boring thing to tell you, too, but in this case, I'd rather be boring than have one of those stories where the two people are leaving anonymous hate mail on the doorstep and dreaming up ways to murder each other.

“I am going to guess that despite your characteristic dismissal of your finer qualities, you are a good photographer,” he wrote. “I arrived at this conclusion not from your profile picture, but from a number of the images you posted on your page, that I deduce may have been taken by you.

“As for that picture of you and your friend,” he wrote, “well, what can I say? Something about the look in your eyes has caused me to return to it half a dozen times this evening. Looking at you in that photograph, I actually said out loud—though there was no one in the room but myself—‘I like this woman.' More significant, perhaps, is the fact that as I was looking at your profile, I registered an unfamiliar sensation around the edges of my lips that suggested to me that I was smiling.

“I have to tell you,” he wrote, “you are a beautiful woman.”

Maybe he's gotten me confused with Ava, I thought for a moment. Because Ava looked stunning in that picture, of course. Ava always looked stunning.

Then I read the next line of his note to me, written as if in response to my thought.

“And don't think I have you confused with your friend, either,” he wrote. “Though I'm sure she's a lovely person. But I'm talking about you, the quiet one, in possession of what I detected as a certain sadness, along with a true capacity for joy. The one on the right”—this would be me—“is the one I am hoping to persuade to have dinner with me. Soon, I hope.”

W
hen contemplating a blind date with someone encountered on a dating site, my general rule was to have a phone conversation first. You could tell a lot from a person's voice, including some things that made it clear you wouldn't want to meet him. (A lot went undetected, of course, which accounted for my many disastrous blind dates.)

But when I wrote back to Elliot after receiving that first note, he suggested that we bypass the usual phone check-in and move directly to dinner. It reassured me when he told me that he was actually busy that night (because it had begun to occur to me that maybe this was some kind of weird stalker; after all, he admitted he'd spent an entire evening clicking back to my photograph at regular intervals). I wanted a man who had friends.

“I'm tied up tomorrow, too,” he wrote, “though I'd much rather be having dinner with you. So how does Friday look?”

Friday was one of the nights Ava and Swift and I often got together, so I hesitated. Then I stopped myself. It was a little ridiculous, I knew, to turn down a dinner invitation with a totally reasonable-sounding and not-unattractive man who seemed for whatever reason to have genuine interest in me, on the chance that my married friends might decide at the last minute to include me in their plans.

“Friday's fine,” I said.

“I'd like to pick you up,” Elliot said. “But I also understand it might feel a little creepy for you to have a total stranger know your address. So let's say we meet at the restaurant this time.”

I recognized him the minute I walked in the door. Often, the men you met from dating websites barely resembled their photograph. But Elliot looked just like the profile picture he'd posted. As I approached the table he stood up. Bad posture: He'd been right about that. But he had nice hair and his eyes looked kind. He pulled out the chair for me.

“I can't help it,” he said. “I just have to tell you. I've been looking forward to this ever since I first saw your picture.”

We were the last ones to leave the restaurant that night, and when he walked me to my car he took my arm, but not in the manner of the Vietnam vet with the marriage proposal. Firmly, but tenderly. “I would like to kiss you,” he said. “You have to tell me if that's a problem.”

“Not a problem,” I said.

After, he stood there looking at me. “I want to remember this moment as clearly as I can,” he said. “Not that I'm likely to forget.”

“I had a good time, too,” I said. Normally by this point, I would long since have noted at least one red-flag issue that discouraged any future exploration of a relationship. But the only ominous thing about Elliot was the surprising intensity of his feeling for me. It made no sense that I would have an effect like this on a man. I never had before.

There was another surprising element to my evening with Elliot. For the first time since I'd gotten into the routine of my dinners with Swift and Ava, I had not spent the evening taking mental notes of all the funny and ridiculous things I could tell them about later.

Elliot asked if getting together for dinner again the next night would seem too soon. “I could pretend to be less eager,” he told me, “but I can't think why I'd do that.”

Tomorrow would be fine, I said. I had been hoping to make a trip to Walnut Creek that day, but as usual, Dwight had e-mailed me that
afternoon to say he and the rest of the McCabe family were meeting up in Sacramento to celebrate Jared's birthday. Bringing Ollie, of course.

“I don't want to scare you off by saying this,” Elliot said, “but this was the best date I ever had.”

“I need to tell you something before we go any further here,” I told him, still in the parking lot. We had covered a lot of ground over dinner but not this one large fact about me that mattered most.

“I have a son. Eight years old. He doesn't live with me, but I wish he did. I lost custody of him a little over three years ago. I wouldn't blame you if that gave you second thoughts about me.”

For a long moment, Elliot just stood there. He took his time responding. “All this tells me,” he said when he finally spoke, “is that you've had a big hard loss in your life. Like most of us, if we're honest. Next time we see each other, I hope you'll feel you can tell me the story.”

“I'm trying to fix things between Ollie and me,” I told him. “But it's a difficult situation.”

“Listen,” Elliot said, “I'm a man who prides himself on being sensible. But I'd better tell you now. I'm going to be crazy about you. I probably am already. The only thing in question for me is whether you could feel the same way back.”

A
va 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.”

E
lliot 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.