A Better Man

by Leah McLaren

  Jacob Brooks rocks back on his heels, blown as if by an invisible wind. When he turns, Maya can see a terrible blankness in his expression. It’s the face of a man who has not yet grasped the events that will change his life forever. Uptown Girl spins on her kitten heels and gives Maya a wincing smile, her fists crunched into little balls of joy. “Thank you, Your Honour,” she squeaks.

  The judge watches all this without amusement.

  “You do realize that you’ve rewarded her bad behaviour?” Jacob Brooks says plaintively, loud enough for the entire court to hear. But the judge is already banging his gavel and gathering up his robes to leave.

  Maya pleads, “Your Honour, my client is being punished for his ex-wife’s refusal to seek mediation or come to an equitable solution. Surely the existing custody agreement best reflects the needs of the child: to have both parents fully involved. Studies show—”

  But the judge, who is now standing, cuts Maya off with a raised hand. “You can keep your studies, Ms. Wakefield.” He pauses to look at Jacob Brooks, who is standing limply before him, unmoving, as if he might stay there until reality sets in. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, Mr. Brooks. Your lawyer here is certainly determined to earn her keep. But that’s my final ruling, and nothing will change it. Now the two of you go home and do your son a favour by never showing your faces in this courtroom again.”

  And with that, the judge sweeps out. Once he is gone Uptown Girl makes no secret of her celebration. She shrieks and throws her arms around her lawyer, oblivious to her ex-husband’s despair. Three feet away, Maya and Brooks pack up their files as if in a parallel universe. As they leave, Maya feels the energy draining from her body and the old exhaustion crashing in.

  “Don’t worry, we can challenge this once the dust settles,” she begins, but Jacob Brooks is already shaking his head.

  “I’m broke,” he says. “And tired.”

  “I’m so sorry” is all she can think of to say.

  He shrugs, back under control now. “You did your best. No need to apologize.”

  They shake hands grimly and go their separate ways.

  In the public bathroom, Maya retches once at the sink before splashing her face with cold water.

  That night, in her furnished hotel suite, Maya orders the twins a pizza from room service and then puts them both down in her king-size bed. They’re all back to sleeping together since leaving home. She wakes up a little after nine with a start—lights blazing, still in her office clothes, a copy of Walter the Farting Dog open on her chest.

  The suite is comfortable enough, with its triple-ply carpet, ruffled drapes and regular maid service, but she just can’t relax. She stares at the garish damask wallpaper, wide-eyed and disoriented, then wanders into the adjoining room and tries to read a magazine. Minutes later she finds herself creeping around the place, checking behind potted ferns and chintz draperies. She’s not even sure what she’s looking for. Every time the phone beeps with a text message these days, she has the same sensation of dread—a premonition that terrible news is heading her way. Now that she’s had her own bad news and acted on it, she supposes the dread is just a rational reaction to a world in which nothing can be trusted.

  Because of all this, the knock on the door both startles and makes sense to her. She looks at her phone. It’s not even ten, so it’s probably the maid asking to turn down the beds. Either that, or it could be Nick. She thinks of the last time she saw him, standing in his bathrobe on the steps of the house on Christmas Day, and it makes her heavy with anger and guilt. She smooths her hair with her palm and opens the door.

  Gray is standing outside in a snow-dusted overcoat. In the narrow, wallpapered hallway, he looks even bigger than he actually is. A bottle of champagne is in the crook of his arm.

  “Hey, kid,” he says, squeezing her shoulder firmly. “My condolences on your first big loss. It happens.”

  For a moment Maya is confused, but then she realizes he’s talking about court today. She smiles a weary thank you and looks down at her outfit: a skirt suit accessorized with a pair of UGGs and a ratty cardigan. “I’m not really in a state to entertain.”

  In truth, she’s been studiously avoiding Gray ever since his bombshell at the Christmas party—taking the fire stairs to avoid passing his office and arranging to be in court during the weekly partners’ meetings. She’s angry and deeply unnerved. Some days it feels as if Gray had reached in and rummaged through her insides. The information about Nick was difficult to process in itself, and Gray’s subsequent declaration of love was—and is—just too much for her. She feels that if she focuses on it even for a second, the centre will not hold. She wants to let him in—the company of an old friend is just what she needs—but to do so would risk sundering her entire, Scotch-taped-together world.

  Gray holds out the green glass bottle fogged from the cold. She sees that it’s good champagne, the proper French kind with microscopic bubbles. “It’s important to mark these occasions, I’m afraid. The losses as well as the wins. They’re all the same. There’s some Buddhist saying about that, I’m pretty sure. Anyway, let’s drink. Firm tradition.”

  Maya lets him in and they sit on the overstuffed sectional in front of a muted episode of Law and Order. Gray goes to the kitchen and fills two tumblers with bubbly. Then he unzips his enormous briefcase and pulls out a plastic bag with several Styrofoam containers that he lays out on the suite’s dining-room table. “Barbequed Peking duck from Hoo Lee Gardens—best in Chinatown, if you ask me,” he says.

  Maya watches the feast being laid out and feels her stomach clench. In the past few weeks she hasn’t really eaten much other than cheese sandwiches from the firm vending machine and chicken Caesar salads from room service—all dietary rules have gone out the window—so the sight of a proper dinner overwhelms her. “You didn’t have to do this,” she says. “It’s all kind of wasted on me anyway.”

  Gray turns her by the shoulders and frogmarches her to the table. Then he scoops rice onto her plate, followed by glistening mouthfuls of sweet, fatty duck and garlic-steamed greens, while she sits gratefully sipping the cold stream of French bubbles.

  “Thank you,” she says numbly.

  Gray barely looks at her. He’s busy topping up their glasses. Finally he sits down and smiles.

  “I’m so proud of you,” he says.

  Maya waves her hand in front of her face. “Why? I’m a fool. And now a loser.”

  He shakes his head so hard she thinks his ears might come flying off. His hair is wet with melted snow and he looks like a Labrador fresh from the lake.

  “On the contrary, my dear girl. You are as clever as they come. You just have an open heart.”

  They are eating now, both of them. Maya is suddenly ravenous, inhaling great mouthfuls of duck, relishing the crispy bits, trying to cram as much as possible onto every forkful. Gray pauses to watch her with obvious pleasure. He takes a long draught from his glass.

  “Losing that hearing really had nothing to do with you. The judge just sided with Heathfield for prejudicial reasons that were entirely beyond your control. Sometimes justice ain’t fair.”

  Maya lowers her fork.

  “I worked my ass off and my client deserved to win—and we still lost.”

  Gray serves himself more rice. “As Clint Eastwood said, ‘Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.’ Especially in family law.”

  “Perhaps not, but I still don’t feel particularly good about it.”

  “The system’s skewed. But you knew that.”

  “I still feel foolish.” Maya pauses her eating and breathes through the pain in her shrunken stomach.

  “Well, maybe you won’t when your own divorce comes through.”

  She puts down her cutlery with an irritated clatter. “I suppose deserve’s got nothing to do with that either?”

  Gray puts a hand on the table, a strangely papal gesture. “I’ve tried to leave you alone lately because I thought you might want some space. But I’m done
now. I’m officially back. How are you?”

  Maya thinks of the past few weeks and finds she can’t remember most of it. There was work and the kids, and then there was more work. Mostly there have been long, grey nights of broken sleep in a hotel bed that felt like a cage.

  “I’m okay,” she says. “Trying to make sense of the world ever since you took it upon yourself to shatter my naive illusion of happiness. How are you? And please don’t say you’re in love with me, because I really can’t hear that right now. I swear if you say it, I will stab you with this fork. I won’t want to, but I will.”

  Gray frowns. “I wasn’t going to mention it.”

  Maya stares at her hands. “Good.”

  “Look, Maya, I know it’s a lot take in, but please don’t shoot the messenger.”

  “Why would I do that?” She’s irritated at his cliché.

  “I dunno. People tend to. You know I only ever wanted good things for you and Nick. You were my idols. I thought your marriage was an example to live by.”

  There is a long silence in which Gray’s email alert goes off twice. He doesn’t check it.

  “I just feel so … duped,” Maya says finally. “I thought we were in a completely different place. I thought that I’d changed him. Can you imagine that? Like I was the first woman in the history of the universe to have successfully changed a bad man into a good one. That’s how in denial I was. Unbelievable.”

  Gray puts down his plate and leans back against his chair, letting out an enormous whoosh of breath. “Maya—” he begins, but she stops him by leaning on his arm. It’s not a sexual gesture but an act of submission. Maya is the puppet who has had her strings cut, and Gray catches her as she falls. He puts an arm around her and strokes her hair. He kisses the top of her head. She is surprised to find she doesn’t mind him doing this. Maybe it’s the champagne. Or the loss in court. Or just the feeling of total confusion. But whatever it is, she finds it comforting. “Maya,” he says again. “We need to talk about it.”

  “Talk about what?”

  “The thing I said. About my … about how I feel.”

  She is still, the whole of her weight leaning into him, taken up by him.

  “No,” she says. “No, we don’t.”

  “Well, what are you going to do?” he says.

  “I have no idea.”

  “You can’t stay here forever.”

  Maya shrugs as if to say, Why not? But her eyes are not convinced. She knows he’s right. A corporate hotel suite is no place for three-year-olds. And Velma can’t do the commute to preschool much longer.

  Gray cranes his neck to catch her eyes. “I know I don’t have to tell you this, but you should be the one in the family home, especially since you have the children. It’s important, not just as a place to live but for your protection. Legally. Down the road.”

  “Possession is nine-tenths of the law?” she says weakly.

  “I don’t have to tell you that half that house is yours. Half of everything is yours—all things considered, probably more. I know you don’t want to think about this stuff, but you should.”

  Maya sits up and presses her knees to her chest. “You know what the funny thing is? After all that, I don’t actually care about the house. If he wants it so much, he can have it. If that’s what’s important to him, I hope he enjoys it. All that stuff—all the stuff we accumulated over those years—it just doesn’t matter to me anymore. I thought after I moved out I’d want to fight over it, but I don’t.”

  Gray looks at her with dubious sympathy. His eyes say he understands, but the rest of his face says he’s heard it all before. “I understand you feel that way now, but remember you need to provide a home for the twins, so that may change. In fact, I’m almost certain it will.”

  Maya presses her chin down on her knees and considers this.

  “In the meantime, you need a more comfortable place to stay. A place with, I don’t know”—he looks around the hotel suite, with its plush carpet and patterned wallpaper—”a kitchen that isn’t a hot plate.”

  She nods. “You’re right. But I just don’t have the energy to look for an apartment right now. I don’t even want to talk to Nick, let alone put the house on the market or whatever we’re going to have to do. I can’t face it yet. I just wish …” She drifts off, and for a second it seems she might be falling asleep, but Gray prompts her with a rub of the shoulder.

  “What do you wish?”

  “I wish I knew what to do.”

  Gray picks a grain of rice off her collar. “What if I told you what to do?” he says. “Not in a bossy way, but as an old friend who has your best interests at heart?”

  Maya smiles uneasily and blows a piece of hair off her forehead. “Sure. I’d love that. Boss me around.”

  “I think you and the kids should stay with me for a while.”

  Maya begins to speak, but Gray covers her mouth as a joke.

  “Look, before you say no without thinking about it, consider this: I’ve got lots of space, and Velma can move in too if you like. Everybody would have their own room. The twins’ school isn’t too far. There’s tons of parking space in the underground garage, and frankly, I feel somewhat responsible for all of you, given the way this whole mess played out and my small but essential part in it. Honestly, nothing would make me happier.”

  Maya is now making strange trumpet noises into Gray’s palm, half-laughing, half-struggling. She tries to pull his hand from her face, but he easily overpowers her.

  “I’m not letting you speak until you say yes,” he says.

  They keep up this strange game until Maya’s protests turn into eye-rolling acquiescence. She doesn’t come around to the idea of staying with him so much as give in to it. She is just so very, very tired. When he takes his hand away, she is nodding.

  “All right, fine,” she says, wiping her mouth and laughing. “Have it your way.”

  And he does. They move in the very next day.

  CHAPTER 19

  The weekends with the twins are the hard part.

  The rest of the time he is able to coast—to take refuge in that numb, unquestioning place where there is neither happiness nor pain, only joyless work, automatic banter and alcohol-aided deflection. He lived so long in that place before the change that the blankness almost feels like a homecoming. He is surprised when it doesn’t make strange with him. Instead, it ushers him in like a hotel concierge, smiling and doffing its cap (“Welcome back, sir!”), and showing him to his blandly furnished but familiar room. This time, he lets himself go deeper into the blankness than he’s ever been. He wouldn’t take notice of an actual emotion if it sat on his lap naked and squirming. He feels like there is a hole in his chest the size of a fist and the wind whistles through it. He can see people looking at the hole, their eyes flitting from his face to his chest. Their eyes say, Whoa, and he finds to his surprise that he is well past caring. Where he used to mind about appearances, now he finds he doesn’t. Instead, he just listens to the wind and feels it go through him like nothing at all. In this, at least, there is progress.

  He takes up smoking—not in the house, of course (he’s not that far gone), but standing on the back stoop, staring at the melting snow, the half-thawed layers of ice and shit and soil. He knows there is a point in every winter (usually around the end of February) when everyone in this city believes the cold will never end. But this time the feeling is a religious conviction. It reminds him of that children’s book where they go to the land of perpetual ice and meet the evil white queen. The threat of darkness is perpetual. The sky is clamped over the city like the lid of a cast-iron pot. The polar vortex has settled. He dreads the day it will lift and let the sun shine on his new life. At least as it stands, his internal and external worlds are well matched in their frigid gloom. Any evidence of beauty, of warmth, of hope, he feels, would only make things worse. He has heard of depressed people who had to leave California for this reason—the sunshine was making them more depressed. He th
ought that was stupid at the time. Now he believes it.

  The thing about the twins is, he misses them terribly when they’re not around. A kind of missing he experiences not so much as longing but as a kind of low-level anxiety that eats at him like rot. He connects this dreadful sensation to his children because of the way he feels at the sight of toddlers in the park, babies in arms or even commercials for orange juice. He can mostly hold it together, except when other children are around.

  And yet when they’re with him—all fat, sticky cheeks, starfish hands and pleas for “Up, up, UP!” and “PLAY with ME!”—he finds he can’t enjoy them. Her absence, the lack of her, the terrible misunderstanding between them (which he knows is not really a misunderstanding per se, but a lie that turned into the truth, then got misrepresented as the original lie), looms over all his interactions with Isla and Foster now.

  Still, he is learning. Doing the single dad weekend dance—a pathetic, unsophisticated two-step he used to pity in others. He used to see those men, sitting in family-friendly brunch places, checking their phones as the kids ate eggs smothered in ketchup. Wandering cluelessly through the park or standing silently by the sidelines of the playground as the mothers traded gossip and jokes. He feels badly for them now in the same way he feels badly for himself. A great big pity party is what he’s throwing—self-pity-palooza, with an exclusive guest list of one.

  Take today, a Saturday. The twins have been here since dinnertime last night, when Velma dropped them off, but she put them to bed while Nick worked late. He’s taken the day off so they can spend some “quality time.” He would like Maya to see them together, doing wholesome family-type things—proof that he is an earnest husband and father, not the selfish, deceptive bastard she believes him to be. But there is no chance of this. Between Velma and the nursery school, Maya has arranged it so they never see each other, not even to hand off the children. And needless to say she’s ignored his increasingly desperate and stalker-ish pleas for conversation. Lately he’s eased off, the hope draining out of him.