A Better Man (17 page)

A couple of the partners glance down at the papers in front of them, and Maya realizes that they must have all her numbers right there—a statistical summation of her entire worth as a lawyer.

“But why Goldblatt’s? Why not return to your old firm?”

“The parting was amicable”—Maya pauses to pluck a bit of lint off her cuff—”but you guys are simply the best.”

She looks out at the table of open, attentive faces and feels a surge of confidence. One of the other partners asks what she can offer the firm now, compared to other potential associates “coming up through the ranks.” By “coming up,” of course, he means younger and unencumbered—and probably male. Like most old-world outfits, Goldblatt’s is dominated by men. The partner doesn’t mention that these associates are willing to work incredibly long hours, without the logistical encumbrance of marriage and children, but the implication is clear. Maya tells them not just what she thinks they want to hear, but what she truly believes: that she has worked and she has not worked, and after all is said and done, working is better. Better for her and better for her family. She can get up to speed on the case law
in a matter of days. And the hours don’t scare her. Unlike these young turks, she actually knows what she’s getting herself into. She knows the circuit judges and the opposing lawyers. She’s hooked up and tuned in and ready to plunge back in and give her entire brain and body over to the job.

The suits are silent as she talks, letting her state her case; some of them even smile and nod encouragingly. The words are tumbling from her mouth in fully formed paragraphs. As she talks about her love of the job, her past triumphs and her eagerness for future challenges—about how a firm like Yeats and Goldblatt can best drum up new clients and move seamlessly into the future—she looks over and sees Adam Gray watching her. And what she sees on his face is unmistakable: it is
love.
Not professional admiration, not loyal friendship, not a crush—it’s the real thing. If anyone else in the room were to glance at his face at that moment, they would see it too, but luckily for Maya no one does. The realization is so disconcerting that she wraps up her monologue before her train of thought derails. When she is finished the men in the room all smile. They sip their mineral water and clear their throats and make upbeat small talk for a few minutes before the discussion of scheduling comes up. Roger Goldblatt himself poses the magic question: “When would you be available to start?”

Maya practically bounces out of the room; she would moon-walk in her heels if she could. She is on fire! She can
do
this. She’s already down the elevator and nearly out of the building—excited to go home and make the twins lunch—when she hears Gray shouting her name across the lobby. She turns and sees with relief that the look from the meeting has left his face (perhaps
she was just imagining things?), replaced by an expression of innocent affection.

“For all your talk of what a highly efficient, detail-oriented perfectionist you are, you left this behind.” He holds up her coat.

Maya laughs, folding the coat under her arm. She can’t stop laughing. She rises to the tips of her toes and grins. “So how was that?”

Gray reaches forward and actually chucks her under the chin, like a cowboy in the movies. “You done good, kid. I’ll eat my hat if we don’t hire you. Now let me take you out for breakfast to celebrate.”

Maya hesitates—the twins. She’d been planning to rush home to do the nursery school run, but it was already too late for that. Then she looks at Gray—the tempting face of professional victory—and she shrugs and pulls on her coat.

“Why not?” she says. And they stride out into the square, overcoats buttoned against the icy early December chill.

Ambergris Caye, Belize

The first day on the beach, Nick reads a magazine, drinks several sweet rum drinks and feels the tourniquet of muscle between his shoulder blades begin to loosen incrementally. “I haven’t been this relaxed in years!” he tells Maya over his second plate of conch tacos, before falling back on the sand. On the second day, he reads some more, drinks some more, feels his body relax some more and his mind begin to wander. Not in a meditative way, but in a restless, muttering search. A loyal dog seeking its master or a junkie in need of a fix. By the third day, the thought of spending another minute in that lounge chair listening to the surf makes him want to pull at his face and howl at the blazing sun.

It’s not that everything hasn’t been perfect—the sun, the surf and the saltwater breeze are all around them in abundance. The hotel, a twenty-room eco-resort he’d found on a travel website recommended by his assistant, is just as advertised: secluded without being remote, luxurious without being ostentatious, simple without being austere. The beach is warm and white and
devoid of hawkers selling cheap shell necklaces Maya would never wear. The room is airy and stylishly appointed in a crisp, hippy-chic fashion—bowls of bleached shells and a four-poster bed with billowing white linens. At night Nick lies awake in it thinking how great he feels, how fantastically
chilled out
he is. How if he weren’t here, he’d be up all night on some awful set, sitting behind the first camera and stuffing his face with cheap sushi, drinking can after can of Diet Coke, wishing the script girl would just shut the fuck up so he could concentrate. Joking around with Mitch, his long-time first AD, and trying to convince a fretful Larry that a little bit of triple overtime never killed anyone—certainly not the client. Yes, thank God he isn’t working. Better to be here, thousands of miles away, paying $800 a night to lie around and imagine what’s happening on set.

Nick’s thoughts of work carry over from night to morning as they eat their holiday breakfast of papaya, passion fruit and mango with lashings of yogurt washed down with black espresso. For the first time since they arrived, Maya seems just a tiny bit uneasy. She keeps glancing at him over her coffee cup and scratching at the hair at the nape of her neck.

Ever since she got the news about her new job, she’d been in an unassailable good mood. Chatty, easy, devoid of gloom. There were still signs of the old Maya, though. In addition to the detailed menu plan and daily activity schedule for Velma, she’d created a hand-illustrated book called
Mommy and Daddy Are Going on Holiday
for the twins. It told the story—in coloured-pencil drawings—of how she and Nick were going to bid the kids farewell and hop on a plane that would take them to a beach filled with sunshine and palm trees. There were even drawings of Mommy
and Daddy kissing over a candlelight dinner and later snuggling in bed, which was meant to convey, he could only assume, that these were the sorts of things that happened on holiday—not that this had been the case so far. If the lack of sex was bothering Maya, though, she hadn’t given any indication of it. Perhaps she was still recovering from the flight.

“Are you okay?” she says now with a gentle expression intended to temper the question no man welcomes. Why, he’s often wondered, do women continue to insist that their constant worrying is a form of love when all men sense its actual purpose: emotional control?

Nick notices that his knee is bouncing under the table like a rabbit on Dexedrine and he’s been reading about the same cricket test match for the better part of half an hour.

“Of course,” he says, throwing down the paper and spreading his arms in what he hopes is the sort of gesture an Incredibly Relaxed Man on Holiday might make. “I’m fantastic. Never been better. Can you believe how good this coffee tastes? And the sun! Who knew the sun could be that … well, that
sunny
?”

Maya is staring at him with open skepticism now. Trying hard is really not his style. She’s no dummy, this soon-to-be-ex-wife of his, he realizes with a rush of premature nostalgia. She looks at him with concern and he looks back with curiosity. It’s suddenly amazing to him that she can’t see through his whole ruse, that it isn’t entirely obvious to her what an asshole he is. Not just an asshole but a lying, selfish, pathetic excuse for a man, rather than the reformed “good husband” she amazingly, against all evidence, believes him to be. He experiences a wave of nauseating guilt before the old contempt crashes in to save him.
Contempt for her self-serving guilelessness. How, he wonders irritably, could anyone be so wilfully blind?

Then he remembers:
People see what they want to see. They hear what they want to hear, editing the story in self-interested ways as they go along.
That’s why it’s so much easier to convince people of a comforting but obvious lie than a glaring but painful truth. People will find themselves drawn toward the story that makes them feel good, no matter how ludicrous it might be.

Maya goes back to reading her novel—a thick book club pick with a cover illustration of a freshwater lake at sunset—and Nick finds himself admiring her hair, which is unusually pale, some bits almost silvery white. At first he wonders if it’s greying, but then he realizes she’s gone blonder from the sun. Her skin is rosy despite her valiant efforts with umbrellas and coats of Swiss sunscreen. A faint galaxy of tiny brown freckles swirls into the V-neck of her T-shirt. Beneath it he can make out her red-and-white gingham bikini, which he hasn’t seen in eons. His annoyance drains away and he feels excited to see the gingham. Under the table his leg is beginning to vibrate again, and Nick suddenly knows what he needs to do. And that is
something.
It’s not that he’s having a bad time—it’s just that unlike his wife (and apparently the rest of the developed world), he finds it quite stressful to lie on a beach doing nothing, hour after hour, day after day.

“I’m going for a walk!” he announces a little too loudly, and then he leaps up from the table, sending his teaspoon clattering to the floor. He doesn’t even bother to pick it up—the waiter is already moving toward him to do so—he just apologizes to no one in particular and shuffles off.

Nick decides to take a walk around the “grounds,” which are not really grounds so much as a large garden of bougainvillea shrubs spreading out from a central fountain featuring a pair of burbling marble dolphins. He retrieves a penny from his pocket and tosses it into the fountain but finds himself unable, or unwilling, to make a wish. He walks barefoot, flip-flops in hand, across the coarse and prickly tropical grass toward an elaborate white birdcage in the corner. Inside is Guido, the resort’s forty-two-year-old talking parrot. There is a bowl of peanuts beside his cage, and Nick picks one up and presses it through the bars. Guido eyes him suspiciously, then sidesteps across his bar to accept the snack, ignoring Nick’s attempts to start a conversation.

“Hallo, old chap,” Nick says in his best English accent (yesterday he witnessed Guido doing a full routine of Monty Python quotes), but the scruffy green bird is evidently not feeling talkative.

Guido hacks open the peanut shell with his hooked beak and crunches down on the nut. Then he rotates his head, fixes Nick with his opposite eye and rubs his beak against the bars for more snacks. When Nick doesn’t reciprocate, Guido leans back and says, in a distinct Jamaican accent, “You can’t fool all da people all da time.”

Nick is disconcerted. Who would teach a parrot to say such a thing? Especially a hotel parrot. Whatever happened to Polly wanting a cracker? He fights the urge to reprimand the bird, then stops himself. He is about return to the breakfast bar for more thick black coffee when a poster on the wall behind the cage catches his eye. It’s scrawled in bleary green ink and features a photocopied picture of a couple sitting on a beach having a picnic. “Get off the island!” it says. “Secluded snorkelling day
trip for two. I will take you to my secret lagoon. $75 per couple—catch of the day and wine included. Call Ike.”

Nick dials the number straight away. Ike, or someone with a Belizean accent he presumes is Ike, answers after seven or eight rings, just as Nick is about to hang up.

“Yeah, mon?” he says.

“Hi there, I’m calling about the secret lagoon snorkelling day trip?”

“WHA?” There is a crackling noise and Nick looks down at the phone to see if it’s disconnected, then a few seconds later Ike returns. “Oh, right. Yes, my man. Of course.”

Nick makes arrangements for a pickup the following day straight after breakfast. Ike will bring the snorkelling gear and Nick will bring his wife.

“Lemme guess—you two lovebirds are on your honeymoon, right?” Ike, a dreadlocked island native, leans back with a self-satisfied grin and continues to steer the boat. The rickety old tiller looks like it might snap off and there are two inches of seawater sloshing in the bottom of the cockpit, but Nick feels much safer since stepping off the dock. He is drinking a lukewarm beer and it’s not even 10:00 a.m. They are finally off the island—going somewhere, doing something. He looks at Maya, who has her face turned against the wind, one hand holding a floppy straw hat. She is shaking her head and laughing, shouting to Ike over the sound of the motor that they’ve been married since they were kids themselves. She takes out her phone and shows him pictures of the twins.

“Good Lord, wouldja look at those gorgeous babies!” Ike laughs, waving his free hand. He reaches over and takes the phone from Maya, and as he does Nick watches it slip from his hand, bounce off the gunwale and fall into the sea.

Ike’s hand flies to his forehead like he can’t believe what’s just happened. Maya is frozen mid-laugh, her mouth hanging open.

“The kids!” she shouts, looking stricken, and for a second Nick wonders if she has somehow mixed up the pixelated images of Isla and Foster with the twins themselves. Then he realizes that the phone is her lifeline to them.

He reaches over and puts a hand on her seawater-dampened thigh. “I’ve got mine. It’s all fine. It’s just a phone.” He reaches into his pocket and is about to fish his out out to show her when he realizes he forgot to charge it last night. It’s dead.

Ike starts steering the boat around, but Nick knows it’s just a gesture. The phone is long gone—a cellular burial at sea.