A Better Man

by Leah McLaren

  Nick hears the blood pounding in his ears like a distant but fast-approaching drumbeat.

  “I know you do. Because she’s living with you. Along with my kids. Every day and every night. And every morning after.” Nick’s volume stays the same, but his tone hardens.

  Gray stands. Nick can see he is doing that thing people are supposed to do with bears—where you make yourself seem as big and imposing as possible to scare away the riled-up animal. It’s all he can do not to raise his arms in the air and shout, “Ooogah-boogah!” back at him.

  “Maya is my friend,” Gray says evenly. “She needed someone to talk to her—honestly, I might add.”

  At this, Nick suddenly finds himself standing too, but he’s not trying to look big—he feels big. Brimming with barely suppressed rage. “Honestly, huh? If what you thought she needed was honesty, then why did you suggest deceiving her in the first place? Have you told her that? That it was all your idea and I was following your counsel?”

  “It wasn’t my counsel. I just told you what previous clients had—”

  “And did you happen to mention what happened when you urged me to proceed? How I essentially told you to fuck off? Did you mention that to her? How I changed, for real, without even knowing I would, just by behaving like the man she needed me to be—the man I actually AM? Did you mention any of that to her when she was crying on your shoulder late at night with your bottle of unoaked fucking Chardonnay?”

  Gray pulls his phone out of his pocket and starts keying the password, but Nick bats it out of his hand with a single swish of his arm. The phone flies, hits a bookshelf and falls face down on the floor with a definitive crunch.

  “I just upgraded last week,” Gray says, but he makes no move to retrieve it.

  Now they are standing chest to chest, like a couple of puffed-up teenage boys. Gray puts his hand on Nick’s shoulder.

  “Listen, buddy, why don’t we just call it a day and go for a drink? Maybe hit the lunch buffet at For Your Eyes Only? It’s Saturday, so I haven’t got any meetings. We can talk it out, just like the old days. Whaddya say? Should we simmer down, take this discussion outside?”

  Nick stares at the floor, feeling the energy drain from him, and he knows Gray is right. They should talk it out. That’s the adult thing to do. His shoulders drop. He rubs his face, suddenly dizzy from all the adrenaline surging through him. “Maybe,” he mutters, more to himself than anyone else. “Yeah, you’re right.”

  Gray keeps on slap-patting his shoulder, almost rhythmically as he talks.

  “Hey there, old buddy.” Slap, slap. “You okay?” Slap. “You’ve been through a hell of a lot, but it’s for the best, you know.” Slap, slap. “I’ve seen this sort of thing before, and crazy as it seems, one day you’ll look back and say, ‘That was actually the best thing that ever happened to me.’” Slap, slap, slap.

  And then, without hesitation, Nick winds up and punches Gray square in the face. It’s a direct hit and he feels the skin split under his knuckles, bone connecting with bone with a crack that is both sickening and delicious. He knows that this will be the end of something—perhaps of everything—but he does it anyway because he is past the point of caring about consequences. What he needs now is some semblance of closure. A punctuation mark at the end of the tragic sentence. With a single blow, he’s made his position clear in a way no amount of talking or writing or battling in divorce court would ever do. He might have had his family taken from him, but he did not take it lying down. Even in his addled mind, Nick is sure his children will respect him for this—one day.

  Gray kneels down, holding his face and cursing through a mist of blood. Nick’s first impulse is to help him, but he sees that would be awkward, so instead he sits back down in the desk chair and waits for the inevitable. First Mandy rushes in, shouting at the sight of Gray’s blood-smeared face. Despite his less-than-convincing protests, she calls security. All three wait together in an almost companionable calm for the guards to arrive. Gray snuffles as Mandy dabs his nose with tissues. Before long two paunchy ex-cops in polyester trousers arrive, grumbling into oversized walkie-talkies. And then Maya joins two weekend cleaners and a photocopier repairman who have gathered at the door to gawk at the scene. She pushes her way past them and looks bewildered as Nick allows himself to be clumsily handcuffed by the guards, who have clearly never made an arrest in their lives.

  She doesn’t bother to ask what has happened. The guard moves to perp-walk Nick out and she orders him to wait.

  “I got a call from Rachel Katz,” she hisses.

  Nick opens his mouth—to say what, he’s not sure—and then looks down at his handcuffed wrists and stops.

  Maya continues, her voice so soft and even it terrifies him. “She was beside herself because she didn’t know how to reach you. She said you just abandoned the twins with her. Just left them there and ran away. She said you didn’t leave a phone number or anything. She didn’t know what to do. Is this true?”

  Nick tries to think of something breathtaking to say. Something that will explain everything and show her that all of it was meant in good faith—an attempt to sort out everything that’s gone horribly wrong. He searches for it like an actor who’s forgotten his big line. But the line never comes.

  “Maya,” he says.

  But it’s too late. She’s with Gray now, taking over from Mandy, tipping back her old friend turned lover’s head to staunch the nosebleed.

  “Maya,” he repeats as the fat men prod him along, threatening worse if he doesn’t hurry up. He says her name once more, but she doesn’t look up. It’s as if she can’t hear him at all.

  CHAPTER 20

  Maya drives to the police station early the next morning. It’s just like a movie, with a lady cop drumming her fingernails behind the bulletproof glass of the cashier’s window as Maya counts the cash, crisp fifties straight from the bank machine.

  She knows that Nick could post his own bail, but he is still her husband and the father of her children. Because of this, on a strange and irrational level, she still feels responsible for him.

  What she tells herself is this: I need him not to fall apart, for the sake of the kids.

  They leave the station together and stand for a while in the parking lot. It’s early and the streets are deserted. It’s snowed overnight—possibly the last blizzard of the year—and everything is covered in a fine dusting of icing sugar. The snow has a muting effect and the city is quiet, cars and streetcars skimming silently past. They stand apart. The only people in the parking lot. Possibly the world.

  “Where are the twins?” says Nick. It’s the first thing he’s uttered since he zombie-shuffled out of the cell, eyes red-rimmed, a haze of stubble across his jaw. He carries his parka under his arm, seemingly immune to the cold. Maya flinches at the sight of his pale blue cashmere V-neck flecked with Gray’s blood. Nose blood, she reminds herself, which somehow doesn’t seem quite as bad as blood blood.

  “They’re at home,” she says, then corrects herself. “At Gray’s.”

  And now it’s Nick’s turn to flinch.

  She sighs. “What would you have me do? Abandon them in the park?”

  “I didn’t abandon them.”

  “They don’t even know Rachel—it was upsetting for them. All of this is upsetting for them, even if they don’t show it.” Maya thinks of their confused little faces when she went to pick them up from Rachel—how they ran to her and jumped up, climbing her coat to get into her arms.

  “I’m not the one who left,” he says.

  She feels a terrible urge to unleash on Nick right here, but immediately tamps it back down. She’s not going to let herself fly to pieces. Not here in this parking lot. She will not give him that. She sucks in cold air through her nose and feels the sensation subsiding.

  “You need to pull yourself together,” she says.

  He looks at her incredulously, forehead puckered. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No, not at all. You can
’t go around like this. You need to talk to someone or start doing something. Take up cycling again or … I don’t know, just get your head sorted out. You can’t go around punching people. This isn’t the movies.”

  He looks at the slow-falling snow. “It’s funny you should say that,” he says with a heartbroken almost-smile, “because it feels like the movies. Awful movies.”

  To her surprise he keeps talking, an ache in his voice.

  “I know how I must seem to you, but you have to believe me when I tell you it’s not what I want. None of it. I want us to be together. As a family. That’s what I want. I think it’s what I always wanted—I just didn’t know it. I got … confused.”

  Maya hears herself laugh. It’s a thin, joyless sound.

  “What’s funny?” he says.

  She shakes her head and presses the key to unlock the driver’s door. The car bleats and clicks, its lights flashing on and off, an invitation to enter. Nick touches her elbow and she flinches. Because of course she has been burned. All those years she lived and breathed the atmosphere of his unspoken contempt for her, his vacant self-regard.

  “You are such a liar,” she says. She knows it’s not a very sophisticated thing to say, but she says it all the same. She wants him to know she thinks it. Not just thinks it, but believes it.

  “No,” he says. “I was a liar. But then I changed. The change was real. It started out a lie, and then it became the truth.”

  Maya looks to the sky and opens the car door. “Nick, I’ve seen the notes you made on the asset file. Gray told me your plan. I’m not an idiot—I’m a fucking divorce lawyer. I know what people are capable of, and now I know what you’re capable of. You wanted to be free of us, and now you are. So I’m giving you that, okay? You need to stop with the lies now—both to yourself and to all of us. You wanted your freedom and now you’re getting it.”

  She opens the car door and begins to duck in but stops when a terrible thing happens. She hears it before she sees it—a great wracking inhalation that can be only one thing: the sound of a grown man crying. Not just any grown man, but Nick. The King of Cool, the Master of Distraction, the utterly unflappable father of her children. She has seen him cry before, but not like this. Which is to say, not really. She stands with the door between her and her sobbing husband. He is gulping for air now, his face a flushed, snot-smeared mess.

  “Oh, Nick. Please don’t.”

  He covers his face and mutters into his bare, chapped hands. “Is there nothing? Nothing at all?”

  She shakes her head, and even though he doesn’t see her do it, the gesture is implicit in her silence. “Why should I take you back?” she asks. “Give me one compelling reason.”

  Nick looks up, his face churning with thought.

  “The money,” he says finally.

  “What money?”

  “If we don’t break up, we won’t have to divide the assets. Everything can stay as it was.”

  “That’s your reason?” she says, almost laughing the brittle laugh again. “That’s your big clincher?”

  He sniffles. “I thought I’d try a more pragmatic tack. The emotional plea wasn’t working.”

  Maya gets in the car, slams the door and starts the engine. Before she pulls out of the parking lot, she lowers her window and looks one more time at this gaunt, unshaven apparition of her former husband.

  “Nick,” she says, “you’d better get yourself a lawyer.”

  For the next few weeks, their work schedules out of sync, Maya and Gray barely see each other. They move past each other in the loft like ghosts, getting up at odd hours, leaving separately and coming home late, eyes circled and brains fogged with case law. Maya works in bed while Gray pulls a few all-nighters at the office, sleeping on his sofa and changing his shirt and tie for the next day’s meetings. The last time they spoke at length was the night Gray asked Maya to move in with him. They have become experts at avoiding what’s going on and why she is there and what the plan is, if there is a plan. And all this is fine with Maya. Or if not “fine,” it’s better than the alternative—talking about her feelings. These days she would rather eat a glass omelette than talk about her feelings. She’s even stopped seeing Harriet—a strange decision in a time of crisis, but there you have it. Maya’s decided she’s just going to have to let things get messy and then see what happens.

  One drizzly Friday evening, she rushes home to relieve Velma and put the twins to bed. Sprawled on the polished concrete living-room floor she finds Gray, still clad in one of his vast collection of rumpled navy suits, head and feet sticking out from under a pile of nubby Scandinavian sofa cushions. Isla props a bolster on his chest and straddles it triumphantly.

  “Look, Mommy! We’re burying Uncle Adam alive!”

  Foster, who has been dragging an L-shaped cushion across the room, runs to her, howling with joy, and she picks him up, burying her face in his silky curls. He smells like a shampoo she doesn’t recognize, and she realizes it’s been a long time since she bathed him herself.

  “Are you going to read me stories tonight, Mommy?” Foster asks, sucking in his lower lip in a way that suggests he is managing his expectations about the answer.

  “You bet I am, baby,” Maya says, giving him a love bite on the ear. “As many stories as you want.”

  At this, Isla perks up. “Five stories?” she says.

  Foster is dismissive of his sister’s math. “Five stories isn’t even a lot. It’s for babies. I’m getting thirty stories. And maybe a hundred extra too!”

  “Okay, then. Deal.” Maya laughs and covers his face with kisses. Then she peers down at Gray, who is still prostrate under a jumble of upholstery with a goofy, exhausted smile on his face. “Can I fix you a cocktail?” she asks.

  “God, yes,” he says, releasing a great breath as Isla resumes straddling his chest.

  A pizza is ordered for the children and sushi for the adults, and once the chaos of bath and bed and storytime is over (“That’s not thirty, Mommy—I counted!”), Maya and Gray find themselves flopped out on the disassembled sofa, debating whether it’s too late to start a movie.

  “Ooh look, here’s one,” Maya says, clicking through the dial. “It’s about a guy who pretends to be a girl so he can seduce the hot office lesbian he’s in love with.”

  “If you’re going to waste ninety minutes of your life, it may as well be on quality trash,” Gray counters, grabbing the remote and scrolling down the menu. “Okay, I’ve got it. A jealous husband tests his wife’s loyalties by contacting her online and pretending to be an old flame. As their ‘affair’ escalates, he’s not sure whether to feel jealous of or wildly excited by the new passion he’s incited.”

  Maya groans and pours them both more wine. “That’s completely unbelievable. Who would bother having an affair with his own wife? And how could she be so easily manipulated?”

  Gray shrugs. “I’d believe anything now. There’s no romantic comedy set-up that’s too outlandish, if you ask me.”

  Maya gives him a skeptical squint. “Why? There’s nothing outlandish about this.” She gestures around the room to indicate the situation they are in.

  “Of course there is!” Gray hollers this, then lowers his voice for fear of waking up the twins. The loft is huge—nearly three thousand square feet. There are no walls to speak of, just three huge bedrooms partitioned off like giant office cubicles, their walls barely reaching halfway to the cavernous eighteen-foot ceilings. He continues, “You and the twins moving in here is the most surprising and wonderful thing that’s ever happened to me. It’s completely changed my life.”

  Maya laughs. “But you’re always working. You’re never here.”

  “That’s because I’m trying to give you some space,” says Gray. “If it were up to me, I’d just hang out at home with the three of you every day. I feel like the luckiest man in the world.” He leans over and takes a piece of Maya’s hair and runs it between his fingers. She feels suddenly self-conscious, like an unwill
ing audience participant in a pantomime magic show.

  “Adam, I … don’t know what to say. I’m grateful, obviously, for your generosity, but in the long term, I’m really not sure it’s appropriate for us to stay here.”

  He tucks the lock of hair behind her ear and leans back. “Why not? You know you can stay here as long as you like. I’d prefer it if you stayed for good. That’s not a formal invitation—I don’t want to put you on the spot here—but I do mean it. I want you to stay. It’s what I’ve always wanted.”

  Maya sits with this for a moment. She lets it settle over her. “It all feels a bit sudden,” she says after a while. “I guess I just figured that, you know, once the settlement with Nick comes through, I would get a place of my own and start my new life.”

  Gray smiles at her in his slightly hopeless, open-faced way—a smile so far from the bullish courtroom litigator she can’t help being flooded with fondness at the sight of it. It’s not attraction she feels, exactly, but more like a deep familiarity. She feels safe, and she knows she feels this way because she has known Adam even longer than she’s known Nick. He’s been smiling at her like this since they met in residence in first year. They’d study together, and every once in a while she’d turn her head and catch him with that face. It is a smile she can trust. But also one that makes her feel ever so slightly guilty.

  “That’s a very lovely offer,” she says finally. “Just let me think about it, okay?”

  Later that night, after the wine and the so-bad-it’s-good romantic comedy, Maya accepts a different offer, and that is an invitation to sleep in his bed. The sex is not what she expected. They are silent because of the twins—though in truth Maya knows an air-raid siren couldn’t wake them mid-cycle—and Gray is very serious about it all, as if he’s attempting to scale a mountain he has been training for his entire life. Maya keeps wanting to burst out laughing, not at the act itself, which is surprisingly enjoyable and easy, but at the fact that she’s doing it—having actual sex!—with a man other than Nick. And of all people, that man is Gray. She feels guilty and ridiculous by turns. But in the end they find a sweet and timid groove, like two teenagers just managing their first slow dance. It’s really not bad. Not terrible at all.