A Better Man

by Leah McLaren

  “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.

  “No, no. Don’t, please,” Maya shouts at Ike above the waves. “I have insurance!”

  Ike apologizes, shaking his dreadlocks and knocking on his skull at his own idiocy, but Maya implores him not to worry.

  “It’s not the end of the world,” she insists. Then, suddenly emboldened, she adds, “It’s probably a good thing!” She laughs into the wind and reaches into the cooler for a beer.

  The lagoon, when they finally reach it well over an hour later, is everything Nick had hoped for. A small fan of beach furnished with clumps of palms and fine pale sand. The water is so blue it reminds him of a retro cocktail. The island is about the size of small city park and empty but for a few trees and a flock of lazily cawing birds Nick doesn’t recognize. He’s done shoots in places vaguely like this before—sunny, sandy and secluded—but never anywhere this remote or (dare he even think it?) magical. He’s suddenly struck by the idea that this would be the perfect place to propose if he weren’t already married. For a strange moment, he wishes he had another ring to give Maya. He’s surprised by this strange thought and quickly writes it off as a director’s instinct. He never could resist a good location.

  Ike is handing them masks and flippers and talking mock ominously in his island patter of tides and reefs and the importance of not touching the coral. “It is razor-sharp—and blood attracts the hungry sharks,” he warns with a grin that reveals
the gap where his upper molars ought to be.

  Maya drains her beer, pulls her hair into a ponytail and raises her arms above her head with an athletic flick as if to say she’s ready for anything—even shark attacks. They pull on their masks and roll overboard.

  Two hours pass in a silent aquatic dream. The reefs are shallow and full of slow-waving plants and tiny fluorescent fish that swirl and glitter like meteor dust from a distant galaxy. Nick loses himself examining a conch shell—complete with lurking conch, shrinking back into his house at a touch. Maya’s long legs swish past Nick’s head, propelled by oversized blue flippers, as she tails a lumbering blowfish. Time passes without sound or punctuation from the real world. The water makes Nick feel light and pleasantly helpless as he’s pulled this way and that—a weightless waterbaby being nursed by the great mother current. He sees one of those flat, flapping creatures that look like the Death Star skimming along the seabed. At one point, Maya glides over and takes his hand, motioning for him to follow. They round the corner of the reef and she points at a giant sea turtle, about the size of a small coffee table, floating sleepily from rock to rock. As he streams past, Nick sees the look on the ancient turtle’s face and can only describe it as an expression of pure being. Soft focused eyes above a chinless half smile. When Nick looks up, Maya is making her way to the surface. Coming up for air, he hears her hoots of delight first. Then he feels her body against his, the slippery sensation of her treading water while pressing against him. She gives him a salty wet kiss, then vanishes back under the surface.

  Later, when they are on the beach and finishing the whole bream and fist-sized prawns Ike has barbequed for them using his little gas hibachi, Maya pours them both more wine and lays her head on Nick’s stomach. They lie there like that for a long while, bodies absorbing the sun, enjoying the skim of sand on their skin and thinking how lucky they are to have come here. Ike calls to Nick and says something about going to a neighbouring island to get more ice for the cooler, and Nick raises a sleepy thumb in consent. Ike places their bags and a big bottle of water on the beach and says he’ll be back in an hour. Nick understands he’s just trying to give them privacy.

  When the sound of the boat’s motor has faded into the wind, Maya shifts her shoulder in a way that tells Nick she’s awake. Soon their hands are moving across each other and they are kissing. Not greedily like on the failed date night, but calmly and with purpose. Like they know what’s coming next and understand exactly what to do.

  And they are right to kiss this way because when sex follows—the first sex they’ve had in too many months to count—it is smooth and familiar. Something about the act reminds Nick of a summertime pop song, the kind that gives you a shiver and a nostalgic tug and a fleeting glimpse into the sweetness of life without weighing you down with insights or moral concepts. A perfect pleasure, Nick thinks, as they lie entangled under a palm tree after the fact. He’s not even sure how they got from the beach into the shade. They stare out at the endless ocean and he sees that Maya is about to say something but then decides not to. Instead, she lays down her head and falls instantly asleep.

  When Nick opens his eyes again, everything is different. The sun has sloped off their side of the island, leaving their private beach entirely in shade. The heat in the air has dissipated, but the sand is still warm. He looks for his phone to check the time, then realizes it’s dead anyway. From the position of the sun, Nick figures it must be late afternoon at least. He scans the water for Ike and sees nothing on the horizon but a distant bobbing sailboat, out for a sunset sail. Maya snores gently beside him, her body curled under a towel, head cradled by a fallen palm frond.

  Nick looks at her pale eyelashes, her small hand curled and trusting as a child’s, and he feels a clutch in his stomach. I love her, he thinks. And then, more clearly, as if the words were written across the sky: I will never leave her.

  And just like that, Nick knows it’s true.

  It’s a revelation, of course, but one he doesn’t have time to dwell on at the moment. Because now, he is suddenly and keenly aware, it’s his job to protect her. To make sure they survive the approaching night. He gets up swiftly, careful not to disturb her, and gathers an armload of kindling from the nearby forest. By the time Maya wakes up, he has built a small fire using what’s left of the gas in the hibachi. She rubs the sand from her face and looks down, suddenly self-conscious about her nakedness.

  “How long did I sleep?” she asks, pulling on a billowy white bathing suit cover and hugging her knees like a teenage girl at a slumber party.

  “Hard to say.” Nick is poking his fire with a long stick, trying to get the embers to turn. “Couple of hours, I reckon.”

  “You reckon?” Maya snorts.

  “Sorry, did that sound weird?”

  She ignores this. “Where’s Ike?”

  Nick looks at her more seriously now. “No sign yet. But don’t worry. We have lots of water left, some cheese and crackers, and I’ve started a fire, so we’ll be fine through the night—if it comes to that.”

  Maya straightens. “The night?” Her eyebrows arch to a point.

  Nick feels a hardness in his chest. He will protect her. That, after all, is his job. He moves close to her and puts a hand on her shoulder, looking her directly in the eye so she can sense his alpha dominance. Nothing can hurt her now. “I’m going to take care of you,” he says. “If I need to, I can spear us a fish.”

  “Oh, really?” she says, biting the smile off her lips. “With what?”

  Nick holds up a stick he carved to a point with his Swiss Army blade while she was sleeping. She looks suitably impressed, if skeptical. For a moment he feels an urge to pound his chest, carry her into the woods and have hungry, proprietary sex with her again. But he doesn’t. For one thing, they need to keep a lookout for a rescue boat. For another, he’s not sure he could perform again after all the sun and wine. But they have the rest of their lives to make up for lost sex.

  While he is lost in this thought, Maya stands and begins packing their things into her straw beach basket.

  “What are you doing that for?” he asks. “I laid them out so we would know exactly what supplies we have.”

  Maya shoves a celebrity magazine into the basket. And the water. He sees that she is in denial about their situation.

  “Will you stop acting as if we’ve been left here to die?” she says. “I’m sure Ike is just around the corner. He probably got waylaid talking to his buddy at the bar—you know, island time.”

  Nick goes to her and wraps his arms around her. “Look,” he whispers into her ear, “I want you to understand something, okay?”

  He can see the nervous energy draining out of Maya and being replaced by something more sinuous and connected. They are on the same level at last.

  “Yes?” she says.

  He pulls back and looks at her face. “I love you and I am never going to leave you. Do you understand that? No matter what happens, we are together. The two of us against the world. Do you get that?”

  She blinks. Nods. Then a peaceable smile spreads over her face. “Like on a desert island?”

  “Exactly,” he says.

  And she leans into his chest, making him feel like one of those men on the cover of a romance novel—only there is nothing ironic or kitschy about the way he feels. He is filled with gratitude and relief—a man who has at the last second reclaimed the prize of all prizes: a beautiful, intelligent and loving wife. How could he have been so blind to her pricelessness? He is about to suggest that they do something out of character, like renew their vows or promise to come back to this very island once a year, when he hears the sound of an outboard motor over the waves. Ike and his battered dinghy round into view. He is waving two bottles of white wine, the tiller between his legs, and shouting apologies over the wind and a long, impossible-to-follow story—something about running out of fuel and his friend Mike at the marina.

  Maya sighs and flops back on the sand, laughter bubbling ou
t of her. Watching, Nick suddenly knows that everything is—and always was—going to be fine. In the end, the big lie was the big truth: his life really is perfect after all.

  CHAPTER 14

  “The navy or the grey?” Maya holds up two skirt suits, both freshly dry cleaned and still in their plastic wrappers, for her husband to choose.

  Nick, who has a squirming child on each knee and a sippy cup in each hand, considers the choice, bringing the entire weight of his directorial experience to bear. He closes his eyes and allows for a lengthy pause. “The grey,” he says finally.

  “Why?” Maya is suddenly unnerved by his certainty.

  “Because it makes your ass look great.”

  “But I want to look professional, not sexy!”

  “You’ll look professional and fuckable,” he says, reaching over to give her hip a good-natured thwack, which sends the twins into fits of giggles.

  “Language, Nick!” She is grinning hard.

  “Mommy’s as naughty as you,” Isla tells Foster, who in turn smacks her. “Foster, no hitting!”

  “Am not.”

  “Are too.”

  “Am not. Spanking is different than hitting. Daddy spanks Mommy’s bum-bum for fun.”

  “Does not.”

  “Does too!”

  Instead of playing referee with the kids, Maya pours herself a cup of coffee. After one thoughtful sip, she shoots back upstairs to put on the grey suit, leaving Nick to break it up.

  When she reappears twenty minutes later, hair ironed to a gloss, kitten heels clicking, Velma has arrived and is washing up the detritus of the weekend. Maya hugs her good morning, asks about her weekend, then feels a clutch of guilt at the state of the place.

  “You look so grown-up,” Velma says nodding, arms crossed.

  Maya thanks her and proceeds to toast two English muffins, slather them in butter and honey, and push them greedily into her mouth, hardly bothering to chew.

  And she does not feel the least bit guilty about that.