A Better Man (8 page)

Nick’s closes his eyes and presses a finger to each temple. He thinks of a question. “How much do you figure I can save myself by doing this?”

Gray, who has clearly been anticipating this question, makes a couple of scratches on the calculation sheet and slides it across the smooth desk. Nick barely needs to look down to glimpse the new number.

“I’m in,” he says.

Without needing to, the two men shake.

When Gray gets up to leave, Nick hands him back the “Wakefield Family Assets” file.

“I think it’s safer for you to keep this—for now.”

Gray nods and shoves the file into his overflowing briefcase. And then he is gone.

Maya’s been seeing Antonio at Drama Salon since the late 1990s, when she was a law student posing as a saucer-eyed party girl on the weekends. The salon sits on one of the city’s skeeziest corners—she secretly relishes the incongruity of having to weave through a small crowd of crackheads hawking ancient hubcaps to get a headful of premium lowlights and a high-gloss rinse. The salon has no sign and the windows are taped over with tissue paper, giving the place a disused look. Inside, however, the Drams (as it’s known among regulars) is a balm for the bourgeois soul—all retro barber chairs, antique gilt mirrors and church pews in the waiting area.

Antonio’s three black cockapoos tear out of the back to greet Maya in a spittle-misted chorus of yelps, ears flying behind them like protest banners. She can never remember their names—a faux pas she tries (and fails) to remedy by sending a magnum of champagne every year on the Saturday before Christmas.

Antonio stands behind her, hands resting firmly on her smock-covered shoulders.

“What can we do for you today, my darling girl?”

He rubs his elegant tapered finger along the base of her skull and lifts up the hair from her neck, making her shiver with delight. Plucking a small tendril away from the nape of her neck, he inspects the ends in a way that makes the roots twirl and sends electric shocks from the crown of her head to the tip of her pinkie toes. She knows he’s only checking for damage, but part of her wants to beg him not to stop. Instead she shrugs.

“I dunno … the usual? I was toying with the idea of bangs, but I’m still not sure.”

Antonio nods solemnly, then closes his eyes and presses his fingers into her scalp as if intuiting the right course of action from her inner hair spirit. After half a minute, he says, “Maybe just a root touch-up and a trim for today. What do we think?”

Maya exhales, relief flooding her body. “Perfect.”

Despite Maya’s marriage, the birth of her twins and the subsequent derailing of her career, Antonio still tends to her like she’s an unspoiled ingenue on the cusp of a great adventure, her whole life waiting to unfold in series of dazzling events, each of which promises to be more glamorous and fascinating than the next, if only—and this is the crucial bit—she can get her hair exactly right. For the past several years, Antonio has been working toward an ashy-yet-lustrous shade for Maya’s highlights that he calls gin-and-tonic blonde. Every six weeks, her standing appointment brings them both a little closer to the pinnacle of hair colour nirvana. There is nowhere in the world she is quite so at home.

He beetles off to mix the colour, leaving Maya alone with a two-month-old copy of
Us Weekly.
She is halfway through a story
on why Pippa Middleton can’t seem to find a husband (apparently she’s “too sexy” to be “wife material”) when she hears someone air-kissing her way through the salon with loud, smacking “mwahs!” Before Maya can arrange herself more inconspicuously behind her magazine, Rachel Katz is descending upon her with flinging arms and juicy air kisses.

“Oh, my God! THIS IS UNBELIEVABLE!” she cries.

Maya’s not sure if she means their running into each other or the fact that it happened the last time they were here too. She makes a mental note to change her standing appointment.

Rachel is married to Glen, one of Nick’s many entertainment lawyers, which has the effect of throwing them together in various social situations throughout the year. Rachel is also one of those people Maya finds she bumps into with random consistency, making them feel more connected than they actually are. In Maya’s view, they are not so much friends as co-wives, watching from the sidelines of real life. Nevertheless, in a grand show of intimacy, Rachel tells Maya how gorgeous she looks, and how amaaaazing her perfectly ordinary shoes are. Maya smiles wanly and allows herself to be complimented, then in return tells Rachel how lovely her earrings are (for this, she well knows, is the Girl Code). After they are done making the obligatory fuss over each other, Maya sits there feeling weirdly limbless in her polyester poncho.

“God, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? I still can’t believe you have twins—honestly you’d never know it. So funny how we always end up here at the same time, isn’t it?”

Maya smiley-nods and looks down longingly at her unread stack of crappy fashion magazines, but Rachel is having none of it.

She tosses a leather handbag the size of a bowling-ball carrier down on the floor and plunks herself on the next chair over. A shampoo girl hops to it and begins hosing Rachel down in a portable sink, but Rachel doesn’t bother to acknowledge her, just continues chatting to Maya with her head thrown back under the suds.

“So what’s up with you?” Her eyes widen in what Maya recognizes as an unvarnished yearning for scandal and misery.
If I told her Nick was leaving me for a lingerie model, she might actually die of excitement and happiness.

“Not much. You?”

Thankfully that’s all it takes to set Rachel off on a ten-minute monologue about two-year-old Verity’s new “boyfriend” at playgroup—a story that is ostensibly about the adorable mating rituals of toddlers but is actually intended to underline the remarkably precocious intelligence and charisma of her genetic issue.

Despite the nature of their non-friendship, Maya’s actually known Rachel since her nightclub days, when she was a three-seabreezes-and-a-pack-of-chips-for-dinner kind of girl. Back then, Rachel was a publicist on the hunt for a rich husband, whom she eventually found in the form of Gormless Glen, the most un-entertaining entertainment lawyer in his field. Glen lets Rachel do whatever she wants whenever she wants, and for this she will never forgive him. By the time Antonio returns with his colour cart and begins the fussy work of painting and foiling Maya’s roots, Rachel is in full flow.

“I’m telling you, he is
so
bad at gifts that this Christmas I’m actually just taking his credit card, buying my own gifts and putting them under the tree. All the lazy bastard has to do is sign
the card, and I’ll probably have to nag him for days to do that. Anyway, the upside is I’ve already got this gorgeous tennis bracelet picked out at the Christie’s auction. It’s not romantic, but you have to make things easy for men, you know? Like I told Glen, he should consider himself lucky—all he has to do now is press Spend.” She cackles at her own unfunny joke.

Maya offers a smile. “But maybe if you gave him a chance …?”

Rachel bats her hands like she’s pushing Maya backwards off a cliff. “Bah! No way. I’ve tried that. If I didn’t do it for him, nothing would get done—trust me. It’s like everything: marriage, kids, buying a house, renovating, vacations, shopping for friggin’ groceries. If I didn’t do it, it would never get done. Honestly, sometimes I think if I hadn’t showed up in his life and stamped my little foot, he’d still be living in his roachy law school apartment, watching pay-per-view in his tighty-whities. And for this, what do I get? The privilege of buying my own Christmas presents.” Rachel shakes her head to convey how utterly convincing she finds herself. “Sometimes I honestly feel like Glen was sent here to help me cultivate patience. Like some kind of test of character from God, do you know what I mean? Surely you must feel the same way about Nick sometimes. How are things going with his company? Is he still crazy busy?”

Maya leans back and one of Antonio’s tinfoil flaps falls forward, mercifully concealing her eyes. She knows that in passive-aggressive Rachelspeak, “crazy busy” is code for “workaholic bastard who neglects your every need.” Frustrated as she is, Maya has never been able to master the art of venting about her marriage to others. She prefers to keep her unhappiness to herself—not because she’s especially private but because
co-rumination seems to trivialize things. She likes to think of her marriage as being in a special kind of trouble, rather than the garden-variety type.

“Mmm … yeah, most of the time,” she mutters. “How’s Glen’s new practice going?” She knows she should ask about Rachel’s work, but she can’t recall the exact nature of her pretend job. Something about importing kaftans from Morocco?

“Oh God, you know, the same.
Terribly
important. Takes precedence over everything. Honestly, you’d think negotiating contracts for TV producers was morally equivalent to cancer research. He’s so caught up in work most of the time, I feel completely invisible. He never notices if I change my hair or get a new outfit. I feel like I could go on one of those Venezuelan cruises and come back with Eva Longoria’s tits and he wouldn’t even notice.”

“I’m sure that’s not true.”

“Oh, it is! This summer I was doing that daily fitness boot camp in the park—you know, the one that runs five days a week for six weeks—and every morning I put on the same stretchy yoga pants and top while I was getting my daughter out the door for day camp. Every day for weeks on end, he saw me have breakfast in the same outfit. Then one morning about halfway through the summer, I got up and said, ‘Time to put on the uniform.’ And he said, ‘What uniform?’ And I said, ‘You seriously haven’t noticed that I’ve been wearing
exactly
the same outfit every day for the past three weeks?’ He just gave me that blank look—the one where they’ve just done something shitty, but if you make a big deal about it, they’re going to call you crazy. God, I hate that look. It’s so invalidating. Anyway, I completely dropped it. A test of patience. But that doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten.”

There’s a flustered silence as the girl wraps a towel around Rachel’s head, causing her to close her mouth. Maya searches for something to say.

“Have you tried counselling?”

Rachel looks astonished. “No, why would we?”

Maya shrugs, not wanting to answer the question. “Well, it’s just that you seem sort of … I don’t know.”

Rachel laughs and shakes her head. “Unhappy? Are you kidding? I’m the happiest person I know—I’ve got everything I want. My life is perfect. I’ve just been married for a long time, that’s all. You’ve got to
vent
once in a while. That’s what
girlfriends
are for.” She gives Maya a meaningful look, reaches over and squeezes her knee. “We should go for margaritas one of these days.”

“Yeah, we totally should.” Maya wonders how much time to let pass before she moves her knee away.

Mercifully, Antonio breaks the silence. “Ready for a blow-dry, darling girl?”

Maya nods eagerly and lets him lead her over to the shampoo station, already relishing the silence.

When she returns home, the house is silent. Since the twins were born, she’s rarely come home to an empty house. She walks through room after room, calling out her children’s names. When she gets to the kitchen, she picks up the baby monitor and stares at it as if hoping for a message from the beyond. It’s nearly quitting time, so Velma won’t be at the park. Besides, they’ll be hungry for dinner soon. She has a moment of blind panic, in which she imagines a car crash, an electrocution involving a misplaced
fork, and the double onset of childhood meningitis all at once. Then she sees the note.

The handwriting is more deliberate than usual but still unmistakably Nick’s. “Hi babe,” it reads. “Got off work early, so sent Velma home and decided to take the kids to the Jungle House for noodles. Back before bedtime. Enjoy your evening off—relax! Nick.”

Beside the note is a jar of lavender bath salts from Maya’s favourite French toiletry shop. She picks it up and studies the mauve-and-white label as if looking for clues. As one set of neurotic fantasies evaporates from her mind, another begins to present itself.
Why is he being nice to me?
she finds herself thinking.
What can he possibly want?
She racks her brains for reasons why Nick might be feeling contrite or emotionally indebted. Has he forgotten some major birthday or anniversary? (No.) Is he having an affair? (Maybe.) Is he just feeling guilty for months of stonewalling and emotional avoidance? (Unlikely.) She goes to the fridge and uncorks a half-empty bottle of Pinot Grigio. Pouring herself a big glass, she thinks about Rachel’s monologue on marital depreciation—how it had made her feel sorry for Gormless Glen, a decent, hard-working guy who could never do a single thing right. A man condemned to a lifetime of criticism and failure in the eyes of his spouse.

Maya swallows a bit of wine, letting the acid sweetness roll down her throat to some deeper, fast-warming place. Low in her belly, a coil unfurls.

Whatever Nick’s game is, Maya resolves to play along and avoid giving him the satisfaction of resistance. She knows how guilt works; she isn’t going to relieve him of it by being the cold
fish to his ingratiating suitor. Whatever he’s feeling guilty about, she’ll make him feel guiltier still by accepting his every kindness with gratitude and compliance. If he wants her to relax, she’ll relax. She’ll be the most relaxed and understanding wife on the block—a paragon of well-adjusted reasonability. As if to prove the point, she picks up the lavender salts and marches upstairs to draw herself a bath.
There,
she figures.
That’ll show him.

There are no two words in the English language that instill more trepidation in Nick Wakefield than those he is being forced to contemplate: “date night.”

It isn’t the event itself that horrifies him—like anyone else, he is capable of enjoying dinner and a movie with his spouse, or has been in better times—but the notion of a life so circumscribed by duty that even a weekly window for romance must be put in dull service to the cause. Date nights were for people who read advice columns, joined professional networking groups, signed up for “club cards” at every retailer they frequented, went on package vacations and had their savings swindled away in pyramid schemes. Unimaginative, credulous people, in other words—
normal
people who’d gone without passion in their lives for so long they’d forgotten what real passion felt like (if indeed they ever really knew at all). Date nights were the death of spontaneity, the gateway into a life defined by middle-class banality. A code word for mandatory sex. And while Nick liked to think of himself as a man with a healthy libido, nothing left him colder than the idea of erotic duty.