A Better Man

by Leah McLaren

  Afterward they snuggle under the duvet in his low-slung king-size bed and talk about the cases they are working on—his a custody suit between two married lesbians and a single gay man, and hers a cut and dried empty-nester’s financial settlement.

  Gray opens the bedside table drawer and takes out a small Cuban cigar box. “Joint?” he says with a twinkle.

  Maya opens her mouth to say she really shouldn’t—the twins might wake up, and besides, pot disagrees with her—but instead she hears herself saying, “Why not?”

  Later, after they have whispered a giggly goodnight and turned out the lights, Gray wraps his arms around her, one strong hairy forearm over her waist, the other looped under. He clasps her to himself in a way that Nick—always a private sleeper—never did. Despite the strength and weight of his embrace, or perhaps because of it, she feels the bed pinwheeling under her like a plate in a circus act. She waits until she can hear him snore, then wriggles free and slips back into the spare room, where the kids will find her in the morning.

  CHAPTER 21

  Statement of Case

  Name: Maya Helen Wakefield

  DOB: 20.11.1975

  I, Maya Helen Wakefield, of Penthouse B, Cannery Lofts, Toronto, Canada, make this statement in support of my divorce petition.

  I married my husband, Nicholas Thompson Wakefield, on 14 August 2001 at my parents’ farm in rural Ontario. Nick and I met at university, and afterward I attended law school while he started his advertising business, SoupCan Productions, now one of the most successful commercial agencies in the country.

  After the marriage, Nick and I cohabitated happily for a few years. Having tried unsuccessfully to get pregnant for several months, we decided to do a round of in vitro fertilization four years ago, and I quickly became pregnant with twins. We were divided by the news. I was overjoyed, but Nick was far from happy. From the outset, he had been against the IVF, and when we learned we were having twins, he made his resentment strongly felt in opposition to my joy. Although we rarely argued, a tension built up between us during my pregnancy, and that was key to the eventual disassembling of our marriage. As I wound down toward my maternity leave, Nick began ramping up, working longer hours and travelling more. As I nested, he withdrew. The more I stayed in, the more he went out. Before long it felt as though we were living separate lives.

  After I gave birth, I threw myself into motherhood wholeheartedly. I was breastfeeding two tiny infants, and for the first few months, I could barely discern between day and night. Nick, to his credit, did try to help at the beginning, but his attempts at hands-on fatherhood seemed increasingly inept and half-hearted, and only served to frustrate me in my sleep-deprived state. This learned helplessness has long been a tactic of Nick’s, and it certainly served him well when it came to caring for our children. He drifted further away, though I hardly noticed at first. Soon the children were in my sole care. I may as well have been a single mother for all I saw of my husband. Sometimes it felt as if we were living in different time zones in the same house. I think it is safe to say that while he certainly loves Isla and Foster, Nick has left the lion’s share of their care to me.

  Six months into my maternity leave I was barely able to function from sleep deprivation, so Nick and I hired a nanny, Velma Gonçalves, who remains with the twins to this day. Initially, Velma’s arrival eased the tension in the house significantly. Finally I was able to go to the gym or get out of the house on my own occasionally. But over time, as Nick continued to keep himself scarce, I felt the tensions begin to surface again. The chasm that had opened up between us wasn’t closing. If anything, the opposite was happening. Several times during this period, I suggested to Nick that maybe he could come home earlier in the evening or cut down on working weekends so we could spend some time together as a family, but he simply ignored these requests. In any case, things remained the same. We had one major argument, which occurred when Nick purchased, without telling me, two tickets to Paris for my birthday. Given that the twins were still breastfeeding around the clock (they were eight months at the time), there was no way I could have gone on holiday for a week, and had he paid any attention to his family’s routine he would have known this. I believe Nick felt I was sexually rejecting him during this time, and it’s true that our sex life had withered. However, rather than discussing this reasonably (my suggestions of couple’s counselling also went ignored), we simply continued to avoid the issue and drift further apart.

  When the twins were nearing a year and my maternity leave was almost up, Nick and I made the decision that I would resign my position as a junior associate at the law firm where I worked. I had been agonizing about going back—I did not want to fail my children or sacrifice my career, the classic professional mother’s double bind—and Nick persuaded me to give up work. He felt strongly that, now that we had two children, we needed someone to run the household apart from Velma, and I agreed. Though I was deeply ambivalent about the decision to give up a job I loved, I knew that the children would grow up quickly and if I wasn’t careful I’d miss their entire childhood in a flurry of trials and paperwork. I hoped my becoming a full-time mother would bring us closer together, but it seemed to push Nick even further away. We no longer socialized together, which I suspected had to do with my lack of a career (it’s hard to make small talk when your days are spent in yoga class and Gymboree), and instead of feeling better about my situation, I developed what I now recognize was a crippling anxiety about the safety of my children. I became obsessed with protecting their health and purity, carefully monitoring all food that passed their lips and making sure everything they came into contact with—from the toys they played with to the clothes they wore to the shampoo they used—was completely free from parabens, dyes, chemicals and toxins. The more I obsessed in my domestic loneliness, the more Nick avoided me, until it became a vicious circle of unhappiness.

  Over the first couple of years of the twins’ lives, I would occasionally wonder if Nick was having an affair. I have no idea if he did, but he certainly had plenty of time and freedom to do so. It is also true that he spent most of his rare time at home on his phone. I’m not saying he did stray; I’m just saying it would not surprise me in the least to learn he had, especially given what happened next.

  In the fall of last year, Nick contacted our old university friend Adam Gray, who also happens to be a family lawyer with my firm and the godfather to our children. He told Adam Gray that he wanted to divorce me and retain at least joint custody of the twins. He disclosed all our financial records and asked what the likely settlement would be. When Adam told him that he would, under the law, have to compensate me as a stay-at-home mother as well as hand over a majority portion of our assets, Nick became distressed. He searched for a way to circumvent this deleterious financial situation while still bringing about the end of our marriage and family life, and eventually he found one: If he could play the model husband for a sustained period of time, say six months, and encourage me to return to work, he would reduce his financial obligations to me significantly.

  Shortly after hatching his escape plan, Nick jumped into action. I watched my husband transform before my eyes. Almost overnight, it seemed, he went from being a remote, aloof, uninvolved and workaholic father and partner to one who prized his family and marriage above all else. He encouraged me to return to work, which I did quite happily (I have resumed my position as a family lawyer). He began coming home earlier, spending a great deal of time with the twins, cooking and generally taking up the slack that resulted as I juggled the demands of a full-time career and motherhood. This was one of the happiest times in our marriage. The fact that I feel like a dupe admitting this only exacerbates the shock and sadness I have experienced since our marriage fell apart. The false Nick I experienced for those few months was more real to me than any of his previous incarnations, except perhaps the man I originally married. I was devastated and humiliated when the truth emerged.

  Late last year, just before
Christmas, I moved out of the family home and took the twins with me. Since then I have moved in with Adam Gray, who kindly offered to take us in. Over the winter, Adam Gray and I grew close, even closer than we had been in the past, and recently we have begun “seeing each other” in a more formal sense. This new relationship has allowed me to move on in a way that is both stable and familiar for the twins and for me. Nick has retained visitation rights and sees the twins every other weekend and on Wednesday nights.

  On March 1, after learning that I was cohabitating with Adam Gray, Nick came to the office where Adam and I both work and, after a discussion, assaulted Adam. He was taken into custody, but we asked the police not to press charges, mostly for the sake of the children.

  It has become ever more clear to me that there is no hope of salvaging our marriage. Nick and I have been apart since before Christmas, and there is no prospect of reconciliation. Although we don’t speak with regularity, I’m sure he will agree that divorce is unavoidable. I would like this process to be completed as soon as possible, to enable us both to move on with our lives separately.

  Statement of Truth

  I, Maya Helen Wakefield, believe that the facts stated in this Statement of Case are true.

  Signed:

  CHAPTER 22

  Nick rides his bike downtown.

  It’s the second day of the first spring thaw and the city is just starting to emerge from under itself. People are peeling off layers and rolling down windows and stepping out of shops just to tilt their faces up to the sun in disbelief. The city exudes a collective sigh of pleasure.

  He takes the long route, cutting across the Beltline Trail, through the big cemetery and down the ravines, and out into the wide valley road that leads him to the centre of town. There is mud spattered on his jeans and a skim of sweat across his face, and he feels, for the first time in months, as if he’s absorbing the world. He locks his bike—the basic three-gear commuter—and gazes up and down the street, amazed. Only a year or so ago, this corridor was nothing but dollar stores and sleazy karaoke joints. Now it’s awash in cocktail bars and new restaurants. Usually he feels a mild indignance in the face of this kind of gentrification, especially in neighbourhoods hipper and younger than his own. But he doesn’t feel this way today. Today he is glad. Not just that it’s sunny out, but that things can change. And sometimes for the better.

  Shelley suggested they meet in a dive bar. Not a real one, of course, but one of those self-conscious places that used to be a hardware store and is now called the Hardware Store, even though it’s really just a place where people in their thirties can feel comfortable swearing, drinking musty draft beer and smoking on the pavement outside. It’s supposed to be authentic, but it makes Nick wonder: What’s any more real about getting drunk in a place that used to sell hammers and nails? What if it had been a tanning salon instead? He considers this as he swivels on his diner stool and orders a soda water and lime.

  The guy behind the bar grimaces behind an Abe Lincoln beard and mock bifocals. “Is soda water okay?” he asks.

  Nick nod-shrugs to say it’s all the same to him.

  He peers through the tiny rectangular window on the bar door—a pane of glass embedded in quilted red vinyl, the kind of door they have in seedy nightclubs or small-town peeler bars—a door meant to keep all funny business safe from prying eyes. There was a time when he would have been relieved at the presence of such a door. Back when he was a disenchanted husband on the prowl, a man with secrets and things to hide and lose. Now none of that matters. He is entirely free and could meet with Shelley on a crowded patio or his own front porch if he wanted to. He is free to kiss her, or even take her home to bed, for he is a separated man.

  Separated.

  It is, oddly enough, one of those occasions when the legal term and the internal emotional response perfectly match. Nick feels separate—from his wife, from his family and most of all from himself. Not the man he is today, but his old self. The scared and desperate man who clung to the clean and shiny aspects of life, skimming along the surface like a terrified speed skater on broken ice. Now he is in the muck of it. It is as if he’s moving through the world halfway below ground, like a bulldozer pushing a wall of debris before him with every step he takes. The energy it takes to get anywhere is monumental, but at least the progress is real.

  He catches a glimpse of himself in the fogged mirror over the bar and is startled. He has lost weight, but it’s not the leanness that unnerves him. It’s the beard—a grizzled muss along his chin and cheeks streaked with two lightning bolts of grey. He didn’t decide to grow one—it just appeared, as if of its own accord. When he came home after his night in jail two months ago, he found he’d run out of razors. It was the first morning he hadn’t shaved since high school. The next day he didn’t again, and so on. And now he is changed. Not just the beard but his posture and something in the set of his eyes. They are deeper in his head, anchored and watchful. His old leather jacket from university, hardened from years of disuse, is starting to soften up around his shoulders. He’s wearing it again because he likes the way the leather smells, like dust and forgotten campfires—old age and youth in a crumbled embrace. Nick can look however he wants since he began “running the company remotely”—which is Larry’s euphemism for his indefinite leave of absence. In the one meeting they had about it, neither mentioned the words “nervous breakdown” or even “stress leave,” though Nick is aware that both probably apply.

  Shelley arrives ten minutes late and trips into the bar blinking, eyes blinded from the early spring sun that’s melted the snow outside into puddles, bringing in with her a hopeful whiff of springtime dog shit. “Hi,” she says, stumbling back a little at the sight of him. “You’re early.”

  Nick goes to look at the time on his phone, then remembers he intentionally left it at home. “It’s the new new me,” he says, half joking.

  They embrace, doing the peck-on-each-cheek thing, foreheads banging together, and Nick is startled once again at how awkward he suddenly feels doing stuff that once came naturally: extravagantly tipping doormen, giving other drivers the finger, air kissing. He’s like a child who’s gone through a sudden growth spurt—none of his old mannerisms fit.

  Shelley perches on the barstool and swivels around to peer at the drinks menu. Her hair is longer than it used to be, and the Christmas ball hue has darkened to a subtler aubergine. She tucks a curl behind her ears and primly smooths down the front of her flower-print dress. It occurs to him that she looks a bit like an errant schoolteacher from the 1950s, and that it’s not unappealing.

  “I’ll have a blood orange margarita,” she tells Abe Lincoln, who nods by pushing his chin out like a rooster without the comb. He brings them a small bowl of those pink Styrofoam shrimp chips that come with cheap Thai takeout. Nick, who has barely eaten all day, puts one on his tongue and lets it dissolve like a giant fishy lozenge.

  “I heard about you and your wife,” Shelley says, fingering a shrimp chip of her own, not actually looking at him, adjusting her glasses with her other hand. “I’m really sorry. That’s super harsh.”

  “Who told you?” Nick asks, then reconsiders. “Actually, don’t tell me. It doesn’t matter.”

  Shelley looks at him. “It was someone in the industry. You don’t know them.”

  Nick nods. He realizes that she means it to be comforting. There is a beat of silence and they stare at each other’s reflections in the mirror above the bar. Shelley wobbles on her barstool and some of the tension dissipates.

  “This is kind of a weird question, but did it have anything to do with us talking that night at that Christmas party? Do you remember?”

  “I wanted to apologize to you,” he says slowly.

  Shelley accepts her cocktail from the bartender and puts the straw to her lips. Her eyebrows rise as if to interject, but she lets him continue.

  “I wasn’t great with you back in the fall. I was … I don’t want to say confused, because that sou
nds like a cop-out, but I know I wasn’t any good. I didn’t know what I was after, and I think I led you on—romantically and professionally—and I want to apologize for that, for what it’s worth.”

  Shelley takes off her glasses. Without them she looks a bit sleepy, her eyes somehow bigger and smaller at the same time. She cleans them carefully while considering her answer, working the napkin in tiny circles with a tight pincer grip.

  “I didn’t think you were that bad,” she says. “Just a bit confusing. I mean, I’ve certainly been treated much worse. Not by a guy your age, but still.”

  She says this not as a way of absolving him but as a plain fact. Nick is sure it’s true, and it doesn’t make him feel any better.

  “Hey, my food blog is going really well,” she says, brightening. “A small publisher has asked to make a book out of it, a guide to how to eat well in the era of social media. How to do a pop-up restaurant in your house and blog your food travels—that kind of thing.”

  “That’s fantastic,” Nick says and he feels genuinely happy for her, as if this good news is somehow meant for them both. “I knew you’d do something like that.”

  “Like what?” she says warily.

  It strikes him that she is still a bit defensive. He doesn’t mind, but he desperately wants to put her at ease.

  “Something original. You just struck me as a person who was going to go off and follow her own path and do interesting stuff that no one else had thought of. I liked the fact that you had ideas.”