A Better Man (12 page)

How does he justify his deception? By telling himself that some forces, once initiated, simply can’t be stopped. Attraction is one. Leaving is another. It’s pure physics, Newton’s first law: an object in motion stays in motion. What he’s doing now is simply setting the stage for a graceful exit. The less acrimony, the better for the kids, not to mention his bank balance. The irony is that the charade of goodness is getting easier the longer the performance continues. In certain moments, Nick feels almost at one with the Good Husband, the way he imagines a well-rehearsed actor feels about a character who is entirely unlike him. The more he goes through the motions, the more effortless the motions become. They begin to seem almost a part of him, something he was always meant to do. A yogi might call it a “flow,” an athlete “the zone,” but he thinks of it simply as “the new Nick.” What once was foreign is beginning to feel almost natural. Weirder still, a few times when he wasn’t paying attention, he’d accidentally enjoyed himself.

“I go on that one!” Foster’s hands are starfished on the car window, eyes trained on the rusted metal Drop of Death ride, which rises up beyond the coaster.

Nick watches as a cramped metal cage full of teenagers is
cranked up to the top, held there for a terrible moment, then allowed to plummet screaming to the earth. He feels his stomach heave and pitch against his lower intestine. He glances over at Maya, whose normally pale skin has taken on a hung-over bluish tint around the nose and lips.

“I’m afraid you’re too little for that one. Maybe next year,” she tells Foster, who responds with a whine of protest.

“Isla’s older—can she go?” Foster hasn’t yet grasped the notion that six and a half minutes is not much of an age gap.

“Nope,” says Nick.

Foster flings himself back in his seat and emits a pitiful moan.

For a moment Nick wonders if perhaps this wasn’t such a hot idea after all. It has been so long since he’s taken the initiative in planning a family activity that he’s losing confidence. He glances at Maya again, but she’s staring out the window at a muddied parking lot.

“I go on the big-boy ride!” Foster’s tone has all the raw ingredients for a major meltdown: high-key excitement combined with an unwillingness to let even the smallest defeat go unprotested. Soon Isla is chiming in her support and the atmosphere of the car becomes unbearable.

Nick scouts the parking lot for a spot as close to the entrance as possible, while Maya rifles through her bag and mutters something about not having brought anything for lunch.

Nick shrugs. “We’ll just get something in there.”

“Really?” She looks at him skeptically. “Do you think they’ll have, you know, things they can actually eat?”

“I guess we’re about to find out. I’m sure we can find them a corn dog.”

Maya takes a breath and stretches her neck. After a beat, she speaks. “I’m not saying they’re going to get pancreatic cancer, but is it really necessary?”

Nick stares straight ahead and wills himself not to react. This is one of their ongoing battles: her obsession with nitrates, toxins and evil ingredients, and his happy obliviousness to them.

“No,” he says as evenly as possible. “I suppose we can look for healthier options.”

They are both out of the car now and unbuckling the twins from their safety seats. Nick struggles with Isla’s belt, prompting Maya to reach over and release it with a one-handed flick of the wrist.

“I’m a little rusty at this,” he says.

She looks at him with weary affection. “It’s okay.”

The kids are on the ground and tearing across the wet open field toward the gate. Even above the bleated polka theme, Nick can hear them singing a song from playgroup—something about a quacking duck.

“Okay that I’m rusty, or okay that I’m trying?” Nick is determined to keep the mood light.

Maya narrows her eyes and rolls them at the same time—an expression she’s perfected in the past couple of years. “Look, when it comes to food, I’m just saying that everything’s a choice. You have to look at the numbers and the potential risks, then weigh them against the perceived benefits—fun, pleasure, etc. And with some things—hot dogs might be one of them—the benefits may not outweigh the risks. I mean, how good does a hot dog actually taste? How much pleasure do you get from it? You wouldn’t put heroin in your body, even though I’m sure it
feels amazing, because you know how dangerous it is. And you certainly wouldn’t give it to your kids, would you?”

They are trudging across the field now.

“I was actually talking about corn dogs,” says Nick.

“Ah, well, that changes everything.”

He puts his arm around her shoulders and squeezes. She stumbles in the mud, then rights herself with a good-humoured hop.

“What was that for?”

“What?” he says. “I’m not allowed to manhandle my own wife? Tell me, what’s the cost–benefit scenario with physical affection? What are the chances of you developing pancreatic cancer if I do
this.
” He jabs his fingers under her rib cage and tickles her where he suspects her pancreas might be. Maya laughs, pinkens and pushes him away, though he can see she’s pleased. She shouts at the twins to slow down to mask how much he’s flustered her.

Once through the gates, Nick hands a man in a fluorescent vest a wad of cash in exchange for a long red serpent’s tail of paper tickets, which he folds up and slips into his pocket. Now he is the Dispenser of Fun. Foster and Isla look around at the flashing lights, candy vendors and hanging gardens of plush toys, then press their faces into Maya’s legs like Eastern bloc foundlings encountering capitalism for the first time.

“Are you ready for FUNWORLD?” Nick booms in the supervillain voice. The children look unsure, so he casts around for an opening. Beyond the weight-guessing contest and the sledgehammer strength test, he sees a game he’s
sure
to win. “Who wants a PET?” he says.

The twins cheer as Maya’s expression clouds, but it’s too late—Nick is halfway across the grounds, twins trailing after him like groupies. There it is, his favourite fall fair game: the fishbowl toss. The twins pause for a moment, hand in tiny hand, and stare at an enormous table laid out in a precarious pyramid of teapot-sized fishbowls. Inside each clear glass bowl swims a single exotic-looking fish. They are beautiful and serene—fancy, feathery fins in gleaming jewel tones. There must be at least a hundred of them, each in its own lonely orb. It looks to Nick like a dubious conceptual art exhibit. In a gallery it would make his heart sink, but here at the county fair it fills him with joy.

By the time Maya catches up, Nick’s spent eight red tickets on four Ping-Pong balls—one for each of them. The twins clutch their balls to their chests. Isla presses hers to her lips and closes her eyes in silent prayer.

A mustachioed man in a dotted bow tie explains the rules of the game in an auctioneer’s holler: “Buy a ball, take a toss, win a fish! One ball, one throw! Get one in the drink, take home your very own pet! Goldfish at the bottom, fancies at the top! Buy a ball, take a toss, win a fish!”

Maya goes first. Her ball bounces off the side of the table, not even touching a fishbowl. She steps back with a self-mocking cringe and encourages Foster to step up. Nick is glad to see that he aims high—for the fish on the upper level—but is less pleased when the ball bounces off the first bowl and then falls to the lower level, spinning around the rim of a goldfish’s home before skittering off to the side. Nick slaps his son’s shoulder, muttering at the injustice of life, as Foster’s face crumples into a sob.

Isla goes next, releasing a gentle underhand toss that to
everyone’s delight sails through the air, falls cleanly in the drink with an almost imperceptible plunk and floats above the head of a tiny, shimmering creature. The mustachioed carny, who’s been scratching at a crossword until now, perks up and, with a flourish of his stained white glove, plucks the Ping-Pong ball off the surface of the water and hands the winning bowl to Isla. Her eyes go wide with joy, and she jumps up and down, sloshing water all over her shoes and causing the fish to leap up and almost out of the bowl.

“Would you like a bag?” asks the carny, and before anyone can respond he’s pouring the fish and its water into a clear plastic sandwich bag, which he secures with a twist-tie. Isla beams and Foster begins to moan. Maya gives Nick a look that says,
Thanks for the awesome idea.
Nick attempts to distract his son by sliding the last ball through his line of vision with two fingers like a magician.

“Don’t worry, Fozza. Daddy’s going to win one for you now! Are you ready? On the count of three. One, two …” Nick takes his toss, and they all watch the ball arc up and fall. It plinks off the side of the bowl he was aiming for and drops into one he wasn’t.

Suddenly the mustache is upon them. “We have a DOUBLE WINNER! Congratulations, sir. You are now the proud owner of two very rare and exotic VIETNAMESE FIGHTING FISH!” He pours the second fish into a bag and hands it to Nick, who marvels at the blue-and-green scales glimmering in the afternoon light.

Foster stares at it open-mouthed. “Is it really mine, Daddy? Really?”

“Only if you promise to take good care of it.”

The man in the bow tie bends down and taps Foster on the nose. “Mind you don’t put those two in with the rest of your aquarium,” he says. “Vietnamese fighters like to be on their own. They have a tendency to get a bit vicious with company. Territorial little buggers.”

Foster nods solemnly and clutches the bag to his chest, dangling it in front of himself from time to time to peer at the pet inside.

They walk around the fair like this for a while, the children unsteadily clutching their sloshing fish bags, staring at the games kiosks and the noisy merry-go-round with its wild-eyed horses humping up chipped plastic poles. Nick is surprised when Maya suggests taking the twins onto the haunted house ride, a big black box covered in cotton cobwebs and fake blood. A toy train filled with uncomfortable-looking teenagers moves down a track into the howling mouth of a dodgy Edvard Munch
Scream
replica. A dark, dusky pop song plays over the ghostly sound effects. It takes Nick a moment to place it: “Another One Bites the Dust” by Queen.

“Won’t they be scared?” he asks.

“Sure,” she says. “But it’s fun to be scared sometimes. Isn’t that the whole point?”

He looks down at his children and gently lifts away each bagged fish. It isn’t hard. They don’t have much of a grip. “Go with Mommy,” he says, handing Maya the stack of tickets from his breast pocket.

There isn’t much of a line, and soon enough they are being tucked roughly into their seats by a fat guy in a Metallica T-shirt who slams a foam-covered safety bar down over their laps and
orders them to keep their hands and feet in the cart. As the ride jerks forward, Maya, who is sitting between the twins, trying to hold their hands under the restraints, looks back at him and smiles a tight little smile. He can suddenly see she is doing this to please him and the effect is like a tourniquet on his throat. He feels a sudden compulsion to throw himself on the tracks and order the metalhead to remove his family from the ride at once. But instead he just stands there. The music starts up—Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”—and Vincent Price’s famous laugh is all can Nick can hear as the train slips into the howling mouth of the painted ghost.

He waits there, a fish hanging from each hand like a surrealist weighing scale, waiting for his wife and children to reappear. When they do finally materialize, several minutes later, cart herky-jerking out of a papier mâché cave strewn with bouncing rubber bats, he finds himself waving like an idiot, fish bags sloshing and leaking over his coat. But they don’t see him. Their heads—pale hair, delicate faces, so familiar to Nick in both individual isolation and mutual resemblance—are all fixed forward, eyes wide, bracing for the next scare. As the cart slips, twists and rattles around the corner, then plunges them back into darkness, he feels a sharp kick to his mid-zone. He wants to go with them. To follow his family into the void so he can protect them from its depths, from the shrieking witches and rattling skeletons, from the horror of the merciless disembodied laughter. He wants all these things, and yet of course he does none of them.

When the ride is over, the twins bound off the cart and over the brown grass toward him, fleece-padded arms stretched out to reclaim their fish.

“Daddy! Daddy! At first I was scared of the ghost, but I touched it and it wasn’t real!” Isla tells him.

Foster is more subdued. He doesn’t look Nick in the eye, rubbing his face in a manner that indicates there may have been recent tears. He takes back his fish solemnly and peers into the bag to make sure all’s well.

Maya brings up the rear, shoving kid detritus into her handbag—a sippy cup, a toy car, a stray pink mitten. She is three feet away, almost touching distance, when she stops, looks up at Nick and smiles. It’s the smile of someone coming home after an extended ordeal, the smile of returning to safety. Nick finds himself taking her hand as they walk, something he hasn’t done in years. The light has a honey-coloured tinge to it, though it’s just past two. The days are getting shorter, nighttime creeping into day. There is a smell of fried fat in the air, and soon the twins start jostling and asking for food. Nick is worried that if he doesn’t find them something, there will be a blood-sugar crash. He looks around for something—anything—that might meet Maya’s exacting standards (a falafel? pretzels?) and sees only cotton candy, swirling ice cream and cages being plunged into bubbling fryers.

“Let’s hit the road, kids,” Maya says. “There’s lots of food at home.”

The children look devastated. “Do we
have
to go? We love it here!”

Nick shrugs and reaches deep into the pockets of his oilskin coat. “We could go home or … we could have
THIS.
”

He pulls out two enormous shrink-wrapped banana–nut bars he pilfered from the pantry before leaving. The twins, who have
never seen their father produce anything from his pockets apart from cash and keys, cheer at his newfound powers. They fall upon the bars like starving puppies, mouths and fingers streaked with carob.