A Better Man (26 page)

The elevator stops once, to let on a pair of young women dressed in weekend jeans. They stand on either side of him, casually discussing holiday plans, before getting off two floors later. Nick feels like a coiled spring of terrible potential, and he is amazed strangers don’t notice it.

He gets off at the twenty-third floor—the ironically named “Family Division.” He stands for a moment in between the banks of elevators. A moment of frozen uncertainty. Then he knows: for once, Nick stops
thinking
and just
does.
He strides boldly past the receptionist, who calls after him, like a secretary in a movie, “Excuse me, sir. Do you have an appointment? The office isn’t actually open to—”

“Penfold to see Gray!” he shouts over his shoulder without breaking stride. This must placate the receptionist because she
doesn’t rise from her desk. Rounding the beige-carpeted corner into an empty glassed-in hallway of locked office doors, Nick finds what he’s looking for: the partners’ offices, each with a gleaming brass nameplate. He finds Gray’s door and pushes it open, but he isn’t there. Mandy, who sits directly outside, is not at her desk. He takes his opportunity and enters the office, shutting the door behind him and scanning around to see how it’s changed since he came here with a bottle of good Scotch the day Gray made partner four years ago—the beginning of one of their more epic nights on the town. The large, light-filled room is dominated by the view of the lake—an undulating grey skin that sprawls out to meet a matching sky. The place is a mess—towering piles of paper and case law volumes teeter on every surface. There is a wine-coloured leather sofa upholstered in file folders, empty Coke cans and Styrofoam takeout containers. Nick takes the only available seat—a swivel chair behind Gray’s desk, which is an L-shaped expanse of teak with a desktop computer and two sleeping laptops. Every inch of the desk is covered in papers, business cards, paper clips, candies, pens and unstuck Post-it Notes. Nick counts three staplers of different colours and sizes. Amid the jumble is a single framed photo in a cheap translucent plastic frame. Nick is surprised that Gray has anything personal in his office. He squints, rolling forward on his Danish wheels, then recognizes the image with a start: it’s a picture of the three of them, taken the weekend when Gray introduced Nick to his future wife. A fateful day. The two young men stand with the woman between them. Nick is tanned and startlingly thin, his neck rising out of a buttoned-down blue-striped shirt like a stem. His sleeves are rolled up at a self-consciously jaunty angle, his
hands shoved deep into the pockets of his pleated khaki walking shorts. He cringes at the sight of a raspberry pocket square, folded just so. Gray, by contrast, is all hulking hippy scruff—a sullen, heavy-lidded smile peeking out from under a bushy student Afro, topping a Peruvian-knit sweater so authentic Nick feels itchy just looking at it. They are two young men, ungainly and obnoxious each in his own special way, but it’s the woman between that gives him real pause. Maya looks slightly off balance in a pair of bright white Keds, both hands clasping the handle of an old-fashioned picnic basket, one that Nick suddenly remembers well, full as it was of wonderful things he’d never seen or tasted before that day: samosas, spanakopita, licorice allsorts and a bottle of cherry schnapps. She stands between them, close yet entirely on her own, touching neither. Her skin is pale and yet somehow seems to reflect the golden afternoon light, blonde hair tucked up under a Blue Jays baseball cap. She wears the cutoff denim shorts that were popular among university girls at the time and peers at the camera, a sunny-day squint, her expression in its in-between state, features about to break into a laugh or a frown. He knows that face so well, yet he can’t quite work out which is coming—the clouds or the sun. Maybe he never could.

“The first day of the rest of your life.”

He looks up and Gray is there, standing in his own threshold, hands full of file folders. It’s only one in the afternoon, but his tie is already loosened. His Afro has thinned with age, but it’s still characteristically tousled.
A great big gorgeous mess,
as Maya used to call him in her half-mocking way. Nick recalls this, as he recalls almost all his memories now, with a stab of regret.
Why didn’t I see it coming?

“That’s what I used to think,” Nick says, glancing again at the picture in his hand before setting it down gently on top of a dusty legal text. “But maybe it was just the beginning of the end.”

Gray puts down his folders with a grunt, letting them slide across the floor in a sloppy fan. He clears a bit of space and sinks down into the sofa, conceding the desk chair to Nick. He mutters something incomprehensible and work-related to himself. When he’s finally settled in he locks eyes with Nick, who is staring at him hard—harder than he’s ever stared at any person or thing in his life. He is trying to look through Gray’s thick skull into his brain to determine his motivations, to understand his level of strategy or deceit. Instead, all he gets back is a dead-mackerel stare.

“To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?”

Nick puts a hand on each knee and squeezes. “At first I wasn’t sure. But now that I’m here, it seems pretty obvious. I wanted to look you in the eye. I wanted to see the man who destroyed my family up close.”

Gray leans back and raises two hands in a gesture of passive defence. “You know I’m not that guy, buddy. I can see how you might think—because of the way things have worked out—that I haven’t had your back these past couple of months, but don’t forget you were
both
my friends. I had to choose who to help. And Maya … well, we work together. I see her every day.”

Nick hears the blood pounding in his ears like a distant but fast-approaching drumbeat.

“I know you do. Because she’s living with you. Along with
my kids.
Every day and every night. And every morning after.” Nick’s volume stays the same, but his tone hardens.

Gray stands. Nick can see he is doing that thing people are
supposed to do with bears—where you make yourself seem as big and imposing as possible to scare away the riled-up animal. It’s all he can do not to raise his arms in the air and shout, “Ooogah-boogah!” back at him.

“Maya is my friend,” Gray says evenly. “She needed someone to talk to her—honestly, I might add.”

At this, Nick suddenly finds himself standing too, but he’s not trying to look big—he
feels
big. Brimming with barely suppressed rage. “Honestly, huh? If what you thought she needed was honesty, then why did you suggest deceiving her in the first place? Have you told her that? That it was all your idea and I was following your counsel?”

“It wasn’t my counsel. I just told you what previous clients had—”

“And did you happen to mention what happened when you urged me to proceed? How I essentially told you to fuck off? Did you mention that to her? How I changed, for real, without even knowing I would, just by behaving like the man she needed me to be
—the man I actually AM
? Did you mention any of that to her when she was crying on your shoulder late at night with your bottle of unoaked fucking Chardonnay?”

Gray pulls his phone out of his pocket and starts keying the password, but Nick bats it out of his hand with a single swish of his arm. The phone flies, hits a bookshelf and falls face down on the floor with a definitive crunch.

“I just upgraded last week,” Gray says, but he makes no move to retrieve it.

Now they are standing chest to chest, like a couple of puffed-up teenage boys. Gray puts his hand on Nick’s shoulder.

“Listen, buddy, why don’t we just call it a day and go for a drink? Maybe hit the lunch buffet at For Your Eyes Only? It’s Saturday, so I haven’t got any meetings. We can talk it out, just like the old days. Whaddya say? Should we simmer down, take this discussion outside?”

Nick stares at the floor, feeling the energy drain from him, and he knows Gray is right. They should talk it out. That’s the adult thing to do. His shoulders drop. He rubs his face, suddenly dizzy from all the adrenaline surging through him. “Maybe,” he mutters, more to himself than anyone else. “Yeah, you’re right.”

Gray keeps on slap-patting his shoulder, almost rhythmically as he talks.

“Hey there, old buddy.”
Slap, slap.
“You okay?”
Slap.
“You’ve been through a hell of a lot, but it’s for the best, you know.”
Slap, slap.
“I’ve seen this sort of thing before, and crazy as it seems, one day you’ll look back and say, ‘That was actually the best thing that ever happened to me.’”
Slap, slap, slap.

And then, without hesitation, Nick winds up and punches Gray square in the face. It’s a direct hit and he feels the skin split under his knuckles, bone connecting with bone with a crack that is both sickening and delicious. He knows that this will be the end of something—perhaps of everything—but he does it anyway because he is past the point of caring about consequences. What he needs now is some semblance of closure. A punctuation mark at the end of the tragic sentence. With a single blow, he’s made his position clear in a way no amount of talking or writing or battling in divorce court would ever do. He might have had his family taken from him, but he did not take it lying down. Even in his addled mind, Nick is sure his children will respect him for this—one day.

Gray kneels down, holding his face and cursing through a mist of blood. Nick’s first impulse is to help him, but he sees that would be awkward, so instead he sits back down in the desk chair and waits for the inevitable. First Mandy rushes in, shouting at the sight of Gray’s blood-smeared face. Despite his less-than-convincing protests, she calls security. All three wait together in an almost companionable calm for the guards to arrive. Gray snuffles as Mandy dabs his nose with tissues. Before long two paunchy ex-cops in polyester trousers arrive, grumbling into oversized walkie-talkies. And then Maya joins two weekend cleaners and a photocopier repairman who have gathered at the door to gawk at the scene. She pushes her way past them and looks bewildered as Nick allows himself to be clumsily handcuffed by the guards, who have clearly never made an arrest in their lives.

She doesn’t bother to ask what has happened. The guard moves to perp-walk Nick out and she orders him to wait.

“I got a call from Rachel Katz,” she hisses.

Nick opens his mouth—to say what, he’s not sure—and then looks down at his handcuffed wrists and stops.

Maya continues, her voice so soft and even it terrifies him. “She was beside herself because she didn’t know how to reach you. She said you just abandoned the twins with her. Just left them there and ran away. She said you didn’t leave a phone number or anything. She didn’t know what to do. Is this true?”

Nick tries to think of something breathtaking to say. Something that will explain everything and show her that all of it was meant in good faith—an attempt to sort out everything that’s gone horribly wrong. He searches for it like an actor who’s forgotten his big line. But the line never comes.

“Maya,” he says.

But it’s too late. She’s with Gray now, taking over from Mandy, tipping back her old friend turned lover’s head to staunch the nosebleed.

“Maya,” he repeats as the fat men prod him along, threatening worse if he doesn’t hurry up. He says her name once more, but she doesn’t look up. It’s as if she can’t hear him at all.

Maya drives to the police station early the next morning. It’s just like a movie, with a lady cop drumming her fingernails behind the bulletproof glass of the cashier’s window as Maya counts the cash, crisp fifties straight from the bank machine.

She knows that Nick could post his own bail, but he is still her husband and the father of her children. Because of this, on a strange and irrational level, she still feels responsible for him.

What she tells herself is this:
I need him not to fall apart, for the sake of the kids.

They leave the station together and stand for a while in the parking lot. It’s early and the streets are deserted. It’s snowed overnight—possibly the last blizzard of the year—and everything is covered in a fine dusting of icing sugar. The snow has a muting effect and the city is quiet, cars and streetcars skimming silently past. They stand apart. The only people in the parking lot. Possibly the world.

“Where are the twins?” says Nick. It’s the first thing he’s uttered since he zombie-shuffled out of the cell, eyes red-rimmed,
a haze of stubble across his jaw. He carries his parka under his arm, seemingly immune to the cold. Maya flinches at the sight of his pale blue cashmere V-neck flecked with Gray’s blood. Nose blood, she reminds herself, which somehow doesn’t seem quite as bad as blood blood.

“They’re at home,” she says, then corrects herself. “At Gray’s.”

And now it’s Nick’s turn to flinch.

She sighs. “What would you have me do? Abandon them in the park?”

“I didn’t abandon them.”

“They don’t even know Rachel—it was upsetting for them. All of this is upsetting for them, even if they don’t show it.” Maya thinks of their confused little faces when she went to pick them up from Rachel—how they ran to her and jumped up, climbing her coat to get into her arms.

“I’m not the one who left,” he says.

She feels a terrible urge to unleash on Nick right here, but immediately tamps it back down. She’s not going to let herself fly to pieces. Not here in this parking lot. She will not give him that. She sucks in cold air through her nose and feels the sensation subsiding.

“You need to pull yourself together,” she says.

He looks at her incredulously, forehead puckered. “You’re kidding, right?”

“No, not at all. You can’t go around like this. You need to talk to someone or start doing something. Take up cycling again or … I don’t know, just get your head sorted out. You can’t go around punching people. This isn’t the movies.”

He looks at the slow-falling snow. “It’s funny you should say
that,” he says with a heartbroken almost-smile, “because it
feels
like the movies. Awful movies.”