A Better Man (19 page)

She grew up in a neighbourhood just like this one used to be, in a small brown stucco house on the east side of the city—a house her parents sold before retiring to a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. She remembers her mother, a professor of architecture at the city’s biggest university, telling her about these houses when she was a girl. Sturdy little houses, intended for soldiers returning from the war. The houses of the postwar boom. Which became the turn-of-the-millennium boom. Which led to people buying perfectly good houses and tearing them down to build six-thousand-square-foot McMansions.

Usually such thoughts are enough to start the low simmer that Maya unconsciously sublimates into anxiety—an anxiety that’s been with her for most of her adult life. A sense that something terrible is about to happen and she has forgotten to do something important to guard against it. Like not taking her vitamin D supplement (rickets!) or signing the twins up for Hindi classes (they will be left behind in the global economy!). The feeling, in essence, that the world is rapidly going to hell and she must do everything she possibly can to prevent its demise.

But today the waters are calm and cool, and as a result no such sublimation occurs. Instead, what Maya feels walking under the wet black boughs on this grey and snowless December morning is a sense of safety and well-being.

Maya is on her way to work,
she thinks, narrating her life in the third person—a private game she used to play as a little girl.
She is wearing her best grey suit and her patent leather heels. At work, Maya will have her very own office with her very own desk. And a chair. And a drawer with pens and pencils. And a sign that says her name and position: Junior Associate. Maya is going to work very hard and earn her own money. And then at the end of the day, she’s going to come home and have dinner with her husband and kiss her children goodnight.
As
she does almost every night.

Except with the hours she’s going to be working, the twins will almost certainly be asleep by the time she gets in. Or she’ll be one of those mothers who rushes home for storytime and then puts in four more hours of work after the kids have gone to bed. And on top of the yeoman work required in her new job, there is also the obligatory guilt. She can feel it nibbling at the edges of her already. She pushes it firmly from her mind. Guilt, she knows, is her mortal enemy.

As she nears the subway entrance—a staircase into the bowels of the city that has always reminded her of a gaping toothless mouth—she notices other people like her, travelling toward the same destination. She can suddenly see all these people, the people in her neighbourhood, as if in a sped-up aerial shot, leaving their separate houses and surging toward the same fixed point: a tunnel that will take them to a train, from which they will all disperse into a different part of the city. They are all the same as her on the surface—professional people in their thirties, forties and fifties, wearing black and grey wool suits under black and grey wool coats, a dark brigade of middle-class professionals, the men carrying leather courier bags (briefcases, she notices,
seem to have gone out of fashion since she had children) and the women gripping handbags the size of small arms carriers. Maya has one of these handbags herself, and for now it is empty of files. Inside is her phone, a package of aloe vera tissues, one lip balm, one lip gloss, a wallet containing $87.76 in cash, a package of tampons (to keep at work), a pair of foldable ballet flats, six black hair elastics, bobby pins, a granola bar, her keys and a copy of
The Way.
She finished the book weeks ago but still carries it with her everywhere. In case of what, she’s not entirely sure.

Maya knows better than to start recommending
The Way
to everyone she meets, but she would if it didn’t make her look like a crackpot self-help junkie. The fact is, all her problems with Nick evaporated as soon as she embraced the theory of Radical Honesty. When she told him of her desire to go back to work, suddenly he wanted it too. Amazingly, against all reason, the Law of Wanting actually worked.

Nick was returned to her by the universe, which, rather preposterously, turned out to be as all-knowing and all-hearing as
The Way
had promised. And then her wish to work again came true as well. Sometimes when she thinks about it too hard, her brain starts to fizz and she wants to run through the streets shouting the incredible story of what has happened. She was about to lose her marriage, but then some outside force of good returned it to her. She had no job and the universe gave her one. The only other time she had felt this way was when the twins were born and she had this strange realization that something completely regular and yet totally miraculous had just happened and she needed to tell everyone about it.

Except, of course, she doesn’t. She doesn’t shout the story
of her resuscitated marriage to the other commuters on the subway train or to the young barista with the soul patch who makes her a non-fat half-caf latte. She doesn’t shout it to the office mail guy or the receptionist or her new assistant or the other junior associate in the office next door. She doesn’t shout it in the series of meetings she sits in all day with the lead litigator on the high-profile lesbian divorce case she’s been assigned to. But when Gray convinces her to have a drink with him to celebrate her first day and let Nick do bath-and-bedtime, she finds it impossible to keep her giddiness from rising to the surface. In any case, he can see it.

“What’s with the grin, gorgeous?” he says as soon as they are sipping a pair of enormous Manhattans in a booth in the new boutique hotel bar he has insisted on taking her to.

Maya can’t believe how many of these places have opened and closed since the twins were born. At times she is amazed that people even do things like go to the movies or have drinks in hotel bars anymore; these pleasures of the unencumbered have become utterly foreign to her. Sitting in a bar having after-work drinks is like returning to a pleasant country she emigrated from years ago but has barely thought of since.

“Flattery will get you everywhere, my dear,” she says with a twinkle. “Well,
almost.
”

He flags down the waitress and orders “some of those spicy Szechuan peanut things” before returning his attention to her.

“So how was the first day back?”

“Fine. Better than fine, actually. Would you think I was a complete nerd if I told you it was absolutely thrilling? Not in the sense that anything particularly thrilling happened, but in the sense
that I am completely thrilled to be back. I can’t believe I was so ambivalent about the prospect for so long. I guess I felt like I wasn’t entitled to have a life outside the home after the twins. They just needed me so much and Nick makes good money, so it seemed self-indulgent or something.” She looks up at him, plucks the sour cherry from her drink, chews it twice and swallows. “Sorry, am I being boring? I promised myself no mommy talk at work, and here I am blabbing on about the kids on the first day.”

Gray’s face has taken on an oddly pained expression. “Not a bit,” he says. “That’s not mommy talk; it’s just life talk.”

Maya realizes that she knows very little about Gray’s personal life these days. All their recent meetings have been focused on her. Feeling suddenly ashamed of this, she starts drawing him out gently at first and then dives in like a crack interrogator. Before long they’ve ordered another round and he’s telling her the story of his last romance—a four-night stand with the pretty summer student a few months back—and how it all went tragically wrong.

“I honestly don’t know why I get into these things in the first place when it’s clear there’s no future in them,” he is saying. He tips another handful of peanuts into his mouth. “I mean, she was lovely—don’t get me wrong. Still is, I’m sure. It’s not like she’s dead.”

“Is she not at the firm anymore?”

“Thankfully, no. She was on a six-month secondment from New York.” He unpeels a nicotine patch, loosens his tie, unbuttons his top two shirt buttons and smacks it directly onto his burly chest. “It hurts like hell to take off, but you get the best effect from putting it close to your heart,” he explains.

“Right,” Maya says, suddenly imagining Gray all alone in his penthouse loft with its concrete and glass and exposed ductwork. She sees him ripping off a nicotine patch and brushing his teeth alone before bed. “Are you lonely?”

He sighs. Perhaps he’s sad that she’d even ask.

“Not really,” he says. “I work too much for that. But I do wish I could have something … different. That I could find a person who I just … well, this is going to sound terrible, but a woman who I could really take seriously. Not as a person, but as a partner. You know, to actually share my life with. I think life is for sharing, don’t you?”

“Of course. But what was wrong with whatsherface?” says Maya, relieved to be taking a turn as the empathetic one. “I mean, she was pretty and smart and presumably very nice, wasn’t she?”

Gray nods dismally and waves a hand through the air. “Oh, Liza. Yes, yes, of course she was all of that. And because of that, she’ll make some lucky man a fantastic wife and mother someday. But that man just wasn’t going to be me. For one thing, I’m too old.”

“Old! But you’re not even forty yet!” Maya leans across the table, her hair sweeping over the peanuts, and hisses. “And by that I mean
we’re
not even forty yet. Which for your information is
not old.
Besides, I thought all single guys your age dated women in their twenties now. I didn’t know it was even a big deal anymore.”

Gray leans back and laughs. “It’s not a big deal! Whoa, whoa, touched a nerve there, did I?”

“Not really. I just … as a friend, I strongly think you should
be able to date whoever you want and not worry about it. At least from my point of view.”

Gray looks at her and snorts. He presses his forehead to the table in a gesture of exaggerated exhaustion, and when he lifts his head he is red-faced and laughing mock tragically. “If only I could.”

“Could what?”

“Date who I want.”

“Well, why can’t you?” Maya tries a peanut and is surprised to find that it is wildly spicy. She drinks the last half of her second Manhattan in one go.

“Are you okay?”

Maya waves her hands in front of her face. Gray reaches over and pats her on the shoulder. Then the pat turns into a gentle squeeze. It’s the sort of squeeze a high school football coach would administer to his star quarterback. Not a creepy squeeze but a collegial one. To Maya’s surprise she finds it very soothing. No one has rubbed her back in ages, not even Nick. She finds it so pleasant, in fact, that when Gray orders another round of cocktails, she doesn’t even bother to object. She just smiles and then narrows her gaze at him, as if to say,
You tricky bastard.

“So …” she says, a rogue thought suddenly swimming into her head. “Is this where you and Nick used to come on your man dates? Or did you go strictly to strip clubs?”

Gray raises his eyebrows and flattens his tie, which, Maya notices for the first time, is printed with tiny geometric wasps. “I have no idea what you mean.”

“Whatever,” says Maya, reaching for her next drink before the waitress has even pulled it from the tray. “I don’t care what you
guys got up to. It was probably nice for Nick to have, you know, someone to confide in. I’m sure you know we went through a pretty rough time. It was actually touch and go there for a while.”

“Oh, yeah?” Gray mumbles, suddenly craning his neck to study the menu board as if it were the Rosetta Stone.

Maya feels self-conscious about confiding in Gray—he clearly doesn’t want to hear it—but at the same time she feels compelled to tell him everything. He is, after all, the only friend still in their lives who has known them both since the beginning. The person who introduced them, in fact. She suddenly needs to present him with the incredible recovery they have made. Their marital tragedy narrowly averted—but why? Under scrutiny, she’s still not sure. Was it really
The Way
? Maybe. Or maybe the change wasn’t in her but in Nick, unprompted. Gray may be the only person who understands the evolution of Nick. The change and where it came from. She realizes it is this—not the new job or the whisky—that’s causing the humming in her veins, that accelerated feeling she has had for the past few days of hovering slightly above earth, moving just above the legal human speed limit.

“Nick’s completely different.”

“Mmmm?” Gray gestures to the menu. “They have tacos here, you know. Pork belly or tuna?”

“None for me, thanks. Are you listening to what I’m saying, Gray? It’s about Nick. He’s changed. Like completely.”

Gray looks up and places his chin in two hands. His eyebrows are raised as though he has just now computed what Maya is saying.

“Really? Completely changed. Like how?”

“Well, for one thing he doesn’t work all the time anymore. And
when he is at home, he actually seems engaged. He acknowledges the twins as something other than small angsty marsupials.”

“You mean he doesn’t play with them?”

“No! I mean he plays with them
more.
And he seems to want to get to know them—young children have a lot of character, if you take the time to notice.”

“I’ll take your word for it. You know I adore my godchildren.”

Maya glowers slightly. “I’m just saying, Nick’s like a new man. He’s been incredibly supportive of me coming back to work. Our sex life is better. And, I dunno, he’s just more
present.
It’s like for years he was anywhere other than with me, and suddenly one day he just returned. I don’t know why but he did, and now everything’s completely different. If that makes sense.”

Gray drains his drink and searches through his wallet. He finds some cash and slaps it on the table. “Well, congratulations, I guess. It sounds like you two are very happy.”

“Sorry, have I said something annoying?” Maya tries to meet his eyes but the bulldog is back, glowering out into some invisible field in the middle distance.

“No, no, not at all.” Gray is standing up now, pulling on his coat. “I’ve just got to go home and get cracking on this file. It’s always a pleasure, my dear.”