A Better Man (21 page)

Uptown Girl is wearing a chaotically printed fluorescent-yellow dress and matching shoes that Maya registers as designer-something. A woman like this would never buy anything so hysterically loud without the safeguard of great expense. “It’s just, you know, he hates me and my family,” she is saying of Brooks, as though he were not in the room. “He always resented my father’s success as a banker, and he used to make fun of my wealthy friends—he thought he was better than them because he’d gone to college on a scholarship and, you know,
made his own way in the world.
” She says this last bit with a tiny sneer, as if she’s pointing out some eccentric piousness on his part. “But in reality he’s just bitter. And all the more so because I was awarded the house and support payments. But as you know, that’s for the simple reason that I don’t actually have an income—I gave up my party-planning business to take care of Baxter, and my family pays my rent and legal fees. I’m
literally
a broke, unemployed stay-at-home mother. Not full time, obviously, since Baxter still has his nanny, whom he loves—another thing he resents paying for. The point is, the loathing and resentment he has for me, I can see that hate in Baxter’s eyes when he comes back to me after spending time with his father. And the things he says—” She starts to choke up again.

Her lawyer, who’s taking notes on his laptop, pauses. “Just take a breath,” he says. “And when you can, I want you to tell me what it is in your son’s behaviour that’s led you to believe that Jacob is engaging in a campaign of denigration.”

Uptown Girl composes herself and takes a breath. “Well,
for instance, last week when I was trying to take away his iPad before bed, Baxter said, ‘Mommy’s stupid. I’m going to poo on Mommy’s head.’ And then he said he wanted his daddy.”

Maya interrupts. “And … sorry, what exactly did you take from that?”

The client huffs slightly, to indicate that Maya isn’t getting it. “My ex obviously told my son to defecate on my head. Can’t you see? It’s a clear-cut case of psychological and emotional abuse. We have to get him out of that house. He doesn’t belong with his father; he belongs with me. I’m his
mother.
”

At this, Jacob Brooks springs up and slams both palms down on the table inches from his ex-wife. She gives a little shriek, but on her face Maya can see a flicker of pleasure mingled with fear—the adrenaline shot of finally getting the desired reaction. She sees how it must have been between them: the spoiled, beautiful rich girl and the up-from-the-bootstraps boy with his cleverly concealed temper. A hot, toxic and volatile combination that was doomed before it began.

“How,” Jacob Brooks begins slowly, looking not at his ex but at some fixed point in the middle distance, “do you live with yourself? Or is that the whole problem? That you can’t? So you invent conflicts to distort and deflect your own feelings of self-hatred? Or …?” He seems to lose his train of thought and falls back into his chair, limp and silent again.

Maya clears her throat and commences with a speech she’s made many times before—about how sometimes it’s necessary to take a step back from the situation and weigh the emotional cost of legal conflict against the tangible gains, but before she can begin, Uptown Girl leans in and hisses, “I want you to know
that my family and I are willing to throw any amount of money at this. We are committed to getting Baxter back.”

She looks at her lawyer, who opens a new file and slides it across the table. “In light of this, my client is willing to offer her ex-husband a very generous deal: she will forgo the support payments and reimburse him for his share of the marital home in exchange for full custody of Baxter, including all major holidays with the exception of a week in the summer and over Christmas, but excluding Christmas Day itself.”

Maya watches Jacob Brooks contemplate the woodgrain in the boardroom table. Finally he says, “If you’re offering to buy out my portion of our son—and it seems that you are—the answer is a categorical no.”

He nods at Maya and she pushes out her chair with a definitive creak.

“Well, then,” she says. “I guess that settles it. Or not, so to speak. We’ll be seeing you in court.”

Back in the office she checks her work email, scanning a long stream of messages flagged “Urgent,” most of which are anything but. It is, she reflects, almost as though urgency has become the regular state of being at the firm, a cruising speed well over the limit. She feels the old feeling—the gut-clench of panic, followed by the fizz-pop of stress hormones in her blood—and recognizes it almost fondly. For the first time in years, she feels genuinely under the gun. It’s not such a bad thing.

Amid all the work emails is a note from Nick asking what time he should meet her at the Christmas party in the atrium of the natural history museum. The party is the first “with spouses” event she’s been invited to since returning to work. Back in the old days of
their marriage, before the twins, she and Nick had a “no social drag” policy, which meant they didn’t bring each other to work events, since it was a drag for everyone involved—the date (who felt uncomfortable and out of place), the invitee (who would rather just hang out and talk shop with colleagues), and the other guests (none of whom really wanted to make small talk with a co-worker’s spouse).

She’d assumed the same rule would apply now that she was back at work, but apparently not. When she’d mentioned the party in passing, Nick jumped on it. He’d filed it and dialled it before she was able to dissuade him from coming. Not only that, he’d booked Velma for the night
and
had insisted on buying the Secret Santa gift when she grumbled about being too busy to do it herself. So it was a good thing, right? A good and perfectly normal thing to attend one’s own office Christmas party with the husband to whom one is very happily married. Except now that the night is upon her, Maya finds herself inwardly backpedalling for reasons that are a mystery even to her.

She looks around the office anxiously, eyes scanning stacks of bursting folders, copies of depositions and affidavits waiting to be filed. She is tempted to claim that she has to work, or that she feels the old strep infection coming back. But instead she forces herself to reply to Nick’s note.

“See you at eight.” And that is that.

Two hours later, Maya is struggling to zip up the strappy silk cocktail dress she’s changed into when Gray materializes in her office doorway in a dinner jacket, looking like a handsome vampire waiting to be invited in.

“May I?” he says, with a dapper flourish of his winter gloves.

“Of course.”

She turns her back and he zips up the dress as nimbly as a tailor. When she turns back to look at him, she is relieved to see that the strange tension from their drink her first day back seems to have evaporated. She considers saying something along this line, then thinks better of it.

They get on the elevator together, whooshing down twenty-three floors to the cool marble echo chamber of the lobby, trading notes on the cases they’re working on. Maya tells Gray about Uptown Girl—her half-cocked case against Brooks and her callous offer. Gray laughs at her impressions but cautions her to handle her client with care.

“Divorce makes people crazy,” he says, “as you’ll soon be reminded.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Maya stops in her tracks so that people around them have to swerve to get by. Gray looks surprised.

“Because you’re working in the family law division?” he says slowly.

Maya bridles slightly and drops it.

Gray gives her a slap on the shoulder. “Take it easy, kid,” he says.

She chews her lip.

The party is held a few blocks away, in the museum’s sprawling new atrium—a thousand tiny candles twinkling under the brontosaurus bones. Fresh versions of familiar colleagues fill the room. Maya looks for Nick but doesn’t see him.

She is overwhelmed by a powerful thirst just as a waitress
with a brassy red bob slides a tray brimming with champagne glasses under her nose. She smiles, feeling almost as if she conjured this young woman and her tray of chilled, fizzing glasses. “Thank you
so much
,” she says to the girl, who smiles at her beguilingly. Seconds later the glass has half vanished.

She looks around for Gray but finds he’s evaporated into the crowd. One of the junior associates, a twenty-something named Mike Nash who was hired at the same time as her, strikes up a conversation. He’s telling her about his “all-consuming addiction” to the eucalyptus steam room at their corporate gym, which Maya hasn’t yet bothered to visit. (“It’s effing amazing.
Way
better than sleep, which I don’t really bother with anymore. Who’s got the effing time?”) All at once, a familiar voice whispers in her ear, “Is this your work husband? I really hope not, because he’s not worthy of you.” Maya spins around and kisses Nick, then gratefully introduces the two men. Nick and Mike immediately fall into an easy man-patter about the city’s new soccer club, in that way that only men who are strangers can.

Maya touches Nick’s arm and motions to indicate she’s heading to the bar. Once in line she finds herself immediately behind Roger Goldblatt, who, to her mild horror, puts an arm around her and slaps her on the shoulder in a “Hey, old buddy” kind of way. She judges him to be at least three or four Scotches to the wind. “Maya Wakefield, our newest oldest associate”—he pauses to chuckle at his own unfunny joke—”have you met Peter and David here? They’re on the board, so we’re forced to invite them to the Christmas party.”

Two bulging white-haired men in identical navy suits offer
their hands to Maya and make disingenuous jokes about how unimportant they are. Roger hands her a glass of champagne that he seems to have pulled from his pocket.

“So how is our loveliest new associate getting on? Have you had the taste of blood yet?”

Maya coughs. She’s terrible at accepting compliments, especially creepy ones.

“Not yet,” she says. “But I have my first hearing next week, so I’m sharpening my teeth.” She mimes filing her incisors, but no one seems to get the joke.

Roger peers at her through a pair of greasy tortoiseshell glasses. A single wiry hair has sprouted from the bridge of his nose. Maya racks her brains for his wife’s name, then decides to take a flyer.

“Is Michelle here? I’d love to see her again.” Even Roger looks impressed.

“‘Fraid not,” he says. “She’s exhausted. You know she has one of those mystery diseases, the ones that make you sleepy all the time. So she never comes out to parties. Either that or she just hates me!” He pauses. “Speaking of marriage, I heard you’re working on the Jacob Brooks divorce. Awful business, isn’t it?”

Maya thinks of Uptown Girl with her Day-Glo silks and her ocean of self-pity and feels a crumbling sensation deep in her gut. “Oh, yes,” she says but declines to elaborate.

Roger puts a clammy hand on her shoulder. “And extra important you win, of course, after that business with her father.”

“What, uh, business?” Maya knows she should conceal her ignorance but doesn’t.

“You know her father’s a very powerful merchant banker.

Owns the second biggest in the city. He pulled all his corporate business with the firm when he heard we’d taken on his former son-in-law as a client. I tried to explain there would be no conflict, but he was enraged and not in the mood to be damage-controlled. The Heathfields are used to getting their own way—you might have noticed. I hope you make sure they don’t in this case.”

Maya nods. Swallows. “I’ll do my best.”

“Do better,” Roger says. “It really is an unfortunate falling-out. Her father and I have known each other since school days. We were both on the rugby team.”

“Rugby, really?” As Maya says this, she realizes she sounds more surprised than she should. Roger probably weighs less than she does.

“It was a small school,” he says. “Anyway, the point is we’ll be watching that case with interest.”

Maya nods, her body edging toward the other end of the room. “Message received. Loud and clear.”

She is about to bolt when Gray appears and gives Maya a knowing look that says,
Tread carefully.
She shoots him one back that says,
Please fuck off and get me a drink.
Roger is oblivious to all this suggestive flickering, as he tries and fails to pluck a half-melted ice cube from the bottom of his whisky.

Gray puts a hand on Maya’s elbow and turns to his boss. “Do you mind if I steal away our protégée to meet some of her new colleagues?”

Roger waves his hand in dismissal, and Maya and Gray are released into the crowd. She finds herself following him as he pushes through the sea of half-drunk lawyers to the food table, where he fills a plate with tiny beef burgers and begins eating
them, one per bite. For a while Maya just stands there like a spectator in a pie-eating contest. Finally she grabs one off his plate and pops it in her mouth. She feels instantly better, as if all her wandering brain cells had suddenly congregated back where they should be. Grease. Salt. Fat. So that’s what she’s been missing all these years.

“I need to talk to you about something important.” Gray says this very quickly, as if he has to get it out before he thinks better of it.

“I’m all ears,” she says, plucking up another beef burger in a brioche and giving it an appreciative sniff. This one, she’s pretty sure, has melted Gruyère on top.

Gray waits for her to swallow. The champagne envelops her like warm gauze. It occurs to her that she hasn’t seen her husband in quite a while.

“Spit it out, then,” she says.

Gray exhales and runs a hand through his hair. A bit of litigator’s theatre. “Nick is planning to leave you,” he says finally. “He’s been planning it for a while now. That’s why he’s changed. He’s hoping to get a better deal.”

Maya has that sensation she used to get at parties when she was in her early twenties—she thinks of it as “the Bell Jar feeling,” as if she is looking at her life from the wrong side of the telescope and things that were far away are suddenly dramatically closer. Her eyes drift woozily across the room, the sound going in and out like a radio feedback loop in her head. She sees all the people, but she doesn’t actually register anyone until her viewfinder comes to rest on Nick. He is standing at the bar, half-obscured by the crowd, speaking urgently to the catering girl with the brassy red bob. The
waitress says something Nick doesn’t like and he backs away, the old blank expression like a blind pulled tight across his features. Maya has no idea what’s happening between them, but it’s clear they have met before this evening. She decides then and there that she will never ask him how.