A Better Man (27 page)

To her surprise he keeps talking, an ache in his voice.

“I know how I must seem to you, but you have to believe me when I tell you it’s not what I want. None of it. I want us to be together. As a family. That’s what I want. I think it’s what I always wanted—I just didn’t know it. I got … confused.”

Maya hears herself laugh. It’s a thin, joyless sound.

“What’s funny?” he says.

She shakes her head and presses the key to unlock the driver’s door. The car bleats and clicks, its lights flashing on and off, an invitation to enter. Nick touches her elbow and she flinches. Because of course she
has
been burned. All those years she lived and breathed the atmosphere of his unspoken contempt for her, his vacant self-regard.

“You are such a liar,” she says. She knows it’s not a very sophisticated thing to say, but she says it all the same. She wants him to know she thinks it. Not just thinks it, but believes it.

“No,” he says. “I
was
a liar. But then I changed. The change was real. It started out a lie, and then it became the truth.”

Maya looks to the sky and opens the car door. “Nick, I’ve
seen
the notes you made on the asset file. Gray
told me
your plan. I’m not an idiot—I’m a fucking divorce lawyer. I know what people are capable of, and now I know what
you’re
capable of. You wanted to be free of us, and now you are. So I’m giving you that, okay? You need to stop with the lies now—both to yourself and to all of us. You wanted your freedom and now you’re getting it.”

She opens the car door and begins to duck in but stops when a terrible thing happens. She hears it before she sees it—a great
wracking inhalation that can be only one thing: the sound of a grown man crying. Not just any grown man, but Nick. The King of Cool, the Master of Distraction, the utterly unflappable father of her children. She has seen him cry before, but not like this. Which is to say, not
really.
She stands with the door between her and her sobbing husband. He is gulping for air now, his face a flushed, snot-smeared mess.

“Oh, Nick. Please don’t.”

He covers his face and mutters into his bare, chapped hands. “Is there nothing? Nothing at all?”

She shakes her head, and even though he doesn’t see her do it, the gesture is implicit in her silence. “Why should I take you back?” she asks. “Give me one compelling reason.”

Nick looks up, his face churning with thought.

“The money,” he says finally.

“What money?”

“If we don’t break up, we won’t have to divide the assets. Everything can stay as it was.”

“
That’s
your reason?” she says, almost laughing the brittle laugh again. “That’s your big clincher?”

He sniffles. “I thought I’d try a more pragmatic tack. The emotional plea wasn’t working.”

Maya gets in the car, slams the door and starts the engine. Before she pulls out of the parking lot, she lowers her window and looks one more time at this gaunt, unshaven apparition of her former husband.

“Nick,” she says, “you’d better get yourself a lawyer.”

For the next few weeks, their work schedules out of sync, Maya and Gray barely see each other. They move past each other in the loft like ghosts, getting up at odd hours, leaving separately and coming home late, eyes circled and brains fogged with case law. Maya works in bed while Gray pulls a few all-nighters at the office, sleeping on his sofa and changing his shirt and tie for the next day’s meetings. The last time they spoke at length was the night Gray asked Maya to move in with him. They have become experts at avoiding what’s going on and why she is there and what the plan is, if there is a plan. And all this is fine with Maya. Or if not “fine,” it’s better than the alternative—talking about her feelings. These days she would rather eat a glass omelette than talk about her feelings. She’s even stopped seeing Harriet—a strange decision in a time of crisis, but there you have it. Maya’s decided she’s just going to have to let things get messy and then see what happens.

One drizzly Friday evening, she rushes home to relieve Velma and put the twins to bed. Sprawled on the polished concrete living-room floor she finds Gray, still clad in one of his vast collection of rumpled navy suits, head and feet sticking out from under a pile of nubby Scandinavian sofa cushions. Isla props a bolster on his chest and straddles it triumphantly.

“Look, Mommy! We’re burying Uncle Adam alive!”

Foster, who has been dragging an L-shaped cushion across the room, runs to her, howling with joy, and she picks him up, burying her face in his silky curls. He smells like a shampoo she doesn’t recognize, and she realizes it’s been a long time since she bathed him herself.

“Are you going to read me stories tonight, Mommy?” Foster
asks, sucking in his lower lip in a way that suggests he is managing his expectations about the answer.

“You bet I am, baby,” Maya says, giving him a love bite on the ear. “As many stories as you want.”

At this, Isla perks up. “Five stories?” she says.

Foster is dismissive of his sister’s math. “Five stories isn’t even a lot. It’s for babies. I’m getting thirty stories. And maybe a hundred extra too!”

“Okay, then. Deal.” Maya laughs and covers his face with kisses. Then she peers down at Gray, who is still prostrate under a jumble of upholstery with a goofy, exhausted smile on his face. “Can I fix you a cocktail?” she asks.

“God, yes,” he says, releasing a great breath as Isla resumes straddling his chest.

A pizza is ordered for the children and sushi for the adults, and once the chaos of bath and bed and storytime is over (“That’s
not
thirty, Mommy—I counted!”), Maya and Gray find themselves flopped out on the disassembled sofa, debating whether it’s too late to start a movie.

“Ooh look, here’s one,” Maya says, clicking through the dial. “It’s about a guy who pretends to be a girl so he can seduce the hot office lesbian he’s in love with.”

“If you’re going to waste ninety minutes of your life, it may as well be on quality trash,” Gray counters, grabbing the remote and scrolling down the menu. “Okay, I’ve got it. A jealous husband tests his wife’s loyalties by contacting her online and pretending to be an old flame. As their ‘affair’ escalates, he’s not sure whether to feel jealous of or wildly excited by the new passion he’s incited.”

Maya groans and pours them both more wine. “That’s completely unbelievable. Who would bother having an affair with his own wife? And how could she be so easily manipulated?”

Gray shrugs. “I’d believe anything now. There’s no romantic comedy set-up that’s too outlandish, if you ask me.”

Maya gives him a skeptical squint. “Why? There’s nothing outlandish about
this.
” She gestures around the room to indicate the situation they are in.

“Of course there is!” Gray hollers this, then lowers his voice for fear of waking up the twins. The loft is huge—nearly three thousand square feet. There are no walls to speak of, just three huge bedrooms partitioned off like giant office cubicles, their walls barely reaching halfway to the cavernous eighteen-foot ceilings. He continues, “You and the twins moving in here is the most surprising and wonderful thing that’s ever happened to me. It’s completely changed my life.”

Maya laughs. “But you’re always working. You’re never here.”

“That’s because I’m trying to give you some space,” says Gray. “If it were up to me, I’d just hang out at home with the three of you every day. I feel like the luckiest man in the world.” He leans over and takes a piece of Maya’s hair and runs it between his fingers. She feels suddenly self-conscious, like an unwilling audience participant in a pantomime magic show.

“Adam, I … don’t know what to say. I’m grateful, obviously, for your generosity, but in the long term, I’m really not sure it’s appropriate for us to stay here.”

He tucks the lock of hair behind her ear and leans back. “Why not? You know you can stay here as long as you like. I’d prefer it if you stayed for good. That’s not a formal invitation—I don’t want
to put you on the spot here—but I do mean it. I want you to stay. It’s what I’ve always wanted.”

Maya sits with this for a moment. She lets it settle over her. “It all feels a bit sudden,” she says after a while. “I guess I just figured that, you know, once the settlement with Nick comes through, I would get a place of my own and start my new life.”

Gray smiles at her in his slightly hopeless, open-faced way—a smile so far from the bullish courtroom litigator she can’t help being flooded with fondness at the sight of it. It’s not attraction she feels, exactly, but more like a deep familiarity. She feels
safe,
and she knows she feels this way because she has known Adam even longer than she’s known Nick. He’s been smiling at her like this since they met in residence in first year. They’d study together, and every once in a while she’d turn her head and catch him with that face. It is a smile she can trust. But also one that makes her feel ever so slightly guilty.

“That’s a very lovely offer,” she says finally. “Just let me think about it, okay?”

Later that night, after the wine and the so-bad-it’s-good romantic comedy, Maya accepts a different offer, and that is an invitation to sleep in his bed. The sex is not what she expected. They are silent because of the twins—though in truth Maya knows an air-raid siren couldn’t wake them mid-cycle—and Gray is very serious about it all, as if he’s attempting to scale a mountain he has been training for his entire life. Maya keeps wanting to burst out laughing, not at the act itself, which is surprisingly enjoyable and easy, but at the fact that she’s doing it—having actual sex!—with
a man other than Nick. And of all people, that man is Gray. She feels guilty and ridiculous by turns. But in the end they find a sweet and timid groove, like two teenagers just managing their first slow dance. It’s really not bad. Not terrible at all.

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.

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.