A Better Man

by Leah McLaren

  Nick nods in a way that encourages her to keep talking, and the whole story comes tumbling out of her.

  “It’s just … the thing is, I’m going a bit crazy at home, and it’s time I started bringing in some money again. I know you like the idea of me staying with the kids, being in charge of the household, but I feel like I’ve been losing myself. I think a lot of our problems in the past couple of years actually have to do with that—the fact that I’ve lost my sense of myself and my position in the world. I don’t mean that the kids won’t be a priority anymore, just that I want to have other priorities too. I’m really sorry. I know this couldn’t have come at a worse time, with you passing on that job—”

  As she talks, Maya feels Nick’s grip on her hand loosen. His face remains unreadable, and she begins to think he’s about to get angry.

  But instead of saying anything, he reaches round and pulls her head toward his. Their foreheads collide with a gentle thunk, and for a moment Nick looks at her close up, eyes shifting from right to left to take in the whole of her face. Then he kisses her gently on the cheek, which turns into a kiss on the lips, which evolves into a kiss so deep and lovely it almost seems to have a language of its own. And what it says is clear: I hear you and I understand you and everything you want is what I want.

  “So I take it you’re not angry?” Maya says finally, once they’ve had a little giggle and resumed eating.

  “Of course not,” says Nick. “Why would I be angry? In fact, I’m delighted. Did you know that you delight me?”

  A shiver runs up her spine. “No, I didn’t,” she replies. “But it’s kind of you to say so.”

  Nick rises and opens another bottle of wine. He tries to pour her some, but she covers her glass with her hand. “Big day tomorrow.”

  “Of course,” he says. He pops the cork back in, then looks at her quite seriously. “I want you to know that not only do I support you in this, but I will help out where help is needed.”

  “What do you mean?” Maya is confused. He wants to help with her work?

  “I mean around the house. With the kids. If you have to work long hours or travel, or even just go out and get drunk at a strip club with clients—because I know you’re really into that sort of thing—I want you to know that I’m going to be here, tending the home fires and all that. So you don’t need to worry about the twins missing us, because I’ll be here for them.”

  Maya is so startled by this speech she begins to laugh. The conversation could not have been going better if she’d scripted it herself in advance. She has a fizzy feeling in her throat and fights the urge to throw her arms around her husband. Instead, she stands up to clear the plates and bring out the unnecessary tiramisu. When she gets back to the table, though, she finds something is nagging at her—it’s the why of it all again. Why now? Why has everything changed? Why is he suddenly so different?

  She is about to ask him all these things, but before she can, Nick has plunged into the tiramisu and carved them each a great boozy slab.

  He catches her look and says, “What is it?”

  And once again she thinks better of things. “Nothing,” she says, shaking her head. “I guess I just can’t believe my luck.”

  The offices of Yeats and Goldblatt take up four buzzing floors of the city’s highest office tower—a building officially named after the blue-chip bank that funded it but colloquially known as the Sword for the way it dominates the skyline with pointed phallic aggression. Maya has often gazed up at the Sword from the ground and thought of all those years when she worked in a similar office, spending sixty, and sometimes seventy or eighty, hours a week toiling away high in the clouds while the rest of the city spread itself out beneath her. Amazing how quickly perfectly normal things can become quite strange, because as familiar as the business district is, she feels utterly intimidated—like a law student out for her first job interview. She remembers what Nick said to her as she was leaving this morning: “Remember who you are.” By which he meant that she must be confident in what she has accomplished—all the cases she’s won, all the clients she’s taken on, all the hours billed and the accolades in her classes at school. Even the past few years of raising children. The sleepless nights and diaper dramas and endless tests of patience involved in caring for two tiny, needy humans. All these accomplishments are hers and hers alone.

  Maya tries her best to focus on who she is as she climbs the grimy subway stairs and shoulders her way through the teeming sidewalk of black-coated men and women toward the building’s revolving doors. She can’t help feeling out of place among this army of professionals, their collars turned against the wind, eyes to the pavement, minds churning over hidden tasks. She joins them and is rushed along by the comforting current of office life.

  Gray is there to meet her at the front desk, an enormous takeout coffee in each hand. He gives her one and does a shallow bow.

  Maya experiences a clutch of gratitude. “Thanks so much, Adam. I don’t even know where to—”

  He motions for her to stop and she does.

  “How long have you been waiting?” she asks.

  “Not long,” he says. “I figured you’d be early. And I’ve been here for hours anyway, so it was time for a coffee break.”

  She checks her watch. It’s 7:45 a.m. and her interview with the partners is at eight o’clock. They take the elevator up to the twenty-third floor, and Gray ushers her into a waiting area with potted fronds and silent automatic glass doors she worries will close on her. He motions for her to take a seat and disappears down a beige corridor. She has been here once before—for her articling interview ten years earlier (they offered her a place, but she went with a competing firm)—and it all seems oddly the same. Same muted neutral walls and sofas, same softly typing twenty-something receptionist in a skirt suit offering water while she waits. Same smell of printer ink, coffee and freshly shampooed carpets. She plucks the Wall Street Journal from the periodical fan on the table and pretends to read it while trying to channel the crisp office energy. Two female lawyers clip past in identical black high heels and nude stockings, trailing rolling document cases behind them. Maya remembers what it was like to be in command of all those files and folders. The hours of research and case law and interviews that went into preparation for court, and the sensation of knowing your argument backwards and forwards, upside down and sideways. The wonderful feeling of being fantastically, ludicrously overprepared for an experience most people would find nerve-racking in the extreme. She wants to go court, to stand in front of a judge and present a well-reasoned argument—one so airtight that when her opponent tries to pick it apart, he will find himself blocked at every turn. Some people find the practice of family law depressing, but not Maya. She loves the transmutation of raw emotion into a settlement. The notion of taking a conflict and defusing it by nailing down all the lingering uncertainty. Divorce is ugly and ungainly, but her job was to simplify it by scrubbing it clean and trimming off the wobbly bits.

  Unlike most family lawyers, who tend to complain incessantly about their clients, Maya had always enjoyed the so-called human aspect of the job. Part of her role was to act as a sort of therapist to the client. People—particularly men, she had found—needed to go over and over the facts of the case, and indeed the breakdown of the marriage itself. They tended, on balance, to be mired in the past, even two or three years after the act of separation. The financial settlement, when it came, was a way for them to begin to digest the facts of a painful breakup. As a high-billing attorney at a blue-chip firm, she’d often found herself passing tissues to and patting the hands of executive alpha males as they dissolved into tears of despair and confusion while sifting through the ashes of their family life. In many cases, these men admitted that she was the first person who’d seen them cry for as long as they could remember. Instead of being uncomfortable with this level of emotional intimacy, Maya was invariably touched. Rather than approaching the job in a parasitic way, as someone who made money of
f other people’s misery, she tried her best to be a fair and supportive facilitator of an otherwise painful process. She didn’t just argue on behalf of her clients; she became their intellectual advocate and emotional rock in an otherwise cruel and impersonal system.

  She is lost in nostalgia for the job when the receptionist says, “Come right this way, Mrs. Wakefield.” For a moment she thinks of correcting her by saying “Ms.” instead of “Mrs.”—while it’s true she took her husband’s name, she still doesn’t like the title that denotes her marital status. It makes her feel old.

  The young woman leads her past banks of glazed glass office doors. When they reach the boardroom, Maya steps in on her own and lets the thick glass panel swing shut behind her. At the table are six men, all in their forties or fifties; she remembers a couple of them from her very first job interview and, later, court. She is surprised to see that one of them is Gray, but then she remembers that he’s a full partner and as such would be involved in any new hires in the firm’s family branch. A part of her is grateful he hasn’t recused himself as he might have done, but another part is mildly annoyed. Whatever happens, she doesn’t want any special treatment. As if to ensure this, she shakes the hands of all the partners at the table in exactly the same way, making eye contact and stating her name brusquely to everyone but Gray before sitting down in the empty chair at the other end of the table.

  Roger Goldblatt, the son the of the firm’s famously irascible, long-dead co-founder, doodles on a notepad with a slim silver pen as he addresses her. “So, Mrs. Wakefield, lovely to see you. I remember you well from your first interview. What makes you so sure that you want to practise law again after your—what?—two- or three-year hiatus?”

  Maya takes a breath. She’d expected this question, of course, but finds herself unnerved by the lack of preamble. Hiatuses are for wimps in the rough-and-tumble world of law. She takes another breath and allows a calm, self-contained smile to spread over her face. She reminds herself to speak slowly, not to babble on like an anxious ninny.

  “I’m glad you asked—and please call me Maya, by the way. Much as I love my family, it seems I’m not cut out for full-time cupcake baking.” A ripple of laughter swirls through the room. She relaxes slightly. “It’s not the status or the money or even the cafeteria tuna melts I miss.” More laughter. “It’s the work. I miss the cases. I miss the victory of avoiding court. And when that doesn’t succeed, I miss working hard to craft an argument and laying it out in front of a judge. I miss dealing with clients and seeing the relief on their faces when I win. And as I’m sure you remember, I like to win. My record speaks for itself.”

  A couple of the partners glance down at the papers in front of them, and Maya realizes that they must have all her numbers right there—a statistical summation of her entire worth as a lawyer.

  “But why Goldblatt’s? Why not return to your old firm?”

  “The parting was amicable”—Maya pauses to pluck a bit of lint off her cuff—”but you guys are simply the best.”

  She looks out at the table of open, attentive faces and feels a surge of confidence. One of the other partners asks what she can offer the firm now, compared to other potential associates “coming up through the ranks.” By “coming up,” of course, he means younger and unencumbered—and probably male. Like most old-world outfits, Goldblatt’s is dominated by men. The partner doesn’t mention that these associates are willing to work incredibly long hours, without the logistical encumbrance of marriage and children, but the implication is clear. Maya tells them not just what she thinks they want to hear, but what she truly believes: that she has worked and she has not worked, and after all is said and done, working is better. Better for her and better for her family. She can get up to speed on the case law in a matter of days. And the hours don’t scare her. Unlike these young turks, she actually knows what she’s getting herself into. She knows the circuit judges and the opposing lawyers. She’s hooked up and tuned in and ready to plunge back in and give her entire brain and body over to the job.

  The suits are silent as she talks, letting her state her case; some of them even smile and nod encouragingly. The words are tumbling from her mouth in fully formed paragraphs. As she talks about her love of the job, her past triumphs and her eagerness for future challenges—about how a firm like Yeats and Goldblatt can best drum up new clients and move seamlessly into the future—she looks over and sees Adam Gray watching her. And what she sees on his face is unmistakable: it is love. Not professional admiration, not loyal friendship, not a crush—it’s the real thing. If anyone else in the room were to glance at his face at that moment, they would see it too, but luckily for Maya no one does. The realization is so disconcerting that she wraps up her monologue before her train of thought derails. When she is finished the men in the room all smile. They sip their mineral water and clear their throats and make upbeat small talk for a few minutes before the discussion of scheduling comes up. Roger Goldblatt himself poses the magic question: “When would you be available to start?”

  Maya practically bounces out of the room; she would moon-walk in her heels if she could. She is on fire! She can do this. She’s already down the elevator and nearly out of the building—excited to go home and make the twins lunch—when she hears Gray shouting her name across the lobby. She turns and sees with relief that the look from the meeting has left his face (perhaps she was just imagining things?), replaced by an expression of innocent affection.

  “For all your talk of what a highly efficient, detail-oriented perfectionist you are, you left this behind.” He holds up her coat.

  Maya laughs, folding the coat under her arm. She can’t stop laughing. She rises to the tips of her toes and grins. “So how was that?”

  Gray reaches forward and actually chucks her under the chin, like a cowboy in the movies. “You done good, kid. I’ll eat my hat if we don’t hire you. Now let me take you out for breakfast to celebrate.”

  Maya hesitates—the twins. She’d been planning to rush home to do the nursery school run, but it was already too late for that. Then she looks at Gray—the tempting face of professional victory—and she shrugs and pulls on her coat.

  “Why not?” she says. And they stride out into the square, overcoats buttoned against the icy early December chill.

  CHAPTER 13

  Ambergris Caye, Belize

  The first day on the beach, Nick reads a magazine, drinks several sweet rum drinks and feels the tourniquet of muscle between his shoulder blades begin to loosen incrementally. “I haven’t been this relaxed in years!” he tells Maya over his second plate of conch tacos, before falling back on the sand. On the second day, he reads some more, drinks some more, feels his body relax some more and his mind begin to wander. Not in a meditative way, but in a restless, muttering search. A loyal dog seeking its master or a junkie in need of a fix. By the third day, the thought of spending another minute in that lounge chair listening to the surf makes him want to pull at his face and howl at the blazing sun.

  It’s not that everything hasn’t been perfect—the sun, the surf and the saltwater breeze are all around them in abundance. The hotel, a twenty-room eco-resort he’d found on a travel website recommended by his assistant, is just as advertised: secluded without being remote, luxurious without being ostentatious, simple without being austere. The beach is warm and white and devoid of hawkers selling cheap shell necklaces Maya would never wear. The room is airy and stylishly appointed in a crisp, hippy-chic fashion—bowls of bleached shells and a four-poster bed with billowing white linens. At night Nick lies awake in it thinking how great he feels, how fantastically chilled out he is. How if he weren’t here, he’d be up all night on some awful set, sitting behind the first camera and stuffing his face with cheap sushi, drinking can after can of Diet Coke, wishing the script girl would just shut the fuck up so he could concentrate. Joking around with Mitch, his long-time first AD, and trying to convince a fretful Larry that a little bit of triple overtime never kille
d anyone—certainly not the client. Yes, thank God he isn’t working. Better to be here, thousands of miles away, paying $800 a night to lie around and imagine what’s happening on set.

  Nick’s thoughts of work carry over from night to morning as they eat their holiday breakfast of papaya, passion fruit and mango with lashings of yogurt washed down with black espresso. For the first time since they arrived, Maya seems just a tiny bit uneasy. She keeps glancing at him over her coffee cup and scratching at the hair at the nape of her neck.

  Ever since she got the news about her new job, she’d been in an unassailable good mood. Chatty, easy, devoid of gloom. There were still signs of the old Maya, though. In addition to the detailed menu plan and daily activity schedule for Velma, she’d created a hand-illustrated book called Mommy and Daddy Are Going on Holiday for the twins. It told the story—in coloured-pencil drawings—of how she and Nick were going to bid the kids farewell and hop on a plane that would take them to a beach filled with sunshine and palm trees. There were even drawings of Mommy and Daddy kissing over a candlelight dinner and later snuggling in bed, which was meant to convey, he could only assume, that these were the sorts of things that happened on holiday—not that this had been the case so far. If the lack of sex was bothering Maya, though, she hadn’t given any indication of it. Perhaps she was still recovering from the flight.

  “Are you okay?” she says now with a gentle expression intended to temper the question no man welcomes. Why, he’s often wondered, do women continue to insist that their constant worrying is a form of love when all men sense its actual purpose: emotional control?

  Nick notices that his knee is bouncing under the table like a rabbit on Dexedrine and he’s been reading about the same cricket test match for the better part of half an hour.