by Leah McLaren
And years later, even after the excitement of marriage and the caffeine-fuelled blur of law school had passed (they’d married in the summer between her third and fourth years, just after Nick set up his company), the physical connection remained. It never took much for them to persuade each other in that direction.
The night is cold and inky, and it feels much later than it is, so Maya wraps herself in a blanket and settles in, abandoning a vague plan to reorganize the mudroom. She turns on the TV and flips around until she settles on a rerun of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. An indeterminate amount of time later (could be minutes, could be hours), she’s awoken by the bleep of the front-door motion sensor. She struggles to compose herself as Nick’s footsteps approach, but the wine has made her bleary, uncoordinated, a person out of focus. He enters the family room, and for a strange, fleeting moment, he looks startled to see her. It is as if he has forgotten who she is, or even that he’s married. Then his face recomposes itself into the smooth, familiar mask. His eyes shift to the nearly empty wine bottle on the coffee table, then back to her.
“Need any help getting up to bed?” He hangs his overcoat on a hook, then washes his hands in the kitchen sink before applying lemon-scented lotion.
“I’m fine, thanks.” Maya’s sitting up now, blinking and smoothing her hair into place. She stands and smacks her thighs to alert her body to the fact that it’s time to climb the stairs. “How was your day?”
“Oh, you know, just the usual office shenanigans. How was the, uh, thingy?”
“What thingy?”
Nick looks exhausted and on the spot. “I mean whatever it is that you …” He searches, then finds what he’s looking for. “I was going to say the gym. How was the gym?”
She looks at him and waits for the sting to subside. But the wine, which usually acts as an emotional force field, has somehow lost its buffering power while she slept. A coppery taste fills her mouth and her eyes begin to sting. It feels like an allergic reaction, but then she realizes that for the first time since the birth of the twins, she might actually cry in his presence.
“You should be nicer” is all she can think to say, her voice smudged with alcohol and emotion. Nick takes this in, rubs his eyes and starts to say something back but decides against it. The set of his shoulders clearly says, What’s the point? They stand in silence for a minute, until he finally gives a dry little laugh and walks out of the room without bothering to look at her again.
CHAPTER 5
Nick is relieved to see that Shelley’s breasts are every bit as remarkable as he remembered. Small and thrillingly high, they remind him of china teacups or those French ballerinas from the old Impressionist paintings.
He doesn’t look at them, of course, but instead shifts his gaze from her eyes—all squinty with laughter at his not-so-great jokes—to the restaurant’s front door, just over her left shoulder. He’d suggested the bistro around the corner from the SoupCan offices out of habit and laziness, and is now keenly aware of how this (perfectly innocent!) lunch might look should one of his colleagues happen upon it. Still, he is here and determined to enjoy it.
Shelley is telling him all about her food blog, and how she takes photos of everything she eats and immediately uploads them to her “platforms” so her followers can track her minute-to-minute consumption habits. “It’s like an open-kitchen diary philosophy,” she is saying, eyes glittering beneath her auburn fringe, “so people can taste what I’m tasting, almost in real time.” She is developing an app with a friend to “digitally replicate the experience of smell, texture and taste,” which she hopes will “give the experience an added sensory dimension.” At present she has over seven thousand followers. Nick pretends to perk up at this, though for all he knows they could be following her just to see her breasts. He certainly would. In fact, he makes a mental note to do so. She keeps talking and talking, and he finds he doesn’t mind, since it leaves him free to daydream about exactly how she would look, sitting here in this restaurant, eating bread and butter and drinking a glass of daytime Rioja with her clothes off.
She tells him a long and animated story of how, three winters in a row, she has volunteered as the cook on the canteen bus for a charity bicycle race across Africa. Local villages in impoverished regions across the continent, she explains, send their best cyclists to compete alongside North American riders and raise funds for local schools and hospitals. The trip lasts four months, stretches from Cairo to Cape Town, is “incredibly inspiring” and has “changed her life.”
Nick lets his eye slide down her throat like a finger as she talks. Shelley is sweeter and more earnest than he’d remembered, though not quite as pretty. She wanted to meet him, she says, because she has always dreamt of becoming a TV food stylist “for a day job.” Presumably she thinks Nick will help her out in this regard. He pushes this from his mind as they continue to talk because he dislikes it when people want something from him.
She is small without qualifying as short—maybe five foot five—and has an overexcited energy that causes her to flutter her hands and open her eyes very wide when trying to make a point, which is most of the time. She wears a pair of smooth black jeans and a tank top that’s so worn Nick can sense that if he were to look closely, he’d be rewarded with a glimpse of pale areolae through the nubby cotton ridges (she doesn’t seem to be wearing a bra). Her severe red bob is a shade brassier than he remembers, and it reminds him of a Christmas decoration. Not the tasteful, hand-crafted ones Maya buys but the tacky kind he grew up with in the suburbs. Also, she wears glasses—thick, black 1950s science-nerd specs that look like they might actually cause her head to buckle on her slender neck. He realizes that something about her style is meant to eschew sexuality, to throw up a roadblock to potential suitors or at least send out a signal that this girl means business. Nick isn’t bothered by this. A part of him instinctively rises to the challenge.
Shelley holds up her phone and snaps a photo of herself, tongue out, eyes closed, slurping an oyster from its shell. Then she snaps one of Nick.
“What’s the problem?” she asks when he shrinks away. Her tone immediately makes him feel ten years older than he is.
He shrugs. “I like to keep my digital footprint to a minimum, that’s all.”
“Footprint?” Shelley is scrolling through images on her phone now. “Isn’t that an environmental thing?”
“I’m not a fan of clutter—physical, virtual or emotional.”
Nick takes another look at Shelley, this one openly appraising. He makes a viewfinder with his fingers, Hollywood director–style, and watches with pleasure as her posture corrects.
“You know what?” he tells her. “I think you ought to be one of those people who cook on TV.”
Shelley presses her lips together and rolls her eyes, but he can see she’s delighted. She takes a long sip of wine. “You mean like on MasterChef?”
“No, no. I mean like one of those shows hosted by women who just kind of float around a kitchen sticking their fingers in everything and licking them.”
Shelley laughs, head back, giving him a clear view of the muscles contracting in her milky white throat. “But those women can’t cook—not really. And I want to be a real chef, not some culinary spokesmodel.”
Nick leans back. “Maybe so, but you make people hungry. You should capitalize on that somehow.”
Shelley smacks his knee, mock offended.
“Ha! That’s almost disgusting!”
Nick’s raises his hands like he’s been busted by the police and has nothing to hide. “How so? I just have a healthy appetite, that’s all.”
This is about as dirty as it gets—for now. Less than an hour later, Nick’s back at the office sitting in a production meeting to discuss possible locations for his latest spot: a three-part narrative smartphone ad about a hot young couple flirting, fighting and making up—all by phone, text, email and instant messages. He’s particularly proud of the log line: CurvePhones—so you’ll never feel alone
again. It’s a lie, of course, but a beautiful one. All the best slogans are.
There are five of them around the boardroom table—Nick, Ben, the production manager, the location scout and Larry, who is flipping through a book of location photos while chewing noisily on a peanut protein bar.
“Didn’t you see anything more, I dunno, swank?” Larry asks the scout, crumbs speckling his chin. Larry has an endearing habit of demanding that everything be classier in the most vulgar possible way. “The actors are kids—but they’re rich kids. Don’t forget this is a high-end smartphone. We can afford to go aspirational on the shag pad here. In fact, I think it’s pretty much imperative.” He glances at Nick, who gives an almost imperceptible dip of his jaw. It is his habit not to talk in the first half of any meeting, even—indeed especially—if he’s in charge of it. That way when he does open his mouth, people actually seem to care.
Larry, meanwhile, continues yakking on in his usual fashion, pushing papers around the table, gesticulating like an angry silverback. On Nick’s left, Ben is taking notes, which he will later type up and email to everyone at the table. Nick is comforted by this, because it means he doesn’t actually need to listen.
He sifts through the images of antiseptic condo kitchens, fluffy bedroom suites and light-flooded lounging rooms. An industrial loft is perfect except for its floor-to-ceiling bookshelves (too intellectually intimidating for the client); an Edwardian brick house is dismissed as “too grown-up” and a gleaming ultra-modern condo “too clinical.”
Just as Nick is beginning to feel almost as agitated as Larry is acting (why can’t these people ever find anything new and fresh?), he comes across a printout of an airy, light-drenched space with white walls, an eclectic mix of mid-century furniture and ragtag antiques, a baby grand piano and a distant view of the water. In the corner is a jumble of musical instruments for children, the wooden, painted kind that Nick remembers playing with thirty years earlier—tambourine, xylophone and drum set creep into the frame. Art books are piled on the floor. Worn oriental carpets on barnboards. Oil paintings lean against the wall. Everything about the space suggests a kind of sophisticated domestic peace to Nick. He taps the corner of the photo on the table. “What about this one?”
The production designer—a slim, soft-spoken man with a head of trimmed, prematurely white hair—reaches over, pinches the photo between his fingers and gently, but not without some effort, tugs it out of Nick’s hand. “Sorry, Nick. Not sure how that even slipped in there,” he says, shoving the photo in the outside breast pocket of his slim black blazer. “It’s a place I’m using for another job, starting next week. A family show.”
“Give it here,” Larry says, plucking the photo from the designer’s pocket. “Oooh, I like it. Just the sort of slice of heaven we need. What’s the other job? Tell me their budget. I’m sure we can trump them. Have the owners signed anything?”
The designer frowns, his loyalties clearly torn. “I’m afraid it’s fully booked. It took us ages to find it. I really can’t—”
Larry leans forward, rubbing his hands together and staring straight into the production designer’s face. He actually licks his lips. “Our director prefers that location,” he says, tapping a thick buffed fingernail on the image. “The question now isn’t if but how you are going to get it for him.”
The designer shifts in his seat as though his ass is suddenly itchy, then glances over at Nick, who, despite feeling bad for the guy, betrays nothing. In moments like this, he’s learned to let Larry be the heavy. His partner loves a good test of loyalty. The designer rubs his face and thinks, then rubs his face some more. Finally he settles on something he can say.
“Maybe if we did night shoots … I could try to arrange it with the owners?” He looks pained.
But Larry is shaking his head. “Nah, fourteen nights in a row with union turnaround time? My girlfriend would kill me. I’d kill me. My vampire days are over, man.”
For a moment this is the end of the discussion, but then Nick reaches over and plucks the photo out of Larry’s hand. He takes one more look at it and knows that’s where he’s shooting the spot. “I don’t mind supervising,” he says.
“But you’re directing. Who’s going to shut you down?” Larry says.
“I’m fully capable of producing myself—after midnight, that is.”
Larry leans back and considers Nick with a smirk. “Fourteen days of all-nighters just because you like the look of the place? What kind of workaholic perfectionist are you, anyway?”
Nick shrugs. He thinks of last night, finding Maya in a bleary heap on the sofa. The empty bottle of Barolo. The scornful look in her eyes when he woke her. “I just like the look of the place,” he says. “I don’t mind working nights. Nights are when all the best stuff comes out.”
Half an hour later Nick is back in his office, sifting through head-shots of model-slash-actresses (Larry is determined to find a girl with a “classy high school French teacher look”), when Ben knocks on the frosted-glass partition that separates him from the rest of the staff.
“What can I do for you, son?”
Ben arcs his neck around the doorframe at a jaunty angle, causing his linen scarf to fall away from his throat. “There’s a very large and scary man here to see you,” he stage whispers. “He seems awfully serious.”
Gray appears, lugging a wheelie briefcase that’s so stuffed full of documents it looks about to burst into a cartoon paper whirlwind. He falls back in a chair without being invited, releases a noisy gust of air, undoes a button and gives his tie a two-finger yank. “This place isn’t actually an office—it’s some kind of futuristic money-laundering front, right? Those replicants out there pretending to type on their shiny laptops don’t even look real.”
Nick grins. “Busted. Now to what do I owe the pleasure of an unannounced visit from the city’s busiest bloodsucker?”
“I prefer the term ‘judicial ambidexter,’ thanks.” Gray’s gaze passes over the smooth, clean lines of Nick’s office. For a moment Nick sees it through his friend’s eyes. The vast white-lacquer desk, concrete floors and floor-to-ceiling plate glass. A few high-gloss modern art books are stacked horizontally and at odd angles on a shelf “for inspiration.”
“Your office is very American Psycho. I assume that’s the image you’re trying to project?” Gray coughs at his joke. “Sorry. It’s my walking pneumonia. Chronic, not contagious. Doc says it won’t clear up till I’ve chucked the ciggies for three years straight. Can you believe that?” He reaches into his pocket, pulls out his toy smoke and gives it a long, hard pull, then blows a vapour ring into the air between them. “Twenty-six days clean, not counting my birthday,” he says. His face drops into seriousness. “Listen, I was just in the neighbourhood—had a client meeting around the corner—so I thought I’d stop in and share with you, confidentially, some thoughts I’ve been having on your, uh, situation.” He reaches into his briefcase, pulls out the calfskin document case and hands it back to Nick. “I thought you’d prefer it if I delivered you the bad news in person.”
Nick opens the file and sees that Gray has paper-clipped an extra page of scrawled calculations to the top of it. He casts his eyes down at the columns of numbers. Beside them in Gray’s tight, unforgiving handwriting are a series of headings like “family home,” “lake house,” “daycare and school fees,” “nanny salary, taxes and overtime,” and more alarmingly, “spousal support,” “child support,” “equalization of family income,” “upfront cash settlement,” “legal fees” and “payments in perpetuity.” He runs his eyes down to the bottom of the page and settles on a single figure circled heavily and underlined for effect. Its effect on him is, quite literally, staggering. He feels as if someone has wound up and slugged him in the stomach with a kettle bell. His vision goes fuzzy and a strange static invades his head, like a radio on high volume between stations.
All my things, Nick thinks. All my beautiful things.
Gray, meanwhile, has adopted his
usual sit-back-and-wait-for-the-client-to-absorb-the-bad-news position. He’s leaning back in his chair, tie descending in waves over his barrel chest, scrolling through the never-ending flood of messages streaming into his phone. After a minute or so, he looks up at Nick with his unshockable basset-hound eyes. “Figures aren’t exact, of course—just a ballpark estimate based on the Divorce Act and my many years of experience.”
Nick finds he has to rub his tongue against the roof of his mouth to generate a film of lubricant before he can get any words out. “So this is … normal?”
“Generally speaking, yes.”
“But don’t people get divorced all the time?”
Gray nods with a certain degree of satisfaction. “Sure. People go broke all the time too. If you’re looking for numbers, the current national rate’s just over a third of marriages—that’s down from 50 percent in the mid-1980s, right after no-fault divorce was legalized, though I find that people still cling to that statistic. People who are getting divorced, that is. It’s comforting to feel normal.”
“But how do they afford it?”
Gray shrugs. “They don’t! This is what I’ve been trying to explain to you, my friend. If you have money, divorce is expensive. Why do you think I’ve got an offer in on a condo in Palm Beach? It’s going to cost you dearly. Which is why, if you’re interested in keeping the trappings of your precious lifestyle, I suggest you find a way to work out your problems. Try counselling, take a holiday. Join a swingers’ club, for fuck’s sake. I don’t care. Just stay married and save yourself the cash and your kids the therapy.” Gray begins buttoning up his overcoat and hoisting himself out of the chair.
Nick motions for his friend to stay put. He is not so easily deterred. Gray must know this, because he sinks back down in his chair, letting his coat flap open. Nick picks up a pen and makes some scratches beside the list of figures. The bridge of his nose burns the way it does when he’s thinking too hard.
