A Better Man (13 page)

When Nick looks at Maya, she’s staring across the field at the corn dog stand. “You saved the day,” she says—a little flatly, he thinks.

“I hope you don’t mind.”

“Of course not,” she replies. “Someone had to.”

Maya is pre-packing for a holiday. A proper grown-up week away, with beaches and cocktails and sunsets and a huge hotel bed with creamy sheets and fluffy towels and all the rest of the clichéd holiday stuff you’d find in a deliciously cheesy karaoke video. Their flight isn’t for more than a week, but Maya can barely suppress a grin as she folds her stringiest of string bikinis (unworn for half a decade) into quarters and presses it tightly in her suitcase alongside the Kenyan sarong, three prize-winning novels and a large spritzer of Swiss-made SPF 50. It will be the first time she and Nick have been away on their own since the disastrous pre-booked heli-skiing vacation they took to Switzerland when she was seven months pregnant (not a memory she wants to relive). It’s not just a holiday—it’s a
surprise
holiday. A trip to a secret location, planned specially and exclusively by Nick for her birthday. She knows they’re going somewhere hot for seven nights, but that’s it. “I’ll take care of everything,” he’d said over dinner at home three nights ago, and she’d had to fake yawn and look at the ceiling to avoid tearing up—not because of the surprise (which was actually
a bit unnerving) but because he was being so nice and she really wasn’t used to it.

Over the past couple of weeks, ever since the date night and the visit to the fall fair, Maya has seen a strange transformation in her relationship with Nick. It isn’t just that he’s changed—it’s as if some old dysfunctional part of him has been extracted and replaced. A transplant of sorts. The new old Nick is familiar but unnaturally so. At times it feels to Maya as if the past five years never happened. The company, the twins, his success, the end of her career and their slow, glacial drift into parenthood have vanished and they are their younger, unencumbered selves again. The man before her now is wiped clean, almost eerily so. She can sense his urgency to make things right and is sympathetic to it (how could she not be?), but she can also feel how little he wants to talk about where it all went wrong. Every time she tries (albeit clumsily) to bring up their problems—the years of silent resentment—he heads her off with appreciative comments or upbeat talk of the kids. She can’t make him a cup of tea for the compliments it inspires. (“Baby, have I told you you’re a prize?”) Before she can get back on the topic of What Happened to Our Marriage, he’s off—making all the right noises, doing all the right moves—until she abandons the impulse to pick apart whatever problems they once had. And perhaps he is right to do so. Nick seems so enthralled by their quick recovery that to retroactively diagnose the illness feels a bit … petty. What’s the point of dwelling in the miserable past when the future is suddenly so bright?

In her most hopeful moments, Maya thinks it’s a return to the natural order. Without discussion, they’ve resumed many of their rituals from happier times. He brings her coffee in bed
every morning. And he gets home earlier too. She waits until he arrives so they can have a glass of wine together—just one each—and then she makes dinner for the two of them. The twins, after a bit of initial caterwauling, are now sleeping in their own beds on the third floor (Velma helped ease the transition by staying over a couple of nights), which frees up space for Nick in the marital bed. Maya still nurses them before they go to sleep, but without them in bed, the night feeds have stopped altogether. At first she was almost disappointed that they didn’t cry out for her, but soon she came to realize the benefit: a full night’s sleep, something she hasn’t experienced in years. And what a difference it makes! She no longer wakes up each morning with an anvil of dread pressing down on her chest. This, she realizes, is what it feels like to be rested. But most importantly, Maya just feels different around her husband. Not just warmer but more
herself.
She is interested in him and—more surprising—feels interesting
to
him, for the first time in a long while.

It’s amazing, she thinks, how difficult it is for us to believe things may change. When we’re in the bad place, it always seems we’ll be there forever. But it’s in fact possible that bad places that once were good can be restored, making the bad times seem like no more than a blip. It’s amazing how easy it is for her to revert to seeing herself as happily married. She feels a bit like a naturally thin person who, having gained a lot of weight over several years, has gone on a successful crash diet and emerged suddenly skinny again. The relief of returning to her
real marriage
at last.

There is, however, one missing component, and that is the sex. Now that they’re sharing a bed again, they are being more physically affectionate (Nick actually scooted across the mattress and
gave her a kiss on the shoulder one morning last week), but this proximity hasn’t translated into actual conjugal relations. It’s not that she doesn’t want to have sex with him—it’s more that she feels she’s forgotten how. After the horror of the botched blow job, Maya opted for a more organic approach. She was hoping that all this loving behaviour would naturally result in … well, the ultimate of loving behaviours—that is, the sweaty, stinky, dirty-talking kind. Yet so far, nothing. This, in part, is why she is so keenly looking forward to their holiday. Just the two of them. No twins. A change of scene—ideally one involving an ocean breeze and a strong rum punch—might be just the thing to coax the skies to open up and end the dry spell.

With this in mind, Maya presses a number of flimsy, filmy things into her suitcase—complicated garments with florets and ribbons and hooks and eyes—things she hasn’t thought of, let alone removed from their tissue paper, for years. Lifting her robe, she touches the small pouch of skin just above her pubic bone, where the surgeons cut her open to pull out the twins. It’s still numb more than three years later, and she can feel where her muscles pulled apart and had to knit back together. The scar is nearly invisible now—the surgeon on duty told her that since the low-rise denim trend, they take care to make such incisions as discreet as possible—but the fact of it being there, and the great change it marks, has altered Maya’s perception of her body more than she likes to admit. No amount of exercise and dieting will change that. It’s as if her body spent the first thirty-three years of its life existing primarily for her own pleasure, and then one day it grew up and put away childish things. It made a baby.
Two
babies. And then it served as their exclusive food source for months, rose
at one and three and five in the morning at the sound of their cries, held them and bounced them two at a time, and generally ran itself ragged in a constant effort to keep them alive. Now that they’d survived, it was time to get back to the pleasure principle. People had been telling her this for years. Every lifestyle magazine seemed to feature a story declaring it. Bradley, the trainer turned life coach, never tired of repeating it. Apparently it was
time to have some me time.
She’d heard it all before, but she was only now starting to believe there might be a time when her body’s primary function wasn’t serving the needs of the twins.

Maya lets her robe slip to the floor with a swish. She stares at herself in the full-length mirror. It’s difficult, but she tries to be as forgiving as possible while also being empirically self-aware. This is what she sees:

1. Pale blonde hair streaked silver, shoulder-length, unbrushed.
   
2. Reasonably decent skin. Some crinkles around the eyes and a vague hint of peach-pit cleavage, but nothing a bit of deep moisturizer and concealer can’t fix.
   
3. Not officially tall at five foot eight, but tallish. (And six feet in the gold heels.)
   
4. Narrow shoulders and small, almost anxious-looking breasts. Could pass for girlish but for the dark, distended nipples.
   
5. Square, jutting hip bones. Hips made for carrying a sack of potatoes. Or a toddler. Or both. But usually the latter.
   
6. Pokey knees separating slender thighs from thickly muscled calves.
   
7. Long, narrow feet with knobby former-child-ballerina toes.
   
8. A face she finds hard to assess, it’s so familiar. Long of chin and wide of eye. A face that wears both makeup and the lack of it well. One that keeps something crucial back instead of giving itself away at first meet.
   

She curls the corners of her mouth and feels the superficial mood enhancement that comes with even the most forced of grins. She will admit what everyone from her mother to countless construction workers has told her is true: she is prettier when she smiles.

Maya traces her fingertips along her throat, over her breasts, across her rib cage and down her hips, and she feels a familiar shiver of delight. The pleasure-seeker is returning to herself.
I am a happily married woman going on a holiday with my husband,
she thinks.
This is a perfectly normal thing to do. My children will survive a week without me.
And it feels right and true. Like an actress in one of those ads for creamy desserts, she looks at her reflection and mouths the words “You’re worth it.” Then she lets out an involuntary half-mad hoot.

She is suddenly conscious of the time—her meeting with Gray is in less than an hour—and so she does something she hasn’t done in years: skips her usual breakfast of steel-cut oats with flax and pumpkin seeds, which takes twenty-five minutes to prepare, and has a piece of toast instead. She smears it with sugarless fruit compote and takes it out to the car, where she eats it while humming along to Velma’s Portuguese pop radio.

When she’d called Gray to suggest they meet, he’d been
oddly apprehensive. He’d tried to hide it with his gruff, good-natured bluster, stammering over which day, which restaurant, what time. She didn’t tell him why she wanted to see him, but it was pretty obvious. And no wonder he was wary. The economy was still limping along, law schools were pumping out qualified young attorneys like super-charged automatons, and clients had less cash to splash out on pricey litigation than ever before. Not to mention, any firm that took her on would be obligated to pay her bar fees retroactively. Plus she had two kids now—an unspoken career liability in a profession that demanded sixty-hour weeks at a bare minimum. Maya sternly reminds herself of all this to avoid getting her hopes up. She is just feeling Gray out about the possibility of returning to the law. Just dipping her toe in the water to test the temperature. In fact, she is so uncertain about the whole thing—so convinced it will never work and no one will ever want her in a professional capacity again—that she hasn’t even bothered mentioning it to Nick.

Funnily enough, even though she knows he prefers to have her at home, Nick was the one who’d put the idea in her head in the first place. A few nights back she’d used the word “recalcitrant” in passing, and he’d smiled and said, “Ah, my little legal eagle,” and ruffled her hair. A gesture that she would have found
infuriatingly
patronizing just a few weeks ago now made her nostalgic for the old days. Now that she had her husband back, Maya could suddenly see what her life was really missing: gainful employment. A stake in the real world.

Her only worry is the twins. She’s been so constantly available to them all hours of their waking lives so far, how would they take her sudden absence? This gnawed at her. But so did the
notion of her idle self—a mother in yoga togs baking gluten-free nut–zucchini loaf. Is that how she wants her kids to remember her? Is that how she wants to remember herself?

On the drive downtown, she daydreams about the early days of her marriage, back when she and Nick were both struggling to get a foot in the door, hungry to prove themselves in their chosen fields. What a kick he used to get out of hearing the details of the trials she was working on, and how she’d laugh at his on-set anecdotes. She recalls with nostalgia how they’d meet up late for drinks and fill each other in on their respective professional dramas, making characters out of colleagues and crafting stories from the day’s events. She suddenly realizes how much she’s missed that, and even more, how much she misses being
a person in the world.
A grown-up whom other grown-ups depend on for grown-up stuff. Stuff that doesn’t include baking for the playgroup charity auction and overseeing laundry.

Maya flicks over to the public radio station and hears a story about the “plunging” divorce rate. According to the host, it’s dropping, but not for the reasons his audience might expect. “The rate of divorce has gone down because fewer people are opting to get married in the first place,” he says with a talk-radio DJ’s air of mock surprise. His guest, a demographer, talks about how today’s “younger generation” has lost faith in the institution of marriage.

“They see their romantic life in terms of serial monogamy rather than a single partnership,” the demographer says in doddering consternation. “And a growing number of them are loath to make promises that the numbers have shown most of us can’t keep.”

The interviewer chuckles, seeing an irony. “So what you’re
saying here is that by cynically refusing to marry, the younger generation has actually lowered the divorce rate.”

The demographer agrees. “I guess if you don’t try, you can’t fail.”

Maya turns the dial to find a pop song she likes and sings the silly words all the way downtown.

Gray is already seated when she arrives a few minutes late, apologizing and cursing the traffic.

“Save your sorry’s,” he says, rising from the table, a look of pure indulgence on his face. He stands there grinning as the waiter takes her coat and her flurry of regret subsides.

They both sink down into the booth, with its great velvet tufts, and Maya lets out a smooth sigh. “It’s good to see you,” she says, cupping her chin in her hands and studying his face.

“I couldn’t agree more. How are my gorgeous godchildren?”

“Complete assholes. In the cutest possible way.”