A Better Man (2 page)

Maya starts pulling things out of the pantry: dried beans, pumpkin seeds, a bag of leathery kale, apples, some sort of unidentifiable ancient grain product. Supplies that will somehow be turned into edible compost squares, pressed into Tupperware and taken to post-preschool play dates in lieu of “bad snacks” full of trans fats, refined sugar and cancer.

Nick observes this chore with the disinterest of a barfly watching a highlights reel on a barroom TV screen—as if he’s seen it all before but is too tired to pay the bill and leave. Finally he blinks himself back into the moment. “How was your sleep?” is all he can think to say.

Maya finishes removing the organic stickers from half a dozen Fuji apples before looking up. “Okay,” she says. Then she adds, “Actually, I had a weird dream and couldn’t get back to sleep.”

He knows he ought to ask what it was about, but for some reason he can’t bring himself to do so. Does anyone actually care about someone else’s dreams? Aren’t they a bit like other people’s children? Or minor health ailments?

“Oh, yeah?”

She draws a small but mindful breath. “We were back in university and there was a huge event happening on campus—maybe it was homecoming weekend? I had your varsity jacket, but I couldn’t find you anywhere. And then I remembered you were writing a philosophy exam and I was meant to be there too because we’d studied together, so I started running through the halls looking for you. But when I got to the right classroom, the professor stopped me at the door and wouldn’t let me in because I wasn’t wearing any bottoms—”

“Pants?” Nick asks.

“No, bottoms. Period. I was naked from the waist down.”

Maya coughs and keeps talking, and Nick nods and nods, eyes drifting to the box scores until a subtle vibration steals his attention. Even with the phone face down on the counter and turned away from him, his finely tuned antennae home in on that delectable possibility, the promise of all information, his mental lifeline to the outside world: an unknown text-message-in-waiting. Now Maya is in full flow (something about her teeth falling out and a baby lost in the football bleachers), and he’s scrolling and scrolling until he becomes conscious of a tonal change. This comes in the form of the sharp, unfamiliar sound of her using his name. “Nick?” she is saying. “Are you even going to pretend to be present?” He thinks this is what she says, but in truth he can’t be entirely sure.

“Sorry, babe.” He gives her a kiss on the cheek, toward her ear, as far away from her mouth as possible. “Big client meeting today. Gotta run.” And he runs upstairs to shower, shave and dress.

In the car, before setting out for the commute downtown, he reads the rest of the text message.
Hey, sailor, when you gonna buy me lunch?
It’s from Shelley, the caterer he’d met on set last week, with the ginger bob and the small but promising breasts. His spot for the new music channel had just been nominated for an industry award, so he’d figured he’d reward himself with Shelley’s number. Since then they’ve been exchanging several texts a day, sometimes back and forth at a rapid-fire pace, making up nicknames for each other (“sailor” is new—he isn’t sure he approves), sarcastically bantering and generally building up sexual tension like a couple of semi-literate teenagers. She isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, this Shelley, but Nick has decided
he likes honing his seduction skills on a pretty girl who is more attractive, yet markedly less clever, than him. He considers it a form of harmless recreation. He is merely exercising the muscle, keeping himself fit in the evolutionary, rather than practical, sense. It’s not that he intends to have an affair (he’s told himself they’ll never actually meet up, and if they do nothing will happen, and if it does it’ll be no more than a kiss), more that he likes to keep himself in fighting form. The libido is life force, and Nick intends to keep his stimulated for purposes of professional prowess, rather than tawdry sex. Success is provision. In this sense, when he thinks about it very carefully, he is actually sexting for the sake of his family. He writes,
Aren’t you being a bit demanding, little miss? Where are your manners?
There, that should throw her off balance. He smiles, reads the message over once and presses Send.

Backing the car out of the driveway, Nick glances up and sees Maya in the window, half-hidden by the curtains, an apparition of herself. She is watching him from the room that used to be their bedroom. The bedroom she now shares with the twins. When their eyes meet, she shrinks back behind the gauze and is gone.

Maya is sprawled on the master bed, breastfeeding Foster and reading
The Way: Ten Rules for Seeking Out a Truth Worth Living.
The book, which she drove across town to buy at an independent bookstore, was recommended to her by her personal trainer and life coach, Bradley. Maya knows it’s basically crap. She also knows she’ll read it right to the end in spite of this. While she normally steers clear of commercial bestsellers, self-help and anything with an embossed cover, there was something about the manner in which Bradley recommended
The Way
that seduced her. “I think you’d really vibe off it,” he’d said, placing a large supportive palm on her forearm for emphasis and really looking at her, almost
into
her, she thought. What was remarkable was not just that she experienced this connection, but that she felt it in spite of his use of “vibe” as a verb. His palm was hot but dry, not moist or slippery in the least. If it had been, she’s pretty sure she wouldn’t have bought the book, let alone read it. So has she found the promised “ecstatic truth of existence” in its pages? Not yet, but she still has 487 pages to go. She’s just
finished the introduction, with its breathless blather of string theory and “the law of truth”—an apparently overlooked rule of physics stating that if you speak your heart’s honest desire, out loud and often, “the universe will invariably answer.” Maya is considering the empirical authenticity of such a “law” when Foster bites her—a sharp nip with his milk teeth that makes her flip upright, stabbed through by a metal bolt.

“Motherfucker!”
She pushes her son’s sturdy shoulders away from her chest and watches as his head comes away last, the suction of mouth on nipple breaking with a pop, his head snapping back. On her areola there is black bead of blood; she wipes it off with her thumb and licks it, tasting the sweet, milky mixture of two vital fluids. Foster stares past her, lazy-lashed and drunk on oxytocin, oblivious to her pain. She mops up her breast before tucking it back into the nursing bra. There is no point in scolding him, she knows.
Praise the good, ignore the bad.
It’s her own fault for not being able to stop. Every week she promises herself that
next week
she’ll wean them for good, but then Monday rolls around and with it the moody morning vicissitudes, the restlessness of bedtime, and she reverts back to the old way. She can feel Nick’s silent disapproval mounting with each week the breastfeeding goes on. She knows what he thinks: that she’s doing it for her own selfish, needy reasons rather than for the twins’ well-being. The truth is, three years after their birth (a botched home birth turned emergency C-section overseen by a disapproving doula and a team of unflappable thirty-year-old female surgeons), she still finds it hard to pinpoint where she ends and her children begin. She knows people think it’s strange—possibly even disgusting—this business of nursing one’s children well past
the infant stage. But what about the importance of unconditional love? What about the foundations of security such closeness can bring? What of the natural immunity? Maya wouldn’t tell a soul, but a deep-seated part of her believes that she is protecting her children with her breast milk. And that without this magic elixir, intimately administered in the ancient way—skin on skin, nipple to mouth—something awful might happen. Madness, illness, destruction, even death … And so she persists.

Now that Foster’s finished, Isla, who’s been looking at a gender-neutral picture book about dinosaurs, swivels across the bed for her turn. Maya reflects for the zillionth time on how amazing it is that they never refuse it, no matter how much dairy and processed breakfast gluten (she’s trying to get them off oatmeal and onto quinoa porridge, to little avail) they clog themselves with first. No matter what, the primordial thirst wins out. Surely they will lose their taste for it eventually, but when will that be? Five? Ten? Fifteen years? Could mammals actually lactate that long without having more offspring? Maya knows such things don’t realistically bear thinking about, but she’s also secretly pleased with her ability to turn mothering into a kind of endurance sport. Where other mothers detach, she persists—the contours of her existence blurring into her children’s development so that all their previous selves, from infancy to kidhood, are imprinted on her skin, a burgeoning palimpsest in bodily fluids.

Isla’s on her lap now, head nuzzling under Maya’s collarbone, on the spot where she once slept as a baby. (Can she remember this in some subconscious recess of her brain?) She draws her knees up to her chest and wriggles into the fleshy curve of her mother’s hips, snuggling down like a baby kangaroo in her
pouch. Before Maya even has a chance to unhook, Isla’s hand has snuck inside her top. She looks up, face full of trust and wonder, and opens her lips to whisper something. Maya leans in to hear her daughter’s secret and decides that this—above all else—is the reason she persists. Yes, it must be.

“Mommy?” says Isla.

“Yes, honey?”

“Motherfucker.”
And she latches on for her morning drink.

When in doubt, seek professional help. This is one of Maya’s core beliefs—one of the few she still seems to share with her husband. For every problem, there is a person whose job is to solve it. She believes this fervently, and yet there is the nagging fear that her mother—a bread-baking retired academic—might be right. That if she keeps on outsourcing more and more efficiently, eventually she will become a tiny bit player in her own life, with all the lead roles taken by talented, competent professionals.

She would be lost without Velma, who comes ten hours a day, five days a week, forty-eight weeks of the year (the remainder a paid holiday). Officially Velma is the twins’ nanny, but in reality she’s also the family cleaner, cook, gardener, handywoman, finder of lost remotes and socks and keys, putter-together-of-Ikea-furniture, writer of thank-you notes, jump-starter of cars, spiritual counsellor, massage therapist, gadget IT support and, if Maya is honest with herself, the other human adult she talks to most.

Each morning, when the twins are at preschool and Maya has returned from the gym, Velma makes a pot of tea and they
convene in the kitchen for girl talk. They would never call it that, of course. Officially, they are employer and employee, mistress and servant, lady-of-the-house and lady-in-waiting. But their chit-chat allows them both to forget this arrangement and act like something less awkward and old-fashioned is going on. For Maya, these bonding sessions assuage her guilt at engaging someone else to hand-wash her delicates despite being unemployed herself. For Velma, a twice-divorced former Brazilian pageant contestant (runner-up, Miss Curitiba 1978) now in her late fifties, it’s just a welcome distraction while she gets on with the daily business of sterilizing the counter, reorganizing the fridge and cleaning the corners of the window ledge with a Q-tip. From the cuffs of her tight white jeans to the points of her gel-manicured fingertips, Velma is a superior human being in every way.

Ever since Velma bustled into their lives three years ago, hoisting a bottle sterilizer and case of Diet Coke against her broad and perfumed bosom, Maya’s household has ceased to be within her own control. One tearful postpartum call to an upmarket child-care agency was all it took to produce this splendidly tanned and cheaply Botoxed Mary Poppins busting out of an emerald sateen blouse. After casting a spell over the writhing, colicky twins (Velma’s method included the ministration of ominous-looking herbal tinctures, some open-handed back-thwacking and swaddling that resembled a straitjacket), she set to work on sorting out the house and, finally, Maya herself. While Velma has succeeded in alphabetizing the spice rack, dry cleaning the curtains, washing the walls and ridding the pillows of dust mites, her campaign to get Maya to “do something
with that hair” and put on a little weight “for the sake of your face” has not been nearly as successful.

Despite this, their domestic companionship has taken on a comfortable rhythm, with Velma running the show while Maya watches gratefully from the sidelines, calling the occasional cue like a well-intentioned but unnecessary stage manager in a long-running Broadway musical. The unflinching competence with which Velma attacks the chaos of a post-breakfast kitchen or soothes a crying toddler is enough to make Maya despair at her own lack of firm domestic instinct. Like all great mistresses of the domestic arts, Velma manages to be bossy and loving by turns. “Watch! Like this!” Velma is always saying, while swabbing gravel from a scraped knee, suctioning water from a toddler’s ear or turning over a perfect tarte Tatin. “You see? Easy-peasy.” But for Maya, it never feels that way. For Maya, domestic perfection is a daily battle. For Velma, it’s a vocation.

In between the cleaning and cooking and child care, they talk about stuff: Velma’s daughters (now twenty-seven and thirty—one a plastic surgeon in Rio and the other a fashion buyer for a major downtown department store), their respective childhoods, places they’ve lived, holidays they’ve taken, grooming secrets, cooking tips, celebrity gossip, high-profile murder trials, political sex scandals. But mostly they revert to their favourite subject, which is the twins.

“You should have seen Foster at the playground yesterday,” says Velma while polishing the good crystal wine glasses using the espresso machine steamer—something Maya would never have thought of in a million years. “Strutting around like he owned the place. At one point he actually went over to the gate
and started choosing which children can come in and which ones he doesn’t like the look of. Such a healthy little ego on that boy.”