A Better Man (22 page)

“I don’t believe you,” she says to Gray, keeping her eyes on Nick. Her voice is a cold, dead thing. “Why should I?”

“Because I’m your friend. And because it’s true.”

“Prove it. You know if I ask Nick about this, he’ll just deny it and I’ll be inclined to believe him—he’s my husband and the father of my children—so if you’re going to drop a bombshell like this, for God’s sake I hope you’re fucking well able to prove it.”

Gray heaves in obvious discomfort. “All right, then,” he says, closing his eyes. When he opens them, he is staring deep into the crowd. “Your house has an estimated market value of $1.8 million; the cottage is worth about a quarter of that. The cars are worth somewhere between thirty and forty thousand each, factoring in depreciation. You pay the nanny just under forty, cash, though that was Nick’s idea and you’re not comfortable with it. Last year Nick earned in the region of half a million. This year he stands to earn about one hundred grand less, mainly because he’s taking fewer jobs in order to spend time with you and the kids. Now that you’ve gone back to work, the income and domestic labour imbalance is beginning to correct itself. You’ve been away on holiday and your sex life is coming back. Nick listens and is attentive to you—more than he has been in years—and the same goes for the kids. Everything feels different because it
is
different. You are married to a different man. A better man. A man who has made you into a better, more independent woman.
But your life is not what it seems, Maya. In fact, it’s the opposite of that. The problem is, when he petitions you, the court won’t recognize that. The family court looks only at surfaces, not at deeper motives. It isn’t fair, but you know it’s true.”

She reaches out and finds herself putting a hand on Gray’s forearm for support.

“Careful now,” he says, looking around for a chair and not seeing one. “Are you okay?”

Maya nods. She feels as if a physical trauma has been done to her. In one minute-long monologue, Gray has just unravelled her entire world like a cheap ball of string. She looks down at the floor and imagines it lying there, the limp remnants of her formerly enviable life.

“Why are you telling me this?” she asks, and as she does so, she feels the familiar anger welling up. The rage, she knows, is a way of displacing the sadness that is the thing that will take her under, never to resurface. The anger, however misdirected, can at least be used to power her through this party, the rest of the night and tomorrow. And the next day. There is energy in the rage.

“Because I was the one who talked to Nick in the first place. It’s the advice I give all my clients.”

“I get that. But why are you telling
me
?”

Gray takes a thoughtful sip of his cocktail. “Because I couldn’t live with myself otherwise. I couldn’t be an accessory to your betrayal.”

“But you betrayed Nick by telling me. He’s not a client—he’s your friend. Just like me. We’re your
oldest friends.
” She says this with a kind of bereft wonderment. When she looks up she notices
Gray is actually trembling. Not just his hands but his whole person. This enormous man, who has argued his case in a hundred courts and won, is fluttering like a sheet of paper.

“I know,” says Gray. “And it was wholly inappropriate. But I think in this case I was somewhat subconsciously motivated.”

Maya stares at him. She is gripping her champagne flute and wonders if she has the strength to break it. She clenches it as hard as she can, craving the pop of glass and the puncture of flesh. Hard as she tries, it doesn’t give.

“What are you talking about?” She spits out her words with distaste. “What do you mean,
subconsciously motivated
? Why would you encourage my husband to leave me?”

Gray pries Maya’s glass out of her hand and sets it down. He keeps her fingers pressed in between his own.

“Because I’m in love with you, Maya,” he says. “And I always have been.”

Nick sits alone at the kitchen counter watching Mr. and Mrs. Fish floating in a slow spiral on the surface of their marital bowl. It’s all his fault. The night before, after one too many vodkas, he’d decided they looked lonely. Forgetting the carny’s warning about Vietnamese fighting fish, he’d scooped out Mrs. Fish and plunked her in with her feather-finned mate. Then he’d passed out on the couch with Letterman blaring, feeling slightly better for this good deed. Now they are both dead. Dead because of him.

It’s been six weeks since Maya left with the twins and he is going to miss his fish friends, however unstimulating their company might be. The events of that night have played through his mind so many times that he can fast-forward them now: Him at the law firm Christmas party, sharing a bad joke with Shelley while lifting a glass off her tray. His wife across the room, sharing an intense exchange with Gray. Then suddenly Maya is there beside him, looking the opposite of flustered. She is very still. Very sure. Her lipstick is perfect. She gives Shelley a smile that could flash-freeze the living. “I have to go,” she says. The twins
have come down with something. Apparently they are inconsolable and need her. She feels guilty for working so much. “But you stay,” she adds—emphatically, not passive-aggressively. He looks at her face and can see that she means it. It’s the only thing that will make her happy. “Stay and enjoy yourself. Please?” He protests weakly—offers to take her home. He almost insists. But in the end, he stays. And when he gets home, his family is gone.

He’s made some futile attempts at seeking comfort. Left a couple of messages for Gray, only to receive apologetic texts about being “utterly swamped” by a “life-sucking mega-case.” Apparently his oldest friend is too busy for one of their epic nights out. And in truth, Gray’s scarcity provides Nick with a glimmer of hope. According to the optimism bias, it can mean only one thing: Maya hasn’t mentioned their separation at the office. She isn’t telling people yet. If she were, Gray would have called him. And since he hasn’t, perhaps she’s not entirely sure.

So it’s just been Nick and the fish. Round and round they’d go in their separate bowls, looping past the decorative underwater ornaments nestled in the artificial blue pebbles at the bottom of the tank. Sometimes they’d stop to nibble the flakes he crumbled like a dusty, unappetizing snowfall on the surface of the water, but mostly it was just the same loop in their parallel glass bubbles.
Swim, swim, swim—hey look, a castle.
A world on endless repeat. Nick has spent a great deal of time getting inside the heads of Mr. and Mrs. Fish, and even in death, he feels a strange pang of envy. They may be dead, after an excruciatingly boring life, but at least they’re together.

He looks around the house and experiences the familiar undertow—a kind of dull, self-loathing enervation that has, to
his vague surprise, turned him into a complete slob. Maya didn’t take much when she moved to a corporate hotel suite—that’s all she will reveal, despite his repeated inquiries into her whereabouts. Apart from some clothes, books, toys and the organic, fair-trade contents of the fridge, she left the place untouched. But the house has rapidly devolved without her. It is as if, unbeknownst to Nick, her presence was beating back the creep of primordial filth, and now that she has gone the native bacteria, empty beer bottles, crumpled newspapers, sticky marks and sink stubble sense their occupying enemy has withdrawn. At first they crawled out slowly, sniffing the air, blinking and timid in the light—a coffee ring here, a toilet-seat dribble there. But now that they know the coast is clear, the agents of filth are laying waste to the place, shouting at each other, getting drunk and rioting in plain view.

The mess is a mockery of his authority. He knows he should hire a cleaner now that Velma’s gone, but somehow he can’t bring himself to do so. Hiring a cleaner would mean having a stranger in the house, and having a stranger in the house would mean showing someone around, and showing someone around would mean explaining why none of the people who should be here—who clearly resided in this large four-bedroom family home until very recently—are here any longer. He could make up a story about a death in the family, a cross-country trip for a wedding or a funeral, an event that he, as the man and the breadwinner, was unable to attend, but that wouldn’t entirely solve the problem. What if—he could barely bring himself to contemplate the thought without his stomach constricting into a rotted walnut—they never came back? What if he has to put the house on the market and move
to a miserable downtown loft like Gray’s, with concrete floors, exposed ductwork and icy industrial lake views? No, he can’t get a cleaner. A cleaner would make the situation real. And it goes without saying that he can’t clean.

He thought about calling a friend but then realized he’d actually have to tell someone else the story. How Maya left quickly, without argument or discussion, after the office Christmas party—at which she treated him coolly, and rather strangely, but not like someone she was about to abandon. How he came home and found the house empty and cold, the lights off and the heat turned low (even in her exit, she was fastidious), and it wasn’t until he received the tersely worded text half an hour later that he had any idea what had happened. He’s pretty sure that Shelley’s appearance at the party was the reason, but he’s still in the dark about Maya’s motive.

Since leaving, she’d refused to answer any of his calls or emails—had refused even to acknowledge him the morning he waited, in complete desperation, outside her office building. Eventually she appeared, looking wonderful, he thought, in a new shearling coat, collar turned against the wind, blonde hair swept up into a tidy knot, tiny ears pink with cold. He’d staggered up to her raggedly, in the manner of the sick or insane, a cup of coffee clutched in his raw hands for warmth, and had spoken her name low and at close range. She’d turned and looked at him, quite pointedly, as if she had no idea who he was. There was not even a glimmer of recognition. It was as if her memory had been erased, or she had been expecting his appearance and had steeled herself against him. Whatever the case, she gave him a single unreadable glance and then swished into the revolving
doors, leaving him standing there in the cold. He considered following her but then had visions of raised voices, flying hands, commotions and security guards. Real life, he reminded himself, does not operate according to the rules of a romantic comedy.

Every day for weeks now he’s dragged himself from bed, head thumping from another night of restless, broken sleep, to drink a pot of black coffee in the increasingly disturbing spectre of his kitchen. There is, he realizes with a chill, a part of him that wants to see just how far it will go. Will he become one of those people who have to be rescued from under a pile of newspapers and pizza boxes by paramedics and a TV crew from the Lifetime network? In a feeble attempt to guard against this possibility, he pours the floating bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Fish down the garbage disposal and flicks the switch beside the sink.

At least Christmas is over. What a horror that was. At first he thought the worst thing would be to spend it alone in the house semi-drunk, as he’d planned to. Maybe check into a railroad motel just to complete the vision of despair. So when Maya called him up on Christmas Eve morning and offered to bring the twins around for the day, he’d jumped at the chance. Now the memory of them both running to him—squealing with delight, then looking back uncertainly at their mother—makes him almost physically ill. Maya arrived at the house in the same black shearling, the one he didn’t recognize, covered with a skim of snow from the walk from the car to the front step. He asked her to come in but she refused with a thin smile that hardened to neutral as soon as the twins disappeared into the house.

“I was hoping we could talk,” he said.

“You hoped wrong. There’s nothing to talk about.” She handed
him an enormous bag of presents, all of them wrapped and rib-boned and looking jolly. “I assume you have a tree?”

“Sure,” he lied, his heart sinking because now he definitely couldn’t persuade her to come in. She would see the state of the place and take the kids back again.

He looked at the bag and noticed a gift tag with his name on it. “You got me something,” he said. “You shouldn’t have.”

“Well, I did.”

They stood there in silence.

“I should have got you something,” he said finally. “I was afraid you’d refuse it.”

“And I would have, so you were right.”

Nick looks uncertainly at the parcel with his name on it. “Should I refuse this?”

“No, Nick. It’s all yours.” She nodded and took a step back, letting the screen door swing toward him to bring the conversation to a close. “I’ll be back tomorrow at noon, so please have them in their coats and boots, okay?”

And with that she got in her car and drove off into the blizzard.

Christmas Eve with the twins was not the comfort he’d hoped for. He’d forgotten, somehow, that he was there to entertain them, not the other way around. It was all he could do to keep the cartoons blaring and the fish sticks and curly fries in the oven. After a few hours of TV and kiddie computer games (Maya had relaxed the screen ban in this time of crisis), Isla and Foster began to squabble from boredom and restlessness, so he gave them their presents a day early in hopes of mollifying them in the hours before bed. It didn’t work. As if sensing his lack of patience, they ripped through the lovingly wrapped packages
from their mother and resumed their moans and low-level discontent. They seemed like small, angry people irritated by their own skin, perpetually on the verge of crying, creating endless tiny conflicts over nothing. Watching them fight over the last curly fry, Nick had a horrible vision of them as spoilt, jaded and perpetually unhappy children of divorce.
They are mirroring the misery I have created,
he thought. A few wretched hours later, once they were in bed and finally unconscious, he sat at the kitchen counter and poured himself three fingers of Scotch.

“What now, Mr. and Mrs. Fish?” he’d asked the happy couple, then still swirling in their mindless loops. He felt the whisky begin to blossom out from his chest and spread to his cheeks and forehead, pleasantly numbing him, putting distance between him and the pain. Maybe Maya was just going through a temporary bout of madness, much like his own period of discontent a few months back—at least this is how he’d come to think of it. He reminded himself how close he had been to leaving her, and how differently he felt now. People really can change. They can even pretend to change, and somehow in the pretending real change occurs. He knows this because it’s happened to him. He remembers reading somewhere that character and habit are essentially the same thing. If you persistently act like a responsible person, you will eventually become one because your actions will meld with your being.
The mask shapes the face. You are what you do.
This is what happened to Nick. He evolved into the man he was pretending to be. For a few glorious weeks, the inside and the outside of his life matched, and he thought he could run with it.