A Better Man (16 page)

“You’re a very lovely woman, aren’t you?” he says in a voice that sounds almost on the verge of … what, exactly? Choking up? Breaking down? Hollow laughter? All of the above?

When she looks at him, his face is opaque. A mask. It’s only when they sit down at the table and begin eating that Nick announces he has something to tell her. At first Maya worries
he’s going to steal her moment, but as Nick starts to talk, relief sets in. He is telling her that he’s had to turn down a big job for SoupCan because the dates conflicted with their holiday. It’s his own mistake, but he doesn’t expect her to suffer for it.

When Maya hears this, she waves her hands and tells Nick that it’s fine. Work is work. They can always have a holiday some other time. But Nick shakes his head firmly.

“Absolutely not,” he says, in a way that lets her know he will not be moved. “I know I can shift the dates, but the point is something has to give. My whole life I’ve always let work take precedence, and I guess at some point that has to stop. We have to make the twins—and of course each other—the main concern. You’ve been doing that for years and now it’s my turn.” He puts a hand over hers in a way she finds almost unbearably earnest and oddly out of character. “Don’t you think?”

Maya finds she’s lost her appetite. She stares at her food, moving eggplant around the plate, trying to will it away like a naughty child at suppertime. “Yes, of course,” she says quietly, giving Nick a sidelong glance. “You’re right.”

He looks at her carefully. “What’s wrong, babe? You’re not worried about money, are you? Because if that’s the issue, I can assure you we’re fine. I mean, of course it would have been nice to get the director’s fee, but I’ll still be cut in as a producer. And besides, since the Duracell job we don’t really have to worry about …” He tails off as Maya holds up her hand.

“It’s not that,” she says.

“So what is it, then?”

Her chin wobbles then steadies itself. She will
not
cry. Crying is for the useless. “I’m afraid you’ll think I’m a jerk if I tell you.
Especially since your re-evaluation of priorities—which is wonderful, by the way.”

Nick winces. “What is it?”

For a second Maya has a vision of them as one of those sickeningly supportive TV-drama couples who are always “checking in” with each other. She used to hate people who talked about how great their marriages were and how supportive their husbands had been through their pregnancy, illness, weight gain or whatever. She didn’t just loathe them—she strongly suspected them of lying. Could anyone really be
that
happy? For years she doubted it. But now she glimpses that what they spoke of might actually be possible, a shimmering oasis in the desert. She still can’t be sure how Nick is going to take her news, though, especially now that he’s made a sacrifice of his own.

She forces herself to look at him and sees he is now officially worried, looking concerned not just for her but for himself. Does he think she’s caught him out or something? Then she has a strange thought:
Maybe he’s afraid I’m going to leave.
But why would he be? It didn’t make any sense. She finds herself seized by the notion, and a part of her is tempted to say the words, just to see what it would feel like.

“What is it, darling?” he says, brow furrowing. “It’s cruel to hold me in suspense like this.”

Maya takes a breath. “I have a job interview tomorrow. At Gray’s firm. I have no idea whether they’ll hire me, but I’ve decided that whatever happens with this one, I really do want to go back to work.”

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 off 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.”