A Better Man (4 page)

“Oh, you know, the usual. Drunk midget wrestling, appeasing the missus. So what’s on again today?”

Ben nods like a naval cadet and lists off a schedule of pitch meetings and casting sessions, followed by the appointment Nick has been waiting for: evening drinks with his old friend Adam Gray.

Nick glides through the rest of the day in a state of pleasant dissociation, skimming along the surface of work in a way that effects maximum output with minimal energy. By the time 6:00 p.m. winds around, he’s pulling on his overcoat and feeling predictably numb, considering the meeting that awaits him.

He gets to the Plymouth early to secure a good table. The small hotel bar is widely noted for its stupendously large cocktails and possible connections to the Russian mob. While the weather has cleared up—a bit of late-afternoon sunshine streaks through—Nick chooses a spot in the back, where he and his old friend can conspire like three-hundred-year-old vampires in the murky half light.

Adam Gray is the top-billing family lawyer at the city’s biggest firm. Notorious for protecting rich clients by screwing their poorer (and usually markedly better-looking) spouses out of their rightful settlement, he is a chronic workaholic who made
partner at thirty-three and now charges more per hour than the average taxpayer earns in a week. He is also one of those friends Nick sees as much to measure his own success against as for the pleasure of his company. They meet up a couple of times a year for a drink or six—usually at a dark, leather-scented hotel bar—and reminisce about the old days, back when they were idealistic undergrads chasing hippy girls in ponchos.

Gray is exactly three minutes late, as he is to every meeting—social, professional or otherwise. He is, Nick thinks, the sort of person who commits all errors with purpose. Nick watches his old friend shouldering through the door and blinking around in the dim light, a tall man with the hunched back of a grizzly bear—a shape created from tens of thousands of hours of adversarial paperwork and a diet of ordered-in prime rib and mash.

The two men give each other a rough, back-slapping embrace and a couple of throaty “How’re ya’s?” then slouch down into the tufted leather booth. It is only after they’ve sent the waitress for a pair of double Manhattans and a bowl of spiced jumbo cashews that actual eye contact takes place.

“Wakefield, good to see you, man.” Gray crunches the words in his throat like a garbage compactor, his voice enhanced by fifteen years of chain-smoking. He reaches into his breast pocket and removes an electronic cigarette—the latest in an endless series of aids in his quest to quit—and takes a deep hit. The tip lights up when he sucks, like a toxic Christmas decoration. Gray holds his breath for a beat, then exhales a strange minty vapour. “Nice suit,” he says, looking Nick up and down. “Your stylist pick it out for you?”

Nick fingers his lapel and allows an indulgent smile to spread across his face as he examines his friend’s mournful eyes and
head of coarse, dark curls. Gray has never been typically handsome, but he is the sort of man women are naturally drawn to: large, dominant and wounded despite his professional success. The weary, court-battered charm gives him an older man’s extra gravitas, but like Nick, he’s only just pushing forty.

“You look like shit, as always,” Nick counters. “Firm still working you like a diamond miner?”

“I wish. Least then I might dig up something pretty instead of profiting from the proliferation of human misery.” Gray says this with a reluctant grunt of pleasure.

“Ah well, there’re worse ways to make a living. For instance, you could spend your days casting fitness models to sell body gel.”

“Sounds like the lowest circle of hell to me.”

“At least they remunerate us for our suffering.”

“Truer words.”

Nick gives the waitress a schoolboy smile and removes his cocktail directly from her hand with a dry brush of fingertips. She flutters back to the bar. He raises his glass toward his old friend, then tosses back half the drink.

“Thirsty?” Gray is watching him with a quizzical look.

“Mmm, parched.” Nick dabs at the corners of his mouth with a cocktail napkin, looks up at the dark mirrored ceiling with its spider veining and waits a few seconds before letting out an old-man sigh.

“How’re the custom-built chaos machines otherwise known as my godchildren?”

“Good, good. Busier than me, what with the Kumon, Zumba, Gymboree …” Nick tails off when he sees Gray looking at him blankly.

“Was that English you were speaking just now?”

Nick laughs. “Not entirely.”

“Maya still keeping up that exercise regimen?”

“Yep, hmmm.”

“Is that all you can say, you lucky bastard?” Gray slaps an open palm down on the table, causing the drinks to slosh and the nuts to scatter. “You don’t appreciate what you have, my friend. If any of my three ex-fiancées had been within spitting distance of that woman, I’d be a happily married trigamist.”

The conversation is not going the way Nick had hoped. Gray’s hopeless crush on Maya is a long-standing source of humour between them. Usually Nick thinks nothing of it. Slobbering over his wife is simply Gray’s way of winding him up and flattering him at the same time. An intimate form of trash talk. But today Nick finds it getting under his skin, which is of course precisely the point.

“I never should have introduced her to you at the regatta. Should have known she’d chuck me aside for a pretty-boy lightweight like you. Typical fickle sorority girl. Did you know it’s one of my biggest regrets in life?”

“So you tell me.”

“Should have kept her for myself. Ditched the race and spirited her away to Vegas for a quickie wedding.”

“Hard proposition when you’re a fat, geeky undergrad.”

Gray’s face cracks a rare smile. “Fair point.”

They clunk tumblers and drink, allowing an amiable silence to descend. Somehow Nick knows it will be his job to break it.

“That’s actually what I need to talk to you about.”

“I wasn’t fat. I was just a bit barrel-chested from rugby—”

“Seriously, dude, I’m being
real.
I need your honest advice.”

“Don’t tell me we’re here to talk about your feelings.”

“No,
no.
Well, maybe a little bit.” Nick catches the waitress’s eye and does the loopy international hand signal for another round. “Actually my feelings are sort of moot. The point is, I’ve made a decision.”

“Which is?”

“I want out.”

“Of what?”

“My marriage.”

“You’re joking.”

“I most assuredly am not.”

“But you and Maya, you’re like Fred and Ginger, Bogey and Bacall, peanut butter and jell—”

Nick cuts him off with an abrupt slice of his hand. Gray is the first person he’s voiced this to, after many months of rumination, and he is mentally prepared for a certain amount of resistance.

“Sometimes things are not as they initially appear. Marriages—families—in particular.”

Gray takes this in. Employs a swizzle stick to scratch a woolly sideburn. “Okay, I’ll grant you that. How should I know what goes on in someone else’s marriage? So I take it you’re not in love with her anymore?”

Nick winces. Such a harsh way of putting it. “It’s not that. And there’s no one else, by the way—not in any
real
sense.” He looks up at Gray, who gives a skeptical cough. Nick casts his eyes away and continues, “It’s more that I don’t feel capable of loving her anymore. Or at least not in the way she needs to be loved. I literally can’t do it. It’s killing me. I feel like I’m drowning or suffocating
or—I don’t know—trapped in a role. Like I’m understudying the lead character in the movie of my own life. I’m in the wings, watching it all happen. I need to get back on stage. Take control. And the only way I can do that is by making a fresh start.”

“Ending a marriage is many things, my friend, but a fresh start it ain’t. And lest we forget, your wife is trained in the black arts. Everyone knows you never divorce a divorce lawyer.”

“Spare me the homilies, okay? I’ve thought long and hard about this.” Nick can feel the whisky humming over the surface of his skin now, freeing him to say what he likes. What he
means.

“Oh, I’m not moralizing. I’m just presenting you with the facts. Divorce—if that’s what you really want—is not the get-out-of-jail-free card you might imagine. It can be a whole other prison in itself. An emotional Abu Ghraib. And a costly one too—not just financially. On every level. Especially when kids are involved. You should know that going into it.”

“You give this speech to all your clients?”

“Only the misguided assholes.” Gray leans back in the booth and studies Nick carefully. “And just to be clear, I’m not taking you on as a client. It would be a real conflict. Obviously. And more importantly, you can’t afford me. Don’t take it personally, bro. Almost nobody can.” Nick hoots skeptically, but Gray holds up a hand. “I can offer you my advice—as a friend—but when it comes down to it, you’ll have to retain other counsel. I can make recommendations, but I can’t act as your lawyer. Is that clear?”

Nick nods and crunches a whisky-laced ice cube. He’d expected this speech and is secretly relieved, since he knows Gray’s wrong: he can afford him. But he’d rather not spend a year’s earnings on legal fees. He gathers himself, then asks Gray
the question he’s been waiting to ask: “So how much is it going to cost me?”

Gray doesn’t miss a beat. “More than you can afford. On every level.”

“I’m talking strictly monetary. Not just the paperwork but the whole settlement. How much?”

“That, my friend, depends entirely on one thing.” Gray raises the tumbler to his lips, leans back and drains it. “How much have you got to lose?”

Nick, who has anticipated this moment too, picks up the calfskin document case that’s been sitting at his feet since he arrived and unzips it. He slides a yellow file labelled “Wakefield Family Assets” across the table.

“You tell me,” he says.

Gray nods grimly and picks up the file.

“How long’s it been?”

“Just over three minutes.”

“Is that all?” Maya’s stomach is clenched, her arms trembling. An angry mist of sweat rises off her. “I don’t think I—” She is rigid, holding a plank position, hands on the floor mat, feet on a vibrating plate, body a thrum of panic, fatigue and numbness. The idea, apparently, is to trigger the fast-twitch muscle fibres into firing in unison, creating what Bradley calls “a thousand tiny metabolisms” to fuel the larger, slow-twitch “central heating system” that is her body’s internal furnace. She thinks she might burst—
splat—like
a blood vessel.
People do die from this sort of thing. It’s not unheard of.
She sees the headline in her mind’s eye: “Housewife Spontaneously Combusts in Exercise-Induced Self-Immolation.”

“Hang in there,” says Bradley. He is a retired pro soccer player with an undulating West Indian accent and the most magnificent pair of shoulders she’s ever seen on or off a sports field. They’ve been “working together,” as he likes to say, for three years now.
He started as her trainer, but six months ago he graduated to life coach after receiving some sort of certification Maya didn’t pay much attention to. The only thing that’s changed since then, apart from his increased fee, is the specificity of his advice. Where once he used to advise her to drink more water, now it’s a glass half an hour before each meal and an additional four glasses throughout the day. Where he once told her to get more sleep, now it’s lights out before 10:00 p.m. at least three times a week to optimize the circadian rhythms. Bradley purports to be a firm believer in the mind–matter continuum, but really it’s the body he knows how to change, not the brain that instructs it. It’s his encouragement she pays for. Those little aphorisms and mantras that enable her to push through to the next level, to force herself toward further heights of self-mastery and optimal humanness.

“This is money in the bank of YOU,” Bradley says now. “Dig deep. Give yourself the gift of expending your full effort.”

As her trembling becomes a full-out Jello-bowl wobble, he starts counting backwards from ten. Maya makes it to a respectable two before collapsing forehead first on the mat, bile searing her throat, brain crackling with static. For one merciful moment, oblivion descends, and then just as quickly it’s gone.

Not cutting it,
says the voice in her head (her mother’s voice, much as she tries not to acknowledge it) as the familiar wave of self-disgust rises up around her. But before she can be engulfed, Bradley is there, sliding a water bottle into her hand, patting her on the neck with his heavy hand. “Good job, atta girl, looking good.” Something deep inside her blooms at the sound of his praise. She wonders if it’s possible—or even advisable—to reach a state of psychiatric transference with a fitness professional.

Afterward, she showers and then reconvenes for their regular debrief in the club juice bar. After three years of biweekly consultations they have developed a companionable post-workout rapport, one that revolves primarily around discussing Maya’s metabolism and Bradley’s personal life. Officially speaking, these follow-up sessions are intended as “nutrition seminars” (in addition to being a certified trainer and life coach, Bradley is also a dietary counsellor, whatever that means) to discuss her caloric intake and expenditure, as well as the delicate protein-to-complex-carb ratio, but the topic has been so thoroughly exhausted over the years that now they mostly just chat.

Bradley is twenty-seven and has four children under the age of six with a woman he never mentions. Maya fetches him his regular—a beet-and-kale juice with added protein powder—and gets a green tea for herself. Back at the table, she falls into cooing over the latest baby photos on his phone, a series of snapshots from a backyard birthday party. Little girls in synthetic princess dresses smeared in purple icing.

“Absolutely scrumptious. Look at those cheeks. What a little pudding she is.”

“Daddy’s little girl. Stubborn as her older sister is sweet. How’re the twins?”

“Growing like superbugs.” Maya finds herself touching the small pouch of skin above her pubic bone reflexively. The Caesarean scar is the only remaining physical evidence of her first—and last—pregnancy. After the twins were born, Nick had suggested she get her tubes tied—a notion that horrified her, though she couldn’t put her finger on why. It wasn’t as if she yearned for more children. In any case, the infrequent-sex
method of birth control seemed to be working just fine these days. “They’ve just started nursery school, you know—for socialization reasons—and I’m trying to keep them off sugar and processed food, but it’s hard. The other mothers are always bringing stuff in. I’ve given the teachers strict instructions, but I’m not sure they actually follow them. Last week Isla asked out of the blue if she could have some Smarties. How would she even know Smarties existed? I felt like she’d asked me for a cigarette.” Maya takes a sip of bitter tea and tries to focus on the antioxidants.