A Better Man

by Leah McLaren

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” she says after the waiter has left.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve gone vegetarian again.”

  She gives him a dead stare. She hasn’t been vegetarian since third-year law school, and even then it was only for six months. Nick knows this but still can’t resist.

  “It’s just I was thinking about, you know, Velma at home and everything. Timing.”

  “What about it?” He slides his hand across the table, thinking this is the moment to fondle her fingers or make some equivalent gesture, but it’s dark and the breadbasket and truffle butter get in the way. “We have a babysitter, so let’s let her babysit.”

  “We are letting her babysit. It’s just a question of for how long. She’s not normally there at night. What if Foster wakes up?”

  “Then he’ll find Velma, his nanny, who he sees every day and is his second-favourite person in the entire world.”

  “You think?”

  “Yes, and she’s also certified in first aid and speaks Portuguese, Spanish and English. Says so on her CV. Don’t you guys talk?”

  “Yes, but reading a CV is different from talking. And anyway, we talk about different things.”

  “Like what?”

  Maya looks at him suspiciously. “None of your beeswax.”

  “Oh, so it’s like that, is it? The sacred pact between nanny and mommy?”

  Maya shrugs. “Let’s just say we talk about stuff. Mostly man troubles.”

  Nick is taken aback. “You mean you tell her about … us?”

  “God, no. Her man troubles,” Maya says. “She’s got enough for both of us, believe me.”

  The waiter arrives with an amuse-bouche of barbeque-flavoured corn nuts, and Maya frowns. Nick remembers why he gave up trying to please her years ago.

  “Maya, we haven’t been out for dinner in months. Can you just relax for a couple of hours? I know it’s hard to be away from the kids, but if we’re going to make things better, we’re going to have to remember how to spend time alone together. To enjoy each other’s company again. Just the two of us. Can you please try to do that for me?”

  She cracks a corn nut between her teeth and looks at him with curiosity. “You’re really trying, aren’t you?”

  Nick feels suddenly called out. Blood pounds in his ears. No, no, he tells himself. This is good. Talk about your so-called feelings. “Yes, I am,” he says.

  Maya nods and he nods back. Then she smiles and he finds himself smiling too, like he’s in one of those strange mirroring games hippie parents play with their babies.

  “So we’re trying, then, are we?” she says. She looks amused by the idea. As though he’s just suggested they buy a blueberry farm in New Zealand and she has, on consideration, found herself strangely delighted by the prospect.

  “Of course,” Nick says, then he smiles again, attempting to put a gloss on the moment. “I mean, really, when were we not trying?”

  Maya starts on the wine. By now the ground meat and sauce has arrived, and they both begin spooning savoury glup onto their brioche rolls until the bread is swimming in sop. Nick sees he has miscalculated her mood.

  “Like, um, maybe for the past three or four years? Definitely the last two,” she says. “If we’re being honest, I think we should admit that. We haven’t been trying. At least not to make things better. I think if anything”—she drifts off for a moment, eyes roaming the room again, before finding her thread and continuing—”if anything, we’ve been trying to make things worse. I don’t mean actively trashing our marriage, but neglecting it to the point of nonfeasance.”

  Nick swallows hard at the legal jargon (is she on to him?), then decides it’s just a flash of the old Maya. At the same time, he’s not sure how the conversation came to be so earnest when earnest conversation was the furthest thing from his mind in bringing her here. What exactly had he imagined would come of this date night? The first and only such night he’d suggested to his wife, outside of the odd obligatory work function, in the three years since the twins were born? He had a vague notion of liberal wine consumption overlayed with lots of tinkling laughter and maybe an accidental brush of thighs beneath the table. (Was it too much to hope she might wear a garter belt? Probably. No, definitely.) Anyway, of all the scenarios he’d imagined, a relationship talk had not been one of them. He is happy to have sex with his wife again in the service of ending their marriage, but he has no intention of talking about his feelings. His real feelings, that is. His fake feelings are another matter.

  Maya, on the other hand, seems perfectly comfortable with the way the conversation is going. Nick reminds himself to keep his eye on the ball. Happy wife, happy life. He tries to get inside the head of the kind of man who believes this. He reaches across the table again, pushing aside all obstacles, and this time finds what he’s looking for. Her fingers shrink away at first, then settle under his like a small animal panicking and submitting. Her other hand clutches at her napkin.

  “You’re absolutely right,” he offers. “We’ve been bad, haven’t we? Especially me. I know I haven’t always been the easiest person to live with, particularly since the kids. But I want you to know that I’m here now and things are about to change. I’m going to be a better man—for you, for the twins and most of all for myself. I really do want things to change, and I’m willing to go to the mat to make it happen. Do you believe me?”

  As he speaks, Maya drops her eyes to her plate, then looks up. She nods silently and does that undulating neck extension women do when they’re trying not to cry. He experiences a small and not entirely unpleasant twinge in the pit of his stomach. Empathy? No, no, he decides. Pity. Pity with a side of guilt.

  At this moment, Adam Gray appears beside their table like a harbinger of doom in a rumpled silk suit. “Well, well, if it isn’t the harvest king and his homecoming queen,” he thunders. “Out on a well-deserved date night, I see. Very good.” He smiles greedily and then kisses Maya’s hand in the unselfconscious manner of a Hungarian count. Nick cringes while his wife giggles with delight.

  “My God, how are you? It’s been forever, hasn’t it? How’s the law?” Maya looks wistful, as she always does when asking after her former profession.

  “Good, good,” says Gray, patting his chest. “Actually, horrible. Look at me—I’m a wreck. Be glad you got out when you did, Maya. You should write a book of health and beauty tips. Call it Escape from the Salt Mine.”

  Everyone chuckles but no one louder than Nick, who is laughing to mask his annoyance. What was Gray doing by validating Maya’s choice to stay home when just last week he’d said Nick’s only hope was to encourage her to get a job? He watches them catching up on professional gossip and then it hits him: Gray is using reverse psychology. The more he publically validates Maya for staying home, the more she’ll privately long to be back in the thick of it.

  As Maya chatters on about the kids and the “utter hilarity” of toddler yoga, Nick lets his mind drift slightly, toward the night’s conclusion and what awaits him there. He has sex on the brain. Now what to do about it? He knows they need to end their epic dry spell since the birth of the twins, but how best to go about quenching the Sahara Desert? He watches her talking to Gray, the way her eyes widen with recognition, then crinkle up at the corners when she gets the joke, which thankfully she always does. Nothing about her—skin, hair, the upper-lip divot where latte foam gathers—looks any different to him than the day they met. She is the same and yet utterly changed. As she teases Gray about some social transgression or other (hair thrown back, glossy lips parted to reveal the tiny gap between her two front teeth, laughter free-flowing and effervescent), Nick acknowledges how rarely he sees this version of his wife—the one whom he used to know, but who now seems off limits to him. The wife reserved for friends and strangers at cocktail parties.

  “I’d better get back,” Gray says finally, giving his bull head a swing toward the corner of the room, where a young woman with a glossy brown side b
raid cranes her swan neck at the menu. Nick pegs her at no older than twenty-five. “Working dinner with my articling student. Poor kid’s been putting in eighty-hour weeks since June. Thought she deserved some overpriced beefaroni, or whatever it is the kids are eating these days.”

  “How generous of you,” says Nick. Maya nudges him under the table.

  Gray doesn’t bother to protest, just gives a shrug of mild defeat and, before loping back to his table, says with a look Nick finds altogether too knowing, “We can’t all be happily married, can we?”

  They wait until Gray is at least eight paces away before discussing him.

  “I know we’re supposed to feel sorry for him, but I’m not sure I do anymore,” she says, twirling a piece of hair between her fingers.

  “Don’t you think he’s lonely and, I dunno, filled with a tragic sense of emptiness?”

  “Why?” Maya laughs. “Because he’s rich, successful and totally unencumbered? That sounds to me exactly what most men aspire to.”

  Nick shifts in his chair. “Not men as lucky as me,” he manages to say after an awkward pause.

  Maya, who’s been watching Gray, snaps her head back and stares at him. “Wow, you’re really laying it on thick tonight, aren’t you?” She says this a little more combatively than she seems to have intended. And for a terrible moment, Nick thinks, She knows. But then her expression blooms into a smile and she reaches languidly for her glass. He finds himself admiring, for the thousandth time, the way her arm furls out from the elbow like a ballerina’s. She nods her head toward Gray, who appears to be edutaining his date by deconstructing the wine list, bottle by bottle. “Looks like I’m not the only one getting the full charm offensive tonight.”

  Nick is keen to shift the focus. “Do you think it’s actually an Internet date? Do grown-ups really go on those?”

  Maya shakes her head. “Nah, guys like that can’t date outside their job description, let alone their firm. Trust me, I know the type.”

  Nick leans back, watching his wife watching Gray. “Do you now?” he says with mock surprise, his tone concealing a flutter of something at once prickly and pleasurable. He is thinking of the old her, the one who glided out the door to the office every day in a series of smooth wool skirt suits. A woman who watches—and is watched by—countless men he doesn’t know and will never meet.

  They’re only halfway through their platter of high-end cat sick, and Maya is toying with her glass, the edges of her expression softly blurred with wine. He suddenly knows neither of them will eat another bite. She looks up at him through her hair, which has gone sweetly mussy, and suppresses a laugh. Nick thinks, If this is the fake me, is that the real her? He flags down the waiter and asks for the bill.

  CHAPTER 8

  Maya wakes up the next morning with a pain in her face and a buzz in her head. A half-dried puddle of spit has gathered in the crease of her pillow, gluing her hair to her cheek and leaving her lips dry and sore, like the sandy edges of a bayou sinkhole. It’s not the hangover that hits her first but the dread. The sense that whatever damage was done the night before may well be irreparable now. She has a strong suspicion that her life is ruined. And as a consolation, she wishes someone would bring her a large bag of salt-and-vinegar chips.

  With this comes the realization that she is alone in the master bedroom. The twins, she remembers, were put down in their own beds and actually stayed there for once. She has a bleary memory of Nick moving them. He slept here with her, she’s sure of that, but he isn’t here now. For a moment she worries that maybe he prefers the guest bed after all this time. But then she decides that he must have gone into the office, which would not be unusual on a Sunday.

  As disorienting as it is to be alone in her bed, it’s nice not to be woken up by sweaty, restless toddlers. She sniffs the air and detects the faintly equine smell of a man. The leathery smell of body hair and fresh sweat. She tries to decide whether she has missed his smell and concludes that, in fact, she has.

  She remembers it’s Velma’s day off—a realization that would normally elicit a dim flicker of anxiety overridden by a desire to accomplish things (a day for educational board games, flash cards, rearranging winter closets, making ambitious to-do lists), but not today. The cinderblock of gloom pressing down on her chest is too heavy for that.

  But what is she so gloomy about? Surely not the fact that her husband insisted on taking her out for dinner. A real live date night! Imagine that. The two of them going out together just like a normal, functional couple trying to raise a family and fit in some “grown-up time.” Finally, Maya had thought, they could actually be the people everybody thought they were—even if only for one night. But then she’d ruined it, although she couldn’t quite remember how. Things had seemed okay at the restaurant. A little awkward—inedible hipster food—but generally all right. Then the drive home, during which she’d teased Nick for being tipsy and he’d laughed but neither of them had done anything about it. (Drunk driving was bad, she scolded herself. They were parents with responsibilities, for Christ’s sake!) And then paying Velma in crumpled bills from the bottom of her handbag (why not just add it to her monthly take-home pay?) while Nick called a taxi, revealing that he was too lazy (and hammered) to drive her home. She recalls trying to persuade Velma to have a glass of wine—a sign she and Nick were definitely over the limit, since Velma never drank on the job or even in the house as a rule. For Maya, there was always a moment in every drunken evening when, on reflection, she should have (a) shut up, (b) left the party or (c) gone to bed. And most often it was (d) all of the above. Velma’s exit, Maya now saw, had been that moment last night.

  But she hadn’t.

  Instead, Nick suggested a TUD (their university acronym for “totally unnecessary drink,” otherwise known as a nightcap) of cognac in the kitchen, and Maya rejoined with some (even more unnecessary) sloppy dancing to a Motown tune that happened to be on the late-night radio. And then, just when she figured it was time to drop the giggly pantomime and go back to behaving like the responsibly dissatisfied grown-ups they were, Nick had leaned in and kissed her. Not one of the dry, joyless pecks he occasionally dispensed while searching for his BlackBerry before leaving for work, but a real kiss. A multi-levelled communiqué that started soft and gathered momentum, like an absorbing conversation with an attractive stranger. A kiss with a view.

  All this was fine, of course. It was during the foreplay that things began to go off course. First Nick lifted her onto the counter, like in the movies, but the angle wasn’t right and her tights had to be removed—a process that involved a lot of kicking and squirming and yanking at control-top spandex. That done, they attempted to move to the sofa, but first the curtains had to be pulled shut and the lights dimmed, and by the time Nick had settled down beside her on the merciless sectional, she was feeling chilly and trying to wrap her bare legs in the mohair reading throw he was always complaining was too itchy. Then, in the vain hope of rescuing the moment, she’d attempted to give him a blow job—a skill she’d always prided herself on, aided in large part, she knew, by Nick’s legendary responsiveness. There was a time—not so long ago, in fact—when Maya had considered them exceedingly well matched on the blow-job front. It wasn’t a complicated equation: she liked administering, and Nick was an avid recipient. But it was the first time she’d gone there, so to speak, in months, if not years. While she felt a bit rusty and thick-tongued with booze at first, her old technique quickly returned, or at least she thought it did. Nick’s body seemed to disagree. He wasn’t just unresponsive; he (well, it, to be precise) actually seemed to recoil from her attentions, like a slug being poked with a stick. Something in Nick’s flinch spurred her on, encouraged her in her task, until long after it was clear that nothing would come of the exercise. They’d failed at sex in the past, but this was different. This was the first sex act between them in many months, and her self-esteem was riding on it. Nick, however, responded as though she were attempting to finalize his corpor
ate tax return. There was no communiqué down here, and if there was, the message was cold and clear: Bye-bye now. Don’t call us, we’ll call you. Please shut the door on your way out.

  Finally, Nick heaved a sigh and apologized, murmuring some self-blaming platitude in what seemed to Maya an obviously disingenuous tone. (He was drunk and tired; it was the end of a long week; and so on.) This had been her cue to throw in the towel, wipe the slobber off her chin and gamely laugh it off on her way upstairs to check on the twins. Yes, she should have smoothed her skirt and made some crack about Nick losing his mojo. And that’s what she would have done, if it hadn’t been for all the wine and the dancing and the disorienting regard (she wasn’t used to him paying her so much attention, not in a real way). But no, instead of seizing her opportunity for coolness and bringing the night to a dignified close, she found herself giving in to a competing urge, one that was unfamiliar yet strangely irresistible—and that was the impulse to fall apart. Slumped on the floor beneath him, with her forehead resting on his left knee, she began to sob. Soon the tears were sliding into the crevice of her nose, where they joined a string of egg-whitey snot that descended in a humiliating string from her nostrils onto Nick’s trousers, then puddled on the floor beneath his unmoving feet. He let her cry like that for a while—whether out of mercy or disgust, she couldn’t be sure, and at the time she didn’t care. By the time he hoisted her to her feet, Maya was inwardly despairing (could she actually have moaned aloud?) that her husband didn’t want her anymore. After all, what could be less attractive than a drunk, insecure, sobbing, unemployed mother of two? The sniffling, convulsing blubfest continued unabated as he helped her up the stairs, unzipped her dress and encouraged her to collapse, face first, on top of the sheets. She remembers nothing Nick may have said while all this was going on, only his silence, accompanied by a grim sense of purpose. His hands firm and determined, like those of a disgruntled but competent nurse.