A Better Man

by Leah McLaren

  “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.

  “I wouldn’t worry about it too much,” says Bradley. “One little Smartie’s not going to kill her, is it?” He slips his phone back in his hoodie and pats his pecs as if to check they’re still there.

  “Well, no, but it does make me wonder why I bother being so careful when other people are so irresponsible. I don’t even allow them wheat products because of the GMO factor. Apparently the strains of wheat we eat now bear no resemblance to the ancient grains, which is why gluten intolerance is so rampant. Anyway, they’ve had a clean diet, so why shouldn’t I try to keep it that way as long as possible? You know studies have linked refined-sugar intake to autism, so it’s not like I’m being paranoid here.”

  “Of course not.” Bradley pats her arm, then raises an eyebrow in mock surprise. “Nice tricep, girl.”

  “Thanks. I have this amazing trainer …” Maya feels a smile blooming across her face. Bradley keeps his hand on her a bit longer than usual. When he pulls it away, she feels the skin burning where his fingertips have been. She springs up, suddenly conscious of the time. “I’d better go. Crazy non-stop day.”

  Bradley winks goodbye, and Maya hip-swivels her way through the crowd of stroller-wielding postpartum dieters and anxious girls clutching yoga mats. Despite her best efforts not to, she imagines Bradley’s eyes on her ass the entire time.

  Once belted safely into the car, engine purring, Maya tips her throbbing forehead to the cool leather of the steering wheel. She breathes in the correct and conscious way—in through the nose, out through the mouth, letting the air swirl in the back of her throat. She imagines the blood in her veins oxygenating, spreading energy through the outer reaches of her body. Despite this exercise in self-soothing, she gets a flash of herself as a hopeless bourgeois cliché—an overeducated, underemployed housewife on the verge of an affair with her personal trainer—and she is suddenly overwhelmed by the increasingly familiar sensation of waking up after a long, disorienting sleep in a room she’s never seen before. How the hell did I …?

  It wasn’t always like this. Back in school, when she first met Nick, Maya was the “together” one. Quietly confident and possessed of a blasé charm, she was the better student of the two, and by far the more socially confident. Nick had to work for a full semester to get her attention. When they first met through Gray, she’d just started dating one of Nick’s fraternity brothers, an arrogant rower and engineering major who liked to get drunk and belittle Nick for his fussy taste in clothing. Maya remembers her first feeling toward her future husband as one of pity for the reverse discrimination he endured (she was particular about her clothing too, after all, and why should girls be the only ones to care about their appearance?). Back then, Nick seemed a bit weak to her, a bit too self-consciously fastidious ever to be one of the real men on campus. And yet there was something compelling about him. A sensitivity and patience, a willingness to listen to her yammering about Spinoza as if what she said were a revelation rather than an undergraduate regurgitation. It was a skill the other frat brothers and private school boys, with their fixation on sports and keg party logistics, didn’t even pretend to possess.

  He reeled her in by listening. Listening to her excitement about some confessional poet or other on the freezing walk from the arts building to her shared student digs. Listening to her story of an argument with her mother as she filled her jumbo Ikea cart with not-yet-assembled bookshelves and plastic kitchen implements. Listening to her pre-exam anxieties as they blew on steaming hot chocolates in the dingy cafeteria under the campus library. And finally, after a drunken night in a smoky fondue joint on the French side of town, listening to her surprise at having ended up sweaty and entwined on a futon on the floor of her bedroom. And that, as they say, was that. Sex bonded them instantly as companions, and from then on it was the Nick and Maya Show, a sold-out run with Sunday matinee in perpetuity. Or so she’d assumed.

  It was difficult to put her finger on precisely when the balance shifted. When Nick the slavishly devoted boyfriend and uxorious husband became Nick the eerily remote apparition of his former self. The twins’ arrival and Maya’s decision to quit the law in the hope of effecting “life balance” seemed to have had something to do with it. In a period of just a few months, Maya had undergone the most dramatic change of her adult life. One day she was a focused, eagle-eyed attorney in a silk suit tackling the business of divorce, and the next she was a harried housewife and budding exercise addict whose biggest daily challenge was determining how to work her private hot yoga session around the twins’ nap schedule. It was amazing, she quickly learned, what minutiae could fill your day and—in the absence of court dates, filing deadlines and responsibilities handed down from the fast-retreating World of Work—begin to take on monumentally troubling proportions. Take email, for instance. Where she had once spent the better part of her days and nights connected, practically via implant, to the endless, absorbing cacophony of her smartphone, today she found it a trial to return more than one or two messages in a day. And why should she, when there was never anything interesting enough to demand her full attention? A play-date invitation here, a preschool newsletter there. A “Hello dear, how are the children?” email from her mother from whatever silent meditation retreat she was on. Reminders and updates from the twins’ endless edutainment schedule of intuitive movement, baby yoga, Junior Picasso classes and Suzuki violin. Her inbox—once a place of intrigue, urgency and melodrama—had become a utilitarian emotional dead zone. Apart from the twins, no one needed her attention anymore. Not even Nick.

  In her first two years of career withdrawal, Maya had made a couple of attempts at “mommy track” sidelines: the hemp-diaper import business that crashed and burned, then a humiliating stint as a self-styled “design concierge” (who knew the rich actually preferred their own dubious taste to other people’s?). But after three years of treading water, Maya has come to the conclusion that it is more dignified simply not to work than to pretend to do so. Nick had supported, even encouraged, her decision to quit the firm (that was around the time SoupCan got the Duracell account, which tipped the balance in favour of his earning power anyway). She could tell that a part of him (probably not the best part) was secretly pleased with the idea of being the sole breadwinner. Perhaps because of his early struggles to fit in, Nick had always had a weakness for status symbols. He took an inordinate interest in material possessions, not for the personal satisfaction they provided but for the outward messages they conveyed. Maya noticed that he liked what an expensive car meant far more than he actually seemed to enjoy driving it. And now his wife, in her well-maintained idleness, was one of these possessions. He took a week off work when the twins were born (she thinks she remembers him being there, vaguely—a hand that occasionally appeared holding a blanket or a wipe between the day- and night-nanny shifts), but shortly after that he began to fade from view. Thei
r conversation, once so engrossing and full of secret jokes, suddenly revolved around teething, cracked nipples and sterilization. She sensed his interest waning but was frankly too sleep-deprived to do anything much about it. He’ll be back, she remembers thinking at the time. Three years later, there was no sign of him.

  Maya knows she shouldn’t blame Nick for her own restlessness. And yet, like the thief who justifies his crimes through angry entitlement (Dad smacked me around, ergo I deserve this stranger’s flat screen), she can’t help holding him responsible. She knows she shouldn’t let her brain get stuck on the repetitive internal monologue of negative thoughts that leads her to believe, in moments like this one, that Nick is somehow conspiring to make her unhappy—that his slow, inexorable fading of feeling is not just passivity but an act of emotional aggression. Try as she might, she can’t shake the suspicion that he holds her in contempt. Not just for what she’s become, but for everything she’s not.

  Lately this persistent, unexpressed resentment she has toward her husband brims so close to the surface she can feel it bubbling up at inappropriate moments. The car will stall in traffic and instead of cursing, she’ll mutter his name. His face will appear in her mind’s eye when she painfully stubs a toe. Amazing, she thinks, the way someone can go from representing everything that’s right in your life to everything that’s wrong with it.

  Winding her way through the streets around the university, Maya comforts herself with the thought that she was right to extend her therapy with Harriet. If she weren’t on her way there now, where else would she be? Probably at the Four Seasons bar, ordering a double vodka for lunch after a round of collagen injections—or worse, upstairs in a suite with Bradley. She lets her mind linger on the notion. As tragic bourgeois clichés go, at least she’s picked the least embarrassing option.

  Harriet’s office is on the second floor of a Victorian building that also houses a small poetry press. Something about the proximity of verse fills Maya with romantic comfort. Harriet’s office is a large, airy room with two bay windows that overlook the campus library. As she enters, Maya is relieved to find everything the same. There’s an enormous rolltop desk in one corner, two tastefully upholstered wing chairs in the middle of the room and an antique daybed against the far wall. And in the middle of it all is Harriet, a tiny, liquid-eyed woman in an endless succession of black knit dresses and ropes of pearls. She ushers Maya in and, before saying anything, looks at her in a way that manages to be simultaneously empathetic and scrutinizing. Maya falls back on the daybed without even bothering to take off her jacket.

  “Tea?” says Harriet, in her customary greeting.

  “Only if you’re having some,” says Maya, as she does every week.

  And so they begin. There was a time when Harriet needed to draw her out a bit, but not anymore. These days Maya enters the office already oozing, a bag of milk leaking at the seams.

  She starts speaking as Harriet returns with the tea tray. “Remember last week—or was it the week before that?—when I was telling you about how I sometimes have this bizarre feeling that Nick just wishes I’d disappear?”

  Harriet glances down at the notepad in her lap and makes a note with a flick of her left hand. “I think you actually said that you felt like you were disappearing—that you might cease to exist.”

  “Yes, but only because he was wishing me out of existence. Me and the twins too. I still feel it, but it’s even stronger these days. Actually, it’s like he’s the one disappearing now. He’s there physically, but there’s just no sign of the other Nick.”

  “What do you mean by ‘the other Nick’?”

  Maya considers the question. “The Nick I married.”

  “Tell me about him.” Harriet nestles into her wing chair, slipping off her shoes and pulling a pair of stocking feet up under her like a sparrow settling down in its nest.

  “He was … beautiful. The most beautiful man I’ve ever known. Before the twins came we used to lie in bed together for hours on end, talking about everything and nothing—teasing each other, making up a kind of secret language, or at least that’s what it felt like. We had more sex then, of course, but it wasn’t even like sex in the traditional sense. I felt like we were part of the same space-time continuum, with our outsides just packaging for pleasure.”

  “You were very much in love,” Harriet says.

  “That’s another way of saying it.” Maya smiles, remembering. It’s been a long time since she’s allowed herself to recall the good times this way. Even in the safe cocoon of her shrink’s office, the indulgence seems slightly dangerous. It’s as if her tenuously constructed life might fly apart just by admitting to a time when it seemed effortlessly whole.

  “We used to go to parties and end up in a corner talking to each other. Not because we were shy but because we were more interested in each other than anyone else. People would come up to us and say, ‘Aren’t you two sick of each other yet? Haven’t you run out of stuff to talk about?’ But we weren’t, and it felt like we never would be.”

  “Until now?”

  “Yes, I suppose. In a way. Although it’s not so much that we’ve run out of things to say as it is that the things we would say if we could bring ourselves to be honest with each other wouldn’t be the sorts of things either of us would want to hear. So we don’t say them. But it’s like the effort of not saying them—of keeping the unsayable things unsaid—precludes any other kind of real or natural conversation. The kinds of conversations we used to have all day, every day. I think that’s what I miss more than anything. Just talking.”

  Harriet shifts in her cashmere, jots a note. “Let’s go back to these unsayable things. Can you tell me what they are?”

  Maya frowns, then stops when she feels the crease appearing between her eyes. “For me I guess it would be that there’s something heartless about him since he became successful, something hard and dissatisfied, as if he’s disappointed all this stuff hasn’t made him happier.”

  “And what do you think he might say to you?”

  This surprises Maya—the question seems like it’s a violation of the cardinal rule of therapy: The only person you can ever hope to change is yourself—and even then only a little bit. At first she feels like she can’t possibly answer. She is quiet for a long time, picking at her fingernails like a neurotic teenager. Harriet waits, implacable, at ease in the silence between them.

  And then suddenly Maya knows the answer. “I think he’d say that he doesn’t know how to love me anymore.”

  Harriet’s eyes widen slightly, a rare physical response. “Why do you think Nick doesn’t love you?”

  Maya shakes her head. “Not doesn’t love. Can’t.” What she doesn’t add, because it would make Harriet probe more deeply, is that she hardly blames him.

  Maya returns home late that afternoon, laden with shopping bags filled with stuff she doesn’t need or want or particularly remember buying, and relieves Velma, who has an appointment to get her eyebrows threaded. The afternoon and evening slide by like all the rest, a montage of sippy cups, talking toys, educational books (L is for llamas, who eat up all the leaves!), make-believe play and board games (Maya instituted a strict screen ban after reading a study that linked the brain’s absorption of LED light to shrinking attention spans), followed by a dinner of spelt-battered chicken fingers and untouched (but dutifully procured) blanched kale. Then it’s bath, shea-butter body rub, story, comfort feed and family bed.

  It’s ten after eight when Maya finally pours herself the first merciful glass of Barolo. The wine untangles the knot in her brain, and for a few minutes she finds she is able to devote herself to the act of reading—something she used to do far more of when she had less time. Tonight it’s just an old copy of the Economist, a week out of date, but she likes to work her way through in order. She’s never been the sort of person who could skim through books, skipping the boring parts and rushing ahead to the relevant bits. Instead, in reading as in life, her talent is diligenc
e and what her mother the architecture professor used to call stick-to-it-iveness. Once set on a course, she will not deviate, pushing through to the bitter end, whatever the cost.

  She pours herself a generous second glass and tries to find a comfortable spot on the unforgiving L-shaped sectional she recently had shipped over from Denmark at idiotic expense. (It looked so comfortable online, who knew it would feel like lounging on a church pew?) After half an hour or so, the alcohol that has, until now, focused her thoughts begins to make her brain murky and restless. A vague sensation of melancholy sets in. She tries to shake it off by fixing herself a dinner of cottage cheese and seaweed crackers and (what the heck?) another glass of wine, making sure to leave a respectable amount in the bottle. She’ll use that for cooking, if she ever gets around to cooking grown-up food again—another thing she did more of when she spent less time at home. And when she had a husband who came home before 10:00 p.m.

  Nibbling her bachelorette’s supper, she wonders what life would have been like if she had ended up just that: a bachelorette. She thinks of her girlfriend Diana from law school, of her immaculate condominium and endless weekend dating dramas. Trawling the Internet for a husband. How depressing to be going through that at this age, when the thought of getting naked in front her own husband—let alone a complete stranger—fills her with a dull, throbbing horror.

  It’s amazing to her that the sex could have stopped when it was once the thing that bound them. A common language and a shared world. In university she and Nick spent what seemed like (and probably amounted to) hundreds of hours in bed, exploring each other, experimenting in physical pleasure, and being swept up in waves of laughter and almost unbearable intensity. The door of her bedroom in the rundown Victorian house she shared with two other roommates (both vegan medievalists) came to seem like a portal to a parallel universe—one that belonged exclusively to her and Nick.