A Better Man (3 page)

“Let’s hope he doesn’t have sociopathic tendencies,” says Maya. “You haven’t noticed him killing any stray cats have you?”

Velma’s laugh is a pealing church bell. “Oh, honey, you don’t have to worry about that. He’s going to be wonderful. He’s very proud but also very sensitive and full of heart. Remember the time he knocked Isla off her trike and then tried to take off his Band-Aid to put over her bloody nose? That was so sweet. Come to think of it, he reminds me of my second ex-husband.”

“What was he like?” Maya is intrigued. While Velma devotes plenty of airtime to her two daughters, she rarely mentions either of her ex-husbands, both of whom are back in Rio.

“Oh, so handsome. A handsome devil—a salesman who could charm the pants off an Eskimo.”

“How long were you with him?”

“Only two years. He was a madman—no offence to Foster—but it was worth it because the crazy attraction I felt for him gave me the courage to leave my first marriage. You know
that
one lasted a long time. Over ten years. Much longer than it should have.”

“Why?”

Velma shrugs, then gives the crystal glass another blast of hot steam. “I dunno. Why does anything need to end? I suppose I got a bit”—she jiggles her shoulders this way and that, causing her mane of frosted tips to quiver around her face—”I guess you would call it
restless.
I had to run. To dance. To get a new life! Looking back I’ve never questioned it. If I hadn’t left him,
I wouldn’t be standing here today.” She spreads her arms, still holding the tea towel with a generous smile.

“But your first husband, you were with him so long. You must have met him very young. He is the father of your children, isn’t he?” Maya hears a note of urgency creep into her voice.

Velma looks confused. “Yes? So? People change. Carlos was a good man, but in the end I was so terribly bored. I had to get out or die. And I did, and here I am.”

A fizzing wave of anxiety washes over Maya.
This is not about you, silly,
she tells herself. She looks down, blinking and stretching her face at the marble chopping block, but it’s no use. The tears have been lurking just below the surface lately, welling up and seeping out whenever she’s reminded of the happy past—back when she and Nick could bear to look each other in the eye. Earlier today, after feeding the twins, she spent ten minutes sitting in a chair, attempting to channel the Law of Wanting—a fanciful notion she’d just read about in
The Way.
The idea is to concentrate on the thing you want most, and the universe will hear you and grant your wish.
I want my husband to love me again,
she’d thought over and over, like a mantra. But the wanting only served to remind her of the loss. It wasn’t that she wanted love so much as that she couldn’t figure out where it had gone.

Velma registers the tears and rushes to put her arms around her. “What’s the matter? Oh, Lord, what stupid idiot thing did I say? Tell me and I’ll chew up my words!” She mimes plucking words from the air and shoving them into her mouth and swallowing.

Maya laughs and wipes her nose with the cuff of her yoga jacket. “It’s nothing, really. It’s just … sometimes I think Nick
feels about me the way you feel about Carlos. It’s like I’m just there. A fixture he’s getting increasingly sick of. Like, like”—she looks around the kitchen, searching for a metaphor—”like an old backsplash.”

Velma raises an eyebrow. “A what?”

“You know, a backsplash. The tiles that go on the wall over the counter. People always change them when they renovate. That was the first thing Nick changed when we bought this house. The old terracotta backsplash—unacceptably 1990s, he said. He wanted European subway tiles. The point is, an updated backsplash gives an old kitchen new life.” Her voice snags in her throat mid-sob. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m sorry.”

Velma hands her a hanky, and instead of wiping, Maya pats at her face the way her dermatologist taught her, then snuffles like a congested pug.

“But why do you assume you’re the backsplash and not the kitchen?” asks Velma.

“What do you mean?” Maya begins to wonder if this metaphor hasn’t run its course.

“Well, you assume
you’re
the old backsplash, but maybe you’re the old kitchen and all you need is a new backsplash to update your look. Or maybe your marriage is the old kitchen and the two of you can get a new backsplash together and then everything will be fine.”

Maya knows she needs to be careful. Apart from the odd eye-rolling joke, she hasn’t let Velma in on the hole in the centre of her marriage. In part this is because she doesn’t quite know how to articulate what’s wrong. She and Nick almost never fight, yet their mutual dissatisfaction is palpable in countless unspoken
ways. Maya is suddenly overcome by the fatigue of long-term denial. She wants to tell someone—anyone, really, but Velma especially—how unhappy she is. But she knows she shouldn’t. This house—this family—is also Velma’s livelihood. She’s as protective of it as Maya is, maybe more so.

“Oh, it’s fine, really. Things have just been a bit strained lately. Nick’s been working so much and I’ve been focused on the kids.”

Velma uncrosses her arms and places a hand on each hip. “And your sex life?” she says.

Maya cringes. She’s always resented the notion that sexual relations could constitute an entire parallel life outside of regular existence. No one asked you about your “eating life” or your “exercise life” or your “sleeping life” or your “job life,” so why should sex be any different?

“What about it?”

“Are you doing it? Regularly? Or have you fallen off the horse?”

Maya can’t meet Velma’s eyes. Her tongue feels mossy from too much green tea.

“I think it began to tail off around the time we started co-sleeping.”

“You mean after you had the babies?”

“More or less. I mean, yes.”

Velma nods, hands on hips. “I know what you need. I read about this in one of those silly magazines, but in this case it’s actually a very good idea. It’s called the ‘date night.’ You put on a nice dress, drink a few cocktails, talk about something other than the kids. In my day we did that every weekend. Then again, when my girls were the twins’ age I was in my twenties and living with my husband’s entire family.”

Maya grimaces. “It’s true we never go out together anymore. I mean, there’s his annual awards gala, the whatever-they’re-calleds, but I didn’t go this year.”

“Why not?”

“Isla had a cold. Remember that awful hacking cough she had last winter?”

“And what? You had to watch her while she sniffled in her sleep? I couldn’t do that for you?”

“No! She was just being, you know, a bit weepy and clingy, and I felt she needed to know that I was
there,
otherwise her foundation of trust might be eroded or … oh, I don’t know. Okay, the truth is I just didn’t feel like going.”

“And
why
didn’t you feel like going?” Velma lifts up the elements and scrubs some grease off the stovetop. She stares hard at Maya, indicating she will tolerate nothing less than the truth. Maya feels herself shrink in deference.

“I guess I haven’t had much use for parties—or date nights, for that matter—since the twins were born. It all just seems so superficial when there are two small lives I’m now responsible for. Well,
we
are.” She smiles sheepishly at Velma.

Velma rolls her eyes with dramatic disapproval. “You’re kidding me, honey. Seriously?”

Maya blinks, then blows a wisp of hair from her face. She knows what Velma is going to say without her needing to say it—that the twins are three years old and well taken care of, so why would it be risking their lives to go out and have some fun once in a while? And even more to the point, that it’s not in anyone’s best interests to sacrifice her relationship with Nick to assuage some deep-seated reptilian fear that if she leaves her children
for more than a couple of hours at a time, they will end up corrupted, maimed or buried in an avalanche of refined sugar. She knows all this, and yet she finds it hard to override the anxious primal urges that brought her to this juncture in the first place.

“Have you tried talking to Nick?”

“About what?”

“About this feeling you have—that he doesn’t love you the same way anymore?”

Velma says this matter-of-factly, but it still manages to take Maya’s breath away.

She shakes her head. “We never talk about our feelings,” she says weakly. “But at least we don’t really fight. There’s got to be some good in that.”

Velma looks unconvinced. “See, that’s just where you’re wrong. A little fighting is
good
for a marriage. Back home everybody says, ‘When you fight, you fuck.’ Is true, no?”

Maya looks down at her hands. She has heard this theory before.

“Maybe that’s what you’re missing—the howyoucallit?” Velma plucks an elastic band off the counter and extends it back, letting it snap against her fingers.

“Tension?”

“Yes, the tension! Exactly. This is what holds couples together. Like the sun and the moon.”

“You think?” Maya wouldn’t begin to know how to pick a fight with her husband, even if she wanted to—or this is what she tells herself, conveniently ignoring the adversarial side of her brain, the side she set adrift when she left the law. The fact is, while she and Nick have almost no conflict to speak of, the resentment between them is constant and palpable—it just
doesn’t lead anywhere. Not to a fight and not to sex. Their marriage, these days, feels like a state of dull discomfort. A pain so familiar that it wears on her like a chronic injury—too unpleasant to ignore, too boring to mention.

For a moment Maya wonders if it’s her fault for not demanding more of her husband. For not calling him at work and ordering him to get home early or bickering over laundry and blown light bulbs. She read a self-help book once about how men prefer bitchy women because their selfish behaviour is a subconscious indicator of self-worth, which men in turn interpret as objective value in a mate. For a while after that, she tried to be difficult just for the sake of being difficult. But her heart wasn’t in it. She liked to think of herself as bloody-minded and tough, but in truth, she was in her own life acquiescent and deferential to the point of absurdity. Why else had she failed to wean her babies after three years? Because they kept asking for “mommy milk.” Why else had she potty-trained them by eighteen months? Because a book told her that’s what good mothers do and she was determined to do things by the book. Another ludicrous case in point: here she was taking marital advice from Velma, a two-time divorcee and avowed singleton (she often said she’d be damned if she ever “washed anyone else’s socks again without being paid for it,” which Maya thought was eminently sensible).

“You should pick a fight with him and see what happens,” Velma concludes, folding and refolding her dishcloth as if to say,
That settles it.

“If you think so,” Maya almost whispers, knowing that she won’t.

SoupCan Productions is located in a former sweatshop in the city’s garment district. Nick ascends in the glass elevator and steps out lightly, enjoying the soft spank of leather sole on polished concrete. Even in the flat fall light, the banks of desktops gleam. He does his usual sweep and is glad to note the absence of water bottles and food detritus (both are banned from the office for obvious aesthetic reasons—if employees wish to consume, they may do so in the cafeteria). Hot beverages may be drunk from plain china mugs, cold drinks from heavy-bottomed glass tumblers no more than four inches tall.

Nick has recently decreed that on the first Monday of the month, all employees must shuffle workstations, resulting in a never-ending game of office musical chairs. His official line is that it’s for reasons of “sociability and transparency,” but actually it’s meant to keep people from getting too settled. Nick believes in the power of order and detachment, but also in the importance of changing up the regular. He discourages personalization of the workplace. The office, in his view, should be an escape from
the cloying demands of the personal, the messy and the earth-bound. In work there is a controlled kind of freedom—a form of crisp, high-minded play not readily available in any other area of life. It’s difficult to be edgy, irreverent and effortlessly on the pulse when constantly reminded that the woman who sits next to you loves her cat.

Nick started SoupCan with his partner and first production accountant, Larry Goldfarb—an unkempt, soft-bellied math whiz and the warm, woolly yin to Nick’s cool, angular yang. They met in their early twenties—Nick fresh out of film school, Larry managing a sub shop—and forged a bond while working on Nick’s only short film, a state-funded, futuristic art wank inspired by his twin loves, Fellini and Ridley Scott. “There must be a way to make money at this shit,” Nick said to Larry one night over cheap draft and soda crackers. When he looked up there was an evil glint in his future partner’s eye. Today they are the busiest independent commercial outfit in town, with a stable of producers and directors working with international clients, churning out dozens of slick TV spots a year. As company founder, Nick is now able to cherry-pick which jobs he wants, passing the rest to his preferred directors while retaining a handsome producer fee.

“Mor-ning!” Nick’s assistant says brightly.

Ben is trim and scrubbed in a made-to-measure suit. (God knows how he affords his clothes on the pittance he’s paid. Nick assumes, as he does with most of his employees, that the kid has family money.) His greeting contains just the right touch of irreverent subservience to make Nick feel simultaneously at ease and important. Ben is immaculate without being anal, animated without being theatrical. It is precisely this level of metrosexuality
that Nick specifically looks for when hiring an assistant—a person he secretly thinks of as an extension of his own brand.

“Morning, young Benjamin. How was your weekend?”

“Oh, quiet. Just did a bit of work in the garden, planted some daffodil bulbs for spring.” Ben offers a pursed-lip smile that suggests he’s actually spent the past forty-eight hours shagging the city while flying on class A drugs. “And you?”