Under the Influence Read Free

position in her affections, but she had this uncanny ability to recognize when a person needed rescuing, too.
    Not just me, though I came to occupy a unique position with Ava, but also strangers. I could be out with her someplace, having lunch atsome little restaurant (her treat, naturally) and she’d see a man in the parking lot, sifting through the trash, and a minute later she’d be talking to the waitress, handing her a twenty-dollar bill and asking her to bring the man a hamburger and fries and a root beer float. If there was a homeless person standing by the side of the road with a sign, and that person had a dog, Ava always pulled over to give him a handful of the organic dog treats she kept in a large tub in the back of her van.
    She’d made friends with a man named Bud who worked at a flower shop where we stopped in for the roses and gardenias—masses of them—that she liked to keep in a bowl next to her bed. Then we didn’t see Bud for a while, and she found out he’d been diagnosed with cancer, and she was at the hospital that same afternoon with books and flowers and an iPod loaded with the soundtracks to Guys and Dolls and Oklahoma, because she knew how much he loved show tunes.
    She didn’t just go see Bud that one time, either. Ava followed up. I used to say about Ava that she was the most loyal friend a person could ever have. If Ava took a person on as a project, she was there for life.
    â€œYou’ll never get rid of me,” she told me once. As if I’d ever want to.

4.
    I met the Havillands around Thanksgiving, at a gallery opening in San Francisco for a show of paintings made by emotionally disturbed adults. I was moonlighting to make a little extra cash, working for the caterer. I had turned thirty-eight two months earlier, had been divorced five years, and if you’d asked me that day to name one good thing about my life, I would have been hard-pressed to come up with an answer.
    That gallery opening was an odd event, a fundraiser for a mental health foundation. The majority of the people in attendance that night were the emotionally disturbed artists and their families, who also seemed a little disturbed. There was a man in an orange jumpsuit who couldn’t look up from the floor and a very small woman in pigtails and a great many plastic barrettes clipped to her bangs, who talked to herself nonstop and periodically whistled. Not surprisingly, Ava and Swift stood out in the crowd, though Ava and Swift would have stood out in any crowd.
    I didn’t know their names yet, but my friend Alice, who was working the bar, did. I noticed Swift first, not because he was conventionally handsome, or even close to it. A person might actually have described Swift as one of the homelier men she’d ever seen, but there was something fascinating about his homeliness—something primal and wild. He had a compact, muscular body and crazy dark brown hair that stoodout in various directions. He had a dark complexion and large hands, and he wore blue jeans—some very well-cut brand, not Gap or Levi’s, and his hand rested on the back of Ava’s neck in a way that spoke of more intimacy than if he’d been touching her breast.
    He was leaning close to Ava, saying something in her ear. Because she was sitting, he was bending over, but before he spoke, he had buried his face in her hair and lingered there for a moment, as if breathing her in. Even if he had been here alone, I would have recognized him as the kind of man who would never have noticed or paid attention to me. Then he was laughing, and he had a big laugh, more like a hyena than a person. You could hear it all the way across the room.
    I hadn’t spotted the wheelchair at first; I thought she was just sitting down, but the crowd parted and I saw her legs, immobile, in her silver silk pants, the exquisite slippers that never touched the floor. You wouldn’t call her beautiful in the usual